"C'mere, stinky."
"What? I just had a shower."
I touch the bruises lightly. "You want something for it?"
"No, I'm OK. . . it's kinda cool hey? Like those psychology ink pictures."
"Yeah."
Holly looks down the hall. "Should I bother waking her up for bed?"
"No."
She juts her chin out, defiantly, words pushing at the bottom of her lip.
"What is it, Hoi?"
"When I go back next week, I gotta write this math test, a final. I suck at math. I suck so hard, Giselle."
"What about your teacher?"
"Yeah, she explains it all and does the questions but then, when I'm alone, doing a test or something... I just forget it. I just don't have that math-brain gene. It's missing in me, I think. I'm gonna ask to bring it home, you know."
I laugh, "And I'm going to write your grade-eight math exam?"
"But the numbers, they get all screwy, and now I missed all this school, so I have no idea what's going on . . ."
She stretches her long body up and grips the top of the doorway; I count her ribs.
"So, you'll do it?"
"I'll show you how. Tonight, come on, bring your books in."
Holly blows out a frustrated breath. "What about Sol?"
"Sol's terrible at math, come on, Holly."
"Come on what? I'm not going to be a doctor or an accountant, it doesn't matter." She's clenching her jaw now, grinding her teeth together.
"But there are basic things you need to know that you don't. You won't be able to get through high school even, when the time comes."
"Were you good at math?"
"Not really."
"So?"
"So, what?"
"Get up," she says, pulling on my arm.
"Stop it," I say, trying to wrench myself away.
"Get up and look at me."
I stand up, trying to extend my spine so I can match Holly's height.
"Look at me."
"I'm looking."
"Look at me, at this."
Holly plunges her hand into her hair and pulls out her hearing aid. She slaps it on my desk. Then she sweeps her arm along my desk, pushing everything onto the floor. I get scared that she's going to try to throw me across the room again, or hurt me, so I start backing away, but instead she just stands there and cries:
"I can't do school, Giselle, I can't do it. I can barely hear the teachers. I can read and write on my own but I can't do it, do you understand me? Do you know what that's like?" she yells, a little too loud now, without her ear.
The piece has become part of her, literally wedged into the side of her head. It's small, shell-shaped, beige-brown, dirty with age and wear. It's creepy, it looks like what it is: a spliced organ missing from the body and made external, the transparent wires dispatching sound-words.
Holly's slit-eyes stare at me and, with her mouth slightly open, she looks like she did when she was very young. Suddenly, I am transported:
It's late at night and no matter how many pillows I pile over my head I can hear our father's sobbing through the thin walls of our suburban house. There's nothing worse than hearing a grown man cry, I think inside my twelve-year-old head. This is the day they have finally taken Holly to the specialist who has diagnosed her with a hearing problem and a slight learning disability. And no matter how many times our mother says, It doesn't matter, Thomas, can't you see, she is perfect? he won't listen and keeps crying.
When Holly can't sleep with Mom and Dad, like tonight, she sleeps with me, sprawled all over my single bed, her long hair spilling into my mouth, but she can't hear his sobbing.
Shut up. Oh please please please please please stop it.
And no matter how many Magic-Markered pictures of our happy family she brings home from junior kindergarten, no matter how many King-of-the-Family gold-sprayed macaroni crowns she makes him with Ts on them, no matter how many endless hours I spend teaching Holly how to hold her mouth to form vowels, filling her with the names of animals, colours, and numbers, disappointment continues to collect in the wrinkles in his brows and ages his long, handsome face.
One day, after months of constant badgering and trickery on my part and so much candy that half of Holly's baby teeth have gone rotten, it has all, finally, paid off. A miracle: Holly learns to read six months into senior kindergarten—almost a full year before the rest of her mud-poking peers and, in the meantime, I have been bumped up a grade; I have become such a precocious child that the teachers are loath to have me in their classes.
"Look, Papa, the doctor was wrong."
We are in the living room, my hands on Holly's shoulders. I push her forward to read him a short paragraph from a children's book about how even spiders have bad days and, when she's finished, he opens his arms and she crawls into them. He nuzzles the plastic beneath her hair, then folds his body over hers. I shift from foot to foot on the dirty hardwood floor, feeling awkward.
He looks up. His eyes examine my oily preteen moon face. He looks at my little nipples poking through my washed-out Mickey Mouse T-shirt, my strong arms. He fixes his eyes on my thick calves: the result of riding up hills on a broken bicycle in high gear, the cost of being big-boned. My squat little in-between body is still waiting for the legendary Vasco genes that should kick in any day now and stretch out this tightly packed mass of muscle and fat and make me long and lean like the rest of them. I smile at him proudly, waiting for compliments on my patience and dedication to rain down on me. Waiting.
Then he does something awful. He reaches out and squeezes my thick leg, pinching the fat next to the knee. It is meant to be a playful gesture, maybe, I don't know. And then I do an awful thing too. I lean over and say right in his face:
"You piece of shit'' I turn on my heel and run out the front door before he can catch up to beat me within an inch of my life as if we are in the old country where children can be poked and pinched and thrashed like barn animals.
He dies three weeks later and Mom takes leave from work so she can sit at home like a zombie. Holly is put in the advanced reading group at school, and takes speech classes twice a week and writes haikus about frogs and heaven.
And I grow three and a half inches the month after Thomas dies.
Bodily wounds may be classified according to the mode of damage,
Holly reinserts her hearing aid and then lies down on my bed silently, touching the soft flannel on the edge of my sheet while I pile the books back on my desk.
"Sorry for throwing your stuff." Holly's eyes glaze over. She seems very tired suddenly.
"Listen, we'll do something, I'll ask Mom to get you a tutor, we'll get your ears retested. But Holly, and don't get mad at me for saying this, you can't blame this on your hearing."
"Why not?"
I make a face. "Because, lazy-ass, you're acing English, because, somehow, miraculously, your batteries only seem to die during math class."
Holly throws a pillow at me.
"Am I right?"
"No!" She peeks out at me through the sheet.
"I don't believe you."
"Look, I don't really care. I just don't want everyone freaking out when I flunk junior-high math, is all."
"Nobody's flunking anything. Do you want to go to summer school?" Holly makes a barfing sound.
"OK, so turn on your hearing aid."
I pause, about to ask her about something else, when she leans herself out of bed, splays one hand on the floor and asks, "Did she tell you? About how she got him kicked out of the house?"
My back arches, I crawl over to her, pull her half on the bed, half off the bed, body to me. I hold her up to my face but her eyes slip away from mine again.
"You know that story, Mom's told you before?"
Holly shakes her head, her lids slide closed. "I've never heard it from Mom, I heard it from Dad."
"Dad?"
"Yup. Daddy tells me everything," she says, her eyes half-closed.
"That's right, I forgot, you talk to ghosts."
"Just his."
"So, who do you think she loved more?"
"Dad," Holly says, without missing a beat.
"Dad? Why Dad?"
"Why not Dad?"
Holly lies back down on the bed and turns away, tracing her fingers over the flower patterns in the wallpaper. Before she passes out, I get her to take out her hearing aid again to do an informal ear examination. She cups her hand over the right side of her head and I drop my books on the floor.
"Can you hear that?"
"Well,'sort of."
"What do you mean, sort of?'
"I can hear it in my feet."
"In your feet?"
"Well, yeah, the vibrations."
"OK, go to bed, baby."
When she's bundled in my sheets and has her head against the wall, I look at the tiny piece of plastic, the source of so many of Holly's and Dad's frustrations. The reason she moves through the world intuitively: touching, feeling, falling into the space around her, careening brightly from sky to earth to floor. I pick up the greasy bit of plastic and try to read her, to feel out her aches, her longings, from that battered little machine that helps her think.
And I think about Thomas, again, how Holly could be persuaded to do anything, possibly even pass grade-eight math, if he were still around.
When we were young he used to take us fishing. He woke us early in the morning, offering cups of hot chocolate as consolation for waking us up. We'd drive about an hour out of the city, then he'd park by a lakefront, take the canoe off the top of the car, and paddle us to the darkest part of the shore. He'd burn through the ends of the plastic lines with the butt of his cigarette and tie our hooks on carefully. Around this time I'd wake up and start chatting, asking him questions.
"How come those sunfish have pointy things on top that hurt so much?"
"I dunno, Giselle, but you're being quiet or you'll scare the fish."
I could never stay quiet for long. I'd start imitating the morning bird calls and pestering him.
"Why can't we keep that one?"
"Too small . . . a good fisherman knows what to keep, what to throw back."
A good fisherman I was not. After a couple of Saturday mornings of rocking the canoe and exhausting both of them with my questions and squawking, I gave up, and only Holly went with him.
Look at this picture: a voiceless three-year-old patiently watching her father cast his line into the warm velvet morning water. She is wearing a white Gilligan hat, her nose is freckled from the sun. She is staring intently at the red-and-white buoy on the surface. Her father is wearing a white undershirt, his face sweaty, his doctor-hands are soiled with worm-dirt and grease and the eternal cigarette dangles from his mouth. He accidentally blows smoke into her face.
But Holly never complains. She cannot hear the birds, or his swearing when he tugs too quickly and yanks the hook out of a bass's mouth and tangles his line. Doesn't want to sing, like in the daycare when they make her and her voice comes out screeching and high. She doesn't question anything he does because it makes sense: the shore, the trees, the muck at the bottom of the canoe, his cigarette smoke, his fishy, musky smell. It is all she understands.
He brings in the line and when she sighs in quiet frustration he paddles away from shore; the wind has blown them too close now.
Hours later, when they are brown and tired and happy with the modest, white-bellied bass, fat enough for four but not too many to anger the god of good fishermen, later, they come home. Me and Mom stand on the porch in our aprons, our faces dusty with the pies we have baked.
After dinner, Holly sits on his lap while he bounces her on his knee, knocking her around as if she were riding a jittery pony. She tries to open her drooping eyes, because the family is happy and laughing and full-—the salty lemon taste of fish melting in our mouths, we are saying her name: Holly Bolly Polly Holly. Girl! Wake up! There's strawberry pie! Your favourite!
Sucking on a rubbery fish skeleton, seeing us from his eyes, she kicks out her leg, flings her arms wide, about to hug the world.
Holly throws herself into the air. Flying. Climbing over Dad, thrashing her limbs at him: she jumps.
Never hesitating for a moment that she will be caught.
And staring at that stupid, too-small hearing aid, I start to cry. For Holly, who lost the man who loved her best, for Mom, who lost them both, for our warped little suburban trinity of women that won't hear a man's step on the stairway, or his cough in the night, or ever taste the paprika stew he made in the winter when none of us was home and he listened to gypsy music at top volume. 1 cry for myself, because I don't even know which man to start mourning. Loss doubled, loss tripled, loss endlessly multiplying is infinite.
You had the chance to love me, but you gave it up. Is it true? Or was it your only way? I stare at the monkey skull Thomas gave me after I had perused his travelling kit one too many times. I once used his scissors and knives to bury little birds and squirrels in our backyard. I received a terse slap from Thomas and a lecture on sterilization and the potential dangers I could be inflicting on his patients. I stood in front of him sniffling, apologizing.
Feeling sorry for me, Thomas leaned over, still wearing his green scrubs, smelling like the hospital, sterile but like a toilet. He held out the one object I could have: a tiny monkey skull.
"Use this for your little explorations. Don't touch my stuff," he said before pushing me out of the room.
I remember the first time I held the little skull, feeling its weight in my hands. Besides the Christmas and birthday presents bought by Mom from both of them, it was the only gift Thomas had ever given me. Holly, dressed in a pink velour jumpsuit, sensed my fascination with the object, and intent on possession, grabbed it from me with her sticky hands. But I'd had the skull clutched next to my heart, and she couldn't get at it. In a loud clear voice I said:
"This is miner
Holly pulled her hands behind her back obediently and, nodding at me in a businesslike way, moved on through the living room.
This is mine. This is—my brain repeats, making words from the sobs that wrench up like chunks of diamonds caught in my esophagus . . . this, this is you. And the last time I let him get tome.
—This is it, we are even. And you are dead.
chapter 16
They think, the kids at school, they think I'm nuts. Today, my first day back, I climbed the ten-foot wire fence that wraps around the schoolyard. I don't know why I did it but it scared me, that stupid fence, with the barbed wire at the top poking up into the sky. So, at lunchtime, I just went up it.
"What're you doing?" Jen said, putting her hands on her hips. "Get the hell off, someone's going to see you." But there was ringing in my ears and the gauze on my ribs was itching me 'cos Giselle didn't wake up early enough to get me in the shower and by then some other kids were standing around watching so I had to do it.
When I got to the top, I gripped the barbs, bent my knees back, and turned around to face the crowd. Mr. Saleri was standing in front, looking up at me.
"Holly, I want you to come on down now."
"OK, sir, just wanted to see if I could do it."
I tried to wave at him but the barbs poked into my hands and shot spikes of heat up my spine. I lowered myself, facing them, gripping each square piece of the fence tightly. About five feet from the ground I jumped off and landed on my knees. Mr. Saleri picked me up under my arms and took me inside to bandage me up.
He looked sad when I sucked in air through my teeth as he doused my hands with rubbing alcohol.
"You know, I have to tell Mr. Ford about this."
"Why, sir?"
Mr. Ford is the principal and I'm already pushing my luck with him; he doesn't want me to graduate, says I'm lucky to be back in school with only a week's suspension after the fight.
Mr. Saleri took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. "Because Mr. Ford is my boss, because he's going to find o
ut anyway and it's better if he finds out from me." He put his glasses back on and looked at me, his eyes magnified. "Why do you do these things, Holly?"
I shrugged. "I hear stuff, there's noise in my head, like a radio that's kinda fuzzy, and my head hurts . . . I can't explain it, something gets in me." My heart started beating faster.
He held my gauzed hands in his. He suddenly seemed old. Outside the small window in the nurse's room, the wind was blowing tornadoes of garbage around and the buzzing, the hotness, came inside my head again. I bent my hands and watched the blood seep slowly through the gauze while I spoke.
"Giselle's home and sometimes it's hard because she's kind of moody and I'm moody too but everything's OK, really, it's OK, and the fight, well, you were there, sir, the fight wasn't really my fault—I got shit for it but you know as well as I do, sir . . ."
"Don't say shit, Holly."
"Sorry, sir." I offer out my hand. He unwraps the bandage and takes a paper towel to wipe the fresh blood off.
I wanted to explain it more to Mr. Saleri but the words didn't come.
"There are only two weeks of school left, Holly. . . Tell you what, you make me a promise." "What's that, sir?"
"You be a good girl, no more of this garbage, please, and I'll make sure you get out of St. Sebastian. You and]en."
Mr. Saleri taped up my hand again and we both sat there looking at it, waiting for the bleeding to come through, but it didn't.
"OK."
Lunch was over, the schoolyard was empty, and there were big puffy grey clouds all over the sky. Suddenly the buzzing was gone and I could hear all the boys in Mr. Saleri's classroom yelling and whipping chalk at the board. He could hear it, too.
. . .
You can feel the cool rise up from the river even on the hottest days, that's why we go there, though the river is poisoned and there is no time. We both have places to be: Jen has to go to her sister's to babysit her nieces and I should be home studying for my math final. But, instead, we meet up by the convenience store next to school, split a grape and lime Popsicle, and walk through the park without talking.
When we get to the top of the hill, we throw our school bags down and sit there, high on the ravine, inhaling the toxic mixture of the polluted river sludge and the lilacs bursting up between the trees. I take my shoes and knee socks off and wade into the river. When the water's up to my knees, Jen lights a cigarette she stole from her sister, Joanne.