Red Plaid Shirt

by Diane Schoemperlen

  When Richard takes his wife out to celebrate their anniversary, they talk about the past year (kind of an annual report) and their hopes for the next year (kind of a prospectus) and then they talk about other things, such as the new lawn mower, the reason the car keeps backfiring, or what colour to paint the bathroom now.

  At this moment, the food comes. In honour of the occasion, they have both ordered the prime rib, medium rare, with baked potato, sour cream. Marilyn likes it when they order the same meal in restaurants—it makes her feel like they are a real couple, a happy couple with no problems, not a care in the world. It makes her think of those old married couples you see waltzing together at weddings, so smoothly you’d think they were one body with two sets of legs. They dance with their eyes shut, humming.

  The food, on plain white crockery plates, is so good they keep smiling at it as they dig in.

  Richard says calmly, “I’m putting the house up for sale.”

  Marilyn thinks calmly, He’s leaving her. He’s all mine now. I will be stuck with him forever.

  Richard says, “We’re going to buy a new one, with a swimming pool and a bay window. We’re even going to decorate it ourselves this time.”

  Marilyn can just imagine Eileen squinting at paint chips, caressing upholstery swatches, studying weighty wallpaper books as though they were the Dead Sea scrolls. She is sucking little mints and making little notes with a thin gold pen. Richard will let her do every little thing she wants and so he will never be able to leave her now. They will live perfectly ever after.

  Over coffee and cherry cheesecake for dessert, Marilyn notices for the first time the country and western music playing in the background: “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” she will recall later, with satisfaction and some inverted sense of justice or triumph. For now, she supposes this is the kind of music that Curtis would like, would tap his cowboy boots to and tease her with when she tells him the story of her romance with Richard. The snow is still piling up outside, sticking to the windows in a festive Christmasy way.

  They leave the restaurant and head back to the car. There is a sense between them, swinging somewhere in the vicinity of their clasped hands, hanging there like a purse, of something unsaid but settled. They step through the snow in silence, convincing themselves that it is merely companionable. They are so successful at this that soon Richard is thinking about how they will have just enough time to make love at Marilyn’s before he has to go on home and Marilyn is worrying that her new black suede cowboy boots will be ruined for nothing in all this snow.

  The car slides sideways toward them out of the snow slowly, so slowly, not like you might think, not like an express train or a charging wild horse. It slides sideways past them, just brushing the tail of Marilyn’s fur coat which has billowed out around her at this instant in the wind. It slides into the basement window of an apartment building across the street. The glass shatters all over the sparkling snow and the hood of the car is sucked into the hole. The tail lights are red, the car is green, the snow is white, as Richard and Marilyn are running away.

  DESCRIBE THE CAR:

  A 1968 Chevy Biscayne Street Racer Special with Posi-traction and a 425 horsepower solid-lifter 427 cubic inch big block under the hood, the car is owned, loved, and now wrecked by a greasy teenager named Ted. He is an unlucky young man and this is just the sort of thing that happens to him. He has just been fired from his job at the gas station and has moved back in with his parents who think that all teenagers are like Ted so it’s not really their fault the way he turned out. When he is not cruising in his car, which was a hunk of junk when he bought it for a song, he’s working on it. Just when he gets it the way he wants it, he thinks happily of something else that should be done.

  Before he hit that ice patch and drove into the window, he was on the way to pick up his girlfriend who works at the Burger King three blocks away.

  DESCRIBE THE GIRLFRIEND:

  Pinkie is waiting out front of the Burger King, sniffing her long blonde hair to see if the grease smell is gone. She’s hoping the snow will wash it away. She has changed into her jeans and has her red uniform in a plastic bag. They are going to see a horror movie. She is thinking about getting a tattoo on her right shoulder, but she can’t decide if she wants a butterfly or a unicorn. Either way, her parents will disown her but it wouldn’t be the first time.

  Ted is ten minutes late. Pinkie hears the sirens but is not old enough yet to be afraid for him. She is just plain mad. She stamps her little foot: if he doesn’t show up in five minutes, she will break up with him. She will take a ride with Gerry, who owns a 1966 Dodge Hemi Coronet, candy apple red, and who has been hanging around the Burger King all week, drinking chocolate milkshakes and pestering her to go for a ride. He would take her anywhere, even in this snow. This stupid snow. She can hardly wait till summer.

  Ted is thirteen minutes late. Pinkie guesses he got the stupid Chevy stuck in the stupid snow somewhere.

  Certainly, she does not suspect that Ted has got the car stuck in an apartment building.

  DESCRIBE THE APARTMENT:

  In the living room of the cozy apartment, there is a floral hide-abed couch and two matching chairs, rust-coloured shag carpeting, glass-topped coffee and end tables with doilies, needlepoint pictures of poppies and Jesus on the walls.

  Judy, the woman who lives there, is lolling around on the hide-a-bed with her lover, Hal, eating pizza and watching TV. Judy and Hal work at the Bank of Montreal, where she is the teller supervisor and he is the accountant. They have been working and sleeping together for two years. Miraculously, nobody knows this. They have ordered this extra-large deluxe pizza tonight to celebrate Hal’s big raise. They feel sinful and smug because they’re supposed to be dieting, each trying to lose twenty pounds by Easter. They giggle and relish their various secrets.

  Judy and Hal always make love on the hide-a-bed because Judy doesn’t feel right doing it in the real bed where she sleeps with her husband, Bruce. She and Bruce sold their house and moved into this apartment after their twin daughters went away to university. They needed the money to put them through, one in medicine and the other in law.

  The picture window which Ted’s green car comes through is right above the hide-a-bed. Glass and snow are twinkling, sprinkling everywhere and they are all screaming, including the boy in the car, but no one is really hurt. Painless pinpoints of blood well up on Hal’s left arm which was in the pizza box when the car hit. One of the broken headlights springs out of its socket and dangles like an eyeball between them. Judy is getting up and tiptoeing through the glass, she is dialling the police, looking for her housecoat, and wondering what on earth she will tell her husband when he finally gets home from work at the bakery, which is where he says he is, but Judy has her doubts.

  DESCRIBE THE HUSBAND:

  The Man of My Dreams (1987)

  I dreamed of myself in a dream, and told the dream, which was mine, as if it were another person’s of whom I dreamed. Indeed, what is life when thinking of the past, but dreaming of a dream dreamt by another who seems sometimes to be oneself?

  —Stopford Brooke, Diary, June 8, 1899

  1

  In the stories I read, the female characters dream in great detail of daring escapes from prisons, kitchens, and burning shopping malls; of reproduction, reincarnation, and masked terrorists tracking them through quicksand just when they are about to give birth. In these fictional dreams, the ex-husbands or -lovers are delightfully drowned in vats of warm beer or are pelted to death with wormy apples thrown by throngs of scorned women in their white negligees. These lucid dreamers wield axes, swords, scythes, and the occasional chainsaw which lops off those unfaithful legs like sugar cane. The male characters in these clever stories dream muscularly about cars, hockey, boxing, and taking their mistresses and/or their mothers out for chateaubriand and escargots.

  All of this seems significant and makes good sense to me. I nod while I’m reading and often underline.

  2


  In the stories I write, the female characters dream about black stallions which burst into flames, carrying their young daughters to certain death in lakes a hundred feet deep; about alcoholic surgeons who keep taking them apart and putting them back together again like jigsaw puzzles, sometimes missing a piece; about bullfights at which they’re wearing their wedding gowns and the matador rides the bull before he kills it and then a team of mules drags the dead bull away on its back like a giant insect and the crowd throws red roses, hysterical; about trains, catching them, missing them, chasing them; about babies, having them, losing them, selling them; about tunnels and eggs.

  When they wake up in the morning, these women are gratified to remember every little detail of these dreams and tell them to their sleepy husbands or lovers who are not really interested but pretend to be as they slurp up their coffee and scratch. The women say, “Last night I dreamed you were dead,” and the men say, “That’s nice, honey. Where the hell are my socks?” And the women just hand those socks over without even having to think: they know where everything is, they just know, and they’re talking about going into dream therapy and the men say, “Sure, that sounds like fun, honey. Go for it.”

  These male characters dream sturdily, if at all, about wrestling, drinking, baseball, skydiving, and pouring vinegar on their fish and chips when they were happy little kids. More often, though, they wake up in the morning with a simple erection and say, “Boy, I was dead the minute my head hit the pillow. I slept like a baby.”

  In the stories I write, I take it for granted that these men snore and roll over forty-seven times a night while these women beside them wander and moan, commit adultery, murder, and magic. This is along the lines of my mother always saying, “When men get upset, they drink. We women, we cry.” Of course, I write fiction.

  3

  In real life, I dream about telephone bills, frying pans, oranges.

  The dream telephone bill is ten pages long, an astronomical amount, past due, which has me calling all over town trying to track down who owes me how much for which calls. Nobody can remember phoning anybody long-distance on my phone ever in their entire lives. They tell me you have moved to a country where they don’t speak English.

  To dream of a telephone foretells meeting strangers who will harass and bewilder you. For a woman to dream of using one warns that she will have much jealous rivalry, but will overcome all evil influences. If she cannot hear well on the telephone, she is threatened with evil gossip and the loss of a lover. If the telephone is out of order, it portends sad news.

  The dream frying pan, red, Teflon-coated, is being returned to me by the man next door and it is three times as big as the one I loaned him in the first place, which was the one my mother gave me for Christmas three weeks before she died. He grins foolishly out from under a white baseball cap as I try to make him understand that this is not the right pan, this is not my frying pan. I give up eventually and get busy scrambling a dozen farm-fresh eggs for brunch.

  To dream of pots and pans foretells that trivial events will cause you much vexation. To see a broken or rusty one implies that you will experience keen disappointment.

  Oranges, twice I have dreamed about oranges.

  The first orange dream, which I had when I was pregnant with Ben, is set in Atwater, the eastern town where I grew up. I am by the water around the docks and grain elevators. My friend, Bonnie, and someone named Lynn are there too, all bundled up in big coats and plastic hats because it is cold and raining. You are at work or in the bar drinking with the boys. We three women discuss this, shaking our heads and smoking in the rain. I go walking down to the water alone and then along the shoreline, which is icy and treacherous. I am thinking about a football star I knew in high school who got a summer job on the railroad and fell from a boxcar his first day out and got both his legs cut off at the knee. I am cutting up an orange with my Swiss Army knife and throwing the slices to the seagulls. I walk back along the shoreline, being extra careful not to slip on the ice because suddenly I am pregnant. I pick my way back to where Bonnie and Lynn are still huddled together on an iron bench.

  I awoke then, suddenly and fully, as if at a noise in the night: breaking glass or footsteps, but there was nothing.

  The second orange dream, which didn’t amount to much, is set in Hazelwood, the western town where you and I lived together. I am squeezing a whole bag of oranges to make juice for our breakfast. There are mountains out the window. You are at the kitchen table in your longjohns looking at the newspaper. I smell my orange-dipped fingers and you read me my horoscope.

  To dream of eating oranges is signally bad, foretelling pervasive discontentment and the sickness of friends or relatives. A young woman is likely to lose her lover if she dreams of eating oranges. But if she dreams of seeing a fine one tossed up high, she will be discreet in choosing a husband from among her many lovers. To slip on an orange peel foretells the death of a relative.

  4

  In real life, I dream about my dead mother, young again in the garden there beside the peonies. Or I dream that it is my father who is dead instead.

  5

  In real life, I dream about grocery shopping.

  My parents, both of them alive in this dream, are here to visit Ben and me in this eastern city where we have come to live. I am at the A&P buying six ears of corn despite the fact that both my parents have false teeth and will have to scrape the kernels off the cobs with a fork, which is harder than it looks. I go over to the 24-Hour Deli Counter which features fresh peaches, three-bean salad, and pickled eggs. A woman slicing meat explains that everything on her counter is twenty-four hours old or less. “This beef, for instance,” she tells me, waving a knife, “this cow has been dead for less than twenty-four hours.”

  I go around the store picking up the ingredients for Chinese Pork: pork tenderloin, three green peppers, mushrooms. I decide I will use fresh mushrooms. My mother, who gave me the recipe, always used canned, but now I will show her how much better it is with fresh. But all the mushrooms they have are brown and shrivelling, more stems than caps. Frozen lemonade, limeade, and orange juice cans go rolling down the aisles with messages on them.

  To dream of pork predicts continued prosperity whether you eat the meat, cook it, serve it, or buy it.

  In the morning I dug out the recipe, one you always loved. It was written on a small blue-lined white card in my mother’s neat strong hand:

  CHINESE PORK

  1/2 lb. pork tenderloin

  2 1/2 tsp. soya sauce

  2 tbsp. flour

  1 tbsp. butter

  1 chicken bouillon cube

  1/2 cup boiling water

  1 green pepper, cut in strips

  1 (10 oz.) can sliced mushrooms, drained

  Cut tenderloin in narrow strips. Brush strips with soya sauce, roll in flour. Melt butter in fry pan, add meat, and brown. Dissolve bouillon cube in 1/2 cup boiling water, add to fry pan with other ingredients. Cover and simmer about 15 minutes. Serve with rice. (Serves 2.)

  The recipe told me nothing about either you or her. It was just something she sent me once when she was dieting, a low-calorie one-dish meal that looked good on the table, good enough to photograph, good enough to eat. We traded recipes, she and I, just as I imagine other women do, but when I went back to Atwater for the funeral, I found the ones I’d sent (Sour Cream Meatloaf, Quick Spaghetti Sauce with Clams, Chunky Chili) not even filed into the box. She had never even tried them, so I made the meatloaf for my father, who liked it very much. Of course, he would.

  This was the day before the funeral. My father and I had been out all morning making the arrangements and Sonja, the woman next door, was minding Ben. When I went over to pick him up, Sonja sat me down with warm spice cake and coffee. I remembered her as cooking, always cooking, bringing over cast iron pots and crockery bowls covered with tinfoil, still steaming.

  That day she was making sauerkraut soup, which I said I had never heard of but it sur
e did smell good. So she told me the recipe, and also one for perogies, which she’d been making twelve dozen of once a week for thirty years. These were family recipes, passed on to her by her mother, who was still alive but laid up these days with a bad back. Sonja had never written them down herself but performed them magically from memory, like playing the piano without sheet music. I tried to follow her directions, scribbling them on the back of an envelope: a little bit of this, a little bit of that, simmer till it looks done.

  Ben hopped happily around the fragrant kitchen, eating peanut butter sandwiches and singing the “Sesame Street” theme song. Sonja and I smoked and drank coffee and talked about people I hadn’t thought of for years, until finally she just wondered why my mother had never told her about Ben until he was nearly two years old.

  6

  In the dream about the bacon (this was years ago), you say, “I hate pork, you know I hate pork, why are you feeding me pork?”

  I say, “You’re lying, you asshole. You men are all alike,” you being the one in real life who, every single time I made roast pork on Sunday, would say, “Oh goody, pork sandwiches for my midnight snack. They always give me the best dreams.”

  It makes sense to me that women should dream about food.

  To dream of eating bacon is good if someone is eating with you and your hands are clean. Rancid bacon is a suggestion to see a doctor. Cooking bacon augurs a surprise or gift, which will please you very much.

  The next morning I was still mad but could hardly explain myself, not sanely anyway, as I slammed around the kitchen, making lousy coffee and slapping together a cheese and tomato sandwich for your lunch, knowing full well that you hated how the bread would be soggy and pink by noon.