After twenty minutes, nothing seemed to be happening. Felix got bored and went to lie down in his room. I sat sadly by myself. Then I stood up and started to walk down the hallway to join Felix in the bedroom. As I walked down the hall, I noticed that it was snowing. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it could snow indoors. As far as I could remember, I hadn’t ever seen it happen. As I stood there marveling at the lovely flakes, I realized that it wasn’t possible for snow to fall from a ceiling. I looked closer at the snowflakes and realized they were thousands of tiny origami cranes that had taken flight. They were so small that they must have been made out of rolling papers and grocery receipts. I walked through Felix’s doorway and they were swirling around the room. The room was filled with them. Felix was lying on his back and didn’t seem to notice anything unusual.
“I think I’ve scratched my scratch-and-sniff stickers one too many times,” Felix said. “They’ve given me a sore stomach.”
I realized that I wasn’t feeling good either. I felt rubbery and nauseous. I was afraid to move. It was as if the world had turned to ash and if I moved even the slightest inch it would all turn to powder and vanish. Here we were, wanting to be death-defying pirates, and we had seasickness just a few minutes off the shore.
Felix and I just lay together in bed for what could have been five minutes or two hours until the dizziness had gone away. Slowly, the origami birds came down from the air and settled under the bed and on the floor. I figured there would probably be several inches down there. I had that feeling you get when you step outside after it snows. Everything in the world was dead and quiet and calm.
You wouldn’t be stunned by anything in this state. A magician could cut you in two or pull doves out of your pocket, but you wouldn’t be surprised. There would be nothing horrific in life, but then again, there wouldn’t be anything wonderful either. It made me nervous that I wouldn’t give a damn about brushing my teeth in the morning, or remembering to put my math homework in my bag, or getting to school on time on the day of a field trip. Some people wanted to feel this way, but I didn’t. This separation from feeling was Jules’s remedy to life. But I was going to have to find other things to make me feel good and confident in life. I was just going to have to start being my own person.
going to war
1
WHEN MY DAD GOT OUT OF REHAB, I had only seen him once in three months. Felix walked me over to the new apartment that Jules had rented, helping me carry my stuff in plastic bags. Mary had given me all sorts of pots and dishes to help us set up house. Felix put on his coat over his pajamas. He thought that since we were going from his house to mine, there wasn’t any reason to put on clothes. According to his logic, we weren’t actually going into the outside world.
Felix was confused when Jules got out of rehab and it was time for me to leave. He had somehow been thinking that I would be living at his house forever. Maybe Mary had insinuated that it was a possibility to him. She had mentioned a few times during the past couple days that there wasn’t any reason for me to go anywhere, but I wanted to get home while it was still possible. One wrong move might mess up everything and I would never get to be in my own skin again. I wanted to be able to sing in the shower and fart while watching television. I wanted things to be the same between Jules and me as they had been on Napoleon Street.
I liked the preparations for my leaving. They seemed all helter-skelter. It was getting Felix all worked up. He flung his shoes out the window for no good reason.
“What are you doing!” Mary shouted.
“My feet need to breathe!” he yelled back frantically.
I was having trouble finding all my stuff. Mary had an obsession with buying Felix and me cheap trinkets. Someone told me that if it weren’t for the people who bought all this stupid stuff, the world economy would collapse. I got down on my hands and knees and pulled out a plastic lion, a Smurf, and three hockey cards from under the couch.
Felix and I divided up our marbles. We had made a model of the solar system with Styrofoam balls and wires and acrylic paint for the science fair at school. For some reason it had taken us two months to complete and we’d been shocked to find out that we didn’t even get an honorable mention. We both wanted to keep the model, so we decided to divide up the planets. It was sort of stupid to have only Neptune, Venus, Pluto, and a handful of moons, but we were both very devoted to that particular universe. As I packed away the orange ball that was supposed to be Saturn, I found that, although I deeply wanted to live with Jules again, it hurt me to leave here.
Mary came running outside after me. There was no reason to run since I was just standing there. I was glad, though, because she always bounced up and down and seemed so soft when she ran. She was wearing her housecoat. Plastic barrettes in the shape of seashells held her hair up, and, for a second, I couldn’t even look at her because I found her so beautiful. I couldn’t blame Jean-Michel for being in love with her. The desire to touch her was overwhelming. I wanted to put my hand in her pockets and mash my face up against her belly and all sorts of other weird stuff. Johnny had warned me about touching his mother. He said I was obscene, and I realized that he was sort of right.
The clouds got thick and gray over us and it seemed as if it was going to rain any minute. The calm before the storm made me feel excited. It gave me the feeling that things were about to change. I sighed happily when I saw Jules walking down the street. I couldn’t be expected to stay in that house all my life, I told myself. Felix’s tapes wouldn’t take him anywhere and Johnny was bound to lose his looks. I was meant for bigger things. Jules had implicitly taught me to turn my back on anyone but him, the way he had done to his family. At that point in my life it probably saved me from an awful lot of heartbreak.
UP CLOSE, JULES LOOKED tired and nervous. He was wearing a green ski jacket that wasn’t even his style. He leaned forward with his hands and neck stretched out awkwardly, not sure whether he was supposed to kiss me or hug me. I couldn’t remember either because I’d only ever done it automatically. All of a sudden we were actors who were trying to play ourselves, not exactly sure what our subtext or motivation was. I settled on hugging him. There was a way that he felt lighter, though. As if something was missing.
Once I got my things unpacked in the apartment, I felt as if I was in an entirely different reality. I had a window that looked out onto the street and would need a curtain. I thumbtacked a pillowcase up. I was going to miss a woman’s touch. No matter what apartment my dad and I moved into, there would never be a mother there. If there was, we’d have a glass to put lilacs in on the kitchen table. The towels might even have a pretty pattern of a seashell on them. The social worker had two beds and the ugliest couch in the world delivered to us. I didn’t mind, though. I was just happy to be living with Jules again, even though we got off to a rocky start.
To tell you the truth, Jules looked five years older. He’d given up wearing dentures for his missing front tooth. His hair was matted and impossible to comb, as if he had been lying in bed for six years. His eyes had gotten bluer. They were that shade of intense blue that only crazy people seem to have.
He had lost a lot of weight and seemed sickly all over again. Once he coughed all day, and he acted as if each cough was a kick in the stomach. It got worse and worse over the next couple days. He coughed for ten minutes at a time. It sounded like an umbrella being torn apart by the wind. The way I remember it, dishes bounced up and down in the sink when he coughed and the lightbulbs started to flicker. He was always squeezing a pillow against his chest. I came home to find him lying on the bed with no shirt on and the pillow on his chest. He reminded me of a doll whose stuffing was coming out.
The doctors said that he had a modern form of TB. They gave him medication and insisted he take it. He always complained that the pills made him crazy. He fell off the kitchen table during the night. I came out to see what was going on, and he said he could have sworn that the table was his bed. The next morning, he thought
that a bird was in the house someplace. He’d seen it flying from one corner to another. He accused me of leaving the windows open at night, saying that was how the bird got in. I didn’t know what to say. I just agreed to keep the windows closed.
Actually, he started blaming all kinds of things on me. He thought I was getting up in the middle of the night and breaking things around the house. A couple days later he was watching TV at two o’clock in the morning and the sink overflowed. He said I had sneaked out of my room and turned the tap on.
“I don’t understand why you do all this hateful shit, man,” he said to me, standing in a puddle on the kitchen floor. He had dragged me out of bed to check out the mess. “You used to be a sweet kid. I don’t know where you got that mean streak. You must have picked it up from Mary or maybe those black kids at the foster home.”
Then one evening he accused me of being on drugs. I’d never ever tried drugs again since the mushrooms. I had to sit there listening to his speech. I burst out crying from frustration.
“Don’t lie to me. You’re sitting there stoned. Your eyes are popping out of your fucking head. I won’t have a drug addict in my house. I’ve battled that demon. I hate it. I just fucking can’t stand it. You’ve got those fucking junky ways.” His face got all red as he leaned over me and screamed. I sort of wished that he’d just go back on heroin, chill out and leave me alone.
He sent me out to buy some milk and then followed me down the street. I knew he was behind me, ducking behind trucks and into the alleys. He wanted to catch me in the act of buying drugs from drug dealers.
He went around acting as if we were enemies and were at war.
It seemed unfair because I hadn’t changed the way I felt about Jules. I sat by myself in my room in the evening; my arms and legs felt longer and gangly. It was the first time I felt like that. When you’re little, you don’t really feel ugly because your parents are always looking at you and rewarding you for your cuteness. I think he was disgusted that I was going to be turning thirteen soon. Then one night when I went to the bathroom, I realized that I had my period. I didn’t even want to tell Jules at first. I thought that it would separate us even more. Someone had yelled at me from a car that I had the longest legs in the world. So maybe there were some advantages of getting older that Jules didn’t care for.
Jules had never really talked to me about my period. Our moral ed. teacher had explained it to our whole class, though. She’d handed out photocopies with a drawing of a naked man and woman standing side by side on it. I had a pair of paper dolls when I was younger who came with top hats and party dresses and leisure wear. These figures, however, weren’t given any adjoining pages with clothes on them to cut out and put on, and they were just stuck being naked forever. There were arrows pointing to their bodies that you were supposed to write the scientific names for their private parts on. These words sounded like the names of devils and wicked angels. I didn’t want to think about my body as being that of an adult. I wanted Jules to like me the way he had when I was a baby, and now that seemed impossible.
BUT I KNEW IT WASN’T JUST ME because he was on bad terms with the rest of the world too. He was constantly arguing with the Vietnamese neighbors who lived downstairs from us because he couldn’t stand the smell of their cooking. He made me stand there and bang the floor with a broom handle for fifteen minutes whenever he smelled it wafting up. When my arms got tired and I started slowing down, he called out for me to continue.
“It’s like I’m living in a Communist country!” he screamed down the hallway. “It’s fucking with my karma!”
He sent me down to the landlord’s apartment with the rent check. I couldn’t help but read what he had written on the back, in his messy handwriting: “There are fucking leeches in my lungs.”
Nobody’s all bad, though. I still loved him so much. He was my only dad and all that. One nice thing I remember him doing for me around that time was buying me a pair of cleats. I had asked for a pair once when I was in grade five, but I had no use for them now since I didn’t play soccer anymore. I guess he’d seen them on sale in some window. They were black with white stripes and had little metallic cleats at the bottom. I didn’t want them, but I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. I wore them outside every weekend. I clicked down the street, looking around and hoping no other kid would see me. I kept to back alleys. No matter how scuzzy and crazy their parents are, kids still try to make them feel good about themselves.
2
WE HAD MOVED ONTO Christophe Colomb, which was about seven or eight blocks east of St. Laurent and was a much more residential street. We moved into the only apartment building on the block. The rest of the houses had colorful turrets and wooden eaves on them. It was the first street that I had lived on that had a lot of trees. It was fall and the leaves were all over the ground, the color of old men’s checkered clothes. The kids there all seemed to know one another. The street was filled with pages of misspelled words that had fallen out of binders along with the autumn leaves.
I didn’t have too many friends on our new block. Part of the reason was Jules. He used to scream at kids if they got within five feet of the yellow five-speed bicycle he kept chained outside our building; once Jules went outside wielding a tennis racket like a baseball bat and threatened to smack a kid who was leaning on the bicycle.
The kids started calling my dad John McEnroe, and they laughed at me when I walked by. Jules was so anxious about his bike being stolen that he decided to keep it in his bedroom at night. He had an asthma attack and then a near stroke carrying his bike up the four flights of stairs. I had to go carry it from the third floor to the fourth, scratching all the walls as I went. He couldn’t go through that ordeal again, so from then on he rode my bicycle around, a pink girl’s bike with a yellow basket on the front. He kept a pair of pliers in the basket and went around cutting the cords off appliances that people had thrown out. He thought there was money in it. There’s no need to explain to you how the kids on the street reacted to all of that.
Still, I remained confident that I could make friends at my new high school. I resolved I would keep Jules away from my school and new friends. At my last school, Jules used to steal clothes from the lost-and-found box. A boy in my class had asked me once why my dad was wearing his hat.
Anyhow, Jules would be happy to stay away from my friends. He was always criticizing them by predicting what they were going to be when they grew up. He said my friend Earl was the kind of boy who would grow up to have sideburns. Ian was going to be the type who stole from the meat section. Adam would paint flames on the backs of leather jackets for a living and Ricky would end up riding a bicycle all day and going through garbage cans looking for washing machine parts.
On the morning of my first day of school, I sat in the kitchen drinking a banana and egg milk shake. Jules said it was healthy and it saved time on washing dishes.
“These milk shakes don’t have any pizzazz,” I said.
“You go for crappy shit. This is what milk shakes are supposed to taste like. They were invented to be healthy.”
I was having sad and insecure thoughts that morning and I knew making conversation would distract me and calm me down.
“So how did my mom die?” I asked.
Jules looked at me like I was crazy.
He had told me a million times about what happened to my mother, who died when she was only sixteen years old. I would ask about her when I was nervous. It was a terrible habit, but I couldn’t help it. Every time he gave me a different answer. That morning, he told me they had been on a cruise ship and she dove off and had never come back.
“I was just standing there, drinking my piña colada, and then she was gone. They say it was the sun that drove her to it.”
“You think she was eaten by sharks?” I asked.
“No, I think she’s living on a tropical island with a bunch of Mau Maus. Of course she was eaten by sharks!”
One time he told me she had entered the
pie-eating contest at a country fair and had eaten too many pies and died.
He didn’t have that many good baby stories about me. I think he was drinking too much after my mother died to be able to remember any funny details. His stories always seemed to be about me almost getting hit by a car or falling down a sewer. “You had this crazy thing about always wanting to cross the street by yourself. And when you cried, you sounded like a goddamn alley cat.”
I much preferred stories about my mother. There was this story about how as a little girl she had been jumping up and down on her bed and had fallen off and cracked her skull open on the radiator. Nobody even knew that her skull was cracked open until she started writing things backward.
“She was always getting into incidents,” Jules said.
I picked up my bag and left for school, feeling terribly nervous. I used to be able to meditate on these stories for hours and they would take my mind off anything. That morning, they just seemed ridiculous.
MY LAST SCHOOL HAD BEEN in a small converted factory building. I had thought it the ugliest school in the world. It had always been on the verge of closing because of lack of enrollment. My new school was within walking distance of many more houses, so it didn’t have to worry about having enough students. It took up most of the block and was made out of large gray stones, like a museum. I didn’t mind changing to this school at all and was very optimistic about it. I hoped that I could be in a school play. There was a stone gargoyle of a woman’s face on the side of the front door. I put my hand up against her cheek and it felt unexpectedly warm.
In class I was seated next to a girl named Lauren. She had a big blonde ponytail and curly bangs, blue eyes, and freckles and I thought she was beautiful. She also had great style. She wore a little gray jogging suit with a rainbow belt that wasn’t attached to any belt loops and she had about forty plastic beads on her shoelaces. She had a gold locket of a mushroom or a clover, I wasn’t sure which.