“You think I’m gonna lie about something like that? That’s the third time she’s let me see it.”
“Really?”
“She got red pubes.”
“Red?”
“Same colour as her hair.”
“Where were you?”
“What, when she showed me?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“None of your business.”
“Oh.”
He kicked a pebble, watched it roll. “Well, first time was on the train tracks. By Dupont, you know?”
“Yeah.”
“I took her walking down there, and right when a train went by, she stretched her panties out so I could look down.”
“She did that?”
“Swear to God.”
“For how long?”
“Till the train passed all the way. As soon as the train passed and the noise was gone, she didn’t let me look no more. It was a long train, though. So, I don’t know, probably a minute, two minutes, I seen it for.
“Holy.”
“Said she might let me touch it this time. You ever touched one?”
“What?”
“A twat. Pussy.”
“No.”
“But you’ve seen one, right?”
“A real one?”
“Yeah. On a real girl. A girl who showed it to you.”
“Dunno.”
“That means no. You should try and see one. A real one, I mean.”
“How many real ones you seen?”
He furrowed his brow, as if he were calculating in his head. “’Bout fifty.”
“Fifty?”
“Yeah, ’bout that. But, anyway, I figure this girl I was waiting for ain’t gonna show up. You know what a whore is, buddy?”
“Like a hooker?”
“Yeah, a hooker. A whore.”
“Yeah, I know what that is.”
“You ever seen one before?”
“Not really.”
“What do you mean not really?”
There was this Coffee Time near my house — at the edge of my street turn west on Bloor, walk three blocks, you were there — and if you passed by after midnight, you’d normally see at least one car pulled into a far corner of the parking lot with somebody in the driver’s seat, and if you looked closely at the driver, you’d notice there was something furry, dark, could be some kind of animal, moving up and down on his lap, and if you peered even closer, maybe snuck a few feet toward the car to get a better view, you’d realize that the dark, furry thing had a neck, two ears, a whole body, and if you got any closer, the guy in the driver’s seat would probably roll down his window and tell you to screw off and mind your own business before he got out of the car and punched your face in, you little pervert.
“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
