Tilt - Alan Cumyn [3]
Ridgepole.
Stan got up. Ridgepole in his pajamas. Why?
He pulled on a sweatshirt, snuck to the door and glanced out. Silence, all clear. He eased down the stairs, keeping his weight on the outside of each foot.
“Stanley?” His mother was at the front door. Just coming in.
Stan sat on the stairs, pulled his legs together and the sweatshirt down.
“How’s Gary?” he asked.
His mother fiddled with her shoes in the front hall. She never wore heels except when she saw Gary. And her dress barely made it halfway down her thighs.
“I thought you have an eight o’clock?” Stan said.
“I do. I do!” Now she wanted to get by him on the stairs. “Are you all right, honey?”
Stiff as a poker. Erect as the Washington Monument.
“I just have a little stitch in my side,” he said.
“Oh, honey.”
“I’m going to sit here like this until it goes away.”
“Maybe you should walk around a bit.”
“I’m just going to stay exactly like this.” Stan squished over to the side of the step so that his mother could get by.
“Do you want some orange juice?”
“No.”
“Sometimes drinking something —”
“I’ll be fine. You need to get going.”
She squeezed past finally. Stan went into the bathroom and stood over the toilet. From the upstairs he heard his mother say, “Oh, Lily!” again and again. He heard sheets being pulled off the bed, his mother’s heavy footfalls, Lily’s crying. His mother’s voice became operatic. “I just don’t understand. If you need to get up in the night, get up! I know you peed before — ”
“I just didn’t feel it! I just didn’t . . .”
Now his mother was calling down the stairs.
“Stanley, could you please handle your sister’s sheets? I have an eight o’clock!”
Life was better down in the basement. It was dark and cool and the ceiling was low enough that Stan could almost bump his head. Maybe by Christmas he would bump his head. And quiet. No amount of opera from upstairs could leak all the way down into the basement, especially when the washing machine was running.
It only took a minute to dump in the sheets and soap and set everything going, but Stan stayed for the pure peace of it. He liked the smell of the detergent. House in order. He leaned against the machine.
Janine Igwash walked out of the darkness again right past him. She lingered near him in silence by the laundry table where the old spent sheets of fabric softener congregated along with little bits of tissue left in pockets from laundries past.
The temperature went up inexplicably. It was a cold-water wash but the heat was on. She was just by the laundry table, breathing. He leaned a little harder against the washing machine. She was bigger than him but not by much. She started to tug at her T-shirt. Arms crossed at the bottom the way women do. Breathing and . . .
Stan stepped back. Leaning up against the washing machine! He opened the lid and watched the cold soapy gray water churn, churn, churn until it was safe to head upstairs again.
—
Janine Igwash sat four rows away from him in biology. She was wearing a red shirt that his eyes had trouble keeping buttoned, especially once he noticed a small tattoo at the base of her neck near her shoulder. He wasn’t close enough to see what it was. She didn’t look at him at all.
They were dissecting cows’ eyes but there weren’t enough eyes to go around, thank God, so they were in groups of four. Jason Biggs was handling the scalpel. Taking notes were the identical sisters Melinda and Isabelle Lafontaine who were each wearing jeans and pearls and running shoes. One of them was pierced in the left eyebrow, the other in the right. Stan could never keep them straight. They both had big watery eyes like this sorry specimen Jason Biggs was slicing apart.
“Stop now, Jason!” Left Eyebrow said. “I think we’re supposed to sketch that.”
Janine Igwash turned and pulled her red shirt off her shoulder. Stan’s mind could make her do that. But he still couldn’t quite see the tattoo.
“Lapman canceled junior varsity for this year,” Jason Biggs said then.
Janine unbuttoned a bit more and pulled her shirt farther off her milky