The Push & the Pull

by Darryl Whetter

  At home, she couldn’t do anything — explain her lateness, order Chinese, break the news that she’d be going back in just two hours (Don’t wait up) — until she had clawed her way out of those boots, had a drink and flopped, however briefly, onto the couch. Andy’s unanticipated absence made a ten-minute flop on the rocks entirely doable until she reached for her boots. The zipper tab on the already torturous left boot broke in her fingers, broke painfully and then jammed. Free leg shorter than the trapped one, she hobbled down the basement stairs. She should at least have mixed a drink first, but she was down now and the hunt for needle-nose pliers was becoming an even bigger priority than gin. Stan didn’t use the fucking things, so why should he have been more likely to know where they were?

  “Mom!” Andy bellowed from the doorway. “I’m ready. I was at Kenny’s and saw you drive by so I ran home. So I’m ready.”

  “Okay. Say, do you know where the needle-nose pliers are?”

  “Oh no. My bike’s fine. Let’s go.”

  “Yep.”

  Sinking her other leg back into the one obedient boot — twenty-seven when she bought these; what was she doing? — she honestly contemplated a swig of gin from the bottle. Instead, she slipped out into the garage and was ruined by the sight of Andy holding the next door open for her.

  “This time I can make it,” he said.

  In the sunny driveway, Pat didn’t quite say, “Bike away from your own fear” but relied instead on old standbys like, “I’ve seen you almost make it” and the vaguely hepcat, “Just keep going.” Now, twenty years later, Andy would be cinched into a bulbous helmet and bike-savvy parents would yell out practical encouragements like, “Look where you want the bike to go.” And they’d practise on grass or a forgiving recreation trail made from recycled tires and fine gravel. Here, all they’d had was the side of a quiet residential street, Andy’s thin moth skull and Pat’s distant but distinct memories of herself riding.

  You never do forget. Somehow, surely, she could get the memory of riding out of these boot-trapped legs and into his little body. Standing alongside, she could hold the bike at both ends, but this demanded a brisker sidestep she would have had trouble executing in sneakers, let alone boots. Worse, she couldn’t see much of Andy’s body and so had no idea why he barely lasted a single bike length whenever she let go.

  “Mom’s going to have to go behind.”

  “No.”

  “I need to see what you’re doing.”

  “Then the handlebars won’t go.”

  “You control the handlebars, kiddo, not me.”

  Andy abandoned verbal protest for some bottom lip work, and Pat gripped the seat under his little coconut rump. Sadly, her skirt and the back tire didn’t get along, leaving her in a hunched run no faster or more convenient than the sidestep.

  “Andy, you’re putting your own foot down. You’ve got to pedal.”

  It wouldn’t be until he met Mark sixteen years later that Andrew would fully abandon this boy’s timid instinct with the foot. “If you can choose to put a foot down, it’s going down too soon,” Mark would later tell him. The quick-drawing body will always get a foot down if it can.

  “Pedal, Andy,” Pat coached with diminishing patience.

  “I am.”

  “Andy, I can see that you aren’t. You’ve got to keep going. That’s how it’s fun.”

  They tried and failed. Again and again. She understood that he was lying because he was afraid, but that didn’t make his snappiness any easier to handle, his imperious, bike seat-throne snappiness. The hobble of her boots was worsening by the minute. The weight of bike and boy was firmly registered up her arms and into her phone-cradling neck. She didn’t need this sweat behind her knees. So, yes, she was impatient and did push a little extra. He needed to feel the bike move. Andy, meet inertia.

  Sadly, Andy met a ditch, a full ditch. Pat couldn’t even think to yell, “Steer,” and just watched the silent slapstick comedy. A bike was moving toward a watery ditch. Boy. Ditch. Boy. Ditch. C’mon, kid, they’re handlebars, not handcuffs. Thankfully, his total refusal to steer meant that he entered the ditch on the angle at which he had approached it, so the abrupt stop of front tire meeting submerged ditch bottom sent his body northwest instead of north. Yes, he landed in green, scummy water, but at least he didn’t hit the handlebars first.

  The sight of the algae-speckled water rising in one small wave up his arms to his chin sent the words, “Oh, Andy, I’m sorry” out of her mouth. She disagreed with sorry as it passed her lips, but in an abstract way. A fleck of cartoon-bright algae clung to Andy’s quivering chin. His small eyes were stretched fully. She was stepping forward to ask if he was hurt, where? She was bending down.

  “My mom pushed me in the ditch,” he hollered, looking away from her to the road he began to run down. “My mom pushed me in the ditch.” She was left to retrieve the slimy bike. She limped home to a fading, “My mom pushed me in the ditch.”

  Back at the house, Stan had none of Andy’s speed. Using one arm to lift the other onto the railing, raising one leg, then the other to climb each stair after the returned Andy, this took just enough time for Pat to come back, drop the wet bike in the yard and head for the stairs herself. When she stepped out from behind Stan at the top of the stairs, she realized that she had seen Andy do this dozens of times, squirm past his dad.

  With both parents in the hall, Andy whipped open his door to scream, “Mom pushed me in the ditch.” Pat took a sharp right and headed for the bathroom, neither closing the door nor looking back down the hall, just scrubbing her hands.

  “Andy,” Stan coached from the middle of the hall, “the only way to stay up is to pedal. Pedal, then steer. Take it from me, kid, in life you either push or get pulled.”

  The bastard.

  56

  Betty’s postcards are now his only map. Fleeing the phantom Mustang, he barely sees the signs counting his way down to New Brunswick’s Botanical Garden / Jardin Botanique, doesn’t yet appreciate that this garden near the Quebec–New Brunswick border is one of the places where the Trans-Canada Highway and Trans Canada Trail flirt enough to briefly kiss. He remains in the dumb hamster wheel of the chase even after he sees the public garden emerge in the distance.

  An entrance building is thrust out from a high green fence over which tall lamps peek their heads like giraffes. When he is close enough to see that the fence is not solid as he had thought, but rather a standard diamond-wire fence with strips of tough green plastic braided through, when he sees that this fence is designed to quarantine beauty for paid admission, he thinks of one of the Germany cards riding just inches from his burning left knee.

  Munich.

  Am I for or against Dachau being on a municipal bus stop? (Dostoevsky: Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel.)

  I knew about Nandor Glid’s memorial sculpture here, lecture knew, book knew, but am really smashed by it. The simplicity: a mass of starved limbs = a barbed wire fence. Knees = barbs = elbows. You stand here and think fence over and over and over. In here, the absolute worst. Out there, buses, shops, radio every night.

  Learning,

  —B.

  This garden fence moans in a warm breeze. In flight not fight, he needs to go to ground, why not well-tended ground? He, too, will hide behind the admission-price-only fence. Provided he can get the bike in. He rides past parked cars and small beds of cheap flowers that border the parking lot and front the entrance building.

  In a grad school seminar, someone once tried to paraphrase Aristotle’s notion of aesthetic logic with a half-remembered, possibly apocryphal, Monty Python line, something like: there’s no problem if three men walk on stage dressed as carrots, but the one guy dressed as a piece of celery will have to explain himself. Celery-Andrew wants to take his vehicle inside a garden with a parking lot. Because he can, this may be a problem.

  Near the entrance, the alienness of small, polite signs and cement and turnstiles is brushed aside by a physica
l dig for cash and a silent audition of various arguments for the ticket taker. I believe this is called smelling the roses. Or I don’t pollute. You let in the planet killers, but not me? Oh this? Seeing-eye bike.

  The turnstiles in front of him leave no hope of slipping the bike past. Drained as he is from fleeing the Mustang, could he even lift the bike over? Approaching the admission guy (guy — damn) he’s still debating aloof expectancy versus some calibre of plea when he hears, “’ang on, let me get da gate for you.”

  Stepping out of his booth to ease the bike’s passage, the young clerk with his whispered moustache asks, “You come up the Temeese?”

  “No, but I’m looking for it.”

  “Right over dere.”

  At the other end of the parking lot, a metre-wide trail reaches into the trees. Small square signs point to Le Petit Témis, a long section of Canada’s incomplete Trans Canada Trail and a bit of cycling heaven. “Merci,” Andrew says, stepping inside the garden.

  Incongruous with flower beds both ordered and sprawling, with patterned groves of saplings and cascades of shrubbery, are the ambitiously tall lampposts with their ballpark halogens and suspended speakers. Sealing the adjacent highway from sight, the botanical gardens try to replace its muffled roar with Vivaldi audible at every step. Andrew is delighted. Every violin stroke is like a wipe from a clean cloth. Bed after flower bed is even more compelling than the fragrant cafeteria. Laying the bike on the ground, he is combed by serrated leaves and showers in greenery. The complete spectrum of green, from the most sprightly bright greens to the most brooding and umbrous, are punctuated by dissolutions of burgundy and brief frosts of blue. Flowers hang their various lanterns. Ladies dangle bright slippers. Around and around he goes.

  Returning to the pavilion, he eats three tasteless bagels greased with slabs of dull cream cheese, drinks two bottles of grapefruit juice and reads photo panels devoted to the region’s rail history.

  Le Petit Témiscouata railway ran for one hundred and twenty-five kilometres, from Quebec’s Rivière-du-Loup into the most westerly point of New Brunswick. Designed to connect New Brunswick’s serpentine Saint John River to the massive St. Lawrence, up towering hills and through almost constant curves, Le Témis remained profitable after other private rail lines lost freight to trucks as nineteenth-century rail was replaced by twentieth-century trucking. Entire forests of lumber were hauled through this curved chute blasted through rock and cut through forest. In its day, Canada’s national railway was the largest civil engineering project in the world. The world’s second-largest country built a railway from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic, then squandered it in favour of perpetually running diesel trucks, those warehouses on public roads. Some of the freight currently passing behind Andrew on the Trans-Canada Highway arrived in Halifax by ship to be trucked to warehouses in Montreal before being returned by truck to retailers in Halifax. The Trans-Can isn’t a road; it’s a river of oil.

  Cut and cleared, then eventually abandoned, Le Petit Témis was finally reclaimed as part of the growing rail-to-trail initiative, that funereal dirge sounding across a continent content to rip up unused rail so every citizen can have the freedom to buy groceries with an eight-cylinder Supermarket Utility Vehicle. Linked once again, Le Témis has become a segment of the growing Trans Canada Trail.

  Here, inside a public garden sealed from public view, at an intersection of highway and trail, Andrew digs out his half-novel to wait for night to fall completely. In this, the first in a series of hidden waits, he isn’t able to bike away from memories good or bad. Betty’s postcards continue to ride prominently on his bike, and sometimes her arguments ride even closer.

  The Argument of Honesty, II

  “Okay, sure, you want to travel with me to some degree,” said Betty. “But obviously, indisputably, you want something else more. I don’t blame you for wanting tea and books in a cold apartment; I blame you for not admitting it.”

  57

  The ride has him eating constantly, with unprecedented nutritional demands but also an inconceivable nutritional licence. He could eat ice cream by the pound without gaining any. Eating alone, squirting twice-warmed but uncooked food into his mouth on the bike or packing himself in a restaurant, he often pictures Betty in one European restaurant or another. He doesn’t yet know the monotonous, tepid reality of bread-and-cheese travelling in Europe, so to him she is eating risotto one day and miso-baked tofu the next.

  Because the start of the trail runs vulnerably close to the highway, he waits for the cover of darkness, passing hours in the garden cafeteria reading, eating and strolling up to one informative display after another devoted to the now extinct railway. Rivière-du-Loup and Edmundston were, as rail enthusiasts call them, the ends of steel. Long after Andrew has read each display panel at least twice, he thinks as he eats of the nutritional museum exhibit he could create for his own culinary evolution, the cuisine he inherited giving way to one he chose.

  The Kingston house that hangs in front of Andrew, waiting 850 kilometres beyond his handlebars, has finally relinquished its gendered kitchen appliances. Even when divorce turned the house into a men’s club, neither Stan nor Andrew would ever have allied himself to antique phrases like her kitchen or her oven, and yet in ways, their kitchen fossilized at Pat’s departure. No Lady Convection warmed their hearth, no Kitchen Maid housed their meals, but gender still lurked in their cupboards and haunted their drawers.

  For the first few years after the divorce, emerging, finally, from numerous mediocre restaurants, Stan and Andrew cooked together, opening bags and cans, double-checking the instructions on the sides of small boxes. Aside from the day’s barbecued or fried meat, they subsisted on the astronaut food of the early 1980s, with vegetables frozen into bricks or stacked into their canned pillars. A few years after Pat’s departure — Stan shrinking, Andrew growing — Andrew unearthed grey memories and dug out the already aging electric frying pan Pat had gladly abandoned. Freckled with pepper, pork chops were fried until they achieved the colour of lead. Sausages hissed and spat.

  On her weekends with Andy, or in the phone calls he made to her, Pat quickly deflected any questions about cooking. She talked over him if necessary — roux-this, parboil-that — or bribed him off with more TV time or asked him to first grate the cheese she knew he’d silently snack on, anything but make him into Stan’s butler, maid and chef.

  At home, Andrew had no complaints. Back bacon sandwiches for dinner. Boil-in-the-bag corned beef. Frozen pizza. Mac ’n’ cheese ’n’ wieners again. Tucked there at the back of the house, the kitchen was their forgotten, Atlantic province. Stan relented to a microwave only after a VCR and a video game console had long ago made their way into the house. When Andrew was stretched on the rack of full adolescence, when their freezer was piled deep with frozen entrées he didn’t then realize were made by a company that started its meat empire removing dead animals from farms, Andrew was unfazed when Heather, his first girlfriend, said, “You don’t cook; you heat. Has this kitchen ever produced a salad?” Mouth and inner body slept a few more years.

  He never did get to ask Betty’s mother if architects and real-estate agents anticipate the architecture of argument. The kitchen and dining-room arguments about meat between Stan and a late-adolescent, quasi-vegetarian Andrew spread throughout the house. Triumphantly raising an arm off his bed during some home physio, Stan had the audacity to boast, “See? Protein,” as if their now contested meals of meat and two tasteless veggies were getting his weak arm up in the air, not exercise or Andrew’s daily coaching.

  “That’s just it, though,” Andrew retorted, resisting Stan’s raised arm. “North Americans consume twice as much protein as we can handle, let alone need. You think any other mammal needs a magazine to take a shit?” A week later, standing over a phone book in the front hall, they debated a pizza order.

  “Ordering one vegetarian pizza won’t infect you for life, Dad.”

  “What other pleasures do I have?” S
tan said, shuffling off. He wasn’t thirty seconds before calling out, “Just order two.”

  That spring, if he hadn’t had to lift Stan off the toilet ten minutes before starting dinner four feet away, if he’d known more food than the meat, potato and one vedge of two decades ago, if he hadn’t been greying meat in an electric frying pan, hadn’t biked his way into a friendship with the vegetarian athlete Mark, he might not have gone fully vegetarian, might not have later fallen in love with Betty. But Stan’s defecting ribs were still palpable in his hands after two washes in the kitchen sink when he dropped two pork chops into the pan. The sizzling, bloody meat aged steadily along its dagger of bone. A phlegmy nugget of fat bubbled in a notch at the bone’s base. With a large fork he plucked up one chop half-cooked.

  Years later, Betty and Andrew strolling home from an Indian restaurant, she once again took up their periodic inquiry into why they had fallen together so thoroughly and so quickly. “All right, look, I’m not asking for the number, but your lovers — how many, and how many were vedge? For me, any time a guy reached for a burger I knew this was just temporary sex, and not the best-tasting fuck in the world at that. The two of us haven’t spent a month in church between us, and yet we know all about the challenges of interfaith marriage. A guy wants non-human ass in his mouth, and I cue the curtain.”

  “Can’t leave the tofu tribe.”

  “This thing with your dad, you so easily could have been an asshole. I don’t just mean scowling at him when he wanted a hand up the curb, though that was no doubt Option Number One. Outwardly, you could have been decent, maybe even good to him, but still let yourself be an asshole the rest of your life — excused, entitled, exempt. A taker. You chose to avoid that.”

  “No, a saint I wasn’t.”

  “That story about the bus, that’s nothing. We all lose our patience. A week with you and anyone could see what you haven’t become. A lot of guys think foreplay is pushing your skull to their dick. A guy has to do a lot of work not to wind up an asshole. You helped. You cared. I can tell.”