Making Beds with Cordelia at the Avalon Motel in Osoyoos: Summer 1973
She could sing Desperado just like Linda Ronstadt.
I showed her hospital corners and how to
smooth sheets like my mother taught me.
She didn’t have one – a mom.
Thrown out of the house – for nothing
according to her and I believed her,
believed the worst of fathers in general,
temper tantrums, hard hands and drinking.
She wouldn’t talk about him, not a thing,
but I remember something about two bitchy sisters –
one with a name like venereal disease
while Cordelia,
she walked right out of a magazine
with her long legs and sort of private smile –
smart too though she didn’t show off like I did
or mouth off either.
I taught her how to
tuck a bedspread under pillows then curve it
snug like a tight t-shirt. She had the knack.
When she wasn’t around I tried
to talk and dress and wear my hair like her,
be patient with my little niece, be nicer
than I was or am.
She lived alone
in our trailer out back of the motel
beside the slough we called a lake –
saving up for university she said.
Sometimes after work we’d lie together
under the walnut tree. I’d play with her hair
while she read Tess – rich green leaves
breaking the heat of an Okanagan afternoon.
I always thought she’d get discovered
like that dairy queen girl, that she’d marry
a millionaire.
Strange thing is
I was the one who kind of made it in the end,
the one with the house and European holidays.
But Cordelia,
she was making her way for awhile,
then somehow it went bad again – a man,
some dark angel, following her.
*
The Avalon
It was a fast food joint on Highway 3
where it turned into Main Street.
Picnic tables in the breezeway, Creedence
screaming up around the bend on the jukebox.
No drive-thru windows like today.
People had to park, get out of their cars.
My father was boss, shape-shifted
from grease monkey in his own garage
to short order cook. Short temper cook
more like it. Hotter than burgers sizzling
on the grill. Hotter than chips in the deep fat fryer.
Him and his shout and his bottomless rum
and coke just inside the cooler door.
Scariest thing for me was making
chicken dinners when he was crazy
busy and the grill was packed. I’d crank
up the flames under the pressure cooker
in the back, drop thighs, legs, breasts,
wings, into popping oil then twist
the metal top on tight as I could.
Timing was critical and I was racing
up front with customers at windows,
making change with fingers burnt
from bagging burgers. Milkshakes
whizzed on metal sticks while I erected
dazzling ziggurats of soft ice cream cones.
All the time at the back the pressure
built. Always I expected the explosion.
My father’s holler. Flying metal, boiling oil.
Fast food shrapnel. Casualties.
When the cooker’s valves got flipped up,
they screamed like murder, smeared the air
with steam and grease. I served up impossible
crispy gold in a cardboard container.
For years I wore burn scars
on the soft insides of forearms.
They are faded, almost gone.
So is my father.
Nowadays summer never gets that hot.
*
Sorting Cherries
We sat in lines on either side
of the belt’s endless loop. Across from me,
a woman in her fifties, black hair dull with dye,
flanked by cronies. She listed infirmities
as numerous as the cherries rolling by.
Her hands darted, deft as a lacemaker,
picked out the split and the bruised.
Beside me, the tough girls I drank
with in high school. The ones who still smoked,
who had sex in the back of Camaros
belonging to boyfriends who worked
at the mill. Girls who weren’t headed
to university when summer was over.
After eight days, the whistle blew for break
and the belt stopped. I fell off my stool.
Mesmerized. The foreman moved me
up the chain. Alone. I pushed boxes of Bings
around a corner. When that crop was done,
we all got laid off until the next call came.
I never went back.
Some nights before sleep, I see them glide by,
a stream of profligate hearts.
