Householders

The Crooked Man

MARTHA REGARDED HERSELF SKEPTICALLY AND assumed skepticism from the other mothers at the table. She had too many children (four), and not for a discernible reason (religion, twins), she was too young (twenty-eight), she was disordered and apologetic. She made stuffed baby toys out of felt and organic wool, her breasts leaked through old tank tops. She was blond but not seductively so: freckled and angular, snub-nosed. A child, pinkish, pedalling a bike home from a violin lesson, earnest and a little sad.

Her breasts were leaking. Denton was probably carrying their crying youngest through the house, cursing lavishly.

I know this is going to be a difficult one, but we need to talk to the family, Bronwyn was saying, and ask them if they can route the car somewhere else or just have her walk to the car.

Bronwyn paused, one hand tugging at a handful of her long hair, thinking. They waited.

"That might be even better, if the car was on a different street. We’ve got the chalk drawing on their street. And the lemonade and the bake sale. And one of the bands. And Martha’s craft table. They’ll have to understand this is a community event. It’s for the whole community. I’m sure they’ll understand."

"But it’s her wedding," Martha said, louder than she meant to. It’s a shame, isn’t it? It’s her wedding.

Bronwyn, Marley and Alison looked at her, and she looked back at them over the table in Bronwyn’s kitchen, and then down at her hands laid in front of her amidst the mugs of tea, the lists and phones and plate of cookies. Outside, she could hear Noah and Max playing.

Martha smiled often, as a cover for sleeplessness. Even though she felt the same watchful aggrieved boredom as the other mothers, she was praised for her cheerfulness. The women surrounding her, on or beside park benches, in yards and community centres, at school pickups, on her street, calling greetings from the open windows of their cars or their open screen doors, appeared to her competent and discerning. Sure of their authority, not bewildered as Martha was by having to find enough mittens to go around, by remembering to bring sunscreen to the park. They complained freely, and their complaints seemed more justified than her own. She had not endangered a career or an artistic practice in order to raise children. Her memory before Noah’s birth went as far as the first half of a degree in history. After: diapers, splatters of yogurt, little jars of fruit mush, tears, mysterious stains. The other women seemed to have had more time to consider the question of what they wanted, and they had refined and elaborated on that question, as if it was a problem that could be solved.

Her own problem was Noah. Loner, lonely, prone to abrupt rage. At first, they said he was like his father, but Denton had a friendliness and self-assurance that made her shrug off the swearing, the jumpiness. Denton could not shut a door quietly. He was big, jovial, already balding, his whole back and his arms blue-black with ink. (Bronwyn had a few tasteful tattoos along her back and shoulders, delicate as leaf veins, which Martha envied; she wasn’t certain enough to get something as declarative as a tattoo.) Denton drank a few beers with dinner, but it made him fond and sentimental. He roared at the children, and they laughed. He was liked. She liked him. He liked himself.

Noah was different. Thin and taut, his blue eyes frantic, his hair sticking up in light-brown tufts. At six months old he screamed if she tried to put him down, and yet being touched seemed to hurt him too. She’d dreaded changing him so much that once she’d put it off until there were red weals on his bum and the creases of his thighs. She was twenty years old.

Noah was sly now. He said mean things, cried if another child stared too hard in the playground, hit children running past. There were meetings with the teacher, the principal. Conversations in the yard that changed when Martha approached. She did not want to seem defensive; she could not defend. She lay in bed picturing his red-rimmed, too-wide eyes. He was not invited to the houses of classmates after school. He was not summoned to birthday parties. Bronwyn’s son Max, a year older, was his one friend. Max enjoyed being needed, and Martha caught a whiff of patronizing kindness (Max was very like his mother), thought that Noah came home from Max’s house looking furtively sad, which Martha, from experience, pretended not to see.

She trembled for Noah, she loved him, but sometimes she imagined him older, kicking someone in the face, throwing a match into the rainbow slick of a gasoline spill, in front of a stranger’s quiet, sleeping house.

Outside, the boys played.

But it’s her wedding, Martha said again, more loosely.

Before she could say anything else, Max ran in with his nose bleeding, Noah eager and fearful behind him. Max had fallen off his skateboard, he’d been nowhere near Noah, and in her relief Martha forgot to bring the wedding up again.

I’ll talk to the family, Bronwyn said to Martha in the hall as they got ready to leave. I’m sure they’ll understand when I explain. She waved as they walked down the stairs.

I feel like we live in a village, Bronwyn called to Martha, don’t you?

Martha had never lived in a village, but she nodded, wishing for Bronwyn’s confidence in her own intentions. The sun was setting.

On the way home Noah let her hold his hand and this was enough of a victory that even Denton calling out "Where the fuck have you been? All she wants is boob!" when she walked in the door only made her laugh and kiss him hard. He grinned at her. Ella stopped crying, smothered into her breast. And Noah was already climbing the stairs, she heard the water running as he brushed his teeth. It will be all right. She kissed Denton again. Maybe it will be all right.

It is all well-meant, Martha thinks. None of it is intended as hostility to the people who have lived in this part of Toronto since the seventies, who seem older than they are, who attend church, who wish to launch their granddaughter from the house in which she grew up, who have rented the white limousine to which she will descend, swaddled in synthetic lace on the morning of her wedding, the groom little more than a willing accessory to her temporary magnificence. The street festival has been carefully planned, and every effort has been made to include everyone, and these efforts have been made in good faith by the families who have organized it, families who have begun to buy the houses that the older people have sold, or that their children have sold after their deaths. They have moved into these small houses and they have made them beautiful according to their ideas of beauty. They have painted the walls in deep Van Gogh colours, they have exposed the red brick that was hidden under brown or yellow vinyl siding. They have laid hardwood floors and built back decks. They feel the right to stake a claim, and the street festival, the chalk drawings and sidewalk sale and music and cookies and bubble machine, are part of that claim. Few of these new people are rich, though they have the pliancy afforded by some money, they may safely accumulate modest debt. Even though Martha and Denton bought their house through an estate sale, a leaking and rotting shell of a place, even though Denton worked over every inch of it himself while they lived with his mother and Martha nursed Sam, the second of her babies, and felt sidelined and useless, the down payment was a gift from her grandmother and she knows that, however uneasy it makes her, she still falls firmly on the side of the radiant houses and the energetic educated people, who don’t clip coupons even though they are daunted by the price of groceries. She knows that the world of those burnished floors and new kitchens and the world of old women bleaching their sidewalks and polishing tiles adorned with pictures of the Holy Family will not be entirely reconciled.

She looked out of the skylight that Denton had installed in their attic bedroom and listened to Denton’s heavy breathing and Ella’s soft whoosh, and thought of the wedding, and, on the floor below her, her three other children, Noah sleeping lightly or also awake, looking out the window. She imagined his heart beating, staccato as the ticking of a wind-up watch.

Mama! I want you!

Sally stood on her chair and Martha scooped her up with one arm, her other hand already stretched out for Sam’s teetering glass of milk.

Mama! I spilled!

The glass spun on the floor. At least it hadn’t shattered.

Denton had left the house early, trying to finish a job installing cabinets, working for a friend who paid him in cash, before going to his other job putting in windows and doors on the four tiny new houses down the street, squeezed onto one wide lot.

She counted to ten in her head, the way Bronwyn recommended. When that wasn’t enough, she turned her back on the puddle, just in time to see Noah lift Ella down from the change table, swinging her around, her naked legs hunched against him.

Noah! Stop!

She’s a superhero!

She resolved to be kind. Putting Sally down, she approached Noah.

Give her to me, sweetie.

She loves it!

She’s not a toy.

She’s flying!

She’ll pee on you! Sam yelled from the kitchen doorway.

Noah dropped Ella, who kept her legs folded into her body, bumped her head against the floor, and lay staring at Noah in surprise.

There was a hushed moment, as if they might agree to let whatever had happened pass unmarked, though no one would, or ever did. Then Ella wailed, Martha screamed at Noah, Noah flung himself away from her and out of the room.

She sat on the couch, nursing Ella, half noticing that Sally and Sam had carefully spread three clean dishtowels over the spilled milk and left them there.

Martha collected the late slips from the school office, called I love you after Noah, who flinched, halfway up the stairs to his classroom, and waved one raw pink hand but did not turn back. Then she walked along Dundas Street, Ella in the sling, humming in her sleep, her forehead against Martha’s chest.

Worming through the grocery list, the necessity of an evening meal, the towels she had left on the kitchen floor, was the sense she should say something to Bronwyn. She rehearsed a speech about the street party and the car that would take the bride to church. In her imaginary speech she withdrew her offer of the craft table, she provoked a disagreement that scuttled Max and Noah’s friendship, she took a principled position and became subtly worthier and was left with no one to talk to, like her eldest child scanning the yard. All this happened in her head before she crossed the second light to the supermarket.

She’d stepped into the road just as she saw the young man on the bike. The bike was too small, his addict-thin body crooked over it. He wore a red bandana, track pants, a black windbreaker buttoned up to his scrawny throat. His eyes were red-veined blue, the knuckles on both hands heavily bruised. He darted in and out of traffic, his head low over the handlebars, his face rigid. She sprinted to the other side just in time, shaken. He hurtled out into the intersection, cars honking and swerving as he made it to the other side and disappeared down a side street, shouting in angry triumph at a victory she did not understand.

Denton managed to come home early. She took Noah to the pool in the community centre, leaving Denton on the edge of the playground with Ella sleeping in the stroller, Sally and Sam digging in the warm sand. She wished Denton wouldn’t smoke, another thing he did that made her anxious that their family would seem unwholesome, though Denton, blowing expert rings over the back of the bench, told her that he was within his legal rights and she shouldn’t care about the assholes. She couldn’t help caring, felt his provocation reflected on her, not him. He appeared rakish, forgivable, his cigarette in one hand and a horror novel in the other, enjoying the spring heat wave, the sun on his face. She would be judged. She tried to swim beside Noah, who wanted to dive and splash, affronting a stately old man who ploughed, puffing, through the deep end, so she lapped away, leaving Noah to his territory. She loved the strange order of the swimmers, the way each person found a path, rarely colliding.

She floated on her back, thinking of the man on the bike, speeding towards her as if she was not there. She watched Noah dive and hover at the bottom of the pool, fighting the buoyancy of his body, his fists clenched.

She should have sent a text first, but she couldn’t decide exactly what she wanted to say (the speech in her head was out of the question), so she walked over to Bronwyn’s house in the dusk, pretending to herself that she was putting Ella to sleep, gripping the stroller as she eased it onto the curb, hoping she would find Bronwyn on her porch. The porch was empty. She lifted Ella out and reached for the bell. Before she touched it, her phone rang.

Come home right now.

They’d fought, they always fought, she thought, putting ice on the bulge on Noah’s forehead. Denton was solid, Noah liquid. She should never leave them alone.

I’m sorry.

I know.

I didn’t think he’d— I know.

As far as she could tell from competing and overlapping explanations, they’d fought about Noah’s homework. Denton had yelled, Noah wept, Denton yelled louder (and he was baffled by his own anger as much as by his son, as soon as the anger left him spent and contrite). Noah ran up the stairs, Denton followed, still shouting, Noah turned back to make sure his father was watching, and then, bracing himself, he drove his forehead against the brick of the exposed chimney.

"And then he looked at me—"

You weren’t listening! Noah shrieked. You never listen!

—and I know I shouldn’t yell—

Mama, it hurts—

I don’t know what to do anymore—

We don’t need to talk about this now, said Martha, in the voice she hated. A loving, brittle calm, the chime of maternal reassurance. She kissed Noah to the left of his bump. He passively received her kiss. The bump would be deep purple by morning.

It was eleven thirty. She wanted to go to sleep. She listened to Denton, slumped beside her, drawn into himself, talking without looking at her. He was failing, he knew he was failing, a failure, he said, of love or patience. What if he was not the right father for this barbed child, what if he could not help Noah, what if neither of them could? She listened, thinking of how jolly Denton seemed, how easy with himself, how surprised her neighbours would be if she described him now. The way he stared at the cluttered shelf on the opposite wall, at their clothes overflowing the laundry basket, the way he seemed on the point of tears. She listened until he stopped talking. He fell asleep before she did, unburdened if not absolved, perhaps grateful for her permission to show himself at a loss. His arm, slung casually across her waist, grew heavier. Her eyes were dry as sand. She turned away from him to Ella, who clawed at the sheet, looking for milk.

You came to my house? Bronwyn asked the next day as they walked together from the school doors.

You saw me?

Max said he saw you come up the steps.

Bronwyn stopped walking, absently jingling her house keys in one hand. Martha fought an urge to go out the gate, to refuse explanations.

I got a call. Noah—you know.

Bronwyn touched her shoulder, nodding.

Can we sit? Martha asked.

They sat on a bench.

Are you okay? Bronwyn asked, her brow creased. I mean, you seem—are you really okay?

I’m fine.

Noah?

Noah’s fine. She sounded angry without meaning to. Then she felt angry. I think we need to move all the stuff off that street.

What street?

The street where Zalia’s wedding is.

Zalia?

The bride.

A short pause.

Oh—you mean—oh. No, Zalia’s the grandmother. The bride is Ashley.

Another pause. If I was Bronwyn, Martha thought, I would make a joke, I would turn this into a joke and make us both laugh.

I’m sorry. I’ve thought about this a lot. I think it isn’t fair to make her walk to the car.

Fair?

I know it’s supposed to be for everyone, and it is, I know it is, I can see that, I agree with you, but it isn’t really, I don’t think it is, I think we need to move everything over, or I’m not going to do it, the craft table I mean, I can’t, I can’t.

I’m sorry you feel that way.

I do. I do.

It would be a loss.

Martha wasn’t going to cry, she wished she could, even if crying was the way