Sweet Affliction (16 page)

“I mean,” Alicia continues, “they did take it off, right? Did you keep it?”

Bruce looks at his hands, his index fingers forming a steeple. Then he says “well, I had originally planned to donate it to science.”

“Really? I mean, you didn't want to keep it? As a souvenir?”

“And deprive modern science of one of the great marvels of our time?”

“The Ball of Bruce,” Alicia says reverently.

“Schoolchildren would come from miles around,” he says. “But actually, I keep it in a jar of formaldehyde. On the mantel above the fireplace.”

“
Mais non
,” says Alicia.

“Saving for a special occasion,” I say, somehow.

“On an unrelated note,” Bruce says, “Alicia, when's
your
birthday?” Alicia laughs, throwing her head back in delight.

Some of the tension in my throat unknots, leaving only a dry ache from the smoke. I put my arm around Bruce. “I believe,” I say, “the time has come for a song.” He glances at me, then away again. I would do anything for him, anything. I turn to the room and raise my arm like I'm holding a baton. “And a one and a two and a—”

Mon cher ami

C'est à ton tour

De te laisser parler d'amour

The Québecois national anthem is sung in unison, and then in a round, with me conducting like Mickey Mouse in an old cartoon. A few people sing the birthday song in English, and underneath John Prine is still strumming his sad cowboy song. People sway and swing their glasses, bottles in the air, stomping on the ground, whistling and hollering at my husband. I lean in close to Bruce and sing in his ear. His face is flushed and he's staring at the floor. My dearest, my heart.

My dear friend

It's now your turn

To let yourself speak of love

Such a wonderfully simple wish.

I lift my head. I must have fallen asleep; there is a small damp spot on the upholstery where my mouth has rested. Alicia is seemingly comatose on Jeff's lap; he is mumbling the top of her head with half-conscious kisses. Bruce is gone. I run my hands through my hair a few times and hoist myself off the sofa. My eyes feel like feet and my feet feel like basketballs. I can't find Bruce anywhere in the apartment. I go into the kitchen and rinse two cigarette butts out of a glass jar, fill it with water and drink it in one go. A breeze nudges my bare ankles, and I see the door to the balcony is open a crack. Bruce is standing in the light snow, bundled in a fleece blanket, looking out across the alleyway. I slip my feet into a pair of rubber boots by the door and join him. It's cold enough. The windows of the apartments across the way are all dark.

“You doing okay?” I ask.

“Fine,” he says, and continues to stare out at the alley.

“I know,” I say after a moment, “but it's not her fault. She's just kind of socially retarded is all.”

He looks at me, and I realize he isn't upset at Alicia. He's angry. At me, for what I did for him. To him. Furious. He could kill me with his pale skinny hands.

“Bruce,” I say.

“You had no right,” he says. “I hate that kind of thing. You know I do.”

“I thought,” I said, “I mean after everything that's happened—”

He laughs, bitterly. In that laugh I hear the old smoke, the old fire.

“Sometimes, Bernie,” he says, “I wish it was you instead of me.”

“You have no idea,” I say. We both wait for me to say something else. The snow keeps up like it has somewhere to be.

I know what I'll do when I get home. I'll go into the baby's room. I'll stand over the crib where he's sleeping and lift him into my arms. He'll stretch a bit and moan, but he won't wake up. I'll sit in the rocking chair by the window and look out at the tree. It will be still and dark and tree-like. I would do anything for him, anything, but never the right thing, and the weight of the baby's head against my arm will be almost heavy as that knowledge, but not heavy enough.

The Yoga Teachers

Risa's mother tries for what seems like hours to get Risa's thick bumpy hair into a French braid. The hair is remarkably resistant, though Risa's mother uses a snagging angry-toothed comb, thirty-seven bobby pins, and half a jar of Dippity-do. “Ow,” Risa says every time her mother pokes a bobby pin into the damp sticky mass. Her hair stands in gelled ridges over her head, like an aerial photo of the badlands. Finally, when Risa and her mother are both near tears, Risa's father knocks on the door, and Risa must get into the car with him and be driven through the long snowy corridor to her dance class.

Every week it's like this, the vinyl floor that lifts at the corners like old slices of cheese and Risa's teacher who is too beautiful, with breasts like long, smooth loaves inside her unitard, and her heavy circling arms. First position, second position, fourth position.
Bras bas
, which Risa knows is French for “arms lowered” but still thinks of as
bra-BAH
, a rallying cry shouted by staunch men on horseback as they ride into battle. First position hums like a calm day in an open field. Second position is a loud embarrassed relative. Third position is a mythological creature, half soldier and half clamshell. Fourth position is grey and ticking like the inside of a watch. Fifth position might be a little bit magic because of the way your thighs squeeze together.

Risa was not meant for ballet, this she knows. She knows it's because of the shape of her head and her thick, bumpy hair. Other girls—like tiny, flexible Shauna—have neat gravity-defying buns that rest comfortably on the back curve of their skulls. Their buns stay done up without hair nets or Dippity-do, they don't have greasy braids crunchy with bobby pins. Their heads are streamlined and aerodynamic. They look like small fighter planes, doing grand jetés across the floor. In comparison, Risa feels like a wooden cart or a wheelbarrow; creaky, unstable, about to crush someone's toe. Her teacher rolls her eyes when she thinks Risa isn't looking, then puts her in the back row.

This week, though, Risa's fat, beautiful, cruel teacher is not there. Instead there are a man and a woman who are here to teach them yoga. The man is blond and tanned and muscular, but he is not a babe the way her friends talk about babes like David Hasselhoff. His hair is dry and tufted, and he wears a purple sleeveless shirt out of which his arms dangle like braided rope. The woman is small and intense, with an oily nose and torn blue sweatpants. They are American, so they can't pronounce the last names of the kids in her class: Jurczak, Konwalchuk, Jzojzofsky. The yoga teachers want Risa to concentrate on her breath. Her breath is a retractable column like a telescope, and she has to push and pull it around her chest like a toy on a stick. She never knew this before, but she can see that it's true, because sometimes it sticks in her neck, where part of the column must have rusted. The woman demonstrates the proper way to inhale and exhale, and her breath echoes through her as though her chest were an underground parking lot.

The yoga teachers tell her to do strange and impossible things, like lift her heart. “Soften your lungs.” “Soften your eyes.” “Open your chest.” Risa pictures her chest opening like the cabinet where her parents keep the good china, her guts stacked like plates and her softened lungs sitting on top like a matched pair of teacups. The man leans over Risa and murmurs into her ear, “Find your breath,” and suddenly Risa feels a wash of energy move through her legs. The man has a long, gentle face like a horse. Do he and the woman do it together, opening their chests and lifting their hearts? Risa cannot imagine it. The woman seems another animal entirely, a musky and active one, like a ferret. Risa closes her eyes against these thoughts and focuses on the column of her breath turning over and over in her glass-cabinet torso.

After class Risa walks across the parking lot to her dad's car. She can still hear the rasp of the woman's breathing and her voice saying, “soften, soften, soften.” Her eyes feel blunt and smooth as fingertips. She floats to the car on waves of breathing, so light and serene and feelingless, and she senses that the expression has slipped off her face like a plate of leftovers dumped into the garbage. She slides into the passenger seat and straps herself in silently. “What,” her dad says. “What is it now?”

“Nothing,” she says, feeling that peace and goodwill must be flowing from her in waves.

“For godsakes,” her dad says, turning the ignition, “what are you upset about this time? Maybe it's time to think about quitting these classes, all they do is make you miserable.”

Risa feels her soft heart fold in on itself. Her face changes from radiant to sullen, but nobody can tell the difference.

Wellspring

I have a guilty secret. The secret is that no matter what happens, there lives inside me a bright sliver of joy. It's like a hum from a machine that won't turn off. However bad things get, however hopeless or sad I feel, there it is:
zzzmmmmmmmmm
.

I've done many things to try to find the switch to quiet it. For years I volunteered as a counsellor at a drop-in centre for teens downtown. There I would hear stories of kids pricked by stray needles as they foraged for food in dumpsters, girls pregnant from gang rapes and unable to procure abortions, rampant diabetes in a thirteen-year-old boy that left him missing both his feet. And while I listened to them, offered sympathy and support and referrals, gave out addresses of shelters even more squalid and dangerous than the streets where they lived, I heard it.

Zzzmmmmmmmmm.

Joy.

Mom calls to ask if I can bring her something, but she can't remember what it's called.

“Come on, Angela, you know what I mean. It sounds tense and desperate. A clench?”

“A clutch,” I said.

Mom sighed. “That's the one. Bring me my clutch, the red one.”

My mother's apartment is in Outremont, a few blocks away from the house where I grew up. On my way down Champagneur I spy three quarters of a smoke by the curb. It looks like a skeleton finger beckoning to me. I bend for it and as my hand goes out, a word floats down from above.

“Hello.”

I look up to see a young Hasid, maybe sixteen, with clear quartz skin and reddish curls showing from under his fedora. Those hats look sharp and I don't care who knows it. “Hi,” I say, closing my hand around the butt and slipping it into my pocket.

“Are you Jewish?” he says.

“No,” I lie, thinking he will leave me alone.

“Do you speak Yiddish?”

“No.”

“Do you speak French?”

“No.”

“English?”

“No,” I say, beginning to feel like I'm in an Abbott and Costello routine. I turn to go, but the kid halts me by going “Ah ah” in a sharp voice and raising his hand. I turn back.

“Listen,” he says. “I need you to tell me about sex.” His eyes are serious, pleading. He has that accent.

This is not the first time this has happened. I've been asked to explain blow jobs and finger-banging to teenage boys in black hats ever since my family moved to this neighbourhood. Once an older man asked me to come home with him, and seemed genuinely surprised when I declined. “Why not?” he said. “I'd pay you!”

“I don't think I'm supposed to do that,” I tell the kid, looking around. A man halfway down the block is smoking on his balcony. His eyes are shaded by the rim of his hat.

“I really have to know,” he says. He seems so sad. What must it be like, to have wet dreams and no internet? I decide to be a grown-up about it.

“Okay.” I take a deep breath. “There's a penis and a vagina—”

“Yeah yeah yeah,” he says, waving his hand. “But is it fun?”

“Well, it helps if you like the person.”

“You only have to
like
them?”

“Some people think you should love each other, but lots of people do it just for… fun.”

He nods. Then he says, “is it big?”

“Is what big?”

“The hole.”

“Uh. It's big enough, I guess. You know, it's not just, like, a hole.”

His eyes widen. “What do you mean?”

“I mean it's like… got skin around it, and lips, and—”

“Lips?”
I can see now this was the wrong thing to say.

“Can I see it?” he says.

“What?”

“The hole, can I see it?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” I say, and start to walk away.

“Please,” he says, and reaches for my arm. I start to run.

“You're so pretty!” he yells after me.

I run all the way to my mom's apartment, three blocks.

I use the spare key to let myself in. The silkscreened People's History posters on the wall have been re-arranged according to colour: Judi Bari, Cochabamba, the People's Occupation of Alcatraz, Emma Goldman, Little Bighorn. It's just like my friends' college dorm rooms, except my mom's posters are dry-mounted, not stuck on with Blu Tak. I notice a new sticker on the fridge:
No Love on Stolen Native Land
. I locate the clutch, which is really more of a purse, beside the bed, buried under the plain white comforter.

As I leave the building I do a quick scan for the kid, but he's either gone or in deep camouflage. Beyond the corner is the kosher bakery, which I can smell a block away. I decide to pay a visit for the first time in years.

A tiny woman behind the counter hustles rugelach and cheesecake and poppyseed rolls into crisp, thick brown paper bags. The crowd shouts out requests in what seems like total anarchy; there is no line, no numbers taken or called. Crumpled bills and handfuls of change flow back and forth over the glass. The smell is trance-inducing: yeast, sugar, eggs, the chemistry of rising and expansion.

I hover near the back of the scrum, waiting for an opening, trying for eye contact with the tiny woman. A short, pudgy, well-dressed man elbows past me and cries “I need some rugelach!”