“I don’t think my boat’s ever going to come in,” I say, standing in the doorway of Abie’s office.
“You’re supposed to knock,” he says and inserts a floppy into his Mac, its crisp click reminding me of a winter morning in the Laurentians, my boots and my grandfather's beside me on freshly packed snow.
“Your door’s open, Mr. High and Mighty in his I LOVE NY t-shirt with rips under its armpits. How do you do that anyhow? I need you to listen.”
“I’m listening,” he says, inserting a roll of paper into the printer.
“So anyhow I’m digging my feet in the sand and I’m staring out—you know with the wind in my hair and blowing my skirt. And the waves roll in and back out and I’m still standing there, flat feet, bunions and all. I can’t even see the horizon anymore.”
“Nice image. Except you don’t wear skirts anymore.”
I lie down on my grandmother’s sofa we had recovered in burnt brown leather. We kept the wood arms light to show off their natural curves. Abie thought it would look upscale to have a leather sofa in his main floor office. “I thought we were going to be happy together. Remember you used to make me laugh. And now all you do is work or watch TV,” I say and he says, “Well someone has to learn a living.”
“I was going to be a famous actress. I was good you know.”
He looks up. “You were great.”
“But not enough I guess.”
“That’s not what Robin Spry told me—or Gino Empy.”
“It’s too late.”
“So that’s it? You’re giving up? Just like that?”
“I didn’t like the directors coming onto me.”
“Who you talking to? You loved it.”
I laugh. I like talking about myself and I adore compliments.
“Yeah well that’s all water under the bridge. I’m a writer now and not some flaky dilettante. Anyhow we’re too broke for me to come out. Look whom I kidding? See all those books?” I point to our first shelving unit, the one that holds itself up, something to do with suspension posts, the ceiling, and a leveller. We’re already in our sixth house; some of the shelves are warped, and each time it takes longer to convince Abie to set them up and each time it’s harder and he’s grumpier.
“Get to the point,” he says.
I can feel that old washer-ringer starting up—the one with double rollers you feed clothes through.
“You’re impossible to talk to, you know that? Some friend you are!”
“Have it your way,” he says, “I’m tired of fighting with you.”
“And remember what Asbel Green said? And what about that note from Ramparts?” he calls out, but I’m already on the top stair.
I sent the book to Ashbel Green. Abie thought it would look more professional if it were bound, a nice thick plastic cover, something dark with a texture to it. We chose navy blue. I sent the book to the New American Library because I figured if Erica Jong could publish her work there, maybe they’d accept mine. And I thought once I was at it, I’d send my poetry collection which also included one short story and four pieces of creative non-fiction. I like to think of myself as a Woody Allen in drag. I didn’t include international postage or a self-addressed envelop. The name I used was Pandora Cohen—Pandora because of all those unspeakables flying out from that box and because of the word box and Cohen because I wanted to be true to my Jewish roots. Actually I wanted to take advantage of my Jewish roots and although my father’s last name is Colman, it was actually Cohen until some time in the forties. He couldn’t get a job in Quebec, couldn’t get his circumcised prick in the door. Abie says my father wanted to assimilate, because of his parents being greeners. “You’re wrong,” I say, “It’s because he was blacklisted. It was because of Duplessis.” He shakes his head. “Dream on,” he says. “You’re the one who’s dreaming,” I say.
So many tears—vats and vats of them—I should give some away. Thing is almost everything is eventually seized and angry landlords have no use for my tears. Neither does Abie. I stashed the tears on the top shelf in the blue writing room. My girls were never as curious as I was, driven from a young age to snoop and seek. Maybe the howling in the blue room gave away the box's contents. But when you have three days to pack up, when you sneak off in the dead of night with green garbage bags which only now sixteen years later can I look at without grimacing, when the sheriff shoves his steel toes in the opening of your door, when it's over one-hundred degrees and you have your daughter red-faced and over-heating from her meds and only a gym bag on your arm, when you can't hear the phone ring or knocking at your door without diving into a corner—secrets slither silently into my daughters' brains, waking and sleeping. I have nightmares about snakes, but I'll do anything to protect my girls.
When Caroline lay in intensive with wide transparent green tubes as blood conduits, the nurse whispered something to me about extreme self care. "Take a bubble bath," she said. I went to the Y and did ten sets of deadlifts instead. And now the girls and I have a garden in Roncesvalles Village. I spent all last summer in thirty degree weather squatting in my yard and claiming the earth. I met new neighbours that way. "What a gorgeous garden," they'd say, "so green." I smiled. The garden was the greenest on the block, not that I'm given to comparisons. I just watered the grass with the contents of those blue-room boxes. Maybe it balanced the earth’s PH.
It’s not that I horded my sorrows. They nurtured my passions which is not to say an artist has to hurt. I used to wonder about that. I told Dr. Wisebord I worried I’d leave my acting if I came down with a bout of sanity. “Why would you think that?” he said and asked me whether I liked his tie. He was always enquiring about his selection. “Yah yah,” I’d say and he’d say “No really, what do you think/” And so I’d look at the texture, the balance in composition, and the blend of colours and how it related to whatever he was wearing. “Hm,” he’d say when I finished my appraisal, “Hmm.” At the end of those two years maybe it was ’72, I quit acting. Cine Plex wanted me to star in a film but they wanted some skin. I said I needed a double. And then I left. Just like that. It took me twenty-eight years to leave Abie.
Monday, April 20, 2009
Hard Times in the Old Town
“I don’t think my boat’s ever going to come in,” I say, standing in the doorway of Abie’s office.
He inserts a floppy into his Mac, its crisp click reminding me of a winter morning in the Laurentians, my boots and my grandfather's beside me on fresh packed snow.
“I’m digging my feet in the sand and I’m staring out—you know with the wind in my hair and blowing my skirt. And the waves roll in and back out and I’m still standing there, flat feet, bunions and all. I can’t even see the horizon anymore.”
“You don’t wear skirts anymore either,” Abie says, inserting a roll of paper into the printer.
“I thought we were going to be happy together. Remember you used to make me laugh. And now all you do is work or watch TV,” I say and he says, “Well someone has to learn a living.”
“I was going to be a famous actress. I was good you know.”
He looks up. “You were great.”
“But not enough I guess.”
“That’s not what Robin Spry told me—or Gino Empy.”
“It’s too late.”
“So that’s it? You’re giving up? Just like that?”
“I didn’t like the directors coming onto me.”
“Who you talking to? You loved it.”
I laugh. I like talking about myself and I adore compliments.
“Yeah well that’s all water under the bridge. I’m a writer now and not some flaky dilettante. Anyhow we’re too broke for me to come out. Look whom I kidding? See all those books?” I point to our first shelving unit, the one that holds itself up, something to do with suspension posts, the ceiling, and a leveller. We’re already in our sixth house; some of the shelves are warped, and each time it takes longer to convince Abie to set them up and each time it’s harder and he’s grumpier.
“Get to the point,” he says.
I can feel that old washer-ringer starting up—the one with double rollers you feed clothes through.
“You’re impossible to talk to, you know that? Some friend you are!”
“Have it your way,” he says, “I’m tired of fighting with you.”
“And remember what Asbel Green said? And what able that note from Ramparts?” he calls out, but I’m already on the top stair.
I sent the book to Ashbel Green. Abie thought it would look more professional if it were bound, a nice thick plastic cover, something dark with a texture to it. We chose navy blue. I sent the book to the New American Library because I figured if Erica Jong could publish her work there, maybe they’d accept mine. And I thought once I was at it, I’d send my poetry collection which also included one short story and four pieces of creative non-fiction. I like to think of myself as a Woody Allen in drag. I didn’t include international postage or a self-addressed envelop. The name I used was Pandora Cohen—Pandora because of all those unspeakables flying out from that box and because of the word box and Cohen because I wanted to be true to my Jewish roots. Actually I wanted to take advantage of my Jewish roots and although my father’s last name is Colman, it was actually Cohen until some time in the forties. He couldn’t get a job in Quebec, couldn’t get his circumcised prick in the door. Abie says my father wanted to assimilate, because of his parents being greeners. “You’re wrong,” I say, “It’s because he was blacklisted. It was because of Duplessis.” He shakes his head. “Dream on,” he says. “You’re the one who’s dreaming,” I say.
So many tears—vats and vats of them—I should give some away. Thing is almost everything is eventually seized and angry landlords had not use for my tears. Neither did Abie. I stashed the tears on the top shelf in the blue writing room. My girls were never as curious as I was, driven from a young age to snoop and seek. Maybe the howling in the blue room gave away the box's contents. But when you have three days to pack up, when you sneak off in the dead of night with green garbage bags which only now sixteen years later can I look at without grimacing, when the sheriff shoves his steel toes in the opening of your door, when it's over one-hundred degrees and you have your daughter red-faced and over-heating from her meds and only a gym bag on your arm, when you can't hear the phone ring or knocking at your door without diving and huddling --- secrets slither silently into my daughters' brains, waking and sleeping. I have nightmares about snakes, but I'll do anything to protect my girls.
Once when Caroline lay in intensive with wide transparent green tubes as blood conduits, the nurse whispered something to me about extreme self care. "Take a bubble bath," she said. I went to the Y and did ten sets of deadlifts instead. And now we have a garden in Roncesvalles. Last year I spent all summer in thirty degree weather squatting in my yard and claiming the earth. I met new neighbours that way. "What a gorgeous garden," they'd say, "so green." I smiled. The garden was the greenest on the block, not that I'm given to comparisons. I just emptied those old boxes and watered the grass--how does the song go?: "With the Salt of My Tears."
He inserts a floppy into his Mac, its crisp click reminding me of a winter morning in the Laurentians, my boots and my grandfather's beside me on fresh packed snow.
“I’m digging my feet in the sand and I’m staring out—you know with the wind in my hair and blowing my skirt. And the waves roll in and back out and I’m still standing there, flat feet, bunions and all. I can’t even see the horizon anymore.”
“You don’t wear skirts anymore either,” Abie says, inserting a roll of paper into the printer.
“I thought we were going to be happy together. Remember you used to make me laugh. And now all you do is work or watch TV,” I say and he says, “Well someone has to learn a living.”
“I was going to be a famous actress. I was good you know.”
He looks up. “You were great.”
“But not enough I guess.”
“That’s not what Robin Spry told me—or Gino Empy.”
“It’s too late.”
“So that’s it? You’re giving up? Just like that?”
“I didn’t like the directors coming onto me.”
“Who you talking to? You loved it.”
I laugh. I like talking about myself and I adore compliments.
“Yeah well that’s all water under the bridge. I’m a writer now and not some flaky dilettante. Anyhow we’re too broke for me to come out. Look whom I kidding? See all those books?” I point to our first shelving unit, the one that holds itself up, something to do with suspension posts, the ceiling, and a leveller. We’re already in our sixth house; some of the shelves are warped, and each time it takes longer to convince Abie to set them up and each time it’s harder and he’s grumpier.
“Get to the point,” he says.
I can feel that old washer-ringer starting up—the one with double rollers you feed clothes through.
“You’re impossible to talk to, you know that? Some friend you are!”
“Have it your way,” he says, “I’m tired of fighting with you.”
“And remember what Asbel Green said? And what able that note from Ramparts?” he calls out, but I’m already on the top stair.
I sent the book to Ashbel Green. Abie thought it would look more professional if it were bound, a nice thick plastic cover, something dark with a texture to it. We chose navy blue. I sent the book to the New American Library because I figured if Erica Jong could publish her work there, maybe they’d accept mine. And I thought once I was at it, I’d send my poetry collection which also included one short story and four pieces of creative non-fiction. I like to think of myself as a Woody Allen in drag. I didn’t include international postage or a self-addressed envelop. The name I used was Pandora Cohen—Pandora because of all those unspeakables flying out from that box and because of the word box and Cohen because I wanted to be true to my Jewish roots. Actually I wanted to take advantage of my Jewish roots and although my father’s last name is Colman, it was actually Cohen until some time in the forties. He couldn’t get a job in Quebec, couldn’t get his circumcised prick in the door. Abie says my father wanted to assimilate, because of his parents being greeners. “You’re wrong,” I say, “It’s because he was blacklisted. It was because of Duplessis.” He shakes his head. “Dream on,” he says. “You’re the one who’s dreaming,” I say.
So many tears—vats and vats of them—I should give some away. Thing is almost everything is eventually seized and angry landlords had not use for my tears. Neither did Abie. I stashed the tears on the top shelf in the blue writing room. My girls were never as curious as I was, driven from a young age to snoop and seek. Maybe the howling in the blue room gave away the box's contents. But when you have three days to pack up, when you sneak off in the dead of night with green garbage bags which only now sixteen years later can I look at without grimacing, when the sheriff shoves his steel toes in the opening of your door, when it's over one-hundred degrees and you have your daughter red-faced and over-heating from her meds and only a gym bag on your arm, when you can't hear the phone ring or knocking at your door without diving and huddling --- secrets slither silently into my daughters' brains, waking and sleeping. I have nightmares about snakes, but I'll do anything to protect my girls.
Once when Caroline lay in intensive with wide transparent green tubes as blood conduits, the nurse whispered something to me about extreme self care. "Take a bubble bath," she said. I went to the Y and did ten sets of deadlifts instead. And now we have a garden in Roncesvalles. Last year I spent all summer in thirty degree weather squatting in my yard and claiming the earth. I met new neighbours that way. "What a gorgeous garden," they'd say, "so green." I smiled. The garden was the greenest on the block, not that I'm given to comparisons. I just emptied those old boxes and watered the grass--how does the song go?: "With the Salt of My Tears."
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Challah with Muscles
The Bagel Rye is my favourite bakery on Grantbrook near Finch. It’s right near Mr.Grocer and Mr. Grocer is right near Leo Baeck, Lisa’s Hebrew school where we’re always behind on payments. Anyhow the Bagel Rye was initially owned by a Jewish couple, old, I think, or so they seemed to me—the husband still had a twinkle in his eye and very even false teeth, the wife was fat and bossy, except if you took the time to talk to her, she’d gossip about her customers and maybe take a shine to you. I adore bread. I love challah, the old man’s whole wheat rolls, croissants, muffins, but since I started bodybuilding I’ve stopped eating white bread although I occasionally relapse and devour a whole loaf of challah in one shot. I’ve managed to side-step stereotype Jewish guilt, but when I do suffer, I mean with what-is-the-meaning-of-life intensity, it’s after these bread episodes. Otherwise I’m practically amoral; I’m an ardent eudaemonist.
Eventually the baker and his wife sold the store to an Irishman with oily thinning red hair and a moustached skinny Lebanese fellow. Then Elaine started working at the Bagel Rye. I’d talk to her about bodybuilding and bread. Sometimes Mike the baker would listen in or list ingredients of his breads. He was trying out new breads and even had pamphlets made up to match—Irish soda bread, special muffins on order. I bought three dozen of the muffins on order, despised the first four, and became attached to the remaining thirty-two. I put them in our big freezer in the basement so I wouldn’t be tempted, but then I’d sneak downstairs and eat them frozen. I threw twenty-nine out. Or I’d leave one on the counter for twenty-four hours just to tempt myself. Sometimes I’d win. I learned to count to twenty when I opened the fridge. I’d talk to myself in the sweetest way—“Now, Janice, you just walk out of the kitchen, there’s a dear, and if you’re still in the mood after twenty minutes, possibly we’ll talk again. Now go on, there’s a good girl, find something to amuse yourself.” I learned to go to close the fridge door and seek out my bathroom floor instead. Even the two-piece on the main floor. I’d squeeze into the space between the toilet and the corner of the door.
Now I buy only one item when I drop by the bakery which I still visit once or twice a week. When I’m there I show Elaine my muscles, talk about Bernie and my anorexia, about John, even about ‘roids. Elaine says she had free-weights in her parents’ basement but now she lives in a house with three female room mates close to the bakery. She’s pretty in a full-bloomed way and her complexion is nearly perfect. She has blond-brown hair with highlights which she sometimes pulls back with a silver barrette or caught at the top with a gold bow or swept up pompadour style. I don’t know whether she has blue eyes or brown. Her figure is like her face. She thinks she’s terribly overweight, but she really looks like a healthy farm girl in a city bakery. She’s not particularly bright, but then the gym has made me less snobby than I used to be.
Anyhow the night Abie and I had our steroid discovery fight, Elaine phoned. I could see she wanted to talk. I had learned a variety of responses in my child development course at Guelph. At first I opted for repetitive empathy without being too obvious, which I quickly discarded in favour of bolstering dialogue. “I’m really glad you called. Really. I mean last week my coach John called me—he thought his best friend was ripping him off, gave him a used motorcycle when I gave him $600 cash for a deposit on a new one . . .”
“You bought him a bike!”
“Yeah well, we have this thing, like I’m his sugar mama although he doesn’t know I’m all of out sugar, know what I mean?” Sharing sometimes takes the edge off. I have a feeling a story’s at the door and damn it, I’m going to let it in and copy word for word. “Anyhow I was honoured with him calling and all, because I guard my muscle sleep—I don’t give a fuck about beauty—but he needed to confide in me and it touched my heart.” I let my voice go all soft and sweet. “Now something is troubling you. I can tell.”
And then she started jammering about Bill the Lebanese baker. She could have snagged any man, she always had the cutest guys and even her friend said how come you got the hots for that creep, but then she fell hard for him although he was so skinny “you could pinch his ass and feel his bones.”
“Some guys just grow on you,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s right. That’s what he did. I always gave him compliments. I was really good for him, I know I was. Sometimes he even told me so. I was always going up to him and telling him he was the best lover and how he had this great body and he made me so wet I started bringing in a change of underwear. Ten times a day I told him.” She started to sob. “Hey, hey,” I said, making little clucking noises with my tongue. Turned out Bill came by her place, left his car in the front with its flashers on, out front being a no-parking zone, came in, and closed but didn’t lock the door—“We fuck,” he announced. “Sure,” Elaine said. She lay down on the beige sofa and hiked up her skirt. Bill undid his zipper, walked to the sofa, flipped her over and took her from behind. She said she could feel the heat on her face. “Bill,” she said, “Bill,” while he rammed in for about three minutes, grunted (or was it growled?), and came. She wanted him to kiss her, but he just zipped up his fly and walked to the door. “Aren’t you even going to kiss me,” she called out. “Aren’t you going to fuckin’ kiss me?” “Cunt,” he said under his breath, but loud enough for her to hear and slammed the door. Elaine sat on the sofa, a movie piece with smudged mascara and tears rolling and then called his wife.
I like the kinks in people. The discordant parts. Elaine is like that—a regular small town teenage kitten. One day she’ll kill herself over Bill. I befriended her because I’m fascinated with edges—round that should be square, square where there should be sweeping curves. I like her because of her dialogue and upward intonations. Part of me cares and wants to help and another part thinks let the cow eat her way into some gigantic bakery in the big beyond. Or as we Jews say let her grow upside down like an onion with her feet in the air and her head in the ground. Elaine was alright. She coped. I guess she’s better at coping than I am, and maybe I have something to learn from her. She met a guy her age at the Scarborough Roller Skating Palace—the kid is sixteen and inexperienced, she thinks he really looks up to her, sure has the hots for her, but he’s afraid; he’s real innocent and he treats her so nice. And he’s good-looking all clean like some young boys are. She feels older and experienced, a bit like her and Bill, only in the reverse.
I know I should be glad. But I’m getting bored with this kid who sees life through the eye-hole at the tip of a prick. After all those hours listening and commiserating, the truth is I don’t give a fuck and I miss my sweet girls. I worry about losing track of fame —I’m sailing off on an old yellow school bus with my mother frantically waving a brown paper lunch bag. Or the reverse. Mostly I miss my daughters. Even muscles can’t fill that empty space on my lap. Before the evictions we had an old rocker, actually two — one was pale wood from my grandmother’s country house and the other a rich mahogany with etchings on the back. We’d sit, my girls and I, belting out every song we knew, like when Abie and I were camping in Kilarney and this brown bear came lumbering down the hill as we paddled in the stream at its base. “Sing!” Abie said, “Sing loud and don’t stop until I tell you.” The girls and I used to sing like that. Abie was the bear.
Eventually the baker and his wife sold the store to an Irishman with oily thinning red hair and a moustached skinny Lebanese fellow. Then Elaine started working at the Bagel Rye. I’d talk to her about bodybuilding and bread. Sometimes Mike the baker would listen in or list ingredients of his breads. He was trying out new breads and even had pamphlets made up to match—Irish soda bread, special muffins on order. I bought three dozen of the muffins on order, despised the first four, and became attached to the remaining thirty-two. I put them in our big freezer in the basement so I wouldn’t be tempted, but then I’d sneak downstairs and eat them frozen. I threw twenty-nine out. Or I’d leave one on the counter for twenty-four hours just to tempt myself. Sometimes I’d win. I learned to count to twenty when I opened the fridge. I’d talk to myself in the sweetest way—“Now, Janice, you just walk out of the kitchen, there’s a dear, and if you’re still in the mood after twenty minutes, possibly we’ll talk again. Now go on, there’s a good girl, find something to amuse yourself.” I learned to go to close the fridge door and seek out my bathroom floor instead. Even the two-piece on the main floor. I’d squeeze into the space between the toilet and the corner of the door.
Now I buy only one item when I drop by the bakery which I still visit once or twice a week. When I’m there I show Elaine my muscles, talk about Bernie and my anorexia, about John, even about ‘roids. Elaine says she had free-weights in her parents’ basement but now she lives in a house with three female room mates close to the bakery. She’s pretty in a full-bloomed way and her complexion is nearly perfect. She has blond-brown hair with highlights which she sometimes pulls back with a silver barrette or caught at the top with a gold bow or swept up pompadour style. I don’t know whether she has blue eyes or brown. Her figure is like her face. She thinks she’s terribly overweight, but she really looks like a healthy farm girl in a city bakery. She’s not particularly bright, but then the gym has made me less snobby than I used to be.
Anyhow the night Abie and I had our steroid discovery fight, Elaine phoned. I could see she wanted to talk. I had learned a variety of responses in my child development course at Guelph. At first I opted for repetitive empathy without being too obvious, which I quickly discarded in favour of bolstering dialogue. “I’m really glad you called. Really. I mean last week my coach John called me—he thought his best friend was ripping him off, gave him a used motorcycle when I gave him $600 cash for a deposit on a new one . . .”
“You bought him a bike!”
“Yeah well, we have this thing, like I’m his sugar mama although he doesn’t know I’m all of out sugar, know what I mean?” Sharing sometimes takes the edge off. I have a feeling a story’s at the door and damn it, I’m going to let it in and copy word for word. “Anyhow I was honoured with him calling and all, because I guard my muscle sleep—I don’t give a fuck about beauty—but he needed to confide in me and it touched my heart.” I let my voice go all soft and sweet. “Now something is troubling you. I can tell.”
And then she started jammering about Bill the Lebanese baker. She could have snagged any man, she always had the cutest guys and even her friend said how come you got the hots for that creep, but then she fell hard for him although he was so skinny “you could pinch his ass and feel his bones.”
“Some guys just grow on you,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s right. That’s what he did. I always gave him compliments. I was really good for him, I know I was. Sometimes he even told me so. I was always going up to him and telling him he was the best lover and how he had this great body and he made me so wet I started bringing in a change of underwear. Ten times a day I told him.” She started to sob. “Hey, hey,” I said, making little clucking noises with my tongue. Turned out Bill came by her place, left his car in the front with its flashers on, out front being a no-parking zone, came in, and closed but didn’t lock the door—“We fuck,” he announced. “Sure,” Elaine said. She lay down on the beige sofa and hiked up her skirt. Bill undid his zipper, walked to the sofa, flipped her over and took her from behind. She said she could feel the heat on her face. “Bill,” she said, “Bill,” while he rammed in for about three minutes, grunted (or was it growled?), and came. She wanted him to kiss her, but he just zipped up his fly and walked to the door. “Aren’t you even going to kiss me,” she called out. “Aren’t you going to fuckin’ kiss me?” “Cunt,” he said under his breath, but loud enough for her to hear and slammed the door. Elaine sat on the sofa, a movie piece with smudged mascara and tears rolling and then called his wife.
I like the kinks in people. The discordant parts. Elaine is like that—a regular small town teenage kitten. One day she’ll kill herself over Bill. I befriended her because I’m fascinated with edges—round that should be square, square where there should be sweeping curves. I like her because of her dialogue and upward intonations. Part of me cares and wants to help and another part thinks let the cow eat her way into some gigantic bakery in the big beyond. Or as we Jews say let her grow upside down like an onion with her feet in the air and her head in the ground. Elaine was alright. She coped. I guess she’s better at coping than I am, and maybe I have something to learn from her. She met a guy her age at the Scarborough Roller Skating Palace—the kid is sixteen and inexperienced, she thinks he really looks up to her, sure has the hots for her, but he’s afraid; he’s real innocent and he treats her so nice. And he’s good-looking all clean like some young boys are. She feels older and experienced, a bit like her and Bill, only in the reverse.
I know I should be glad. But I’m getting bored with this kid who sees life through the eye-hole at the tip of a prick. After all those hours listening and commiserating, the truth is I don’t give a fuck and I miss my sweet girls. I worry about losing track of fame —I’m sailing off on an old yellow school bus with my mother frantically waving a brown paper lunch bag. Or the reverse. Mostly I miss my daughters. Even muscles can’t fill that empty space on my lap. Before the evictions we had an old rocker, actually two — one was pale wood from my grandmother’s country house and the other a rich mahogany with etchings on the back. We’d sit, my girls and I, belting out every song we knew, like when Abie and I were camping in Kilarney and this brown bear came lumbering down the hill as we paddled in the stream at its base. “Sing!” Abie said, “Sing loud and don’t stop until I tell you.” The girls and I used to sing like that. Abie was the bear.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Decadence at the Gym
As long as I’ve known, there have always been chandeliers. In Bobi’s dining room on Rockland, in my childhood house on Wilder Avenue before it became Antonine Maillet, and now in this ramshackle Willowdale house, in my own dining room, this chandelier that cost seven hundred dollars when I didn’t think anything of the cost, the standing chandelier on the buffet—there’s a tall buffet and a long one with three drawers and two cupboards at either end. It’s a set, two buffets and a table with eight chairs, deep dark brown carved oak with my grandmother’s blue oriental carpet beneath. A rich royal blue tapestry table cloth is displayed on the table when we’re not eating in this room, which is almost all the time except for Friday nights and birthdays and our anniversary. I tell my girls their father and I are going to grow old in this house that’s falling apart before its time.
We’re at the Mansfield Gym in North York. John’s biker friend Bob and his lesbian girlfriend join us. Bob wants Sophie to compete, but she doesn’t want to, she’s not sure, she doesn’t think her family will approve. “What do you want?” I say, but she doesn’t know, she sees a seesaw with Bob on one side and her parents on the other. Sometimes they balance and sometimes Bob’s up on the top, all alone, such a skinny little thing and then she feels sorry. Other times, he’s sneering at the bottom, holding her parents high in the air, and they’re screaming away in Greek, but no one comes to rescue them. “They’re not young anymore,” she says. “You have to figure out what you want. Abie says I’m wasting myself. He says I’m hanging around with gym monkeys.”
John pulls me aside when I walk into the gym. His brush cut has that slept-in look like wind-blown grass. “Will you quit talking to her,” he says. “You’re uprooting all the seeds Bob’s planting. Sophie’s his business, not yours.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. Women got to stick together and what’s all this shit about seeds like she’s a kid he’s moulding, his little woman.”
“We’re not all as big as you are, Bev.”
“Damn straight,” I say.
Not much cash these days. We cart around our old Visa card. Sixty dollars at a pop at Kitchen Table and they won’t check it out. I don’t like answering the phone on account of collectors calling. Mr. Johnson from the mortgage company phones to ask where an alleged cheque is. He says he’ll have to turn the matter over to his lawyers. “What kind of man is your husband anyway?” he says. “That can’t even take care of his family. And you should be aware of your financial situation, don’t you think?” I tell him about Caroline. I try to explain how she grabs my heart and time, no use saying I’m losing my heart and I horde my time and that real life is shit. NSF cheques. Payments made and stopped. Fucking rich parents in their Highland Beach penthouse condo dealing with their residual socialist guilt as they watch their middle daughter and her family squirm under the financial knife. Then there’s a coach who’s got a habit, juicing up, shots in the ass. I guess I’m his sugar mama but I just want him to love me. So I phone my father collect and ask for cash. “What wrong with that swine you’re married to? There’s got to be some changes here.” I keep the phone an inch away from my ear so I can hear when he stops talking.
John’s driving, lurching and breaking , wrecking the transmission, swerving on turns. Bob’s in the back seat—“We’ll tie her down, then we’ll blindfold her, you don’t like blindfolds, do you hon? Yeah, I know. Been there and back. I’m a master sweetheart. Anything you can think of. Done it all. See, I’m in retirement now. At your service sweetheart.”
I follow John up the stairs of his mother’s pre-war house. Lately I’m not wearing panties; I’m in my decadent faze. I don’t tell Bob who’s behind me shouting obscenities. But the truth is I miss the closeness of my underwear. Bob says his glutes won a contest. “See?” he says, pulling down his sweatpants, bending over, and wiggling his ass. He’d been fading away for a year in a mental joint somewhere out west, maybe Vancouver, and John asked me for two-hundred and fifty dollars to bring his friend home—Bob was going to pull the plug, he said. So I gave it to him. Bob tells me he was a hit man with no feeling until he met his Sophie. He’d pop a guy off, watch him bleeding in the street and he’d walk off. But he also has this beautiful daughter who can walk in any tough part of town and he’s still tight with his ex, a Japanese artist. He can talk at length about Dali and Warhol. Even Rilke. “I’m teaching our John about the art of decadence,” he says and winks at me.
I’m sitting on the floor pretending to pat John’s old bug-eyed dog, while Bob is shaking up a vial of GH or diabonal. A set of handcuffs dangle from John’s second drawer handle. There’s a scene in “Something Wild” and the wild thing is this chick bent on teaching a little man about life and salacious love. I told John about the flick, and the day before he went to visit his nurse girlfriend, I went downtown to Yonge Street and bought a pair of handcuffs all laid out in a black velvet box. “You having a party?” the tattooed salesman asked, winking at me. “Something like that,” I said, “I’ll take two.” I also checked out several whips but they didn’t look authentic. So I went to The Rider’s Crop on Avenue Road. “My daughter takes lessons at Sunnybrooke Park and I’m told she requires a switch for her competition,” I said. “Do you know what size or type?” the middle-aged saleswoman asked. “No, I don’t really. She’s not a beginner, actually, you know. What do you think?” The saleslady adjusted her forest green cardigan. “There are two I might suggest,” she said. So I bought both, kept them in the Rider’s Crop bag and stashed the handcuffs inside as well. And now John was using the cuff to secure his roids. I look at his flushed cheeks—fucking wasp choirboy. Bob sure has his work cut out for him.
“John?” I say.
“Don’t even think of it.”
“Why not?”
“Because I said so.”
When he talks like that. I smile. Can’t help it.
“You knew, didn’t you?” Bob says to John and to me, “Holy shit, aren’t you something else!”
“I’m jealous,” I say, “I want to be as big as you are.”
“You’ll never be as big as I am, in mind or body,” John says.
“Asshole,” I say.
I’m taking Nilevar. Five feet one inch and one hundred and thirty pounds of muscle embedded in a modest amount of fat. Substantial tits. I’ve been juicing for two weeks. John gives me more shit which I put in my black gym bag. “Be smart,” he says. When I get home, I put my leather bag on one of the kitchen chairs, the navy blue ladder-back chair nearest the counter, and start making supper. Abie comes in and puts the gym bag on the floor. The pill bottle falls out.
“And what is that?” Abie says.
“Aminos,” I say.
“Who are you kidding?” he says, his chest puffing up and his arms flaring.
“Aminos.”
“How about I call the police?” he says.
“Anabolics, OK?”
“What kind?” he says and I say “Nilevar.” He wants to know who gave them to me, was it John or Bob, he says, it was John wasn’t it? He says he’ll call the police and have both of them put away. He’ll call someone he knows and have John’s house raided. “How will your little friend like that?” he says.
“You think I’d put my friends in that position?” I say. My throat aches. I hate myself when I cry.
“Then who gave them to you?”
“A jock at Gold’s. The guy in the grey flannels. Anyone can get pills at Gold’s.”
He’s going to get the pills tested. I still have a half a bottle stashed away. I empty the pills into the whole wheat flour in the dark brown Tupperware container in the lazy Susan beside the stove and I’m thinking—what’s happening to you, what the hell is happening to you—while I’m sifting through the flour and Abie’s talking of police and broken kneecaps and dead bodies dropped off somewhere. And I’m just a forlorn child standing in rubble, German bombers flying overhead—an old flick in black and white.
Elaine the sad bakery chick phones. Bill the baker is fucking someone else, she says. She’s hiding from Children’s Aid and living with four guys who screw her regularly. Except for Bill, she never feels anything, but Bill, she’d wanted him for so long, she just came all over the place but now he has another girl and she really needs to see me before she does something really crazy. “Alright,” I say, “I’ll try to get out, but my husband is really angry and he’s watching me all the time.” I put on a red plaid lumber jacket. In the ornate hallway mirror, I look too big. Sometimes I don’t recognize myself.
“Fucking damn shit,” I scream, slamming my fists on the steering wheel. I use the pay phone at the Grantbook and Finch strip plaza. Bob is out. His father has a French-Canadian accent. John’s line is busy. I drive along Cummer to Bayview in search of payphones. Abie’s too broke to delegate. I check to see whether a silver Mercedes is following me. Sometimes I call John a schmuck or an asshole, “you’re only after my money,” I say, and then he talks away until I feel ashamed and laugh from the craziness of it all, because I’m fucking thirty-nine and wild in love with this vigilant twenty-three year old. Elaine’s street is dark and it takes me a long time to locate her house number.
We’re at the Mansfield Gym in North York. John’s biker friend Bob and his lesbian girlfriend join us. Bob wants Sophie to compete, but she doesn’t want to, she’s not sure, she doesn’t think her family will approve. “What do you want?” I say, but she doesn’t know, she sees a seesaw with Bob on one side and her parents on the other. Sometimes they balance and sometimes Bob’s up on the top, all alone, such a skinny little thing and then she feels sorry. Other times, he’s sneering at the bottom, holding her parents high in the air, and they’re screaming away in Greek, but no one comes to rescue them. “They’re not young anymore,” she says. “You have to figure out what you want. Abie says I’m wasting myself. He says I’m hanging around with gym monkeys.”
John pulls me aside when I walk into the gym. His brush cut has that slept-in look like wind-blown grass. “Will you quit talking to her,” he says. “You’re uprooting all the seeds Bob’s planting. Sophie’s his business, not yours.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. Women got to stick together and what’s all this shit about seeds like she’s a kid he’s moulding, his little woman.”
“We’re not all as big as you are, Bev.”
“Damn straight,” I say.
Not much cash these days. We cart around our old Visa card. Sixty dollars at a pop at Kitchen Table and they won’t check it out. I don’t like answering the phone on account of collectors calling. Mr. Johnson from the mortgage company phones to ask where an alleged cheque is. He says he’ll have to turn the matter over to his lawyers. “What kind of man is your husband anyway?” he says. “That can’t even take care of his family. And you should be aware of your financial situation, don’t you think?” I tell him about Caroline. I try to explain how she grabs my heart and time, no use saying I’m losing my heart and I horde my time and that real life is shit. NSF cheques. Payments made and stopped. Fucking rich parents in their Highland Beach penthouse condo dealing with their residual socialist guilt as they watch their middle daughter and her family squirm under the financial knife. Then there’s a coach who’s got a habit, juicing up, shots in the ass. I guess I’m his sugar mama but I just want him to love me. So I phone my father collect and ask for cash. “What wrong with that swine you’re married to? There’s got to be some changes here.” I keep the phone an inch away from my ear so I can hear when he stops talking.
John’s driving, lurching and breaking , wrecking the transmission, swerving on turns. Bob’s in the back seat—“We’ll tie her down, then we’ll blindfold her, you don’t like blindfolds, do you hon? Yeah, I know. Been there and back. I’m a master sweetheart. Anything you can think of. Done it all. See, I’m in retirement now. At your service sweetheart.”
I follow John up the stairs of his mother’s pre-war house. Lately I’m not wearing panties; I’m in my decadent faze. I don’t tell Bob who’s behind me shouting obscenities. But the truth is I miss the closeness of my underwear. Bob says his glutes won a contest. “See?” he says, pulling down his sweatpants, bending over, and wiggling his ass. He’d been fading away for a year in a mental joint somewhere out west, maybe Vancouver, and John asked me for two-hundred and fifty dollars to bring his friend home—Bob was going to pull the plug, he said. So I gave it to him. Bob tells me he was a hit man with no feeling until he met his Sophie. He’d pop a guy off, watch him bleeding in the street and he’d walk off. But he also has this beautiful daughter who can walk in any tough part of town and he’s still tight with his ex, a Japanese artist. He can talk at length about Dali and Warhol. Even Rilke. “I’m teaching our John about the art of decadence,” he says and winks at me.
I’m sitting on the floor pretending to pat John’s old bug-eyed dog, while Bob is shaking up a vial of GH or diabonal. A set of handcuffs dangle from John’s second drawer handle. There’s a scene in “Something Wild” and the wild thing is this chick bent on teaching a little man about life and salacious love. I told John about the flick, and the day before he went to visit his nurse girlfriend, I went downtown to Yonge Street and bought a pair of handcuffs all laid out in a black velvet box. “You having a party?” the tattooed salesman asked, winking at me. “Something like that,” I said, “I’ll take two.” I also checked out several whips but they didn’t look authentic. So I went to The Rider’s Crop on Avenue Road. “My daughter takes lessons at Sunnybrooke Park and I’m told she requires a switch for her competition,” I said. “Do you know what size or type?” the middle-aged saleswoman asked. “No, I don’t really. She’s not a beginner, actually, you know. What do you think?” The saleslady adjusted her forest green cardigan. “There are two I might suggest,” she said. So I bought both, kept them in the Rider’s Crop bag and stashed the handcuffs inside as well. And now John was using the cuff to secure his roids. I look at his flushed cheeks—fucking wasp choirboy. Bob sure has his work cut out for him.
“John?” I say.
“Don’t even think of it.”
“Why not?”
“Because I said so.”
When he talks like that. I smile. Can’t help it.
“You knew, didn’t you?” Bob says to John and to me, “Holy shit, aren’t you something else!”
“I’m jealous,” I say, “I want to be as big as you are.”
“You’ll never be as big as I am, in mind or body,” John says.
“Asshole,” I say.
I’m taking Nilevar. Five feet one inch and one hundred and thirty pounds of muscle embedded in a modest amount of fat. Substantial tits. I’ve been juicing for two weeks. John gives me more shit which I put in my black gym bag. “Be smart,” he says. When I get home, I put my leather bag on one of the kitchen chairs, the navy blue ladder-back chair nearest the counter, and start making supper. Abie comes in and puts the gym bag on the floor. The pill bottle falls out.
“And what is that?” Abie says.
“Aminos,” I say.
“Who are you kidding?” he says, his chest puffing up and his arms flaring.
“Aminos.”
“How about I call the police?” he says.
“Anabolics, OK?”
“What kind?” he says and I say “Nilevar.” He wants to know who gave them to me, was it John or Bob, he says, it was John wasn’t it? He says he’ll call the police and have both of them put away. He’ll call someone he knows and have John’s house raided. “How will your little friend like that?” he says.
“You think I’d put my friends in that position?” I say. My throat aches. I hate myself when I cry.
“Then who gave them to you?”
“A jock at Gold’s. The guy in the grey flannels. Anyone can get pills at Gold’s.”
He’s going to get the pills tested. I still have a half a bottle stashed away. I empty the pills into the whole wheat flour in the dark brown Tupperware container in the lazy Susan beside the stove and I’m thinking—what’s happening to you, what the hell is happening to you—while I’m sifting through the flour and Abie’s talking of police and broken kneecaps and dead bodies dropped off somewhere. And I’m just a forlorn child standing in rubble, German bombers flying overhead—an old flick in black and white.
Elaine the sad bakery chick phones. Bill the baker is fucking someone else, she says. She’s hiding from Children’s Aid and living with four guys who screw her regularly. Except for Bill, she never feels anything, but Bill, she’d wanted him for so long, she just came all over the place but now he has another girl and she really needs to see me before she does something really crazy. “Alright,” I say, “I’ll try to get out, but my husband is really angry and he’s watching me all the time.” I put on a red plaid lumber jacket. In the ornate hallway mirror, I look too big. Sometimes I don’t recognize myself.
“Fucking damn shit,” I scream, slamming my fists on the steering wheel. I use the pay phone at the Grantbook and Finch strip plaza. Bob is out. His father has a French-Canadian accent. John’s line is busy. I drive along Cummer to Bayview in search of payphones. Abie’s too broke to delegate. I check to see whether a silver Mercedes is following me. Sometimes I call John a schmuck or an asshole, “you’re only after my money,” I say, and then he talks away until I feel ashamed and laugh from the craziness of it all, because I’m fucking thirty-nine and wild in love with this vigilant twenty-three year old. Elaine’s street is dark and it takes me a long time to locate her house number.
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