Mean Boy (28 page)

I pled poverty. Ever since September I’ve been explaining to anyone with a potential interest that I have no money for Christmas presents outside the immediate family.

“Just write everybody one of your nice poems, Larry,” said my mother. “They’d love it. Grammie loves to read, you know—she’s always reading.”

About that time Dad slipped me his usual silent twenty-dollar bill, but it was December 24 and what exactly was I supposed to buy? I wracked my brain for the purchases of Christmas past. It was ridiculous. I had a short time off school to relax and recharge and here I was in downtown Summerside wracking my brain over what to get my grandmother and personal nemesis for Christmas. Why did we go through this every year with the Humphrieses? Maud and Janet are okay, but Lydia is evil, and Wayne and Uncle Stan are more or less blatant in their estimation of me as a homo.

I would, I decided, participate in the charade no longer. I went to the bank, broke the twenty into fives, and stuck each one into a Christmas card when I got home.

So now I’m sitting in front of the fireplace in my good sweater and pants, waiting for it to be time to drive out to Stan and Maud’s. I’ve been diverting myself with two books since I got here, one of which is my decrepit copy of
Blinding White
. Ever since I got home, I’ve been going over and over the poems, trying to puzzle things out. Fit the stanzas
together in such a way that Jim’s personality will suddenly reveal itself to me in all its complex, dazzling clarity. How to decode the mystery of the past few weeks, the way Jim has been? It feels like it’s my duty to figure this out—as the guy who loves Jim’s work the most.

The other is a year-old issue of
Atlantica
which I smuggled out of the library because I didn’t have time to go through it before the holidays. Reviewed in this particular issue? Jim Arsenault’s
Blinding White
, by Dermot Schofield.

I have spent the entire day doing everything but reading Schofield’s review backward and upside down, and this, as near as I can tell, is the line that exploded the friendship, spurring Jim to retaliate with the foaming rabidity of
wasting sickness
and
mucus-like sheen of mendacity:

Dad walks in, sighs to himself and wipes something invisible from the crotch of his pants. He sits down and watches me reading for a moment, which I am meant to be aware of. He may as well be smacking his lips and rolling up his sleeves. It starts with one word.

“Studying?”

I move the book to the side of my face so I can see him. “No,” I reply—maybe being a bit short, because Dad has seen me with this book lots of times and I’ve already told him what it is. “Reading Jim.”

“Didn’t bring anything else to read?”

“Yeah,” I say, picking up
Atlantica
with my free hand and
waving it at him before positioning
Blinding White
in front of my face again. “I’m just reading Jim right now.”

“Haven’t been reading much else since you got here.”

“Yes, I have. I’ve just been carrying this one around with me for times like these.”

“What times?” interrogates Dad.

I move the book aside again.

“You know, like when we’re waiting to go somewhere. Is Mom ready yet?”

“What about having a conversation with your parents?”

“We can do that too,” I say—although, judging from his mood, I’m thinking a conversation with Dad is about the last thing I want to pursue right now. Dad, I know, has never been big on Christmas Eve at the Humphrieses’ either. But heaven forbid anyone suggest doing otherwise. It’s like church—you’re not supposed to enjoy it, but you’re not supposed to go around acting like you don’t enjoy it either. And so we repress in the grand familial tradition, letting the rage and frustration emerge at more appropriate times—such as now.

So Dad goes off. There’s no other way to describe it.

All year long, my father complains to the cosmos, all he’s been hearing about is this Jim guy. Jim this, Jim that. Doing a reading with Jim. Having dinner over at Jim’s. Heading out to a bar with Jim. A bar, if you please. Not a word about studying.

Jim
is
what I’m studying, I try and remind him.

Balls! rejoins Dad. You know things are about to get serious when Dad starts hollering
Balls!
He uses it as a kind of conversational guillotine, to lop your sentence in half so the first part of your argument plops uselessly to the floor while the rest of it dies in your mouth.
Balls
lets you know this discussion is not about give and take, there’s no free exchange of ideas about to be enacted.
Balls
reminds you who, exactly, is in charge.

I put the book aside, cross my arms, and dig in.

“Don’t give me that sullen look,” warns Dad.

“I’m not giving you a sullen look, Dad. I’m just sitting here.”

“I just want to know what you’ve been doing since September. You show up off the boat half-dead with the hangover, you put off coming home so you can stay and get drunk with ‘Jim’ “—Dad always says “Jim” in quotation marks—he manages to convey them by rearing back his head, widening his eyes and otherwise looking incredulous—”Does the school know about this? That ‘Jim’s’ getting his students drunk and God knows what else?”

“I didn’t stay to get drunk, Dad. I stayed to help with the reading.”

“And what’s with all these goddamn ‘readings,’ anyway?”

“That’s what poets do. They give readings.”

“Well, here’s what I’m hearing, Larry.” Dad leans forward, therapist-like, for a moment. “I know you like poetry and readings and what all, but on the rare occasions we get you on the phone these days, I’m not hearing about that stuff. I’m hearing you’re off to pick up some bastard at the bus stop, or you’re running around putting posters up across town.”

“I—”

“Now maybe I’m just some idiot who didn’t get past grade 9, but it seems to me the whole point of sending a kid to university was so he wouldn’t have to be running around doing chores for some prick. That’s what I was doing when I was your age, for Christ’s sake, and I didn’t have any reason to hope I’d amount to much more. I was sweeping up at the rink and working stints on people’s farms and anyone would have called me a fool to think I could do better. Now here’s you with all your scholarships and awards doing the same goddamn thing.”

“I am going to
school
to learn to be a
poet
,“ I say. “That’s
all
I care about.”

I choose to emphasize this because I know it’s the one thing that really drives my father crazy. He is convinced that any day now I’ll come to my senses and switch all my courses to law.

“That’s being a ‘poet,’ then, is it?” he demands. “Running around like a chicken with a wick up its arse? Putting up posters, chauffeuring people around?”

“It’s being part of a community, Dad,” I explain.

“First,” says Dad, jerking forward again, this time with such violence his butt pulls the couch along with him, “don’t give me that oh-don’t-I-just-have-the-patience-of-Job attitude, all right? Second, that man is a professor at Westcock University—why doesn’t he have some uneducated dickhead like me to pick people up at the bus stop? Why couldn’t he have called a cab? We’re not sending you to school so you can clean up someone else’s shit.”

“I don’t get it!” I yell, losing my patience of Job. “Half the time I’m here you tell me I’m too big for my britches, I’ve got it easy, when you were my age you were working in the woods, you almost lost a hand in the sawmill, you had to piss on your toes in winter to keep from getting frostbite on the way to school. Now—what? You’re telling me I’m too delicate, I’m too good to move chairs around and put up posters?”

Dad is looking at me. His mouth moves.

“Which is it? What do you want me to be? You want me to be the guy who organizes poetry readings, or you want me to be the guy who sweeps up at the rink?”

Dad keeps staring at me. His face contorts like a sudden, infuriating stink has filled the room.

“Well, for Christ’s sake!” he erupts. “There’s gotta be another option in there
somewhere!
”

My grandmother’s Christmas frock is the bilious, black-faded green of Jim’s house in the woods. The sleeves go all the way down to her wrists, and white eyelet trim pokes girlishly out from beneath them. More eyelet pokes out from the neck. It’s as though the dress is full of eyelet instead of my grandmother. Slung about her bed-knob shoulders is a festive rain-grey sweater. A grotesque Christmas corsage of glitter and plastic berries completes the ensemble; she has suffered Aunt Maudie to pin it to her breast at some point in the evening.

As I watch from my Santa-spot beside the tree, Lydia somehow manages to slit the end of the envelope open with one of her stubby fingernails. Lydia is the soul of fastidiousness on these occasions. She doesn’t tear into her presents like the rest of us, but carefully removes each piece of tape, balls it between her fingers, and places the ball on the end table beside her. Then she proceeds to unfold the paper from the gift before refolding it back into a utilitarian square, to be reused in seasons to come.

“Perfectly beautiful paper,” she will glower at the rest of us, sitting there in our respective piles of shredded waste. “There was a time we took nothing for granted in this country. Such days are behind us now, it would seem.”

If I thought that Grandma Lydia was constitutionally capable of experiencing pleasure, I would say she takes more pleasure in amassing her neat pile of wrapping-paper squares than in any other aspect of the holidays.

I watch her slide the greeting card from its envelope. The envelope she puts aside—it can of course be Scotch-taped for future use. I know how this is going to go down. Stan and Janet have already opened their own cards, each identical to the other. A big poinsettia on the front, with
Holiday Greetings
written in gold. So I know how this is going to go down. Lydia said nothing as Janet and Uncle Stan (on behalf
of himself and Aunt Maud, to whom a single card was addressed) unsheathed their own fresh-from-the-bank five-dollar bills. She said nothing as they muttered their bemused and insincere thanks, as my mother loudly proffered eggnog and my father hunched over the elaborately photographed tie-flying manual he’d unwrapped from Maud and Stan only minutes ago. Back then, things were holly-jolly. There was still some comfort and joy left wafting around the room.

I see now the cards and bills were a mistake. But I still can’t accept how big a mistake they are. I’m still feeling a little indignant about the whole thing. Because how could what seemed like such simple genius only a few hours ago be such a mistake? To the extent that the blood in my face is boiling like acid? To the extent that I want to crawl in behind the Christmas tree and start sucking on the plugged-in icicles—electrocute myself among its needled fronds?

But before that can happen, Grandma Lydia has to open her present from her grandson. And am I imaging this, or is the old bat making a production of it? Maybe she’s old and shaky, but does it really take this long to extract a card from its envelope? Does she really need to be turning it this way and that? Examining it from all sides?

Lydia coughs—
ahem
. She holds the thing up to the light. Squints. Get this—the monster adjusts her glasses.

“Holiday,” reads Lydia. “Greetings.”

The only one who looks at me is Janet, wrapped in an afghan in a corner of the couch. She’s got her lips pressed together in an expression of sympathetic mirth.

Lydia takes her crotchety hand from her glasses and opens the card. She holds it at a nice distance from her body so everyone can experience the effect of the flaccid five-dollar bill wafting into her lap. She affects not to notice, entranced by the ten-cent charms of
Holiday Greetings
.

“To
Grandmother Humphries,”
reads Grandma. She’s not letting merest detail escape that milky old eye of hers. She even reads the lousy poem printed on the inside.

“Wishing you and all your guests/A Christmas that’s the very best!
Well!” says Lydia. “I see.
Love your grandson Lawrence
. Indeed. Lawrence, now, is it?” The milky old eye rolls up to meet mine.

“Larry likes to be called Lawrence now that he’s in college,” my mother explains.

On the radio, the faithful are being summoned by a heavenly choir, joyful and triumphant.

“And in college,” inquires Grandma Lydia, “do they teach one that
guests
rhymes with
best?”

“It’s what’s been printed in the card,” I mutter.

“Oh!” Lydia’s batlike shoulders jump, and she examines the card again. “Yes. I see now. And a fine card it is, boy.”

She’s never called me anything but that.

“ Guests, best,”
she repeats.

“I told him he should write you one of his
own
poems,” near-shrieks my mother. “You know how he loves to write poetry.”