“I don’t have anywhere to live.”
“What?”
“It’s a breakup thing. Can I crash here? Just for a few days?”
“Yes. Sure. Of course you can.” Instantly the chemicals in my body swirled with worry—I’d never had a guest in my place before. All I could think about were petty disruptions of my drab schedule. What was there for breakfast? I like to read my newspaper in silence. What about a key? And the bathroom!
Jeremy said, “Don’t be so stressed. I’m a good guest. I’m clean. I don’t steal. And I’m good at fixing things.”
Leslie and I prepared a bed, cobbling together enough blankets and pillows to make the couch sleepable. Jeremy watched all this in peace. He behaved as if I was making him happy, simply by being me. What a novel idea.
The setting sunlight turned the room a blazing orange colour, and I remember how nice it made my sheets look. Leslie was asking about dinner plans, and when I looked at Jeremy he was shivering. “Jeremy?”
Sweat was pouring from his face.
“Jeremy? What’s wrong?”
“I can’t see.”
“You what?”
“I can’t see.”
“I don’t understand you.”
Leslie said, “Liz, are you sure you need this?”
“Leslie, shut up.” I held him by the shoulders. “Can you see light and darkness?” I waved my hand in front of his eyes. “Anything?”
“No.”
“Jeremy, what’s going on here? Did you do drugs again?”
“No. Last night was an accident.”
He put out his arm and I took him over to the bed we’d made. He told me he was frightened.
“Jeremy, what can I do here? Should we go to the hospital?”
“No.”
“Honey, I don’t know what else to do.” A part of me marvelled that I’d gone from zero to “honey” inside a day.
“Call Jane. I’ll give you the number.”
“Who’s Jane?”
“Call her. You’ll find out.”
He gave me a number and curled up in a fetal ball. I dialed the number, and the woman’s voice on the end made me feel as if I’d caught her in the middle of her favourite TV show. “Yeah?”
“Is this Jane?”
“It is. Who’s this?”
“I’m Liz.”
Through the phone’s receiver I could hear her posture shift. “What about him?”
“He’s here at my place. He checked out of the hospital okay, and we came here to eat and now he’s … blind.”
“Oh jeez …”
“What’s going on?”
“Give me your address. I’m coming over right now.”
“What am I supposed to do? Should I call an ambulance?”
“No. Just stay there. Things’ll be fine. Give me a half-hour. Okay?”
“Are you sure?”
“Trust me.”
So I did.
* * *
I wish modern science would invent a drug that causes time to feel much longer, the way it felt when you were a child. What a great drug. A year would feel like a year, not ten minutes. Your adulthood would feel long and full instead of like some out-of-control carnival ride. Who would want a drug like this? Older people, I’d guess—people whose sense of passing time has hit the acceleration pedal.
And I guess they ought to also invent a drug capable of the opposite effect. Again, there’d be no immediate sensation, but after a year of the drug you’d say, Wow! Has it been a year already? It feels like just yesterday. Who’d take that drug? Me, when I’m lonely. And prisoners with life sentences.
Here’s a third notion: what if you had to choose just one of these drugs? And what if taking one would instantly and forever cancel out any effect you might get from the other? I imagine most of us, myself included, would take the one that makes life feel longer. Which means that a lonely life is still better than no life at all.
I guess alcohol is the closest thing we have to a drug that makes time fly. Cocaine, perhaps? I wouldn’t know about that. Maybe that’s why I’m so mistrustful of booze: it makes time fly in the short term, and in the long term it obliterates memory—which is, of course, a way of erasing time.
And, okay, here’s a confession: I’m a really fun drunk. Some people cry, some become belligerent and some just vanish. But me? I’m a riot. Or so my family tells me—I only ever drink with my family—God forbid I would drink at the office Christmas party.
* * *
That’s my cue to continue the Italian travelogue. About four days into the trip I remained homesick and miserable, and Mr. Burden had run out of his tranquilizers. So we went to a local doctor, which sounds easy, but in Italy in the 1970s it was the equivalent in labour of filing multiple tax returns while running a triathlon. Just finding an open clinic was torture, and once we found one, we had to fill out paperwork and have it stamped. Mr. Burden lost his ability to conceal his crossness as I blubbered away in taxis that stank of mufflers. Finally we met with a pleasant young woman doctor who asked what I’d been taking, and it turns out in Italy it was an over-the-counter medication available everywhere—which was a relief, but boy oh boy, those Italians must be one highly sedated tribe. Our problem then became one of finding an open pharmacy; yet another strike or religious holiday or who knows what had closed everything down. Mr. Burden and I spent an hour in a cab, and ultimately, finding my homesickness drug ate up most of the day—our one free day, the students all exploring Rome on their own.
Once we had pills in hand, Mr. Burden gave me three, made sure I had lire and gave me directions to a restaurant where we were all going to eat a “home-cooked Italian meal” at eight o’clock. Then he abandoned me. I think he just wanted to go find a good cheese shop or a hooker.
I must say that Europe on tranquilizers is a great place. Graffiti-smothered subways felt festive; the lame and elderly animals that back then hobbled everywhere didn’t bring us down; sooty buildings didn’t remind you of the impending death of Mother Nature; cars parked on sidewalks, as if beached, seemed quaint. I recommend the experience.
So it was with this serenity that I arrived at the eight o’clock dinner at a large institutional restaurant that truly taxed the meaning of the term home-cooked. I was also the sole student to arrive on time. Mr. Burden was in a foul mood. He sat at a table loaded with bread sticks and plates of butter that lured wasps in through a nearby open window. A trio of elderly waiters smoked and scowled at us. I looked out the window and saw a courtyard full of bicycles, laundry and the always-present banks of tiny cars parked in happenstance mode.
“Little wretches. All of you.” Mr. Burden was on his second bottle of Chianti, and I could tell he was easily going to finish it. I poured myself a glass and he just chuckled. A waiter, sniffing a tip, brought us some gnocchi in a sauce that tasted like Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup. The flavour made me long for home once again. Mr. Burden, seeing sniffles begin, handed me the bottle of tranquilizers and said, “Just be careful with them.” I took two. He also gave the waiter the equivalent of twenty bucks and asked for more food and wine.
And so I sat there like a Spanish infanta, quiet and happy in the knowledge that home was a mere five days away and I could remain blissed out for all 120 hours of it. I also felt grand and mature, having a solo dinner, red wine included, with a man. To Mr. Burden our dinner must have been the opposite—the low-water mark in his life. He poked at the dead food with forks as a child might poke at a slug in the garden, after which a pair of sherbet-stuffed oranges arrived, as did the other students, trickle by trickle, all apologies, all of them lying shamelessly and yet sincerely.
The big draw at dinner wasn’t the food but the promise of the disco that was to follow. Discotheque was still a sexy word back then, newly coined. It promised sex, adventure and the chance of making out with Europeans who might even possibly resemble the singers of ABBA. Fortunately, Mr. Burden was too drunk to much care about herding us ar
ound, and sat at the front of the bus chortling with Christy and Alain. I’d had quite a few drinks, and I was being, in my mind, quite witty. This was when the others began to notice me, but not in a Wow-she’s-cool! way, more in a Let’s-get-the-cat-stoned way—but how was I to know? Attention was like ambrosia to me. My behaviour became sillier, and they egged me on, mostly the boys.
Liz, I know you can dance the Hustle if you really try.
So I did, in the bus’s aisle.
Liz, try this. We swiped this from the restaurant.
It was a bottle of red. I took some swigs. I was having a ball.
Liz, do you ever remove your sweater?
I did, exposing the red-and-white-checkered Levi’s shirt I considered the height of style.
The disco was a big laundry room with a glitter ball, seven coloured light bulbs and that strange Euromusic—like normal music but with, of all things, an oompah band in the background. There was one other youth group there, from Austria. We mingled, marvelling at revelations such as that Vienna had Kentucky Fried Chickens and that, as a currency, the lira, with all its zeroes, was silly to them too. And I danced, oh did I dance. I shudder to think of what I must have looked like.
After an hour, about seven of us went up to the roof to smoke, or, rather, six people did, and I was the seventh, happy that people weren’t brushing me off. The night air was damp and smelled like an uncleaned fridge. It began to rain and we all pretended not to notice our collective shivering while we huddled under a ledge.
The Colosseum was surprisingly close, and to my drunken eyes seemed like a backdrop for a Bugs Bunny cartoon rather than an arena in which history was created. An afternoon slave killing? Quite jolly, I thought. Did they have guys selling the Roman equivalent of beer and hot dogs? The Austrians gave me a swig from their red wine bottle, and I remember feeling dizzy and wanting to leave the group. I went behind a ventilation unit, where I listened to the acid rain dissolving the city, atom by atom. I developed walking bedspins, and then …? There lies the question mark.
The next thing I remember is being packed away into the bus headed to the hostel, everybody looking absolutely dreadful. Mr. Burden was tanked, and I had my face stuck in a plastic bag from a Standa department store. Once back in our hostel, those girls who weren’t in too rough shape walked down the road to use the toilet and to flirt—at nearly two in the morning—with the golden Elf men. Tramps. I’d have happily joined them had I not felt like a swiftly revolving sludge pool.
As for the remaining 110 hours or so, our Roman tour became textbook dull. Our debauched night out had left everyone hungover and surprisingly mousy. I take it on faith that we saw the Trevi Fountain, the Pantheon’s dome, a hundred fountains and an equal number of churches, churches, churches, and more churches still. Few memories remain. Only a side trip to the ruins at Ostia Antica made any deep impression on me—the excavated ruins of a typical Roman day, allowing us to imagine the day-to-day world of the ancients. As I think about it, this is what my apartment reminded me of when I returned from my wisdom tooth surgery: a place in need of thawing or excavation to somehow bring it to life or meaning.
Rome—what else? The cracked travertine floors of museums, neon signs advertising Candy appliances, and elaborately naked statues on every corner. Oh—and there were streets named after famous dates, like Via XX Settembre. I began to think about human civilization—no better place to do so than in Rome—and I wondered what would happen if life just kept on going, on and on, and how, in a thousand years, every day of the year would have its own street named after it, and they’d be into repeats. Why, I wondered, didn’t North America have streets named after dates?
In 2004, I no longer wonder.
* * *
Our homeward flight seemed to pass in all of three seconds, and once at the Vancouver airport my homesickness vanished as though it had never been. My parents met me, and I squeaked with delight upon seeing them. Father’s sole question to me at the luggage carousel was, “So, how was your time travelling back to the past?” My mother shushed him, and on the ride home they filled me in on Leslie’s job hijinks back east. I may have just been to Italy, but she was the interesting one.
There’s not much more to say here except for two confessions. The first confession I tell you only because it helps explain the second. My first confession is that I’m fat. I’ve said that I was fat as a child, but I remain fat as a woman.
There. Perhaps you might not wish me to go any further. Who wants to know about a fat person’s life or what goes on in her mind? Surely my words must unconsciously ooze the stuff. EvenlardwhencarbsIcaloriestrysugarconcealingpigit, porkIcholesterolspeakcelerylikecottage cheeseatunafatty. Big deal.
Even in the car riding home from the airport, I knew that Leslie’s exploits would eclipse my own. I’m realistic. I have no problem being me, except that I’m lonely. I’ve lost a few pounds in recent years—better proteins, more fruit and all of that—but when you’ve spent four decades being fat, even were I to become a stick figure, I’d still be fat in my head. Guys would just know. I’d know.
And you’ve probably guessed the second confession, which is what happened nine months later. I’m not going to pretend this was some cosmic virgin birth. When I skipped my first few periods, I just assumed that it sometimes happens when nature begins to toss all these new and marvellous changes at you. After about the fifth month I thought, Okay—there’s something going on here. Then I spent a month thinking about that, which was really just denial. By the sixth month I could feel junior doing somersaults and kicks, and basically, I was too scared to tell my parents—specifically, Mother.
I’ve not discussed my mother much. She’s not a mean person, but her moods have always been both extreme and random. Today she takes something nice twice a day, and she’s stable—still random, but the mood yo-yos are gone. Back then? When she lost it, dogs halfway across the mountain bayed and yowled in sympathy. The moment they were old enough, William and Leslie landed summer jobs as far away as possible. Being with Mother all day long for the entire summer? Unthinkable. Unfortunately, two unsuccessful stabs at summer camp—homesickness again—ruled me out for that sort of gig. I suppose it’s a major reason for breaking into the houses of strangers: a house with no possibility of relatives walking into the room and going random on me. People coming home unbeknownst to me were nothing compared with this.
The best thing about being young is being stupid. Or rather, the best thing about being young is being too stupid to know how stupid you really are. By the seventh month, just as school ended, I was tired a good deal of the time. Mother briefly floated the idea of mono, until she remembered it was a kissing disease. Luckily, my morning sickness had been brief enough to be passed off as flu, even to myself.
As the baby grew, I don’t think I once thought of it as something I could keep. Many women moon and wonder about their expected baby’s little fingers and downy hair. Me, I was trying to figure out how to have it and leave it in a milk crate on the steps of the church where Taylor Way meets the highway. Dumb as it sounds, I was hoping for early morning contractions, which would allow me to go out into the municipal watershed forest, have the baby, and then drop it off at the church and get home in time for dinner.
You wish.
Tuesday in late August was when the contractions came. Father was upstairs with his ham radio, and Mother and I were watching TV. From nowhere I had a cramp like never before—seismic. Mother looked at me and said, “What? What’s going on?”
“It’s a cramp.”
“Some cramp.”
“Mmm.” I was trying to play it cool so I could go fetch the birthing kit I’d assembled: blankets, soda water, Aspirin and feminine products, all of them bundled into a yellow Dairyland milk crate along with a clean blanket placed in a plastic bag, which I’d planned to wrap the baby in before placing it on the church’s stoop.
“What have you been eating?”
“Nothing. Just dinner. And som
e strawberries.”
“Local strawberries?”
“Yeah. The girl in the berry van down at the corner gave me some.”
“They water those things with raw sewage.”
“They do not.”
“Don’t go blaming me and my dinner for your cramps.”
“Was I blaming you?”
We went back to TV. I was about to slip out when the next cramp came with a good kick. I felt like I’d run into a tree on my bike. There was no way I was going out into the forest to have the baby. What had I been thinking?
“Strawberries. You had to eat them unwashed.”
“Take me to the hospital.”
She turned toward me. I’m not an alarmist, nor am I a fibber. So she couldn’t ignore this. “Okay. I will.”
The drive there was tense. Father was clueless, but Mother knew something was going on. “Lizzie, there’s something you’re not telling me.”
“Later, Mother.” The thought of a shit fit in the car was too much to deal with. She probed all the way to the hospital, but I was offhand. I’d gone this far—I might as well go the whole way.
It was a slow night, and this was back when hospitals were better funded and better staffed than now. They took me into one of their unoccupied slots (just two over from where I’d meet Jeremy so many years later), and they asked me routine questions, Mother repeating the words “Unwashed strawberries” to whoever was nearby. The duty doctor came in, said hello, asked a few questions, poked around a bit and said, “Get her up to maternity. Now.”
I shrugged as they wheeled me away.
Mother’s face!
* * *
In the half-hour between my phoning Jane and her arrival, Jeremy was untalkative. Leslie and I were baffled. We both suspected it was drugs, and all we could do was wait. Then he said, “I can see out of my left eye now. And it’s not drugs.”
“What is it?”
“I—don’t want to say what it is. I won’t say the words.”
“Why not?”
“Jane will be here soon.”
We sat in the living room amid stacks of sad videos, drinking coffee and waiting.
Eleanor Rigby Page 7