Degrees of Nakedness (4 page)

My mother is thinking of making love while monkeys dash
coconut shells at the corrugated tin roof. Outside chunks of icicles fall from the eaves.

I’m in Stephenville, at the community college. Herpes capital of Newfoundland, the Heavy Equipment guys say. Stephenville has one traffic light, a penitentiary, a bar called the El Dorado, and a long beach with round stones, driftwood and pink tampon applicators.

I’m a Trojan woman that summer. We do it outdoors on the war memorial. The stage is lit with torches. Helen is this woman from New York and that annoys the girls from Beauty Culture. She comes out in a see-through negligee from Woolco. All the Heavy Equipment guys are there, and Bartending, Cooking, Community Studies and Travel Counselling. Nobody catcalls. The other Trojan women and I writhe in the background.

In September the town is fog-soaked and since all the barracks look identical, I get lost. Sometimes I end up at the airport landing strip with the sound of a plane bearing down on me, but from what direction? I spend two nights a week at the movie theatre watching Chuck Norris or David Carradine. Some nights I’m the only one there.

I fall in love with my art teacher because he tells me to paint with my whole arm. He lets me ride in his truck with him on the abandoned airstrip, his Newfoundland dog loping beside us. The windows of the hangar flash morse code. He listens while I talk about Mother Teresa. I love him so much I stutter every time I speak to him. Then I meet his wife and just love him in an uncomplicated way, which is a relief.

That was the first time I left my mother. Now I’m in Toronto. I’m here with Mike, my husband, a graduate student. I followed him here. I have to explain that to everyone I meet, except Darlene. Darlene doesn’t know what she’s doing here either. Besides, she doesn’t judge me, or if she does she keeps it to herself. I’m in a lot of pain because my wisdom teeth are growing in.

Darlene is on her way to Japan to teach businessmen how to speak English. She’s just finished her Master’s in Art Education. She’s accomplished. We walk through Chinatown together without saying much to each other. We look at strange vegetables. She says, unfolding an unwieldy map, “I had a dream I’m pregnant in a kitchen and my hands are magnetic. Forks and knives fly out of the drawers and my hands become so heavy with cutlery I can’t lift them.”

I say, “A woman on Dundas was stabbed to death with an ice pick by her husband.”

Darlene is waiting for her Japanese visa. It could take two weeks. We both apply for jobs at the Royal Ontario Museum. Phone salespersons, membership promotion. The guy phones me for an interview. His voice is like caramel. Almost seductively he says, “So, Jill, what makes you think you’ve got what it takes?”

I meet Darlene in Stephenville. She’s sixteen. She wears black lipstick, black leather skirts and gogo boots that go all the way up to her thighs. She convinces me to go to the El Dorado. The band is from Banff. We go early because there’s no one on
the door then to check I.D. I’m wearing Darlene’s cowboy boots, a black peasant skirt and a gold headband. A guy comes over and offers to buy us a drink. Darlene says, “I’d rather drink hemlock.” The guy says, “What’s wrong with your friend?” When he leaves I say, “Darlene, he was only trying to be nice.” She slits her eyes at me. The disco ball begins its slow revolutions, eggs of light spray one wall, then the other, and then Darlene’s cheekbones and hands. She is seeing Harry, who is in the pen for dealing hash. They let him out to go to Art class but he wants to transfer to Heavy Equipment. Darlene memorizes the whole air-brake manual so she can quiz him. She tells me he sneaks hash into jail, wrapped in a condom stuck up his bum. Harry doesn’t like me. He says I look like too much of a virgin. But it’s Friday and Harry’s in for the evening.

On stage the light show starts and they have dry ice. The taped music dies a groggy death; someone pulls the plug. Rich leaps onto stage. He wears jeans and a red T-shirt with a black sickle. The T-shirt has been torn from the neck to reveal a chest of golden hair. He struts across the floor swinging the microphone in circles near the amps so that it makes a zoom zoom sound. Everyone squeezes onto the dance floor and rocks to this sound. Rich tucks the mike between his legs and claps his hands over his head. People clap their hands over their heads. Rich bends double and screams into the mike, “All right!”

The drummer smashes the cymbals.

“Yeah,” screams Rich.

“Uh huh,” answers the crowd.

Darlene and I dance together. Darlene has her eyes closed,
she barely moves, her fingers stretch and relax with the beat. I twist and gyrate. I’m homesick. The telephone lines are out in St. John’s where my mother is. This snow storm has gone on for three days, and it’s getting more violent by the hour.

Mike and I start hunting for an apartment in Toronto. The heat exhausts us. One super says, “Youse don’t have no pets, youse don’t have no parking, youse pay heat, weese pay hydro. Youse fill out these forms and leave ’em face down.”

I write, “Waitress, presently unemployed, no bank account at present, spouse: student.” The woman beside me writes, “Art Director, Telemedia Corporation.” I push back the petals of my torn gum with my tongue and unwrap the tinfoil from my two-twenty-twos.

I wake up crying that night because I’ve bitten my own cheek. It’s infected and swollen. My crying wakes Mike.

“I’ve bitten my own cheek, I have to call my mother.”

“It’s two in the morning, she has to work, can’t you call her later?”

“Well, I’d just like her to know.”

“Come on, Jill, get back in bed.”

“I bit my own cheek.”

My mother takes risks. She falls down a well when she’s nine. When her father hauls her out, her hair stands out from her head like a halo with the pieces of cardboard and straw that someone has dared her to stand on. She holds a rope a second too long while water-skiing and smacks into the wharf. She
opens too early from a double somersault, tearing the skin of her shins against the diving board. Ribbons of blood twirl around her in the water like a maypole. She paints the house in her underwear high on a scaffold so when the electrician comes she has to hobble across a wobbly two-by-four in her black lace bra.

I say to her late at night, “You won’t catch me loving someone that much, that hard. I’m going to have my own bank account. I’ll be a single mother. Nobody’s leaving me for another woman and nobody’s going to die on me. That’s for sure.”

She says, “You don’t know what you’re missing.”

End of first set. Dry ice dissolves, taped music lurches back to life. Rich is coming in our direction. He sits down with us. “You like the music.” It’s not a question. He’s talking to me, not Darlene.

“Oh, yeah, you guys are great, you’re really alive.”

Darlene excuses herself.

His eyes slide down my body, and back up. He moves a handful of hair over my shoulder, touching my neck with his finger.

“You want to dance?”

Before he goes back on stage he chucks me gently under the chin. “You going to stay around?”

“Sure, Rich.”

Rich takes me back to the band apartment, over the Lick a Chick take-out. There’s a party going on but he takes me directly to the bedroom. The drummer is in bed.

“Frankie, out,” says Rich, jerking his head at me.

“Jesus,” says Frankie and throws off the sheets. He’s wearing leopard-skin briefs, polyester.

“Let’s sit down,” says Rich, pulling me onto the bed.

“I’m not ready,” I say.

We neck for a while, innocently, and Rich drives me back to the dorm at three in the morning. Outside the dorm we sit for a few moments in the truck. The drifts are still and foreign. Rich leans forward, tapping the doe-skin fingers of his gloves against the steering wheel. His breath freezes on the window in peacock feathers. He’s singing softly, “Hot blooded, check it and see, I got a fever of a hundred and three, I’m hot blooded, hot blooded.” Then he turns to me and says, “Jill, I’m in love with you.”

I swallow. “Rich, you can’t be in love with me, you just met me.”

He slams his fist against the dash, making me jump.

“Don’t tell me how I feel, I know how I feel.”

Years before this I’m a camp counsellor and a boy of twelve has a crush on me. He throws the basketball hard at my breasts and then at the velvet stage curtain in the back of the gym. He puts trouble makers in their place. “You shut up or I’ll bash your face into a brick wall. You answer miss nice.” One day all the kids wrestle me to the floor for a bag of chocolate kisses. This boy lands on top of me with all the other kids on top of him. Everyone is laughing, shouting. His hips grind against mine as he stretches for the Cellophane bag and suddenly he
looks down at me. I’m struggling, being tickled by a thousand fingers. He screams at everyone, “Get off me, get off me.” Rolling over, he lashes them with his fists. Everyone gets off and he storms out of the gym, revving his dirt bike, slapping a spray of stones at the wall of the school.

I haven’t eaten anything in two days. Even orange juice hurts my mouth. I should be out there getting a job. I get up at eight and have a bath. I go upstairs to wake Mike. The bedroom is even hotter than downstairs. He says, “Lie down.” When I wake up it’s two o’clock. I almost miss my dentist’s appointment. The assistant is blond and wears a gauze mask. She squeezes a thread of liquid from a syringe and lowers a blinding light into my eyes. She squirts some chemical into my mouth and sucks it out with a hose. Then the dentist, who has been scrubbing up to the elbow, bends for a quick glance.

“Wisdom teeth,” he says with satisfaction. “You’re looking at nine hundred to a thousand bucks.”

“I haven’t got any money.”

“Then I suggest gargling with salt water.” He removes his silver pick gingerly.

My mother calls later in the day. She wakes me.

“Would you please do me favour? Would you just go round to a few schools and ask them for a job? They’re crying out for teachers in Toronto.”

“Mom, they don’t hire people who aren’t qualified.”

“Couldn’t you pretend you didn’t know that, just try?”

“Mom, don’t worry, there’s plenty of work up here.”

“I know, but it’s time you did something.”

“I know.”

My mother works in the office of a new insurance company. She works from eight-thirty until five as a secretary; she has two weeks off a year. Once, her boss, who is three years older than me, rang her phone and when she picked it up immediately, he said, “Good, Marsha, just wanted to make sure you got it by the first ring.” My mother complained to someone in a senior position. Now she’s afraid she might lose her job. At her age it would be difficult to find another. Everyone else in the office is twenty-five or twenty-six at the oldest.

Everyone has left the dorm for the long weekend. Darlene and I hitch-hike to a cabin she knows about. We heat a can of beans on the woodstove, and eat a tub of ice cream with one spoon, and then a can of Vienna sausages. Our sneakers are soaking from the rain and we put them on the woodstove to dry; the plastic soles melt, creating a stink.

We play crazy eights and talk about sex. I say, “My mother has
The Joy of Sex
hidden under her mattress. I mean she’s explained the whole thing in detail, she’s shown me every other how-to book published, but they got
The Joy of Sex
as a wedding present and it’s like she thinks she’s the only one who has a copy. Anyway, I looked at it and the drawings are in soft pencil. I mean they’re really soft and gentle, even the leather and bondage section is gentle. My mother thinks that you only have sex with people you love.”

We leave wearing rubber boots belonging to Darlene’s brother. We hitch a ride in a pick-up. It’s dark and it’s not until I’ve slammed the door that I realize the two men have rifles on their laps. They head immediately off the highway onto a dirt road. Darlene and I say nothing, they say nothing. We bump along and I dig my fingernails into my soaking coat sleeves. They drop us at the turn-off to Stephenville. I ask Darlene, “Were you afraid?” Darlene says, “They have a moose in the back, it’s out of season.” As the truck pulls away I see the bulk of it in the red brake lights.

Darlene calls. Her visa has come through. I invite her to Pizza Hut. Toronto is getting the tail end of Hurricane Hugo. My feet are sloshing in my shoes. I have to wait fifteen minutes outside United Cigars watching headlights sword fighting the rain at the intersection. Then I see her. Her glasses are streaming with water. Our jeans are wet below our rain jackets while we eat our pizza, and they have the air conditioning on. Our teeth chatter while she talks about raw octopus, sleeping mats, paper walls and geisha girls. She says, “Japanese dentists are the richest men in the world, and if they’re single, who knows, maybe I’ll have a few teeth pulled.” She’s joking. We hug outside the subway and where we press together the water soaks through our chests, icy cold. Sayonara.

Mike and I have moved in with Kate and Paulo. She’s a painter and he’s a physics professor. They take us to their cottage up north. It’s the end of summer, you can wear a sweater,
but it’s warm enough to swim. Kate’s parents are there. They’re both seventy. Her father and I swim for almost an hour. We take turns diving off a board set upon a raft. He watches me and comments, his voice strong on the silent lake, “That’s a nice one, that was a lovely one.” My mother was a lifeguard when she was eighteen. What I call freestyle she calls the crawl. She does the crawl with even strokes. When she teaches children to swim, she says, “If you measure your strokes you can go a long time, you can go for ever.”

Kate’s mother is sorting old slides. She says, “If we don’t know what they are, we’re throwing them out.”

Kate says, “You can’t do that.”

“Oh, yes I can.”

Kate pins a white sheet over the fireplace. We each have a hot cup of tea. I have a fever now from the infection in my teeth. There’s a picture of Kate’s mother and father when they had just met. They’re laughing into the camera.

A picture of Kate at ten with a kitten. A jungle in Malaysia. A falling cliff face in Venezuela.