Lemon Read online

  Coach House Books, Toronto

  copyright © Cordelia Strube, 2009

  first edition

  This epub edition published in 2010. Electronic ISBN 978 1 77056 253 0.

  Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also acknowledges the support of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program.

  The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Strube, Cordelia

  Lemon / Cordelia Strube.

  isbn 978-1-55245-220-2

  I. Title.

  ps8587.t72975l44 2009 c813'.54 c2009-904271-

  for Carson

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  About the Author

  1

  ‘If I hadn’t been reading about a Jewish girl in Nazi Germany, I might have let Zippy kill me.’ This gets Blecher scribbling in her notepad. I knew it would. She’s a psych-major-dropout-turned-guidance-counsellor, the only thing between me and another suspension.

  ‘She tried to kill you, really?’

  I nod, sucking on my Tootsie Pop.

  ‘Let’s talk about all your mothers.’ Blecher always wants to ‘talk’; she learned that in Psych 101. I don’t want to talk, especially about my mothers. It’s not that I have anything against them. I don’t go around blaming them for my inability to attend classes regularly, or to find the meaning of life, but mental disturbances seem to be a recurring theme, if my current mother’s crack-up is any indication. ‘Why would a student want to stab me?’ she keeps asking. The fact that she was the school principal eludes her. Which is why another suspension must be avoided. Rattling around the house with Drew freaking over her stab wounds is no joyride.

  I keep sucking, staring at the mottos taped to the wall behind Blecher’s desk. ‘HANG IN THERE!’ one of them says. ‘TOMORROW THIS WILL BE YESTERDAY!’ assures another. ‘TIME IS THE GREAT HEALER!’ Beside the slogans are smiley faces. I endure Blecher because our ‘sessions’ keep me out of the halls crowded with buttheads, but the woman is seriously damaged. She dyes her hair orange and fries it with a curling iron to make it puff off her head. She wears little pointy shoes and stashes food in Tupperware in her desk. You can be talking about something personal, like how you wish you could develop an eating disorder but you can’t stop eating, and she’ll reach into a drawer and pull out a cracker and one of those cheese triangles wrapped in foil. You’ll have to sit there watching her tear the foil off the cheese in little tiny strips. Soon the cubicle-sized office will stink of Blecher’s digestion.

  Pen ready, she looks probingly at me. ‘Let’s talk about how your first mother tried to kill you.’

  ‘Pills. Plus a jump off the balcony, holding hands so we wouldn’t be lonely.’

  ‘How did you stop her?’

  ‘I said I was reading.’ After Anne Frank, I was hooked on persecuted-Jewish-girl stories. Compared to them, living with Zippy wasn’t so bad. Or putrid Damian for that matter. Shared custody meant I was in constant motion. Like the Jews, I had no homeland.

  Blecher pats her puffed hair. ‘Why do you think Zippy wanted to commit suicide?’

  ‘To teach Damian a lesson. He was always bumping uglies with other dames.’

  The truth is I considered pretending to swallow the pills, faking the jump, then shaking myself free of her, watching her body flail through the air in her fluffy bathrobe. Then I twigged to the awful truth that I’d be left all alone like the Jewish girl. Her father had gone into hiding and her mother was constantly volunteering at the orphanage. Jews had been forbidden to attend German schools so the girl had to hide out in the apartment all day. ‘I love you more than anybody, Mother,’ I said, which wasn’t saying much as I didn’t love anybody - except my hamster, Alice, who’d died - but I understood that dramatics were required, that our death warrant was Zippy’s cry for help. I dropped to my knees, grabbed her around the waist and wailed into her bathrobe. ‘I don’t want to die and I don’t want you to die! Why do we have to die!?’

  ‘Because nobody gives a fuck about us, honeybunch. Nobody gives a fuck!’

  Blecher twirls one of her gold stud earrings, winding up her brain. I spare her the sordid details of Zippy’s debacle because Blecher’s one of those living-in-a-Disney-movie types who get hysterical when you reveal life’s atrocities. ‘It must have been terrifying for you,’ she says.

  ‘I just wanted to finish my book.’ The Jewish girl was walking alone in streets full of Nazis. She bought sausages from an ‘Aryans Only’ butcher. He even called her liebling. I was scared shitless he would discover her true identity and snatch her bratwurst.

  ‘You’ve always found solace in reading, haven’t you?’ Blecher’s powers of observation continue to amaze. I only have a book on me 24/7. ‘I love to read,’ she says, which is outrageous because the only thing she reads is Archie comics. She hides them in a New Yorker or something so you’ll think she’s intellectual.

  ‘How’re you taking Archie tying the knot with Veronica?’ I ask, suspecting she’s pro-Betty and pretty broken up about the wedding.

  ‘We’re here to talk about you, Limone. What did Zippy do when you refused to co-operate?’

  ‘I distracted her by begging for another hamster.’ The Jewish girl begged her mother to promise she wouldn’t send her away with the orphans to England. ‘Promise me, Mutti,’ she’d pleaded. But Mutti pushed her away and told her to finish her latkes. Zippy didn’t push me away but the fluff on her bathrobe was tickling my nostrils. Thump thump thump banged through the wall as the neighbours cranked their stereo for another Friday-night beer swill. If we made it through the night, Damian would be there in the morning, stinking in his Buick. We’d go to the Golden Griddle and I’d stuff my face while he’d sweat over the sports section.

  I never told Damian about the botched double suicide. He’d already left Zippy anyway to shack up with Drew who’s ashamed of being a neat freak and tries to mess things up once in a while, do something really radical like leave her coat lying around. I’m a chronic slob so there have been tensions between us. At first Damian tried to get me to call Drew ‘Mother.’ Drew didn’t care what I called her. We got along alright, passing the Shredded Wheat and all that. Damian was busy bossing around illegal immigrants on construction sites, so Drew and I spent a lot of time alone, in separate rooms. Mostly I read, got into the dead Russians, especially Dostoyevsky because everybody in his books is so totally damaged. He must have been totally damaged what with that secret society business, being sentenced to death and all that, then being carted off to Siberia.

  Blecher digs around in a box of Ritz Bits. ‘Did Zippy get you another hamster?’

  ‘Negative.’

&nbs
p; ‘How did that make you feel?’ She’s wearing her concerned-counsellor expression, lips pursed, eyebrows merged. Best to defuse things before she contacts Children’s Aid.

  ‘I watched Bob and Bing movies.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Hope and Crosby.’

  Blecher masticates Ritz Bits, clearly ignorant of the twentieth century’s primo comic duo. I’ve got all the road movies. Bob lived to be a hundred. I think about that when I watch him being blown out of a cannon or something. I like movies made before 1950, when women had soft bodies and something to do in flicks besides strip and fake orgasms. Dorothy Lamour never flashed her headlights. Rossi and Tora, my non-compos associates, can’t stand anything that doesn’t have sex or special effects. ‘How can you watch black and white?’ they kvetch. When I tried to get them to sit through Harvey Rossi said, ‘Is this supposed to be funny? Like, anybody can see there’s no rabbit.’

  ‘Maybe the rabbit shows up later,’ Tora suggested.

  James Stewart’s alright, but Cary Grant’s my man. I almost read his biography once but decided I didn’t want to know what a fuck-up he was, twenty-five wives and all that. I know he was born Archibald Leach then remade himself as Cary Grant. I wouldn’t mind doing something like that.

  ‘You have your whole life ahead of you, Limone,’ Blecher says, shaking the empty Ritz box. ‘You should be full of hope and enthusiasm.’

  ‘It’s hard to get enthusiastic when adults keep telling us everything sucks.’

  ‘When have you heard me speak negatively about anything?’

  ‘Not you, the usual noddies who yak about the good old days before kiddie porn and pollution. When people left their doors unlocked and kids walked home alone. When employers paid benefits and didn’t downsize every three seconds.’

  This stumps her. She scribbles on her pad.

  ‘These days,’ I continue, slowly so she can get it all down, ‘unless you’re a super-brain or gorgeous, you’re going to end up in some bottom-feeder job at some corporation that’s going to restructure every time you take a crap. If you make it through the first cuts, you might as well chain yourself to your cubicle because they’re going to want your soul.’

  That’s why boys get into guns. It’s easy and you can scare people who wouldn’t give you a job interview if you offered to blow them. Well, maybe if you offered to blow them.

  ‘There’s no room out there,’ I say. ‘It’s way too crowded. We need more war and pestilence.’

  ‘You cannot,’ Blecher says, ‘you simply cannot expect to function with such a bleak outlook.’

  ‘I don’t expect to function.’

  ‘You’ll break your mother’s heart.’

  ‘Which one?’

  2

  Drew’s hunched over the crosswords again, still in Damian’s old pjs.

  ‘Do you want anything from the store?’ I ask. ‘There must be something you’ll eat.’ I think she shakes her head. She’s stopped picking up after me. The place looks like a tornado hit.

  Instead of jail, the knifer’s getting medication and treatment for pms, plus therapy for depression and anger management. She’s supposed to keep an hour-by-hour log of her mood and seek counselling if it’s negative. She wears a wristwatch that beeps every forty-five minutes to remind her to check her mood. She hasn’t returned to school. She told the judge she was sorry and that she wants to meet with Drew to apologize in person. Drew can’t face her, couldn’t even attend the court proceedings. The letter opener was twenty-three centimetres long. Drew had to have surgery to remove it. I caught her trying to look at the scar in the full-length mirror. She couldn’t turn her head enough to see it properly but I saw it, red and ridged, like something out of a horror movie.

  I push my cart around the Valu-Mart, sniff and squeeze things, pretend I’m like other people, buy some Black Forest ham thinking Drew might go for it instead of peanut butter. Her first husband’s son is coming next week. He’s a tree saver, climbs trees and lives in them. He gives the trees names and has a special tree-saver name himself, Thor or something. I stare at the frozen foods trying to figure out what a tree saver might eat that I can nuke because old Drew won’t be playing hostess any time soon. Zippy was always buying prepared foods and becoming hysterical when the food didn’t look like it did on TV. Me, the seven-year-old wizard, explained that TV wasn’t like real life. Zippy had a problem with this concept, was always comparing her daily grind with the smoke and mirrors on the one-eyed monster. ‘It’s not humanly possible to look that good,’ she’d say, regarding some liposuctioned model type. I decided there was no way I was going to spend my life sitting in front of a box that told me I was ugly. I quit TV and even movies, the modern ones anyway, because they get inside my head: all those hard bodies jumping in and out of cars and rutting. Plus the violence. Rossi forced me to watch Gangs of New York and I couldn’t handle all that butchery. What’s his name, who was in Titanic, was in it and Rossi’s got the hots for him. Ever since her breasts sprouted, Rossi’s only concern is whether guys think she’s sexy. I tell her they’d ram a tree if it had a hole in it. Tora has small breasts and writes poems in lower case about her isolation. She’s been working on an ode about the stabbing, depicting Drew as some kind of girl Jesus. The three of us were eating fries at the time of the incident, heard a hollering and saw Drew with the letter opener sticking out of her back, still holding her food tray. She must be the only principal in history who eats in the cafeteria. Anyway, preoccupied with the greater good, she didn’t twig to the fact that she’d been seriously wounded. She carefully set down the tray, switching to conflict-resolution mode, but the knifer didn’t seem too interested and started swiping at Drew with her paws, calling her a cunt-shitting bitch. This got the mob’s attention; even the geeks looked up from their techno-crap. Finally Mr. Coombs, super-jock phys. ed. teacher, tackled the girl from behind and held her arms behind her back. She kept wiggling around, shoving her ass into his crotch, making Coombs’ eyebrows pop. When the paramedics arrived, Drew was lying motionless with her legs sticking out at weird angles.

  ‘How’s your mother?’ Damian asks.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Has she left the house yet?’

  ‘Negative.’

  Ever since Damian started feeling guilty about leaving me on suicide watch for mother number one, he’s been taking me out. We started with doughnuts but have progressed to beer. The waitresses act wenchy around him and don’t ask my age. I guess he’s good-looking, though his hair’s thinning a bit. He’s alright. I’ve never expected much from him. When he isn’t chasing pussy, he’s stomping around in a hard hat on building sites. He met Drew when he was the site manager for our school reno. Now he’s with some other tomato he really wants me to like. They play tennis and drag me out so I can miss every single ball.

  ‘She should be seeing a therapist,’ he says.

  ‘To which mother would you be referring?’

  ‘Drew, obviously.’

  ‘Obviously.’ I like saying that word, stretching out the ob then gliding into the vious.

  One table over, a couple are shoving tongues down each other’s throats. Damian’s pretending he hasn’t noticed.

  ‘I’d like some nachos,’ I say, knowing the cheese will stick to my thighs.

  ‘Whatever you want,’ he says, wiping sweat off his forehead with his napkin. He always sweats around me. I figure it’s due to his high blood pressure and compulsive lying. ‘A little bird told me your biological mother wants to meet you.’

  I don’t say anything because I know he will.

  ‘That’s exciting,’ he says. He always says, ‘That’s exciting,’ or ‘How exciting.’ It never is. I ask the waitress for nachos.

  He leans over the table, giving me his undivided attention. ‘Aren’t you just a tad curious about her?’

  I don’t tell him she’s probably trailer trash who hopes my existence will give her life meaning.

  ‘Zippy phoned the other day,
’ he says. ‘She thinks you’ll never forgive her.’

  That’s sweet, the two of them talking behind my back. ‘They let her out?’

  ‘She hasn’t been institutionalized for some time, Limone. If you paid attention you would know this.’

  ‘Are you paying attention? I mean, she was your wife. Maybe if you paid her more than a dollar a month, she wouldn’t have to clean toilets.’

  ‘For your information, she is no longer with Molly Maid. She’s working at Marty Millionaire.’

  ‘That’s exciting.’ I try to picture Zippy in her fluffy bathrobe hustling couches.

  The nachos arrive and I start shoving them in my mouth. When I was eight I decided to stop reacting to humans. Reacting gives them power, which they can use against you. Registering nothing shields you. The attackers throw jibes and punches but go unrewarded. You’re still inside your body feeling the pain, but the ass-faces can’t see it. This is particularly useful when boys stalk you. I’m classified as a ‘dog,’ which means they pass me off to a friend: ‘How ’bout some sucky-fucky with my friend here, bitch?’ What is it about boys and packs? A bunch of them are currently swarming total strangers. Even if the victims offer up their iPods and cells, the dullards still beat the crap out of them. So I take precautions, dress baggy, cover up. Avoid all techno gizmos.

  ‘Why don’t you give her a shout?’ he asks.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your real mom. It can’t hurt and, who knows, you might like her.’

  ‘What’s it to you if I call her?’

  ‘Limone, you’re a little short on role models right now. She might be just what you need, with Drew in rough shape.’

  ‘Drew’s fine.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Don’t think, okay, do me a favour, don’t think.’

  He does one of his walrus sighs then takes a gander at the couple swapping spit. I ingest more nachos, thinking about that woman who adopted two unbelievably cute Guatemalan babies only to discover that she couldn’t ‘bond’ with them. Nine loveless years later she passed them back to the adoption agency. ‘I made a mistake,’ she said. ‘They deserve so much more than I can give.’ Of course the boys weren’t cute babies anymore and nobody wanted to adopt them. They’re in foster care. I cut out their photo and put it in my mother/daughter scrapbook, even though they’re boys.