Thirteen Shells Read online

  “Or if I went and threw it all down the sewer drain? Is that corrupt?”

  Dad furrows his brow. “That doesn’t make sense, Shell. Why would you do that?”

  Shell asks Dad what he owes Kremski money for.

  “The mortgage,” Dad tells her.

  Before she can ask what a mortgage is, Vicki comes by on her training wheels. “Having a barbecue?” she calls out.

  “Waiting for Jégou.”

  “Jay who?”

  “Jay-goo.”

  Vicki says she’ll go look up the street. She rides back and asks if Goo-Goo is coming in a taxi. Shell looks at Dad, but he shakes his head.

  “Oh, ‘cause I saw a lady in a taxi up on Maurice Street.” Then she turns her bike around in the driveway and pedals off. “Time for M*A*S*H.”

  Dad has another beer and Shell a lemonade. Mum brings out a bowl of crackers and a plate of cheddar. “Well, I’m not surprised with that character.” Mum shakes her head.

  Dad says nothing.

  “He’s gonna come,” Shell says. She doesn’t tell Dad she’s praying to God for it.

  Cashel Street gets busy with traffic cutting through to avoid some construction. Though there are lots of cars that seem to be slowing down in a meaningful way, none pulls up in front of the house. After a while the air fills with the smell of hot charcoal and then the smoky-sweet of grilling meat.

  Dad says Shell raised people’s consciousness today, even Kremski’s. That means people will act more reasonably about what they eat and be thankful for it. If she waits for Halloween, she can put the money in her unicef box.

  “But maybe by that time the famine will be over?”

  Dad doesn’t think so.

  “Or we could put it towards the mortgage.”

  Dad sips his beer instead of answering.

  When the street lights come on, Mum says they’ve waited long enough, it’s time for supper. The pesto goes on whole wheat spaghetti; the homemade pasta will keep in the fridge until tomorrow. Dad and Shell keep watching out the window, and every time a car goes past a little slowly or a car door slams, they jump up.

  “Is that Jégou?”

  The Corn Flakes box gets so dusty Mum wipes it down with a damp dish towel.

  “Are Corn Flakes expensive? Is that why we can’t eat them?”

  “No, it’s because they’re cheap,” Dad says. “And that they’re American.”

  When Shell says no, they are made right here in Somerset, Dad tells her Kellogg’s is part of a larger network of American global imperialism — same as McDonald’s, Burger King, Ford, and Bruce Springsteen.

  “And Miles Davis?” says Shell, because she hates the shrill sound of his trumpet. “Why’s he better than the Boss?”

  Dad sends Shell to her room for talking back and when she’s allowed to come down for supper, the rooster is gone from its perch on the fridge.

  Mum’s face is wet from standing over the spaghetti pot. The pesto is warming on the counter next to that carrot salad with raisins and nuts that Shell picks out.

  “What about the Corn Flakes? Does that mean Jégou’s not coming?”

  Dad sips his gin and tonic. He smiles and says the Corn Flakes are on their way to Uganda. Shell owes him the seven dollars and twenty-five cents in the kefir jar for postage.

  “Like you owe Kremski?” Shell says. “Is that what a mortgage is? Spending money that’s not yours?”

  Dad sets down his drink and looks hard at Shell.

  When Shell says, “Or that’s corruption?” Dad pushes his glasses up his nose. He’s thinking of a punishment. Shell steps back just as Mum hands Shell forks and knives for the table, three cloth napkins, crispy from the line.

  Now it’s Mum’s eyes that are hard. “Enough about politics, Shell,” she says. “You have your whole adult life to worry about that.”

  Really, the Corn Flakes are on the high shelf in the broom closet, behind the Javex, Ajax, and packets of bright-coloured sponges. For weeks Shell sits on the floor and looks up at the box, the green and red just visible behind the cleaners, and she prays for Jégou to still please come.

  She manages to leave the Corn Flakes until late in September. By the time Mrs. Ball introduces Shell’s grade four class to the “Countries in Need” unit of Social Studies, Jégou is nine weeks late. For the main project, everyone in the class has to pick a country and make a report. Instead of reading encyclopedias when they go downstairs to the library, Shell finds a corner and reads Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret for the tenth time. The very next week, she hands in the stuff she has on Uganda and the whole class says she cheated.

  How’d she do it so fast?

  Look how perfect it is.

  She couldn’t have done it herself.

  That picture’s a fake. Who ever saw a hand that small?

  I bet it’s the hand of a little monkey.

  No, her dad did it — they make all that weird stuff behind their house.

  Shell says she had her own fundraising campaign in the summertime. She has her T-shirt and the seven dollars and twenty-five cents still in the kefir jar to prove it. That shuts them up. But then Mrs. Ball says handing in work you’ve already done is a kind of cheating.

  “Like corruption?”

  Mrs. Ball tilts her head and thinks. To be fair to everyone in the class, Shell will have to do her “Countries in Need” assignment over again.

  But Uganda’s the only country in need Shell knows.

  “How about another place in Africa, Shell, if that’s what interests you? They’re all in need, really. Like, whatever happened to that place, you know, Biafra, for example? Or, what’s it called, Ethiopia, there’s famines there sometimes.” Oh, and don’t forget that the work is due tomorrow.

  Shell was supposed to have gone to bed an hour ago. Through walnut branches and phone wires, Shell can see from Mum and Dad’s room right into the studio. Mum is mixing clay while Dad’s painting uptown. Yesterday, Mum and Dad didn’t talk for the whole day and for the first time ever Mum didn’t eat supper.

  “I’m going for a walk,” Mum had said. Shell watched Mum going down the street without even her purse. Dad and Shell ate minestrone soup thawed from the freezer, and because Shell finished her entire bowl, she got vanilla ice cream for dessert and an extra tablespoon of maple syrup. She was doing her homework when Barb Nutt drove Mum back home. If Barb is Mum’s best friend, she should come in the house and stay for dinner sometimes, like Kremski and Vicki. Instead, they just sat out front in Barb’s Volvo, talking and talking while the engine idled like Dad says is a waste. Then the house filled with Mum’s quiet footsteps and the smell of her buttered cinnamon toast.

  Above the studio, the three-quarter moon is marshmallow. A red kerchief ties back Mum’s curly hair, her plaid shirt rolled to the elbow, and heavy glasses slip down her nose. Crisp autumn air cools the house, though Dad put the storm windows on a few weeks back. By the low light coming in from the hall, Shell scans the books on Mum’s shelf. None are about a country in need. There’s lots of books on ancient civilizations, though, as well as a whole row on painters. At eye level is a shiny spine with bright yellow letters: Gauguin’s Tahiti.

  The house is silent and dark. Shell’s nose drips from the cold. She finds her paper scissors and spreads the book on her desk. The ladies in the paintings don’t look very hungry, but at least they are brown and their dresses kind of look like towels and no one seems to have shoes. The lettering in the book is too small and the words are too long, so Shell just makes up her own data. Like how there’s no men in any pictures of Tahiti because they all died in a war and the island is so far away hardly any tourists go there. The people eat nuts and berries, just like birds, and then they eat the birds too. Mrs. Ball asked for pictures of natives of the country. Shell tries to be careful as she snips out a painting of three nake
d girls on a beach, which she then glues onto a piece of cardboard. She also snips a map from near the beginning of the book, which fits alongside. The thick, glossy paper makes the pictures look better than they are. But it is all kind of messy, so no one will say Shell’s corrupt.

  Shell puts the book back on the shelf. Out in the studio, Mum hunches over her potter’s wheel, tongue between her teeth, rolling her shoulders as her fingers coax the wet clay into a wide, squat bowl. The kitchen still smells of the sausages and apples Mum made for supper. Apart from the brightness of the moon, the only light comes from the dim bulb glowing in the hood over the stove, and there is nothing to hear but the fridge. With the collapsible stool Mum keeps beside the stove, Shell climbs up and reaches into the broom closet. Behind the Javex and Ajax and sponges is the box of Corn Flakes.

  Shell tugs on the box, knocking the sponges to the floor. Shell thought the box would be kind of heavy, but instead it’s pretty hollow. She sits down on the floor, toast crumbs and dried peas littering the linoleum. The top flap opens easily; not only is it already unsealed, it has been opened many, many times before. Inside the crumpled bag there are only two handfuls of cereal left in the bottom, most of it just dust. Now it’s Mum who has done something corrupt.

  The remaining Kellogg’s Corn Flakes almost fill a breakfast bowl, which Shell tops with milk and brown sugar. Replacing the box just as it was, including putting back the packet of sponges, Shell carries her Corn Flakes up to her room. Usually Shell only ever eats at her desk if she is grounded. She keeps her lamp on low and tucks a pencil behind her ear — a flower, just like plump brown girls-in-need in the painting she clipped from Mum’s book. Shell slurps cereal from her spoon. The fine golden silt really does taste like corn, sweet and earthy, and the smell is just like driving though east end Somerset with Dad.

  Fair Trade

  Because Shell’s house is built on what used to be the neighbourhood dump — really it’s called a midden — every time Dad digs up more of the backyard’s grass, he finds some kind of treasure: a cat’s eye marble, a diamond of topaz glass, a hollow splint of chicken bone, a brass coin embossed with a ship Dad calls a schooner. Morning, before it gets too hot, Dad attacks a stretch of weedy grass beneath the high, wide windows of the backyard pottery studio. Mum’s inside the studio glazing mugs — it’s cool in there — shaking her head to the politics show on the radio.

  “Goddamn it.” Dad bounds over to the tomato cages. The squirrels tunnelled right underneath and — shit — they even dug up a couple of iris bulbs too. Buggers take just one bite and leave the rest to rot. That’s what Dad really hates, the waste of it. He rolls a ball of half-eaten fruit between his thick fingers and — “goddamn” — chucks it into the compost.

  “Maybe you should try the chili powder like Kremski said.”

  Dad doesn’t hear. Hands on his hips, he takes in the panorama of the garden. Soon the whole yard will be just berry bush and vegetable rows, plenty of herbs, nasturtium vines, and a patch of specialty irises. Thick beds of poppies and cosmos conceal the rusted fencing enclosing the yard, and even in winter they never need to buy root vegetables or pickles or pesto or tomato sauce or compote — Dad harvests so much for Mum to can, jar, and freeze, she’s started complaining.

  Dad scratches his beard and murmurs about the basil patch that’s coming up: he’d better lay chicken wire. He plunges his shovel into the sod. Stepping down on the blade, he pulls back, ripping out the grass by its roots.

  Shell uses a short red spade to tear away at the backyard too. As they go deeper into the dark soil, bright bits of treasure bubble to the surface. Each time Dad turns up something new, he whistles Shell over. Shell pokes around the shovelful of dirt he holds out. This time it is one of those decorative combs that ladies once stuck in their coiled-up piles of hair. Shell sucks in her breath and picks it out. The rhinestones lining the comb’s curved edge are almost all intact, but of its teeth, only three remain. The comb smiles at Shell: a toothless old woman, once beautiful.

  “Real tortoise,” Dad says, rubbing the comb on his jeans.

  He lifts it to the sun, which turns it amber yellow, just like the stains under the armpits of his T-shirt. Dad gives the comb back to Shell then picks up his shovel and heaves it deeper into the earth, glasses sliding down his nose.

  When it gets too hot in the garden, Shell follows Dad into the studio. She’d better go find someone to play with.

  “What about Mamoon?” Mum says.

  Mamoon goes to a special French school even in summer and lives in the apartments beside Cashel Street United Church. He’s older than Shell but is never allowed to do anything except on Saturdays or after five, and that’s only if his mum knows about it well beforehand.

  “She’s very protective,” Mum says, dipping her hands into a bucket of wet clay.

  “Why? Because he’s Muslim?” Mamoon’s mum has long yellow hair, blue eyes, skin as white as Elmer’s glue. It must be Mamoon’s dad who is the Muslim parent. Shell imagines him as Gandhi sitting cross-legged on a mat like in the book Mum borrowed from Barb Nutt, who said of Gandhi he was too busy making peace to be a good dad.

  “Or,” Mum says, “there’s always Vicki.”

  Shell washes the tortoise comb in the bird bath and, without taking off her sneakers, gets her purse from her room. Barb Nutt brought Shell the purse — her first such accessory — all the way from the east coast. The outside is red quilted fabric, but the inside is mustard yellow with flowers; a button in the shape of a scallop shell holds it shut. Barb gave it to Shell at the co-op store. Shell and Mum were in the freezing walk-in fridge arranging bulk bags of Parmesan cheese. Barb’s long curls looked even more white against her tan face. Barb was doing a summer course in Nova Scotia. “In a few years more, I’ll have a PhD in folklore,” she told Mum and Shell. She saw the purse and thought of Shell.

  Shell said thank you, shivering.

  Mum said, “You are just so brave to be pursuing what you love, Barb. Good for you.”

  Barb said, “Any woman can do it.” She looked at Mum and then Shell.

  Shell tucks the hair comb into the Nova Scotia purse and walks up the block. Vicki’s on her front porch, a colouring book open on her lap. A Cool Whip tub of crayons softens in a pool of sun. In the driveway, the chrome trimmings of Clarke’s emerald two-door gleam bright. He’ll be inside the angel-brick bungalow, watching TV in his La-Z-Boy, bamboo shades closed.

  “Look what I inherited from my great-great-grandmother,” Shell says, climbing the concrete stoop and holding out the comb. “She brought it all the way from the old country.”

  Vicki’s eyes get big. Her smudged fingers touch each of the comb’s sharp teeth.

  “What’s tortoise mean?”

  “Turtle.” Shell says they can make a trade. “Maybe for another nail polish. The last one’s all dried shut.”

  Vicki’s got a whole Barbie suitcase full of her mum’s old makeup, but slowly, piece by piece, it’s migrating to a shoebox hidden under Shell’s bed. Along with nail polishes she can’t unscrew, Shell’s got a chalky coral lipstick, a compact of orange rouge, a dry mascara, and a dull eye pencil that cuts into the lid if you press too hard.

  Vicki shakes her head. “Can’t trade you no more.”

  “Why?” Shell’s face gets hot and she wants to hit Vicki.

  Then Vicki’s eyes crinkle. “You gotta bring all my stuff back. Okay, Shell?”

  She rummages in the Cool Whip tub for a purple and starts scribbling. Vicki still likes colouring because she’s nine, a whole year and a bit younger than Shell. Vicki gets all the toys and stuff she wants, but she also gets swatted in the face for doing things like starting to eat before Clarke does. Clarke’s a foreman at Silverhorn Dairy. His right pointer finger got caught in the machine that puts the caps on milk jugs, so all that’s left of it is a shiny red hook from which he dangles his car keys. He’s skin
ny and pale from sleeping all day, and because Vicki’s mum is fat, Dad calls him Jack Sprat.

  “What stuff?” says Shell.

  “Our trades.” Vicki presses the crayon very hard into the butterfly outlined in her book.

  Because the only makeup Mum wears is some Vaseline on her lips, Shell doesn’t know what to do with the tubes and bottles in the shoebox. But she likes reading the Archie comics she got in exchange for the china teacup Dad dug up when he was putting in a trellis for the runner beans. Even better is how soft the Head & Shoulders shampoo gets her hair, well worth the tiny brass ring Mum found weeding.

  “But what about that ancient teacup I gave you?” Shell says, bending a warm red crayon into a U. “The princess ring? Or the pirate coins?”

  Vicki slams down her crayon. “Clarke says it’s just old garbage.”

  “It’s not, dummy,” Shell says. “You just don’t know antiques. My dad does, though. You’ve seen our house. All that old stuff’s worth a lot.”

  Vicki’s stayed for supper at Shell’s just once. Clutching the Strawberry Shortcake doll her dad sent up from Michigan, she had looked around at the dark, mismatched farmhouse antiques and the paintings and woven rugs hanging up on the walls, and after a while asked how come there was no TV. She was okay to drink her milk without chocolate syrup, but she wouldn’t put the stew in her mouth after Dad said it was moose. She did try the wild rice, though, but spit the first bite into her cloth napkin. Dad shook his head and talked about how many hungry children there are in the world while Mum made some toast and heated a can of baked beans. Then she took away Vicki’s stew and rice but not Shell’s, even though she wanted beans too.

  After that, Clarke started calling Shell a hillbilly.