First Things First, page 10
Enough—no more lists. Let me make light rays instead. Laser beams can kill but not if you don’t believe in their power. It will hurt you to see me with my arm around another man but it’s bound to happen. Because after all, it’s my arm and I’ll put it anywhere I want to. But it might not hurt if you don’t let yourself believe in me too much. But I see already that you aren’t like me, cannot convince yourself of virtually anything just because you want to. Truth only comes with the telling. It will hurt at the time but afterwards you won’t remember the pain.
Don’t call me a pessimist. I want to hear violins just as much as anyone but I twirl in the silence too well. I persist in making always the wrong songs, will never remember how to harmonize. Harmony is for choir-boys and barbershop quartets.
Within a certain space of time we’ll be so very honest with each other. We’ll be able to tell lies only to ourselves, never to each other. We’ll never believe that the simple answers just might be the right ones.
You cannot hear harmonica notes without trying to play the blues. You cannot understand that I will give up reasons for Lent, will rewrite your semantics, will stop asking for reasons and start asking for long explanations instead. And smiles. Oh yes, you are already so greedy for my smile (if only because yours comes so easily, with a little bacon grease just around the edges) but I don’t give it out for free. One night I will sit with my teeth all brushed up and waiting for you to phone, believing you will smell them white across the wire. But no, you don’t phone and you must be out drinking again with the boys from work and oh, you think you’re so unique. But don’t you know that all the wayward men on afternoon TV stop off at easy bars for beer before they go home to those pretty wives busy giving birth to Chicken Fricassee and Pineapple Surprise?
There will be Sunday just-after-noon phone calls.
I will say: Good morning, how are you?
You will say: Lousy.
I picture bugs in your beard but my answer is noncommittal: Oh?
I’ve got this crummy headache and I slept in too late and I’ve got nothing to do. I’m bored. God, I hate Sundays.
Oh.
Well, what do you want to do today?
I have my fistful of suggestions ready: Maybe a ride? Or we could go to the library or for a walk by the lake.
Nah. What else do you want to do?
Well, we could go for a walk or—
You said that already. What else?
We could drop in on Harold and Jean or we could go for an ice cream cone, chocolate mint.
Nah.
What do you want to do then?
Whatever you like.
But I just told you what I’d like.
Whatever you’d like besides those things then. What about supper?
I haven’t planned anything.
Oh.
We could go out to eat.
Okay. Where do you want to go?
We could go to the Waterfront, they’ve got good seafood.
Nah, I don’t feel like seafood.
What about that steak place on Knight Street?
Nah, too expensive.
And then I will say: Let’s go wherever you want then.
But I won’t mean it. Do not make a note of the things I say to you. I won’t remember your reply and my words may or may not be true.
THE GATE
(1978)
We’re on our way to Mapleside.
Our new station wagon—my father calls it “the suburban”—is black and my mother, fanning her face with a magazine, says for the fourth time, “I don’t see why you had to have a black car, Roy. Black just absorbs the heat. I can’t stand it!”
My mother’s name is Natalie and she’s a hairdresser. Her short dark hair, coated with hairspray, is perfect. She never touches it. I’m not supposed to tell anyone that she dyes it. As if I would.
The inside of the suburban rises around me in white folds: front seat, dashboard, doors. My father is driving too fast but I’m not worried. I’m reading all the road signs to him as they pass. The prairie unfolds around us and we’re all sweating.
Up ahead, the broad-shouldered asphalt is liquefied by the sunlight. I’m expecting the car to fall off when it reaches that point where the highway seems to spill into the sky. I know it won’t really—it doesn’t—and I try not to be disappointed. I am twelve and I don’t want to go to Mapleside today anyway.
We’ve already been driving for two hours and the windshield is covered with bug guts. I think I can smell them. My father swerves onto the shoulder to miss a dead skunk lying in the middle of the road. The smell makes my eyes water. My mother says, “Tomato juice. You have to use tomato juice to get the smell out.” I try to imagine washing the whole car with tomato juice.
Around the next corner, there are red flashing lights and a policeman stops the traffic with a flag. We have to wait five minutes while another policeman directs a tow truck backing up to a transport truck which lies upside-down in the ditch like a giant silver beetle stuck on its back, legs waving, helpless. My mother says, “Look the other way, Sylvia. Just in case.” Is that blood on the road?
Further on up the highway, my father guides the car left across the oncoming lane and pulls in past two green gas pumps.
“What are we stopping here for?” I ask.
“This gas station’s the last before Mapleside,” my father says. “Thought you might have to—”
“—freshen up a bit,” my mother finishes. Her voice is sudden in the car—I’d thought she was asleep. “I think we could all stand to get out and stretch our legs a bit, don’t you?” she continues gaily, feeling for the door handle with one hand, smoothing her dress down over nylon knees with the other, and looking back over her shoulder meaningfully at me.
I think briefly of refusing to get out of the car but realize it would be futile.
I clamber out of the back seat, my bare legs peeling off the hot upholstery like a Band-Aid. My father, lifting the legs of his suit pants and shaking them, stands beside the car and admires it.
“Do you want a pop, Syl?”
I wish he wouldn’t call me that.
“No thanks, I’m not thirsty.”
I am too.
My father strides purposefully away and my mother says, “Come on, Sylvia. The ladies’ is over here, around the side.”
I step carefully over the black tube which runs from the gas pumps to the building like a leash. I follow my mother around the side where we find a green door marked LADIES. Below the word is a painted figure, armless, with a white triangular skirt and one thick leg. This is much the way I feel in my new pink dress. My mother made it.
Inside, she runs the tap till the water comes out clear and cold; smelling of must and metal. The porcelain sink is stained brown around the drain. Holding me by the chin, she dabs at my greasy forehead with a wet lace handkerchief.
She says, “I want you to look presentable this afternoon.”
I stand there obediently, concentrating on the wall over her shoulder. A hard-backed beetle inches up the tile and disappears through a hole under the wire-covered window. Lucky.
My mother keeps on talking. “Now Sylvia, this is your first funeral.” As if I didn’t already know that. “Your father and I have discussed it and since you’ll have to go to one sooner or later, we figured it would be just that much easier on you if it was someone you weren’t really close to—I know how sensitive you can be. You’ve only met Old Isaac once or twice and he’s just a distant relative—the perfect choice, we decided.” Her explanation makes me feel resentful and grateful both at once.
She lets go of me, rinses out her handkerchief, and leans close to the spotted mirror, inspecting her own face, which, of course, isn’t nearly as dirty as mine.
I wait near the door, watching her draw new red lips on her mouth. The film of water on my forehead evaporates, leaving my skin feeling cooler but tight across the eyebrows. I can feel my white socks sagging around my ankles.
“There we go, we’re all set,” my mother announces, smacking her lips. She turns to me, smiling, and her front teeth are pink.
“You’ve got lipstick on your teeth,” I say.
She walks past me, opens the door, and says, without looking at me, “Your socks.”
As I climb back into the car, my father holds out a bottle of Orange Crush. When my mother isn’t looking, I press the cold rippled glass against both cheeks.
A few minutes later, we turn right off the highway onto a gravel road. I am studying the back of my father’s bald head, tracing the line between his sunburn and the smooth white dome of his skull. Being an important businessman at home in the city, he almost always wears a hat. But now, in the prairie heat, it’s perched on the seat between him and my mother, white straw with a navy band. I keep thinking it will collapse like an angel-food cake. I don’t really know what my father’s job is, but he’s always making appointments and long-distance phone calls.
My mother pulls a magazine out from under the hat and starts reading. But from the way she turns the pages so fast, licking her thumb every time, I can tell she’s only looking at the pictures, which all seem to be of well-polished women and cars. Her fingers leave damp rings on the glossy pages. I try to look over her shoulder but she slaps the magazine shut and puts it back, face-down, under the hat.
My father is still driving too fast and we’re leaving a cloud of dust behind us. I roll down the window and stick one arm out into the warm wind. I imagine that my skin will be instantly coated with colourless dust just like the brown weeds straggling all down both sides of the road. The wind rushes into the car.
“What’re you doing back there?” my mother says, turning in her seat. By now I’ve got my head halfway out the window, holding my mouth open to the wind.
“Sylvia! You close that window this minute! I don’t want all that dust getting in here. Don’t you forget we’re going to a funeral—this isn’t a picnic, you know.” We never go on picnics anyway.
I close the window, look at my father, and roll my eyes. Watching the road ahead, his face is sweaty and blank. But I know that once we’re alone, he’ll shove my shoulder and snicker, saying, “You sure know how to get your mother riled up, little girl.”
I turn my back to her and look out the rear window. She probably thinks I’m sulking. Let her. She fiddles with the radio but, impatient, gives up easily and the radio snaps back into silence like a rubber band.
I read the sign: MAPLESIDE—ONE MILE. My mother was born in Mapleside and my parents often go back for weddings, funerals, christenings, and sometimes just to visit. I seem to be related to half the town. The residents of Mapleside, all 816 of them (that’s what the next sign says), have always seemed old to me, sand-coloured and dull. I can’t imagine them ever living anywhere else. Even their babies look used.
The last time I was in Mapleside was two years ago when we came for the wedding of one of the cousins whose name I can never remember. My father got drunk so we stayed overnight with some more cousins—Ed and Betty Overing and their only daughter, Colleen, who live on a farm west of town.
My cousin Betty Overing is the fattest person I have ever seen. She is the daughter of this Old Isaac whose funeral we’re going to this time. But he was still alive then and lived with them on the farm.
Betty’s husband, Ed, was still alive then too, for a few more months anyway. Ed was a dairy farmer and always wore a dirty red bandana around his neck. I think he slept in it.
Colleen Overing was ten then, the same age as me. I had to sleep in her room. She kept putting her hands in my hair and whispering, “Pretty, pretty, you’re such a pretty.” She was always scratching herself and there were little round scabs all over her legs, some still bleeding. For weeks afterwards, I was sure she’d given me lice and I would wake up one morning bald like my father, with all my pretty hair just lying there on the pillow beside me.
That night, when Colleen and I were getting ready for bed, she pushed a chair in front of the door and said, “I have to show you my collection.” Which turned out to be a lot of old black-and-white snapshots in a shoebox. She went through them all, one by one.
“This is my dad in the war.” A much-younger Ed was standing with four other soldiers in front of a big sign that said: DANGER: DO NOT GO BEYOND THIS POINT: VENEREAL DISEASE. They all had their arms around each other and around a black-haired woman laughing with no shoes on.
“Funny, eh?” Colleen said, poking me in the ribs. I laughed and had no idea whether it was funny or not.
“This is my grandpa killing a pig.” Old Isaac had one arm stuck halfway up the pig’s rear end. What?
“This is my mom chasing a chicken for supper. That’s before I was born. See that bulge there? Well, that turned out to be me. Funny, eh?” Hilarious.
Before we left the next morning to go back to the city, Colleen took me out behind the chicken coop to show me the slough where her father drowned the barn cat’s kittens.
This time, before we ever left home, I decided I wasn’t going to let her scare me.
My father parks the suburban in front of the Mapleside Anglican Church, my mother puts on her little white gloves, and we go single-file through the churchyard gate. The church had been redone that spring in bright white clapboard and the townspeople had planted red peonies around it like a wreath.
Inside, the sunlight streams milk-coloured through new opaque windows and there are ranks of new blond pews, each with a small brass plaque nailed to the aisle end. We’re ushered into a pew near the back by a bony young man whose pants are too short. His forehead is peeling with sunburn or acne. I smile at him just in case he’s related but he doesn’t smile back. He’s no one after all.
The church is packed and people are still coming in, standing three-deep along the back wall. The whole town is here, rustling, sweating, and clearing their throats. My mother leans across me and whispers to my father, “Isn’t it lovely so many people turned out?” My father’s bald head nods amiably.
The congregation falls silent when the minister steps up to the pulpit. His bushy white eyebrows twitch and he’s sweating too. Cocking his head like a dog, he looks out over everyone’s head and seems to be talking mostly to the clock on the back wall. I can’t hear him for the hum of an electric fan mounted on the wall at the end of our pew. Under the fan is a bouquet of red snapdragons and blue forget-me-nots wilting in an old jam jar of yellow water.
The woman sitting next to my mother keeps shifting around, adjusting a baby in her lap. I can’t tell if the baby’s a boy or a girl because its face is all scrunched up. We’re all waiting for the baby to cry but it falls asleep suddenly and the mother relaxes, smiling gratefully at my mother.
A strange animal howling begins near the front of the church. The minister’s mouth just keeps on opening and closing, so I decide this must be part of the funeral, something that happens all the time, one of those things my mother was trying to protect me from.
“That’s Betty,” my mother whispers behind her gloved hand. “You remember poor Betty.” Betty has been “poor Betty” for a year and a half now, ever since her husband, Ed, went out behind the chicken coop one morning after milking and shot himself in the head.
I squirm forward, trying to get a look at her. She’s still fat, maybe even fatter, and the rolls at the base of her neck wobble when she cries. I’d expected that grief would somehow make you hollow. Her shiny black dress is pulled tight across her shoulders and her bluish flesh bulges out around her sleeves. My mother pushes me back into my seat.
A faint smell of cow dung drifts back to me from the man in front. His head is nodding and I can’t tell if he’s sleeping or agreeing. A blue fly lands on his neck and just sits there.
Then everybody stands up and sings clumsily, picking their way through an unfamiliar hymn. My mother is singing too, her throat tight and muscular like a fist. My father stands up but doesn’t sing. I’ve never heard him sing. At the front, all the women in the choir look bloated in their royal-blue robes. One warbling voice stands out above the other average singers. They’re all singing with their eyes closed. The congregation slurs along behind them like boys in hip-waders.
From where I’m standing, I can just see one corner of the coffin. It takes me a minute to figure out that’s what it is. Cool grey like seagull wings, its sides are studded with silver scrolls. It’s closed and I’m disappointed because I thought I’d finally get a chance to see a real live corpse. Then again, my mother probably wouldn’t have let me look anyway.
At some clandestine signal I seem to have missed, everyone starts to leave. Betty is still crying into a red bandana squashed up under her nose. Her other hand flutters at her black lace collar. Colleen is walking right behind her.
Outside, the congregation stands around in loose bunches. They’re all shifting from one bunch to another or from one foot to the other in the heat. The women are talking and the men are batting at flies. Some are already making their way to their cars for the mile-long procession to the cemetery west of town. A knot of black-suited boys is moving towards the back of the church. Betty stands on the steps with Colleen and the minister, who is patting both of them alternately. Colleen stands sway-backed, watching the boys go through the back gate and out behind the church. They’re all patting their pockets, looking for matches. Betty is managing a smile for the minister. I’m trailing my mother all over the yard.
“Come on, Sylvia,” she says, steering me towards a circle of women who are all wearing loose flowered shifts and sensible shoes. “We have to be sociable at least. Your father’s already gone to the car.” I can tell she feels slighted by this.
