Pete said, “Sonia, why do you always make so little food? It’s not the end of the world yet.”
She dropped her spoon. I realized before Pete and Dieter did that she was crying. I was sitting next to her and, dumbfounded, saw the tears rain in her soup.
“I’m still hungry,” Pete bleated, clasping his hands. “Feed me. Feed me.”
She leapt up. “How can you joke about the end of the world? How?” Before he could answer, she snatched a biscuit off the tray and hurled it. It struck Pete square on the forehead, then bounced off, leaving a floury mark. He sat, momentarily stunned, before letting go a long, crazy, primeval whoop, a pterodactyl call. “It’s not funny!” she shrieked. “Not at all!” and she stumbled from the table and out of the room with Dieter hurrying after her. “Asshole,” he hissed at Pete.
Pete took advantage of the moment to jam a fourth biscuit in, the one that had ricocheted off him. “Do I go too far, Zed?” he asked when he had finally choked it down. I didn’t reply. I didn’t think he cared what I thought. When he left, he took another biscuit with him.
I cleared the table and put the dishes in the sink, though cleanup was the cook’s job. I could hear Pete talking in a funny voice and Sonia begging him to stop. When he wouldn’t let up, I went down the hall to see if she was all right. Her door was open and she was sitting on the bed hugging a stuffed toy, Dieter kneeling on the floor at her feet, Pete on the bed behind her, massaging her tiny shoulders. “Leave me alone,” she was moaning, “go away,” while Pete kept telling her in a duck’s voice that everything would be okay.
That night I woke to the leaded glass window on the ceiling. I stared up at it, wondering what time it was. Maybe Sonia was afraid of the dark. Maybe that was why her light was on so often at night.
It was true she never made enough food. I was hungry again.
I felt my way into the dark hall and down the stairs. Moonlight penetrated the living room, rebounding off the white surfaces—the note taped to the lamp, It’s payback time!!!, and the statue’s painted grin—relegating the rest of the room to obscurity. I carried on past the French doors, to the kitchen where I saw the glow and stopped.
A bright orange spiral.
The stove was on. My first thought was that this was why I’d woken. Sometimes it was the front door slamming, or Belinda and Pete’s noisy exertions. But Belinda wasn’t there tonight so I must have instinctively sensed danger. I’d just taken a step to shut the burner off when I realized someone else was there—Sonia, moving toward the stove at the same time, her face and upper body washed in the thin orange light. Palm down, fingers outstretched, she was reaching for the element, lowering her hand over it. When she got close enough to the coil to make me wince, she drew her hand back and shook it out. She tried again, getting closer the second time.
I crept back upstairs and lay on my futon staring at the pattern on the ceiling, wondering what to do. When Sonia’s light finally snapped off, I turned my own on, tore a sheet from my notebook, tore that in half, wrote. I folded the note until it was compact enough to wriggle through the grate. Then I listened for it, the small sound of it landing on the dresser below, the soft tap of my message reaching her.
She seemed so tormented, but if I lost any sleep over Sonia’s problems, it was only because her light woke me up. Those first months in the Trutch house I mostly tried to avoid my housemates, staying in my room and getting up earlier than everyone else. But I couldn’t escape our communal supper or the awkward dashing to and from the upstairs bathroom that I shared with the men. And in the afternoon, when I came home, someone was inevitably there. Pete would be there, or Hector with his gold tooth and his beret, watching Looney Tunes with Pete. Sometimes if Dieter was there, he and Pete would exchange a look when I came in, their unsecret signal to close the subject, which was always politics. But maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was them wondering about me and just what my problem was.
What was my problem? I wondered it myself.
Then one afternoon I came home and found my bedroom door open. I always kept it closed, but it was open now and Pete was there, in my room, his back to me, hair in a ponytail, T-shirt inside out. I saw a tag and seams.
“What are you doing?” The words came out in a quiet rasp.
“Looking for a pen.”
He wasn’t looking for a pen. He was lying on his side on the floor, one hand propping himself up as he studied the spines of my books. My private, treasured books. My room received the sun’s afternoon attention and he was basking in it, in a bright cloud of dust motes. “There are pens downstairs by the phone,” I said.
“Can you get me one?”
“No.”
“See?” he said. “It’s too far to go. You read a lot of novels.”
“Some of them are short stories.”
“It’s a waste of time.”
Now I mustered a tone nearly appropriate to what I felt. “Can you get out of my room, please?”
The books were arranged in three pillars. He pulled one out from the middle, causing the whole stack to collapse, opened it and began flipping, pausing to read the underlined bits. “Art is just a means of making money, as sure as haemorrhoids exist.” He looked over his shoulder at me. Utter delight. Complete self-satisfaction. My expression seemed not to register with him. “I rest my case. It’s written right here. What is this?” He glanced at the cover.
I wanted to snatch it from him, whack him with it. Riffle the pages in his face—literature farts at you! Instead I dropped my backpack to the floor and began digging. Pete read on to himself but, finding nothing else of interest on the page, tossed the book back on the pile. “You need a bookshelf, Zed.”
I pulled out my pencil case, unzipped it. “Here.”
“Oh, good.” Before he left, he took the pen and scribbled on his arm to make sure it worked.
I don’t know if he could hear me, crying, over his music. When I had calmed down, I took a decision. I couldn’t live there any more. These people were horrible. I hated them. Pete was a drug addict. (What he smoked out on the deck was marijuana.) Dieter was a control freak. Sonia hadn’t even mentioned my note. I’d go back to my aunt’s and live there until I found another place. I didn’t care about the bus ride, or that she was crazy. They were crazy. I knew I was overreacting, but at that time I felt I had nothing, nothing except my privacy.
I heard Sonia’s call to supper and Pete and Dieter bolting, racehorses out of the starting gate. Sonia called again. A few minutes later a tap sounded on the door, though I hadn’t heard any steps. Sonia was weightless.
She put her head in. “Aren’t you eating?”
I didn’t look up from my book. “No.”
“Are you sick?”
“Yes.” I was sick with anger.
“Do you want me to make you some toast or something?”
“No,” I said. “Thank you.”
“I hope you feel better.”
“Thank you.”
I put the book down as soon as she closed the door.
Pete came up directly after supper. When I didn’t answer his knock, he thudded to his room. A moment later my pen shot through the gap under the door. “I’m returning your private property!” he called.
I heard him go away, then come right back. “I need to borrow that again.” I was afraid he’d barge in so I got up and kicked the pen back under the door. It came skating through a second time, followed by a piece of paper I could read from where I had retreated to my nest. Property is theft.
I threw the covers off and stomped to Pete’s room, where he was apparently anticipating our clash, standing with arms crossed, half smiling. “I don’t go into your room!” I shrieked.
“You’re welcome to,” he said. “Any time.”
“I don’t want to! And I don’t want you going into mine!”
“Anything I have is yours.”
He wasn’t mocking me. He mocked Dieter mercilessly all the time and that was not the tone he was using n
ow. I hurled the pen but, other than dodging it, he didn’t react, just stood there, a beautiful statue that had briefly come to life. “Hold it,” he called after me.
I slammed my door. Pete opened it—without knocking!—and set down two yellow milk crates. “I don’t want those,” I said.
He returned with two more, blue and red, then the boards. Kicking my books over a second time, out of the way, he began assembling the shelf. Two crates, a board, two more crates, another board. I sank down on my futon, face in my hands, and sobbed.
“There. You want me to put the books back or do you want to do that yourself?”
I looked up, streaming. “What do you want?”
He was still on his knees but, to my horror, he changed position, got comfortable interlacing his fingers behind his head and falling onto his back—all to ponder his reply. It didn’t take long. “I want a fairer world,” he said. “What do you want, Zed?”
“I want you to ask permission before you come into my room.”
“I don’t ask permission.”
“You should!”
“Why?”
“Because it’s polite! It’s respectful!”
“Polite is bullshit. It’s bourgeois. I don’t recognize private property and I don’t respect it.”
“I’m not talking about respecting property! As if I care about a stupid pen!”
“Oh,” he said. “But I respect you, Zed. You’re intelligent. You don’t play games. You’re funny.”
“Funny?”
“Dry. Anyway, I didn’t want to go all the way downstairs to get a pen. I was curious about what kind of books you read.”
He spoke so reasonably to my hysteria. At least that was how it seemed now. I scrambled for a tissue. “You might say sorry.”
“That’s another thing I don’t do.”
“Fine.” I blew my nose with an embarrassing quack. “Can you get out now?”
“I can.” But he stayed exactly as he was, on his back, naked foot tapping the air. When I threw up my hands, he laughed. “You asked me if I could.”
I felt dizzy after he left. I couldn’t believe he thought those things about me. I looked over at my scree of books and, though it actually pained me to see them in disarray, I resisted putting them away. Then a voice quavered through the grate. “Is everything all right up there?” I went over and peered down. “Toast?” Sonia asked.
A few minutes later she came up with a tray. “Thank you,” I said.
“There wasn’t any supper left.”
“No doubt.”
She sat on the floor and hugged her knees, watching me eat. “I heard you and Pete,” she said with a glance at the grate. “Don’t mind him. He acts like that because he’s smarter than everybody else.”
I huffed.
Sonia: “It’s true. He doesn’t even go to class. He studies on his own in the library. Engineering’s unbelievably hard. I admire him so much. He has discipline. He lives by his code.”
“His anarcho-feminist-pacifist code?”
Sonia nodded. She didn’t seem to get sarcasm. “His family’s rich. He won’t have anything to do with them. He has a trust fund, but he gives most of it away. He gives Hector money all the time.” And though Pete paid the kitty, she told me that he wouldn’t take any money out because he didn’t believe in it. In money. He shopped on the five-finger discount, which explained the bizarre miscellany of groceries he always unloaded from his pack. Tomato sauce, popcorn, frozen peas. I’d seen him come home from university with a roll of toilet paper under each arm.
“Remember that time he said, ‘Jane will tell me if she doesn’t like what I call her’?”
I finished the toast and, licking my finger, gathered up the crumbs. “Zed. He calls me Zed.”
“If you tell him not to, he won’t.”
“I don’t care.”
“Ask for his shirt, he’ll give it to you. But you have to ask.”
“Ask and I shall receive?”
I meant, Does he think he’s Jesus? but Sonia brightened. “Are you a Christian?”
“No.”
She felt for the little cross around her neck, as though to reassure herself she was. “The other thing. Pete separates out his feelings. Unlike me.” Tears appeared then and were blinked back fiercely. “We are this close to a nuclear war,” she said, pronouncing it “nucular.” There was precious little space between the finger and thumb she held out. “Ever since they shot down that airliner, I’ve been waiting. Waiting. It’s killing me. I can’t talk about it now. I’ll be a wreck. I have a project due tomorrow. As if it matters.” She let go of her knees and lurched over to hug me while my own arms hovered in the air, not knowing what to do. “Actually,” she said, letting go, “would you like to help me? Are you busy?”
My whole body tingled, like a limb gone to sleep, or waking up.
We went downstairs to her room. Sonia collected Japanese things. There was a teapot and two tiny handleless cups on the dresser, strings of origami cranes, a calligraphic banner. The stuffed toys looked Canadian. I went over to the dresser and peered up into my room, but all I could see was the blank of the ceiling. “Do you know Japanese?” I asked.
“No.”
“Drink—more—tea,” I pretended to read off the teapot. Then I saw my note behind one of the cups, still folded budtight.
“Let’s have tea,” she said, so I passed her the pot and cups. The moment she left the room, I tossed the note into her open closet where it fell among her shoes.
She returned shortly with the tea and sat down on the floor. I sat the same way, cross-legged, facing her while she poured with demure, faux-Japanese gestures, the little white cup balanced on the tips of her fingers as she bowed to me. I accepted it, bowing in return.
“It tastes better in these cups,” she said.
I sipped. “It actually does.”
We were going to make origami cranes for her practicum. Sonia spread out the coloured paper. I chose a yellow square, Sonia a pink one. She flipped aside the braided rug to start. “Okay. Like this.”
I reoriented the square as a diamond, like she did. I repeated each step, each fold and turn, fascinated, even distracted by her deft little fingers. It was like watching the manipulations of a baby or a raccoon, except her nails were chewed down and raw-looking. I wondered if they hurt. We made a tighter diamond, transformed it into a kite, pleated and repleated what we’d done. Then, somehow, out of this intricately wrapped present of air, we coaxed two birds. “That’s good, Jane. Your very first crane.” Which was how she talked to her seven-year-olds, I presumed. “Keep it if you want,” she said.
We paused to sip our tea then bowed again over new squares, the crowns of our heads almost touching. “A hundred and fifty thousand people died when they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.” Sonia looked up, gauging my reaction.
“Really? That’s awful.”
And it was. Awful.
“Not a day goes by that I don’t think about it,” she said.
I helped her fold twenty-four cranes, for which she hugged me again. Afterward, I went back upstairs where I set the yellow one on the grate so she would see it roosting there if she happened to look up. Then I moved my books into their new home. Art Through the Ages. The Science of Life. Chekhov. Turgenev. Dostoyevsky. Tolstoy. When I was done and I slid back for a better look, a line from The Cherry Orchard popped into my head: My dear venerable bookcase, I salute you.
Mid-terms came and I wondered how I had allowed myself to be flattered into taking Russian. It was nothing like French, the only other foreign language I’d attempted. French was a mouthful of feathers. Russian was spitting out stones. But if only I could spit them! I was able to read simple sentences now and even understand the absurdist dialogues in the language lab, but I choked on the stones. In addition to Russian and Russian Lit, I’d enrolled in the stupefying Canadian Poetics, and Biology 100, the obligatory science credit I’d sidestepped the year before. After exams were over, wh
en I could with great relief recap my highlighter pen and file away my index cards of notes, a house meeting was called. The main item on the agenda: what to do about Halloween.
Pete: “If we’re not going to use it as a consciousness-raising opportunity, then I’ll boycott it as a bourgeois ruse.”
“How is Halloween a bourgeois ruse?” It was the first time I’d spoken during a meeting.
“Zed,” Pete said, shaking his gilded head. “What happens at Halloween?”
“Children dress up. They go door to door.”
“Yes. Essentially begging. A friendly adult disperses candy—for free! How fun! But what does it teach them? That the society they live in is generous and benign? Zed? Imagine a genuinely needy person begging door to door. And is that candy really free? Is it even sweet? Under what conditions did the workers in the factory labour to produce it? And what about the virtual slaves toiling in the sugar cane fields?”
“Oh dear,” Sonia said.
I wondered what he would have to say about Christmas.
Dieter: “I see your point about candy. Maybe we can hand out something else.”
“We could hand out cranes,” I said.
Sonia literally lifted off the seat of her chair, making excited flapping motions with her hands. “Yes!”
“How does that raise consciousness?” Pete asked.
“The crane is a symbol,” Sonia said. “It’s a symbol of peace.”
“They don’t know that.”
“We could write a message explaining it,” I said.
Pete smiled, showing all his perfect teeth. “Okay. Let’s write messages on the cranes. I’m fine with that.”
“Do we have consensus then?” Dieter asked.
We did and I felt pleased because it was my idea. Sonia went to get the origami papers from her room, then we set to writing. The crane is a symbol of peace, I wrote. I didn’t know what else to say. When I got bored writing that, I just wrote Peace, but that, too, became tedious. The others were writing more than I was. Pete appeared to be composing a manifesto. Dieter kept leaning over to read Sonia’s messages, leaning close so she almost had to fold her little self sideways to avoid touching him. Think about what peace means, I wrote, though I had never given it any thought myself. I glanced at what Sonia was writing.
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