Born Weird

  “You’re in the phone book.”

  “Right.”

  “Do you want to know how long I waited?”

  “Yes!”

  Angie took her phone out of her purse. She checked the timer. “Forty-seven minutes,” she said. “And twenty seconds from right … now.”

  “That’s not so bad.”

  “No. I guess it isn’t.”

  “Can you give me five minutes?”

  “Of course,” Angie said, setting the timer again. Lucy turned. She ran up the steps to her house. Her hair was just as ragged in the back.

  Angie had always known her sister to be tightly wound. Lucy had obsessed over her grades. She was considered one of the prettiest girls in her school, yet she never went out with anyone. At the same time she was a bit of a slut, although her choice of partners had always seemed more than literally beneath her. Growing up Lucy had always disliked surprises. As Angie stood on the sidewalk in front of her house, she assumed that her sister’s desire for control had finally broken her.

  Angie’s timer dinged. She walked across the front lawn, which was manicured to a golf-green perfection. Picking the blades of grass off her shoes Angie knocked on the door. It was immediately answered.

  “Angie!” Lucy called.

  “May I come in?”

  “Please do,” Lucy said, and Angie stepped inside.

  Two skinny floor rugs lay side by side in the hallway. Angie stood by the door. She could see into the living room, where matching white armchairs were pushed against the far wall. Both rooms were without coffee mugs or newspapers or anything accidental. It did not look like anyone lived there. It looked like an advertisement.

  “Can you take your shoes off?” Lucy asked.

  “Um …”

  “Please.”

  “Give me a minute,” Angie said. She sat on the floor and lifted her feet into the air.

  “Come on, Angie, you’re a big girl now.”

  “Obviously you’ve never been pregnant.”

  “It’s not too late,” Lucy said. She crossed her arms. Angie kept her feet in the air. The effort strained her stomach muscles.

  “If you want them off you’ll have to do it,” Angie said.

  “So, what? You never take your shoes off?”

  “It’s just hard.”

  “You sleep in those shoes?”

  “You can’t just help me out here?”

  “Not if you can’t help yourself!”

  “Fine,” Angie yelled. She wedged off her left shoe with her right foot. It flew into the air and landed upside down on the left rug. She did the same with the other shoe, which landed on the right rug. Lucy collected both shoes. She set them inside the hall closet, next to her own. Then she reached out her hand and helped Angie to her feet.

  “The hard part is getting them back on.”

  “Well, maybe I can help you with that,” Lucy said.

  The two sisters walked into the living room. Lucy sat in the left armchair. Angie lowered herself into the other one. She watched her sister, knowing that Lucy would be trying to predict what she was about to say. Angie waited some moments. She waited a few more. Then she just came out with it.

  “I went to see the Shark!” Angie said. This was the name the Weird siblings routinely used when referring to their grandmother.

  “Good God why?”

  “Didn’t expect that, did you?”

  “No. I did not.”

  “She says that she’s on her deathbed.”

  “Again?”

  “I know, I know.”

  “Is she still on Blake Street?”

  “No. She’s in the hospital. Vancouver and District. Room 4-206.”

  “Do tell.”

  “Don’t get excited. She doesn’t seem sick at all. She does however claim that she will die on her birthday.”

  “Very dramatic.”

  “She was pretty convincing, Lucy.”

  “You’re the only one who still falls for the bleeding nose thing.”

  “She also claims—”

  “It’s not as if we all couldn’t do it. So handy for getting out of phys. ed., remember?”

  “She also claims that she gave us all special powers when we were born.”

  “Beautiful.”

  “At the time she thought they were blessings. But now she realizes that they were curses.”

  “Blursings!”

  “Let me finish—”

  “What did you get?”

  “Listen to me!”

  “What does she claim to have given you?”

  “I can always forgive.”

  “And me?”

  “You’re never lost.”

  “She always liked you better.”

  “Luce! Listen! I believe her!”

  “Oh you do not.”

  “I’m starting to,” Angie said. She looked up at her sister. She wished everything didn’t always have to be so hard. “Ask yourself. Have you ever been lost?”

  “I have a natural sense of direction.”

  “Exactly. And I’ve let almost everybody I’ve ever met walk all over me.”

  “That’s not just low self-esteem?”

  “She’s charged me with collecting all of us and bringing everyone to her hospital room so that at the moment of her death she can lift the curses.”

  “She gave you—a quest?”

  “Don’t mock me.”

  “Don’t be mockable.”

  “Thirteen days …”

  “You’re really taking this seriously?”

  “It seemed like a lot of time but now it doesn’t.”

  “Does anyone know where Kent is?”

  “That seems like enough time? Right?” Angie asked. She looked at her sister and saw a mixture of pity and skepticism. “You think I’ve gone crazy.”

  “No. No. It’s just big. That’s all. A lot to take in.”

  “There were ladies falling unconscious and nurses rushing in and then the lights dimmed. She grabbed my arm and she wrote her phone number on it and I still can’t wash it off. Our plane was on fire! We had to make an emergency landing. We were all going to die! And then I called the number! I agreed to do it! Then the plane landed safely!”

  “Do you want some tea? I have the kettle on.”

  “Are you hearing this?”

  “Do you really believe that the plane would have crashed if you hadn’t called the Shark?”

  “I think … yes, I do.”

  “Angie, that’s called magical thinking. You’ve always been prone to it. The whole family has. It’s okay, but it’s a certifiable mental illness. It’s in all the textbooks.”

  “You think it’s just a coincidence that we were forced to land in Winnipeg?”

  “I think it even has its own drug now,” Lucy said.

  Neither sister said anything more. Angie swallowed several times. She bit the inside of her cheek. She tried to take deep breaths. But none of it worked. The tears came. Angie started to sob.

  “I’m not going to do it just because you’re crying.”

  “I’m s … s … sorry. I’m not trying t … oo. I’m trying rea … lly hard n … ot to,” Angie said. She wiped her nose with her sleeve. Slightly revolted, Lucy retrieved a box of Kleenex, which she handed to her sister. Angie blew her nose but her chest still heaved.

  “I lost my job today,” Lucy said. “I got caught fucking a stranger in front of the 813s.”

  “No w … ay!”

  “I did.”

  “Just like … when you … worked at F … f … rosty Queen?”

  “Yes.”

  “And … at … I … deal Coffee … and Cinnamon … To … Go?”

  “No need to make a list.”

  “But don’t you … th … ink … that’s too … coinci … dental? You getting fired … today?”

  “It doesn’t mean anything, Angie.”

  “Okay,” Angie said. She blew her nose again. She took several deep breaths but then sh
e started sobbing again.

  “Oh Jesus Christ,” Lucy said. “I’ll go see Abba.”

  “Really? You … will?”

  “Only because we should have done it a long time ago.”

  “Thank you, Lucy. That … means … so … m … uch.”

  “I can’t believe that still works.”

  “It’s … because … you have … a good … heart.”

  “Too bad for me.”

  “But y … ou’ll really … go?”

  “Yes, yes. I just said I would. I’ll go as far as Abba,” Lucy said. Angie nodded. She pushed herself out of the white armchair and moved across the room, lowering herself onto Lucy’s chair, sitting half beside her sister and half on top of her. She turned herself sideways so she could hug Lucy.

  “Watch my shirt.”

  “This … means … so … much … to … me.”

  “Careful with your nose. Here, blow. Everything’s going to be okay. There’s just one thing we’ll have to do first.”

  “What is it?”

  “We have to visit Mother.”

  “Okay,” Angie said. “I’ll do it.”

  In the kitchen the kettle began to whistle. This was a trick Lucy had been using since high school, to interrupt moments precisely like this one. It got louder and louder and higher in pitch. But Angie didn’t loosen her grip and Lucy did not try to break it.

  THE MOST IMPORTANT THING the Weird siblings ever did together was Rainytown. It was a city made entirely out of cardboard boxes that they built in the half-storey attic of their family’s cottage. It was a project they worked on every summer, whenever it rained. Two factors contributed significantly to its genesis: that it rained for seven straight days during the summer of 1994, and that several weeks earlier Kent had found numerous cardboard boxes, big and small, in a neighbour’s garbage.

  Kent had dragged the boxes back to the cottage with the intention of playing girlbots. This was a game that Lucy and Abba were disinclined to join. It was forgotten until the grey dismal morning of the seventh day, when they looked outside and saw that the rain continued to fall. Lacking fresh ideas, they followed Kent up to the attic, where conflict began almost instantly.

  “Hold on there, Kentucky,” Richard said, using the nickname he knew Kent hated. “I’m obviously the mad scientist since I can’t be a girlbot and I’m older than you.”

  “That’s not fair!” Kent said. A small trickle of blood began to leak from his left nostril.

  “Truth isn’t fair,” Richard said, invoking the expression that was the unofficial Weird family motto.

  “You know that isn’t going to work with us,” Abba said. Kent’s nosebleed ceased.

  “Just because I’m a girl doesn’t mean I can’t be the mad scientist,” Lucy said. She began collecting boxes. Richard tried to pull them out of her hands. Fighting ensued. Their voices rose in volume and pitch and soon their mother’s head poked up into the crawl space.

  What she saw disturbed her. Abba appeared to be crying, although it was hard to tell because of the box that covered her head. Angie was also in tears—but then again when wasn’t she?—because she couldn’t remove the Kleenex boxes that had been duct-taped to her feet. Lucy repeatedly hit Richard on the head with a long cardboard tube.

  “Stop it,” their mother screamed. “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!”

  Nicola, who was not prone to losing it, looked at her children. She looked at the boxes scattered on the floor. “What are you people trying to do?” she asked.

  “Make robots,” Kent truthfully answered.

  “Robots? Surely the five of you can come up with something better than that. Something more …”

  A silence followed. The sound of the rain striking the roof could be heard. Their mother’s eyes seemed to be focused on something quite far away. The silence captured their attention, and the look on Nicola’s face, wistful and sad, cracked their self-absorbed shells.

  “More what?”

  “Just more. Larger. A bigger scale,” Nicola said. “Not a mimic of some movie. Something original. Something that can be all your own …”

  “Okay …”

  “But like what?”

  “What, Mom? Tell us!”

  “Like a city!”

  “That’s a great idea!”

  “From Mom!”

  “Why so surprised?”

  “How should we start?”

  “A town hall?”

  “A TV station!”

  “A motorcycle speedway!”

  “You choose, Mom,” Richard said. “What would you start with?”

  “A hair salon,” she said, instantly. “A beauty parlour.”

  And so they got started. That very afternoon they designed and built the It’s About Time Hair Cutting Saloon, situated in what would become the heart of Rainytown, the first of many buildings to follow.

  If it hadn’t been for Besnard there were many things Nicola would have done with her life. But after he vanished she didn’t do any of them. She didn’t even try. Two days after her husband’s crumpled Maserati was pulled from Georgian Bay, having apparently veered off the road and over a cliff, Nicola went into her bedroom. She closed the door. She did not come out.

  The Weird siblings assumed that their mother was waiting for their father’s body to be found, just like they were. When the Maserati was towed out of the water, Besnard’s body had not come with it. It was thought that it had been swept away by the tide and that the same forces would soon push it back to shore. But two weeks later their father’s body had not been found and their mother had not come out of her room.

  The meals she placed in the hallway went untouched, and Angie began to suspect that her mother was leaving the bedroom at night and making her own food. Angie set her alarm for 3:30 a.m. She crept downstairs, to the kitchen. To keep herself awake she brewed a pot of coffee. This was the first time she’d ever tried to do this. Angie took one sip and dumped the rest into the sink; it was the last coffee she ever tasted.

  Angie sat at the kitchen table and waited. Without anything to keep her awake, she soon fell asleep. When she woke up her mother stood at the counter. Nicola wore a black pantsuit, heels and a small string of pearls. She was making a loaf of sandwiches. Angie watched her butter twelve slices of bread. She set down the knife and opened the refrigerator. The light from inside shone on her carefully styled hair. She took out a jar of pickles and strained to open it.

  “At least I know you’re eating,” Angie said. Her mother didn’t seem to hear her. She continued trying to open the pickle jar. “I said, it’s good to know that you’re eating!”

  Frustrated, Nicola set the unopened jar on the counter. Angie went over to the cutlery drawer. She took out a knife and tapped the lid of the pickle jar in a circle. Then she set the jar back on the counter and put the knife back in the drawer. As she returned to her seat at the table, Nicola made another attempt to open the jar.

  “Hey? Mom?”

  “Yes!” Nicola said as the lid popped open. She fished out four pickles, sliced them and put them on the buttered bread. She got a tomato from the refrigerator. Angie took it off the counter. She held it in her hand. Her mother went back to the refrigerator and took another tomato out of the crisper.

  “Please don’t do this,” Angie said. “Don’t do this to us.”

  Nicola sliced the tomato. She put her pieces of bread together, stacked all the sandwiches on a dinner plate and carried the stack towards the kitchen doorway. Angie got up and stood in front of her mother. Nicola stopped. The sandwiches wobbled. For the briefest moment Angie was sure that her mother recognized her and that everything was going to be okay. But then the look of recognition disappeared. It went away so quickly that Angie couldn’t tell whether she’d caught her mother off guard and seen through her act, or if the look hadn’t really been there in the first place. Keeping the plate level Nicola bent forwards at the waist. She leaned down until she and Angie were eye to eye.

  “Ar
e you staying here too? It’s such a beautiful hotel,” Nicola said.

  Not being recognized by her mother was unsettling, yet what troubled Angie even more was how much confidence and joy there was in Nicola’s voice. Emotions it had not conveyed for as long as Angie could remember.

  “What’s your name?” Nicola asked.

  “Please. Mom? Don’t?”

  “Well, whoever you are,” she said and she lifted her left hand, extended her index finger and dabbed Angie on the nose, “you’re as cute as a bug!”

  Angie looked at the floor. She watched her mother’s shoes as they stepped around her. She did not turn around as Nicola Weird left the room and climbed the stairs and stopped being her mom forever.

  ANGIE WAS SURPRISED WHEN Lucy handed her a pillow and a sheet. “Wait,” she said. “I have to sleep on a couch and I have to make it up? This is no way to treat a guest.”

  “You’re not a guest, you’re family,” Lucy said. Angie started to cry. Lucy turned out the light.

  In the morning Angie woke up with stiff legs and a sore back. She took tiny steps into the kitchen, where Lucy had already made breakfast.

  “Do you drink coffee yet?” Lucy asked. Angie shook her head no. Lucy poured her a glass of orange juice. The hardboiled eggs were perfectly timed. The toast was golden. Their taxi arrived at 8:55. Lucy’s suitcase was already at the door and Angie rushed to collect her things. Checking the lock three times, Lucy then carried both of their bags to the sidewalk. Here they stood for several moments as Angie inspected the cab.

  In 1963 Angie’s grandfather Samuel D. Weird founded the Grace Taxi Service. He named the enterprise after his mother. When Besnard took over the business, in 1982, it had grown into the second largest fleet in the city of Toronto.

  Over time Besnard developed many theories about taxis. For one, he believed that you should make a wish while hailing a cab. If the first taxi that passed by stopped and picked you up, your wish would come true. He also felt that every taxi ride was metaphorical—that it could be interpreted, like tea leaves or the lines in your palm. But his most firmly held theory was that your choice of taxi was a reflection of how you saw yourself. Of all his theories, this was the one that had been most firmly passed on to his children.

  “No visible dents or scratches,” Angie said. She circled the cab slowly.