Annabel - Kathleen Winter [44]
Jacinta, despite her wishes, envisioned Eliza leaping into bed, highly elevated and in a kind of supernatural slow motion, in her garter belt, and Edward waiting for her clad only in his garment from Montreal. It was not a pretty sight, and Jacinta wished, not for the first time, that she were more honest with her friends. She wished she could tell Eliza to stop taking the drug that skewed the truth for the sake of convenience. She wished she had told all her friends, the day Wayne was born, that he had been born a hermaphrodite. She wished she had not locked the secret inside her, where it clamoured to get out. Treadway would have just had to deal with it. The beautiful bridge would still be up, with her child on it, singing and drawing with his best friend, a girl. Her child would not have to come home this evening to find the bridge had disappeared.
“Why does Treadway have no idea that he has no right to destroy someone else’s possession?”
But her friend was unmoved. “The property is Treadway’s. It’s on Treadway’s land, and a man’s land belongs to no one but himself.”
Jacinta thought of all the times she had listened to Eliza. No matter how outrageous Eliza’s reasoning, Jacinta had tried to understand it. Even now Jacinta did not argue about the Valium, though she felt Eliza’s new outlook was a chemically induced illusion. This is my problem, Jacinta thought. I am dishonest. I never tell the truth about anything important. And as a result, there is an ocean inside me of unexpressed truth. My face is a mask, and I have murdered my own daughter.
Roland Shiwack gave Wayne his eight dollars, and Wayne walked home feeling the bills in his pocket. He could buy supplies for the bridge: some Caramel Log bars, and Cheezies, and a couple of cans of Sprite. It would be great if he and Wally had some art supplies they could leave there instead of bringing them back and forth from home. There was a spyglass in the Eaton’s catalogue. He could save up for it and use it to watch the constellations. He could lie on his bridge and find the magpie bridge in the sky. He could save up for a new sketchbook.
There were dragonflies, ladybugs, and strange, flat bugs whose copper-coloured carapaces glittered amazingly. If you had a spyglass you could watch the secret life of the creek and take scientific notes or make accurate sketches. Yes, he would put money aside, and see what other work he could get, and buy the spyglass. If he saved his whole eight dollars and forgot about the junk food, he’d need only seven more days’ work from Roland Shiwack. And Wally could contribute too. She helped Gertie Slab with her grade four homework for three dollars an hour, and she babysat.
The great thing about walking home with eight dollars in your pocket was that you could imagine spending it, over and over, on a whole bunch of different things you might want, and it was fun to envision all of them.
By the time Wayne had walked up the hill he had spent the money, in his mind, on Caramel Logs, on the spyglass, and on things for other people. There was an Italian cheese grater his mother wanted but would not send for from the catalogue. She had a grater but it was ugly. The Italian one grated hard and soft cheeses. The top had a knob that fit snugly in your hand, and it would never rust. And there was a tool in the Hudson’s Bay store that his father looked at every time he went in. It was a long iron bar, called a pince-monseigneur, that you could use to lever just about any heavy object from one place to another. Treadway had used an ordinary crowbar to move all the boulders from the front yard except one, a piece of pink granite near his mother’s old-fashioned roses. That granite needed the pince-monseigneur, but Treadway did not want to spend thirty-five dollars on something he considered a toy.
I could surprise him, Wayne decided as he approached home. I could put it on layaway and carry it home and let Dad find it