Annabel - Kathleen Winter [106]
“Did you really want to be a dancer?”
Joanne rolled her eyes, took the empty Heinz bottle, opened it, squirted in new ketchup from the kitchen’s generic mother bottle, and wiped the Heinz cap with a dishrag. “I dance by myself in the kitchen when no one’s around. If you could see into houses all over St. John’s, and all over Newfoundland for that matter, and while we’re at it, all over the whole world, I suppose, you’d see women dancing by themselves. Men don’t know that. Now you’re one of probably three or four dozen men in the world who do know. Because I’ve told you. But you’re still only a boy. You’ll forget.” Wayne smelled Javex, perspiration, and Ivory soap escaping from under Joanne’s uniform. “I really did want to be the sugar plum fairy. You thought I was joking about that, didn’t you.”
He did not tell her that he had always danced alone in his room to music on the radio, and that he still did it now, in the apartment on Forest Road. That he danced, and watched the shadows of his body on the wall, and tried to connect the music’s beauty with those shadows. Street lamps soaked through the window from Forest Road. Their light soaked into his shirt, and in the dark you could not see it was a man’s shirt. You saw that it folded, that it was cotton, that it draped.
What was beauty? Not frailness, not smallness. Wayne looked at his arms and tried to imagine them holding Joanne, with her expressive wrists circled around him. That was how lovers’ limbs were. Years of hormones had made him angular, and it occurred to him that he wished he could stop taking them. He wanted to stop swallowing them every day and having them alter his body from what it wanted to be into what the world desired from it. He wanted to throw the pills down a toilet here in Shelley’s All-Day Breakfast, where no one knew him anyway, unless you counted Joanne, and she did not really know anything about him. He wanted to throw the pills away and wait and see what would happen to his body. How much of his body image was accurate and how much was a construct he had come to believe? He tried to see his body objectively.
If he squinted it could look softer. If he stopped taking the pills might his breasts bud, as they had done at puberty? He was afraid of having breasts. But were breasts beautiful? Could anyone tell him? At night when he danced alone, his body wanted to be water, but it was not water. It was a man’s body, and a man’s body was frozen. Wayne was frozen, and the girl-self trapped inside him was cold. He did not know what he could do to melt the frozen man.
He did not tell Joanne at Shelley’s All-Day Breakfast any of this. He had no one to whom he could tell anything. There was a funny old woman on Circular Road who, when he made his deliveries, often asked him to come in and do tasks for her that had nothing to do with delivering meat. She had him fix a broken rail in her banisters, and she asked him to change the water in a font under her staircase. He had to clean the font with a rag she had for that purpose and pour in new holy water the priest had brought her in a Harvey’s Bristol Cream bottle. He had a few customers like that, who turned his meat deliveries into something more like doctors’ appointments or some sort of gentle social services call. It slowed him down and meant he was earning less money per hour than he should have been, but he let these customers hold him up because they were the closest thing he had to friends. They talked to him, and they were something to look forward to in his week of lonely deliveries. People had family, didn’t they? People had someone who remembered them from one week to another.
To walk home from Shelley’s All-Day Breakfast, Wayne had to pass the Anglican graveyard, where massive beeches had knots the size