Helpless Read Online Free PDF Page B

by the day. He was a destitute architectural student. He’d hitchhiked up from New York City to see the train stations of southwestern Ontario and Quebec. She hadn’t had sex in over a year and he was agonizingly handsome, so when he couldn’t find a condom she went ahead anyway. Afterwards he confessed to being engaged to a girl who wanted to save herself for marriage. “I betrayed you both,” he said and looked so miserable that Celia patted his shaved head and made him instant coffee in a CN Tower mug. How strange, she reflects now, that Rachel should be the outcome of those few, not unpleasant, but hardly earth-shattering hours in a squalid room where the radiator banged and a woman out in the hall kept yelling, “That’s your opinion!”
    She’s had this thought before, of course; she’s just never been so impressed by it as she is now. But over the past few days a lot of things—known things—are striking her as remarkable. “Can you imagine?” she said yesterday to someone who was renting the new Gone with the Wind DVD. “There was slavery only a hundred and fifty years ago! Mammy was Scarlett’s slave!”
    It’s as if the heat is slowing down her normally racing mind and urging her to see details and hidden implications. In her dreams, oddly enough, just the opposite is going on:she glances over things, she misses the obvious. A couple of nights ago she dreamed that she and Rachel were driving along a highway littered with what she thought were pieces of tire, but when she said, “Look at all those pieces of tire,” Rachel said, outraged, “They’re armadillos! What if you hit one?” In a dream a few nights before that, she bumped into her mother on the street, and when she said, “But you died!” her mother told her, irritably, that the dead come back all the time, they’re all around “if anyone cared to look.”
    R ACHEL LIES on her cot and wonders if the black lamb is sleeping. It was so cute. Mrs. Dunlop took the class to visit it this afternoon at the Riverdale farm, and everybody tried to pat it through the fence but only Sindra, who has really long arms, could reach. “The coat isn’t called fur,” Mrs. Dunlop said, “it’s called fleece.” Rachel already knew this. The mother sheep was white, so the father must have been black, but then why wasn’t the lamb brown? Or gray? Rachel didn’t ask in case it was a stupid question. An old, scruffy man Mrs. Dunlop thought worked there (he turned out to be just a man walking by) told the class that when the farm was the Toronto Zoo back in the fifties, there was a chimpanzee who used to beg for cigarettes. “He’d go—” the man said, and he bent down right in front of Rachel and started huffing and tapping his fingers on his mouth. His pushed-out lips disgusted her but she didn’t want to hurt his feelings so she stood there until Mrs. Dunlop tugged her away.
    She thinks about lips. Fish have lips. Cats don’t. Felix only has two lines, the same pink as his nose and the pads on his feet. His pads are like beans. For some reason he’sscared of the basement. He sleeps out on their deck at night and eats moths. He’s getting fat.
    She wonders if the fat man in the baseball cap was looking at her mother. If he is in love with her mother from afar.
    O UTSIDE THE rear service doors of the restaurant, Nancy lights a joint. Frank doesn’t care. Whatever keeps her smiling is how he looks at it. She hears him through the open window, banging pots, whistling. He’s through for the night. Not her, she has to wait for the family at table 3. They’ve settled their bill, but they’re taking their time over dessert. Nancy’s guess is they don’t have air conditioning and want to stay cool for as long as possible. That’s fine with her. They’re nice people. Their little girl gave her the picture she crayoned of a woman with blue, droopy eyes, a crooked red smile, and a red-checkered apron. “Is that me?” Nancy asked because the