Journey, p.23
Journey, page 23
“There. Isn’t that lovely?” she said shyly. And it was lovely, the whiteness of it, the gleaming.
“Now I make tea for George. He sits in the sunroom in the afternoon and reads his paper.” Aunt Ella gave me a tea bag to look at while we waited for the kettle to whistle. I liked the soft paperiness of it, the whispery sound it made, and the way its shadowy insides shifted when I turned it.
I decided that the afternoon in this house was longer than the afternoon in my own, and that the same things happened here in the same order every day. This was a comfortable thought. I thought it over and over while the kettle whistled and Aunt Ella poured the boiling water glugging into the teapot.
In my own house, my brother went off to Cub camp, then came home, then went somewhere else. My father was always sawing and hammering upstairs, because Ted and I were going to have to sleep up there when we were bigger. And my mother said she couldn’t wait for a brand new kitchen. There was always somewhere in our house that was covered in plastic or smelled of sawdust. And every few months, I had to go to a store full of shoes where a man measured my feet. “You’re growing so fast,” my mother always said, shaking her head, opening her purse.
But nothing changed here. No matter what the pictures in the hallway said.
“That’s George,” Aunt Ella told me, pointing a purple finger at an old brown photograph. We were waiting for the tea to steep. The photograph she pointed to was of a baby dressed in ruffles and ribbons.
“That’s not Uncle George!” I said. “That’s you!”
“Oh no it isn’t, child. No. Surely you can see that it isn’t me.” I looked and looked. Then I saw. The baby’s face was all the same colour.
There were so many old pictures of Uncle George, in short pants, long pants, a cap, a straw hat. Pictures that changed from brown to black and white.
“Where are the pictures of you?” I asked. She didn’t answer. I asked again.
“Well, they didn’t. My parents just didn’t, you see. They didn’t think it fitting.”
I tried to imagine what it would be like to never have my picture taken. I didn’t think I’d mind. But maybe Aunt Ella did mind, because she said, “There is one of me.” She pointed, this time with the white hand, to a small, cracked photograph in a round frame. It showed a lady in a long-sleeved white dress pulled tight in front and bunched out the back. She had on a white flowered hat with flowers. The hat made a shadow over her face.
“George took that one,” Aunt Ella said, sounding shy again. “I was twenty. I remember that day. We were all set to go out hunting eggs.”
“Easter eggs?”
* * *
I could hardly feel the hollow shell on my palm. A breath would roll it off onto the hardwood.
We had brought Uncle George his tea in the sunroom, and Aunt Ella had said, “Lady here to see some eggs, George.”
They were in shoeboxes, bedded down in cotton batting. Robin’s eggs like drops of sky. Speckled eggs, the speckles blurred as if somebody had dabbed them onto the shells with a watercolour brush.
“We’d go off, Ella and me, whenever we could get away together,” Uncle George was saying. “We’d take a blanket and pack a picnic lunch.”
“What do you mean, we?” Something giggly in Aunt Ella’s voice made me look up at her. “I’m the one who packed the lunches. You never so much as made a sandwich.”
“Oh? And who carried the heavy basket, miss, and helped you over the fences, and swatted bees away from you?” There was a laugh inside Uncle Goerge’s voice too.
“We’d be out sometimes sunrise till dark,” he said more quietly. “Some days the sun would be so hot even the bees would be heavy and slow with it. So we’d leave the blanket spread after lunch and just sleep. Sleep for hours some days. I remember us waking once when the day had cooled and the dark was just beginning to fall.”
They were quiet for a long time. I began to think they had forgotten I was there. I reached and picked up a grey-and-brown speckled egg.
“You like that one?” Uncle George asked. I nodded. “Hen that laid that one,” he said (he had already explained that all lady birds were hens), “knew a pretty good trick. And we saw her do it, didn’t we, Ella?”
“We did. I remember.”
“She’d hidden her nest pretty well, way back deep in the shadows. But as soon as we got near it, she came right out of hiding and pretended to have a broken wing. Flopped around on the ground to lure us toward herself. And once we were a safe distance from the nest, she took off. Flew straight up and away into the sunshine.”
“Who showed her how to do that?” I asked.
“Oh, she just seemed to know, all by herself.”
“Perhaps God taught her, George,” Aunt Ella prompted, glancing at me.
“Well, yes, come to think of it, I guess that’s what happened.”
I yawned. The sun in the room was making me sleepy. Aunt Ella sat down in a chair and pulled me up onto her lap. I leaned back against her, my eyelids heavy. Her hands were clasped in front of me, purple over white. I reached a finger and touched the purple skin. Then I touched the white skin. They felt the same.
“Am I being trouble?” I asked, pulling my finger back. Maybe it was a mistake to touch purple skin. Uncle George grinned at his sister. His teeth were as white as his hair, but he hadn’t any gold ones.
“No,” Aunt Ella said. “You’re not.”
Music was coming in the window. Tinkly, one-note-at-a-time music. Carillon,” Uncle George said, checking his watch. “We hear it every afternoon. Comes from over there.” He pointed out the window to a steeple poking up above the trees.
“Shhhhh!” Aunt Ella sat up a little. I turned and looked at her face. Her chin bobbed with each note, and her eyes were sad and happy at the same time. Uncle George was leaning forward in his chair now, his good ear cocked to the window. Almost together, they said, “Blessed Assurance.” Then, in a high, shaky voice, Aunt Ella sang the words in time with the picked-out notes. I could feel the singing in her body as I leaned back against her.
I fell asleep. Not a deep sleep, because as I was dropping off I remembered something that kept me floating near the surface. I remembered my father telling my mother that as soon as they were grown up, George and Ella quit going to church. Just quit all at once. Never went back.
* * *
When the noise of my parents and brother coming back woke me, it was as if all three of us had fallen asleep, and still were. Aunt Ella kept hold of me, even when my mother called, “Hello? Folks? We’re back!” I had a strange, half-awake thought. That it was a mistake for them to be my family. That this was where I really lived.
Aunt Ella still held me. At last Uncle George looked at her. She unclasped her hands. He began struggling up out of his chair.
All of a sudden I remembered the eggs. I didn’t know why, but I was afraid for them. They were like a secret between Uncle George and Aunt Ella and me. But the eggs were gone. Uncle George must have put them away while I was asleep. Or maybe I dreamed them.
* * *
“Did you say thank you to Aunt Ella and Uncle George?” my mother asked me as we were going down the porch steps on our way to the car. I didn’t answer. “You didn’t say thank you, did you?” She could always tell every single thing I had done or not done, just by looking at my face. “All right then, we’ll wait for you in the car. March back inside and do it.”
But that house was for tiptoeing, not marching. I made no noise at all as I went down the long hall, hardly glancing at the covered dish of licorice allsorts. I stopped near the door to the sunroom, where they both still were. They didn’t see me.
Aunt Ella was standing behind Uncle George’s chair, arms around his neck, cheek resting on his white head. He took one of her hands in his and kissed the fingers. Then he turned it over and gave the palm a long, slow kiss. She slid the fingers of her other hand inside his shirt collar. Very slowly, in bigger and bigger circles, she ran her fingers round and round on her brother’s neck and shoulder and chest.
I held my breath. Then I began to back away from the door to the sunroom. They still didn’t hear me.
All I knew was that I had found something nobody was supposed to find. And the tiniest noise from me would shatter it. When I was halfway down the hall, I turned and ran the rest of the way on tiptoe.
In the car my mother looked at my flushed face and said, “What? What is it?”
“Nothing.” I ducked my head. Now Ted was looking at me too. I could feel my cheeks getting hotter.
My father was about to turn the key and start the car. My mother put a hand on his arm to stop him. “Now come on,” she said. “Something happened in there. Did you break something just now? Were you any trouble for Aunt Ella and Uncle George?”
“No!”
“Well,” my mother said, “I’m going back in there and ask them.” Her hand was on the door handle.
“I did do something,” I said. My mother turned and looked at me. Her hand was still on the door handle. “All right,” she said slowly, “you’d better tell me what.”
“I took another licorice allsort! I took one of the little logs! And I ate it!”
My mother took her hand away from the door handle. She glanced at my father, and for a second the two of them looked as if they were trying not to laugh.
Then, as my father started the car and my mother took a deep breath, getting ready to give me a talking-to, I began to feel light. I felt lighter and lighter until soon I was so light that if there had been no top on the car, I would have been flying.
Angélique Lalonde
Pooka
Pooka lived in a room with carpets of all shapes and sizes woven from different cloths. Pooka picked up carpets wherever he went. Most of the time unwanted carpets were dirty or cut up or had cigarette burns in them or smelled like cat piss, so Pooka had a lot of cruddy carpets alongside the nice carpets he was gifted or able to buy during blowout sales at home furnishing stores, end-of-the-roll off-sales, and Oriental outlets. He mixed them together because Pooka was like that, all mixed up himself. Off-white blend of kinfolk peppered down the line. Indian nearly fractioned out, they told him, because grandmaman Therese, already a half-breed, married Renaud Fortier, a Frenchman from the logging camp upriver. Then mama took up with Gunther Poundsly, Pooka’s no-good pa, who gave only bruises, crooked teeth, a penchant for sauerkraut, and armfuls of meanness until he left them to go back to the Sault.
Mama said, “Getting lighter with each successive generation of mixing”; said, “Despite blending in, the ghosts of the ancestors are all frayed up inside, calling to our spirits with directions we don’t know how to follow, so we get lost along the way.”
Frayed up from not knowing how to live between worlds, Pooka knew—from the structural forgettings legislated on mama and grandmaman’s lives, and the oceans between here and the places in the world his other people came from. Mama did some big forgetting, she said, when she was twelve years old and the government came to take her out of the bush, place her in a good white home where there wasn’t no more booze, just a whole lot of work, a brother who liked to touch her up, and godliness she shed as soon as she skipped out at sixteen. Didn’t see grandmaman again until Gunther left and the city streets spat her out, back to the village with her little boy. Not-quite-white Pooka, picked on at powwow for his white-boy face, ticking the Métis box on the census ’cause that was the closest fit. Never mind that saying it out loud made him feel like a sham, bringing up everything he didn’t know about who he was supposed to be.
Pooka felt there was no real demarcation between things. He learned from his school books that life was a mash-up of history told like a storybook of happy endings if you were on the right side and unfortunate circumstances that couldn’t be reversed now if you weren’t. He knew that the sullied carpets he collected had been woven from pristine cloth, that given time and human use the new carpets would become sullied. For Pooka, the mixed-up rugs felt something like a homeland. A place to collapse time and storylines, create a sanctified present from a mucked-up past.
The rugs were Pooka’s only furnishings. Layered and layered on each other to make a bed or a rise on which to set a coffee mug. Sometimes Pooka got creative and sculpted them into intricate replicas of couches he sat on at other people’s houses.
Once, during a particularly bleak winter, he sculpted an entire IKEA bedroom suite. The lampshade was a bit tricky, and although he was usually loath to do so, for this particular project he got hold of a pair of scissors. He cut up one of the already-torn carpets so that the lampshade would fit right and not light on fire from pieces of fabric touching the bulb. He looked up videos of how to wire a lamp on YouTube and scavenged wiring from a lamp of cousin Vicky’s. It made Pooka feel modern to have a lamp in his home, to live in an IKEA bedroom suite like all the women he met who worked at smart retail stores, the only ones other than cousin Vicky who would talk to him.
Pooka spent a lot of time in smart retail stores pretending to shop for things. Mostly he was getting ideas for how to sculpt his carpets, or noticing display carpets showing wear that might come on sale sometime soon because no one would want to pay full price for them. Pooka knew how to talk carpet; he could always haggle the saleswomen down. With salesmen he didn’t even bother, feeling most of the time like they weren’t worth the trouble of talking rug with. They wanted to seal the deal, not send the carpet to a good home. Or so Pooka thought.
Pooka was thrilled when his room of sculpted carpets was featured on a website. One of those sites where people who spend a lot of time on computers go to compare their own lives to those of other people they have never met who live in places like New York or San Francisco. Meaningful places with panache that people might imagine themselves in. Online mock-ups for how to navigate the world of things and properly curate a life. His “eclectic suite,” however, was quickly taken down because of the spiteful put-downs posted by viewers who were used to staged, minimalistic homes. Homes that displayed their inhabitants’ sophistication, cookie-cutter individuality, and eye for tasteful decor. Homes that had class.
This place looks like a thrift store stocked by a blind four-year-old, wrote Micah4u. Is this a joke? posted dEsignBaby. This is the most tasteless jumble of trash I’ve ever seen in my life, was Grendel Piker’s response.
Pooka was crushed. This was during his 1960s Star Trek phase, when he’d actually gone so far as to spray-paint some of his carpets silver and black to look like the captain’s chair. His photographer friend Peanut, who had taken the artful photos of Pooka’s rug replica of the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701), felt awful about the ordeal.
Pooka pretended not to care about what online design critics thought of the place he called home. He reckoned they couldn’t see beyond the obvious, viewing things only in terms of outlines and not in terms of spirit. He saw that theirs was a gated community of taste, that they used aesthetic condemnation to keep the riff-raff out. Nonetheless, Pooka dismantled the carpet rendition of Captain Kirk’s bridge.
Until then Pooka’s fanciful successes in carpet sculpture had helped to keep his mind off mama’s latest disappearance, let him keep pretending she was just drifting, that like every other time she had drifted before, she would find her way home. But time stretched on and mama did not resurface. With nothing to distract him, Pooka knew this time that mama was lost, the way tante Bernadette was lost, and Tina from high school, and Liz from the village upriver. No follow-up down at the station, no mention on the evening news or photos along the roadside. One more woman washed out of a world scripted to efface her, not even a ripple in the surface of the fabricated story in which all people belong.
Pooka’s online ridicule was one more disappointment in a life he could only see through his sorrows. Alone on the outskirts of his humanity, not belonging became too much for Pooka. He ceased pretending to be Mr. Spock, wearing pointy ears and trying all sorts of foreign foods he found around town to test the Vulcan’s taste buds. He couldn’t remember what grandmaman had said about always being at home among his ancestors because he could not speak their tongues and had no sense of the inspirited landscapes they’d inhabited. He could not hear them because they were far gone to him, people in history books wearing clothing crafted from animal skins, weaving baskets and boxes from plants. Pioneers with fringe jackets and musket rifles, bottom-of-the-barrel Englishmen sailing in the bowels of dank ships, German peasants tilling up whatever land they could find, uprooting hundred-year-old trees with bare hands.
Pooka’s sneakers were made in China by labourers he’d never know, his skin clothed in factory cotton travelled all around the globe, he’d barely been a hundred klicks from the one-room box he called home. Unlike grandmaman, Pooka couldn’t hear the ancestors when he walked through the furniture district downtown built atop the old fish camps. But sometimes Pooka imagined that the carpets gave voice to them, that the foreign-made rugs hoarded up in showrooms scattered all over the city might be a medium through which the relations could speak. The IKEA suite and the bridge of the Enterprise were Pooka’s attempts at coaxing them out.
* * *
After Pooka’s online ventures in “carpArtry” were quashed, and with mama gone for good this time, he became unable to feel at home among his carpets. For five years Pooka kept things flat. He didn’t shop around or notice shifting trends in rug manufacturing. He lost track of developments in loom engineering and stopped haggling for deals altogether. Pooka was down-and-out. During these years Pooka worked on and off as a casual labourer for various construction projects. He experimented with crystal meth and got addicted to it, the way people do. He made other meth friends who were down-and-out like him. A lot of scattered spirits stimulated only by the hit, every other aspect of life losing texture, ceasing to impart meaning.
