Degrees of Nakedness (5 page)

“That’s the earthquake,” says Kate’s father. A slide of a green field covered with mist.

“Oh, I love England,” says Kate’s mother, and she claps her hands.

A slide of a church window. Everyone leans closer.

“Throw it out,” says Kate’s mother. “We don’t know what it is.” But her father clicks on.

“You’re not throwing anything out, Dave.”

A slide of a grave stone, out of focus.

Mike tucks me in bed. He rubs my body vigorously because I’m freezing cold and boiling hot.

“That’s some long life together they had,” I say.

I’ve got a job. I’m working as an assistant in an office that is publishing a directory of Canadian artists, musicians and writers. It’s my job to open letters and sort the biographies alphabetically. Returned biographies with any kind of correction go in the edit pile. I call home and tell my mother I’m an assistant editor. She’s relieved. I’m doing the R’s. There he is. His bio is shorter than most. But he has cut a record with the Sickles. All around me, paper rustles. The real assistant editor is glued to the screen of her computer.

We agree to meet the following weekend in Corner Brook, where he has his final gig before leaving the island. He’s leaving via the Port-aux-Basques ferry the next morning. This is my last chance to see him. But the highway’s closed. The mall is closed and the school is closed. Everyone is stuck in the dorm. The woman who runs the snack bar downstairs is selling microwaved subs hand over fist. There’s a line-up at the Pac-Man machine. Harry says he’s going to Corner Brook. This is the first weekend he’s allowed out of the pen. He wants a meal of home-made bread and pickled beets, a few beers with his father. Even the Heavy Equipment guys pale.

“You can’t see a hand in front of you.”

“You’ll end up arse over kettle in a ditch.”

He says I can go with him as long as I don’t talk. I pack my bag. We see almost nothing for miles except abandoned cars. Harry drives with the window down so he can reach the moving windshield wipers to slap the sleet off them. Sometimes the car turns three-sixty. We go off the road and Harry makes me drive while he pushes. When he gets back inside he has icicles on his moustache. He claps me on the back with his big mitt. He says, “How well do you know this guy Rich?”

“Well, I only met him for one night, but we talked a lot.”

“And you’re going to stay with him, just like that?”

“He said I could have a room to myself.”

“Yeah, well, why don’t you stay over at mom’s tonight? You could sleep with my sister.”

“I’m sure I’ll be okay, Harry.”

In the summer evenings, once in a while, my mother mows my father’s grave. She manages to get the mower in the trunk of her car by herself. His grave is near the ocean. When she finishes she lights a cigarette and sits down on the pink marble that frames the grave. She says his name out loud. I watch out the window for her to come back. Often she’s back just before sunset, smelling juicy green like cut grass.

My mother phones the dorm in Stephenville. She’s shaken. She says she was walking down the path to the house in the dark and she heard it before she saw it. She managed to push herself into a fir tree just in time, branches all over her face. A moose galloping up. She says she could smell it, she could
have touched his antler. She lost her groceries, Campbell’s Soup tins tumbling into the dark.

She says the roof is leaking and she can’t keep the place up by herself. My mother and father put icicles of stucco on the ceiling, it reminded them of a hotel they stayed at in Spain. Now it’s falling off in clumps.

She has very set ideas about how she wants her own grave kept after she’s gone.

“If I taught you anything in your whole life it’s how to write a thank-you note. When I die you’ll be getting lots of sympathy cards and you have to answer every one of them.”

“Not on your life.”

“Don’t say that.”

Everybody is drunk and stoned and Rich looks surprised to see me. The apartment is a lot like the one in Stephenville, wood panelling, girlie pictures, squashed cigarette butts on the tiles. Around three, everyone goes to bed. Rich leads me to the couch. I say, “Where are you going to sleep?”

“Right here with you.”

“Rich, you said I could have my own bed.”

He begins unbuttoning my blouse. I push his hands away. He kisses me, I kiss him back. He pulls my blouse until the first three buttons pop off. He giggles.

“I don’t want to.”

“I’m leaving tomorrow, baby, this is your last chance.”

“I came all this way to see you.”

“Well, you’re going to have to come a little further.”

He unzips his jeans and forces my hand down his pants, closing my fingers over his penis. He grabs my elbow and jerks my arm. He moans, “I’m going to come.” I wrench my hand away.

“What are you doing?” he hisses.

“I’m sorry.”

“You frigid bitch.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You cock tease.”

“You said I could have my own room.”

“Why the fuck did you come here?”

“I was lonely.”

“Yeah, well, Jesus. Good night.”

He rolls over, his face pressing into the couch, leaving me only the edge. This is something I can’t tell my mother. This is something that would disappoint her. I open the door to the apartment, but the screen door is blocked shut. Snow has drifted to the very top of the door.

When I wake up, Rich is at the table drinking orange juice from a carton. I think of my mother’s plaid chair in the morning light, the glass empty on the table beside it.

Degrees of Nakedness

T
he top half of Joan’s house caught fire and burned while she slept downstairs. The microwave and television melted into lumps as smooth and shiny as beach rocks. She woke up to make herself a cup of tea in the morning and when she got upstairs everything was black. The furniture was in cinders. The windows were blackened with soot. She walked into the centre of the living room and looked around her. Her footsteps had exposed the green and gold shag carpet beneath the soot. It occurred to her that she must be asleep.

She went back downstairs and sat on the edge of her bed. Then she went upstairs again. She picked up the phone but it was dead. Her greenish gold footsteps were the only colour in the room. It reminded her of Dorothy on her way to the Emerald City.

The fire chief said it was a miracle Joan was still alive. The temperature had risen to three thousand degrees. There were
large double-paned patio windows. The inside panes had broken but the fire ran out of oxygen before the outside panes could break. The fire chief said if the second pane had broken or if she had gotten up in the middle of the night and opened the back door, the house would have exploded. Joan said she felt as if she had been stripped.

She and her twelve-year-old son, Wiley, moved in with us. Wiley had been at his grandmother’s the night of the fire. Joan says she keeps having the same nightmare. Her hand on the doorknob of the back door. Everything in sharp focus, like before a storm. Wiley is standing outside the door, in the forest. In the dream, Wiley is a baby. Joan knows she can’t open the door, he’s toddling through the woods to the highway. He waves to her the way he first learned to wave, with both hands, the fingers pointed toward himself. Her palm is sweaty, and she turns the knob. The house blows up. In the dream, she sees two-by-fours twirling into the sky like batons.

One night, during the dream, she reaches for the glass of water by the bed and throws it over herself. She wakes because she smacked the bridge of her nose with the glass, and water is running down her nightdress, between her breasts, down her belly. She has a little half-moon bruise on the bridge of her nose.

I have become interested in nakedness. All the different kinds. Especially since my sister-in-law moved in. It’s as if she can’t keep herself covered. Things always seem to slip away from her. I walked in on her in the bath once. Her skin was tanned in the
shape of her bathing suit. The skin of her torso seemed very white, the colour of a tree when you strip off the bark.

I have this idea for an art exhibit. I want to get myself photographed all over town, nude. Sitting on a bench in Bannerman Park, reading the newspaper, riding my bike past the Salvation Army and Bowring’s, sitting on the War Memorial with a take-out coffee. I’ll keep a wrap-around dress nearby in case anybody shows up. I figure it can be done at five in the morning when nobody’s around.

Before supper, my husband, Mike, shoves Joan out the front door and locks it. There’s a small square window in the front door. Joan has her face pressed against it. She’s giggling, and saying, “Come on now Mike, let me in.”

There are seven neighbourhood boys armed with water balloons standing in a semi-circle around her, arms raised.

Mike puts his face to the window so he can meet Joan’s eyes and quietly lifts the mail slot, sticks a pistol through and squirts, hitting the crotch of her jeans. It takes her a moment to realize what’s happening. Then Wiley, who has gone to the third floor, opens the window over the front door and drops a wobbling balloon on her head. She shrieks. The boys open fire, and balloons splat against her. The breeze changes direction. At the end of the street eight girls are lined up from one sidewalk to the other. They seem to be advancing to the music of the sea cadets’ band in the Star of the Sea Hall at the end of the street. Each one has a swollen balloon, held like a baby. The boys are still for a second, then one of them yells, “Run!”
and they tear down the street, their sneakers slapping on the pavement. Mike lets Joan inside.

I’ve persuaded Joan to go to the only strip joint in town with me the next night. I just want to see what it’s like. A woman can’t get in without a male escort. Joan’s hair is very short, and she’s going to dress like a man to get us in. The newspaper ad says formal wear required. The woman on the phone said that means no construction boots or torn shirts. I dig out the tuxedo Mike wore to our wedding for Joan to wear.

I’m not usually one for telling strangers things but I’ve gotten into the habit of telling the woman who sells the coffee and muffins in the cafeteria of the building where I work the most intimate things about myself. Early in the morning, the ugly cafeteria is huge and empty; my footsteps echo as in a cathedral. Usually, it’s just the two of us at that hour. She wears a brown polyester suit with two seams down the front, and a gold bull horn on a chain around her neck. Sometimes when I fall asleep I can see that horn and the skin of her neck. The exact location of her mole, the tiny gold horn jiggling while she wipes the counter. When I give her a twenty she looks at me as if I should know better. She says with her eyebrow arched, “Are you trying to break me?”

Sometimes, just as I’m dropping off to sleep, I see her arched eyebrow, exaggerated, and a disconnected voice “Are you trying to break me?”

I have told her, for instance, that my sister-in-law has moved in because her house burned down, that Joan hates her
ex-husband, and that we have no idea when she will move out. That my husband had a daughter with another woman, before he met me. Sometimes we have the child over for supper. I have told the cafeteria woman I believe Joan got drunk and set fire to the house on purpose. Often I find myself saying to her, “Strange old world, isn’t it?” and shaking my head like an old man. She wears a plastic name tag that says “Cathy.” Once I said, “Good morning, Cathy,” and she said, “That’s not my real name.”

At the dinner table, Mike says, “Joan, I bought you a little present.”

Mike drops a tape into the tape deck. It’s Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. Joan squeals with delight and jumps up to dance to “Tijuana Taxi.” At the end of all the big brass, there’s a deep honking sound. Joan wiggles and struts, and when the honk comes, she sticks her bum out. Then she falls onto the floor, giggling. From the floor, she wheezes, “That’s what Mike and I did when we were kids.”

Wiley takes this opportunity to scrape his broccoli into the garbage. I take a single triangle of cold pizza out of the fridge, hold the pizza in front of my crotch, lay a bunch of bananas on my head, and start miming a striptease while the Tijuana Brass do their thing. Joan drags herself off the floor, pulling herself up by the rungs in the chair, still panting with laughter, and starts to drink her coffee. We tell Wiley, “Okay, okay, settle down.” But when another honk comes, Joan almost chokes and the coffee comes out of her nose. She is snorting and choking, her eyes watering. Wiley says, “Jeez, Mom, will you give it up?”

With the fourth honk, Joan bursts into tears. Mike turns off the tape. “For God’s sake, Joan.” I point my fork and a limp piece of broccoli at Mike. “Leave her alone, she’s allowed to cry.” Joan has been bursting into tears a lot since the fire.

Joan’s last boyfriend broke up with her two or three nights before the fire. She says he was a real sweetie. She slapped a newspaper at his chest outside a restaurant and it bounced off and fell between a mail box and a newspaper vending box. It’s still there. We walk past it on the way to the supermarket. It’s waterlogged and you can see she twisted it in her fists before she flung it at him.

I remember the cover of the album, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. A naked woman covered in whipped cream, the heart-shaped swirls of cream covering her breasts, she licking a blob of cream from a long red fingernail. One smooth long leg parts the soft folds of cream, almost up to her hip. You can almost taste that cream in the brass music.

Later that night, when Wiley is in bed, Mike and I fight. I throw my cup of coffee across the room as hard as I can. The cup hits the wall behind his head and leaves a mark in the gyprock like a frown. There are no curtains on the front window. It’s dark outside and the living room is lit like a fish tank. A woman in a cotton skirt with a black palm leaf print is standing on the opposite sidewalk under a street lamp, arms crossed over her breasts. She is watching our fight as if it were a movie. Then, on our side of the street, two heads pass under the window, a man and a woman. They wave, surprised to see us. Mike’s face is stiff with anger, but both of us wave back, uncertainly.
They knock on the door. It turns out they were neighbours of ours two years ago. We hardly spoke to them then and haven’t seen them since, but they seem delighted to see us. Mike and I stand in the doorway to talk to them. I can feel the snarl on my face thaw. The breeze is warm and it rushes through the trees on the traffic island as if it can’t make up its mind which way to go.