Alligator - Lisa Moore [9]
It had been snowing since dawn on that day. The parking lot was covered in snow; the cars looked crammed together and restful under sloppy white caps. Men and women in orange vests waved glowing wands to direct traffic. The buses were sweeping their headlights into the grey dusk of the afternoon.
The Aqua Velva was the first gift Colleen had ever picked out by herself. A tower of boxes ingeniously piled one on top of the other, each with a corner slightly off-kilter so the stack rose like a spiral staircase. There were giant Christmas bulbs hanging from the rafters, carols bubbling wordlessly through the overhead speakers, shoppers in bright coats rushing forward and away like the bits of coloured glass in a kaleidoscope.
Inside the department store Colleen’s tight red wool coat with the black velvet trim and matching buttons smelled of the cold. The coat had been purchased at an expensive children’s clothing boutique on Duckworth Street, the first of its kind in St. John’s, which had closed after only one season. Beverly had eyed the coat for four months, watching the price go down, and bought it in the spring close-out sale for the following winter. As a result the sleeves were too short, but Colleen had to wear it anyway.
Beverly had lifted Colleen into a shopping cart and she was hanging on tightly while her mother charged forward into the crowd, unwilling to slow down for the customers who wandered into her path, until the front of the cart hit a motorized wheelchair and snagged on a protruding bar.
The woman in the wheelchair was obese. Her body was composed of three distinct rolls of fat that settled on top of each other and made Colleen think of soft-serve ice cream pouring out of the nozzle at Moo Moos. The woman’s shiny red rubber boots didn’t quite reach the footrests and the appliqué Christmas tree on her sweater had green lights that blinked on and off.
Colleen was well into Grade 1 and had been taught to look adults in the eye, to shake hands when introduced, never to mumble. But the woman in the wheelchair frightened her. Colleen looked down from the cart, now jerking back and forth on only two wheels, to the top of the woman’s head. Greasy white hair lay flat over her skull. The grooves made by her comb were still visible and the pink of her scalp showed through.
It was all her mother’s fault — the bravado she brought to every gesture that most often paid off and sometimes went very badly.
BEVERLY
BEVERLY WAS WAITING in the food court on the ground floor of Atlantic Place, having watched Colleen get into the elevator near the bank. Before the doors closed Beverly had called out, There’s nothing shameful about being wrong.
They were not speaking very much these days. Beverly had taken the vandalism as a personal affront. Colleen was trying to protect the Newfoundland pine marten, an endangered species.
A whole species wiped off the face of the earth, she had screamed at her mother.
Pine martens, Beverly had said. She could not fathom what Colleen might mean by trying to save them.
They’re rodents, her mother said.
They’re dying out forever, Mother, Colleen said. Somehow Beverly had raised a daughter whose voice could be as shrill as a fire alarm. Was that genetic? Does it skip generations? Beverly had never even seen a picture of a pine marten. There was a whole subgroup of animals — squirrels, badgers, beavers, rats, mostly grey-haired or brown, flicking through peripheral vision if seen at all — in whom Beverly had no interest. Why not albino tigers?
I’m sure we can manage without them, she’d answered. She wondered what David would have thought.
Beverly had met David, Colleen’s stepfather, at a prenatal class. David was with a downtown barmaid whose husband had left her during the pregnancy. The barmaid had asked him to accompany her to the classes — be her birth coach — because she was afraid to do it alone.