“You don't need to ask
me
what
I
do all week,” I protested. “You could ask anyone in Thunder Hill and they'd be only too happy to tell you where I was on Monday night, and Tuesday, and⦔
“But I don't want to ask,” said Ray. “And you know why? Because it's none of my business what you do.”
“I see,” I said. I remember thinking that he really had left me. In his heart, I mean.
I found myself craving him like I never had before. How different this feeling was from how I felt years ago when one night I'd woken up to his penis bumping against my lips. The nerve of this guy, I thought. The light from a full moon poured through the window into our bedroom. Even when I turned my face away, it kept following my mouth like there was some chance I'd change my mind.
“You gotta be kidding,” I probably said, before turning on my side and drifting back to sleep. I remember not caring if he went back to sleep or jerked off. But last year, after he left, I found myself yearning for his dick more than the cigarettes after I quit smoking. I would have sucked that thing the whole night and the next day too.
Somehow it's different this time around. Maybe I'm feeling just as fed up with Trish and Ray as he is, but suddenly I find myself wondering if I should even care if he ever shows up again.
11. Road to Toronto
B
EAR JAMES WAS RAY'S
best man at our wedding. I remember the mouse-chewed tuxedo that he'd found at the dump a week before the wedding. He looked more like a groom than Ray, who just wore jeans and no shirt and a tie around his neck. I'd put on a purple dress that Alana had worn during her pregnancies. That's why it was so faded at the belly. I felt honoured to wear it to my wedding.
If my father had had his way we'd have been married at church with the reception in the back of his house. He had already spoken to us about renting a giant tent, about hiring a jazz band from Moncton, about serving baked Alaska to the guests. It was my mother who whispered to me that we should go ahead with our plan of a beach wedding with just our friends. How naïve we are in youth. Here I'd thought she was being cool when really she was just sick and tired of my father's spectacular parties, and she looked at my wedding as just another huge event she'd have to help organize.
Not long after my father died, we got to drinking together one night, which was weird since I can't stand seeing her drunk. But she confessed that, unlike my father's first wife, she hated parties. Mostly she hated the small talk. She just didn't know how to go about doing it and would start drinking about two hours before the event just so she could cope. Then she put on this far away look and said something about that was how the drinking started. I bit my tongue from saying something like, funny how you can find a way to blame my father for just about everything, even after he was dead.
I haven't had a drink with her since.
But she convinced my father that Ray and I should be allowed to have the sort of wedding we wanted and that he should back off. He put on that half mad, half sad look of his, before he threw up his hands and walked out of the room. When I stop to think about it, I wonder if that was the moment when he decided to leave Kyle House to Olive instead of to me.
Ray and I got married that summer without our families there. Everyone, except for the minister and me, had dropped acid. We were just stoned on hash. He was Ray's cousin and everybody thought he was so cool. I'd refused the acid because I was pregnant, but not the hash. Back then we trusted in the wholesomeness of cannabis.
It was a bright hot day so we waded out into the water up to our waists and when we were pronounced, “Husband and wife,” we all splashed each other. The sparkle in the water spraying around that day looked like thousands of crystals. It was all the wedding I needed.
Hard to believe that a year before the wedding, I was the one who left Ray for what I thought was for good. My cousin Nancy and her boyfriend Ricky were driving up to Toronto and said they'd take me along. I thought of this as my big chance.
My mother was happy I was leaving. She'd said this was an opportunity she'd never had. One of her biggest fears was that I'd end up stuck in town, working out there at the Zellers. I wonder now if her biggest fear was that I might stick around and cause her more grief. Here all of her friends' children were away at school or were married and settled while I went around like some sort of a free spirit.
At that time, Ray and I lived in a one-room apartment over a burger joint where we worked just enough hours to pay the rent. The rest of our time was devoted to just having fun and partying. That was before Ray started drinking pretty much full time and that was before I caught him at the receiving end of that blow job care of one Rena Dickson. After that, life in town didn't seem like any fun.
My mother may have felt that I should head out into the world, but my father was another story. He didn't want me to leave, period. Oh, he wanted me to leave Ray alright, but he thought I should just move back home with them. My father had turned sixty and the day after his gigantic surprise birthday party, complete with his favourite, baked Alaska, he'd begun to worry about the future of his business. My mother wasn't the least bit interested in blueberries, and in fact, was pressuring him to retire. He told me he'd always hoped I might join him. I told him that capitalism, even in the blueberry business, went against everything my generation believed in. Back then we thought we had a valid mission, which meant staying stoned on weed as a way to stay free from society's hold.
We had gone for a drive, something my father liked to do when he had something to say. As we drove to the blueberry fields, he told me about all the things he'd hoped I'd do with my life. I said to him, “You really don't have any idea what I'm about, do you?”
“You believe in natural foods, don't you?” he reasoned. We stopped in front of the first field he had bought. “What's more natural than blueberries?” He asked me then if I had any idea how he got started in the business, how it had nothing to do with the frozen food plants, or the freighters hauling crates to Europe, or the wheeling and dealing that allowed him to reach the million dollar mark close to ten years after he scraped up enough money to buy his first field. “How? I'll tell you. I was bouncing in back of the pick-up truck with all the other scoopers, and I thought, Bernie, you belong in the cab of that truck, not the back. So I saved half of every dollar I made until I could buy this very field.”
I'd been hearing this story since I was five years old.
He went on. Okay, so maybe his daughter wasn't cut out for business. But shouldn't she at least consider going to university before it was too late? I had already told him I never cared to see a school again, that I only cared about today or maybe next week when my cousin Nancy and her boyfriend Ricky were driving to Toronto.
“But what will you do in Toronto?”
“I'll find something.”
“What's something?” He was getting angry. “You need some sort of plan.”
“The only plan I have is to get away from here. The rest will take care of itself.”
“That's what I'm worried about.”
The blueberry hill we'd been admiring had already turned crimson following the first real frost of that year. The same field in which there's this old home movie of me, running, then tripping, then falling just before reaching the bottom. Whenever he played the movie, my father would say, “Wait, here's the best part. Look at her, it's like she didn't even notice that she fell.” True, the girl on the screen rose up from the shrubs and continued to run to the camera as if nothing whatsoever had happened. I'm sure that fall had hurt, but mostly I remember hoping he hadn't caught it on film. Every time my father watched that film he'd laugh so hard he'd have a coughing fit, and I'd find myself hoping he'd choke.
I wanted to prove that I could find my own way in Toronto, but when an old friend of my father's offered me a job as a receptionist at his advertising agency, I agreed to check it out. I left after only two days, glad to have escaped with my life. How could anyone expect me to work in a place where women wore pantyhose and men choked themselves in ties, all in pursuit of cigarette and booze jingles?
Besides, I had just met this cool guy named Slip, who lived in a much cooler building than the rooming house I'd been staying in. Slip paid his rent by selling hits of mescaline. Most of the people who lived in his building were serious political activists whose causes we supported by joining their protests against practically anything.
During the entire drive to Toronto I had watched the pavement whiz by through a hole in the floor of the car and couldn't believe how much I missed Ray in spite of him getting blown by Rena Dickson. But that wasn't the only thing about Ray that I was escaping. He had these little habits that bugged the shit out of me and it wasn't just his obsession with sweeping floors, walls, and ceilings. I hated how he'd do this little tongue flicking thing just to get a laugh. It was one thing to use his tongue on me that way in private, but quite another when he did it in public. I tried to tell him how it made me feel, like he was exposing the secrets of our sex life to the whole world. How often had someone embarrassed me by giving me a nudge and saying, “You're a lucky girl, Trish.” He thought I was making a big deal out of something harmless. I thought he was repulsive. So when people asked me why I was going to Toronto, I said it was to find work. But now I think it was to find a better man than Ray. Someone who showed some respect for his girlfriend.
Ray is not a whole lot taller than me, and I am only five foot three. Short men make up for it by learning how to charm. Drop Ray into any crowd and he'll make friends with everyone. Except for thinking that the stupid tongue flicking thing was funny, he doesn't usually resort to cheap shots and dumb jokes, the way Danny does. And he feels just as at home with people like Olive and Arthur, as he does, with say, me. He has a low strong voice, especially over the phone, and he's always been able to get this woman's pants pretty wet just by talking into her ear.
Like that time in Toronto. There I was, lying on Slip's king-sized bed, where we seemed to spend most of our time. We were coming down from acid and had just finished fucking for what seemed like hours, and while it had been good while stoned, I now felt like throwing up. Slip's phone rang. It was Ray. The timing was perfect.
“Trish?”
“Ray? Ray!” I sat up in the bed. “How did you find me?”
His voice seemed so far away, like the acid was acting as a filter. But I remember him saying, “I will always be able to find you, Trish.”
“That is a beautiful thing to say, man,” I said, forgetting that I had given my parents this phone number and that he had likely gotten it from them. “So fucking beautiful.”
Ray said, “So how are you making out there in the big
T.O.
?”
Slip was next to me in the bed, but it was Ray's voice that stroked every cell in my being. A final wisp of
LSD
let me slide right into the receiver and along six hundred and fifty miles of telephone wire so I could wrap myself around my Ray. Talk about cosmic connections.
That day in Toronto, after Ray hung up, I tried to keep his voice in my ear for as long as I could. When Slip pulled gently on my arm, I turned to him, thinking he might say something comforting. But when he went to suck on my nipple, I knew what had to be done. The next day I was on a train heading home. Stupid tongue flick or not, I was going home to the only man for me.
The second I stepped off the train, Ray whisked me out to Thunder Hill to show me the coolest farmhouse for rent. We would start a co-operative farm and fill it with good people like Alana and Danny and Bear, people who would share the cost along with the good vibes, and together we would show the world how a free and natural life should be lived. That day we walked around the property, deciding where we would plant our organic garden. There was a small barn so maybe we could have goats and a horse. And yes, we'd have lots of dogs.
Still, the next time he pulled the tongue flicking thing in public, I told him we needed to be clear on something. As much as I loved him, I could not live with the tongue thing. “What tongue thing is that,” he said, pulling it right there on the spot. He must have seen the disgust wash over my face and I guess he didn't want to risk me running away to Toronto again because for the longest time, I thought the tongue thing was good and gone.
Bear deals out two hands in the candlelight. It seems we're storm stuck. I must be pretty drunk because I hadn't even thought about where the hell we're supposed to sleep tonight until I yawn and look around the room. Clayton seems set for the night over there on the couch even though he doesn't even have a blanket covering him. I'm growing colder just looking at him.
Bear must see me shaking, because he says, “You could always go over to Perry's house. He won't even notice if you curl up on his kitchen couch. And it's probably warmer there than it is in here.”
“Bad idea,” I tell him. What woman would take the chance of Perry Card finding her asleep on his couch? Knowing Perry, he would consider her a gift from Heaven.
Bear deals out another hand.
“How about Rummy 500 then? Think you could handle that?”
“Rummy 500 I can handle.”