Thirteen Shells Page 5

  “Mums and dads aren’t always good to each other,” Dad said. But it never means it’s Shell’s fault. He promised he’d stay in the house until Mum got home.

  Shell counted the beeps of a snowplow and the cars going slow until one stopped in the driveway. It was Barb Nutt who drove Mum back. Mum hugged Shell at the top of the stairs. Her glasses fell off. Without the thick lenses and round frames, Mum was not Mum, but the faraway girl from the pictures in Mum’s underwear drawer. “It’s not your fault,” Mum told Shell just like Dad did.

  Dad pushes up his glasses and opens the lid on the turntable. He shows Shell how to remove a record from the sleeve, touching only the edges. Just as the needle connects with the sound of clapping and whistling, Dad says, “The Easter Bunny is a load of rubbish, kiddo.” Then Leonard Cohen’s deep God voice cuts in. She’s to listen carefully to the lyrics.

  Shell and Mum make a million little Ukrainian piroshky for Kremski when he comes for Easter dinner the next day. The smell of fried onions and mushrooms that began after breakfast deepens, spilling out the open windows along with Mum’s radio opera, this being Saturday.

  Dad bought a leg of lamb to go with baby-size potatoes. But first there will be borscht and a full course of appetizers: herring in sour cream, semi-ripened dills, fish roe, and black bread. The way Dad cooks for him, you’d think Kremski is missing the Soviet Union. But Mum says that, really, Kremski is happy as a clam eating his chicken dinners before he starts his Swiss Chalet shifts.

  “That’s why he came to Canada,” she says.

  “For the tangy sauce?”

  Mum nods. “That’s exactly it.”

  When Mum goes down to change the laundry, Shell sits on the back porch with one of the books Mum got at the library: Freckle Juice. The clothesline, from the porch all the way to Mum and Dad’s pottery studio, is crammed with pyjamas and bedding, but not underpants; those get hung in the basement. And in the middle — too high for Shell to reach — is Kevin, pinched to the line by the tips of his long skinny ears. His fur is no longer bubblegum colour but peachy, and the grey parts — paws, belly, ears — are as white as the sheets fluttering adjacent. Along with dirt and grime, most of Kevin’s stick-on face is gone too; only the plastic whiskers, lower lip, and inward-looking left eye remain.

  Shell sets an overturned bushel basket under the line. She has to really stretch to connect with Kevin’s damp paws. Her tug is closed-eyed and hard. Clothespins go flying. Teetering, clean sheets rippling around her, she holds Kevin close, smelling sun and Mum and lemon soap. The bottom of the dried-out basket gives way. Shell and Kevin tumble into a patch of fresh-turned soil already seeded with beans. Dad gets mad.

  “That basket was perfect for weeding.”

  “But the pins were hurting Kevin,” Shell says, brushing dirt from the rabbit’s mashed face.

  Dad narrows his eyes and clicks his dentures. “Who’s he, the Easter Bunny?”

  Above, the clothesline begins to creak. Mum is on the porch, pegs between her lips.

  A bed sheet cuts between them.

  “Maybe,” Shell says.

  Shell wakes to birds; her curtains smoulder in half-light. Across the hall, Mum is snoring — that low-pitched gargling before she wakes — and the air is hung with the mushroom and onion of yesterday’s cooking.

  It’s Easter.

  The hallway is silent. Shell switches off the light that stays on all night and then — without brushing her teeth or peeing — goes down the stairs. Somewhere, behind the couch or high on a windowsill, a Laura Secord egg will be hiding, or else a hollow rabbit with candied eyes and a tiny brass bell around its neck. Then there’ll be the assortment of foil-wrapped eggs tucked around the house.

  Down the stairs — one, two, three steps — Shell stops. Frozen as a Popsicle. There on the landing, where the stairs twist before descending into the front hall, is Kevin. Shell had snuggled him in her arms as she went to sleep, thinking about those boot-style roller skates and also no nuclear bombs or famine in Africa. But now he’s face down on the landing, his head wrenched to one side. The long rusted pipe under which he lies is bent into an exaggerated U, for the strike that killed him had been just that forceful. Positioned near his right paw is a brown paper bag, from which jelly beans spill, a rainbow of them, all the way down the stairs.

  The older grades at school eat jelly beans; so do kids with good allowances or paper routes. Edibles downtown at the market sells really fresh jelly beans from England, along with chocolate-covered potato chips and tiny chocolate bottles with real booze inside.

  Shell goes back upstairs to pee, brushes her teeth. Dad’s joke is still there. She tiptoes down, stepping over Kevin, the pipe, the jelly beans, and hunts through the silent house for a few eggs wrapped in bright foil or a hollow rabbit. She even checks in the fridge, garlicky with marinating lamb, inside the stove, and in the shed. There is nothing but a new pair of gardening gloves in the berry basket she’d left on the porch.

  Shell sits on the bottom stair. She doesn’t want to cry but does a bit when she picks up a yellow jelly bean and all it tastes like is the Freshie always in Vicki’s fridge. A green one also tastes of Freshie.

  “Happy Easter!” Mum says. She is standing on the landing. Her hair is flat on one side and her bathrobe skims the ground. “What happened to your rabbit?” Mum’s frowning.

  Shell swallows the candy in her mouth and looks away. She will not eat any more of Dad’s jelly beans.

  “Oh, Shell.” Mum releases Kevin from beneath the pipe, fluffs him up. Then, stair by stair, she gathers up the jelly beans, along with dust and stray hairs, then gives Shell back her rabbit.

  “We’ll go to Laura Secord and get a chocolate bunny.” On Monday the leftovers will be on sale.

  Shell shakes her head. Instead of chocolate she wants the boot kind of roller skates. “I prayed for the Easter Bunny to bring them.”

  Mum whisks eggs and milk in a metal bowl. Peameal bacon goes in the big iron frying pan and also there are hot cross buns, like they’re supposed to have at Easter. “Maybe next year for the skates, Shell,” Mum says, nibbling a hot cross raisin.

  Upstairs, the water is running. Dad is brushing his teeth.

  “It’s okay to not think it’s funny, Shell,” Mum says.

  Shell nods. Her mouth still tastes like jelly bean. “Can we get a Cadbury Creme Egg instead of Laura Secord?”

  Before Mum can answer, Dad comes down and switches on his Handel’s Messiah record, extra loud.

  Shell butters everyone a toasted hot cross bun. The choir voices brighten her skin with tingle. Mum and Dad laugh when she says the music makes her love Jesus.

  “I hear you had an intruder last night,” Kremski says. Kremski’s beard is full of bald spots from the small pink scars that Mum says will never grow hair. His baggy jeans are always falling down though he lives on French fries and cherry pies that come in boxes. When, at a dinner party, Shell offered him one of her best barrettes to keep his oily bangs from getting in his eyes, the grown-ups all laughed. Kremski smiles at Shell, his brown teeth are purple with borscht, and there is sour cream daubed along his moustache, like snow on pine needles.

  Kremski toasts Dad as a vigilante hero and they both laugh. “A real John Wayne.”

  After everyone’s had seconds of lamb and potatoes and the piroshky are gone, Mum puts the coffee on and slices the poppy seed cake Kremski brought. Even with a smear of honey Shell doesn’t like the cake’s bitter taste and Kremski doesn’t eat his slice either.

  “Ehk,” he says. “I never really went in for that seedy stuff.”

  “Shell,” Mum says, “maybe you can share your jelly beans?”

  “Beans!” Kremski cries, showing his metal molars. “The magic fruit!”

  Mum puts the candies into a glass bowl, picks out a long dark hair. She gives Shell directions to pass it around the
table. Everyone nibbles the orange and lime first.

  “All are Freshie flavoured,” Shell says.

  Mum and Dad and Kremski don’t know what Freshie tastes like. And neither should Shell, Dad reminds her. “What else do you have at Vicki’s?”

  With a rolled Drum smoking between his fingers, Kremski sucks on the black ones left over.

  “Licorice!” That’s his favourite.

  After the bowl goes around a few times, Kremski pats his lean belly and asks Shell if now he’s going to have jelly toots.

  “Maybe.” Shell frowns. “But no chocolate toots. ‘Cause I didn’t get any chocolate.”

  Dad says Shell always thinks she’s so hard done by. She should ask Kremski about that. So she does and finds out that Soviet chocolates are always’’ old and crumbly. But the wrappers are beautiful, illustrated like art pieces — Kremski especially remembers the wrapper with Misha the bear from childhood stories.

  Dad and Kremski take their Scotch and cigars out back, along with one of Dad’s pottery ashtrays. Shell sits on the back steps, reading, drinking in the rich brew of cigar smoke along with her warm milk. Dad and Kremski shake their heads and talk a lot about the usa. The words they use are long and sticky: fundamentalist, hegemony, ideology. “Imagine if Ronald Reagan actually gets in?”

  Kremski keeps forgetting you’re not supposed to inhale. When he stops coughing long enough to take a drink, the sound of something scraping comes from out on the front sidewalk. Then a trundling, like wheels. It starts quietly and builds. Could be a skateboard — that big kid down the street had his out yesterday. But this noise isn’t steady. Rather, the scrapes alternate with the jagged rolling: side to side, side to side, like cross-country skiing.

  Shell wonders what took Vicki so long to come and show off her new roller skates. Dad and Kremski compete to blow the biggest smoke ring and Shell stares hard at her book, waiting for Vicki to go by. And she does. But then in a few minutes the scraping passes by again, and again, until it sounds like Vicki is skating rough, clompy circles right out front on Cashel Street.

  “Vicki’s outside,” Mum says from the couch as Shell passes through the house on her way upstairs. A lone green jelly bean hides in the carpet of the landing. Shell scoops it up and, as she shoves it deep in her jeans’ pocket, crawls into her room and up to the window.

  The street lights are coming on now, but Vicki’s mum doesn’t shout for her to come back home. Vicki’s new helmet, elbow pads, and knee pads are so white they glow in the dusk. And she needs them, for each time she attempts to skate backwards, she falls — hard — onto either the sidewalk or Shell’s boulevard. When she lands, she waggles her feet in the air and laughs, giving Shell a good look at her new Easter skates — the adjustable key kind. They have the same wide plastic toe guards and ankle straps as Shell’s; the only difference is that Vicki’s straps are Velcro. Hanging from a shoelace around her neck is the big metal key for opening and closing the hinges to accommodate a kid’s growing feet.

  Shell keeps her light switched off. Through the open window, the chill breeze pimples her arms. But still Vicki does not go home. The white sweep of street light on the sidewalk is for Vicki the flashing disco lights of Bootin’ roller rink, across which Vicki tries skating backwards, again and again. And then she makes it, and off she goes, swishing her hips for propulsion, twisting around to see what’s coming behind, brand new skate key swinging from the string around her neck.

  Mum has stretched Kevin out on Shell’s bed. Shell crawls in beside him and wakes in the morning still in her clothes. Mum or Dad has pulled up her blankets and their room is dark, so Shell is quiet on the stairs. She eats the top off a hot cross bun and unlocks the back door with a tea towel because the handle is so stiff. The skate key is still buried beneath the cardinal bush.

  Shell skates over to Vicki’s, tripping on a sidewalk crack just once, and sits on the steps. The angel-brick bungalow is sleeping. When the cartoons come on, Shell knocks on the living room window.

  “Hi, Shell,” Vicki says through the window screen. “I like your skates.” Then the door opens. Vicki is in her new skates. “My mum let me sleep in them.” She is chewing a pink Pop-Tart. She gives Shell a bite and sits down. The pastry is cold and hard, the goop inside is sweet.

  “Don’t you toast it?”

  Vicki shrugs. Her toenails are polished lilac. “What did the Easter Bunny get you?”

  Shell says, “Kevin got hit on the head with an iron pipe and almost died.”

  Vicki’s eyes get wide. Red Pop-Tart filling makes whiskers at the corners of her lips.

  Shell’s voice gets proud. “But then we had a jelly bean feast. My dad knows where to get really fresh English ones.”

  “Like the big kids?” Vicki wants to know. She’s never had a jelly bean.

  Shell digs the green one out of her pocket and gives it to Vicki.

  “Yummy,” Vicki says. “It’s just like Freshie.” She sighs. She wishes her dad was there for Easter too. “It would be better than new skates or anything.”

  “Why does your dad not live here?” Shell says.

  “Because he doesn’t love my mum and my mum doesn’t love him, but they both love me all the same. I didn’t do anything wrong,” Vicki says.

  “Oh,” says Shell.

  Before Vicki can ask Shell if Dad loves Mum and Mum loves Dad and Shell has to say she doesn’t really know, Shell grabs the railing and pulls herself up.

  “Let’s skate.”

  Tooth Fairy

  The pottery studio in the backyard is too dusty for painting, so Dad and Kremski go in on it together and rent a painting studio above Sorensen Sports on Clayton Street. Saturdays, Dad and Shell drop Mum to volunteer at the co-op, and then Shell climbs in the front seat and she and Dad drive to the studio. Dad stretches canvas or talks to Kremski if he’s around, and Shell sits on the wide window ledge watching Clayton Street below. No one, not Mum or Vicki or anyone in Shell’s grade three class, knows how small downtown is from up here. Even on a Saturday it all sounds pretty quiet. Sometimes people stand on the corner or in front of the bank long enough Shell can draw their picture. Shell wants to know how she would look if she could see herself from the third floor but doesn’t know how to do that. She wonders because from up in Dad’s studio she sees things only God maybe could. Like people looking a bit sad even if they’re smiling or at Christmas when the parade goes by and Santa’s sleigh is full of Bud cans. Or the time when this boy on a bike got hit by a car and a box of Smarties went flying right out of his back pocket. All those chocolates — tiny polka dots of pink and yellow and red — had scattered across the grey asphalt and also there was a small puddle of blood where the boy had stopped skidding. Dad went down and joined the gathering crowd, and Kremski called later that night to say Dad had flashed by on the local news.

  Dad used to go paint just on Saturday, but now it’s evenings too. After supper, a Thermos of coffee and a slice of loaf cake in his shoulder bag, he walks down the drive and turns left. But he can’t leave without making Mum mad by rinsing his denture plate in the kitchen sink. One winter on a prairie ice pond when Dad was not much older than Shell, a slapshot took out five of his upper teeth. Dad’s a caveman without those dentures, especially when he pulls out his ears and rolls back his eyes.

  “Bring something back tonight, Dad?” Shell calls down from her front window. Dad waves, says he’ll see, but really Shell can already guess what it’ll be. Tuesday’s garbage night, so Wednesday there’s something from the trash in front of the stationery store: accounting ledgers or typewriter ribbon or outdated calendars. That or maybe some loose tennis balls or sticks of ski wax from Sorensen’s. Wednesdays, Kremski washes dishes at Swiss Chalet, so Dad brings home round plastic boxes with barbecued chicken and soft fries inside, a white bun that’s just toasted, and there’s never enough of that red gravy sauce that goes best with the bun.
Mum warms up these chicken dinners for lunch the next day, Thursday. Today is Thursday. On his way home, Dad stops at Enriched Bakery on Derby Street where some friend who works there saves day-old pastry. Dad says every shift this friend finds bums scrounging in the garbage bins.

  “Behind any of those restaurants, Shell, the Dumpsters are brimming with perfectly good food.” Dad shakes his head. “And yet men go hungry.”

  But the bums don’t get everything, because Friday mornings there’s almost always a paper sack getting greasy on the kitchen counter. There’s ham and cheddar biscuits inside, sugared apple strudel, sausages wrapped in soda pastry, and sometimes almond croissants or the chocolate bread that Mum ate for breakfast in Paris when she lived there at age eighteen. But Mum won’t eat the chocolate bread from Enriched or anything else from there. Dad clicks his denture plate with his tongue as Mum scoops herself porridge.

  “All the more for us, Shell,” he says.

  Nights, after the dishes, Mum plays the records Dad doesn’t like. And now that Dad sleeps more and more on the couch, the pile of them by the record player gets bigger. The street lights will be on and Mum will sit in the Quebec rocker, her toes hooked over the broken rungs, mending clothes with a needle so fine it’s near invisible. At the harvest table, Shell draws in the margins of her school booklets because she doesn’t like the homework. They hum along with Joni Mitchell or the McGarrigles, but mostly it’s Bob Dylan, who Dad says is a hypocrite. Shell doesn’t know what hyprocrite means, but she uses it on kids in her class anyway. Well, whatever it is can’t be that bad if Mum plays Bob Dylan over and over while she’s patching Dad’s shirts. There’s that one song she likes about the lady with the Egyptian ring who is an artist and don’t look back. Mum has a scarab ring in her jewellery box upstairs and making pottery counts as being an artist and because she’s a grown-up she has no place to fall either, right? It’s a love song for Mum, or once was. And maybe it still is, though Mum’s black hair is greying and her feet are covered in corn pads and there’s a drip of tomato sauce down the front of her blouse from supper.