Mad Hope

by Heather Birrell

  My Friend Taisie

  ‘IN MY NEXT LIFE,’ I tell Taisie, who is drying a glass pitcher with a tea towel covered in tiny Eiffel Towers, ‘I will come back as a dancer.’

  ‘Thomas,’ she says, ‘you are a dancer.’

  ‘Exactly,’ I reply, flexing and pointing one exquisite foot. ‘I am already a dancer.’ And I am thinking, that’s how good it feels, that’s how unlucky you are, all of you who have never danced. It is smug and mean of me to have these thoughts, but it is also the truth, and I believe that the truth, while not always possible to speak, is essential to the evolution of the spirit. Joe always said that if you can’t say something out loud, you can say it to your Self and if you are lucky, your Self will listen, head cocked, eyes heavy-lidded and entranced.

  Taisie picks up a sticky note from the counter. ‘I have to remind myself of things these days,’ she says. The note says, Register yourself at Sears, 6th floor Help Desk.

  Joe used to leave me notes around the house. Like: What, according to you, is the funniest thing ever?

  ‘Let’s go and get me registered,’ Taisie says, turning, one hand tucking a piece of blond hair behind her ear, the other cupped under her hard, distended belly. ‘You get Anton.’

  A few things you need to know: 1) Anton is six years old and black. Taisie, who is white, recently single and pregnant, adopted him officially last year after his parents died. Taisie likes having me here because my mother was black. I am a role model. My father was white and a class-A asshole, so I’m not sure what that says for white parents and black children, but this is something I keep to my Self as opposed to sharing with Taisie, who is my friend and should therefore be supported. 2) The problem with Anton is he sees Truth everywhere, and hasn’t yet learned how to tell it to his Self in confidence. This truth-telling thing is a problem with most kids who live in housing projects; they don’t yet know how the rest of the world tamps down reality with dreams of condo furniture and vacations in Belize. 3) I am here with my friend Taisie in Toronto because Joe is dead. He jumped off the Capilano bridge almost six months ago. They found him in a heap at the bottom, water flowing around and over him like he was just another weird-sized boulder plunked down by God.

  I hold Anton’s hand on the escalator to the baby department in Sears, the two of us following our reflections in the panels of mirrors as we go up. It is surprising, always, to see myself like this, even though I am accustomed to tracking my likeness in dance studios, assessing and appraising, stalking and chiding my wayward feet, correcting my one drooping shoulder. But here is my static self, moving, but not movement, mired instead in the terrain of splendour and surface. It’s shocking the way my profile – the high, rounded forehead, the dark, fierce eyebrows and full protruding lips – tails me, less like a shadow than a spy, daring me to smile or to age or to duck suddenly from view.

  ‘Look,’ says Anton, touching his own face in the reflection. ‘I’m on the move, like a motorbike man.’ He presses his fingers into the mirror the whole way up.

  Taisie leads like the proud prow of a ship, belly first. We follow her to a computerized kiosk whose inset screen asks questions when you touch it.

  ‘Is this how you register?’ I ask, encouraged by the apparent efficiency of the operation.

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Do I want a message to appear on the registry printout?’

  ‘You mean like Save the whales?’ I say. ‘Or, Help, I’m pregnant and my shoelaces are undone?’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘Not like that.’

  Once joyful and quick to laugh, Taisie is now prone to bouts of humourless intensity when her attention is not flitting like a debutante between topics. It’s the hormones, I know, but it can make things a drag or a crapshoot.

  ‘What does this say?’ says Anton, pointing to an onscreen option.

  ‘Thank you for your generosity,’ says Taisie. ‘You’re right, that’s a good one.’

  The machine stutters out a printed page with instructions and a password.

  ‘Are we done here,’ I say. I sound like a police officer or a patriarch and for some reason this pleases me.

  ‘No,’ says Taisie, patient in an angry way. ‘Now we choose. But first we need to go to that counter and get a registry gun.’ She points in the direction of a large sign that reads, One Day Clearance Now Extended, and embarks on her mission with the kind of determination only the very pregnant can muster.

  If Anton is at all alarmed by this, he does not say. He takes my hand again and we set off after her.

  The woman behind the counter is interested in names. ‘If it’s a girl?’ she says.

  ‘It’s a boy,’ says Taisie. ‘We already know.’

  ‘You can never know,’ says the woman at the Help Desk. ‘You can never know for sure. My nieces are Celine and Connie, pretty names and original. You can almost be certain they’ll be famous when they grow up.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Taisie. ‘But you can never know for sure. Where do I get my gun?’

  The woman frowns and points, then busies herself cleaning out a small plastic receptacle used for receipts. Under the receptacle is a stack of shiny magazines with pictures of smiling, sordid people. She is obviously dazzled by creepy celebrity, this Help Desk woman, but she has a point. For example, my Joe was the kind of guy you were glad they named Joe. It’s a short, friendly sort of name, simple, with no awkward dangling bits. It has a kind of happiness and stability built in. You don’t expect a person like Joe to die because there’s no particular reason for it. Other people you can imagine it, although you might not wish it on them: the piano teetering on the balcony before sailing in cinema slo-mo down onto Sarah’s unwitting form, or the ice working its way free from the overhang to deal its glancing sidelong blow to Luke – someone tall with a shaved head. The cancer nosing its diligent, mutant way through Alison, with its inception … where? They never really know, do they, and when they know, they still shake their heads or slap their notebooks shut and sit there close-mouthed and wide-eyed. Or the plane that panics mid-air: a banana up the exhaust pipe or a disgruntled man to blame. The man is unhappy because someone he knows, perhaps someone named Joe, has died, or been made president, chief, prime minister, leader of the pack. Or not been made president, chief, prime minister, leader of the pack. He’s upset, so he brings a bomb, or snips a wire, or points a gun at the pilot’s temple.

  And then all those people in the plane’s belly have a moment, or three, or maybe even a whole half-hour, just to weigh things up. And I imagine it’s a bit like those times when you look up in the middle of an exam, in the midst of all those pens scratching furiously, everyone so intent on Lear’s crappy decision or how to deal with the remainder in the long-division question, or the nature of a world where so many men feel the need to point their guns at pilots’ temples, and you wonder, unhurriedly, what brought you to this particular moment in your life. And maybe you ask yourself why your name is Aline and not Oxana or why you were born human and not, say, salamander. Joe shouldn’t be dead because his name’s Joe, and he was a soft walker was Joe, a soft, soft walker.

  Anton tugs at my hand.

  ‘Look, Anton,’ I say. ‘I think that’s the stroller with the ejectable seat.’

  He eyes me warily. I do a little merengue move to mollify him. ‘Let’s go check it out,’ I say. ‘Please.’

  He drops my hand, but saunters his way towards the display. ‘We’ll be over there,’ I say to Taisie.

  ‘Okay,’ she says, with some small hate in her voice. ‘But I’ll need you later to pick out outfits.’

  ‘I am nothing,’ I say to Anton, as we clip and unclip various stroller accoutrements, ‘if not good at picking out outfits.’

  ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘I’m gonna sit in one.’

  ‘I think you’re too big, honey,’ I say.

  ‘I am not too big,’ says An
ton, climbing gracelessly into a ­jogging contraption on sale for one thousand dollars. He perches himself on the seat and initiates a quite passable shimmy in the hopes of getting his bum to fit. ‘I’m a baby,’ he says, clenching his teeth, still wiggling.

  ‘You’re not,’ I say. ‘You’re a little man.’

  ‘I’m a baby,’ Anton says. ‘You need to know that I am a baby.’

  ‘Anton,’ I say, detesting myself for the low, measured voice I have adopted, for the parent who possesses me. ‘You are going to hurt yourself, and probably me, and break that ridiculous chariot, and I will have to give up dancing and get a day job with medical insurance in order to pay for the painkillers and the department store will never, ever let us shop here again.’

  He looks nonplussed and somewhat regal, silent and oversized.

  ‘Or ride the escalators,’ I add.

  ‘Okay,’ he whispers. ‘But I’m still a baby.’ He rolls defiantly out of the stroller.

  We find Taisie staring at a shelf full of pastel-hued receiving blankets, shaking her head. She turns to us, exhausted, panic playing across her face. ‘I can’t decide,’ she says.

  ‘That one,’ says Anton, pointing to a green and yellow package called Blankies.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Blankies.’

  ‘Okay,’ says Taisie. ‘I need to use my gun.’ She waves the contraption at the price tag, but nothing happens. ‘Stupid gun,’ she says, shaking it.

  ‘Stop calling it a gun,’ I say. ‘It’s a wand.’

  ‘I think it’s a gun,’ she says, examining it. ‘I think they call it a gun. Here, you try.’

  I take the wand from Taisie and aim it carefully at the bar code. The end of the wand flashes red like a dragon’s eye and bleeps.

  ‘Magic,’ I say to Anton. ‘Sears-style. Where’s Taisie?’

  Taisie is examining a shelf full of baby bottles and breast pumps.

  ‘I cannot believe there are no glass bottles,’ she says.

  ‘Aren’t they too heavy?’ I ask.

  'Yes, but no. I mean, they are but plastic is very dangerous. It can lead to cancer and developmental delays and birth defects. There’s a hormone that leeches out into the liquid. Very bad news.’ She reaches for a box, reads the back, then shakes her head. ‘Plastic is bad. Bad plastic.’ She slams the box back down on the shelf and waddles purposefully over to the Help Desk.

  I look at Anton. He looks back at me in a way that suggests he knows what I am thinking: Plastics don’t kill people, people kill people.

  On the way home Anton falls asleep in the car, propped up against an overturned, second-hand bassinet.

  ‘Maybe we need a pet,’ says Taisie, changing lanes. ‘Now that we’re like a family. A dog?’

  ‘Fish, maybe,’ I say. ‘It’s good to start small. We had two fish when I was little. Names: Rhubarb and Custard.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We had no idea at the time – just heard the names on a British TV program and thought they sounded exotic. But our cat ­understood.’

  ‘What? Oh.'

  We are stopped at a light, two lanes of traffic to either side, parking lots and scraggly trees beyond them. It’s funny: when I am in the west of this country, I miss the east, or the centre-south-east, I guess I should say, in deference to Maritimers, who are tetchy when it comes to geography although magnanimous in almost every other respect. Then once I’m back in Toronto I feel sort of sad and full, like I’ve just eaten too much dinner I didn’t deserve. It’s the simplicity of this landscape, the comforting stodginess of ill-used space on the fringe of the city. In the fall especially, it feels like home; too chilly to walk to the mall and who would want to anyway? Joe. Joe would want to.

  ‘Did you bury them?’ Taisie taps my leg.

  ‘What?’ I say. ‘You don’t bury fish.’

  ‘I don’t want a pet,’ says Anton from the back seat. ‘Please don’t buy a pet.’

  I turn around to check on him. ‘You okay, buddy?’

  ‘I don’t want a pet,’ he says.

  ‘Let’s have pizza tonight, eh, boys?’ Taisie says brightly. And to me, whispering, ‘With hot peppers. They say spicy food and sex.’

  ‘Spicy food and sex what?’ I say, frightened.

  ‘Hurry things up,’ she says, rubbing her genie-bottle belly. ‘Don’t worry, I know. This much T&A must be like total reverse-sexy for you. Just the hot peppers.’

  ‘Green or red?’ I say.

  ‘Red,’ says Anton from the back. ‘I like red.’

  On the day of the shower, Taisie puts me in charge of baking miniature frozen quiches and lets Anton vacuum the living room even though the machine keeps sucking up coins and bobby pins and other clanky things even the most technologically advanced Hoover is not designed to digest. I stop her as she dashes by me with a tray of crustless sandwiches.

  ‘Mmm, I love these,’ I say, grabbing an egg salad on white from the edge. I observe as she rearranges the remaining sandwiches to close the gap. ‘Are you nervous?’ I say.

  ‘Why?’ she replies gaily. ‘Everybody is coming to support me in this new phase of my life. They want me, I mean us ... ’ She shoots a look over at Anton, instead of down at her belly. ‘They want us to do well, to live long and prosper.’

  ‘They think you’re crazy, sweet thing.’ I grab another egg salad, then put it back when I see the look on her face. The vacuum gurgles, retches and chugs to a halt.

  ‘For a person with a baby on the way you sure have a lot of chokables lying around,’ I say.

  ‘I know,’ she says. ‘It’s like you live your life not understanding anything at all and then you find out there’s a whole new subset of things you don’t understand.’ She turns to Anton, who is now standing in the living room doorway looking defeated. ‘Anton, that’s good, you’re such a good helper. Thomas needs help with the quiche.’ She looks quickly towards me. ‘Don’t say it. Real men do, and besides you’re essentially just defrosting, not sampling.’ She slaps my hand away from the sandwich tray and begins arranging wedges of cheese on a cutting board.

  For a long time I believed there was only one type of cheese in the world – it came in a large orange square block with the word cheddar printed in capital letters across the middle, and it sat in stacks next to the bags of two percent in the SuperSave. My Self and I agree that it is a very, very good thing that I have been disabused of this notion. Stilton with pineapple slivers, my Self whispers. Camembert. Once, while tipsy, I told Joe I could never love a man who didn’t love a good cheese. I made him promise that, if we split, he would find someone who appreciated a decent fondue. I sidle up to Taisie and she hands me a slice of Manchego.

  ‘How do you stay so slim?’ she says.

  I shrug. She’s right; they are incompatible passions, cheese and dance, and life is not often fair.

  ‘How many guests?’ I say.

  ‘Twenty or so, if they all show,’ Taisie says.

  ‘You’ll have to sit on a throne.’ I pretend-crown her.

  ‘I know, I don’t mind.’

  I can tell she really doesn’t. It’s a combination of things – the padding she has created for the wad of new life inside her, and the extra padding all the gifts represent. Anyone who says stuff can’t help you feel safe, ward off the creepy-crawlies of the future, anyone who tells you this is only partway right. Stuff can make you feel a lot better, and then turn around like a floozie and make you feel a lot worse. It’s a tricky inverse relationship based on the stories you were told as a child, the last time you got laid, how many people admit to loving you and probably the position of the moon, or its glint on the world’s rapidly reproducing satellites. Anyway.

  ‘I’ll be the greeter,’ I tell my starry-eyed friend. ‘People need to feel sufficiently greeted these days.’

 
Anton sits next to me on the bottom step, just inside the door.

  ‘What are we waiting for?’ he says.

  He seems nervous or tired; it’s sometimes hard to tell with kids. With people, for that matter. ‘We’re waiting for Taisie’s friends,’ I tell him. ‘We’re going to dance with them.’

  ‘Really?’ He brightens a little.

  ‘Really,’ I say. He nods and crosses his ankles officiously. ‘If there’s one thing I know,’ I tell him, ‘it’s that women love a dancer, especially when they are surrounded by other women.’

  He looks like he might be interested, so I press on. ‘The thing about west-coast swing is it’s always characterized as more elastic than regular ballroom,’ I explain. ‘There’s a little more freedom within the constraints of the steps, something less naive and brash about the moves. Impossible, of course, to convey this to a beginner – today is about a tight twirl in the foyer, some impromptu dips and pivots. Something to make us all stand up a little straighter.’

  ‘Let’s play a game,’ Anton says.

  ‘All right,’ I say. I hate games, always have, can’t help getting impatient with the conceit, with waiting to take a crack at the trick at the heart of them. Joe liked games, but there was no logic to his games, no real rules to butt up against. He liked to gather things randomly, and it seemed to me there should really be some strategy behind the gathering, a plan.