Year of Lesser Read Online Free PDF Page B

they’d made love in the bedroom and the sunlight had fallen through the thin curtain onto his arms and stomach, and later, counting eggs, his scent was still in her nose.
    Johnny had entered the refrigerator room and stood, leaning against the door, and told her about his father hanging from the tree and how he had no shoes, they must have been kicked off, and he told her about the dead dog and the bloody baseball bat. “Why on earth would he kill the dog?” Johnny asked.
    Loraine didn’t have too much to say. She kept stacking trays and glancing up at Johnny. She didn’t want to touch him right then, either. “Sorry, Johnny,” she said once, but he didn’t seem to hear. She wasn’t terribly sorry, she’d never really liked Mr. Fehr. He’d been stingy.
    “How’s Charlene managing all this?” Loraine asked. “Where is she?”
    “At home. I miss you,” Johnny said. “You.”
    Loraine shook her head. “No you don’t, Johnny. You use me. I’m sorry about your father,” she said, “but there’s nothing I can do. You and me, we’re apart. If you lay in my bed every night and I could hold you, not just have sex with you, then we could weep together, but what we have is nothing. We screw. That’s all.” Loraine was surprised at her own anger and at the word she’d just used. She hated it; so cold. She imagined that it was because her desire for Johnny had been spent that afternoon. Always, after the fact, she became rueful and disliked herself.
    Johnny hung his head. Loraine picked up an egg and heaved it at him. It hit the plywood wall beside him. He looked up and grinned. Furious, she threw two more eggs. One hit the floor, the other he caught and cradled in his palm. “Hickety pickety, my black hen,” he said. He put the captured egg in his jacket pocket and walked out. He left the door open. Thechickens flapped and screamed in their cages. Loraine sat for the longest time, wishing Johnny would come back.
    Loraine goes to parent-teacher interviews at Lesser Collegiate and she talks to Mr. Jameson, the Grade Nine Science teacher, and Ms. Holt, the English teacher. Science is okay, Chris could do better she is told, but he’s all right. Outside the English class she waits for her interview and looks over Chris’s writing folder and journal. She wonders if Chris knows his writing is available for her to see.
    She reads, “Gonna write a cheap story about this woman who lives on a farm with her son. She’s a wannabe and so is he.” Loraine looks for the story but there is nothing else. Scribbled on the inside of the folder is this:
Sex is like math.
Subtract the clothing
divide the legs
and multiply.
    Inside the pocket is a paper with Chris’s sprawling handwriting:
Your father was a bastard,
Your mother was a whore,
This all wouldn’t have happened
If the rubber hadn’t tore!
    Loraine blinks, reads it again, and then she slides the paper back into the pocket and closes the folder. Ms. Holt pokes her head out and smiles, her face round, her eyes oily. Chris claims she’s a fossil and Loraine can see what he means. She knows that Ms. Holt taught Johnny. Taught him how to write a composition. She thinks she should ask about Johnny. Find out what kind of a student he had been, if back then already he was into sex. Of course.
    They sit at a table and Loraine says, “It’s so odd to be in a school. I keep waiting to be tested or something.” She tries to laugh but it comes out too loud and she turns her head, stares at the wall.
    But Ms. Holt is smiling and the two of them talk about living in this town, something Ms. Holt doesn’t do. She commutes from Winnipeg. “Oh, no,” she says, “it’d be claustrophobic.”
    Loraine nods. She leans forward and says, “The kids, when they write their compositions, do they have preoccupations? You know …”
    “Oh, yes, at this age everything ‘sucks’, of course. Our themes are violence and sex but we’re not allowed to write about either.