Body and Soul: Short Story (2 page)

Sighing, Aunt Bea’s daughter closed the window. She could hardly blame Marcy. Suddenly there was this stray living in her granny’s apartment, sleeping in the bed that used to be reserved for
her,
playing with her Barbie doll. “I wish you’d talked this over with me first,” she said.

“You don’t have to shout,” Aunt Bea said gently.

Marcy speared the stick straight at Terry, missing her by
inches. “Oh, God,” Aunt Bea’s daughter said. She glanced at Aunt Bea’s placid face. “They say you shouldn’t make any big decisions for at least a year,” she said. “Now you’re tied down again.”

Thank the Lord, Aunt Bea thought.

“Just don’t get too attached to her,” her daughter said. “She could be taken away at any time.”

Aunt Bea crossed her arms over the ledge of her bosom and said, “Yesterday I made meringues, and when I gave her one, you know what she said?”

“I have no idea.”

Aunt Bea chuckled. “She said, ‘This is good Styrofoam.’ “

“I can’t get it out of my mind that time I came here and you’d left the burner on,” her daughter said. “I’m going to worry myself sick when we’re living in Saskatoon.”

The idea was to get somebody full of beans like Marcy but a little older, eleven or twelve, maybe, somebody who could play with Terry and walk her to and from the school for the blind. That walk was the hardest part for Aunt Bea. The school wasn’t far, just a couple of blocks, but in the mornings, until she’d been up and around for a while, her ankles were so swollen they hardly fit into her shoes.

Out of some mixup, however, the social worker brought over Julie. It was a weekday afternoon, and Terry was at school. At the social worker’s recommendation Aunt Bea was waiting until she and the new girl—Esther, she had been told her name was—had met each other before she said anything to Terry. The visit was a trial. If Esther took a strong dislike to Aunt Bea (or vice versa, although Aunt Bea couldn’t imagine disliking a child), then Children’s Aid would come up with somebody else.

While she sat at the dining-room window keeping an eye out
for the social worker’s old blue Chevy, Aunt Bea busied herself with knitting a skating sweater that was gradually, in her mind, changing from Terry’s to Esther’s. When she saw the car, she quickly folded the knitting up and put it in the sideboard drawer, then turned to the window again. The social worker was striding around as if to open the passenger door, but it opened before she got there. Aunt Bea adjusted her bifocals to get a good look.

“Oh, my,” she said out loud.

It was the name, Esther, that had misled her. She had pictured a Jewish girl—dark, undernourished … haunted Anne Frank eyes. She had pictured a cardigan sweater several sizes too small. The girl who climbed out of the car was fat—Lord, as fat as Aunt Bea herself—and she had short white-blond hair in some kind of crazy brushcut. She headed in a beeline for the wrong apartment building. When the social worker called her back, she turned on her heel and took up a new beeline. Like a remote-control car, Aunt Bea thought. There was something else funny about that walk, though … a looseness in the legs and torso, a struggle for co-ordination that didn’t seem at all right.

“Poor thing,” Aunt Bea said to herself. This was not so much sympathy as a resolute summoning of sympathy. “Poor little motherless thing.”

She scarcely had the door open when the girl said, “Hi.” She said it suddenly and loudly, as if to frighten Aunt Bea. Then she rolled her eyes as if she were about to black out.

“Hi! Come in! Come in!” Aunt Bea said enthusiastically, but she was thinking, “A retard,” and now she really was thrown for a bit of a loop. “Don’t sweat the petty things!” she said, reading the girl’s sweatshirt.

“Believe me,” the social worker said. “It was not
my
idea that she wear that.” She took the girl’s arm and turned her around.

“Pet the sweaty things,” Aunt Bea read. She didn’t get it.

“It belonged to her mother,” the social worker said, giving Aunt Bea a confidential look.

“Oh?” Aunt Bea said.

“Come on, Julie, don’t do that,” the social worker said. The girl was bunching up the shirt with her fists, revealing a belly like a mound of virgin snow.

Julie? Aunt Bea thought.

“Should we take off our shoes?” the social worker asked.

“No, no,” Aunt Bea said, blinking herself back into action. “Sit down anywhere. I’ve got shortbreads and chocolate milk, and coffee’s made. Would you like some chocolate milk?” she asked. She looked at the girl and added, “Julie?”

“Coffee,” Julie said loudly.

“Julie’s been drinking coffee for years,” the social worker said, falling into a chair. “And beer,
and
I shudder to think what else.” The social worker was a homely, frizzy-haired woman in dungarees and work boots. “Actually
I
wouldn’t mind a glass of chocolate milk,” she said.

Don’t sweat the petty things, Aunt Bea said to herself as she poured the coffee. Pet the sweaty things. Speaking of sweat, her body was soaked in it. “Everything’s fine,” she told herself. “Everything’s just fine and dandy.” She hummed a hymn:

The first thing she would do was give that crazy jailbird hair a perm.

Coming out of the kitchen, she asked Julie how old she was. Fifteen was her guess.

“Five,” Julie answered.

“Five?” Aunt Bea looked at the social worker.

“Eleven,” the social worker said with mild exasperation.

Aunt Bea nodded. At least Children’s Aid had got
that
right. She handed Julie her coffee, and Julie immediately gulped half of it down.

“There isn’t sugar in here,” Julie said, holding up her mug.

Aunt Bea was startled. She cast back to a moment ago. “No, there’s sugar.”

“It’s
not
sugar,” Julie said. She looked infuriated.

“Oh!” Aunt Bea laughed. “Yes, you’re right! It’s Sweet’n Low!” She beamed at the social worker. “I can’t tell the difference.”

“Just drink it,” the social worker said.

“No, no. I’ve got sugar.” Aunt Bea hurried over to retrieve Julie’s mug. She smiled into Julie’s suddenly blank eyes. Pale, pale pupils, almost white. Aunt Bea had never seen eyes like that.

The social worker seemed to assume that everything was settled. “I’ll bring her back Monday morning,” she said after Aunt Bea had given Julie a tour of the apartment, showing her the bed she’d share with Terry, the empty dresser drawers where her clothes would go, the chair that would be hers at the dining-room table. Julie exposed her belly and rolled her eyes.

At the front door the social worker handed over a file, saying, “You might as well keep this.”

“Oh, good,” Aunt Bea said, as if the contents were familiar but she’d better have them just in case. When she was alone, she sat on the couch with a cup of coffee and the rest of the cookies and opened the file. How she would end up explaining Julie to people (to her daughter) was that she was floored by the coincidences, especially the coincidence of Julie’s last name—Norman. “That was the clincher,” Aunt Bea would say.

To see or hear her husband’s name still threw weight on Aunt Bea’s heart, but to see his name written next to that poor, forsaken girl’s fogged up Aunt Bea’s glasses. She touched under one eye, and she was crying all right. Before Norman died she wouldn’t have believed it was possible to cry unbeknownst to yourself. Before Norman died she wouldn’t have said that her glasses fogged from crying, although she didn’t doubt that they had and she just couldn’t remember. The most startling and depressing news in her life these days was what she was capable of forgetting. Well, she wouldn’t forget the girl’s last name, she could guarantee that. She removed her glasses, wiped them on her blouse and lifted her feet onto the coffee table.

The report was handwritten, hard to read. Under “Mother” it said either “Sally” or “Sandy” and then “38.” Then there was a short, tragic biography. Sally or Sandy had an honours B.A. in English Literature but she also had a drug habit and a long history of arrests for possession and trafficking. She was currently serving a five- or an eight-year jail sentence. Her only other child had been born addicted to heroin and had lived just a day.

As she read, Aunt Bea shook her head in pity and amazement. It so happened that she had a cousin named Sally, who used to teach school but who lost her husband and her job due to addiction to alcohol. She died at age forty, a broken old woman.

“Heaven help her,” Aunt Bea prayed for Julie’s mother.

Under “Father,” all it said was “Michael,
iii
.”

“Good heavens!” Aunt Bea said. He must be a stepfather, she thought. Or maybe he was the mother’s father. But still …
III
. And then she let out a whoop of laughter as she realized that what it actually said was “Ill.” She laughed and laughed and had to remove her glasses and wipe them again. When she settled down she got a little irritated. What did they mean by
“Ill”? Crazy? Dying? Dying from
aids,
which they didn’t want to say in case people were afraid to take Julie? Aunt Bea clicked her tongue to imagine so much ignorance.

She turned the page, and there was another coincidence—Julie suffered from epileptic fits. Aunt Bea’s younger sister, dead thirty-four years now, had suffered from epileptic fits. Aunt Bea was handy, therefore, with a pencil. Get the tongue out of the way first, tilt back the head. Nothing to be alarmed about, so long as there were unsharpened pencils all over the house.

“Prone to temper tantrums,” Aunt Bea read. “Domineering.” She thought of her daughter and felt herself well prepared. “Behavioural and intellectual age,” she read, “five to six.” “Well …,” she said dubiously. She had been very impressed by Julie’s detection of Sweet’n Low.

She told Terry the news that afternoon, on their walk home from school. It wasn’t until she was actually describing Julie that she recognized what a burden she was asking Terry to share. This wasn’t how she had planned it at all. The braindamaged girl she found herself bracing Terry for was a far cry from the helpful and spirited older sister she’d had in mind. She tried to brighten up the picture. “We’ll have a whale of a time, though,” she said, “the three of us.”

“Doing what?” Terry asked.

“Oh, I don’t know …” Aunt Bea thought back to when her daughter was small. “We’ll take the ferry to the island,” she said, although being on boats gave her heart palpitations.

Terry swept her white cane in scrupulous arcs.

“And we’ll go to the zoo,” Aunt Bea said, although the zoo was a good fifty miles away, and Aunt Bea no longer drove a car.

“Where will she sleep?” Terry asked.

“With you. If that’s all right. It’s a big enough bed.”

“What if she wets her pants? A boy at school who is five, he wets his pants.”

“In that department, I’m sure she’s eleven,” Aunt Bea said, although she thought, Good point, and wondered if she shouldn’t lay some plastic garbage bags under the sheet.

“Will she go to school?”

“She already goes. That school on Bleeker. You know, where the sidewalk’s all cracked?”

“Will she go by herself?”

“No, I don’t think so. We’ll both walk her there, and then I’ll take you to school.”

Terry came to a stop and lifted her thin face in Aunt Bea’s direction. “Your feet will kill you!” she cried, as if delivering the punch line.

“Lord,” Aunt Bea said. “Lord, you’re right.”

Julie is holding Aunt Bea’s left hand. Terry is holding Aunt Bea’s right hand. The three of them take up the whole sidewalk, and oncoming people have to step out onto the road. Julie is thrilled by this, believing, as she does, that it is happening because she does not smell afraid. “Bastards and dogs can smell it when you’re afraid,” her mother told her. So Julie is walking with her head lowered to butt. Whenever somebody veers off the sidewalk she murmurs, “Bastard.”

Eventually Aunt Bea asks, “Where’s the fire?” She thinks that Julie is saying, “Faster.”

“Dog,” Julie says quietly—this time it’s a dog that has trotted onto the road. She laughs and pulls up her dress.

“No!” Aunt Bea says.

“No!” Terry echoes, recognizing the familiar sound of Aunt Bea slapping Julie’s clothing down.

“Oh-kay, oh-kay,” Julie says.

“Not now,” Terry says. Sometimes Julie and Terry play a game that Julie made up, where Julie chants oh-kay, oh-kay while she and Terry hold hands and swing their arms back and forth, just a bit at first, and then higher and higher until they swing them right around over their heads. Terry isn’t crazy about this game, but she plays it to calm Julie. She thinks that Julie is probably blue with lines. Aunt Bea is green. Blood is red.

Aunt Bea gives them each a Life Saver, then takes their hands. The sweeps of the white cane along the sidewalk strike Aunt Bea as a blessing, a continuous sanctification of their path. “I want you both to be angels in church,” she says. “It’s a special day.”

“I know,” Terry says importantly.

Julie sucks her Life Saver and rubs Aunt Bea’s wrist against her cheek.

“Do you know what?” Terry says.

“What?” Aunt Bea says.

“Julie poked the eyes out of her doll.” The hole in her Life Saver has reminded her.

“Yes, I saw that,” Aunt Bea says.

Julie isn’t paying attention. She is remembering her mother’s phone call and is daydreaming about her mother singing “Six Little Ducklings.” Julie smiles at her mother, which provokes Aunt Bea, who after a year still gets Julie’s smiles and grimaces confused, to say, “Listen,
I
don’t give a hoot. It’s
your
doll. If you want to destroy it, that’s up to you.”

“Just don’t expect a new one!” Terry cries.

“That’s right,” Aunt Bea says.

“My mother has left the jail,” Julie says.

“What?” Aunt Bea comes to a stop.

“She phoned yesterday. She told Penny.”

“No, she didn’t!” Terry cries. Her shrill laugh shoots pain through Aunt Bea’s eyes.

“Yes, she did,” Julie says slowly and murderously.