Cherry Bites (8 page)

Cherry Ring needs work. I don’t mean a job. I mean that my being, my self, needs work done on it to make it right and sound, like a dilapidated house or a broken-down car.

I’ll try to illustrate the type of person I became by telling you more about my job at the
Free Press
. One of the first interviews I did was with Dr. Bondurant, the psychiatrist Pete and I had seen when we were kids. He never stopped wanting to help me. We met in one of the snack bars at the Health Sciences Centre and this is how it went:

C.R.: Dr. Bondurant, what led you to become a psychiatrist for children?

Dr. B.: Well, I’ve always gotten along with kids. I like ’em. And I figure if people are troubled at such an early age, there may be hope for them. It may be possible to help them turn something around.

C.R. So are you saying that by the time people become adults it’s too late for psychiatry to be of any help to them?
I snickered here.
Some of your colleagues might take issue with that.

Dr. B.: No, I’m not saying that. At least, I don’t think I am. I just mean that the earlier you tackle a problem, the more likely you are to solve it.

C.R.: Uh-huh.

Often I paused for long moments. That gave people a chance to dig little holes for themselves if they weren’t comfortable with the silence, or if they felt the ball was in their court like Dr. Bondurant did now.

Dr. B.: I’m sure my able colleagues in the field of adult psychiatry accomplish a great deal of positive work.

C.R.: Isn’t psychiatry mostly just about dispensing drugs?

Dr. B.: It’s true, drugs often play a large part in treatment. There are some wonderful drugs available these days that help to make difficult lives much more bearable.

I’m on one of those drugs myself, which Dr. Bondurant knew, but he wouldn’t have mentioned it under threat of death. He did, however, look at me as though I had bitten him hard on the nose.

C.R.: Is it true that some psychiatrists use only drugs as treatment? They don’t spend any time talking to their patients, trying to get to the root of their problems?

Dr. B.: Yes. That’s true.

C.R.: Do you ever do that? Use the drugs-only method?

Dr. B.: No. I generally try to talk to the kids, get them to open up to me.

C.R.: So you’ve never done that? Not once?

Dr. B.: Well, maybe once or twice. When it seemed the only way.

C.R.: Drugs as the only way for kids. That doesn’t bode very well for the great long future ahead of them, does it?

Dr. B.: No, it doesn’t.

He patiently stuck it out as I went at him, Dr. Bondurant, who had been nothing but good and kind to me. I battered him terribly.

My columns hurt people. I told the truth at the expense of feelings. But people want to be thought of as truthful so they seldom refused to be interviewed. They even invited me to do them.

I still read history books; I can’t help myself. Sometimes I fill in the blanks or change things to the way I figure it would have been. I spend a lot of time on these projects—rewriting books—and again, certain of my friends think I’m wasting my time. But I enjoy it and that’s worth something.

Who is the bigger failure, Nora or me? As I put this to paper I find I don’t know the answer to that.

The more I read of her journal the less inclined I felt to work on my column. I had set up an interview for a Wednesday afternoon in mid-July with Mitch Podolak, the founder of the Winnipeg Folk Festival. I’d met Mitch before and liked him. I wasn’t entirely sure if I would be up to my usual methods and even if I was, I could picture him flattening me instead of the other way around.

So I phoned on the afternoon before the interview and cancelled. He laughed and tried to set up another time. I hemmed and hawed and he laughed some more.

“Are you chickening out?” he asked.

“Maybe.”

We left it that I’d call him in the fall when “things had settled down.”

“What things?” he asked. “What settled down?”

“I’ll talk to you in the fall, Mitch,” I said and hung up.

He may have still been talking when I put the phone down, but I was seriously unable to continue the conversation.

I poured myself a gin and tonic and sat down with the journal.

September, 1939

The men were coming for cards. I hid in the barn so Luce couldn’t find me. Then I listened from under the porch to the talking that went on. Where’s the littlen? Darcy Root said. It was quiet for a minute before Luce said asleep.

That littlen looks about ready for pluckin, you ask me Darcy said. Nobody asked you. That’s Mr. Dickson Trent talking now. He laughed, though, and that made him sound like he was on Miss Root’s side. You’ll just have to do with me. That’s Luce. I barely heard that last part. It was like she was talking into her sleeve.

My mother, the littlen. I shivered in the heat.

The ice cubes had melted in my drink and Spike was asleep upside down at my feet when I closed Nora’s journal for another day.

Nora was cool toward Henry for a while after the car accident. I guess she figured she was supposed to be upset about him undoing a light bulb and kissing her daughter passionately. But it was just an act, like her flower garden and her church circle. And it didn’t last long. He was impossible not to like, with his polite ways and his ability to talk to parents. Once he showed up at the door with chocolate on his chin and Nora actually hugged him, something she never did to Pete or me. She’d had several rye and Cokes, but still.

Henry and I fizzled out. We didn’t even make it till Christmas. It was my fault; I didn’t have any energy for him. And the university and the gigs where O Henry played were bursting with young women who did. We said goodbye in early December and wouldn’t see each other again for a couple of years. It was Henry’s idea to cut off all contact. He didn’t think he could be just friends, which was what I suggested. I could have slit my own throat for saying it; if a man ever said that to me I’d slit his for sure.

I missed him for a long time, but I didn’t give in to the urge to get in touch. I didn’t even go to see O Henry play in the pub at the St. Vital Hotel. I missed some great nights from all accounts, but it wouldn’t have been fair to him, the state I was in. Henry deserved better. I felt chill and hard inside, like I imagined Nora to be. He needed someone soft and warm.

The winter was cold. All winters are cold in Winnipeg but the year of my new hip seemed brutal. I felt drafts in the old house that I’d never noticed before and I wore socks to bed for the first time in my life. I had graduated to a cane before the snow fell and could walk with no support by the end of November. But sometimes I used my cane anyway, after new snow fell and the sidewalks were extra slippery or if I had to take a bus. It kept people from banging into me and was something solid to hang on to.

Pete drank a lot that winter, eased up on the dope and got into rye whiskey like our mother. I heard him early on Sunday mornings, vomiting in the bathroom. And later in the day, he whispered into the phone.

“What happened last night?” he would say, talking to one of his friends. He groaned. “Do you think I have to phone anyone to apologize for anything?”

And sometimes he’d make more calls, full of excuses and apologies.

“I’m sorry I pulled the chair out from under you.”

“I feel terrible about making fun of your hair.”

“I’m so sorry I left you at the social. I sure hope you managed to get a ride home. It was cold last night.”

That time he was talking to Eileen. Her knee froze on her walk home from the Elks Hall that January night in 1970. She had worn only pantyhose under her short dress and coat, never dreaming she would be left to walk home. They split up after that frigid winter night. The knee that froze was vulnerable for her whole long life after that and she never stopped blaming Pete. Or loving him: he was her only love. She said as much to me, not so long ago.

Pete was kicked off the basketball team for missing too many practices. Nora didn’t find out till the playoffs when she and Dougwell were all set to go and watch him do his stuff.

My brother and I didn’t get any further. His staring at me stopped seeming like a positive thing. It got tiresome, then creepy, like Joanne thought it was from the start, and finally I had to start yelling, “Quit staring at me!”

He listened to what I said, if someone else was around. I could tell. But if it was just the two of us, he paid my words no mind. So I stayed out of his way, backed way off. I had nothing left to offer him. Maybe my basket of offerings wasn’t very full to begin with but I didn’t know how to change that. It wasn’t that I didn’t care. But I didn’t have it in me to push. I came to think of him as the mad woman in the attic, except he walked among us and was a boy.

I spent a lot of time in my room over the winter, listening to
Abbey Road
and
Cheap Thrills
, smoking a lot of cigarettes and a little bit of hash. The dope helped me to be nice to Nora. She was oblivious to what I was doing, just noticed if I was grumpy or pleasant.

“You’re awfully easy to get along with lately,” she said once when I had made my way, heavy-lidded and thirsty, downstairs to have a look in the fridge. She smiled at me.

I felt confused and shuffled back upstairs with just a glass of water. Was it me and the way I was that kept her from smiling at me like that more often? Could she and I have something more if I changed? Was it more than just her fault?

When I ran out of hash I didn’t buy any more for a long time. That little encounter with Nora freaked me out. I was more comfortable being crabby and unhelpful.

In the spring I took a job in the office at the Dominion store. I filed and typed and dealt with complaints. My hip still ached. The manager’s idea was that when I improved physically I would head out onto the floor as a cashier. My idea was that I would quit in a year or so and go back to university with the help of Murray’s life insurance money.

Dougwell was okay with this. He was an optimist, like Murray.

He sang the Dominion’s theme song, that one about why more Canadians shop at Dominion than any other store. Apparently it was mainly because of the meat.

I sang along with him and we laughed. Later, when he was puttering around in the yard, I heard him whistling the tune and I felt a huge fondness for him. I wondered again how he could stand my mum.

Nora was sullen. She was tired of me. I think she thought I would never be gone. I would live with them forever, the pathetic daughter who never managed to break away.

When she was my age she had been on her own for four years. She took the commercial course at school and landed a job as a secretary the Monday after she graduated. It was the first job she applied for, I remember her saying, more than once. Soon after that she moved away from the Kennaughs into her own apartment. She left them behind.

Once, when she was more talkative than usual, I asked her why she hadn’t kept in touch with the Kennaughs. After all, they had been her family for four years.

“They were paid to be my family,” she said. “You would have to pay me to go back to see them.”

“Didn’t you like them?” I asked.

“They were all right. They were an improvement over what I came from.”

I think Nora missed Henry more than I did. She saw his leaving as a door closing. My mother didn’t like me very much. Ever. I try not to dwell on it.

I was stretched out in the hammock in my backyard. It was hung between two trees, an ash and an oak. Joanne sat on a lawn chair close by, one of Dougwell’s old wooden ones. It needed a coat of paint.

“Let’s take kick-boxing lessons,” she said.

“Kick-boxing?”

“Yeah. I’d like to have a sport that I’m good at.”

“We walk our dogs,” I said.

“Walking our dogs isn’t a sport.”

Spike had heard the word walk twice and he was up on his feet, on full alert.

“But kick-boxing? Why not yoga, something more leisurely?”

Joanne and her husband Grant had moved back to Norwood when their last kid left home and their house in Southdale grew too big. We had stayed in touch over the years but it was so much better now that she lived only two streets away.

“My hip couldn’t handle it,” I went on.

“Oh,” Joanne said. “I forgot about your hip.”

“I’m on the list for a new one.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. This one is a little outdated; it’s a one size fits all.”

“You’re kidding!”

“No,” I said. “They build much better appliances these days, more personalized. That’s what they call them: appliances.”

“Well, good then. When’s this going to happen?”

“I don’t know. I’m on a list.”

Joanne was eating salted peanuts in the shell and was covered in peanut dust. I was eating sunflower seeds, spitting the shells over the side of the hammock onto the lawn. Spike had sat down again and was gnawing on a piece of rawhide.

“My new hip will be titanium,” I said.

Joanne let out a low whistle.

We both love salty snacks. If I were to interview myself I would say that munching on popcorn with my head on a pillow, staring through the leaves of an oak tree is one of my favourite things to do.

Blue and green are my favourite colours. I think it’s because of the times I have spent all my life, staring through many shades of green at the deep blue Winnipeg sky.

There are other things I like: throwing a stick for Spike, reading history books, playing Scrabble with Joanne. She always wins and I’m a poor sport, but she doesn’t mind it when I call her a slippery slapper.

Sometimes four of us play: Joanne, Myrna, Hermione and me. We drink wine and swear a lot, call each other cunts and cocksuckers. In the summer we play outside. We shout so loud we wake the neighbours. We eat snacks and smoke.

But that day in late July it was just Joanne and me and by the time the sun got lost behind the oak tree we decided on yoga at the Norwood Community Club. There was a class coming up in the fall. My Italian cooking class had finished at the end of June. It was amazing how little I had learned. Maybe I would do better with the yoga.

When Joanne left, I went in the house. I remembered some focaccia that I had made at my cooking class and I took it out of the freezer. I ran a bath and immersed myself in eucalyptus-scented bubbles. Before I even soaped myself up there was a loud commotion outside so I got up to look out the bathroom window. It was a Green Guy deweeding my lawn.
Green Guys
is a lawn care outfit that I hired to contaminate my little patch of the universe. I got a special deal because I planned a year ahead. I closed the window to keep out the toxic fumes. My guilt was strong enough that I knew this was the last time ever for the poison. I returned to my bath, which had suddenly lost its appeal. It was just another chore.

Afterwards I threw on a sundress and sat down at the dining room table with a glass of iced tea and a slice of the focaccia. Nora’s green book sat on the table in front of me. Several days had gone by since I read about “the littlen” being ready for plucking and I hadn’t picked it up again.

Sometimes I was afraid that her words would bury me. Like quicksand they would suck me down, fill my lungs and close in over my head. But I was determined not to let that happen, always taking the time to digest each entry before I went on to the next. Digest and then what: blow out or assimilate? I didn’t know, still don’t. Some parts will be with me always. I do know that.

My Italian bread wasn’t very good. Maybe I shouldn’t have frozen it. I chewed slowly for a while and then gave up and threw the rest away.

I reopened Nora’s journal.

1939 Fall

Luce has quit eating. She cooks for Mr. Trent and me but she doesn’t eat anything herself. I asked her about it and she said she eats when I am at school. She’s lying.

Uh-oh, I thought, and closed the book.