Ma looked at me blankly. “You didn’t tell me. You have money? I hope you change your mind.” The word money was said in English, which was strange.
I looked at her grained hand holding the steaming cigarette, and it had developed a slight tremor.
“Yes, I have money. What do you think I’ve been doing every afternoon and night?”
I was ashamed of the sharp impatience in my voice, but I continued. “Pops wanted it for me. He told me. He felt his life was a failure.”
I was being cruel. Ma had been the workhorse, never complaining to or of a partner who drank himself into oblivion every night. I was implying that she had brought about Pops’ failure, pushing him into a premature death as a result of her limitations.
There was a silence and then Ma shrugged her acquiescence, but when she spoke her voice was bitter. “Do what you like, you will anyway. You’re just like your father. You better watch your drinking.”
I sighed and reached out my hand to touch hers, but she pulled it away, crushing out her cigarette in her coffee cup.
I got up. My appointment for ear piercing at Clarke’s was at ten. “Not to worry, Ma,” I said, not unkindly, waving away a cloud of the last drag of her exhaled smoke. “I’ve seen enough of addictions.”
4
THE UNIVERSITY STUDENT
TORONTO IN SEPTEMBER WAS GLORIOUS with bright sunshine, a cool breeze, and a cloudless blue sky. Once I had settled into my room at the residence that I shared with Sandra, a physiotherapy student from Sudbury who told me after a brief introduction that she’d be spending most of her time at her boyfriend’s apartment, I walked around Bloor Street and then Yorkville, where I had a glass of Riesling in honour of Mutti. From my table I watched the women trot by in their tight jeans with high heels or boots and freshly coloured hair. I loved it all.
I entered Holt Renfrew, Bloor Street’s most exclusive store, and the smells of dozens of costly cosmetics and perfumes wrapped around me. Like a perfumed heaven, I thought. Going up on the escalator to the second floor I looked down at the dozens of immaculate and expensively dressed women who sauntered from counter to counter. The second floor was filled with designer clothes, elegant and unattainable. I looked at the price tags and caught my breath—glamour, but at a price.
I paid for my first half-year of the residence and was relieved to see that I should have enough to cover the entire year. Now I was able to buy some clothes, and I would get my hair styled at one of the expensive and exclusive salons in Yorkville. The bun was so out of date, in spite of the fact that it showcased the diamond earrings that I never removed.
I sauntered through the campus, admiring the old stone buildings and the surrounding lawns and trees. I had picked my classes with my mind on the Honours English degree but took a psychology and French course as well. My scholarship depended on my keeping an eighty percent average. Not difficult for me surely.
It was an all-girls residence and I felt my usual sense of personal isolation. There were groups, laughing knots of girls, some who I assumed had gone to high school together and who gave off an easy sense of familiarity and confidence. None of them, I was certain, came from as poor a background as mine. Sometimes I would hear them discussing social events and certain sought-after on-campus males. I would sit detached, munching my lunch and dinner in the cafeteria, casually reading a newspaper. The cafeteria selections were fair, some fresh fruit and vegetables, better than stale pumpernickel and a pickle, but far inferior to Mutti’s dinners. For several weeks I sat alone, my newspaper replaced by required reading from my English courses; then, slowly, I was joined by two other misfits.
“May I sit here?” She was drab but neatly dressed in tailored pants, a striped shirt, and a cardigan. Her chin-length hair, straight and shiny ash blond, fell forward, partially concealing a taut, pale face.
“Reading for English 120? Too bad we have to take medieval studies for an honours degree. It’s that or Old English, and I’ll take Chaucer before Beowulf any day.” Her voice was high and precise, like a little girl at a school concert.
“Yes, certainly,” I answered, delighted that I finally had company; it was no longer necessary to disguise my isolation by flipping through my study books.
Her name was Janet Murdock, and she came from London, Ontario, where her father was vice-president of London Life Insurance Company. She intended to enter law should her LSAT be high enough once she had completed her degree.
“I’m going to teach high school,” I muttered. So ordinary, I thought.
“Oh lovely,” carolled Janet. “All those summers off to go to Europe.”
“Yes, I’ve thought of that,” I lied. It might have been true if I’d had a father who was a corporate executive rather than a rent collector who drank his life away in Davenport.
Finally we were joined by another student, a Johanna Borden from Calgary, overweight, with short hair and a uniform of blue jeans and a tan-coloured blazer that I suspected might be cashmere after hearing that her father was a chief engineer with Suncor, an oil and gas company. She was in first year of mining engineering and preferred to be called Jo. She was, I suspected, a lesbian, and she made us both laugh with her vicious remarks aimed at the twittering knots surrounding us in the cafeteria.
“Heavy intellectuals,” she would snarl, “all here so they can tell their future bridge partners and philanthropist husbands that they graduated from U of T.”
“There are serious students here,” protested Janet. “Most of them are focused on their future careers. You’re back in my grandmother’s era, Jo. Isn’t she, Sonja?”
“Sure is,” I replied. I liked Janet, and we usually sided together against Jo when there were three of us at the table.
“Are you attached?” Jo asked me one night when Janet was off-campus having dinner with a visiting aunt.
It was an open question, but I realized there might be more behind it than a casual inquiry. I was yet to have a date, a ridiculous admission for a girl of eighteen, but I was not a lesbian. Somewhere in the recesses of my mind there lurked a handsome, dark, brilliant poet or author with whom I could share titillating cerebral conversations and travel all over the world, where we would entertain in our various salons the foremost intellectuals of the day. But I knew I would never meet him in Davenport, home of hockey and hokum—although my mental images at times had a disconcerting way of metamorphosing into Carl Helbig, complete with blue sweater and scrubbed jeans. My answer could hardly be “No, I’m waiting for someone good enough. Haven’t met anyone smart enough yet” or “The only one ever interested was a dyslexic hockey hero from Davenport.”
So I replied, “My high school boyfriend’s been drafted by the Boston Bruins; he turned down the Oilers. He’s quite the hero back home. These hockey contracts pay millions. No wonder kids these days are only interested in sports and never read a book.”
“Wow,” said Johanna, showing her first enthusiasm since we’d met. “What’s his name? I love hockey. I’ll watch out for him.”
“Carl Helbig,” I replied. “They think he’ll be another Gretzky.”
It was good, I thought, that I’d attended at least one game.
AS USUAL, I was alone and lonely. I attended classes, turned in my papers promptly, and received top grades, with the expected comments on my originality of thought. This stemmed, I believed, from both my ability to conceptualize and then to analogize various works with other, very disparate, works. It was less genius but more a creative talent. It was just the way my mind worked, and academics loved it. And I worked like a dog, having no other distractions. There would be no problem keeping my scholarship for next year, although there would be a problem with living expenses unless I acquired a well-paying summer job—a remote possibility. I listened to my two affluent friends speak of travelling to Europe the following summer, and I envied them.
“Could your father get me a job with London Life next summer?” The question formed in my mind and then remained unexpress
ed, a not only embarrassing but futile inquiry. I would have to find room and board in London, Ontario, and that would erode any savings. There was no London Life, or indeed any other life, in Davenport.
5
THE ACADEMIC ENTREPRENEUR
“WOULD YOU HAVE DINNER WITH me?” Jean Pierre was tall, thin, almost cadaver-like, with thick, dark, oily hair combed straight back into a knotted little ducktail. He wore a long wool scarf looped around his neck and spoke with a French accent. He smelled strongly of cigarettes and I thought of Ma. He was in my Shakespearean study group and his answers to the teaching assistant indicated that all was lost in translation. It was in November, too late for him to change courses. I did not want to have dinner with him but could think of no immediate excuse to refuse the invitation.
We walked from the weathered stone campus building north to Bloor. It was dark early now and fat snowflakes drifted down slowly, disappearing in his scarf and forming blurred hives around the street lights. Our destination, Jacques’ Omelettes, was on Cumberland, one street north of Bloor, and we climbed up the stairs to the second floor of the three-storey house. It was only five and the dining room was empty, so we had a choice table looking down on the street. Jean Pierre ordered a carafe of Cabernet Sauvignon in French and lit a cigarette, letting the smoke ooze out of the big, black nostrils of his thin, arched nose. Again, I thought of Ma.
“C’est impossible, hopeless,” he pronounced. “I will become, what you say, a Christmas graduate.”
He had come from Bordeaux to better his English and to acquire a degree as a preliminary step to graduate work at the Sorbonne.
“You should have gone to McGill in Quebec,” I chided sympathetically. “It’s essentially a francophone province, less of a cultural shock for you.”
I felt relieved at the conversation. I found him so unattractive with his greasy hair, cavernous nostrils, and small stained teeth with their enveloping stench of smoke that any thought of intimacy with him, or having his emaciated acrid body next to mine, gave me a psychic shudder. On an academic level, however, I could be forthcoming. I looked down at the street, watching huddled figures walk with their heads lowered through the drapes of clotted snow. It could be a romantic setting, but I was with the wrong companion.
After we had finished our steak and frites, he stretched forth a large cool hand and rubbed my upper arm. “My apartment’s near here. Why not come in for a drink?”
“Not tonight, I’m way too busy.”
He sighed, removed his wallet from his leather jacket, and handed the waiter his credit card.
Shakespeare 100 was based fifty percent on essay work and fifty percent on the final exam. There was an important essay due the following week. I did not want to hurt his feelings—after all, he had bought me dinner—so I said, “I’ll draft your paper on Macbeth and you can be assured of a passing grade.”
He kissed my hand with the fervour of a man pulled from quicksand.
Better than sex, I thought. Academic payment for the beefsteak, frites, and the glasses of Cabernet Sauvignon. I felt nostalgic for Mutti’s dinners and Carl Helbig smelling of Irish Spring soap and Aqua Velva.
The incident inspired me. The next day I tacked a small white card on the bulletin board in the building where our English classes were held. It read: HELP WITH TERM PAPERS. PHONE SONJA. $150 DOWN.
The response amazed me. There were apparently an unlimited number of students lacking either the inclination or expertise to produce an acceptable term paper and who were not above passing off my work as their own. Within two weeks I branched into British history, specializing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I presented all papers with a flourish—as if for publication—to my grateful “customers.” Within thirty days there was $3,600 in a newly opened account at the Toronto-Dominion Bank on Bloor, the same bank that held the monies from the Helbig tutorial funds.
“YOU’VE HEARD ABOUT Carl, I’m sure,” said Jo at dinner one night before the Christmas break. “He got his bell rung, just lay there for a while, but was playing again by the end of the game. Bet he had a concussion.”
I felt shock. Then shock at my own shock. After dinner I phoned Mutti.
“Not worry,” she said, “Carl good. Just a few little head bumps, not serious. Carl let no one down, he top-scoring rookie. And would you like to attend Christmas party, in Carl’s honour?”
I assured her I would if I returned home.
I decided that night to go back to Davenport for the Christmas break. My first inclination had been to stay in residence and concentrate on the January exams, but the residence was shut down with only a skeletal staff for the holidays. I had neglected my own work, churning out papers for others, but I could study just as well at home. Then there was Ma, who I could never think of without guilt. Both Pops and I had deserted her, but I had done it more directly. She never phoned the residence because of her English problems, and I had only contacted her once as she was never home. Cellphones, I had read, were on the way.
I would buy Ma a gift. It would be a first. We were not a family who exchanged gifts, small bills perhaps, but not gifts. My diamond earrings, presented at the Helbig house to celebrate Carl’s passing grades and never removed, had been a first. Now it was Ma’s turn. I would buy Ma a coat to replace that ugly, ill-fitting grey flannel tent she always wore and some good scented moisturizer for her hands. That would please her, I felt sure. And help dilute some of my guilt for leaving.
Even at pre-Christmas sale prices, the coats at Holt Renfrew were expensive, and too tailored and chic for Ma. I saw a black cocktail dress on the second floor, twice reduced and now half-price but still expensive. I tried it on. I had lost more weight but not on my breasts, which rose pale, swollen, and exposed from the low-cut square neckline. I would need a black bra, spike heels, and sheer, barely black hose—and a chinchilla wrap, I thought, making fun of myself, the latter out of the question.
“Mademoiselle is gorgeous, simply gorgeous,” cooed the saleslady with an accent like Jean Pierre’s but with much cleaner hair. “Quel décolletage.”
“I’ll take it,” I said. Of course, there was the matter of having no place to wear it, but then one never knew in life, although my past had never shown any social activity except for the Helbig dinners. But Mutti was partial to parties and she had invited me to a Christmas party for Carl, whose health I wondered about. Carl and The Choir would be there, and I would shock them all with my newfound glamour and fleshy exposure. Carl would really be impressed, not used to seeing me as anything but a dowdy academic. And I wanted to see him again. This time we’d kiss, if he wanted to drive me home, and perhaps see a movie together later on. Just a casual date, something I’d never experienced. I picked up the bra and the black patent pumps with the stiletto heels and sharp pointed toes—again, totally impractical. But impressive.
I felt guilty, so I left with my own purchases on my arm to find a less expensive and more appropriate store for Ma. In Yorkville, I passed a display window with a small-sized steel blue coat with a fluffy, grey-white fox collar. I stopped and took notice: a consignment store. It would have been thoroughly dry-cleaned and Ma would never know. I went in. There were racks of clothes, all previously worn, but in excellent condition. Forest Hill rejects, I thought, knowing I would never wear anything previously worn, regardless of the price and source. There was nothing like the arrogance of the impoverished.
“It was purchased new for over fifteen hundred. The collar alone would be worth seven-fifty, and now it’s a steal at two-fifty, a real steal. It would have been gone long ago, but it’s a petite, for a very little person, a four or even a two perhaps. Not for someone like you, of course.”
“I’m aware of the meaning of petite,” I said. “Is this the final price?”
“My dear,” purred the saleslady, rolling her eyes.
The store operated on behalf of a charity, and the saleslady was no doubt volunteering her services, which explained the attitude.
<
br /> “I’ll take it,” I said.
I would switch the tag of my $850 cocktail dress to this little coat and wrap it in my Holt Renfrew dress bag. I felt no guilt at my subterfuge. The price would impress Ma, even perhaps serve as some solace for what I thought of as my desertion. She would be delighted, having worn her grey tent as long as I could remember, and unlike the cocktail dress the coat could go anywhere. A cleaning woman with an expensive coat in Davenport—not that Ma would wear it to any of her house-cleaning assignments.
I waited at the Dundas Bus Terminal, textbooks in a large briefcase and my clothes in a small suitcase. The coat, wrapped in the Holt’s bag, was carried on its hanger over my shoulder. My fellow passengers might wonder how anyone affluent enough to shop at Holt Renfrew would be travelling in a rickety Greyhound Bus to a place like Davenport, but then no one on the bus would ever have shopped at Holt’s.
It was a four-hour journey by bus. As the bus left Toronto, I looked at the wet streets lined with store windows shining with Christmas lights and at assorted crowded small restaurants. Inside the cafés and restaurants staff members from the surrounding offices were being feted for the holidays and there would be laughter. I felt depressed. Leaving Davenport had changed nothing. I always felt alone.
As the bus left the city, the lights lessened and I became aware of my fellow passengers. The man across the aisle was already asleep, mouth open, a thin silver thread of mucus stitched between his lips. He drank, I surmised, and would be heading off to ruin someone’s Christmas with some drunken violence on Christmas Eve. In the seat in front of him a woman of perhaps thirty-five chewed her gum methodically, puncturing the soft grey wad with greyer teeth. A waitress, a single mother, going up north to see her kids, who were being brought up by her mother. I noticed a bag from Toys “R” Us under her feet. Perhaps she was not a waitress but worked in one of the body-rub parlours near Yonge and Dundas, rubbing baby oil into swollen bodies, not missing any part. Occasionally a police officer was rubbed by mistake and a bawdy house charge laid, with Kleenex stiff with semen from a nearby wastebasket used as evidence. I had heard of this from a police officer who attended my Wednesday-night psychology class and who was working toward his BA. He was trying to impress me and he did, but not in the way he intended—nauseating stuff.
Sonja & Carl Page 6
