Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall (13 page)

~

I’m sitting on the toilet when the Jehovah’s Witnesses come to our door. They ring the doorbell. Sammy runs down the stairs to see who it is. “Who is that, Mommy?” he calls. Tutti goes downstairs and opens the door. I sit on the toilet with the bathroom door open a crack, trying to hear what the Johos are saying to Tutti.

So far today I have eaten a bowl of cereal, drunk two cups of coffee, and watched a video with Sammy. Sammy made tea in his plastic tea set and brought it into the living room for us to have while we watched the video. It wasn’t really tea. It was just water that I put in Sammy’s plastic teapot from the tap in the kitchen. About halfway through the movie, Tutti got out of bed and came down and sat on the couch with us to watch the movie. Sammy gave her some tea.

Now it’s ten o’clock and the Johos are at the door and I am sitting on the toilet. The Johos are saying something to Tutti about world events. They ask Tutti what she thinks about recent world events. Tutti says she knows nothing about recent world events. This is true. Neither Tutti nor I knows anything about recent world events.

Tutti tells the Johos we are a Catholic family and that she has to go out now because she has a dentist appointment. I come out of the bathroom and go into the kitchen. I can see the Johos standing in our driveway. There are three of them. They are deciding which houses they still need to visit. One of them is talking to the other two and pointing. The other two are looking where the other one is pointing.

“Bloody Johos,” Tutti says. She looks at me. “Do you agree?”

~

Tutti says, “What are those things on your knees?”

I look at my knees. “What things?” I say.

“Those little scabs,” Tutti says. “Why do you have those little scabs on your knees?”

“I always get those,” I say. “Every year. Usually they go away.”

Tutti looks at my knees. “What is it?” she says.

“Psoriasis?”

“I guess so,” I say.

“Are you going to get psoriasis like your dad?” she says. “You’re getting more and more like your dad every day.”

~

I have all my clothes on except for my socks. I pick some black socks out from my sock drawer. I unball the socks and sit down on the edge of the bed. I pull one sock on. I sit on the edge of the bed, going up and down a little because of Sammy jumping on the bed behind me. After a couple of minutes, Sammy lies down on the bed and starts to cry.

Tutti comes into the bedroom and tells Sammy to quit crying.

“Cut it out,” she says. She stands in front of the mirror, brushing her hair.

When we get outside, it’s raining, and the rain is freezing onto the trees. Sammy’s got an apple. I put him in his car seat and he sits in the backseat eating his apple.

“I like the skin, Daddy,” he says. He has only recently begun to like the skin. This is something new. He is always chomping away on apples these days, telling me how much he likes the skin. “This is good skin, Daddy,” he says.

~

Tutti wants to know: where are all the jokers of the world? She wonders if we are wrong about something, if maybe God meant us to live our lives a different way, because it seems we are the only ones living them the way we do.

A
FTER YOU
go out and do things, you get home from doing them and you go away from the people you did things with, back to the people you live with and the things you have done are done and they are nothing but memories of things that were done and where you are is at home with the people who have never done anything and you can try to remember the things you have done and tell the things you have done to the people who have never done anything – but what’s the point?

~

The guy was down in my garage.

When the garage door went up, the light hurt his eyes. He held his arm there. He had whiskers on his face. His face was white. He’d been staying in my garage for a week. I didn’t want him to go home.

“Can you get me a woman?” he said.

I went back in the house.

“He wants me to get him a woman,” I told Tutti.

“Where are you going to get him a woman?”

“I don’t know.”

“You can’t just go down to the drugstore and get him a woman.”

“I could maybe call some people.”

“I don’t like having him down there.”

“It’s only temporary.”

“I can feel him down there. We have no place to park our car.”

I kept giving him things.

“Are you comfortable down here?” I said. “Maybe I could just come in and look around.”

~

When I was in grade four, I got four red stars. No one got four red stars. After that, I was all set.

I
GOT
to thinking about the drawer in the teacher’s desk where she kept all your stuff. All everybody’s stuff whenever she took anything away from anybody and said, “It’s mine now.” And then we would say whatever it was we thought would get the thing back if we didn’t have it and something were to happen to us, like if we were going to die or something because we didn’t have it. What I got to thinking the other day was, say the teacher took away some kid’s heart pills or like their hearing aid or something like that, and the kid gets run over by a car on the way home because he can’t hear anything. That’s what I got to thinking about, and I wanted to tell somebody about this, so I’m telling you.

I
WOKE
up in bed with Sammy still asleep beside me and I thought,
I should stay here in bed beside him until he wakes up
. I thought,
I may never see him wake up into innocence again
. Then he turned his back toward me and pushed himself back into my arms, and I realized I had been right in the first place: I would never see him wake up into innocence again.

~

I was trying to spread peanut butter onto some bread. Finally, I couldn’t spread it anymore. I put the knife in the sink. I left the peanut butter jar sitting open on the counter. I went into the living room to lie down. I looked out the window. There were some trees out there. There were two trees. I could see some of the branches on two trees. This is all I could see.

~

Yesterday a dog was killed in a car crash. I read about it in the newspaper this morning. It was on the front page of the newspaper. No people were killed. Only this dog. The newspaper showed a picture of the car where the dog was killed. It looked like the kind of crash that would kill somebody. They had this picture of the smashed-up car on the front page of the newspaper. The caption under the picture read,
Dog Killed in Car Crash!

~

I don’t care about Tutti, really. The fact that Tutti will not get up in the middle of the night and go see what Sammy wants. This doesn’t piss me off anymore. It used to piss me off.

~

When Dad drove into the driveway that time in that strange, blue-colored station wagon he drove, I thought he and Mom were going to go back to being married. I really thought this. Mom was standing beside Dad’s car, looking down at her feet. Dad had the window rolled down. I had not seen Mom and Dad talk together in five years. I felt something important must be happening.

Dad didn’t even stop to talk to me. He waved. He waved as he backed out of the driveway, and then he got the car out onto the street and drove away.

Mom stood in the driveway, the gravel underneath her feet and the trees behind her, looking at her hands.

~

Sometimes I will just be sitting there, like in the kitchen, or in the living room or something, and I will be sitting there talking to Tutti, and we might be talking, or maybe we are watching television, more likely we are watching television, because we don’t sit around and talk to each other too much anymore, or maybe Tutti is cutting out a pattern for one of her sewing projects and I am sitting there watching her, and once in a while one of us says something, but most of the time I am just sitting there and Tutti is just sitting there and Tutti is maybe cutting out one of her patterns, and I’ll look down at my knees and see those two little scabs I have there on my knees, and I’ll go into the bathroom and get some cream and start rubbing some cream on those scabs, and if it’s Tuesday morning all you can hear outside is the garbage trucks going up and down the streets in the neighborhood, you can hear them even if they are clean over on the other side of town, you can hear them drive ten feet and then stop, and then drive ten feet and then stop again, and you can hear when the guy pulls down on the lever that makes the big hydraulic thing go up and squish all the garbage into the truck.

~

I can’t even believe that guy was my dad back then. That was some other guy. That must have been some other guy.

~

There is a big returnable bottle in the trunk of the car that rolls around and bangs into things. It sounds like a small body and Tutti says if I don’t get it out of the trunk and return it soon, she’ll throw it out.

I guess if I had to pick a day to die, I would have picked this afternoon. There are things I never resolved in my life. But at least the weather was good. Kind of cool. But sunny. If you stayed on the north side of the street, you could keep warm.

I know there will be people who will want to know certain things. For instance, do I have regrets? I’m sure that’s a popular concern. Or, what one thing would I have done if I had known ahead of time I was going to die?

I was the kind of guy who let things slip. I guess if I had one wish, it would be to get the world to quit slipping by so fast. I’d like to sit back for a couple of minutes, like on the couch in my living room, and take control of the universe.

I
WENT
back one time, to see how it looked. Sammy was asleep in the backseat. Tutti was in Edmonton with her sister. I didn’t get out of the car. I drove past slowly. I was trying to see if the swing was still in the backyard.

~

“What’s your grandfather’s name?” Tutti asks. Tutti and Coco are just looking for something to laugh about.

“Wynnfield,” I tell them.

They crack up.

“Rennie,” I say.

They laugh even harder.

“Thelma,” I say. “Bill,” I shout.

They stop laughing.

“You never know when to quit,” Coco says.

~

They stay there for a while in the mornings, in that tiny apartment, with a sort of tiny apartment attitude on the future. A tiny rose of hope for the frail thing they have together. They sit on the couch and have coffee and talk. Sometimes they don’t talk. Sometimes he reads and she does needlepoint. They are young, but in another way they are old, as though they have this tiny hope of making it the rest of the way together, but God help them if the rest of the way is a long way.

One day they leave the apartment early and head for an amusement park they know. It looks as though it will rain and she’s not sure if they should go. She keeps watching the sky and finally she tells him to drive to a coffee shop. They can talk things over. Maybe there is someplace else they could go.

He says they would have to do something inside if it’s the rain she is worried about. He keeps saying it isn’t going to rain, but she’s not sure. They get coffee. They buy a paper. He finds a pay phone. They call up a movie theater to see if there is a matinee that day. There isn’t.

In the end they go to the amusement park and after a while the sun comes out and it gets warm.

At the end of the day they come home. He falls asleep on the couch, but wakes up later and watches a movie. She goes to bed halfway through the movie, but he stays up until it’s over.

In the morning, she has to get up and go to work. He hasn’t worked all summer, but he gets up with her anyway. She’s tired, but she puts her arms up under his arms and rests her head on his chest.

~

It is always somebody else’s inspiration you are feeling. Even your own inspirations sneak up on you when you least expect them, and only in retrospect do you recognize them as inspirations, and then only if you allow for the fact that looking back on them divides you from yourself and that the you who knows the value of inspiration will never actually achieve inspiration, and the you who achieves inspiration can never know the windless velocity of inspiration and the terrible effect it has on your respiratory system.

~

Eventually, she said, you’ll have to leave. You’ll have to leave, and I’ll have to leave. We’ll both have to leave.

But as we leave, she said, we’ll both be leaving. You’ll be leaving and I’ll be leaving. But, she said, we won’t, each of us, be leaving the other. It won’t be an exponential kind of leaving, where the one leaves the other and the other leaves the one, and there’s a leaving of one from the other and the other from the one. It will be more a concurrent kind of leaving of everybody from everybody else, where everybody is leaving and nobody is staying.

That’s how desperate things are, she said.

~

I was in a washroom drawing Mozart’s head on the mirror in lipstick when a guy in cowboy boots came in and told me there was another way of drawing Mozart’s head.

Ken Sparling
is the author of
Intention Implication Wind
and five other books. He lives and works in Canada.

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