Object of Your Love (19 page)

It was a soft night. Soon, I thought, the canal will melt and then the river will break up, just as the policeman had said. Spring would come.

I went into the house, pulled off my boots, passed through the silent rooms to the kitchen. I turned the light on over the sink. There I found Harlan's psychology book standing in the dish drainer, its pages entirely dry now and beckoning to me. From their soaking, they'd turned all ripply and beautiful, like the petals of a spring daffodil, transformed by my act of madness. I sat down with the book at the kitchen table and read well into the night.

*   *   *

After Harlan left me, Art said, “What is so terrible about that? There are people everywhere who aren't too happy. People being robbed.”

I said, “I guess
you
would know about that, wouldn't you?” But then I thought, What
is
so terrible, seeing as Franklin calls me every day and now I've also got Henry?

Because one day the policeman from the park came to my door. At first I didn't recognize him, he was in civilian clothes, a very chic trench coat and brown suede shoes with brass buckles, and I thought, Who is this man with such a marvellous chest and fine head of hair?

That night, Art called me.

“Did a cop come and see you?” he asked.

I said, “Yes, and I'm in love with him.” Though why I'd confide anything personal to Art, I don't know.

Art said, “Well, shit,” and I knew from his voice that he was pleased.

Henry cultivates bonsai trees. He clips away at them with a pair of small scissors, he seems to be able to spend hours at it.

“I never saw myself doing anything like this,” he tells me happily. “I just discovered it by accident.”

He lives on the other side of the river and in his backyard he has created a Japanese garden, with sculpted shrubs and imported rocks and a bed of white sand that he grooms in different patterns with a rake.

I said, “It's so tranquil here, Henry. This is like a Peace Garden.”

Henry says that some day he's going to take me to Japan.

Henry also says that what made him notice me in the first place was that I live life with passion, something he admires in a woman.

Every weekend I take Franklin over to my parents' apartment to visit. My mother says, “There's something about you, you're calmer now, Mariah. You seem less driven.”

Art is like a second or third father to Franklin and I am willing to let him be. Franklin and Henry have made me see Art's redeeming qualities, which I won't go into now, since I'd still have difficulty naming them. It's more the whole picture rather than the separate pieces. What is it they say?
More than the sum of its parts,
which is a phrase I never really understood, but now I think I have an idea.

GRASS

M
OM
said Stirling was like a time bomb that summer, ready to explode, so when he said one day at lunch, “I'm gonna cut grass,” she sat down suddenly at the end of the table and let out a big breath.

“You won't get anybody to pay you to do that,” Dad told Stirling. There was no money in our neighbourhood. The year was 1950.

“You'd like to think I couldn't get work just because you haven't got any yourself,” said Stirling. He had a tongue on him. “I've got fifteen customers already. Not on this street, but nearby.” That made Dad sit up.

“And whose lawn mower are you figuring to use?” he asked Stirling.

“Well, I thought I'd use ours,” Stirling answered with a smirk.

“You did, did you?” Dad said, raising an eyebrow. Then he told me to get him a piece of paper and a pencil.

“Let me get this straight,” said Dad. “All these customers of yours probably have mowers of their own but you've offered to use ours, is that right?”

“That's what I said.”

“And who's paying for the gasoline? That coming out of your pocket?”

“That's right.”

“Now, look,” said Dad, starting to write down figures. I could see he was excited. Any mention of making money got him interested. “How much are you charging people?” he asked Stirling.

“A flat rate for ten weeks, now to Labour Day,” said Stirling sounding proud and know-it-all. “Five dollars for a regular yard. Ten if it's a big one.”

Dad wrote it down, straight-faced so far. He was comfortable with a pencil in his hand. He loved any kind of figuring.

“How do you know how many times you're going to have to cut the grass? Could be twice a week in August, weather gets hot enough.”

“I never thought of that,” said Stirling, getting nervous. By this time Mom had got up and started the dishes, but she kept looking at Stirling and Dad over her shoulder, as if she saw what was coming.

“Two times four, that's eight,” said Dad. I could tell he was beginning to enjoy himself. To tell you the truth, I was having a pretty good time myself. “Say you cut it eight times in August and four times in July. That's twelve times, plus once in September probably. Five dollars divided by thirteen. That works out to thirty-eight cents a cut. Now, how much is a gallon of gas?” Dad asked gently. He could be patient when he wanted to make a fool out of you. He liked to pull you in, bit by bit, like a fish on a line.

Stirling was squirming in his chair now, watching Dad's pencil fly across the paper. He kept a package of cigarettes tucked inside the sleeve of his T-shirt and he reached for them now, tapping one out onto the table and lighting up. His big ugly hands were trembling. His fingertips were all swollen where he'd bitten his nails back hard and they were yellow with nicotine.

“How many square yards are there in a normal property and how many do you figure you could cut with a gallon of gas? Then there's your labour. What were you figuring on for an hourly wage? How long do you think you'd take to cut a normal-sized property? What about maintenance? Oil? Spark plugs? Do you have any idea how much they cost? What if the mower breaks down? Not inconceivable if you drive her hard. May run into parts. If you can't fix her right away, you'd have to get hold of a rental. Daily or weekly charge for that.”

“Wear and tear on his shoe leather too,” I tossed in, and Dad winked at me.

Stirling was red-faced, looking reluctantly across the table, reading the figures upside-down. Finally, Dad threw his pencil down triumphantly on the table and pushed the paper across at Stirling.

“You're practically paying them to let you cut their lawns for them,” Dad said severely. “Do you see that?
Course
you didn't have any trouble finding customers. Lotta people recognize a sucker when they see one coming. I don't suppose you could have asked my advice before you set your price. I don't suppose there's anything I could have taught you about profit and loss.”

“I'll go back and tell them something different,” Stirling said. “Say my price has gone up.”

“No, you won't. You've struck a bargain and you'll stick to it. You won't go back on your word.”

Then Stirling slammed outside and Mom said to Dad, “Did you have to be so hard on him? At least he's doing something with himself.”

I thought what she meant was Stirling would be out of the house now and not banging doors and smashing things around and standing in front of the hall mirror all the time, combing his hair with one knee bent and his pelvis, tipped at an angle, or picking fights with me so that Mom had to keep saying to him, “I don't know what's got into you!”

But Dad took it different and said, “I'm doing something with myself,” and Mom answered, caught off guard but ready to fight all the same, “I don't see you looking for work. I don't see you even picking up the newspaper to search the ads.”

Then Dad said, “What I'm doing now has a lot longer range possibilities than just finding a job. I got vision but I'm married to a woman who can't see past her nose.”

After that Dad went down to the cellar, where he was spending all his time in the cool temperature making diagrams, trying to invent things. Mom finished up the dishes, out of pride. She wasn't going to let it show that Dad had thrown her off. But after she'd dried the last plate, I heard the screen door swing shut and the latch snap to. I went to the kitchen window and saw her going down the street, her body at a slant and her feet like two pistons churning, and if she hadn't been in such a hurry she would have noticed she forgot to take her apron off. She disappeared up the sidewalk that cut through our block, leading to a better part of town where there was a friend of hers from church, a Mrs. Merrifield, whose husband was fully employed.

*   *   *

All through July the days were soft, the shadows deep, and the leaves lifted gently in the breeze, sighing. The sweet smell of fresh-mown grass filled the air. Stirling left the house at eight in the morning, when the sun was still low and filtering in yellow shafts through the trees. He disappeared down the street, pushing the mower lightly with one hand, a bag lunch and the gasoline can in the other. The rattle of the mower wheels, rolling along the sidewalk, was carried back to us like small thunder. We didn't see Stirling all day but in the silent afternoons it seemed we could hear the drone of his mower somewhere in the distance, dreamy and far away as church bells.

The first day Stirling went out, Dad got in the car and drove over to where he was working. He came home rubbing the back of his head and smiling to himself. “Whatever else you might say about Stirling, he takes pride in his work,” he told Mom. “Doesn't miss a blade of grass. Leaves a fine geometric pattern on the lawn. Trims the edges down close with a clipper. Nice and polite with the customers.”

After that, Dad seemed to respect Stirling more and to take him seriously. When Stirling came home at night, Dad would be waiting for him on the porch. “How did it go today, Stirling? How's the mower performing? Any problems getting her started? Don't forget she's got a sensitive choke. Give her too much choke and you'll flood her.” Then Stirling would get impatient with all Dad's advice but Dad would pretend not to notice.

Stirling brought home stories about his customers. They were mostly old women, widows or spinsters who spied on him suspiciously from behind their curtains. “There's this one old babe, that every time I go there I have to knock on her door and tell her again who I am, 'cause she forgets. Else she calls the police,” he told us.

He sat at the supper table with a stack of bread on a plate at his elbow and while he talked he buttered one slice after another flat on his hand and ate it. Grass-cutting was hard work. He felt the need to fortify himself. He told us about how, at one house, he'd sat on the front porch to eat his lunch. “The lady came out with a broom and started to sweep the porch like crazy,” he said. “She got closer and closer to me and the grit was flying into my sandwich, which I'd put down on a piece of waxed paper beside me. Finally I turned to her and said, ‘Excuse, me, ma'am? Would you like me to sit somewheres else to eat?' And she said, ‘Now you mention it, I would. This ain't a park bench.'”

“Oh, Stirling, stop it!” Mom would beg from the end of the table, where she was holding her sides and laughing so hard the tears came out. “Stirling, you're making it up! Wait a minute while I catch my breath!”

Stirling sat there buttering his bread, full of himself but in a good way for once, just as surprised as the rest of us that he'd turned into our supper entertainment.

*   *   *

For the first time in my life it was a source of some pride to me to have a big brother and to be able to walk down a foreign street and see him in the yard of somebody I didn't even know, cutting their grass in a very profound and businesslike way, pushing the mower hard, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. It gave me a strange feeling. One day, coming home from the confectionery with my new friend, Bonita Connor, I stopped and said, “That's my brother, Stirling,” which was something I never wanted to admit before. She paused with a popsicle halfway to her lips, took a good look at him over a boxwood hedge and said, “No kidding,” in a way that made me feel good.

One afternoon toward the end of July, Stirling pushed his lawn mower into Bonita's backyard. She and I were sitting on a blanket in the sun playing with her paper dolls.

“All right, children,” Stirling said, “get off the lawn.”

“I never knew you were cutting Bonita's grass,” I said, surprised to see him there. The Connors had just moved into the neighbourhood that summer.

“New customer,” said Stirling, bending over and taking a cookie out of a tin we had there with us on the blanket.

“Those aren't for you,” I told him, but Bonita picked the tin up and held it out to Stirling.

“Have as many as you like,” she said and he took a handful, more than I'd had myself.

“Aren't you girls a little old for dolls?” said Stirling. He was trying to look big in front of Bonita. I don't know why. She was homely. She had poached-looking skin, mauve lips, pink eyelids, hair almost white, not pretty. She made me think of a white rabbit.

Stirling bent over and jerked the starter cord. The roar of the mower drove us indoors. It was dark all the time in their house because Bonita's mother had the curtains drawn so she could watch television without the glare of the sunlight on the screen. She never came out of the living room to talk to us and we never went in. From the hallway, I could barely make out her tiny figure, sitting in a big armchair, her hand curled around a glass on a side table. I'd begun to think of her as somebody who had floated out of the television itself, a blue, flickering, drowned figure. Bonita and I took the paper dolls upstairs to her room and sat on the bed, with the sound of Stirling's mower rising to us through the window screen. Once, I caught Bonita looking out the window and she said, “Your brother's cute.”