Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall (8 page)

“The sons buried these women in the woods behind the house.”

~

When we first got married, Tutti used to come home with canned goods. She would come home with bags of canned goods, and she would bring the bags into the kitchen and set them down on the kitchen counter. She would stand there in the kitchen, in her coat, with the keys still in her hand and the smell of the outside still on her. “How was your day?” she would ask.

~

There are places in the middle of the city where a sort of silence settles, like snow, and all the noise seems far away, coming toward you like clouds.

~

Headlights kept hitting the backs of her legs. Her legs were white and formless, and they disappeared, eventually, into a pair of white shorts. It was dark enough now that I was losing sight of her. The headlights of cars coming toward her lit up the hair on her arms so she glowed around the edges. Then the headlights got past her and blinded me so I lost sight of her momentarily. When the headlights got past me, I could see her again, but it was growing darker and she was harder to see. What I saw now was mainly motion.

~

I knew him when he could stand up. He can’t stand up anymore.

It’s their heads that I notice.

Okay, who’s the guy who keeps saying maybe, and who’s the guy who keeps saying no? Who are all these guys?

~

Tutti says there is a God because of this Brad Pitt guy, who is the biggest honey of all time, if you listen to what Tutti has to say. Tutti says she doesn’t even know what the movie was about, she was too busy thanking God, because as far as she is concerned, yes, Robert Redford is still the god of gods when it comes to honeys, and, yes, he has still got what it takes, but, she’s sorry, a thing of that nature cannot go on forever. Eventually a person has to pass the crown and, up to now, as far as Tutti was concerned, there were no contenders.

The weird thing is, this Brad Pitt guy even smiles like Robert Redford.

“It’s his son,” Tutti says. “It’s Robert Redford’s son.”

“No,” I say. “It’s not. I saw it on TV that it’s not Robert Redford’s son.”

“It’s got to be his son. I don’t care what they say on TV.”

Tutti is cutting out patterns for her sewing projects. We have this movie with Brad Pitt going on the VCR. Whenever Brad Pitt comes on the screen, Tutti gets down on her hands and knees and starts to howl at the screen.

I get the clicker and turn up the volume. “I’m trying to hear what they’re saying,” I say.

“Who cares what they’re saying,” Tutti says.

“I care.”

The next morning, at breakfast, we’re both feeling rough. The movie was a long one. When it was finally over, Tutti lay beside me in bed going, “There is a God. There is a God.” Normally, I can go to sleep in an instant when Tutti is talking to me. As a matter of fact, this is a bone of contention between me and Tutti, because Tutti will be talking to me and right in the middle of a sentence, I’ll just go to sleep.

But with this Brad Pitt thing, things are different. Every time Tutti says, “There is a God,” I flinch.

So at breakfast, we both feel it. I feel swollen is what I feel. I feel as though there is water trapped beneath my skin. My cornflakes are going soggy.

“I’m sorry,” Tutti says, “but if that Brad Pitt guy asked me to sleep with him, I’d have to do it. I hope you could forgive me.”

I look at Tutti with her hair going out in fifteen different directions, and her eyes puffed out. She’s wearing her bathrobe that makes her look like a blue lamb.

~

Can anyone tell me where this area on the map is in the actual building?

I
F YOU
look at a book about Casa Loma, you will see that it originally had three bowling alleys. This was in 1914, the year construction on the castle ended.

When Tutti first learned she was pregnant, we went looking for a house. I’m not as naïve as I once was. I understand now why a guy might want to build a castle in the middle of a big city. And why he might want to put three bowling alleys in.

~

Tutti and Sammy are standing in the middle of the driveway when I get home from work. The two of them standing there. I stop the car and look out the front windshield. Sammy waves.

~

I’ll tell you something which used to keep happening to me, which is, I used to keep thinking I was going to remember something. I kept getting this feeling, as though something was about to come back to me. What I used to do whenever this happened was, I would get all nervous and try to remember everything as fast as I could, and if there was anyone around me who was making a lot of racket, I would think to myself,
Fuck
, and that would be the end of it.

~

He lifts his face and there are marks on his face that were not there before. No one says anything. The angle of his head shears off the possibility of speech.

~

I was sitting at my desk, writing up an order for blue ballpoint pens. Outside my window large snowflakes were falling out of the sky like white spiders coming down to earth.

~

The sun was shining. Sometimes you might see a dog. The yards were empty squares. There were fences, and pictures of people having adventures. Things went by fast. Girls were screaming.

I
NEVER
wanted to go to dinner with her. I never wanted to put myself inside her, feel her taking things away. I only wanted to go to sleep, take everything with me into sleep, and keep it there with me, alone with me, in sleep.

~

“You know what he does?” Tutti says. “He puts three or four kinds of cereal into a bowl. Then he puts milk on it and walks around the house waiting for the cereal to get soggy.”

This is what Tutti is saying to my sister. They are downstairs talking about me, and I can hear their voices coming up the stairs, but I can’t hear what they are saying, except for the thing Tutti says about the way I eat my cereal.

~

I wanted to see big old houses, big old mansions. I wanted to see the people who lived in them, people whose lives were coming home from work.

~

“Stay off my desk,” I tell Foufou. I go to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee. I come back to the bedroom and sit down at the desk and stare at the wall.

Foufou jumps up on the desk. She gets her paw up in the air and knocks the pen out of my hand. It lands on the floor and rolls under the bed.

“Get off,” I tell her. I get down on the floor and get the pen out from under the bed. I pick up my coffee and go into the kitchen. I look in the fridge. Foufou comes in and starts rubbing my legs.

“Get lost,” I tell her. I push her away with my foot.

At 3:30 I go over to pick Tutti up at work. She’s waiting outside the front door. She’s wearing her blue terry-cloth shorts set. She’s smiling and waving. She climbs into the car. “How was your day?” she says.

~

A guy from work says this to me: “I bought these things in China.” He holds the things he bought in China up to my face. I hear the far edge of his voice slip away, sliced off by the things he is holding.

~

I keep my hair short. I have had several different jobs. I brush my teeth. I live in a small apartment. Sometimes Jehovah’s Witnesses come to the door. I take the pamphlets they give me and put them in the kitchen. One time a minister called me up. He said his wife’s name was Jewel. He said he was not at all sorry.

~

The guy was looking for a truck manual.

“I need to fix my truck,” he said. He rubbed his hands together and squinted. “I can’t work those computer things,” he said. He was wearing a white T-shirt with the hair on his belly showing through and a dark spot down toward his groin.

That would be his navel
, I thought.

“It’s a pickup truck,” he said.

~

Once in a long while I can feel myself spilling out through my eyes. Climbing down over my cheeks. These are the best times. The worst times are all the rest.

~

You know what I think? I think when Tutti calls me at work it just makes me lonelier. I think there is something in my brain, some tiny relay, a switch, only pretty small, which gets tripped by certain combinations of light, making it seem as though there are things, for instance, a TV, in the room here with me.

It sounds as if Tutti is in a phone booth in a foreign airport when she calls me at work. Then she puts Sammy on, and it’s this same foreign airport thing.

~

There’s no way I can know for sure if my sister-in-law is falling asleep on the couch every day out there in Edmonton. How could I know that? I would never ask her. And I don’t think she would ever send us a letter:
Falling asleep daily, Yours truly, Coco
. Probably, if I found out, I would find out by accident, like her boyfriend would make some remark, some joke.

Say I really wanted to know, though. For my own peace of mind or something. Say it was something I just had to know. For instance … I don’t know … say I couldn’t fall asleep. This sounds crazy, but just for the sake of argument, even though I realize it is crazy, but say I worried about my sister-in-law getting enough sleep out there in Edmonton. Say I suspected she was not getting enough sleep.

And she sends us letters, assuring us she is okay. Telling us, don’t worry. Don’t be such a pair of worriers, you two crazy people.

But say I’m still suspicious. Say I detect something in her letters, in the tone of her letters. She’s keeping something from us. She doesn’t want us to worry.

So I lie awake at night, worrying.

What I could do is, I could insist she send me a videotape of her sleeping on the couch. Not just for a minute or two. For at least twenty minutes, so I know she’s not faking. Then I could be assured. Even if they don’t own a video camera, they could rent one. I’m sure you could rent a video camera in Edmonton. They must videotape things out there.

~

All I can hear is the wind outside. I don’t care. I feel all right, except that I have to take a piss and I don’t feel like getting back out of bed.

Somewhere in the Bible it says you are supposed to stop talking to the people in your family forever.

When the wind is like this, I find it hard to sleep. It was worse when we were in the apartment. I would lie awake in bed and imagine all my stuff out on the balcony blowing away.

S
OME
BIRDS
went by the window. Seagulls.

“It’s going to rain,” Tutti said.

I went over to the window.

~

There is this really weird paper you have to get for the machine at work that photocopies the microfilm. This paper is shiny on one side, and sort of yellowy on the other. You have to put the paper in the paper tray with the yellowy side up. If you don’t do it this way, the paper gets jammed in the microfilm machine. Much of my day is spent traveling to and from the microfilm room, unjamming the microfilm machine because someone put the paper in wrong.

~

Someplace along the way I stopped wanting to lie to people anymore. I wanted to tell the truth. But you try telling the truth. Just try it sometime. Maybe you think you are already doing it.

But I’ll tell you something. I learned a lot along the way, looking at all the other liars.

What? That thing about the house? Forget it. Lies. Not particularly true, anyway. Although I do remember the light of it. But I don’t think I stepped out. I think I was pushed.

I learned you are doomed. But I couldn’t quite get the lesson deep enough. I couldn’t get the consequences to give themselves up to me.

So. Here I am. Here is the state of affairs. This is it.

~

I heard my grandma was dead. Before she died, she had a heart attack and went to live in the St. John’s Rehabilitation Centre for a while. She lived a few more years. She even went home to her apartment some of the time. When she died, she left me her car. My sister got the silver.

~

The first book I ever bought was about the red-tailed hawk. I still have the book. I just remembered it when a little girl came up to me at the reference desk and asked for a book about the red-tailed hawk. At first I thought she said, “I need a book about the red-tailed cock.” But then I realized it was the red-tailed hawk. The girl was about six years old.

We didn’t have any books about the red-tailed hawk. There were citations in some of the encyclopedias, but she needed something she could take home. She said she wanted to cut out some pictures. I told her she shouldn’t cut the pictures out of library books. I told her, “Don’t cut the pictures out of library books. Okay, honey?” I called her honey.

~

Tutti and Sammy are in the living room watching
Bambi
. They want me to turn off the radio so they can hear the movie better. I’m in the kitchen frying bacon. Tutti calls from the living room, “Can you shut that thing off? We can’t hear
Bambi.”

I can hear Bambi. I can hear Bambi from out here in the kitchen. I can hear Thumper, too. I can hear all the little fuckers of the forest.

~

If I had more of those tiny decorative magnets
, Hammersmith concluded,
I could put up more pictures of my wife
. He was writing down things he wanted to have for dinner: liverwurst, steak tartare, Filipino bean sprouts.

~

I probably shouldn’t be in charge of putting Sammy to bed. I always put him to bed too late and in the morning he’s tired. He calls me at work to tell me Mommy won’t let him do something. I can hear Tutti in the background telling Sammy to give her the phone. She gets on the phone and tells me I have to get him to bed earlier at night or else I won’t be allowed to put him to bed anymore.