Catch My Drift Read online

  Lorna didn’t want to spend time with Debbie, but she didn’t want to be alone either. She suggested Ballantyne’s.

  Sitting up at the bar, Lorna ordered a rum and Coke and Debbie had a 7-Up. The windows were closed and the music pounded and crashed. While Debbie talked about a swim school for little kids at a new community centre, Lorna scanned the bar for Alex.

  “Are you looking for someone?” Debbie asked.

  “No,” Lorna said.

  “You seem distracted.”

  “Sorry.”

  “That’s OK, it’s really noisy in here.” She leaned in. “But does that sound good to you? I mean, do you like little kids?”

  Lorna tried to smile at her friend. Were they friends? “Sorry. Does what sound good?”

  “Teaching with me! Like I said, Marianne wants me to find another girl and I think we’d be a good team. Just Saturday and Sunday afternoons. Maybe after school, too, if there are enough kids enrolled.”

  “You want me to teach swimming with you?”

  “Yeah!” Debbie nodded eagerly. “I told Marianne I’d ask. I didn’t promise anything, but what do you think?”

  Lorna felt the heat underneath her sweatshirt creep up into her face. “Debbie,” she said. “The team has practice four hours a day. Saturday and Sunday mornings, too. The whole school year.”

  “Sure,” Debbie said. “But in case—.”

  Lorna swallowed. Even doe-eyed Debbie didn’t think she was going to make the team. “In case what?”

  Debbie looked up, but her gaze didn’t quite meet Lorna’s. “I think you’re training too hard, Lorna.

  “I’ll be fine.” Debbie had no idea. No idea how Lorna could surprise people when the whistle blew. Her body and mind worked together; they did impossible things under the right kind of pressure.

  “Even if you do make the team,” Debbie said, “Are you sure you really want all of it? All those practices, all that strain?”

  “I’ve been doing this since the seventh grade.”

  “I know it,” Debbie said, although Lorna was quite sure she didn’t understand it. “But I just wonder if it’s making you . . . ” Debbie didn’t finish her sentence. She smiled warily at Lorna.

  “What? Faster?”

  “I was going to say happy.”

  Lorna picked up her drink and sucked it through her teeth. The cold clipped the back of her molars. “Don’t worry about it.”

  Debbie crinkled her wide, freckled forehead. “You’re still healing.”

  “My knee hardly hurts at all.”

  “It’s not just that.”

  “If you mean Kenneth, I don’t even miss him.” It came out so easily. Lorna looked at Debbie, emboldened. “As a matter of fact . . . ” But she decided not to say anything about Alex. Debbie would want to know too much. “As a matter of fact,” Lorna repeated, gulping the rest of her drink, “I’ll be fine.”

  “We could have such a fun year,” Debbie said. “We could have parties . . . ”

  Lorna thought of repeating what Alex said about following your path, but Debbie wouldn’t get it, she couldn’t relate. Debbie would just float on ahead; she wasn’t good at anything. She would become a teacher, marry a teacher, have three kids and a two-car garage with a basketball hoop. Lorna was different. She was a swimmer. “We can have a party if that’s what you want,” Lorna said finally, to shut Debbie up. “Later in the month. After tryouts.”

  Debbie wiped the counter in front of her with a napkin. “Well. You’re doing really, really well.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re doing so well, Lorna.” Debbie frowned. “It’s good enough. You don’t need to prove anything.”

  On the first day of school, Lorna searched for Alex’s name on class lists, but there was nothing. She tracked down a drama seminar and crossed campus after lunch to watch a British professor with tea-stained teeth demonstrate how to faint. She considered staying late and asking the students about Alex, but what would she even ask? What reason could she give for wanting to know? What would she do with what she found out?

  On the night before varsity tryouts, Lorna couldn’t sleep. It was the idea of not sleeping that kept her wide awake, the fear of being too groggy to swim fast in the morning. She was up to pee every half-hour, and each time she returned to bed, she tried to do it with a clear head. I will think of nothing. There is nothing at all to think about. But her mind spun, seeming to search for something to hook on to. She jammed her eyes closed and tried to picture a calm blue surface. She liked to encourage dreams about water.

  For a few thick seconds, Lorna drifted into the same nightmare she’d been having since the seventh grade. It was set on a misty pond she’d seen once in a library book on the Salem witch trials. In this version, Lorna was floating on a raft, her body bound by a burlap sack. She felt the familiar, heavy push on her chest: a rushing, then rapid sinking underwater. When Lorna coughed herself awake, her hair and skin were damp.

  At four thirty, Lorna gave up on sleep. She put her best race suit on under her clothes and pulled the band from her wrist to tie her hair into a tight, scalp-searing ponytail. She did her stretches on the bathroom floor and then moved quietly out the door, trying her best not to wake Debbie.

  In the dark, Lorna hurried down the sidewalk, shivering from the mix of morning cold and nerves. Despite an early start, somehow she was running late. The apple had returned to her stomach; it rose and pressed against her sternum then her throat as the athletic complex came into view. She walked around to the side of the building where the pool doors were opened up to the outside. Humid, chemical air rolled into the morning dark. She could hear the echo of girls’ voices, the slapping and forcing of water. She thought of her nightmare and tried to push it out of her mind. Lorna heard Coach Vicky’s brash, dirty laugh. She leaned against the brick, her arms hugging her mid-section. She was all twisted up; her body wanted the apple out.

  Inside, a few girls were still in the change room but most were already out on the deck. The change room was bright and overwarm, and chlorine caught the back of Lorna’s throat. She hurried past the strewn gym bags, warm-up suits, and towels. On a corkboard across from the bathroom stalls, a single mimeographed sheet pinned to the wall said “Varsity Qualifying Times: ’75-76 Season.” She didn’t stop to scan the paper; she really couldn’t stop.

  Lorna slammed into a toilet stall and knelt over the bowl. She coughed hard, trying to dislodge the apple, but produced only a mouthful of bitter saliva. Out on the deck, she heard Vicky’s three short warning blasts. It was time for the girls to assemble, to receive instructions, to focus. Lorna spat and spat.

  Leaving the bathroom stall, Lorna tightened her ponytail in the smudged mirror. She splashed water over her mouth and face, pink and puffy from lack of sleep. She did not look at the corkboard. She did not take off her clothes. What she really needed was air.

  Outside, the sun was beginning to push up in the east, making the sky as peachy and confident as a juice commercial. Lorna hauled the cool air deep into her chest. Then she began to walk south, away from the athletic centre. She passed vendors out in Chinatown, sweeping the sidewalks and setting up white plastic tables for displays of fruit, perfume, and underwear in plastic packages. In a dusty window, a man was stringing a line of bright, barbecued chickens. Lorna nodded at him and kept on following the road, sweat gathering under her swimsuit, the sun rising against the side of her face. She passed joggers, dog walkers, and street cleaners. Buses roared by. Lorna kept moving forward, reaching downtown’s loud grey construction. Her right knee began to click, then her left, but she didn’t stop. She continued under a dingy expressway underpass, holding her breath against the sharp smell of urine.

  It was full morning when Lorna reached the end of the street and the lake from her bedroom window. She headed west along the painted guardrail, such a meager separator from the cold water’s lapping edge. She looked over at the scratchy swathe of the island airport. Not too far to reach.<
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  Lorna peeled off her nylon jacket, the breeze waking the damp skin under her swimsuit. A few feet away, a man sat slumped against the rail in an oil-stained sleeping bag, a squash-coloured dog cuddled next to him. She looked down at the foam clinging to the lake’s concrete retaining wall, the ribbons of gasoline. Below the lake’s surface, concealed from swimmers, were rusted car parts, broken furniture, dogs tied to concrete, birds that hadn’t made it across. Everyone knew this about the lake. But at the surface, the blue water sparkled. She took a deep breath. She laid her jacket on the rail.

  A little plane took off from the airport, low and shaky in the sky. Though the plane was headed east, she imagined Alex was up there. She put her hand out toward the plane, as though to wave at it or shield it from view.

  “Beautiful,” the man with the dog said.

  She looked over and smiled politely. His gaze was on nothing in particular; he closed his eyes.

  Lorna thought of the passengers looking out the plane’s tiny windows. Would they see her? A girl standing at the edge of a guardrail, knees slightly bent? Let’s hope she’s stronger than she looks. For a second, they might wonder who she was, where she was heading. In another second, they’d be too far away to see.

  Wise

  Christmas, 1987

  Dad is sleeping at our house tonight, but he’s not coming to the play because he’s three sheets to the wind. Mom told us that, frowning in the way that makes her chin red and lumpy like a spoonful of Zoodles. But Dad doesn’t look like sheets to me. Sheets are what I’m supposed to wear for my Shepherd in Blue costume. They’re rolling in the dryer downstairs. Mom had to wash them after Dad knocked the gravy pot onto my lap at dinner.

  Before we leave for church, I find Dad watching TV in the den with Jed. “Mom says we’re going without you.”

  He glances back at the kitchen. “Boss’s orders.”

  I sit on the ottoman, smelling Dad’s socks. “My part’s stupid, anyway,” I say. “All I do is shout ‘O come let us adore him’ and then stand there staring at Jesus.” Dad was an actual actor on a real TV show once. If he came to our play, he’d see that I’m the only shepherd with a line.

  “O come lettuce adore him. O come cabbage adore him. Who’s next, the artichokes?” Dad laughs. I laugh because that’s what he wants me to do.

  “You should be Mary,” Dad says.

  “Impossible. She’s nine. Mary’s gotta be at least twelve.” Jed talks without moving his eyes from the TV.

  Dad pulls his cigarettes from his front pocket. “Who says?”

  “That’s how old the real Mary was when God knocked her up,” Jed says.

  “Jesus Christ,” Dad says.

  “Why did God pick someone who was only twelve?” I ask.

  Jed turns and grins. “Still had her V-card. Virgin Mary, right? Girls those days were easy.”

  “You hearing this, Lorna?” Dad calls to the kitchen.

  I think about Angela D’Souza, the twelve-year-old playing Mary. She cried at the last rehearsal because someone accused her of farting. There’s no way anyone would want to do it with her. The easy girls are in eighth grade at least, like Cindy Springgay who will show a guy anything for five bucks.

  Mom sticks her head in the door. She doesn’t answer Dad. “We’re late.”

  I look back at Dad and he smiles at me kind of dopey. “Go on, Care Bear,” he says. “Break your legs.”

  Driving to church, Mom asks us if we’re nervous and we say we’re not. I am a little bit nervous, but not about the play. I’m nervous because Mary had a baby when she was only twelve. That’s just a little more than two years away.

  “How old were you when you had us?” I ask Mom.

  “Too young,” Mom says. “Twenty with Jed. Twenty-two with you.” Twenty-two is ten years older than Mary.

  “Do you think God will ever decide he wants to have another baby?” I ask.

  If God wanted another kid, I wonder if he’d pick me or Angela D’Souza to be the mother. Angela smells like onions, but at least she’s twelve.

  Mom looks at me in the rear-view. “Not likely.”

  Not likely, but maybe. What if it did happen again? What if God chose me?

  “Mom, if I had a baby in junior high, would you be really, really mad?”

  When mom gets annoyed, she makes her lips all thin and mashes them together. Jed calls it bitch mode. I can see bitch mode in the rear-view.

  “I’d be very disappointed,” she says. “It would ruin your life.”

  “Except what if the baby was God’s?”

  “Cara, that’s ridiculous.” She is scanning the church parking lot. We are late. The lot is almost full.

  “Even if God did get you preggo? Everyone would just think you were lying,” Jed says.

  “Jed, don’t say preggo,” Mom says. “Please.”

  “I bet most of Bethlehem thought Mary was just making up a story to cover her butt.” Jed elbows me in the arm and puts on a squeaky voice. “‘We only did it once, Joseph! How did I get to be such a fatty?’”

  Mom drives into a parking spot that says Authorized Vehicles Only. She breathes hard out her nose. “It’s Christmas, what are they going to do?” She glances back at me like I have any idea what they’d do or not do then looks irritated when I don’t answer her.

  I press my belly as hard as I can with the seatbelt. I do feel something. Something lumpy, like a knot or a baby. I tell myself it’s just dinner in a ball, but there’s always a chance. If it happened once, it could happen again. That’s why it’s important to be good, but not too good. If I’m too good, God could pick me next. I’d be preggo with Jesus II, and no one would believe me.

  By the time we get down to the parish basement, Shepherd in Red and Shepherd in Yellow are already dressed. The mothers are putting pink powder on their cheeks. When Mom lays out Jed’s costume, I realize we forgot my sheets.

  “Why are you just standing there?” Mom says.

  “We need to go home,” I whisper. “You forgot the sheets.”

  Mom’s lips are thinner than ever. “I forgot them? For Christ’s sake, Cara.”

  I stay quiet. Good, but not too good.

  “Ask if anyone has extras,” Mom says.

  “But I’m Shepherd in Blue. I need blue sheets!”

  Mom peels off her powder blue ski jacket and shoves it at me. “Wear it back to front.” The jacket makes me look more like a hippo than a shepherd. I’m about to tell her this, but her eyes are across the room. Jed is standing in front of the mirror, smearing black gunk all over his face.

  Mom marches over and I follow. “What the hell—”

  Jed grins and holds up a small tin. “Shoe polish,” he says. “Balthazar’s a black guy.”

  “Where did you get that?”

  “Everyone knows Balthazar’s black.”

  It’s true. Most of the illustrations in our catechism book are red and brown, but there is an exception on the nativity page: Balthazar, the second wise man, is definitely black.

  “I mean the polish,” Mom says.

  “From Dad. He polished his shoes for this, you know.”

  Mom breathes out all heavy. “You have to take it off.”

  “No way.”

  “Yes way.” Bitch mode.

  Mom turns to Father Oliphant, who is coming over to join the excitement. “I’m sorry, Father. Jed didn’t tell me about this.”

  Father Oliphant’s face is pink and sweaty. Little kids call him Papa Elephant. Jed and I call him Garbage Breath because his breath reeks like the alley behind Mandarin Mansion. Mom says he’s suspicious of our family because we don’t go to mass on Sundays. We only go to the Catholic school — Our Lady of Fatima, or Fat Lady’s — because a kid at the public school got curb-stomped a few years ago.

  Garbage Breath dabs Jed’s cheek with his thumb. “I’m not so sure this will come off.” His stink reaches my nostrils even from a few feet away.

  Jed backs away. “Balthazar’s black!” />
  “Yes, we know.” Mom grabs Jed’s elbow, steering him toward the bathroom. “But it’s racist to paint your face like that.”

  “Why?” Jed jerks away from her, looking at me with this question. I want to help, but I have no idea.

  “Right now, Jed.” The vein in Mom’s forehead sticks out like a strand of blue spaghetti.

  “Fuck you!” Jed says.

  Mom slaps Jed’s face. It happens so fast that I think it’s my imagination, but the palm of her hand is streaked with black polish.

  “Lorna, easy,” Garbage Breath says, putting a hand on Jed’s shoulder. When I notice him again, I notice everyone else. A mom with a makeup brush has her hand over her mouth. The other Wise Men stare at the floor. They have small triangles drawn on their chins for beards, so it doesn’t seem fair that Jed’s not allowed to paint his own face.

  Garbage Breath picks up Jed’s gold and red gown. “Take your brother’s costume,” he says to me. “We need a Balthazar.”

  I stand backstage with the other Wise Men. We don’t get to come on until the very end, after Jesus gets born. It’s freezing backstage. I pull my arms into the sleeves of Jed’s gown and hug my ribs. I wish I were still Shepherd in Blue, under a warm bundle of sheets.

  As the play starts, I think about whether God heard what Jed said to Mom. If God did hear, it probably means Jed’s going to hell. But there’s a good chance he didn’t catch it. If God is everywhere, if he’s spread across the whole entire world, it’s pretty unrealistic that his ears are anywhere near us. Here in this church, we probably just get a tiny slice of his toenail or his anus. I try to erase that thought. I don’t want God to know I’m thinking about his anus — the little x Mom showed me in the diagram of privates that came with the My Changing Body book she got at our neighbour’s garage sale. Then again, if God knew I was thinking about his anus, he probably wouldn’t choose me to be the one to have his baby. Anus, anus, butthole, I think.

  Through a space in the thick, dusty curtains, I watch Mary and Joseph circle the stage, rapping at innkeepers’ doors and getting turned away. Each time Mary and Joseph get refused, Angela says, “Do not despair, Joseph.” She was only supposed to say that line after the first no, after that she’s supposed to act like she’s losing hope. I wonder if the real Mary lost hope. Did she know that having a baby was going to ruin her life?