One Good Hustle Read online

  I pulled a pen out of my purse. I had bought a postcard in the tuck shop and I was about to write an earful to Marlene about where she’d sent me. From my left I could feel a pair of eyes watching my hands. It was the guy I’d noticed when I arrived the afternoon before. He was gangly, with woolly blond hair and a sweet face, and he sang so loud at the first evening campfire that I thought he had to be joking. I turned my head and stared him in the eye. He smiled and looked away. Christian wimp, I thought.

  I left the postcard in my purse and, instead, carefully drew a pentagram on my palm. The wimp blinked down at my hand. I wiggled my fingers in his direction and gave him a wink. He hiccuped, suppressing a giggle. That was Drew.

  “You’re bad,” he whispered. Eyes twinkling, he looked almost giddy.

  “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

  “I can’t wait.” He grinned.

  We were inseparable for the rest of the week. I wished we went to the same school but Drew’s family lived in North Burnaby while Marlene and I lived in South. Maybe he was a church guy but he wasn’t super pious or anything, just kind of abnormally clean-living. Which suited me fine because I’m abnormal too. If I were normal, I wouldn’t be a virgin who doesn’t drink or smoke.

  After our Hollow Tree Ranch week, Drew invited me to some of his church’s DYF nights. DYF stands for Divine Youth Fellowship—Tenth Avenue Divine is the name of Drew’s church. They have these roller parties the first Friday of every month. I went with him to a DYF roller party once. At the rink, I said “shit” when I landed on my ass and Mandy Peterson, one of the DYFers, looked at me like I’d just ripped off a big fart.

  “I used to swear,” Mandy said to me. “People underestimated me when I swore.”

  I didn’t fit in but at least nobody wanted to beat me up. They were nice to me. Even that Mandy Peterson chick was nice. Especially when I tried not to swear.

  The DYFers had a game night at Mandy’s house once. Her parents had a nice place: tons of bedrooms, two cars and a boat. Those church kids all seemed to have boats and swimming pools and camping equipment and rumpus rooms and chandeliers. Marlene asked me once if I felt bad being in their houses, uncomfortable, like I didn’t belong there. I think she was trying to ask if I felt low-class next to them. I was too busy swimming in their pools and eating steak off their fancy plates. Deluxe accommodations suited me just fine. And to be honest, the whole clean-living thing gave me a weird, spearmint-fresh feeling inside. All that chastity stuff was kind of a relief after years of Marlene.

  One time, a year or so ago, I was complaining about my zits. Marlene was acting all ballsy and sexy with a vodka brave-on. She told me I should go get laid and my skin would clear right up.

  That’s when I told her that I was going to save myself until marriage.

  “Over my dead body!” she said. “You want to end up with some guy who does a wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am and then leaves you lying there? Staring at the ceiling? Stuck with him? Married to him?”

  “God! There’s other stuff, you know. Ways of knowing that someone would be nice to you in bed.”

  “Other stuff? Those goddamn Christians are going to ruin your life.”

  Treat your body as a temple, the youth pastor would tell us. I started tossing that one at Marlene to get a rise out of her. Drove her bats. Holier than thou sons-of-bitches, she’d say.

  It pisses me off when Marlene slags all that religious stuff as being totally not like us—I suppose because I’m scared she’s right. I mean, why is Drew friends with me? Maybe he’s only nice to me because he has to be—it’s in the Bible. Meanwhile, I don’t know if I even believe in God.

  At the Jesus camp, they sang this song that went, I’ve got the joy joy joy down in my heart. I don’t think I have that. I know my mother doesn’t.

  From the corner of my eye, I saw her turn around on the couch and stare at me. “I love you, you know,” she said. “More than anything in the world.”

  I wanted to pound her. Instead, in this very matter-of-fact way, I asked, “How’re you going to get on the roof?”

  She blinked. “Fine. I’ll go up to the top floor and jump off someone’s balcony.” She pulled her purse straps over her shoulder, stood up, and went strutting down the hallway like it was a red carpet.

  “Yeah?” I followed her. “Who’d let you in?”

  “That won’t be hard.” She opened the front door of our apartment and tossed me a creepy starlet glance over her shoulder. “I’ll just smile.” Her teeth flashed.

  I watched her head down the hall and push the elevator button. She waved to me as she got on. I slammed the apartment door.

  Do it, then. See if I care.

  I wandered into her room. The top drawer in her dresser was open—that’s where she keeps her stash. I plucked out a prescription bottle: Valium 10mg. When I turned it over, all the little blue happy pills rattled around. Actually, “happy pills” is a misnomer. They’re “I-don’t-give-a-crap pills.” She’d become a big fan of Ativan too. Same shit.

  I read once about this woman who took Valium before she cut her wrists and bled to death in a nice hot bath. Does blood look beautiful when you’re stoned on Valium? In the dresser mirror, my pupils were holes in my head. Little black monsters stared out of them. I pushed my hair out of my face. All the cool girls at school seem to have smooth TV hair, but mine is a frizzy, curly, snaky mess. The day I first talked to Drew, he said, “Man, I love your hair—it’s that wild witchy hippie kind of hair.” He loved it, he said. I started to not mind my head so much after that. Drew likes when I wear drapey hippie blouses too. I have lots of those now.

  I don’t know how long I stood there thinking about that sort of stuff, but when I heard the front door opening, I dropped the Valium back in her drawer. I went into the living room as Marlene came waltzing in, all giddy and grinning. Turned out she’d never made it to the roof. She’d been hanging out with the goof upstairs, the unemployed guy with the moustache who lies around on his balcony all day, tanning. I went to my bedroom and closed the door.

  I didn’t tell Mr. Walters any of that, though. I told him I had insomnia. It wasn’t a lie either. I had been awake till one or two in the morning trying to think of quick and easy ways to die: eating Drano (in gel capsules so it’d just slip down), electrocution (blow-dryer in the bathtub), fast-moving truck (stepping in front of). One time on The Phil Donahue Show, I saw a woman tell the whole world how her son died by auto-erotic asphyxiation. He hanged himself with a necktie in his closet, accidentally suffocating while he jerked off over a porn mag.

  How can you tell a guidance counsellor shit like that? You’d sound like a whiny pathetic jerk, snivelling for attention. Sam says that serious people don’t talk, they act.

  But after I left Walters that day, I was pissed off that I couldn’t say anything to him. I’m pretty sure that is when I first started to actually plan Marlene’s suicide. She could wash a couple of Valium down with vodka. Maybe she’d forget and I’d give her a couple more. When she passed out, I could lay the pillow on her face and slowly push down. What would be so wrong about it? She kept on insisting she wanted to die, and I could help. I could be the one to make things right for her. I started to think that this was the only way out for Marlene and me. She couldn’t bear to be alive and I couldn’t bear to watch her misery any more. I would be a strange kind of angel.

  But I had to figure out the money situation. I’d need enough to get me through for the first few weeks at least.

  What if I endorsed the welfare cheque over to me when it came? Or I could deposit the cheque into her account and write myself a new one.

  I couldn’t stop thinking how it would work.

  I remember it was one-thirty in the morning and I was in my room, sitting up in bed, practising Marlene’s signature in my school binder. I had started by tracing her name from an old cancelled cheque. Then I went freehand. I’d done two nearly full pages of Marlene Bell, Marlene Bell …

  It was quiet t
hat night. No sirens in the distance. No voices in the halls.

  I thought I heard muttering and I glanced at the wall that separated our bedrooms. It almost sounded as though she was crying. Then nothing.

  I went back to my signatures.

  A screech ripped the air.

  Jolting up from the page, I knocked my head against the wall.

  Marlene.

  I stared at the wall between our rooms again. Her scream became a crying wail and I ripped the signature pages out of my binder and crumpled them up. I switched off my lamp and stared into the dark, my heart banging away like a monkey in a cage.

  The wailing turned into loud gasping sobs and I jumped out of bed just as my mother’s door flung open. I heard her stagger against the wall as she rushed toward the kitchen. I chased after her.

  As I came round the corner, she pulled a butcher knife out of the sink. In just her bra and panties, she turned the point of the blade toward her stomach. Then she let it drop.

  “It’s too dirty,” she said. She sank to the floor, choking on her tears. “And I’m too fat. It’ll never go in. How did I get so fat?”

  I tried to help her up, but she pushed me away.

  I went back into my room, took the crumpled pages out of the wastebasket and ripped them into pieces and more pieces. Miserable confetti.

  The next morning while she was sleeping, I got up the guts to phone my dad in Toronto. We hadn’t heard from him in months. I thought maybe if Sam knew how shitty things were, he would come and get us.

  Sitting in the living room I filled him in as quietly as I could. “She threatened to stab herself in the stomach last night. Last week she swallowed a bottle of pills and then called the ambulance. Another time she said she was going to drown herself.” I had decided before I picked up the phone that there was not going to be any crying, but that went out the window as soon as I heard Sam’s voice. “I can’t stay here,” I said.

  It was silent on his end. I waited for him to say something. Something about a plane ticket for me.

  “I’m goin’ out of town,” he blurted. “You got friends you could stay with?”

  Not much to talk about after that.

  When I came home from school to pack my bag before going to stay with Jill, Marlene came into my bedroom and sat on the floor with her back to the wall, tears rolling.

  “I just can’t—” She wiped her nose with a Kleenex. “I don’t know how to fill another day. It’s such a relief to go to sleep and so horrible when I wake up and know I have to drag through another one, like a thousand pounds of dead … until I can sleep again.”

  I sat on the edge of my bed and watched her. Mascara had streaked down her cheeks into the corners of her mouth. She dug her fingers into my bedroom rug.

  “I wanted you to know because—” She swallowed. “I always thought it was cruel when I heard a woman killed herself and let her kids find her like that. I didn’t want that.”

  I said, “If you want help trying to get pills together, I’ll try. But, um, I have to go. I’m not going to watch.”

  I couldn’t look at her. I kept tweetzing the sheet on my bed. Tweetzing is this thing I do where I rub a fold of the cotton between my fingers. Marlene says I’ve been doing it since I was a baby.

  I nodded to myself. “I can’t be here for—” I lost the words then, as if I had already begun to seep away, long before I stood up to leave.

  THREE

  JILL’S LAST EXAM was earlier in the day so she was long gone by the time I got out.

  Except for Jill, I don’t have a crowd at school. Part of the problem is, like my dad, I don’t drink or smoke. Sam says addicts are weak. People in this school don’t hold that opinion, though. The halls are full of alkies and heads who think the fact that I don’t drink or smoke weed means I’m a spineless little suck. A chick named Crystal Norris actually shoulder-checked me in the hall once and called me a suckhole. I didn’t do anything about it so maybe she had a point.

  When I come through the front door, I hear Jill squeal, “She said what?” Jill’s front door opens into a tiny vestibule with a few coat hooks. Two steps forward and you’re in the living room.

  Creeping onto the braided rug, I pause, listening as Jill and Ruby cackle in the kitchen. The hair on my arms prickles. They’re talking about Marlene. I know it. Laughing at her.

  I keep still, listening as I glance around. There are two little paintings on the wall over the couch: a happy clown and a sad clown. I hate those clowns. Even the happy one looks miserable.

  The furniture is old, but everything’s tidy. Clean. Maybe some dust on the TV screen but that’s about it. Marlene likes to say, “I don’t mind clutter but I hate dirt.” What a laugh that is. My stomach lurches when I think of what Ruby and Lou probably saw over there today. At least Jill wasn’t with them.

  “She’s a piece of work all right,” I hear Ruby say.

  “How did Dad react?”

  It’s quiet a moment. Ruby calls, “Sammie? That you?”

  Shit. “Yeah,” I yell through the wall at them.

  When I come into the kitchen, Ruby and Jill are at the table, an ashtray and two cups of coffee between them. Smoke wafts out of Jill’s mouth.

  “Hey, sugar,” she says. “What’s shakin’?” Bright purple lipstick greases the filter of her cigarette.

  “Nothin.’ What’s shakin’ with you guys?”

  “My thighs,” Jill says. “Like a Jell-O tree in a windstorm.”

  That’s a favourite line of Jill’s. She probably says it five times a week.

  Ruby titters and taps ash off her cigarette. “Were you eavesdropping, Sammie?”

  My mouth opens. “Excuse me?”

  Another one of Ruby’s gotchas.

  She bounces her skinny eyebrows. “You snuck through the front door like a cat burglar.”

  “No. I just dropped some stuff out of my purse so I was—”

  Ruby laughs big. Making me squirm is a total riot, I guess.

  Jill picks her compact up off the table. Gold bangles jangle up her arm as she checks out her purple lips in the mirror, snaps it shut. She drops the compact into her purse.

  “Well, just so’s you know, we have no secrets around here,” Ruby says. “Sit down so we can talk about you to your face.”

  Jill laughs. She brushes some chalky face powder off the strained denim on her thigh. Her thunder thighs, she calls them. Jill is what Marlene would call “built.” About five-foot-ten, she probably weights a hundred and sixty pounds. Boobs out to here, hips out to there. I look like a boy next to her.

  “There’s fresh coffee if you want,” Jill tells me.

  I go to the counter and pour a cup. I used to only drink tea but coffee’s the thing around here.

  “So, I met your mother today,” Ruby says.

  I sit down at the table with my mug and dump in extra sugar. Extra cream. I want extra everything lately.

  “I called her before I went over and she didn’t seem too interested in company.” Ruby is wearing her ironic face.

  “Really?” Jill slaps a hand to her chest for extra mock-value. “How strange!”

  Ruby grins. “Very strange. I told her that we were worried.”

  I chew off a bit of skin inside my cheek and start in on my bottom lip.

  “So, Lou and I went over there.” Ruby takes a drag off her smoke and shakes her head as she exhales. “She hadn’t bothered to get dressed. Just lay there in this old stained negligee, saying her head ached, her back ached, she couldn’t find Freddy’s number—whoever that is—she had the shakes, she needed a drink. She actually asked Lou if he would pick her up something at the liquor store. She said she was scared of getting the DTs. Food didn’t even occur to her. And everything was filthy! Dirty dishes piled in the sink and on the counters. How she can live like that … or let her daughter live like that …” Ruby flicks her cigarette. “Poor Sammie.”

  My jaw clenches. “I was going to clean up,” I say. “Before I lef
t … Vacuum. And wash the—”

  “Sammie, that was two weeks ago.”

  Stop saying my name. “So?”

  “So, what self-respecting person—” Ruby stops. “Well, I guess that’s the problem, she’s not a self-respecting person. Or she wouldn’t talk about killing herself when she has a daughter to look after.” She sighs. “The sad thing is, she was probably a nice-looking woman at one point.”

  Probably? Fuck. “She’s still—She’s depressed.”

  Ruby pats my arm. “Sammie, she doesn’t need your sympathy right now. You did her a big favour when you left.”

  Jill eyes me and plucks the gold chain off her chest, plays the little gold cross back and forth with a look that I can’t make out.

  “I guess you know she’s drinking pretty hard,” Ruby says. “There was an empty bottle on the coffee table. Nothing in the fridge but sour milk and some condiments. Mouldy bread on the counter. Pill bottles all over the place. I picked a prescription bottle up and she says to me, “Mind your own business, you tubby little dyke.”

  I choke back a laugh. Even fucked up, Marlene kicks ass.

  Jill giggles and shakes her head theatrically. “Tubby little dyke,” she repeats.

  Ruby butts out her cigarette. “Then she started hitting on Lou.”

  Jill’s eyes widen like she just can’t believe it. I know the look on her face now—as if Marlene and I are on one of those TV shows with the white trash characters that make everyone giggle and gag.

  “She says to him, ‘What’s a gorgeous hunk of man like you doing stuck with that.’ ” Ruby puts on a drunken, haughty face that looks nothing like Marlene’s. “ ‘Maybe you should come visit me on your own.’ ”

  Jill says, “Wow. This chick is, like, not mellow at all.”

  Ruby joins in, mimicking the hippie-girl voice. “Totally unmellow.”

  I’m glad Marlene hit on Lou. Ruby asked for it. Tubby little dyke.