Sputnik's Children

by Terri Favro

  As the coffee steams its way into a mug, I gather up my pantyhose, blouse and bra, scattered around the room. Skirt? Missing in action. Ever so gently I tug the sheet from around Darren. Nope, he’s not wearing it. Eventually, I find it lying in the closet.

  Darren’s left hand is resting on the bedcovers in plain view. No ring. No telltale marks, like a tan line, either. Not that that means much. My grandfather and father didn’t wear wedding rings: people who work with machines often don’t. A ring, a tie, a watch, a scarf, earrings, a ponytail — all easily hooked by moving parts or superheated by motors and wires. The lack of jewellery might simply mean that he’s cautious about taking chances in his professional life. Maybe in his personal life, too.

  I sit in a chair and watch his face in sleep. A straight nose, high forehead, pale eyebrows, prominent cheekbones — Nordic. A sensitive-looking face. The outdoorsy Lutheran minister look, all dry rectitude and simmering sexuality fighting to keep itself in check.

  Darren mumbles. I put down my cup. His eyes open, dark brown irises under fair lashes. An odd combination.

  He smiles. “Hey there.”

  “Hello,” I say back.

  He sits up. “You feeling okay?”

  I rub my head. “A little hungover. You?”

  He rubs his head in sympathy, but without the conviction of the truly hungover. “Not feeling too bad, but. Well. Anyway. Wow. I guess we got a little carried away last night, eh?”

  “Guess so. In fact,” I pause, trying to decide whether to say this out loud, because it sounds so awful, “I’m having a hard time even remembering last night, after the lobby.”

  He nods and turns to plant his feet on the floor. Pulls the sheet modestly over himself.

  “Do you remember getting into an argument about Chekov?”

  I shake my head. “The writer?”

  “No, the helmsman. From Star Trek. Original series.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I say, and I do. Something about how amazed we both were by the retirement of the space shuttle. How wrong it seemed for future NASA astronauts to be taking off from Russia, and yet how appropriate, in that it proved that Star Trek got it right. That the Federation could bring together people of all nations to explore space.

  “Oh, and we discussed your origin story at length,” adds Darren.

  For a moment, I’m so surprised, I can’t take a breath.

  “My origin story? I think you mean Sputnik Chick’s.”

  Darren grins and shrugs. “They’re really the same thing, aren’t they? Just like you told me in Montreal, you’re mining your own life in your work — childhood, growing up, immigrant family, et cetera. But as I said last night, I wonder whether you should go beyond personal trauma and explore more archetypal themes.”

  I stare at him, astonished. I never talk about my writing to anyone. Never. I don’t discuss ideas or share work in progress. I never solicit opinions or seek out collaborators. Hell, I hardly ever listen to my editor at Grey Wizard. I’m a lone wolf, just like Sputnik Chick.

  “You sound as if you’re trying to fix my origin story,” I say carefully.

  “Sorry. I overstepped,” he says. “Frustrated writer myself, I guess. It’s just, despite the offbeat humour and cartoony violence, I’ve always felt that The Girl With No Past was a revenge tragedy at heart. There’s a darkness at its core. That’s what makes it so interesting.”

  I step into my skirt. “Vengeance implies some type of betrayal. Who betrayed whom, in your opinion?”

  He shrugs. “You’re the writer.”

  We say our goodbyes at the taxi stand. Sliding into a cab, I’m already chalking him up as yet another one-night stand with a Spunky, when he says, “Can I get back to you tomorrow, around noon? I have to catch up on the appointments I missed yesterday. Otherwise, I’d look after you today.”

  I stare at him, not comprehending. “Look after me?”

  “I meant, the Miele. But I wouldn’t mind looking after you again, too,” he says. “If you’re interested.”

  Either he just asked me on a date or he needs the business.

  As the cab heads west, I smell something burning. Sniffing the air, I peer at the driver in the rear-view. His eyes catch my frown.

  “Something wrong, miss?”

  “I thought I smelled cigarette smoke. Must have been one of your previous passengers.”

  He shakes his head firmly and taps the NO SMOKING sign bolted to the dashboard.

  An olfactory hallucination, then. It takes me a few seconds to place it: not cigarette smoke, but burnt toast, sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon. The smell of tragedy and grief, vengeance’s older sisters. I dig around in my purse for the vial of lorazepam.

  Just to take the edge off.

  one

  Plonk

  Shipman’s Corners, A.M.T.

  When the laughing gas wore off, I understood why the Trespasser had warned me not to act surprised. Instead of waking up in the dentist’s chair, I was in the open air, facing Dad, his boots sunk up to the ankles in yellow horse manure, spraying grapevines from a tank painted with the letters “DDT” strapped to his back. I saw myself standing next to him. And by “myself” I don’t mean “me,” but rather the future me. Taller and heavier, bookish-looking in wireframe glasses, my shoulder-length hair covered by a red bandanna, knotted at the nape of my neck. Like Dad, I was dressed in knee-high rubber boots and (surprise of surprises) a pair of blue jeans. I watched myself reach up to gently tug on a bunch of immature grapes hanging from a vine, testing their firmness.

  Even with the midday sun beating down on my bare skin, I was shivering as if I’d been standing naked in a deep freeze. In a way, I had been. When you swing Schrödinger’s cat (I would later learn), you are frozen in time until you re-enter the continuum where your future self already exists. Until you integrate your two selves, one of you is on the outside looking in.

  I waved my hand up and down in front of Debbie-of-the-Future’s face. No reaction. I was invisible to her and Dad.

  For one freaky, gut-twisting moment, I felt myself moving toward me/her. The acceleration felt like the final drop on a roller coaster, when you’re sure you’ve left a few of your internal organs behind. Next thing I knew, I was fondling the grapes and thinking about how urgently I needed to empty my bladder. I had integrated with my future self, but the body I was standing in did not feel like my own.

  Dad had aged — his hair greyer, for sure — but he was skinnier and healthier-looking, with the tan of someone who spent a lot of time outdoors. I’d never seen him dressed in jeans and a denim shirt before. He was almost handsome, even with a tank of pesticide strapped to his back.

  His face registered concern. I must have looked as disoriented as I felt.

  “You okay, there, Debbie? Heat getting to you?”

  I improvised. “I am feeling a little woozy. And I need to pee.”

  “Time to call it a day,” said Dad. “Why don’t you use the Johnny-on-the-Spot? Too gross for you?”

  “I can handle it.” I walked awkwardly toward a green plastic outhouse at the edge of the field. I felt so top-heavy that I kept thinking I was going to fall forward onto my face.

  I tried to figure out exactly where we were: this was a much bigger vineyard than the one in our backyard, the grapevines rolling in long straight lines toward a far blue horizon that suggested we were close to a large body of water. The vines looked like the twisted bodies of burnt men, crucified on posts. Judging by the firmness of the grapes, harvest time was still months away. Strange, considering that the Trespasser had said he was sending me forward in time nine years to the day. I’d been sitting in the dentist’s chair in mid-November, but the weather felt more like early summer.

  Opening the door of the outhouse, I half-expected to see the Trespasser inside, waiting for me. All I found was a foul-smelling pit covered
by a rudimentary toilet. As I hovered over the seat, I looked down at myself. I was wearing a bright yellow T-shirt printed with a big happy face, under which protruded a pair of breasts the size of cake mixing bowls. I was horrified to see how womanly I’d become. The Trespasser said I was supposed to save the world, but how could I do anything heroic in a body that made me feel as if I were swimming through wet cement?

  I didn’t see the Country Squire among the few vehicles in the gravel parking area behind a grey windowless bunker of a building, so I slowed my pace to see which one Dad would unlock. To my surprise, he threw his equipment into the truck bed of a canary yellow Ford half-ton pickup, painted with the catchphrase of Shipman’s Corners’ favourite brand of plonk: Sparkling Sparrow Wine & Juice. Have A Grape Day! A lemon-scented cardboard deodorizer in the shape of a happy face hung from the rear-view.

  Sitting high in the passenger seat, I followed Dad’s lead and clipped myself into a device I’d never used before — a seat belt — before we peeled out of the parking lot. I could see now that the front of the grey bunker, facing the road, was painted a cheerful yellow and purple, with a huge sign reading: Sparkling Sparrow Wines and Juices, A Division of ShipCo Pharmaceuticals (Canusa) Limited: Your World Looks Better Though Grape-Filled Glasses. In the near distance, a saltie cut through the canal. I had my bearings now: we were in a township on the outskirts of Shipman’s Corners, on a stretch of Lakeshore Road.

  * * *

  Dad turned on the radio. The music that flowed out sounded immediately fresh and new and exciting.

  “I don’t know what the hell it is with the music these days,” complained Dad, fiddling with the station. “Just want to hear the damn news.”

  I drowsed to the drone of Prime Minister Stanfield’s monotone — the old fart was still in power with that perennial loser, Pierre Trudeau, still the Leader of the Opposition. Surprising that the government hadn’t changed in nine years.

  At the end of the newscast, the announcer said: This has been the Canusa Broadcasting Corporation’s five o’clock news for June thirtieth, 1971.

  I sat up straight in my seat. Had I heard the announcer correctly?

  “What day is it today?” The voice in my ears did not sound entirely my own.

  “Saturday.”

  “I mean, the date.”

  “June thirtieth,” answered Dad.

  “What year?”

  Dad frowned. “1971. Sure you’re okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah, just — lost track of time.”

  The dizziness of disorientation was turning into heart-pounding panic. Instead of the jump of nine years to the day that the Trespasser had promised, I had landed short by seven years and six months, give or take a week. The glitch might explain the Trespasser’s absence. He might not show up for years.

  Dad reached over and pressed his hand to my forehead. “You’ve got heat stroke, honey.”

  I laid my head back against the seat and closed my eyes. If only my problem was as simple as a few overheated brain cells. I had been stuffed inside a strange body and thrown into summer in Shipman’s Corners with no clue about what I’d been up to since 1969. If I’d changed so dramatically in a year and a half, it was scary to think about how much more I would have changed over nine. Now I had to figure out my next steps for myself, saving-the-world-wise.

  two

  No Place Like Home

  I woke up with a start as Dad pulled into the driveway.

  “Home again, home again, jiggity-jig,” he said brightly. Yawning, I climbed out of the truck and entered the house behind him, fearing the worst.

  I was surprised we had a house at all, considering Dad had lost his job at ShipCo. The fact that he and I were working as field hands — the dirtiest, lowest-paying way to make a living in Shipman’s Corners — hinted at a certain financial desperation. Yet our kitchen had gained a fresh coat of harvest gold paint and a new set of avocado green appliances. The effect was cheery and sickening at the same time. I was shocked to see Mom loading up a dishwasher, an extravagance we’d never had in my time. Maytag, of course.

  Mom’s tight coarse black curls had turned steel grey, and her face looked thinner, as if her flesh were being slowly honed away. Like Dad, she was in Levi’s and the same yellow smiley-face T-shirt I was wearing — when did dressing like a farmhand on mood-altering drugs become acceptable for matrons in their forties? I wondered. What happened to Mom’s cinched-waist housedresses and demure sweater sets?

  “Linda phoned. She just got to the bus station,” she said.

  “What? She should have been here hours ago,” said Dad.

  Mom shook her head. “Some idiot left their identity papers in Toronto, so there was a holdup when they crossed the Hamilton checkpoint. I told her to jump in a taxi,” she told us as she put water on to boil for pasta. Except for the bottles of Sparkling Sparrow Purple People Eater Grape Drink in the middle of the table, our meals didn’t seem to have changed. But what was Linda doing in Toronto — was she still forbidden from living at home after all this time? And since when did anyone in my penny-pinching family “jump in a taxi”? Everyone was acting like the Moneybags McGurk family in the comics. I stood watching Mom for a while as she hummed in front of the stove, oddly happy as she simmered a pot of tomato sauce. Something was definitely off.

  I went to my room. Yellow chenille bedspreads were pulled tight on both beds. A stuffed bear wearing a T-shirt with the Sparkling Sparrow happy face was plopped on my pillow. A bowl of cinnamon-apple potpourri made the air smell like New England in autumn, a good way to cover the smoggy fug of a summer day in Shipman’s Corners. A silver and black telescope stood on a tripod in one corner, the lens angled toward the window. A little engraved plaque announced that its owner, Debbie Biondi, had taken first place in the 1971 Canusa Regional School Board Science Fair. On my desk, my sketchpads, pencils and Walter Foster art instruction books were neatly lined up. I picked up the one on top — How to Draw Flowers. Below that, How to Draw Cars. The next one — How to Draw the Human Body. I flipped through that one. It was full of naked women with backcombed up-dos, posed in fur stoles and high-heeled slippers. Their nude bodies were tastefully rendered, revealing only the crack of a bum or the slope of a breast. No bullet-shaped nipples.

  I caught sight of myself in the mirror. What did my body look like under this stupid shirt? I pulled it over my head, revealing a beige nylon bra with a tiny pink bow where the cups met. I unclipped the bra and checked the size: 36B. I was shocked — two years earlier I’d been a 32A. The reflection of my cow-like body astonished me. The dark brown orbs of my undrawable nipples. The little pout of fat around my middle. The slouch of my shoulders. If I was on a mission to save the world, why didn’t I look more superheroic? I put the bra and T-shirt back on.

  Everything in the bedroom seemed calm and peaceful, like something out of an air-freshener commercial. I, on the other hand, had grown into the “before” picture in a Shake Yourself Thin ad, the kind for which they cut out a fat woman’s head and stuck it on the body of a skinnier woman for the “after” shot.

  I went into the living room, feeling like an explorer in my own home. The Canusa six o’clock radio news drifted in from the kitchen. Something about President Nixon leading a rally against Soviet aggression. How did Nixon jump from vice-president to president? And what had happened to Bobby Kennedy, newly re-elected to the presidency just two years earlier? It would be a few days before I could sneak off to the library to scan back issues of the Shipman Corner’s Examiner, where the scandal was covered in salacious detail: a young woman drowning in the White House pool, her nude body discovered after she’d taken late night “dictation” in the Oval Office. No wonder Kennedy had escaped to Ireland.

  I slipped my hand inside the waistband of my jeans. I wasn’t used to wearing pants; these ones were uncomfortable, stiff and tight around the middle. I stared at myself in a mirror Mom ha
d put up in the living room, also new. How had I got so big?

  As I tried to figure out how to not look like a large blue sausage, Linda breezed through the door, carrying the same suitcase she’d been packing the last time I saw her.

  “Debbie, you look fantastic! Have you lost weight?” Linda lied, throwing her arms around me. I hugged her bony frame cautiously, trying not to snap her in two.

  My sister was the one who looked fantastic, if strangely dressed: fashion had evolved more rapidly in two years than it had in the previous decade. Like everyone else in the house — possibly in the Free World — Linda was wearing blue jeans, paired with thick-soled, bubble-toed shoes and a polyester blouse ruched up like the folds of a bloodhound. Her thick black hair had been permed into a dandelion of frizzy curls, as if her head had been pumped full of static electricity. When I’d last seen Linda, she had looked wan and bloated, like a teabag left too long to steep in lukewarm water. Now she was back in wholesome star-volleyball-player shape. Like Mom, she seemed almost too happy.

  “Sit down, Linda. Nonna Peppy is coming for dinner,” fussed Mom as she set the table. “I want to have a little family conference before she gets here.”

  “Isn’t Nonno Zin coming with her?” I asked.

  All three of them looked at me with obvious surprise.

  “Debbie, you’ve definitely had too much sun,” said Dad.

  From the conversation that followed, I learned that Nonno Zinio had passed away. Over time, I would eventually piece together the rest of the story as my family rehashed the tragedy for dinner guests: not long after Linda and Mom had retreated to Toronto, Dad found Nonno Zinio in the wine cellar, so eaten up by cancer that his body looked like a puddle of clothes on the floor. Nonna Peppy had been living alone next door ever since. She insisted on setting a place for Nonno Zin at every meal, even ladling food onto his plate. Sometimes, she was overheard having conversations with him. Except for old Pepé the Seventh, she had little company. Something had to be done.