Bodily Harm (16 page)

Rennie’s dreaming, she knows it, she wants to wake up.

She’s standing in her grandmother’s garden, around at the side of the house, she knows this garden disappeared a long time ago, I can’t take care of everything, said her mother, but here it is, back in place, everything is so bright, so full of juice, the red zinnias, the hollyhocks, the sunflowers, the poles with scarlet runner beans, the hummingbirds like vivid bees around them. It’s winter though, there’s snow on the ground, the sun is low in the sky; small icicles hang from the stems and blossoms. Her grandmother is there, in a white cotton dress with small blue flowers on it, it’s a summer dress, she doesn’t seem to mind the cold, and Rennie knows this is because she is dead. There’s an open window, through it Rennie can hear her mother and her aunts singing hymns in the kitchen while they do the dishes, three-part harmony.

Rennie puts out her hands but she can’t touch her grandmother, her hands go right in, through, it’s like touching water or new snow. Her grandmother smiles at her, the hummingbirds are around her head, lighting on her hands. Life everlasting, she says.

Rennie struggles to wake up, she doesn’t want to be in this dream, and finally she makes it. She’s lying in her bed, the sheet’s twisted around her, she thrashes and untangles herself and pushes herself upright. Outside the window it’s grey, the room is dim, perhaps it’s not yet morning. There’s something she has to find. She stands up, in her bare feet, she’s wearing a long white cotton gown, it ties at the back, but this is not a hospital. She gets to the other side of the room and pulls open her bureau drawers, one after another, rummaging through her slips, scarves, sweaters with their arms tucked carefully behind them. It’s her hands she’s looking for, she knows she left them here somewhere, folded neatly in a drawer, like gloves.

Rennie opens her eyes; this time she’s really awake. It’s dawn, the noises are beginning, the mosquito netting hangs around her in the warm air like mist. She sees where she is, she’s here, by herself, she’s stranded in the future. She doesn’t know how to get back.

What do you dream about? Rennie asked Jake, a month after they’d started living together.

You sound like my mother, Jake said. Next thing you’ll want to know about my bowel movements.

Jake was in the habit of making Jewish-mother jokes, which Rennie felt was just a way of not really talking about his mother. She resented all jokes about mothers, even the ones she made about her own. Mothers were no laughing matter. You don’t have a monopoly on mothers, she said. And I’m not yours. You should be flattered that I’m even interested.

Why does every woman in the world need to know that? said Jake. A few good fucks and they have to know what you dream. What difference does it make?

I just want to know you better, said Rennie. I want to know everything about you.

I’d have to be crazy to tell you anything at all, said Jake. You’d use it against me. I’ve seen those notebooks of yours. You’d keep lists. I bet you go through the trash can when I’m out.

Why are you so defensive? said Rennie. Don’t you trust me?

Do chickens have lips? said Jake. Okay, here’s what I dream about. I dream about your bum, a hundred times life-size, floating in the sky, covered with neon lights and flashing on and off. How’s that?

Don’t put me down, said Rennie.

I like you down, said Jake. Flat on your back. He rolled over on top of her and started biting her neck. I’m uncontrollable, he said. I’m an animal in the dark.

Which one? said Rennie. A chipmunk?

Watch it, pussycat, said Jake. Remember your place. He got hold of her two hands, held her wrists together, shoved himself in between her thighs, squeezing her breast harder than he needed to. Feel that, he said. That’s what you do to me, the fastest erection in the West. Pretend I just came through the window. Pretend you’re being raped.

What’s pretend about it? said Rennie. Stop pinching.

Admit it turns you on, said Jake. Admit you love it. Ask for it. Say please.

Fuck off, said Rennie. She kicked him on the backs of his legs with her heels, laughing.

Jake laughed too. He liked it when she swore; he said she was the only woman he knew who still pronounced the
g
in “fucking.” This was true enough: swearing was one of the social graces Rennie hadn’t learned early in life, she’d had to teach herself.

You have a dirty mouth, Jake said. It needs to be washed out with a tongue.

What do you dream about? Rennie asked Daniel.

I don’t know, said Daniel. I can never remember.

Last night Rennie set her alarm for seven. She lies in bed, waiting for it to be seven. When the alarm goes off she claws her way through the mosquito netting and pushes the
OFF
button.

If it weren’t for Lora and the grandmother with the bad heart, she wouldn’t have to get up at all. She considers staying in bed, she could always say she slept in. But Griswold is ingrained in her. If you can’t keep your word, don’t give it. Do unto others. She struggles out through the cocoon of mouldy-smelling gauze, feeling not virtuous but resentful.

She wants to have breakfast before taking a taxi to the airport, but the Englishwoman says breakfast isn’t ready yet, it won’t be for another hour. Rennie can’t wait. She decides to have coffee and a doughnut at the airport. She asks the Englishwoman to call for a taxi for her and the Englishwoman points to the phone. “You don’t need to call for one,” she says, “they’re always hanging around down there.” But Rennie calls anyway.

The car’s interior is upholstered in mauve shag, the kind they use for bedroom slippers and toilet seat covers. A St. Christopher doll and a pair of rubber dice swing from the mirror. The driver is wearing purple shorts and a T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off, and a gold cross on a chain around his neck. He’s young, he turns the music up as loud as it can go. It’s a noxious capon-like rendering of “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” and Rennie wonders what month they’re in; already she’s lost track. She’s far too cowardly to ask him to turn it down, and she clenches her teeth against the adenoidal soprano as they drive into town, much too fast, he’s doing it
on purpose. They pass a clump of people, gathered outside a store for no discernible purpose, and he honks the horn, a long drawn-out blare, drawing attention to them as if it’s a wedding.

At the airport Rennie wrestles with the door, gets it open and climbs out. The driver makes no move, so she goes around to his side.

“How much?” she says.

“You leavin’ us?” he says.

“No, I’m just picking up a package,” says Rennie, and realizes immediately that she’s made a mistake, because he says, “I wait for you here.”

“That’s all right,” says Rennie. “I may be a while.”

“Nothin’ else to do,” he says cheerfully.

The airport is almost empty. Rennie looks around for the snack bar and finds it, but it’s closed. The customs window is closed too. There’s a large poster Scotch-taped to the glass:
ELLIS
is
KING
.

It’s a quarter to eight. Rennie sits down on a bench to wait. She hunts through her purse, looking for Lifesavers, cough drops, anything she could eat, but there’s nothing. Beside the bench is a photo machine, a booth with a curtain and a slot for the coins. Rennie considers this, but it takes only American quarters. She stares across at the poster, the one with the rooster on it.
THE BIONIC COCK: IT GIVES YOU SPURS
.
Prince of Peace
, someone has scrawled across it.

At eight-thirty the window slides up, there’s someone behind it. Rennie digs the crumpled customs form out of her purse and goes over.

“I’m looking for Harold,” she says, feeling very silly, but the man behind the counter isn’t surprised.

“Yeah,” he says. He disappears into a back room. Rennie thinks he’s gone to find Harold, but he returns with a large oblong box.

“Are you Harold?” she says.

He regards this as a stupid question and doesn’t answer it. “That must be one fat old lady,” he says. “She get six parcel this month. From New York. Food, it say. What she needin’ all this food for?”

He looks at her slyly, smiling as if he’s told a joke. The box is too big to go through the window, so he unlocks the door at the side.

Rennie was expecting something more like a package. “Isn’t that the wrong box?” she says. “I’m looking for a smaller one. It’s just some medicine.”

“That in here too,” he says airily, as if he’s been through the contents himself. “This the one, ain’t no other box I see.”

Rennie is dubious. She reads the label, which indeed has the right name on it. “You forgot this,” she says, handing him the customs form. He glances at it with contempt, then tears it in two.

“Shouldn’t I sign something?” says Rennie, whose sense of correct procedure is being violated. He scowls at her.

“You tryin’ to get me in trouble?” he says. “You take that and go on out of here.” He locks himself in his cubicle and turns his back on her.

The box weighs a ton. Rennie has to drag it. It occurs to her that she has no idea where Lora lives or where the grandmother lives, or how she’s supposed to deliver the box to either of them. The address is typed clearly enough, but all it says is
ELVA
,
Ste. Agathe
. There isn’t any last name. What next? She feels she has been either duped or used, but she isn’t sure which or how. She makes it through the front door and looks for her taxi. It’s nowhere in sight and there isn’t another; probably they come to the airport only when there’s a plane. There’s a single car parked across the street but it isn’t a taxi, it’s a jeep. There’s a policeman sitting in it, smoking a cigarette and talking with the driver, and Rennie realizes with a small shock that the driver is Paul. He doesn’t see her, he’s facing straight ahead, listening to the policeman. Rennie thinks of asking him for a lift; he
could carry the box up those stairs for her and then they could have breakfast together. But she’s embarrassed, she can’t ask him to do that. After the way she’s behaved. Chickening out on friendly sex with no explanation at all is socially gauche, inexcusable really: she treated him as if she thought he had genital wens. He’d be right to be angry.

She’ll have to lug the box back into the terminal building and phone for another taxi; then she’ll have to wait for it to arrive. While she’s sifting through her purse for pay-phone change, a taxi pulls up, the original. The driver is eating a huge roti; filling drips down his wrist, meat sauce. The smell reminds Rennie that she’s nearly faint with hunger, but she can hardly ask for a bite. That would be borderline familiar.

The box is too big to fit into the trunk. The driver tosses the remains of his roti on the sidewalk, wipes his hands carefully on his shorts so as not to damage his mauve upholstery, and helps Rennie slide the box into the back seat. Rennie sits beside him in the front. This time the music is Nat King Cole, singing “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas,” which is better.

“How much?” Rennie asks again, outside the hotel.

“Twenty E.C.s,” he says promptly. Rennie knows this is outrageous.

“It’s only seven one-way from the airport,” she says.

“The extra for waitin’,” he says, grinning at her.

Before, on a trip like this, Rennie would have haggled; once she prided herself on her haggling. Now she doesn’t have the energy, and he knows it, they all know it, they can smell it on her. She gives him twenty-three and goes around to haul out the box.

To her surprise, the driver gets out of the car, though he doesn’t help her, he just watches.

“You a friend of Miss Lora’s?” he says. “I see you with her. Everyone know Miss Lora.”

“Yes,” says Rennie, to avoid explanations. She’s grappling with the box; the end slides off the back seat and hits the street.

“She a nice lady,” he says softly. “You a nice lady too, like her?” Two other men, also with the sleeveless T-shirts, have stopped and are leaning against the wall.

Rennie decides to ignore this. There’s an innuendo but she can’t interpret it. She smiles, politely she hopes, and retreats toward the inner courtyard, dragging the box with what she hopes is dignity. Laughter trails her in.