Red Girl Rat Boy Read online

  Strong Jennifer moves to Toronto. Bum never seen again.

  At the next branch meeting, Roy shoves in to argue his case, shout it, till the TU coms throw him out. In this the old one doesn’t exactly take pleasure, but she doesn’t not either.

  Russell locates the Apt For Rent sign, pens 2 clumsily before Apt.

  A day later, a summons from Mrs. W.

  “Jake, look what that man did before he left.”

  The Sandringham’s garbage cans, tossed. Newsprint all over the alley, cat litter, tins, jars, peels and grounds, bacon fat, tea bags. Slimy leavings coat the cans’ insides. After tomorrow’s pickup, scrub. Russell won’t do it. Somebody has to.

  “He even threw these out.” Wet white papers stick to asphalt, drift under parked cars. She holds a handful. “From when Jennifer was a little girl.”

  Artworks, must be back through elementary. One picture has a strip of green along the bottom, red flower-dots above, a white sky thick with paint. Along the top are plump blue clouds with scalloped edges.

  “Poor girl. She got that wrong too.”

  This doesn’t cover the whole situation, yet nothing to say occurs. Mrs. W stoops to gather up more refuse.

  Red Girl Rat Boy

  In Marcia’s favourite book, Cinderella’s stepsisters had thin carroty hair. So did Hansel and Gretel’s mother, and the wicked fairy not invited to the christening, but Snow White’s stepmother had rolling auburn curls that filled a page. They gleamed. Her image, doubled by the speaking mirror, made Marcia’s insides feel hollow. She looked at it so often that the book readily fell open just there. This pleased the aunt whose gift it was.

  In a magazine of Mum’s, left open on the sofa, Marcia saw an ad for shampoo. Carefully, secretly, she cut out the sheet of rippling hair, mahogany-red. In her small bedroom she looked about. Where? Mum was always cleaning. Not the bookcase, though. The image slid into Chickadee, also from that aunt.

  In time the back issues all thickened with highlights, streaks, conditioner. Always the magazines showed more blondes and brunettes, even more silvers, than redheads. Never enough.

  At night, Marcia did not argue for a later bedtime. After kisses from Mum and the aunts, she used her flashlight to choose from the shelved treasures. Back under the quilt, she stroked the invisible hair, imagining colour, then slid the paper behind her bed. She remembered, every morning, to hide it again.

  At school that September, for the first time the kids sat in rows.

  In front of Marcia sat a new girl, down whose back cascaded red-gold hair in a shining tumble drawn in by a scrunchy. Beyond reach. When the teacher moved the class into groups the ripples came nearer, but as the weeks went by the row suited Marcia best. For hours each day, the red hung right before her. Sometimes, a ribbon. Sometimes the hair swayed, once it got past a pair of frail barrettes at the temples.

  Red-girl’s face was putty with small pale eyes. Irrelevant. That hair enlivened Marcia’s fingers, the crevices where they met her palms, the palms themselves. Her inner wrists shivered at the nearness of the silky warmth. Mesmerizing, how the classroom’s fluorescent beam bent one way on a curl’s crest and another in its hollow, while a single hair, fallen, made a sleek red thread on a sleeve. Marcia’s glances punctuated silent reading and subtraction and graphs, yet her hands still ached.

  One day the new boy behind Marcia—he’d transferred in after Thanksgiving—abruptly signalled flu season by throwing up.

  “Ewwww!”

  The teacher led him away. He reminded Marcia of Hamelin’s rats, though his teeth weren’t so prominent. Under his lips his chin sloped right back, and his scrape of blond hair ended in a rat-tail.

  Giving the janitor space to clean up the mess, the kids shoved their desks close. Now those red strands lay heaped before Marcia. Curls slid between her fingers, rode over and under knuckle and thumb as she pretended to write at the teacher’s direction. As with her mother’s scissors, she took care. No lift, no intrusion must be detectable. All went well until Red-girl reached for a dropped pencil. In a nanosecond Marcia let go but emitted a sound.

  Smirks, grimaces nearby—these weren’t about the continuing stench of pine cleanser blended with puke.

  Chilled and flaming, Marcia held her own pencil tight. Her other hand grasped her seat as the gold-red swirled, bounced. Once Red-girl put her head back, laughing; the tide rolled in towards Marcia’s chest and out again. When Red-girl scrubbed at her page with an eraser, the curls slid ssssshing back and forth across Marcia’s desk, inches away. Sssssh.

  When she got home, her fingers still hurt.

  Mum sniffed her. “What’s that nasty smell?”

  That night Marcia got a special hair-wash with Mum’s own shampoo. In bed, she cried at her old ignorant pleasure in coloured paper.

  Next day one aunt said, “Pity her hair’s so mousy.”

  “Fawn,” said the other. “Fawns are pretty.”

  Her mum sighed. “I just wish she had more friends.”

  “Any, you mean,” said the first aunt. “She’s a loner. Just like him.”

  “Marcia is not like him!”

  Rat-boy came back to school.

  As he walked down the hall, boys made vomiting noises. He made louder ones and laughed. Thus he joined the group that sneered and swaggered about the playground, tripping up kids on their way out of the portables. Every time Rat-boy went to his desk he bumped Marcia’s. She didn’t look up.

  Marcia, invited to a birthday party, agreed to go.

  “Get her hair cut, first. All those split ends.”

  “Long and loose suits Marcia. She’s like a girl in a fairy tale.”

  “Hopeless!”

  The mum snapped, “At least she’s not obsessed with her looks, like some people.”

  Red-girl wasn’t at the party.

  A circle game was played. In darkness, mysteries passed with shrieks from hand to hand. What is it? Guess! Slithery spaghetti, peeled grapes. Unseen, Marcia touched the hair of the girl beside her. Stringy, dry, hateful. She wiped her fingers on her dress, then received a handful of chunked-up pomegranate, for brains.

  In the birthday girl’s bedroom some dolls still resided, though set aside on a shelf. No redheads. One brunette had braids all down her back, silky-soft. Marcia undid them, did them up. After the others drifted downstairs again, she found nail scissors in a bathroom. Right by the skull she cut off a braid, then hid the doll behind all the others.

  Doll hair was way, way better than paper. Red was imaginable.

  At school, Rat-boy and his friends squelched their armpits as girls went by, or they farted. They got into the girls’ washroom to dump wastebaskets and trash the vending machines. In his newsletter to parents, the principal alluded obliquely to all this.

  “Marcia, do these boys ever bother you?”

  “What?”

  “Can’t you ever listen?” Her mum read aloud again. Marcia shrugged and went upstairs.

  “Bet she has a crush.” The first aunt.

  “My girl’s only eleven!”

  “Have you forgotten what we were like?” The aunt looked from sister to sister. “Maybe you just don’t want to remember.”

  Weeks later, the mother of the birthday-party girl surfaced.

  Housecleaning, she’d exposed the mutilated toy. Her daughter said at once, “Marcia. That weirdo.”

  The principal and guidance counsellor showed Marcia’s mum the doll. Marcia, also present, at first admitted nothing. After she gave in, the grown-ups sent her out into the hall. Rat-boy came by, saw her sullen on a bench. His eyebrows went up. He winked, raised his thumb. She stared.

  “I’ve never been so ashamed,” said the mum that evening,

  One aunt laughed. “Not true!”

  “You can just shut. Up.”

  Softly the other inquired,
“Marcia, can you tell us why?”

  The mum finally demanded to see that thing.

  Soon enough she found the braid, under Marcia’s mattress. The girl watched, tense, as her mother rummaged through closet and dresser but bypassed the bookshelf.

  At school, the only scissors provided were short and blunt.

  Marcia opened her mother’s sewing basket, hesitated, replaced it. The next day, having no choice, she opened it again.

  Then she waited.

  Waited.

  A month went by, thirty-one calendar squares for a child who beheld for hours each day, at close range, what she desired. Once, in the changeroom after gym, Red-girl stood close enough for Marcia to smell her hair.

  Rat-boy now bumped Marcia’s desk hard. If she tucked her feet under her chair, he’d stick his forward to kick her. Once he waited on a street corner near the school and tried to walk alongside. When she paid no attention, he followed her.

  The mum said, “Marcia seems much better now, doesn’t she?”

  “Didn’t you get that wake-up call? A dangerous age she’s going into. As you should know.”

  The second aunt, “Marcia’s imaginative. Creative.”

  “She makes things up! And those fairy tale books encourage her.”

  The mum stated, “My little girl does not tell lies, and you needn’t remind me what I did as a teenager. You did plenty yourself.”

  “Aren’t you at all worried?”

  “Marcia’s fine.”

  “Yeah, fine. And yes I did, but I didn’t get caught. Not many single mums have your support system, either.”

  “Another reminder I don’t need!”

  “What about love? No one’s mentioned love.”

  The mum looked down. The first aunt rolled her eyes.

  “Don’t you remember wanting, wanting till your heart hurt?”

  Marcia’s mum couldn’t find her sewing scissors, made inquiries. Annoyed at her own carelessness, she had to make do with kitchen shears.

  During the monthly school assemblies, Marcia’s class sat cross-legged on the floor at the back of the gym. Rat-boy was behind her at November’s gathering, she right behind Red-girl. All three sat far from the teacher, who aimed a warning look at Rat-boy on turning to inspect her class.

  The autumn-leaf hair gleamed.

  Announcements. A skit from Grade Two, a song from Kindergarten. Applause for Grade Seven’s track-and-fielders’ success at city-wide.

  As always, the program ended with the principal.

  When everyone clapped after his first joke, Marcia’s nerve broke. Her shaking hand wouldn’t leave her pocket.

  In the second outburst of applause she didn’t even try.

  As the speaker neared his final punchline, she remembered that fairy tales offered three chances. Only three. Grasping a tress of red silk, she raised the open blades as the laughing girl flung her head back hard and Rat-boy reached to grab Marcia where her breasts would have been if she’d had any.

  Time, many people said.

  Give it time. Give her time.

  Just let time pass. Which it did, though not because anyone let it.

  Red-girl never came back to school. Rat-boy got transferred out.

  Marcia’s mother, vacuuming, nudged her daughter’s bookshelf so magazines fell and released their hoard.

  “A blizzard of paper,” she wept to her sisters, “a blizzard. Why?”

  “The girl was plain, I’m told,” said one aunt. “So it was love.”

  The other’s expression said Slut. “You burned it all, right?”

  “But why?”

  A decade later, her mother’s question stayed with Marcia.

  Often her desire was water not wine, skim not cream, and after sex there swelled a sense of insufficiency. Hair colour, its brilliance and fire, didn’t change that. She refused or excused herself from more love-making, left whatever bed she’d got herself into and went off elsewhere, over the hills and far away and still with that hollow inside.

  The Sister-in-Law

  That winter the sister-in-law emailed to say she was coming to the city. The siblings hadn’t seen her for eight years, since the funeral. Their brother Alan had died driving a rental car in Albuquerque. So—was Olivia still related to them?

  The sister, phoning her extant brother, scoffed. “That woman made Alan go to the States. And he crashed.” Post hoc ergo propter hoc, for her, had sundered the link earlier corroded by dislike. “Void,” she tested, “invalid.”

  He looked towards the mountains. Rain came across the water.

  Also, Joyce noted, the couple hadn’t been happy for some time before his death. Alan had mentioned divorce, to them though not to their mother, then still alive barely. So wasn’t the sister-in-law only technically a widow?

  “If there’d been children,” she argued, “it’d be different. Children change everything.”

  Olivia’s email proposed a get-together for lunch? drinks?? dinner??? Wherever you like, I don’t know Vancouver any more!!! A smiling emoticon.

  “Where’d she find my email address? Yours, for that matter?”

  The brother shrugged. If Joyce would only shut up, he could brush Sadie and make his tea.

  “Ronald, why can’t you talk like a normal human? We’ll discuss Olivia tonight.” Snap.

  Quiet.

  Sadie gazed at him, her plumy tail just moving. As he reached to a drawer, she jumped onto the appointed stool. First he brushed her coarse outer coat. Good—but soon impatience showed. Amused, he started on her silky under-fur. Sadie squirmed with pleasure. When she’d had enough she bounced down, drank, got into her crate, twirled round and went to sleep. The Sheltie-Pom is not available.

  While the smoky leaves brewed, Ronald imagined Alan’s death, as he’d done for months after the event. The fantasy had blurred. His brother’s habit of speeding, though, was hard fact. He’d got tickets, made their mother cry.

  Ronald himself didn’t feel like a widower, but then he’d never felt much like a husband. Or had he? Louisa. A short marriage, ended decades ago by her death. Louisa.

  The timer sounded. Ronald drank, looking out at the silver Pacific, at mountain peaks swathed in cloud. Soft weather, yet every year people drowned here, or they slid off cliffs and died. They never learn was said, illogically, for it couldn’t be the same victims every time.

  Olivia still sent a card every Christmas. Elves, glitter. Ronald supposed that the university’s card he mailed to her was in comparison somewhat austere.

  N

  “No, I’ll cut the pizza,” Joyce said. “Classic first-born, super-responsible. Help Mum. Calm down Dad. Take care of my little brother.” She sawed through to the cardboard.

  “When did you take care of me?”

  “Alan. You could always cope, Ronnie. You had a childhood. I didn’t. Then Stanley’s father came along, and Stanley was born. Hah!”

  The two were chewing before Joyce’s silent TV, where one well-dressed man shook his fist at another. The text read Elder abuse rampant, no govt accountability.

  Ronald pulled the hard rim off his slice, as inedible. “But you and Harris were together a long time before Stanley was born.”

  “Don’t remind me. Thirteen years. Harris was as much trouble as any kid, too.” She glanced at the TV. “God, who’d go into social work?”

  “I didn’t see a lot of Harris. University, grad school, I was busy.”

  “You didn’t miss much.”

  The door to Stanley’s room was closed. No light showed.

  “Will he want some?”

  “Stanley does like pepperoni. Uncle Ronnie’s here!” shouted Joyce, pushing aside much of the remaining pizza. Her voice cracked. “His father wouldn’t have asked that. He’d just eat it all. Stanley!”

  A plast
ic cuplet in the pizza box brimmed with a creamy substance. Hopeful, Ronald dipped his crust into it.

  “They never send enough of that,” Joyce said. “When our son clearly needed professional help, Harris wouldn’t discuss it. Let alone budget for it. Or take him to his appointments.”

  Stanley peeped out at the food. “Is there some other uncle I don’t know about, Mum?” Bearish, he shuffled forward.

  Ronald, who’d not had a sighting in some time, noted his nephew’s belly and drooped posture. At twenty-one, the kid looked forty. When did he shave last? Stanley’s bedroom door stood ajar. On the Xbox, monstrous black-browed men all girt in white had at each other with swords.

  Joyce got to her feet. The comfy chair, another channel, fresh coffee?

  “No, Mum.” He licked out the cuplet of dipping sauce. “I mean, Uncle Alan died, right?” His plate laden, her son disappeared.

  Ronald fetched another beer for his sister. “Joyce, there has to be better pizza than this on Commercial Drive. Next month let’s try somewhere else.”

  “You know, my benefits don’t nearly cover his therapy. Where the hell is our so-called union? Social workers never fight for themselves.”

  “Is therapy helping him, do you think?”

  She slammed the bottle down. “You think Stanley’s a loser! That he’s lazy and screwing me around to avoid school or work. You’re wrong,” Joyce croaked. “You don’t know anything about depression. Stanley was devastated by Alan’s death.” She headed to the bathroom.

  Ronald calculated. When Alan and the then sister-in-law left Vancouver for his job at an eastern university, Stanley had been four.

  On the TV, a woman wept by a house with For Sale and Happy Day Daycare signs outside. The crawler read 2 Tots Shaken, In ICU.

  A knock at the door. Joyce went, crossly. A vague female muttering sounded.

  “Not again! You never learn, do you?”

  Footsteps went down the hall.

  Ronald watched a silent commercial for Febreze and one for Dove.

  Joyce came back. “She can’t figure out the dryer. Twenty times I’ve told her, shown her. Why haven’t you finished your pizza?”