Presbyterian Crosswalk: Short Story Read online

  “Brother,” Helen said again, but she left the room and came back a few minutes later with a pad of foolscap and her mother’s sewing basket.

  Beth wrote “Date” and “Size” at the top of the page and underlined it twice. Under “Date” she wrote “June 30,” then she unwound the measuring tape and measured Helen’s head—the circumference above her eyebrows—and wrote “27½.” Then she and Helen sat cross-legged on the floor, closed their eyes, held each other’s hands and said, “Water go away,” starting out in almost a whisper, but Helen kept speeding up, and Beth had to raise her voice to slow her down. After a few moments both of them were shouting, and Helen was digging her nails into Beth’s fingers.

  “Stop!” Beth cried. She yanked her hands free. “It’s supposed to be slow and quiet!” she cried. “Like praying!”

  “We don’t go to church,” Helen said, pressing her hands on either side of her head. “Whew,” she breathed. “For a minute there I thought that my cranium veins were throbbing again.”

  “We did it wrong,” Beth said crossly. Helen leaned over to get the measuring tape. “You should chant tonight before you go to bed,” Beth said, watching as Helen pulled on the bedpost to hoist herself to her feet. “Chant slowly and softly. I’ll come back tomorrow after lunch and we’ll do it together again. We’ll just keep doing it every afternoon for the whole summer, if that’s what it takes. Okay?”

  Helen was measuring her hips, her wide, womanly hips in their dark green Bermuda shorts.

  “Okay?” Beth repeated.

  Helen bent over to read the tape. “Sure,” she said indifferently.

  When Beth got back to her own place, her grandmother was playing her “Sea to Sea” record and making black bean soup and dinner rolls. Talking loudly to be heard over the music, Beth told her about the car accident and Helen. Her grandmother knew about Helen’s condition but thought that she was retarded—in the flour sprinkled on the table she traced a circle with a triangle sitting on it, which was “dunce,” and a question mark.

  “No,” Beth said, surprised. “She gets all A’s.”

  Her grandmother pulled out her pad and pencil and wrote, “Don’t get her hopes up.”

  “But when you pray, that’s getting your hopes up,” Beth argued.

  Her grandmother looked impressed. “We walk by faith,” she wrote.

  There was a sudden silence. “Do you want to hear side two?” Beth asked. Her grandmother made a cross with her fingers. “Oh, okay,” Beth said and went into the living room and put on her grandmother’s other record, the Christmas one. The first song was “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing.” Beth’s father’s name was Harold. The black bean soup, his favourite, meant he’d be home for supper. Beth wandered down the hall to his den and sat in his green leather chair and swivelled for a moment to the music. “Offspring of a Virgin’s womb …”

  After a few minutes she got off the chair and began searching through his wastepaper basket. Whenever she was in here and noticed that the basket hadn’t been emptied, she looked at what was in it. Usually just pencil shavings and long handwritten business letters with lots of crossed- out sentences and notes in the margins. Sometimes there were phone messages from his office, where he was called Hal, by Sue, the woman who wrote the messages out.

  “ pdq!” Sue wrote. “ asap!”

  Today there were several envelopes addressed to her father, a couple of flyers, an empty cigarette package and a crumpled pink note from her grandmother’s pad. Beth opened the note up.

  “Call,” it said, and then there was an upside-down V. Underneath that was a telephone number.

  Beth thought it was a message for her father to call the church. Her mother hadn’t called in over four years, so it took a moment of wondering why the phone number didn’t start with two fives like every other phone number in the neighbourhood did, and why her father, who didn’t go to church, should get a message from the church, before Beth remembered that an upside-down V meant not “church” but “witch’s hat.”

  In the kitchen Beth’s grandmother was shaking the bean jars to “Here We Come a-Wassailing.” Beth felt the rhythm as a pounding between her ears. “My cranium veins are throbbing,” she thought in revelation, and putting down the message she pressed her palms to her temples and remembered when her mother used to phone for money. Because of those phone calls Beth had always pictured her mother and the man with the toupee living in some poor place, a rundown apartment, or one of the Insulbrick bungalows north of the city. “I’ll bet they’re broke again,” Beth told herself, working up scorn. “I’ll bet they’re down to their last penny.” She picked up the message and crumpled it back into a ball, then opened it up again, folded it in half and slipped it into the pocket of her shorts.

  Sticking to her promise, she went over to Helen’s every afternoon. It took her twenty minutes, a little longer than that if she left the road to go through the park, which she often did out of a superstitious feeling that the next time she floated, it would be there. The park made her think of the boy who was run over. On the radio it said that his foot had been amputated and that he was in desperate need of a liver transplant. “Remember him in your prayers,” the announcer said, and Beth and her grandmother did. The boy’s name was Kevin Legg.

  “Kevin Legg and he lost his foot!” Beth pointed out to Joyce.

  Joyce laughed, although Beth hadn’t meant it as a joke. A few minutes later, in the bedroom, Beth asked Helen, “Why isn’t your mother worried about us getting your hopes up?”

  “She’s just glad that I finally have a friend,” Helen answered. “When I’m by myself, I get in the way of her cleaning.”

  Beth looked out the window. It hadn’t occurred to her that she and Helen were friends.

  Beth’s best friend, Christine, was at a cottage for the summer. Amy, her other friend, she played with in the mornings and when she returned from Helen’s. Amy was half Chinese, small and thin. She was on pills for hyperactivity. “Just think what I’d be like if I wasn’t on them!” she cried, spinning around and slamming into the wall. Amy was the friend that Beth’s grandmother represented with an exclamation mark. Whatever they were playing, Amy got tired of after five minutes, but she usually had another idea. She was fun, although not very nice. When Beth told her about Helen dying, she cried, “That’s a lie!”

  “Ask her mother,” Beth said.

  “No way I’m going to that fat-head’s place!” Amy cried.

  Amy didn’t believe the story about the doctor ripping out Beth’s grandmother’s tonsils, either, not even after Beth’s grandmother opened her mouth and showed her her mutilated tongue.

  So Beth knew better than to confide in Amy about floating. She knew better than to confide in anybody, aside from her grandmother and her Aunt Cora, since it wasn’t something she could prove and since she found it hard to believe herself. At the same time she was passionately certain that she had floated, and might again if she kept up her nightly “I love Jesus” chants.

  She confided in Helen about floating, though, on the fifteenth day of their chanting, because that day, instead of sitting on the floor and holding Beth’s hands, Helen curled up on her side facing the wall and said, “I wish we were playing checkers,” and Beth thought how trusting Helen had been so far, chanting twice a day without any reason to believe that it worked.

  The next day, the sixteenth day, Helen’s head measured twenty-seven inches.

  “Are you sure you aren’t pulling the tape tighter?” Helen asked.

  “No,” Beth said. “I always pull it this tight.”

  Helen pushed the tape off her head and waddled to the bedroom door. “Twenty-seven inches!” she called.

  “Let’s go show her,” Beth said, and they hurried to the living room, where Joyce was using a nail to clean between the floorboards.

  “Aren’t you guys smart!” Joyce said, sitting back on her heels and wiping specks of dirt from her slim legs and little pink shorts.

  “Com
e on,” Helen said, tugging Beth back to the bedroom.

  Breathlessly she went to the desk and wrote the measurement on the chart.

  Beth sat on the bed. “I can’t believe it,” she said, falling onto her back. “It’s working. I mean I thought it would, I hoped it would, but I wasn’t absolutely, positively, one hundred per cent sure.”

  Helen sat beside her and began to roll her head. Beth pictured the water sloshing from side to side. “Why do you do that?” she asked.

  “I get neck cramps,” Helen said. “One thing I won’t miss are these darn neck cramps.”

  The next day her head lost another half inch. The day after that it lost an entire inch, so that it was now down to twenty-five and a half inches. Beth and Helen demonstrated the measurements to Joyce, who acted amazed, but Beth could tell that for some reason she really wasn’t.

  “We’re not making it up,” Beth told her.

  “Well, who said you were?” Joyce asked, pretending to be insulted.

  “Don’t you think her head looks smaller?” Beth said, and both she and Joyce considered Helen’s head, which had looked smaller in the bedroom, but now Beth wasn’t so sure. In fact, she was impressed, the way she used to be when she saw Helen only once in a while, by just how big Helen’s head was. And by her lumpy, grown-up woman’s body, which at this moment was collapsing onto a kitchen chair.

  “You know, I think maybe it does look smaller,” Joyce said brightly.

  “Wait’ll Dr. Dobbs sees me,” Helen said in a tired voice, folding her arms on the table and laying her head down.

  Joyce gave Helen’s shoulder a little punch. “You all right, kiddo?”

  Helen ignored her. “I’ll show him our chart,” she said to Beth.

  “Hey,” Joyce said. “You all right?”

  Helen closed her eyes. “I need a nap,” she murmured.

  When Beth returned home there was another message from her mother in her father’s wastepaper basket.

  This time, before she could help herself, she thought, “She wants to come back, she’s left that man,” and she instantly believed it with righteous certainty. “I told you,” she said out loud, addressing her father. Her eyes burned with righteousness. She threw the message back in the wastepaper basket and went out to the back yard, where her grandmother was tying up the tomato plants. Her grandmother had on her red blouse with the short, puffy sleeves and her blue skirt that was splattered with what had once been red music notes but which were now faded and broken pink sticks. Her braid was wrapped around her head. “She looks like an immigrant,” Beth thought coldly, comparing her to Joyce. For several moments Beth stood there looking at her grandmother and feeling entitled to a few answers.

  The instant her grandmother glanced up, however, she didn’t want to know. If, right at that moment, her grandmother had decided to tell her what the messages were about, Beth would have run away. As it was, she ran around to the front of the house and down the street. “I love Jesus, I love Jesus,” she said, holding her arms out. She was so light on her feet! Any day now she was going to float, she could feel it.

  Her father came home early that evening. It seemed significant to Beth that he did not change into casual pants and a sports shirt before supper, as he normally did. Other than that, however, nothing out of the ordinary happened. Her father talked about work, her grandmother nodded and signalled and wrote out a few conversational notes, which Beth leaned over to read.

  After supper her father got around to changing his clothes, then went outside to cut the grass while Beth and her grandmother did the dishes. Beth, carrying too many dishes to the sink, dropped and smashed a saucer and a dinner plate. Her grandmother waved her hands—”Don’t worry, it doesn’t matter!”—and to prove it she got the Sears catalogue out of the cupboard and showed Beth the new set of dinnerware she intended to buy anyway.

  It wasn’t until Beth was eating breakfast the next morning that it dawned on her that if her mother was coming back, her grandmother would be leaving, and if her grandmother was leaving, she wouldn’t be buying new dinnerware. This thought left Beth feeling as if she had just woken up with no idea yet what day it was or what she’d just been dreaming. Then the radio blared “… Liver …” and she jumped and turned to see her grandmother with one hand on the volume knob, and the other hand held up for silence. “Doctors report that the transplant was a success,” the announcer said, “and that Kevin is in serious but stable condition.”

  “Did they find a donor?” Beth cried as the announcer said, “The donor, an eleven-year-old girl, died in St. Andrew’s hospital late last night. Her name is being withheld at her family’s request.”

  Her grandmother turned the volume back down.

  “Gee, that’s great,” Beth said. “Everybody was praying for him.”

  Her grandmother tore a note off her pad. “Ask and it shall be given you,” she wrote.

  “I know!” Beth said exultantly. “I know!”

  Nobody was home at Helen’s that afternoon. Peering in the window beside the door, Beth saw that the mauve suitcase was gone, and the next thing she knew, she floated from Helen’s door to the end of her driveway. Or at least she thought she floated, because she couldn’t remember how she got from the house to the road, but the strange thing was, she didn’t have the glowing sensation, the feeling of glory. She drifted home, holding herself as if she were a soap bubble.

  At her house there was a note on the kitchen counter: a drawing of an apple, which meant that her grandmother was out grocery shopping. The phone rang, but when Beth said hello, the person hung up. She went into her bedroom, opened the drawer of her bedside table and took out the message with her mother’s phone number on it. She returned to the kitchen and dialled. After four rings, an impatient-sounding woman said, “Hello?” Beth said nothing. “Yes, hello?” the woman said. “Who’s calling?”

  Beth hung up. She dialled Helen’s number and immediately hung up.

  She stood there for a few minutes, biting her knuckles.

  She wandered down to her bedroom and looked out the window. Two back yards away, Amy was jumping off her porch. She was climbing onto the porch railing, leaping like a broad jumper, tumbling on the grass, springing to her feet, running up the stairs and doing it again. It made Beth’s head spin.

  About a quarter of an hour later her grandmother returned. She dropped the groceries against a cupboard door that slammed shut. She opened and shut the fridge. Turned on the tap. Beth, now lying on the bed, didn’t move. She sat bolt upright when the phone rang, though. Five rings before her grandmother answered it.

  Beth got up and went over to the window again. Amy was throwing a ball up into the air. Through the closed window Beth couldn’t hear a thing, but she knew from the way Amy clapped and twirled her hands between catches that she was singing, “Ordinary moving, laughing, talking …”

  She knew from hearing the chair scrape that her grandmother was pulling it back to sit down. She knew from hearing the faucet still run that her grandmother was caught up in what the caller was saying. Several times her grandmother tapped her pencil on the mouthpiece to say to the caller, “I’m still listening. I’m taking it all down.”

  If you enjoyed “Presbyterian Crosswalk” by Barbara Gowdy, look for the print and e-book versions of the entire short story collection We So Seldom Look on Love.

  E-book: 9781443402484

  Print: 9780006475231

  About the Author

  BARBARA GOWDY was born in Windsor, Ontario, in 1950. When she was four, her family moved to Don Mills, a suburb of Toronto that would come to inspire the settings for much of her fiction.

  Gowdy considered a career as a pianist until she decided her talent was mediocre. While working as an editor at the publishing house Lester & Orpen, she found herself writing characters into her clients’ non-fiction and took this as her cue to start writing professionally.

  Her first book, Through the Green Valley (a historical novel set in Ireland), cam
e out in 1988; the following year she published Falling Angels to international critical acclaim. Her 1992 collection, We So Seldom Look on Love, was a finalist for the Trillium Award for Fiction. Four years later, the title story from this collection was adapted into Kissed, a film directed by Lynne Stopkewich. Falling Angels was also adapted to film in 2003, with Esta Spalding as screenwriter.

  Gowdy’s books, including three bestselling novels—Mister Sandman (1995), The White Bone (1998) and The Romantic (2003)—have been published in twenty-four countries. Gowdy has also had stories appear in a number of anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English and the Penguin Anthology of Stories by Canadian Women.

  Gowdy has been nominated repeatedly for many prestigious literary awards: four times for the Trillium Award and two times each for the Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. The Romantic earned her a Man Booker Prize nomination in 2003. In 1996, she was awarded the Marian Engel Award, which recognizes the complete body of work by a Canadian woman writer “in mid-career.” Nine years later, Ben Marcus praised Gowdy’s literary realism in Harper’s Magazine, singling her out as one of the few contemporary writers who has “pounded on the emotional possibilities of their mode, refusing to subscribe to worn-out techniques and storytelling methods.”

  Barbara Gowdy has also appeared on television as a regular commentator on literary matters and has taught creative writing courses at Ryerson University. Her sixth novel, Helpless, was published by HarperCollins in 2007.

  She lives in Toronto.

  Also by Barbara Gowdy

  THROUGH THE GREEN VALLEY

  FALLING ANGELS

  MISTER SANDMAN

  THE WHITE BONE

  THE ROMANTIC

  HELPLESS

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