“I mean, I’ve seen one. Passed by one on the —”
“Yeah, whatever,” he said. “You wanna see a real one?”
“Where?”
“I know a place. She won’t come out till later, though. Time is it?”
My Timex said four-thirteen. “Quarter past four.”
“You gotta go home for dinner?”
“I think so. Yeah.”
“Your parents would let you come out afterward?”
“Yeah, I could come out.”
“So then meet me back here at six-thirty.”
“Six-thirty?”
“You didn’t hear me the first time?”
“I heard you.”
“Then the hell’s wrong with you?”
“What?”
“You’re retarded, eh?”
“No.”
“What’s your name?”
“Jim … Jim Myers,” I said.
“I’m Charlie.”
“Oh.”
“Retard,” Charlie mumbled, then crossed the road, slipping between idle traffic, and headed south down a side street. I walked west, back to my house on Concord Avenue.
* * *
My kitchen: a square white-walled room with white cabinets and a white counter and a white Bosche dishwasher and a white gas stove and a white table with four wooden chairs and a white fridge that had a white rectangular magnet sticking to the top left corner that read DR. R. BRUSILOFF GENERAL IMPLANT AND DENTISTRY in black print and below that had the address (somewhere on St. Clair Avenue West) and the telephone number (I knew it started with a nine) of Dr. R. Brusiloff’s office. Black and white tiles on the floor. Track lighting on the ceiling.
The sole piece of art in the room was a framed watercolour on the wall across from the sink that my sister, Amanda, had brought home the first summer she came back to Toronto from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. It was a semi-bird’s-eye view of a dense pine forest that cut off into a glassy green lake, with the sun setting all purple and pink on the horizon.
Marcia, Amanda’s dorm mate during her first year of university — who Amanda said was pretty much like her twin, they had so much in common — had painted the watercolour at the family cottage in Muskoka (where Amanda had spent reading week) and given it to Amanda for her nineteenth birthday.
When I returned home from my first day of school at Lawson Street Junior High, Amanda — she was taking a bus back to Kingston the next morning to begin her second year of university — was standing in the kitchen, admiring Marcia’s watercolour from a few steps back, three fingers pushed into her cheek.
“Isn’t it just … beautiful, Jim?” she asked without taking her eyes off the picture. “Don’t you think it adds a lot to this room? Makes it a lot more, I don’t know … livable?”
I flung my knapsack onto the floor, looked at the painting.
“It’s the … colours,” she said. “Marcia has such a good sense of colour. There’s something about them that’s so perfect … so real … in a way … but not real. So … imperfect …”
“Imperfect?”
“Yes, Jim. Imperfect.”
“Oh.”
“Imperfect,” she whispered to herself, and stood there, neck hunched, chin up, knees locked, small belly pushing against her floral-patterned button-down blouse, gazing deeply into the watercolour as if she were trying to find Waldo, until I asked her — and this was an honest inquiry — how come she didn’t hang the picture in her room if she liked it so much.
My sister huffed loudly and turned to me. Her face was long, and she had a small, squishy nose like my father’s, a bum chin, tiny eyes, straight brown hair with blond streaks bunched together at the back of her head with a see-through plastic clip. She gazed at me in that I-know-something-you-don’t way she had of making her chin wrinkle and her upper lip touch her nostrils. Instead of answering my question, she turned back to the watercolour, stared at it silently for a few moments, then, still looking at the picture, told me that Marcia had spent the summer sleeping on the uneven giant-cockroach-ridden dirt floor of a thatched hut in a small, impoverished West African village helping to build a library with a youth organization, and she wished she had done something interesting like that with her summer, something meaningful, something challenging, something … altruistic. Altruistic. Did I know what that word meant?
“No,” I said, and instead of telling me what that word meant, Amanda scratched the back of her neck, made a face as if she’d just taken a sip of rotten milk, and told me how much it sucked being stuck in nothing-to-do Toronto all summer working as a stupid lifeguard at stupid Sunnyside Pool, and how she hated the guy who worked with her, just hated him. He was this annoying high-school kid who called himself G-Bone, and he was cocky and talked as if he was black even though he was skinny and white and was so ignorant about everything, so affected, so uninformed, so … high school. And it was a stupid idea to take the job, and when she thinks about it the only real reason why she worked here all summer was because she felt as if she had to be around the house, that it wasn’t fair for her to be away all the time, the way our father was so … old. Seventy-one. Could I believe Dad was seventy-one?
“I guess,” I said.
“He was sixteen at the end of World War II.”
“I know.”
“He walks with a cane.”
“I know.”
“It’s hard for him to get to the second floor sometimes.”
“I know.”
“He has dentures.”
“I know,” I said.
Amanda smiled at me in an older-sister-kind-of-way, cocking her head a little, peering at me as if I were still an infant, and told me again how miserable it was being stuck in Toronto, especially knowing there was sooo much to see in this world, soooo much to do, sooooo much to learn, soooooo many interesting people to meet, and how wonderful it would be to travel around Europe or South America or Asia for a year, and her and Marcia were planning to go on some kind of trip after they graduated but that was still a long way away and she didn’t want to start thinking too far ahead because you never knew how things were going to turn out, and I should always remember that, that you never knew how things were going to turn out.
“You don’t?”
“No,” she said, then turned back to the watercolour, made a face as if somebody were shining a flashlight in her eyes, and said that living in Kingston last year, being independent, going to university — all of that was a really good experience. She couldn’t wait to leave tomorrow and move into the five-room apartment she’d found with Marcia and this other girl named Deborah who lived on her dorm floor during first year. Deb was from Ottawa and was really funny, said the most random things, and the three of them got along really well. They were all pretty much like twins, triplets, really, and she knew she’d already told me about Deb a hundred times. It was just that she was