One Good Hustle

TWO




THIS IS THE LAST DAY of grade 11. One more year and I’m finished. Forever. I’m pretty sure my dad is a high-school dropout. Maybe it didn’t matter as much forty years ago. But nowadays, “high-school dropout” sounds lame. And kind of skeevy.

I stare up at the clock. 2:15.

A monitor walks up and down the aisles, watching us. Not our regular English teacher. She taps the desk of one girl, two rows over: Eyes on your own paper.

I’m sitting here in room 221 doing my final English exam and all I can think of is Ruby and Lou descending on Marlene.

I wrote down the phone number for Ruby this morning.

“We’ll just look in on her, make sure she’s all right,” she said. Ruby was stern but energetic about it all.

Being looked in on goes against everything Marlene stands for. Unless it’s a guy. If Lou was going over on his own, Marlene would be all for it.

Lou’s shift is the early one: 5:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. He works as a guard at Oakalla Prison Farm here in Burnaby. Jill’s dad is the opposite of my dad in just about every way you can think of. They’re both quiet, but that’s where the similarity ends. Lou is so tall he has to duck his head to come into a room; Sam claims he’s 5-foot-10 but he says a lot of things. Lou wears a close-cropped beard, I think to hide his pockmarks; Sam’s got no facial hair, I think so a potential mark will believe Sam’s got nothing to hide. Jill gets her jollies when people mistake her for Lou’s girlfriend instead of his daughter. Nobody would ever mistake Sam and me for a couple.

Wait till Marlene gets a gander at giant Lou. She’s probably staring at him right now. It’s hard to know with Marlene if she’ll get scared, or turned on.

At two-thirty I’m out the door. I love these final exam days. You just get up and walk out when you’re done. And English exams—I mean, for chrissake, if you have two brain cells to rub together, how can you not pass an English test? Mind you, I probably wouldn’t have said that a few weeks ago when I kept walking into things. Forgetting what I was saying and where I was going. Wondering if Marlene would still be breathing when I got home.

It got so bad that Mr. Walters, my Trades Math teacher, asked if he could speak to me after class. It’s a bit embarrassing that I take Trades Math, but when things started to get hairy at home I didn’t want to take the chance of failing geometry or trigonometry or whatever else they were selling. I just wanted a class that would show me how to think on my feet, keep my funds in order. Sam would approve, I figured. My dad is a practical sort of guy.

Mr. Walters, who is also one of the school’s two guidance counsellors, waited until the classroom was empty before he got serious with me.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

Without those student bodies filling up space, the words echoed off all Walters’ little chalk numbers on the blackboard. He’d been talking about taxes, I think. Or the way compound interest is calculated daily—something useful, but I couldn’t concentrate. Walters had a very concerned expression on his face and his long eyebrows pricked up like antennae.

I waited for some smart-assed response to come out of me.

Nothing. Blank. So I shrugged.

“I know I should be grateful for small mercies,” he said, “but you didn’t say a word today. You stared right through me. Frankly, you have me a little worried.”

Generally speaking, Mr. Walters is an easy target. Short, with a face like a penguin and a persnickety, anxious demeanour, he’s the sort of guy whose pants you want to pull down just before you leave him blindfolded on the front stoop of a convent.

The fact that he wanted to know why I was too depressed to harass him seemed pathetic and beautiful all at once. I was scared I might start bawling. I wished I could hug him. I wished that he would hug me and pat my back with nice quiet thumps, the way Marlene used to do when I skinned the crap out of my knee.

What I really wished was that I could just tell on her. What would a proper little guy like Mr. Walters think if he knew that the night before, my mother had sat on the couch putting on her makeup because she was planning to off herself?

“I’m going to throw myself off a pier,” Marlene had said, and then she put more lipstick on. My mother has always liked the idea of looking pretty when she dies. So she kept at it, putting on layer after layer of mascara while she talked about how she would dive into the ocean. “My bones drifting free, finally free,” she said, as if it was the most gorgeous ambition ever.

In other words, I thought, you want to be a jellyfish, one of those floating, white ballerina-things that dance in the quietest parts of the water.

She caught me rolling my eyes.

“You know everything, don’t you.” She took another slug of her vodka and milk, zipped up her makeup bag, and announced that she was going to jump off the roof of our building instead.

I didn’t respond. I was at the dinner table, trying to finish a short story for English class. Coming from a family of bullshit artists, fiction is the only school thing I truly excel at.

“So s-superior …” Marlene sputtered. “I was going to get you some bubbly for your sweet sixteenth, a nice little bottle of Baby Duck maybe. But you’d have turned your nose up at that!”

“My body is a temple,” I said.

“Oh, for chrissake! Why couldn’t you just turn Catholic like a normal person?”

It’s because of Marlene that I even know any born-again-Christian kids. I wouldn’t know a guy like Drew, that’s for sure, except that Marlene had the bright idea to send me to camp a couple of summers ago so she and Fat Freddy could take off for a week and work a few hustles in Los Angeles. It turned out to be one of those Jesus camps. The Welfare paid for it. Most of the camps Welfare pays for are Jesus camps. It’s like they think that poor kids must all be morally bankrupt too.

The Hollow Tree Ranch was set up like the Old West and the pastor who ran the campground called himself Tex. I thought I’d died and gone to hell, sitting in the chapel the first morning, listening to Tex spout off about what it means to “put a spoke in the devil’s wheels.”

I pulled a pen out of my purse. I had bought a postcard in the tuck shop and I was about to write an earful to Marlene about where she’d sent me. From my left I could feel a pair of eyes watching my hands. It was the guy I’d noticed when I arrived the afternoon before. He was gangly, with woolly blond hair and a sweet face, and he sang so loud at the first evening campfire that I thought he had to be joking. I turned my head and stared him in the eye. He smiled and looked away. Christian wimp, I thought.

I left the postcard in my purse and, instead, carefully drew a pentagram on my palm. The wimp blinked down at my hand. I wiggled my fingers in his direction and gave him a wink. He hiccuped, suppressing a giggle. That was Drew.

“You’re bad,” he whispered. Eyes twinkling, he looked almost giddy.

“You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

“I can’t wait.” He grinned.

We were inseparable for the rest of the week. I wished we went to the same school but Drew’s family lived in North Burnaby while Marlene and I lived in South. Maybe he was a church guy but he wasn’t super pious or anything, just kind of abnormally clean-living. Which suited me fine because I’m abnormal too. If I were normal, I wouldn’t be a virgin who doesn’t drink or smoke.

After our Hollow Tree Ranch week, Drew invited me to some of his church’s DYF nights. DYF stands for Divine Youth Fellowship—Tenth Avenue Divine is the name of Drew’s church. They have these roller parties the first Friday of every month. I went with him to a DYF roller party once. At the rink, I said “shit” when I landed on my ass and Mandy Peterson, one of the DYFers, looked at me like I’d just ripped off a big fart.

“I used to swear,” Mandy said to me. “People underestimated me when I swore.”

I didn’t fit in but at least nobody wanted to beat me up. They were nice to me. Even that Mandy Peterson chick was nice. Especially when I tried not to swear.

The DYFers had a game night at Mandy’s house once. Her parents had a nice place: tons of bedrooms, two cars and a boat. Those church kids all seemed to have boats and swimming pools and camping equipment and rumpus rooms and chandeliers. Marlene asked me once if I felt bad being in their houses, uncomfortable, like I didn’t belong there. I think she was trying to ask if I felt low-class next to them. I was too busy swimming in their pools and eating steak off their fancy plates. Deluxe accommodations suited me just fine. And to be honest, the whole clean-living thing gave me a weird, spearmint-fresh feeling inside. All that chastity stuff was kind of a relief after years of Marlene.

One time, a year or so ago, I was complaining about my zits. Marlene was acting all ballsy and sexy with a vodka brave-on. She told me I should go get laid and my skin would clear right up.

That’s when I told her that I was going to save myself until marriage.

“Over my dead body!” she said. “You want to end up with some guy who does a wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am and then leaves you lying there? Staring at the ceiling? Stuck with him? Married to him?”

“God! There’s other stuff, you know. Ways of knowing that someone would be nice to you in bed.”

“Other stuff? Those goddamn Christians are going to ruin your life.”

Treat your body as a temple, the youth pastor would tell us. I started tossing that one at Marlene to get a rise out of her. Drove her bats. Holier than thou sons-of-bitches, she’d say.

It pisses me off when Marlene slags all that religious stuff as being totally not like us—I suppose because I’m scared she’s right. I mean, why is Drew friends with me? Maybe he’s only nice to me because he has to be—it’s in the Bible. Meanwhile, I don’t know if I even believe in God.

At the Jesus camp, they sang this song that went, I’ve got the joy joy joy down in my heart. I don’t think I have that. I know my mother doesn’t.



From the corner of my eye, I saw her turn around on the couch and stare at me. “I love you, you know,” she said. “More than anything in the world.”

I wanted to pound her. Instead, in this very matter-of-fact way, I asked, “How’re you going to get on the roof?”

She blinked. “Fine. I’ll go up to the top floor and jump off someone’s balcony.” She pulled her purse straps over her shoulder, stood up, and went strutting down the hallway like it was a red carpet.

“Yeah?” I followed her. “Who’d let you in?”

“That won’t be hard.” She opened the front door of our apartment and tossed me a creepy starlet glance over her shoulder. “I’ll just smile.” Her teeth flashed.

I watched her head down the hall and push the elevator button. She waved to me as she got on. I slammed the apartment door.

Do it, then. See if I care.

I wandered into her room. The top drawer in her dresser was open—that’s where she keeps her stash. I plucked out a prescription bottle: Valium 10mg. When I turned it over, all the little blue happy pills rattled around. Actually, “happy pills” is a misnomer. They’re “I-don’t-give-a-crap pills.” She’d become a big fan of Ativan too. Same shit.

I read once about this woman who took Valium before she cut her wrists and bled to death in a nice hot bath. Does blood look beautiful when you’re stoned on Valium? In the dresser mirror, my pupils were holes in my head. Little black monsters stared out of them. I pushed my hair out of my face. All the cool girls at school seem to have smooth TV hair, but mine is a frizzy, curly, snaky mess. The day I first talked to Drew, he said, “Man, I love your hair—it’s that wild witchy hippie kind of hair.” He loved it, he said. I started to not mind my head so much after that. Drew likes when I wear drapey hippie blouses too. I have lots of those now.

I don’t know how long I stood there thinking about that sort of stuff, but when I heard the front door opening, I dropped the Valium back in her drawer. I went into the living room as Marlene came waltzing in, all giddy and grinning. Turned out she’d never made it to the roof. She’d been hanging out with the goof upstairs, the unemployed guy with the moustache who lies around on his balcony all day, tanning. I went to my bedroom and closed the door.



I didn’t tell Mr. Walters any of that, though. I told him I had insomnia. It wasn’t a lie either. I had been awake till one or two in the morning trying to think of quick and easy ways to die: eating Drano (in gel capsules so it’d just slip down), electrocution (blow-dryer in the bathtub), fast-moving truck (stepping in front of). One time on The Phil Donahue Show, I saw a woman tell the whole world how her son died by auto-erotic asphyxiation. He hanged himself with a necktie in his closet, accidentally suffocating while he jerked off over a porn mag.

How can you tell a guidance counsellor shit like that? You’d sound like a whiny pathetic jerk, snivelling for attention. Sam says that serious people don’t talk, they act.

But after I left Walters that day, I was pissed off that I couldn’t say anything to him. I’m pretty sure that is when I first started to actually plan Marlene’s suicide. She could wash a couple of Valium down with vodka. Maybe she’d forget and I’d give her a couple more. When she passed out, I could lay the pillow on her face and slowly push down. What would be so wrong about it? She kept on insisting she wanted to die, and I could help. I could be the one to make things right for her. I started to think that this was the only way out for Marlene and me. She couldn’t bear to be alive and I couldn’t bear to watch her misery any more. I would be a strange kind of angel.

But I had to figure out the money situation. I’d need enough to get me through for the first few weeks at least.

What if I endorsed the welfare cheque over to me when it came? Or I could deposit the cheque into her account and write myself a new one.

I couldn’t stop thinking how it would work.

I remember it was one-thirty in the morning and I was in my room, sitting up in bed, practising Marlene’s signature in my school binder. I had started by tracing her name from an old cancelled cheque. Then I went freehand. I’d done two nearly full pages of Marlene Bell, Marlene Bell …

It was quiet that night. No sirens in the distance. No voices in the halls.

I thought I heard muttering and I glanced at the wall that separated our bedrooms. It almost sounded as though she was crying. Then nothing.

I went back to my signatures.

A screech ripped the air.

Jolting up from the page, I knocked my head against the wall.

Marlene.

I stared at the wall between our rooms again. Her scream became a crying wail and I ripped the signature pages out of my binder and crumpled them up. I switched off my lamp and stared into the dark, my heart banging away like a monkey in a cage.

The wailing turned into loud gasping sobs and I jumped out of bed just as my mother’s door flung open. I heard her stagger against the wall as she rushed toward the kitchen. I chased after her.

As I came round the corner, she pulled a butcher knife out of the sink. In just her bra and panties, she turned the point of the blade toward her stomach. Then she let it drop.

“It’s too dirty,” she said. She sank to the floor, choking on her tears. “And I’m too fat. It’ll never go in. How did I get so fat?”

I tried to help her up, but she pushed me away.

I went back into my room, took the crumpled pages out of the wastebasket and ripped them into pieces and more pieces. Miserable confetti.

The next morning while she was sleeping, I got up the guts to phone my dad in Toronto. We hadn’t heard from him in months. I thought maybe if Sam knew how shitty things were, he would come and get us.

Sitting in the living room I filled him in as quietly as I could. “She threatened to stab herself in the stomach last night. Last week she swallowed a bottle of pills and then called the ambulance. Another time she said she was going to drown herself.” I had decided before I picked up the phone that there was not going to be any crying, but that went out the window as soon as I heard Sam’s voice. “I can’t stay here,” I said.

It was silent on his end. I waited for him to say something. Something about a plane ticket for me.

“I’m goin’ out of town,” he blurted. “You got friends you could stay with?”

Not much to talk about after that.

When I came home from school to pack my bag before going to stay with Jill, Marlene came into my bedroom and sat on the floor with her back to the wall, tears rolling.

“I just can’t—” She wiped her nose with a Kleenex. “I don’t know how to fill another day. It’s such a relief to go to sleep and so horrible when I wake up and know I have to drag through another one, like a thousand pounds of dead … until I can sleep again.”

I sat on the edge of my bed and watched her. Mascara had streaked down her cheeks into the corners of her mouth. She dug her fingers into my bedroom rug.

“I wanted you to know because—” She swallowed. “I always thought it was cruel when I heard a woman killed herself and let her kids find her like that. I didn’t want that.”

I said, “If you want help trying to get pills together, I’ll try. But, um, I have to go. I’m not going to watch.”

I couldn’t look at her. I kept tweetzing the sheet on my bed. Tweetzing is this thing I do where I rub a fold of the cotton between my fingers. Marlene says I’ve been doing it since I was a baby.

I nodded to myself. “I can’t be here for—” I lost the words then, as if I had already begun to seep away, long before I stood up to leave.