Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall (2 page)

I don’t think she’s pretending. I really don’t.

But, the thing is, it occurred to me. There was a time when something like this would never have entered my head.

~

There were layers of trikes feathered out behind us, lined up against the wall. They were lined up in rows, with spaces in between them, and they were all, each and every one of them, red. Each trike was a red moment, separated from other red moments by something skinny and breathtaking. I felt short.

~

The wife came over to the bed and bent her face down close to the husband’s toenail. While she was bent over like that, she started pulling off her pants. She got her pants down over her feet, tossed them into a corner, and then stayed bent down like that, looking at the husband’s toenail.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” the husband said.

The wife stood there in her underwear.

“It looks like a thread from a pair of my pantyhose,” the wife said.

The husband went on looking at his toe.

When the wife was gone, the husband sat up and pulled the thread out of his toenail. He held it with his fingers and kept it there, close to his face.

~

There was this girl who used to take me over to a park near my house and make me take my clothes off. I always got a boner. What I am talking about here is a boner. A real boner. Exactly what you might picture in your head when you hear the word “boner.” I was not even six at the time. I was four. Maybe. Or five. Because I was six when my parents split up and my mom and my sister and I moved to a different neighborhood. So it had to be before I turned six that I sometimes went to that park with that girl and took off my clothes.

I guess I wanted to take off my clothes. I must have wanted to. This girl, she wasn’t holding me down or anything, or threatening me in any way. She just said something like, “Take your clothes off.”

I must have wanted to. I must have enjoyed taking my clothes off. I think I liked getting that boner. It was new to me, that boner. But I didn’t get the boner because I had all my clothes off and I was with a girl. Being with a girl had nothing to do with getting the boner. I was getting the boner from being out in the park like that, out in the open that way. It was having the boner that gave me the boner.

She made me sit on a swing and swing in the park, with my clothes off, with that boner of mine. As far as I know, she just watched me. She never took her own clothes off. I think I wanted her to take her clothes off. I think I must have asked her, at some point, if she, too, would be taking her clothes off. But she must have said no. She must have liked seeing me naked like that. A little boy like that with the little boner I had. She must have liked that.

It was not because I wanted to see her naked that I asked her to take her clothes off. That was not why I asked her. I asked her because I had my clothes off, and I did not want to have my clothes off and then not have her have her clothes off. It was a matter of having.

I think she must have told me she would take her clothes off. She must have told me if I took my clothes off, she would take her clothes off. In order to get me to take my clothes off, I think she must, at some point, have told me she, too, would be taking her clothes off. Now that I think about it, I think she must have left me there, swinging on that swing with my clothes off, and her running off, away from the park, leaving me there with my clothes off, swinging on the swing like that, with my boner poking in the air.

And it wasn’t a park. It was somebody’s backyard. It was a big backyard. More of a forest, really. It must have been some kind of estate, with a swing on a tree back there, and you could not even see the house that the backyard was a backyard of.

~

Sometimes when I sit at my desk at home I’ll just sit there with some papers in front of me, but I won’t really be looking at the papers. Tutti will come up behind me and touch my shoulders. She will stand behind me for a moment with my shoulders in her hands. Maybe she thinks I’m looking at those papers.

~

There was so much love. I think it forced us to eat that way. I think it forced us to eat like there was no way to get at all that love that there was. We couldn’t stand up, there was so much love. It was like all that love was right there over our heads. We were afraid to stand up. All we could do was keep sitting there, eating.

A
T
EIGHT
weeks it’s the size of a lima bean,” Tutti says. “By eight months it’s like a basketball full of puppies.”

I look up from the book I’m reading. I’m outside the story, which is only a swamp after all, and a swamp that’s a long way off, with the surface look of a solid stretch of land. Something you could walk over without sinking in. Just five hundred pages, you could say.

“Positive pain,” Tutti says. “Pain with a purpose.” She grunts.

The apartment building speaks. The walls speak. It’s this apartment we are living in that’s telling our story, and we are deep inside it, hardly listening.

~

This is me leaving the house. This is me not looking at the door when I’m home, and here I am not looking back when the other side of the door is behind me. Here is me not thinking much about the door.

Here I am lifting up off the bed, hearing my thoughts drift away, falling suddenly when they reach a certain radius of existence.

I was either inside the house, or on my way to being inside the house. I kept track of my time inside the house.

~

I died. I went to heaven. After a couple of weeks, I was given an apartment.

T
HE
WOMAN
who sits at the desk across from me was typing something on her computer. She would type something on her computer and then she would stand up and do some kind of a little dance. Then she would sit back down and start typing again. Each time she did the dance, she did it a little different. She would wiggle her hips a different way. Or put her feet on a different part of the floor.

~

We were all sitting in the car. There was Harold, who could not hear out of his right ear since his father hammered him in the head one night when Harold was asleep in his bed. There was Ronnie, the mechanic, who could fix any car and never charged anyone for his work. There was Bill, who had no car of his own and would ride around in anyone else’s car any chance he got and who always talked about how any day now the deal was going to come through and he would have a car of his own. The guy in the driver’s seat was J.B. It was J.B.’s car. He had had the car for three weeks, but so far he had not been able to scrape together enough money to put gas in it. So we all just sat around in J.B.’s car, parked in J.B.’s driveway.

~

Tutti and I used to watch
Star Trek
reruns together every night. We got them on video from a guy at my work. This guy videotapes all the new
Star Trek
episodes, numbers the tapes, and indexes them on his home computer. I would bring home three tapes, with five or six episodes on each, and then a week later I would bring them back and get three more. This was during the winter. We were working our way back to tape number one.

~

Is it my imagination, or did we all, at one time or another, spell “center” the same? The Americans and the Canadians I am talking about now. Was there not, at one time, a single spelling for the word “center,” just as there was, at one time, only one God? I am thinking now of grade three. Did we not all spell “center” the same in grade three?

~

She used to go up and down the aisles not looking at anyone, just going up and down the aisles, past everyone’s desk, telling everyone how to spell certain words, like “gravity,” and “pulse.”

~

She wasn’t a beautiful girl. He didn’t think she was beautiful. She had acne and acne scars from old acne, but from a distance you didn’t notice the acne because her skin was very dark. Her hair was dark also. She wore a black skirt and a yellow blouse and her legs were bare. He felt as though he were walking with someone who had no clothes on. He could smell her skin and feel her breath and he saw the way she let her arms fall, as though she were through with them forever. But then she would hold them up again at the last minute, just a little, and he would wait. When she blinked, her eyelids fell like torn rags in the wind.

~

Dad took the bike out of the car and set it down in the parking lot, and I put my leg over the bar, but I couldn’t reach the pedals. So Dad picked up the bike and put it back in the car.

The next week he did the same thing. He drove over to the mall, got the bike out of the car, and set it down in the parking lot. Only this time he brought some wooden blocks, and he strapped the blocks onto the pedals so I could reach.

W
HEN
WE
first got married, Tutti bought us a queen-size bed and now everybody is out in the hall and all the lights are off and I am lying alone in the queen-size bed and all I can see are the red lights on the clock radio.

~

“You see that space in the clouds?” he said.

“What space?” she said.

“That one,” he said, “shaped like a rabbit.”

“I don’t see it.”

They were sitting on the couch.

“Right there,” he said.

“Oh yeah,” she said.

“It’s shaped like a rabbit.”

“It looks like a warship to me,” she said. “A Nazi warship.”

“A Nazi warship?” he said.

“There’s the swastika.”

He looked out the window. “But look at the ears,” he said. “One of the ears is flopped over.”

“Those are anti-aircraft guns,” she said. “And see those little ridges?” She moved her finger back and forth across the air. “Those are little lifeboats.”

They stared out the window for a while. The space changed shape and eventually disappeared. Now the sky was solid cloud, and the wind was picking up. She went back to her book. He kept staring out the window at the sky.

I
T
WAS
dark. Mom was running the back end of her car into the trees. I could see the taillights of her car as she backed up and then stopped, and then backed up a little more.

Sammy won’t let me come into his room anymore at night. It’s as though we are involved in a great, big, dangerous experiment. My idea is, you can’t give them enough. You have to give them everything.

When Mom was getting ready to leave, she said, “I can’t find my keys.” She had been standing on the beach, looking at the sky, as though this was everything she ever wanted to see in the world.

Sometimes my mom says to my sister, “Don’t touch my stuff.” She will have all her stuff out of her purse –her little pack of Kleenex, her wallet, her pack of gum – and she will say, “Do not touch my stuff.”

~

Tutti said, “I never ate my salad. I got it out and put dressing on it, but I never ate it.”

“Where is it?” I said.

“I looked at it, but I couldn’t eat it,” Tutti said.

“Where is the salad now?”

“It’s in the fridge.”

“You put dressing on it?”

“I couldn’t eat it. It’s in the fridge.”

~

Like a bedroom at night, with the lights down low, maybe just the television on. Your eyes glow, you can feel them, little coals of warmth.

She’s in the bed beside me. I can feel her there, feel the rise and fall of her chest. I can see the shape of her body, the line of the covers. Beyond that, I can see the world. The world is waiting for me. She’s asleep.

That winter was hell. You couldn’t get out, it was so cold. The car wouldn’t start. Sometimes you would get to work, put in your hours. You couldn’t go for a walk after dinner.

We would do the dishes. She would maybe throw one at me, a plate, usually Corning. She knew it wouldn’t break.

I would get her down on the floor. She would scream. She would bite. She would end up giggling. As I was tickling, I would have to hold back. My hands were like aliens. I had to tame them again and again, and still I would never know.

~

I have never wanted to hang myself, or slit my wrists, if that’s what you are thinking. There are certain ways of talking – sometimes I am capable of this – where everyone shuts up and listens. I don’t know why they do this.

I
ALWAYS
paint my dad as a boor. I always tell people, “My dad says he saw you at the mall today. He thinks you dress funny.”

People never take anything I say seriously. People say, “Don’t listen to him. He doesn’t mean a thing he says.” This always surprises me. The fact is, I mean everything I say.

~

My sister used to stay in her room. She would take a piece of toast in there and she would eat her toast and read until Mom came and got her to take her to school. This was nineteen years ago.

~

We were on holiday at a campground and we were having a pretty bad day, so we all went over to the camp store to buy some chocolate bars. At one point we bought some chips. Tutti said they were the lousiest chips she ever ate, and she wished she had gone ahead and spent the big bucks and got a decent brand of chips. How the chips tasted to me was, it was as though someone had taken regular chips and decided at the last minute to sprinkle them with sour cream and onion flavoring, but then they ran out of sour cream and onion flavoring and said, Oh well. Tutti said she thought they would have at least been rippled.

~

I wrote what I thought I could understand. Like the tunnel your foot makes when it drops through the air.

I’
D
LIKE
to put my fingers into his beard and believe that that is all there is. His beard, with its silver streaked deep toward the skin. I’d like to believe it never makes it deeper than the skin.