A Boy’s Hand

I
stood at my bedroom window and watched snow cover the brown grass in our backyard. The falling snow reminded me of when I was young, although my mother always told me I was still young, but I didn’t know it. When I was young, my brother and I put on our snowsuits and played in the backyard until long after dark; we could see our frozen breath and our hands and feet got cold, but we didn’t care. We built snowmen and dug tunnels, and I took breaks to make snow angels I would then forbid my brother to step on. He was not like other brothers who picked on and tortured their younger sisters; he did not step on my snow angels and if my hands got so cold I could not feel them, he would lend me his Toronto Maple Leafs gloves for a few moments, until I was ready to give them back.

My mother was out playing cards, and my brother was out with his friends. So that I wouldn’t be alone, I was going to Jonathan’s, and I was going to ask him for a hug. A hug was the most I wanted, the most I would dare to ask for, and when the hug was over, as I knew it could not last forever, I would command my body to hold on to the hug. My body was a kind of delicate instrument that I could play as I wished.

Shannon and I had been friends since Kindergarten, and last weekend, I watched television with her and Jonathan in Jonathan’s living room, and when I got up to get another Molson, he followed me into the kitchen. I stood at the counter opening the beer bottle, and he stood beside me and blew into my ear: a sudden, small explosion of heat. I turned and he laughed in my face, his mouth wide open and his small, sharp teeth exposed, as if I had been the one to sneak up beside him and blow into his ear.

I went to the kitchen and phoned Jonathan, and he answered on the seventh ring.

“Jonathan?” My voice was gravelly.

“Yeah?”

“It’s Tanya.” I pressed my finger to a spot on the wall where the wallpaper—a pattern of grandfather clocks with cuckoos inside—had peeled away.

“Yeah.” I heard something being banged against a counter. Even through the phone, I detected a harsh, clanging echo.

“So I wanted to come over.”

“I don’t see what the point is,” he said flatly.

“It could be fun,” I said, and I wondered if he remembered breathing into my ear, sharing his warm breath.

“How?” he said.

“It could just be fun,” I said.

The banging started, and I couldn’t tell if the mysterious object or the counter was being destroyed. Then he hung up, and there was only the drone of nothing and nowhere.

Snow caught on my eyelashes, so I had to squint, the way I did in direct sunlight. The only warm spot on my body was between my legs. The snow muffled all the usual sounds of dogs and cars and kids. It was like I was the only person left in my neighborhood.

When I was near the top of the street, a car passed slowly, and I peered through the snow to see who was in it. I saw my brother in the back seat, and his face was long and frightened. He blinked, and I said, “Hi,” and my voice was alone in the snow. He nodded. His face was always frightened, but he never told me what he might be afraid of. A couple of years ago, he plucked out all his eyelashes, and my mother said it was just a stage. The car revved on, whipping up a tail of exhaust.

The last time he was really kind was at the end of the summer and I was on the front lawn on a towel, tanning in my black bikini, the straps untied. The sun had pressed against my skin for an hour, clearing up my splotches, and I could hardly see anything but pale, wavy blurs when I opened my eyes.

He said, “You’re getting burned.” I sat up and saw that I was. He had given me this gift, offered for nothing in return.

I kept my hands over my ears. The wind came straight at me, pushing my shoulders and chest back. I walked with my head down, forward into the wind.

I was friends with Jonathan in grade six, when he moved from Scarborough to our softer outer region, mall and plazas and schools and quiet streets. He, like me, only mouthed the words to Oh Canada and The Lord’s Prayer. He had dark hair and freckles and back then, people used to say that we looked alike, especially from behind, because we had the same waves in our dark hair. But Jonathan was slow. We would sit through the same French lesson in Mrs. Martin’s class, and when we were supposed to begin our work, he doodled grotesquely muscled, miniature superheroes in his book. The men flew over cities or stood inside of burning houses with living babies under their arms. Other times he drew headless creatures with multiple arms and other times he drew people in T-shirts and jeans but with bloody holes in their temples. Later, I wrote the new words out for him and explained what they meant. Most of the slow kids with their droopy eyes looked different than other kids, but Jonathan looked like everyone else and he ruled every sport, even gymnastics. He climbed the rope like a tropical spider and could do ten back flips in a row on the mats and land on his feet. I’d seen him practice in his back yard; he did flips back and forth along the length of the grass until it was dark, until the only way I could track his body was to keep an eye on his white T-shirt, spinning like a ball.

Being friends with Jonathan was like wearing a special, impenetrable coat, and I had looked forward to going to school, passing him notes that no one else could read, notes that said the teacher had a snotty nose or that the girl in the front corner had pimples on her back. He wrote me notes back, asking me if I was coming to his house after school, or asking me if I loved him. Not knowing if it was a joke or not, I always printed, Maybe, Maybe Not. The closest we had ever gotten was holding each others’ hands in front of Jack and Crissy and Janet (reruns), his hand as pale and bony as mine, but solid and heavy and warm, a boy’s hand. His parents were never home. Jonathan’s mother was a real estate agent, and his father took the train to Toronto to work. We opened the fridge whenever we wanted.

Then Jonathan transferred to the slow school and I stayed at the smart school. Now, in grade eight, I might see him at the edge of the field standing in a tight huddle with other boys while they exchanged money and baggies full of pot or hash. Everyone knew that Jonathan was the town druggy. He grew pot in his closet and his parents didn’t know. He bought and sold.

Then Shannon started going out with him. Her mother cleaned Jonathan’s house and sometimes Shannon helped. When I saw him the other night, I didn't want to not see him again. He had been my friend, and what I needed was a friend. Shannon said, “I could live without him.” She didn’t like that he had a runny nose.

Jonathan lived in a three-storey house. His bedroom window had brown curtains and his sister, Sandra’s, had white ruffled curtains, the kind I always wanted for my room, to show that I was a girl.

On Jonathan’s front lawn stood three plastic pink flamingoes. Snow buried their feet and ankles and piled on their backs and their tiny heads, their fragile knees looking broken. His parents kept them up all year.

I walked up the driveway to the front door, and I banged the aluminum with the side of my fist.

After a minute, the winter door opened, making a small sucking sound. Jonathan stood behind the screen door with his head tilted back, as if I were shining a light into his face. He wore his green satin football shirt with the white number eleven on it, with a white turtleneck underneath. He didn’t say hello and he didn’t open the door. I tried to act like I wasn’t freezing, but my cheeks stung. His face had changed. He used to smile when he saw me but now there was a hard flatness in his face. He looked at me as if I was someone who didn’t matter, a person of no consequence in the hallway at school, someone who wanted to exist but who didn’t exist and never would.

“What do you want?” he said.

“I came to see you.”

“Why?”

“Because.” I shrugged, trying to appear light and friendly.

I opened the screen door, taking control, showing that my mission was casual, that I was his friend, and that he could be mine, like before.

“Why the hell are you acting so weird?” I said, and my voice was sharp in my ears, sharp and fearful like someone commanding a dog not to bite. “Where’s Shannon? She said she’d be here.” I stamped snow off my boots onto the mat, even though his parents were out with his sister.

“Who said you could come over?” he said.

Then I saw the rifle leaning against the chesterfield. I had seen it the other night on the wall outside the master bedroom, and wondered what animals his father, who hunted up north, had killed.

“You have ghoul eyes,” he said. He leaned against the door frame of the kitchen doorway. He looked through his long, dark bangs at me.

“Ghoul eyes?”

“Your mascara’s running,” he said, and he actually stepped closer, and he wiped my eyes, wiped beneath my eyes with his firm thumbs. Between my legs, I flowed and opened, warm, golden.

When he was finished, he laughed. “Your face,” he said. “You look like you’re going to cry.” He put his knuckle against my cheek, and the warmth of his knuckle spread down my face, down my neck, to my breasts.

I shook my head, and he laughed again—a hoarse, punching sound in his throat.

“Cat got your tongue?” he said, and those were the words my father bothered me with before the visits stopped, for no reason.

Then he went into the living room, sat on the couch, and wrapped his hand around the muzzle of the rifle.

“Why do you have your Dad’s rifle?” I said.

“Why not?”

He picked the gun up, and I felt my toes curl in. He looked at me, then he pointed it at me. I could tell I was on the other end of a fierce concentration—he was lining me up, getting me in his perfect aim. All I did was stand there, my toes still curled in, my tongue growing dry and stiff, like a chunk of solid wood.

“Got you.” He laughed once, then resumed his fierce concentration. Some time passed, but not the regular kind of time. I was being abandoned by something that I had always counted on, that I had been born into.

He kept the gun pointed at me. I kept standing there and he kept pointing.

Then he lowered the gun and propped it between his legs. His eyes were open and aghast, as if he had seen something that had frightened him.

“I knew you wouldn’t,” I said, and my voice, just like in a movie, was a low whisper.

“Wouldn’t what?” he said.

“What it looked like you were going to do.”

I leaned against the door frame. I pushed my hair behind my ears. The carpet in his living room was pink, and the coffee table had a glass top. The other night, Shannon and Jonathan and I ate all the green mints in the bowl on top of the coffee table, grabbing handfuls and shoving them past our teeth, chewing with our mouths open. His bedroom, back in grade six, had pictures of trains and trucks on the wall. We did puzzles of jungle animals—tigers and elephants—together on his bedroom floor. I wanted to see his room tonight, to lie on the bed, to smell the Finesse in his hair, and I hoped there was still some way for me to feel his arms around me, for me to be a girl who cared about nothing.

“It’s hot in here,” I said.

“I still don’t know what you’re doing at my house,” he said.

“I came to say hi.”

“You always go walking in the snow just to say hi?”

“I don’t mind snow.”

He got up and went down the hall, and he left the gun resting against the chesterfield. I could have taken the gun in my own hands or I could have left. If I took the gun, he could take it away; if I left, I would no longer be near him. Breath moved noisily in and out of my nose, and it was like I was listening to someone else breathing.

He came back in the room with a baggie of pot and rollies. He spread a rollie onto the table, opened the bag, took one pinch of pot and then another, until he filled the rollie. He licked it, closed it, then reached into his front pocket for a lighter and lit it. The beautiful, wretched smell floated across the room to me, and my knees bent, as if someone had pushed them gently from behind.

“Can I have a toke?” I said.

“What will you do for it?” In the field where kids hung out, boys always got girls to do things for whatever they wanted. It was a joke, but most girls did it.

“I just want a toke,” I said.

“Jump up and down twenty times.”

I just stood there. There was nothing to say and my voice was gone.

Jonathan took a toke, held the smoke in his lungs for a few seconds and then a few seconds more, then he exhaled, and he sank back into the couch, like someone who had suddenly lost all strength. “Guess you don’t want it bad enough.”

I almost took a step toward him, but stayed where I was, leaning against the living room door frame.

He held the joint out for me, a small, smoking present.

I stepped across the living room towards him, tracking snow onto the carpet. My legs moved all by themselves. I reached for the joint, but he moved his hand away quickly. He finished it in three quick puffs.

I stood before him. My mother was far away, tilting her head back in laughter, holding up her glass for more wine.

He smiled at me, and he put his hands on my waist and pulled me close, so his face was right at my pelvis.

“Come closer.”

“Why?”

“Because I want you to.”

“Why do you want me to?”

“Because I think you’re sweet,” he said. I felt the firm bulge of my stomach, like a pregnant stomach, but I wasn’t pregnant; I had never had sex.

“What if I’m not?” I said.

“I can tell you are,” he said. I looked down at his head, his dark layers and strict, white part. I had a sudden flash of him playing the trumpet, his cheeks sucked in. I used to turn around from the row of clarinets and try to make him laugh, but I never could.

“I’d like to see your room,” I said.

“Why do you want to see my room?”

“I used to like your room.”

“You wanna get laid?”

“No,” I said.

“Then why do you want to see my room?”

“I used to like your room.”

He took another toke. A car went by slowly on the road, and its headlights filled the living room with beige-grey light, like daylight. For a second, I remembered the outside world, where I didn’t have to worry about a gun pointed at me, and where my loneliness hurt but never betrayed me. I had a mother and a brother.

He got up with the gun and went to the window and looked out. I concentrated on the number eleven. Then he turned around. His high cheek bones made the hollows of his eyes bigger and deeper. I knew he was going to point the gun again, play with my life again. There was only one thing to do with a gun.

“Why do you hate me?”

“You’re too disgusting,” he said. “I wouldn’t touch you with a ten foot pole.”

I stiffened, gulping harshly. I prickled all over.

He stood limply, the way he had always stood, like he was someone who didn’t fight, but ducked. He opened his mouth, and then he closed it. He breathed in and out of his mouth and the sound was familiar, the sound of Jonathan breathing beside me in French, breathing after his ten back flips in a row. Noisy, uneven breathing; peanut butter breath. A reminder that he was close, that I had someone else. With the gun lowered and Jonathan breathing, we were both connected by a wire, and our feelings were passing back and forth along it.

“I’m thirsty,” I said. “Do you have any beer?”

He looked at me.

“For a pig like you?”

He raised the gun and pointed it at me, his entire body tensed in concentration.

“I could blow your head off,” he said. “And you wouldn’t feel a thing.”

I had the feeling I could never get away. And for some reason, instead of wanting to run, as I had a second ago, I felt exhausted. The sight of the gun made me want to collapse, to fall to the floor and fall into a deep sleep.

“You better run,” he said, the gun still trained on me. “And don’t come back, ghoul!” He did his hoarse, open-mouthed laugh; the laugh sounded as if it jumped out of his mouth and he had to endure it. A deranged sound; the sound of an empty person.

I turned and walked toward the door. My throat filled with ground glass, and I swallowed painfully. I opened the front door and I squeaked the screen door open. There were lights on in other houses, and time fell back into its proper slots, into its lines, and I was Tanya, whoever that was.

I walked down his driveway, my hands in my pockets again, flames of sweat dripping down my back. When I turned down another street, the flames cooled and slid off. I turned to look behind me. No one was there. Jonathan would never be there again, following. I was back to who I had been before. I had people around me but I was alone. That was my disease; that was the thing that kept going on and on, and that I couldn’t stop.

I wanted a hug, the kind my brother used to give, making a trap of his arms, so I would try to get away but not hard enough to really get away. My mother would say, “Let her go, Dylan,” and he would release me, and the air would grow cold. He walked away and did other things, counted his change or took down posters of trucks and put up new ones.

The wind was coming straight off the lake. In winter, lapping waves grew slowly into hunks of ice. And it amazed me how something so full of motion could be slowly trapped, trapped into deadness by slow cold, something no one could even see. In grade six, Jonathan and I used to go skating on the bay on Friday nights. Only the edges of the lake froze, but the bay froze completely, all the black fish beneath, moving dumb-foundedly. I didn’t stop to pity them. I was taller than Jonathan then, even when we were both wearing skates. Jonathan’s skates were black and my skates were white, because that’s the way it always was. Boys skated one way and girls skated another. Jonathan did fast, show-offy boy stops, and he could skate backwards, swinging his hips professionally like a real hockey player. The stick he brought dangled loosely in his hand. I did figure eights, over and over, arms out for balance. Figure eights were the only thing I knew how to do, and doing them meant I was a girl, that I could softly flow. Sometimes he held one end of my scarf, and I held the other, and he would pull me as far as he could out onto the frozen water, into the darkness. The wind from the lake sculpted happiness on my face. I didn’t know the time would end. I didn’t know that everything would change because it had to change, and that he would become one of the boys he used to protect me from, because he was a boy and he liked me no matter what, because he was a boy and he smiled at me as if I had something to give him that he didn’t have, like I was someone important, like there was nothing wrong with me at all.

I kept walking. The houses looked uninhabited, as though they had been abandoned for warmer homes. The snow scared everything and everyone away. But I had wanted a hug, and that made the snow nothing. The white fell on my hair, onto my face, and still the snow was nothing at all. The snow was covering me up completely, but it wasn’t, because I was walking. The snow could fall on me as much as it wanted, but the snow could never bury me, do what it wanted to do, because I was moving. That’s what I could do.

When I blinked, the barrel of the gun filled my vision. The gun would live inside of me forever. The gun had been on the outside, but because it was a gun and it was pointed at me, it had gotten on the inside. Things that were on the inside never got out. They found a place to live, and when you closed your eyes, they showed themselves; they showed that they would never leave. I kept my eyes open. In the streetlight, the snow shone and twinkled, like something innocent. But nothing was innocent. Nothing was what it was supposed to be or what it could be or I what I wanted it to be. Everything was going to be a fight, everything was going to be about winning or losing, living or dying, being alone when I didn’t want to be. I walked through the snow. I breathed in the cold air and held it deep in my lungs. And when I couldn’t hold it any longer, I opened my lips and let it all burst out.