Dancing Girls and Other Stories Part 10

Raucous laughter, in which the rest of the cabin joined while Rob blushed. "I don't think that's very nice,"

he'd said the first time.

"He doesn't think it's very nice," Dave mimicked. "What weighs two thousand pounds and twitches?"

"Moby Spaz!"

They called these jokes "spaz jokes." What bothered Rob most about them was that they reminded him of the kinds of jokes his brothers and their medical-student friends would tell, having a game of pool in their father's rec room, to relax after cla.s.ses. ("Bring your friends over anytime, boys. You too, Rob.") Except that theirs were supposed to be true stories. They played endless practical jokes on each other, most of them involving parts of cadavers they would cut off during dissection: eyeb.a.l.l.s in the teacup, hands in the coat pocket.

"Hey, we were doing this old guy, and I thought, What the h.e.l.l, and I cut off his tool, it's all brown and shrivelled up, like they get, and I slipped it into my briefcase. So I go down to the Babloor, and I have a few beers, and I go into the can and I open my fly, but I stick this old guy's dork out instead of my own. So I stand there like I'm p.i.s.sing, and I wait till another guy comes in, and I shake it and it comes off in my hand.

So I throw it down and I say, 'd.a.m.n thing never worked anyway.' You should've seen the look on his face!"

They related rumours from Emergency at the hospital, most of which seemed to involve women with broken c.o.ke bottles stuck in them or men who had been masturbating with the hot water tap. "Had to get a plumber to saw him out. Came in with the tap still on and two feet of pipe." "I heard of one with a crayon.

Got stuck in the bladder. He came in because he was p.i.s.sing blue and he couldn't figure out why."

"I heard about one with a snake."

"Why do you tell those stories?" Rob asked them one night when he felt courageous.

"Why do, you listen to them?" James grinned.

"You'll do it, too," Adrian told him. "Wait and see." Then, after the others had gone home, he said, more seri-ously, "You have to tell them. I know you think it's pretty gross, but you don't know what it's like. It's real life out there. You have to laugh or go crazy." Rob tried to reject this, but it haunted him. Real life would be too much for him, he would not be able to take it. He would not be able to laugh. He would go crazy. He would run out into the snow with no galoshes, he would vanish, he would be lost forever.

"What weighs two thousand pounds and has an explod-ing head?""Moby Hydrocephalic!"

"That's enough!" Rob said, trying to a.s.sert his author-ity.

"Look, Groaner," Dave said. "You're here to see we have a good time, right? Well, we're having a good time."

"Yeah," Pete said. "You don't like it, you can beat me up."

"Sure, go on," Dave said. "Do your Boy Scout good deed for the week. Kill a cripple." Bullying him with his own guilt.

It didn't help that the other counsellor, Gordon Holmes, encouraged them. He smuggled beer and cigarettes into the cabin for them, ogled their girlie magazines, and told them which of the girl counsellors were "easy outs."

"Hey, make out last night?" Dave would ask him in the morning.

"Not bad, not bad."

"She go down for ya?"

Gordon's secretive smile. Patting Old Spice on the back of his neck.

"Who was it, Pammer the Slammer?"

"Every time she pounds my back I get a bone on."

"Hey, was it Jo-Anne?"

"Naw, she's a crip. Gord wouldn't take out a crip, would ya, Gord?"

"You got to go along with them," Gordon told Rob. "Kid them a little. They're frustrated, they got normal emo-tions just like you and me." He punched Rob on the shoul-der. "Take it easy, man, you think too much."

Gordon went to a public high school in East York. His mother and father were divorced and he lived with his mother, whom he called "the old lady." He'd got the job with the camp through the Big Brothers. He wasn't a juve-nile delinquent, and Rob could think of many good points about him, but he couldn't bear to be around him for long. It did no good for Rob to tell himself that Gord would probably end up as a garage mechanic, that the kind of girls he talked about so freely were what his own mother would call "cheap," that he would get one of them pregnant and have to get married and end up in a dingy, overcrowded apartment, drinking beer in front of the TV while his wife nagged him about the laundry. He was envious anyway, listening despite himself to the sagas of back seats and for-bidden mickeys at the drive-in, of heavy petting, forays into undergarments by Gord's daring fingers, triumphs over hostile elastic straps, conquests of b.r.e.a.s.t.s. He resented this sleazy freedom even though he knew he wouldn't enjoy it himself, wouldn't know what to say or where to put his hands.

He himself had never taken out anyone but his mother's friends' daughters, pallid little girls who needed to be es-corted to their own private-school dances and didn't know anyone else to ask. He bought them wrist corsages and steered them swiftly, correctly, around the floor in their dresses like layers of pastel toilet paper, their small wired bosoms pressing lightly into his chest, his hands against their backs feeling the rows of hooks that might conceiv-ably be undone; but no, that would be too embarra.s.sing. Though he'd sometimes felt his crotch tighten during the joyless foxtrots (he stood out the few chaste rock numbers the hired band would attempt), he hadn't liked any of these girls, though he tried to make sure they had a good time. He had even kissed one of them goodnight, because he felt she was expecting it. It was three years ago, when he was still wearing bands on his teeth. So was the girl, and when he'd kissed her harder than he'd intended, their teeth had locked painfully together, at her front door, in full view of the entire street.

Anyone watching would have thought it was a pa.s.sionate embrace, but he could still remember the panic in her eyes, though he'd repressed her name.

Rob turned Jordan right, onto the Nature Walk that ran in a meandering oval through the small woods behind the boys' cabins. It was paved, like all the other walks. The trees were labelled, and there was a little gla.s.s case at the far end of the oval where Bert the Nert, who was a nature buff, put a new exhibit every day. He'd taken Jordan on the Nature Walk several times before, stopping to read the labels on the trees, pointing out chipmunks and once a stray cat. Hardly any-one else seemed to go on it. He liked to wheel her along through the trees, whistling or singing songs to her. He wasn't shy about his voice when there was no one else but her, he even sang songs from Bert's repertoire that stuck in his throat when the a.s.sembled children sang them, led by red-faced Bert, his master-of-ceremonies smile, and his en-ergetic accordion.

Jordan River is chilly and cold, Hallelujah, Chills the body but not the soul, Hallelujah."Your name is the name of a famous river," he told her. He hoped she would be pleased by that. He wondered if her parents had known about her, about what she was going to be like, when they named her, and whether they'd felt later that the expensive-sounding name was wasted because she would never match it, never sip c.o.c.ktails on a terrace or smile like Grace Kelly in cool lipstick. But they must have known; it said in her file that it was a birth defect. She had one brother and one sister, both normal, and her father was something in a bank.

Sometimes, thinking of the catastrophe ahead of him, his failure and his flight, he thought about taking her with him. That was her clinging to his neck as he scrambled up the boxcar (but she couldn't cling!), she was with him in the hotel room when he woke up, sitting in her chair (how had he got her there?), looking into his eyes with her icy blue ones, her face miraculously still. Then she would open her mouth and words would come out, she would stand up, he would somehow have cured her.... Sometimes, very quickly (and he would repress it immediately) he would see both of them hurtling from the top of a building. An acci-dent, an accident, he would tell himself. I don't mean that.

Jordan River is chilly and wide, Hallelujah, Rob crooned. He was heading for a bench, there was one up ahead, where he could sit and they could have their game of chequers.

"Hey, look at this." It was Bert's gla.s.s case. "Shelf fun-gus, " he read from the typed card. "There are several species of shelf fungus. The shelf fungus is a saprophyte which feeds on decaying vegetable matter and can often be found grow-ing on dead trees. You can write your name on the bottom with a stick," he said. He used to do that at the cottage, without removing the fungus from the tree, and it gave him pleasure to think of his name growing in secret, getting a little bigger every year. It was hard to tell whether or not she was interested.

He found the bench, turned Jordan to face it and un-folded the board. "I was red last time," he said, "so you get it this time, okay?" There was one chequer missing, on her side. "We'll use something else," he said.

He looked around for a flat stone, but there wasn't one. Finally he pulled a b.u.t.ton off his shirtsleeves. "That okay?" he said.

Jordan's hand moved yes. He began the laborious trial-and-error process of determining how she wanted to move. He would point at each chequer in turn until she signalled. Then he would point to each possible square. They could get through a game a lot faster now that he was used to playing this way. Her face would fold and unfold, screw itself up, twitch, movements he found distressing in other CP children still, but not in her. Concentrating made her worse.

They had hardly gone through the opening moves when the bell sounded from the main building. That meant the Play Period was over and it was time for the afternoon group activities. Jordan, he knew, had swimming with the rest of her cabin. She couldn't swim, but someone held her in the water, where her movements, they said, were more controlled than on land. He himself was supposed to help with Occupational Therapy. "Mud pies," the boys in his cabin called it. They liked making obscene statues out of clay in order to shock Wilda, the OT instructor, who wanted so much to be able to tell them they were being creative.

Rob put his shirt b.u.t.ton into his pocket. He took out the notebook they used and marked down their respective positions. "We'll finish it tomorrow," he told Jordan. He wheeled her along the path in the same direction they'd been going, which would get them back sooner, since they were three-quarters of the way around the oval already.

To the north side of the cement path there was a clear-ing, a stretch of gra.s.s and across it the silver of water: the stream that was always there, usually a sluggish trickle but swollen now by last night's rain. Rob thought, She's proba-bly never felt gra.s.s before, she's probably never had her hand in a real stream.

He suddenly wanted to give her something that no one else ever had, that no one else would ever think of.

"I'm going to take you out," he told her. "I'm going to put you down on the gra.s.s, so you can feel it.

Okay?"

There was a hesitation before she signalled yes. She was looking into his face; perhaps she didn't understand. "It's fun," he told her, "it feels nice," thinking of the many times he had sprawled on the lawn of the back garden, eight or ten years ago, chewing on the white soft ends of gra.s.s blades and reading the almost-forbidden Captain Marvel comic books.

He unbuckled the straps that held her in and lifted her thin body. She was so light, lighter even than she looked, a creature of balsa wood and paper. But tough, he told him-self. She could take it, you could see it in her eyes. He put her down on the gra.s.s, on her side, where she could see the flowing stream.

"There," he said. He knelt beside her, took her left hand and put it into the cold stream. "That's realwater, not like a swimming pool." He smiled, feeling magnanimous, a giver, a healer; but she had closed her eyes, and from some-where a curious sound, a whine, a growl... her body was limp, her arm jerking; suddenly her leg shot out and her foot in its steel-crusted boot kicked him in the shin.

"Jordan," he said. "Are you all right?" More growling: was it joy or terror? He couldn't tell, and he was frightened. Maybe this was too much for her, too exciting. He wrapped his arms around her, pulling her up to put her back into the chair. The gra.s.s had been damper than he'd thought, and the right side of her face was streaked with mud.

"What the h.e.l.l are you doing with that child?" Pam's voice behind him. Rob turned, still holding Jordan, who was thrashing her arms like a propeller gone crazy. Pam was standing on the cement walk, hands on her hips, the posture of an accusing mother coming upon the children playing Doctor in the bushes. Her face was red, her hair mussed, as if she'd been running. There was a twig dangling above her ear.

"Nothing," Rob said, "I was just...." She thinks I'm some kind of a pervert, he saw, and felt himself blushing. "I thought she would like to see what the gra.s.s felt like," he said.

"You know that's dangerous," Pam said. "You know she isn't supposed to be taken out. She could hit her head, injure herself...."

"I was watching her the whole time," Rob said. Who was she to be bossing him around like this?

"I think you spend far too much time with that child," Pam said, less angry now but definitely not convinced by his explanation. "You should spend more time with some of the others. It's not good for them, you know, forming... attachments... that can't possibly be kept up after camp." Jordan's eyes were open now; she was looking at Rob.

"What the h.e.l.l are you talking about?" Rob said, al-most shouted. "How do you know, you don't know..."

She was accusing him, in advance, of betraying Jordan, abandoning her.

"Don't get your girdle in a knot about it," Pam said.

"But I think you should have a word with Bert, after Staff Lounge tonight. I've discussed this problem with him al-ready."

She turned away from him and walked quickly off to-wards the main house. On the back of her Bermuda shorts there was a small patch of wet mud.

Rob buckled Jordan back into the chair. This problem, Why was it a problem? There wasn't much time, he would be a.s.signed to other children, discouraged from seeing her, and she would think.... What could he say to her, how to convince her? He knelt in front of her, resting his arms on the chair tray, and took hold of her left hand.

"I'm sorry if it frightened you, being on the ground," he said. "Did it?" Her hand did not move. "Don't pay any attention to what Pam just said. I'm going to write you letters after camp, lots of letters." Would he?

"And some-one at your house can read them to you." But of course they might forget, or lose the letters. In Pre-Meds, dissect-ing corpses, would he have time to remember her? Her eyes watched his face. She could see through him.

"I'm going to give you something special," he told her, casting around desperately for something to give.

He searched his pocket with his free hand. "This is my b.u.t.ton, and it's magic. I wore it on my shirt cuff like that just to keep it disguised." He placed it in her hand, folded the fin-gers around it. "I'm giving it to you, and whenever you see it...." No, that wouldn't do; someone was bound to find it in her pocket and throw it out, and she would have no way of explaining. "You don't even have to see it, because it's invisible sometimes. All you have to do is think about it. And every time you think about it, you'll know I'm think-ing specially about you. Okay?" He'd tried to make it as convincing as possible, but she was probably too old and too bright, she probably knew he was just trying to rea.s.sure her. In any case, she moved her hand yes.

Whether it was real belief or embarra.s.sed kindness he could never know.

After OT Rob went back to his own cabin, to help with the pre-dinner change into clean clothes that Bert felt was good for morale. The boys were unusually boisterous, but it was probably only his own anxiety and need for peace that made them seem that way. Or it might have been the show that was being put on that evening, by a number of the seniors. All of these boys were in it, even Pete, who was going to be the MC, with a mike strapped to his shoulder near his mouth. None of the ordinary counsellors were involved; they and the younger children were to be the audience, while Scott and Martina, Drama and Dance re-spectively, ran the show. Rob knew the boys had been prac-tising for two weeks at least, but he had not been interested enough to ask them what the show was about.

"Lemme borrow your zit cream."

"Wouldn't do you any good, pusface."

"Yeah, he's got pimples on his pimples.""You spaz!" A scuffle.

"Cut that out, p.r.i.c.khead!"

Rob wondered if he would be transferred to another cabin. He was helping Dave Snider into his clean shirt, a pink one with charcoal stripes ("Cheap," his mother's voice said), when Gordon strolled into the cabin, late. Rob sus-pected him of thumbing into town for a quick drink in the beer-parlour, which wasn't choosy about your age. He had been late a number of times recently, leaving Rob to at-tempt control of the cabin single-handed. He looked very smug; he didn't reply to the admiring mock cheers that al-ways accompanied his entrances, but dug into his pocket and, very casual, very cool, draped something over his bedpost. A pair of black panties, with red lace edges.

"Hey! Wow! Hey, Gord, whose are they?"

Out with the comb, patting the blond pompadour into place. "That's for me to know and you to find out."

"Hey, come on, Gord, eh Gord?"

"Hey, no fair, Gord! Bet you stole 'em from the laun-dry!"

"Take a look, smart boy. They're not from any laun-dry."

Dave wheeled over and grabbed the panties. He stuck them on his head and circled the cabin floor.

"Mickey Mouse, Mickey Mouse," he sang. "Forever let us hold our whammers high.... Hey, Groaner, you wanna try 'em on? Bet they'd fit, you got a big head."

Other hands s.n.a.t.c.hed at the panties. Rob left the room, went down the hall into the washroom. They must have been in the woods, near him, near Jordan. Her outrage, lec-turing him like that with the twigs still in her hair, what gave her the right? Mud on her rump.

His face, his nice face, bland and freckled, framed in neatly trimmed sandy hair, watched him from the mirror. He would have preferred a scar, a patch over one eye, sun-burned wrinkles, a fang. How untouched he looked, like the fat on uncooked bacon: n.o.body's fingerprints on him, no dirt, and he despised this purity. At the same time he could never be like the others, gloat over some woman's musky underpants. Maybe I'm not normal, he thought with gloomy pride.

After the chaos and mess of dinner had been endured, Rob went to the auditorium with the others. The stage, which was like a school stage except for the ramps at either side, had its red curtains closed. There were no chairs. Those in wheelchairs didn't need them, and the others sat on the floor, wherever they liked.

Rob sought out Jordan and moved closer to her. He prepared to applaud, dutifully, whatever was set before him.

The lights in the room dimmed, there was some fum-bling behind the curtains, and Pete in his chair was pushed out by several pairs of hands. The audience clapped, some cheered. Pete was quite popular.

"Don't push me off the edge, you spaz," he said into the mike, which got a laugh from some of the older boys. He was wearing a vaudeville straw hat with a red crepe-paper band, and someone had glued a false moustache un-evenly to his upper lip.

"Ladies and gents," he said. He made his moustache wiggle at one side, then at the other, and the younger chil-dren giggled. At that moment Rob almost liked him. "This here is the Fair-Eden Follies, and you better believe it, any-ways, we all did a lot of falling down practising it." His voice went serious. "We've all worked hard to make this a good show, and I want you to give a big hand to the first number, which is-a square dance, by the Fair-Eden Wheeler Dealers. Thank you."

Pete was jerked backwards, became briefly entangled, and disappeared. After a pause the curtains parted haltingly. In front of a brown-paper backdrop with a poster-painted apple tree and a cow, four boys and four girls faced each other in standard square dance formation. They were all in wheelchairs, without the trays.

The girls were two polio cases and two paraplegic CPs. They were wearing lipstick and had red paper bows at the necks of their white blouses; their emaciated legs and braces were hidden by long printed cotton skirts, and one of them, the one without the gla.s.ses, was astonishingly pretty. Dave Snider was the front corner boy. Like the others, he had on a Western string tie and a cardboard cowboy hat. The danc-ers looked self-conscious, but proud. None of them was smiling.

Martina was off to the side, with the primitive record player. "Now," she prompted, and the scratchy fiddle mu-sic started up. She clapped her hands in time. "Honour your partners," she called, and the two lines bowed to each other from the waist. "Honour your corners!" Then the two opposite corners shot forward, met each other in the centre of the square, pa.s.sed, and by quick hand-turnings of their wheels executed a perfect do-si-do.

Jesus, Rob thought. They must have practised for hours. He saw the concentration in Dave Snider's face and thought for a brief second, He cares about it, and, triumphantly, Now I've got something on him. Immediately he was ashamed of himself. The dancers whizzed out again, locked wheels and arms, andswung, careening dangerously. They seemed to have forgotten about the audience: their attention was held entirely by the rhythm and by the intricate manip-ulations of the wheels needed at such close quarters.

Rob looked over at Jordan. She was sitting almost still, her arms moving slightly, aimlessly, under the leather straps. He wanted her to turn her eyes so he could smile at her, but she was gazing straight at the dancers, her eyes shining with what he saw, with a quick jolt of his heart, were tears. She had never cried before: he hadn't known she could, he'd thought of her as a little changeling, not quite human. What was wrong? He tried to see as she was seeing, and, of course, it wasn't anything he could give her that she wanted. She wanted something she could imagine, some-thing almost possible for her, she wanted to do this! A square dance in a wheelchair. She longed to be able to do just this much, this particular dance, that would be wonder-ful. And it was wonderful. He had wasted himself, his body, why couldn't he have moved with such abandon, such joy in precision, during those interminable formal dances when his legs went stiff as wood, his feet compressed themselves to clumsy blocks inside his polished shoes....

But it was grotesque, he saw also, he couldn't help see-ing. It was a mockery, of themselves and of the dance; who had ever allowed them to do it? All their effort, their perfection even, amounted to this: they were ludicrous in their c.u.mbersome machines. They danced like comic ro-bots. They danced like him.

Rob felt something inside him, coming up, bursting out. He doubled over, his hands clenched to his mouth.

He was laughing. He tried to hold the laughter back, stifle it, turn it to coughing, but it was no use. He was red with shame and shaking all over; he couldn't stop. He crouched towards the door, hands across his face, stumbled through it, and collapsed onto the gra.s.s of the baseball field. He hoped they would think he was being sick to his stomach. That's what he would tell them afterwards. How could he, how could he have been so incredibly callous and rude? But he was still laughing so hard his stomach hurt. And she had seen him, she had turned her wet eyes and seen him just as it happened, she would think he had betrayed her.

Rob took off his gla.s.ses and wiped his eyes. Then he pressed his forehead into the gra.s.s, which was damp and cool with dew. From the open windows of the auditorium the tinny music ground on, to the rumble of wheels. I'll have to leave, I can't explain, I'll never be able to face them. But then he realized that n.o.body had really seen but her, and she couldn't tell. He was safe. And who was that, in the bright room at the back of his room, that man in the green gown and the mask, under the gla.s.s bubble, raising the knife?

Lives of the Poets

Lying on the bathroom floor of this anonymous hotel room, my feet up on the edge of the bathtub and a cold wet washcloth balled at the back of my neck. b.l.o.o.d.y nosebleed. A good adjective, it works, as the students say in those creative writing cla.s.ses that are sometimes part of the package. So colourful. Never had a nosebleed before, what are you supposed to do? An icecube would be nice. Image of the c.o.ke-and-ice machine at the end of the hall, me streaking toward it, a white towel over my head, the bloodstain spreading through it. A hotel guest opens his roomdoor. Horrors, an accident. Stabbed in the nose. Doesn't want to get involved, the roomdoor shuts, my quarter jams the machine. I'll stick with the washcloth.

The air's too dry, that must be it, nothing to do with me or the protests of the soggy body. Osmosis. Blood to the outside because there's not enough water vapour; they keep the radiators going full blast and no switch to shut them off. Cheapskates, why couldn't I stay at the Holiday Inn? In-stead it's this one, pseudo-Elizabethan motifs tacked to a mouse-eaten frame, somebody's last-ditch attempt to make something out of this corner of the woods. The outskirts of Sudbury, nickel-smelting capital of the world.

Can we show you around, they said. I'd like to see the slagheaps, and the places where the vegetation has all been scorched off. Oh, ha ha, they said. It's growing back, they raised the stacks. It's turning into quite a, you know, civilized place. I used to like it, I said, it looked like the moon. There's something to be said for a place where absolutely nothing grows. Bald. Dead. Clean as a bone. Know what I mean? Furtive glances at one another, young beardy faces, one pipe-smokes, they write footnotes, on their way up, why do we always get stuck with the visiting poet? Last one threw up on the car rug. Just wait till we get tenure.