1979

by Ray Robertson

  Who is this someone? What is this thing?

  ~

  There was homework and then there was homework, and Julie and Angie at the kitchen table with their notebooks and textbooks and pens and pencils and calculators and empty cans of Coke implied the more onerous latter. Sometimes when they were studying in Julie’s bedroom it was just so that Julie could close the door and warn me not to be loud and to keep anyone from bothering them. They might have been studying, but the music on the record player and the occasional eruption of laughter were obviously pedagogical priority number one. Physics, apparently, wasn’t a subject to be tackled while Siouxsie and the Banshees screamed from the stereo speakers. A large, flat, shared work area and uninterrupted silence were what was necessary when attempting to crack the quantifiable rules of the universe, or at least prepare for tomorrow’s test.

  Except that I needed to get to the fridge. And for reasons not entirely clear, whenever Angie looked at me I felt like checking to see if my fly was up. It wasn’t as if I thought she was hot. How could I? For one thing, she dressed weird—tonight, for instance, in aqua-green tights and a black leather mini-skirt and purple eyeliner and actual safety pins for earrings—for another, she was taller than a girl was supposed to be and didn’t look anything like the Farrah Fawcett poster on my bedroom wall. She wasn’t even as good-looking as Charlie’s least attractive angel, Kate Jackson, who didn’t have her own poster. Plus, she sometimes punctuated her sentences with a drawn out Gawd whenever she found a subject particularly distasteful. Ever since Mom left, God words were tacitly taboo.

  I kept close to the kitchen wall, following as direct a route to the refrigerator as possible, Julie’s impatience with my presence whenever any of her friends were around justification enough to become invisible. She looked up from her calculator and I knew she was tired; she only tied her hair up when she wanted to disguise how dirty it was.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, “I’ll be in and out.”

  “Sounds like a guy I used to know,” Angie said. She and Julie laughed. I didn’t understand the joke, but I knew it was at my expense, so I gave back an all-purpose scrunched face and got my can of C Plus from the rear of the fridge where they were coldest. C Plus was my new favourite drink because it contained something called Sunkist Juice and I wanted to try out for the junior football team when I went to high school and I’d decided that I should start thinking about getting as strong as possible. It wasn’t clear what exactly “Sunkist Juice” was, but it was copyrighted right on the can so I figured it had to be pretty special.

  “Are you any good at science?” Angie said, pushing back from the table. She crossed one leg over the other, the toes of her raised right foot wiggling beneath the footing of her aqua green tights.

  “He’s in public school, Ang,” Julie said, back being busy with her calculator. “And your problem with physics isn’t with the help you’re getting.”

  “My problem with physics is I don’t give a shit about the magnitudes of the north and east components of the velocity of a plane flying at 300 miles per hour heading 30 degrees north of east,” Angie said, standing up and stretching as she yawned, her raised arms pulling the bottom of her shirt just over her belly button. It was only a flash, and I could have been wrong, but it looked like it was pierced. My mouth felt dry. I popped the top of my C Plus and took a swig.

  “No one does,” Julie said. “Giving a shit doesn’t have anything to do with it. Getting the right answer is all we’ve got to worry about.”

  Feigning an exaggerated pout, Angie sat back down like an admonished child. “Does she keep you in line all the time too?”

  “She tries,” I said. Although she actually didn’t—not much, anyway.

  Angie smiled. Because of what I’d said. I had made her smile.

  “What grade are you in?” she said.

  “Seven. I’m going to CCI in a year and half.”

  “Where your big sis will be top dog next year before she’s off to U of T.”

  Without looking up from her calculator, “Not if she doesn’t pass physics, she won’t,” Julie interjected. “Hint, hint.”

  “What about you?” I said to Angie.

  “What about me?” she said, smiling again, but a different kind of smile this time. Her mouth wasn’t any different—it was something about her eyes that made it another kind of smile altogether.

  “Are you going to U of T too?” I liked saying “U of T” instead of the University of Toronto, the same way I liked saying “D-back’ instead of “defensive back.” When we played pick-up football at school and talked about what positions we wanted to play in high school, I’d say “D-back” and it sounded like I really knew what I was talking about.

  “Uh, yeah,” she said, rolling her eyes, the question so silly it barely warranted a reply. “I’ve been counting the days until I can leave Shat-ham, Ontario, since the moment I got here.” I didn’t like it that she called Chatham “Shat-ham”—she wasn’t from here; only people who were born and raised in Chatham should have been allowed to say it sucked—but I took a sip of C Plus and nodded a couple of times anyway. I felt like I did that time in grade six when I pretended I wasn’t Timmy Grainger’s friend anymore because Jeff Hartman said Timmy’s dad had left his mom for another guy. I didn’t care about what his dad had or hadn’t done—Timmy was a good ball-hockey goalie and he always traded sandwiches with me whenever he had peanut butter and jam and I had ham—but I avoided him like everybody else. He moved to Sarnia with his mom and two sisters the next year.

  “I’m going to the bathroom,” Julie said, standing up from the kitchen table. “When I get back, you decide if you want to study or if you want to talk to my brother all night.”

  When we heard the bathroom door close, “Busted,” Angie said, leaning back in her chair, her hands clasped behind her head.

  “Busted,” I said, and we both laughed.

  Young Woman Finds Ontological Comfort in New Pair of Pants

  “When I Look at Them, They Remind Me of Who I Am”

  EVERYWHERE SHE WENT her new pants went with her.

  Impossible to buy them anywhere in Chatham the way she wanted them—tapered and tight at the bottom, no leftover hippie flares for her, thank you, New Wave the new age all the way—her mother used the picture she’d provided of Elvis Costello to fashion a pretty good knock-off. If not by geography, then at least by the circumference of her pant cuffs, was she an au courant Torontonian again. Well, Etobicokian, anyway. Not that anyone here needed to know that. As far as her classmates were concerned, she was as Toronto as Maple Leaf Gardens and the CN Tower, places they’d seen, if not in person, then at least on TV.

  Her new pants—black and sleek and sharp—went with her on the ride to school, her father dropping her off on his way to work at Rockwell’s head office, his transfer there the reason they’d had to move. Her father didn’t know how long he’d be needed to “sort things out down there,” so they hadn’t sold their house in Etobicoke, which was a solace. She missed knowing that the Royal York subway station that could transport her downtown was a four-minute walk away. She missed her big room with the big window overlooking the big, thickly treed backyard. She missed their swimming pool. Her favorite aquatic occupation wasn’t swimming, but lying out on the hot, pleasantly gritty cement near the deep end reading a paperback and getting a good sweat and an incidental tan and knowing that if she wanted to be in the water, she could, the water was always there. They didn’t have a pool in Chatham.

  Her new pants went with her while she drifted dulled through her classes—smart enough to not have to try too hard and nothing ever interesting enough to make her attempt to be smarter. But that was all right. She’d get to where she wanted to go and do what she wanted to do, eighty percent average and Ontario Scholar or not. People like her always found a way. People like Julie, her best and only friend here, have to mak
e themselves up, which is hard work and oftentimes makes you sad a lot before you’re made even a little bit happy and sometimes doesn’t even work. Her new pants reminded her that she already was who she was supposed to be; that all she needed was closer proximity to where she didn’t have to try so much.

  Inside your head is no place to figure things out. An old building in an old city; Patti Smith’s latest album; a new pair of pants: look, listen, feel. Know.

  ~

  Feb. 18:

  1 (one) bowl of Cheerios (with two tablespoons of sugar)

  2 (two) glasses of Tang

  1 (one) tuna sandwich (with lettuce and tomato and mayonnaise and onion in tuna)

  1 (one) apple (ate only half)

  3 (three) Dad’s Oatmeal Cookies (with raisins)

  2 (two) servings of Hamburger Helper

  2 (two) pieces of bread and margarine

  2 (two) glasses of milk

  3 (three) green beans

  1 (one) bowl of Neapolitan ice-cream (mostly chocolate) with most of a can of pineapple chunks on top

  Also: 3 (three) cans of C Plus, 1 (one) Oh Henry chocolate bar, 1 (one) bag of barbequed Fritos, 1 (one) glass of water before bed

  Chapter Four

  Paul Lynde was our Oscar Wilde, Hollywood Squares our Algonquin round table. Because I didn’t live near the school anymore, Dale and I didn’t live down the street from each other anymore either or watch our favourite shows at one or the other’s house. The morning after whatever we’d watched on TV the night before, however, standing around on the blacktop at school with our hands in our coat pockets waiting for the bell to ring and to be let inside, we’d run down what had made the grade and what hadn’t. Our tastes were catholic yet discriminating.

  First up on the critical agenda, WKRP in Cincinnati:

  “It was all right,” Dale said.

  “It was okay.”

  We waited for the bell and watched our breath. When we were younger and it was cold outside, sometimes we’d goof around with Popeye cigarettes and pretend we were smoking. Now we were old enough to know people who brought the real thing to school, Scott Corson flashing a stolen pack of his mother’s Player’s Lights at the rear of the schoolyard, way back by the soccer field and the big trees and away from the teacher on yard duty.

  “Did you see Bailey wearing those boots though?” he said.

  “Oh, man.”

  “I know.”

  “Oh, man, those brown leather boots. They were, like, up to her knees almost.”

  “I know.”

  “Oh, man.”

  Even though Dale’s dad was a lawyer who had an office downtown with his name stencilled across its frosted glass door and his family had an in-ground swimming pool and a two-car garage and got the TV Guide delivered right to their house, Dale didn’t make you feel funny when you were around him like, say, Paul Hopkins whose dad was an executive at Ontario Hydro and who didn’t sip beer at home like my dad but who made his drinks in a blender with fruit and bottles of clear liquor and ice cubes that came from an ice-making machine built right into the fridge. Paul always wore brightly coloured shirts with alligator insignias and the collars turned up, and although he never teased you for having North Star running shoes purchased from K-Mart instead of leather Nikes, when you passed him in the hallway he never seemed to notice you, and if he was smiling, it was because it looked like he knew something that you didn’t and never would.

  “Bailey totally blows Loni Anderson away,” Dale said.

  “I know. Totally.”

  Loni Anderson had big blonde hair and bigger breasts and everybody thought she was so hot, but Dale and I liked tall, skinny, brown-haired Bailey better. Loni Anderson just sat there covered in make-up waiting for someone to make a joke about her tits. Bailey was smarter than everybody else on the show except maybe her boss, Andy, and dressed in men’s suit jackets and jeans, which made what was underneath even sexier because you couldn’t see everything that was there. It was like the best horror movies: when you didn’t see the monster until the end, your mind made up its own monster. And nothing anyone could come up with was ever as scary as what was in your head.

  “Did you watch The White Shadow?” I said.

  Dale shook his head, kicked a hockey-puck-sized piece of ice across the frozen pavement. The White Shadow came on at 9:30 and Dale’s TV time was limited on school nights and his bedtime non-negotiatable. His father wasn’t just a lawyer—a couple of other kids’ dads wore suits to work and could get you out of a traffic ticket or would happily sue somebody on a commision basis because somebody said they’d do something for you but ended up not doing it—but, in spite of having MS and recently being relegated to a wheelchair, Dale’s dad was who Chatham-Kent’s member of parliament called when he claimed to have been libelled by the New Democrat candidate during his recent re-election, and who Pritchard Industries kept on retainer because they were always in trouble for allegedly polluting the Thames River. Dale didn’t talk about his dad’s disease, but I knew he thought about it. How couldn’t he? When Mom left us, Julie and Dad and I didn’t say much about it to one another. But no one didn’t think about it. How could we not?

  Dale’s mother was almost as busy as his father, heading up one local charity or another, and his sister was a senior at CCI and the All-Ontario 1500 meter champion who was going to Cornell University next year on a track-and-field scholarship. Dale and his sister were honour students and neither one of them was allowed to be just like everybody else. Even though we weren’t even in high school, his mother typed up all of Dale’s projects for school. I knew he liked The White Shadow as much as I did—there wasn’t any teacher at our school as cool as Coach Reeves, just like there weren’t any students as funny as the Sweathogs on Welcome Back, Kotter—so I didn’t want him to feel too bad about missing out.

  “It was all right,” I said, shrugging.

  “What happened?” Dale kicked another piece of ice, but this time it broke in two, skittered this way and that.

  “The coach booted Gomez off the team because his grades were crappy, so then he started hanging around with his old street gang again.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  Dale was looking at his boots. “Then what?”

  “Oh, you know: the coach goes off and finds him and talks him into coming back and then everything’s the same again.” I’d tried to make it sound as boring as possible, but it was actually a pretty good episode. Maybe CCI would be like the high school on The White Shadow. There was still time for life to be like TV.

  The bell rang, recess was over.

  “Math,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Dale said.

  Some kids back by the soccer field were still throwing snowballs at each other. The teacher on yard duty blew her whistle; put her hands on her hips and blew the whistle again, louder.

  “Five minutes to Mr. Mole,” I said. Mr Cole, our math teacher, did look a little like a mole—was short with shaggy brown hair and a slight overbite—but we called him Mr. Mole mainly because it rhymed with his real name. Mrs. Rankin, the art teacher, definitely didn’t resemble plankton. We stomped the slush off our boots on the large black rubber mat just inside the doors like we’d been told.

  “Would anyone care to venture an educated guess?” I said in my best Mr. Mole voice. It was what Mr. Cole said when he wanted someone to answer a math question he’d written on the board.

  Dale laughed. It wasn’t new, but it was still a good one.

  I did it again—“Would anyone care to venture an educated guess?”—but this time with eyes stretched open as wide as I could, just like Mr. Cole did when he surveyed the classroom for a volunteer.

  “Oh, man,” Dale said, laughing harder now.

  We went to our lockers to take off our coats and get our books. Once class started,
it wasn’t so easy to laugh.

  Dale’s family was okay, but the best part about staying over the occasional Saturday night was that they weren’t around much. His dad sometimes didn’t come home from his office until nine or ten o’clock at night—even on weekends—and his mother was out a lot, too, at meetings or fundraisers or charity auctions. Even his sister was always either going for a run or cocooned in her room studying. Dale’s house had central air-conditioning, the first house I’d ever been in that did, and during the hottest days of summer the house was so cold everyone would wear sweaters. When you stepped back outside it felt as if the seasons had changed.

  It wasn’t as if Dale was neglected—there was usually somebody home, at least for awhile, and there was always a meal waiting for him at dinnertime, even if it had to be reheated in the oven—but usually we got to eat in front of the television in their den and walk to the variety store after dinner if we felt like it and make prank phone calls without fear of anyone overhearing. We’d pick a name at random from the phonebook and have it all planned out—after they’d answer, one of us would say in our best Steve Martin voice, “Well, excuuuuse me!”—but we’d always chicken out and hang up when we heard the other person’s voice. We’d still laugh, though, just as much as if we’d actually gone through with it. If we hadn’t, it would have meant we weren’t having fun.

  There wasn’t much I missed once we moved downtown after Mom moved out. I couldn’t walk to school anymore and there weren’t as many kids to play with, but the one thing I really missed was something I didn’t even know existed until it was gone. I was staying over at Dale’s house one Saturday night, and it was springtime and we were walking home from a ball-hockey game a few streets over. We were tired and not talking much and Dale was dragging his stick behind him, something you weren’t supposed to do because it wore down the blade. It wasn’t dark yet, but the street lights were starting to flicker and I could smell every front yard and backyard in the subdivision along with the cooling evening earth underneath and it was more than just the smell of grass and dirt. It smelled like… life. I wanted to say something to Dale, to ask him if he smelled it too, but I knew he wouldn’t know what I was talking about, would probably just think I was weird. He lived there—how could he know what he was missing? You had to go away to know where you’d been.