Monkey Beach (28 page)

“Ouija board,” Pooch said in a loud ringing voice, “are you listening to me?”

The pointer moved to “No.”

“Very funny,” Pooch said, looking at Cheese, then Frank.

“I didn’t move it,” Cheese said.

“Me neither,” Frank said.

“Who’s there? Who’s with us?” Pooch said.

The pointer didn’t move for a long time. Someone touched my shoulder. When I looked up, no one was there. Pooch repeated the question four times before the board spelled out G-u-e-s-s.

Cheese started laughing.

“Stop screwing around!” Pooch yelled at him.

“It’s not me!” he said, trying to be serious, but spoiling the effect by snickering.

“Spirit,” Pooch said, “who are you?”

“D-e-a-d.”

Pooch punched Cheese in the arm. “Stop it.”

Cheese took his hand off the pointer. “Go ahead. Try it. It’s not me!”

Pooch looked exasperated. “Name yourself, spirit. I demand that you reveal your true name!”

Oh, brother, I thought. I’d seen this on one
of The Exorcist
rip-off B-movies on the late show about a week earlier. Cheese rolled his eyes. Frank narrowed his eyes and mouthed something at him and Cheese put his hands back on.

The pointer started to move, and Pooch loudly sucked in his breath.

“J-o-s-h.”

“What?” he said, jerking her fingers off the board.

I felt the pointer quiver and stop.

We all looked at each other. Frank dropped his cigarette and hopped up to brush it off when it landed on his pants.

“Josh?” Pooch said, putting her hands back on. “He took her cat?”

The pointer went to “No.”

“He killed her cat?”

“No.”

“What about Josh?” Frank said. “B-e-d.”

“This is fucked,” Cheese said, taking his fingers off the pointer again. He stood beside Frank. Pooch looked confused.

I stared at the board. “Do you know where Alexis is?” I touched the pointer and it moved to the W, O. I thought it was going to stop again, but it moved back to the R, then M.

“ ‘Worm?’ What are you trying to say?”

The pointer didn’t move for so long that I thought the spirit had left. Then it trembled and spelled out, “Meat.”

The room was still. I watched the pointer, mesmerized. As long as I kept my hands on the pointer, it spelled out “M-e-a-t” over and over again. In the distance, I could hear kids shrieking. I lifted my hands and the pointer squeaked to a stop.

Sunlight hit the windows, lighting up the room like spotlights.

“That’s the problem with the dead,” Pooch said. “They have such a fucked-up sense of humour.”

On Valentine’s Day, I got three cards. One from the teacher, one from this white girl who gave cards to everyone, and another one that wasn’t signed, but had written on the back, “To Lisa, the girl who don’t take shit from no one.”

Frank’s handwriting was unmistakable. No one else had his big, loopy scrawl. I stared at the card. I wanted to stare at Frank, but couldn’t bring my eyes up. I could feel him watching me. I put the card with the others then tucked them in my lunch box.

Mom had made me buy a box of chirpy Valentine cards but I’d tossed them in the garbage: I hadn’t thought Frank or Cheese or Pooch would take a Valentine the right way. The best way to deal with this, I decided, was to ignore it completely. After all, if Frank had sent it, then he would have signed it. But I
couldn’t imagine who else would write that note—if I had a secret admirer, he was doing a damn good job of hiding it. I glanced around the room. Erica sniggered when I looked in her direction. Another possibility was that the card was a joke, purposefully sent to make me think Frank liked me so I’d do something lame and embarrassing. This made sense. I felt a profound sense of relief at having the world settle around me again.

The first real sign of my impending womanhood was that the hair on my legs became thicker. It was so gross, I had to shave it. I snuck one of Dad’s razors and hid in my bedroom. I was enthusiastic at first, but dry shaving burnt like heck and the nicks stung worse than paper cuts. I asked Mom how she could stand it, and she clucked over my bandaged legs and gave me quick shaving instructions. Hair appeared a few weeks later in more sensitive spots that I wasn’t letting a razor anywhere near.

Most of the girls my age already had their periods. It got them out of gym, especially swimming. Sometimes they even got the day off and just stayed home. I felt cheated that mine was so late, and that I was missing out on skipping school.

Frank became quiet for a while when his voice changed over because Cheese and Pooch would kid him about sounding like Michael Jackson when his voice cracked. He’d nod or shake his head in response and use short sentences. He was immensely proud of his emerging mustache though, and I’d catch him staring at it in window reflections and mirrors. If he saw me watching him, he’d look sheepish. A girl named Julie, who blinked too much and giggled at anything,
began to hang around us at the playground, watching Frank with wide, earnest eyes. He ignored her.

I didn’t understand the games the girls played with boys. Watching them disappear behind bushes or chase each other and pretend to give hickeys, or spin bottles at birthdays just didn’t make sense. I liked smoking. I liked hanging out and goofing around. The rest of it seemed a waste of time.

Early in the morning, the little man woke me by touching my shoulder. It was just a tiny shock, the kind of thing you get from rubbing your feet across a carpet, but it was a nasty way to wake up. When I stopped swearing, the little man hopped onto my dresser and grinned at me. He hadn’t changed, still wore his hair like a troll, sticking up in jagged red tufts. When he did his jig, the bells on his shirt jingled. I threw my pillow at him and screamed, “Get out! Get out of here, you goddamned little bastard!” and kept on screaming until Dad burst into the room holding a bat. By the time he flipped on the light, the little man was gone—blink. Dad was still bleary-eyed from being jolted out of his sleep, and Mom followed, with one of Dad’s golf clubs. They were annoyed to no end when I told them it was just a nightmare. But Mom came and patted my knee, then kissed me good night. I lay in bed, afraid to sleep, waiting for disasters.

Without thinking, I went downstairs and put on my coat. I didn’t know where I was going. I ended up on the beach. I tucked my knees up and hugged them. I
closed my eyes and listened to the waves as the tide came in.

Dad touched my shoulder, I don’t know how much later. He told me Ma-ma-oo had just had a heart attack. I pictured it happening like it was on TV: she clutched her chest, keeled over, and someone gave her mouth-to-mouth and then pounded her chest. In the operating room, a doctor yelled, “Clear!” then applied a defibrillator to her chest. Then the heart monitor beeped and everything was A-OK.

Later, Ma-ma-oo told me she had hopped into her car and driven herself to Emergency. She thought she was having a really bad gas attack and just wanted to get some prescription stomach soothers. Even when they were wheeling her around on a gurney, she said she was more worried about whether or not she’d left the oven on.

Dad had answered the phone. Jimmy said he had talked calmly to the person on the phone, then hung up and phoned Aunt Edith to come baby-sit us while Mom drove them to the hospital. Ma-ma-oo was flown down to Vancouver for further examination. As soon as I heard that, I thought she was going to die. The doctors only flew you down as a last, desperate resort. All the people I’d known who were flown to Vancouver were on their last legs.

Most people only learn about their body when something goes wrong with it. Mom could tell you anything about skin when she got her first deep wrinkle. Dad could talk for hours about the stomach after he got a hiatus hernia. After she had her first attack, Ma-ma-oo read everything she could about the human heart.

The doctors gave her pamphlets, a slew of nurses sat patiently by her bed and drew her pictures of what had gone wrong, and Mom tried to translate the jargon into something that made sense. Ma-ma-oo stared up from her hospital bed, annoyed. She pored over the pamphlets and pictures, listened carefully, but she still looked lost. When she came back to the Kitimat hospital, I would visit her after school, catching the late bus home after we had looked at my picture books describing the heart. Even in the kids’ books, the technical words were confusing. We kept having to open up the dictionary, puzzling our way through the multisyllabic words. For awhile, I thought we were just gruesomely curious. But when your body is falling apart, and you can’t do anything to stop it, there is a grim satisfaction that comes with knowing exactly what is going wrong.

Ma-ma-oo annoyed the doctors. When she stopped feeling dizzy, tired and nauseated, she assumed she was better. She’d casually rip off the monitoring wires and take off for a walk down the hallway. When the nurses ran in, ready to resuscitate her, they’d find her in the TV room, or chatting with other patients. She couldn’t endure lying in bed. She insisted on feeding herself the day after her heart attack. She insisted on the nurses leaving the room when she peed. She told them what soap she liked and when she liked to bathe. She woke up at her regular hour of 5 a.m. and did her crossword puzzles until the nurses came in at 7 a.m. to give her pills, which she would only drink with orange juice. She never yelled or lost her temper, but was unmovable. When lectured, she watched the nurses
with a disdainful expression, and then told them to bugger off.

“She’s so Type A,” one of them said to me, “it’s not funny.”

Aunt Kate stayed at Ma-ma-oo’s house for the first two weeks she was home. After that, they were yelling at each other so much that Aunt Kate declared that if Ma-ma-oo didn’t drop dead of another heart attack, she was going to strangle her.

“Good riddance!” Ma-ma-oo called as Aunt Kate stormed out of her house.

Dad spent that entire night worrying. He drove to her house first thing in the morning, but Ma-ma-oo had locked the doors and pulled all the curtains closed. He sat on the steps until Ma-ma-oo opened the door and invited him in for tea. They agreed that Aunt Kate would come over once a day, and that Ma-ma-oo would call her if she had any pain at all.

I knew she hated people hovering, but it was hard not to twitch whenever her expression changed. Mom had made me memorize all the emergency numbers and we went to a CPR class together. Knowing that I’d have to pound Ma-ma-oo’s chest and force air down her throat if she collapsed in front of me was unnerving. She lifted a case of canned salmon once and I watched her with my eyes bugging out. She wasn’t supposed to exert herself at all. She wasn’t supposed to lift anything. I sat at the edge of my chair, waiting for her to clutch her chest and keel over.

“Na’,”
she said, when she saw me ready to run for the phone. “You and your aunt.”

Ma-ma-oo’s breath smelled like oolichan grease.
She had two tablespoons of oolichan grease every morning. The doctors had told her that fish oil would be good, and had tried to get her on cod liver and halibut, but she insisted on oolichan. One tablespoon she spread over her toast and the other she simply tipped into her mouth and swallowed. She also took one Aspirin a day, and was told she was very lucky she didn’t have to continue taking anything else. She had to carry nitroglycerin just in case, but the medicine cabinet collection of bottles slowly diminished as she recovered.

But of all the things that had changed, Ma-ma-oo mourned her salt the longest. Mom bought her a salt substitute but Ma-ma-oo spat it out as soon as it went in her mouth. I tried it to see if it was really that disgusting and the taste lingered in my mouth for a whole hour, even after I scraped my tongue. When she came back from the grocery store, she had a whole bunch of spices she didn’t know how to use. Pepper she knew; thyme and sage were familiar from Thanksgiving turkeys. We spent an hour sniffing and sampling the contents of the spice jars and bags that spent their remaining days in a shoe box in the bottom cupboard beside her potatoes and onions.

After two months of positive results on her tests, Ma-ma-oo was confident she had her health back. Other than the salt, she hadn’t had to give much up. One of the dietitians had told her to eat only white meat and fish, but she found chicken and turkey tasteless without gravy. Egg whites she made once, bounced around her plate, then nibbled. “It’s like eating rubber,” she said. She was supposed to eat more vegetables, and did for a while, but fell back on potatoes,
onions, turnips, carrots and celery. Once, she baked a squash. But when it came out of the oven, she declared that it looked like worms, ate a bite, then chucked it. When she made herself salads, she usually put them in the fridge until they rotted.