The Romantic

by Barbara Gowdy

  I’ve never been on an airplane before. I am amazed by how unspectacular it is—the smooth lift-off, the momentary view and then clouds. No UFOS, no angels. I soon fall asleep. The seat beside me is empty, and when I awaken with the serving of breakfast I find I have kicked off my new open-toed, too-small pumps (the right size made my feet look like canoes) and hoisted my legs over the armrest. I sit up straight, tugging at my skirt as the stewardess, whose blasé pantomime of the safety instructions I had admired, reaches across my legs, unfastens the little table on the seat back, bangs it down and then, still without a word, as if returning some repulsive thing I mislaid, hands me my breakfast tray.

  I take it, although I have no appetite. I even eat the fruit cocktail and one piece of toast, my fear of vomiting not as strong as my fear of annoying the stewardess if I don’t at least make a dent. Yesterday, when I got home from school, I ate half a dozen chocolate chip cookies and a minute later threw up into the kitchen sink. Mrs. Carver herded me to a chair and began brewing one of her awful stomach-settling teas. Over her shoulder she gave me that penetrating look again.

  “What?” I challenged her.

  She turned back to the stove.

  “This flu is hanging on,” I said. I didn’t put it past her that by some voodoo indicator she had lit on the truth.

  The stewardess reappears and snatches away my tray without offering me any coffee. To comfort myself I think of how I’ll be seeing Abel in only a few hours. But the prospect, now that it is almost a certainty, unnerves me. “Are you on the pill?” he asked. Since getting the pregnancy test I haven’t allowed myself to remember this, how solemn he sounded. More than solemn, frightened. “I can’t be pregnant,” I said,“it’s impossible.” By which I guess I meant impossible to imagine.

  From the Prairies to Vancouver the sky is overcast. We land in rain. Because I haven’t checked any luggage I keep walking, past the carousels and through the exit doors. Spotting a phone, I go over, fish a dime out of my change purse, put it in the slot.

  Hang up.

  Better to show up in person. That was the original plan.

  A white-pages directory lies open on the ledge under the phone. Hardly aware of what I’m doing, I leaf through to the K’s. There’s half a column of Kirks, none of them preceded by the initial G., though. Or H. (my mother might be going by Helen these days). Or S. (she might have listed herself under my father’s first name).

  I leaf back to the H’s. Haggerty. Hague. Hahn, her maiden name. No H. or S. Hahn, but—what do you know?—a G.

  I check my watch. Nine-fifteen. I drop the dime back into the slot and dial the number. One ring, two rings. The blood booms in my head.

  “Hello?” says a woman’s voice. She sounds impatient, interrupted. “Hello? Who is it?”

  Noiselessly, as if I’d been eavesdropping on an extension, I hang up.

  I head for the taxi stand. Halfway there I stop in delayed shock. I take a breath and keep walking. Was it her? I don’t know, I don’t know! It might have been. An older, more jagged voice than I remember, but she is older. Why would she be living in Vancouver, though? And if she is, why would she use her real name?

  Why did I phone? That’s the real question. What did I expect? If she wanted to get in touch with me, she’d have done so long ago. I should have at least said something. I imagine the following exchange:

  Me: “Is this Helen Grace Kirk? Formerly Hahn?”

  Her (after a pause): “Who’s calling?”

  Me: ‘Your daughter, Louise. I thought you might be interested in knowing that you’re going to be a grandmother.”

  Her (with a sarcastic snort): “Oh, great.”

  Me: “If it’s a girl I’m calling her Millicent” (after my grandmother, her mother and enemy). “But if she only lives a few hours, that is to say, if she fucks off, I’m calling her Helen Grace.”

  Just as well that I hung up.

  Me: “What did the mother cow say to the daughter cow?”

  Her: “What?”

  Me: “Any cow can get herself pregnant.”

  Her: “That’s not funny.”

  The rain stops during the drive into the city. A few minutes later, the fog thins and I glimpse mountains, water. So I really am in Vancouver. I made it.

  I wonder if my mother, when she first arrived at wherever she disappeared to, experienced this dull astonishment, this strange letdown.

  I wonder if she was pregnant.

  The thought hardly stirs me. It is as though I have alighted on the proper expression for something, an odd behaviour, say, or a circumstance, that I’ve been dimly conscious of for years. My mother pregnant by another man. By fancy Dan. The surprising part is that nobody ever suspected it. Or maybe everybody did, and it was just that nobody mentioned it in front of me.

  Which would mean I’d have a half-sister or half-brother somewhere. Right here in Vancouver, it’s possible. If it’s a girl, she’d be Louise, given my mother’s views on wasting a perfectly good name. “Let’s hope for her sake she’s ravishingly beautiful,” I think with a tremor of resentment that dismantles the entire fantasy. If there is another Louise (or Louis), it’s none of my concern. My mother did as she pleased. She minded her own business and wasn’t very curious about anyone else’s, except as it seemed to bear out what she already thought. I can’t remember her ever once asking me how I felt about something, or even paying much attention to me, other than to be entertained by one of my jokes or to fuss over how I looked. “Louise knows how to work the washing machine,” she wrote in her goodbye note. No, I didn’t.

  We have left the highway and are driving along a street lined with rundown furniture and hardware stores, a Chinese restaurant called O.K. Happy Food. After a couple of blocks the places begin to look and sound more respectable: Everton Flower Shop, Cedric’s Antiques. Elegant Fashions—the same name as the store where I work, or used to work (I had to quit to get this weekend off). Behind the stores you can see wooden houses on wide lots, many of them surrounded by high, dense hedges like ramparts. We turn onto one of these residential roads, and almost immediately pull over in front of a ranch-style bungalow whose front lawn is a jungle of flowers.

  “Are we here?” I say with a feeling of having just woken up.

  “Twenty-four Saint Clarens,” the driver says.

  I pay him, get out. Why doesn’t he stop me? Why doesn’t somebody shout,“Wait!”

  A German shepherd watches from the living-room window. Sirius, it would be, Cane’s replacement. He sits in the gap between the drapes, his big patrician head cocked. Oh, and there’s the station wagon! I hadn’t noticed it under the carport. The same old station wagon with the woodpanelled sides. “It goes with the house,” I think and drift for a moment, disoriented.

  The sound of an approaching car rouses me. I step onto the sidewalk and look at my watch. Twenty to ten.

  Abel might still be sleeping. In all my plans (they now seem insanely provisional) I never pictured anyone other than him answering the door. Well, if the station wagon can undo me, I’ll be a wreck with Mrs. Richter. She’ll only have to say my name and I’ll start crying and confessing. I can’t let that happen. Before I tell anyone else I have to tell Abel.

  I look around. There aren’t any houses on the other side of the street owing to a drop-off down to a ravine. Between the drop-off and the street is a strip of public lawn landscaped with cedar trees and shrubs, a few slabs of granite, a drinking fountain. I cross over and go behind the cedars. Several of the slabs are arranged like chairs, a tall one abutting a squat one. I choose the pair offering the best view, set my case beside them on the grass, remove my mother’s leather jacket (a previously forbidden treasure—flare-waisted, soft as raw meat—that my father allowed me to wear for this “rare and important occasion”), fold it and lay it on top of the squat slab, which is still damp from the rain. I sit. Now I’m chilly. I open the case and get out my blue jeans. That’s all I packed, except for a change of underpants and powder-bl
ue baby-doll pyjamas I bought from Elegant Fashions on my salesgirl discount a few minutes before I quit. I should have put the jeans on the slab. But the jacket will be wet on the underside; I may as well leave it. I drape the jeans around my head and shoulders. It doesn’t matter what I look like, I’m hidden from the street. I can see out, however. By moving a few branches I can see the Richters’ garden, front door, driveway. Anybody leaving the place, I won’t miss. I’ll just wait. The sun is shining, it’s warming up. Unless Abel is sick, he’ll come outside sooner or later.

  I’m good at waiting.

  And I’ve done this before. Seven and a half years ago, day after day, I hid in shrubbery and waited for Mrs. Richter to walk past her windows. I have also (the Presbyterian church episode) sat on a cold surface in an odd headdress as I prepared to spring myself on my beloved. The coincidences strike me as portentous … and unsettling, that my life should be repeating itself in this eccentric, hazardous way.

  “He loves me too much, he loves me too much,” I say to banish anxiety. I consider the lilies of the yard: white gaping flowers with petals like splayed limbs. I contemplate the house and hallucinate a fish from the sleek length, the shingled siding and a bathroom window whose partly opened Venetian blind gives the impression of gills.

  Abel’s room is at the back, he told me once. Abel, asleep. The whole neighbourhood asleep, caught in an enchantment until he wakes up. So you’d think.

  An hour elapses before a single person—a bald man carrying a rolled-up newspaper under his arm—strolls past. His silver hound noses into the park, stops, hunches, trembles all over, casts me a mournful, abject glance, then defecates. About fifteen minutes later, a boy flies down the middle of the road on a high-speed bicycle, which, before I see it, I hear as crickets.

  I am, by this association, reminded of the five types of North American cricket: house, field, California tree, snowy tree and black-horned tree. I try to remember what insect family crickets belong to. Can’t. I turn, then, to remembering jokes from A Thousand and One Side-Splitters. (“What did the mother cow say to the daughter cow? We owe all we have to udders.”) I drift to song lyrics. “Baby, baby, where did our love go.” No. “Be my, be my little baby.” No, I don’t want to think about babies, mine growing down there, bones brewing, fingernails forming, a fetal shape. See it? In that cloud of cells, see the big bean head? Well, no, I see a bomb. Make that a hand grenade.

  I think about the Vietnam War and wonder, if Canada should ever get involved, where Abel would draft-dodge to. Germany? For long moments I fall under the street’s enchantment and think nothing. It is during one of these spells that the Richters’ front door opens.

  I jump to my feet.

  Mr. Richter steps out. He is thinner than I remember, but not bent over or feeble, as I had feared. Jingling keys, he goes down the steps and toward the car. Before he reaches it the front door opens again.

  “Karl!”

  Mrs. Richter! With white hair! Abel never told me. And she’s fat, she’s gotten fat! She’s wearing a red bathrobe, not the same old one, surely, she wouldn’t fit into it. She calls out something in German. Mr. Richter holds up a finger, gives a curt nod: Ja, danke schön for the reminder, he won’t forget. He climbs into the car and drives off. She descends the porch steps. Hands on hips, she surveys her yard. She squints my way and for a delirious moment I’m convinced she has spotted me. Then she bends at the waist. When she straightens she is clutching a bunch of carrots. She turns and goes back into the house.

  It is all I can do not to run over there and pound on the door. It is all I can do.

  The morning passes. Eleven-thirty. Noon. Mr. Richter doesn’t return. Nobody enters the park. I am the street’s witness, its prisoner. I drink from the fountain, pee among the shrubs, occasionally I stand on my slab to get a better view of the mountains bolting out of their laurels of cloud. Otherwise I stay put, sitting now on both the jeans and the jacket and using the overnight case as a footstool while I try to read the book I brought along, the J. S. Bach biography. I wonder if Abel knows that Bach, too, was orphaned. This, I learned on the plane. Here, in the park, I have skipped ahead to Bach’s marriage to Anna Magdalena. The book describes her as “a flower or a star … so faithful was she, so unwearying, so simply useful and so courageous with the courage that only women have or by natural decree need to have.”

  Nothing much has happened across the road, not since Mrs. Richter went inside. Late morning she opened the curtains, then the window of the room nearest the garage. A little later she opened the living-room drapes with a flourish, standing in the gap and throwing them apart as if she were about to break into song.

  Sirius, by that time, had abandoned his post. I figure they let him out into the back yard, which adjoins somebody else’s back yard, the two properties separated by a chain-link fence that I can see part of where it extends past the Richters’ house. So anyone leaving by a rear door would have to come around to the front. I presume. Maybe I should make certain, and get something to eat while I’m at it. Suppose I ran over, reconnoitred, pulled up a bunch of carrots, ran back?

  I close the book and set it down beside me on the slab. If I get caught … If I get caught, I get caught. It’s almost two o’clock, and I’m starving. I’m jet-lagged. I’m pregnant, for God’s sake!

  Just as I’m coming to my feet I see a skinny guy hurrying down the sidewalk across the road, about fifty yards to my left. His head is bent to one side and held there unnaturally. His hair is a burning bush, an orange Afro. He wears flapping beige trousers, not bell-bottoms, just trousers too big and belted high on his torso, and a short-sleeved sky-blue shirt with a navy collar. For all that he’s speeding along, he doesn’t swing his arms.

  “A weirdo,” I think. I can guess where he’s headed. Sure enough, there he goes, turning onto the Richters’ property.

  On the back of his shirt, in large navy letters above an inverted pyramid of bowling pins, it says GARY. Did Abel ever mention a Gary? I’m sure he never mentioned a guy who wears an imaginary straitjacket and yet belongs to a bowling team.

  Gary reaches up (so his arms do move) to bang the knocker. The door opens.

  And out comes Abel.

  He shuts the door and follows Gary down the porch steps. My heart punches at my ribs. No, it’s not my heart, it’s the baby leaping up, sensing proximity to its other genetic half. I step from behind the tree.

  I step back.

  I’ve lost my nerve. I forgot how good looking he was. Or has he gotten even better looking? His hair has grown. His arms, too, they seem longer, more muscular. I move back onto the sidewalk and watch him and Gary disappear around the corner. I dash to the rock, stuff my jacket, jeans and book into the case, grab it and my purse and start running. When I reach the corner they are only half a block ahead of me, stopped at a fruit vendor’s and getting yelled at.

  I slip behind a telephone pole and step partway out of my shoes, which are already giving me blisters. The yelling woman wears a black kerchief; she waves her arms around. Gary stands there, hands stiff at his sides, head still cocked toward his left shoulder. Abel’s head is also cocked, though less drastically. It is so familiar to me, the slow nod that means you have the enormousness of his attention. The woman can have no idea how passionately and sympathetically she is being listened to. I wish I were her. At that moment I would gladly recast my skulking self into a ranting foreign woman who, purely because she is ranting and foreign, has (I’ve no doubt) won Abel’s heart.

  She waves her hands, slaps her breasts. I can’t make out what she’s going on about—a diatribe against long-haired boys, I imagine. But then Abel says something and she bleats out a laugh and seizes an apple from a bushel basket and presses it on him. He takes it and bends down closer to her, and with both hands she brushes back his hair, as a lover would, to kiss his forehead. I am surprised, but only for a second. Of course! She adores him! She is one of his million best friends. She gives him another apple. He passes it t
o Gary, who flings out one stiff arm to snatch it.

  They move on.

  I step back into my sadistic shoes and follow, scuttling from mailbox to newspaper box to phone booth. As I pass the old lady she glares. I smile at her. Anyone who loves Abel, I have a soft spot for. Even Gary I am warming up to because of how he walks almost sideways so that he can direct his tipped-over head at Abel’s face, and because his whole upper body bounces in sprees of nodding as though he savagely endorses everything Abel says.

  I have no plan. If they’re on their way to Gary’s place, and they go inside, I guess I’ll find some bushes to wait behind. Obscurely I feel as if I’m building up my courage by reacquainting myself with the way Abel looks: his hair, how he’s dressed—bell-bottomed blue jeans, a silver belt of linked stars, like sheriff badges, a blue-and-purple tie-dyed T-shirt under which his shoulders move in the loose roll of a person far from the grip of heartache or regret.

  Oh, Abel!

  Has he stopped loving me? How is that possible? How do you love somebody one day, and the next day you don’t? I know who he is. By letting me love him, he made a path to himself, and what I gathered up is mine. If he doesn’t love me, how can he not love the perfect version of himself in me?

  These thoughts start me crying. I am a spectacle, clumsy and darting, limping, crouching. Whimpering “Excuse me … Sorry” to Saturday shoppers I zip by and accidentally bash with my overnight case before we turn onto a desolate strip of auto-body shops and second-hand clothing emporiums. Here, however, with fewer people about, I’m more visible. I cross to the other side of the street, just in time. A few seconds later Abel glances over his shoulder, then he and Gary duck into an alley, where Abel draws something out of his pocket. A cigarette. No, a joint, I can tell by the way he inhales. He passes it to Gary. As soon as Gary inhales he has a coughing fit and spins around smacking his thighs. Abel thumps him on the back. When the coughing abates they re-enter the street and start crossing, but on a diagonal away from me, headed for the building on my right. They go inside.