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Authors: Barbara Gowdy

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BOOK: Helpless
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Chapter Seven

N
ANCY SETS DOWN
her banjo and lights a joint. Something’s bothering her. What? Is it Tasha? Whether Ron remembered to walk her?

Oh, now she remembers: it’s the girl Ron told her about. Nancy can understand why he’s worried, just not why he’s
so
worried—following her around everywhere and watching her house. She keeps forgetting what she has figured out about this. He was abused as a child, that’s it. She lets the smoke out of her lungs in a long, reassured breath. She would never ask (he would never say), but if he
was
abused, some things would make a lot more sense.

Usually when the weather’s nice she practises out on the fire escape. But she’s got the electric heating pad wrapped around her right knee and the cord doesn’t reach that far. So she’s sitting at her kitchen table, which is really only a shelf hinged to the wall. Anything bigger wouldn’t fit. It’s an attic apartment: one room, a window at either end. In the front window her ancient air conditioner rattles. The kitchen window looks out onto a blue spruce tree and the robin’s nest she watched all spring. No two creatures ever worked harder
than those robins, building their nest, guarding it, driving off constant attacks from crows. Then one afternoon it was empty. What happened? Did a gust of wind knock the eggs out? Did the crows eat them? This morning Nancy found a piece of blue eggshell stuck to her windshield and she could have cried.

From that point on, the day went downhill. First, her car wouldn’t start. Then the bus never came, so she accepted a lift from a harmless-looking old man in a pickup. He kept glancing back and forth from the road to her lap, interested, she thought, in the box of chocolates she was holding. Finally at a stoplight he said, “Ya got something for me there?”

“Pot of Gold,” she told him. “Not for you though, I’m afraid.”

“Spreading it around, are ya?” he said.

“Pardon me?” she said.

He shoved his hand between her thighs.

She jumped out and walked the rest of the way, half running to get to Angie’s before the chocolates melted. And after all that, Angie didn’t even want them. And then, from running, her leg cramped and she had to borrow money from Angie for a taxi home. Frank was good about it when she said she wouldn’t be able to work her shift, but she still felt guilty. She phoned Ron for some sympathy. “We don’t have to talk long,” she said to his machine.

That was eight hours ago. He must still be down in the basement.

She’d like to phone her sister Brenda and hear about the new baby, except if Brenda asks about her and Ron, she’s liable to start blurting things, and Ron made her swear on her
mother’s life that she’d keep her mouth shut. He won’t even let her call adoption agencies, not yet. “The minute you start broadcasting your plans,” he says, “they fall through.” And she thought
she
was the superstitious one. He says he intends to take it one step at a time, and the first step is fixing up a bedroom. Which, if you ask her, should be the third or fourth step, but try telling him that. He used to be sensible and easygoing; almost overnight he’s become superstitious and stubborn. Don’t get her wrong, she’ll take the new Ron over the old, the new Ron being the one who wants the two of them to settle down together. She just needs time to get used to him, that’s all.

Another thing about the old Ron…he was a person who minded his own business. Now he’s obsessed with a little girl he’s never even met. He thinks she’s being molested, so it’s sweet how upset he is, but Nancy feels—and she told him as much—that it’s time he phoned Children’s Aid. “You wouldn’t have to give your name,” she pointed out.

He frowned. He seemed to be considering it.

“A lot of children are in bad situations,” she went on. “So that’s why it’s good we’re adopting, right? Because then at least one little girl will have love and a safe place. Right?”

This perked him up. “You think she’ll like the room?”

“Oh, yeah. Of course.”

She held back from saying, yet again, that one of the upstairs bedrooms would have been a better idea. The adoption agency people will set him straight. And if they don’t, the little girl will.

The little girl. If the agency people find out about their stints in rehab, Nancy has a feeling that the girl they get will be a leftover, somebody no one else wanted. She’ll be hard
to handle or stuck in a wheelchair. Nancy hasn’t brought this up with Ron in case it puts him off. It doesn’t put
her
off. The more unlovable the girl is, the more love she’ll need poured into her, and Nancy is jam-packed with love. If the girl is in a wheelchair, she’ll decorate it with pretty decals and push her around the neighbourhood. She’ll massage her legs with essential oils.

She unwraps the heating pad from her own leg. The pain is a soft ache, not too bad. She tries phoning Ron again. “I guess you’re still working,” she says to the machine.

At least he’s not with another woman, she can stop torturing herself about that. She can put away the psychic pouch.

She picks up the banjo again. “Yellow bird,” she sings, “up high in banana tree…”

Chapter Eight

H
IS MORNING IS
spent painting the bookcase. After lunch, he cleans the brushes and carries the paint cans out to the garbage shed.

It comes to him, with the sound of the shed door banging shut, that except for buying a few posters and picking up the dollhouse from J. R. Miniatures, he’s almost finished. The fact takes him by surprise, as if he heard it from someone else. He returns to the basement and looks around at what he’s done. He starts touching things: the desk and chair, the dresser, the toy chest, the sofa. All the furniture is white. Yellow was what Nancy recommended—something warm and sunny—but white is purer, cleaner, the colour of nurses and angels, and against the mauve walls it turns out to be unexpectedly vibrant.

He touches the TV: a thirty-two-inch Samsung highdefinition plasma. He runs a finger down the stack of Walt Disney DVDs. In the middle of the night, lying on the canopy bed among the stuffed animals, he has watched every one of them. If he had to choose a favourite it would be
Cinderella
, for obvious reasons, he supposes: the flight from the evil
stepmother, the tiny feet. He straightens the stack and aligns it with the edge of the screen. He wanders into the bathroom and touches the unused bar of Ivory soap. The container of Johnson’s baby powder.

It has been a form of worship, putting the apartment together. Not even when he was refurbishing the Westinghouse did he feel this kind of dedication to making a thing perfect. He strokes the chrome faucet and tries to recapture the sensation of being in a dream. He can’t do it. The work was the lullaby, and with the work virtually over he finds himself wide awake. He’s here, in the moment. In the middle of…what? What would you call this? Not an apartment really, not in the normal sense. Showroom, he thinks.

He climbs up to the kitchen and pours himself a drink. Then he goes into the shop, unlocks the front door, and checks his phone messages. One is from Vince, telling him that his car is ready. He finds his insurance forms and heads across the street.

A couple of days ago, while he was at the garage checking to see if Vince had installed Nancy’s alternator, he noticed a 1994 silver Civic for sale at eight hundred dollars. He bargained it down to six hundred cash. “It’ll do the job,” Vince said, and for a quaking moment Ron thought Vince knew that the job was to cruise around Rachel’s neighbourhood in something more anonymous than a van with Ron’s Appliance Repair written on the side.

How will he explain the car to Nancy? As he’s driving out of the garage, the thought of accounting for himself makes him feel claustrophobic. Nancy has been acting like a wife lately, ever since he mentioned adoption. Why did he do that? Thank God he refrained from saying he didn’t want
just
any
girl, but he showed her the basement room. The next morning, what horrified him even more than the heartless way he’d misled her was the glimpse he’d gotten of his fantasy—how it seemed to have a will and inevitability of its own. And yet his devotion to it held. As soon as he picked up a paintbrush, the dreamlike state returned.

A small car is easier on gas—there’s his explanation, and it’s not a lie. He drives on, relieved, and only now becomes conscious of where he’s headed. A few minutes later, at twenty-five past three, he pulls up in front of the parched front lawn of Spruce Court School.

Four days have passed since he was here. Such has been the basement’s compulsive hold on his mind. He massages his wet palm on the gearshift and tells himself that without the smokescreen of Tasha he’d better not get out of the car. He glances in the rearview mirror and is startled by his manic-eyed reflection.

What’s happening to him? Three weeks ago he was a man in charge of his life. He worked in his shop, paid his bills, returned his phone calls. Maybe once or twice a week he drove by a school, but there was a line in his head and he never once came close to crossing it.

He’s close now. Unless he finds another overpowering distraction, he’s in trouble.

Chapter Nine

H
IS MOTHER DIED
on the morning of his eleventh birthday. She was on her way home from the Dominion Store with his chocolate ice cream cake when she stepped into the intersection against a red light and a car ran her down. At first she seemed unhurt. Several witnesses described how she got right back up and said to the driver, “You’ll be paying for that,” referring, it was presumed, to the smashed cake. Then she fell again.

He still can’t believe it, not so much that she died but that only seconds away from death she mustered the nerve and presence of mind to lecture the driver. She’d been a shy woman and by her own frustrated admission a scatterbrain. The reason she’d called him Constantine, she’d said, was because it meant “firm and unwavering,” unlike her.

Only
she
ever called him by his full name. Outside of the house he was Con, and from a very early instinct not to draw attention to himself he told people it was short for the more normal-sounding Conrad. He started going by the name Ron in his midtwenties, after buying Ron’s Appliance Repair. For the sake of a single letter he couldn’t see changing all the
sales receipts and invoices, let alone the neon sign. His father, who was still alive and had always called him Buddy anyway, said, “Your mother would have understood.” (Would she? In his dreams, the ones where she came back from the dead to finish the ironing or to wash the kitchen floor, she seemed sad and disappointed. “I’m no different,” he’d tell her, and yet the truth was—and he had the experience of it every morning when he woke up—
he felt
different. He felt more himself: disguised by ordinariness…Ron of Ron’s Appliance Repair.)

She was buried in a church cemetery in the tiny southwestern Ontario town where she’d been born. A few days later a group of women showed up at the house to ask his father if he’d like to donate any of her clothes to the Crippled Civilians. His father told them to take whatever they could find. “There isn’t much,” he apologized. Except for her winter boots and some boxes in the spare bedroom, he and Ron had already cleared out nearly everything: her clothes and toiletries, her metal hair curlers that reminded Ron of a bunch of tiny carburetors, her scarves and gloves, and all her old purses with their residue of pennies and lintcoated Chiclets. An antique toy dealer had bought the collection of stuffed monkeys, and a bookseller had carted off the books, though most of them were rippled and stained from her habit of reading in the bath.

And now the churchwomen. Once they were gone the only thing left that had been hers alone was the black-andwhite framed photograph, which Ron’s father said Ron could keep in his bedroom.

It was a photograph of a girl standing with her hands on her hips and her legs planted apart. Somebody had written
“Yvonne 6 years” on the cardboard backing, but Ron’s mother had always doubted it could be her. “I never stood like that in my life,” she said. She thought that the girl was her sister, Doreen, who’d been the strong-willed, confident one. Whatever the case, it made no difference to Ron. For him, the keepsake was the Y-shaped crack in the glass from the time his mother accidentally knocked the photograph off the mantelpiece. Being forked, the crack represented not only her first initial but also the warring emotions of protectiveness and exasperation that brought her most vividly to his mind. Not that he welcomed these emotions or was even able to name them. The thought of her was a barely lit fire that nobody, including his father, could be bothered to keep going.

So it was up to Ron. Alone, after school, he lay on the couch and visualized everything she would have done that particular day if she were still alive. He was faithful to her habit of starting one chore and then, a few minutes later, abandoning it for another. Sometimes he drew a chart to illustrate where the chores took her: from the kitchen to the backyard to the basement, and so on. The tangled circuit he ended up with seemed eerily significant, as if he had copied down a message from an alien. He gave the charts names—“Commander,” “Junior,” “Rochester”—after his favourite vacuum cleaner models, and then he put them in an envelope labelled, simply,
MOTHER.
Meanwhile, as he was doing all this, he yelled out replies to questions he imagined her calling from another room. “What?” he’d yell. “I’ll be right there!” He set a place for her at the table but always whisked it away again before his father got home.

His father had given up his position as an Alcan aluminum sales rep and accepted a desk job at the head office. Sometimes on his way home he picked up takeout Chinese or Kentucky Fried Chicken. The rest of the time it was Swanson frozen suppers or canned spaghetti. Barbecued steaks on Sundays. After supper, instead of disappearing into the third-floor office as he’d always done before, he poured himself a rum and Coke and sat with Ron in front of the television.

Here, a complicated undercurrent of decorum came into play, based on his strict and, to Ron, still largely mysterious views on life. Jokes at the expense of drunks and confused old people weren’t funny, but it was all right to laugh at overweight people getting stuck in doorways and blind people knocking over priceless vases. When
Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom
was on, you rooted for the lion, not the gazelle, the wolf, not the deer. During commercials his father sometimes came right out and declared his positions in the form of warnings and words of advice along the lines of “Never do business with a man who wears jewellery” and “Bad poker players blink a lot”—flat, open-and-shut statements not necessarily connected to what they’d just been watching and often hinting at an acquaintance with the seamier side of life. One of his favourites was, “Nobody wants to hear the unvarnished truth,” which Ron took to mean that there were things that he, Ron, wouldn’t want to hear. What could they be? Was he adopted? Had his father killed somebody? Was his aunt Doreen, who said, “Holy shit” and “Kiss my ass,” a sex maniac?

In the hour or so before his bedtime Ron liked to take apart and reassemble one of their small appliances. He had
discovered that even without the expectation of his mother’s praise to spur him on, he could still tap into pleasure, only of a different kind, hypnotic and private, which his father’s casual interest hardly grazed. “Everything under control?” his father would ask. “You sure you can get that all back together?”

One night, as Ron began to dismantle the vacuum cleaner, the question was, “How many times did your mother break that thing?”

He sounded good-humoured, but Ron’s instinct to shield her prevailed and he said, untruthfully, “She never really broke it.”

“Pretty quiet around here,” his father then said. “With just the two of us.”

That his father might also be missing her came as a surprise to Ron. “Sometimes,” he admitted.

It must have been only a few days later that his father brought up the subject of Margaret and Jenny. He asked if Ron’s mother had ever talked to him about her old friend from high school Margaret McGraw.

Ron wasn’t sure.

“I thought she might have mentioned her,” his father said. “Margaret’s grandfather, Arthur McGraw, was the coinventor of the pop-up toaster. Before then you had to open up the sides to get the toast out.”

“I never heard of him,” Ron said, struck that it had taken two grown men to invent a simple release mechanism.

Ron’s father went on to say that a couple of months ago he had run into Margaret McGraw—now Margaret Lawson—and found out she’d buried her husband the same week they’d buried Ron’s mother. Mr. Lawson had been a rich chicken farmer but had died without a cent. It was possible,
Ron’s father said, that he and Ron had eaten Mr. Lawson’s chickens, which were called Jenny’s, after the daughter. “You’d like Jenny,” he told Ron. “She’s really smart.”

Ron couldn’t imagine liking a girl, no matter how smart she was. “Smart how?” he asked with a prick of jealousy.

“Well, she’s only eight and she’s in grade five. They’ve got her in a school for gifted children. On a scholarship, fortunately, because there’s no money.”

Ron wondered why, if his father knew so much about these people, he’d never mentioned them before. It wasn’t the kind of question he felt comfortable asking, though. He asked how Mr. Lawson had died.

“Choked to death,” his father said.

“How?”

“On a chicken bone.”

“A
Jenny’s
chicken?”

“I guess the man ate his own chickens.”

“Holy smokes.”

His father didn’t seem to find this particularly remarkable. He wanted to get back to Mrs. Lawson’s money troubles. He said that Mr. Lawson had been a compulsive gambler, a poker player. Eventually he’d lost everything—the chicken farm, their savings, everything.

“He must have blinked a lot,” Ron noted.

It took his father a minute. “Right. He probably did.” What it all boiled down to, he said, was that Mrs. Lawson could no longer make ends meet. The salary she earned as a receptionist for a foot doctor hardly covered the interest on her debts. Just last week, after holding off as long as she could, she sold Jenny’s horse to the people who’d been boarding it. Ron’s father didn’t learn about the horse until too late.
“If I’d known,” he told Ron, “I’d have tried to work something out. I said to Mrs. Lawson, I said, ‘Listen, before things get any worse, you and Jenny had better come and live with my son and me.’”

Ron was still back with the husband. “What?”

“I told them they should live with us. Until they can get on their feet again.”

“How long will that be?”

“We’ll have to play it by ear.”

H
IS FATHER
drove to get Jenny and Mrs. Lawson late Sunday morning, returning a few hours later with a U-Haul trailer in tow. Ron, who’d been waiting on the front porch, thought that they’d picked up the horse; somehow they’d managed to get Jenny’s horse back. The truth was more incredible. They’d brought the furniture, and not just odds and ends but beds, dressers, chairs, tables, a gigantic dollhouse, plus boxes of dishes and towels and then all their clothes, in garbage bags and falling off hangers.

Under Mrs. Lawson’s direction, Ron and his father unloaded the trailer and placed the furniture around the house. Their furniture, if Mrs. Lawson felt it didn’t match or was in the way, got banished to the basement. Far from being the sad, rundown lady Ron had been expecting, Mrs. Lawson was high-spirited and young looking, a lot younger looking than his mother, though they would have been the same age. Where his mother had been on the heavy side, Mrs. Lawson was thin, with no hips or chest. She had wispy light brown hair, slanted eyes, and a small, flat nose, like a baby’s. In a few weeks Ron would learn that she was part Chinese.

She called his father Clarkson, their last name. Ron she
called Constantine, though his father had introduced him as Con. Ron never went by his full name, and hearing it said, especially in front of Jenny, was torture. For most of the afternoon Jenny sat on the porch bench holding a pen and notebook and watching him as if this were
her
house and she resented the intrusion. Never once did she smile; she hardly said a word. When Ron’s father told one of his blind-man jokes she narrowed her eyes. She wore yellow shorts and a puffy white blouse that looked too big and a yellow plastic watch, also too big, which slid around her wrist and which she kept checking. Off and on she jotted something on her pad, giving Ron the idea she was making a list of their belongings, but then he passed near enough to see entire sentences. He saw her chewed nails and the ladybug clips in her hair. Her hair was as fine as her mother’s, only reddish blond. Otherwise, except for a birthmark on her cheek, she and her mother looked alike: the eyes, the thinness.

It was evening by the time everything was moved in. Ron’s father offered to pick up some Kentucky Fried Chicken, but Mrs. Lawson said, “Your fast food days are over,” and in her own frying pan made a mushroom-and-cheese omelet, which she served on her own white china plates. Over supper his father told stories Ron had heard many times before about the characters he used to run into during his travelling salesman days: the woman outside of St. Mary’s who swept the highway in front of her house; the trucker who travelled with a pet squirrel in his glove compartment. Mrs. Lawson laughed. Jenny, as before, remained stony, and in her cool, lidless eyes and the clink of the spoon against her teeth, Ron sensed danger, not necessarily to himself but as if she were a wild animal that, for the time being, accepted the company of
humans. She had changed into an old-fashioned-looking dress, navy blue and cone shaped. It had a white frill at the neck and in the middle of the chest a large pocket, like a door, in which the outline of her notebook showed. As his father began clearing the plates she removed the notebook and turned to Mrs. Lawson and said, “Mother, should I read my new story to them?”

“Maybe they’d rather hear it after dessert,” Mrs. Lawson said.

Ron’s father waved a hand. “Let’s hear it now. Fire away.”

“Jenny reads and writes at a grade-six level,” Mrs. Lawson informed Ron.

The story was called “Moving Day.” It was about how their furniture had been in an aunt’s basement but was now arriving at the Clarksons’. The way Jenny read, in a singsong voice and with hand gestures, was astonishing, as if she’d practised over and over. She said that the weather today was lovely, not a cloud in the sky (an upward gesture), and that at the sight of the house, her heart (she patted it) leapt with joy because the brick was the same yellow as her old place. At this point she trailed off. She squinted at the page.

“Can I start over?” she asked, not looking up. A blush began to climb her face.

“Sure you can,” Ron’s father said. “You can tell it any way you want.”

The blush had Ron enthralled. It was like a natural calamity. It drowned out the birthmark, then seeped away, like water into sand.

“Constantine—” she said. His attention snapped back. She was talking about how he’d almost dropped her dollhouse. She said she’d trembled with fear (a shake of her
shoulders) but luckily nothing fell out. “All and all,” she finished, “it was an exciting day of work and fun.” She closed the notebook. “There’s more,” she murmured, “but it’s not ready yet.”

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