The Whole Beautiful World

  To Dad

  CONTENTS

  Mourning Wreath

  Mood Ring

  Pretty Prayer

  Maternity Test

  The Missionary Game

  Mother-of-the-Bride Dress

  Two-Toned House

  Ploughshares into Swords

  Holy Oil

  Barn Cats

  Bacon Bits

  Looking for Drama

  Cat Food Trees

  Happy All the Time

  Mattress Surfing

  Road Pizza

  The Whole Beautiful World

  Acknowledgements

  MOURNING WREATH

  LIONEL CRANE WAS AS QUIET as they come. He was homeschooled for the first thirteen years of his life, and then transferred into our Grade 7 class when his mother decided she had nothing left to teach him. He could have gone right into high school, but the principal advised he stay with people his own age. He had a much smaller sense of personal space than the rest of us. He didn’t stare at your chest when he talked to you, but he didn’t look into your eyes either—always into your mouth, as if he were looking for some secret hanging from the end of your uvula.

  The only thing that got Lionel a little respect was the fact that he was the tallest in the class and had already completed a voice change without any dips or squeaks. No one bothered him. He kept to himself mostly, and no one really knew where he went at lunchtime.

  Just before Thanksgiving, the Grade 7s and 8s had a talent show. A bunch of the girls lip-synched Britney Spears songs, and some guys did an air band version of “Superman’s Dead,” and the rest of us were just glad to get out of class. Then Lionel came out of the wings in denim tights and a blue tank top. A teacher turned off the houselights. Lionel stood in the middle of the stage, eyes glued to the floor, and then rose up on his bare toes, lifted his arms and performed the first contemporary dance routine we had ever seen. He danced to a slow romantic pop song that every boy in the class had put on the mixed CD he made for his girlfriend that year, a song sung with a smoky, questioning voice. He spun his skinny body around the stage with muscles I didn’t think a thirteen-year-old could have. He flung his fluid legs above his head with a grace and confidence I didn’t think possible for anyone our age. The girl sitting beside me said to me or the universe, “I’m going to make my boyfriend learn to do that.”

  That was when Lionel Crane and I became friends—not because he had earned popularity points, but because the tenderness of his motions showed me that he had something worth sharing. I made it my job to tell off every pimple-faced boy who dared to say Lionel was gay. I even flicked my eraser at Jonah MacKenzie’s Adam’s apple and told him he was just jealous when he asked Lionel if he was a fag. That day Lionel and I walked home from school together. We kept the tradition for the rest of the year.

  His mother had been a ballerina—not a pretty one, but still a successful one. Mrs. Crane had met our town’s optometrist, Lionel’s father, while he was finishing his degree in Calgary. She was ten years older than him, and much older than most mothers of kids my age, but I only knew this because Lionel told me her age in secret once. He told me in exchange for my secret that our dog was half pit bull, but we didn’t want to keep him in a muzzle all the time. He could have told me she was twenty-four or fifty and I would have believed him. The only thing that gave her age away were the thick strands of white hair running through her dark bun. She refused to dye them out the way most mothers did.

  There were two things about Lionel’s mother that fascinated me: she wore black painted-on eyeliner that met in a perfect narrow V at the corners of her eyes, and her legs, which were bare even in the dead of winter, were pure white and veinless. I thought all mothers had spider and varicose veins, that they appeared automatically when your blood pumped into someone else for nine months.

  Since she had so much free time now that Lionel was in school, she rented the upstairs of the Legion one evening a week and started Talbot’s first dance class. The impact of Lionel’s performance was obvious when she ended up with a hundred kids who had spent the holidays twirling all over their families’ living rooms until their parents relented. I didn’t take lessons because my parents couldn’t afford it, but, in the Cranes’ basement with its walls lined in mirrors, Lionel would teach me how to stand in ballet shoes and spin without getting dizzy. He would improvise for me and then ask me to try.

  “You know I can’t dance,” I’d say.

  “Because you won’t try,” he’d say, smiling. He’d grab my hands and pull me into a crazy jitterbug, scrunching up his face with his tongue hanging out as if the movements took effort, as if they didn’t flow naturally from somewhere deep and unreachable. I’d laugh and pull away, plunging my fists into my hoodie pouch. I’d curl up into one of the green faux-fur beanbag chairs with pink centres, and he’d collapse dramatically into the other. He told me once they looked like boobs. “Boys think everything looks like boobs,” I said. I stood up and dropped my beanbag on him, then jumped on it.

  I’d go home, close the curtains, blare Alanis Morissette and try to free my scraggly limbs to flow like his. Next time, I told myself, I would dance with him. I would be freer and less uptight and I’d be able to laugh at myself. But I’d catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and my hands would fall at my sides. The next time we’d hang out I’d watch him again in awe and would never let him know how awkward I really was.

  The summer between Grade 7 and 8 I helped my mom clean houses, while Lionel went with his mother to Vancouver where she had been cast as the mother in Giselle, and his father stayed home to check people’s eyes. Lionel and I thought Mom would seem more professional if we gave her business a name. Lionel came up with Keeping Kleen. I bought a khaki utility dress from the Goodwill and he took a Sharpie and drew a little feather duster on the breast pocket with two calligraphy Ks under it. The duster looked more like a mushroom and I told him that.

  We sent each other postcards we made from cereal boxes. It became a game in testing Canada Post. One day he unravelled an entire roll of masking tape and wrote a message the whole length of it, then rolled it back up still in one continuous piece. Along the inside circle of cardboard he wrote, “All the tape in the world can’t contain our love.” He wrote my address along the outer layer and used four stamps for good measure. I never got it. He told me about it when he got home, and we laughed and I loved that it was worth all that effort to create something I might never see.

  When he came back from out West halfway through September, it was clear something was different. His mother had spent the summer sleeping longer and longer, he told me, till she was going to sleep at eleven after the show, and waking up at noon the next day. Her performances were becoming more and more sloppy, and he had worried they would replace her permanently with the understudy. I wondered why he hadn’t said anything about it in his postcards to me, and was glad he hadn’t. He didn’t bring it up again until October when she broke a hundred little hearts by cancelling her class for that term. Lionel got his father to pull him out of Grade 8 and register him as homeschooled so he could stay with his mom. It didn’t take much convincing since he was way ahead of the rest of the class anyway.

  Lionel’s mother started covering her legs with long broom skirts when she started using a wheelchair. She lost the defining black lines around her eyes when she no longer had the strength to lift her arms for longer than a few seconds. Lionel kept updating me about the stages of her body breaking down, how her voice was changing, how she would soon need a machine to help her breathe. She had told him she didn’t want to drag this dying thing out. She wanted to go gracefully, smoothly, and if she shut down she didn’t want anyone reviving her.<
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  I was okay with the way he was changing. I could handle him being sad all the time. But I couldn’t stand myself for never knowing what to say. I would sit there in silence while he told me he had to cut her long, thick hair because she couldn’t lift her arms to brush it, because she felt the weight of it too heavy along the back of her neck. I sat there willing myself to put my arm around his shoulder, but I’d freeze in fear. I’d try to moisten my stiff mouth to say something thoughtful and I’d just end up making nervous gulping sounds. I couldn’t get myself to cry with him when he cried. I’d try to force the tears, try to imagine how I would feel if my mom died, but all I could do was sit there sweating, afraid to hold his hand because mine was so clammy.

  I finally stopped visiting after the day Lionel and I sat at the kitchen counter playing Uno while Mrs. Crane sat nearby in her wheelchair. Her head was propped up with a foam neckpiece. Her new bob splayed out crazily around it. I skipped Lionel for the third time in a row and he swore. She started to snicker, then laugh. Her voice had started becoming nasally as her throat muscles began to relax. She laughed and laughed and I started laughing too. I laughed with her for a few seconds until I turned and saw that her eyes looked scared. Lionel had told me that sometimes that happened, that she cried or laughed for no reason. But he told me too many things about how her body was betraying her for me to keep track of it all. I kept laughing with her, looking into her scared eyes, my heart thudding. I couldn’t look at him. I saw the bright colours of the cards droop in his hands as they went limp on the table. I could see his hand reaching out to touch my arm. I stood up before he could reach me. I was still laughing as I ran to the washroom and sat on the toilet and cried until I could hear her laughter trickle away.

  After that I started going with Mom to work more often. I tried to fill my weekends with cleaning, told her I was saving up so I could buy a bike to get to school. I stopped wearing my khaki dress to work—I was outgrowing it anyway. He called twice for me, and then stopped trying. It made sense to me. He must have understood I wasn’t the right person to talk to.

  It went on like that for a couple months, me working a couple nights a week with Mom, doing some cleaning gigs with her on the weekend. I mostly liked it, seeing the kinds of crap people had, learning the different kinds of dust that accumulates in different kinds of houses, discovering the corners no one seems to care about. I loved finding a closet or basement full of cobwebs, standing on a stool with a broomstick and waving the handle around just below the ceiling till the webs wrapped in a fluffy cocoon of filth around the end of it.

  Then one Saturday while I was staring at my fingernails as we drove to work, Mom pulled the car into the Cranes’ driveway.

  “Mom, this is Lionel’s house!”

  “Oh, honey, I’m sorry—I didn’t even make the connection.”

  “Drive me back home, please.” I saw the curtain move in the front bay window, and Lionel’s face flashed there for a second.

  “I don’t think I can very well do that now.” I knew she was right. It would look awful if we left now that we’d been seen. “Besides, it’ll make me late.”

  I slunk down into my seat. “I can’t go in there.”

  “I think you can be a big girl about this. I don’t see any problem—friends grow apart. You’re here to work, anyway, not to socialize.”

  My heart was thudding as I reached into the trunk and lifted the bucket of cleaning supplies. The wooden porch made its familiar warm thudding sound as we walked up the steps.

  Mr. Crane was sitting on a stool in the kitchen, in the same spot where I had had my fit. “Heidi, nice to see you again,” he said. He smiled like he wanted to mean it. “Lucille’s resting in the other room, and Lionel’s reading to her,” he said.

  “We’ll make sure not to bother them,” Mom said.

  “Oh, no—I’m sure you won’t be a bother,” he said, his voice trailing at the end. “No bother at all.” It was as if he had forgotten what the words meant. He left to do some work in the office. Mom sent me to work on the basement. I figured I’d have to go through an entire bottle of Windex to get the dust-speckled mirrors sparkling.

  My heart slowed as I stood in the middle of the familiar mirror-covered room—the bureau and bankers boxes in one corner, the fuzzy green beanbag chairs with pink centres on the foam mats on the floor. I picked up one of the green blobs with both hands and threw it against a mirror. The mirror wiggled a bit and the tiny Styrofoam balls in the chair made a hushing sound as it slid down the wall. I didn’t feel like staring at myself for an hour, so I started dusting the bureau in the corner.

  It was covered in well-wishing cards, dried flowers, and hummingbird figurines. I found a shortbread cookie tin and opened it. Inside was a long dark ponytail, thick and speckled with strands of white. I ran my hand along it slowly. Her hair was course and dense. I turned to the mirror, held the ponytail against the back of my neck, ran it along my shoulder.

  IN GRADE 7, we’d had a class trip to the Talbot museum. In a town with a population of 6,500 there wasn’t much history to brag about, but the museum prided itself on its extensive collection of Victorian hair wreaths. The other kids thought the wreaths were gross, but Lionel and I thought they were beautiful—the various shades of black, brown, and blond all looped and twisted and woven together as intricately as lace to form flowers and organic shapes and patterns.

  “Women would trade hair with their friends and neighbours,” the curator said reverently, “to add colour and texture to their pieces.” I loved the thought of that—various pieces of friends and family woven together to make an heirloom. They were also used as a form of mourning art. Sometimes strands of the hair of a dead loved one were wrapped into tiny pieces of jewellery. Lionel said it was weird since hair is something that grows but is made up of dead cells. Apparently, he said, hair can still grow after someone dies.

  I told Lionel I was going to make one. I went home and started to collect the hair from my brush, tenderly pulling the strands straight into long strips, curling them in large loops and storing them in an unused pencil case. I was religious about it for a week and was about to start asking other people for their unwanted hair when my mom found the collection, told me hair is dirty and said it’s disgusting to keep it.

  I PUT MRS. Crane’s ponytail back in the cookie tin, and put the cookie tin in the pocket of my hoodie. It bounced gently against my belly button as I climbed up and down the stepping stool to reach the tops of the mirrors. Every creak from the ceiling made me look to the door, just in case Lionel came in. I kept dreading that door opening, and yet I was disappointed when it never did. I didn’t tell my mom I was keeping the cookie tin for the time being. I took it home and put it on my dresser, beside my collection of postcards from Lionel.

  The trick to writing along a whole roll of tape is to empty one roll, and then start rewrapping the other roll onto the empty cardboard centre. I lay on my bed that evening and threw my ball of extra masking tape against the ceiling and waited the few seconds for it to fall while I tried to think of things to write to Lionel—about the collection of creepy wax dolls I had to dust every week, about the man who wouldn’t let me throw out the mouldy bread he was saving for the ducks, about all the things I loved about his mom, all the things he got from her like her grace. And how I was so eternally sorry. I put five permanent stamps on it, wrote his name and address, and dropped it in the mailbox on my way to school the next day.

  MOOD RING

  ALEESA PRINS HAD NO ARMPIT hair. She told me once—or did Tyler tell me? Not even a little peach fuzz. At the time I felt it made her seem more evolved, like she had total power over her body. Also more infantile. For the entire year we shared a room, every time I’d shave my own prickly pits in the shower before running to class with wet hair, I’d blame her for the stinging red dots when I swiped antiperspirant against them.

  I never pretended I wasn’t envious of Aleesa Prins. It wasn’t painful because I didn’t lie to my
self about it. I would have told her to her face, had she cared to ask. She and Tyler would fool around after band practice under her pink comforter with hand-stencilled peace signs all over it—nothing too serious, he said. We’re all too young to get serious.

  You would think she’d hardly be able to play the triangle, but some guy with Sun-In highlights and torn jeans had met her at a mixer in the first month of school and offered to teach her to play his bass guitar. Even half-wasted she got pretty good after one night of practice. He lent her the bass for the year, and she would play it unplugged in the afternoon. Its soft and tinny sound quivered through the air between us while she tucked herself away in her corner of the room.

  Tyler met me at our dorm one Saturday morning to go yard sale-ing for vintage action figures, as we had done once a month at home in Talbot. But when he heard Aleesa playing bass he went back to his dorm and grabbed his guitar and by the time the afternoon rolled around she was the new and only girl in his band. There wasn’t much she would say no to. It was her idea to call the band the Ne’er-Do-Wells. I went to every one of their gigs that year, as I had for all of Tyler’s coffeehouses in high school, and he had for all of my plays, even when I was a lineless fairy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with nothing but a plastic kazoo for a voice.

  Their hooking up wasn’t supposed to bug me because he and I had always been just friends, and because it was mostly happening in his room.

  DURING CANCER AWARENESS Month in Grade 9, Tyler’s mom had taken us to the Salvation Army to buy afghans, and then taught us to unravel them and crochet the yarn into hats for chemo patients. We spent the month turning blankets into balls of string, then resurrecting the wool into berets or toques. At the assembly at the end of the month, the student body gave us a standing ovation for our generous work. I felt we were changing the world.

  Tyler lost interest in crocheting, but I kept it up, making the trip every few months with his mom to the hospital. When I moved away to university, I found the nearest hospital and walked down every few months with two grocery bags full of hats. I attached a little note with a ribbon to each one: THINKING OF YOU, it said in sparkly ink.