Mel ducks into his bedroom to change his shirt. He stands in front of the mirror stripped to the waist. He turns sideways, examining his profile, flexes his muscles, and checks to see if his pectorals are larger. He looks to see if something has changed because he has “banged” a girl. Then he feels a pressure in his chest, the imprint of
a foot. Hangers clank in the closet as he pulls free a clean shirt. He tucks it down around his waist and turns to the mirror. He imagines he can see the treads of a sneaker.
Jill sits on her bed holding a mirror to her groin. Blood pools beneath her skin, becoming an angry-looking bruise. She runs her finger across it lightly, back and forth, and feels something else. A lump. It will disappear when the bruise fades, she thinks. Jill believes that the lump is from the boy’s kick but the node has been swollen for a month or so and is rapidly growing larger.
Amy washes her hands in the bathroom. The air is moist and smells of Chantilly, and bubbles from Margaret’s bath still cling to the side of the tub. When she steps from the bathroom she looks inside Margaret’s bedroom. The new blouse her mother made lies crumpled on the floor. The Blue Book, Margaret’s journal, lies open on the white bedspread. Amy’s stomach sings with hunger and so she decides that she’ll wait for another opportunity to discover what her mother has written in it today.
They sit waiting around the table as Margaret unwraps a damp tea towel from a plate of sandwiches and sets the plate down. She hovers over her children, pouring ice tea into their glasses, and then sits down to watch them eat. Amy’s hands shake as she tears apart her sandwich and stuffs chunks of cheddar cheese, ham, and bread into her mouth.
“So, what did you do today?” Margaret chooses to ignore how Amy’s cheeks bulge with food, that she barely chews it before she swallows and reaches for another sandwich. Often, they lose their appetites when they watch Amy eat, and so they have learned not to watch when she sometimes stirs everything together into a soupy mush so she can eat it more quickly with a spoon. They can always tell where she has sat by the sticky globs of food left behind, the
dribbles of milk, the litter of crusts or bits of fat or rind picked off and discarded.
“We went to the zoo. We saw monkeys,” Jill says.
“Baboons. They belong to the family of Cercopithecidae.” Mel’s voice is deep today. Baritone.
“Oh really?” Margaret replies as though this information is surprising.
“The usual picnic stuff.” He raises his arms, stretches.
“And swans. We saw swans. They were in the duck pond.”
“I have always loved the swans,” Margaret says to Jill. She leans into the chair hugging herself as though suddenly chilled. “And what did you see, Amy?”
She will tell them absolutely nothing about the country and western band because they ran off on her. “Three boys on bicycles,” she says through a chunk of bread and notices how Jill’s and Mel’s faces grow sharp. “In the duck pond. Quack, quack.” She draws her lips back to reveal a wad of half-chewed bread stuck against her teeth.
Mel shoves his sandwich aside, his appetite gone. “I think I’ll go out for a while. That okay?”
Margaret appears not to have heard. “I think your father should be home quite early in the morning.”
“I’ll go with you,” Jill says.
Margaret becomes suddenly alert and Amy, anticipating her next move, plucks up another sandwich before she can clear them away. “Haven’t you all had enough of the outdoors today?” Margaret asks.
“Just for a while. It’s so cool now. I thought I’d look up Garth,” Mel says casually, although he knows that his cousin is probably waiting for him.
“Well, all right. But don’t be long,” Margaret says as she goes to put the sandwiches away. Her foot meets George napping in front of the refrigerator door. Her face turns red and all three look up in astonishment as Margaret heaves the plate of sandwiches at the cat.
“Melville Barber! I have had it up to kingdom come with that cat of yours! You’re going to have to do something about it!” She turns and flees the kitchen.
“What now?” Mel stares at the shattered plate, the sandwiches fallen open, meat and cheese and egg salad scattered across the shiny new floor.
Jill shrugs. “I’m not a walking encyclopaedia.”
They leave together and Amy sits at the table alone. She sets her hands onto her lap, palms up, lying there limply. Her head drops forward until her chin almost rests on the table. She hears Margaret’s heels thumping on the ceiling overhead and then the squeak of bed-springs. She stares at the wall as she chews and wonders, Why did Margaret throw the plate of sandwiches at the cat? She eats methodically, steadily, to still a gnawing at her centre. Why does Timothy have to go away? Why can’t he stay home and work in town like other fathers do? She remembers Timothy out back, chopping wood, heat radiating from the woodstove, the happy smell and crackle of it. She remembers it being more orange when Timothy stayed home. A glowing orange fire, friendlier than the house is now, warmer. There is something about the house that is too hard and shiny with Timothy away. She gulps back tea to wash down the sandwich, and reaches for Mel’s half-eaten one. “Born July 4th, 1946. Jill Anne. A beautiful, bouncing baby girl. Eight pounds, four ounces.” Amy has read this in Margaret’s Blue Book. Sometimes the entries are cryptic: “I don’t know.” Or, “Over my head.” Sometimes they’re clearer: “Tim goes away.” “Tim returns Thursday.” Margaret records her cycle, the onset of menstruation, with single Words: “bloated,” “cramps,” “depressed.” Amy has read pages of tiny script that summed up a day or a conversation, or their own antics recorded in a tone of high exuberance, her love for them declared in a flourish of curlicues, sometimes followed on the next page by an abrupt printed sentence such as: “I can’t stand this any more.”
“Amelia Jane, born April 29th, 1950, seven pounds, twelve ounces.” Amelia’s a name for an old woman, Timothy had protested, and so, although the birth certificate said otherwise, she became Amy. Amy has read puzzling descriptions of herself in Margaret’s Blue Book which, if it weren’t for her name written there, she would not have recognized as being herself.
Usually when Margaret throws herself onto the bed it’s over a slight disagreement with Timothy or after a visit from her mother. And usually the springs squeak again only moments later when she gets off the bed and comes back down to them, subdued and shamefaced with apologies. Amy listens now. The silence in the house draws back and up, at its centre a hole, the pause before the wind rushes in and fills it. She scoops globs of creamy mayonnaise from bread and sucks it from her fingers. When she finishes the insides of Mel’s sandwich, she pushes away from the table, her stomach distended.
She leaves the house, going out the back way to avoid a chance meeting with Mel or Jill. As she crosses the yard towards the garage, the rope swing is a dark silhouette, a skinny U suspended under the branches of the shade tree. Gravel crunches under her feet as she follows the driveway to the back of the yard. The air inside the garage rushes forward to meet her as she opens the door, hot, heavy with a sweet smell of paint. Timothy’s jalopy is covered with a tarpaulin. When he works on it, she sits behind the wheel practising for the time she will drive it. She feels through the dark until her hands rest against the rungs of a ladder. She lifts it down from the wall. A can of paint topples from a work-bench as she swings the ladder around and out the door. It scrapes against the roof of the garage as she sets it in place, teetering beneath her feet as she climbs upwards.
“Where are we going?” Jill hears a noise in the backyard but she doesn’t mention it. She’s afraid Mel will leave without her. They
lean against the side of the veranda. Across the street the cries of several children playing in the school yard float up to meet the coming night, and, set against it, is their light-coloured clothing, phantoms dancing, gliding in a strange waltz.
“You mean, where am
I
going.” Mel leaves the yard and walks down the street, quickly passing from view into the shadows cast by the trees.
“Mel!”
He turns and his heart becomes sick with the sight of Jill’s limping, gimpy walk as she tries to catch up to him. He drops to the grass beneath a tree and waits. “So Howdy Doody has a sister.”
Jill sits down beside him. “Jerks. They were just jerks.”
Mel yanks at a blade of grass. He cups it and blows. He’s been trying for years but he never succeeds in making it shriek. “Howdy Doody. They meant my ears, of course.” He feels the flutter of her cool mouth against his cheek. “I should have gone for the cola. Not you.”
“I don’t think it would have been the same.” She laughs and he feels himself blush. She hugs her knees and presses her face into them, running her tongue across the taut, smooth skin, tasting salt, and feeling the slippery smoothness of her kneecap against her lips. Is that what it’s like, she wonders, a wet kiss? A wet mouth sliding across another wet mouth? “So?” she asks.
“So, what?”
“So did you and Elsa do it?” She grins at him and her white teeth shine out from her wet lips.
“Yes.” And he would like to do it again. Soon. He feels the rush of desire.
“I thought so.” She leans back onto the grass and shivers as dew soaks through her thin cotton top. She looks up at the dim pinpricks of new stars. The children in the playground still seem to be dancing, their muted voices saying, We have secrets. Adults will call from
doorways. Come on in, now, they will say. You’ll catch your death. Time to pack it in. Time for sleep. Children having fun seems to make adults nervous, Jill thinks, as she hears the first call and listens to the anguished pleading. Adults want to stop their children’s playing quickly with a warning that is really a veiled threat. The children continue their play, choosing for several moments at least to close their ears to the beckoning cries of their anxious parents, who offer safety in the rooms of houses, as they wait in doorways for their children to return and for their own lives to continue.
“Well, so? What was it like?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Jill springs on him, beats him down onto the grass with her fists. “You have to. You have to.” She straddles him with her thin bruised legs and wraps her hands around his throat. “You have to.” She threatens murder. Mel’s eyes bulge, his tongue lolls grotesquely, and then his head drops to one side as he feigns death. She flicks the end of his nose and rolls away. It’s not fair, Jill thinks. She picks at a small scab on her knee. It stings as she pulls it away. And then her tongue stings too with the sudden craving for something salty. “Pickled herring,” she says. She would die to sink her teeth into a piece of pickled herring. Her tongue shivers as she imagines the salty taste of it, her teeth slicing clean through its blue skin, feeling the texture of its flesh, salty, tangy. She feels the heat of Mel’s fingers against her cool ones. “God, I’d kill for some pickled herring.” He lifts her hand and sets it against his groin. She feels the bump that is his penis. “It’s hard!”
“That’s what it was like.”
She withdraws her hand. The children playing in the school yard have all gone home. She misses their voices. “What’s it look like? Hard.”
He groans. “Aw, come on.”
“I’m serious.”
“For the love of Mike,” Mel complains but he unzips his fly and shows her.
His knob is bluish, cold-looking, she thinks, as though it must hurt. “It’s –”
“It’s what?”
“Kind of …” Ugly, she thinks. “Show-offy.”
Mel leaps to his feet and walks away.
“Hey, wait up! I meant big. It’s big.” She grabs his arm and slows him down. Her mouth fills with saliva as she thinks of brine and sucking at a chunk of pickled herring. “So are you and Elsa going steady now?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“But you are going to ask her to the dance, aren’t you?”
“Maybe.” He wouldn’t be caught dead going anywhere with Elsa.
They walk down towards Main Street, their destination the hardware store where their cousin Garth Johnson waits for them. Beyond, cars pass beneath the yellow bug-repellent lights at the filling station.
“I don’t think you have Howdy Doody ears. I really don’t.” Laughter bubbles in her throat. “Actually, your ears are more like Prince Charles’s ears.”
“Thanks a lot.”
The air has grown cool and goose bumps rise on Jill’s arms as she and Mel walk downtown. The sudden chill is a reminder that spring had been swallowed up overnight in May, causing those who had murmured against the unusual almost-tropical weather and its offspring (salamanders spawning in sump holes in basements, clumps of moist penis-shaped mushrooms erupting in lawns during the night, their pale new skin turning leathery-brown beneath the sun of the day) to wonder aloud now whether it has been just too darn good to be true, this marvellous weather. “Don’t you forget, it’s only June,” they remind themselves as they step out onto back stoops,
hands on hips, confronting their wet gardens. “At least there’s no sign of rain tonight. Good thing, that. Enough is enough, eh? About all we’re gonna wind up growing this year is slugs and mosquitoes and little boys.” They bite back the dreaded thought of punishment, an unseasonable frost.
As Mel and Jill walk beneath the street lamps, past houses and then the shops of Main Street, the streets they pass through feel as familiar as the lines running across the palms of their hands. Unlike Amy, who treats her travels through Carona’s streets as something she has to do in order to arrive at her destination, Mel and Jill have the ambling gait of landowners. They pause in front of Hardy’s Gem Store. While all the other stores are closed, windows dark, there’s a light in the Hardys’ window. The abalone shell lamp has been left burning. Jill has always been drawn to the shell, by how its colours appear to vibrate, iridescent waves curling over a landscape of spiky coral. Usually when Jill looks at it, she thinks that it’s what an ocean would look like on the moon. But tonight as she looks at it, she thinks of pickled herring. The craving is for more than its tangy brine, it’s the texture of its flesh she desires as well. The sensation of shredding thin skin between her teeth.