1979

by Ray Robertson

  The news anchor said something about gorilla warfare and I looked at the TV screen expecting images of battling apes, but it just ended up being a story about civil war in some country in Central America. I didn’t know why anyone watched the news—they never showed anything really interesting, like war-mad monkeys or killer sharks or the Bermuda Triangle. Dad must have been thinking the same thing, because he picked his newspaper back up and rattled the pages and began reading again, this time the classifieds. He wasn’t ready to hire a real estate agent yet, but until he could put together enough money for a down payment on his own place he’d peruse the paper for buildings for sale. Saving up for the down payment was going slower than expected—right-now necessities had a way of getting in the way of one-day accumulation—but he said that once the new mall was built he’d double, maybe triple his income, and that it wouldn’t be long until he owned not just his own business, but his own property as well.

  Now the newscaster was talking about Iran and the revolution going on there and how university students were among the Ayatollah’s most fanatical, violent supporters. We both looked at the TV and saw cars burning in the streets and piles of burning books and crowds of men with long black beards dressed in long white robes pumping their fists in the air and loudly chanting Death to the USA! I knew that wherever Julie ended up going to university, it wouldn’t be like that, but I was still glad I only was entering grade eight next year. The news ended with a group of men screaming and stamping their feet standing around a burning American flag. They looked like hometown football fans enraged with the referee for blowing the call that cost their team the game.

  “What do they want?” I said.

  I could tell Dad was thinking because he kept running his fingers through his handlebar moustache while he watched a commercial for pantyhose, the ones that came in a plastic container that looked like an egg. They were the same kind that Mom used to buy. She used to give me the containers when she was done with them. Put enough of them together and you had a pretty good blockade for your G.I. Joe army.

  “They’re jealous of what we’ve got over here,” he said. “And if they can’t have what we have, they don’t want anyone else to have it either.”

  ”What are they jealous of?” I said. Other than having to wear white dresses and identical beards, they looked okay to me. At least they weren’t starving like those poor skinny kids with flies on them in Africa that you’d see on UNICEF commercials on late night TV. Dad looked at me like I’d just sworn.

  “Freedom,” he barked. “Freedom to think what you want and do what you want and go where you want and with whoever you want to go there with.”

  Like Mom, I thought, but didn’t say it. Instead, I nodded like I knew what he’d meant all along, like I just wanted to hear him say it aloud. Satisfied that I’d finally understood the meaning of freedom, he turned his attention back to the television. Big Boy restaurant was having a special on hamburgers: buy one of their world famous Big Boy Burgers and get a second delicious, world famous Big Boy Burger for half price. What a rip off, I thought. Chatham didn’t have a Big Boy Restaurant. As usual, the US had all of the good stuff. You never knew for sure, though. Maybe we’d get our own Big Boy one day when the mall opened up. It never hurt to hope.

  Chapter Five

  February was the short one, the month that got to the next one the quickest, which worked out well because March Break was in the middle which meant it was only a few weeks away from nine straight days without school. Kids whose parents had lots of money talked about their condos in Florida or how they were going to visit the Science Centre or the zoo in Toronto. I liked to think about how for nearly a week and a half I’d be able to sleep in and stay up late and my evenings would be homework-free and whatever I wanted them to be. All I had to do was deliver my newspapers and collect on Saturdays and my time was mine.

  What Julie did with her week off depended on Dad saying yes to her and Angie’s planned trip to Toronto. Which was weird because he’d already said no. Said it so often, he didn’t even bother to say it anymore, would just stare at his newspaper or clear his throat or walk out of the room anytime she brought it up. She brought it up a lot. Especially now that it would soon be March.

  “So just don’t tell him.”

  “Angie, I can’t just… go. It’s not like he wouldn’t notice.”

  “Fine. Tell him you’re staying with my brother and his girlfriend.”

  “I already tried, you know that.”

  “Tell him something else then. Gawd. Whatever.”

  I wasn’t trying to listen. I was in my bedroom with the door closed, and Julie and Angie were in her bedroom with the door closed, but the record they’d been playing had finished and no one had flipped it over or put on another one. I couldn’t help hearing what I wasn’t supposed to. Sometimes knowing things was like that.

  Neither of them said anything, and there wasn’t any music. Ordinarily Julie and Angie were either talking or laughing or playing one of Angie’s weird records, so it sounded strange. It sounded loud. Eventually, in a small voice, “You should probably just start making plans to go without me,” Julie said.

  “I don’t want to go without you. One of the reasons I want to go is to show you some of the places I told you about. Like Larry’s Hideaway and The Turning Point and the Record Peddler and all the bookstores on Queen Street. And have you meet Tim and his crazy brother and Candace and all the rest of those guys.” I could tell Angie wasn’t just saying she wanted Julie to go to Toronto to be polite because she never usually said things like “those guys.”

  “Well,” Julie said “they’ll all still be there when I’m at UofT. If I get in.”

  Like the rest of us, Angie knew she was expected at times like these to assure Julie that of course she’d be accepted into UofT, but, instead, “That’s not until a year from this September.”

  “I know when it is.”

  “But I don’t want to wait that long,” Angie said.

  “Neither do I, but even if I could get permission, it’s still…”

  “Still what?”

  “You know. I don’t want it to seem it to seem like… ”

  “Like what?”

  “Like, I don’t know, that I’m being set up just so…”

  Angie laughed. “That’s exactly what’s happening.”

  “I know, but…” Then Julie laughed and Angie laughed too.

  “Look, I told you,” Angie said. “It’ll just be a bunch of very cool people hanging out having a good time—we’re going to see some amazing bands, you’re going to love The Diodes—and then, you know, boys will be boys and girls will be girls.”

  It was quiet again until Angie said, “What? What is it?”

  “I just wish…”

  “You weren’t a virgin. I know. And if I’d grown up here like you had, I’d still be one too. Between the hayseeds and the mouth-breathers, I’d probably be wearing a frigging chastity belt.” They both laughed. “But by the time we’re back home-sweet-home in Shat-ham, you won’t be a virgin anymore and it won’t be anything you have to think about ever again. Or that we’ll have to talk about ever again.”

  Julie was going to Toronto to do it. If she went to Toronto without Dad’s permission, he’d be furious. If he knew why she was going, he’d be… I didn’t know what came after furious, and I didn’t want to find out.

  I could hear someone taking the record off the turntable and putting it back in its sleeve. Then music, then I couldn’t hear any more talking.

  Julie in trouble, or in danger of being in trouble, wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. I wouldn’t have wanted anything too serious to happen to her—getting picked up by the police, say, or being expelled from school—but a little drama around the house was worth a degree of hassle on her end. It was exciting when bad things happened to other people. When Scott Bolland and J
im Tate slunk into art class puffy-eyed and all-over shaky after being sent to Vice Principal French’s office for fighting during recess, everyone, including Mrs. Newbury, pretended her talk about the Group of Seven was more interesting than the strapping they’d both received. They both kept their hands hidden underneath their desks for the rest of the class, but we all knew they’d been tanned red from Mr. French’s strap and we couldn’t help being secretly thrilled, the mystery of playground horseplay stigmata.

  My newspaper bag was almost empty, all I had left was the part of the job I liked the least. The final stops on my route were dead-ended by the railroad crossing near the cemetery, five small tar-paper-covered homes that weren’t much bigger than the shed in Dale’s parents’ backyard. As long as it wasn’t snowing or raining, the surprisingly large number of people who lived inside always seemed to be sitting outside on their wooden front porch or in torn lawn chairs in their front yards, not saying or doing much, or else doing things like taking turns giving each other haircuts or letting a pet rabbit run around the lawn on a ball-of-string leash. Chatham’s east end was about half white people, half black people, but the dead end of Stanley Street was all white, and although the different families had different last names you couldn’t help but wonder whether they were all related somehow, had settled together near the cemetery as part of some strange new, or really, really old religion.

  It was snowing and cold, and thankfully there was no one around, so I didn’t have to pretend not to look at a porch overflowing with faces looking back at me as I walked up to the house with the newspaper. One, two, three, four, and one more house to go and I was done and then home and warm socks and dinner and Charlie’s Angels at nine o’clock after writing down what I ate and maybe doing my English homework. The last house on my route, the one right next to the train tracks, wasn’t only not much bigger than a shed, it was a shed, albeit with a couple of greasy windows and a smokestack for the wood stove inside. Its sole occupant was a fat woman named Bertha who pulled a handmade wooden cart with two bicycle tires for wheels behind an old bike and scavenged other people’s garbage for the leaky garden hoses and old Styrofoam coolers and chipped jam jars that filled her yard. The property was large enough that she not only had enough room for all of her garbage-day collectibles, but also a chicken coop at its rear. If she’d had any other neighours someone would have probably forced her to get rid of it, but because it was Bertha who sold everyone on Stanley Street their eggs, no one ever did.

  I stuffed Bertha’s newspaper inside her front door—none of the houses on the street had mailboxes—and was officially done for the day, except I couldn’t ignore the sound of a clucking chicken that wouldn’t shut up. Apart from eating them, I didn’t have much experience with chickens, but this one sounded like a cartoon chicken, its non-stop Bawk! Bawk! Bawk! Bawk! sounding funny—Bugs Bunny, Saturday-morning-cartoon funny. I looked to make sure Bertha wasn’t around and saw that her bicycle and cart were gone and walked to the rear of her property where the sound was coming from.

  A dead chicken was lying on the frozen ground in front of the old wood-and-wire coop. Beside it hopped the hysterical chicken I’d heard making so much noise. I could see a few other chickens inside the coop, apparently content to stay warm and peck at their food or stare through the wire mesh at the overcast afternoon nothing, the Bawk! Bawk! Bawk! Bawk! chicken the only one who seemed to care about their fallen friend. The snow was slowly covering the dead chicken in a thin white blanket, but there was nothing the other chicken could do about it except hop up and down and cluck and cry.

  If Julie ran off to Toronto with Angie, I didn’t know how bad it would be for her when she came back, but it would be bad. Dad didn’t enjoy getting mad at us—he wasn’t like Mr. Laidlaw, the shop teacher with the big red nose who seemed like he wanted someone to do or say something wrong just so he’d have a reason to yell and slam his fist down on his desk—but he had no problem grounding us or taking away our TV time if he felt he had reason to. If Julie did what I’d overheard Angie and her talking about, it wouldn’t mean she had to clean the house Sunday afternoon instead of going to the movies or that she wouldn’t be able to watch Saturday Night Live. I didn’t know what it would mean, but I knew I wouldn’t want to be there when she found out what it did.

  Old Woman, Known Only as ‘Bertha’ to Neighbours, Dies

  “You Don’t Remember Her? The Old Lady with the Bicycle and the Cart? The One Who Fed All the Stray Cats?”

  SHE SMELLED. BAD. Let’s start with that. Like overripe cheese; like long-expired meat; like a stomach-churning sulphur leak infiltrating every pore from somewhere, somehow, as plain as the pinched-nostrils nose on your face. You wanted to be polite, you didn’t want to make anybody feel bad, but godamnit, the woman stank.

  And no wonder why. Some people have sunburns, their exposed necks scorched ring-around-the-collar red; she bore a deep tan of imbedded dirt summer and winter both. She was squat and plump, but her fingers were long and thick and filthy: grime-crammed fingernails, scabby knuckles, nicotine-stained skin. Her fingers looked like diseased sausages. A paperboy accepting her money, for instance, would jam her payment deep into his pants pocket and hope that it would lose its awful ickiness by mixing with the good clean money already collected. He’d want to be polite, he wouldn’t want to make anybody feel bad, but godamnit…

  Her clothes—rough corduroy skirts, saggy brown nylons, polyester-cheap, too-large men’s sweaters; white running shoes no longer white, knee-high rubber boots when the weather turned cold or wet—were neither new nor secondhand because she’d always wore them and never replaced them. In the evenings, when she’d sit on her small porch and no one would stop in to talk, she smoked a pipe as old as the rocking chair she always occupied, both items likely having belonged to a long-dead relative or a still-missed lover or perhaps no one she’d known at all.

  How she paid her way in the world was impossible to tell—selling a few dozen fresh eggs to her neighbours every week wasn’t enough, that much was for sure—but she got by by getting by: a tin-roofed shack without hydro or running water to shut out the rain and snow; a wood stove to help keep her warm in winter; a vegetable garden to supply her with what food her many chickens didn’t; pop bottles and scrap metals and whatever else salvaged with her bicycle and cart from other people’s trash and turned into dimes and quarters and sometimes even whole dollars. Anyway, she got by.

  Her world was Stanley Street, and Stanley Street knew her and accepted her, always had a “Hi ya, Bertha” or a “How you doin’, Bertha?” for her as she pedalled her way past her neighbours and through their shared secret days. But no one but the stray cats that she fed every evening after supper came to visit, no one came to see if she needed wood for her stove or a new roof for her outhouse or whether she’d managed to avoid that nasty flu bug that’d been going around town.

  Then she died; she just died. An ambulance without flashing lights quietly took her away and there was no need to find out when or where she was born or what her last name was because there wasn’t any tombstone, and the only ones who really missed her were the cats who kept coming around for their evening meal long after she was gone, until they, too, forgot all about her.

  When the city cleaned out her house, there was a tin box full of old postcards. “Penny postcards,” they used to call them, covered with scenes and sayings that used to be called “funny.” —MY WIFE SAID SHE WANTED ME TO TAKE HER SOMEWHERE SHE’D NEVER BEEN. —SO WHAT DID YOU DO? —I SHOWED HER WHERE THE KITCHEN IS! Some were addressed to “Dearest Mother,” others to “My Own Isabel,” others to simply “Father.” They ended up at the dump with the rest of her garbage.

  ~

  “If you don’t want me to stay with Angie’s brother, maybe I’ll call Mom then,” Julie said.

  Julie placed her coffee cup on the kitchen counter and crossed her arms. I rested my spoon in my bowl of post-dinner cereal. Dad l
owered his newspaper, didn’t respond. One second left in the game and backed all the way up to her one-yard line and needing a touchdown to pull out the win, this, apparently, was Julie’s last-play strategy to get Dad’s okay to go to Toronto: take the snap, shut her eyes, and hurl a Hail Mary that the old girl would guide with spirally grace to waiting, paydirt-hungry hands, Godspeed, my fleet-of-foot friend, and run, run, run.

  We didn’t talk about Mom much, especially not around Dad. What was there to talk about? To Julie and me, she was a slightly eccentric aunt who moved away when we were kids and to whom we intermittently talked to on the telephone at holidays, on birthdays, and even more infrequently in person when she came to visit. To Dad, she was… someone we weren’t encouraged to talk about. Dad knew we occasionally spoke to her, but pretended like he didn’t, which we helped him do by not mentioning it when it happened. If I thought about it, maybe it was a weird arrangement, but how much weirder was it really than Dale and the rest of his family pretending that his dad was ever going to get better or people making believe that the Toronto Maple Leafs were going to win the Stanley Cup in our lifetime?

  “I mean,” Julie said, “none of us has ever visited her—ever—she’s always come here. It doesn’t seem fair really. She is our mother after all.” This last line she delivered while looking at me. I suppose I was old enough to fall in line as Julie’s co-conspirator—two impish teenagers united against the fun-crunching adults—but I lowered my eyes to my bowl of Raisin Bran and picked my spoon back up and shoveled away so I wouldn’t be able to use my mouth for anything else, like talking.