And he is in a dream, rumbled to sleep by the level of the sliding rails, by the lulling movement of the speed. He can hear his dream and he can hear the train. His head hits against the cold plate glass window, not hard enough to wake him, but strong enough to pierce the dream with the reality of knowing he is not dead, that he is disappearing from the small town, and without watching or counting the miles in the darkness outside, he sits like a man drugged from gin waiting for this journey to end. Jane passes through his dream one more time. She is wearing silk and black pantihose that is ribbed with an almost invisible design. And she has pumps on her feet. Her legs are strong from all the running she has done. Her breasts are prominent in a style and fashion of dignity and determination. His mother would have told her, “You walking like a woman now. With your chest push-out. If you have it, show it off, girl. Show it off.” She is walking beside Jim. Not that the two of them are a couple. There is not that kind of love between them. She is walking beside Jim, because she could not get rid of him, her encumbrance, her disappointment, her hindrance, from catching that train that would have brought her sooner to glory and to the freedom she was seeking. Jane is in a dress that tells him she is a working woman, a woman who rises at five to make food for her children, two from Jim in the five years of her new life in the big city, and in that time, two years more than the contended legal space of decentness and trial and error to make her into spouse, woman, wife; and to make up his mind; Jim walks beside her as if he is not tied to her; as if he was plunked there by masculine ego; and not as her partner. He is dressed in a very expensive suit of shiny silk material. The bottoms of his trousers are narrow, and the “play” in the legs gives them a zoot-suit look. He has a long chain from his fob pocket hanging in a sweep by his knees and up again into his left trousers pocket. It looks like gold. The waist of the jacket is small and it shows the rippling muscles of his back that had chopped wood in the plantation year. The shoulders are flat and broad. And the jacket hangs like the flair in the skirt of the dress Jane is wearing. “Why’re you always walking beside me dressed like a pimp? Am I picking fares for you? You’se my pimp? Or my man? The man I want walking beside me is a man dressed in overalls, and open-necked shirt in summer, a heavy sweater in winter, and boots reinforced with steel. A laboring man. A working man. A man who works. A man who knows sweat and who carries a lunch pail to the site.” Jim has not worked since he arrived in the big city. “What do I want with a man walking beside me carrying a purse in his hand like if he is some faggot! And with a beeper like if he is some, some, some pimp! Or crack dealer! Or time-keeper. Who’re you keeping time for?”
“Bitch.”
It was as if he was fighting to catch his breath, so bitter and short and fierce was the way he uttered the word. It was a new word. It was a word he had heard her called by, years ago in the large plantation yard, swept so clean by him when he was a boy, and drenched in the life-giving sun, when his knowledge of the new language he was growing up with, English, was sufficient for him to ape the word bitch, spewed out of the mouth of the Master of the Slaves.
The towns and hamlets are fireflies in the darkness that surround the train as he moves in the snoring silence, coming into view, and before he can surmise where he is passing, and even after the trainman announces the place, it is gone. Like the dream of Jane and Jim. He wonders if they caught another train. But it could not be: this was the last train. The last train from the small town the short distance of a bridge spanning water that no longer moved. He can sense the smell of destination: the air is heavier; the cigarette smoke in the coach is thicker. The fireflies change into the eyes of cats in the darkness that is not so thick. Around him now, are lights as numerous as Christmas, but in the moving distance, all the same colour, against the black trunks of roads and intersections.
The woman in the small town becomes lovable the farther he is from her. Her dog is no longer a pest, but a pet that he could, with some understanding, cuddle and kiss, if he had three rums in his system to give him the strength and stomach. The small economizing room was as spacious as the coach, and the toilet with its sides made of tin, did not reverberate to the noise of his peeing as the shaking latrine on the train did, spewing his urine on the seat and making it difficult for him to aim in the unsteady bullseye of the soiled oval. The lights in the coach go out, just as the trainman announces the last town before his destination. And in that temporary darkness he forgets dog and woman, room and enclosed bathroom. He is standing, pushing papers into his leather bag, putting on his shoes, taking a last drag on the cigarette, checking that his Walkman is not left for a dishonest passenger to find and keep, getting into shape to manage the rush from the train and into the subway, and bounce women with large bags out of his way, and ignore the begging man, hungry at this time of night, as he can spare the time it takes to dig into his pocket less than he can spare the change.
All he is thinking of now is how short is the time to get from this train and the hissing steam down the stairs to the subway off the subway four stops north, and into his house to pour himself a stiff gin and tonic and listen to the midnight program of contemporary jazz. Before he leaves the train, stepping on the rickety iron step; “Watch your step, now,” the same entreaty as “Spare any change?” and he has already wiped woman and dog, Jane and Jim out of his mind. He is back again in the big city. And it was only a train ride.
In An Elevator
It was mid-November and after five o’clock, and most of the staff had left. It was snowing. And the evening, early as it was, looked like midnight. Hundreds of men and women had already streamed out from the building heading for the trains to the suburbs, and except for one woman who was in the ladies’ room, almost the only people in the twenty-nine storeyed building of glass and steel were the heavily built Portuguese and Greek women who cleaned the offices and the washrooms.
The occupant in the ladies’ room was Susan Cole. Tainted seafood eaten at a place on the lake, the Fish Tackle & Bone Café, had given her a touch of diarrhea all day. It had magnified itself into a constant run to the bathroom. She waited in slight pain and with great embarrassment in the locked cubicle, while other ladies entered, chatted and gossiped while doing their business, and left.
Susan was a careful woman. She was tidy. She dressed well. Perhaps, above her means and salary. But the job was temporary: she was heading for Osgoode Hall Law School. She lived at home with her parents. Her father had been in hospital from June until two weeks ago, lying in silent writhing misery from his back which he had “put out” from playing old timers’ hockey, after his wife had told him not to skate at his age, and he went and did and “put it out.” She loved her father.
Susan was sensitive. Not only to the dirty language some of the women used in the ladies’ washroom, and to the corny, horny jokes of the supervisory male staff, but also to the changing face of the city, and to the fabric of her own office: faces and accents. She was above all, sensitive to smells. On the subway, at a quarter to eight each morning, she traveled from home to office and had to stand for the thirty-one minutes of the journey because the train was jammed. She would be very close to men and women from lands she had not even come across in geography books at school. And she would smell and become aware of their lotions, their aftershave and the hairsprays.
Earlier this afternoon, the chief executive officer had called her into his office, and had dictated a letter of such length and questionable syntax, that she cringed in her seat, sucked on her breath, gritted her teeth, and spent most of the dictating time looking through the window into the foreboding grey sky that hung over the Lake. Her stomach was grumbling. The curtain of bad weather was hanging round her like a mood, and she could barely make out her club, The Royal Canadian Yacht Club. But the sky began to clear. And the name of the restaurant she had eaten at came through the clouds, and the sight brought her lunch close to her mouth and lips. Half an hour before, she had vomited in the ladies’ room. Now, she placed a man-siz
ed white Kleenex to her red lips and missed a very technical phrase in the CEO’s dictation. She closed her eyes. When she opened them, the nausea had passed. Clouds hid the name of the restaurant. And the dictation was at its conclusion. For a moment she could not move. But she had to think of the missing phrase. She was capable. Very intelligent. And inventive. And very uncomfortable.
She had rushed to the ladies’ room the moment her boss got up from his deep-seated leather chair, and she sat on the cold porcelain bowl and was about to surrender to the turmoil in her stomach, when Grace entered with Joyce, carrying on a conversation. Susan raised her shoes, for she wore shoes that were distinctive in style, in colour and in quality, and she was known throughout the office as Shoes.
This afternoon, the two of them did not talk in whispers as they were sure they were alone.
“From ten this morning, she started. I counted three times before lunch.”
“Didn’t you tell me last Christmas, that she’s engaged?”
“Me?”
“You said she’s engaged.”
“Not me.”
“Must’ve been Anne, then.”
“Couldn’t have been!”
“Anne and her were reading about the man who molested the woman in the elevator last Friday.”
“You think she’s pregnant?”
“Could be.”
“It happened at seven o’clock. It wasn’t even midnight. At seven, imagine!”
“And in an insurance company building.”
“Look! See my whistle? I don’t leave home without it. But I wish I didn’t have to catch the five-thirty so I could go with you to those classes.”
“Last night, they taught us how to overpower a man with pepper spray.”
“The papers said she was in the elevator with the man for four floors. Did you say pepper-spray?”
In all this time, with her shoes raised, out of sight, adding a tightness to her stomach muscles, and trying to control the rage within her bowels, Susan remained quiet and in great discomfort, barely hearing and unable to pay attention. But then she lost control. The toilet bowl erupted, and she hoped that the smell was not equal to the echo.
“Somebody!” Joyce exclaimed.
“I have to catch the five-thirty!”
“Have a good weekend.”
“What’re you doing this weekend? God, I have eight minutes!”
“This pepper-spray thing. You have seven and a half minutes....”
Susan was grateful when they’d gone. And she settled on the toilet seat, and tried to think of the cause. “It’s the oysters!” She spoke it loud enough for the person who had entered after Grace and Joyce had left, to hear, and know that the bathroom was occupied at this late hour.
“Some person?” the cleaning lady asked.
There was silence, and then the noise from the locked cubicle.
“Some person?”
The cleaning lady retreated and closed the door; and parked her trolley and walked to the end of the corridor, where another cleaning woman inside the men’s room was mopping the floor, with its door held ajar. They stood talking, waiting like watchmen for Susan to come out.
When Susan got up from the bowl, she could hardly stand, she was so weak. And when she walked to the wash basin, her high-heeled shoes clipped over the tiles, with less noise. Susan Cole was twenty-eight. And she had learned to walk this way, making noise with her heels, even when, at Bishop Strachan School for Girls, her shoes were Oxfords with half-inch rubber heels. At Bishop Strachan she’d been captain of the field hockey team, captain of the wrestling team, captain of the junior track and field team and ended up as Head Girl.
Grace and Joyce were convinced she looked down on them. They had attended a collegiate institute to boys and girls of working class background from Leaside. Once, Susan left a copy of the Bishop Strachan Alumni magazine on their desks. The two of them felt it was done to remind them of their place. In fact, Susan had left the magazine mostly to show them what she looked like at age ten.
Susan was not married; and they wanted to be able to say that in spite of her clothes from Holt Renfrew, and her Bishop Strachan schooling, her red shoes of leather and suede, she would find herself in precisely the predicament both of them had known. Grace was a single parent. And Joyce barely escaped that state through an abortion, suggested by her mother. So it was a digestible piece of gossip when they hoped that Miss Susan Cole would find herself in a state of want, rejection and dislocation they themselves had known.
Susan went back to her desk. It was now ten minutes past six. A woman in a blue uniform, came along the corridor with a trolley that was silent as an expensive European car. The woman held a dusting mop in her left hand, and humming under her breath, absent-mindedly, she passed it over the tubular pencil and ball-point holders, over the man-sized boxes of Kleenex, over the framed photograph of Susan’s sweet-hearting man. This cleaning woman was once in a school of dress designers in Athens. She liked clothes and designs. Her first three years in this city, were spent bending over a power sewing machine, putting buttons on women’s blouses in the garment district on Spadina Avenue; and sometimes falling asleep. She watched and waited and cursed her husband a little for being too slow in pulling himself up by the laces of his construction boots. She knew that if she got the chance, in two years she could make a woman of herself; and a man of her husband. And be successful like this woman, sitting at her desk, whom she would watch closely and love from a distance. Susan hated her.
Each morning, standing in the subway train, one of the hundreds of jostled women thrown against people from places like the one the cleaning woman came from, with her breasts and waist pressed against those men and those women who stared at her with lust and love and envy, all she could smell during those short minutes of the long ride was the aroma of garlic. And once, in an honest confession of her allergic reaction to it, she mentioned it to Joyce, not remembering that Joyce was Joyce Maviglia before she became Joyce McCarthy, before she became divorced.
Now after all this time, she got it. It was the garlic she had eaten at Fish, Tackle & Bone Café. But the garlic had been buried in the fresh shrimps large as little lobsters. She sniffed the air now. The woman with the silent trolley went about her cleaning humming under her breath. Susan knew she smelled garlic.
There Are No Elders Page 5
