Nights Below Station Street (7 page)

The favour Ruby often asked of Ralphie was could she bring a boy over in the evening. And Ralphie always said yes she could, that bringing boys over was the “very best” of an idea, except that Ruby often brought someone over who was going out with Cindi at the time. Cindi had his
ring, or his high-school jacket, or something else, and Ruby had him. Cindi would blink her albino eyelashes and look about hopefully, sitting in her new corduroy bibs.

Adele was abrupt with Ralphie sometimes, and had a fiery temper, but he saw that people could take advantage of her in a lot of ways, and she would play the fool for them just so she would not be left out or be regarded as different. People teased her about not drinking, and he knew it hurt her to listen to them telling her how natural it was to drink. For the longest time, she never told people about her father, or what it was that kept her from taking a drink, and she often would ask Ralphie to buy beer for Janet and Ruby. She did not want to be thought of as the person who would ruin everything for others just because she did not do it herself.

“Cheers,” she would screech as they drank. “C’mon – let’s clink glasses.” Her eyes would blink, and there’d be grass stains on her woollen knee socks, leaves in her brown lovely hair.

Ruby and Janet took advantage of her over this very thing, and played upon it, and mixed her up, and gave her nervous feelings, and made her throw up because she thought she wasn’t doing enough to please them. Adele would run about trying to please them and Cindi would follow her with peace signs all over her coat, in the damp fall air.

For some reason Cindi’s epileptic seizures always got worse in the damp, and once she fell near a car outside the Basket Centre and began to twitch convulsively. Adele immediately went over to her and dragged her out of the puddle, and tried to shove a pencil in her mouth, while Ruby and Janet went into Jean’s Restaurant and hid behind the coat rack. Adele kept kissing Cindi’s albino eye-lashes
and petting her, and Cindi later on told Ruby she was sorry.

Everything at this time was exciting. There was the girl who had taken an overdose of birth control pills, and another who threatened to slash her wrists unless her boyfriend came home that night from St. Thomas University to see her, and they had to sit up with her until four o’clock while a storm blew outside. All of this made Adele feel that she had secrets to keep from her parents, that these secrets identified her as being a part of a group, that this group was more irreverent than any other group you could ever imagine – that this whole idea of irreverence was somewhat new and shocking – that she, in fact, belonged to the eight or nine people who knew that these were the right secrets to have.

Sometimes when it was high time for them to go home, and Ralphie, half dressed, was walking about trying to be polite and get ready for a carpentry class he was taking, while the dim lights from the street shone on the great bare-looking furniture and showed the long stovepipe in the early winter dark, and there was that vague smell of cinder on the ice, people would sometimes ask Adele to intercede for them. The girls would bring her into the kitchen and beg her, and hold her hands, and whisper in her ear. And like anyone else who is not used to having influence, Adele would run about trying to make them all happy. “Can Janet stay while you are out – her mother’s mad at her for smokin hash.”

There was the idea that they were suddenly all in hiding from their parents and desperate because of it. And Adele, without knowing it, found herself acting like a maid. Running out to the store for them in the afternoon, standing in line with them at Zellers even though she didn’t need anything – and
finding out that whenever they went anywhere they never actually called her. But when Ralphie mentioned this, she would get angry and it was all shoved into the corner. The trouble was Adele felt that these new friendships would last and that she was indispensable now to Ruby and Janet. She realized how they ridiculed people and exactly how they talked about people they didn’t like, but as long as she was with them, and indispensable to them, they would not talk about her that way.

Upstairs, a woman named Belinda lived with her daughter Maggie. She was Vye’s ex-girlfriend, and had to get up every morning at five to go across the river to work. And Ralphie, though he tried to keep everyone quiet at night, could never seem to manage it. Every time the woman saw him, she fixed him with a cold stare, and then ran upstairs, two steps at a time. And at night she would take a broom and pound it on the floor. She could not afford to move out, and the landlord never acted on her complaints or on the complaints of anyone else either.

In the afternoons, Belinda would trudge up the stairs with her groceries. With the entrance door propped open with a stick she would haul the flour up the steps as snow swirled over the welcome mat. Then she would go back down and haul the potatoes up past Ralphie’s doorway where the girls would be standing waiting for Ralphie to get home and let them in. Belinda would get the box of canned goods, and then begin to carry the bags. All the while, the girls would stand at the door with morose faces. Once, as Belinda passed them, one of the girls ran down to the entranceway and kicked the stick out of the door and rushed back up the stairs. Once, when the woman had to leave a bag of flour on the second-floor landing while she went up to the third floor to open her door, Cindi, Ruby, and Janet kicked the flour back down the steps.

“Who did that?” the woman said.

“We don’t know – it fell by itself.”

“It did not.”

“Did so.”

“Did not.”

“So – it fell by itself – it flopped over by itself, if ya wanta know.”

“I can’t afford to waste flour,” the woman said.

“Then don’t waste it,” Janet said. “No – don’t go bout wasting it.”

When Belinda went up to her apartment and when she came back down she told them she had telephoned the police. She wore an old dress too tight for her legs, a big sweater, a lime-green woollen winter coat. Vye had promised to marry her at one time, and she had been hoping he would.

Because she always said she telephoned the police, and the police never came, the girls laughed. Just at that moment Adele came up the stairs: “There’s Del, there’s Del,” they all said, with more excitement than usual, as if she would immediately know what was going on, and immediately recognize the hilarity of the situation.

Adele had no idea what was going on, but at the moment believed she did, and that it was hilarious. She burst out laughing and put her hands over her mouth. The smell of late afternoon pervaded the walls, and in the half-dark apartment building they had the feeling that this was the best place to be.

Even though Adele finally had friends now, she still became constipated and couldn’t sleep, and then she became afraid that Ralphie liked Cindi, or Ruby, or even Janet, more than he liked her. She became scared that this is what the girls wanted. She remembered how Ruby once put her arm about him and laughed and winked.
Every time Adele lay down to go to sleep, she saw that wink.

In many of the things his friends said, Ralphie felt at a loss to argue with them, not because he agreed with them, but because he was only sure that he wasn’t sure one way or the other. And sometimes he took a stand on things that were particularly contradictory to others in the apartment.

One of the great debates was that this generation had somehow not only invented drugs, but that everyone who did drugs was more aware of life. Ralphie – with his bottle of Paarl brandy and his father’s old coat, coming back from a meeting with his mother where she cried and was angry with her dead husband because the fence boards were loose at the back of the house – would say that he didn’t know if that was true.

This was the idea of certain people who came to his apartment, which gave rise to the idea, with the town police, that his apartment was a commune, and the place was raided twice in a month.

That the police could and did pick Ralphie up allowed his mother’s neighbours to sympathize with her, and to feel a little gleeful that such a smart aleck – which is what they considered Ralphie to be once this happened – was getting his comeuppance.

Once, the band that played at the rink dropped in after their performance and brought in some booze, and word got around that there was a party at Ralphie’s. He himself didn’t hear about it until he was walking home from his mother’s.

Ralphie soon found, at a hundred and twenty-seven
pounds, and wearing a great big cowboy belt, that he was not able to take care of the apartment the way he should, and whenever he visited his mother, she would always ask him to come home before he got into trouble.

The drapes and the furniture in Thelma’s house were white. The coffee table was made of heavy glass, with round glass coasters on it. There was a smell of faint cigarette smoke in the air, but it never seemed to be in the room you were in.

Thelma would talk to Ralphie, about having to do something with his life, and having to think of his father, who had wanted him to go into law. “All as he wanted you to do, was to do something with your life,” she would say to him. Her biggest disappointment was her daughter Vera, and she did not want Ralphie to be a Vera!

“You know, Ralphie, that it isn’t any kind of life to hang around downtown – that can only lead to trouble. We have one girl now who does that. We have one girl who didn’t even come to his funeral. We have one girl already, Ralphie, who travels about with hippie people and has lived in a commune and was married and divorced. We have one girl now, Ralphie, like that –”

Then she would look at him, breathe deeply, and return her gaze to the far side of the den.

Sometimes he would go and visit his mother and bring Adele along with him. Her house was beyond the tracks, above Myhrra’s trailer, and it would loom up sorrowfully in the night air. There was a stream that ran through some dying bushes behind it, and an old swing sat in the trampled grass. The fence boards were loose and rattled in
the wind, the brick made the windows look blank, and though the front yard had been landscaped, there was an unfinished quality to it. The garage was huge and smelled of chipped paint. Adele and he would sit out on the swing, which was hidden from the wind, and sometimes you could see her unbuttoned coat flapping. There was a smell of iron in the autumn evening, the pervading scent of apples in the darkening lanes.

Beyond the swing, on the other side of the shed, which was brand new and had nothing in it but a lawn hose, beyond the trampled garden, too, there was a small enclosure where they used to go after school to get away from everyone. Adele would sit on Ralphie’s knee and eat carrots – which she constantly did for her eyes because she was afraid of going blind. Ralphie would put his hands up under her coat, and down the top of her elastic pants to keep them warm, and Adele, tapping her feet and chewing carrots, would worry about her teeth going bad and her eyes getting strained from looking at the blackboard. There would be wind along her legs, and the smell of frost in the upturned earth, earth that had amongst the stones the hardness of turnips.

Joe Walsh started working when he was fourteen. He joined the navy just after his seventeenth birthday, and was a diver on the
HMCS
Yukon
. One time, because of a remark made by the Chief Petty Officer about someone Joe knew, Joe threw him down the teak-wood stairs leading to the galley. He was sent off to jail because of this. The Chief Petty Officer said it was an unprovoked attack, and Joe, stubborn – and with a trait that men often have, who believe that if they are stubborn they are right – refused to speak or to defend himself. He then got fed up with the navy and came home. He married Rita, while all of those that knew her wondered why she would bother with him. They had two children.