by Nino Ricci
“It’s okay. I’ll be all right.”
We left her at the corner of College and St. George.
“I’ll call you,” she said. On the sidewalk, bookless and purseless, still clutching the lapels of her sweater, she looked abandoned, cut adrift. But by the time I pulled away from the curb she had already disappeared in the crowd of passersby. I left John at Rita’s door. A few minutes later, while I was waiting for a break in traffic at the head of the street, he pulled up next to me on his bicycle and smiled, waved. He dismounted and walked the bike onto the sidewalk to cross over at the light further up, then started east along College.
I pulled out. John was already a couple of blocks ahead of me, more or less keeping pace with the traffic. I crossed Spadina, but then instead of turning in at my street I continued on, not certain why. John had stopped for a light at St. George; it only occurred to me now, as I slowed, afraid he would turn and see me, that I was following him. The light changed and John moved on. He kept up a steady clip, his legs moving regular and precise, the tail of his windbreaker flapping behind him. His bicycle was an old red C.C.M., anachronistic next to the sleeker ten-speeds people rode now; it held him dignified and straight-backed as if he were some old-world gentleman out on a Sunday tour.
Further on he turned up a sidestreet. I got held up at a light, turned, thought I had lost him, but then caught sight of him at the head of a cross-street just turning onto Yonge. When I made the corner I saw his bike, put up on its kick-stand, parked near the door of a variety store. I pulled over to wait.
It was one of the seedier stretches of Yonge Street, mainly discount stores and porn shops, army surplus, the occasional head shop or bar. When I’d first come to Toronto several years before, the long central artery Yonge Street formed had seemed the essence of what the city was, even then when it was just an endless strip of arcades and second-storey massage parlours. But now whenever I crossed it it felt like some ravine that the city’s detritus collected in, the bored suburban kids in from the malls and the addicts and drunks in search of a fix.
Today, in the spring sun, the street looked slightly redeemed. The sidewalks were thick with pedestrians, shoppers with their parcels, young men idling outside doorways, young women in sweaters and skirts. Across the way, a moustached older man with the magisterial air of some gold-rich desert merchant had come to stand in the sun at the doorway of his shop. He took me in watching from my car and stared an instant, arms folded over his chest, then finally retreated back into the darkness of his shop.
Through the open doorway of the variety store I saw John go up to the counter, place some items there, smile at the cashier though in a tired, distracted way. The doorway I saw him through was like a frame: it held him a moment anonymous and alone, out of context, so that it seemed I was seeing him – the cut of his limbs, his simple animal presence – for the first time. Some energy seemed to pass between us as he stood there, a deep, wordless line of force as if for an instant the world had been whittled down to just the two of us: he was predator or ally or prey and I was brute instinct in the shadows, watching.
He came out of the store. I thought the intensity of my attention on him must draw his gaze in my direction. But he simply pushed his bicycle off its stand unawares, his bag of purchases balanced off its handle, and walked it up a bit to an unmarked door wedged between two storefronts. Leaning the bicycle against his hip, he pulled a set of keys from his pocket and opened the door. So he lived here, then, in one of the second-storey flats that rose up above the shops. With a single deft movement, he swung his bike over his shoulder and disappeared with it through the doorway. I waited, staring up at the curtained windows of the second floor. Sure enough, after several minutes, one of the curtains opened and John appeared at the window there, still in his windbreaker. For a moment he stood staring down into the street like some sea captain gauging the threat of a coming storm; and then the curtain closed.
XIV
Two days went by before I saw Rita again, from the car as I was driving westward past the university buildings on College. I recognized her from behind: she was dressed in the same sweater and jeans she’d worn to the zoo, as if she’d simply been wandering this stretch of sidewalk since I’d dropped her here two days earlier.
I pulled up beside her.
“Would you like a ride?”
For a moment, she seemed truly not to recognize me.
“Oh.” She stared up the street an instant as if to gauge the distance home. “Sure.”
In the car, a silence. I had waited for her call after our day with John, but it hadn’t come.
“Coming from school?” I said.
“Yeah. The library.”
But she wasn’t carrying any books.
It was a grey early evening. All day, rain had been threatening and now it began, a fine drizzle that hit the car with a sound like needles spilling. On the sidewalks, people ducked into doorways or raised newspapers above their heads to shield themselves.
“Are you better now?” Rita said.
“Sorry?”
“I mean, you were sick.”
“Oh, that. Yes.”
We were already at her street; in a minute more, at her house. I pulled over to the curb. A car wheeled around us with the slick, wet sound of tires against rain, then another.
“John said you were upset about your mother. About her moving away.”
“Yeah. Well. It’s no big deal.”
“Is it set then?”
“Sort of.”
“You know you can still count on me for help. You know that.”
“I know.”
In the tiny front lawns lining the street, clusters of old leaves preserved through the winter sat glistening in the rain. The weather, the leaves, the barren trees stretching out their grey limbs made it seem as if we had skipped through the seasons to autumn again. I had an image of making wine in the fall back in Mersea in this same drizzly wet under a lean-to my father had built against the kiln, cooking the pressings over a fire that we huddled around against the cold.
“I guess we made a bit of a mess of things,” I said.
“I guess.”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“I don’t know. There’s nothing to do.”
Twilight was coming on. In the car, darkness had settled like silt, Rita just a wash of shadow across from me.
“I don’t want you to think it’s your fault,” she said.
“It’s hard not to think that.”
“I’m not a kid. We both did what we wanted. We could look at it that way.”
“Yes.”
“Except that it was a mistake.”
We were coming to an agreement, how to see things, how to live with them. That wasn’t the difficult part after all. What was harder was the sane reasonableness of letting go, of being on the verge of grasping an unutterable thing, and passing it by.
“I was thinking of that tree near the barn at your father’s farm,” Rita said. “The mulberry tree. Is it still there?”
“I don’t know. We cut some of them down.”
“It was the one you built the treehouse in.”
“Oh. Yes. I’m not sure.”
The house had been just a crude platform of old planks where the trunk branched. On the far side of the trunk, where my father wouldn’t see them, I’d nailed a few two-by-fours as steps to allow Rita to climb up.
“We used to go up there together,” she said.
“I remember.”
“You used to tell me not to go up alone, but I did. It was so quiet there, with the leaves and that smell. That mulberry smell. I’d sit up there for hours sometimes.”
The rain was still falling. For some reason the streetlights had not yet come on; with the growing dark, it seemed the world was dissolving, slowly washing away. There was no traffic now, just the hush of early evening with its eerie expectancy, the tiny hammering of rain.
“What made you think of that?” I s
aid.
“I’m not sure. The rain, maybe. We sat up there when it was raining, once, the two of us. The leaves were so thick we didn’t get wet. I thought then that that was what made it a house. That we could stay dry in the rain.”
It hurt me to remember her as a child, in my charge, the ways I had held her life in my hands then, the ways I had failed her. All the things that had brought us here to where we were now, and that made being here impossible.
“I’m thinking of going away,” she said.
“Going where?”
“I don’t know. Away. For a while.”
“Because of what happened.”
“Maybe. Because of everything.”
“If you need money –”
“I can get by.”
I couldn’t read her expression in the dark.
“We could go together,” I said.
The smallest pause.
“You know we can’t do that.”
We had reached a point of stillness. Everything had been acknowledged, every possibility veered toward and passed over.
“I’m probably going with John,” she said. “Just so you know.”
“I see.”
“It’s easier that way. He was planning a trip. He asked me.”
“I suppose it’s none of my business.”
“You think it’s strange, his friendship with me.”
“I’m not one to talk,” I said.
“It’s just easier, that’s all.”
“Sure. Anyway, thanks for telling me.”
The streetlights came on. A moment later a light went on in the front room of Rita’s apartment: Elena was there, moving through the room, arranging things on her desk. In a minute she’d turn and see us sitting in my car at the front of the house, and begin to wonder.
“So is it set?” I said. “Your going away?”
“More or less.”
“When?”
“In a few weeks. After exams.”
“Does Elena know?”
“I’ll tell her. Maybe she’ll have to move to a smaller place until I get back.”
“Which is when?”
“The end of the summer, I guess.”
“It’s okay. I’ll cover the rent.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“It’s okay.”
“Maybe she could get a roommate or something.”
“Sure.”
But we were just spinning words out now. In a moment she would have to get out of the car and there would be nothing more to say.
“It might be better if we didn’t see each other before I left,” she said.
“If that’s what you think.”
“I don’t know what I think.”
Her hand was on the seat between us, a delicate tracery of shadow and bone.
“I should probably go,” she said.
We didn’t look at each other.
“All right.”
And then she’d stepped out into the rain, crumpling slightly beneath it before disappearing through her door, no looking back.
The weather continued cold and wet. April weather, not quite free of the shackles of winter. It put me in mind of my first month in Canada, closed off in the house with Rita, just a baby then, and the cousin who’d come to look after her. At times when my father was working night shifts and slept in the day, we’d take Rita out to the porch to keep her from waking him, though the wind rattled the windows there and the cold seeped in at every crevice.
My classes had ended by now but I still had final papers to write. I kept to my apartment, trying to work though my mind was like an alien substance no longer matched to the world, that no new thought could take shape in. I’d picked up a small black-and-white TV at a yard sale down the street, and for days sat watching reruns on UHF of shows I’d seen as a child. There was an innocence in them that was like a balm, the television world they presented of hopeful suburban domesticity as if they’d preceded some global loss of faith, a great falling away that had somehow broken us.
Then one day, I got a call from Elena.
“I’d like to know what’s going on,” she said.
My heart was pounding.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Bullshit. You knew Rita was going away.”
“She mentioned it.”
“Was it supposed to be some kind of secret?”
“No.”
A pause.
“Look. I’m not sure what’s going on with you two. It’s probably none of my business. But I think I’m entitled to some information. Getting anything out of Rita these days is like pulling teeth.”
“She’s just going travelling for a while. With John.”
“And you don’t think that’s a little weird?”
“It’s what she wants to do.”
“Okay. Fine. But in the meantime, I’m a little involved in all this. Like this apartment, for one thing.”
“I told Rita I would pay her rent while she’s gone.”
“That’s not exactly how she put things to me.”
“What did she say?”
“Something about not taking money from you any more. That I should look at getting a place on my own. If that’s what you want, fine. It’s just that I’d like to know.”
“That’s not what I said. I told her I’d pay.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Yes.”
Another pause.
“Jesus. All of a sudden everything feels so fucked up. I don’t get it. Maybe it’s just this whole thing with Mom.”
“I thought you guys were all right about that.”
“Yeah, well, think about it for a minute. How would you feel if you were suddenly homeless?”
“Is she leaving you any money?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know. Maybe after she sells the house. Meanwhile, Rita decides this is when she has to go off and find herself.”
I was left feeling that Rita was much more concerned about her financial situation than she’d let on. The question of money seemed to put what had happened in an entirely different light: I had abused a trust. She was my ward, I was her family; there couldn’t be any emotion between us that wasn’t tinged with these half-shades of dependence and power. It had been a life’s work just to reach a point of sanity between us, of normality, and now in a matter of weeks, of days, an hour, all that had been wrecked.
I decided to send her a cheque to help tide her over, finally making it out for just over half what I had in my account. I tried to write her a letter to accompany it, but was at a loss what to say. I thought of the letters I used to write her from Africa, with their careful weighting of implication like a balance set to tip – the tension between us then, the very possibility of expression, had been all in that balancing, the constant featherweight of difference between what we said and what we held back. With that gone, there seemed no place to speak from any more except to descend into ravings, apologies, pathetic pleas. I ended by attaching only a short note:
This isn’t a gift or a loan, just part of your due. I hope it saves you from being dependent on me or anyone for a while.
I put the cheque in the mail and waited. The days went by and still the money sat in my account; but just after a week had passed it was gone. I had expected some relief at this, but instead it was like having something cut out of me, a splitting down the middle of what was hers, what was mine. Another, perhaps a final link had been severed: she was on her own.
One afternoon toward the end of April I saw her from across the street at Spadina and College. We had hit another day of cold after some warmer ones, and she was dressed in her old blue parka again. When I spotted her she was just coming out of a bank at the corner; at the threshold, she looked both ways like someone in flight from a pursuer, then started south down Spadina. I followed from across the street. At Baldwin she turned into the market and I had to run to make the light. I caught sight of her turning down Kensington, then rea
ched the corner in time to see her entering a coffee shop at the market’s edge.
It was one of the cleaner places in the market, a sort of European-style café with a large front window that allowed a clear view inside. I watched her from the vegetable store across the way. She had taken a window seat at a table for two; from her shoulder bag she pulled out a paperback, then a pack of cigarettes, something that surprised me, since I had never known her to smoke more than the occasional one she cadged from me or Elena. A waiter came for her order and returned a moment later with a coffee; and then for several minutes she sat smoking and reading. A vase on her table held a single yellow tulip that made her look as if she’d been posed for a painting: woman reading in café window.
A man in a dirty overcoat went into the café and up to Rita’s table. She smiled at him as if she knew him, exchanged a few words, handed him a cigarette from her pack. She watched as he brought a match tremblingly to the cigarette to light it, then reached into her bag and took out some coins from a change purse to put them discreetly in his hand.
She finished her coffee and came out. At the street entrance of a second-storey pool hall on the corner, she looked nervously in each direction again, then went inside. It was another of the places where dealers hung out; sometimes acned acid-heads or dreadlocked Rastas stood at the door whispering to passersby as if not to wake some sleeping infant inside. I waited a little way down from the entrance. When Rita emerged several minutes later, her hands fisted down in the pockets of her coat, she did so swiftly and eyes forward, disappearing almost at once around the corner back in the direction of Spadina.
I followed again. It was utterly different, seeing her this way, not only because of her secrets, her delinquencies, but because I was glimpsing the space that I was not in, what in the usual course of things was always kept from me. I had the sense I was invisible, that if she turned now, as this different person she was, she’d see only a stranger’s face amongst others, and walk on. Or else being here among strangers, outside other people’s ideas of us, or our own, it would be possible for a smile to form, for a complicity to make itself manifest: something had happened between us, a devious, hoped-for, unexpected thing, we were large enough to let that be part of us. I’d go up and silently take her arm, and we’d walk on together, into the anonymous world; and we would not stop.
