Cherry Bites (3 page)

A huge sadness washes over me now when I think of what Pete and I missed out on by not having each other to lean on. After that one time when I took things way too far and bit him on the cheek, what I felt for my brother was mostly a contained kind of love and, I guess, frustration at his avoidance of me. I wanted to be friends with him, although I didn’t try very hard. His complete rejection of me did its job.

When Pete was in grade two, in the fall of the year that Murray died, Nordale School had an air raid drill. This happened from time to time because of the threat of nuclear war. Even I, in grade five by then, knew it was a useless exercise. I’d seen the pictures of Hiroshima; we all had.

My classroom was across the hall from Pete’s. I could see his small form sitting on the floor against the wall, arms around his knees, head down. He was shaking, sobbing. I went to him against the shouts of the grade four teacher, Miss Pratt, who was in charge of the drill. It was an automatic gesture on my part; I didn’t think.

“Pete,” I whispered and touched his back through his little plaid shirt.

He stiffened at the sound of my voice. His body became a plank beneath my hand.

After a few moments I stood up and walked back to my spot on the floor. It wasn’t easy for me to let him go, but he embarrassed me as well as hurt me. What must people think of a gangly girl who a sweet little boy hates so much?

Later that afternoon I was called down to the principal’s office over the public address system. Miss Pratt was there and she watched with a smirk on her face as Mr. Austin, the principal, strapped me three times on each hand for disobedience. I had liked Mr. Austin up till that day. All he had was Miss Pratt’s word that I had ignored her. I remember thinking that he was probably just punishing me because she had great big pointed tits and he wanted to squeeze them.

I saw that trying with Pete would open me up to bigger hurts than the ones he sent my way by ignoring me. But we needed each other, especially after Murray died. Nora wasn’t enough family for anyone.

She went through the motions: planted flowers in the flowerbeds; joined the women’s church circle; she even became a
CGIT
leader for part of a year, but she couldn’t pull that one off. She had to quit—made up a health problem and weaseled out of it. All her motherly activities were acts, and not for Pete and me, but for the other women in the neighbourhood. She fed us and she clothed us, but I couldn’t help feeling it was just for show.

I have never been an ambitious person. I just liked going to school. History was what interested me in high school, recent history, so that’s what I ended up studying. After I’d gotten my bachelor’s degree I just kept on going till I had a master’s and then my Ph.D. It could have been Henry’s influence. He was my first real boyfriend and a history nut. We talked a lot about wanting to understand what went before, getting down to the actual reasons that led men and women to do the things that they did.

As a fifth-generation Canadian on Murray’s side I wanted to know why men like my great-great-grandfather left Armagh to come to such a strange and stormy land. Was his Irish life so terrible? Or was it restlessness? And what about my great-great-grandmother? Was it love that made her follow? Duty? How hard did she fight against the plan? Or was it she who grew restive? How could anyone be so brave and strong and naive? Yeah, I know: famine in the old country, promise of land in the new. But still. I feel so far removed from anyone who could have set out on such an adventure.

That I come from such stock is a source of pride for me. I wonder what they pictured as they clung to the ship’s rail and peered out over the dark waves. How different were their dreams from what awaited them on the distant shore? Quite different, I’ll bet.

It wasn’t hard for me to imagine Pete on one of those ships. I was physically stronger than my brother, but he was a tough little guy in his way.

He was slight and very pale. It didn’t take much to flatten him. He was one of those kids who went to the doctor once a week to get needles because he was allergic to so many things: dust, cats, tomatoes, strawberries, nuts, pollen. It seemed to go on for years, that desensitization process. Maybe that’s why needles were so easy for him to take in later years.

During grades one to six he missed many weeks of school with one childhood disease after another. He got chicken pox, measles, mumps, scarlet fever, all the things that young kids got. Nora fussed, of course, but supposed it was just as well he contracted them early on. She wished I had come down with them at the same time, to get it all over with at once, but apparently I had an immune system like Mighty Mouse.

Pete’s strength came out in other ways. For instance, he wasn’t afraid to take a dare. I thought of it as toughness at the time, but as I look back now, I see it could have been foolhardiness, not giving a hoot.

He stole from Norbridge Pharmacy all the time, with his friends Ralph and Timmy egging him on. He insisted on going in alone.

“Hi, Mr. Fisher,” he said, as he pocketed a small bottle of Evening in Paris perfume. He was in grade four by this time.

“Hello, Pete,” said Mr. Fisher, one of the pharmacists.

He didn’t call my brother by his nickname; no adults did. They thought it was disgraceful.

“What can I do for you today?”

“Nothing, thanks. I’m just browsing,” Pete said.

Sometimes he sat at the counter drinking a chocolate milkshake, thin and frothy, reading Superman comics. Mr. Fisher always gave him the silver container that the milkshake was made in, with the extra bit to top it off. He liked Pete, didn’t have a clue about the Evening in Paris or the pen set or whatever contraband he had hidden in his parka pocket. And he didn’t seem to mind that my brother returned the comics to the stand, never buying one. Pete did pay for the milkshake, of course, just twenty-five cents in those days.

He wrapped up the perfume—it was close to Christmas—and put it on his teacher’s desk. That wasn’t even part of the dare. He liked to take things a little further.

His teacher was Miss Pratt, the same one who had turned me in and watched gleefully as I got the strap. No one liked her.

He used one of the tags Nora had bought to attach to Christmas presents. On it he wrote:

in morning light
your eyes are like the sky
from Mr. Dupont

It was his first haiku. No one knew it; not even me.

Mr. Dupont was a grade seven teacher who some of the older girls, including me, had a crush on. He had greasy hair and a lump on his forehead, but his eyes were always half closed and that caused my friends and me to think about how a man might look when he was about to stick it inside you. He made us wonder what that might be like. We did our best to ignore his stringy hair.

I was impressed with Pete when I found out from the kids at school the details of what he had done. Even at his age he knew that Mr. Dupont was the right guy to pick. Miss Pratt had blushed and stuck the package in her purse. There was no way she was going to question it; she was too smart for that.

Pete would do anything. Once during the spring breakup of the Red River, he hopped onto an ice floe and rode it along from the monkey speedway to the old rowing club. A small gang of boys cheered him along. The escapade could so easily have gone wrong.

That type of thing made him exciting to be with. So Pete was a popular boy, in spite of his frailty and his nickname. And his inability to speak to his own sister.

Miss Tufts, the school nurse, caught on to this. She saw most of us at one time or another and she saw a lot of Pete. She must have spoken to him about me and received an unusual response, because she asked to see the two of us together. I turned up, but Pete didn’t, so Nurse Tufts called my mother in. Nora must have hated that. She wanted so much to appear normal, even special, in a good way, and the fact that her kids had an unhealthy relationship would have reflected badly on her parenting skills.

Miss Tufts suggested a child psychiatrist named Dr. Bondurant who had an office in the Manitoba Clinic. Nora agreed, of course. Anything for the health and happiness of her children, she said. I sneered inside and even Pete made a face. But we didn’t sneer together.

The visits were fun. The doctor saw us both separately and together. When we were together Pete didn’t speak. I don’t know if he spoke when he was alone with Dr. Bondurant. I’m inclined to think that he did, but I haven’t a clue what he might have talked about.

“My brother doesn’t like me very much,” I blurted out one day when it was just me and the doc. I drew as we talked. He encouraged that.

“Why?” asked Dr. Bondurant.

“I don’t know.” I lied.

It was drilled into me not to talk about the incident: it was a rule in our house. Pete was not to know of his sister’s cruelty. He didn’t remember the biting episode, as far as anyone knew; he was only one when it happened. But he wasn’t unaware of something dreadful having taken place. He remembered the terror and connected it to me. We all knew it.

“Do you think it might have something to do with your biting him?” Dr. Bondurant asked.

His words stunned me into silence. I worked on my drawing of a beautiful lady with flowing hair; that was my specialty. I used the golden crayon for her hair.

“Your mother told me about it,” he said.

“Pete doesn’t remember it,” I said. “We’re not supposed to talk about it.”

“It’s okay for you and me to discuss it,” he said. “Your mother said so.”

I found out later that Dr. Bondurant thought the biting incident should be brought into the open, discussed with both Pete and me, but that Nora wouldn’t allow it. She made him promise. He was the only one outside of the family at that point, besides my friend Joanne, who knew what I had done.

It puzzled me why Nora had confided in him if she wouldn’t let him use it. I came to the conclusion that she wanted him to know that it was my fault and not hers that Pete was weird.

The tiny scar on Pete’s face was explained away to the world at large by a fall he’d had at a very young age. The skin taken from his bum wasn’t a secret, thanks to me and my big mouth and the constant curiosity about his nickname. Nora hadn’t been able to control that part of it.

No one could force Pete to talk to me. Dr. Bondurant tried his best, but Nora thwarted his efforts with her need for secrecy.

Pete still wouldn’t look at me either. It was more like he looked through me or at a point just in front of me. There was a hole in my heart on account of it, but I didn’t let on. And I didn’t want to appear pathetic by loving someone who didn’t love me back. So I was inclined to go too far the other way.

Sometimes he bumped into me.

“Watch where you’re going, you little simp!” I would shout and Pete would say nothing in return.

One day he drove over my bare foot with his toy fire engine.

“Mu-um!” I shouted. “No Eyes ran over my foot with his stupid toy and it really hurts.”

“Why aren’t you two playing outside, for heaven’s sake? And Cherry! Don’t call your brother names!” was all Nora said.

“I don’t fucking believe this,” I muttered. “The little rat just about ripped my toenail off.”

“What did you say?” Nora asked.

“Nothing.”

I ran out the back door and over to Joanne’s house to tell her that I had successfully said
fuck
in front of my mother.

“Are you sure it was successful?” Joanne asked. “She might kill you when you go home.”

We were up in her bedroom, me on the bed, Joanne in front of her mirror, experimenting with the small amount of makeup her mother allowed her to wear.

“Nah, I don’t think so,” I said. “She can’t be bothered with a lot of stuff. She has enough on her plate, she’s always saying.”

“Well, good then,” said Joanne. “Good for you. There’s no way I’ll ever be able to say it in front of my mum.”

“Why would you even want to?” I asked. “Your mum’s perfect.”

“No, she’s not.” Joanne blotted her lipstick till it was almost gone, then added gloss.

“Girls!” her mother called up to us. “I’ve just finished icing some chocolate cupcakes. Would you like to try them?”

“See!” I said.

Joanne smiled. “There’s more to her than cupcakes. One time she threw a flower pot across the kitchen.”

“Really?”

“Yup. It even had a plant in it.”

“Wow! That’s great!” I could almost picture it, a girly throw that caused no damage, but a throw, nonetheless.

“Why great?” asked Joanne.

“It just is,” I said. “Come on. Let’s go eat cupcakes.”

We bounded down the stairs. Joanne’s lipstick was ruined after her first bite.

Joanne is one of the few friends I’ve confided in over the years about my relationship with Pete. Oh, I told Henry certain things and one or two other friends heard bits and pieces, but Joanne has always been my one true confidante. I know how lucky I am to have her.

A few days after Stan delivered the journal, I had another go at it. I set myself up with a gin and tonic in my favourite chair in the living room. Over the years I had turned the room into a cozy and comfortable place. Murray smiled at me from his home on the mantel above the fireplace. Spike lay upside down at my feet with his shorts legs pointing upward.

Before I even opened the book, a picture of Nora tapping away on a typewriter at the dining room table flashed before me. There she was, just for a second, in the space between my eyes and the weeping birch outside the front window.

She had wanted to be a writer. The memories welled up: letters to the editor of the
Winnipeg Free Press
, her excitement when one of them was published. It was about stop signs and how there weren’t enough of them. She addressed the city planners who made the decisions about where the signs went, letting them know where she felt an extra one or two would be provident.

I remembered the incident that drove her to write that letter. Nora had knocked a pedestrian down with her car because he had ignored a stop sign and she didn’t have one. She wanted one so she wouldn’t have to drive over people who got in her way. The man wasn’t hurt; he even apologized to her. That’s the type of thing men did around Nora. But still, it shook her up.

And there were book reviews. She worked like a maniac on those, pencil between her teeth, ashtray full of lipsticked butts. She sent her reviews to the literary page editor hoping he might use one. He never did. And he asked her in a letter to please stop.

She tried our community newspaper next; it was called
The Norwood Press
in those days. But the most she achieved there was a single review of a Harold Robbins book.
Where Love Has Gone
, I think it was. And the editor left out whole paragraphs and changed her sentence structure more than once. She raged.

But kept on. She had an idea for a regular column for housewives. It would contain a review of a book that she had recently read and enjoyed. She would pass her ideas along to women in the hope of expanding their horizons. It was a lie. Nora didn’t care about other women and their horizons.

I remembered reading her submission and wondering where she stole the folksy, motherly way of communicating. It had nothing to do with the woman I knew and I was overjoyed when the little paper turned down her idea. They didn’t even print the review she had included. This time it was
The Girl Hunters
by Mickey Spillane. The editor explained to her that it wasn’t the type of book their readers expected them to review.

If she had a novel in her sweater drawer or a closet full of poems, I didn’t know about it. I had never paid much attention to what she did unless it had something to do with me.

Some of her journal entries were written in the voice of a free-spirited woman I never knew, a relative of the one who had tried her hand at a newspaper column, the unknown soul who later sent me letters from the coast:

1974

The ducks chatted happily among themselves on the water of Lost Lagoon.

But more often it was real.

1962

The boy scares her. She wonders if a person can be born without a conscience. She thinks she heard that somewhere or read it. Maybe it was in a Reader’s Digest at the doctor’s office.

Nora had written the genuine parts in the third person. It took me a few pages to catch on to that. The journal was all about her, but her at a distance.

I felt a fleeting connection to my mother: our mutual fear of Pete.

He made a career out of scaring me. One particular instance stands out in my memory.

There was a climbing tree on Lawndale Avenue in the rich guy’s front yard, Old Man Whitall’s yard. It was a Russian willow. He wouldn’t let the kids in the neighbourhood anywhere near it. This made the tree an enticement for all but the most sucked out among us.

We climbed it when his car was gone; we climbed it after dark when we could see him through his front window staring at the flicker of his black and white television set. And the more daring of us, like Pete, climbed it during the daylight hours when Mr. Whitall was at home, even when he was out working in his yard. Once, with rake in hand, he chased Pete all the way to the end of the block, the length of about six houses. No one was hurt and it did nothing to deter my brother.

One hazy afternoon in the summer of 1964, Joanne and I were walking home from the swimming pool. My sandals dangled from my fingers; I was trying to toughen up the bottoms of my feet.

“My mum won’t let me buy
A Hard Day’s Night
,” Joanne said.

“Why not?”

“She thinks two Beatles albums are enough.”

“Hmm. That’s not good. You have to have them all. Why don’t you come over to my house and we can listen to it?”

Nora didn’t know what I had or didn’t have. It was my babysitting money that I used to buy records. And she was busy with her new job as a secretary and with her boyfriend, Mr. Jones.

We walked by Old Man Whitall’s place on the way to our house on Monck.

“There’s Ralph and Frankie,” said Joanne.

I looked and I saw the two of them, Pete’s friends, hiding behind a mock orange shrub at the edge of Mr. Whitall’s yard.

The sidewalk was so hot I plunked myself down on the boulevard to put on my sandals.

Joanne screamed and I felt what Murray must have felt before he died. It was like my heart was failing me. I had never heard her scream before.

I looked up at her and then stood to see what she was staring at.

My brother was hanging by his neck from a rope tied to the big tree. His head was awkwardly twisted to one side and as I ran with one shoe on and one shoe off, I saw that my brother’s tongue was lolling out of his mouth.

“Pete.” The scratchy sound of his name caught in my throat.

I recall the softness of the grass, so luxurious compared to the dry bumpy lawn in our own front yard. Mr. Whitall cared deeply for his grass. But its softness didn’t get me there any faster. I ran, but I wasn’t going anywhere, like in my dreams of polio. I needed to lift Pete up; that was all I had to do. And he would be okay. Why weren’t his friends lifting him up? Why were Ralph and Frankie hiding behind the mock orange?

It turned out I was making some progress after all. I found myself close enough to my brother to see that he was standing on a crate. The crate had been hidden from my eyes by another one of Mr. Whitall’s shrubs, a honeysuckle. I stopped so suddenly that I skidded on the soft grass and the two boys behind the bush burst out laughing. Joanne knew what was going on by now and came to my rescue. Pete did nothing that he wasn’t already doing. Nothing had happened as far as he was concerned.

I couldn’t quite convince myself that it was okay to leave him like that. Okay, so it was a joke. But what if the crate slipped or Pete went crazy for a second and kicked it out from under himself? So I wouldn’t move. Joanne understood; she pointed upward and I followed her gaze from the noose around Pete’s neck up the rope to the thick limb above his head. I marvelled at the noose; it was so well done. That was the kind of thing eleven-year-old boys spent their time perfecting while we were imagining what it would be like to kiss John Lennon.

The rope was slung over the limb but it wasn’t tied. There was no danger there.

“Come on, Cherry,” Joanne said. “Let’s get out of here.

“You should be ashamed of yourself, Peter Ring,” she added.

He looked at her as if to say, “What’s it to ya?” But he didn’t speak because I was there.

Joanne left it at that. She didn’t want to make anything worse.

I managed to make it out of sight of the boys before I began to cry. Joanne put her arms around me.

“Why do I even care about him?” I wailed. “To him I don’t even exist.”

“Where did he get such a sick idea?” said Joanne.

“Probably from one of his stupid comic books.”

“What’s Frankie doing playing with those guys?” Joanne asked. “He’s our age.”

“And he’s usually so nice,” I said.

By that time no one called Pete Assface anymore. When he got to be about ten his nickname simply faded away. He grew far too cool for the name to stick.

Joanne and I went to my house. We stretched out on my big old bed and listened to “And I Love Her” and “If I Fell” and “I Should Have Known Better” and it really did make everything okay.

The next day we dressed carefully in our favourite shorts and tops. Joanne’s mother packed us a lunch of tomato sandwiches, sliced cantaloupe and Peak Freans and we went downtown to the Metropolitan Theatre where we watched
A Hard Day’s Night
three times in a row. That was the first time I tasted cantaloupe; it seemed strange. We almost stayed for a fourth viewing but didn’t want to overdo it. After the show, in the early evening, we walked over the two bridges, home to Joanne’s house, where I slept over. Her mother had baked cinnamon buns and we ate so many our stomachs hurt and we worried we would be too fat for Paul and John.

I took a break from Nora’s journal to freshen up my drink and slip a frozen chicken pot pie into the oven. Spike followed me, his toenails clattering across the floor. He knows if I go into the kitchen chances are good there might be some food involved. He had already eaten his official meal but would have gladly gobbled down another. I gave him a dog biscuit.

The evening sun poured in the living room window. It was hot for early June and I pulled down the blinds to shut out some of the heat. The trees in my yard did a pretty good job of keeping the main floor of the house cool. The upstairs needed air conditioning. I’d had it installed a few years back during a particularly hot summer.

I considered phoning Dougwell Jones on the coast to ask him why he had sent me the journal, but I didn’t feel up to it. And really, what difference did it make what his reasons were? I sat back down and read on:

1962

Today when the girl asked her a simple question she ignored her completely, acted as though she weren’t there. She finds this easy to do. The girl waited a moment or two and then disappeared. The mother will try it more often. (Perhaps it is she who has no conscience).

A lot of what Nora wrote hit me hard. I remembered her ignoring me, but was shocked by the planning that went into it.

It was in the early days after Pete’s first death—which is how I came to think of the fake hanging—that I started up with Henry Ferris. As I remember it, Nora ignored me almost completely that summer when I was fourteen. Henry and I met at the Norwood Community Club, at canteen. That’s what the dances were called. He chose me from a clump of awkward girls milling around pretending we didn’t care. We danced slowly to “You Don’t Own Me” by Lesley Gore. I was terrible at dancing fast so I was glad he picked a slow song. Henry smelled so good that first night. I still don’t know if it was cologne or just plain Henry. He was one year ahead of me at school, one year older.

Nora was jealous of our youth, our innocence, of how much fun we had; she was probably jealous of our brand new kisses at the back door. I didn’t think about it then, just wondered mildly at her lack of interest, but I know it now. That was why she ignored me to such an extent that summer.

Henry loved The Beatles as much as Joanne and I did. We sang their songs as we walked along the dark back lanes of our neighbourhood. We did the harmonies and Henry talked about starting a band. His parents bought him a guitar for Christmas.

“I’d fuck John Lennon,” Henry said.

That didn’t seem weird to me at all. “I love you, Henry,” I said then.

“Really?”

“Yeah. I love that you’d fuck John Lennon. And that you’d say so out loud.”

I also reflected briefly on the possibility of Henry being homosexual, or maybe bisexual, but he wasn’t. He just loved John Lennon.

We spent a lot of time necking, standing up at the side door of our house, beside the short driveway that led to the garage. Henry wore glasses. To keep them safe he took them off while we kissed and set them down on the flowerbed next to the shallow step. He wasn’t old enough to drive, so when he brought me home we had no proper place to make out, unless Nora wasn’t home. Then we went inside and used the living room floor.

There was no decent chesterfield, just the Toronto couch, as Nora called it—slippery, backless and horrible: the place where Murray died. And there was a straight-backed wooden bench that looked as though it was built by someone with no interest in comfort. It was as big as a love seat, big enough for two, but hard and sharp-edged.

“I like it,” Henry said. “It looks like it was built by a Quaker or someone.” He ran his hand over the upright back. “Fine workmanship.”

“It hurts to sit on,” I said.

“Yeah. I guess the floor is less painful.”

I’ve wondered about that in the years since—how a couple of parents trying so hard to be normal could have put such a low value on a comfortable place to sit. There were a few other chairs, but nothing good for cozying up in. I’m pretty sure I’m the first generation of Rings or Woodmans to place any priority on physical comfort.

On the nights when we were stuck outside, Henry would reach up and untwist the back door light in its socket, just a little, to give us some privacy while we kissed and touched and pressed up against each other.

“Cherry,” he whispered in my ear and reached underneath my top to touch the bare skin of my back.

I wanted to suggest that we go into the backyard and lie down on the grass, but I was afraid he would think I was wanton. Maybe the raw ground was too wild for Henry.

“You’re tremendous,” he said.

“Thanks.” I loved being tremendous.

Before he left he twisted the light back on and retrieved his glasses from in amongst the dahlias. I went inside and tried to act casual in front of Nora, hoping that nothing showed. She paid me no mind. I could have walked in with a miniature version of Henry perched on my shoulder and she wouldn’t have noticed.

I never stopped wanting some mothering from her, some advice maybe, on how to live my life, on what not to do, something I could save for later on: don’t wear pointy-toed shoes, wash mushrooms really well before eating them, don’t say
fuck
, for sure don’t say
cunt
.