I said I wouldn’t post stories here that were longer than 750 words, I said I wouldn’t fuss over them, and with this one I’ve done both. It’s an attempt at improving the previous story, and I don’t know if it worked or if the optimist in me is lying again. Writing is a practice and I’m learning all the time, today’s lesson is that brevity is not an excuse, just because stories are short they still need to end gracefully.

Putting these stories up for grabs is both terrifying and exhilarating, I am convinced they’re excellent one minute and crippled by their faults the next – I’m never in between – I’m either Nina Simone “I decided that whatever they might think of me I was probably the finest pianist they’d ever hear, so I was going to present myself as such. I put on my best long chiffon gown” or Eeyore "It's not much of a tail, but I'm sort of attached to it."

So excuse me while I slip into my chiffon and record this story in one gulp. Thank you and see you next time.

I Remember Baltimore by Sherry Cassells

There’s something about the syllables in that sentence. I remember Baltimore. Like if you said it over and over it would tumble into nothingness. We used to do that with the word chrysanthemum, it eventually fell apart in our mouths, just a few abstract scraps of colour.

crumumsesanth

Baltimore is an eastern Ontario township, so let the spot in your mind drift to rugged and rural Canada.

There were falls in Baltimore, my mother remembered when they were real falls, before the damn dam, but when I was a kid they were just a beautiful little squirm of water. 

We called them Rapunzel for the cascade of golden rock we climbed like a tower to our cave, we crouched behind the stream, such a surprising perspective – I never got used to it – it felt like prying. We stuck our tongues into the wet and caught it in our palms.

I remember Baltimore.

Can you stand one more?

I remember Baltimore.

Those false falls, Haskin’s Drug Store, Langley’s Grocery, The Read Bookstore – my friend Tillie’s grandparents owned it – she lived with them summers when we were kids. They sold used books and named the store accordingly, they corrected every person who pronounced it reed and almost everybody did, that’s what you get for naming your store a homonym. 

Me and Tillie we used to ransack that town daily and lightly lightly every night Rapunzel.

Tillie Tillie Tillie

Last night I dreamed of her again. 

What a strange thing it is to wake up with her on my mind. 

There’s a storm brewing this morning, I can feel it, my centre of gravity is off, it’s one of those secret storms that send shifts of light you’re not sure you actually see, maybe it’s a fault of the eye, and the roll of thunder you also deny, maybe it’s your guts, or maybe somebody’s beneath your window calling without calling. 

She used to roll against the house, the clunk of a shoulder, her flat shimmering back, another shoulder, a quick heartbeat, and out I’d tumble into the purple. She greeted me in vibrant silence – with an exuberance I’ve not seen since – until it came again last night like an elixir, and today I crouch in this purple dawn, the rain comes now, I remember Baltimore.

We invaded one another’s lives, I scoured her bedroom and she mine, I was too young to have any real secrets, a few forbidden candy wrappers in my wake, a permanently borrowed necklace, a specific meanness toward insects, some babysitting snooping and shame, lightly lightly, and hers were similar, softly shocking, they included real shoplifting, a harsher cruelty, and lies lies lies.

We bobbed in this slew of ourselves, our sinnish concoction of purged secrets, wobbly and malleable, almost liquid.

Tillie was pretty in a sophisticated way, she practiced in front of the mirror, she expertly revealed her sweet profile and learned how to work her eyes, I was raw and rogue, she said I was charming.

It was luck that we were neighbours. My grandfather had recently become old and frail, I watched it happen so quickly like frying an egg, we sold the house by the school and moved to the farm where my mother had grown up, my father assumed the overalls and the pitchfork, she started cooking and being annoyed, she wore her hair in a newly severe bun, think of the American Gothic painting and take maybe thirty years away, a ragged little me on my mother’s skinny shoulder and another me, newly brave, dug into my father’s shoulder on the other side of the frame.

First time I met Tillie she walked straight into our house, she was still wearing her school uniform like Wednesday Adams, she’d only just arrived next door, her suitcase flat on their driveway, she flung inside and sort of swam to him saying Leopard, Leopard, Leopard (my grandfather’s name was Leopold). She had no idea we’d moved in, she didn’t notice at first everything was different, there’s something about moving back home my mother said, you need to change things. 

I don’t think she ever changed them enough, she could not relax, or maybe it was the death she fed every morning and tucked into bed every night, listening for its soft steps to the bathroom in the night, would it peer into her room or mine.

I was careful with my grandfather but Tillie threw herself against him, his limp arms went strong around her shoulders, she peered over his twisted wrists, I was eating egg and soldiers wearing pink pyjamas and reading a book fit for a simpleton, I felt six, she didn’t care, who are you her words poured out and mine poured out beside them. I claimed my grandfather, his granddaughter I said, and then my name, Claire.

She said nice to meet you Claire I am Tillie Townsend, here for the summer, every summer, I live next door, I hope our friendship will be eternal.

Like I said, or maybe I only thought it, there was something about Tillie that made me believe there was something about me, too.

Childhood sleepovers. Roll that one around a minute. Childhood sleepovers. 

Tillie wore my pyjamas, I made pancakes, my mother yelled at me for the little dots of yellow on the counter top, that’s when in a nearly invisible way we starting setting traps that would make her jack-in-the-box – a stacked cupboard, a loose blueberry, a puddle – we waited but sometimes missed the results. 

My grandfather had an ageless core, he reported her reactions softly, gleefully, without teeth. I noticed the crosshatched skin of his neck matched the plaid of his shirt, the stripes on his cuffs ran into the veins of his hands, he rocked not with laughter but with its absence, as if he could not find the guffaws he wanted, as if he had run out, his hands caressed a non existent orb that sat in his lap, he just couldn’t easily get a grip on joy, but it was in his eyes and I set these traps for him, sometimes at dinner he looked so sad across the table that I would drop my glass of milk, she said I’d made him choke. My mother did not know that was the way her father laughed.

Tillie experimented with makeup and clothes, I stayed the way I was in a sort of ambiguity throughout puberty, my mother was in a continuous smoulder about it, I was in the habit of wearing my grandfather’s plaids at the time, he left cigarettes loose in the pockets like bait. 

We never talked about our lesser lives, the ones we lived apart, I knew nothing about Tillie, it was as if she didn’t exist but for the summer months of our childhood, our youth, her grandparents died the winter we turned 16, one at sunrise, the other at dusk, as if scheduled.

She came for the January funeral in the company of two nuns – she’s a orphan of course, my mother said – I had never seen those birds except on The Sound of Music, I went to the funeral and stood in true American Gothic style between my parents, she didn’t look up, the next day she was gone.

When people from childhood leave us we do not think they can ever come back, this starts with Bambi, and then we learn about wars, Kings who murdered their Queens, Joan of Arc and Hitler. President Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated on our watch, four dead in Ohio, the naked Vietnamese girl running from her burning village, and everything else that lurked behind Walter Cronkite’s shoulder on the nightly news. 

There was no hope for hope and summers lapped on, one over another over another over another. 

When I was 32 I found her, Tillie Townsend right in the phone book, and I called her, I couldn’t speak.

Claire, she barely said, it’s you. 

Telephone silence is tricky, I don’t remember who finally spoke or what was whispered, but we decided to leave our past in the past, we make a pact, tearfully, a blood sister agreement, it was the only way to be best friends forever.

Now I am not so sure it was a mutual decision.

Climbing Rapunzel had been her idea, she suggested the havoc in town, the tricks and traps to exacerbate my poor unhappy mother, eventually alcohol and boys, and it was her decision to still our friendship.

I know I said I didn’t remember what she whispered into the telephone but I remember exactly. 

You won’t like me now, she said, just remember Baltimore.