The Heart Begins Here

by Jacqueline Dumas

  I made a mental note to call Carmen to let her know that everything was okay.

  To my knowledge, my mother had never been to the bookstore, although she had to know it was the lesbian bookstore that was in the news now and again. It wasn’t as if she didn’t read the newspaper or watch TV.

  “How’s your skin?”

  “Fine,” I lied.

  “Are you all right, Marguerite? You don’t sound like yourself.”

  “Everything’s great.” As if I ever divulged anything of importance to my mother. “Just a bit tired, that’s all.”

  “It must be the heat,” said my mother. “Too bad you’re missing the weather here. It’s perfect. And it’s the feast day of Florus and Lorus. You know, the twin martyrs that were drowned in a well for destroying pagan idols. And wouldn’t you know, our parish is holding a rally for those thousands of baby martyrs who are murdered in their mothers’ wombs every day. I’m making signs for it as we speak. Those poor babies. They’re the most helpless of the helpless, and we must do everything in our power to protect them. Mrs. Kobash and her daughter are picking me up. They’re very close, you know, Mrs. Kobash and her daughter. The daughter’s name is Luba. You’ve probably heard of her: Luba Kobash. She writes poems for those greeting cards you see in all the drugstores. They’re for sale all over the country. All the malls have them.”

  My mother was also making potato salad for the church potluck after the rally.

  Church potlucks are probably no worse than the lesbian ones I’ve come to dread. Lesbians seem to gravitate to potlucks like beer drinkers to peanuts.

  It’s not so much that I mind the cooking; it’s more that whatever I make is guaranteed to be the one dish left over at the end of the party.

  My introduction to the lesbian potluck experience was at Alice’n’Peggy’s. Wanda had refused to go, but I was excited. It was my first ever invitation to a lesbian gathering of any kind, and when Alice’n’Peggy suggested I bring a pot of chili, I decided to make it from scratch, although I had never so much as baked a bean in my life.

  Trish said not to worry; she had a foolproof recipe.

  The eve of the potluck, I put the beans (what seemed a reasonable amount for twelve or fifteen people) out to soak as Trish had instructed.

  The next morning, the casserole lid was on the floor and the kitchen walls dripped with brown liquid. Overnight, the beans had swollen into a huge thirsty mound that continued to grow.

  “Holy shit,” said Wanda. “That’s enough to keep the whole gathering farting for a week.”

  I transferred most of the mess to a larger container and shoved it all into the fridge to be dealt with later. The remaining product was glutinous and bland, no matter how much added spice I stirred in.

  At the party, no one had seconds, and bowls of partially eaten chili could be seen abandoned here and there throughout the house. I brought home the leftovers, dumped the lot in the toilet, and flushed twice. The rest of the beans coagulated at the back of the fridge for a month before Wanda finally threw them out.

  I wished my mother well at the rally and said goodbye.

  LESS THAN A WEEK to go, and Wanda and I would be back on the plane headed home.

  Nights, I managed only two or three hours sleep at a stretch, while Wanda tossed and turned. Sometimes, she moaned and reached out to me in her sleep, and I cursed the wretched body that responded. As for the daylight hours, they seemed insufferably long and hot with far too much sunshine. But with Wanda’s affair now out in the open, the tension between us had dissipated, which rendered the last few days of our holiday almost enjoyable.

  We discovered a couple of unobstructed hiking paths and spent an entire afternoon watching the surfers from above the cliffs at Ho’okipa. One morning, we rented snorkelling gear and took a boat ride to the tiny island of Molokini, a crescent-shaped spit of volcanic residue where the surrounding water was clear like the air that you cannot see because you are in it. With my masked face pressed into the water, I felt like a poorly disguised tourist propelling herself through a huge aquatic city, a foreigner spying on the brightly coloured reef fish whipping in and out of their coral houses. I identified needlefish, parrotfish, surgeons, eels, a pair of whitetip sharks, and even the uncommon wrasse. The wrasse female had the ability to change sex, transforming her drab self into a hot-coloured supermale.

  The eve of our flight home, we walked one last time on the beach. Ahead of us, a young man and woman strolled hand in hand and barefoot in the sand.

  I looked over at Wanda who was gazing out to sea.

  She avoids my green eyes to seek blue eyes thousands of miles across the sea, I thought.

  Suddenly, she placed a hand on my shoulder.

  “Look, out there.”

  She pointed at the horizon.

  At first, I saw only endless water and the dropping sun, but when I scrunched my eyes I saw them: A family of breaching humpbacks, three of them spouting and rolling and leaping through the pink and golden waves.

  According to the travel brochures, the whales had left weeks ago. “I guess you can’t believe everything you read,” said Wanda.

  The whales vanished, and the sun dipped and sank into the horizon, missing the edge of the earth altogether. Conch shells echoed mournfully all along the beach. The young man and woman embraced and kissed, a long languid kiss that made me turn away for the ache of it.

  How to handle such misery in the midst of so much beauty?

  Later, I lay stiffly in bed while Wanda snored with her back to me. We could have been acquaintances sharing a bed to cut costs. As the fan cast bamboo shadows on the ceiling, I wondered what Wanda had in common with Cindy anyway. What could Cindy possibly know about the heady days of feminist awakening, about the struggle for legalized abortion, the fight for a woman’s right to say No? Cindy belonged to the new generation that took the achievements of that era for granted. No way could she appreciate the incredible optimism and force of will that it took a woman of my generation to say Yes to another woman. And what about the corresponding proliferation of women writers and the collectives that had published them? The bookstores that had promoted them? What about my bookstore? Cindy had probably never heard of Angela Davis, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Robin Morgan, or Nicole Brossard, for that matter.

  The trip to Maui had been a mistake, one mistake in an accumulation of mistakes. How had Wanda fooled me into coming with her to honeymoon heaven?

  More to the point, how had I fooled myself?

  14.

  TRISH MET US AT EDMONTON INTERNATIONAL, as arranged. She immediately picked up on our sour mood and must have worked hard to rein in both her curiosity and chatty disposition. We rode in closed silence as she slipped the car in and out of traffic, making it to the house in twenty minutes. She had just parked and released the trunk lid when a police car pulled up behind.

  “Damn,” she said. “That radar detector must not be working.”

  But the police had not come to issue a speeding ticket. They introduced themselves, verified identities, and asked which of us had known Cindy Lottridge.

  Trish said they had never met, and I acknowledged that I knew Cindy in passing. Wanda said nothing.

  The two officers, a male in uniform and a plainclothes female, were polite and looked too young and innocent to be dealing with criminals and the like, especially the uniformed cop. He wrote down Trish’s particulars in case they wanted to speak with her later. Trish helped unload the suitcases and hugged me goodbye. I promised to call her.

  “Ms. Wysoka, could we come in for a few minutes?” the male cop asked. “Detective Takada would like to ask you a few questions.”

  The detective’s card read: Det. Amy Takada. She was tall and toned, supermodel Susan Shimizu in a suit.

  Hearing the police refer to Cindy in the past tense had snapped me into the present, and I steere
d a dazed Wanda up the steps and into the house. The uniformed officer placed the suitcases inside the front porch and he and Detective Takada followed us into the kitchen. I pulled out a chair for Wanda and stood behind her.

  Detective Takada asked where we had been during the last twenty-four hours, then examined our boarding passes.

  “How well did you know Cindy Lottridge?” she asked Wanda.

  Wanda stared back at her.

  “Very well,” I said, still in shock at this turn of events.

  Detective Takada gave me an odd look.

  When asked again, Wanda replied that they had been good friends.

  “Really good friends,” I mumbled.

  Detective Takada gave me another unfathomable look, and I immediately regretted the reckless remark.

  “Please, Ms. Wysoka,” said Detective Takada. “When was the last time you spoke with Ms. Lottridge? We need to know. It’s very important.”

  Wanda continued to stare and say nothing.

  “They spoke on the phone the day before yesterday,” I said. “Why?”

  Detective Takada ignored me.

  “Is that right?” she asked Wanda. “Two days ago? That would’ve been Friday?”

  “I talked to her yesterday morning as well,” said Wanda.

  When had she managed that? I wondered.

  “Why are you asking these questions?” I said. “What’s happened?”

  “Ms. Lottridge was killed early this morning.”

  “What?” I said.

  “The fucker,” said Wanda.

  “Who? Who’s a fucker?” said Detective Takada. “Who are you talking about?”

  “Her ex.”

  “What’s happened?” I asked again.

  “We can’t divulge those details just yet.”

  “I need to see her,” said Wanda.

  “Sorry, that’s not possible,” said the male cop.

  “But I need to see her.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “We do understand,” said Detective Takada. “It’s just not possible right now…. But you seem to have an idea who might’ve done this….

  “Her fucking ex-husband, that’s who. He’s been threatening her for months. You must know about it. Ask Freddie about him. She knows.”

  “Freddie is Cindy’s partner,” I said.

  “Frederica Coyne, you mean? She’s in the hospital. We haven’t been able to speak with her yet.”

  They asked more questions. What did Wanda know about the ex? Any idea where he lived? Where he could be reached?

  The police returned later in the day. They were still unable to speak with Frederica Coyne, but they had spoken with some of Ms. Lottridge’s other acquaintances. Would Wanda please elaborate on the exact nature of her relationship with the deceased?

  It later turned out that everyone, everyone but me, that is, had known for some time about “the exact nature” of Wanda’s relationship with Cindy, but not one of them had bothered to tell me.

  The entire lesbian community, including Alice’n’Peggy of all people, had been trundling in and out of my bookstore for months saying Hi and How’s-it-going without bothering to tell me how it really was going.

  ALL THIS SEEMED TO PALE, however, when the next day, the day after Wanda and I returned from Maui, the two planes crashed into the Twin Towers in New York City.

  The whole world was falling apart.

  Griselda Woods, professor of English literature, was the one to deliver the news. I was on my own in the bookstore at the time, in full jet lag and still in shock from the news of Cindy’s murder.

  “Turn on the radio,” Griselda said as she charged through the door. “Quick, never mind what station.”

  I listened incredulously to the news that had pre-empted all other programming. I wouldn’t see the TV images until later in the day, but it was to be one of those times when the 49th parallel becomes, for us Canadians, the truly invisible border that it is.

  Griselda dabbed at her eyes with a Kleenex.

  “You’ve no idea how upsetting this is for me,” she said. “New York City is my second home. It’s the centre of my research on the Queer Metropolis. I’ve studied those communities, I know them intimately. I have friends there, colleagues. You can’t imagine what this is doing to me.”

  Griselda continued for some time in this vein, as if her intellectual pursuits somehow entitled her to superior weeping privileges, access to deeper wells of sorrow than the rest of us.

  Although not reflected in the sales figures, the rest of the day was one of the busiest since the store opened. People needed a place to be with others.

  Along with the reality of Cindy’s death, the attacks south of the border seemed to have a numbing effect on Wanda. I came home from work each day to find her in front of the TV, stretched out on the couch with a bottle of wine. The TV blared out a continuous stream of news stories.

  No respite from the day for me, just non-stop yammer from New York City.

  I would prepare dinner and bring it to her. She’d drink the wine and pick at her food as she flicked from channel to channel to stare at the same homemade videos, the same distraught interviews and testimonials, the ad nauseam expert comments by the same retired generals, over and over again. She must’ve watched the plane crash into the second tower at least one hundred times.

  Perhaps the focus on the people buried in the rubble gave her a frame of reference for a fate that would abruptly rob you of two lovers in one lifetime. Perhaps this larger-than-one-life tragedy allowed her to situate her own loss amongst those other thousands of losses that included window washers, toilet cleaners, undocumented workers—the latter now symbols of annihilated refugee desperation.

  After a few days, the attacks also seemed to distract her from her own grief, for they brought out the Wanda who strived to talk sarcastic sense into the world.

  “Clearly, a single American life is worth more than all the other lives on the planet combined,” she’d say. And, “Tell me this: Since when do U.S. citizens get to call themselves Americans to the exclusion of the rest of us? Canadians, Mexicans, the peoples of Central and South America—it’s time we reclaimed the term as the other citizens of the Americas.”

  She’d remind me of Chile’s earlier 9/11 and of Argentina’s Dirty War. At the time, how many denouncements had there been from U.S. citizens of their own government as a terrorist organization?

  “All those tortured and murdered people, all those stolen and brainwashed children. Where was the outpouring of American grief then?”

  Images of mothers and grandmothers circling the central plaza in Buenos Aires came to mind. Women in black clutched to their breasts photos of children presumed dead or kidnapped by members of the military junta. But unlike the people on the streets of New York, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo stood in silent vigil, because to speak out was to invite violence from the very officials who should have been protecting them. The New Yorkers, on the other hand, had the full support of their police and other officials.

  The Saturday after the attacks, I came in to hear to a measured CBC voice suggest that the U.S. might be preparing to go to war against a certain unspecified group that claimed to have orchestrated the terrorist attacks.

  “I wonder if I should cancel the Brossard reading,” I wondered aloud, mostly to myself.

  Wanda emerged from her TV fog to give an opinion. “No reason to cancel. Security will be so tight now that flying is probably safer than it’s ever been. And it’s not as if the world stopped after the other 9/11,” she said. “Anyway, people could use something positive about now.”

  She turned her attention back to the TV.

  “They’re out there somewhere. I know they are,” she muttered, flicking between channels in a vain search for media cove
rage of any critical voices.

  The volume increased for a series of ads, then an abrasive female voice said, “Our sense of safety has been shattered. Terrorism has introduced unforeseen risks into the economy.”

  The CNN voice feared that people would stop flying, that the airline industry would collapse, and worse—that investors would shun America.

  Meanwhile, I had my own economic problems to worry about. The bookstore was heading into the busy season and some of the major publishers had stopped shipping us books. It was a vicious cycle. No payments meant no book shipments, which meant no book sales, which translated into no payments. My operating loan was maxed out, and none of the strategies to improve my cash flow had worked.

  The latest failed scheme had been Carmen’s idea: A resale section to which customers would donate no-longer-needed books. How could we lose? Books acquired for free, then sold at bargain prices?

  The response had been immediate. Boxes of musty journals, tracts, and earnest feminist books from the eighties dropped on the front counter or dumped at the back door, inevitably when Carmen or I was on her own. But who read Betty Friedan anymore? Kate Millett? And who read Gloria Steinem since she got married? It seemed that our customers had embraced the book-donation scheme as a conscience-clearing exercise for the worthy books they couldn’t bring themselves to throw out. Meanwhile, our remaining saleable titles had become lost in a clutter of discarded, dog-eared books annotated with indelible scribbles and underlinings and bold exclamation marks in the margins. I had called a halt to the program after three weeks. Disposal of the remaining donations took hours of packing and five trips to the municipal recycle bin.

  The one bright light on the horizon was Nicole Brossard’s upcoming reading. Her appearance would not turn the tide, but if I did decide to close the store, at least Common Reader Books could go out with one final triumphant reading. We would go out with a bang, and then I could get on with my life.

  I would have to make a decision soon.

  A few days before leaving for Maui, I had answered an ad for a free consultation. Do you feel like help is out of reach? Bankruptcy is not always the solution! As it turned out, in my case, bankruptcy was indeed the recommended solution.