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Love Object
Love Object
a novel
Sally Cooper
Copyright © Sally Cooper, 2002
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.
Editor: Barry Jowett
Copy-editor: Lloyd Davis
Design: Jennifer Scott
Printer: Transcontinental
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Cooper, Sally (Sally Elizabeth)
Love Object
ISBN 1-55002-387-X
I. Title.
PS8555.O59228L69 2002 C813’.6 C2002-901067-5 PR9199.4.C665L69 2002
1 2 3 4 5 06 05 04 03 02
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program, The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program.
Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credit in subsequent editions.
J. Kirk Howard, President
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is coincidental.
Portions of Love Object in an earlier form appeared in The Coastal Forest Review.
Printed and bound in Canada.
Printed on recycled paper.
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For my family
1 You Are Somewhere
My Uncle Larry Brewer has meek snores: a mew followed by a sigh or a gasp, nothing like the riotous carols I’m used to hearing from my father Sam or from Grandma Vi. The effort of straining to catch Larry’s snores is what wakes me up inside those first two dreams of Mother.
It’s the Saturday of Canada Day weekend, July 2, 1983, and Larry’s down to help Sam insulate the addition before returning up north to Drag County to wait for his next job. Our place in Apple Ford is one of Larry’s stopovers on the Sudbury-Windsor route he’s been running four times a year since my mother Sylvia left in 1978. He parks his rig at the arena and snort-laughs when Nicky and I beg to sleep there. Vi has just moved in with us but she makes a point of staying at a friend’s after she sees Larry and Sam playing euchre at the kitchen table with Nicky and me.
When he plays euchre, Larry says he likes to imagine a real court, an upside-down court where the knaves, the jacks, the everyday guys have authority over the king. In most games the jack is the lowest face card but not euchre. In the euchre court, Larry points out, the queen is down near the bottom where she belongs. The order of the game appeals to Larry, the reversal of fortunes that comes when he least expects. He relishes the terminology too. Trump. Trick. Bower, which comes from the German bauer, meaning peasant or knave.
“Euchre is about the triumph of the KNAY-vuh” Larry says, drawling out the word as if he is afraid he sounds too smart. “I’m a perfect example. A jack-of-all-trades. I’ve driven bus, sharpened saws, cut hair, laid pipe, chopped trees, cleaned ditches, plowed snow.” Hauling steel is the most gainfully employed Larry has ever been.
Vi says, “As far as I’m concerned a jack is a scoundrel. Just look up knave in the dictionary, Mercy,” she says and I do and she is right.
“Not just scoundrel” I read, “but rogue and rascal too.”
Larry flutters his eyelids then squints and talks in a flat Clint Eastwood voice until Vi leaves pulling her suitcase across the plywood floor of the addition.
Sam plays cards with indifference but we know better; Sam has memorized every possible combination of cards in a given game. He can quote Hoyle and he lays cards without looking at his hand. To add flair, he has devised several precise gestures and difficult manoeuvres: shuffling the deck away from his body, using one hand to deal, turning up cards with the flick of a finger. He wins every game then acts as if he has no idea why he bothered to play in the first place. The romance: of the court and the beauty of inverted power delineation do nothing for Sam. To him, cards are a math problem and he plays with the confidence of one who understands the true nature of numbers and can manipulate them to lie for him and only him. A notion that each deal might bring something new and never been before is what causes his brother Larry to lose most times he plays. This same sense of mystery is also what spurs Larry to play again and again.
Saturday I wake up before my alarm with the sheets wound in knots around my legs. My skin, sticky with sweat, holds a pickled brine smell. Sylvia’s crocheted afghan lies in a heap on the floor. Before doing anything else, I pick up the afghan and straighten it on the bed, Sylvia’s instructions still ringing clear after five years. I’m less than a month away from my seventeenth birthday but I still have the same little girl’s room Sylvia did up for me as a grade-six graduation gift: the white ruffled curtains, bed skirt and pillow shams, the blue fleur-de-lis wallpaper, the oval hooked rug with cardinal and jays on a leafy branch, the furniture painted white with gilt trim. True, posters of David Bowie in his suit and fedora do hang next to Sylvia’s framed 3-D collages of hummingbirds and finches and Stephen King has joined Lewis Carroll and the Brothers Grimm, but the rest is the same as it was before Sylvia left.
With a lamp on, I stand in front of the round dresser mirror that cuts me off at the shoulders. I am proud of my body this summer. Last summer, filing claim adjustment forms for Sam’s insurance office, I gained ten pounds from sitting all day dipping into a bag of Licorice Allsorts in my desk. This summer I cycle to and from the Trout Club and spend my evenings in the back yard painting planks for the addition’s board-and-batten siding. My legs and arms reflect my efforts. A hard muscle curves out on the back of each thigh and my arm pops a bulge when I flex.
My summer job is bussing tables and washing dishes at the Tecumseth Trout Club, an exclusive resort for fishermen. Members stay in the main lodge, coming for a weekend or a week.
The Club backs onto the Tecumseth River and sits away from the road, protected from local eyes by thick bunchy cedar. The Tecumseth River courses down from the escarpment and through the Trout Club ponds, swings around Apple Ford, then hustles back west to hie itself across a golf course and head south. In April the province dumps trout into the river and fishermen with rubber boots stretching over their trunks cluster along the road and railway bridges that cross the Tecumseth east, west, north and south of Apple Ford. The Trout Club stocks its man-made ponds at the same time.
The Trout