Cherry Bites (5 page)

When I tell you about my job and the reason I do it, you’ll probably agree with Joanne and Myrna that I’m asking for it, that I deserve whatever I get. Hermione isn’t quite so hard on me. She likes what I do, thinks of it as stirring things up which, as far as she’s concerned, can never be a bad thing.

It began when I became obsessed with thinking that large parts of the history I read are either lies or mistakes, that the way people want to be remembered and the prejudices of those keeping the records skewer the facts. We get the odd pocket of truth, but generally it comes out wrong.

And then there are the silences in the history books—the childhoods, the friendships, the family fights. Where were the home lives—the parts that shaped those who were written about? Elusive long-dead truths raise my curiosity but leave me edgy because I can’t know them.

I decided to try to add something genuine to the history being written today. I did this by interviewing people and asking them questions they couldn’t answer with clichés or platitudes:

When was the last time you cried?
I asked.

Describe to me a time you recall in your life when you really hated someone.

I don’t believe you,
I often said.

When did you last feel afraid, sad, hopeless, happy, proud, lustful? Describe those occasions.

Have you ever hit someone? No, but really.

Have you ever taunted someone?

Were you made fun of as a kid? What for? What did you do about it?

Have you ever planned your own death? your own escape? someone else’s death?

Those were the types of questions I asked.

The
Winnipeg Free Press
published several of these interviews and after a few years I was lucky enough to get a regular gig with the paper.

Public figures were my favourite subjects. And writers and teachers and business people and religious leaders and advocates for the downtrodden. If their answers didn’t ring true I threw the interview away. I spoke to them face to face—never on the phone. I wanted to see their eyes.

Pissing people off was part of it. I’d had more than one death threat.

Myrna thought I was wasting all my years of education. We bickered about this but I had no argument for her other than it was what I wanted to be doing. I wanted to tell the truth. Besides, she didn’t need a science degree for what she was doing, running the family funeral business, so what was she doing criticizing me?

The work wasn’t always satisfying. Sometimes weeks would go by without my getting anything real. The paper was very good about my column appearing sporadically. I was paid by the interview. But I tried to keep it regular, as best I could.

My column was called
No, But Really
.

I have a small income as a result of Murray’s life insurance policy. If I live frugally, which I do, I can get by.

Joanne never bothers encouraging me to move up in the world; she’s known me for too long. But other people sometimes say things like, “Dr. Ring, is it? My goodness, you could be…”

Yeah. So what.

When I got something good for a column—like when a woman who makes her living being poor and droning on about it suddenly blurts out that she would like to slap some of the poor people she knows, hard across the face, it feels good.

I guess I am asking for it: to be exposed, embarrassed, killed. But other than the odd letter of attack on me to the editor of the paper and those death threats I mentioned, I haven’t been tested. I’m almost certain I feel ready to take what anyone is going to give me, but I could be mistaken.

Joanne thinks it’s just a matter of time till someone shoots me. She’s probably right. She has a theory that I crave punishment. Maybe she’s right about that too.

I’ve mentioned Myrna now, more than once, so I should explain her presence in my life.

When I was sixteen I got my first job. I worked at The Bay in the men’s shoe department. In those days men’s shoes were serious business and I had to take a course, on two Saturday mornings.

There were several of us starting at once and we learned terms like
last
, which we had never associated with shoes before. I forget now what it means but I do recall that it was the most important thing to remember about shoes, according to our instructor. His name was Ken McLeod and he was the manager of the men’s shoe department.

In order to work, I needed a social insurance number, and to get one of those I needed my birth certificate. So I enlisted Nora’s help. She dug it out from somewhere after my asking her for it on four consecutive days.

I studied it, this flimsy record of my birth, and was shocked to see the date written as November 13, 1949.

Nora was sitting at the kitchen table, smoking and flipping through a copy of
Ladies’ Home Journal
.

“It says here I was born on November thirteenth,” I said.

She looked at me with a blank expression fixed around the fag between her lips.

“I thought my birthday was on November fourteenth,” I said. “That’s when we’ve always celebrated it.”

If you could call Nora’s pitiful icingless cakes a celebration. Sometimes there was a present; sometimes there wasn’t.

“Let me see that,” she said, snatching the worn paper from my hand. It tore along one of the thin creases. “Well, what do you know!” She laughed.

I noticed that her teeth were yellowing and I rejoiced in her misfortune.

“Imagine us having it wrong all these years,” she said.

“It makes me feel kinda funny,” I said.

“Why?” Nora asked. “It had a hell of a lot more to do with me than it did with you. I did all the work and it was no picnic, believe me. Not like with Pete; he just slid out like a slippery eel.”

I took the paper back and folded it carefully. Maybe I could get a new sturdier one when I applied for my social insurance card.

A heaviness in my stomach dragged me down so far I had to lie on my bed for a while; I’m not sure of the exact reason, whether it was the incorrect date or the fact that Nora didn’t think my birthday had much to do with me. Both, I guess.

Anyway, the birth certificate got me my social insurance card and I worked Saturdays at The Bay through most of grade twelve, some Thursday and Friday evenings as well.

I hated it. I dreaded busy days but slow ones were worse. We weren’t allowed to sit down when there were no customers and sometimes I wanted to scream out loud. Maybe that’s where my hatred of standing up began. I like walking, I love walking, but I hate standing for more than a couple of minutes, like at bus stops without benches.

The only part I liked about working at The Bay was the time I spent in the employees’ lounge, smoking enthusiastically. I knew it was smoking that had turned Nora’s teeth yellow but I also knew it would never happen to me.

It was there that I ran into Myrna again, the undertaker’s daughter. She was a Norwood girl, but two years older than me, so we hadn’t had much to do with each other till then. By this time I was fascinated by her situation. Her huge house on the other side of St. Mary’s Road was attached to a funeral parlour. The place where she ate, slept and bathed was home to dead people, with their blank eyes and their various stages of decay. Stiffs, as she still called them, got worked on there, laid out by her father and his helpers. For all I knew Myrna was one of those helpers.

“Myrna, dear, hand me that tube, would ya,” her father might say. “Stick it in this corpse’s neck, please, and we’ll drain all his blood out before embalming him.”

“Sure thing, Pop,” she would answer.

I was afraid to ask her questions about the business even though I longed to hear her talk about it. Sometimes I could have sworn the stink of formaldehyde was on her. It might have been my imagination but at the time I didn’t think so.

Myrna attended university and worked only weekends, the same as I did. She worked in the girls’ clothes department, which seemed a much better deal. Both of us got a ten per cent discount on all of our purchases. She helped me pick out clothes that suited me. I was grateful for this because I didn’t have a clue. For instance, I loved pink. Myrna convinced me that I looked like an idiot in pink, a deranged bunny rabbit was how she put it, and that greens and rusty colours suited me better.

I had been a little nervous about approaching her in the lounge because she was older and all, but she soon came up to me and it didn’t take long before we were making fun of people together and laughing a lot. Once we started talking she told me that she was going into the family business but that her parents insisted on a university education first. They also insisted on the job at The Bay in the hope that it would improve her people skills.

“Do you want to go into the family business,” I asked, “or are your parents making you?”

“I want to,” she said. “My sister doesn’t. She wants to get as far away from it as she can. But I like it. Especially when no one else is around, when my dad’s not there talking too loud. It can be so quiet and…I don’t know…awe-inspiring? I feel at home with the dead.”

She smiled and I liked her very much at that moment.

Myrna could be nasty, even back then. I found it a relief to have a nasty friend, someone worse than me. I could picture her biting a baby.

She actually played tricks on people. There was a woman in her department named Muriel whom she played tricks on all the time. Poor Muriel was in her forties, skinny and lonesome. The Bay was her life, according to Myrna.

“Hey Muriel, what’s shakin’?” Myrna would call across the lounge as Muriel walked in.

Muriel grimaced into her shoulder and took a seat as far away from us as possible.

“Last Friday night I really got her going,” Myrna said.

“What did you do?”

“I phoned her at home and disguised my voice and asked her if Moses was there.”

“Moses?”

“Yeah.”

“What did she say?”

“Nothing much. Just that there was no Moses there, that I should double-check the number. She didn’t seem to think it was weird that someone these days would be named Moses.”

“There are Moseses,” I said.

Myrna squinted at me with a look that said I didn’t have any more of a clue than Muriel. She lit up another cigarette from the one she had just finished. If we smoked fast we could squeeze two into our break.

“Okay, so then what?” I asked.

“I called her back and said, ‘May I please speak to Lucifer?’ Muriel said ‘Who?’ Then I said, ‘Lucifer. You know, Satan? I need to speak to him.’”

I laughed.

“She asked if it was me. ‘Is that you, Myrna?’” Myrna said, in imitation of Muriel who sat across the room from us staring straight ahead. “I guess I didn’t do that great a job of disguising my voice.”

“Or you’re the only person she knows who would phone her and say such things.”

“She called me evil, said it’ll all come back to me one day.”

“It might,” I said. “I’m not sure if anyone is off the hook if they’re intentionally mean.”

Myrna looked at me as if I were speaking a foreign language, Russian maybe, one of the hard ones.

She didn’t give a hoot about a lot of things and I think that’s what drew me to her. But she also scared me. What if she used one of her nasty ideas on me one day? What if it involved a dead person? After I began to understand the reverence she felt towards the dead I stopped worrying about that. But still, I kept my fascination with her family’s business to myself. I was afraid she would invite me over to look at corpses, to share the experience, and I knew I would take her up on it against my will.

Her cavalier talk about stiffs was all for show. She was like Nora in that way, careful about what she put out front. But she had cracks that you could slip through, unlike my mother, who lived behind a wall of stone.

One Saturday in the spring of 1967 Myrna came home from work with me. She backcombed my hair and put eye makeup on me and I looked like someone I had never met. We went to a dance in Windsor Park at Winakwa Community Club. We had to take a bus to get there. I knew as soon as we arrived that I was in over my head. Myrna got swept away soon after we arrived.

Joe Turner was there; he was the only person I recognized at first.

Boys approached me because they didn’t know who I was and because I didn’t look like me. l looked like someone who, at the very least, would give them a hand job.

I went to the restroom and washed the makeup off my face. Then I brushed my hair till the backcombing was out.

There were lewd messages written all over the walls in pen, in pencil, in lipstick. Some were carved into the old wood:

ROXIE SUCKS COCK

EAT ME NICKY, PLEEEESE!

Some weren’t so lewd:

PANTS VS TROUSERS VS SLACKS

Those last words cheered me up; I laughed out loud.

When I found Myrna she was dancing with a guy who had both hands on her bum. The song was “Somethin’ Stupid,” by Frank and Nancy Sinatra.

“I’m leaving,” I said.

“Party pooper,” Myrna said. “What happened to your face?”

The boy turned around and I saw that it was Duane. He had a black eye.

“What did you do to your hair?” Myrna asked.

Duane looked through me; it was as though he’d taken lessons from Pete. Or maybe he genuinely didn’t recognize me: his least memorable sexual experience.

I was well over any feelings of desire for Duane, but I wasn’t over what he’d done to me. That stuck like rubber cement.

Last I heard, which wasn’t long ago, he was in prison in Quebec. Armed robbery, I think it was. So Duane’s not doing well.

Joe Turner gave me a ride home that night and he didn’t even ask me for a hand job. I guess he thought I was just a kid, without the big hair and eyeliner.

I didn’t hate Myrna after that night. But it took me quite a long time to want to hang around with her again. A person could disappear if left in her hands, fall into a hole somewhere when no one was looking, where no one even knew there was a hole.

She pursued me quite fervently; I still don’t know why. We never had much in common except that for some reason we liked each other.

Myrna and Nora liked each other too. That really got to me. It was one of the main things about Myrna that drove me crazy. It seemed peculiar to me that a kid would want to hang around with the mother of another kid. Not just peculiar. Wrong. One time she dropped in on me when I wasn’t home. She used to do that—drop in. I didn’t like it; I preferred some kind of plan.

It was late in the summer, the final week before university classes began. When I arrived I found her and Nora sitting on chairs in the backyard. Mr. Jones had bought two wooden lawn chairs for us. The grade eight boys in shops class at Hugh John Macdonald had built them. They were a lot more comfortable than the nylon ones Nora had brought home from Canadian Tire. Mr. Jones had painted the new chairs green.

Nora and Myrna were facing each other and one of Nora’s feet rested on Myrna’s bare knees. My friend was painting my mother’s toenails.

“What the hell is going on here?” I asked and they both looked up at me.

The nail polish was pearly peach.

“Myrna’s helping me get ready for the party,” Nora said.

She and Mr. Jones were going to a party at the Castles’ place, Quint’s parents’ place. They lived in a huge house by the river.

I turned around and went inside the house. I felt sick to my stomach. As I hurled up my Red Top cheeseburger into the toilet I could hear the sounds of giggling wafting up from the backyard, through the bathroom window.

Myrna also developed an interest in Pete as time went by and he was no longer a kid. She asked me about him all the time.

He was handsome in a pale poetic way, smart in school, and good at sports. Not football, he was too slight for that, but he played on the basketball team and with his agility he beat the high school’s all-time record for leaping hurdles.

And Pete had a way with words. None of them were ever directed my way, but whenever an occasion called for a poem, the high school principal, Mr. Longbottom, would ask Pete to write a haiku. Here’s an example:

pigskin champs
lead the parade
autumn rains down

That was when the Norwood Broncs won the football championship. Pete’s haiku were often related to sports, as that was what was most often celebrated at our school.

I don’t know if they were any good; I’ve never been a studier of poetry. It was just amazing to me that he did it. I saved them, the ones I knew about, the ones I liked. They seemed to me like they came from a good part of Pete, maybe the best part.

Here’s another one:

pageantry in snow
players are the figures
in a dream

That was after some kids from the school enacted the nativity scene at an outdoor Christmas festival.

Mr. Longbottom hung Pete’s haiku up on the bulletin board next to photos of the occasions that they described. He had the art teacher, Miss Kirby, write them out in fancy lettering.

I developed a renewed interest in being friends with Pete. It was the haiku, I think, that sucked me in. I made a few tentative gestures. I asked him some questions, which I hadn’t done for years, about his poems, about his hurdles, about his clothes.

“You seem to prefer wearing your shirts tucked in,” I said cheerily.

That one was more a comment than a question.

I left long spaces of time between my efforts, not wanting to cause a disruption. But I never got an answer.

When I baked a blueberry pie I took him a piece on a plate and placed it next to him on the front steps. Later, when he was gone, I picked it up and offered it to a neighbour kid who was riding by on his trike. I sat with him while he ate it, watched his face and hands turn blue. Then I fetched a damp washcloth and we cleaned him up before he pedalled off home.