When I Was Young and In My Prime

by Alayna Munce

  Ten minutes pass. People gradually begin to talk with one another about connections they’re going to miss, daycares that charge a dollar for every minute you’re late.

  I’m thinking it was a jumper.

  After twenty minutes I turn to the woman next to me and say, “How about you?” She’s older than I am, but younger than my mother. Her hair dyed blonde, but not platinum—a dirty blonde trying to match an old natural. Homemade-looking scarf, practical boots.

  “How about me what?” she says, but in an inviting way. She has an accent. European. I like the lines around her eyes—they seem to suggest a habitual expression of tender commiseration.

  “Are you going to be late for something?”

  She looks at her watch as if it’s just occurred to her. “Oh, maybe. But I always give myself plenty of time to get to work. Just in case.” She says this not without a note of smugness in her voice, like the ant to the grasshopper. The self-satisfied voice of the citizen who has forgone her allotment of summer fun in order to stockpile for the hardships ahead.

  “What do you do?” I ask, grateful to have a natural opening for the question. It’s the question we always want to ask. Not to place someone in the class structure anymore—which is the old and valid objection to the question—but because we’re genuinely curious. I always stop myself from asking though, because what if the person is out of work or can’t tell by my tone that I think all work is valuable?

  “I’m in meat inspection,” she says. No nonsense. Matter of fact. This, I think, is a woman who faces facts. A woman who has seen people break promises and die untimely deaths, a woman who has cleaned up unspeakable messes.

  “Ah,” I say, “meat inspection.”

  “Chickens,” she says, nodding, looking at her hands. “At a kosher chicken plant in North York. It’s hard on your body, standing like that all the day long. And on your hands. Hard on your hands, I mean.”

  We sit side by side in silence for a while as I take this in.

  “Thirty-eight a minute,” she says. And it takes me a moment to realize she’s talking chickens. That this woman earns her living inspecting thirty-eight chickens a minute. All the day long.

  “It’s better than some places. I worked in one company that did eighty-six a minute. They did it electronically with x-ray cameras, one person looking at the viscera, another at the cavity and so on. Me I do it by hand now.” She gestures as if opening a book with her thumbs. “Open each one up.”

  “Wow,” I say. I try to think of something else to say but am stumped. My social graces have for the moment been swept away on a wave of generalized guilt. Guilt for my eating of chickens, guilt for my comparatively cushy work. This woman has a kindness about her that makes me afraid for her.

  “I’m getting older, and I’m on my own since my marriage ended and I don’t know how much longer I can do it. I hate these night shifts especially. I want to try to get an office position in the company, but it’s exactly how they say. I didn’t believe it at first, but I know now it’s true. It’s who you know, you know. And people are so backbiting. It’s unbelievable, but you have to believe it.”

  Her accent is lovely. The way she says unbelievable is so pristine, the word sounds as if it were doing a high platform dive with a twist from her lips.

  The subway jerks forward, the obstruction having apparently been addressed.

  I’m tired all the time lately. Sandbags in my limbs keeping a flood at bay. I refuse to use the word depressed. The word depressed depresses me.

  I walk around thinking, I’m not included. I watch the perpetual impromptu yard sales spread out on the wide patch of sidewalk just east of the No Frills by the newspaper boxes. I watch the pigeons take off and land, take off and land and I think, I am not included in the life of this sidewalk. A pigeon on the ledge of a boarded-over window on the Bingo Country building gazes at me from behind another pigeon and moves its head to one side as if to say, Meet me in the other room so I can tell you a secret. I keep walking.

  A couple in the window of the café where I stop to have a coffee is kissing in the full sunlight, heads rotating this way and that, sucking face as if milking each other for all they’re worth. I’m not included, I think. I try to think it without the self-pity, see if it can still be thought. It can, but it’s different: colder, limpid, almost philosophical. Not included.

  From time to time Sammy, the bartender I work with every Friday night, will write Get a room on a chit and slip it nonchalantly, as if it’s their bill, onto the table of a couple who starts fondling each other at the bar. Sometimes they laugh when they read it; sometimes they don’t.

  He says he figures the couples who laugh will be the ones who last.

  Connie

  Early retirement I call it. Cheques come from welfare end of the month and Billy signs his over right away and I cash the both of them and cover the rent and the bills and head to the beer store with the empties and some cash, stock up for the month. I sublet the upstairs to a couple of old fairies and I make sure I get their rent off them before they liquefy their assets if you know what I’m saying. Next thing I head to the Market. Kensington. I know everybody in the Market and they all know me—been going there for twenty-five years now, even lived there for a bit, after my stint at Rochdale in the sixties. Cheapest chicken parts in the city if you know where to go. Spices in bulk. Fresh eggs, fresh fish. Whatever you want. Good stuff. All cheap. And I volunteer two days a week at the food bank—the big Daily Bread warehouse downtown—and they let me take the cream of the pickings there. Sometimes if they’ve got a big load of something good—like that time with the tubs of ricotta cheese just past their best-before—I take enough to share with the neighbours. And I got a garden out back. Save the seeds every fall in egg cartons, labelled. Start the seedlings inside in Styrofoam cups from the soup kitchen the food bank runs. I got a used freezer from the Buy-and-Sell a few years ago, so I can grow enough tomatoes for the whole year. I stake them up with the posts from campaign lawn posters—spent the morning after the election one year going around with my bundle-buggy, gathering them up. A few pot plants in between the tomatoes and no one’s the wiser. The girl next door, she lent me her food dehydrator this year. It dried the weed up perfect in less than a day. I had her in to thank her, gave her a beer, smoked her up. I hinted how I’ve been hearing her and her man fighting lately. Then I got up and went to the fridge and cracked a couple more beers open and stood in front of her and before I handed hers down to her I looked at her and said in a slow voice, When things get tough between a woman and a man, the woman’s got to take a step back and ask herself, What’s really going on here? What’s really going on. I don’t figure she caught my drift, but at least I did my bit. Crazy how we’re all a lot more likely to learn how to take care of a thing by killing it a few times than by just watching it grow. Who knows why, but that’s how we’re made, that much is for sure. I figure I’ve got a few things figured out by now. Enough anyhow for me and Billy to have a pretty good living.

  Usually when James and I are in a disagreement we don’t really fight—we freeze each other out. Mutual policy of strict sanctions: no smiles, no humour, no touch. Curt conversations, strictly logistical. Did you call the landlord about the furnace? What day is recycling now? Are we still going to your sister’s on Sunday?

  It never lasts long. Neither of us can stand it. Always the gradual thaw and before you know it we’re lovers again. It occurred to me the other day though that lately the thaw hasn’t been going quite through before the next freeze sets in, resulting in a kind of underground permafrost that you wouldn’t notice unless you were digging. Plus sometimes we’re actually out and out fighting. Funny thing is, I couldn’t even really tell you what we’re fighting about. Sometimes I hear myself saying we need to spend more time together. Sometimes I hear myself saying I need space. Sometimes I hear him saying I’m needy. Sometimes I hear him saying I’m cold. Neither of us wants to be fighting, but we can’t seem to he
lp ourselves.

  Life out of balance. James and I have lost the flow in our economy. Somehow we’ve started tallying. We’re competing to get where we used to compete to give.

  Last night it escalated into a shouting match. At some point James grabbed his coat and went out for a walk to cool down. I turned on the stereo far louder than strictly recommended in the interest of good neighbourly relations. Dylan, Desire. I paced. I checked the messages. One from Gloria asking if I’ll water her plants and feed her cat for the three weeks she’s away over Christmas. Saying I can use the place to write in if I want.

  I started to pack.

  I stand at Gloria’s fifth-storey window and look out over the rooftops in the twilight. I love the flocks of pigeons in this grove of apartment buildings; whatever music I have on Gloria’s stereo, they seem to be taking off and landing in time to it.

  James and I are taking a break; no one to tell the day to.

  The band that played at the bar last night finished their last set with a languid wander through “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” The percussionist—who’d been playing a cheese-grater earlier in the evening—played a solo on a toothless saw with a violin bow.

  I think of my grandfather in his new apartment an hour and a half away. Stewing in a loneliness so intense and undeserved it borders on rage. How the equation is impossible: the greater the loneliness, the less eager I am to approach it.

  On the streetcar this afternoon during rush hour I ended up wedged with my bags in a window seat by a large Portuguese widow, all in black. (How many years will she end up wearing black in comparison to the years she was married? Another impossible equation.) She had even more bags than I did. I always carry lots of bags. Big purse. Backpack. Plastic shopping bags. Library books, errands, changes of clothes just in case. James calls me Baglady, a term of endearment. I don’t let him use regular terms of endearment. Honey, sweetie. They make me feel like a caricature of a couple, they make me feel in danger of disappearing. James is disheartened by this but goes along, which makes me feel both cruel and crazy in love with him. He’s become inventive. Problem-child, he calls me. My velour kitten, he calls me when I wear my blue hoodie. Mmm, I say, rub me the wrong way.

  Hey Baglady, he calls me.

  The freefall of every second. On the streetcar, crowded with my bags beside the Portuguese widow, I sat watching us all—passengers, passive. Wanting to know how to never, never kill time.

  Insomnia. I check the mirror in Gloria’s bathroom: looks like I spent all night reading the newspaper then rubbed the ink on my fingertips off under my eyes.

  Middle finger of my right hand throbbing where I caught it in the faulty fan of the beer fridge at work. Throbbing in time to my heartbeat. Hard not to think fuck you fuck you fuck you.

  Insomnia is like being caught in a sieve when all you want to do is be liquid and fall through. I try different positions. Stomach, side, back, other side, foetal, stretched, two pillows, one pillow, none. I get up to get a glass of water. An hour and a half later I get up to pee the water out. I switch on the light and read Lorca in New York ranting through his heartbreak about how the city can’t receive morning how nothing is hallowed amid the greedy towers how we have let our bodies lose their auras. He couldn’t sleep either.

  I flip onto my stomach. Been thinking lately about the welfare state. I’ve been thinking about the institution of marriage and seatbelt laws and the granting of bachelor degrees. About life as a series of shams of safety. Universal healthcare is undoubtedly a good thing. And yet, I’ve begun to wonder if the social safety net has, on some fundamental level, made me a softie. Oh lord. Am I becoming a redneck? What is a redneck anyway? Someone who works bent over in the sun.

  I can feel myself veering with the stubbornness of a shopping cart with a frozen wheel toward nihilism. It takes everything I have to counter the momentum, keep myself on track. I could volunteer somewhere but what good would that do? Charity is institutionalized pity. If only there were a barn-raising to attend. A crop to harvest. Yeah, right. If only I weren’t such a bloody romantic.  If only I could sleep. I flip onto my back, the covers twisted, pillow damp.  Maybe insomnia is a product of capitalism. Or the industrial revolution. So simplistic. And yet...

  All night my mind going like it’s pedalling in too low a gear, going like it’s trying to whip cream.

  To Mom’s for Christmas dinner. James has come with me, but we’re stiff. My mother has just had new white carpets laid in her house. White. Why on earth would a person choose white carpets? For Christmas, my stepfather gets her a cordless iron that turns itself off. She says, “I hope it didn’t cost too much.”

  I’ve offered to put together the traditional basket of cheeses and preserves to bring to Aunt Deborah and Uncle Nick’s. Later she says the basket looks nice. “You’re good at that,” she says. “You’re not as stingy as I am.”

  We meet eyes.

  It shocks me sometimes. Not the fact that I love her, but that I forget.

  Gloria’s building seems to have an unlimited hot water supply and her utilities are included in her rent, so I’m taking advantage while I’m here. I run a bath right to the top, hot as I can stand it.

  I’ve lit candles but don’t have enough of them to read by so have to switch the overhead light back on. You’d think there’d be more light with the candles, but somehow there’s less; they take the edge off the glare of the glass-shaded bulb screwed into the ceiling. I read until the bath is lukewarm and the story—The Death of Ivan Illich—is finished and my fingertips are puffy and wrinkled and then I sit for a while longer, feeling clammy and blue, and indulge in a little private wallowing. Time is passing. The bath is cooling. I’m getting older by the second.

  I stare at my fingertips and imagine my body fifty years from now—when it’s like Liza’s or Mavis’s or Grandma’s. When I’m pushing eighty will there be anyone in my life with enough history with my body to love it for the story it tells? I don’t allow myself to think of the specificity of James’ body. The calluses on his chording fingers. The hair starting to grow on his shoulders. His shoulders.

  Any moment now I’ll make the effort, lift myself out of the bathwater, stand naked, briefly streaming like a cataract, then bend, pull the plug, step out. But not yet. I’m not done wallowing.

  Is it okay to be lonely? Is it permissible? Or is it a sign of a lack in me that should be addressed. Maybe the intensity of my loneliness when I’m away from James proves me to be backward, like a country whose people haven’t yet learned to govern themselves, a country that still longs for a king. I sit in the cooling bath and look at the blue bathroom tiles, at the shapely white porcelain of the toilet. How does matter hold its form? There are very basic things I have no idea about. I sit in the bath and stare at the tall white candles burning at half-mast in Gloria’s brass flea-market candelabra. What is it in us that craves intimacy? Is it that I want distraction? Is it simply the biological urge to procreate?

  Or is it—please let it be—something indescribable. Something more.

  A conversation between regulars, overheard at the bar:

  “You ever spent so long at your computer you find yourself sitting at the bar or on the streetcar expecting little drop-menus to come down in front of you?”

  “I know whereof you speak, man. You spend all day working on an image file then work on it more at night asleep and then wake up and go to work and can’t remember what you’ve done and haven’t done. It’s like a revolving door you can’t get out of.”

  I stand behind the bar listening, sipping beer from a mug. Bartenders aren’t, of course, supposed to drink on the job but dark beer looks remarkably like a latte when it’s in a coffee mug. Listening, I’m washed by mild relief that other people feel that way too. The relief ebbs quickly, though, and is replaced by a deep undertow of dismay—dismay at the thought that being stuck in a metaphysical revolving door is normal.

  Spit me out, I keep saying into the darkness. I don’t k
now if it’s prayer or demon-taming or superstition. I don’t know if we are all fundamentally alone or fundamentally loved. I find I don’t know a thing.

  I sit on the streetcar these days and simmer in envy. I watch a mother two seats up nuzzling her toddler nose to nose, giggling, tickling—they’re like lovers, except they need no privacy. A low low boil in me, a thickening liquid. Every once in a while a languid pop.

  I close my eyes. Spit me out. I think I used to have something like faith. I vaguely remember having some kind of faith in something. No doubt it was misguided, but it seems to me it felt good at the time.

  Give me some of that, I think. Some good old-fashioned feel-good faith.

  I open my eyes and look out the streetcar window: a bearded man in an apron and short-sleeved t-shirt carrying stacked flats of eggs down the snowy sidewalk. Beaming. Dozens and dozens of eggs in his tattooed arms. Beaming.

  And I grin in spite of myself.

  Addicted to Tolstoy lately. I’m a sucker for his impossible blend of moralistic romanticism and brute realism. Plus, War and Peace is quite simply a page-turner. Who knew?

  When I’m caught with a stranger in the elevator in Gloria’s building I can’t help thinking about the peasant Nikita from the story Master and Man who, from kind-hearted politeness, always says something to anyone he’s alone with. In the elevator, I try at least to meet eyes, nod. It’s exhausting. So many people. Some of them unwilling to meet you halfway, stonily thwarting your noble effort. Some of them too willing, bottomless pits. Makes me want to hole up in the apartment and never come out.