Degrees of Nakedness (7 page)

What was that woman’s name? The Swedish woman in the tight floral print. She was a chaise longue, soft as a swimming pool. You think I didn’t smell her kitchen, all crushed camomile and coconut suntan oil? Oh, you could sleep in with her, the phone company would come and disconnect the alarm clock by mistake. Her seeds sprout as she flings them. She made me mince my garlic. I said she was dewy-eyed, bucolic. But you would remind me, her caesar salad’s creamy and her pubic hair is magenta. I’ll be in Sidi Ifni.

The taxi driver’s horn will blast, nasal singing, fast impossible banjo. We’ll drive as fast as that.

I’ll be running a hotel of pink chalky colour. The paint is peeling in the shape of continents and oceans that I can read like tea leaves.

I’ll have an affair with the projectionist from the movie theatre. The theatre has many smashed light bulbs in its sign. He
speaks only Spanish and grunts
“Me gusta”
while he grinds. The film in the noisy projector. You on the screen. You on the highway where the car broke down, in your yellow rain coat. You, swallowed by the fog of Signal Hill. You, jerking your body to screaming Bob Dylan in the kitchen. Your voice through the wall, overanimated, reading your daughter bedtime stories. You, crouched with the hose waiting for your sister, spraying your mother by mistake, spraying all the years away from her, so when she scurried back inside, her face looked like she was fourteen.

I’ll be dancing with my Spanish ghost in the dust. We’ll dance the tango, very seriously. Sweat makes my make-up run, and our cheeks are pressed together. We’ll smell of gin that has come through our skin in the thinnest film. His coarse moustache will tickle. He’ll say,
“Me amore, Me amore’
— and then you — having ridden on Air Canada, a rickety bus and finally a blue Mercedes — you will burst through the doors, crushing the rusty locks in your fist. You will be wearing your jeans and suspenders, but instead of that pink T-shirt, you will for once have dressed for the occasion, a white cotton shirt with pirate sleeves. You will pull out a sword. One by one you will pop the buttons off the shirt of my Spanish troubadour. They will fall to the floor with a click click that resembles the grinding of your teeth.

Carmen Has Gonorrhoea

I
’m wishing for Carmen to get hit by a cement truck. I’ve thrown pennies in the mall fountain wishing for that. Muttering with my eyes closed. Cement truck, cement truck, cement truck. A crisp winter night, a hint of wood smoke in the air, stars like little pieces of glass, and the cement truck, snorting exhaust, waiting on top of Barter’s Hill. Lots of vehicles lose their brakes on Barter’s Hill. Twice in the past three years cars have careened down the hill and smashed through Lar’s Fruit Store. I lie on my bed and wish for that cement truck so hard I get cross-eyed. There’s a crack in the plaster on my bedroom ceiling, coming out from the light fixture. I stare at that crack until it starts to move like a hand on a clock, around and around. Carmen’s days are numbered, like a radar scan swooping, swooping. Where are you, Carmen?

She’s at Bar Baric. It’s Fetish Night. There’s a children’s plastic swimming pool in the corner filled with chocolate pudding.
Two men will wrestle in white boxer shorts printed with little hearts. Later, two waitresses will clean the men’s bodies. On Fetish Night the barmaids wear yellowish lettuce leaves over their breasts, dangle green grapes from their nipples and spank willing customers with palm leaves.

Carmen sings Bossa Nova. She says she had to leave Eddie to pursue her rising star. She wears a Spanish dress made of embossed leather and a black feather boa that she weasels over the paunches in the front row. You can bet Eddie is among the paunches. Some say Carmen’s power lies in the castanets. She takes a big breath and raises her arms over her head. You’d think she was going to dive off the cliffs in Acapulco while the tide was out. Then she starts. She gives them one snap and every neck in the bar twists like a wrung chicken. Those castanets are second nature to Carmen, claws on a crab. Her mother swears she could hear Carmen snapping her fingers while she was still in the womb. The first few snaps are like the hooves of bulls pawing the Formica tabletops. Then complicated rhythms squirm and writhe over each other. Carmen has the whole bar filled with black bulls in heat. Every one of those slack-jowled husbands searches for himself in the smoky, goldflecked mirror behind her. He’s searching for his own pasty face, but what he finds looking back is a matador.

I never would have resorted to the cement trucks if other plans hadn’t failed. One night I was down at Bar Baric with a tube of crazy glue. Carmen had her back turned and in a couple of seconds, that’s all it took, I had the castanets glued together, like a couple of clam shells. She got up there, raised
her arms over her head, looked down the end of her nose, and there wasn’t a click out of her. I thought I had her. But that was the night she started playing the spoons. When she finishes her number she does this spontaneous dive from the stage. The crowd on the dance floor catches her in its arms and lifts her overhead.

Every night they chant, “Carmen, Carmen, Carmen.” I can hear them from my bed. Her name thunders up the hills of downtown, raises the hairs on the leaves of geraniums in the windows of Gower Street, makes the light turn green at Rawlins Cross, grows softer, ticklish, near our split-level behind the Avalon Mall. But you can hear them chanting her name, even up here you can hear it, just barely, like a feather on your skin when you’re sleeping. I can see Eddie’s pink ear straining for it, straining, straining. It makes the curtain ripple against the hardwood floor as if a cat was stretching against it. I dig my fingernails into Eddie’s back. Peek-a-boo, Carmen. Come out, come out, wherever you are!

Eddie drops off. I can’t sleep. I’m feverish. I throw off the sheets and rip open the sheers of our bedroom window. The lawns of all the houses between my house and the mall spread out before me. New frost stiffens them. Beyond is the mall parking lot. Blood rushes to my cheeks. Five gleaming cement trucks are parked there, hulking and silent under the streetlights.

When I go to work in the morning, the red and white bellies of the trucks are already grinding hungrily, flopping over the cement inside. Their white cabs gleam like teeth. I feel
delicious shivers. I work the cash at Woolco. Mornings, the machine hums under my fingers. The register imitates that grinding, the hunger of the machine that will bring Carmen down, flatten her. The manager pats my polyester pant leg.

“You’re looking animated, we sure like that,” he says.

I imagine the actual impact, the thud, the ka-thunk of the front wheels, the ka-thunk of the back. Then, from the tail, spewing thick blobs of cement on her squashed carcass until she’s a slab of grey stone. If I could be there when it happened I’d tie a rope onto her remains, maybe onto her bony hand with that hypocritical little ring with the peace symbol sticking out the top. The fingers crooked as if grasping a last handful of breath. I’d haul her to the harbour. Dump. Let all the sewers of the city spill over her. Ha.

Lots of women hate Carmen, so I’m not alone. But lots of women forgive her, fall out of rank in the army of hatred. Which is disappointing.

Eddie’s mother, for example, likes Carmen a lot better than she likes me. Oh, she’s had the wool pulled, let me tell you. Gert sells life insurance and not much gets past her. We’ll all be sitting down to Christmas dinner and she’ll bring up Carmen. “How’s Carmen, Eddie?” The syrup in her voice.

Or on St. Patrick’s Day: “Carmen’s a lovely woman, isn’t she, Merle?” I tried to show a little creativity with the potato salad, a little green food colouring, and for dessert, little jelly shamrocks. Does anybody mention those special touches? No, it’s all Carmen, Carmen, Carmen. Merle is Eddie’s dad. Merle had a real thing for Carmen, even while she was his daughter-in-law. That’s
the kind of family I’ve married into. Gert had no problem turning a blind eye to that, but she’s down at my house running her finger over the dust on the windowsill every other afternoon, turning up her nose at the socks on the stairs, the garbage piled up in the laundry room. The diapers in the toilet. “Do you hear much from Carmen?” ask his sisters, “I guess she’s pretty busy now that she’s cutting those records?”

They’d all like to see me fail. Eddie’s sisters work on the grill in the Woolco cafe. They’d do anything to have my position, head cash. The jealousy makes them spiteful. I can’t blame them, working under those heat lamps all day with the grease from the deep fryers. There’s nothing less attractive than a hairnet under a paper hat, and neither of them are married. As far as they’re concerned there isn’t another man as wonderful as the baby, Eddie, and there’s nobody good enough for him, either. Except, of course, Carmen.

Carmen and Eddie still have long conversations on the phone. She’s into the whole Goddess thing, and she wants to share that. She’s always talking witch burnings, prisms, tidal pulls, tea leaves, crystal balls. She’s got no money to pay the heating bill, but she’s got a bigger crystal ball on layaway. The crystal ball she has is too small for her purposes. I mean we all have to pay the heating bill, right?

“Yeah, I got a bigger crystal ball on layaway,” she smiles to Eddie, her chin in the palm of her hand, the candlelight flickering over her cheekbones.

“Who in the name of Christ puts crystal balls on layaway?” I scream at Eddie, after she leaves.

I mean, why bigger? Why a bigger crystal ball? Is there a better picture or something? Have they got a warehouse full of crystal balls on an empty prairie somewhere out west that pulses with unnatural light every equinox?

How does she pay for them? Nobody makes any money singing Bossa Nova, I don’t care how far her voice carries. I’ll tell you how Carmen makes her money. Admirers. She must have had every disease on the go, believe me. Who do you think went down to that alley outside the Bar Baric and spraypainted “Carmen has Gonorrhoea”? Fluorescent orange. Ha. Most of the wives in town banned her from the spiritual healing retreat. They had a vote. How could they do otherwise? Half the women there were trying to heal a wound Carmen caused. Women baring the lacerations of their hearts, moaning at the loss of their breadwinners, their brothers, their fathers. Carmen has caused more than half of the spiritual carnage downtown.

But no more. The cement trucks are charged. I can feel their power vibrating like jackhammers through my body. I walked home from the mall today, too exhilarated for public transport. I entered every street on the way home just in time to see a cement truck pulling around the distant corner. There must be a convoy a hundred strong. In the kitchen Eddie can’t understand why I’m in such a good mood. I chuck him under the chin. “Cha-cha-cha,” I say to him, enigmatically. Soon he will be asleep in front of the football game.

I’m standing on Barter’s Hill. Carmen is just leaving the bar. We see her pass, beneath one streetlight after another. Then,
there she is, outlined in the flashing lights of Lar’s Fruit Store. Carmen is silhouetted against a pyramid of delicately balanced bananas reaching from floor to ceiling. I have her where I want her. I let the red flag rip through the air and savour the cutting whisper it makes. This is for you, Eddie. This is for our marriage. The headlights of one hundred cement trucks come on at once. Carmen is stunned in the brilliant glare, her body pressed against the glass window. There is the deafening noise of one hundred cement truck engines. Even if she could reach for her castanets, nobody would hear anything over that noise. They are charging, charging cement trucks.

Then another noise, unearthly, like lobsters dropped in boiling water, amplified a thousandfold. I cover my ears with my fists. The sound of one hundred cement trucks screeching their brakes. It is the sound of those same cement trucks stopping inches away from Carmen’s long legs. After a moment, the trucks roll over. They lie on their backs at Carmen’s feet, like playful puppies.

Surge

G
iselle is supposed to go with her mother for a picnic. She’s left messages on her mother’s answering machine, but her mother is working toward a deadline, and not answering the phone. We’re in the back seat of the car, at the Quik Stop parking lot. There’s no breeze. The picnic was supposed to be at two. It’s almost four. Giselle’s arm is damp against mine, the moistness of a pound cake. She is wearing a pair of taupe shorts belonging to me, stained with blood or raspberries, and a shirt of mine. The armhole of the shirt hangs too low and I can see her breast, white newness, barely a breast at all. She notices my glance and tucks the material under her arm. She has a fitting tonight for shoes and a dress for her uncle’s wedding.

Giselle laughs for no reason, tilting her head back.

I say, If that candy touches my shirt.

Her eyes are brilliant, the darkest blue with splinters of a lighter blue. I find it dizzying to try and understand her by
looking into her eyes. Neither of her parents wears glasses and the colour of Giselle’s eyes seems to suggest she’s inherited sharp vision. I saw Giselle and her mom at a distance last weekend, at the park. Giselle held her body with a particular kind of grace, exactly like her mother’s. Anyone could tell they were mother and daughter without even seeing their faces.

She’s with us for two weeks, then she’s with her mother. Everything changes in two weeks. Her clothes. A different shirt. Sometimes I realize she’s taller. Her face changes so fast. I’m trying to keep up with her. She glances out the window. Something has caught her attention.

My mother is phoning right now, she says. I can hear it.

For a second I think Giselle is hearing a ring from one of the houses down the street. Then I understand she means the phone is echoing through our empty house several blocks away.

I can tell, she says. Whenever she’s calling, I can tell.

Her moist face, new freckles, so close to me on the hot upholstery of the back seat. She and her mother love each other with something as hard and strong as metal scraping metal, something that can produce sparks. She’s sucking a sticky piece of candy, translucent red, the wrapper crushed around the bottom, candied saliva in the creases of the Cellophane. A glassy bead of spit hangs in a thread of her hair. Her lips are neon. She has artificial strawberry breath.