All this talk and yet after three weeks he still left the seat up. She knew as she flushed that he'd still be exactly where she'd left him, glued to the couch one floor down, head lolling as he listened to music. The rage that shot her off the damp toilet rim had time to collect as she walked back through halls, down stairs and across the entrance-way, time to sharpen and gleam. The very skirt that had made the drop to the bowl so quick (would she have checked if wearing jeans?) enabled her plan.
“I was wondering,” she began, crossing to where he dangled his head off the edge of the couch, “if you'd like some ass.” The pleated charcoal skirt was short enough that she simply had to saw a little wool left then right. Perfectly, predictably, he cranked his body around to get under her. She cooed and did ass until his head dropped fully over the edge of the cushion and his heels climbed the couch's back.
“If you want this ass,” she said, glancing back for a final check on his cramped arms and legs, “then love it!” She clamped his head
between her thighs. “Love it by leaving the seat down. Got it?! Got it?!” She reached down for a few playful pinches at his cheeks. “Easy, Tarzan. Your arms are not as strong as my thighs. Look up here. Relax. Stop fighting and I'll stop squeezing. Okay? Okay? Listen. You've got bad Ass Rhetoric. If we're going to live together, don't think
right
or
wrong
. Don't think
man
or
woman
. Don't dare think
chore
. Think
more
or
less
ass. You want this ass? Keep it happy, and keep the seat down.”
Although small, the Sunnyvale Clinic still had one long hallway Stan and the late-adolescent Andrew had to walk down, still had the fumigated smell of a hospital, that sharp bullring in the nose. Andrew was grateful when Stan tried to start whatever conversation he could.
“
Clinic
originally meant âof, or pertaining to, a bed,'” said Stan, ever the teacher.
“Really? . . . Infectious Diseases of a Bed,” replied Andrew, all the while calculating distances, worries and threats as they walked. Make the edge of that open door. Inside edge of its window. Outside.
“Advanced Summer Tennis about a Bed,” Stan continued.
“Public Speaking about a Bed.”
Stan was okay in the hallway, no cane, no walker. Andrew walked his slow shadow walk, certain Stan too must be swinging from guarded hope to dissolving pessimism to simple impatience.
“So,” Andrew asked, “what kind of clinic is this?”
“I don't know. You've got the directions.”
“I got us here, didn't I? Seriously, what kind of clinic is this? OT? Muscle? Are there muscle clinics?”
“
Kind?
Christ, I don't know.”
Like toddlers who close their eyes in hopes of avoiding danger by ignoring it or people in the 1950s who turned their TVs off before undressing or having sex, clinics, doctors' offices and hospitals politely ask us to limit our knowing to seeing. In a hospital, however, a bedpan needs more than a curtain to hide. One hears so much.
Waiting in their curtained cubicle, Andrew and Stan couldn't help but hear the adjacent conversation, and each counted floor tiles to avoid eye contact.
“Cold,” a boy said with a crispness either decisive or affected. “Cold. Cold. Warm.”
“It was after a bath,” a woman added, “and he says, âGet that cold cloth offah me.' I felt like I'd been bit.”
“Yes. Mm-hmm. Keep your eyes closed, Tyler. A few more.”
“Warm. Warm. Cold.”
“Okay, Tyler, rubber hammer time.”
When a human shadow finally advanced across the curtain of their own examination cubicle, Andrew and Stan would've signed up for anything just to get out of there. By injecting stale urine into the muscles. . . . Derived from boiled rabbit spleens, this serum . . .
“Mr. Day. Sorry to keep you waiting. Let's get to the gear.” This technician or therapist or salesman held out the antithesis of a Walkman. The unit was small and portable and obviously battery-powered, but electrodes dangled instead of earphones. “We'll show you and your â must be your son, looks just like you â we'll show you and your son how simple the Medtronic is to use. If you're satisfied and ready, you can begin building muscle tonight. Funny that a computer runs this little thing, because computers are a good analogy. You know that computers work with a series of ons and offs. So do muscles. When we want to take a bite out of a hamburger, our biceps need to contract on one side and expand on the other to lift the burger. One side's on; the other's off. Stan, you don't need me to tell you that the on and off commands your brain sends aren't always being obeyed. Unstimulated, the muscles atrophy, and there's less of them there the next time the signal does get through. The Medtronic sends a regular signal to fire those muscles all night long. We'll start with sixteen-second intervals. Ask the Chinese track team about the benefits of working out while you sleep.”
Fine, but can I still grab my pecker?
Andrew knew his father was thinking. Hand splint. Electrodes. The weakening arms.
The clinic had a return policy, and Stan was about to lose his unique teaching job and the generous health plan that went with it. Stan went electric.
An assistant arrived to show Andrew how to gel the electrodes, drawing rectangles and squares on Stan's shoulders and arms in black marker, assuring Andrew that the electrodes would be more pliant if the unit was allowed to run for thirty seconds before they were applied. The ink outlines remained on Stan's body for a week, as father and son absorbed wiring up Stan into their nightly routine, three more minutes after the trache tube and hand splint. By two weeks,
Andrew could usually get it done without waking Stan â Stan surely not noticing the beery breath wafting above him. By then, the square and rectangular outlines had almost worn off Stan's irregularly curved shoulders and his atrophied arms, inspection stamps fading from old meat.
One night, Andrew had sealed most of the charges, one, two, three, but then he stopped to feel the rise of Stan's bony shoulders while he slept. Defiantly arced toward the ceiling even in sleep, this was definitely, indisputably bone, the steel of the body. Andrew pressed, gently at first, trying to ease that crescent down into the untouched mattress, waiting for gravity to do its share. Instead, the remaining electrode he'd stuck to the back of his own hand suddenly spat current. “Fuck,” he whisper-screamed, feeling in an instant the electric charges that didn't even register on Stan's benumbed body. Andrew's arm shot out in front of him, whipping a cord across Stan's chest. The shock stopped as abruptly as it had started, leaving Andrew panting and Stan startled awake.
“Didn't that hurt?”
“Didn't what hurt?”
“G'night, Dad.”
Andrew pinched a single toe on his way out.
Preparing for his bicycle odyssey, Andrew had looked at a map of Canada so often that it became a folding cartoon with frayed edges, each panel of the map a tired animation cell. Eventually, his native city of Kingston, Ontario, became the tail end of a twitching fish.
Read from left to right, Canada's largest lakes depict a bird diving from the northwestern corner down to the southernmost tip, then rising again, weighted with catch. Great Bear Lake is steady in flight, the smooth hunt; Great Slave, a pair of reaching wings, a bid for air to power the dive of Athabasca, Reindeer, Winnipeg. The Huron-Michigan talons pluck Erie from beneath a dark surface to flash silver in the busy Ontario air.
Halfway between Montreal and Toronto, a middle child with starlet siblings, Kingston marks the end of Lake Ontario and the beginning of the long staircase of the St. Lawrence River. Or the end of the river and the beginning of the lake.
Eastern Canada is caught tight in a cold blue fist. The Labrador Sea is a set of straining tendons, the Hudson Strait the first length of finger past the Chidley knuckle. Thick merchant's fingers reach for Hudson Bay, that fat man urinating, draining his plump James Bay pud all the way down to Kingston.
The Gulf of St. Lawrence is a gouging thumb. Quebec and the Maritimes â Europe's first handful.
Halifax to Kingston: Andrew is biking from a thumb to a fish.
Syringomyelia: incurable and practically unknown, Stan's degenerative neurological disease spared him and Andrew false hope and too many hospital parking garages. As long-term diseases go, Stan's offered little medical comfort. Or intrusion. Ensnared in warping bone, he was nonetheless exempt from the roulette wheel of meds. Anti-inflammatories didn't grease his joints but corrode his stomach. Nerve stabilizers didn't cloud his thinking or tip his mood. With the exception of the arced silver tracheotomy tube in his throat and a few specialized physiotherapy devices, Stan's body was little better for four hundred years of scientific medicine.
“This is how it works,” Stan said more than once. “Children get stronger.”
A few weeks after Chris, Nathan and all of Andrew's school friends left Kingston to attend university somewhere else, anywhere other than where they were born, boredom or emotional self-preservation prompted Andrew to start recycling some of the lecture material he met during the day while he exercised Stan at night. Surely now he knew a few things Stan didn't.
“Otherwise, Donne's a smart guy,” Andrew began while aiding then resisting one of Stan's mutinous arms. “But for a time he's just wasted with illness. Boils. Perpetual fever. In bed for months. And what does he do? Scours his soul to discover what sin he's committed. In the seventeenth century, everyone, including you, would take one look at this bod and think,
Child-diddling Satanist
. I'd probably be standing over you with boiling oil, not a helping hand.”
Stan's arm weakened even more as he warmed to a story. He stopped staring absently at the ceiling and looked at Andrew. “I wouldn't have been scrutinized for very long. I would have been the guest of honour at a mattress party before I was twenty-five.”
“
Mattress party?
What is this, death by orgy?”
“Not quite. Pre-industrial revolution, home was a place of work.
Cottage industry. Tenant farming. Granny's food consumption could only outweigh her productivity for so long. Admittedly, it's tough to axe the old bird directly, and everyone was marooned in the same class, same five-mile geographic radius, same, here it is,
prison of illiteracy
,” Stan joked, punning on his job teaching for Correctional Services Canada. “We all understand about Gran. Invite the neighbours, unstop the ale and throw a mattress on top of her. Everybody piles on and no one person is guilty of murder. Six months later it was somebody else's house.”
“Jesus,” Andrew said, rotating Stan's arm with his.
“The Princess might have had a pea,” said Stan. “Everybody else got Mom or Dad.”
After her fourth consecutive night in Andrew's Kingston house, Betty awoke to an empty bed and the sound of a distant foghorn warning her:
rebound, rebound
. He'd already left for campus, so she had the house to herself. Wrapping her hands around a mug of tea, she wandered through the rooms alternately trying to tell herself that she hadn't just leapt from one relationship to another (
again!
) and that, okay, there clearly was a possible relationship here, but it was a good one. Once your pants were off, once he had crippled you with laughter, what could “take things slowly” possibly mean? “Take it slowly” was for self-help books. The heart doesn't have a throttle.
Her mother, Elaine, might say, “Take it slowly,” but both of them would know it was the sort of advice she felt she ought to say, not anything she really meant or advice she'd ever followed herself. Hollywood produces enough caricatures of mothers that Betty and even Elaine have been able to laugh at various satirical portraits of a mom keen to be more hip and rebellious than her daughter. Elaine's idea of cutting the apron strings was asking Betty, “Can you come on ecstasy, or do you spend eight hours half an inch from the finish line?”
When your mom tells you she has trouble reaching orgasm if her window blinds are lowered to different heights, when she tells you this at breakfast, you either learn to raise your voice or you discover solitude and discretion. Baby boomers for parents: what a joke. Baby boomers are baby boomerangs â they keep coming back when you try to throw them away, and when they're not crying or soiling themselves, they're trying to put something in their mouths.
Elaine would forget saying “take it slowly” as soon as she'd said it, but she'd call back later to add, “Make sure you have your own key” and “You know you always have a room here.”
Betty did indeed know there was a room at her single mom's house in Ottawa reserved for her, and that was one reason why she was
doing her Visual Culture degree here in Kingston. Just last night she'd told Andrew her theory that the phrase
dysfunctional family
is redundant. “All families are dysfunctional.”
Until her ex-boyfriend Dave and her ex-roommate Sara had suddenly rearranged the emotional furniture of her Kingston apartment, she'd told herself that living away from home she finally had a room of her own. Growing up in eight different bedrooms, each of them hers alone but only for a while, Betty had read Virginia Woolf as a teenager. Maybe Andrew was right; maybe she needed a whole storey of her own, not just one room.
Their first night, surrendering to fatigue near dawn, mouths tired as much from talk as sex, he had asked if she wanted to sleep alone, offered her any bed, any room in his house. No, that was another, more crucial virginity. She'd always found sleeping together literally much more intimate than the half-hearted and often half-assed sleeping together figuratively. Your chest my back's proper blanket. The top of your foot filling the arch of mine. “Not a chance,” she had replied to his offer of separate quarters. Separate home offices, yes. Separate beds, never.