The Cloaca (7 page)

At the very least, Frances wanted to get a look at the poor woman who had squeezed that impossible skull out of her body. But the lot emptied and there was no sign of Derek.

In her car she fixed a modest bowl. Pulling out, Frances watched the community centre get small in her rearview mirror, liking the feeling of leaving a place having done something there. Things were changing, it felt like. Finish this class and she could finish any goddamned thing. If Frances could get control of her life metaphorically, then handling the real meat of it shouldn't pose a problem.

“You know a gal can't live on metaphor alone,” one of the teenagers from Bad Service had warned Frances the night of her party. But Frances wasn't so sure. She had lived alone for a while now.

She passed him sitting on the curb by the bus stop. Her Honda's one working brake light turned Derek an evil red. As she backed up, Frances tapped her pipe into an empty coffee cup. “Need a lift?” she called out, leaning across the front seat.

Frances's logic explained to her that because she was a woman, and a woman in the same art class as this kid, bringing Derek into her car was not inappropriate and in no way pedophiley.

After looking down the street for any hint of the bus, Derek stood up like he had no other choice, like he'd been caught running away from home.

“I know that smell,” Derek said at the open window. He stared cruelly at Frances, half in the dark of the night, half in the light of her car, that same head-exploding intensity from class. Finally he said, “You don't need those to see.”

Frances took off her glasses and handed them across the seat to Derek, who put them on and looked around, then took them off and looked around, then put them back on and burned at her through them.

“I could tell the way you looked through them in class that you didn't need them. People who need glasses don't like wearing them. That's how you can tell. If they didn't have to then they wouldn't.”

“Maybe I like the look of them,” Frances said.

“So say I think wheelchairs looked really cool,” Derek started, sounding out his idea, “and what if I just started going around in a wheelchair because I liked the look of it? Because I liked how it looked on me?”

“I don't think that's the same thing.”

“I don't know if it is,” he said, getting into the car. He looked at himself in the side mirror, then handed the glasses back to Frances. Opening the glove compartment to stow the glasses, her knuckles brushed Derek's crotch. Frances flinched, but the boy didn't seem to notice. His thighs were soft and white in a way that made her want to slap them raw and purple.

“Sorry about the state,” she said when Derek began to collect the mess of library books from around his feet, piling them on his lap. The books were at various stages of overdue, from really to extremely to shockingly, but Frances kept paying the fines. Her interest in astrophysics, or the Bolshevik Revolution, or post-colonialism, or masonry would be repiqued every time the library phoned asking for their books. “
I know
it would be cheaper to just buy them,” Frances sassed back when the librarians phoned. “Don't you think I don't know that?”

“You've read all these?” Derek asked.

“You betcha.” Frances pulled away into a red light.

He opened a book and leafed through. He settled on a page.

“Okay,” he said. “I am a small songbird. I have a pale brown back, a black face patch, a black chest patch, and a yellow or pale throat. I have small horns on the top of my head and the sound I make goes ‘su-weet.' What bird am I?”

“I don't know.” The light greened and Frances was off. Coming down one side of the street was a girl she worried might be Betsy, but she couldn't tell any of these kids apart. They all had tight jeans and dock shoes and moved with the same sort of offended insouciance. “Are you a Patchy Sweeter?”

“I thought you said you read this book.” Derek scowled at Frances.

“I've started,” Frances said. “I just haven't got to that part yet.”

“A right here,” he said, turning away and looking out the window. Frances stifled an urge to knock on his skull, test his ripeness.

From then on the only talking Derek did was calling out the turns, until he had directed Frances into an end of town she didn't know had houses. “So, what are your parents up to tonight?” she wanted to ask, but resisted.

Murder flitted to mind. She had this kid. Really had him. Do people murder people because they really mean to, she wondered, or because the opportunity's there? When she was little she would marvel at her cat, Althea, how frail and trusting she was. She would pet the cat's skull, place her palm over the cat's whole head, and wonder how easy ending the thing could be.

“Take this left and just drop me off at the corner,” Derek ordered. “I don't want you to know exactly where I live.”

“In case I'm looney toons.”

“Right.” He got out, only to shove his head back in. “I don't want you following me,” he reminded her, and then slammed the door.

Instead of turning around Frances went forward and, after two turns, was completely lost. Every house looked the same and none of the streets seemed to have anything close to ninety-degree corners. One street just rolled into the other. Who were all these people and how did they get here and what did they do? The air of her high was starting to turn dense and sour and Frances started to seriously worry about how irrevocably lost she was.

The last time she had been this far out the land was fallow fields, crumbling sheds, and barns with mattresses, condom wrappers and empties in them. But now a whole new town was here. A Wal-Mart had been built. All the Marilyns in town had fought to keep the store out, arguing that it would take business from the independent stores downtown, but now the sprawl had gone so wide that there were plans for a second Wal-Mart. The hippies were protesting that now too. But for what? Would another Wal-Mart take away business from that first Wal-Mart?

After ten minutes of hopeless, random turning, Frances spotted a body ahead of her at the bus stop. She slowed to ask directions. Derek glanced up from the book he was reading and squinted into her approaching lights.

After that first class, Frances started seeing Derek everywhere, always dressed in high-riding track shorts and grocery store T-shirts covered in expressions like Wicked! and Cool Dude! and Totally Awesome! First she spotted him delivering papers across town from where she had dropped him off the week before. Up the opposite side of the street he came, walking in rollerblades, a canvas newspaper bag slung over his chest and a cart rattling behind. Later that week she caught him downtown, waiting for a bus and reading the free real estate listings. Sitting against the wall of the bank with the paper on his knees, Frances glimpsed the white of his underwear in the scoops of his shorts. Another time, walking back from breaking up with a guy she'd been on a few dates with—who had accused Frances of only loving things about people and not the people themselves—Frances saw Derek coming out of a women's clothing store carrying two heavy bags, a half-wrapped candy bar dangling from his mouth. She would drive or bike by bus stops and, one time out of five, he would be on the curb, bowed into a book, always alone. And he picked at his penis a lot, Frances noticed. She'd seen little boys mindlessly do this, but it seemed an odd thing for a boy Derek's age to be unconsciously up to.

Frances also started to see Betsy everywhere. Before her party Frances had never seen this girl, but now she was around every corner, always in some new ugly, sarcastic ensemble right out of Frances's grade two class photos. She was never with less than two people, some dressed like squeegee kid anarchists, some like moms from the early 80s, some like they had come from what people in the 60s thought the future would be. They dragged their feet like they'd had a long day at work, though Frances just assumed these teens never did anything. They were in bands that had silkscreened T-shirts but no songs.

When Frances couldn't duck Betsy, they had awkward conversations, Betsy inviting Frances to punk shows and zine fairs that Frances wouldn't be caught dead at, or at least felt too old for. When Betsy and her friends were obviously stoned or drunk, Frances found herself disapproving, even if she was one or both of those herself. She escaped away with an excuse of somewhere she had to be. Her step-sister's ex-husband's dog was graduating from obedience school, she had to pick up her car from the mechanic's, she was late to visit old friends at their new yurt in a part of the outskirts that had yet to be built up.

Whatever Frances's reason, Betsy responded the same. “Awesome,” she'd drone, from the back of her throat. “Oh, cool.” Frances was furious with herself for doing the things she had done with Betsy. That was not what she needed to be doing at this point in her life. At the very least, she should be going down on strangers with mortgages.

The other person she was seeing more of around Corbet was Marilyn, strutting in her flowing, gaudy hippy dresses, gesticulating wildly while speaking softly, usually in the company of men with beards or women as crunchy and effusive as she was. Twice, Frances had spotted her teacher topless in the streets, a legal though rarely acted upon way for women to walk around in Ontario. Whenever she noticed Frances she would wink in a way that felt the same as a blown kiss.

All the teens at Bad Service thought it was an absolute scream that Frances was taking an art class with children. “That's
so
cool that you're doing that,” they said. “Oh my god.” And in a way it was. Frances wasn't blind to that. She could remember being their age, in that frame of mind, where all that mattered was how interesting the things you were doing or the things you knew about were. Never mind whether you were any good or successful at those things or not. The people she had admired most when she was that age were the ones who landed a job being a butler for eccentric local millionaires who took them on winter vacations, or those who participated in demolition derbies for the blind up north some weekends, or who knew people in New York. If you couldn't tell some outrageous story about what you'd done, what was the point?

Children or no children, the art class was hard. This she didn't mention to the teens. Frances hated how hard it was, hated that that made her want to quit. She didn't have the patience to sit at a desk with a ruler and complete her perspective drawings, or make a gridded oval every time she wanted to draw a face. She thought she'd signed up for an art class, not a planning-to-make-art class. Getting a bit high would briefly do the trick, but Frances could only manage to get a few lines and a couple shapes onto the page before the bird of her attention winged off to another project. The rest of her homework night Frances would spend reading ten pages of a book about Wyatt Earp, or cutting out pictures of fat, bald, professional men for a folder she was compiling, or watching some David Lynch shorts that the video store really wanted back.

The weeks passed and Marilyn's lessons became increasingly New Agey, having less to do with the technique and practice of art and more to do with the technique and practice of living. Like figure drawing. While sectioning a head into four hemispheres filled with circles, squares, and triangles, trying to get the class to see complicated figures as being made up of simple shapes, Marilyn paused to point out that this artist's trick could just as easily be applied to the tricky intricacies of life. When she drew on the board, her breasts would waggle furiously and obviously under her shirt.

“When you think about it,” she paused to say, her cans swaying to a halt, “we're really all made up of the same basic shapes, aren't we?” And then that wink of hers, aimed always at Frances. What could this woman possibly know about life if she didn't even know that she was showing her tits off to a class full of children? That only certain dads could pull off a wink?

“Fucking hippy–dippy fucking bullshit,” Frances called the approach one night after work in a Jägermeister rage. “What that woman needs is a bra and punch in the fucking face.”

Marilyn never checked their homework—“Draw a portrait of someone you admire. Draw a portrait of someone you don't know. Draw a portrait of someone from your imagination.”—so Frances stopped doing hers. She would burn whole classes scribbling and making lines in her book to keep up the appearance of work, all the while flip-flopping whether she should just get up and leave. She could lose fifteen minutes ogling Marilyn's chest, getting winked at when she was caught. Whenever she resolved to take another crack at it, to do the work, Frances would freeze up, spend a whole class staring back at the one eye she had managed to put on a page. If she'd got brave enough to try another eye, she wound up with tits basically. Maybe the incessant presence of Marilyn's breasts were somehow gumming up Frances's imagination.

It didn't help seeing how dedicated and accomplished the children were, how not hesitant. They would squint at their blank page for a few minutes, spin it around on the table to see different angles of attack, and then jump at the task. They twirled and chewed their hair while they drew, they sang to themselves, they made quiet farting noises with their mouths. When Derek drew his tongue came out and slopped all around his lips in a way that would have been pervy if he hadn't been a little boy.

Presumably to guard his beeswax, Derek would sometimes prop two binders in front of him, but always his eyes were peeping over top, seething at Frances. His was the dense, fixed, ireful glare of a cat watching a bird through a window.

The teens at Bad Service were all certain Derek was in love with her. They wanted her to take him on a date at the café so they could meet him. “He totally sounds like one of those Glass kids,” they droned. But Frances wasn't so sure Derek's feelings towards her were positive, never mind loving. He seemed constantly offended by her, like someone watching an adult hit a child in the mall, so horrified that he couldn't turn away. Frances couldn't figure him out, couldn't solve the mystery of him.