Swing in the House and Other Stories Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Copyright

  What I Really Did

  Swing in the House

  Something Steady

  The Perfect Guy

  Madison’s Bag

  Indelible Markers

  TOM AND CHRISTOS

  PERSEPHONE AND HADES

  Between Black and White

  Marilyn Bombolé

  Doppelgänger

  The Dare

  The Holder

  Elephant Heart

  A Bear, Alone

  Fruit, Nut, Reality

  The Search

  The Jumpsuit

  With Friends Like These

  Acknowledgements

  Cover End

  SWING IN THE HOUSE

  Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Canada Book Fund of the Department of Canadian Heritage, and the Société de développement des entreprises culturelles du Québec (SODEC).

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarities to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Esplanade series editor: Dimitri Nasrallah

  Cover design: David Drummond

  Typeset in Minion and Mrs Eaves by Simon Garamond

  Printed by Marquis Printing Inc.

  Copyright © Anita Anand 2015.

  Dépôt légal, Library and Archives Canada and

  Bibliothèque nationale du Québec, second quarter 2015.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Anand, Anita, author

  Swing in the house: and other stories / Anita Anand.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-55065-398-4 (pbk.). – ISBN 978-1-55065-407-3 (epub)

  I. Title.

  PS8601.N28S95 2014 C813’.6 C2014-908333-5 C2014-908334-3

  Published by Véhicule Press, Montréal, Québec, Canada

  www.vehiculepress.com

  Distribution in Canada by LitDistCo

  www.litdistco.ca

  Distributed in the U.S. by Independent Publishers Group

  www.ipgbook.com

  à Frédéric:

  me voilà, encore ébahie

  What I Really Did

  You say you want to know what we did on our summer vacation, but do you really want to know? Why would you ask teenagers this question? You know that for most of our supposed vacation I was taking remedial math. You don’t know about the last two weeks. All right.

  On the last day of August I travelled to Barcelona with my parents. My mother had an obsession with mosaics. The trip was a present from my dad to my mom. They brought me along because what else were they supposed to do with a thirteen-year-old girl? It was too late to send me to camp. The hotel was a three-star, four-storey job. Our room had a double bed and a cot in the corner for me. The comforters were plush and orange. Not super exciting, although my mother kept exclaiming to my father how clean everything was, as if she had been expecting to be living in filth for two weeks.

  The two of them went off every day to look at tiles. I always pretended to be sleeping in the morning when they set off, so after trying to wake me up a few times they would leave me alone. As soon as they left, I would raid my mother’s cosmetic bag, put on loads of makeup, a long t-shirt but no shorts, just underwear, and flip-flops, and run to the plaza by the magazine stores, the plaza they didn’t know about, where the other putas stood around chewing gum and tottering on their high heels. I say “other” but I was not really a prostitute, just a wannabe, just a kid travelling with her parents hoping something would happen to her.

  I never actually got picked up. I don’t think it was because I was too young. The makeup made me look almost ten years older, I swear. Maybe it was the flip-flops.

  However, on the last day, I went to another plaza where artisans were selling their stuff and where a group of Peruvian buskers were playing. I spoke to a beautiful man who was selling cheap jewellery, and to my relief he understood my Spanish, whereas none of the locals could. This was because Jorge was Peruvian, and Mr. Cortes teaches us South American, not European Spanish. I joked that I wanted to buy some jewellery but had no money, so would he just give me some? He picked a necklace off its hook. It consisted of a pewter chain with a long cross made out of wood, crudely painted green and studded with tiny tiles. He put it around my neck. Then he asked me if I wanted to go somewhere with him.

  Jorge was tall, had very dark skin, very long straight black hair, and stunning green eyes that were much more like jewels than anything he was selling. He packed his stuff in a little wooden case, took my hand and led me out of the square. I thought of saying “I am thirteen” but the words didn’t come out. We went in a little red door and then up a set of narrow stairs, into a small, barely furnished apartment. We went into his bedroom. There was a mattress on the floor and a light bulb hanging from the ceiling. He motioned to me to lie down. I asked him to tell me about where he was from, but he was one of those people who looks really artistic but does not have an imagination or a flair for words. He just said he was from Peru and that he was an Indian. I asked him to tell me about his family and he just snorted. I gave up and let him kiss me and pull up my shirt and kiss my breasts. He took his jeans off and started to pull off his underwear and I asked him about condoms. He said he would be careful.

  My Canadian education asserted itself.

  “Necissita usar un condom,” I repeated several times until he gave up and put his pants back on. He lay on his back, smiled at the ceiling and shook his head, sighed, smiled at me, shrugged, and told me I was killing him, that he was in agony. He kept his hand on his crotch and I looked at it curiously. I hadn’t actually ever seen an erection before, and wished I had been paying more attention when he was in his underpants. I asked him if he wanted his necklace back and he just laughed and asked me how old I was. I turned onto my stomach and put my head in the pillow so that he couldn’t see me blush.

  After a while he said he had to go run some errands. Did I feel like waiting for him? I said it depended on what time it was. He laughed at that too and asked why. He said life was too short to worry about what time it was. I told him that he was right and that it didn’t matter. I told him that because I couldn’t very well say it was because I had to be back at the hotel room ten minutes before my parents returned so that I could wash my face and put some pants on.

  He got up and went down the stairs and out the door. About a minute later, I went out too. Suddenly I realized I was lost. I hadn’t paid attention to how we had gotten here from the plaza. I ran a few blocks to make sure I wouldn’t run into him, and just started walking any which way. The air was starting to get sticky and smell like meat. After what seemed like an hour I heard Peruvian flutes and ran towards them. I froze as I spotted my parents walking hand in hand, their backs to me. I ran in the other direction for several blocks and found myself back at the end of Jorge’s street. Jorge was knocking on his own door. He was holding a small white paper bag with a picture of a green cross.

  Before he could turn and notice me I flew back the way I had come, and miraculously found myself back in the street of our hotel. Sitting on a bench by the door were a Turkish couple my parents and I had met in the elevator. They squinted at me curiously but did not seem to recognize me. I ran into the hotel, washed my face in the bathroom on the mezzanine, and took the fire escape up to our room. I crossed my fingers and prayed that my parents hadn’t come back yet. I turned the key in the lock and crept inside.

  They didn’t notice I wasn’t wearing pants. What they noticed was the necklace.

&nbsp
; “That’s beautiful,” my mother said.

  “You should have let us buy that for you, honey,” my father said. “We’ve been looking for something for you. We feel so bad that you’ve been left on your own so much.”

  “How much did you pay for that?” my mother asked, opening her purse.

  Swing in the House

  One day, Julie came home from a doctor’s appointment to find Mike washing his hair in the sink. He looked up at her warily.

  “It’s easier to clean up,” he said by way of an explanation before ducking under the tap again.

  What was he talking about? Curious, Julie peeked into the sink: mixed with the white foam from the shampoo were heavy purple drops. These formed muddy brown rivulets that cascaded down the white enamel.

  She was dumbfounded. For a few minutes, she watched him. Who is this man?

  “I didn’t know you dyed your hair,” she said.

  “Well, I’m stopping now. Too bloody messy.”

  “What colour is your hair naturally?” Julie asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Reddish brown, I guess.”

  “Well, that’s a nice colour.” She remembered the school photo on the mantelpiece at his parents’ house. Of course, it made sense. Red-haired little boys didn’t suddenly turn completely raven-haired.

  Almost a year they had been married. And he still had secrets.

  Mike snorted, misunderstanding the disappointment in her voice.

  “I can’t take it anymore,” he said. “You’re winning, okay? It’s a war of attrition, and you’re winning.”

  ***

  Patty was talking about her pregnancy, about all the vitamins and examinations and tests. One test had a woman’s name. Eliza.

  “What’s that?” Julie asked.

  “An AIDS test. Didn’t you have one?” Patty said. She and her husband Lionel had dropped in with their six-month-old daughter, Angeline. Now the two couples sat across from each other on the rolled-out futon, their babies asleep in the middle. It was mid-December, 1989. Outside, thick snow was falling over Montreal.

  “Well, they made me have one,” complained Patty. “It was negative, of course.”

  “Funny. How come they never asked me to?”

  “Come on. You know. Look at your husband,” Lionel said, laughing.

  Mike and Julie looked at each other, baffled.

  “What?” they said together.

  “He’s white,” Lionel said. “I’m black. And they’re really racist.”

  Lionel and Patty both laughed, as if this was uproariously funny. Julie looked at Lionel’s inky black face, his startling white grin, then at Mike, pink with embarrassment, looking very privileged, English, and unattractive, like a member of the Royal Family. She felt a protective ache in her chest.

  Baby Angeline woke up then, with a howl of protest.

  The two couples lived around the corner from each other on the Plateau Mont-Royal. When Patty and Lionel left with Angeline, Julie and Mike stood at the door and waved. The fresh air felt good after hours spent in their overheated four-and-a-half. Huge snowflakes, the size of small birds, fell from the sky. Julie hadn’t slept well and her nerves were raw. She had been having trouble following the conversation.

  Many things had happened in the last month: the Berlin Wall had come down. Julie had given birth to a son. What she felt for him was beyond anything she had ever experienced before. Eleven women had been gunned down at a university campus a few kilometres away. In retaliation for the university massacre, a woman had threatened the male babies in the maternity wards of all the hospitals in Montreal. Julie thought she might be cracking up, or that her marriage was breaking up; she wasn’t sure which. She wasn’t sure when it had actually started. It seemed to her that she and Mike hadn’t spoken to each other in a long time. He surprised her by speaking to her now.

  “Actually,” Mike said, as he closed the door. “I’ve had an AIDS test.”

  Paul began to stir. Julie picked him up and laid him across her chest. Eyes still closed, his tiny hand waved like a sea frond and brushed hers. She held his fingers and thought how fragile he looked. Don’t rock the boat. An expression she had taught Lionel, who was from Zaire. Also, walking on ice. Tread carefully. Her mind was full of fortune-cookie warnings. So she said simply, in an even voice, “Why?”

  “Well, you were pregnant. I thought I should.”

  “But you said nothing happened. You said you only kissed Ishl.”

  “Oh, please drop it. It’s over. Please, for him.”

  That is who the AIDS test was for. Of course. For the baby. Drop it. Let sleeping dogs lie.

  Mike turned on the TV. On the news, students in the Czech Republic were about to honour the twentieth anniversary of the death of a man who had set himself on fire to protest the Soviet occupation. Or more precisely, the reporter was saying, the demoralization caused by the occupation. Julie stood behind the couch and watched her husband watch TV.

  Did they love each other? Had they ever? Was it just that what they felt for their son made their feelings for each other pale in comparison? Watching her son sleep, she thought the word love didn’t begin to describe her feelings and Mike’s for this new perfect being they had somehow thoughtlessly conjured up out of nothing. A new word was needed, a verb that meant I would immolate myself for you.

  Julie woke up the next morning with a headache, thinking she had better check the basement, wondering how to get there, why she hadn’t noticed any stairs, realizing with great relief that they didn’t have a basement, that she had only been dreaming.

  She had dreamt that Mike hid Ishl in the basement, fucking her more often than he did her. That she had chased her out once, but would probably have to do it regularly, as Ishl just laughed at all the cruel things she said to her. She thought of telling Mike about the dream, but knew that he would probably just clam up. Then she would fly into a rage, and he would say something contemptuous about monogamy and the middle classes, which he pronounced clawses. A sentence seemed to click on and off in her brain like a neon sign, announcing the truth, the answer: she and Mike were not compatible. But she wasn’t ready to let that brittle insight penetrate her heart.

  Many people had observed Julie and Mike’s first meeting. He was obnoxiously handsome and knew it. You could see it in his eyes as he rose from his chair and introduced himself to her at the party. A glass of vodka in one hand. Absolut suave. Mid-Atlantic accent. He had her at hel-looo, all her friends said. The heady scent of linden trees in Daniella’s garden, the orange glow of the tealights, the way he kept making her smile with his smile. All seemed to emanate from his almost cartoonish good looks. Thick black hair, fine features, muscular build. A Saturday-morning superhero, a fairytale prince, a man modelling boxer shorts in a catalogue.

  She dropped by where he worked, saying she had being doing an errand in the neighbourhood. Mike sat in his studio and bragged about his soundproof walls. Twelve hours a day he sat there composing advertising jingles. He did that with the help of various beeping, blinking electronic devices; occasionally he took his clarinet out of the case tucked away at his feet. Sometimes he took weekends off. He derived equal pleasure, he told her warningly, from his work and from his solitude. He told her that he had once found a similar sort of happiness on a trip to Burma.

  “A cliché, really,” he said, though he didn’t seem embarrassed. “You know, motorbike, incognito, wind in your hair, destination undecided.”

  His hair had the thickness and gloss of the coat of a wild animal. She wanted to grab it in her hands. She didn’t like the idea of him on that motorbike. She imagined him carelessly careening around a precipice, being thrown off and flying through the air. What would happen to that pretty face of his?

  He would be safer with her, she decided.

  Their first night together, as if sensing danger, he told her he didn’t want to get involved.

  “I know,” she said, “That’s all right.”

  But somehow she
got pregnant and he was the one who decided they had to get married. Her terror, her feeling of utter stupidity, the lost look on her face, seemed to seduce him completely, loins and heart, maybe for the first time. Anyone could have told them that it wouldn’t last very long.

  ATTRITION n.1. the act of wearing away or the state of being worn away, as by friction 2. Constant wearing down to weaken or destroy (often in the phrase war of attrition) 3. Geography – the grinding down of rock particles by friction during transportation by water, wind or ice. Compare abrasion 4. Theol. Sorrow for sin arising from fear of damnation, esp. as contrasted with contrition, which arises purely from love of God (C14: from Late Latin attrition a rubbing against something, from Latin atterere, to weaken, from terere to rub.)

  “Jesus,” said Mike. “You really should read more.”

  “I am only twenty-two,” Julie said, though she realized it was a weak argument; Mike was four years older. She realized that what she didn’t understand wasn’t the word. It was what he was trying to say.

  They had gotten on that train again, the one that could only lead to another fight that would leave her confused. She put her coat on, packed baby Paul in the snuggly and walked to Patty and Lionel’s. She tried to take her mind off things by admiring the beauty of her neighbourhood: wrought-iron staircases, pretty, old-style masonry, funkily painted walk-up duplexes and triplexes. She walked up the winding staircase of her friends’ apartment, knocked on the door and then just opened it, as was their arrangement.

  Patty was making a cake. She told Julie the story of her sister’s life. Three kids and an abusive alcoholic husband. He called the kids “shits,” raped her, told her she was ugly, drove like a madman.