“I didn’t do anything.”
“You did. You were there. I felt supported having another woman in the room.”
“Pete wouldn’t hurt you,” I said.
We stopped at the bottom and Isis said, “All men are latent rapists as far as I’m concerned. But what a relief! What a relief it’s finally over!” She threw her head back and inhaled. “God, the air smells wonderful. I love spring. Have you read The Cherry Orchard? Of course. You’ve probably read it in Russian. We should read it together. The group, I mean.”
Then the street lights suddenly winked on and we looked at one another in surprise. Isis laughed and took my arm. Together we walked on, linked like schoolgirls crossing the street. “Was I too hard on him, do you think?” she asked. “See, I’m trying to be assertive. I’m trying to find my power.” Before I could answer, Belinda—this time it was Belinda—pulled her arm out of mine and staggered over and sank down on someone’s lawn. People were obviously home. Lights were on in the house. She toppled onto her side, howling, “He would never say he loved me! He would never use those words!”
I hurried over. “He won’t say sorry either.”
“You keep defending him! Are you sure you didn’t sleep with him?”
“No!”
“But if he did, Jane? If he had once told me he loved me? If he had said it tonight? That’s what I wanted. I need to hear those words. I’m so insecure.”
This surprised me very much.
“My mother used to say the awfullest things to me,” she went on. “Like my breasts are two different sizes. Who cares! She made me so self-conscious. I hate her.”
She curled in a ball, sobbing, with me bent helplessly over her. “He kept screwing around. I said it was okay but it wasn’t. I was jealous. I wanted to slit their throats.” She looked up at me, grass and snot blending with her freckles, and her whole body spasmed. “Hic! Sorry. That’s not non-violent. God! Now I’ve got the hiccoughs.
“He’s jealous too,” she went on. “He won’t admit it, but he is. Remember what he did at the Hyatt? He’s jealous of—Hic!—Carla.” She rolled onto her back, used her sleeve on the tears, sighed. “Look. Stars.”
I looked up and saw them, the first faint emanations that night. “Make a wish,” she said and I did. “I’m always torn,” she said, lying at my feet, “between disarmament and gender equality.”
When she got up, fresh-cut grass was stuck all over her army pants. She brushed herself off and we continued down Gandhi Street. Every time she hiccoughed, I pretended to too, so by the time we reached the Blenheim house, we were laughing again. “Are you going to be okay?” I asked.
“Yes. Carla’s home. Thanks.” She foisted the mandatory goodbye hug on me, then started up the walk. Halfway she turned, wearing a different face altogether—pleased and smug. She said, “Carla worships me.”
We didn’t see Pete for three days. Except to cross the hall to the bathroom, he never left his room. Nor did he respond to Sonia’s pleas, delivered through his door, to come down to supper. His heart was broken, Sonia said, but I thought it was more complicated than that. Getting Belinda back would have been easy. All he had to do was utter the formula she had doubtlessly given him many times, the three magic little words we all long for. He could probably have got her back without them, but he knew it wasn’t fair. His looks, his manifold charms—they were inherited, not earned. If he turned his magnetism on, like he had done that time at the Hyatt, what message would it give to people like me who had none of his physical advantages? So he stayed in his room, pitting his heart against his principles. I knew he would come out when his principles had won.
Without the Reliant, both Dieter and I had to take the bus the last few days of term and, in the morning, we walked together to the stop. “I really don’t want to do that action in Seattle,” he told me. “It’s a way bigger deal to get arrested down there.”
“You can be support. That’s what I’m doing.”
“They’ll arrest everybody. They’re a bunch of Fascists. I’m going to Nicaragua in June. We’re driving down. I’ll have to get across that border again. But we need consensus, right? Are you with me?”
I thought he was asking if I understood. “Yes,” I said.
“Good.” After a pause he said, “What are you doing this summer?”
“I don’t know yet.” I was in a quandary. I was supposed to go home. My mother had asked in her last letter when they should expect me. But Sonia and I were moving out together. If I left for the summer, I’d have to sublet my room. I’d have to be apart from her for four months when I could scarcely endure the day’s separation and often trudged halfway across campus just to eat my lunch near Scarfe, the Education building, pathetically hoping to catch a glimpse of her. Who knew what would happen during those four months? It was always there, the enormous matter of a nuclear war, the monster in the room, the ominous shadow falling over all our plans and dreams. And where did I want to be at the end of the world? Wherever Sonia was, I knew.
“Did you talk to Sonia about me?” Dieter asked when we reached the bus stop.
“No.”
“No! Why not?”
“I didn’t know what you wanted me to say,” and by his crumpled look I saw he didn’t know himself any more.
“Well, could you do this for me then? Could you find out if there’s any other guy she likes at the moment?”
“There isn’t,” I said with complete confidence.
Pascal mostly kept to the living room, out of everyone’s way. Or he hung around with Dieter when Dieter wasn’t studying. I think he hoped being unobtrusive would earn him an extended stay. The night it was his turn to cook, I came into the kitchen and saw no evidence of food being prepared. When I went to remind him, he leapt off the chesterfield, killing the cartoons. The doorbell rang. “Supper!” he called.
Pizza was a treat, though a guilty one. “Cheese is made with rennet,” Dieter explained—nicely. He seemed relaxed, almost jocular, now that he had a friend in the house he didn’t feel the need to impress. Now that Pete was in seclusion. “See, rennet comes from the hooves of calves. We usually buy rennetless cheese at the co-op. Anyway, it won’t kill us this one time, right?” he asked Sonia.
“It killed the calf,” she said, stripping the stringy topping off her slice.
Pascal looked at her, rueful, his eyes big, like the calf’s, so she couldn’t help but excuse him. “You didn’t know,” she said. “Take some up to Pete later.”
“I’m surprised the smell didn’t lure him down.” Dieter yelled at the ceiling, “Pete! We’ve got pizza down here! Yummy! Yummy!”
Sonia: “Leave him alone.”
“Is he sick?” Pascal asked.
“He’s heartsick,” Sonia said.
“It’s his pride,” said Dieter, pushing up his glasses. “The worst possible thing that could happen to a guy just happened to him. His girlfriend became a dyke.”
I’d already figured it out walking Isis home a few days before. She as much as told me. Still, I felt sick when Dieter brayed the word out so coarsely. Sonia seemed as shocked. “Who told you that?” she asked.
“It’s obvious. They’re a bunch of man-haters. You’d better watch it when you go over there. They’ll convert you too.”
“That sounds pretty sexist to me, mister.”
“Sexist? Me?” Dieter tossed his crust into the box. “They can say whatever they like. They can make jokes like, ‘What do you call a man at the bottom of the ocean?’”
“What?” Pascal asked.
“A good start.”
Sonia and I laughed. “See?” said Dieter. “But if I said, ‘What do you call a girl at the bottom of the ocean?’ it wouldn’t be funny. No. I’d get the lash for saying that.”
Now Pascal laughed. He’d only just got the joke. Sonia leaned over and hugged him, because he was so sweet and naive, because he made us feel less so.
After supper, Pascal and Dieter went out to the back ya
rd to kick a soccer ball around while Sonia and I lingered at the table. “I thought Belinda and Carla were best friends,” she confessed.
Maybe if we weren’t sitting on six hundred thousand Hiroshimas. Maybe if the hands of the nuclear clock weren’t stuck at two minutes to midnight. Maybe without all that pressure, instead of feeling racked over what it was I felt for her—whether it was physical or not—I would have been thrilled to be designated a best friend. It might have ended my torment. But it was March 31, 1984. “We have to give a month’s notice if we’re going to move out,” I told her.
When Isis and I had made our star-bent wishes, I’d put moving in with Sonia ahead of world peace.
“We can’t have a meeting if Pete won’t come down,” Sonia said.
Outside the window the soccer ball soared past like a moon in an accelerated orbit. We could hear Dieter and Pascal laughing and the robins belting out their songs in the vaudeville of spring. I wanted to say, but didn’t, that we could give our notice in writing.
“Let’s try talking to Pete one more time,” she said.
We crept up the stairs together, bearing the pizza box with the two pieces we’d saved at supper by slapping away greedy hands. “He’ll come down if we call a meeting,” I said.
Sonia stopped on the landing. “Jane. He’s in so much pain.”
“Do you still want to move out?”
She saw then, and heard in my voice, that I was in pain too, and squeezed my arm to reassure me. Her pupils were dark pools of compassion I wanted to dive into. “Yes, Jane. But we might have to put it off a month. Okay?”
She tapped on Pete’s door and, placing her little shell ear against it, listened. “Pete?” She opened the door. Immediately a sickroom smell hit us—fetid and sour. Three days weren’t enough to starve, but maybe he did other drugs besides pot. Maybe he’d overdosed. Two towels on the curtain rod shut out most of the light so it took a moment for our eyes to adjust. Sonia went over to the foamie and knelt. “Pete? We’re so worried about you.” She lay beside him and motioned to me to come too. I set the pizza box on the floor and went and knelt on the other side of him.
Sonia: “Pete? We miss you. We love you. You have to talk about it. You have to let your feelings out. Belinda hurt you, didn’t she? You love her.”
He turned onto his back. I saw grease-darkened hair, dry lips bleeding in the cracks. He smelled, not just of B.O., of something rotten. Now he was ordinary, like us. I didn’t want to see him ungilded like that.
Sonia brushed his face with the ends of her hair. She painted his eyelids and cheeks. He stopped her hand and blindly guided the hair into his mouth. “We love you, we love you,” she whispered and I hated him and wanted to be him at the same time. I wanted her to whisper those words to me.
Turgenev’s Bazarov had reached this same stalemate, I remembered—love or principle? It killed him, but it didn’t kill Pete. He sat up and spat Sonia’s hair out. “What day is it?”
“Friday,” she told him, staring at the miracle of his rising.
“Fuck. My sister’s coming.”
The next morning when he came down, he seemed himself again, though somewhat gaunt. He’d showered and it was hard to believe that terrible smell could ever have come from him. “You’re back,” Dieter said with a tinge of something in his voice. “When are we going to Seattle?”
Pete was obviously starving. He took a mixing bowl from the cupboard and filled it with all the granola in the jar. After jiggling each milk carton in the fridge to ascertain which was the fullest, he doused his cereal.
“Pete?”
“I don’t know. My sister’s coming for a few days. After that.” He didn’t join Dieter and Pascal at the table, but bowed over the bowl on the counter, feeding himself with a wooden spoon.
Dieter: “I didn’t know you had a sister.”
“Do you have a sister?”
“Yes.”
“Wow. My life is completely altered.”
Dieter coloured. My toast popped and I raced to scrape margarine across it and get out. Pascal, I noticed, was drawing Pete in his book.
“Guess what?” Dieter said as I moved off with my plate. “This is weird. Pascal and I are from the same town.”
Pascal: “Esterhazy.”
“He didn’t know what a dyke was,” Dieter added. “I had to tell him.”
Pascal put a hand over his embarrassed face. Dieter was watching Pete, waiting for a reaction. Pete straightened and, from where he stood at the counter several paces away, threw the bowl he had been eating from into the sink. It crashed onto all the undone dishes and, from the sound of it, more than one thing shattered.
We didn’t meet the sister immediately. Pete kept her away in whatever hotel she was staying at. All along we’d thought he’d severed his family ties, but now we realized he just didn’t talk about that part of his life. He was ashamed. He switched cooking nights with me and begged off both the potluck and the meeting.
“You won’t be at the meeting?” I asked.
If he’d told me he was joining the army, I would have been less shocked.
It was a spiritless affair without him, first because the planned scouting trip to Seattle that hadn’t happened left an unfillable hole in the agenda and, second, because now it was obvious how much Pete’s dynamism motivated us, even during his silences, even when he lay back in the beanbag and furiously pumped his ankle, beating out the dwindling minutes of our lives while we argued over petty details and bruised feelings. We always felt judged, but now we realized we deserved it. Our efforts were half-hearted. We were weak.
In “My Life—A Provincial’s Story,” Misail’s sister is saddled with the ludicrous name of Cleopatra by their egomaniacal father. A sickly, lachrymose sender of notes at the beginning of the story, she strives to reconcile father and son, visiting Misail secretly so as not to provoke their father’s wrath, begging him to change his ways for the sake of their dead mother.
“Zed, this is my sister Dede,” Pete said when I came into the kitchen. I’d noticed her shoes when I came in, loafers with two bright American pennies glinting in their leather slots. Now she was perched on a chair with her argyled feet twined around a rung, afraid of coming into contact with the floor, I could tell. She stared right at me. I encountered Dedes all the time on campus, a type that possessed not only dewy prettiness, but unnerving psychic powers; instantly they knew I was irrelevant.
“Hi,” I said.
She turned her tight smile over to Pete, who was at the counter opening cans. He was the more striking of the two, but that didn’t mean she was in any way flawed. Maybe her jaw was a little too large. It didn’t seem as though she’d shed a tear her entire life.
“When did you learn to cook, Peter?” she asked.
“It’s easy. Why don’t you help?”
“What should I do?”
“You can chop the garlic.”
“My fingers will smell. Zed’s a funny name.”
I looked up from where I was making myself a snack. “It’s Jane actually. Only Pete calls me that.”
She smiled. “He calls me Pea.”
“Are you visiting for long?”
“Just a few days. I’m checking out UBC.”
Pete set the can opener down too loudly then up-ended the beans into the colander in the sink. They made a sucking sound as gravity pulled them from the can. “Where are you studying now?” I asked her.
“We have Grade Thirteen in Ontario. Do I have to?” Pete passed her the garlic and, putting the heel of his hand to the side of her head, he gave her a little shove, which she seemed to like.
At supper Dede told us, “Oh, I’ll live in residence for sure.” Her eyes made a rapid blue sweep of the kitchen before coming to rest on the contents of her plate and, apparently finding them as disgusting, her lips pursed, as though on a drawstring. Dieter, who was sitting across from her at the table, chewed and smiled with an expression of delighted horror. “I’m thinking of majoring
in English,” Dede said. “Or maybe French.”
“I hated residence,” said Sonia. “I couldn’t connect.”
Dede blinked at her.
“It was so lonely,” she said.
“Oh. I thought you meant the electricity didn’t work.”
Dieter laughed, then Pascal laughed.
“You did not,” Pete said.
“I did!”
It was the only thing he’d said since introducing her. He seemed so subdued with her here. I imagined the sobering heart-to-heart the night before, Dede begging him to talk to their father, Pete refusing, saying, “He rapes the earth.” We all ate in silence for a minute except for Dede, who poked. Then she asked us what we did for fun.
“Fun?” I said.
“I play soccer,” Pascal offered when no one else answered. “I like to draw.”
“Are you in Fine Arts?”
Eyes darting, he suddenly bent over his food, heavy brown waves flopping over his plate.
“What about you?” she asked me.
“I was going to major in Slavonic Studies. I’m not so sure now.”
“I’m back to fun now.”
“Oh. I’m studying for exams.”
“That’s right. I forgot.”
Dieter was still staring at her. I wasn’t sure she’d noticed, but now she met his gaze and smiled as though he were an interesting insect. “What about you, Dede?” he asked. “What do you do for fun?”
Pete stood and took both their plates to the counter.
“I sail. I play field hockey. I party quite a bit.”
“Really?” said Dieter.
Pete squeezed her shoulder. “Smoke?”
“So you do have some!” She got up at once. On the way out to the deck, she pointed to the Ronald Reagan mask. “Cute.”
As soon as they were gone, Dieter said, “Do you believe that?”
“I think she’s nice,” said Sonia. She looked at Pascal, who bobbed in agreement.
“Talk about bourgeois. I sail. I play field hockey. I drink tea in the afternoon.”
We could see them through the window, their backs to us as they leaned over the railing, passing the joint back and forth. Dede was talking, administering little jabs to her brother’s shoulder. Pete kept shaking his head.
The Sky Is Falling Page 18
