Featherless Bipeds (11 page)

I move an old canvas tent and some sleeping bags to the top of the deepfreeze, and heave a heavy antique Underwood typewriter onto the floor. A layer of dust dulls the shine of the varnish on the chest, but the intricate carvings of vines and roses are still impressive. A tarnished brass lock is fastened through the latch at the front of the box, and Mom's maiden name is carved in script over the clasp: Jessica Wilder.

When I was small, maybe four years old, I asked my mother what this box was for.

“It's a hope chest, Honey,” she said, “my Daddy, your Grandpa, made it for me a long time ago, before I was your Mommy. Before I was married to your Father.”

I asked her if I could see what was inside the box. “Oh, there's nothing in there that would interest a little boy,” she said. “Besides, I think I lost the key.”

Then she distracted me with an offer of chocolate chip cookies.

Now, here I am, sixteen years later, still wondering what is inside this chest. Who was my mom before she was my mom? I hold the lock in the palm of my hand, and with hardly a tug, it slips open in my hand. All these years I thought this box was locked tight, that I would never see inside it.

I exhale slowly, check over my shoulder, then gently slide the lock from the latch. My heart begins to pound in my throat as I raise the lid. I rock on my heels as I reach for the old knit blanket that covers the chest's contents.

“Dak?” my mother's voice calls out from upstairs. Startled, I lose my balance and fall on my butt.

“Uh, yeah?”.

“We're having fish sticks and french fries for dinner. Would you like broccoli or green beans with that?”

“Um, either's fine, Mom” I reply.

“I'll make both, then” she says.

I return to my kneeling position in front of the open chest, my heart throbbing now. Maybe I shouldn't be doing this. Whatever is in there is none of my business. I suspect that ignorance is bliss when it comes to a parent's past. I should just stand up, put the stuff back on top of the chest, and walk away, but I reach out and gently pull the blanket off.

On top is an old Faireville High yearbook. Both Mom and Dad's photos are in the “Seniors” section. Dad appears in pictures of the Debating Club, The History Club, and the Chess Team, and Mom is in the Drama Club, the Glee Club, the Brass Band (trumpet), and the Visual Arts Club. As different as two people can be, even then. I wonder what made it work for them all those years ago? It seems that some of the other boys at Faireville High were wondering the same thing, judging from the numerous declarations of affection scribbled in the yearbook's inside covers.

Tucked inside the back cover of the yearbook is a yellowed certificate, which reads:

Faireville District High School
proudly presents this certificate to
Jessica Wilder
for
Highest Class Standing
in
Gr. 12 Visual Arts

I put the certificate back into the yearbook, then peer into the chest again. Beneath a few other yearbooks and trinkets are a bunch of artist's canvases. I slide one of them out, an impressionist-style landscape painting. Even in the basement's dull light, it bursts with colour and life. The trees seem to move, and the painting's sky warms my face with its radiant orange sun. My mother's signature,
J. Wilder
, is in the corner of the canvas.

I pull another painting from the box. It's a realist portrait of a young man I don't recognize. Maybe it's one of Mom's old high school boyfriends, someone she dated before she met Dad. It's painted with the precision of a Renaissance artist, with those liquid eyes that seem to gaze right at you from no matter what angle you approach the piece.

One by one, I look at the paintings, which vary in style, theme, and mood, but invariably shine with talent. The paintings of Jessica Wilder, before she was Mrs. Arthur Sifter, before she was Mom. Why aren't these framed and hanging upstairs where everyone can see them? Why isn't she still painting? Why are these works all hidden away in a locked box in the basement?

“Dak,” Mom's voice calls from upstairs. “Dinner's almost ready. Come wash up.”

I place the paintings and other things back into the hope chest, close the lid, position the old Underwood typewriter over its footprint in the dust, stack the camping gear back on top, and snap the lock closed.

At the dinner table, Dad glares at me, but says nothing. Mom rearranges things on the table as we eat, avoiding eye contact with my father and me. My sister is working this evening at a local doughnut shop, and for a change I miss our pointless squabbling. Anything would be better than this silence, so complete that my chewing rumbles like an avalanche in my eardrums.

“So, Mom,” I finally manage, “Dad was telling me that you went to University for a year. What did you take?”

“Art,” Mom blurts out, caught by surprise. “Visual Art. Painting, mostly.”

“How come you quit?”

Mom looks shaken. Maybe I shouldn't have brought this up.

“Oh, painting isn't all that useful in the real world, I suppose,” she says. “Besides, I wasn't very good at it.”

I want to tell her just how good she really was, but I don't want to let on that I've been snooping around in her hope chest downstairs.

Dad places his fork and knife in their proper positions on either side of his plate. His chair creaks as he turns to face me. “Dak,” he says crisply, “your mother has sacrificed everything for you.”

“Oh, Arthur,” Mom says, “let's not overstate things.”

Strangely, Dad doesn't look at Mom but continues glaring at me. “All of her hopes are in you. When you were a baby, she even wanted to name you after the artists she admired.”

“There's an artist named ‘Dak'?” I wonder.

“I wanted to name you ‘Albert',” Mom says in a misty way, “the English form of the name ‘Albrecht', after Albrecht Durer, one of the most versatile of the seventeenth century masters. Your father, though, thought you should be called Dick, after Charles Dickens . . . .”

“You wanted to call me
Dick
?” I say to Dad.

“ . . . Or David,” Mom continues, “after Robertson Davies. Those were two of your father's literary heroes. So, we compromised. ‘D' for Dickens and Davies, ‘A' for Albrecht Durer, and ‘K' for Kahlo. Frieda Kahlo, the great Mexican painter.”

“‘K' for Kafka,” Dad rumbles, rolling his eyes. “Franz Kafka, the great Czech novelist.”

“So, my name isn't even a name? It's an acronym?”

“The point is this, Dak,” my father says, “your mother, and myself also, I suppose, have put a lot of hope and faith in you, and you can't just selfishly throw it away by chasing after some immature fantasy to be a rock star.”

He says ‘rock star' the way another parent might say ‘drug dealer' or ‘male prostitute'.

“I don't care about being a
rock star
!” I protest. “I just want to be a
musician
. Why did you buy me a set of drums when I was a kid if you didn't want me to play them?”

“That was your mother's idea, not mine.”

Mom says nothing. Perhaps there had been a fight over those drums that I hadn't been aware of.

Dad picks up his fork, skewers a chunk of fish stick, and jams it into his mouth. He glares past my mother at the gleaming white face of the refrigerator door. His jaw muscles bulge rhythmically as he grinds up his food. Mom's knife and fork clink quietly against her plate as she cuts everything on it into bite-size pieces, but she does not actually eat much of anything.

I can't take this. I can't take being the sum of all of my parents' hopes, dreams, and regrets. Charles Dickens. Robertson Davies. Albrecht Durer. Frieda Kahlo. Franz Kafka. Why couldn't they have just named me ‘Bob'?

“May I be excused?” I ask. “I'm full.”

Simultaneously, Mom says, “Yes, Honey”, and Dad says, “Absolutely not”.

I get up from the table and walk outside.

My feet carry me up Faireville's main street, and down a random side street towards the waterfront. I'm not paying much attention to where I'm going. I am thinking about those kitchen table revelations.

During my childhood and early teens, Dad had been desperate to make a man of me. He bought me a baseball bat and a basketball, boxing gloves, barbells, fishing tackle, a pellet gun, and finally, a pint-sized dirtbike, all in the hope of interesting me in what he considered to be ‘manly' pursuits. I had always thought he bought me the drums because he considered rock ‘n' roll manly, and also because, unlike all those other things, playing the drums was something I wanted to do. While the other stuff collected dust in the garage, I rattled the floorboards daily, working up a sweat and eventually even building a few muscles. I was sure it made Dad happy that he'd brought those drums home for me.

But it wasn't Dad at all. It was Mom.

I look up from the sidewalk and realize I've taken a wrong turn. Nineteen years living in Faireville, and I've happened on to the one side street I haven't patrolled a hundred times before. It's more of an alley than a street — a narrow, broken strip of pavement, lined by the back doors and dumpsters behind the stores and restaurants on Main Street. This is a place I avoided in high school, where the Bad Boys used to hang out to smoke, drink, and sell drugs in the shadows behind Faireville's pleasant Victorian façade.

A narrow storefront is wedged in at the end of the alley, between the backs of the bowling alley and the hardware store. The cement block exterior is splattered randomly with faded, cracking blobs of dried primary-coloured paint. In the single bay window beside the crooked wooden entrance door hangs a bright yellow sign that reads, in crazy hand-lettered purple paint:

JACK-O'
S
O
NE
-W
ORLD
, N
EW
-A
GE
C
REATIVE
S
UPPLY
S
HOP
O
PEN MOST EVENINGS
(P
EACE, BROTHERS AND SISTERS
!)

I wonder if they have paintbrushes and paints? Bamboo chimes clunk and clank as I push the door open. The floorboards, which are splattered with a rainbow's assortment of dried paint flecks, creak and groan as I make my way through the maze of half-assembled display cases, stacks of new canvases, opened shipping crates half-filled with tubes of oil paint of different colours, paint cans streaked with dried drippings, cylinders full of paint brushes, and a bookcase full of roach clips, bongs, and other drug paraphernalia. A small, hand-lettered sign above this particular display reads:

FOR DECORATIONAL USE ONLY
(OF COURSE!)

There are enormous abstract paintings hanging on all the walls: one resembles an enlargement of a blood-filled mosquito after hitting a car windshield, another appears like an extreme close-up of the guts of a green tobacco bug that's been stomped by a hostile workboot, and a third looks like the remains of a watermelon dropped onto a sidewalk from a twentieth-floor balcony. The three paintings are respectively entitled
Birthglory
,
Treedom
, and
Earthgasm
, and the price tag affixed to each is One Hundred Thousand Dollars. Judging from the dilapidated state of the store, I assume that not many of this particular artist's works have sold for anywhere near that price.

“Hello?” I call out. No answer. I walk behind the dust-covered cash register desk to a door with a sign that reads “STAFF ONLY”, and I knock. “Hello?” I call again. I can hear what sounds like Indian sitar music, accompanied by high-pitched chanting. I push the door open.

The sitar music is blaring from a small stereo parked in the corner of the large cinder-block room. The strange vocalizing is coming from a man in paint-splattered overalls, who is suspended six feet off the floor from a bungee cord attached to a hook in the ceiling and looped through a rope around his waist. His eyes are closed tightly. He bounces slowly up and down on the stretchy cord, and as he levitates his voice rises to a shrill pitch, and drops to a gurgling sound like a drunk with the dry heaves. He sinks toward the floor again. His wild beard and mass of hair flies around as if alive. In one hand he holds the handle of a huge pail of blue paint, in the other an oversized paintbrush that he dunks into the bucket, then uses to fling paint randomly at a gigantic canvas spread out on the concrete floor.

I clear my throat. He abruptly stops hurling paint, and his eyes snap open.

“Ohhhhhhh, yessssssss,” he says as he looks down at his handiwork, “Oh yes oh yes oh yes! Whalepassion! Whalepassion!”

He plunks the paintbrush into the bucket, then reaches around with his free hand to release himself from the bungee cord. He lands on his feet just to one side of the huge canvas, but loses his balance, stumbles, and lands face down with a splat on one corner of the still glistening work.

He lies motionless long enough to make me wonder if he has knocked himself out; then he peels his face away from the canvas, looks at the imprint in the thick paint, and rolls onto his back with his face cupped in his hands, crying, “Noooooo! No no no no no no no!”

“Um, hello?” I say.

He removes his hands from his face — one side of which is plastered with blue paint, while the other side wears a fresh blue handprint. He looks up at me and shakes his head in sadness.

“It's ruined, you know,” he says.

“Maybe you can just use your faceprint instead of a signature,” I say.

He sits there on the floor for a moment, wearing an expression as if he is fathoming Einstein's Theory of Relativity for the first time, then scrambles to his feet and rushes toward me, limbs flailing, bloodshot eyes bulging and wild.

“That's it! That's it! Whale-MAN-passion! Whalemanpassion! That's what it was meant to be! Of course you
see
it! You
see
it!”