Colleen
Colleen shuffled the God pamphlets in her lap while Mr. Andrews chalked square yellow letters on the board. Boring. The white-paper one was cheaply printed: the yellows did not line up with the reds or blues, so Jesus was all halo, no body. Inside was just a boring list of Sunday school and Bible-study classes. The glossier one had pictures of candles and sheet music, a paragraph about the joy of faith, a couple things that sounded like cheers. Even better, no church address where her father could go and ask questions. Not that he would.
“Ok, people, focused attention…” Mr. Andrews dropped the chalk into his sleeve. In her notebook Colleen wrote, Bible study group. Leader: Drew. Then she crossed out group and wrote cell, like terrorists. Scarier.
Mr. Andrews was saying, “I hope you’ll really get involved with this project, come to see poetry not as words on the page, but reality interpreted in words.”
Colleen wrote: The leader will interpret the reality of God’s words.
“Well, that’s the hour. Thanks, guys.”
Colleen stayed in her seat, waiting for Andrews to skedaddle out. She stared at her blue-ink, red-underline title: Mindfuck. Date in the upper righthand corner.
She flicked through the Bible she’d got out of the library. She was worried, a little, about accidentally brainwashing herself. Not very worried, but she’d watched talk shows. She knew about Mormon harems and Catholic perverts, kids going naked on compounds in Arizona, parents selling their houses to pay for deprogrammers.
Her mother would have had something to say about that. But her mother’s car had gone spinning off black ice seven months ago, and Joe was always at work or partying when anything good was on TV.
Joe
“No, I want the gig, but I can’t rehearse tomorrow. I’ve—I’ve got something else.” He dragged deep, held it in. Something else was recruiting focus groups of people who bought than a litre of cough medicine a year, but that didn’t sound how he wanted to sound. He exhaled into the exhaust fan. “I know the set, I could jump in after the opener.”
Joe was on the kitchen phone, watching the window for Colleen on the basement steps. He’d have time to pinch the joint and shove it in a pocket and before she got to the bottom and opened the door. Ever since her silent rage at the tinfoiled ball of hash beside the bathroom sink, he was trying, but the exhaust fan wasn’t that strong. When she lived across the country and they were together only two weeks a year, she’d been a little more forgiving. The turnips boiled over as he hung up, and he slammed the phone down. Joe knew seven recipes; tonight was root vegetable casserole.
He was pretty sure the drugs were part of that silent rage, but not all. She didn’t say what made her unhappy, or even that she was. But no one moved that fast, turned that sharply, with any joy. There was so much shit, it was hard to guess: dead mother, strange father, new school and apartment, plus nobody liked root vegetable casserole, it was just all he knew how to do. That was a problem with a lot of what he did.
Other girls her age talked more, he thought. Marcy had…probably. He’d only been with her three weeks and he hadn’t been sober all the time then, either. But it seemed that Marcy had bitched about homework, cried about dead birds, yelled when he stepped on her toes. Colleen never said a word.
Then again, neither did he. There was a cushion missing from the back of the couch where he slept. In the night, his right foot slipped through the gap and the ripped upholstery to the cold springs, the jagged edge of the broken one. He didn’t have the money for a new couch, nor the time to find a new cushion the right size. He just tried to keep his feet still at night, thought about sleeping in shoes, bandaged his right foot in the mornings. Maybe they weren’t the sort who talked about troubles, Joe and Colleen.
But Joe’s last relationship, and several others, had ended with normal people talk things over. But Colleen had left “The Lessons of Deuteronomy” mixed in with his dead mail and sheet music. But he didn’t mind talking, really. So he scraped the serving spoon through the casserole, sat down across from her and asked, “So, you’ve been thinking about religion?” Then he took a bite. The rice was mushy.
“Yep.” Colleen was picking out all the carrot medallions and lining them up around the rim of her plate.
“That’s cool. I went to church when I was your age. Sometimes.” A long pause, for chewing. He hadn’t cooked the turnips enough tonight. “You like Deuteronomy?”
“Yep.” Colleen was eating everything except for the necklace of carrots, even the tough turnips. “You know about that one?”
“Not really, much. But I care about whatever you care about. Tell me.”
Colleen chewed hard, blankfaced. Then she stood and left the room. He listened to the kitchen door’s creaking swing, put some salt on the rice, took a sip of water. He had no idea if she’d gone to get ketchup, to vomit, to Paris, reacting to something he’d said or the voices in her head. When she swung back in and snapped some pamphlets down on the table, he was relieved to see her again, relieved that the church stuff was pretty low-level. He was relieved to put down his fork to read. Nothing about hell, or door-to-dooring, not much even about God. Kids could go to YouthZone and learn Christian alt rock on Tuesdays. He wondered about that sound; probably lots of acoustic guitar, handslaps against the wood. He wondered if he had the cash for pizza.
“This sounds cool.” He set the papers down and picked up the knife again. “Fine.”
She shrugged and dug the tines of her fork into the twelve o’clock carrot. “I’m trying for more than fine.”
“Trying?”
“To know God.” She brought the carrot to her mouth and bit it in half. “To understand the universe.” Her rage was radiant and he couldn’t guess why. He couldn’t guess anything about her, not even whether she liked carrots most or least.
Colleen
The Bay jewellery was expensive, and Claire’s at the mall was just embarrassing. Besides, she wanted something over-the-top, a printed shopping bag that would make even live-and-let-live Joe squirm. She wanted Family Christian Bookshop.
It was so far east there were no sidewalks. Every asshole driver who saw her had to honk—to tell her she was in the way, that she was hot, that she wasn’t, who knew? There an even better-sounding store across town, but she couldn’t have walked that far, not even for Loaves and Fishes.
Family Christian Bookshop was pretty good—sky-blue carpeting and glass-fronted cases with wet streaks of Windex. Everything—t-shirts, aprons, stuffed dogs—was printed with Bible verses, or numbers and dots that maybe meant verse numbers. Clocks and bike helmets with prayers, t-shirts about chastity. Two mud-haired toddlers running around, jangly guitar music on the speakers. It sounded a little like tunes she heard through her bedroom wall when her father rehearsed. Other than that, pretty good.
When she asked the wall-eyed clerk where to find the “talismans of faith,” she sort of got told off. “I don’t think talisman is the right word to use. A talisman is supposed to bring you, like, luck and power. Talismans do stuff. A cross represents something, but it doesn’t do anything. You should read—”
Afterwards, she went down a new path in the slanting sunlight, trying to cut home through the ravine. She had her library Bible in her bag, thunking heavy against her thigh.
As she walked, she dangled the silver in front of her face like a hypnotist, poked at the cross with her fingertip. Her fingertip was bigger. The thing was actually from the baby jewelry section. It wasn’t likely Joe would notice more than a glint at her throat. She trickled the chain back into the bag, and uncrumpled the receipt.
FAMILY CHRISTIAN BOOKSHOP
Silver cross/chain — $4.95.
She would leave that somewhere prominent, maybe.
Four-ninety-five could’ve bought what she’d meant to buy, a rhinestone WWJD, but with the one eye watching her, the too-familiar guitar, those kids with their clean soft faces, Colleen couldn’t think.
The receipt wasn’t going to be much good soon, she was rolling it ragged, fretting the edges. Soon it would look like garbage and Friday 6am, when Joe ran around throwing things into grocery sacks, it would be gone. She carefully tucked the receipt back into her pocket.
Colleen wasn’t sure where she was—the path seemed to have zagged away from the underpass, and she couldn’t hear traffic anymore. She still didn’t know this stupid town very well. She tipped her head down against the laser sun, now almost parallel with her face. The clerk’s weird gaze had felt like a laser, too, an x-ray of her brain to see she wasn’t one of them, a different sort entirely, a liar, not very nice.
Marcy had always said her father was a nice person, just not ready to be a dad when Colleen was born. And when he’d finally turned up, when she was four and she’d visited him those summers he wasn’t tree-planting, she didn’t think he’d gotten any readier, though he was nice. He was always trying to give her stuff she didn’t want or like: a hat made of straw, candles stuck in winebottles, once a puppy that got sick. Nice didn’t mean anything. Nice was just how you looked at it. If red was blue, it wouldn’t make a difference, really, in what you saw. Seeing your father as God on a cottonball cloud or a guy in Toronto who never called you—just a perspective thing. You didn’t get to have dinner with either of them.
Except now she did, when they both were home. She was hungry, and the sun was giving her a headache. It was possible that someone—a teacher, not Joe—had said not to go to the ravine, or maybe just not alone. She wanted spaghetti, the best of Joe’s suppers.
Different ways of looking—he tried so hard to be nice to Colleen, but he’d ditched her mom when she was pregnant. Not so nice, not so…Christian. He said, “I care about what you care about, Collie.”
Colleen shut her eyes. “I’ve been born for a long time. You only now care.” She was talking to no one. By the pink slant of the sun, she knew it was nearly night.
Marcy had been right. Joe wasn’t ready for anything, not even trash day. He’d met Colleen at the bus station the first day with a milkshake, tried to hug her and got milkshake all down her back. Her father was a very nice person, but that didn’t mean much. It was just a way of seeing the world.
She heard the shush of the highway at last.
Joe
“Collie, hey, leave your shoes on. I dropped a glass. I—”
“Colleen.” She stood on her right foot, her left foot braced against the wall, the laces on the green suede sneaker half undone.
“Colleen, please leave your shoes on.” Joe was crouching by the piano, a wet paper towel shredding in his fingers. He had liked that glass. “And why’dja miss dinner?”
“What do you have against my name?”
Joe sighed, put the grey wet lump on the parquet. “The N just slips away when I’m talking fast. You missed ratatouille.” He swabbed at the floor, wet mixing with the shards. This didn’t work too well, but he couldn’t find the dustpan.
Colleen thwacked her unlaced shoe onto the floor. “You don’t like my name.”
“I like your name. It’s yours, it’s you.” He pressed drown on the paper towels, wringing a puddle onto the parquet. “Listen, I’m playing tonight, I’ve got to get going.”
“It’s because my mother gave it to me.”
Joe pitched onto his knees. He had meant to reach for the glass glints near the wall, but she startled him and he toppled to fast, hard. “Why would you say that?”
“Because you didn’t like her either.” Colleen stepped on the heel of her untied shoe to get it off; then the other with her bare toes. She didn’t have socks on. “Right?”
“Colleen, where are you getting this?” Joe looked at the sharp spots of light, at Colleen’s naked feet, at her pinched mouth. “I never said a word against your mother.”
“Yeah, you’ve never said a word.”
His knees popped as he rocked back on his heels. “What do you want me to say?”
Her eyes glinted like glass. “Drew says to honour our mother and father—”
“Drew?” Joe wasn’t really listening, fretting the paper to mush, pricking his fingers. He tried to remember the exact definition in 1001 Beautiful Babies at Chapters.
“Drew says to honour is to know. She gave me my name.”
“I’ll honour it, I’ll remember.” He wanted to say that he would honour Marcy’s memory, too, but that would sound too much like a lie. His memory of Marcy was thin as a summer dress, Baby Duck wine, vending machine condoms. “Who is Drew?”
Colleen tossed her hair down her left shoulder, smiling with only the left corner of her mouth. “Don’t worry, he’s someone nice.” She started towards her bedroom.
“Just, I want you to…be careful.” Once she had crossed the floor unflinching, slammed her door, he relaxed, until he saw the smudged blood on the wood.
They were the same blood type. He had a whole box of words and letters to clarify who he was dealing with. Late at night, when he didn’t know what the fuck to do, he went page by page: birthweight, grades in kindergarten, eye test, bloodtype. No baptismal certificate, he was nearly positive. But it didn’t matter, he couldn’t imagine her from the documentation, could barely imagine her when she was in front of him. Maybe imagination was the problem.
He hadn’t been able to imagine why independent Marcy was trailing him along the library shelves, the autoshop hallway, the soccer field. He hadn’t noticed her puffy face, her refusal of a smoke. She was a party girlfriend and he wanted them to be party broken up. So he told her his band, no name yet, just three guys and a drum kit, was going to Montreal in his uncle’s old van. They had a gig, sort of.
She’d nodded, sniffled, said, Call me when you get back. We need to talk. But it had been so much easier to forget about flunking trig tests, fighting with his dad, returning the van, calling Marcy. So he didn’t go back, not for a long time. Even when she got his number, even when he sent her money, even when he was visiting and sitting with Marcy and four-year-old Colleen in the sweltering ball-room at McDonald’s, they’d never really talked. He’d always been sorry, and he’d never imagined. He didn’t think that made him any less of a douchebag, really.
Colleen
Little known fact: Colleen hated falling asleep when her father wasn’t home. Of course he didn’t tuck her in, or necessarily even notice that she was going to bed to say goodnight, but she liked him there at night. His breath, rustling pages, voice.
Colleen listened to her father. In one sense, he knew: she obeyed, mainly. The other sense of listen—that she heard his voice—she was happy to keep to herself.
Good nights, she lay awake after homework and teethbrushing and laying out school clothes, and listened to Joe was rehearsing in the living room. Through thin walls, his voice was light but not soft, smooth as a muddy path. He took hours to perfect a song, a verse, a bar.
When she was only visiting, when she didn’t have time to get used to things, his tenor would get into her head and vibrate there. Now she didn’t mind. Through the plywood and drywall, she couldn’t make out the words, but the sound was edgier than anything he ever said, and stuck in her head in a way their conversations never did. Sometimes, she heard something wistful, a dreamy minor key. Those times, she could treat his voice as a lullaby, or at least it lulled her, and she fell asleep more or less peaceful, more than she might have been otherwise.
The nights he wasn’t home, falling asleep took hours.
Joe
People used the words holy fool if you were 32 and still messing around with your guitar. If you wore stretched-out t-shirts with band names on them and played for free at parties while the only perk at your real job was a headset phone. If you couldn’t afford cable or brand-name cheese, but you thought you were a musician. Joe accepted that, mainly. When he was on break from querying strangers about laxatives, and someone said, “How’s the music?” he said, “Ah, you know how it is,” which meant anything, so was safe. He’d looked up holy fool on Wikipedia and knew it didn’t seem to mean what everyone seemed to think, sort of heroic, really. Probably Colleen knew what a holy fool was, or at least would’ve understood the Wikipedia page. She knew a lot, his daughter.
The bands he was in always broke up, or something less something less violent than breaking, maybe fell apart. But there was always a friend’s band that needed a second guitar, a wedding, a fundraiser, something in a bar with no cover—always a stage somewhere where he was welcome. Not his melodies, not his count-ins, but all right. If the lights were bright enough, he couldn’t see the audience. He could pretend to be just fooling around in the living room, the same chords again and again, until they were perfect. If that was all, it was enough.
But there was more, after: beer and hugs and kisses. Of course there were reasons to go home: the 8-to-4 shift tomorrow, the shoes he’d spilled soup on, the cheap silver cross that he had found tangled in the shower drain, and what could he say to her? He kept listening to the chords in his head, kept drinking and feeling good and liked and talented. He didn’t go home until drunk verged on hungover, and when he crash-landed on the couch, he left his feet on the floor.
The clatter of pans woke him, too early, in time for work. Colleen was at the stove when he swung through the kitchen door. She kept her back to him, pretending she hadn’t heard the creak. His head felt inflated and rubbery, aching as if slammed against the floor. Finally, to her flagpole spine, he said, “There’s this movie.”
She turned, what he’d wanted, but then she winced. Joe could imagine his face ridged with pillow creases, too-long red hair standing sideways, bruisy bags under his eyes. The room spun. He wanted to sit, but felt the advantage of height.
“I was thinking you’d like it.”
She shook her head fast and her braid almost flipped into the eggs. She looked tired, too. He knew it was exhausting to sleep unhappy. “I have things to study, I haven’t time for entertainment.” She reached to spatula the eggs onto plates.
He collapsed heavily into a kitchen chair, skidding it loud across the floor. He’d heard about the movie at work, or the bar, or something. He mainly remembered. “It’s about—um, it’s, like, the life of this saint, this woman in…like, the 1500s. I think.”
“So, it’s a choice between thoughtful Bible study with my cell, and two hours of Hollywood faux-spirituality?” She thrust a plate at his chest, two lonely eyes of eggs.
He set down the plate of black-edged whites. “But you can have both, can’t you?”
“Drew says…”
He waited out the pause, staring at the gritty floor: bits of onion peel, a grey spider web, a flake of stale cereal.
“Drew says to avoid distractions.”
“Drew is— This is…” He abandoned that comment, slouched lower and cut a yolk to watch it bleed yellow across white and black. “I don’t know who Drew is.”
“I’m learning from him about the…powers in my life.” She was scraping up burnt shards of egg.
Joe had to be at work in 48 minutes. He couldn’t do more than eat his breakfast and hold his head steady. He wondered if she felt happy about what she said. She didn’t look happy. She picked up her plate, char and little else. Moving towards the hall, she paused and rested her oily fingers on the bone of his narrow shoulder. The touch was so sharp and fast that it was almost a pinch, but it seemed to zero in on the tense spot there, and her gaze was softer than her grip.
All she said was, “I will honour your request as a dutiful daughter. I will check the listings for an early show.” She took her plate to her room. It was something.
Colleen
By the time they hit the Mariah-Carey Muzak at the movie theatre, it had occurred to Colleen that she was being stupid, stupid in a very tiring way. The cuts on her feet hurt and before she lost it, the fake silver off the little cross had itched a crucifix rash into her throat. Joe was confused by the parking meter for five minutes before they could go inside. She was too tired to think of another plan.
They walked across the lobby, and Colleen thought: Do I do it now? Toss myself to the carpet before the snack-girl smiles at him. What will he think? The thing about tongues is how does anyone know it’s tongues? What if he thought I was having a seizure? Well, so, fine: hospitalized for glory, holy in a paper dress.
How long can I writhe on the floor? How long could God speak through a girl? I don’t know if I can lie any more. Lies are sins, too. My mother would hate this. How did I fuck this up? Why’s he buying popcorn? We’ll never eat it. If I don’t fall now he’ll get close enough to see the lie in my face. What do tongues say? Did Marcy ever believe in God? She didn’t teach me enough words. What words did she love? Did she love my father, let him leave her? Why didn’t she say something?
I wish I had a script. The words of God should be perfect. I don’t want to shriek and thrash. I want to say beautiful things, just this once.
Her father walked fast, spilling popcorn, looking worried. Colleen spun away as he approached. “I’m going to the bathroom.”
The bathroom was cold and smelled of cinnamon disinfectant. Colleen stood in the third stall. Her feet hurt and her throat hurt and she was so tired. This would be the last scene of this performance, and even now she needed a script. Colleen felt very young. Just a few years older, Marcy had had the world in her belly.
I want to say, I want to say…
Colleen pressed her forehead against the metal door. She could hear the perfect words in her mind, like the classroom words she was supposed to look up but never did—they were perfect as they were: lambent, id, fulcrum, mercury, palatial. Colleen fumbled in her purse for a pencil, couldn’t find any paper. She was imagining how she wanted to sound. Smooth, elegant—like a melody. She did not want to mutter, twisting facedown on the popcorn-scented carpet. She raised the pencil to the wall and began to write all the good words she knew, or sort of knew—aerial, liar, Perspex, munitions, Galapagos, countess, illustrious, wire. Stopped, thought for a moment, wrote more over the toilet paper—taint, Toledo, dwarf, darn, coffee—the feminine product disposal—clavicles, lackadaisical, tree, direction—the slide lock—arboretum. She wrote, milk, calico, fury, endive, halo, zip, emery, lithe. Crouching, around the hem of the door she wrote, tinsel, bruise, munificent, remunerate, suicide, Maybelleine, fortunate, dial. She wrote until her brain spun, the pencil smudged, and shoes hammered heavy across the tile floor. She saw them stop under her wall of words, but she kept writing—cascade, gelato, mirth, plebiscite, ennui, night—until a thick, tired voice said, “You wanna come on out of there, ok? I wanna have a word with you about what it means to deface property, ok? Now.”
Crouching surrounded by her script, Colleen surrendered to whatever surveillance cameras or omniscient God told security when kids wrote on the walls. She surrendered that scripting tongues wouldn’t work. She stopped writing.
Without standing, without putting away her pencil, she reached up to slide the bolt, tipped sideways to open the door. Colleen looked up at a thick young woman in a blue security uniform, sky-blue blouse half untucked from navy slacks. She had nothing but a walkie-talkie on her belt.
When the woman didn’t lunge for her, Colleen asked, “How did you know?”
The guard shrugged, tugging more shirt from her waistband. “Sometimes I just get a bolt, you know? A bolt from God.”
“These are His words.” Colleen jerked a thumb at the wall. The words went all the way up, from hinge to bolt. Calliope, sugar, tandem, gloss, mistral, concubine, zeal. Colleen didn’t know how long she’d been writing.
“God writes on the bathroom walls? Huh. Could you stand up, please? Grafitti’s a call-the-parents one.” Colleen didn’t want to stand. She put her cheek down on her knee. She could feel the pricks on her soles, painful, for such shallow cuts.
The guard was not small, so it surprised Colleen when she crouched to meet her gaze. Her eyes were very light brown, like beer or shadows on sand. Her light eyes traveled over the walls, over the beautiful words. “Congruent,” she said softly. “Mica, Marlboro, toreador. Cardiac.” On cardiac, she leaned closer, looked harder. Then she licked a finger, and smudged it through the r, the d, up into the x of excelsior.
“Pencil?”
Colleen shrugged. She was getting a cramp in her left thigh.
“Well. Well.” She stared at the dirty wet floor. “Still vandalism. But…” she gazed up “…but who hath heard such a thing? Who hath seen such things? … We gotta go call your mom and dad.”
Colleen propped her chin up on her right knee, watched a pair of red boots stride by, then pink sneakers, plain black loafers. “My mom’s dead,” she said, “but my dad’s out by the popcorn stand.”
Joe
Nobody loves a lone man staring at a ladies room door. Joe stood well back, but he was too scared to move out of view. The snackbar clock said 24 minutes. Could she have collapsed? Escaped through a window? Ascended radiant and immaterial into heaven? Other parents twitched their daughters closer, seeing him staring ravenous at the little lady symbol, clutching an untouched jumbo popcorn.
Joe knew God in the grace of his daughter striding across a crowded lobby. A miracle of a daughter, a sin by some standards, but a win somehow, anyway. A provisional victory: a woman in blue followed her.
When Colleen stood in front of him he had nothing to say. All questions, accusations, pleas dissolved before her sword-straight body. Her gaze was barely on him. She was looking at the point you punch for, that spot on the back of the skull.
“Who is Drew?” he asked finally.
“Drew is my study advisor.” She was motionless. So was the woman behind her.
“I… Collie— You and…Drew study the Bible?”
“The world. The world is confusing and complex, and Drew—”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“Yes, the world is complex and confusing. I was just agreeing with you.”
‘Oh. Ok.” She shifted her weight, then again. “Wait. No. It is only confusing if we let extraneous matters distract us.”
The guard cleared her throat. When they turned, she said slowly, “They that forsake the law praise the wicked: but such as keep the law contend with them. So I’m afraid you’ll have to come with me. I’ve got to write this up.”
She started towards the guest services desk without checking to see if they followed. Joe did. After a few paces, he looked back, eyebrows raised. Colleen caught up, light on her sore feet, and they went on together to the long blue desk.
“What did you do?”
“I wrote on the bathroom wall.”
“What did you write?”
She slumped, almost leaning into his shoulder. Almost. “The words of God.”
“Yeah, ok.” Joe felt the burn of fear returning to his belly. He wished he had anything Colleen needed: strength, insight, advice, wit, anything but the stupid crinkling sack of popcorn still bundled in his arms like an infant. He couldn’t even think of an appropriate question to keep her talking instead of staring at Ticketholder Privileges. The guard rummaged for a form. He whispered, “What words does God use?”
Colleen finally met his eyes, green to green. “The best words.”
Joe inclined his head.
“I—I didn’t know what words God would use. I don’t know God. I just tried to guess, words that, words that sound good.”
There was a crash of thunder through the theatre wall and Joe realized that the movie had started. It didn’t matter; the posters in the lobby all looked holy-war bloody, and here, now, while the guard peered at her papers, there was a moment’s peace.
Joe thought about God and had no answers, and his daughter was praying with a man who wasn’t real to a God he doubted she believed in. Colleen didn’t seem to believe in anything at all. Stop. He didn’t know what she believed. Stop. He had never asked her. She was sad and Joe wanted her to have what made her happy, even if it was false gods or complicated mindfucks or imaginary friends. Stop. He had to ask her to know what she wanted. She probably wouldn’t say, but that would be an admission, too.
He asked her, “Did you write your name?”