Swing in the House and Other Stories Read online

  “Why do you think he tells her she is ugly?” Julie asked.

  “Oh, that’s the least horrible of his insults.”

  “What else does he say?” Julie asked, horrified and fascinated.

  “Every day he comes up with something that will hurt her more.”

  “Why? What has she done to him?”

  “Ishl has a theory…”

  “Oh yeah?” Julie said. She always kept her voice casual and her face neutral at the mention of that name; she was too proud to tell anyone of her suspicions. To most people, Ishl was a radical lesbian feminist set painter with entertaining takes on things. To Julie, she was a dangerous, though invisible, bisexual threat. She never saw Ishl, except at the occasional party, but she constantly felt her.

  “Yeah… it’s that… she refuses to leave.”

  “She refuses to leave?” Julie said, a slight ache developing in her chest.

  “Yes, Ishl thinks that’s what he does it for. He wants to force her to leave. Ishl calls it a war of attrition.”

  They use the same words. Julie forced herself to shrug, to breathe normally. There was a picture in her head of Mike and Ishl, standing close together at a party at the anarchist theatre where Ishl worked. Ishl had a radical, platinum haircut, an eyebrow piercing, a nose ring and several earrings. When Julie had come up to them, she heard Ishl whisper, “Oh, shit, here she is”, before she slid away, the back of her head like a light as she slipped through the knots of people. Julie wondered if the weekends when Mike had to be alone meant alone with her.

  He didn’t disappear very much anymore. He stayed home now. But he seemed utterly miserable.

  Attrition. She had known it was about rubbing, but thought it had something to do with sex. People rubbing each other the wrong way, wearing each other down with too much friction, too much grinding. In her heart, she still felt that Mike needed her. He needed her to keep him moored.

  Snowy February morning. Julie stood next to Mike’s chair as he watched videotaped footage of hockey players hurting one another. The couple communicated without speaking.

  “But it’s so beautiful outside,” Julie pleaded in her head. “It’s all sparkling white and magical. Please come outside and make snow angels with us.”

  “I don’t understand why there’s a problem,” Mike seemed to reply, staring at the screen. “I’ll stay inside and be happy, and you can go outside and be happy. I won’t judge or try to stop you for wanting to go outside in subzero temperatures. Ergo, you have no right to put down what I am interested in. We’re two separate beings. Do whatever. Individual needs.”

  “I’m unbearably lonely,” she thought as she zipped Paul in his snowsuit and put him inside her coat. “And so are you.”

  As soon as she stepped outside, the clouds in her head began to dissipate. A bright yellow sun shone in the beautiful clear morning, like in a child’s drawing. The fresh snow met her boots with a satisfying crunch. She walked aimlessly for a time, then turned towards home. When she felt the vague sadness return, she headed to Patty and Lionel’s. She tried the door; it was locked.

  She was about to turn and go down the steps when Lionel appeared, smiling. He greeted baby Paul, who beamed back at him. Through the open door she glimpsed Patty at the kitchen table. She was in tears. A lover’s spat? Are they like us? She wondered what to say, how to apologize for this intrusion, but Lionel, having followed her gaze, surprised her by inviting her in. Paul gurgled and cooed.

  Lionel insisted, waving his arms expansively. “You see, your boy likes it here.”

  Patty looked up at Julie, still crying, apparently unembarrassed.

  “She’s tired,” Lionel said, and put his arm around her. Patty nestled into him, closed her eyes and smiled.

  Their apartment was dingier than Julie and Mike’s, with a slanting floor and a smell of damp wood, but they had painted the walls orange and gold and decorated them with large black and white photographs of their naked bodies, black and white, entangled together. The kitchen looked completely decrepit; the linoleum on the counters was peeling and turning brown for some reason; the sink, full of dirty dishes, had rust around the taps. Cheerful African music was playing on a cassette recorder on top of the fridge. The room smelt of fruit and herbal tea.

  They told Julie how Angeline cried virtually all night, how they couldn’t figure out what was wrong with her.

  “She’s just a nasty baby,” Lionel said, his accent heavy and humorous on “nasty.” He put a cup of tea in front of Patty, and kissed her on the top of her head.

  Patty declined the tea and, despite her exhaustion, pulled herself up from her chair, put her coat on and came out for a walk. Once outside, she complained bitterly about her baby daughter, and told Julie she was obscenely lucky that Paul slept through the night. But Julie remembered the warmth of their kitchen, Lionel’s tenderness, and how he had convinced her to leave him with the baby for a while. She felt a rush of envy, quickly followed by guilt. Be happy for your friends, she told herself. She knew that Lionel hadn’t had an audition for a long time, and that the couple survived on welfare and the occasional decorating job.

  Winter went by. The weather warmed up. An unusually warm late May evening, the kind of evening which always felt exciting and full of promise in Montreal. The leaves were barely on the trees, but the air was hot and sultry. People shed their jackets, walked around the Plateau soaking up the atmosphere. Jazz floated out from cafés and bars. On a sudden impulse, Lionel and Patty decided to blow their welfare cheque. They left Angeline with Julie and Mike while they went to a restaurant three blocks away. Julie estimated that Mike’s job paid about five times as much as their friends earned under the table or received through government supplements at any given time. She longed to go out with them; she could have picked up the tab. The babies could have slept in their strollers. Well, maybe not Angeline, she reflected. She told herself firmly that she was happy to babysit for them, and when they didn’t come back when they were supposed to, didn’t mind stopping Angeline’s hungry cries by putting her to her own breast. Angeline blinked with surprise for a few seconds, then sucked greedily.

  “I don’t think Patty nurses her anymore, does she?” said Mike.

  “I know, but she didn’t leave us a bottle for her.” Julie wiped the sweat from Angeline’s brow.

  “If you ask me, she should nurse her. She could lose a little weight.”

  Julie wondered if Mike just felt like insulting her friend to score points against her, or was actually trying to reassure her that Patty was someone he would definitely not sleep with. Or maybe, it dawned on her, though not for the first time, he was just an asshole, and this was just… honesty. Honesty from an asshole. She pushed the thought away.

  Julie told him that Patty had nursed her daughter three months, but that it seemed to make her sick. She didn’t want to fight. Mike just snorted.

  She looked down at the baby girl and combed her damp black curls with her fingers. There was a flush across her dark cheeks; her eyes were closed now. “I think I’d like a daughter too,” she said in a playful voice.

  Mike gave her a look that said, “Well, you’ve got your wish.” or maybe, “Please leave me out of that wish of yours,” or maybe just that he was going to bed. But as he rose to go to the bedroom, footsteps thumped up the stairs outside. He signaled to Julie to pull Angeline off her chest. By the time he opened the door to their friends, Mike and Julie both had wide fake smiles on their faces, as if they had nearly got caught doing something indecent.

  Spring, summer, autumn. Late November now. Things Paul said: Baba, Ididit, Mama, Pappa, Daddy, and sometimes ooo. He pointed to things from his high chair and said, “Whazdis.” At first, Julie would say, “Oh, that’s your cup” or “That’s a roll of tape” and he would go crazy, turn red and scream, until it dawned on her that he was asking for the thing in question. He liked to make Donald Duck sounds and to wrinkle his nose and sniff. He hated being dressed or changed. He was sociab
le, but sometimes scared by strangers. He was strikingly beautiful. She loved to hold him, breathing in his baby smell, watching his eyelids and his pout, the way his little thumbs curled under his fists, feel the warmth of his sleeping body. And she wished she could freeze the moment, and experience it again when she was better rested, when her head was clear. He wouldn’t be small for long.

  Paul was already one. The year had gone by so quickly, and he was already transformed from a listless little bundle with the tiniest fingers imaginable and the quietest kitten-like cry to a pudgy, mobile, boisterous little boy. He began walking. And carrying. He obsessively carried large objects—a stool, a coffee-table book, his father’s winter coat—from one room to another. He reminded her of an ant dragging a breadcrumb across a sidewalk. This added a whole new dimension to housework. Julie now spent considerable chunks of her day looking for boots behind the bathtub, pots and pans under beds, recipe books in the toybox.

  She told herself to cherish it all. She was all in pieces, and knew that part of what was tearing her apart was her envy of the people who had it all together.

  The first of December. It was raining. The breeze from the window was soft. Paul asleep in Julie’s arms. Julie reread the letter she had received from Patty, and considered its secret request. She gently shifted Paul to her left shoulder, removed the key from the envelope and stepped outside.

  Around the corner on Duluth Street was a sad empty apartment. Patty had suddenly fled home to her parents in B.C. with Angeline. Lionel was in the hospital, suffering from a kidney dysfunction as well as some kind of mental breakdown.

  That was what the doctors said. What Julie and Mike had seen: windows smashed; Lionel, suddenly very thin, his face contorted with rage, screaming, blaming Patty for everything that had gone wrong in his life; Lionel, lying on his side on the floor, weeping, arms wrapped tightly around his middle. Mike called an ambulance and, a few minutes later, after the screaming, the shattering and the sirens, the chaos turned into eerie silence.

  The lock was stubborn now, as if the apartment was bracing itself for another attack. Julie finally managed to push the door open, and here came the smell: damp wood, garbage, sweat. There was broken glass everywhere, as if someone had swept it evenly between the rooms.

  Julie went into the bedroom, the private, sacred room, feeling like an intruder despite the task she had been given. This was where Angeline was conceived; this was where Patty and Lionel had fought and made up and made love. Except Julie had never thought they really fought. She had assumed they were so much happier.

  Still holding Paul with one arm, she followed Patty’s instructions and located a shoebox full of letters. She sifted through them, these records of an unhappy marriage, and found the one that was particularly cruel, which Patty wanted to keep. As a memento, Julie supposed, as a kind of protection against remorse.

  There were other things Patty wanted too: clothes, cassette tapes, photographs and knick-knacks. Her descriptions were well-detailed, her handwriting surprisingly even. Absence made the heart go harder. Still, Julie thought, she would not want to be in her shoes as she opened the package and the memories came flooding back again.

  For some time afterwards, Julie didn’t hear from her friend. Julie had worried dreams of Patty and her little daughter, fleeing an enraged Lionel. Standing on the street outside their apartment one night, Julie saw a light behind their curtains. Lionel had returned. Julie panicked; he would notice all the things that had gone, maybe realize who had taken them. One day when Julie was alone at home she heard a knock on the door. Peering around the living room window, she saw that, yes, it was him, and he looked irritated. Her heart suddenly felt like a wildly kicking baby, but in her chest. She dived behind the couch and hid.

  Finally, at Christmas, a card came from B.C. A blurry picture of Patty and Angeline dressed in red and white coats. Patty was smiling happily; Angeline looked hot and smothered in her coat. Inside, Patty’s large, enthusiastic handwriting: “Hi, you guys, sorry I haven’t been in touch”—followed by instructions. Another package to be mailed out. Some of it from the apartment ( “Lionel says he came by but that you were too scared to open the door—what were you afraid of?”) and some from other friends’ houses.

  So Julie bundled up her son and went to visit Lionel. The old Lionel. Not so thin, and without a trace of rage. He smiled warmly, tickled Paul and made him squawk. He laughed as he informed Julie how funny she had looked, hiding behind the couch that day.

  “Hey, you’re red!” he exclaimed, throwing back his head and laughing. Paul began to giggle. Julie was completely puzzled, and wondered if Lionel could see that too.

  “So you’re in touch with Patty?” she asked Lionel. “How is she doing?”

  “Fine, fine. The only bad things she said is nobody write her letter. She keep sending some, get nothing back.”

  “But I’ve written her a lot,” Julie protested.

  He laughed again and told her she was right. “She said nobody write except you. I don’t know what she complain about: nobody ever write to me from Zaire. For all I know, everybody dead.” He laughed loudly at that.

  He showed Julie a photograph he had just received: the same one, except it was in focus. He was upbeat, and unembarrassed, as if all couples went through something like this. After a few minutes Julie stood in the doorway with the box of paintbrushes Patty had asked for, Paul in an orange bag on her back, a hand-me-down gift from Lionel. No shadow on Lionel’s face as he handed over this last article of his daughter’s. He explained that he had given away all her clothes and toys to the Salvation Army.

  “Would have give them to you, Paul, but your mama don’t open the door, ha ha.”

  Julie walked through the snowy streets, Paul on her back, three boxes in her arms, and rang the doorbells of Patty’s other friends. People she vaguely remembered opened their doors; they didn’t recognize her, but when she explained why she had come they became warm and trusting, as if imitating Patty herself, and invariably showed her their Christmas cards. Patty and Angeline in red and white coats, in varying degrees of blurriness. At one house, the picture was in perfect focus. Julie glimpsed the message inside: “Dear dear Vanessa, I am sending you the best photograph.” Vanessa had spiky blue hair and a lot of bangles and beads; Julie didn’t recall meeting this one before.

  All the way home, laden with baby and boxes, the words rankled. “Dear dear Vanessa, I am sending you the best photograph.”

  When Julie mailed Patty her parcels, she enclosed the bill for the postage.

  April, 1991. Paul, throwing things from his high chair, named them as they landed. “Uh-oh,” he said, with a comic look of insincere surprise. “Uh-oh, duh o-winge.”

  “Yes, uh-oh, the orange,” Julie agreed. She picked the little crescent of tangerine up off the floor, scraped off the dark hair that had somehow wound itself around it, rinsed it off under the tap and popped it into her own mouth.

  “Gone,” she said, mimicking Paul’s exaggerated shrug, shoulders almost touching her ears, arms outstretched, palms up. Or was Paul imitating her?

  “Ya, gone,” he agreed thoughtfully, before abruptly flipping his little cup of yogurt off the tray of his table. Peering down at the floor, he said, “Uh-oh, duh yogo.”

  The cup landed on its bottom, contents unspilled. She put it safely away on the kitchen counter. “Don’t want it?” she asked. “Not hungry?”

  Paul ignored the question. “Uh-oh, da poon!” he cried happily, his voice chiming with the sound of metal thunking to the floor. Yogourt from the spoon splashed onto her chair leg. She bent down to retrieve it, wiped up the mess with a wet cloth and—splat.

  “Uh-oh, duh o-winge again!”

  She extracted another bit of tangerine from inside her collar.

  What she had hoped to do: put Paul—now seventeen months old, head sufficiently filled with words and images to sometimes amuse himself—into his high chair for ten minutes, and for these precious minutes let her
mind slowly unclutter, maybe even have a little daydream.

  “Uh-oh, Mummy, some mo o-winge!”

  Realizing how much he was enjoying this game, she gave him back the spoon, and they played like this for another few minutes.

  “Oh!”—always the same theatrical expression of bafflement in his high-pitched voice, on his cherubic face. “Uh-oh, mummy, the poon! Uh-oh, again!”

  Julie put Paul in a pair of overalls and a t-shirt and got out the stroller. The day was overcast and mild, the air outside wonderfully soft and fresh after too many hours inside the stuffy apartment. She locked the door. Paul held her hand and they were carefully making their way down the winding iron staircase when next door a man, an unknown neighbour, came out of his apartment and locked his door.

  But without the protection of a small child to slow his descent, the man, chic and anonymous in his flat cap and long coat, began to gallop down his identical staircase. Paul pulled on Julie’s hand and stopped. He wanted to watch.

  He was rewarded: sure enough, the man lost his footing, slid down the rest of the winding steps, and fell flat, face first, onto the sidewalk.

  “Uh-oh,” Paul squealed, thrilled, mock concern in his singsong voice, “Uh-oh,” he called out into the quiet street, clear as a bell. “Uh-oh, duh man.”

  Mortified, Julie let out a giggle.

  The man rose, his back to the young mother and child, brushed himself off and silently continued down the street.

  “Your climate is so bloody extreme,” Mike said later that evening, having one of his periodic rants about the weather. They made his English accent come back. “I don’t understand how anybody can live here. You go from freezing cold to boiling hot. You don’t have spring. You have a few days when the snow melts and the trees, formerly bare, are suddenly lush.”

  “It’s gorgeous,” Julie protested.

  “It’s monstrous. It’s not natural.”

  There was a silence while they both let his words sink in the way he meant them to. He liked this game of cleverly veiled accusations. Julie had trouble keeping up with him; she was never much good at games. She could only honestly tell him how she felt.