The Secret Life of Roberta Greaves

by Ann Birch

  “No, no.” The comment comes from Jason, the young man who led the earlier round of applause. “The important thing is to get people reading the stuff. So it’s not word for word what the original text says, so what?”

  “Then,” Roberta asks the class, “if you say that the translator’s role is one of adapting the text to draw in a wider audience, how far are you prepared to go?”

  “My brother’s in a special ed class at Western Tech,” another boy says. “He’s reading a graphic novel version of Romeo and Juliet. It’s Shakespeare’s story, but it’s not Shakespeare’s words. My brother loves it. So what’s wrong with that?” Roberta remembers that this student seldom comments, and his face is red now with the strain of speaking up.

  Suddenly, the lesson that seemed “safe” has taken on dangerous overtones. But Roberta finds herself unable to resist the opportunity to look into the abyss.

  “Would a graphic novel of, say, the story of Procne and Philomela, be a good way of introducing a wide audience to Ovid?”

  Now there is silence. Then Muna says, “It’s one of the sickest stories in literature. Do we want the great unwashed reading about brutal rape and cannibalism? Or that disgusting story about Myrrha lusting after her father?” She makes gagging noises. “If the bozos out there have to wade through a literal translation in a book with a boring cover, they probably won’t bother. And that’s okay with me.”

  “Yeah,” Jason agrees. “This Classics in Translation class at Trinity is one thing. But the general public reading this stuff without you in charge, Professor Greaves, to steer them … well, I wouldn’t carry adaptation that far. But I think you’re off base, Muna, calling people names just because they don’t have our advantages.”

  There is a buzz now as the students get off track on the subject of Muna’s elitism, and Roberta makes no effort to steer them back on topic. She should make a comment, of course, but her own worries take over. What a morning she has had. First Joan Wishart lecturing her on her failure to maintain standards, then her class seeing her as some sort of Dalai Lama figure who shows young people The Way. And it is only a few weeks until that wretched novel comes out. Maybe it will just die quietly, the way most third-rate novels do. But already in her mind she is fast-forwarding to the local Rexall Pharma Plus where, every time she goes to buy hairspray or toothpaste, she may have to look at it on the racks alongside the latest Danielle Steele epic. And it is so much worse than anything Steele ever came up with. And what if it takes off in a big way? Someone is sure to make the link with Ovid’s nasty little tale. And then what?

  22.

  GETTING BACK TO HER morning classes at Trinity has also meant Roberta’s return to her volunteer work at the Christian Mission on Major Street later in the day. It is almost two o’clock now, and she makes a point of always being on time. But as she hurries past the University Bookstore on College Street, she pauses briefly to drop a toonie into the cap of the red-faced old man who sits on a pillow of filthy newspapers on the sidewalk in front of the store.

  “God bless,” he says, and she moves on, cursing to herself. With all the taxes we pay, surely there must be enough funds to provide something better for the poor than sitting on cold pavement dependent on the patronage of so-called do-gooders like me.

  That is why she is “teaching” (not quite the right word, she knows) poetry to a group of street people in the YES program. The government has shelled out a measly ninety thousand dollars for the endeavour, and along with many donations from the Mission supporters, Youth Employment Services does its darndest to get kids off the street and into the workplace. Most of them are sixteen going on thirty-five. They have little formal education, and Roberta’s attempts at creativity are supposed to help their “communication skills,” as the official pitch goes.

  It is her fourth Wednesday afternoon with them, and she is not exactly looking forward to what comes next. But she is amazed that they come at all to these workshops. Probably it is a way to keep warm or safe. But maybe, just maybe, it’s a secret longing for something better. Whatever the case, she wants it to work, and she has been worried that they may think she abandoned the project. Her first three “sessions” — as she inwardly calls them — were before James’s death, and she doesn’t know whether the kids were ever given an explanation for her absence or not.

  As she reaches the building, she takes a deep breath of cold air and opens the front door. Immediately, the stink of overcooked cabbage and stale cigarette smoke assails her. Down the stairs she marches to a basement room where twelve kids sit on an assortment of mismatched plastic chairs around an Arborite table.

  “Hey guys, it’s Roberta,” Big Chris calls out. “Surprise, surprise.” He smiles, revealing the gap where a front tooth is missing. He has a sandwich in his large, chapped hand. “Welcome back. Someone upstairs told us a while back that your husband died. Too bad. Sorry about that.” He passes a Styrofoam plate of sandwiches over to her. “Have one of these. Roast beef and some kind of sweet-and-sour stuff that’s real good.”

  “Chutney, probably. Charlie, he’s my son, said he was going to send over beef and chutney on pita bread.”

  “He’s a cook or something?”

  “Yes, he’s just graduated from George Brown College, and he’s in his first job at a restaurant down on Queen Street, not far from here. The Fig Leaf, it’s called. He’s going to send over food every Wednesday when we have our poetry workshops.”

  Bat, a little guy with a shaved head, puts his half-eaten sandwich back on the plate. “We gotta pay for it? Is that what you’re saying?” He rubs a nasty-looking bruise over his left eye.

  “No, no,” Roberta says. “Charlie’s treat.” And fearing that this will sound like charity, she adds, “It’s all about promotion, you know? You like the sandwiches, you tell everyone about The Fig Leaf.”

  Yeah, yeah, they all say. They see through her subterfuge without difficulty.

  But Big Chris has a suggestion. “Hey, if Charlie is giving us this good stuff to eat each week, least I can do is go down and pick it up. Wednesday, one-thirty on the nose. Right, Roberta?”

  “Nice of you, Chris,” she says. “Good idea. I’ll tell Charlie to look for you.”

  She sits down at the head of the table, relieved that no further explanation about James’s death seems necessary. “Okay, let’s get to work. Today, we’re doing concrete poetry.”

  “Shit,” Hester says. “I hope it’s not going to be like those fucking high-glues.” Her dog, Scrappy, who sits beside her, head on her lap, looks up, recognizing anger. Roberta has to confess to herself that she likes Scrappy better than his owner. With a bath and a brushing, he would be a clone of the black-and-white pet collie in her favourite Renoir painting, Madame Georges Charpentier and Her Children. But even with a bath and a brushing, Hester would still remind her of the grim-faced figure in Picasso’s Woman with a Crow.

  “Okay, so maybe the haikus were a mistake, but I hope you can forget them and move on. These concrete poems are a bit of a challenge, but I think you’ll catch on. Then, you can try writing one of your own.”

  She passes around several of ee cummings’s poems and one by George Gabor. “What the fuck is this?” Bat asks.

  “Hey, should we of brought our jackhammers?” Big Chris’s question gets a laugh, and Roberta is grateful for his intervention.

  “Trying to make us look stupid, is that what you’re doing?” Hester asks, scraping her chair back and tugging on Scrappy’s leash.

  But just at that moment, Moose, a small boy with a large nose and stick-out ears, speaks up. “Hey, man,” he says. “I know what this one is all about.” He is pointing at Gabor’s “The Critical Putt.” “This is the shape of a golf ball bouncing along. Right?”

  “You got it. Good for you,” Roberta says, smiling.

  “But what’s this word ‘Palmer’ there for?”

  Robe
rta explains who Arnold Palmer is, that he once had a horde of followers called “Arnie’s Army,” and there is laughter from the group. She notices that Hester has pulled her chair back to the table.

  Soon, they have decoded the rest of the poems, and now they decide to give in and humour her.

  They get absorbed in designing their own concrete poems, and in twenty minutes, they are ready to exchange their offerings with each other. There is a good deal of laughter, some rude comments, but soon everyone acknowledges that Hester’s poem is the best. Though the girl is determined not to be pleased, she can’t help showing it in the way her face grows red and in her repetitions of “Oh piss off, piss off.”

  “Good work, Hester,” Roberta says. And it is.

  DREAMS

  b k r

  a e

  HOPE

  fades

  ___________________________________________

  a child’s life . . . e . n . d . s . . .

  “I like that long line she’s drawn,” Bat says. “Makes it look like the kid’s buried already under the ground. Heather’s got everybody’s fuckin’ life into one poem.” There are murmurs of agreement.

  Well, Roberta reflects, that lesson certainly worked better than the haiku one. “I’ll leave coloured pencils and paper here on the table,” she says, “and for next class you can get your poems in presentable form, and we’ll put them all up on the walls for display.” She decides to stop on this positive note and let the kids disperse to their favourite spots in time for the rush hour traffic and a chance at some spare change.

  With a long subway ride ahead of her, she visits the washroom tucked down at the end of a dirty hallway leading from the basement room. It is cleaner than she expected, and someone has affixed a handwritten notice above the toilet:

  If you sprinkle when you tinkle,

  Be a sweetie, wipe the seatee.

  Ah, the power of poetry, she reflects, though when she thinks about it, she remembers reading the same lines in a novel by Carol Shields. Unless, was it? Is the quoting of doggerel from a novel whose writer has kidnapped some graffiti from a toilet somewhere double plagiarism? Oh, the things you worry about, Roberta.

  She climbs the stairs back into the main area where volunteers are setting up tables for the evening meal for the drop-ins. She hears a familiar voice and sees that Hester has waylaid a stout, grey-haired staff counsellor named Annie and is yelling at her, “Oh, go fuck yourself. And then write a high-glue about it. You probably won’t even need seventeen syllables.”

  When Hester sees Roberta, she hurries off, Scrappy close behind her.

  “What’s up, Annie?” Roberta says.

  “Oh, that girl. Sometimes, I think she’s beyond help.”

  “Perhaps. But less than an hour ago, she was describing haikus with her favourite four-letter word. And now she’s using her knowledge of their structure to swear at you. Come on now, Annie, isn’t that a leap?”

  Annie laughs. “Sure is. I’m so grateful that it won’t take seventeen syllables to fuck myself.”

  “Yeah, let’s put a positive spin on things. Would you believe that when I was here earlier in the fall, she didn’t even know what a syllable was?”

  “I’m happy you can see the light. But I get discouraged,” Annie says, shaking her head. “I’ve worked as a counsellor here for twenty-five years, and I feel sometimes that the world is sick. Sick, sick. Hester came in here two weeks ago, her arms all covered in bruises, and when I got her alone in my office, she told me — in a string of four-letter curses, of course — that her mother’s boyfriend had attempted to rape her. She managed to beat him off with a few kicks in strategic places. I’ll spare you the details. Said that her mom was in the kitchen when it happened, could hear her yelling, and did nothing. Scared, maybe. Though I won’t make excuses for the woman. And the creep evidently said afterwards that Hester led him on.” Annie sighs, brushing her hair back from her forehead. “How can I clean up that filth?“

  Roberta tells Annie about Hester’s poem. “It’s a small creative miracle, you know. Lugubrious, but brilliant in its way. Perhaps she’ll find something within herself to be proud of. If she can find self-esteem, she’ll be able to move on to a better world.”

  “Yeah,” Annie says. “We can hope. But let’s not hold our breath.”

  As Roberta emerges into the waning afternoon sunlight, she catches a glimpse of a feathery tail disappearing into the dirty alley to her right. Scrappy. That means Hester is hanging around. Sure enough, she is about six feet down the alley, flattened against the Mission wall beside a stack of discarded wooden boxes. Shooting up, maybe?

  Roberta takes a few steps into the alley. “Hester, anything I can do?”

  “Bugger off.”

  Okay. There are times when she feels that way herself. She turns back to the sidewalk and almost bumps into Big Chris.

  “Hi, Roberta. Everything okay?” he says.

  “Hester’s upset about something.”

  “Yeah, I seen her there in the alley. I’ll stay with her a while. Bad things happening at her place, you wouldn’t believe….” He punches one mittened hand into the other and shakes his head. “I heard what she said to you just now, but she doesn’t, like, mean it the way it sounds.”

  “I know, Chris. And thanks. I just hope you can help her sort it out. Goodbye now.”

  Roberta decides to walk up to the Bloor subway instead of taking the Spadina streetcar. She needs to be alone with her thoughts for a few minutes. Hester lives in a foreign world. Roberta does not speak her language. But she can imagine, oh yes, she can imagine the horror of rape. What she cannot see, does not want to see, is Hester’s mother standing there, listening to the would-be rapist blame Hester for “leading” him on. “Scared,” Annie said. Well, maybe. But what kind of mother would let her daughter be abused in such a horrific way? No wonder Hester wrote that poem about broken dreams and a child’s death.

  She strides on, heaving her heavy briefcase from one hand to the other. She is almost to Bloor Street when another thought seeps into her mind like oozing slime.

  If only she had remembered the abyss Hester inhabits, surely she would not have chosen to write that sick story that’s coming out soon, the sleaze that lets men like Hester’s rapist believe it’s the girl who bears the guilt. What can such a piece of filth do except make the whole fuckin’ world worse?

  23.

  ROBERTA GETS OFF THE GO TRAIN at the Summerton station. She jumps over a slushy pile of snow near the tracks in order to connect with Victoria Street, the village’s main thoroughfare. Apart from an old man picking up a free Toronto Weekly paper from a box at the station, there seems to be no one about on this sunny Saturday morning. She makes a left turn onto Osborne Road and heads for her mother’s house.

  Roberta took the first train from Toronto’s Union Station and it’s now only nine-thirty. Her mother will probably still be lingering over her morning coffee, and Roberta hopes to break the news to her about Mira, do the necessary handholding and get back by late afternoon to the city and the stack of late January essays she has to mark.

  It is not going to be easy to give her mother the news. She has put it off too long. She should have done it on Christmas Day as Charlie hinted. She’d had several moments alone with her mother upstairs while she was putting her mink coat on the bed and Neville was in the living room with her sons. That would have been perfect timing. No way her mother would have been able to say much with Christmas dinner pending and everyone on their best behaviour.

  She walks past the stone bulk of Wesley United Church, noting the fancy moving sign that they’ve installed in the last couple of months on the lawn near the front door. “SWALLOW YOUR PRIDE” one flashing message advises. The next flashes, “IT WON’T COST YOU ANY CALORIES.” Not much different from Greek mythology, Roberta reflects, with its constant warning
s of the punishments the gods mete out to people with hubris.

  “Hey, Roberta,” someone calls. “Like our new signage?” She looks towards the small parking lot at the side of the church. The pastor, a young man with a receding hairline, waves.

  “Startling,” Roberta says, waving back. She strides on, hoping not to have to engage in further discussion.

  The flagstone walk in front of her mother’s house, as well as the steps leading up to the front porch, have been neatly shovelled. She pauses for a second at the oak door with the lion’s head knocker. Then she tries the handle. People seldom lock doors in Summerton. Sure enough, it’s unlocked, so she pushes it open calling “Mother?” as she enters. The downstairs seems empty; no one is in the kitchen though the automatic coffee maker has kicked in, done its work, and the coffee stands fragrant and ready. She comes back to the foot of the stairs. “Mother?”

  She hears a scuffle from Sylvia’s bedroom as she starts upstairs. By the time she gets to the landing, she hears a thump as if someone is trying to get out of bed. Could her mother be sick? She takes the second half of the stairs at a run.

  The bedroom door is wide open and a man, stark naked, is stumbling towards it as if to shut it. Roberta takes another look. “Neville!”

  He makes a pitiful attempt to cover his crotch. She glimpses a caved-in chest covered with a thatch of sweat-soaked, straggly hair. There’s a familiar chlorine-like smell. Is it semen? Then from the bed itself comes her mother’s voice: “Roberta!” She sits up, the sheets pulled up to her bare shoulders.

  Oh my God. Roberta is down the stairs in a flash, out the front door, and down the porch steps. She’s just hit the flagstone walk when her mother calls to her. She looks back to see Sylvia, barefoot but covered now in a terry-cloth robe, standing at the open oak door.