Things Withered (29 page)

There’s nothing wrong with him
.

That’s good
. Unconvinced.

I told her that I had much unpacking to do, but in fact I was ready to tell her to shove off. Maybe. Not likely, but in retrospect. While it would be literally months before she set foot on my lawn again, it proved nearly impossible to get her off then.

When she was finally ready to leave, she pulled Cuth out of the small, unplanted flower garden where Todd was digging with both hands and getting filthy. Cuth was clean, calm. God I felt sorry for that kid. Later you would be able to see his mind drift away and his chest heave slowly upward in a huge sigh, whenever his mother took to berating him on the lawn.

But Hazel had more to say.
Roger, my husband, worked at a bank.

Oh,
I said, lips pressed tightly together, wanting her to leave, my back aching from standing there, tenser by the moment. Then she dropped her pity bomb on me and like Japan, I was just so terribly unprepared for it.

My husband died last year
, she said suddenly. She leaned in for her story, and her voice dropped. It wasn’t just discretion, though. There was this feeling that she wasn’t really saying it aloud yet. Like
she
herself might hear.

He died in our bed. I woke up and there he was, dead
.

I nodded, could think of nothing else to do. What would you say? Of course Dan’s face crept into the story and that was more than I could comprehend. He was, of course, my husband, lover, father to my children and I loved him—we all loved our husbands—but he was also my life support system. I knew nothing of the world. What would I have done?

And that was when this tiny, pale woman with her odd, affected hand gestures, strangely intimate questions, seemed to smack me in the head. How could I be so rude, even if I hadn’t yet done anything more than think rude thoughts, I was deeply chastened.

I’m so sorry
, I said
. I’m so sorry.

She nodded and got a better grip on Cuth’s arm. She had to go, she said. She had to start lunch for Cuthbert. I, she said, should probably feed my baby too. Then she looked at him, curiously.

Did you take thalidomide? I did not.

I forgot to mention that whenever Hazel sees me, when she looks over at me, there is first a blank expression and then a kind of creeping knowledge that crawls over her face. I know, I just know, she’s thinking,
That’s the one with the retard.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with Todd, but for years, I couldn’t stop myself from practically shouting his accomplishments in her face, rapidly and desperately, like a liar would.

He’s an engineer, now. University of Toronto. Graduated with Honours.

I’m trying to tell the story about Rita and the roof. I don’t like to think about that day.

The roof was a major neighbourhood project and at the end of any major neighbourhood project, such as when the Carraways put an addition on to their house taking nearly all of one summer, the neighbours were generally compensated with a party. Rita was planning a barbecue bash for the weekend coming up. It was the talk of the street. Rita was such a glamorous creature for those times, for that neighbourhood. She was so terribly pretty. She had a lovely figure and that generous set of guns. She wore sandals and pedal pushers, tied her blouse under her bosoms, told jokes that were just on this side of racy, and she was
fun
.

What Rita did, was make Burlington Street, even the whole controversial suburban neighbourhood, feel okay. Even in curlers and a house dress, Rita’s laugh implied that there wasn’t a damn thing going on outside the neighbourhood that was worth missing
this
for. It was all a kind of party.

So we all wanted to be at the barbecue. When I looked out at the house and saw her flirting with the roofers, and I also saw that pencil stuck in her ear, the clipboard dangling from her hand, I figured it was as good a time as any to stop cleaning and go dish about the barbecue over coffee.

Those little lifts, you know, in a regular day? The things you poke yourself with to feel alive, like it’s all worth it? I have a distinct memory of that morning, thinking about that barbecue, the little thing in my day to look forward to. In fact, sometimes I was so thrilled with the quality of my life, going to the store could do the same thing. I had,
we
had, all of us, everyone on Burlington, had everything we wanted.

Hazel was always industrious, or at least as industrious as she could be given the limitations of her skills and strength. Later when Cuth was older and more capable, she made him help her with the more ambitious tasks, but delicate as she was, she did a pretty good job of things on her own. She built the gazebo in their backyard. She didn’t do the really heavy lifting, she didn’t put the roof on it for instance, but she was in there with the hired guy, hammering nails and holding up her end. I’ve always admired that gazebo, and the rare times I have seen her back there with a book in her lap, cup of tea, I thought she looked just like the rest of us, a little tired, but . . . content. From the street you couldn’t see how pinched her lips were, or the lines across her forehead that were digging their way deeply into her psyche. All you could see was Hazel, the shell they gave her to work with.

The point was, she had done her share of building over the years. There had been the gazebo, and she’d had double-pane windows put in. Every year she had a crew come and clean her yard for summer, and that was two days of lawn mowers and hedge trimmers. She’d poured a new driveway, that was a guy breaking concrete for a full six hours—swear to god—and then a big, loud, stinking truck pouring cement down to two ex-cons with shovels, yelling back and forth.

Anyway: Rita never said a thing about it all. None of us did.

I was at Rita’s before noon. I had taken a minute to comb my hair and put on a bright pair of shorts. I sometimes felt a little like the sandbox next to the Taj Mahal when I’d go hang out at Rita’s, and I sometimes needed to put on a bit of the dog. I never went so far as making up but I would change a blouse.

Nor was I immune to the fact that I was twenty-five years old and there were three handsome young men up on the roof of my best friend’s house. Maybe I put on a little lipstick, too. Who remembers so far back?

By the time I wandered over and sat in the back with Rita, the fellows on the roof were on phase two of the roof work. Whatever it was they were doing, the hammers had come out.

The sound of the banging echoed up and down the street.

Rita and I had coffee in the back and discussed the party in lazy detail. I forget now, what I was planning to bring, which is funny because such things used to occupy so much space in my mind: dessert, salad or main course, what would you bring? I had dishes that I made only for potluck parties, like Red Velvet Cake, the recipe for which I got from my mother-in-law. I had a recipe for Belgian Potato Salad that my mother gave me, that I had perfected over my years of marriage so that it was more mine than hers. I frequently had requests. But I don’t remember now.

What I do remember is:

Talk was winding down. We could hear the noise of the boys coming back from their pickup game. They would want sandwiches, a gallon of milk to go with it, cake. I remember Rita had a cigarette burning in the ashtray, I brushed the smoke away from my face, and she laughed—it was interrupted by a raised voice that we could hear over the hammers. We turned our faces upwards, as though our ears were cocked, like poodles.

I remember the abrupt cease of the hammering and Hazel’s distinctive voice.

Did we look at each other and laugh? We may have. However we felt about Hazel, we kept it to ourselves unless absolutely necessary.

We both stood up. The cigarette rolled out of the ashtray and onto
the table—

Rita leaned over and picked it up, dashing it out in the ashtray just as—

Tommy came around the side of the house, his hand still stuck in a ball glove, fingers of his other hand wrapped around a baseball.
Mom, Mrs. Kummel—

And she said,
I’m on it Mickey Mantle
.

I was just slightly behind Rita and Tommy.

There was Hazel, shouting up at the workers, telling them to be quiet. Telling them that it was lunch time, telling them she was a widow.

What she said once she silenced their hammers, was,
Is it necessary to make so much banging I’m trying to—

Some of the boys were on the lawn, looking uncomfortable and interested. Donnie Bradbrook, whose parents owned a tire shop, had a grin on his face, which was red as though he’d been running. Or was embarrassed. He stared at the ground, occasionally looked over at Rita’s other boy, Darren, who was beside him.

Poor Tommy.

I was looking up. On the roof, the man who had tied a handkerchief around his head, a fellow tan and dark enough to look Latin, had something in his hands. Ignoring the fuss on the lawn even as the other two were staring helplessly down at Hazel, he pulled up on something long and flat. It caught the sun and flashed terribly bright into my eyes.

I flinched and shut my eyes. When I opened them, I could see the other boys on the street. Cuth was there, one foot jauntily up on the curb, his gloved hand tucked under his arm. Just behind him was my Kerry.

I thought:
They shouldn’t be on the road
—

And I was watching when Cuth’s mouth dropped open and he raised his arm, pointing at the roof—

Someone shouted. I looked where Cuth was pointing and as I did, sunlight caught metal and flashed me again, blinding me; I didn’t actually see although I heard,
I heard
Rita and Hazel scream and there was a terrible sound, like the whir of a jet engine, far away but I didn’t see it happen—

I saw later.

Oh Tommy. Poor, poor Tommy. His head.

His head.

I didn’t see Hazel when I got back from the hospital. It was dark, very late. I had my arm around Kerry’s shoulders. He hadn’t said a word since the accident and I only noticed then, I think, and I supposed a mother’s urge is to comfort when you can’t protect. There was little I could say. Everything would not be all right. It wasn’t okay.

He had been standing ten feet away when his friend was
beheaded
. There were no magic words for that. A kid he’d run through the sprinkler with. A kid he’d traded Hot Wheels cars with. Slept in the backyard tent with. Stayed up late watching television with. Played ball with. I didn’t know how I was going to feel in a day or two, but at that moment every nerve in my body was alive and alert.

I didn’t know exactly what
he’d
seen, but I knew what
I’d
seen: when the light reflected off the piece of aluminium and flashed my eyes, I looked away. Another flash was closer to me, and then a shadow flew up and down.

Or maybe it was the sound of it, made me think I saw something. I heard it. Like a sneaker in mud. A sucking sound.

Years later, some neighbours got to talking about it. It took years before we started analyzing it, and you could tell by the tightening of voices that it was something that had stayed fresh in our minds.

John Bastion, who had not been there that day, said that it would be nearly impossible to repeat. He said that everything had to be exactly right for what happened to happen; he said the wind velocity, the angle, the timing, all of it had to have reached a kind of perfect storm.

Would have been a scrape, otherwise. Nothing to write home about,
he said. Everyone stood around nodding at him, stupidly, like he was the authority on the thing that happened.

Wind velocity. Like the stuff coming out of his mouth.

On the roof of Rita’s place the new shingles brightened up the house. I worried about the piece of sheet metal. I worried that they had used it on the roof. I worried that in twenty years when the roof needed doing again, some contractor was going to pull up the old shingles and find that piece of metal, a serrated edge of it still foamy with poor Tommy’s blood.

I saw. The blood had foamed, like what we used to call lake spit, that bubbly white stuff that ends up on the shore.

I hoped they’d found another piece.

Rita and Mac never came back to the house. I knew they wouldn’t, I guess. The family closed ranks pretty quickly and although I got lumped into the group of people
who were there that day
, and therefore possible poisonous to their minds, I continued to visit Rita in the hospital.

Only once was she straight enough to speak to me. She had been sleeping, or at least her eyes had been closed, when I came into the hospital room. Her sister Betts was there, and a nurse was fiddling with her IV. More drugs I hoped. Usually she was higher than a kite when I showed up. Who wouldn’t be?

El,
she said.
How was your trip?
Even though she was forming the words, her eyes were vague.

We hadn’t gone on the trip. I didn’t want to say that, and so like an idiot I stood there, smiling down at her. I don’t know what I said, but I held her hand. It wasn’t long after that that her eyes closed again. Drugs in the IV.

Rita’s cousin came around to pack up the house. A bunch of us from the neighbourhood helped out. We packed their stuff into boxes. When we ran out of boxes we packed clothes into garbage bags.

The whole day there was a smell. No one mentioned it. I think everyone was thinking that given the horrible thing that had happened, that the place
should
smell bad.

It wasn’t until late in that long day that I realized what it was. I opened the fridge to start emptying it, and was blasted with the most horrible, sickly sweetish bad smell I had ever encountered. Worse than the smell of the cat that had died in a pile of lumber at the back of the house one year.

There, stacked neatly on the middle shelf, were fifteen T-bone steaks. For the barbecue.

So
sad.
They’d been robbed, Rita and Mac. Especially Rita.

Stick ’em up.