First Things First, page 26
When relating, for instance, the story of her visit to her parents out west last summer, she says how on the Friday night she thought she’d just walk down to The Cecil Hotel, which was close, and have a quick beer just because she hadn’t been there for ten years nearly and was feeling nostalgic. She doesn’t say how really she was climbing the walls of her parents’ hot little bungalow, her mother was already repeating herself after only two days, her father was planted in the swivel chair, drinking a forty-ouncer of rum, staring out the bay window at nothing, and Myrna went storming out in an inexplicable rage which was never mentioned again.
At The Cecil (which hadn’t changed much, was still a dive, overcrowded and vaguely criminal), she stood drinking beer at the bar until she caught the eye of a handsome black-bearded biker by the pool table who motioned her over, bought her a drink, said his name was Leonard but they called him “The Drake,” pleasta meetcha. It turned out that the slim French woman playing pool like a shark was his girlfriend, Jacinte. Resting her heavy breasts on the table for the long shots, Jacinte was cleaning up at a buck a cue and proudly handing him her winnings after each game.
But Jacinte went home early because she had to work in the morning. Then Myrna was buying and The Drake was pumping her quarters into the jukebox and pulling up his black Harley-Davidson t-shirt to show her his tattoos. There was a lion, a wolf, a dragon, a cobra, and the omnipotent eagle. Myrna said, “I like a tattoo,” and touched them.
The next thing she knew they were kissing at the table. The Drake was putting his whole tongue in her mouth and she was feeling invisible the way she always did when she was drunk: as if nobody could see what she was doing so she thought she could do anything. The Drake said how much he’d like to take her for a ride but he’d lost his licence for five years, vehicular manslaughter, and so now they had a car, which he called a cage, and Jacinte did the driving. He walked Myrna back to her parents’ house, kissing and pleading, and when she tells this story, Myrna doesn’t say how she just wanted to get rid of him. His tongue was too big, and rough like a cat’s. She’d already got what she wanted, which had little to do with him in the first place.
Four days later she flew home and Brian, her lover at the time, met her at the airport with flowers and a bottle of pink champagne, which was romantic but not like him at all. At three in the morning her phone rang. It was The Drake calling to say he’d bought a bus ticket, he’d be there Sunday at eight. Then Jacinte grabbed the phone away from him, yelling, “Who the hell are you talking to? I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you!” Myrna hung up, unplugged the phone, put a butcher knife and the empty champagne bottle on the top shelf of her bedroom closet, not sure yet who she should be frightened of. Brian from the bed asked, “Didn’t you tell him about me?”
Telling this story, Myrna says how she felt terrorized for weeks afterwards but that was the end of it, thank God. Except (she doesn’t say this part) she told Brian that the biker had called her again, not once, but twice, when Brian wasn’t there, was sleeping, Myrna suspected (and correctly), with another woman.
She doesn’t say how she kept expecting to be punished but nothing ever happened, nothing changed, and she could still look herself in the eye in the bathroom mirror in the morning without flinching or cringing. This consummate failure of justice, poetic or otherwise, this failure of a call or a need for atonement to appear gave her a licence, she felt, to do whatever she wanted, because nothing made any real difference after all and you really could get away with things without being caught, damaged, or disfigured.
But of course this new lease on life was fleeting, and when considering whether to write a story about this story, she eventually abandoned the idea because whatever promises it contained (of violence, retribution, or morality) could be neither broken nor fulfilled in the end, not convincingly anyway.
14. Myrna doesn’t pick up strange men in bars anymore. There is the fear of disease, of course, and the problem of breakfast: what to make without appearing too domestic or grateful, or whether to just stay in bed with her head covered up, waiting for him to comb his hair and leave.
There is the perennial problem with the ones you wish would stick around because you would like to spend the rest of your life (or at least the rest of the weekend) with them, so you offer coffee, an omelette, grapefruit, buttermilk pancakes, but he is shrugging on his jean jacket, edging towards the door at 6 a.m. because he has to go fishing, has to go rip the engine out of his truck, play baseball, move a piano, feed the dog, and you know you will never get him back into your bed again.
But the ones you never want to see ever again, not even in the grocery store by accident, the ones you will cross the street to avoid, are always calling and driving by your house and falling like feathers in love with you.They have no sense of humour, none of them. There is the way the bedroom begins to fill up with their long faces and the only thing left to do is redecorate or move.
15. Myrna is walking back to her car on Queen Street. At the busy corner of Queen and Clergy, a man with no legs is trying to manoeuvre his wheelchair over the curb up onto the sidewalk. His head lolls alarmingly to the left and the stumps of his thighs are wrapped in white bandages.
Myrna turns and walks in the other direction.
Her heart is beating so hard that the blood seems to be escaping the ventricles, filling up her whole chest cavity, hot and shameful, bubbling like soup all down to her knees.
She is swallowing and swallowing, like the time she was driving through a trailer park at night (she didn’t know anyone who lived there, she was just cruising) and a cat ran out in front of her, green eyes likes marbles in her headlights, and after she hit it she just kept driving until she was home.
16. Myrna checks her answering machine as soon as she gets home. She is disappointed when there have been no messages but, on the other hand, she often doesn’t feel up to returning the calls she does get, even when they’re long-distance from people she hasn’t talked to in years. Their phone numbers get accidentally erased.
Sometimes, feeling antisocial, frightened, or smug, she leaves the machine on even when she’s home. In the instruction manual, this impersonation of absence is politely referred to as “Screening Your Calls”. Eating supper, soaking in the bathtub, lying on the couch reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, or watching Family Ties on TV, Myrna looks up and listens to disembodied voices speaking with false bravado into the machine: “Hi Myrna! It’s just me! Haven’t heard from you in ages! Just called to say hi! Call me back when you can!”
What she hates most are the hang-up calls when the machine faithfully records a click and then the dial tone or a maddening silence. Myrna plays back these calls over and over, trying to detect breathing, background music, or a sigh. Frustrating as they are, these mystery calls also fill her with exhilaration, with a premonition that someday soon somebody special is going to get through to her.
17. Myrna is sitting at the kitchen table just around suppertime. She is working on the crossword puzzle in the evening paper, discovering that she knows:
1. a 4-letter word for ACIDITY (1 Across)
2. an 8-letter word for IN AN ADULT FASHION (10 Down)
3. a 4-letter word for GR. CHEESE (68 Down).
But she has to look up in her crossword puzzle dictionary:
1. a 4-letter word for AVATAR OF VISHNU (94 Across)
2. a 4-letter word for CHIN. GELATIN (64 Across)
3. a 4-letter word for ONCE, ONCE (13 Across).
She is trying to decide if she should heat up the leftover chili from last night or should she just give in to temptation and order another pizza?
She is looking periodically over at the well-kept brick house across the street. She doesn’t know these neighbours, still hasn’t figured out who all lives there or what the connections are between them. One of them is a mailman who looks very handsome in his postal uniform, there is an older heavy-set couple who drive a blue Lincoln, a woman in a fur coat who comes over every day with or without a small child in a red snowsuit, there is a very old woman with long white hair who sits at the upstairs window in her nightgown (for a long time Myrna thought the old lady was watching her in her window but now she thinks she’s watching TV). These neighbours are always juggling their cars around in the long driveway, backing out, pulling in, waving, honking, just driving away.
They have one of those pretty Tiffany lamps hung over the dining room table (at least Myrna thinks it’s the dining room). The multicoloured light which it casts makes the whole house look safe and inviting. Inside, Myrna imagines, there would be a cosy warmth, good smells of supper, the sound of the television news coming quietly from another room, laughter. The older man sits at the table with his back to the window, reading the paper, sometimes shirtless even in the winter so that his broad white back looks like a pillow.
One day at The Bay Myrna bought herself a Tiffany lamp too, also a tablecloth printed with flat-faced pansies and long-necked pink gladioli, also one of those new wooden dishracks which looks like a book- or music-stand. She put these purchases on her charge card and hurried home with them. She ironed the tablecloth, laid it out, set up the dishrack, and hung the lamp above the table.
But later that evening, sitting under it doing another puzzle, she had to admit that she didn’t feel any different. She supposed her house must look different from the outside, to someone walking by, walking the dog or taking the air, or having just had a fight with their husband/wife over who was supposed to take out the garbage and needing to get away for half an hour, trying to figure out why nothing ever went right in their lives—to someone just walking by like that, Myrna supposed the house might look now like a home for happy well-adjusted folks with children, pets, and dreams.
This gives her some small satisfaction but, sitting under the lamp, which sheds its colours, she imagines, down upon her lustrous black hair like rainbows or leaves, Myrna has to admit that she doesn’t feel any different: she still doesn’t feel like the people across the street.
18. After supper, Myrna does the dishes promptly, sweeps the floor, reads and watches TV at the same time, thinks about all the writing she will definitely do tomorrow, goes to bed early, and reads some more. She prefers a good fat hardcover, the weight of it expensive and significant in her hands. She does not like library books because they smell funny, the plastic jackets crinkle, and the pages feel coated and damp.
After she turns out the light, she curls up on her left side till she feels all warm and relaxed. Then she rolls over onto her right and falls asleep.
Sometimes she thinks about Rose, when they were roommates, announcing puffy-faced at breakfast, “I cried myself to sleep last night.”
Myrna has never managed to cry herself to sleep. She has tried it the odd time when, at some suitably melancholy juncture, the idea seemed attractive enough in theory: the tragedy, the loneliness, the balled-up Kleenex all over the bed. But in practice she finds it impossible to sustain. For one thing, crying keeps her awake. And once she starts, she wants only to stop, to get up, eat, wash, smoke, something, anything to save herself at the brink. Because once she starts, she is afraid she will never be able to stop. She can only imagine poor Rose drifting off in mid-sob, waking up before the alarm with her fingers still in her mouth.
19. Myrna has never doubted that she will survive. Oh, there was that one time years ago when some man had dumped her and she was drunk and thinking she’d drive her car into the river. It was February, the ice was rotten, and she would sink down slowly like a horse to its knees, nose first and the windows open. But then she realized how drunk she was and, with her luck, she’d probably get picked up for impaired on her way to the river and it would be just too embarrassing, losing her licence like that. So she threw the clock, several heavy books, and her cowboy boots across the room and stayed where she was: in bed fully dressed, listening to his favourite song, and pounding her pillow and her thighs.
By the next morning, she was already laughing at herself, writing “A Fate Worse Than Death” in her notebook—which is what she would have called the story she might have written about the story someday.
But Myrna never thinks about that time anymore, she doesn’t write or tell the story, and she does not remember the name of the man, the song, or the river.
20. This is just some of how Myrna survives.
TRICK QUESTIONS
(1989)
Only the most naïve of questions are truly serious. They are the questions with no answers. A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.
— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The important thing about grass is that it is green. It grows, and is tender, with a sweet grassy smell. But the important thing about grass is that it is green.
The important thing about the sky is that it is always there. It is true that it is blue, and high, and full of clouds, and made of air. But the important thing about the sky is that it is always there
— Margaret Wise Brown, The Important Book
Sam was telling Janice an amusing anecdote from his recent trip to a conference in Oslo. On the flight home, he had been seated beside an obnoxious young man named Dirk, who, Sam said, did not know his ass from his cranium and hadn’t the sense to shut up about it either. As they embarked on the first leg of the transatlantic trip, Sam was trying to read, sleep, or think with his eyes closed. But this Dirk was one of those unfortunate seat-mates who simply cannot settle themselves. He partook liberally of the free liquor served in first class, flirted with the stewardess every time she came within range, drummed his fingers maddeningly on the arm of his seat in time to whatever juvenile trash was blaring through his headphones, and tried repeatedly to engage Sam in meaningless conversation.
“Where are you from?”
“Where have you been?”
“What do you do for a living?”
Sam responded with vague one-word answers:
“Canada.”
“Norway.”
“Teach.”
He kept his eyes closed and could only hope that the idiot would get the hint eventually.
After the meal had been served and then cleared away again, Dirk pulled a briefcase out from under his seat and placed it on his lap. Sam thought thankfully that finally he was going to get some peace and quiet.
But when the innocuous-looking briefcase had been sprung open, Dirk pulled from it, with a flourish like that of a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat, a contraption of tangled wires and Styrofoam balls in different sizes and colours. He fussed with it for a minute and then shoved it triumphantly under Sam’s nose. It was a planetary model, and a primitive one at that, with the nine Styrofoam balls impaled upon the wires at various intervals, waving now like insect antennae. Mars was painted red, of course, and the rings of Saturn were shaped in gold foil.
“What’s wrong with this model?” Dirk challenged Sam.
“Pluto should be three blocks away,” Sam said.
“That’s right!” Dirk cried. “How did you know that?”
“What do you think I am?” Sam said. “Stupid?”
Now, to Janice, Sam said, “It was a trick question. You can ask things like that of your friends, but not of a total stranger on an airplane.” Janice laughed with what Sam took to be intelligent appreciation.
They were in the kitchen: Janice at the stove stirring the spaghetti sauce, Sam at the table having a drink of single-malt Scotch, their ten-month-old daughter, Celeste, in her playpen in the middle of the room, flinging brightly coloured plastic blocks at her parents and crowing.
Technically, of course, Janice knew that Pluto was the most distant planet, placed at an educated guess of 6000 million kilometres from the sun. She could still recite the mnemonic device she’d learned in public school for remembering the planets in order: Man Very Early Made Jars Stand Up Nearly Perpendicular. It was only the M’s, Mercury and Mars, that sometimes still got mixed up. She knew that Pluto had been found almost by accident in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh and that it was believed to be a frozen world, totally encased in ice, possibly once a moon of Neptune that had somehow been flung out of its orbit, left to wander around the sun on its own.
But whenever they talked about Pluto, Janice pictured a grassy sweet-smelling planet populated by thousands of cartoon Pluto dogs, like the one from Mickey Mouse, with yellow fur, flapping black ears, and noses like black jelly beans. Lanky and clumsy with oversized feet and tangled-up legs, they went wiggling under white picket fences, tromping through pink flower beds, and tumbling headlong down soft green hillsides. So whenever they talked about Pluto (which was often enough in their household), Janice laughed.
Janice was Sam’s second wife. Sam, a professor of astronomy at the university, was twenty-one years older than Janice, who was almost twenty-five. Sam had been divorced from his first wife, Solange, for only two months when he became involved with Janice.
The circumstances of their meeting and subsequent marriage were, as Sam put it, so trite that he had long ago begged Janice to please stop telling the story to everyone they met. She agreed. Guiltily. It was as if he knew (but how could he? he was intelligent, yes, but hardly omnipotent) about that time last fall on the crosstown bus when Janice, then six months pregnant and very pleased with herself, had told the whole story to the woman sitting next to her. She was a friendly, motherly sort of woman who was, in fact, on her way to the hospital to visit her daughter who had just given birth to twins. She held on her lap a wicker basket of fruit with two pink bows on top. She sat for ten whole minutes with her hand on Janice’s belly, waiting to feel the baby kick. She predicted that it would be a girl because Janice was carrying high—or was it because she was carrying low? Either way, she was right. And when she got off at her stop, she gave Janice a big hug, an apple, and two perfect pears.
