“I have a
surprise for you,” Garth says.
“What?” I
say. “Tell me. What?”
“A house.”
“A house.
You bought me a house!”
“Well, yes
and no.”
“Garth,
there’s no yes and no about buying a house.”
“OK,” he
says giving his little teeth full play. “I did get a house, but, I rented it.”
“Oh Garth,
a house! Caroline and Lisa could—”
“First
things first, we have to move in.”
“Yes.” I’m
picturing Garth and Talon and me and Lisa and Caroline. The house has four
bedrooms and an in-law’s apartment
in the basement. With Abie and the girls, I was the third man in the ring; I’d
get right in there calling the shots, fouls, knock downs, delivering the
8-count. Being a referee is a tough job.
“So, where
is it?”
“It’s in a
nice area.”
“You like
the area?”
“That’s
what I said.”
Garth
doesn’t like old houses. Also he doesn’t like wood.
“So you
like the area—North York. It’s in North York, isn’t it?”
“It’s in
the Bayview area.”
“Bayview
and?”
“Bayview
and Steeles.”
“East or
west?”
“West.”
“Oh. I
see.”
“What are
you doing?”
“I’m
phoning Lisa.”
“To tell
her the good news, right?”
“Yeah,
something like that.”
“Guess where it is,” I say and then I tell her
it’s just off Bayview and Steeles, maybe a five-minute drive from the Bluffwood
Drive House. I’m sobbing because I despise the suburbs, and I’m moving to
someone else’s house in the suburbs when I had my own although it showed signs
of age and misuse even before it reached a ripe age, like a woman haggard
before her time, overworked and underappreciated, crumbling inside and out,
like the Steichen photos of Appalachian women. I don’t write much in this
house. I plant sunflowers in the garden. I dig a bonfire pit for Talon. Talon
and I hide from Garth—it’s a big house. I hide from Garth and Talon. Under the
carpenter table in the furnace room. In the low cupboard in the rec room which
has a counter and sink and where I’ve painted four new canvases. Crouched in a
corner of the garage with an old flannel sheet pulled over me.
Garth has
two sisters, Yola and Audraine. Audraine devotes her life to God in London,
Ontario. She’s the breadwinner, God being more of a homebody, trying to keep his
household in order which should never be under appreciated as any homemaker
will tell you. The part I don’t agree with is she hands over most of her
hard-earned cash to God, but shit I did that with a flawed mortal when I
mortgaged the Bluffwood house those two times. Lately Yola’s taken to phoning Garth
for advice; she’s convinced Sean Paul is her boyfriend. I tell Garth his sister’s
a groupie, that maybe Sean Paul fucked her once or twice. She complains he
never calls her and when she calls him, someone else answers. He’s never home.
He doesn’t return her calls.
Yola
bore witness to her mother’s righteous attacks on Garth’s person, never uttered
a word of protest. “Why do you talk to her then?” I say to Garth every time she
phones. He says he doesn’t listen while she rambles on, that usually he’s doing
something else, and you never know when you’re going to need somebody. “I think
you miss her and you need family, otherwise you wouldn’t spend that time on the
phone. You’re not as cold and reclusive as you think,” I say. She’s a
curiosity,” he says. “I thought you said she bored you.”
Yola is staying over because
it’s Sean Paul’s birthday even though she hasn’t been invited, but then she’s
his girl and since when does a girlfriend need a formal invitation? While she worries
about what to wear, she disinfects the upstairs’ bathroom. “You don’t have to
do this,” I tell her. She says she wants to; I come back with “I prefer you wouldn’t”;
she walks into the hallway and standing beside Garth, she says, “Why don’t I ask
my brother? After all he’s the one paying the rent isn’t he?”
Yola
smiles. “So where the Javex?”
“You have to leave.” I say,
walking to the guest room. “Take your bag and leave.”
“Touch my bag and I’ll slap you.” I pick up
her bag. Her slap is full and fast.
“Garth, you can see your
sister out. Well, little girl, you will not visit here again nor will you
phone. Garth?” I lift heavy weights. I don’t fight.
He pauses.
“Yola, you have to leave.”
Yola lets
loose a shriek like a Green Cheek Conure which I’ve never actually heard, but
once read about on the Internet when I was searching out bird calls, plugging in
adjectives like shrill, piercing, primordial.
“You!” she
screams, “you ugly old honkey! Don’t you see he’ll get tired of you?” And as
he’s opening the side door, she sashays into the hallway. “And do yourself a
favor when I leave? You know the mirror in the upstairs bathroom that I
cleaned so now you can actually see yourself? Why don’t you check it out, old woman!”
She throws out a gaudy laugh. The screen door closes and then reopens. “Janice,
can I use your car to take Yola to the bus station?” I want to say “let the
bitch take the subway.” “Yes,” I say. “Do you have the keys?” he says in a
high-pitched voice which is disconcerting, even annoying to hear coming from such
a big man. “Yes,” I sigh. There’s a bottle of port waiting for me in the
fridge. Half a tea-cup will knead out the knots entrenched in my chest and deliver
a welcome home that sits like mulled apple cider in my base of my cunt.
Heather,
who manages the Woman’s Fitness is a lush. I didn’t know until Garth met her at
reception when he came to pick me up. He was wearing a white, red, and blue
nylon
I learned about port from
Heather. Bailey’s was too fattening, I said, but wine was bitter and I didn’t
want wine with a high sugar content like Manushevitz that was served at my
in-law’s Seders and at Chanukah. “You should try port, you’ll like it,” she
told me. So I went over to the liquor store on the ground level of the
Promenade and asked one of the staff, a skinny middle-aged guy with a
dark-brown pageboy, “I’m wondering about port which a friend tells me I should
try.” Sometimes sounding innocent pleases me, which is why I held out the verb
“wonder.” And there’s a certain sweetness in a present participle.
In the Bluffwood Drive house I
went out with Sandy our housekeeper whom we couldn’t afford, owing as we did on
everything else, to a bar in the Hudson Bay Centre, the one on Bloor and Yonge.
North east corner. She used to laugh with Abie, she had wild wacky laugh, until
she discovered that she despised him whereupon she turned to me. “If it’s the
last thing I do,” she said, “I’ll get you to switch sides.” “Not going to
happen,” I said. Once she offered to massage me, I insisted on keeping my
underwear and muscle shirt on, and I could swear someone was standing outside
her basement window even though it was a winter night that reminded me of my
childhood in Montreal. “How come the laundry room door is open?” I said to Abie
who was wearing his old save-the-whale t-shirt. Sandy believed getting smashed
would do me a world of good.
“I’m wondering if you could help me,” I said
to the bartender. “I mean, I want to experience what it’s like to get drunk.
Only I don’t know what to order because, you see, we mostly smoked up in the
sixties—” My ears buzzed for two days. Turned out I didn’t like getting drunk.
You couldn’t act cool when the only way to walk in a straight line was to keep
your legs stiff and your cunt drawn tightly in. So I took Heather’s port tip
and ceremoniously allowed myself half a tea-cup at 5 p.m. daily.
Sometimes
Talon, Garth, and I wrestle. “You think you got me,” I say and give him the
Rock’s people’s elbow. I giggle when we wrestle, which doesn’t mean I’m
enjoying it. But I know about Mankind and that he was really smart before he
got all messed up from jumping off twelve foot scaffolds and China when she
paraded her massive muscles in black leather before she had her face redone,
including having her jaw broken and wired to reshape her square steroid jaw and
the two Hart Brothers before one jumped to his death. I can’t say it was my
scene. “But it’s all fake,” I’d say, until Garth told me how hard they trained
and the chances they took. Once on a wooden platform in the park near our house
on Gossamer, Garth and his five-year old son lay on top of me, Garth holding my
hands down so all I could do was move my head from side to side.
“Get off me, you creeps,” I yelled.
“Say ‘Uncle,’” Garth said while
Talon hooted.
“No fucking way,” I said. “Same
here,” Garth said and tightened his grip on my wrist.
“I can’t breathe,” I said, “Really,
it’s enough.”
I went too far.
It’s winter. Garth is in the back
yard, wearing his navy sweats. I lock the patio door and walk away. He stands in
the cold calling my name, knocking, then banging on the door. From the upstairs
window, I watch him walk down the patio steps, slip on the black ice, and land with
his four-hundred-and-twenty pounds on his left knee.
I went too far.
“Do you still want to get married?”
“Yes,” I say. “Yes.”
“And you’re
still willing to change your name to Chambers?”
I think what am I going to tell Caroline and Lisa? “Yes,” I say.
“Shall we go upstairs to
celebrate?” he says. “Oh, it might be a
good idea for you to have some port. I’ll meet you in the bedroom.”
I don’t know why I want him to think
I like it so much.
This is what it’s like. He
says “where do you want to do it?” I
miss the sofa. On the sofa I can lean my hand on the seat and cradle my arms
around my head. There are two sofas in this house in two separate rooms on the
main floor. I remember Nina Street. This is a big house. We drift apart. I look
around the bedroom. The bed is too high.
“Garth, do you remember the
sofa on Nina Street?”
“I do,” he says, his under-face
showing.
“Do you think?”
“Yes,” he says.
“Yay,” I say and he smiles. I love
making him smile.
“Don’t forget,” I say.
“What do you take me for,” he says,
pulling out the lube from his pocket.
When I hesitate in the doorway of
the family room, he knows. “Well?” he
says.
“Well what?” I say.
“You’re really going to get it
hard,” he says.
“Yeah, so?”
“You think you’re tough, don’t you?”
“Hey man,” I say, swinging into a
double bicep pose and sliding into a three-quarter chest.
He’s grinning.
“It’s been a while, you know,”
I say. “I may not be as talented as I was.”
He tells me to stop stalling. It
takes ten steps to walk from the doorway to the sofa. I face the wall. It’s
easy to pull down my grey muscle pants that are elastic around the waist and
ankles and balloon around the legs. I put one leg back, going into a reverse
lunge, both hands on the edge of the sofa. Kneeling now, arms akimbo on the
sofa; now too close to the sofa, knee by knee back and back some more, head
into arms, ass up and wiggling, back scooping in like a ladle. He whistles softly, just a few notes.
And then he shoves. He plows
right through that dividing line even though my gasp is loud and jagged. He
fills me; that’s what he does. “Alright?” he says. And I know he would stop in
an instant, sliding out like a fish in a pan, so I say, yes go hard and I add
please because I know he likes it, but he wants more, more words—sometimes he
likes words and then I don’t know what to say. He asks me if I like it and I
say yes. He asks me why I like it and I say I don’t know, I just love it, I
love to have you hard up my ass. And because I’m all out of words, I say go
harder, I love when you hurt me, which just sends him, causes him to pull my
hair even harder, and he’s ramming away but not pulling out too far, just
slamming ba ba’, ba ba’ like a trot maybe, growling low in his throat,
grabbing my left tit and squeezing my nipple with one hand, and yanking my hair
with the other.
He hands me a towel. “I’ll be back
in a minute,” he says. He has to clean his cock and his hands. I wipe between my legs and up and down, also the
crack of my ass and in my asshole. Then I lie full out on the cold wood floor
with my legs straight and tight and my toes en pointe like a dancer except for
my bunions. Sometimes I can come to the count of twenty. Once I counted to ten.
I’m a bit of a glutton; I want more, so I come again, my ass and cunt linking
up, and I’d eat the whole damn thing, but Garth comes in with my our old black Nina
Street quilt. “I thought you might want this,” he says.

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