I stayed in my room the whole of Saturday, and when I came down for supper Sonia jumped up from the table and hugged me. At that moment I passionately did not want to die. I thought I would cry again, but didn’t, because of the men. Our embrace aroused enough curiosity that they paused with their forks in mid-air. After a few minutes Hector remarked, “The ladies are very quiet tonight.”
Dieter said something in Spanish.
“Excuse me. I had just been told there are no ladies present here. Only two very quiet women.”
“Jane is upset,” Sonia explained. She sounded oddly triumphant.
Concern flashed across the little round lenses of Hector’s glasses. It glinted off his tooth. “You are sad, Jane? Why?”
“Have you seen If You Love This Planet, Hector?” Sonia asked him.
“This is the movie you invited me to last night? Then I’m glad I didn’t go. The world is full of cruelness and injustice, but Friday night is not for suffering.”
“Has your life changed, Zed?” Pete asked.
Sonia: “Don’t tease her.”
“I’m not teasing her. I’m asking her a question.”
They all looked at me. “I feel horrible,” I said.
“As you should,” said Dieter. “The bombs could start raining down at any moment. Quick! Go to the window! Check! Are they falling yet?” He grinned when, predictably, Sonia wailed and had to be comforted. Stiffening against his chest, she struggled free.
Pete had finished eating but instead of going for his second course of bread and margarine, he folded his arms on the table and addressed me. “This is what’s going to happen, Zed. First you’ll feel frightened. Then you’ll feel depressed. This is normal given the circumstances. You’ve just learned that you might die at any moment.”
Hector: “Anybody might die at any moment. It is a fact of life.”
Dieter: “This is more than death, Hector. This is annihilation. The entire planet.”
Sonia resumed picking at her dismantled burrito. “Is there meat in this, Hector?”
“After the fear, after the depression,” Uncle Peter went on, “you’ll begin to get angry. This is good because when you’re angry enough, when you’re sufficiently pissed off, then change can happen. You’ll say, ‘This is not right. This is unacceptable to me.’ At that point you’ll commit to action.”
“First mourn, then work for change,” Sonia said and Dieter nodded.
“What am I supposed to do?” I asked.
Sonia: “We could let her in NAG!”
“No, we couldn’t,” said Dieter. “We would need consensus. Have you heard of SPND? It’s a group on campus. Students for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament.”
“Nu-clee-ar,” I said.
“What?”
“It’s pronounced ‘nuclee-ar’ not ‘nucular.’”
“No, it’s not.”
“It is.”
Pete: “Whoa. This is premature. Let’s wait till Zed gets mad. I’ve seen her mad. She showed promise.”
On Sunday morning I brought the sacred yellow telephone to my room and called my aunt. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “You are upset about something. I can hear it in your voice.”
“I can’t talk about it.” The dread was rising in my throat, acidic, like reflux. “I’ll come next week. Not tonight.” I hung up before the tears started. How could I confide in a person for whom the worst thing in the world was constipation?
Sirens kept going off. The fire hall was a few blocks away on Balaclava Street. I’d always tuned out the shriek of the trucks, but I heard them now and every time thought of the newsreel schoolchildren in If You Love This Planet donning gas masks and crouching futilely under their wooden desks. Finally I opened my Chekhov again and got to work. Just before the duel between Layevsky and von Koren, I underlined two sentences. Layevsky experienced the weariness and awkwardness of a man who perhaps was soon to die. And this: It was the first time in his life he had seen the sunrise.
The meeting was still going on downstairs when I finished preparing for the next day’s discussion. I wrote another note to Sonia, the same thing as before, Are you all right? but this time I snuck down and put it in her clog. And I wrote it in Russian, so she would know it was from me.
The next day she brought it to me so I could read it to her. “It says Vsyo normalno?”
“Jane,” she said, staring at me, twisting her little cross in agitation. “I’m not normal.”
“What do you mean?”
“Everybody goes around like—like everything is fine. But it’s not. I know you understand. I know you feel like I do. Don’t you?”
I told her, “Yes.”
2004
Their faces in the newspaper. It all came back, everything that happened that spring. The spring those pictures were taken. I decided to skip my first day of work. I wouldn’t be able to concentrate anyway. I’d go out somewhere. Where? And if the paper was still on the table when I got home, if Maria hadn’t put it in the recycling, then. Then I would read what it said.
Was it Maria’s day? She comes every second week to clean for us and vex us. For example, our most needed utensils? She deliberately hides them, I’m sure of it, yet when I ask her politely and respectfully and without a hint of criticism to put things back where she finds them, she merely informs me that I put them in the wrong places. “Jane, do it the way I do. Because it’s better.” She’s Slovakian, short and muscular with a yellow bob and chapped hands. Joe Jr. claims she pays inordinate attention to his underwear drawer, that his briefs are always meticulously folded and stacked and, occasionally, on some Slovakian whim, transferred to a different drawer. “It freaks me out,” he says.
“Yet this same woman,” Joe Sr. says with a finger in the air, “this same woman will not dust.”
Maria would make the newspaper vanish. She would say that we had our chance to read it and we lost that chance. She’s done it before. But it was Monday, I remembered then. Tuesday is Maria’s day.
I went to wake Joe Jr. for school. He’s fifteen so this can be a challenge, though, surprisingly, he was already awake. I heard sounds before I knocked. “Come in,” he said.
He was sitting on the edge of the bed in his boxers with the cello between his bare splayed legs. Instead of the bow, a bamboo backscratcher. “What are you doing?” I asked.
“I didn’t want to wake you,” he said.
“I don’t mind being woken by the cello.”
“I’m not that good yet. Listen.” And he played a little silence for me.
I was supposed to begin copyediting a manuscript, the first job I’d accepted all year, but even before I could feel guilty about playing truant (I hadn’t checked my e-mail to see if it had arrived yet), even before I had decided where to pass my truancy, the phone rang and I left Joe Jr.’s room to answer it. It was the editor phoning from Toronto to say there had been a delay. I cleared the gladness from my throat. “Oh well.”
“I apologize,” she said.
I like this woman, Morna Crane, whom I’ve worked for before though never met in person. She does things like this—phone instead of e-mail, then take the trouble to prolong the conversation to a friendly length, which she did by asking, “What’s the weather like out there?”
Though I’ve never been to Toronto in the early spring, I had a snowbound childhood and remember the season’s fetid start—the dirty snow receding, the sordid revelations: candy wrappers, plastic bags, dog shit. “Do you really want to know?” I asked as Joe Jr. finally emerged from the bathroom, handsome despite all the holes he’s punched in himself, hair gelled into glistening tufts (an operation so time-consuming breakfast must be taken on the run). He stood in the open door of the fridge swigging milk from the bottle. I’d set out the day’s provisions—bun wrapped in wax paper (breakfast), five-dollar bill (lunch). He took them, kissed me on the phone still held to my ear, and left for school, dragging the cello down the hall.
“Tell me everything, Jane,” M
orna said. “Don’t spare me.”
“Our magnolia is blooming. The cherries too.”
She sighed. “I saw on the news that it’s snowing in Calgary. That comforts me a little.”
And I got an idea. I’ll go look at the beautiful trees, I thought.
On the crest of the hill, at the four-way stop just before the descent to Arbutus Street, there’s a bit of a view northward toward the mountains, over other cotton-candied streets. Two varieties of flowering trees were in bloom, one a darker and one a lighter shade of pink. I drove through the frothy tunnel of 33rd Avenue, past the bright armies of daffodils amassing in the mansion gardens of Shaughnessy. All these carnival colours. All this spring cheer. It’s a bit much, I thought.
The radio brought the story up again while I was driving. I could have switched it off but was better prepared now after an hour of consciously avoiding thinking about it. It was over in a few sentences anyway. Sonia Parker, one of the “masterminds” of a 1984 bomb plot gone awry, had been released yesterday. Peter English would be released in 2009. The next item, in keeping with the terrorist theme, was about the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
When I reached the parking lot, I sat in the car for a few minutes until I was breathing normally again.
Queen Elizabeth Park is the highest point in the city proper. I hadn’t been up there for years. On the plaza in front of the geodesic dome, a contingent of senior citizens was Catching the Monkey’s Tail as they Tai Chi-ed in perfect unison. I made my way past them, feeling clumsy, and headed for the lookout where three life-sized bronze people stand waiting for their picture to be taken. According to the nearby plaque, they’ve been posing there since 1984. The view behind them is entirely obscured by trees now, which seems fitting since the present skyline would have been unrecognizable in 1984. We couldn’t have imagined how the city would grow and change, upward and outward, its concrete leavened. Because we didn’t believe it would still be here. Only the mountains would be left standing. Or so we thought.
I headed through the Quarry Garden, over the Japanese bridge, down to where I’d seen the largest group of trees as I drove in. Walking under their collective canopy was like entering a cloud. I remembered bringing Joe Jr. here when he was about five, him in his baseball cap standing under a tree like the one I was standing under now, letting his head fall back as he gazed up through the ruffled branches. The cap tumbled off his head. “Mom,” he said, sounding like he hated to be the one to disabuse me. “They’re not really real, you know.”
I sat on the damp grass under the tree. Then I lay down. How wonderful and sublime, the scent of the blossoms. I only noticed when I closed my eyes. Naturally, I thought of Chekhov, Chekhov on his deathbed and how the doctor gave him champagne. Chekhov sat up, smiled, and said to his wife: “It’s been a long time since I drank champagne!” He drank it, then he lay back down and died.
I don’t know how long I’d been lying there when my purse rang under my head and startled me upright. It was Joe calling from work. Of course I expected the worst. What else? “Nothing’s wrong,” he said. “Did the book arrive?”
“No. There was some kind of delay. Tomorrow maybe. Shouldn’t you be working? Isn’t somebody dying over there?”
“Not at the moment. Ma for dinner? That all right?”
“Fine.”
“Maybe we’ll play a few songs for her. You remember Simon’s coming?”
“I didn’t, but it’s okay.”
“It’s not too much?”
“It’s fine.” I wondered if Joe had seen the paper, if that was what the call was really about. There was a pause full of hospital sounds—nurses being bossy, carts rattling by.
Joe: “I wanted to ask your opinion. The Streptococci?”
“The what? Oh. I like The Joes better.”
“Won’t Simon feel left out?”
“You’re kind. And literal. Were The Ramones all named Ramone?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Really?” I was stunned. “The Ramones were brothers?”
“Well, not from birth.”
I walked around the park. I had lunch in the café next to the organic grocery store, then stopped in to buy more food, grocery shopping being sort of a second job these days, part-time and volunteer. I was stalling, though I wouldn’t have if I’d known Joe’s mother was already sitting patiently on our porch with a casserole dish in her lap. When I pulled up later that afternoon, Rachel called out, “I’m early!”
I came up the steps and hugged her, thinking, as usual, that every time I do she’s smaller while every time Joe Jr. is bigger. The hug went on a little too long. One of us wasn’t letting go. Who? The one with the heavy dish in her hand, or me? Finally, we separated and I turned to unlock the door.
“I still find this mat rude,” she said. “Go Away.”
“It’s not meant for you.”
“Are you sure?”
Then I remembered the newspaper lying on the mat that morning, the reason I’d stayed out most of the day. It was on the kitchen table now. I didn’t want Rachel to see it so, while she dealt with her shoes and coat, I hurried ahead to get rid of it. When I got to the kitchen, though, the paper was gone.
Rachel set the casserole dish on the counter. “That’s apple crumble.”
“I’ll get the groceries,” I said, slinking off, perplexed. I brought in the first set of bags from the car and Rachel asked if she should put them away. “I’ll do it,” I said. “There’s more.”
“I’ll put the kettle on,” she said.
Two more trips to the car so the metabolic furnace inside the resident fifteen-year-old might be stoked. Rachel, meanwhile, was already making her rounds of the houseplants, pushing a finger into the soil to check for moisture, plucking off dead bits. No judgement was implied by this. She’s one of those super-seniors. Active Native Daughter of British Columbia, editor of the Heritage Society newsletter. Every autumn she hikes into the mountains to collect, catalogue, and consume wild mushrooms. She’s also handy with a needle. Among Joe’s most prized possessions is a petit point Sex Pistols album cover Rachel made for him in the eighties, God Save the Queen, no less. She’s doing one for Joe Jr. now, The Clash’s London Calling, but in crewel because petit point, she says, is murder on the eyes. Anyway, I am so far from threatened by her solicitude and competence that I never even look at the plants.
“I haven’t seen paper grocery bags in years,” she said, coming in from the living room with dried leaves cupped in one hand.
“That’s why I shop there.”
When she opened the cupboard under the sink to get at the compost, I took advantage of the moment to stash a box of dish detergent. “Hold still,” she said, pulling something out of my hair. She showed me what it was. “What have you been doing?”
“Buying groceries with sticks and grass in my hair,” I said.
“Flower petals, too, by the looks of it.”
I jammed the blocks of ice cream in the freezer then went to the bathroom to check how bad I looked. A paper didn’t just disappear. I’d left it there that morning face down on the table. We have a key hidden in a spot so obvious no thief would bother looking. Rachel knows about it, so why didn’t she use it? Then I remembered, belatedly, that she receives the newspaper herself every morning and listens to the CBC all day long, and I sank down on the edge of the bathtub and cried into a towel. I was crying out of gratitude. For her tact. For everything she’s ever done for me.
Every year around this time, I have to grapple with these memories and feelings. Spring is difficult. Spring is a challenge.
Joe Jr.’s door was closed. I don’t usually go in without his permission, but now I tapped on the door and opened it with the intention of looking for the lost paper. Surprise! Joe Jr. curled up in bed with the iPod clutched in his fist. Sometimes when I look at him I see every stage of his life in superimposition, the culmination of a whole person, not just the disinterested grunter he is so often now. It’s almost
overwhelming. I closed the door again.
In the kitchen Rachel asked, “What’s wrong, Jane?”
“Joe Jr.’s home.”
She frowned. “I rang the doorbell.”
“He’s plugged in.”
She nodded. “Is he sick?”
“Oh, God. I hope not.”
“Well, don’t fret. Joe will have a look at him.”
This is the kind of brave talk you get out of people who eat wild mushrooms. Every time he gets sick, I think he’s going to die. Of course, I didn’t know if Joe Jr. was sick. I felt sick thinking there might have been something about me in the paper. Since I hadn’t actually read the article myself yet, I couldn’t be sure, but I doubted it. Then I remembered the recycling (belatedly again) and stepped out onto the back deck. Opened the blue bag, and yes! There it was, the prodigal Vancouver Sun, at the very top, all the sections intact. I was losing my mind. I glanced at the headline again—Opposition Mounts to Iraq War—but when I flipped the paper over to see their long-ago faces, to read what was being said about Sonia and Pete now, the article was gone.
The Sky Is Falling Page 7
