By saying that, I am not saying Appollonia is a bad person. Far from it. She is kind, and holds a special place in her heart for society’s cast-offs. There are just some things she doesn’t understand – will never understand – because she is Appollonia, and she is a different person from you and me. A good person, certainly. But a different person. Let’s just say she is mainstream, and leave it at that. I mean, she’s one of my good friends, and I know her, and she would not think the label “mainstream” was a negative thing.
Do you remember earlier, when “Panama” came on? She said to me, “Who sings this, again?” And I said, “It doesn’t matter, Appollonia – they’re playing it ironically.” But she started bopping her head to it anyway. That’s just the way she is. And she says the funniest things! What was it she said the other day – she’s no poet but she just comes out with the great est turns of phrase. Oh, I remember. She was talking about her work – she works in an office, as in permanently – and she was explaining how she’d stood up to her boss about switching the complimentary coffee milk from two per cent to one per cent. Now, I’m sorry, but if you’re putting it in your coffee, you cannot tell the difference between one per cent and two per cent, it’s impossible. If you’re drinking the milk on its own, then maybe. But otherwise not in a million years. And these people were up in arms about it! So they had a meeting and Appollonia called for a vote for two per cent, which she knew was the consensus, but none of her co-workers backed her up, so it was just her against the boss. And do you know what she said to me at the end of her anecdote? She said, “They hung me out to frigging hang myself.” Isn’t that wonderful?
I asked her once for permission to write a poem about her work life. Because it is so unpoetic, there’s actually an irony at work there – ha! – that’s worth writing about. And Appollonia said to me, “Sure, what the hell. Immortalize me.” Isn’t that perfect? The things she comes out with.
Between you and me? Appollonia has lived a terrible life.
Her parents were gypsies, which is bad enough, but while at least most gypsies are known for their flair for performance, Appollonia’s gypsy parents were bookkeepers. And I’m not talking librarians, which would’ve been something, right? So, you know, they moved around a lot. Up until she started kindergarten, Appollonia was uprooted I can’t even tell you how many times. Over and over again, suffice it to say.
But she is not a complainer. Never has been. I met her in grade one, we were in the same class, and the other kids would throw blocks at her and she wouldn’t say boo. That’s what first intrigued me about her, actually. She also has that voice – you must know her voice, where it always sounds like she’s about to burst into tears, like “Huhhh, huhhh, huhhhn,” all the time, but she’s not, it’s just the way she sounds.
So we became friends. I’d make up the games and she’d just go along with whatever. And I would tell her stories on our walks home from school – I was a storyteller even then. Appollonia of course enjoyed being entertained. Our friendship grew and grew. Then we lost touch for about twenty years. She went her way and I went mine, and isn’t that the way it goes, though, so often. With friends.
I bet you can guess how we found each other again! The thing of it is, I only really got on there in the first place to pro mote my chapbook. You must do that with your press too, I’m sure. Anyway, do you know what Appollonia said, when she got in touch with me? She said, “This Internet thing is the wave of the future!” I know. Adorable.
The funny thing was, I didn’t remember her at first. Her name rang a bell, but it was such a long time ago. So I looked through her friends list to see if I recognized anyone, and of course I saw you, and so many of the other guests here, and I thought, What a small, small world we live in.
Soon after that we met up for lunch and got reacquainted. I took her to that place, what’s that place called. You know, the restaurant that’s loud, with the salad they make from things that fall out of trees? Anyway, that’s where we went. And it all came rushing back to us. Grade school. Playing. Our storytime walks. And I told Appollonia about my chapbook and she said – if you can believe it – “What’s a chapbook?” Oh dear. So I explained it to her, and she was thrilled for me and asked me could she buy it in the bookstores, and I said no, she could only buy it directly from me. Poor thing, she has no idea how it all works.
She doesn’t know anything about the “scene,” either, but I guess why would she? Just because she knows all these people through – How does she know all these people? She’s really kept that to herself. Although she’s never even heard of sp@cebar, which is amazing to me. To be that out of touch with what’s going on in the world. You put out his last flip book, didn’t you? She said to me, “Well, what does he do?” And I said, “He engages with the absence of sound. He communicates his poetry through gestures and facial expressions.” And she said – now, you’ll get a real kick out of this – “Isn’t that what a mime clown does?” I said to her, “Appollonia, sp@cebar is not a mime clown. He is a soundless poet.” She really doesn’t have a clue. I mean, I’ve never seen one of his performances, but at least I know. You know?
Appollonia is an accountant now, and she’s married to a man named Bob, who’s in one of the trades, I can’t remember which, and they’ve talked about children and they just bought a condo, but not a loft condo, it’s one of those postage-stamp, cookie-cutter high-rise ones, which she is going to have a very hard time selling, but still, it’s property, and you’ve got to believe that owning any property in the city is an achievement these days. I said that to her too, and she said, “Do you really think it’ll be hard to sell?” I said, “Appollonia, none of us has a crystal ball.” Well, maybe some of us do. Appollonia’s parents might! But anyway, I said she should be proud of her accomplishments.
And she’s going to be a mother someday! Which is the last thing I’d want to be, but who am I to judge? The second-last thing I’d want to be is a homeowner. The Appollonias of the world are welcome to it. I explained to her that renting is the way to go if you’re an artist, and I told her, “Appollonia, you are so lucky you’re not a creative person. You are so free!” And do you know what she said to me? She said, “Well, yeah, it’s true, I guess I am pretty lucky that way. None of those pesky thought bubbles overhead to weigh down my empty noggin!” I’m telling you, she says things like that all the time! It’s hilarious. But of course also very sad.
The thing about me is, I think about other people. Other people are always at the forefront of my mind. And I worry about Appollonia, I really do. She’s a bit of a loner, so she’s not the best with crowds, which is why I said I’d come with her tonight and keep her company. Okay, I’ll come clean and admit that there are people at this party who I would like to meet, of course there’s that. But really I am here for Appollonia.
I wasn’t even going to come over here, but Appollonia said I should. One of her favourite sayings is, “Why not go out on a limb, because that’s where the fruit is.” Priceless, I know. That’s what she said to me earlier, when I happened to mention that it might be nice to talk to you about my chapbook and about poetry in general. So here I am.
There are people who might say to me, “What are you doing with a person like Appollonia?” And I would say to those people, “Hold on, back up, please. Appollonia is my friend. Don’t tell me what she’s like – I know what she’s like. But she is my friend who I care for very deeply.” That’s what I would say.
You know, I’m so glad I met you, you’re so easy to talk with. And you’re enjoying the pie too, I see! Oh, I’m sorry. Strudel. And here I thought it was pie all this time. Now isn’t that funny, because I’m normally very observant. I can even show you right here in my chapbook, it has all these observations I make every day, transformed into verse. I’ve got this acrostic series on yearning, let me just find that page … You do? No, no, of course, I know how it goes. You’ve got people you need to – sure. It’s a party! I really should be getting back to
Appollonia, anyway, she’s starting to look pretty lonely over there. You mean that’s where you were – Well, perfect, the three of us, then! Oh. Really? No, sure, I understand completely, I don’t mind at all. I was just on my way to the bathroom, anyway. Where is the bathroom, do you know? Of course you’d know. Could you please just point me in the right direction before you – You don’t know? Well, that’s fine. I’ll find my way there eventually.
JAY BROWN
THE GIRL FROM THE WAR
This happened twelve years ago, when Kevin Lock came home from his time in Nepal. It was the late fall in 1996, before Oscar was born and before we’d moved into the old farmhouse in Watertown. We lived in Toronto, in a yellow one-bedroom apartment on Vermont Avenue. Kendra worked Thursday through Monday at her parents’ restaurant, C’est Ça, and I had a contract with a company that provided special effects for the film industry. Kendra was pregnant and we’d decided to keep the baby, so we were saving as much as we could. I was working nights and she worked days, and our conversations in the rare hours we spent together tended to bleed into real estate and money-market accounts, practical matters pertaining to the near and middle future.
Kendra was halfway through a degree in horticulture and envisioned a family business selling fresh herbs directly to Toronto’s restaurant industry: trays of Genovese basil, tarragon, oregano, chervil. She spent a lot of time thinking about the way this could work. As she saw it, we’d need greenhouses and at least two acres of land somewhere close to the city. She’d already designed a logo for the door of the delivery van: the silhouette of a mint plant and a line of ants carrying pieces of its leaves away. I didn’t have a counter dream of my own with that same degree of specificity, so I went along with hers.
“Although, why does it have to be ants?” I said.
“Because that’s something that ants do.”
“People will think we’re exterminators.”
“No, they won’t. They’ll be happy little insects, not menacing ones.”
“Oh. Well, then, why not ladybugs? I’ve always been kind of afraid of ants.”
“You’re afraid of everything,” she sighed. “You’re afraid of driving and … magic markers … and …”
“… and little electric carpet shocks. And fog.” Our lives were strained and whatever the topic was it always felt like we were one breath away from some manic argument. Kendra had a way of taking playful facts about me and spinning them into small humiliations. I tried to keep it light. “It’s true. And monkeys! Do you think there’s a word for all of those? Monkaphobia? Carpetricobia?”
She laughed dutifully, but I’d lost her. She wanted to talk about our future home, about kitchen stoves, a cast-iron superefficient monster we could eventually have imported from Scandinavia. It would heat the house. A big investment up front, she said, but it would pay off down the road.
Kendra has great big curls – almost ringlets – and back then she mostly wore them wrapped in a bun, an expertly spun and folded package held tightly together with a single elastic. Her fingers were forever searching out zany stray curls and tucking them back into the knot. I liked the solid feel of the knot, the cloud of her hair concentrated like that. I used to bite it or squeeze it like a stress ball. Sometimes when I touched her she’d take over, grabbing my hand and using it like a puppet to stroke her own skin. My fingers hung limply in her grip and grazed the light hairs all along her forearm.
The production I was working on was called Blue Hawk, a miniseries set in the late eighteenth century about conflict between a Native village and a British outpost in northern Ontario. Blue Hawk was the main character. He was some kind of double agent for the Cree. We’d never see the final product since the primary market was German television and the whole thing was being dubbed then shipped off overseas. They’d dressed one corner of the facilities at the old Gooderham & Worts distillery to look like the mud and timber of a military fort.
The current episode called for ice on the laneways, so the characters could skate from building to building, as if that’s how garrisoned British military got around back then. But the producers hadn’t anticipated that the December weather in Toronto wouldn’t be cold enough to keep ice frozen during the day when they needed it. They decided that they’d build up as much ice as they could in the nights, which dipped below zero just long enough for freezing to occur, and then start shooting the skating scenes at first light for as long as they could. My job was to renew the ice every night by misting the cobblestone laneways with water that then froze into hard, thin layers like candy. My partner, Joe Cicone, started at one end of the plant and I started at another. We were the only ones on the entire lot. Every half hour or so we’d see each other, have a few quick words, and then turn around and paint another layer.
I had trouble explaining why to Kendra, but in some ways that was the best job I’d had in my life. The traffic on the nearby Gardiner Expressway slowed to the occasional delivery van and airport shuttle. The streetlights flashed their colours into empty streets – you could hear their internal clicks over the hissing of the hose. They were the loudest things in a sleeping city. The nights were calm but it was the activity that I liked most of all. It wasn’t drudgery. I was focused and appreciative. The wa ter was too warm coming out of the hose, and too much of it at once could quickly ruin an hour of work by melting the ice. It had to rain down in a plume loose enough to cool before it landed. I applied the layers with a passion so guarded against over-enthusiasm and yet so fed by desperation against the coming of the day that in the narrow channel between these two feelings, something tingled in me all night long. It was wonderful and terrible, akin, in a way, to sexual pleasure. The ice accumulated like tree rings, each blanketing the other with surety and fastness – a molecular perfection.
The last night of the job was a Wednesday and so we finished up on Thursday morning as the sleepy camera and lighting men arrived and began unloading their gear from a truck. After we’d coiled our hoses into their muddy bins it was eight-thirty and we flipped a coin. Joe lost and drove the truck back to the lockup on Cherry Street and I went to C’est Ça to say hello to Kendra before going home and to bed.
I came in the back door and found her helping Kumar, the chef, by sprinkling a row of plated omelettes with chopped green onion. I slipped behind her and slid one hand under the strap of her apron, where her shirt was warm and moist. She batted me away.
“We’re packed,” she said. “Are your hands clean? Can you take these to the Germans, the table of four, in the window booth?” She held the plates out to me and mouthed a silent “please.”
At the table, the Germans all turned to me with big smiles. There were four of them, two older couples, and they were in great moods. They were laughing about the warm December.
“How will you play hockey?” said one man with a healthy head of grey hair brushed up into one compact wave. “Where is this Canadian winter? We brought boots, but where is all the ice and snow?”
“In Germany,” said a woman I presumed to be his wife, “we have our gardens all covered in snow right now. We are stealing from you,” she laughed.
Kendra came out of the kitchen and edged past me on her way to another table. She had her apron tied up high, under her chest, and her pregnancy was just showing, I now saw. She looked frazzled and some what angry under her armfuls of pancakes, strangely unlovely and unfamiliar against C’est Ça’s faux-aged yellow walls.
I turned back to the Germans and was distracted by the front page of the newspaper that one of the women had been reading, which was folded in half in the middle of the table. The intriguingly large, bold font headline drowned out the photo it addressed, the way big events often will, and I wondered about it.
“Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated,” said the woman in answer to my peering. “Isn’t it so terrible?” The rest of the table nodded their heads in agreement. She unfolded the paper and held the photo up so I could see it. Rabin’s legs were on the ground, while al
l around him other men in dark suits were about to spring into action.
There was a weird space into which rushed the ability of water to freeze, the need for breakfast, and the sharing of this largish piece of world news. I was taken by a sudden force of emotion birthing from me like an alien clawing through my stomach. I almost broke down right there, cried in the morning in front of the Germans. They could see I was upset, presumably by the news, and were all made a little awkward by it; after all, what did these strangers really know about me? Maybe I felt deeply involved in the Jewish homeland. Maybe I was prone to tears. The truth is I didn’t know what upset me so much about it. I really only barely knew who Yitzhak Rabin was, so there was no reason to be upset, but something inside had found its flimsy key. The low orange light of the new sun caught all of the imperfections in the grain of the table, and I tried to focus on them to compose myself: the scratches and the bits of salt and sugar and crumbs. I felt unexpectedly lost or as if I had lost something.
I went back into the kitchen and kept on going, out the back door that led into the courtyard. There was a large water tank in the rear of the restaurant that shaded a bit of lawn. I could see a slice of the glowing street through a passage onto the sidewalk, where the blacktop had just started to steam away the night’s freeze accumulation, but in the dark yard the grass was still battered in a frost so thick it snapped under my shoes.
“What are you doing?” It was Kendra, half annoyed, half concerned, hanging her head out of the steaming door.
“Nothing.” I turned away from her so that I was facing the wall. I needed to be alone.
I heard the crunch of her footsteps coming towards me. Then she stopped and stood right behind me, a question in her silence.
The Journey Prize Stories 23 Page 6
