Cleaning up, p.5
Cleaning Up, page 5
That night Jess lay awake in her tent, thinking about what she could tell Matt about herself. She rolled over and tried to find a cool spot on her pillow.
The night was warm and humid, the air in the tent stifling. She could say she was from Kingston, and that she wanted to study landscape design. She had no siblings, she liked grilled cheese sandwiches and vampire novels, she’d take raw veggies over cooked, ice cream over cake or pie, and she preferred leggings to jeans.
She didn’t have to say that she lived in a tent at a trailer park.
“I was in my school’s gardening club,” she practiced aloud.
Was that enough?
When Jess graduated from grade eight, she didn’t win any academic or sports awards, but she did get a citizenship certificate for her volunteer work with the gardening club. She felt like a fake accepting the award. She didn’t do it for the kids or the garden. The little garden saved her. All the long summer afternoons when her dad was drunk or hung over, filling the apartment with cigarette smoke and alcohol fumes, Jess crouched in the community garden pulling weeds.
Other kids like her neighbor Amber smoked pot to forget themselves.
“My skin feels so good when I smoke,” Amber told her. “Tingly and soft at the same time. And the candle on the table, I could look at it all night. It’s so beautiful.”
Jess never tried pot, or any of the harder drugs circulating at school. She knew she’d like them too much, and if addiction was inherited, then Jess had it from both sides of her family — her father’s use of alcohol and sometimes harder drugs, and who knew what her mom was “tied up with” or whatever useless expression her dad used to offer when Jess was still asking.
Jess rolled over in her sleeping bag and reached for her knapsack. She held it to her chest, feeling the familiar items. First her everyday things: her wallet and her phone with its cracked screen and weak battery. Then she felt the older items she thought were her mom’s: a soft pink-and-black plaid shirt wrapped around the cracked and empty CD case of Shania Twain’s Come On Over, and the mostly used-up tube of lipstick. The knapsack also held a ragged copy of Goodnight Moon, a disintegrating paperback edition of The Secret Garden held together with elastic bands, and the mostly empty diary that Mrs. M gave her.
Jess thought the knapsack was her mom’s. She’d had it for as long as she could remember. The stitching on the straps was wearing thin, and if Jess held the material up to the light she could almost see through it.
When Jess started kindergarten, she asked her dad about her mom. She seemed to be the only one in her class who didn’t have one.
“Everybody in your class got a dad?” her father asked.
Jess shrugged.
“Well,” her dad said, “some kids got a mom and some kids got a dad.”
But Jess knew that babies came from moms.
“Well, I used to have one, didn’t I?” she insisted.
Jess’s dad looked up from the TV. “Just for a while. And then you were all mine.” He grinned at her.
“What happened to her? Did she go away or something?” Kids from Jess’s class were always going away to stay with an aunt or moving or getting evicted.
“Your mom got sick and she couldn’t look after you.”
Jess imagined her mother in a hospital. “Does she need us to take care of her?”
“No, honey,” her dad ruffled her hair. “She doesn’t have a kind of hospital sickness. More like a drug sickness.”
“Oh.” This made more sense. “Like Dawn’s dad?”
“Yeah, like Dawn’s dad.”
Dawn was their neighbor who babysat Jess after school. She and her mom had moved to Kingston because Dawn’s dad was in the pen. They had been waiting for him to be released, but when he got out he had a drug addiction.
Jess saw her mother once, when she was nine. She and her dad were downtown to watch the Santa Claus Parade when a woman called out to them as they were passing by the Royal Tavern.
Jess saw a tall woman break away from a group of smokers.
“Hey, Dave,” she bellowed in a throaty smoker’s voice. “Is that you?”
Her dad’s face fell, but the woman didn’t seem to notice.
“How ya doing?” she shouted. Jess could tell she was drunk.
Her dad waved, said, “I didn’t know you were back in town.”
“Oh,” she cackled, “sometimes I’m here, sometimes I ain’t.” She pointed at Jess. “Is that her?”
The woman was so loud people turned to look at them. Jess wished her dad would hurry up. He had promised her hot chocolate before the parade started.
“Yeah.” Her dad gripped Jess’s shoulder tighter than normal and drew her toward him.
“Aw, she looks real good, real pretty,” the woman said.
“She’s good.” Her dad squeezed her shoulder tighter, making Jess wince.
The woman was looking at her too long, and it was creeping Jess out. The woman was wearing sneakers instead of boots, and her cheap leggings showed her too-skinny legs. She didn’t have a proper winter coat on, just a big wool sweater. Jess noticed she had the kind of drawn, wrinkled face some of the moms at her school had that made them look as old as grandmothers. She also noticed that she had the same arched nose and round face as Jess. Her cheeks were hollowed out, but her hair was thick and beautiful and hung halfway down her back. She wore it parted in the middle — just like Jess.
Jess wanted to keep looking at that hair. It was her hair, but without the braids.
“See you around. Keep yourself well.” Her dad steered Jess down the street.
As soon as they were away, her dad loosened his grip.
“Who was that?”
“Yeah, so that was your mom.”
“Oh.”
“I would have introduced you, but she doesn’t look so good.”
“Is that why we don’t know her?”
“Yeah.” He grabbed her hand. “That’s why.” Then he gave her a cheerful grin. “Who needs a mom when you have me, right?” He tugged at her hand.
Jess nodded, because she didn’t want to make her dad feel bad.
Sometimes at night when she tried to imagine herself older, she saw herself outside the Royal Tavern, her voice damaged by years of smoking, just like her mom.
Jess rolled over in her sleeping bag and tried to move her air mattress off a root that was jabbing into her hip. Then she tried to plump her too-flat pillow.
She would tell Matt she was interested in sustainable agriculture, that she liked being outside.
“My name is Jess,” she said out loud. “And I like plants.” This sounded so stupid she wanted to squeeze her fingers together until they hurt.
She would tell him she liked country music — both older stuff and more contemporary hits.
“I live with my dad,” she said out loud.
Or she could make up a whole other Jess.
I’m from the Township, the west end of the city. At Holy Cross I play soccer and rugby and make cupcakes for the bake sale. My friend Chantal is on my soccer team too. Once I drank too much at a party, but mostly I babysit for my neighbor’s daughter, Sophie. Sunday mornings my mom makes me pancakes, then sometimes we go to Costco to try the samples. My mom keeps one copy of my soccer photo on the fridge and another in her wallet. Sometimes she texts me too much, wondering where I am, but it’s just because she loves me.
Jess pulled off her covers. She was too hot. She was too awake. It was going to rain any minute or maybe not until tomorrow. She was never going to sleep.
Finally she turned on her phone light and pulled out her copy of The Secret Garden.
Jess first read The Secret Garden in Mrs. M’s grade-three class. She loved the idea of a secret place that needed to be brought to life so much that she stole the book at the end of the year. The book, which she kept in in her knapsack, was so tattered that Jess put an elastic band around it to hold it together. She reserved it for desperate moments when she couldn’t sleep or when she was worried about how she would ever carve out a future with no money.
Jess flipped to an illustration of Mary Lennox walking a flagstone path lined with sculpted hedges. She closed her eyes and for a few moments she was in the garden with Mary discovering the tendrils of hanging roses that formed curtains.
Sometimes she was Dickon, the boy who lived on the heath and was friends with the birds and the squirrels. Other times she was a forgotten child in the lost garden — half ghost and half angel. Mostly she was Mary herself, following the robin and discovering the garden and nursing it back to health. She imagined herself alone in the garden, uncovering the sleeping crocuses, snowdrops and daffydowndillys.
Today Jess followed the red robin along the brick wall until she came to the secret door. One turn with the key tightly clasped in her fingers, and she was in. Once inside there were only weeds to pull from the tangle of narcissi and deadwood to cut from the roses. As she set the garden right, she felt herself relax, her eyes grow heavy.
Jess clasped the book to her chest and turned off her phone light. She kept weeding the secret garden until it was the only thing in her head, until sleep overcame her.
04
Rain fell in the night, thrumming on the walls of the tent. Jess dreamed her tent washed right past the trailers into the lake, but aside from a puddle at her feet where the canvas had leaked at the old zipper, she woke up dry.
The morning air was crisp with new sunshine when she hung her sleeping bag on the clothesline. Today she would do her Kingston cleaning and she’d tell Matt about herself. She was from Kingston, and she liked gardening and country music. Those were all true enough. She nodded and clicked the empty Shania Twain CD case in her backpack open and closed a few times.
The day continued to improve. Coffee was already brewed in the trailer and her dad was out whistling by his truck, poking under the open hood. There was enough bread to make a breakfast sandwich with peanut butter and bananas and another with cheese for lunch. She had time to bike leisurely along the country roads in the fresh morning air, and to stop in front of the Guptas’ house before meeting Matt.
Jess looked up at the front steps. If she was Quinn Gupta, she would sit on the shady front porch in the rocking chair with her journal. Maybe she would listen to some music on her phone. She would write a poem about grasses in the wind, or a description of the sound of passing trucks on the road.
Except Quinn was angry about something — angry enough to destroy her own room.
Jess could run into the house right now, run upstairs and read through the diary. Then she could unravel the mystery of Quinn and her room.
Except she was never going to do that.
Jess checked her phone. It was time to meet Matt. She took a deep breath and got back on her bike.
Matt was already in his truck listening to music when Jess pulled up beside him.
“You have to hear this,” he said, beckoning to her from the truck cab. Jess stuck her head inside the cab to hear a jazz trumpet solo blaring from the speakers.
Matt listened with his eyes closed, his fingers dancing on the steering wheel.
“That,” Matt said, pausing the music and gazing at Jess, “that little trill, is pure Wynton Marsalis.” He played it again, his eyes closed, his head swaying to the notes, his fingers conducting his own mini band. “It makes my heart soar!”
Jess nodded, as if she knew who Wynton Marsalis was. She listened to five more minutes of trumpet solos holding her handlebars before she could suggest she put her bike in the truck bed. When she finally settled into the worn passenger seat, Matt turned to her with a serious look in his eye.
“Okay, if we’re going to drive all the way to Kingston together, I’m going to need to know something important about you.”
Jess felt her toes curl. She clutched her knapsack. “Yes?”
“Are you in agreement that John Coltrane’s ‘Giant Steps’ is the one piece of jazz music you would take with you into outer space or to the desert island of your dreams?”
“Uh,” Jess stammered, “I don’t know much about jazz.”
“What?” Matt’s eyebrows shot up his forehead. “How can you not know jazz? Were you raised in a …” Matt sputtered. “… a musical barrenness?”
Jess shrugged and relaxed into her seat. “I guess so. I know more about country music.”
“Well,” Matt said, his eyebrows flexing. “Clearly I know what we are going to be doing on this drive — fixing the glaring hole in your musical education.” He handed her his phone. “Find Jelly Roll Morton in the jazz playlist and we’ll start there.”
Fifty-five minutes later they were entering the city limits and Matt was still holding forth on 1950s bebop. Jess had listened and nodded, fascinated how Matt could drive, give complex jazz history and dance his fingers in time on the steering wheel at the same time. When he dropped her off near Queen’s campus and Jess pulled her bike out of the truck bed, she hadn’t had a chance to say anything about herself.
For a moment she stood on the hot pavement, the campus mostly deserted around her, and felt a moment of disappointment as she watched Matt pull away.
For an hour she had just been Jess who needed to learn about jazz.
Now she was Jess who needed to hightail it across Bath Road to clean the Chins’ west-end split-level.
Right, she needed to clean to save some money so she could go to college. College, job, house, Jess recited as she clicked on her helmet.
Jess cleaned the Chins’ house in the morning, then after the cheese sandwich in their backyard, she biked back downtown to the Muellers’ elegant home on King Street by the water.
By 4 p.m. she was racing back to campus to meet Matt. He was waiting for her in front of the library with a girl, Cat. She had purple hair shaved on one side and long on the other and a ring through her septum. She was pale with squinty eyes behind cat-shaped eyeglasses. Jess expected her to be pretty and trim, but instead her jean cutoffs exposed pale lumpy thighs. A tattoo of a 1940s pinup girl took up most of one freckled arm.
Instead of saying hi, Cat said, “You look strong.”
Jess shrugged. She supposed she was, but right now she felt hot and sweaty. She’d washed as best she could in the Muellers’ powder room and put on a fresh T-shirt and shorts, but her hands still smelled like rubber gloves, and sweat itched at her temples and the back of her neck under her bike helmet.
“Strong enough to help with a piano,” Matt added.
Professional movers had put the piano into the truck bed and strapped it down, but Cat and Matt were uncertain how they were going to get it out.
“I’m sure we’ll figure something out,” Jess said. She didn’t add that she had moved more than ten times in her life already, that she was practically a professional mover herself.
In the truck Matt and Cat were too busy playing old country songs for each other — Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline and Hank Williams — to ask Jess how she had spent her day, and she melted into the narrow bench of the cab as best as her long legs would let her.
Back at the barn they used old boards to make a ramp to wheel the piano from the truck into the barn. When it was set in the dark corner by the bass and the drum set, Matt sat down on the piano bench and proceeded to play a boogie-woogie tune, improvising lyrics.
“The Lady Cat, she don’t take no scat, no one gives it to Lady Cat.”
“I thought you needed to find a piano player,” Jess said.
Matt banged out more chords. “I do.”
“Why don’t you play?”
“A lot more people play piano than bass,” he explained.
“Oh.”
Matt noodled around on the piano while Jess sat on the couch in the dim barn listening, her knapsack at her side. She’d rushed around all day and now she let her eyes close for a moment.
Then she heard a car pull up and a male voice talking to Cat outside. Cat came in a few minutes later holding the hand of a stocky, barrel-chested guy with cropped dirty-blond hair. The guy waved to Matt and then wandered over to inspect some plastic pails in the corner. Jess watched him stir the pail and then stop to slap his arms. He tried stirring again and then stopped to slap away another mosquito.
“Why do they only bite me?”
“You are clearly the most delicious,” Matt offered, turning on the piano bench to face him.
Jess giggled and the guy looked over at her.
“Jess, this is Yolo,” Matt said, waving. “He’s in the band. Yolo, this is Jess. She cleans at the Guptas’, moves pianos, hangs out. She also might be a spy.”
Jess tensed. “Why a spy?”
“You ask questions but say little about yourself. Also, you are a spy from the land of the employed.”
“Marginally employed,” Jess said.
“Matt, you’re the only one who isn’t employed.” Cat flopped onto a saggy chair across from the couch where Jess was sitting and pulled out a pen and notebook from her backpack.
“That is true.” Yolo took a sip of liquid from one of the pails.
“Is the beer starting to taste any better?” Cat wrinkled her nose.
“It is improving daily,” Yolo said with fake enthusiasm.
“Yolo is studying chemical engineering, so he thinks making beer should be easy,” Matt explained.
“Imagine Yolo’s Keggers. They’ll name parties after me.” He grinned and thumped his chest.
“Only if the beer doesn’t taste like shit,” Cat said. She bent her head over her notebook, drawing something.
Yolo made a face. “Want to try?” He offered Jess a cup.
She took a step back. “Uh, no, thanks.”
“Smart girl,” Matt said.
“Ah, shut your faces,” Yolo said. He drifted away from the vat and sat down at the piano. He ran his fingers up the keys, banged out a few chords, sang, “If all the raindrops were lemon drops and gumdrops …”
