Red Girl Rat Boy (11 page)

My mother: “Don’t fuss. Can’t you see she’s having trouble?” She fetched his jar of maraschinos. “Here, Ellen, eat.”

“What?” my father asked. “What is Ellen having?”

The baby cried.

Because Lawrence’s mother was not there to soothe her, he took her up to my attic and walked about. His steps, her cries resounded above. I watched TV with my parents. Stuck in those big fat armchairs, they looked littler all the time.

Lawrence insisted I go back to the doctors. “You have to stop crying.”

After my tubal, things changed yet were not better. Not
really
. Try that, translators!

A form letter came. Our post-office box was up for renewal. Mail had scarcely ever reached us thus, but we remembered the happy rental. We cried. Side by side, Lawrence and I turned and folded and smoothed that shoddy official paper till it became soft as muslin. For days that form lay on the dresser in the guest room. One of us would pick it up, read, smile, cry.

He announced, “This is despair.”

His saying so was pivotal to the plot. A hundred times I’d felt myself alone in framing that definition.

On our first travels we’d floated on whim, spores adrift, blending clouds of love as we learned each other’s tongues and conjugated our own idiom. This time Greece took us three months to work through, Turkey the same, Thailand almost six. Researcher, photographer, translator, writer, we packed our laptops everywhere each day, yet my handwriting filled one notebook after another. I scrambled to move the pen fast enough.

These travels were bliss encore.

In airports and libraries I met magazines. Narratives went into my laptop and out again, as submissions. Rejection wasn’t defeat. In nature, most attempts at distribution fail. Only if many occur do some succeed.

The first anniversary of this happy life found us in Malaysia with a bevy of lichenologists. At the hotel, after collecting the colloquium’s agenda and our mail, we panted up to our room for air-conditioned love, but found that Mrs. Whatsit had sent photos.

“She looks like you,” in unison.

Shiny coloured rectangles slid over the king-size. She held a toy plane Lawrence had sent her from Istanbul. On Mrs. Whatsit’s lap she cuddled smiling, on my father’s too.

“A lot like you,” we repeated. I told the truth.

When he thought I wouldn’t notice, Lawrence examined the photos again, again. I heard his fingers handling
them,
not notes or reports. He tried to bring the images into bed. I wouldn’t agree. He persisted. I sensed a new rule arriving. When he reached for me I was sure, and quickly moved to my own margin. By now I understood my mother’s twin bed. She had no notebooks, though, poor woman. Then and there in front of Lawrence I got out my stories and began to write in my own idiom.

He did not ask. He, we did not speak our language
very much any more
(another conundrum for the translators).

Her third birthday approached. Lawrence wanted to go to Canada.

“What would a child that age know about celebration?”

He had no scientific comeback, but one day after a siege of meetings he and I were having drinks with other participants. A fellow translator asked me with gentle concern if I were tired.

Lawrence snapped, “No, Ellen always slouches like that. And she gets all worked up.”

The inquirer stammered. Others lowered their eyes while my husband publicly raged, glared, sulked.

At last I said I’d go. Not then. At Christmas. With conditions. Our arrival must be unannounced, so no airport reunion. No gambols, no funny gifts of the kind that Mrs. Whatsit, given opportunity, would invent. And we’d stay at a downtown hotel, to prevent a child from slipping into our room at dawn expecting special treatment.

I had to force myself to get on the plane. Even my parents’ rather austere seasonal practices reared up like penitentiary walls. (That’s the last, unless I’ve lost count. Four’s plenty.)

At dusk the taxi moved through softly falling white to the old neighbourhood and so to the Whatsits’ house, its basement dark. Snow flowed around us.

Peering through the bright living-room window, we saw our daughter, arms akimbo, face red, tongue stuck out. Her body shook with shouting, “No no no, I hate you!” Tears sprang off her face.

Lawrence gasped, laughed. His eyes too were wet.

My mother-in-law, her back to us, spoke inaudibly. Her hair was greyer. She was fifty-five now, I calculated.

“When the worst teen years hit, she’ll just be getting her pension.”

Lawrence’s fist almost reached me, but we flinched. That idiom, alien still. We watched as the woman and child calmed down, smiled, kissed.

He and I kissed too, a long deep final word. Then the father ran up to his front door.

I walked, wondering where under the everywhere whiteness lay that delicate lichen, frilled, leathery.

Through the living-room window of my parents’ house glinted an enormous Christmas tree. For her. They never used to do that. A light shone in the attic, another by my private door. My key slid in. On the stairs I sat to note the essentials. In the airport lounge I’d go further, for likely there’d be hours before the flight above the tumbling snow, hours to live in my idiom. Ours no more. Never hers.

Some women take to it, some don’t.

Writing poetry was now imaginable.

I tiptoed up.

My parents’ huge TV and chairs and beds were in the attic, as were they, two tiny dried-apple dolls in robes and slippers by the fire. They nibbled mince-tarts. On the dormer windows, glittering lichen bonded with the sky. The trees, sheathed in ice, stood silent.

My mother sighed. “So nice with just the two of us.”

“What did you say?”

Dirty Work

With deepest sympathy?

In Your Hour of Loss?

Certainly not.

I searched through the rack of cards with no text.Flowers and rivers cooled both the September heat and my anger at the day’s news reports from Afghanistan about Bush at his dirty work again, cosying up to the Taliban’s leaders. Stars, clouds, ocean beaches.

Then—a wide field where two old trees stood close, their colours muted, the sage and olive conveying respect, I thought. Admiration.

Rowena deserves neither. Light and lethal as plastic wrap she is, so I bought that card.
Very sorry to hear the news. Catherine.
She’ll get it. With snail mail you can’t see recipients react, though, unless your daily lives are linked. Perhaps she never noticed that ours briefly were.

Entering the Vancouver branch thirty years ago, Rowena wore an ankle-length coat, black wool. Richard walked behind, royal consort. She was tall, pale; the fashionable coat gave her still more height and presence. This twenty-something pair were fresh to the Coast, had just driven his old beater cross-country from the movement’s Centre in Toronto. Who forked over for that garment? Not Ms. Radical, who never had a nickel for the collection bucket. Her man was taller, paler, with a curly smile, and bent to Rowena like a folding measuring-stick. They wore Beatles glasses. His long hair was carroty red, hers a stream of black.

Sally, the assistant organizer, stood no chance. Her stocky build would have made that coat grotesque, and her face—after years of poverty, fluorescent light, cheap food, the stress of political crises—was sallow mud. Organizer Pete’s skin was as coarse. Unimportant, for an important man. Nor did his hands matter, stained by Gestetner, silk-screen, spirit ditto, Remington and Underwood. He and Sally exuded the twinnish affect of the long-coupled. Pals.

Cordially they brought the new comrades to the hall’s kitchen for the Friday supper, and sat by them: Sally, Richard, Rowena, Pete. I was there, only a contact, not seated by the leaders, but I too saw Pete draw on the paper table-cover a map of downtown. As Rowena watched, his ballpoint showed the route for the anti-war march coming up in April 1971.

“See?”

“You’re the chief marshal?” Admiring gaze. Wide eyes. The works.

Pete blushed.

Richard’s death thirty years later, a week ago: sad. Not tragic, like those of others once in the movement, Josie, Bruce.

In today’s newspaper, tomorrow’s, Richard wouldn’t rate a line of print, but last week the
Sun
did note yet another drunk driver’s kill: male, 55, credit union manager. No family mentioned. Local TV showed a rainy crosswalk. Diagonally across the white stripes, a reflective yellow jacket. Long legs scissoring. A crushed bike.

Right after Richard and Rowena’s arrival on the Coast, anti-war worked hard to build the protest against America’s war in Vietnam. What
hard
means, people unfamiliar with radical politics have no idea. Friends of mine do time in the standard parties, but even if angry, worn out, tricked of victory, they’re safe. Secure. The left that
I
knew felt itself alone on a shattering rim.

That march was a huge success, Vancouver’s biggest to date, the cops nearly brutal. Seventeen seconds on
The National.

At the movement’s social that night (the hall antic with exhausted revelry), the assistant organizer located me in the crowded half-dark.
The Age of Aquarius
reverberated so that Sally had to repeat her question.

“Cathy, could you find space for a comrade?”

“
Catherine
. I don’t understand?”

She explained. How humiliating.

My apartment then had an odd ell off the hallway where I stored camping gear.

“Of course!”

Sally obviously wanted to leave at once. I had no one to stay for. Silent, she walked by me down the hill towards the West End, where freighters’ lights glinted on English Bay’s blackness. The mountains, invisible.

At my place, as we cleared away tent and paddles to roll out foam and sleeping bag, I accidentally touched her arm. Tense. Almost rigid.

The next week, two small cartons and a suitcase appeared. The revolutionary stored her food in a corner of the fridge and washed her few dishes right away.

“I’ll be gone by month’s end,” paying her share of the rent to the penny.

Why did Sally ask a contact for refuge? Not a comrade. Not even a former comrade who’d dropped to sympathizer. Among the latter, old Duncan had heroic status, having gone to Spain with the Mac-Pap brigade. Others had cachet if they’d continued radical work in unions or the NDP, but most were judged as simply having failed to cut the mustard.

In Vancouver as elsewhere, thousands came
around
the far-left in the 1960s, 70s. Some were just
here on a visit,
as the comrades said, but others lasted over a decade, into the death years. I did. Rowena was soon history, off to write her dirty work—aka gossip columns—for any paying rag, but Richard, another relict, kept on through turn and fusion, faction and split, all the while studying accountancy.

Those two trees on that greeting card—why alone? Logging? Fire?

Ten decades ago, where I live was little more than tracks hacked out of ancient forest. A paddler by the shore, once past the False Creek sawmills, would have seen little through the trees but wisps of wood-stove smoke. Now it’s all towers and traffic.

Not long after Sally came to my place, on returning from a late movie I heard moans in the ell. Walk by, brush teeth, bed. A strangled concluding gasp. The apartment door closed, the street door. Out my room’s window I saw a comrade walk away.

Next morning, Sally and I stapled some beach-towels into a curtain to shield the open end of her space.

Some of the almost nightly men were comrades, one a leading trade unionist and friend of Pete’s. This trophy pleased me. Where she got the others I don’t know. None stayed over. Sally then was thirty-five, I a decade older. Did she, wrongly, believe herself still young? At her age I failed to detach a man from his marriage. A pretty woman succeeded. No later chances at a long-term connection came my way. As for Rowena, she could have been my daughter.

What did we contacts do? What comrades did: cook Friday suppers, staff the bar at socials, distribute leaflets, paint banners, address envelopes, put up posters, sell newspapers, drive (few comrades had cars) to the demo, the printer, post office, bus depot, union hall, women’s centre, airport, ferry terminal, liquor store, hospital. We donated toilet and typing and carbon paper, paper towels, paper for silkscreening. We gave cash. What we couldn’t do: participate in the branch to decide the line.

My first act of witness occurred while on an errand at the Courthouse.

On its legal steps stood perhaps a dozen people, in chilly rain.
Stop the War in Vietnam
, their placards demanded. Alone they stood, held, were stared at. Thus I learned that my small hatred of America’s invasion wasn’t unique.

My notary’s office, my cubby, overlooked False Creek. Weeks later those same people, a twig of the Fourth International’s Canadian section, rented space downstairs. The storefront window advertised their forums, also meetings of a local anti-war group. I went. Again, again.

Having been in my thirties still imprisoned by hopes of marriage, I’d only seen on TV the huge
Ban the Bomb
marches surge over Burrard Bridge, Now I began to live in the vigour of anti-war. The slogans grew nuanced, transitional:
End Canada’s Complicity, Bring the Troops Home, Don’t Do Uncle Sam’s Dirty Work
. Clean bombs, dirty: that distinction featured in 50s war-talk too, then in the 80s, 90s.

The language of the 00s won’t differ. Today that’s beyond doubt.
Dirty work. Someone’s got to do it.

Another, later discovery and distinction: I opposed all war. The comrades didn’t.

Professionally I did little for the branch. In British Columbia we’re scrivener notaries, with more powers than in many other jurisdictions, but revolutionaries don’t redeem stocks and bonds or purchase real estate overseas—not that I frequently oversaw such tasks. Often, notaries just witness. (That again.)
This person is who she claims to be. This document does what it purports to do.
Law school hadn’t been an option. I got over that; most people change shape to fit. I did review the branch’s lease with Pete, and gave advice after Maoists smashed the print-room window, but a lawyer was needed when two Youth got charged with resisting arrest.

Once I did assist children of the revolution. An anguished narrative of cross-border separation, separation, separation, divorce, illness, death, grief preceded these relicts. The extant parent needed a notary to satisfy US authorities that certain monies could be paid to the youths, or, in one case, to the parent in trust. All the real decisions long predated that amputated family’s arrival in my cubby.

The organizer and assistant organizer, Pete and Sally, side by side for years before
The Age of Aquarius
dawned, though uprooted by Rowena still must confer. Avoiding their private office, they worked at a card table in the main hall. Low voices. Eyes on file-folders. Nearby, a work-party collated a pamphlet critiquing social democracy. Even we contacts knew that Sally’d asked the Centre for a transfer to Edmonton, Windsor, anywhere.

A chair banged to the floor, a high-speed hand met a face.

Sally rushed out.

We picked up page three, four. Pete didn’t touch his flaming cheek. The stapler bit sets of sheets. He folded the card table, went to the office, shut the door. Dialling. Soon, a honk in the back alley. He left. We finished our assignment.

Even with my bedroom door closed, I heard Sally and the man.

What did all that fucking mean? With Pete, had the basics of release, satisfaction, been rare? So easy to despise another thoughtless man whose cock makes his life-choices—yet Sally’s sex at my place did seem
routinist
, the movement’s term for one kind of political thought and action. A clinical assessment: nearly dead. They arrived about half-past eleven, she and someone, when the news was over and I’d finished in the bathroom. Soft footsteps. Flushes. Murmurs. Darkness, stillness, then the sounds.

After some nights of regret I’d been so accommodating, of wishing my guests would hurry up and be done with it so we could all get some sleep, I found my own breasts tingling. To touch myself with others nearby, unaware, was novel. Exciting. I stuffed the sheet’s hem in my mouth. My body became more eager, until when they entered my place I’d already be in bed, lights out, my hands moving. To keep myself from coming till at least one of them did was a painful pleasure.

I slept well. Sally’s morning face was porridge-grey, her shoulders curled as if to block further injury to her core.

Satisfaction. Is that what I felt last week, shoving Rowena’s envelope in the mailbox? Even at seventy-five, I don’t know.

Perhaps it’s me who wants condolences, sympathy for not being the relict of an old pair with dead roots still strong, romantic.

On Fridays before the forums, Sally with Pete still welcomed everyone to supper, she as ever a little shy, he affable. During his post-movement years with NGOs in Zimbabwe and Kenya, that trait surely served Pete well.

At the meal itself he sat by Rowena.

Sally, her back to them, chose another table.

Pale Richard ate anywhere. His eyelids had the rusty edges, sore-looking, that some redheads get, and he communed with his chili or hash as if in a room where no other steps sounded. I know that room. He didn’t converse. I and others tried, more than once.

During dessert, Pete rose to announce upcoming events. One night came great news: a French comrade, direct from the International, would expand his North American speaking itinerary to include our outpost.

Such a buzz over the canned pears!

Sally got up also, unusually, to remind us that North America’s struggle too was crucial for world revolution. As always, correct. Yet who’d choose to hear postal worker Helen on mechanization’s threat, again, when with Raoul we’d enter French anti-war? Helen was no Jeanne Moreau. In our heads 1968 still shimmered. Aznavour, Belmondo. We contacts, no matter our age and the pears’ tinny taste, just then felt part of
us
.

Those tragic deaths.

Josie. Only seventeen, she asked such urgent and politically naive questions that the Youth snickered. Older comrades winced, kept a kind eye. In a matter of weeks her speech fragmented. A brain tumour lopped off her life.

Saplings planted alongside city sidewalks often wear necklaces.
Please water me.
For all its rain, this climate may not provide enough. Some don’t survive. During winter, dead young trees look just like live ones. The surprise comes in April.

Near those trees on Rowena’s card was there a river, a wriggle of blue?

Comrade Bruce was forty-five but took the split hard, a child of bitter political divorce. Less than a year later he was running drugs across the Montana-Alberta border. A train killed him. His last joe-job for the International had been to remove the bright posters, banners, placards from the storefront.