“My father is a solicitor,” Beth said.
Helen was concentrating on opening the door. “Darn thing’s
always stuck,” she muttered as she shoved it open with her shoulder. “I’m home!” she hollered, then sat heavily on a small mauve suitcase next to the door.
Across the hallway a beautiful woman was dusting the ceiling with a mop. She had dark, curly hair tied up in a red ribbon, and long, slim legs in white short shorts.
To Beth’s amazement she was Helen’s mother. “You can call me Joyce,” she said, smiling at Beth as though she loved her. “Who’s this lump of potatoes,” she laughed, pointing the mop at Helen.
Helen stood up. “A boy got run over on Glenmore,” she said.
Joyce’s eyes widened, and she looked at Beth.
“I didn’t see it,” Beth told her.
“We’re dying of thirst,” Helen said. “We want lemonade in my room.”
While Joyce made lemonade from a can, Helen sat at the kitchen table, resting her head on her folded arms. Joyce’s questions about the accident seemed to bore her. “We don’t need ice,” she said impatiently when Joyce went to open the freezer. She demanded cookies, and Joyce poured some Oreos onto the tray with their coffee mugs of lemonade, then handed the tray to Beth, saying with a little laugh that, sure as shooting, Helen would tip it over.
“I’m always spilling things,” Helen agreed.
Beth carried the tray through the kitchen to the hallway. “Why is that there?” she asked, nodding at the suitcase beside the front door.
“That’s my hospital suitcase,” Helen said. “It’s all packed for an emergency.” She pushed open her bedroom door so that it banged against the wall. The walls were the same mauve as the suitcase, and there was a smell of paint. Everything was put away—no clothes lying around, no games or toys on the floor. The dolls and books, lined up on white bookshelves, looked as if they were for sale. Beth thought contritely of her own dolls,
their tangled hair and dirty dresses, half of them naked, some of them missing legs and hands, she could never remember why, she could never figure out how a hand got in with her Scrabble letters.
She set the tray down on Helen’s desk. Above the desk was a chart that said “Heart Rate,” “Blood Pressure” and “Bowel Movements” down the side. “What’s that?” she asked.
“My bodily functions chart.” Helen grabbed a handful of cookies. “We’re keeping track every week to see how much things change before they completely stop. We’re conducting an experiment.”
Beth stared at the neatly stencilled numbers and the gently waving red lines. She had the feeling that she was missing something as stunning and obvious as the fact that her mother was gone for good. For years after her mother left she asked her father, “When is she coming back?” Her father, looking confused, always answered, “Never,” but Beth just couldn’t understand what he meant by that, not until she finally thought to ask, “When is she coming back for the rest of her life?”
She turned to Helen. “When are you going to die?”
Helen shrugged. “There’s no exact date,” she said with her mouth full.
“Aren’t you afraid?”
“Why should I be? Dying the way I’m going to doesn’t hurt, you know.”
Beth sat on the bed. There was the hard feel of plastic under the spread and blankets. She recognized it from when she’d had her tonsils out and they’d put plastic under her sheets then. “I hope that boy hasn’t died,” she said, suddenly thinking of him again.
“He probably has,” Helen said, running a finger along the lowest line in the chart.
The lines were one above the other, not intersecting. When Beth’s grandmother drew one wavy line, that was water. Beth
closed her eyes. Water go away, she said to herself. Water go away, water go away …
“What are you doing?” The bed bounced, splashing lemonade out of Beth’s mug as Helen sat down.
“I was conducting an experiment,” Beth said.
“What experiment?”
More lemonade, this time from Helen’s mug, poured onto Beth’s leg and her shorts. “Look what you’re doing!” Beth cried. She used the corner of the bedspread to dry herself. “You’re so stupid sometimes,” she muttered.
Helen drank down what was left in her mug. “For your information,” she said, wiping her mouth on her arm, “it’s not stupidity. It’s deterioration of the part of my brain lobe that tells my muscles what to do.”
Beth looked up at her. “Oh, from the water,” she said softly.
“Water is one of the most destructive forces known to mankind,” Helen said.
“I’m sorry,” Beth murmured. “I didn’t mean it.”
“So what did you mean you were conducting an experiment?” Helen asked, pushing her glasses up on her nose.
“You know what?” Beth said. “We could both do it.” She felt a thrill of virtuous resolve. “Remember what I said about chanting ‘Water go away, water go away’? We could both chant it and see what happens.”
“Brother,” Helen sighed.
Beth put her lemonade on the table and jumped off the bed. “We’ll make a chart,” she said, fishing around in the drawer of Helen’s desk for a pen and some paper. She found a red pencil. “Do you have any paper?” she asked. “We need paper and a measuring tape.”
“Brother,” Helen said again, but she left the room and came back a few minutes later with a pad of foolscap and her mother’s sewing basket.
Beth wrote “Date” and “Size” at the top of the page and
underlined it twice. Under “Date” she wrote “June 30,” then she unwound the measuring tape and measured Helen’s head—the circumference above her eyebrows—and wrote “27½.” Then she and Helen sat cross-legged on the floor, closed their eyes, held each other’s hands and said, “Water go away,” starting out in almost a whisper, but Helen kept speeding up, and Beth had to raise her voice to slow her down. After a few moments both of them were shouting, and Helen was digging her nails into Beth’s fingers.
“Stop!” Beth cried. She yanked her hands free. “It’s supposed to be slow and quiet!” she cried. “Like praying!”
“We don’t go to church,” Helen said, pressing her hands on either side of her head. “Whew,” she breathed. “For a minute there I thought that my cranium veins were throbbing again.”
“We did it wrong,” Beth said crossly. Helen leaned over to get the measuring tape. “You should chant tonight before you go to bed,” Beth said, watching as Helen pulled on the bedpost to hoist herself to her feet. “Chant slowly and softly. I’ll come back tomorrow after lunch and we’ll do it together again. We’ll just keep doing it every afternoon for the whole summer, if that’s what it takes. Okay?”
Helen was measuring her hips, her wide, womanly hips in their dark green Bermuda shorts.
“Okay?”
Beth repeated.
Helen bent over to read the tape. “Sure,” she said indifferently.
When Beth got back to her own place, her grandmother was playing her “Sea to Sea” record and making black bean soup and dinner rolls. Talking loudly to be heard over the music, Beth told her about the car accident and Helen. Her grandmother knew about Helen’s condition but thought that she was retarded—in the flour sprinkled on the table she traced a circle
with a triangle sitting on it, which was “dunce,” and a question mark.
“No,” Beth said, surprised. “She gets all A’s.”
Her grandmother pulled out her pad and pencil and wrote, “Don’t get her hopes up.”
“But when you
pray,
that’s getting your hopes up,” Beth argued.
Her grandmother looked impressed. “We walk by faith,” she wrote.
There was a sudden silence. “Do you want to hear side two?” Beth asked. Her grandmother made a cross with her fingers. “Oh, okay,” Beth said and went into the living room and put on her grandmother’s other record, the Christmas one. The first song was “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing.” Beth’s father’s name was Harold. The black bean soup, his favourite, meant he’d be home for supper. Beth wandered down the hall to his den and sat in his green leather chair and swivelled for a moment to the music. “Offspring of a Virgin’s womb …”
After a few minutes she got off the chair and began searching through his wastepaper basket. Whenever she was in here and noticed that the basket hadn’t been emptied, she looked at what was in it. Usually just pencil shavings and long handwritten business letters with lots of crossed- out sentences and notes in the margins. Sometimes there were phone messages from his office, where he was called Hal, by Sue, the woman who wrote the messages out.
“
pdq
!” Sue wrote. “
asap
!”
Today there were several envelopes addressed to her father, a couple of flyers, an empty cigarette package and a crumpled pink note from her grandmother’s pad. Beth opened the note up.
“Call,” it said, and then there was an upside-down V. Underneath that was a telephone number.
Beth thought it was a message for her father to call the
church. Her mother hadn’t called in over four years, so it took a moment of wondering why the phone number didn’t start with two fives like every other phone number in the neighbourhood did, and why her father, who didn’t go to church, should get a message from the church, before Beth remembered that an upside-down V meant not “church” but “witch’s hat.”
In the kitchen Beth’s grandmother was shaking the bean jars to “Here We Come a-Wassailing.” Beth felt the rhythm as a pounding between her ears. “My cranium veins are throbbing,” she thought in revelation, and putting down the message she pressed her palms to her temples and remembered when her mother used to phone for money. Because of those phone calls Beth had always pictured her mother and the man with the toupee living in some poor place, a rundown apartment, or one of the Insulbrick bungalows north of the city. “I’ll bet they’re broke again,” Beth told herself, working up scorn. “I’ll bet they’re down to their last penny.” She picked up the message and crumpled it back into a ball, then opened it up again, folded it in half and slipped it into the pocket of her shorts.
Sticking to her promise, she went over to Helen’s every afternoon. It took her twenty minutes, a little longer than that if she left the road to go through the park, which she often did out of a superstitious feeling that the next time she floated, it would be there. The park made her think of the boy who was run over. On the radio it said that his foot had been amputated and that he was in desperate need of a liver transplant. “Remember him in your prayers,” the announcer said, and Beth and her grandmother did. The boy’s name was Kevin Legg.
“Kevin
Legg
and he lost his
foot!”
Beth pointed out to Joyce.
Joyce laughed, although Beth hadn’t meant it as a joke. A few minutes later, in the bedroom, Beth asked Helen, “Why isn’t your mother worried about us getting your hopes up?”
“She’s just glad that I finally have a friend,” Helen answered. “When I’m by myself, I get in the way of her cleaning.”
Beth looked out the window. It hadn’t occurred to her that she and Helen were friends.
Beth’s best friend, Christine, was at a cottage for the summer. Amy, her other friend, she played with in the mornings and when she returned from Helen’s. Amy was half Chinese, small and thin. She was on pills for hyperactivity. “Just think what I’d be like if I
wasn’t
on them!” she cried, spinning around and slamming into the wall. Amy was the friend that Beth’s grandmother represented with an exclamation mark. Whatever they were playing, Amy got tired of after five minutes, but she usually had another idea. She was fun, although not very nice. When Beth told her about Helen dying, she cried, “That’s a lie!”
“Ask her mother,” Beth said.
“No way I’m going to that fat-head’s place!” Amy cried.
Amy didn’t believe the story about the doctor ripping out Beth’s grandmother’s tonsils, either, not even after Beth’s grandmother opened her mouth and showed her her mutilated tongue.
So Beth knew better than to confide in Amy about floating. She knew better than to confide in anybody, aside from her grandmother and her Aunt Cora, since it wasn’t something she could prove and since she found it hard to believe herself. At the same time she was passionately certain that she
had
floated, and might again if she kept up her nightly “I love Jesus” chants.
She confided in Helen about floating, though, on the fifteenth day of
their
chanting, because that day, instead of sitting on the floor and holding Beth’s hands, Helen curled up on her side facing the wall and said, “I wish we were playing checkers,” and Beth thought how trusting Helen had been so far, chanting twice a day without any reason to believe that it worked.
The next day, the sixteenth day, Helen’s head measured twenty-seven inches.
“Are you sure you aren’t pulling the tape tighter?” Helen asked.
“No,” Beth said. “I always pull it this tight.”
Helen pushed the tape off her head and waddled to the bedroom door. “Twenty-seven inches!” she called.
“Let’s go show her,” Beth said, and they hurried to the living room, where Joyce was using a nail to clean between the floorboards.
“Aren’t you guys smart!” Joyce said, sitting back on her heels and wiping specks of dirt from her slim legs and little pink shorts.
“Come on,” Helen said, tugging Beth back to the bedroom.
Breathlessly she went to the desk and wrote the measurement on the chart.
Beth sat on the bed. “I can’t believe it,” she said, falling onto her back. “It’s working. I mean I
thought
it would, I
hoped
it would, but I wasn’t absolutely, positively, one hundred per cent sure.”
Helen sat beside her and began to roll her head. Beth pictured the water sloshing from side to side. “Why do you do that?” she asked.
“I get neck cramps,” Helen said. “One thing I won’t miss are these darn neck cramps.”
The next day her head lost another half inch. The day after that it lost an entire inch, so that it was now down to twenty-five and a half inches. Beth and Helen demonstrated the measurements to Joyce, who acted amazed, but Beth could tell that for some reason she really wasn’t.
“We’re not making it up,” Beth told her.
“Well, who said you were?” Joyce asked, pretending to be insulted.