The Juliet Stories (16 page)

To the world at large and the room in general, Oma Friesen declares, as she often does, “To everything there is a season.”

The clock over the sink points its short hand just shy of a quarter past, and its long hand centimetres beyond the number twelve. It is Wednesday, the twelfth of June. Juliet, a girl in her twelfth year of life, sits at her grandmother’s table, alone. Before her is a glass of milk and half a soggy tuna salad sandwich prepared with sweet pickle relish on bought white bread.

Juliet stands. Standing, she swallows the milk and wipes the skin above her upper lip with her turned wrist. She wears blue jeans, a white short-sleeved shirt that buttons up the front, and a green corduroy vest with a pocket over each hip. Into the right pocket she places the remaining half of her tuna sandwich.

She is filled with something that is not courage; it is not determination; it is not sadness or questioning or the desire to err. It is the perfect calm of a girl who knows what she is about to attempt and who is being pulled onward by the inevitable. It is the perfect calm of a girl who neither guesses the consequences nor suspects that there will be any.

The front door to Oma Friesen’s apartment opens onto a stairwell that leads to the front entryway. On the other side of the stairwell is a cavelike laundry room shared by all the tenants. The washer and dryer are not being used right now, but when they are, their thump and whirr can be heard dimly inside Oma Friesen’s apartment.

The smooth plastic railing beside the stairs slides under Juliet’s hand.

She thinks,
Oma Friesen, what a big house you have
.

At street level, noon light pours through tall windows and heats the small foyer. Juliet steps directly up to the closed door marked with a brass number one. She tries the handle, hot under her palm, and it turns. The door is open. The threshold beckons. The girl steps silently across it and into otherness.

She pushes the door shut behind herself. She is in a room darkened by a blind drawn down over a square window that would otherwise gaze onto the street. An aura of illuminated dust motes marks its outline.

The girl feels her way past heavy lumps of furniture to the kitchen, where a plate of bread crusts rests on the counter. Everything in the room is grey, lit dimly by a rectangle of glass high in the wall above the cupboards. A cat leaps on silent, padded paws to the gold-flecked Formica, startling the girl, but only for a moment.

“Hello,” says the girl. The sound of her own voice, alive in the still air, claims this place.

Boldly she presses her fingers over the bones of the cat’s pulsing skull, flattening its ears. The cat is telling the girl exactly what it wants, its soft body beneath her hand seeking pressure. The warmth of its interior motor hums as the cat noses her sweater, bats at her pocket; it finds what’s hidden. It wants the sandwich. The girl is happy to share. She feeds the cat ripped portions off of her fingers, its rough tongue scratching her as if into a new life, another body, one that feels one with this shrouded world.

When the sandwich is gone, the cat leaps to the floor, darts out of the room, and disappears. The girl cannot find it in any of the darkened rooms, though she can hear the patient sound of the animal retching, coughing, disgorging itself of the sandwich. The sound of this act, taking place somewhere nearby but out of sight, is so familiar that it does not disgust or surprise her.

She says, “I have to go now but I’ll come back.”

The foyer’s brightness stuns Juliet: overexposure painted by dilated pupils. She stands outside apartment number one, its door closed, and breathes deeply and with contentment. There is no hesitation as she continues up the stairs to the second floor, to the door marked with the number two. Again the handle yields.

The girl expects no less.

This room is dazzling and barren. Light rushes through the thick maple leaves outside the window, throwing shadows that move across the green shag carpeting that makes a wall-to-wall appearance on every floor. There is nothing here but a television with a monstrous antenna balanced precariously atop a red milk crate. Elsewhere a mattress lies in the centre of a room, a sleeping bag crumpled upon it. The fridge is packed with sticky bottles of condiments and two cases of diet soda. Behind the bathroom mirror are brown bottles of pills.

Nothing living is kept on purpose in apartment number two. No plants, no fish, no animals, and even in the spider’s web wafting across the corner of the bedroom window, no spider to be seen.

The girl says, “Hello? Hello? Hello?” making an echo of her voice, and she says, “Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye,” not certain whether she will return. She feels no great desire to discover more than can be seen in apartment number two.

There is one more elbow of staircase, the yellow handrail slippery under Juliet’s palm, crumbs of dirt crammed into the angles of the steps. But the door to apartment number three is locked. The handle gives ever so slightly in either direction, and she rattles it with perplexity, almost shock, that this last secret is closed to her. Surely this is not what is meant to happen. The door must open. The girl must discover what is hidden behind it.

Juliet walks to school through a heat wave, dressed in brown boys’ shorts and a red T-shirt, purchased on her behalf and without her approval by Oma Friesen at Oma Friesen’s favourite thrift shop. Oma Friesen buys all her clothes, linens, and household accessories second-hand. When the items were presented to Juliet, they smelled of rotting threads, decrepit attics, and damp cellars permeated by decay. Even freshly washed and dried, the smell clings, a reminder that Juliet does not belong to these clothes and these clothes do not belong to her. But this makes sense to Juliet: nothing in this country is hers; everything is strange, almost like home but off-kilter.

In Canada, the month of June is spent indoors in stifling classrooms whose windows are cracked open yet do not breathe. Juliet is certain these days are wasted — she learns nothing new, nothing of consequence or even of interest. It seems to be expected and accepted, a wilting of intentions built deliberately into the system: to be done with something in Canada, one must be more than done, one must be extinguished. The teachers give up teaching and fill the hours with “fun” activities: crafts, skits in French (
Bonjour, Papa, comment ça va? Ça va bien, merci, et tu? Ça va bien, merci!
), board games, Xeroxed sheets of math problems, National Film Board films, extended recesses.

There is a new development on the playground at the end of this grade six year. The sultry heat brings it on, and it appears, fully formed, at the far end of the school grounds, where the yard dips down, hidden, into a stand of scrubby sumac: “Dare.” The game is only for the popular; this excludes Juliet, who is drawn with her fellow outcasts to the site as if to the scene of an accident. The girls who participate, most of them from the other classroom, perform tasks with a mixture of protest and obeisance to the rules: they close their eyes and kiss a boy; when they open their eyes, no one will tell who it was. “Dare” is almost entirely about danger: kissing, touching, showing, saying words that are not allowed; between the boys it is sometimes about fighting or wrestling or taunts.

The game progresses over several recesses as the school year struggles towards its bludgeoned end. The day is particularly hot. The children should be swimming in northern lakes or lounging on concrete beside community pools; instead they gather under the slim shade of the sumacs, frantic with enforced boredom. Under the circumstances, anything might happen, anything to slice the day wide open.

Lazily, a girl in crisp white shorts and a sky-blue polo shirt turns to Juliet and says, “I dare your friend to take off her Paki scarf.”

Juliet does not reply. She has assumed herself invisible, and is at once amazed and appalled to discover that she has been seen and observed.

Juliet’s friend shrugs, refuses. Her name is Nabihah, and she is accustomed to people, even teachers, claiming they cannot remember how to pronounce correctly such strange syllables. She tells Juliet, when Juliet asks, that her name means nothing here in Canada; it means only
different
.

Nabihah will not fall for the girl’s trick, the appearance of inclusion.

“Okay, then I dare her” — pointing — “to take off her glasses.”

“So?” Juliet’s bespectacled friend throws her chin back like she’s taking a blow. Juliet realizes how little she knows about this girl, Mary Ellen, who is removed twice weekly from school to attend mysterious counselling appointments arranged by her mother, who is not her birth mother or her stepmother or even her adopted mother — she is a foster mother. The foster mother, who is Catholic, gave her the name; in the time Mary Ellen calls
before
, her name was Crystal.

“So what? That’s all? That’s a stupid dare. I take my glasses off all the time.”

Silently Juliet telegraphs
danger
, but Mary Ellen is slipping the frames over her ears. One of the boys, slight and blond, removes the glasses from her hand, which opens to let him. Mary Ellen’s eyes blink rapidly, shrunken in a face that looks undrawn, exposed. “I did it. See? Now give them back.”

“Make us,” says the dare’s originator.

Juliet recognizes that it is her duty as a friend to say something. But if she does they will turn on her, their instincts tuned to weakness and fear, and she is not brave in this new country. She is not courageous. She is not herself at all, the self she left behind in Nicaragua, the self who followed fisher boys into a seaside cave, who ate shark.

She is not like her brother, who is at least as brave as he ever was, who shrugs off
cancerboy
, who says, with honest curiosity, “What do they know?”

Because she knows what the Canadian children know: they know how to torture. They are looking for something simple: proof of their own power. They want tears and the humiliation of begging; their contentment depends upon it, and they will not be deterred. The scene will proceed as written. But Nabihah, tiny, her black eyes like polished stones, steps forward; Nabihah says, “Stop.” And what seemed inevitable suddenly is not.

Juliet imagines that Nabihah’s hidden hair is cropped short around her head.

They don’t say
Why should we?
They don’t say
Paki
.

They don’t like Nabihah and they don’t know her name, but the surprise of her certainty commands respect. Juliet feels the distance between herself and Nabihah expanding; she thinks, despairingly, We will never be friends.

The blond boy throws the glasses into the dirt at their feet. One arm is twisted and no longer sits properly on Mary Ellen’s ear. She’s gone crooked.

“My mom is going to kill me, she’s going to kill me, she’s going to kill me.”

The way she says this makes Juliet think it might be true.

The danger, for the unwanted, cannot be quantified. It lodges inside the body and the mind, poison seeping from a secret wound.
I am not wanted
, the rejected child says to herself; she finds it entirely possible to believe that she is unwanted because of some want within, and thus the want within is invented, and recurs, replicates itself as voraciously as a cancerous cell.

She hears his voice all the way from the foyer, instant recognition that pops like a bubble in her brain. Blindly, possessed of a desperate joy she has not previously known, Juliet throws off her backpack and tears down the stairs and past the laundry room (where a woman in black is folding silky items on top of the dryer), sprinting into Oma Friesen’s apartment, darting along the hallway, looking in every room until she finds her father, and flings herself into his arms.

He lifts her like a toy and squeezes her against his chest. “My girl, you’ve grown so long and tall. How can this be?”

She is too overwhelmed to reply.

It isn’t until she is set back down that the room slides into focus — the sickroom, air dank with expelled mucous — and the people gathered in it — her entire family, and her oma, all of them, all together, here, in another country.

For a moment no one says anything. No one can. Then Keith begins to cough, and Bram, who is unaccustomed to seeing his pain, bends at his son’s side and tries to hold him, to soothe him, placing his big hands on Keith’s head the way Juliet’s fingers stroke the cat in apartment number one.

“I’m not leaving,” Bram says (no one has asked).

———

The girl’s heart jams her throat with its throbbing. She stands frozen, one hand flat against the closed apartment door with the cat twisting around her ankle, rubbing its naked, deep ear into the bones of her bare foot. There are noises in the foyer. She’s lingered too long, but her opportunities have grown scant now that her father is here to stay.

Her needs are bold, demanding. She has found patches of white fur on her clothes or caught in the pale hairs on the backs of her arms, evidence that is proof of her daring, proof that she is known elsewhere. That she knows things no one else knows, or knows she knows.

She knows that a single woman lives in apartment number one, older than her own mother but not as old as her grandmother, and she has seen the woman, in pressed pants, snapping towels in the laundry room and folding each with symmetrical precision. The woman’s short, fluffed hair is a brash shade of red, and she has told the girl, in passing, “My hair used to be exactly the colour of yours.” (This is something grown-ups say often to the girl, or a variation on the theme — my daughter’s hair was just like yours; my grandson’s hair is just like yours; I always hoped for a child with hair like yours.)

The girl presses her cheek to the door. She has no escape route. The foyer door does not slam immediately; she imagines it propped open as bags drop heavily to the floor. Voices. The girl relaxes fractionally, her spine compressing: the noise belongs to her parents, not to the woman in apartment number one.

Her parents have come into the building talking, stuck in a conversation they do not wish to end though they have arrived at their destination. The girl slumps to pet the cat. Her parents cannot know that their voices, in the foyer, carry as if amplified into every apartment. If they knew they would stop themselves, if they could. But perhaps they could not.