Joyland (15 page)

OBJECTS MAY BE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR.

Chris watched the flower bed on the Scott side, used it as a guide as he accelerated backward. Yesterday, in the car, his father’s neck had been stiff and sunburnt, the grey hairs almost greyer against the red flesh, the rectangular canvas of it etched with lines. How could it have been so sunny on a funeral day? It seemed wrong somehow. His dad had stared straight ahead, said nothing except to announce his intentions: “Grab some fuel,” as he pulled into the Shell, or “Grab some grub,” before the Blimpie.

Chris caught his own eyes in the rear-view. They were like his father’s, only young. His dad must have been miserable, but when Tammy started to cry, he had scooped her up as if she were the only thing that mattered. Chubby cheeks and skinny, hairy legs beneath nylon — she still fit in his lap. Meanwhile, Chris remained tight-lipped and tentative, arms folded, standing close to his mother — close, but not touching.
Trying to keep track of your own emotions and someone else’s at the same time must be like trying to fly a plane backward,
Chris thought. He pulled the station wagon back into Drive, edged it forward slowly, until the fender was within spitting distance of the garage door.

J.P. appeared, a pair of swimming trunks hanging beneath his T-shirt, a towel slung over his shoulder.

“Aren’t you supposed to be in the corn?” Chris asked.

“Jesus H . . . whole crew got canned. White thought it’d be funny if we all grabbed Keele and chucked ’im in this nasty-ass ditch. Marc didn’t put a stop to it, so Keele — yeah, like Marc woulda stopped it — whipped this corn tassel at him. Brutal. Caught him —
smack!
— right in the eye. Sure you can just imagine Marc’s reaction. . . . How was . . . How was your grandpa’s party?”

“Ha, ha, yer so bloody funnay.”

“You’re so totally gay when you do that lousy Jagger imitation.”

Mrs. Lane came out of the house, their conversation cut like the ignition.

“If you already had it going, you could’ve left it,” she said to Chris, accompanied by a pointless hands-up gesture. “Hello, John Paul. How are things? Swimming?” Before he could nod, she was yanking open the driver’s door, Chris left with no choice but to passenger on over, J.P. only a “Goddammit” in the rear-view as they pulled away. Mrs. Lane agitatedly adjusted the mirror that Chris had set to his own height.

Mrs. Lane zipped the car into the strip mall lot. She walked into Zellers and came back with a huge box in a shopping cart. Chris got out to help her. Inside the brown cardboard was a microwave. It was about two and a half feet wide and weighed a ton. It was going to change their lives. Chris hefted it onto the tailgate of the station wagon, slid it in.

The night smelled like chlorine. The stiff pages of Mrs. Lane’s magazine clicked like knitting needles between her fingers as she turned and flipped them. Mr. Lane had the sound down on the television, its dumb jumpy head parked in the corner. As soon as they touched home ground after the funeral, Chris had been on his bike and gone — in search of recharging, an hour or two in a game, and any game would do. But now, a few days later, guilt had delivered him down: he suddenly felt he couldn’t leave the Lane house, had to stay close, shakily plucking at pages. Orwellian landscapes gnawed at his cortex, strange and hollow. Above him, his parents tucked and untucked themselves into their chairs. Tammy lay on the floor next to him, also flipping, one of his father’s issues of
Time.

Chris glanced over at her but didn’t say anything. A head-loll above him, his mother was hidden behind her women’s magazine.
War of the Sexes,
one of the blurbs screamed from the glossy front. Tammy had gone three shades of red when Mrs. Lane picked it up, presumably because it had the word
sex
on it. Chris leaned over, clutched at Tammy’s reading material, flipped past the article she was pretending to absorb, kept leafing.

“Check this out,” he said. “It’s about Jack Kilby and the integrated circuit.”

His sister stared at him blankly.

“The microchip.”

She took the folded page and studied the picture. Wires on a wafer of glass.

“Back in 1958, in the span of one summer, he built something that would change the entire world. One summer.”

Tammy gazed down, words under her elbows, eyes that didn’t appear to be processing.

Chris nodded, “The instant exchange of information.”

Tammy yawned sarcastically, a melodramatic hand draped across her mouth. She snorted, collapsed onto the carpet. The volume on the television leapt, though it was only a taste test.

Chris dove back into
Nineteen Eigthy-four.

“What’s it about?” she simpered, eyes on the novel, quietly flipping away from the microchip.

“The future.”

“But that’s right now.” She pointed to the title in the running head.

“Big Brother.”

With a socked toe, she dug into his anklebone, goofy-faced.
You,
she mouthed.

He steamrolled her, the television volume rising another notch as he did.

PLAYER 2

“I made a friend already,” Sam said. “She lives down the street from Warren’s. She’s really cool. She’ll be in Grade Seven this year. She’s got a bikini and we built sandcastles together and then smashed them.”

“Uh-huh,” Tammy said. She fingered the cellophane Chris had left behind on the kitchen table from a Fruit Roll-Up.

“We shared a cigarette out backa’ the neighbours’ boathouse.”

“You did not.”

“Admit it,” hissed through the earpiece. “It freaks you out how cool I am now. It’s just too much for you.”

Tammy admitted it was, and hung up the phone.

A layer of pink polish spread across the nail, formed a thick streak in the centre. Tammy dunked the brush back in the bottle and coated the sides, tried to spread the texture evenly. It remained heaviest in the centre. She redunked and recoated until the white of crescent-moon cuticles disappeared. Its hard pink shell was like candy.

Chris stood in the kitchen and sniffed audibly. “That stuff traps disease,” he said, not coming any closer. “It forms a base where germs can thrive. They live in oil. In only a few hours they’ll be all over your fingertips.”

She imagined them swarming, ambushing her. Removing the dripping brush from the bottle, she painted. On the table inches from her elbow, a simple five-pointed pink star took shape, shining. She closed the last brush stroke. The cover of Chris’s
Starlog
magazine. His 8th Anniversary Issue: Leonard Nimoy, Frank Oz, Mark Singer, 2010
, Donald Duck.
The Beastmaster peered through a sketchy portal of polish.

Tammy abandoned the magazine and the Bonne Belle. One game of Defender was the perfect amount of time for nails to dry. If she played carefully — gently — she would not smudge the nails, would not wind up with those hard creases and buildups of paint at the corners, pink pyres.

A patch of sky hung above her spaceship, filling with indistinct white blobs, showing her the space she had left behind or was about to fly into — and all the enemies that filled it. She fuelled and began the unrewarding task of rescuing humans, shooting the alien ships that carried them ever upward. When the ships disappeared, the humans fell, small bold dots in the black. Tammy scooped them up carefully, set them back down to Earth for 500 points. Refuelled and rocketed onward.

The bleating of the new invention signalled a thing was done in thirty seconds time. It signalled a chance to call Jenny Denis, from school, and have her over to make S’mores. Tammy had waited three whole days since Samantha’s desertion; it was time to get into the world of friends again.

Jenny confessed she too was ready for a change of friends. “For a while all we did was make prank phone calls,” Jenny said of her own former best friend, Ann-Marie. “But prank phone calls are so fifth grade.” Tammy agreed. “Now all she wants to talk about is
doing it,”
Jenny said, her voice dropping from volume 6 to volume 1, as if a knob had been turned inside her. She blushed until her cheeks looked like they would explode. Her hairstyle was the kind with a window cut out for her face. “You know, like whether we ever will, or how old will we be? It’s really gross.”

“Yeah, gross,” Tammy nodded. “Samantha was the exact same way.”

“Pervs,” Jenny said, pushing aside Tammy’s Snoopy dog and other stuffed animals. “Ann-Marie said that even though she never would, the best time to do it would be before you ever got your period, because that would be the only time in your life when you wouldn’t have to worry about getting pregnant.” Jenny picked up the Snoopy and shook it gently so that its ears flopped back and forth. Its eyes were thin, blind black lines of fabric stitched on.

“When I grow up, I want lots of kids though. Five,” she said, and rattled off an assortment of names she had already chosen. Jenny’s lips pulled back when she smiled, the glint of metal showing through.

“Hey, when did you get that?” The retainer shimmered, alien in the other girl’s mouth.

Jenny recounted getting the mould made for it, how it had been like biting into a jaw-shaped tray of pancake batter — but salty as tears and awful. Its gummy hands got down in the crevices, melted around molars, filled divots where nonexistent wisdoms waited, a gooey union cemented, tongue plastered into stone:
surprise!
A maw full of Fiberglass, thickening, wadding, clotting around canines. How it would harden, harden, harden, harden, harden, seal, a bond between gums and cavity, open mouth slammed shut. When the dentist had finally pried it out, she thought that her inscisors would go with it. It captured an imprint of every bump and depression, the retainer fitting snug against her gums. Jenny popped it out and let Tammy look at the firm filmy plastic: an exact replica of the roof of her mouth.

“What if they could do this with your heart?”

“Like . . . cloning?” Mousey brows scrunched as Jenny tried the word out.

“Can I hold it?” Tammy extended her hand toward the plastic in Jenny’s palm. The thing was pink, translucent, a three-dimensional map.

“No way.” Jenny wouldn’t let her touch it. She said that was disgusting.

“I have to take it out if we’re going to eat something sticky, like S’mores,” she said. “I usually wrap it in a paper towel, so other people don’t have to look at it.” Jenny wound the perforated white sheet around her mouthpiece. Tammy continued to stare at the lumpy shape it made on the dresser, bound in Viva.

“Do you ever think about your parents breaking up?” Tammy asked.

“Yeah, but I don’t think they would. They’re always saying ‘I love you’ and stuff . . .”

Tammy didn’t believe her. She picked up an old friendship pin from the dresser and popped it open and closed, running her finger absently over the point. “But if they did, who would you go with, your mom or your dad?”

Jenny wasn’t sure you always got a choice, but if you did, she said, she would go with her dad. “Because I think he’d need me more.”

Tammy giggled suddenly and couldn’t stop. Tears leaked out of the corners of her eyes, and she threw herself back on the bed. “Like you’re a washing machine or something?”

“My mom has more friends,” Jenny explained soberly, a sadness opening in her plain, happy face like a trap door. “But my dad would be all alone.”

“I think my dad has a secret life,” Tammy said, straightening up, equally sober. She stared out the window at the lopsided little shed that had been tagged onto the back of the garage. “Maybe even a whole other family somewhere. One day he’ll just leave us. We’re only his temporary family.”

Even as she said it, Tammy knew it wasn’t true. It was her mother who hovered, hovered, hovered. Like a jet overhead, leaving nothing behind but a trail of cloud. Or smoke.

Tammy and Jenny stood with their faces pressed directly against the microwave door. They watched through the black screen of window as squares of chocolate and mountainous marshmallows toppled and merged with graham crackers.

“You shouldn’t do that,” Chris said, coming abruptly into the kitchen. “The waves inside it can seep out. They’ll turn your brains into nuclear mush.”

“Screw
off,” Tammy said, the word emerging for the first time in front of a friend. The thrill of officiousness and obscenity stuck to her palate as she popped pure sugar between her lips, crushing graham crackers under teeth without twins.