Broke City Read online

  ‒ Teenagers today lip off their parents way too much, her mother had said. I wouldn’t have dared talk to my parents the way kids talk to theirs today.

  Christine thought her parents lipped each other off too much too. They lipped off to each other most of the time. But nothing really happened, nothing ever really changed. They had always been that way, since she could remember. Once she had seen Mr. Vanderveen put his arm around Mrs. Vanderveen’s waist when they were out in their garden, both holding cups of coffee and she thought, “That must be love.” That’s what it must be. She had thought other parents were like her parents. Maybe not. In her school reader, she read a story about a family going on a picnic to Blue Pond. “Father and mother laughed,” it said. Her family had never been to Blue Pond. They had been to Elk Island Park for a picnic once and her father wore his work boots and sat in the shade by himself just smoking cigarettes. She remembered it as a good day, she had learned how to swim. But she couldn’t remember her mother and father as happy. They didn’t laugh, not even once that she could remember. Was that unusual or usual? It would be a long time until she was a teenager, but she knew she had to make a decision. Unusual or usual. A girl in the reader said, “When I am big I shall make rhymes to put in books.” Shall. What an interesting word. I shall do that too, she thought. I shall put rhymes in books and, not only rhymes, but drawings and maybe paintings to go with them. Christine made her decision.

  ‒ I shall be unusual.

  She took her aunt’s old Phys Ed uniform out of her drawer. Another girl in her reader had a green dress and matching bow, and a green purse with her own money in it. Christine mimicked the expression of the girl. Smiling she unbuttoned the uniform and stepped into it. Arms through the short green sleeves. The gathered legs of the uniform came down past her knees and the waist fell to her hips. She buttoned up the uniform anyway and fastened the belt. The uniform looked more like a long baggy dress. Christine bunched the extra fabric in her fists and hiked up the waist to where it should be. When she opened her fists, the green fabric fell back down and was now mapped with wrinkles. If she pulled up her knee socks as high as she could, they almost met the hem. She didn’t want to be obvious about how much she liked the uniform and how unusual she felt wearing it, so she walked casually and quietly into the kitchen. Her mother was washing the lunch dishes and had her back to Christine. Her mother swished a plate in the sink and shook the suds off it before rinsing it and setting it to drain.

  ‒ Mom, what does Edmonton mean?

  ‒ I don’t know. There was a Fort Edmonton once . . .

  ‒ No, what does it mean? What does the city mean now? What’s the reason it’s here? Why are we here?

  ‒ Well, Edmonton’s nice and green this time of year . . . there are jobs here . . .

  Her mother still didn’t turn around and she twisted the dish rag into a coffee mug. What could make her turn around?

  ‒ Can I wear bare feet on the grass?

  ‒ No, the ground’s still too cold. Besides, you’ll get worms . . .

  Her mother turned to her.

  ‒ What the hell are you wearing?

  ‒ My Phys Ed uniform . . . auntie’s old uniform.

  ‒ It’s miles too big for you. She shook the soap suds off her hands.

  ‒ I like it. It’s unusual.

  ‒ That’s one word for it. Here . . .

  She grabbed a safety pin from a small dish beside the sink and, with her hands still wet, gathered some of the fabric in the back of Christine’s uniform.

  ‒ Don’t get it wet, Mom.

  ‒ Stand still.

  The legs were still past Christine’s knees, but there was now some shape to the formerly shapeless green uniform.

  ‒ Looks like you’re wearing bloomers. Christine’s mother laughed.

  Christine laughed too and did a little dance.

  ‒ Can I take my socks off and go in barefeet?

  ‒ No, wear your shoes and socks.

  ‒ It’s warm out, Mom . . .

  ‒ Shoes and socks. Go on . . . go out and play.

  ‒ I’m going to practice some physical education.

  ‒ Go get some fresh air. Get some sunshine. You’ll end up with rickets.

  Her mother turned away again. She wiped the counter and shook crumbs from the toaster into the sink.

  ‒ I don’t want to get rickets, Mom.

  ‒ Well, you’d better get outside then . . .

  Bonnie Prudden was always saying to keep fit, be happy. She said you wanted to avoid a dowager’s hump.

  Christine wanted to be happy and avoid a dowager’s hump, it probably had something to do with rickets. She was afraid to ask her mother.

  She pulled up her knee socks as far as she could, until the heels of her socks were halfway up her calves, and tied the shoelaces on her new, white runners. They had pointed toes and they fit her feet. Perfect for keeping fit and being happy.

  Quickly out the back door, down the concrete steps and out onto the lawn. First a warm-up, so she swung her arms in big circles while running around the backyard. She could hear Bonnie’s voice in her mind as she jumped back and forth over the ruts in the backyard by the garage telling her what to do while some beautiful music played in the background. Run and circle. Now making snow angels without the snow, then running on the spot, but she had to pull up the legs of the uniform over her knees. Some more arm circles then. The exercise and the idea of Phys Ed was getting boring, but the idea of wearing the uniform was still appealing. When she looked down, it kind of reminded her of an artist’s smock.

  While standing in the middle of the backyard she was struck by the possibilities of the white surface of the garage wall. It looked plain. It needed a painting, some kind of story. There were tins of paint in the garage. She opened the door and went in. On the shelf under the small window was a tin of red, a tin of yellow and a tin of green. There was also a tin of powder. Wood putty with that muscle man on the front. She’d used this before to make disks that held the talisman of a moment. Held them in her hands and then surrendered them to the roots of the pine tree in the yard.

  Here were possibilities. Her father had a small toolbox in the corner and she rifled between the putty knives, wrenches, carpenter pencils, small hammers, boxes of nails and screws to grab a screwdriver. Popping the lids of the paint tins, the way she had seen her father do it, she laid them neatly beside the corresponding tin. There were two paintbrushes on the shelf.

  She chose the widest one.

  She stirred the green paint with the brush and brought it up from the tin letting some of the bright green drip back into the tin. Holding the brush like a torch, she stood in front of the blank page that was the garage wall.

  Christine brandished the brush without even thinking about what was going to happen.

  A triangle. Another triangle. And another triangle. There was a pine tree. She began filling the shapes with branch-brush strokes. When the brush went dry, she brought the paint tin outside. Green dripped off the brush and on to her uniform. It was beginning to look like a real artist’s smock. The paint went on thickly. The tree began to sway back and forth. Its top brushed the garage roof and touched the far corners of the wall. Its branches seemed to move in a gust of wind that Christine couldn’t feel and they dripped green colour all over the wall and the smell of pine shot through the air around her. She drew a straight green line on the bottom of the garage wall. That was the ground. Grass. A green clover. Five leaves by accident. She took a breath. Red and yellow. She brought out the other tins of paint. A yellow circle. The sun. A broken yoke in the sky. A red flower. Not the way she imagined it to be. This flower was just five clumsy petals and a solid blob of red in the middle. But it began to move in time to the pine tree. Now a red house beside the flower, under the sun and the pine tree.

  Christine stood back and looked at what she had made. The pine tree was moving gently now and the flower mimicked its pace. The door of the house opened and people begi
n to walk out: the neighbour, her friend’s dad, with a small smudge of red on his shoe, Brenda who’s her friend, her father wearing his work boots, a man Christine doesn’t know walks out of the red house holding her mother’s hand, and then there is a woman Christine thinks she knows.

  It’s herself. She is afraid.

  ‒ Christine? Christine! What the hell are you doing?

  She turns to see her mother run toward her, then she grabs the paintbrush out of Christine’s hand.

  ‒ I . . . I . . . thought you’d like it. It’s green . . . it’s a green city.

  Wanting to share the story of the painting on the garage wall with her mother, Christine turns and her painting and the story of the green city is nothing like what she just saw. It was simply a mess of green and red and yellow. Static, thick and messy.

  ‒ Get into the house. Stand inside the porch so you don’t get paint all over the house. What were you thinking? Wait until your father gets home. You’ve mixed all these colours together. They don’t make any sense at all anymore . . . shit!

  Her mother carried the paint tins back into the garage, leaving the paintbrush on the grass.

  Christine walked slowly back to the house. She looked down at the uniform, it was splattered with green, red, yellow. There, on the toe of her running shoe was a smear of red. In that moment, she thought she saw herself but it wasn’t herself. She thought she imagined herself moving in this house and it had been painted red, like a barn, and she was older and she was happy . . . no, she was sad.

  V

  Christine dreams:

  A woman with a metal opening where her heart should be.

  Around this circle of metal is smeared raspberry jam.

  A dream Christine can’t verify:

  She has had this dream many times and knows it by heart, but can’t get it right. A man is sitting at the kitchen table in the old house in Santa Rosa. He is having breakfast. The table is crowded with people she doesn’t know. And in this memory, she sees the man chewing his breakfast. She stares. She focuses on the veins at his temples as they inflate and deflate slightly with each bite. Like the barely perceptible chest movements, final breaths of a man, shot, dying on Main Street in a T V western.

  The tree was so big now.

  Christine ran her hand along its thick, cracked bark. It reminded her of the rough disks she had made out of putty when she was little and buried at the foot of the tree. Hard and strong, but not immortal, not infinite. Kneeling, she stroked the moss that covered the base of the trunk, green fur tucked around the knuckled roots. When she was a little girl, Christine had scraped this crayon colour across paper turning the smooth, white sheet into something else. Green. The colour by itself and the smell of the colour made her think: leaves and grass and pine trees that were green always and anyway with fields of colour, fields grounded in the colour of green. The bigger world of green fields beyond this backyard, beyond this neighbourhood, Santa Rosa, beyond Packingtown and the smell of those meat-packing plants.

  Christine had gone to the city archives, found them in an old City of Edmonton telephone book. Her family was in a book. Her family and herself were defined by a street, an avenue, and a phone number. This line of type will rearrange itself into a story of ghosts in that place. A story of her ghost.

  Christine thought of herself as a child, with no idea of the world but all the ideas in the world. Maybe this was her dream self. She wasn’t sure anymore.

  She had a memory of opaque light through windows in this house. She was colouring on a wooden floor with her crayons nearby and she remembered she could taste each colour. Sensation and image on her tongue. Now she could draw or paint or mold those stories that began with colour and taste, each colour had an infinite possibility of creating something, anything, everything.

  Stroking the soft moss at the foot of this tree she recited other words for green: Vert. Verde. Verdigris. Celadon. Sea green. Forest green. The little house was pink when she lived there, now it was green and the open glass verandah had been walled in. Two bland aluminum windows stared out in blank surprise.

  She hadn’t told Fergal that she’d seen her old house listed. She hadn’t told him she’d arranged to meet the real estate agent and actually gone to look at it. Same owners for the past 40 years.

  It was just this tiny house. It was so much smaller than she remembered. Who lived here after them? She wanted them to buy it. The bathroom still had the same tub and sink — a hodgepog of faucets and taps, but still the same tub and sink. She would have to restore it in some way. Maybe more of an erasure than restoration or renovation. Relive or rewind. A do-over. A make-good. A try again.

  This was the place she had become herself. It had made her, whether she wanted to admit it or not. Santa Rosa would always be the invisible part of her. Just as Santa Rosa was invisible now. The neighbourhood wasn’t called that anymore. It didn’t exist — bureaucratically, anyway. A vote to become part of the neighbourhood of Montrose. A rose by another name, another rose. A vote for Santa Rosa to disappear.

  Christine is the girl that used to live here, but the girl has disappeared. Her ghost is here, existing parallel to the person she is now. How did this happen? There must have been something she wasn’t paying attention to, something she didn’t see coming. But the line of type in the telephone book pins her down in the north east.

  She drives to the house in Santa Rosa to meet the real estate agent. Today is a cold March day, so bright the snow is light itself. But the house and its address contain the ghost of its own sadness. Was this what she carried with her for so long? The family that lived here before and before; the family that was hers, was gone. Ghosts.

  But she had danced in that light and imagined the specks reflected in the sun were tiny stars that shone in the day, not at night. If she had known how to read those stars what would have happened?

  It doesn’t matter which house this memory is from: a box of cereal on the table — corn flakes, Rice Krispies — and Christine’s father pretending to hide behind it and then peeking around the box, pretending to scare her. It didn’t scare her at all, she thought it was the funniest thing and her father didn’t have to say a word. And most of the time he didn’t. He would fill his bowl with cereal, pour on the milk. He ate quickly. Maybe he was just in a hurry. She thought he was angry when she was a kid, but now she thinks he was afraid.

  Her father is an absent memory. Where is his ghost? He is the mysterious smell of cigarettes Christine would smell late at night in the basement of another house many years later as she sat up alone writing or drawing or painting: the only one awake.

  The CN railyard on 127th Avenue at the end of the block her grandparents lived on let her see the sky at night. Duplexes and houses with basement suites; their almost hidden stairs leading to lives led underground. This is where her grandparents lived, a working-class neighbourhood and it would be years before Christine even understood what that meant. Santa Rosa was a working-class neighbourhood too. The kind of work her father did defined her, defined her family. Her father took a flask of coffee in his lunch kit, and bologna and ketchup sandwiches wrapped in wax paper. Some Fridays, there was only puffed wheat to eat. They didn’t have the money for her father to drink a lot back then. It was only the odd bender.

  The 1963 Edmonton Henderson Directory lists Christine’s father’s occupation, address, his wife’s name (her mother’s name misspelled). This is a mistake. She thinks she could have told someone.

  ‒ Hey, you got it all wrong. Try again. This isn’t us.

  So maybe these people wouldn’t turn into her family after all and they would all get another chance.

  The basement was a hole dug in the dirt under the house. Christine’s mother got to it by lifting a door in the kitchen floor. She kept the wringer washer down there and once when she was rinsing clothes, Christine climbed onto the kitchen counter to get puffed wheat. Her mistake was to look back at her mother. She fell from the counter all the way down to the b
asement. She didn’t cry and that was what worried her mother, waving lit matches in front of her eyes to make sure she didn’t have a concussion.

  ‒ Watch anything you want on TV just don’t fall asleep, okay? Okay?

  The Santa Rosa house had a verandah and Christine loved to play out there, especially at night. The door from the verandah to the living room was open wide and she pictured her parents through it. They watched TV — Country Hoedown with Gordie Tapp. The square dancers wore different gingham dresses every week and were always smiling. The street lights shone on the floor of the verandah and she had put a big stuffed teddy bear her father had won for her mother at the Prince Albert exhibition on a chair.

  Her mother and father are sitting close together. They must have still loved each other.

  Her mother had sewn her a dress. It was winter but the dress was a green, spring colour and had a pocket that was a big half-circle tilted to the side. It was dark outside and her mother had clothes hung on inside lines and she asked Christine’s father:

  ‒ What do you think?

  ‒ Nice.

  She ran around the house in the new dress and she remembered there being a lot of room. The inside of the house felt expansive. Standing in the middle of a shining wood floor and knowing that one of the doors in front of her led to her bedroom.