Alligator (7 page)

That wasn’t love, she said out loud.

She snapped on the overhead light and everything became hurtfully present and stark. She had been fifty-five then and already a widow. She went back out to tell her secretary about some leather couches that were on sale.

The wine tasted like what it was: homemade wine, too sweet, too strong. She had expected a visitation. The wine slammed into her.

The wind took the aluminum door from her and it crashed against the wrought-iron rail and it rang like a gong. The male officer asked if she was the mother of Colleen Clark. Beverly slumped against the door frame and her eyes rolled back in her head. The male officer caught her elbow before she hit the floor.

I have relinquished my hold, she imagined writing to Madeleine, once the officers had put her head between her knees at the dining-room table. The female officer unrolled the yoga mat that had been pushed against the wall and had Beverly lie on it. Then she took Beverly’s legs and lifted them into the air, resting the woman’s cold bare feet against her chest.

I think I’m very discouraged, Beverly said.

You may just have to cheer up, said the officer.

She came to after only a minute but she felt chilly and had broken a sweat. She heard vandalism and bulldozers. Apparently Colleen had not been hurt. There had been a car accident, she’d got a good crack across the nose, but that was it. Her nose wasn’t even broken. She deserved a broken nose at least, Beverly thought. Thank God her beautiful little nose was okay.

The male officer was in the kitchen checking the cupboards for a glass. He came back out with a beer stein full of ice cubes and orange juice.

Electrolytes, the officer said, and Beverly closed her eyes and saw fireworks on her eyelids. She imagined killing her daughter. She imagined putting her hands around her throat and squeezing tight. She imagined the cartilage of Colleen’s windpipe snapping under her thumbs. How dare Colleen frighten her like that?

Colleen had been saying eco-terrorism, but Beverly had not been listening. Colleen had been saying change the world, the plight of animals, the environment, radioactive waste, the World Trade Organization. She had said Seattle, she had said Quebec City. She had been going on, but Beverly had not listened.

Are you listening? Colleen kept asking.

Beverly had said about new shoes.

We should get you a nice pair of shoes, Beverly had said.

Of course she’s a minor so the complainant has no way to recoup costs of the damage, the male officer said. The sun came out at that instant and hit the prisms in front of Beverly’s window and a rainbow fell on the officer’s cheek and another on the front of his blue shirt. The glass of orange juice flared with sunlight as if it were a fire in his hand.

I have a daughter, the female cop said. They’re nothing but trouble.

Colleen was wilful and lovely. She had become beautiful overnight, large blue eyes and full lips, long, shiny hair. Her trembling, towering empathy, her insistence that the world play fair. She would not allow injustice; she would not stand for it. Beverly had seen the colour rush to her cheeks and tears brighten her eyes over nothing, over some insult visited randomly on one classmate or another — a girl disfigured by acne who had been teased, someone left out, someone who was poor, the kids who had no lunch. And then came the animals. She could never stand the immense unfairness to animals, the chicken factories, cows led to slaughter, even fish. As a four-year-old she had worked herself into an inconsolable rage when Beverly flushed a dead goldfish. She could not bear the indignity of the funeral, her little fists white at her sides, the stamp of her small foot on the bathroom tiles.

How did you catch her? Beverly asked. The worst was how thoroughly she had been betrayed, how befuddled and old she felt. She felt dangerously foolish.

We had a call from a gentleman who picked her up hitchhiking, the male officer said. The officer had been distracted by the crystals. He gave one of the spears of glass a little flick with his finger.

She dropped her knapsack at the scene of the crime, he said. We found the address in there. A rainbow jittered over the wall like a new butterfly.

She’ll have to come down to court, he said. Your daughter will have to admit she’s sorry for what she’s done and then she can avail of the youth diversion program.

You’re thinking of diverting her, Beverly said. She thought of rivers in the developing world that were diverted for hydro-electric power, how plains were flooded and birds had to abandon their nests and whole villages were made to move with their belongings on their backs. She had seen this on the documentary channel.

We have a very good program, the kids do community work, said the female cop.

COLLEEN

B
EVERLY HAD MADE
crustless sandwiches for the funeral home three days in a row when David died. Colleen remembers her leaning over the bathroom sink applying mascara, her eyeball very near the mirror, her mouth stretched open between each stroke. She had pulled the matted hair from her brush and wiggled her fingers so the hair fell into the toilet. These were the ordinary gestures of getting ready. There would be no hysterics; for whatever reason, Beverly had decided she would appear completely intact.

I’m still intact, she’d said.

David was dead but she would apply mascara.

At the funeral home she gripped the hands of visitors and held them. Colleen watched her squeeze each hand for emphasis when she was recounting some memory. Madeleine stood beside Beverly throughout, directing friends toward the casket, bringing cups of tea, sometimes holding her arm above the elbow as if to keep her on her feet.

Late, on the last afternoon of the wake, Colleen had followed her mother into the bathroom of the funeral home and saw her leaning on the sink, her arms straight, her knuckles white, her head hanging down. The water was running in the sink and she might have just thrown up. Finally, she tossed her hair back and they stood like that, mother and daughter, looking at each other in the mirror.

They were absolutely still and they didn’t look away from each other, nor did they touch each other or speak. Colleen became aware of the ticking of her mother’s watch over the running water, and the thrum of a heater and the murmuring of guests in the rooms over their heads.

There were five separate rooms in the funeral home for separate wakes and each room had a slotted board near the door with the dead person’s name in movable white letters that slid into the slots. What sounded like voices might have been steam in the pipes running under the floor.

The lights pulsed slightly, a surge of electricity that caused them to buzz, and still Colleen and her mother stood there not moving until her mother closed her eyes and drew a deep breath through her nose and exhaled with a shudder.

She rubbed one of her eyes hard with a knuckle and there was the wet sound of the knuckle and eyelid and eyeball, a watery, interior, extremely private noise. Colleen’s mother yawned deeply and Colleen yawned too. She saw herself yawning in the mirror and she could not stop yawning. They might have fallen asleep on their feet; they might have been generating the same dream.

David’s body in his charcoal suit with his wedding ring and white rose, his hands, and the creamy ruffled lining in the casket and all the old women and men who had come to visit might have been something from a deep, deep sleep. The way part of a particularly exhausting dream floats back throughout the following day, overtaking the dreamer, portentous and absorbing.

Then her mother shattered the gathering quiet.

I think a trip to Florida after the funeral, Beverly had said. She closed her purse, which was beside her on the sink, with a hard little snap. She turned off the water.

In the evening, after the funeral, they drove home without talking and when they pulled into the driveway Beverly turned off the car and they just sat there. All the lights were off in the house.

Let’s go in, Beverly said. But neither of them moved.

Finally, Colleen’s feet were so cold she got out of the car and her boots broke through the thin glossy crust on the banks of snow. Each step she took toward the house made a loud crunching noise.

When she got inside she went to the bathroom and when she lifted the toilet lid she saw the thin nest of her mother’s hair, pulled from the hairbrush earlier that morning, floating on the top of the water in the toilet.

The hair in the toilet was floating in an idle circle and there was, in that subtle movement, something sinister.

It struck Colleen her mother had aged with David’s death. She became instantly ancient. She had always been older than all the other mothers who wore jeans and got on the toboggans with their kids and knew, instinctively, the right kinds of junk to put in loot bags. But now she was ancient.

Colleen stared at the hair and thought that her mother had been hurtled into a remote solitude, far away from Colleen or anyone else, sealed away forever. She had been robbed of sex and the intricate privacy and rituals of a couple who have been in love for a long time — the aspects of her mother’s life that had been invisible to Colleen before David’s death. But, yes, they must have had sex, they must have loved, they were each other’s best friends, they’d spoken together in murmurs while they cooked; she saw the staggering, bald truth of it, the bottomless loss. Her mother’s vast, new solitude was a stigma, banishing her from fun or lightheartedness, banishing her unequivocally; it was a solitude that seemed to Colleen infectious.

The dark hair, floating in the toilet bowl, embodied the simplicity and horror of her mother’s grief and it terrified Colleen. She wanted to be as far away from the voyeuristic intimacy of that floating nest of tangles as she could get.

She woke up on her bed, the light still on; she was wearing her winter coat. The snow on her boots had melted all over the bedspread. She woke as though she hadn’t slept at all but it was 4 a.m. and she went to the living-room window and saw her mother had fallen asleep in the car, her forehead resting on the steering wheel, the windshield frosted over.

BEVERLY

C
OLLEEN FINISHED THE
undercooked, mucuslike egg Beverly had prepared. Beverly believed in a proper breakfast. She believed that even a daughter who disappoints irrevocably deserves breakfast.

She put the cracked eggcup on the placemat in front of Colleen.

Just eat it, she said. She stood at the window with her back to her daughter. She was watching a cat stalking a robin in the backyard. She looked vindicated and dreamy.

What can possibly happen to me next? she whispered. The cat pounced and held the bird under its paws for a long, considered instant, then tore off its head.

You look lovely, she said. They had fought over the piercing in her tongue for three months and, as a concession, Colleen had removed the stud.

Off to youth diversion then, said Beverly.

FRANK

H
E HAD BOUGHT
the first hot-dog cart with his paper route money. He put every cent of it away for four years and during the winter he went door to door asking if people wanted shovelling and he asked if there were beer bottles they wanted to get rid of.

There was a restaurant downtown that let him wash dishes in the summer when it was busy.

His friend Kevin got him a part-time job at a photocopy place; he helped cut posters and business cards, he fiddled with the machines when they wouldn’t work. He put every cent away and paid for his own school supplies in September.

One day in June he and his mother got the bus to the Village Mall and took a taxi the rest of the way out Topsail Road. They told the taxi driver the address he’d found in the
Express
and when they arrived it was a used-car lot with a string of faded plastic flags sagging from one street light to another.

They’d arrived at dusk and it was cold and had been raining for eight days and the lot was muddy and someone had laid down two-by-fours on the walk up to the house. The cars had their prices marked in white shoe polish on the windshields and some were missing a tire or two and the rusted axles sank into the ground. There was a small bungalow at the end of a dirt driveway. It had pale blue vinyl siding and two narrow windows. The front door was six feet above the ground with no front steps. They went around the side and found the back door and rang the bell. A row of faded men’s jeans hung on a clothesline. There was a German shepherd on a short chain tied to a doghouse. Someone had written
Shep
on the doghouse in red, dripping paint that looked like horror-movie blood. The dog rose when they approached and it sniffed the air and turned three circles and lay down again on a patch of concrete. They had heard the doorbell chiming through the house but no one came to the door so they knocked.

The man who finally opened the door wore jeans and a white undershirt and he asked them in and they had to take off their shoes in the tiny porch and step through a pile of children’s boots and toys. In the kitchen the heat was on bust and a kettle started to whistle and the man waved at the kitchen table for them to sit down. He took out three cups and he got a tin of Carnation milk from the fridge.

There was a
TV
on in the living room. He had a belly that was hard and round and grey hair sprouted out from under his arms and above the neck of the white undershirt and he got out a package of Jam Jams, slit the plastic with his thumbnail, and put them on the table.

Frank saw the man’s hands had a kind of tremble; they hovered over the cookies as if he were deciding how best to offer them. The trembling made Frank think the man was in financial need and would demand a good price for the hot-dog stand.

His mother reached across the table with a sigh and poured the Carnation milk from a bit of a height and gave the tin a jovial little dip and twist when she had enough milk and she stirred the tea very quickly and knocked the spoon on the edge of the cup three times.