It’s still early afternoon on Friday when Amy and Richard return from registering him for kindergarten and so Amy takes him to the playground. She sits on a warm bench, basking in the glow of the June sun and the kindergarten teacher’s comments about Richard’s evaluation tests. Above-average vocabulary; intelligent.
Middle-aged, fat, the woman had bottle-blonde hair and wore a kind of fairy-queen costume. For the children, she explained, and waved her magic wand. It made them feel more at ease when they were brought in. As Amy watched her float around the room in
bouffant netting, she thought, Who do you think you’re kidding? She came to learn later that the woman was a trained musician. An opera diva who had sung all over Europe but suffered a mental collapse and became a teacher late in life. “Richard is an intelligent and well-adjusted child,” she’d said, and Amy thought, Thank God for small mercies. In spite of me, Richard is well-adjusted. She’s impatient to tell Hank that Richard has an above-average vocabulary, which includes a few words she wishes he didn’t have, the ones he’s picked up at the playground where they have spent entire summers, Amy reading, Richard learning how to defend himself. Children’s play, Amy discovered, could be awfully bloody and Richard managed to do his fair share of bashing. Does it hurt? Where does it hurt? she’d ask. Show me. But she didn’t offer to kiss it better the way other mothers did. She didn’t want to use tricks.
Amy already knew her son was intelligent. She’d known it early on from the books she brought home from the library on child development. She realized he was ahead of his age in the way he stacked blocks or arranged them in patterns. She watched him in the kindergarten room as he explored, going back and forth between the Activity Centre and the Learning Centre, fingers lifting, examining, deftly fitting pieces of puzzles together; fingers never, never still.
She watches now, his thin legs scissoring through the sun as he dashes between the water fountain and the sandbox carrying a soup can. On the bench beside her, unopened, is the latest book she has borrowed from the library:
Your Gifted Child
. Richard waits patiently for the narrow stream of water to fill the tin can and then he races back to the sandbox and empties the water in one corner, his spot. His tongue follows the direction of the road he’s constructing.
“Can I? Can I?” Richard stands in front of her now, his sand-encrusted fingers drumming against her knee.
“Sure.” She watches him dart off to the refuse barrel to rummage through it for a larger container.
Later, Amy feels the tug of his hand in hers as he drags his feet, tired from the excitement of the visit to the school and an afternoon in the bright sun. She feels the flush of it in her own cheeks too. Amy sings a song about raindrops, and he joins in now and then with his ragged voice, a bit off-key. He wants to go to school again, tomorrow, he says, and Amy will take him to the calendar when they get home and try to explain how many days, weeks, months before this will happen. “When the leaves on the trees are gold and start to fall off,” she explains and he seems satisfied by this and turns his face up to the trees as they walk away from the park, heading down towards Pete’s Grocery to pick up the can of peaches she didn’t manage to get that morning. “Not gold yet,” Amy says. He nods solemnly. Her heart twists.
“Hi, hi, hi,” Richard says as he scrambles up the stairs in front of her. “Stanley Knowles,” he says, and points to the poster.
“What? You here again?” Pete says as she enters the store and then he kicks an empty box down a narrow aisle and disappears behind a shelf. She hears a knife slicing open a carton.
“Milk,” she says. “I told you I was bound to forget something. Any specials?” she asks, more to hear the sound of his voice, so that she can determine where he is at all times.
“There’s a special on canned ham,” Pete says. “I got a good buy.”
Richard kneels in front of the bins of potatoes and begins sorting through them, dumping red potatoes in with the white and white in with the red. Amy moves down the aisle.
MOTHER AND CHILD ARRESTED FOR SHOPLIFTING
. I beg your pardon, ma’am, would you spread your legs, put your hands above your head. Don’t move. Careful, she’s got a can of peaches in her jacket pocket. Look, I only take what I need. This is just a temporary solution.
“Been a busy day today?” she asks.
“Not any more than usual,” Pete says.
Her hand jumps. He’s moved. His voice comes from – she looks in the mirror. Where in hell is he? Suddenly, he’s standing beside her, leaning against the shelf. He crosses his pointed-toed shoes. “You want to buy tickets for a social?”
She picks up a can of devilled ham and pretends to read its label. “I haven’t been to a dance for ages. I don’t think I’d know how,” she says.
“Go ‘way. You and Hank go to socials, don’t you?”
“Oh, we used to. But he can’t stand the smoke,” Amy says. “It’s terrible in those halls. It makes his eyes swell.”
Pete laughs. “He’s pulling your leg. I’ve seen that man of yours in the Lincoln Motor Inn often enough. The smoke’s so thick in that place you could cut it with a knife. I’ll bet he doesn’t take you because he’s afraid he’d never get a chance to dance with you.”
No weather talk, this, Amy thinks. She feels the heat of blood rising in her face, feels flustered, confused. “I’ll have half a pound of bacon,” she says so that they will fall back into their familiar roles. She doesn’t need bacon but is relieved as Pete becomes businesslike again. He hurries away behind the meat counter. She’s irritated and set off balance by this information. When Hank is away she always assumes it’s work, an estimate or a pick-up or delivery. She’s never doubted that his absence was due to work.
Mrs. Pozinski is waiting for them at the fence as they enter the yard. “Yoo hoo, missus,” she calls. “I don’t like it to bother you, but I find glass on my sidewalk. Your boy, he throw drink bottle into my yard yesterday.”
“Uh uh, no I didn’t,” Richard says and backs away from the woman’s accusing finger.
“I’ll come over and clean it up,” Amy says wearily. No peaches for dessert, a half a pound of bacon she doesn’t really need, and an irate neighbour. What next?
“Good, good,” Mrs. Pozinski says. “Boy oh boy, broken glass, big trouble.”
“I’m sure he didn’t do it on purpose,” Amy says. “I’ll speak to him.” She sends Richard into the house with the bacon and then follows the woman down the walk to the broken pop bottle. As she bends and gingerly picks at the thin slivers of glass, she winces with pain. A bubble of blood rises on her finger.
They keep the Band-Aids on the top shelf in the bedroom closet and out of reach or else they’d find them plastered on Richard’s toys or on cracks in the walls, his attempts to “fix” things. She jumps and makes a grab for the box on the shelf and a clear plastic bag falls to the floor at her feet. Inside it are dozens of plastic monkeys, amber, green, red, the kind used to decorate fancy cocktails. But something else captures her attention. A bank passbook. She opens it and the figures jump from the page. Two thousand and eight hundred dollars. She sits down on the bed. Each entry, the precise accounting of deposits, interest payments, each figure a hammer blow. Bitterness fills her mouth. Here I am, she thinks, a juggler, trying to keep all the balls in the air and he’s hoarding money in a savings account. The unfairness of this settles heavily in her chest. Her hands shake as she slips the passbook back into its plastic sleeve.
Richard lies on his stomach under the kitchen table shielding something with his arm. “I’m making a surprise,” he says. “You’re going to like it.”
“I sure hope it’s not the kind of surprise you gave Mrs. Pozinski,” Amy says drily. Damn him, Amy thinks, the cheap bastard.
“I didn’t do it.”
“I’m going outside for a while. I’ll be out in the backyard if you need me, okay?”
“I’ll call you when my surprise is finished.” He bends over his work, scribbling furiously.
Amy lies back in the chaise lounge facing the garden. She looks up at the latticework of wires crisscrossing the sky above her yard, at the chokecherry bush growing wild beside the battered garbage cans, thinking: Almost three thousand dollars. Thinking of his meagre gifts in the past, a roasting pot for Christmas, a second-hand synthetic Persian lamb jacket, the cheap Woolworth’s nightgowns. Thinking: Here I am, twenty-six years old, with a mouthful of plastic teeth. It isn’t fair. But it’s his secretiveness that unnerves her. What else, she wonders, has he concealed? She sees Selena across the street, closing her gate and teetering off on very high heels to the corner and the bus. To work, Amy thinks, and realizes that she envies Selena. Amy isn’t at all certain what courses she would take even if she did go to university. Three thousand dollars is a lot of courses. But she doesn’t want Hank’s money. She wants to be like Selena, to have the freedom a job allows, to weigh possibilities and make decisions. Maybe she should take a course in psychology. She would like to try and learn how to understand herself better. Or perhaps she could become a teacher; or a medical lab technician who tracks down the insufficiencies of human fluids or the presence of abnormal cells, records the hot and cold of the body’s climate zones. She would like to be in a position of saving people. Whatever, she would not study what Mel had and become a snob who gets her kicks being recognized by waiters. I want to do something, she thinks, and feels the pressing urge just to
do
. Then she hears a scream inside the house. It yanks her to her feet. Richard meets her at the door, his face gone pale, his mouth open, and his words jumble together. “Mommy, Mommy, oh, oh, oh.”
“What is it?”
“Fire.” He points towards the kitchen.
As Amy bounds up the stairs two at a time she can see in the kitchen doorway the reflection of orange light dancing on the refrigerator door and as she enters, then the fire itself, shooting up the wall from the garbage can. She grabs a pot of leftover coffee from the counter and sloshes it onto the flames. The coffee sizzles and the fire draws back under cover of a sheet of smoke. Then she flings water from the dishpan, quenching the flames. The smoke rises and billows throughout the room, dark and thick, making her eyes and throat smart. Pieces of burnt paper swirl up near the ceiling and then softly float down onto the table, the countertop, her head and shoulders. Amy opens the window as wide as it will go and both the front and back doors. Her canvas running shoes are tinged black with soot and the wallpaper and ceiling around the garbage can glisten silky black.
“Richard! What the hell happened?” He enters the kitchen rubbing his eyes against the sting of smoke. “You almost burned the house down! What were you doing?” She’s an inch from hysteria.
“I was baking a cake,” he says. “I was baking you a cake.” He points and she sees the broiler element in the oven glowing red.
She forces herself to lower her voice so that he will not retreat into stubborn silence. “What do you mean, baking a cake?”
His eyes shift to a pie plate lying on the floor and a tea-towel beside it, slightly singed. Amy squats in front of him and looks into his fear-filled eyes. “It’s okay, Richard, everything’s okay. Just tell me the whole story, all right?”
“I put the cake in the oven,” he says, blinking the way Hank does and twisting a corner of his tee shirt around one finger.
“And then what?”
“It started on fire and so I put it in the garbage.”
“Put what, Richard? I don’t see anything here.”
“It burned. It was a paper cake.”
The evidence of this lies under the kitchen table, the crayons, scissors, and brown paper. Her surprise.
She draws him into herself, holding him against her tightly. She feels the sticky warmth of his hands sliding about her neck in a hug and the tickle of his moist lashes against her face. “It’s okay, honey,” she hears herself say. Positive reinforcement, she has read somewhere, for telling the truth. “I’m glad you told me. Would you like to make a real cake some time?”
He nods and leans heavily into her breasts, clinging, wanting to stay.
She pats his back, draws his hands from her neck, and moves away. “Well, that’s what we’ll do then. Not now, but another day. Soon, okay?”
An hour later the kitchen is back to normal except for the lingering burnt odour and a scorch mark on the wallpaper beside the garbage can. She looks at the clock and realizes that Hank is late. Her joyful anticipation of telling him that their son will do well has faded and in its place is the sour taste of his secret: the bank passbook. His withholding. She thinks she will use it as ammunition to put him on the offensive, off balance, and then she’ll tell him flat out that she’s going to get a job. “It stinks in here,” Richard says. She agrees and so they go out into the backyard where they’ll wait for Hank.
Richard plays in a corner of the yard where Hank has set down a piece of indoor-outdoor carpeting. He moves vehicles through streets in the town he has constructed out of pieces of wood, bits of broken cement, anything he can find. The rush-hour traffic has thinned to a trickle of cars passing through the intersection on the corner. The day has lost its brightness and the sharp edges of the neighbourhood begin to soften. She watches as Richard gets up and tiptoes to the back of the garden and over to the chokecherry
bush. He carries a stone, she knows, and watches as he bends and places it among the others he has laid there. A tiny pile of stones, which they were not to touch or ever disturb because they are “very, very magic,” Richard had said rather vehemently. He cups his mouth and leans forward and whispers into the tree’s branches. Then he turns his ear as though he’s listening to something. He walks towards Amy, carrying a twig that he’s pulled from the bush. “Daddy’s coming soon,” he says and offers no explanation. Hank, you bastard, where are you? Amy thinks.
She watches as Richard climbs up onto the clothesline stoop and begins to strip the branch of its leaves. His tongue flicks from side to side as he concentrates. Then he twists the twig until it breaks into two pieces and he sets the pieces one against the other. He lifts the crossed sticks and swings them across the sky, making the
ssshh ssshh
sound of a powerful jet engine as he pushes his airplane up over the roofs of the houses, over the stingy, gritty neighbourhood, high above and on to other worlds. Yes, Amy thinks. Yes, she will confront Hank about the passbook and ask, Why do I have a mouth full of plastic teeth when we have all this money? She will demand the right to get a job, to make decisions, the freedom to choose.