Catch Me When I Fall (4 page)

I step off the bathroom scale. Peter has left a hard copy of his zine on the counter and a headline catches my eye as I page through it.
Take Baby Steps to Reduce Your Ecological Footprint
by Peter Boersma. The article begins, “Obviously, drastic measures are needed, but not everyone can quit habits cold turkey. Here's how to start.” Then a chart lists environmental sins on the left (“If You Do This”) and correctives on the right (“Try This”). The transgressions include using plastic bags to bring home groceries, buying fruit grown in Mexico or snack food from Wisconsin. Leaving toaster ovens and televisions plugged in, driving the car even when the distance is short. Applying chemical cleaners. Running the washing machine when the load is not full.

Even though I want to kick Peter, I feel a bit of sympathy as I scan the list. No wonder he's so frustrated with us. I move aside the lace curtain on the bathroom window to gaze at the snowy field on this side of the house. When Bertha Armyworm invaded the canola last year, Peter lectured Dad about this field. Told him he shouldn't be using Roundup, let alone Decis, this close to the house. Dad isn't much for arguing—we're similar in that way. He voiced something obscene in Dutch and slunk out to the barn. But he left the field fallow last summer.

Wandering into the kitchen, I wait for Mom to finish cleaning the mudroom. She's breathing heavily, and the metal dustbin clatters as she wallops the floors with the broom. I snatch an oatmeal cookie from the tin on the counter and stay out of her sight. Maybe when she's done, I'll explain to her what I see. What I now understand about Peter. I plan my words. “Mom, to Peter, the world is like a high school gym class volleyball team. Everyone has to play, but only a few people care. And some are disastrous. Obstructive. That's why Peter has to work so hard at saving the earth. Because of people who don't. People like his own family who won't even switch to energy-saving light bulbs.”

I reach for another cookie and chew it more slowly than the first. Mom would just recoil from the idea of Peter trying to atone for her shortcomings. I don't think I could make her understand.

She thunders into the kitchen with a dustbin surprisingly empty for the amount of noise she was making with the broom. I move to the table with another cookie, avoiding eye contact. “I'm going to clean upstairs now,” she says with brimstone in her voice. “It'd be nice to get a little help.” She stomps out with the vacuum cleaner.

Moving slowly, I pull out a dust cloth and the Pledge from the broom closet, thinking about Peter's world view. The chart bothers me. There is something skewed about it. It needs more columns, or at least one more: “Damage Control: How to fix the things you break as you're trying to repair the world.”

I return to the cookie tin. Outside the kitchen window, the branches of the poplars are bare and intertwined, like roadmaps against the sky. When I was little, I used to love surveying our land from on top of the silo. I don't climb it anymore. Fat twenty-one-year-olds can't climb silos, at least not without attracting a lot of comment and probably laughter. But I know how the landscape appears from up there. So much perspective. A vast mosaic of fields in yellows, browns, and greens. On clear days, the faint smudgy shadows of the foothills far to the west. To the east, the prairie stretching farther than I have ever travelled. And Oma way on the other side of that prairie.

I put the cookie back. Something is changing. An idea is growing. I have some problems to solve, because I spent a lot of money on the bogus diet powder and on the bridesmaid dress in the past couple of months. But my idea makes me feel light enough that I don't care what the bathroom scale said this morning.

•  •  •

I drove to Red Deer right after breakfast today. Dad and Mom are going to have to travel the forty minutes in the car to pick up the truck after I call home, but I couldn't see another way to do this. Last night I emailed Peter—who is back in Edmonton—to tell him that the wedding program was ready for printing. Maybe because the
Holy Earth!
deadline is approaching, he just said, “Great!” and didn't ask me to email him the final version. I had a special copy all ready in case he did. The one I actually took to the printer this morning had been altered a bit, by about ten pages. It was easier than I thought. I kept bits of the wedding liturgy, especially the parts of “God's Plan for Marriage” that I thought Peter would benefit from hearing. I got rid of the poems and reduced the hymns to one verse each. It was a bit tough with “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling.” I should have used the first verse, but I decided the second had a stronger message:

Breathe, O breathe Thy loving Spirit,

Into every troubled breast!

Let us all in Thee inherit;

Let us find that second rest.

Take away our bent to sinning;

Alpha and Omega be;

End of faith, as its Beginning,

Set our hearts at liberty.

The girl in the copy centre was pleasant in a remote way. Maybe she was thinking about the conversation she was having on her cell phone when I came in. “Do you have recycled paper?” I asked.

“Yes, but it's not very good quality. Not usually what people use for programs.”

“I'm sure it's fine.”

She nodded and filled out the order form. One of the things I like about running errands in Red Deer is that nobody pokes their nose into your business.

But when she tallied the final cost, I felt deflated. It wasn't enough. All the changes I made hadn't saved enough money. “Is there any paper that's even cheaper?” I asked.

“Not really.” If she was surprised, it didn't show. “Not unless you printed on scrap.”

“Scrap.”

“Paper that's been printed on one side already. From a misprinting. We save that paper for test runs and stuff.”

I thought quickly. The program couldn't be folded or printed double-sided. “But I'd need double the amount of paper, right?”

“You'd probably want to staple the programs, which will cost a little more. But the scrap paper's almost nothing.” She punched the calculator keys again and showed me the total. Thirty-five dollars less.

“That's good,” I said. “Can I see what will be on the back? On the scrap side, I mean?”

“You might want to pick it. You don't want the program printed on the back of a strip club ad or something.” She winked at me. I've never met someone my age who winks.

She led me to the back of the shop and pointed to a shelf near the floor. I spent quite a while searching. “This will work,” I said. I placed the stack I had chosen on the counter. The girl raised her eyebrows but, since this was Red Deer and not Poplar Grove, said nothing.

Then I drove along Gaetz Avenue here to the bus station. I parked and walked inside to the ticket booth. “St. Catharines, Ontario,” I said.

And now I sit in the waiting room, clutching my ticket like a raffle prize.

•  •  •

They'll get over my defection, eventually. Mom will have something new to be angry about and maybe she'll make up with Peter before the wedding. Dad will withdraw even more for a while—find fences that need fixing, watch late-night
TV
. But they'll recover, especially once they learn I have plans. Parents want their kids to have passions and goals. That's why my parents tolerate Peter's wackiness. At least it keeps him busy. At least he cares about something.

I feel a bit bad about the program. Maybe I should have chosen something neutral for the backside of the pages. Not
Steps in the Right Direction
by the Alberta Seniors Taskforce.
Our Seniors Deserve Better!
Well, at least no one will be able to read beyond the title—the text was all blurry because of whatever went wrong in the printing process.

I checked out St. Catharines online. Found apartments for rent, greenhouses to work at, and a local college with extensive horticulture and agribusiness programs. I'm picturing myself growing plump and juicy vegetables. Organically. I've been thinking about Oma's ingenious ways of warding off bugs, slugs, and worms in her vegetable garden with blender concoctions of eggshells and plantings of stinky flowers nearby. Most of her methods worked. But not for the cabbage worms. Maybe that's what I'll do with my life—find an organic way to control cabbage worms.

I take off my coat and unwrap a Caramilk bar. Two hundred and seventy-three calories, the package reads. I rewrap it, stow it in my knapsack, and fold my wool cardigan more tightly around me. It's one that Oma knitted when I was in high school, pale yellowy-green, the colour of a new seedling.

THE SECRET ROILED
in Eustace DeHond's stomach along with the forkfuls of meat he was forcing down. “Pass the gravy,” his mother said. She had mashed the heaping mound of potatoes on her plate and now spooned a lake of thick brown goo over them. She was fatter since the gunshot, eating heaps of comfort food though the bullet had missed her by two metres. Now she was round in the middle, like Humpty Dumpty, her stomach jutting out so far she had to sit back from the table. That's how Naomi would look in a few months. Maybe more than a few—he was vague about the pace of pregnancy in humans, knew more about hogs and Holsteins than women in that department. Would Naomi stay enormous after the baby? He would be eighteen with a shapeless manatee of a wife. And a kid.

He felt too young to marry her. Though he did love her. Was astounded that she wanted him. Useless Eustace.

But love was an uneasy thing. The ground it created shifted; it was dependent on appetite and circumstance and emotion. What kind of life could he provide for them? Something as simple as the barbed-wire fences he built around their pastures wobbled and curved without his dad's help to keep them straight. And his dad would be no help. What did he know about parenting?

His folks would be furious. Unwilling to accept Naomi. Full of recrimination. He imagined his mother's wrath. “Filthy. What you did was dirty.” He meant to stay on the righteous path. He thought it would be clearer—the choices he would have to make. Like an actual path, where you can see the split ahead.

When he kissed Naomi, blindfolded, in a game at Stephanie's party, he was amazed—the petal-soft lips, her breath on his cheek, the musky smell of her. It had just happened, that first time. They slipped out of the house and into the field. Out of their clothes and into the marvel of each other's flesh. The second time—his memory was murky. They had been drinking, lemon vodka for her, beer for him, in the back seat of the abandoned Dodge in their bush. Afterwards she had vomited in the wild rose hedge along the road while he patted her shoulder and pulled burrs from her hair. Now when he passed rose bushes, the sweet, heady scent triggered nausea.

He wished he had waited, at least till he went to town and bought condoms. People on
TV
had sex without getting pregnant. But then, most of them lived in cities where you could get condoms in a minute. He had to plan, to connive. Told his mom he wanted to come along to get groceries because he needed some things for a school project. “Tell me what you need. You stay and help your dad.” “I'd rather get it myself.” “What do you need that I can't get for you? Is it those girly magazines?” If only he had made do with magazines.

His mom was watching him now, a peculiar look on her face. Wariness, maybe. She'd worn that expression since the gun blast. It drove him crazy, the rebuke in it, the vigilance. Yes, he should have been more careful, and would be from now on. He bent over his plate and stuffed a forkful of overcooked green beans in his mouth, fighting the urge to gag.

•  •  •

Beatrice shot what she thought were furtive glances at Eustace. Something was eating at him. He was a peculiar boy. Difficult. A source of tension between her and her husband, Willem, from the get-go.

“If you can't think of a name for him today, I'm gonna write down Eustace,” Willem had said at the hospital.

“Why should
I
name him? He's your son too.” Beatrice had turned her back on Willem. The baby came by C-section after nine hours of labour. She ached. She felt too old to be a mother, had waited too long. She stared at the shadows of the wall-mounted
TV
and its metal arm on the wall beside her. Maybe she had postpartum depression. Her milk was coming and her breasts were painfully swollen. At the last feeding they were bigger than the baby's head, an observation that depressed her.

The depression had lingered in all the seventeen years since then. She managed. She coped, more or less, but felt certain that other people, her neighbours and friends, had it better than she did. She looked out the window at the unpainted barn, the scruffy yard. It lacked the tidy flower beds and well-tended gardens of the neighbouring farms, especially those owned by other Dutch Canadians. A rickety barbed-wire fence surrounded the land in front of her house—why couldn't Eustace do any job properly?—and inside it a few cows grazed, a forlorn, untended air to them. The driveway was dirt and gravel, potholed and dusty. Behind the house—“
Verschrikkelijk
,” she had heard the old people at church say—sat a moulding plaid sofa and a '73 John Deere tractor with a rusted can inverted over the upright muffler to keep out the rain. She pictured the west side of the house, the remnants of four more cars, including the doorless Dodge Dart that was Eustace's favourite place to play when he was younger.