This Cake is for the Party (13 page)

Her father had found the note when they had driven out to the lake—it must have fallen out of her jacket pocket when she was in the car. He knew about it all week and didn't tell her. Kevin Lalonde had slipped a note into her locker. Kevin was in Christine's music class, third period. He played clarinet. He and the other clarinets had to suck on their reeds before class, and Kevin Lalonde knew how to flip his upside down with his tongue. The note was folded into a secret-note square. On the inside there was a picture of a chickadee on a branch in front of a red heart. It had come from a girl's notepad, probably from his older sister Judy's.
Come here little chickadee
, he'd written on the paper. He wrote it in pencil, and the word
chickadee
had been misspelled, erased and rewritten, the lines of the original faintly visible underneath. Christine was in her bedroom on Thursday night trying to do her trumpet scales when her father tapped on the door. He asked her to come downstairs with him.

His collection of diseased houseplants lived on a long table in the basement under a purple fluorescent grow-light tube. He collected the plants from the garbage bins behind the garden centre—mildewing African violets, stringy Boston ferns, and pot after plastic pot of pale, drooping spider plants. The purple light was on constantly to stimulate their growth. It made any green they had left in their leaves look muddy and brown. Watering and fertilizing these plants once a week was a chore worth one dollar.

I want to show you something, her father said. He lifted the limp legs of a large spider plant to show her a smaller one underneath. A long white stem connected the new sprouts to the old one. This is a spider plant baby, he said. It comes from here. He pointed to the base of the white stem. If you wanted to start another plant, you could just clip this off, right here. He pinched his fingers to show her. Then you would put that in rich soil and nourish it and let it grow into its own mature plant.

I have to practise my trumpet, Christine said.

Her father cupped the small leaves in the palm of his hand. The best children are like the healthiest plants, he said. They need to be cultivated. And the Bible says, Children are an heritage of the Lord, and the fruit of the womb is his reward. Psalm one-twenty-seven.

Christine's feet felt thick and cold from standing on the concrete floor, like they were made of wet clay. A potato bug groped its way across the plant table. The damp smell of potting soil mouldered in the back of her throat. Her father pulled Kevin's note out of his shirt pocket. He had unfolded the secret square and folded the whole thing in half himself, unevenly. In the dim purple light, the fine lines of the chickadee disappeared, leaving a mottled black stain over a grey heart. I think this belongs to you, he said, and handed it to her. She could barely make out Kevin's writing on the creased paper. The light made his pencil lines almost invisible.

Love is a sacred gift, her father said. He looked at her. Who gave you this?

Nobody, Christine said.

The sexual act is filled with love and grace, Christine. It transcends the sins of petty human selfishness. But only when you are married.

I'm not having sex!

Your sexual purity can be disturbed, even by immoral thoughts.

I am so repulsed right now, said Christine.

Her father smiled at her. The wise father must be dedicated and determined in order to cultivate the sweetest flowers, he said. And you are nothing less than a holy blossom.

He won't let me come see you this weekend, Christine told Sonia on the phone that night. He's going on about God.

No way. He has to let you. Juicy said she'll pay for your ticket.

He says I've been gone too much.

I'll get Juicy to talk to him.

I wish I lived with you.

The suburbs suck, said Sonia. The people of Mississauga are disempowered and inauthentic. I want to move downtown.

When Christine got off the phone, she found her father at the stove skimming congealed fat off a cold pot of chicken-neck broth. The soup was covered with a layer of lumpy yellow wax. A weathered-looking brown bone poked through the surface. He started at the edge, patiently scraping at the yellow gunk little by little, saving each spoonful in a reused yogurt container.

It's a good batch this week, he said. We can make some yellow rice for dinner tomorrow.

I'm going to Mississauga this weekend, Christine said. I'm going.

You love chicken soup and rice, he said.

Juicy is going to call you soon.

He slid the spoon on the edge of the soup pot until it balanced there. He stared into the centre of the pot. Why don't you just stay home this weekend? he asked. We can go out to the lake together.

I told you. I hate going to the stinking lake to pick up other people's dirty beer bottles.

He turned around and looked at her. Christine, he said.

She bent her head so she didn't have to meet his eyes. They pulled at her like those sticky hands you get out of gumball machines.

I wish I knew what made Mississauga so enticing to you, he said.

Well, we don't go into the bush and scavenge other people's garbage, for starters.

I wish you wouldn't think of it that way.

You wish, you wish. I wish you didn't eat dead animals. So.

They stood there across from each other in the kitchen. Her father looked down at his slippered feet on the brown and white kitchen linoleum.

I wish your mother were here, he said. She would know what to say. She would know how to talk to you.

Christine looked at his sad, murky face. There was a shadow in the middle of it, like his nose was sinking into his skull. The hair between his eyebrows looked like the hair on top of a big toe. When he spoke, his teeth were just bones in his mouth.

Get used to it, Christine said. Because she's not ever coming back.

She stomped down the hall and pounded her fist into the door as she slammed it. She stuffed two T-shirts and two pairs of underwear into her backpack. Even through the closed door, she could hear his misery: the spoon tapping against the side of the pot over and over, the sound of steel scraping steel ringing down her spine.

Her aunt Juicy taught music to kindergarteners three days a week. She wore dangly earrings made out of felted wool pompoms. She carried a bright green iPod with
Music is my life!
engraved on the back, and when she was nervous about something, she sang verses from “It's the End of the World as We Know It” as fast as she could. She said it helped her relax. Juicy got pregnant with Sonia when she was nineteen years old, and Sonia's biological father was gay, so they didn't stay together. Bill moved to New Brunswick, where he became a beekeeper and sold herbed oils and vinegars at the Sackville Farmers' Market. Christine has never met him, but she's tasted the wildflower honey.

When Sonia and Juicy picked her up at the bus station on Friday night, the first thing Christine said was, I can't live with my father anymore. I want to move here.

Sonia grabbed Christine's backpack and dropped it in the trunk of the car. Cool, she said. My friend Stoney's brother could get us jobs at the CNE this summer.

Juicy started the car and waited for the girls to get in the back seat and click their seat belts over their chests before she pulled out of the parking lot. Then she asked Christine what was going on.

He stopped going to work, said Christine. And he's smoking in bed.

Gross, said Sonia.

Sonia, be kind, said Juicy.

He wasn't going to let me come here this weekend. He keeps quoting from the Bible.

Uncle Rod's gone done lost the plot, said Sonia.

Oh Christine, Juicy said. I wish you could have known what your father was like when your mother was alive.

I just would have felt sorry for her, Christine said. They were driving on the expressway, passing all the condos with their windows lit up. Christine could see into individual apartments. She could see their fancy light fixtures, dining room tables, blue and green television squares.

Not that it's wrong to be religious, said Juicy. But it is interesting, because Rod didn't even believe in God before your mother died.

Christianity is nothing more than a cult for weak and lonely people, said Sonia. She was applying her lip gloss from a tube with a long white applicator that looked like a Q-tip. The headlights and the traffic made the gloss flash in the dark of the car. Her lips looked silver, then shiny black, then dark red. Poor Uncle Rod, she said, and she twisted the tube of lip gloss shut.

Sonia was sixteen, which was only two years older than Christine. But Sonia had grown up in Toronto and went to an alternative high school downtown and took guitar lessons from a guy who knew the Tragically Hip. Sonia wore Chanel No.
5
. She had a huge tester bottle that she swiped from the Bay's fragrance counter. She smoked these little leaves tied up with string that she bought in the bong-and-incense store on Queen Street. Whenever a good band came to town, Sonia used her fake laminated media pass ID and pretended she wrote for Toronto Dot Com. She was good at it. She knew where to find the band after the sound check, what time to wait outside the radio station. Sometimes she talked to the roadies first. But she always got inside the tour bus in the end.

At Juicy's house, Christine borrowed Sonia's terry cloth bathrobe, balled her Greyhound clothes into her backpack, and asked about laundry. There was a smell to her clothes that she could only sense when she got away. It was a residue from her house in Sudbury—a pungent, chalky smell of cigarette smoke, fried onions and damp grief.

Juicy washed Christine's grey hoodie, her
Music is My
Boyfriend
and
Metric
T-shirts, her three pairs of blue boy-cut undies and her jeans in lemon Sunlight powder so she'd smell like a normal human teenager for the weekend. While the clothes were in the dryer, Christine and Sonia sat cross-legged on the white shag carpet in Sonia's bedroom and ate wasabi rice crackers while they planned their tattoos.

I want two sparrows, said Sonia. One here and one here. She tapped her chest just above her B-cup breasts, hitting one with the right hand and one with the left. One for where I've come from, and one for where I'm going.

I want mine to start at my ankle and go all the way up my leg, said Christine. A vine. I'll keep adding to it. Eventually it will wind up around me. She touched the back of her neck. In black, she added.

Black is classic, agreed Sonia.

On Saturday, Juicy drove them into the city. She parked the car in the lot in front of the Harbourfront Centre and said, We'll have dinner on Toronto Island. I'll meet you girls at the ferry in two hours. Sonia wore an olive green shirt-dress and mustard yellow tights with a pair of white-fringed cowboy boots that she found in a store in Park-dale. Christine wore her clean jeans and her hoodie. Juicy let Christine borrow her red Fluevog Mary Janes. They had a short heel in the shape of a heart.

At the Power Plant, there was a room full of resin sculptures that looked like gigantic knuckles and a silent black-and-white film projected on the back wall. Christine stood in front of the screen. A mushroom cloud exploded over a body of water. The plaque said that the images were spliced from over two hundred cameras that recorded nuclear bomb tests near Hawaii after the war. The explosions were mushroom-like. Not just the shape: round on top, with a fat stem. But the stem itself was white and shaggy, just like a forest fungus. Then the cloud grew, and it looked more and more like a cauliflower. Smoke would gather itself up from nothing and then make a firework of cauliflowers.

Sonia got caught stealing a Power Plant notepad from the gift shop, and because of that, they were late meeting Juicy at the ferry terminal and they all had to wait for the next boat. They sat on a bench for an hour and watched a pigeon pick at an old scone sticking out of a paper bag.

I was a little worried at first when you weren't here on time, Juicy told Sonia. Then she hugged Christine around the shoulders. But I knew you were with your cousin, and she'd keep you in line. Right, Christine? You keep Sonia in line.

I want to move here, said Christine. I was serious when I said that.

Juicy twisted the knob of brass hardware on her Roots handbag. We would have to get you into a school, she said.

You could come to my school, said Sonia.

I'll have to talk to your father, Juicy said. Does he know you want this?

Christine stared out at the bushy trees across the water. The ferry was coming back. It looked like it wasn't moving at all, but when she glanced away and then focused on it again, she could see that it was heading towards them. Yes, Christine said. He knows.

The ferry docked at Ward's Island and everyone walked off the boat together. A crowd of people on the island side waited to get on the boat that would bring them back to the city. A white-haired man in the lineup winked at Christine when she passed him. He had a wide-brimmed hat and rested his weight on a purple metallic stick that looked like a ski pole. A wooden bead cinched the strings of his hat together under his neck.

It was so quiet on the island with the city skyline crouched on the other side of the harbour. Juicy took the long way, leading them through the trees. The green-grey sliver of a tiny garter snake wriggled through the leaves right in front of Christine's shoes and disappeared into the scrubby bushes. The crunchy whine of red-winged blackbirds buzzed in the trees. Christine's ears were ringing. A flash of brown glass and a blue label in the dogwood branches. Probably Labatt's.

It's so beautiful here, sighed Juicy.

I partied here once, said Sonia. Geoffrey Duguay's mother's boyfriend used to live here. We had a bonfire, it was potent.

When was that? asked Juicy.

Sonia looked at Christine and rolled her eyes. Never mind, she said.

They ate dinner outside, on the patio at the café near the boardwalk. Juicy ordered a glass of white wine for herself and sparkling elderflowers for the girls. They each had the same thing, because it was the only vegetarian dish on the menu: pasta salad with white beans, spring peas and watercress. For dessert, flourless chocolate cake. The sunlight fell through the leaves, making spots of shade on their faces.