Monkey Beach (34 page)

Grade eight had been a less than stellar academic year for me. Grade nine was worse. When I was going in to grade ten, Mom and Dad got the note from school suggesting I’d be better suited to the pace of modified classes. They sat me down in the living room, both wearing the same grim expression. They were sitting on the sofa. I hunched into the armchair, waiting for the lecture to start.

“It may seem fun now,” Dad said, “but believe you me, it’ll be a different story when you’re trying to get into university.”

“Look, it’s not like I flunked. I’m still going to school. Pooch has to repeat grade nine and no one is—”

“I don’t care what Pooch is doing or is not doing,” Dad said.

“This is about you,” Mom added. “Don’t try to wriggle your way out of this one. You have to think about your future. This is important, Lisa.”

“I have been thinking about it. I’m going to work in the cannery with Tab,” I said. “You don’t even need a high school diploma to do that.”

That made them pause. Dad’s face went ashen, then blood rose up from his neck straight to his forehead. “Have you completely lost your mind?”

“Over my dead body,” Mom said.

“What?” I said. “It’s good money.”

Mom snapped, “That’s not the point—”

“I want to work in the cannery. You said you’ll be happy if I just get a job I like. I’m doing it.”

They exchanged frustrated looks.

“Lisa,” Mom started, but she was gritting her teeth so hard that she had to stop. Then she added, “You could be anything you wanted, if you just try—”

“I am trying!”

“You’re goofing off!”

I dropped my head and stared at my feet. It didn’t matter what I said. I didn’t think it was such a big deal. It wasn’t like I was going to sponge off them, I was going to pull my own weight. In fact, I was going to be giving them a break. With me gone, they could devote everything to Jimmy’s swimming. I’d go my way and they’d go theirs.

“… listening? Lisamarie Michelle Hill, you look at me,” Dad said. “Look at me.”

They went on for another half-hour about how I could be a doctor or lawyer or whatever I wanted, then they sent me to my room to think about it.

Erica threw her head back and laughed when I told her I was going to work in the cannery. “You’d last an hour,” she said.

“I would not,” I said. “I’m tough.”

“You’ve never even been near a cannery.”

“Have too.”

“When?”

“Last year.”

“That doesn’t count, that was a museum.”

“It does too count.”

“You can’t even stand the smell of outhouses.” She shook her head. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

Ma-ma-oo wasn’t much help either. “I remember your mom’s first day. She put on her fanciest boots and her best lipstick and curled her hair. She was just supposed to be a washer, but she looked like a movie star. All the other girls had on gumboots and old jeans. Then Dan Thompson said, ‘Hey, Gladys, are you going to kiss the fish?’ and she was so mad that she didn’t talk to him for years.”

“Mom worked in the cannery?”

“Mmm,” Ma-ma-oo said, pouring herself some more tea. She poured it into a saucer, then used the saucer as a bowl, tilting it into her mouth and sipping tea like soup. “For a week, I think.” Mick worked there too, she said. He had a boat from the company that Ba-ba-oo helped him rent. Mick hated working for the company because he wasn’t making any money—it was all going to the boat and fees—and he wanted to quit but Ba-ba-oo wouldn’t let him. In the end, Mick took off, leaving for his career as an A.I.M. activist.

The more I thought about it, the more I was certain that it was what I wanted to do. Sure, when I first said it I was just talking, but the idea of being free appealed to me. I knew I could do it. I’d be sixteen in six months and could do what I damn well pleased, and no one could tell me otherwise.

I met up with Erica at the rec centre. We went to the official party at Toodley’s house, her sweet sixteen, with all the balloons and sappy cards and fluffy-looking cakes a mother could want. It mellowed out after eight. The real party was by the pumphouse at Walth Creek. I’d heard it was going to be rocking and frantic because there were a couple of soccer teams in
the village, but most of the players ended up in town and there were only ten of us. I was stuck on one of the picnic tables with Erica. She was dating this guy named Chuck, had heard he was seeing some other girl on the side and she was getting weepy. I wanted to tell her to go bust Chuck’s ass, but she was welling up and I knew she was going to have a crying jag. She stopped mid-sentence, eyes blinking the tears back, staring at something behind me.

Everyone knew Adelaine Jones, if only by reputation. She was gorgeous. She still wore her hair down to her waist, but she’d filled out since the start of summer and looked years older than fourteen. Wow, I thought, staring enviously, it was as if she’d had expensive plastic surgery to look like a Playboy bunny. Pooch, who was her cousin, told me she’d got the nickname Karaoke last year after she hijacked the machine at the bar and his older brother had to stop her from killing the bouncer who tried to throw her out. Now she walked around the picnic area with biker-wannabe Ronny, all attitude and sneers, and stared around like she was daring you to say something. This seemed to have an energizing effect on the guys, who flocked to her and argued over who was going to get her drinks or something to eat.

As the night wore on, Toodley took offence at being ignored by her boyfriend, who was trying to give Karaoke his phone number. Toodley was a heavy girl with a big mane of spiral-permed hair. She called Karaoke a slut, pushing herself against the taller girl until they were almost nose to nose. Instead of trading insults, Karaoke lifted two fingers and casually poked
Toodley’s eyes. She squealed and clutched her face and fell to the ground. Her boyfriend slapped Karaoke, who slapped him back. He was about to shout at her, when she punched him in the kidneys. While he was bent over, she grabbed a fistful of his hair, forced his head farther down and kneed him in the face. His nose snapped with a delicate crunching sound.

“Holy shit,” someone said.

“Let’s go,” one of Karaoke’s friends said.

Karaoke paused, gave us a sweeping glance. She watched the couple rolling around on the ground for a moment, then turned and left.

“And she’s the quiet one in our family,” Pooch said, coming up behind me and Erica.

“I heard she was in juvie for kicking the shit out of some girl in the Tamitik,” Erica said.

“They couldn’t make it stick,” Pooch said. “The girl wouldn’t testify.”

“Then where’s she been for the last couple of months?”

“Vancouver, I think, with some guy,” Pooch said.

I sipped my beer and watched Karaoke’s victims haul themselves up and stagger to the road.

A few weeks earlier, Jimmy had had his fourteenth birthday party early so he could go to a meet. He’d invited his first girlfriend, Annabella, an Italian girl with large blue eyes and curly black hair who was the twin sister of one of Jimmy’s teammates. She’d been chasing him through all of grade eight. Not once at the party, even while Jimmy was blowing out his birthday candles, did she let go of his hand. She couldn’t stop staring at him, as if he was the only boy
who existed. Some of the girls had muttered among themselves—when they thought no one was listening—that Jimmy should be dating someone from the village, sneering at Annabella when my brother wasn’t looking, but adopting dewy, helpless expressions when he was. Jimmy had worn a glazed, mildly overwhelmed expression until he’d opened his presents. The problems of the beautiful and the popular, I thought, rolling my eyes.

Erica and I were partners in home ec, and she took this opportunity to regale me with sob stories about being in love with two guys at once, not knowing which of her friends to take to Prince Rupert for the All-Native basketball tournament, and—my favourite—hairdo horror stories. While describing the worst perm she’d ever had, she put one cup of baking soda in the blueberry muffins instead of flour. She reached the part where she was hissy-fitting at the hairdresser, who’d refused to give her a refund, when we both heard a loud banging. Each of the twelve muffins had exploded and the batter caught fire, setting off the fire alarm.

The day after the party at the pumphouse, home ec had soufflé on the menu. Lue Ann yelled out that we should call the bomb squad.

“Oh, ha ha,” Erica said.

One of the secretaries’ voices came over the P.A. system, “Could Lisamarie Hill please report to the principal’s office. Lisa Hill.” There were giggles and fake concern that I was in trouble. I ran through a list of all the things I might be in trouble for, but I hadn’t done anything that week.

Mom was waiting for me in the principal’s office. She blinked too fast, nervously moving her clutch purse back and forth.

“Ma-ma-oo had a stroke,” Mom said. “Do you want to get anything before we go to the hospital?”

Until that moment, I had never appreciated the little man. This is, I thought, what it’s like for everybody else. Hello, it’s bad news. Bam. I couldn’t grasp it; my head wouldn’t wrap around it. “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” Mom said. “The doctors say it was a small one. We caught it early. Everything’s going to be fine, Lisa.”

The hallways were empty and my footsteps against the linoleum were strangely slow. It was hard to catch my breath. Opening the office door was like moving through water, so slow and odd to see my hand in front of me, pushing against the handle, and to notice the nails bitten down to the quick, the three scars on my left hand from fighting with Alexis, the way the knuckles looked huge and too big for my fingers.

Knowing what to expect helped, but not much. We didn’t see Ma-ma-oo until the next day, and then only for a few minutes. She waved a disgusted hand at all the tubes and needles and said she wanted them to take a few out so she’d feel less like a pincushion.

My teachers waived my tests and based my marks on the schoolwork I’d done over the year. Erica and I flunked home ec. My teacher offered us a chance to bake a lasagna or a dessert to make up for the sections we’d bombed on. We chose the lasagna and still flunked. I told Ma-ma-oo this, and she said I’d better find a rich husband. She was spunky that day, had
bounced back in record time, much to the relief of the nurses, who said she hadn’t changed.

She was allowed back home eight days before Christmas. I packed my things and slept on her couch while Aunt Kate slept upstairs.

For Christmas dinner, we had a skinless turkey. On Boxing Day, Ma-ma-oo insisted on two large Ziploc bags of frozen
uh-unt
, herring roe. It was laid on branches, not on kelp, which was Ma-ma-oo’s favourite type of
uh-unt
, but she said that eating
uh-unt
would make it worth putting her teeth in and had me go the bathroom to get her partial. She didn’t put them in that much these days, because she said they grated against her gums.

Ma-ma-oo wanted bacon in her
uh-unt
, but Dad rolled his eyes and said oolichan grease was enough. Ma-ma-oo wanted soy sauce and Dad handed her the light soy sauce, which made her grimace. When Dad wasn’t looking, Ma-ma-oo snuck the salt shaker and dumped at least two teaspoons in her bowl. She gave me a look that meant “Don’t say anything,” and seemed so happy at outsmarting Dad that I didn’t want to tell her Aunt Kate had filled the shaker with half sodium substitute. Ma-ma-oo and Dad sounded like rabbits as they chewed. I didn’t like herring eggs much. The flavour was too strong. I liked how tiny the eggs were, though, and how loud they crunched when you ate them.

When she was done, Ma-ma-oo sat back and held her stomach. “Ice cream next.”

“Mmm,” Dad said.

While Dad and Aunt Kate were doing dishes, she said to me, “You watch out for your brother. No sense.
Just like Mick. Nothing in his head but swimming. How’s he going to give me great-grandchildren flapping around the water like that?”

“I don’t want you to leave,” I said.

She raised an eyebrow. “When it’s time to go, you go.”

I sat on the floor and put my head on her knees. “Don’t.”

“The place I’m going,” she said. “Nobody’s hungry and nobody’s in pain. Sunny all day. People I love everywhere, waiting for me.”

“No,” I said.

She touched my hair. “Everybody’s singing. Everybody’s dancing and laughing.” The kettle whistled. She patted my shoulder. “Go get us tea. Go on. Hurry. You want to miss ‘Dynasty’?”

Ma-ma-oo fell asleep on the couch. I picked up her mug of half-finished tea and brought it in the kitchen where Aunt Kate and Dad were having tea and biscuits.

“Ma-ma-oo’s getting worse,” I said. “We should call Aunt Trudy. She should be here.”

“Good luck,” Aunt Kate said.

“We’ve already called her,” Dad said. “She’s not coming.”

“Oh,” I said.

“She always has to have someone to blame,” Aunt Kate said. “Nothing’s ever her fault.”

“Kate,” Dad said.

“Well, she does. She thinks Mother’s dirt, while she goes out and parties and treats Tab worse than what she blames Mother for.”

“Let’s put Mother to bed,” Dad said. After they did that, Kate said she could handle it, and that Dad should take me home because I didn’t look well.

When we were alone, Dad said, “Don’t listen to her. Just be there for Mother. That’s all she needs now.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Good girl.”