It was like stepping into a time tunnel and heading back more than 50 years, walking down that long corridor; passing students chatting, laughing, hurrying heads-down between classes; then up the stairs and into Room 215, where he was expected to share his observations as an author and sometime poet.
He stepped over the threshold with a sense of foreboding. An eerie premonition that, despite the sameness of it all, everything had changed in the half century since he’d celebrated his graduation from St. Laurent High School back in 1969… and awakened the next morning to a splitting hangover.
My hair has greyed, skin wrinkled, reflexes slowed and primal urges waned, he thought. My kids have grown up, and I’ve become a grandfather… I’m history.
While the students settled in and Ms. Drury introduced him, he realized there’s nothing like making a presentation to a Grade 12 English class to remind you just how ancient you have become. How irrelevant!
Unlike indigenous peoples, North Americans of European extraction – the majority in Room 215 – don’t really have a tradition of cherishing the wisdom of their ‘elders’. To them senior citizens are alien creatures, apparitions from the world of rotary phones, black and white TV, Underwood typewriters, cursive script and cheap gasoline.
Generation Pre, he figured. As in ‘pre anything digital or online’.
A Google reference had informed him that he’d be addressing students of Generation Z, ‘our first true generation of digital natives,’ according to the write up. ‘Born into a technological world, information has been placed at their fingertips and social media use has become the norm.’ The article was titled ‘Gen Z and Gen Alpha in the Classroom: The Importance of Digital Learning’. It ran under a photo of a girl wearing a pair of virtual reality goggles, her hands reaching out to touch something he couldn’t see or even imagine.
He considered it an iconic portrayal, troubling with its certainty that two beings can exist in the same space, at the same time, and yet be on entirely different planets. My version of Room 215 might just as well be off Platform 2153/4, he thought. An utterly alternate reality.
Buck up! he rallied. Don’t be pathetic.
And so began his laboriously prepared presentation. Later, he would describe the episode to Maria as, Sort of like being a fly, droning around in a room, looking for a place to land. “I’m still laughing at myself.”
When she consoled him, he shook his head. “They were being honest, hon, not rude. And I learned more in that hour or so than I care to admit.”
“Like what?”
“That even when kids are smiling and nodding at my rambling, for them it’s like talking to someone who’s dialled the wrong number, long distance, from another world.”
“I’m with them on that one,” she joked, and they had a good laugh.
Thankfully the session had ended on a high note, he remembered. They had a brief conversation about how authors deal with rejection, which he morphed into an oblique commentary on his then-and-there. “I referred back to comments I’d made earlier about the writers’ vocation of ‘experiencing and expressing life’, and his belief in the personal importance of the literary cycle… “How that gives you the strength to push through and carry on,” he explained.
“Then, when Ms. Drury said thanks as I was packing up my books and papers, the students gave me a fulsome applause!”
“You’re sure it wasn’t just because you were leaving?”
He ignored the quip.
“I suspect it was in recognition of a determined effort by someone hopelessly out of his depth. Appreciation for his refusal to give up – like cheering on a water buffalo who’s blundered in a pit of quicksand.
“I do believe they were telling me to keep trying.”
Not that they’d want me to book another performance before the end of their last year in high school, he thought. But perhaps to inflict myself on the Generation Alphas, who will soon be occupying their seats in Room 215… or is it 2153/4?
“I have to say, daunting as it remains, the thought of having another go appeals to me,” he admitted to Maria. “And I sort of hope I’m invited!”
They hugged, then got on with the business of preparing dinner.
Toward the end of our session Dr. Nolan said, “It would help if we knew what your daily routines and rituals are, Bob. Don’t you think?”
He has a way of doing that… inviting me to approve every next step in our ‘journey’ so it will be my fault as much as his if we get lost in the metaphorical forest or I walk off a cliff. I suppose I could have said, ‘No way. I’m paying you to get me out of this mess!’ But that’s not how things work.
Besides, I’m not paying him; my boss is. It’s one of the ‘employee benefits’ we lucky clones at college receive for dedicating our souls eight hours a day to the education of a cadre of snotty rich kids. ‘Education?’ That’s a laugh. I could just as easily teach a bunch of baboons the intricacies and nuances of English Literature.
The ‘mess’ I’m talking about occurred three months ago, when I shoved Lenny Hertz and he tripped over the coffee table in the staff room. He bruised his elbow, a small price to pay for his crude arrogance. I apologized and helped him up, but he lodged a complaint anyway and the verdict turned out to be anger management counselling with Dr. Nolan.
It’s my penchant for ritual that got me into trouble, he believes… or rather, he’s nudging me toward that belief. The sessions last an hour, the conclusions marked by his hummingbird alarm. When the hummingbird zooms through the room – an audio avatar emitted by an app on his iPhone – we are supposed to sum up our day’s progress, and prepare for the next session. Dr. Nolan always smiles when the hummingbird hovers, as if he’s imagining it landing on his shoulder.
I hate the hummingbird, because it reminds me where I’m at, and why, and what we’ve talked about during the last hour. I imagine it hovering next to my ear, sticking its pointy beak inside, and sucking all the private nectar out of my brain.
The objective of my ‘conversations’ with Doc Nolan is for me to become aware of the ‘detonators’ that caused me to shove Hertz, and to be able to ‘defuse’ the situation when – not if – it recurs. His logic goes something like this: I am ritual bound; my rituals are sacred; if anyone makes fun of my rituals, anger builds; if, like Hertz, they don’t stop making fun when I signal my displeasure, I am likely to explode.
My theory is much shorter: Hertz is an asshole.
Doc Nolan says we have to ‘unwrap’ the meaning of words like that. They are the labels we slap onto our ‘perceived enemies’ to avoid having to them becoming real people. “What you have to do, Bob, is become aware of the human beings who have become the antagonists in your life’s stories, and deal with them on a mature level.
“Make yourself bigger than them, then invite them to grow up with you.”
In our fist sessions Doc Nolan and I reconstructed the day leading up to the staff room incident. In retrospect he forgave me. Said I’m not alone, when it comes to living by rituals. “Everybody has ‘em,” he proclaimed. “We like to think of ourselves as ‘free spirits’ and ‘spontaneous’, that’s how the marketeers portray us, but truth is, as soon as we start analyzing our lives we find they are made up of routines, which are actually the stem cells of ritual.”
That assurance in place, he said: “Describe a typical morning, Bob.”
Anger management training is not so much an exercise in healing as a perverted form of punishment, it occurred to me in that moment. For session after session you are forced to decide between the truth, or denial, or silence, or a lie. And you realize gradually that you’re not going to shove dickhead Hertz next time, because you’ll have to go through this kind of counselling torture again, and again… that you’d rather leave him to his smug taunting and go put your fist through a bathroom mirror or something…
“Bob?” Doc Nolan coached.
The first thing I do in the morning is look at Maria, lying next to me, and thank her for being there, and hope I will be able to make her happy. I have to confess, I’m not the best of husbands. I’m boring, I know. And weird in so many ways. And resentful of Maria’s interminable efforts to ‘liven me up’ and get me ‘eating healthy.’ The least I can do is love her, and renew my vow to make her smile, keep my love from becoming threadbare.
“And after that?” Doc Nolan prodded, murmuring in that tone counsellors have mastered, a subtle frequency that sounds like benediction emanating from somewhere deep inside your own brain.
Lordy, I found myself mocking. If only I had a couch to lie on.
“Bob?”
“After that, I hang ten and stretch for the sky.”
“Hang ten?”
I sit on the edge of our mattress, a gigantic aerial raft of memory foam, my tootsies dangling like pulled roots seeking ground, my crown expanding toward the overarching light. And there, in equipoise between being and not, I imagine the dawn of another day.
“You do this every day?”
I have to admit, his surprise gave me a fillip of pleasure. The thought of my own counsellor thinking of me as a nut case made me feel special. I pictured him at his next mind-benders’ convention, offering me up a an example of weird and wonderful that would surely outdo the tales of his colleagues…
And my feet hadn’t yet touched the floor.
“Then what?”
The rites of brushing teeth, letting out the cat, shuffling into the kitchen and getting the coffee brewing seemed hardly worth mentioning, although none of them are routine, now I think about it. Routine is the things that happen on autopilot. You’re not actually there. I’m a priest at my bathroom sink ablutions; a prophet, sending Rusty out into his dangerous world; a saint, counting scoops into the French press for the coffee I’ll offer Maria in bed. But Doc Nolan wouldn’t appreciate that. Those daily chores are too ordinary to parlay into anything verging on madness. Quirky, perhaps, but in unexceptional ways.
What he was really rooting around for, like an earthworm in my gut, were the five affirmations, and that clumsy ballet I perform in their honour every day, when I think no one’s watching… Maria excepted. She has intruded on my ritual often enough to know about it. We laugh when she refers to it as the platypus’s dance of the sugar plum faery; laugh even harder when I accuse her of being unkind to platypuses.
“The five affirmations?”
Value Life; Complete the Circle; Give with Joy & Grace; Receive with Gratitude and Appreciation; Experience and Express the Tetrahedron. I sometimes wish I was a hologram so I could enact those things with the fluid movement they deserve, a whirlwind of flashing light, limbs spiralling like constellations, toes and head axles of a universe without boundaries.
But I’m only human, and Hertz caught me unawares, doing my clumsy dance in tune with the final chant of the fifth affirmation. I was balanced on one foot, the other leg stretched out behind me, arms reaching toward the horizon to give and receive. Spirit is the fourth corner of The Tetrahedron, and I was lost in its meanings, so immersed that I didn’t notice Hertz suddenly there, behind me in the staff room.
I knew Dr. Nolan couldn’t possibly understand. At best he could misunderstand and misrepresent. “Spirit consists of four definitions that are beyond comprehension,” I explained.
“Go on.”
“Infinity, Eternity, Omniscience, Omnipotence.”
“God?” he guessed.
“Not God,” I corrected.
“What then?”
“Not God,” I repeated.
I admit it was wrong for me to have shoved Hertz, even though it wasn’t really much more than a nudge, which he exaggerated into something more dramatic. But the idea of Not God next to the reality of Hertz was just too much for me to take. I confess, I wanted his smug, leering face out of my sight and I won’t forgive myself for that, even though it wasn’t a sin, it was just being stupid.
So I only get to imagine the photo I might have taken of him in front of the clattering bird he had once flown on its metal wings, me behind the camera, Dad looking impossibly old and feeble, but heroic just the same. I only get to remember that touristy shot as it might have been, an explicit moment where – with the click of a shutter – we got to forgive each other our complicities, our sins, our armageddons.
The earliest evidence of my existence isn’t preserved as a proper memory. It’s been reconstructed based on family photos, blurry black and whites captured by an Eastman Kodak ‘Hawkeye’.
Dad’s never in those seminal shots because he’s the guy working the camera, and I don’t figure in many or them either because my older brothers Frank and Kevin were the stars along with my sister Natalie.
There’s one of me in a baby carriage, parked on a sidewalk, my face wrinkled and scrunched up like I’m getting ready to howl. If I try really hard, I can imagine Dad hunched over the view finder, divining just the right moment to trigger the shutter and capture another chemically rendered pattern of light for posterity… this one of his prune-faced youngest.
What was going on inside his head? I wonder. What sequence in the charged neural plasma determined the exact moment the hologram of me got burned into the photo emulsion? And what was mother thinking when she scribed on the flip side of that archival image: “Arthur in his carriage at Portage la Prairie.”
Then there’s a shot of us kids and Mum posed in front of the family Christmas tree, taken in some living-room I can’t for the life of me remember. Frank and Kevin are playing with their shiny-new truck and grader; Natalie looks petulant and pouty, as if she already knows Santa’s never going to bring her exactly what she wants; Mum looks like she’s staring into the headlight of an oncoming car. I’m toddling in front of the montage, slightly to the side, looking doubtful – as if I haven’t yet figured out who this guy Santa really is, and why I’m getting presents and having my picture taken in his name.
Dad wasn’t much of a family man back then. I suspect he took the photo as a form of misrepresentation. But since the Hawkeye didn’t have a timer, he couldn’t insert himself into the happy montage – could only claim that he’d been there in absentia. How would he have fit in anyway: still young enough not to have succumbed entirely to the dreariness and pettiness of it all… to believe if you drank hard enough and laughed loud enough, maybe things would turn out alright. If he could have swapped himself into the scene quicker than the speed of light, I think he would have struck an intrepid explorer’s pose, looking over the top of the camera’s infallible lens into a future none of us could either foresee or forestall.
The first shot I can actually remember being in with Dad was taken on the edge of the Atlantic. The family trekked to Sydney every summer, our pilgrimage to Dad’s ancestral home. Our favourite destination from there was Kennington Cove, about an hour south, just past Louisbourg. To us kids the waves rushed in like liquid mountains, as if the God we still believed in had grabbed the far edge of the flat world and was shaking it like a sheet. Frank, Kevin and Natalie would have been out there in the surf, but I was too young. So I ended up in Dad’s arms. Mum must have snapped the picture.
His right arm is wrapped around me. I’m clinging to him and squirming at the same time, my left hand planted on his neck. It’s hard to tell if Dad is really aware of me or if he’s successfully ignoring my struggles, but I like to think we’re connected somehow. He is aware of the camera all right, striking a relaxed pose, leaning against a boulder, the ocean roiling in the background, hissing up and down the strand.
That photo sucks me in like the Atlantic’s undertow. Whenever I see it I am suddenly there, at Kennington Cove; held tight in my father’s arms; my chubby baby’s hand splayed against his neck and cheek. I mustn’t forget that. Despite everything else that would happen, I have to recall the tight muscles of his neck, the rough stubble of his cheek, him peering ahead as if there might be something dangerous, lurking out there on the bluffs, me fascinated by the breakers collapsing onto the beach behind, where Frank, Kevin and Natalie frolicked.
Family photos are counterfeit memories, reproductions of light that has long-since been absorbed by the landscape or bled off into unalterable dimensions of space. We preserve them in battered valises, in dusty attics, in houses moved away from long ago. They never get thrown out; instead, we simply leave them behind for someone else to deal with. They molder away in dark attics, forever waiting to be discovered. Like crematory urns, they become repositories that reassure us simply by existing.
It’s the images never taken that define us – the photos not allowed.
I don’t remember a single photo of Mum and Dad holding hands. There’s a picture somewhere of Mum sitting on a grassy slope, her skirt hiked up above her shapely thighs. She looks directly into the camera, laughing at the man who would be her husband. On the back, in her neat script: “Taken near London, during the war.”
Odd, we still call it that: ‘The War.’ As if applying the title to any other of the murderous cataclysms that have bloodied and tortured the planet in the last six decades would be a misuse of language. Ten billion lifetimes since Hiroshima and Nagasaki supposedly put a full-stop to hostilities, and we still look back on that global paroxysm as present and playing itself out in the here-and-now.
I can’t be sure why there are no photos in our family albums of Mum and Dad holding hands. Never really thought much about it. I have a slight aversion to hand-holding myself – as if it’s a species of weakness, an act of self-delusion, like offering a stuffed toy to someone waiting in line, patting him on the back and saying: “It’s okay kid, everything’s going to be just fine.”
There are other pictures of Mum and Dad during the war: the one taken on their wedding day, Dad in uniform, clowning around, making a face, his hat turned sideways on his head, Mum laughing, leaning into him, his arm around her shoulder; My sister in a pram, somewhere in London, the lineaments of our shared genetic code showing clearly, even then, in her frown.
But there’s not a single image that breaches the unofficial secrets act. Not one that breaks the unspoken code adopted by sane men whose job it was to fly over the blighted, blasted cities of Europe and drop pulverizing incendiaries onto the innocents below: children, women, men. Dad never talked about it, so I invented that period of his life – his hands gripping controls, nudging throttles, easing the lumbering bird of vengeance up into the sky.
I once asked him to accompany me to the Royal Canadian Air Force museum, where the preserved carcass of a Lancaster bomber sits on display, as if it were some breed of mechanical pterodactyl. He avoided the topic at first, then turned me down flat. Mum said he was afraid he might have forgotten too much about those times, what it was like to fly those ancient machines and might have been embarrassed.
I think it was because he didn’t want toremember.
So I only get to imagine the photo I might have taken of him in front of the clattering bird he had once flown on its metal wings, me behind the camera, Dad looking impossibly old and feeble, but heroic just the same. I only get to remember that touristy shot as it might have been, an explicit moment where – with the click of a shutter – we got to forgive each other our complicities, our sins, our armageddons.
At Dad’s funeral they couldn’t get the hands right. The way they were arranged on his chest, against the blue serge of his blazer, under the Royal Canadian Air Force crest, was… and there’s no other language for it… fake, grotesque.
Rigor mortis sets in about 12 hours after death. The muscles tighten around the bone, jerking the limbs into a sort of fist, which is unable to let go because the enzymes that normally complete the cycle of clutching and releasing are no longer being produced by the body. It remains in that state about 48 hours, then as decomposition sets in, the body relaxes, accepting – it would seem – that it has truly died. Dad’s hands never did relax, so the mortician arranged them as best he could, the fingers meshed like cogs in a gear-train.
His face looked almost normal. You could tell there was something unnatural about it, like it might have belonged in a wax museum, but at least you could imagine it once having been alive. The hands are what I remember, though, the message they conveyed in their involuntary language of signs.
University was wasted on me, pretty much, but one thing I did learn was how to throw together a pretty mean Eagle Brand cherry cheese pie. That was my specialty, laid claim to as my signature dessert on the potluck circuit.
For those who’ve never tasted one, Eagle Brand cherry cheese pie can only be described in superlatives: scoop the concentrated flavour from a can of Eagle Brand sweetened, condensed milk into a bowl; add a squeeze or two of lemon from one of those plastic bulbs, shaped like the real thing; glop the whole concoction into a pre-baked Graham Cracker crust; top with canned cherries – glossy-red as Marilyn Monroe’s lips; shove your culinary creation into the fridge (not the oven, stupid) et Voila!
In my day that passed for an enlightened-male version of ‘adept in the kitchen’, that and – when occasion warranted – an easy-bake lasagna. Whenever I got invited to a potluck, and on the odd occasion even when I hadn’t been, I would bring along an Eagle Brand cherry cheese pie – usually one whipped up fresh that very afternoon.
Between potlucks I lived pretty much on coffee, Kraft Dinner and cognac – the three essentials of a wannabe bohemian diet. I rarely entertained. People would drop by, we’d sit around and ‘rap’ aimlessly, maybe eat out if we could scrape together enough moolah… but entertaining, I had learned after a couple of awkward experiments, was out of the question. My place was too small.
The kitchenette gave way with no clear demarcation to a combined dining-living-bed-study room. The bathroom, located at the other end of the kitchenette, just past the stove, I shared with Chloe, a second-year anthropology student, who rented the suite opposite mine. Instead of being fitted with locks, the bathroom doors – one on each side, opening outward – were secured when ‘in-use’ by a hawser, hooked to mine on one end, hers on the other… pretty much a failsafe system unless you both happened to be groping your way to the toilet at the exact same 3 a.m. instant to piss or puke or whatever.
Our experiences in student digs eventually coagulated into my dissertation on the nebulous quality of privacy, which I described as ‘a state defined by the negative space surrounding it, and the intrusions that ultimately destroy it, friends being the worst culprits…’ To that I would add, ‘…inconsiderate friends, who have confirmed me in the belief that the very notion of friendship is, in the end, self-contradictory…’ a sort of agreement intended to make pleasant the mutual annihilation we all engage in, trying – and inevitably failing – to achieve reconciliation en route to the ultimate vanishing point that is our common destiny.
As for society, that’s nothing but friendship writ large, riddled with lies and steeped in deception. At least with friends-in-the-flesh the possibility of innocence and occasional respite exists, something society does not permit. Even so, the likelihood of betrayal can only be avoided in the illusion of an afterlife, never in the here-and-now. In the here-and-now it’s quite likely better and certainly more productive to have more enemies than friends.
Chloe was one of the few exceptions to that somewhat skewed description of human relations. It’s hard not to be intimate – in a friendly way – when your bathroom doors are connected by an umbilicus of rope.
But I must continue to digress. Let’s take the sanctum sanctorum of dreamless sleep as an example of how evanescent the state of untroubled inner repose really is. Dreamless sleep can be exploded at any moment by: a telephone’s alarmed ringing; the fat guy next door firing up his flatulent Harley; the dog jumping up on the bed and scratching his fleas; a terrorist attack; the sudden manifestation of an uncalled for dream about things as impossible as they are horrific, or embarrassing, or both; the sensation of choking on your own vomit (which unfortunately did not awaken Father when his time came, a fact Mother interprets as divine retribution, even though she doesn’t believe in ‘all that crap’ about God).
There’s any number of irruptions that can burst the sanctuary of dreamless sleep. My favourite is Chloe spooning close, her familiar forearm and hand cradled in my waist.
As a for-instance from my BC (Before Chloe) past, I was wakened one morning to the sound of workmen jack hammering cobbles in the courtyard below my University Boulevard digs. Normally I would have accepted this intrusion with the intense equanimity of a Zen master, aware that the stings, itches and bites of existence are mere illusions within the equipoise of my standing cosmic wave. But I had a fucking hangover to sleep off and their harsh rattling reminded me painfully of the fact, so I jumped out of bed, marched over to the kitchen window and bellowed “Fuck you!” into the irritated dawn, then slammed the casement shut. The glass shattered, cascading into the netherworld, adding an ethereal, tinkling contrapuntal to the gruff laughter of the crew down there.
As another for instance, take the ever present threat of Aphrodite, of her bare footed dance and its accompanying music, insinuating itself into the folds of dreamless sleep. If you’ve never seen her, if you’ve only ever been enticed by her cheap, designer avatars, you won’t have a clue what I’m talking about. That’s okay, Mac. I don’t mind being considered crazy; quite the opposite… what scares me is the likelihood of becoming sane. Aphrodite is a sigh, a scent, a brilliance in your neurones, the antithesis of sleep. She has the peculiar and deeply disturbing quality of being able to awaken you even in moments when you think you’re already fully awake.
Janice, although less annoyingly intense than a pack of Neanderthals with jack hammers, and not exactly Aphrodite in the flesh, did invade my private space with her peculiar charms. The jangle of her bangles aroused me in waking and sleeping moments; I sensed the swaying of her hips the same way a shark feels the throbbing of a ship’s engines propagating through ocean undercurrents from miles away. She was enrolled in the same 100-level Sociology course as me. Turned out she lived just a couple of blocks away with a friend, and that the two of them were having a little get-together, and of course I was welcome… they’d heard about my Cherry-O-Cheese Pie, and asked me to ‘bake’ one for them.
It shouldn’t have been so easy. I remember thinking: There should have been some reticence shown by one or the other of us, even if the invite didn’t signify anything other than friendliness, politeness, perhaps even a wretched variant of pity. That I desired Janice on a visceral level couldn’t be denied, which in my case meant a form of atonement was required, a spark to ignite the sex laden vapour swelling dangerously inside my skull, into a poetic vision.
That she had responded to my incipient urge could reasonably have been predicted under the first law of sexual thermodynamics, which states: Chemistry asserts itself no matter how awkward the circumstance, and in inverse proportion to human resistance – all we can do is learn to manage its chain reactions with some degree of decorum and grace. Aplomb, I think it’s called. I would eventually do a dissertation on the relationship between misogyny and a pathological fear in some men of Aphrodite’s power. I got a fucking F for that effort, I think because my professor – a woman – felt it inappropriate for a being with a penis to express that kind of view.
Janice and her friend Corinne co-existed in a space not much bigger than my own, but with the addition of a bedroom, separated from the dining-living-study room by a tie-dyed silk curtain. “Whoever gets tired first, or needs some privacy, gets the bedroom; the survivor sleeps on the futon,” Janice said, patting the cushion between us. Aside from this musical-beds arrangement their mode of living seemed similar to my own.
The evening began with the two of them making a fuss over their new friend, then teasing me about my dessert offering – an anticipated segment of the Cherry-O-Cheese Pie ceremony was the amused commentary it invariably drew from hosts and fellow guests alike. Wisecracks about its caloric content, diabetic tendencies, and the level of culinary skill required to ‘bake’ it were de rigueur and I received them graciously, overplaying my hapless bachelor role shamelessly. I hadn’t cottoned on yet to the fact that savvy women – the kind of women I liked – might amuse themselves with a kitchen bumbler, but the day was dawning when they’d only get serious with a guy who could actually cook, or offer the reciprocity of dining out… frequently and preferably expensively.
Even before I knew I was serious, my romantic inclinations toward Janice had flopped, which tinged her acceptance later that evening of an invitation to dinner at my place with a hint of malicious treachery.
The centrepiece of their soiree was a chocolate fondue, which Corinne set on the table ceremoniously. I found fondue etiquette amusing. It evoked the image of a polite tribe, stabbing cubes of pineapple and wedges of strawberry with forks the length of surrogate spears then popping the boiled victims of their civilized savagery into their mouths between words, in the midst of sentences. These morsels they washed down with quaffs of wine, gulps of beer, or sips of coffee for the abstemious.
Conversation raged. “What’s your major?” “Did you catch the Joni Mitchell concert?” “He’s such an idiot, I hate his classes!” “Where did you get that scarf? It’s beautiful!” The dinner party babble drifted in and out of consciousness, filling the interstices between Janice and me, helping us ignore the tension. We chatted with each other, flitted about, engaging others, but no matter where in the room we were, we remained moths, locked in each other’s brilliance… or so I thought. Problem was we’d got beyond small talk too quickly and now things were getting awkward. The urgency of the situation couldn’t be broached around a fondue pot with a paper plate of no-bake cherry cheese pie balanced on your knees.
“Got to go,” I said right after dessert.
Janice looked surprised.
Who can say what triggers the question – what precise balance of mental and emotional self-delusion results in a positive read, leading to the conclusion that a woman is receptive. I’m not an expert in such things. I don’t have cause, or the need to brag. All I know is the moment seemed right, so before Janice’s look of surprise at my sudden departure morphed into a frown, I invited her to dinner at my place, then waited for her response with the unwavering anticipation of a male praying mantis.
She looked even more surprised, her eyes widening like a cat’s. She could simply have declined – mid-terms, fatigue, a previous engagement, no reason at all – but instead she said: “Sure, do you mind if I bring a friend?”
“Corinne?”
“No, he couldn’t make it tonight. His name is Paul, I think you’ll like him.”
~~~
The thing about Cherry-O-Cheese Pie was its simplicity. Everything needed to make one was listed on the labels of select tins of Eagle Brand sweetened condensed milk. Mother stapled one of those labels to a page in the scrapbook where she collected her recipes – in a manner of speaking, she passed it on to me. I say “in a manner of speaking” because she still keeps that scrapbook on its shelf in the cupboard above the stove – the one where you can only fit odds and ends because the oven hood’s ventilating duct takes up almost all the room, and because the cupboard’s hard to reach, especially when you’re five-foot-four in circumference as well as height. Before Dad finally did get driven out of the house, to the room he rented on the other side of town, he took to calling Mum ‘the human beach ball’. Never to her face – except that one time – but for the benefit of us boys.
I suppose what he was trying to do in his underhanded way was warn us against the hardships of marrying the likes of our own mother – perhaps against the institution of marriage in any of its various forms, unless you happened to be such a prude that you considered it a pre or post-requisite to the ‘sex act’ in any of its diverse forms. “Jerking off; no hands” was my father’s final word on the subject, a pronouncement he also avoided repeating in front of Mother.
She never gave me her archetypical version of the Eagle Brand cherry cheese pie recipe but did pick through the tins of Eagle Brand sweetened condensed milk, stacked on the shelf at Steinberg’s, and find a label with the recipe on it. “Here,” she said, plunking it down on the kitchen table during one of my visits home. “You’ve seen me make it often enough, all you have to do is follow the instructions. You can’t go wrong.”
Mother was right, too, as she usually is when it comes to things that simply require doing: washing a floor; hanging laundry to dry; picking kale from the back garden; making an Eagle Brand cherry cheese pie; taking out the trash. If Mum ever had an imagination, she got over it young, like so many other things children of the Great Depression had to cure themselves of at an early age. Dad used to talk about the Depression as if it was a thing of the past, only existing in faulty memories (‘brains like scratched records’, was how he put it) and dusty photo albums; Mum perpetuated it, lived it, the Eagle Brand cherry cheese pie fitting in as an ‘affordable luxury’ for us kids.
~~~
Funny, no matter how often I see a recipe I can never remember what goes into the bowls or in what order to coagulate into a Cherry-O-Cheese Pie. Mum never has to thumb through her book of favourite recipes; she just needs to know it’s up there in her cupboard, the yellowing formula for cherry cheese pie pressed between its pages, to carry out the Cherry-O instructions perfectly every time. I never got round to it, but did think of doing a dissertation on The Sanctity of Belief, inspired by Mum’s unerring certainty when it came to Cherry-O-Cheese Pie.
My shortcoming in that regard might possibly be considered an excuse for knocking on my side of Chloe’s bathroom door the day after Janice accepted my invitation to dinner – if, in fact, an excuse was needed. Maybe I really didn’t have all the ingredients it took to make an Eagle Brand cherry cheese pie in my cupboard.
“Hello?” Chloe said.
“Hi Chlo, mind if I disturb you?”
She laughed, just like always when I used that line, the same way a car starts when you twist the key in the ignition, so I pushed the door open and stuck my head into her kitchen.
“I’ve got company coming over tonight and I’m making cheese pie and lasagna,” I said.
The layout of Chloe’s apartment mirrored mine, but that’s where the similarity ended. She kept her place organized and tidy: pots and pans hung on pegs beneath the cupboard opposite; the sink standing empty, a washcloth folded neatly over its faucet; the linoleum countertops uncluttered and wiped clean.
Pictures hung in groupings on every available surface. In the kitchen, beyond the pots and pans, a collection of food and farm images: still lifes of fruit and vegetables; a medieval feast; Third-World farmers scratching at baked hardpan with sticks; a woman’s glossed lips about to kiss the rim of a steaming latte cup.
The dining-living-bed-study room’s south wall featured landscapes: a vineyard sunning on a steep Italian hillside; a lighthouse standing guard on a windswept British Columbia coast; a ruined stone cottage in the Peak District of England’s Midlands… scenes where only the evidence of human habitation remained, the occupiers of the land having been vaporized or beamed up en mass to some undisclosed Nirvana in somebody else’s dream. Chloe said she wanted to go to all the places on her walls.
The east and north walls, which bracketed her sofa-bed, formed a sort of shrine to the world’s religions: a poster of Salvador Dali’s Christ floating horizontally into the vortex of gravity; a gaudy bas-relief Krishna, seated on what looked to be a rustic throne, raising his pipe to his blue lips; Buddha, cross-legged, hands folded into his lap, above what would be the head of Chloe’s bed if the sofa was unfolded; Shiva dancing on the scattered bones of New York City’s Wall Street; Venus emerging from the Aegean Sea on her clamshell.
“So who’s coming over?” Chloe asked.
I stepped from the bathroom into the kitchen. She sat at the dining room table, surrounded by piles of books, a binder opened in front of her. Chloe peered out from the encircling literature as if it was a fortress, she being the guardian of its secrets.
“A friend I met in Sociology class the other day and her boyfriend.”
Chloe raised her eyebrows and smiled inscrutably – one of those smiles that might have said, I know something about you that you don’t… or then again, might have signified, I want you to think I know something about you that you don’t. The older I get, the more I’ve learned to love that enigmatic smile of hers. I see it all the time – am caught off guard by haunting memories when she’s not around – as if we were embracing, and she was smiling over my shoulder, her sigh a whisper in my ear, a sound imbued with deeper meaning than words can ever tell.
“Would you like to join us?” I asked.
“Do you want me to?”
“Yes!”
Her smile broadened into something more emphatic. I blushed. Could tell she knew everything – every fucking thing!
“Sure,” she said. Easy as that, as if neither of us had ever entertained a moment’s hesitation or tinge of doubt… as if there had never been a need for me to think up a hypothetical missing ingredient – the additive that was supposed to make my dinner with Janice and her beau complete.
~ The End ~
Hope you enjoyed Cheese Pie with Cherries on Top. There’s more in The Feel of Gravity collection.
Taken out of context, I can understand how that plea might trigger thoughts of collapsed mines, bombed out apartment buildings, avalanches or any number of natural and man… er, human made catastrophes. You could add car crashes to the list, strokes, falls off ladders, the tally goes on.
That’s not what I intended, though, lounging in one of the blue plastic Cape Cod chairs out on our back deck, watching the progress of another home run for God arcing through the infinity of blue sky over Mount Brenton.
“You weren’t thinking at all!” was how Ashley put it. “You scared the crap out of me!”
Actually, I’d been thinking about a lot of things, before Plato came along and jumped onto my lap. Good thoughts, mostly, about how lucky I am to be living my retirement era in Chemainus. As suburbs go, Cook street rates pretty good. It’s got a crime rate that flat lines somewhere near zero, there’s not a single traffic light in town, strangers wave and say hello on the street and in the aisles of the 49th Parallel Grocery Store, and it’s located in the mild temperate zone of Southeast Vancouver Island – accurately fabled as a bit of paradise afloat on the Salish Sea.
There’s some irredeemably grouchy types who grumble in their coffee mugs down at Nic’s Café that the best thing about Muraltown is it’s within easy driving distance of Nanaimo in one direction, Victoria in the other. I say to them: If you can afford a patch of turf in either of those two places bigger than a dish cloth, go for it. I’m happy where I am.
I was especially happy to be out on the back deck that day.
Not that I don’t like company. I do. And I really like Serena, even if she is smarter than me and can’t help delving excitedly into the details about her research into ‘mitochondrial DNA and the role it plays in aging and degenerative diseases’. She’s ‘good people’, our niece. And my wife’s good people too. But put them in the same room, and you might as well stick your head inside a beehive, the way they natter. A quiet guy like me can’t get a word, or even a thought in edgewise.
That’s why I retreated out onto the back deck. Once they’d talked their ways through the agony of childbirth, how to get your lemon poppyseed muffins out of the tray, the best deals to be had at the hospital auxiliary thrift shop, and so on, I decided it was time to take out the recycling and stop off on the way back for a snooze in the waning light of a balmy spring afternoon, while they went about the task of sorting through the family photo albums.
“Oh look, there’s you uncle Martin, fifty pound lighter, with hair and no wrinkles!” “Aw! There’s Panda. Remember the time he ate your socks and we had to watch like expectant parents for him to poop them out.” “Auntie Ash, you were such a hippie. I love that dress, and the army boots are ever so chic! Ha, ha, ha!” “The Half-Lemon! Oh My God, we actually drove around in a yellow VW beetle? Look at the price of gas… 48 cents a gallon! Christ, they don’t even mint pennies anymore, and gas is measured out by the litre.”
Even though I was happy for them, I have to admit to being pinpricked by envy, watching Ash and Serena babble on like partners at a quilting bee. I’m not a feminist or anything, but I was thinking, if more men could get themselves into that head space, there’d be fewer Putins in the world, and the people of the Ukraine might not be suffering through a senseless armageddon, watching their cities getting pummelled into dust like 21st Century Sodoms and Gomorrahs. I’m ashamed of my male gender sometimes. Wish I could have a bit less Y in my jeans.
We have strange thoughts in that fantastical zone between awake and asleep. There I was, reclining in the Cape Cod out on the back deck, the brilliant sunshine lighting up the inside of my eyelids like lava lamps when, plop, Plato landed on my lap.
Cat’s paws are the closest thing I can imagine to an angel alighting… until they begin kneading that is, their claws tugging at your clothing and pricking your skin. Plato circled round for a couple of laps, like he was tamping down the grass on his vast savanna, then settled in and started purring. I sat perfectly still, trying to make my bony thighs soft as down filled cushions. The rumble of his contentment echoed through me. You have to feel a cat’s purr to really appreciate it, let it permeate consciousness.
Please understand, Plato is not a lap cat. He’s aloof, a strutter through our lives, more likely to show you the pink petunia when you make a move to pat him than to rub up against your leg. Usually he stumps off like you’re beneath his dignity. Ash and I are lap-cat-people, though, yearning for that mystical connection between cat’s fur and human skin, and that reassuring deep vibrato of feline contentment. He was deigning to settle onto my lap for a snooze that afternoon. But lap time with Plato its like cuddling a land mine. Don’t touch, don’t move, don’t even breathe, or he’ll be gone.
Ash and I share the joys of those moments as if we’d experienced a second coming. I often wonder what it is we’re missing in our lives, that we hanker so desperately after our cat’s erratic affection? We have each other, isn’t that enough? Our death defying circle of friends? Our kids, brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces, our dog Sophie, neighbours who wave hello wherever we go in Muraltown? Isn’t that enough?
Not unless Plato loves us back, I guess.
How could I be so selfish as to not share that glorious interlude with Ash? So, risking all, I slipped my fingers like a bomb disposal expert into the hip pocket of my ever tightening jeans, pinched the top of my mobile and slid it ever so gingerly out from under Plato. He was still purring when the phone came to life and I pointed it at him in camera mode. His enlarged rump filled the bottom of the frame; my hiking boots, propped on the deck table, the top; the bridge of my tingling legs stretched in between.
‘Click’ went the camera. Plato purred on. I dared not breathe a sigh of relief.
Kids can thumb in a text quicker than ‘u or i’ can let go a fart. I punched my mobile’s runes the same way you’d poke at an elevator button, my pudgy index finger hitting the wrong key half the time, so that I’d have to go back and try again, and again, hissing like kettle too long on the hob. But eventually I got the message into the allotted space beneath the distorted image of Plato on my lap, then zip, off it went.
‘Help! I can’t move my legs!’ it said.
Panic is instantaneous contagion. It zaps the collective consciousness of a room like the sudden glare of a flood light. It’s another sort of bomb, its shockwaves radiating out into the neural network, forcing adrenaline to squirt like juice from a squeeze bottle into the guts of its infected tribe. On the one hand, panic gets us moving before the bus runs us over; on the other, it doesn’t give us time to think. The autonomic nervous system kicks in and we’re jerked around like puppets. If we’re lucky enough to survive, we analyze ‘the event’ after the fact, picking apart the threads of mayhem.
My theory is we’re predisposed to panic. The Doomsday Clock is always ticking closer and closer to midnight, shaving off half the remaining time, then half again, until the calculus of destruction tells us there’s nothing, no measurable allotment of milliseconds left between us and…
Duck, cover and hold! We don’t want to hear that bomb go off!
Ash, for example, is predisposed by images of me snacking on potato chips and sneaking chocolate bars, for the imminent possibility of a heart attack; she has witnessed my shuffle-footed stumbling often enough to anticipate my tumbling down any convenient flight of stairs; tick, tick, tick, the clock keeps on ticking, until…
‘Bing!’ The text message slid into the corner of her screen, without the cute, explanatory photo of Plato snuggled in my lap. It shouted: “Help! I can’t move my legs!”
So there I sat, swaddled in the joy of Plato’s fidgety affection, while Ash and Serena dashed about the house looking for the corner I had collapsed into, or the staircase I’d toppled down, expecting to find me dead, my finger still touching the screen after I’d shot off my desperate expiring plea for assistance.
“You scared the crap out of me!” Ash shouted, slapping me on the shoulder hard enough to trigger some kind of cardiac episode. “Serena was about to dial 911!”
Thoroughly harangued, I was left standing on the deck by my two saviours, who marched back into the house through the sliding door, shaking their heads, words like ‘inconsiderate’ and ‘stupid’ reverberating in their wake. I turned round, and looked wistfully at Plato, inscrutable as ever, purring away. “You little shit,” I said. “I really do love you.”
~ The End ~
Hope you enjoyed The Cat’s Ass Trophy. There’s more in The Feel of Gravity collection.
Click up above for a Video Reading Excerpted from the children’s novella, Flibber T. Gibbet, this story-within-a-story sees a quick-thinking squirrel trying to avoid being eaten by a predatory, but not unsympathetic owl.
Ptero was going about his business one evening, searching for nuts, berries and tasty insects to eat, when – whoosh – Bubo, the owl swept down and snatched him up in her talons.
He struggled and squirmed, but she held him fast in her powerful grip, and he knew he could not survive long. He had to think quickly if he was ever to see his nest again.
‘Bubo!’ he gasped. ‘Bubo, why would you bother eating a scrawny little squirrel like me. Winter has just ended, and I’m not much more than a skeleton right now. Let me go, and I promise to return to the very branch you snatched me from in three month’s time. Then I will be plump and delicious, and make a mouthful… er, a beakful.’
Because squirrels always keep their word, Bubo agreed to Ptero’s request, and returned on the appointed evening to find his prey, plump and well-fed, on the same branch where they’d first met. Bubo swooped down and carried him off again.
‘Bubo,’ Ptero pleaded this time. ‘Why would you tear me to pieces and eat me up now, when it is the season I am preparing to make many meals for you?’
‘Explain yourself, and be quick about it, for I am hungry,’ Bubo demanded.
‘It’s springtime, and I must mate. Soon there will be many of me scampering amongst the branches for you to catch and eat. Three more months, and I promise to return so you can me carry off a third time. But by then there will be many more like me for you to feast on.’
To Bubo this made good sense, so he returned Ptero to their favourite branch. ‘I shall see you in three months my little friend, then – sadly – I will have to gobble you up, for that is my nature,’ she said as she flew off.
So Ptero met a mate, and they had a family, and after the three months past he returned for Bubo to catch again.
‘What am I to say now,’ Ptero fretted, shivering with fright. He thought, and thought, but no new ideas came to him before Bubo glided silently overhead and snatched him up a third time.
‘So Ptero,’ the owl said as they flew away, ‘what reason are you going to give me tonight to keep me from my dinner?’
Ptero had nothing to offer, so he went limp in Bubo’s talons, closed his eyes, and prepared for his grisly fate.
‘Before I devour you, let me ask a question,’ Bubo said.
Eager to postpone what was surely coming, even for a heartbeat – and I can tell you, a squirrel’s heart beats very quickly when he is afraid – Ptero replied, ‘Please ask, and I will do my best to answer.’
‘What time of year is it, my scrumptious little friend?’
Now, to Ptero this seemed a silly question. But he pretended to be puzzled, and took as many wing beats as he possibly could to answer. ‘It is the season of long days and warm weather,’ he said at last.
‘Indeed,’ Bubo agreed. ‘It is also the season of abundance, is it not, when an owl can catch more food on a single night’s hunt than she could eat in a week.’
‘True,’ Ptero agreed.
‘And what season will arrive in three month’s time?’
‘Why that would be the season of falling leaves and withering fruit.’
‘So what might a wise owl do – and there is no such thing as an owl who-hoo-hoo isn’t wise – what might a wise owl do with a bit of prey, if her stomach and larder were already full, but winter was on its way?’
Ptero hesitated, fearful of making a guess. But he finally screwed up enough courage to say, ‘He might return a little squirrel to its branch and come back again in three month’s time, when his larder and belly will both be empty?’
‘Ah!’ Bubo hooted happily. ‘Excellent idea. Why, if you weren’t shaped like a plump little rodent, I might mistake you for one of my kind.’
And so for many seasons Ptero and Bubo have been getting together for their pleasant flights, and neither has figured out in all that time why one should eat the other. You could even say they’ve become good friends.
