“Go ahead, Darlene. You probably know a little something about this.”
“No, I’ve never done this sort of thing.” She reads the recipe. “Brown the chicken in oil. Oh, we need onions. Heart, liver, gizzard. Eew.”
“You have to cut up the chicken first.”
“I don’t know how.”
“I’ll do it,” says Joan. She clears out the innards, grabs the butcher knife, and begins with the thighs, cutting fiercely through to the ribs. She works quickly, hacking and stretching and pulling and sometimes slicing cleanly.
Darlene is surprised at the abandon with which Joan is attacking this chicken. She expected her to be more precise, more clinical in her dissection.
“He really is a special man,” says Joan. “Very unique!”
Darlene pours oil in the pan and heats it on the gas stove. They throw pieces of chicken in and flinch at the sizzle. Joan grabs the handle and begins to shake the chicken, but most of it already sticks to the pan. Her cheeks are flushed. Darlene passes the tongs, and Joan pries each piece away from the bottom.
“I’ll chop the onions and heart and all that stuff,” says Darlene. “We have to cook it all in the pan once the chicken is browned.”
“So, you are doing very well together,” says her professor, who has just returned with the wine.
“It’s all a matter of opinion,” says Joan. “All right, what’s next?”
“Uh, add the spices and some water, and put the chicken back in,” says Darlene. She turns and smiles, studying her professor’s eyes. He reminds her of John Lennon.
He puts a lid on the pan. “Just needs to simmer for a while. Let’s have a sherry.”
Darlene tried pot for the first time the week before. She sat with other students feeling raunchy and loose, sharing a joint and listening to Abbey Road on cassette while cartoon images formed in her mind.
Now the smell of Morocco wafts through the air. He puts a record on. “Miles Davis,” he says. “From Bitches Brew.” Sherry is poured from a crystal bottle as Darlene sits at the end of the plush green sofa. She takes a sip and is taken aback by the burning sensation as it spreads from her lips. She looks straight ahead, uncomfortable without a chicken to deal with.
Joan chooses an upright, firmly padded brocade chair while her husband sits next to Darlene, his legs sprawled out in front of him. “I don’t like seeing the two of you together,” says Joan.
“You have just spent the last hour or so together and you’re getting along just fine.”
“I said I don’t like seeing the two of you together.”
“Hey. I’m here for you. I haven’t left.”
Darlene lets the sherry ride up on her lips and sizzle there for a while. She pulls her knees up close to her chest, rests her bare feet on the sofa, and presses closer to the end of it. She studies the raised velvety swirls in the fabric, follows a path from one large button to the next, and traces the roped edges of her cushion. She finds a frayed edge on her jeans and straightens each thread so that they all run in the same direction. She realizes for the first time that her professor is wearing brown leather sandals. The straps weave in and out across the top of his foot, and his long gangly toes protrude in an unseemly manner. He and Joan are talking, but she doesn’t hear what they are saying.
“I’m going for a walk,” says Joan. “I need to be alone.”
“She’ll be all right. You’ll see,” he says to Darlene. “Come, we’re going to make a salad together. Radish and orange salad.”
“Really?”
“You’ll like it. First, we’ll put on The Rite of Spring. Stravinsky.” He surrounds her easily with his arms. He strokes her hair.
Darlene thinks of singing along with Mick Jagger instead and gyrating under strobe lights to driving rhythms. Her professor pulls her close and runs his hands up and down the inside of her sweater as they listen to the whirling and booming and trilling of music, the pulsating of drums. She wonders what Joan knows about Stravinsky’s ritual dance. She pulls away from him.
“The salad,” she says. “I want to make the salad.” She heads back to the kitchen, grabs two navel oranges, and holds them out to him. “What do we do?”
He flashes an uneasy smile and takes both oranges in one hand. “You peel them in layers.”
“How?” She wonders how you peel an orange in layers. She’s only ever seen them come in sections. Onions come in layers.
“I’ll show you.” He takes a sharp pointed knife and begins by slicing off the end, just missing the orange flesh but neatly removing the white fibre. He pulls off the rest of the peel and a bubble of juice oozes from one section.
“So now you have sections.” She shrugs.
“Not so fast. First you take off the outer membrane.” He holds the paring knife as she imagines a surgeon might do. With the point he separates the membranes from the flesh then gently yanks them apart. He removes the stringy core and then, with a broad grin, puts a section, with sweating juices, into his mouth.
These are not neat little layers, she thinks. But she giggles as he offers her a section. An orange has never tasted so good.
They are startled by the strains of a Strauss waltz and by Joan. “Can you believe that a hundred years ago this piece was considered licentious?”
Darlene envisions the aristocracy dancing with polished decorum. But lords and ladies were allowed their mistresses and lovers, were they not?
“I’ll have another sherry,” says Joan, and the professor pours one for himself as well.
“I think it is justifiable that you invited the Donaldsons this evening,” Joan says to her husband.
“Why is that?”
“Well, since we are moving in new directions, I might as well tell you.”
“Tell me what?” He is attentive.
She takes a good swig of sherry. “Stan and I are not just friends. At least we weren’t last year.”
Darlene studies the two of them. His pants are too short and his hair is greying and bordering on stringy at the back. His eyebrows have lowered and become rigid. Joan is like a hissing cat, in charge of her doorstep. She asks, “Didn’t you know?”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that we did it together.”
“I don’t believe you. You’re just being vindictive.”
“Well, yes. But I am also telling the truth.”
“Then why didn’t I know?” he demands. “Where?”
“On the river bank. Coming back from a walk. You guys had gone on ahead. I didn’t think you could handle it if I told you. Am I right?”
“Jesus,” he says and slumps into a chair.
Darlene, now even more anxious, waves a bunch of red radishes. “I’ll prepare these if you tell me what to do.”
“There’s a grater,” says Joan with a new level of confidence. “Clean them and grate them coarsely.”
“And that’s it?”
“Yes. Then you just add the oranges, sugar, and lemon juice, and mix it all together. It really is quite delicious.”
Darlene hears voices coming from the other room, but she can’t make out the words. The music has stopped. She hears her own grating of radishes and likes the rhythm of it. The chicken still simmers and occasionally spits sauce onto the burner. She smells the onions and ginger that are enhancing the chicken. She looks at the checkerboard floor and the white enamelled cupboards, pretending this is her kitchen. She imagines herself sharing wine and conversation around a candlelit table. She offers up a serving of her chicken-and-egg mixture encased within delicate layers of filo pastry and topped with almonds and sprinkles of cinnamon and sugar. She plays her choice of music, probably a piano concerto. She wears a long white cotton gown and lets her hair tumble down her back in soft curls. She is barefoot, and the guests are beguiled by her combination of innocence and sophi
stication. The professor and even Joan glow with admiration.
Darlene looks out the windowed back door, seeing movement there. The colony of gulls with their black wing tips and unhinging jaws are still cruising the area just outside the kitchen. She opens the door and hears them wail and squawk, drowning out her piano concerto. Drawn to the spruce and the budding poplars along the banks, the birds sail down to the river’s edge, testing the frigid waters and previewing spots for nests; the young ones are courting, the mature ones re-establishing monogamous pair-bonds. Instead of her imaginary gown, Darlene fingers the familiar cotton-spun tension of her blue jeans. She leaves the kitchen and walks to the edge of the bank. This is presumably where Joan’s adultery took place. Darlene walks through dead grass and brown thorny roses, then slips and slides down the muddy bank. The mud feels smooth and certain, and the air smells of spruce and mouldy winter leaves. She alternately runs and slides and stumbles, picking up speed, scraping her backbone, and scratching the skin on her arms and hands.
The river moves swiftly from spring run-off. It bubbles and foams at the edges. It carries ducks and geese heedlessly through minor swells and around unpredictable bends. She continues on down until she reaches a narrow pathway. Houses are no longer in view. She follows the path with mud oozing into her shoes. She reaches a fork; the wider path heads gently up the bank and comes to the main road that encircles the campus. She pauses. She sees the new crop of high-rises on campus as an alien might. Voices, innocent and serene, sing “Blowin’ in the Wind.” She quickens her step. The smell of pizza is in the air.
No Regrets
CALVIN ALWAYS ASKED, “No regrets?” Now I use it as my mantra. No regrets, no regrets, no regrets. Like that, over and over and over.
I met him over the radio. By day he was a psychologist. He had the mustache and beard but looked more like Lenin than Freud. I didn’t know what he looked like, of course, when we first hit it off. I needed to wind down after my evening shift at the hospital so I tuned in and there he was moonlighting with his mellifluous voice, kept low key for the midnight crowd. He seemed like God’s gift to the intricacies of jazz, especially swing and gypsy, always describing propulsive or languid rhythms. (He claimed to have been somewhat of a gypsy in his younger days, following bands across Europe before settling on Freud.) But his analytic take on every composition, referring to dreams or unconscious associations, was all speculative. Bullshit, really. That’s the reason I got involved in the first place, not realizing he was a real psychologist. I called in to protest his comment that clarinetists have an oral fixation. I am proof against that falsehood. I explained my stint in the high school band. I told him that I had never sucked my thumb, never bit my nails.
He said that I had a seductive voice. Then he put me on hold while he spun a Django Reinhardt anecdote for his listeners. We arranged our rendezvous with “My Sweet” playing on the radio. It was, for me, surreal.
This is where we first met in the flesh. Spiros has always been my favourite place. It reminds me of the Mediterranean, not that I’ve ever been there. Calvin gave me D. H. Lawrence’s The Virgin and The Gypsy to read and said I should try to use my instincts and intuition more and not be so uptight. I guess he still thought himself part gypsy. He must have thought I needed a new kind of education, to be saved from certain small-town constraints, just as Lawrence’s spellbinding gypsy transformed the oppressed and virginal Yvette. Though the gypsy was older and married, he was free spirited, kind of like Calvin. He saved Yvette’s life from a deluge, and while enduring that flood she learned to “be braver in the body.” She stopped obsessing about him as well.
In the end water was a factor. They pulled Calvin out of Lake Windermere (he was on vacation). Somehow, the driver, his wife, jumped out just in time, but Calvin’s door apparently jammed. There was an on-air memorial service so I felt like I was part of the farewell. They had an archival bit with Stéphane Grappelli. They played Django’s “Tears” and compared the percussive sounds of the guitars and the diminished arpeggios to Calvin’s irrepressible love of gypsy jazz.
And I have my mantra.
Svea
THERE’S A PHOTO of my cousin next to her namesake, Moder Svea, a bronze statue in Berga Memorial Park in Linköping, Sweden. It bears the inscription On Guard for the Motherland. In the photo, our Svea is blonde and already a little buxom for a twelve-year-old. Unbeknownst to her she will soon be motherless and on guard for her younger twin sisters, Lilly and Anna. She will be on a flight with her father and sisters over the North Pole to Winnipeg, then on a CN train to Edmonton, where we will pick them up.
That was the year that Ingemar Johansson knocked out heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson, and my father and Uncle Peter celebrated their arrival by listening to the fight and getting stinking drunk. Svea looked to my mother with sheepish eyes. My mother sent us outside to have a picnic on the lawn.
We ate peanut butter and banana sandwiches, which was a first for Svea and her sisters and became their favourite for months to come. After we overheard Uncle Peter waxing on about Swedish royalty, we turned our picnics into royal affairs. In 1958 the remains of mad King Erik XIV, who apparently lost his mother before the age of two, were examined and found to contain high levels of arsenic; it had probably been added to his final bowl of pea soup. There was also evidence of a blow from a sword. He died in 1577, a year that was a total abstract in our girlish minds; it fell into that vague era of “the olden days.” At Svea’s urging we drank “arsenic water” from the garden hose to accompany our sandwiches, being royal to the core.
Death was a popular subject for the twins. They liked to lie prostrate and still on the grass for as long as possible while we used dandelion flowers and long blades of grass to tickle them back to life. They still had half notions that their mother would reappear.
It was fun to have them stay at first. Being an only child I fancied having sisters, and Svea and I each had a curly-haired twin to possess and lead around. We often competed over who would claim Lilly or Anna for the day. It depended on which twin seemed the most chirpy or malleable at the time. But eventually I yearned to have my own room back, to have my parents’ undivided attention, and to resume my favoured status in our home.
And, like King Erik’s father, Gustav I, Uncle Peter soon took up with a Margaret, though his Margaret was not a noble woman like Gustav’s Margareta, who Gustav actually married. We called her Margareta when adults were not around, but she was really just plain old Margaret Strand, widow of Albert Strand, left to manage the Strand movie theatre and rumoured to have special showings up in the projection booth. Uncle Peter, who seemed unable or unwilling to manage a place of his own, moved into Margaret’s modest two-storey Victorian, and Svea, Lilly, and Anna became well versed in movies of the late fifties and early sixties before they were of age. Lilly and Anna often reported seeing their mother in movie scenes. Uncle Peter got a job at the Creamery and worked at the Strand on weekends. Svea became chief cook and bottle washer (Margaret was not known for her housekeeping as it turned out) as well as surrogate mother to the twins. I remained the slightly naïve only child, with few responsibilities. Svea was way ahead of me in so many ways.
While they sat at the Strand (the twins armed with colouring books and crayons to keep them from watching) they saw movie queens like Elizabeth Taylor in incomprehensible films such as Suddenly, Last Summer, in which Elizabeth was institutionalized for mental illness after witnessing her cousin being ripped to shreds by a swarm of Spanish boys. At the urging of her aunt, Katharine Hepburn, Elizabeth faced a lobotomy. Katharine Hepburn tried to nullify the fact that her son had lured young boys for sexual favours until he tired of them and refused to give them more money. He was cannibalized as a result. It was all very weird. Then young brain surgeon, Montgomery Clift, saved Elizabeth Taylor with a serum that allowed her to bear the truth of it all. Svea told me all about it in detail. Who knew men could favour boys? Who
knew boys could eat men?
By contrast I was allowed to watch Sandra Dee in Gidget, which was all about her teenage crush on James Darren. Sandra tried to make James jealous by throwing herself at Cliff Robertson; she dabbled with the idea of losing her virginity to Cliff as an appeal to James. Of course she didn’t follow through, and James Darren gave her his class pin. I looked forward to getting a class pin myself once I went to high school.
I wanted to be sweet Sandra Dee. Svea wanted to be glamorous, sexual, on the brink of danger Elizabeth Taylor. Lilly and Anna thought maybe their mother was being held in an institution with a hole in her brain, which would explain why she had not yet reappeared. All this in spite of the fact that I, unlike Sandra Dee, had dark hair and had never kissed a boy, and Svea had blonde hair, unlike Elizabeth Taylor, and actually felt sorry for Debbie Reynolds who looked a bit like Svea’s mother and whose husband, Eddie Fisher, had been stolen by Elizabeth. And this, in spite of the fact that we had explained to the twins that their mother was in heaven and would not be back on earth but would see them again much much later when they were really really old.
Svea already had the body of a woman, curvaceous and motherly—you could imagine her consoling boys and girls alike. In fact she embraced Anna and Lilly with fierce devotion. Amongst thirteen-year-olds, however, she seemed a little fat. In our minds she was bigger than a teenage girl should be. Although I couldn’t read the minds of sixteen-year-old boys, they seemed to fall for the likes of Elizabeth Taylor and our Svea. Apparently so did married men.
In a funny twist, around age fourteen, Svea decided to change her name to Sandra in order to fend off comments about her unusual (to us) name. Her accent, however, could never be displaced. Years later when Britt Ekland, who only changed a vowel (Eklund to Ekland), became the token sexy Swedish blonde, famous for marrying and divorcing Peter Sellers, for becoming a Bond girl, and for later cohabitating with the mod Rod Stewart—Svea was already back to being Swedish full tilt. She was no longer the bigger girl with the big heart. We all passed through puberty and caught up to her size, developing hips and breasts like our mothers. She had already abandoned Sandra to become Svea again. It was cool to be a Swedish blonde.
Dear Hearts Page 2
