Crying for the Moon, page 7
“It is only right,” Mr. Browne said. “I’m the man of the house after all, and I bring home the bacon—or, in this case, the lobster.” He laughed. “I deserve it, don’t I?” He turned to Bo and challenged him to say different. “Don’t I, Trevor?” Bo muttered his ascent and looked down at his plate, but Mr. Browne wouldn’t let him get away with that. “Speak up. What, are you afraid in front of the new girlfriend, are ya? Don’t let yourself be whipped, boy. Now, what do you say?”
“Yes,” Bo muttered again.
“What? I can’t hear you.”
And he kept at that until Bo, in a rage, stood up from the table and yelled out, “YES.”
“Sit down. Pull yourself together. You got to learn how to take a ribbing and stop getting hysterical like a little girl.” And then he winked at Maureen, and she felt sorry for Bo having to grow up in the shadow of that man. She almost said something, but Sara, also over for Sunday dinner, grabbed her hand, squeezed it and begged her with her eyes not to open her mouth. Mrs. Browne listlessly pushed the food around on her plate and didn’t say anything.
After dinner, Maureen was helping Mrs. Browne clear the table, when Mrs. Browne, laughing, turned to Maureen and said, “Awright, Maureen? When I married Mr. Browne, you know, I was so excited about moving to the New World. I thought I was going someplace like New York—maybe even somewhere better.” All this was said in a very thick, what Vera called her “Glaswegian,” accent.
“Art’s family were from a little wee place called Open Hall in Bonavista Bay, a heart-stoppingly beautiful place, but a good ways back from the back of beyond.” She put her hand over her mouth and said, “Oh, don’t let Art hear me say anything against Open Hall. It’s the Browne natal seat and must only be spoken of with solemnity and respect.”
She giggled. Maureen could see she was nervous. Bo came in then. He looked with suspicion at his mother and Maureen laughing. Later, Maureen understood that Bo was the type whose first thought if he heard someone laugh was that they were laughing at him. Vera waited for him to leave, but Bo stubbornly stayed in the kitchen, and so with some hesitation, Mrs. Browne continued to tell Maureen how she got from the slums of Glasgow to Paradise.
“When I got off the wee boat in 19 and 45, aye, it was ’45, in St. John’s, I thought I’d reached the end of the known world, but no, far from it. I still had to board the wee train and ride that all one day to the town of Trinity. But I still hadn’t gone far enough, and it took two dog teams, tearing through the frozen tundra, until I finally reached—”
“And you never really got over it, did ya, Mom? She’s been half-cracked ever since,” Bo said.
“Get off Mom’s back, will ya, Bo,” Sara said, coming into the kitchen and putting her arm around her mother. “Don’t mind him, Mom. Since he’s going for his B.A., he thinks his shit don’t stink. Yea, B.A. from MUN—that’s the two little x’s you put after your big X when you sign your pogey cheque.”
“Go fuck yourself, Sara.”
“Oooh, touchy.”
The smile had left Mrs. Browne’s face and she was back to drying the dishes. She didn’t have much else to say for the rest of that Sunday.
On the drive back to the apartment, Bo told Maureen that his mother was often in and out of the mental. Nobody really knew what was wrong with her. They kept changing her meds and hoping for the best. But she seemed to be getting worse.
“Worse how?” Maureen asked.
“I don’t know. She wants to be dead all the time or something,” Bo said, not taking his eyes off the road. “They are going to try shock treatment on her.”
Maureen had read Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and was terrified to think of little Vera being put in a vegetative state like Ellis or one of the chronics. But when Maureen said as much to Bo, he got mad and said they might as well shut up about it because there was nothing they could do anyway.
Bo was often mad at her and Maureen hardly ever knew why. She started to suspect that he didn’t really like her, especially when she talked or if she was feeling emotional about something. The first time Maureen got drunk with Bo, she went on a crying jag about the baby, and he just got up and walked out, leaving her there in Chamberlains. Maureen had to hitchhike home by herself.
A few days after that Sunday dinner, Mrs. Browne went into the mental, and three Sundays passed before they went back again for dinner. Maureen couldn’t believe what she saw: all of Mrs. Browne’s front teeth were missing. There had been some kind of accident during the electroconvulsive therapy. From then on, Maureen very rarely saw Vera smile, even when they were alone in the kitchen, even after she had gotten a new set of “choppers,” as Art called her oversized false teeth.
Maureen asked Mrs. Browne why she had let them go ahead with the shock treatment. Vera looked at her, her eyes dull, and said, “I needed it.” But later on, after she made sure that Mr. Browne was in his room with the door closed, she told Maureen that in the late 1950s, the doctors and Art had felt that a frontal lobotomy might do the trick. “But I had just enough spark left then to stop them.”
Maureen thought Mrs. Browne was amazing. Despite everything, she was always taking night courses at the university, she spoke six languages, and she somehow continued to survive around that house, quiet as a mouse, terrified to disturb Art in any way.
CHAPTER SEVEN
ONE DAY, ALMOST A YEAR AFTER THINGS STARTED TO GO terribly wrong between Maureen and Bo, Maureen found herself alone in their apartment, and just on a whim, began poking through his stuff. Just snoopin’, not looking for anything in particular, no biggie, just looking for . . . what? She didn’t know.
“Nosy Parker,” the Sarge used to call Maureen whenever she’d catch her going through the stuff the Sarge kept poked away in the trunk room. “Curiosity killed the cat,” she’d say, giving Maureen a smack to the back of her head. Yes, Maureen had always been a bit of a snoop. It’s just that she always felt safer knowing what other people were keeping secret. She was just looking to see if there was anything she should know. Maureen had an abiding and overwhelming fear of not knowing and of being caught out as a fool. Maureen thought that knowing stuff would protect her. “I knew that already,” Maureen imagined saying when she found herself humiliatingly taken advantage of. Maureen didn’t trust anyone.
Maureen started flipping idly through Bo’s bank book. She saw the two-thousand-dollar credit in September for his student loan, the fifty bucks a week his old man paid him to do candy and confectionery deliveries. But where did the three-thousand, four-thousand and five-thousand-dollar deposits come from? Every week, multiple thousands were going into his account. The money appeared just after Bo had started working for DAFT. Maureen’s first thought was, That cheap fucker. There he is with thousands and thousands in his bank account, and he makes me go halves on cheeseburgers out at the Pioneer. She’d had a pretty good idea, of course, that when he started working for the DAFT crowd, he’d be at it with the rest of them—dealing marijuana and whatnot. But he’d never said anything to her, and though he must have gotten all that money from dealing drugs with the DAFT boys, he’d never really splashed out like the rest of them, with their vans and their leather coats and always throwing dope, and lately even coke, around everywhere. Bo still lived like he was making fifty bucks a week. According to his bank book, he was making a small fortune working for the DAFT boys. But even having that much cash didn’t make him happy. Only a few days ago, after they had gotten through three-quarters of a bottle of Glenfiddich, Bo was in the bathroom with the door open—he never shut the bathroom door, no matter what he was doing—saying, “I’m too fuckin’ volatile to be a fucking partner with that bunch of fuckin’ whack jobs? And that fuckin’ little psycho Deucey had the nerve to say to me that I was too fuckin’ volatile. Volatile? VOLATILE? Fuck them and the boat they’re riding out on.”
He worked himself up into a red rage. When he came out of the bathroom and stood, totally naked, at the foot of the bed, still going on about how unfair the DAFT boys were, he started to jump up and down with anger, to actually dance with rage. Maureen could hardly breathe, she was so terrified, but at the same time, some secret, small place inside her was laughing—he looked so ridiculous in his frenzied, berserk toddler’s flip-out, with his package flopping up and down. “Volatile! I’ll show them vola-fuckin’-tile!”
Maureen heard Bo at the front door and quickly put the bank book back where she’d found it.
“Maureen! Reenie . . .”
“Just in the bedroom, Bo.” She tried to keep the resentment out of her voice.
“What are we gonna eat?” Bo called out.
“Why don’t we go out and eat for a change?” You cheap fucker, she added under her breath. She heard him come to the door.
“Jesus,” Bo said.
For one terrifying, awful instant, Maureen thought he’d overheard her, but he went on. “I forgot we gotta go in to Mom’s. And by the way, did you hear? Deucey’s gone missin’ and Big Jack is havin’ a conniption. Couldn’t happen to a nicer pair,” Bo said, smiling smugly.
Maureen looked at Bo, concerned. “Deucey? Where is he?”
“Well, how the fuck should I know?” Bo said, turning on Maureen with such rage that she instantly took a step back, hit the desk and almost took a tumble. That made Bo laugh.
“Yea, stupid question,” Maureen said. “Of course you don’t know. But where do you think he is . . .” Maureen didn’t go on. The look on Bo’s face put a stop to any further conversation.
CHAPTER EIGHT
SOON AFTER BO AND MAUREEN HAD STARTED LIVING together, they went to a party at Roger “Booman” Tate’s. It was a kind of big, open warehouse space up over a law firm on Duckworth Street. Maureen was really chuffed to be there at that party with those guys—it felt like she was finally making it, becoming part of the happening, all the peace, love and groovy stuff she read about. If she wasn’t so self-conscious and if she’d had a tam, she would have thrown it into the air and sang out The Mary Tyler Moore Show theme.
Booman was part of DAFT, a company that started dealing drugs on a small, friendly basis and then got more serious and even started a legit business as a front for their dealing. DAFT stood for Dunne, Albert, Furlong and Tate. The boys were heroes to the local counterculture scene. To Maureen, at that time, they were the closest things to revolutionaries she’d ever seen. There they were, right in the middle of boring old St. John’s, living an alternative lifestyle, doing what everybody wanted to do but didn’t have the guts to do, setting up their own rules, sticking it to the man, living high off the hog. They were just selling marijuana and that was natural—it grew in the ground, for God’s sake, and it was good for you. They—the government and them—just didn’t want people to get high. They didn’t want people’s consciousness to expand, because then everyone would start seeing how foolish and stupid the whole big phony system was, everybody working nine to five, the war in Vietnam, all the oppression and all the vast structures of bullshit it took to keep everyone with their heads down, going into their shitty little offices every day, doing their shitty little stint of meaningless shitty labour, and driving home to the wifey, who was going around in a coma, out of her mind on Miltowns and boredom, and the two and a half kids they were brainwashing, crushing them until they were ready to step up and take their turn on the big treadmill of bullshit. The DAFT boys were boldly and courageously saying, “Fuck that shit!” and starting a new life, a different kind of life, a peace, love and groovy-acid-trips kind of life. It was a fucking shining city on the hill they were building, on marijuana and freedom and equality. Of course, now they were dealing a bit of cocaine, which, according to Time magazine that week, was really bad for you and dangerous and rotted out your brain on top of that. But, sure, that’s what they said about weed, and that was just lies, so they were probably lying about the coke too. Bo had just started working with them, doing carpentry work, building packing cases—not for dope, he assured Maureen, but to send legit stuff around the country.
The party was packed and loud, and it was the first time Maureen saw whole green garbage bags full of marijuana, and Nescafé jars of cocaine. There were gallons of liquor, and Maureen got drunk, of course. She couldn’t find Bo. She went reeling around the loft, but there weren’t that many places to look. Turned out he was holed up in the bathroom, necking with red-haired Marina Halley, a girl Maureen had gone to kindergarten with. Maureen physically pulled Bo out of the bathroom, and then there she was at the top of the stairs, punching him as hard as she could in the face.
“Just do that once more,” Bo warned her, and so she did. By the end of it, Maureen was at the bottom of two flights of stairs with an eye that was rapidly swelling, handfuls of hair missing from the side of her head and what was feeling like a broken rib. She was on her knees, sobbing, crying.
“Look . . . look what you did . . .”
Bo started to walk away from her, saying nothing. She stumbled after him, desperate for him to acknowledge what he’d done, to beg her forgiveness, to address this unbelievable, unbearable situation. Part of her hoped and prayed that he could change it somehow, make it better, make it go away. He shouldn’t be walking away from her, she shouldn’t be running after him, but she couldn’t just let him walk away, could she? Some attention had to be paid. She followed him back to their apartment on Livingstone Street.
That was the first time he hit her, and of course, it wouldn’t be the last. There were lots more black eyes and bruised ribs and rackets every weekend. For a while, foolishly, she thought she could take him, that she had the physical strength, that she could go punch for punch. She wouldn’t let herself be beaten down like this. But after a while, she stopped fighting back altogether, hoping, thinking, that would make a difference. It didn’t. She tried to give up drinking, but that failed miserably. She tried to control the amount she was drinking, the kind of liquor she was drinking. Beer was all right, but inevitably beer led to whisky, and whisky seemed to drive them into a frenzy of fists. Nothing she tried worked, and half the time she felt too useless to even try. She blamed herself and she kept it as secret as she could. Somebody, the Sarge probably, said, “Once it starts, my darling, it never stops. Why should it? Shure if he got away with it once, why wouldn’t he do it again the next time he got mad, even if it’s only to prove just how mad he is?”
Lots of times she ran away from him, back to Princess Street. But one night, Maureen’s father tried to push Bo out of the house. Bo started pushing back, and then there was Maureen’s father on the floor, fighting with Bo. The Sarge broke it up with the help of a broomstick. She called the cops and they hauled Bo down to the station. Maureen went with him, and the whole time she was there, she felt that’s where she belonged, and after that, she didn’t even have Princess Street to run away to.
The more she lost or cut off ties with her family and friends, the deeper she got into the violent mess with Bo, the more draw the mess seemed to hold for her: she’d spilled blood for this relationship, and she’d lost family—even Kathleen didn’t want to see her if she was with Bo. She was too ashamed to have friends and Bo didn’t want anyone in the apartment, so this was it: the big love they wrote about, giving up everything for love.
Secretly, Maureen knew she hated and feared Bo. He made her feel sick. More than one person asked Maureen, “The sex must be great though, is it?” That question left Maureen speechless. What were they thinking? Because she was so bloodied and bowed, because there was so much anger and instability, because the violence was so bad, the sex must be good? It was unfathomable to Maureen that the kind of shit-kicking she was getting could be, in some people’s minds, the door to pleasure.
Maureen could not think her way out of it, and she could not feel her way out of it. She just wanted to die, but at the same time, she wanted to make Bo pay in some way or at least admit how wrong he was, and she held on to that hope month after miserably unhappy month.
CHAPTER NINE
SOMEHOW, EVEN THOUGH SHE FAILED HER CIVIL-SERVICE exam, Maureen got a job as the assistant to the film-strip librarian at the Department of Education Film Library. Gerry was the film-strip librarian, and he was old, but as old as he was, he didn’t really need an assistant for the simple reason that no one ever wanted to borrow film strips anymore.
A cute but dorky guy named George, who was doing a master’s degree in English at the university, worked in the film library, humping around those big heavy cans of film, checking them out and restacking them on the shelves when they came back. There was a steady stream of films being borrowed and brought back, but George always found time to hang out in the tiny film-strip library room to talk to Maureen—talk at Maureen, really. He talked at her about Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane, about Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade and Mike Hammer. Maureen could not be less interested. She dismissed all those books as penny dreadfuls, mindless pulp, but George was doing his master’s thesis on mid-century American hard-boiled detective fiction. He’d say, “Don’t be a bunny,” when he meant, “Don’t be stupid.” He called money “cabbage,” and when he referred to Diana Ross, he always called her “the canary.” It could have sounded cool, Maureen guessed, but it just didn’t. Gerry didn’t say anything, but whenever George was perched on the edge of Maureen’s desk, talking a mile a minute, Gerry would give Maureen that goofy “oh, he likes you” nod and wink, which managed to make Maureen feel even more low-minded than she already did.
Of course he would like you, said Maureen’s mind, because he’s a dweeb and you are like a gravitational force field for dweebs. They cannot resist you.
At least someone likes me, Maureen said to her mind.
Yea—’cause they think they’ve got a chance with you. Who else are they gonna like?
Oh, shut up.
Maureen tried to lose herself in restacking the shelves of film strips, which were unmoved and untouched since she restacked them two days ago.
