Eleanor Rigby

Jeremy was mad now. “May have seen? I was being pulled down, down into the earth. I wasn’t going up into any light. There was no light for me.”

I took hold of his hand, which was freezing cold. The bracelet looked more like a dog tag than jewellery. “Jeremy, look at me,” I said, saying his name out loud for the first time. “How long have you been wearing this bracelet on your wrist?”

“Four years.”

“Four years?”

“And a bit.”

“And you didn’t call me?”

“No, but don’t take it that way. I didn’t call because you’ve always been my hope—the ace up my sleeve.”

“But you don’t know me. How can you say that?”

“I know enough about you.”

“How?” I couldn’t imagine what this must’ve sounded like to Dr. Tyson and Constable Chung.

Jeremy said, “I did legwork.”

“How do you mean?”

“I, well, I sort of followed you around.”

“You what?”

“Relax—it’s not scary like it sounds.”

“Yes, it is.”

“No. You’re looking at it the wrong way.”

“What’s the right way?”

“The right way is this: I’ve been with so many screwed-up foster families in my life that before I went to meet my real family, I wanted to make sure you weren’t a psychopath like the rest of them.”

This struck me as a pretty good reason. It also shut me up.

“I know where you work and where the rest of the family is. All that stuff. The basics.”

I said nothing; he had every right to be wary. Constable Chung coughed. Dr. Tyson hadn’t left; overworked or not, this was truly something.

Jeremy said, “Liz—Mom. You like to think of yourself as a rock—that you’re tough and nobody can hurt you, but you’re wrong there.” He stopped. I had the strange notion that something in his head had just melted and made a stain of some kind. “I think I’m fading here,” he said, and closed his eyes.

Dr. Tyson checked his pulse, looked at me and the cop, and told us he should probably sleep awhile.

“Can I stay here?” I asked.

“Sure.”

Jeremy was instantly asleep, and what could I do but sit there silently, now holding the chilly hand of my own son? On a chair I saw a pile of silly-looking mesh stockings and black lingerie. Constable Chung saw me looking and said, “Uh, we found him in those, and he was all made up. The nurse cleaned him up.”

I recalled the body I saw when I was twelve, the blackberries; the body clothed in something abnormal; the creosote stink of railway trestles.

Taking a look at my face, the doctor volunteered, “I think it was actually a costume for The Rocky Horror Picture Show. They do midnight screenings at the Ridge Theatre. I used to go to them back when they were happening the first time around.”

“Is he going to be okay?” I asked her.

“This time, yes. Next time—maybe. The time after that? Who knows?”

Unarguable logic. Jeremy’s hand was warming up. I looked at Chung and he shrugged. “You’ve never met your own son?”

“No.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. I mean, I knew he—Jeremy—was out there, but not…” But not what? But not this beautiful man here in front of me.

“How old is he?”

“Twenty.”

“Twenty?”

The hiss of oxygen in the tube beneath my son’s nose—it took me back to Rome. It carried me back two decades to the night where fat, plain, Canadian me stood in the rain on a rooftop near the Colosseum. I was sixteen, and it was the era of acid rain—a subject that seems long forgotten now. The skies of Europe showered battery acid back then. I remembered looking out over the Colosseum and its neighbourhood, under a pigeon-feather grey sky, quite late on a weeknight, all traffic noises gone. The acid rain was falling on the city’s marble and travertine monuments, and I imagined I could hear them hiss and crackle under the acid, dissolving more in one year than they had in a thousand, history melting away before my eyes. And this was the oxygen ventilator’s noise.

I moved in closer to Jeremy and kissed him on the cheek.

That I had wanted to travel anywhere, let alone Rome, had sent a shock through the family dinner table. To most ears a Latin class excursion sounds like the pinnacle of dullness. Not quite so. The class actually had a somewhat dark mix of students, a blend of linguistic geeks, rebellious sons of literary parents, and cool-headed girls with their efficient eyes focused on being MDs one day. It was the only fun class I ever had.

Leslie, recently graduated and in and out of home at whim, was our family’s traveller—a ten-day tour of southern England in ninth grade and three weeks in Nova Scotia as a B & B chambermaid the summer after she graduated, both trips drenched in sex and scandal.

“Rome?” said Father. “That’s yesterday’s world. Go to Tomorrow. Go to Houston—San Diego—Atlanta.” Father was only interested in making new things. To him, a fifteenth-century church would be nothing more than a shell on a beach.

“You’re too young to go anywhere,” said Mother.

William, a year older than Leslie, said, “Sixteen is fine. And what—like she’s going to hop off the plane and be instantly molested? Come on.”

“But those Italians …” My mother wasn’t so sure that my plump frumpiness rendered me asexual.

“They’re no different than the English, Mother. Men are men. Face it.” That Leslie, aged eighteen, could say something this daring-yet-cliched at the dinner table, and have it accepted as gospel, testified to her unshakeable faith in the power of her own allure, and to my lack thereof.

“I suppose you’re right,” Mother caved in. “What about money?”

“I’ll pay,” I said. “I’ve never spent any of my babysitting or paper route money.”

“What?” My brother was clearly astonished. “That’s so depressing. None of it? Not even a blouse? A Chap Stick?”

“Nothing.”

Leslie asked, “What’ll you wear?”

Father said, “Whoa, Nellie! Who said Lizzie was even going?”

“Oh, hush, Neil,” Mother replied. “It’ll broaden her horizons.” Again she spoke as if I wasn’t there: “The poor thing doesn’t even have any posters up in her room.”

“Fair enough.”

That I was paying for the trip myself was all my pragmatic, rules-oriented father really needed to know.

My parents … I suppose one could call them generic. In the absence of any overarching quirks or pathologies, they had ended up defaulting on the side of cheapness, dirt management and chore scheduling—which is to say, they ended up like most parents. Father had his garage, off the floor of which you could, if you wished, eat one of my mother’s economically prepared meals at precisely six o’clock every night, cardigan sweaters optional but preferred.

My father was killed in 1985, when I was twenty-five. He fell asleep at the wheel driving into Honolulu on the 78, ramming headfirst into an Isuzu truck with three local kids in the cab. Mother was unhurt, and remembers none of it. Funny—he seems so far away to me now. He never spoke much, and as a result I have few memories. Below a certain point, if you keep too quiet, people no longer see you as thoughtful or deep; they simply forget you. In any event, at the airport he handed me five hundred dollars in lire, which for him was the equivalent of a normal person renting a biplane to spell out a goodbye in the sky. He was essentially a kind man.

Back at the dinner table that night, Leslie said, “I think I have some jumbo oversize sweaters that just might fit you.”

“Thank you, Leslie.”

“You’ll have hickeys all over your bum from being pinched.” William was attempting to be gallant in his way, flattering my young mind that, no matter what, I could still be wanted, however slim the odds.

Mother said, “Stop that, William. The Latin class sponsors this trip, not your friends with their hot rods. I might add, last week I was driving a bit too slowly on Cross Creek and your friend Allan Blake gave me the finger. He didn’t know it was me, but I knew it was him, and I never want to see him here again, you hear?”

William was still focused on my trip. “I bet you fall for some guy who works at a Fiat factory.”

“Marcello,” added Leslie, “a fiery idealist. Chianti bottles. A sweaty undershirt—picnics beside the autostrada—”

“He slaps you around a bit. He gets jealous easily—”

“But you’d kill for him—”

“Stop!” My mother was appalled at how sexualized her two eldest children were. The only comfort she seemed to find was my incontestable virginity. “Lizzie is going to go to Rome, and she is going to learn about the great works of art there, and … eat Roman food, and …” Words temporarily failed her. “… become a serious and scholarly young woman.”

Even my own spirits were dampened by such a clinical vision of Rome. Truth was, I wanted to see naked statues of people because I was too embarrassed to pick up certain magazines in certain stores, the ones in the part of town it took me three bus transfers to reach. I always wimped out and stayed up front reading the knitting catalogues. Why they even bothered stocking catalogues up front is beyond me. The real clientele of those places always lurked at the store’s rear, exclusively men, clad in raincoats, toupées and shame.

To me, the thought of Rome—a city adorned with genitalia rather than vinyl siding and stucco—seemed improbable. I had to see this place. In the weeks leading up to the trip’s charter airline departure, I kept waiting for a TV studio’s buzzer to sound, for an audience to shriek at me, telling me that it was all a big prank.

Jeremy and I were alone in the hospital room well into the night, save for the sinister hiss of his oxygen, a speaker system squawking in another wing or the rare motorcycle gunning its engine on the road below. Jeremy’s eyes stayed shut. I wondered what I was going to say when he opened them—but it turned out I didn’t have to worry about that. Around three a.m., he opened them and said, “My name isn’t written in the Book of Life.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, but answered, “Don’t be stupid. Of course it is.”

“No—you don’t understand—when they paddled me back here, I was already falling on my way to hell. I was yanked, like I was bungeed, back into this building.” He squeezed my wrist, as if taking my pulse. “It sucked the air out of me.”

“Jeremy, you’re not going to hell.” My son had no apparent aptitude for small talk, but that was fine, for nor do 1.1 said, “All that happened was that last night you did some very stupid party drugs, and now you’re paying the price. That stuff fries the wiring in your head like booster cables.”

“Let’s change the subject.”

“Done.”

We sat there feeling foolish.

Jeremy asked, “So, have you been preparing a speech to give me inside your head for the past twenty years?”

“Of course. You, too?”

“Yup.”

There was more silence, happier this time.

I said, “Neither of us is going to give the speech, right?”

“It’d be kind of corny.”

“It would.”

“I feel much better already.”

I asked, “How did you find me? I tried locating you for years with no luck. The government was really prickish about it.”

“Well, it’s amazing what you can find in this world if you’re willing to sleep with people.” He said this as if he were giving me a household hint.

“I suppose so.”

“I’d be a good spy.”

“I didn’t notice you spying on me for four years, so yes. When was the last time you ate?”

“As in food?”

“No, as in tractors. Of course I mean food.”

“I had a ninety-three-cent piece of pizza yesterday. At noon.” The unusual pizza price was a local merchandising twist; with tax, a slice came to one dollar.

“Those ninety-three-cent slices are about as good for you as a roasted bandage.”

“I swiped a block of mozzarella from the supermarket on Davie.”

“What on earth does that have to do with anything?”

“Everything. So long as a block of cheese is still vacuum-sealed, the pizzerias accept them as currency. They give you a free slice, and maybe five bucks.”

“You’d risk a police record for five bucks and a microwaved Band-Aid?”

“It’s okay. The supermarket gives you two options if they catch you—one: they call the cops, and two: they take a Polaroid of you holding up whatever it was you shoplifted. It’s almost always cheese. And then they tell you never to come back into the store. They have this whole back wall covered with faded photos of street scum holding cheeses. It’s not as if I’m risking a police record. Merely a ritual humiliation.”

This was genuinely interesting to me. I said so.

“I bet you something.”

“What? What do you bet me?”

“I bet you think I’m street trash.”

I sighed. “Well, Jeremy, let me check my data so far: drugs; overdose; mesh stockings; cheese theft …”

“I used to be street trash.”

“Okay. Sure.”

“But I stopped being trash a few years ago.”

“I’m glad to hear that.” I considered this. “Can you do that? I mean, just stop that whole way of life?”

“Yes. Or I thought I could. Until last night. My friend Jane got me all dragged up for the Rocky Horror show.”

“So your doctor told me.”

“Tyson? Man, from what I just saw, she needs a morphine drip and a lost weekend with a tennis pro. She’s one of those doctors who overdoes it. I can tell with one blink.”

“I think you may be right.”

“What’s with the puffy face?”

“I had my wisdom teeth taken out four days ago.”

“Pain?”

“No. They gave me lots of drugs.”

“Any leftovers?”

“No!” I pretend-swatted him.

“Never hurts to try.”

I asked him how he felt. He went quiet. I said, “Hello?”

He pulled into himself, just like that, his shine gone.

“Jeremy? Here you are, sick and all, and we’re discussing … stolen cheese. That’s stupid. Sorry.”

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