Kathleen Winter - Annabel

THE WIND IN ST. JOHN’S was not like Labrador wind. Here it was damp. It sneaked under Wayne’s jacket and unnerved him until he had got a hot coffee in him at Shelley’s. Forest Road was not a home, and as the winter progressed he regretted having rented it. Home, when he had finished making his deliveries for the day, became Shelley’s All-Day Breakfast, between George Street and William’s Lane; or the Ship Inn, where he heard old unaccompanied songs on Wednesday nights; or Afterwords Books, across from the courthouse, where nag champa incense mixed with the aromas of free coffee and musty editions of How Green Was My Valley and By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept . Home was the alleys through which Wayne walked back to Forest Road, looking in other people’s lit windows where there were children, sunflowers in vases on the floor, and fireplaces that had once burnt coal but now had sheets of tin screwed over them and little electric heaters on the hearths.

Spring aches on Forest Road, once you get past the gingerbread houses. There isn’t one piece of softness through March or April. Oh Henry wrappers in the gutter. Black snowbanks with bubbling holes. Every dog turd excreted over the winter has found its way to the edge of the sidewalk, and these too have the bubbles. Everything melting has the bubbles. You don’t want to stand on the bubbling crust, but the town does not clean the sidewalks. Wayne had no choice but to crunch the mess as he walked back and forth between Forest Road and the harbourfront, where at least there were boats, cranes, women with high heels, men with briefcases, and street people sitting in the doorways of coffee shops, begging, their dogs wearing cowboy scarves.

He saw a reflection of his loneliness on the street, where regulars wove in with the people who worked in the shops and banks and law offices. He watched who gave panhandlers and buskers money and who did not. He watched the constabulary clear corners where men played busted harmonicas. He learned names. Caroline Yetman stood playing a Sears guitar at the bottom of the courthouse steps. Paul Twomey sat on his parka in front of the Gypsy Tearoom making portraits with broken pastels. Betty Flanagan pushed her shopping cart from the east-end post office to the old Woolworth’s building in a pair of silver platforms.

“Have you been to Corner Brook?” Betty asked Wayne. “I used to teach school in Corner Brook. I taught at Broadway School for seventeen years.”

Hobo Bill sat on George Street reading Dostoevsky. “I have never,” he told Wayne after asking for a quarter, “asked a woman for spare change. And I never will.”

Joanne Dohaney, the oldest waitress at Shelley’s, daily gave Hobo Bill three coffees, a BLT, and a tub of vege-table barley soup.

“That Bill,” Joanne told Wayne, “has not had a bath for the past however many years I’ve seen him around Water Street. I don’t know how you can stand out there talking to him.”

“I don’t have all that many people to talk to.”

“You got no friends? A fine-looking fellow like you — if you combed your hair and tucked in that shirt. You look like you could talk about anything you wanted. More intelligent than a lot of them out there. How come you don’t make more of yourself? You could get a nice smart girl up at the university.”

“There was only ever one girl I liked talking to.”

“That’s what you put me in mind of. Someone up at the university. You’re not though, are you? What girl?” Joanne Dohaney didn’t mind asking a customer anything. This one would be out of her hair after his second refill. It wasn’t like she had to sit and listen to him all day.

“When we were kids. Her name was Wally Michelin. She wanted to be an opera singer.”

“Yeah, well, I wanted to be the sugar plum fairy.” Joanne hoisted a tray filled with stainless steel teapots through the swinging doors. She was in her fifties but there was something expressive in the turn of her wrist. Wayne did not remember ever hearing people talk about the beauty of wrists. The little bone like an ankle bone. He noticed it again when she came out.

“Did you really want to be a dancer?”

Joanne rolled her eyes, took the empty Heinz bottle, opened it, squirted in new ketchup from the kitchen’s generic mother bottle, and wiped the Heinz cap with a dishrag. “I dance by myself in the kitchen when no one’s around. If you could see into houses all over St. John’s, and all over Newfoundland for that matter, and while we’re at it, all over the whole world, I suppose, you’d see women dancing by themselves. Men don’t know that. Now you’re one of probably three or four dozen men in the world who do know. Because I’ve told you. But you’re still only a boy. You’ll forget.” Wayne smelled Javex, perspiration, and Ivory soap escaping from under Joanne’s uniform. “I really did want to be the sugar plum fairy. You thought I was joking about that, didn’t you.”

He did not tell her that he had always danced alone in his room to music on the radio, and that he still did it now, in the apartment on Forest Road. That he danced, and watched the shadows of his body on the wall, and tried to connect the music’s beauty with those shadows. Street lamps soaked through the window from Forest Road. Their light soaked into his shirt, and in the dark you could not see it was a man’s shirt. You saw that it folded, that it was cotton, that it draped.

What was beauty? Not frailness, not smallness. Wayne looked at his arms and tried to imagine them holding Joanne, with her expressive wrists circled around him. That was how lovers’ limbs were. Years of hormones had made him angular, and it occurred to him that he wished he could stop taking them. He wanted to stop swallowing them every day and having them alter his body from what it wanted to be into what the world desired from it. He wanted to throw the pills down a toilet here in Shelley’s All-Day Breakfast, where no one knew him anyway, unless you counted Joanne, and she did not really know anything about him. He wanted to throw the pills away and wait and see what would happen to his body. How much of his body image was accurate and how much was a construct he had come to believe? He tried to see his body objectively.

If he squinted it could look softer. If he stopped taking the pills might his breasts bud, as they had done at puberty? He was afraid of having breasts. But were breasts beautiful? Could anyone tell him? At night when he danced alone, his body wanted to be water, but it was not water. It was a man’s body, and a man’s body was frozen. Wayne was frozen, and the girl-self trapped inside him was cold. He did not know what he could do to melt the frozen man.

He did not tell Joanne at Shelley’s All-Day Breakfast any of this. He had no one to whom he could tell anything. There was a funny old woman on Circular Road who, when he made his deliveries, often asked him to come in and do tasks for her that had nothing to do with delivering meat. She had him fix a broken rail in her banisters, and she asked him to change the water in a font under her staircase. He had to clean the font with a rag she had for that purpose and pour in new holy water the priest had brought her in a Harvey’s Bristol Cream bottle. He had a few customers like that, who turned his meat deliveries into something more like doctors’ appointments or some sort of gentle social services call. It slowed him down and meant he was earning less money per hour than he should have been, but he let these customers hold him up because they were the closest thing he had to friends. They talked to him, and they were something to look forward to in his week of lonely deliveries. People had family, didn’t they? People had someone who remembered them from one week to another.