Help Me, Jacques Cousteau Read online

  To keep busy, my grandmother is trying to teach me a few useful things, such as how to cook and use a sewing machine. Last summer it was knitting, which is one of the few things she doesn’t do very well. I took to it like it was illicit and knitted everybody something absurd for Christmas. My mother got a tank top made of butcher’s string. My best friend, Jeannie, got a pair of wool boxers with tinsel and chestnuts worked into the pattern. Jeannie put them up on her wall and her mother told her I was crazy.

  This anarchy wasn’t what my grandmother had in mind. So she is trying now with sewing. But I snarl the thread into pom-poms and run the needle through the edge of my finger. Predictably, my performance in the kitchen is no better.

  My grandfather reads the paper and complains that Andrew isn’t small enough to sit on his knee anymore. He acts as if Andrew grew on purpose. Once in a while, he goads my brother into trying again and then makes a big deal about how his leg almost broke from the weight.

  Before my grandparents arrived, I collected all my poems and notebooks and old childhood drawings of other planets and I hid them behind the furnace. I thought I was safe from his teasing then. But, the first morning, Grandfather came down holding one of my earrings he’d found on my dresser — a silver fish skeleton. He promised to find a dead cat for me to wear around my neck. The earring is gone, perhaps dropped by him in a garbage bag: ten bucks down the drain. It bugs me sometimes when I consider the appalling things he wears.

  Now Andrew is outside with a bunch of other little boys. They are popping the top off a yogurt cup by combining baking soda and vinegar. This is explosion number five. The littlest boy is standing with one sandal on the lid and they are all shrieking with excitement. I can hear my grandmother in the kitchen, going through the cupboards, irritated about something. It is a warm, airless day. Cloud has settled low in the sky. There are puddles forming in the narrow alleyways between houses, spiders string their webs everywhere, and the branches of the highest trees look rotten and wet.

  My grandmother is planning to teach me to bake a cake this afternoon, lemon cake, my favourite. But today I can’t stand any more lessons. I just want to be alone. A series of images flies through my mind. A roast chicken, white as my underarm, hard as a rock, with stuffing extruding out its rear end like wet sand; a Jell-O mould with sockets where the cherries slid out; a cream of mushroom soup that smelled like an ashtray left out in the rain. I’m not sure I can stand another moment of it, my grandmother’s smooth, graceful hands taking the bowl away from me, whipping the batter with stunning speed and, despite her efforts, the cake coming out stunted and gooey, with my name written all over it.

  And then it hits me: no cake today. Andrew has exploded all the baking soda. I see the yogurt cup spurting and hissing like a sick toad on the sidewalk and little boys screaming, kicking it. My grandmother comes thumping across the carpet to see what the noise is and so I hit the road out the back door. All I want is to lie in the back seat of my grandparents’ Cadillac and read poems or watch the clouds sink lower and lower.

  Like so many of the other things he sorts and compares and commits to memory, my father has a fondness for weather. He collects magazine pictures of tidal waves and tornadoes and sheet lightning. He has photos of storm fronts on the prairies moving towards the camera like grey walls. He has photos of clouds forming over mountains, slide after slide of cirrus, nimbus, cumulus. Clouds that resemble the sand in shallow water or the waves in a girl’s hair. Clouds that bulge like muscle, or streak and ribbon.

  In his classroom at Willow Heights High School, there are aerial shots of Mount St. Helen’s exploding, diagrams of the directional forces inside twisters, a map showing the incidence of human deaths caused by lightning. Rangers get hit a lot. They hold up blasted hats as proof for photographers, complain of bald spots, ringing ears, a leg that won’t stop trembling. Women almost never get hit because, unlike men, they opt not to adjust the TV aerial in a storm. Dad says you can feel lightning coming, a tingle in your feet and calves, a searing in your mouth. If this happens, he says, throw yourself down and roll on the ground. Lightning comes from two directions, the ground and the sky.

  “Like any current,” he says, “two sides must connect or nothing happens.”

  I remember him running his fingertip along a flickering fluorescent tube at school, the blue flashes following his finger to the other end and the tube snapping on. I remember him counting between the lightning and the thunder, saying every fourteen beats is one mile. Or maybe he said every beat is fourteen miles? I can’t remember. And now he’s not here to ask.

  I lie in the car and look up and hear a thin rumble come across the sky, without a flicker of light from anywhere. I put the convertible top up and listen for the sound of rain on the tattered black canvas.

  I’m feeling bad about Andrew. I should be helping him, but I can’t even help myself. Last night, he wanted to know if I thought Dad and Mum were going to split up, and I told him to shut up. It popped out so fast and mean that I surprised myself; I couldn’t even say sorry. He was quiet for a long time, holding on to his covers. And then he said, “Where’s the coffee shop?”

  “What?”

  “Where Mum was.”

  “Who knows, Andrew? Who cares?”

  It’s funny how your mind works. Someone says don’t think about dogs and suddenly your mind is filled with dogs. I knew where my mother was. I could see it. The walls were white, the tables brown, she was smoking and there was a man coming along the row of tables with a pot of oily coffee. There were trucks parked outside and people leaning on cars, filling their tanks at the pumps. My mother was watching my father’s shape in the phone booth, and he was looking back at her shape in the window of the café.

  How stupid can I be? I get fooled all the time. I believe Bigfoot exists, I really do. But such things are easy to imagine because they don’t have to be true; it isn’t important. I feel bad about my brother, because he wants some impossible things to be true.

  It’s getting dark out, and the lights from the house illuminate the inside of the convertible roof. Rain pelts down on the car and things feel different, as if I might have fallen asleep without noticing. Gradually, it comes to me that I have been asleep with my book lying open on my stomach. There is a radio playing somewhere nearby and so I sit up to see what is going on.

  “Oh, Jesus God!” My grandfather twists himself round in the front seat. “Where did you come from?” The baseball game is on and he’s sitting there in his white undershirt and bathing trunks. He’s soaked with rain and he looks happy — or he would look happy if he wasn’t holding his chest against a heart attack.

  “I’ve been asleep, Grandfather,” I croak, quickly sitting on the poetry book.

  “What have you got there?” he snaps right away. Reluctantly, I hand e.e. cummings over to him. He opens it and stares, then reads out loud.

  “‘i sing of Olaf glad and big / whose warmest heart recoiled at war: / a conscientious object-or’ … What is that? I don’t think that’s poetry. Object-or?”

  “Grandfather …” I try to take the book back, but he holds it out of my reach.

  “…‘to eat flowers and not to be afraid?’ Oh boy.”

  He hugs the book close and keeps reading. Rain pelts the car and I watch it drool off the tops of the windows and confuse the image of our back fence. I’m getting used to ridicule. Kids at school make fun of everything everybody does. Reading poetry isn’t so bad; at least I don’t have huge boobs, or flood pants, or a case of acne. I’m not in the chess club. I don’t have a name like Bogdana or Flower. Things could be worse.

  “That one’s not bad,” Grandfather says, poking a page, and then he gives the book back to me and sits still for a moment, holding the wheel. He taps at the glass over the red brake indicator. “Do you know that I used to write poetry?”

  “Before or after you ate mastodon?”

  “Never mind, then.” He snaps his waistband, annoyed.

  “
Granny told me,” I concede.

  “Huh … well,” he says.

  Actually, Granny had showed me some of his poetry, and it wasn’t embarrassing; in fact, some of it didn’t rhyme. From the looks of it, he’d written a ton. The poems were all dedicated to her, and not one was about love. Grandfather shifts in his seat a little, then turns the radio up louder and we listen to the Blue Jays and the Angels get rained out.

  When we come in for dinner, Andrew is in the kitchen alone. He is standing on a chair stirring a pot of soup. The kitchen is dark. Grandfather and I stand in the hall and watch the shape of my brother cooking in the diminishing glow of the burner under the soup pot.

  “We blew a fuse,” Andrew says without looking up. Then the lights come back on and we can see that Andrew has the apron doubled up and tied high under his armpits, so he won’t trip on it. My grandmother can be heard making her way up the basement stairs, and Grandfather hotfoots it up to my bedroom to change out of his bathing trunks before she catches sight of him. She wouldn’t have said anything to him, of course. She wouldn’t have to.

  I look at my grandmother where she stands at the head of the stairs with her hands on her hips. “Your father did a decent job on that wiring.”

  Andrew and I gawk at her. These are the most unlikely words to be spoken in our house. My father rewires when he’s nervous, and he’s been very nervous lately. It occurs to me that my grandmother, between teaching my father how to cook and to sew, might have given him practical home improvement lessons as well.

  The food smells great and we all sit down together to a delicious meal cooked by Andrew. He’s at the head of the table, spooning the soup into bowls, hacking at the chicken and passing out beautiful white, uneven slices. He stirs the gravy and spoons out beans and potatoes. It’s the nicest meal we’ve had in a long time, and I go to bed with a new respect for my brother.

  As usual, my dreams buck and roll under me. Sometimes, when you sleep, you are aware of everything: the fact that you are dreaming, the room around you, the strange logic of your own dreams. I can hear Andrew breathing the way little boys do when they are exhausted. I can sense my grandfather moving in the hallway, and yet I am horrified by the floor under my bed, which swells and breathes like a living thing. I know that, soon, I will fall off and see whatever this thing is, as clearly as an insect sees a shoe. But as the bed sinks away to nothing, I find that I am awake. Birds have appeared in the trees outside the window and a weak yellow sun filters through the curtains. I sit up and stare at my brother, who is small and pretty and restful.

  For a long time I’ve had the strange idea that he and I were born the wrong way around. He should have been born first, born female and given to my grandmother, who always wanted a daughter but got boys instead. My brother should have been me. And I should have been born later, and male.

  Of course, years later, when my brother grows huge and muscular and bearded and leaves home in a truck to go to college, that idea will seem absurd. But in the moment it strikes me as horribly true. My parents are gone, shot into orbit by something out of our control, and my grandparents roam through our lives in their own perplexing patterns. How would it be, that other life? I lie back and watch the sun come across the ceiling and I picture things as they might be, picture myself as a boy, and it’s not exactly difficult. I don’t tell myself that things might be better. I don’t tell myself anything at all.

  FISH - SITTING

  ………… MY BROTHER HAS STOPPED talking. All he does now is read: kids’ books, adult books, newspapers, the cereal box, pill bottles, signs, advertisements, and scrawls on the sidewalk. He’s the best reader in his class, but no one can make him talk. I’m looking at him now, lying on his stomach on the living room rug.

  “What’re you reading, Andrew?” I say. But he just holds up Asterix.

  I go back to spying on the new neighbours with the binoculars. The new neighbour lady, Mrs. Draper, is out drinking on the grass of her backyard with someone who isn’t her husband. In this way, she is just like the previous neighbour lady. My mother says that maybe it’s something about the house itself, maybe there’s a gas that comes out of the basement and makes people crazy. She’s convinced Mrs. Draper is having an affair with this man, and it looks like she’s right. Mrs. Draper has her foot up on the man’s thigh and she lets her head fall back, sun beaming on her exposed neck. He’s rubbing Mrs. Draper’s ankle and touching her leg. He’s got his back turned to me, but I can see red hair under his baseball cap, and on his forearm. He leans over and retrieves a bottle from under her chair. With Mr. Draper the way he is, I’m not surprised Mrs. Draper has opted for this.

  I can also see my father across the street, talking to the Bison. I named our neighbour “the Bison” because he’s got a huge head with woolly hair that starts too far back. I imagine a sci-fi world where everybody looks like that. The Bison is kind of shuffling around on his front mat, the blare of sunset throwing his lumpy shadow across the front door. My dad’s at it again. I can tell by his expression: open, fatherly. The Bison is spilling his guts.

  When Dad comes in, I say, “What did he tell you?” Andrew glances up at Dad, wiggles his nose to adjust his glasses.

  “The Bison? Oh, well, he’s worried about selling junk bonds, and he should be, because it’s just a disgusting thing to do. He’s attracted to Mrs. Shiffler down at the corner, and … um, I think that’s all. Oh yeah, his first sexual encounter was with his cousin.”

  That’s my father these days. He’s spending more time talking to people outside the family, mostly because he can’t talk to Mum, and as time goes by, he’s getting better at it. People seem to trust him, to want to confide in him; he’s the stranger on a train. They take one look at him and decide it would be much better to get that niggling little secret out in the open. Men confess to impotence, cheating on their taxes, a desire to drive into oncoming traffic. One lady confessed to poisoning her husband’s dog because he always kissed it on the lips. “It was repulsive,” she said.

  It’s a relief to find out how really warped other people are, because our own home life is a mess. My parents have decided to separate and my mother is moving out soon. We are all floating now because, even though the change has come, nothing has happened yet. Meanwhile, I’m not doing too well in school. I don’t know what it was, but I felt I was suddenly on holiday and I had nowhere to go and nothing important to do. My dad has been taking me aside and doing his best to scare the shit out of me about what happens when you let yourself go, but I still feel like school is something other people have to care about, not me. I sit in class and enjoy the sound of talking, but I’m not really there. Some of my teachers worry about me. I see their mouths move, but it never occurs to me to wonder what they are saying. And then at night I stay up late and stare through neighbours’ windows using my binoculars.

  Sometimes, walking along the street, I pass by a face I’ve been spying on and it’s hard not to say hello. Or worse, to say something like: “How’s the zit cream working?” or “Why do you let that cat lick your toes?” It’s true, there is a lady who puts her feet up on her coffee table so her cat can get up and lick her toes. I’d go through the roof.

  It’s ten o’clock at night, and I see Mr. Draper coming up the drive to his house. He swaggers, fumbles with the key. In the dark he lets a bottle drop and it smashes on the stoop. Mrs. Draper has locked him out again. I watch as he disappears into the house, leaving the door ajar. In a minute, Mrs. Draper comes out with a dustpan and pokes the shards of glass onto it with a fingernail. Then she’s gone and the door is still open, the hall light beaming through the door and glistening in the pool of booze outside.

  I can tell something’s going on downstairs in my own home, but the fight is pretty quiet as usual, no raised voices. My brother comes in and sits on my bed with a book; sometimes Andrew crawls under the bed and reads, with only his head and shoulders sticking out.

  My school report is a wall of rejection, and what’s
worse is my dad can see that I don’t care. My parents are talking to me about it and they are like wolves working as a team to pull something down. This is one of the rare moments when they co-operate. I have to admire their self-control. I know I’m a pain in the ass. I know I should be promising things, acknowledging faults, or at least trying to look worried. But I can’t even manage that.

  We’re in the kitchen, with the back door open and a lawn mower droning away two lawns over. I am on auto-pilot as usual, watching my parents’ mouths move, listening to the grinding machine as if it might tell me something useful. When I come back into focus, my father is sitting back, looking satisfied. My mother gives me a kiss on the forehead and then leaves the room. I realize that I’ve agreed to something, but I have no idea what it is. Two days later, Mum gives me a book from the library on tropical fish. “I thought this might help,” she says.

  “Thanks,” I say. Apparently I’ve agreed to do something about fish.

  I’ve always hated school, but now even my girlfriends there are acting as if I’ve got some illness they don’t want to catch. We’re sitting at a greasy spoon eating fries and gravy, drinking coffee.

  “You know,” Ginger says, “you used to be a lot more fun.” I can tell she’s angry for some reason, glaring at me, stabbing her fries in Rosalie’s gravy. It’s obvious they’ve been talking about this, because Rosalie looks panicked, like she’s thinking maybe she’ll go to the washroom right about now.

  “You spend too much time with Marty. I don’t know what you think is so great about Marty. She’s not a normal person.”

  “What do you want me to say?” I ask, and it’s a real question. But Ginger doesn’t take it that way.

  “See, Hazel? That’s what I mean. You think it’s everybody else’s problem. You totally change, and it’s everybody else that’s screwed up, right?”