The Way the Crow Flies

by Ann-Marie MacDonald

  He motioned with his head toward the door. “That cardiologist, he can tell me what’s going in here”—he pointed with his thumb to his chest—“they could even give me a new heart if they had to, and that’s no mean feat. But a fair number of people could study and learn to do that. Try as they might, though, very few people can open their mouths and make a roomful of total strangers laugh. And that’s the best medicine in the world. Just keep doing it your way.”

  She smiled and looked down at her feet dangling over the floor.

  They finished the list. Pro: world’s biggest English-speaking market/close cultural-political affinity/job satisfaction/fame/more money. Con: your Canadian identity/Maman.

  “Maman?”

  “I think she might miss you something terrible.”

  Madeleine raised her eyebrows but forcibly drained the irony from her voice. “Really?”

  He nodded—stoic, complicit—then sipped his juice through the jointed straw. His blue eyes widened and his mouth worked carefully, drawing in the liquid. He looked so innocent—like a child. She held her face immobile, weathering the rise of sorrow in her throat. She knew what the biggest Con of all was—that she would miss him something terrible: what if Dad died while I was far from home?

  He asked about Christine, and she set to rubbing his head the way he liked it. “She’s great, Dad, thanks. We’re thinking of buying a house—”

  She caught his warning look, and turned to see her mother entering the room. They hugged and Madeleine smelled the familiar mingle of tobacco and Chanel, feeling comforted in spite of herself.

  His voice took on a boyish quality. “Hey Maman, I told Madeleine I’ve been sprung out of here. No need for surgery.”

  Madeleine gauged her mother’s expression. Sour. She must have overheard them referring to Christine. She told herself to be nice. “Maman, did you bring the Scrabble game?”

  Mimi smiled brightly, and reached for the shelf under Jack’s bedside table. Madeleine saw her shoot him a “significant” look and wondered what was up, but he pulled the portable black-and-white TV down on its hinge and turned on the news: the great escape.

  Madeleine pulled a handful of letters from the old flannel Crown Royal bag. Mimi pulled out hers and said, “Voilà, I pulled out seven without counting.”

  “Me too, weird eh? Do you think the tiles have soaked up the energy of the game after all these years?”

  “Ask your father.”

  But he had his taut news face on. The picture of a certain species of masculine contentment.

  Madeleine looked down at her tray and saw the inevitable. Amid the other innocuous letters, the word, scrambled but unmistakeable, popped out at her: CUNT. She sighed and made CUTE.

  The sound of a countdown … we have liftoff.

  “Holy Dinah,” breathed Jack.

  “What is it?” said Mimi.

  “Wait now,” he said, “they’re going to replay it.”

  They huddled around the tiny screen and watched the Challenger explode.

  “Your mother hasn’t come to terms with your sexuality?”

  “You might say dat, doc.”

  “Are you an only child?”

  “No.” Madeleine has heard the truculent note in her own voice. Nina waits. “I have a brother.” Nina waits.

  Madeleine says, “He went away.”

  “When?”

  “Nineteen sixty-nine.” Madeleine feels her face simmering as she stares at Nina. Go ahead, ask. Make my day.

  But Nina asks a different question. “What’s the anger about, Madeleine?”

  Madeleine changes the expression on her face. Friendly. “Remember moon rocks?”

  Nina waits.

  Two can play this game. Madeleine smiles, unblinking, blank as a coin-operated dummy waiting to receive a dime through the slot in the palm of its hand.

  Nina says, “We have to stop now, Madeleine.”

  “Had enough, eh? Wimp.”

  “No, our time is up for today. Would you like to come back next week?”

  “Would you like to sit on my face?” Nina’s expression doesn’t change. “I can’t believe I said that.”

  Nina nods.

  “Clearly I need therapy.”

  Nina waits.

  “Yes, please may I come back next week?”

  In the summer of ’69, the three of them gathered in the rec room in front of the television. Mimi sat perfectly still, not ironing, not smoking, Madeleine sat next to her on the couch. Jack was in his leather La-Z-Boy and Mike was long gone. But he would be watching too, wherever he was. The whole world was watching. Walter Cronkite, “the voice of space,” was standing by to bring them live footage from the moon. “History in the making,” Madeleine expected her father to say, but he just watched, tight-lipped. His grim profile trained on the screen reminded her of something but she couldn’t place it. Another broadcast, years ago…. The late John F. Kennedy’s voice came up under photographs of the smiling astronauts, “… this nation should pledge itself, before this decade is out, to landing a man on the moon, and returning him safely to….” And she remembered: crouching on the landing in her pajamas, listening to the sound of the television, hollow and mushrooming up the stairs to reach her where she sat hugging her knees. Anyone who thinks the Russian missiles can’t reach Centralia from Cuba is sorely mistaken. Her memory wants to attribute this to Kennedy, she can hear it in his Boston tones, but she knows Mr. March said it. Mr. March explaining the domino effect: For want of a nail the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe, the horse was lost….

  Walter Cronkite brought her back. “… live, from the moon.” On screen, the Eagle landed, spindly and impossibly fragile, more insect than bird. Neil Armstrong’s boot hit the surface and raised a puff of moon dust. “That’s one small step for a man—”

  Jack said, “Well, we beat them.”

  Mimi threw up her hands. “What did he just say?! Bon D’jeu, Jack, you talked over him.”

  “They’ll rerun it.”

  They saw the earth reflected in the glass of a NASA helmet. They watched as the astronaut lumbered weightlessly, as blunt as a child’s drawing—his glossy round head; the rudimentary movements of arms and legs encased in white, segmented at the joints; a slow bounding caterpillar poised with the American flag, which he planted in the Sea of Tranquility. It was really happening. Up there. While we were watching down here on Earth, in the rec room.

  Jack shifted his chair to the upright position with a thunk, rose and headed from the room. Mimi ignored him but Madeleine called, “Dad, aren’t you going to watch?”

  “What for? He did his job, over and out.”

  Madeleine was shocked.

  “It’s a sideshow,” said Jack.

  Mimi reached for a cigarette, and Madeleine tensed. She hated it when they bickered. Her mother was like one of those Hitchcock birds, pecking, pecking at her father’s head with red talons. No wonder he had no patience with her. She’s going through menopause—like one giant endless “time of the month,” thought Madeleine uncharitably, staring at her mother’s tight face. Things had been calmer since Mike had left home, but constricted, too. Arid.

  Her father continued, referring to the television so Madeleine would know he wasn’t directing his bitterness toward her. “These guys’ll splash down—if they don’t burn up on re-entry—and they’ll get a big tickertape parade and all that good stuff, and we’ll all pretend to be interested in moon rocks, but no one wants to know the real story.”

  “What do you mean?” Madeleine could hear something in his voice—either it was new or she was recognizing it for the first time. A self-pitying note. It repelled and embarrassed her.

  “No one wants to know what it took to get them up there.” He jerked his thumb at the ceiling, dry red patches appearing on his cheeks. “While the hippies have been moaning and bellyaching about police brutality and free this and psychedelic that, it’s all been happening right under their noses.”

  Thi
s voice didn’t belong to her dad. Her dad gave opinions, sometimes adamant, but always with an expansive quality, inviting argument. This man was whining. “You want to know where the rocket program started?” he asked, thin-lipped.

  Madeleine was confused. “Okay.”

  “Ever hear of Dora?”

  “Who?”

  “What do they teach you in school anyhow? Sociology and basket-weaving, God help this generation—”

  Mimi said, “Shhh.”

  Walter Cronkite had established contact with the Marshall Space Flight Center, where Wernher von Braun was standing by. Jack left the room.

  Later that evening Madeleine asked her father who Dora was, but he waved his hand dismissively. “Ancient history.”

  “Dad, are you mad at me?”

  He laughed. “Naw, what gave you that idea? I’ll tell you something, you’re lucky to’ve been born into a generation of yahoos. You’ll be able to set them all straight.” He asked if she wanted to go to a movie. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Mimi didn’t go with them. She never did.

  When they got home, Mimi was in bed. Jack made them a snack of sardines on toast and a cucumber broken in half and doused, bite by bite, with salt. Food of the gods. They talked about the origins of life; about whether or not there was a purpose, a design for it all; about the nature of time and the illusion that it moved forward. He poured her a Scotch, taught her to sip it. The Scots were the most civilized people on earth, second only to the Irish, from whom they sprang; they gave us golf, single malt and accounting. He laughed and she could see his gold tooth. He asked her where she wanted to be in five years.

  “On TV,” she answered.

  He reached for a napkin, found a pencil stub in Mimi’s coffee can next to the phone, licked the tip and drew a flowchart. “What’s your first step?”

  The man who whined reappeared from time to time, but she kept him separate from her dad. It never occurred to her that the woman who criticized and complained was anyone other than her mother.

  Madeleine walks her bike home through Kensington Market after her session with the therapist. She has chosen not to ride, aware of carrying something that ought not to be jostled. She pictures a collection of old wooden blocks painted with letters of the alphabet—faded red A, blue M, stolid D…. They are in a precarious pile, as though they have recently been played with and may collapse at the slam of a door, an adult footfall.

  The sights and sounds of the market envelop her, she is comforted by the ramshackle opulence of it all. Feathers lilt up with the breeze of passing feet, narrow streets are gridlocked with cars at the mercy of pedestrians as disregarding as pigeons. Madeleine looks up; buds are on the trees, and the thousand market smells have begun to blossom too, in the warmth of the April noon—empanadas, chicken shit and Brie. West Indian, Portuguese, Latin American, Granola, Punk, Dowdy Artist, Old Lady Who Has Lived in That House since 1931, Korean, Italian, Greek, Vietnamese, South Asian…. Toronto’s politicians are on a “world-class” kick, and monuments to eighties prosperity have been going up—gold-plated bank buildings, the CN Tower. But this is where Toronto is truly world-class, because so much of the world has chosen to live here.

  She turns from Augusta onto Baldwin Street, already appreciating the shade of musty awnings. Even if most of the live animals are destined for the chop, at least you can hear them squawk, see them strutting freely in courtyards. In the fishmonger’s, giant turtles stir like living rocks; doomed lobsters crawl over one another in their tanks; bright trout and tuna bask on their beds of crushed ice, united in their one-eyed stare across the great fresh/salt water divide; in the window of the butcher shop a stencilled trio of smiling pig, calf and chicken preside over the pledge Live and Fresh Killed; bunnies hang upside down, stripped of flesh, resembling cats; there is no pretence here. Nothing comes in a Styrofoam shell emblazoned with a logo, history of hoofs and ears erased. The most processed thing you can buy is a jar of Kraft Sandwich Spread, wipe the dust from the lid first. Vegetables tower, the bins of nuts and rice could suffocate a grown man if they ever tipped over, and you can buy a complete wardrobe of Doc Martens, plaid flannel jacket, orange safety vest and polyester sundress for under fifty bucks.

  Kensington is bordered on the east by a Chinatown that’s advancing up Spadina Avenue, following the prosperous retreat north of the first wave of Eastern European Jews, kosher delis giving way to Peking duck, bolts of textiles to embroidered dragons. Bagels are now toasted and draped with lox by women fresh from Hong Kong. Businesses and dwellings are tucked in tight, their painted signs abrupt translations of the mother tongue—restaurants, funeral parlours and weight loss clinics, “Eating Counter,” “Danger Figure Centre,” “Wing On Funeral Home.” And a curious concentration of driving schools.

  On the corner, a wooden telephone pole bristles with staples, some biting into nothing more than dog-eared wads, the corners of flyers long since torn away to make room for fresh chatter—Refuse the Cruise, A Woman’s Right to Choose, Learn to Think in Spanish! Reg Hart Retrospective, Sunny Basement Apartment, Have You Seen Our Cat? The Vile Tones at the Cameron, Hamburger Patty at the El Mocambo, Abortion Is Murder! Thursday Is Dyke Night. A glossy new poster catches her eye—three women in matching power suits, stylish, almost film-noirish, the thrusting semicircle of city hall in the background. The race for mayor is on. The favourite to win is a politician called Art Eggleton. The women in the poster are part of a multimedia alternative theatre company called Video Cabaret. They are running as one candidate. Their slogan: Art versus Art.

  Toronto is a big dresser with big drawers, and this is a golden time when there is room for everyone to fight for room, enough funding for the arts to seem as though there is not enough funding for the arts, and massive immigration in flight from an increasingly dangerous world.

  Down Spadina and along King Street, old textile factories—ex–sweat shops years away from loft conversion—are presently incarnated as cavernous rehearsal spaces and illegal live-in artists’ studios, where thousands of straight pins can be found in the cracks between the floorboards. It’s in one of these—the Darling Building—that Madeleine is working with Olivia on a piece called The Deer. A bewildering, glacial process called collective creation. She feels as foreign to it as those women from Hong Kong must feel when rumpled regulars of The Bagel set themselves down at the counter and ask for knishes.

  Olivia asked Madeleine to be part of a group of actors with whom she is creating this feminist revision of the Greek tragedy Iphigenia.

  “Why don’t you call it Death in Venison?” said Madeleine.

  “I think it’s about colonialism,” said Olivia, and Madeleine nodded sagely.

  The “alternative theatre” is about as far from the comedy scene as you can get, but Christine encouraged her to do it, and Madeleine jumped in, if only because Olivia has a piquant way of both idolizing her and disagreeing with everything she says. The Deer is set on a shifting landscape evocative of the fence at Greenham Common and a rainforest. Olivia is working with a composer on a score inspired by baroque music and Latin jazz which incorporates text from Dr. Strangelove. Last night they improvised a scene in which the deer was caught in car headlights and interrogated in Spanish and English. “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Sandinista party?” “Are you tired and listless? …” It all makes a strange sort of sense to her, but she is reluctant to admit this to Olivia. The deer itself—Madeleine—is an entirely physical role.

  “Why do you want me to be in this?” Madeleine had asked.

  “Because you’re good with story and character.”

  “I thought it was supposed to be avant-garde, non-narrative, non-fun theatre.”

  “You see why I need you.”

  They had gone to the Free Times Café and Olivia had bought her a beer and was asking her opinion on everything despite Madeleine’s protestations that “I don’t know much about art, but I don’t know much about art.” Olivia is a gorgeous, if s
lightly punked-out, egghead. The reverse of the classic 1950s secretary whose boss says, “Miss Smithers, take off your glasses. Now remove that bobby pin from your bun.” And voilà, bombshell. Madeleine listened and allowed one eye to cross toward the other—her way of declaring herself allergic to the kind of intellectualizing that Christine and Olivia love to get up to.

  “But Madeleine, you are an intellectual.”

  She responded with her best puppet face, and Olivia laughed but didn’t back down until she had drawn out and dismantled Madeleine’s most dearly held prejudices. “You deal with ideas all the time, your work is about something.” Olivia’s eyes are hot crystal-cut blue, the irises limned in black, they make her olive skin glow.

  “I hate arguing, why am I arguing with you?!”

  Olivia countered reasonably, “We’re talking, I’m asking you questions about yourself, you love it.”

  At the corner of her mouth there is an indentation—not so much a dimple as a bracket—that lingers after she smiles. Shades of the face she will age into, eroded by happiness.

  “What.”

  “What ‘what’?” says Madeleine.

  “You just zoned right out.”

  “Oh yeah? Well … you’re not the boss of me, kid.”

  Madeleine decides to stop for a coffee. Olivia resides in the top two floors of one of these festively decaying houses, over a bar and grill. Christine is a TA at the university and Olivia was one of her students. Being a few years younger, she has enjoyed waif status, Christine insisting on feeding her, even at times dressing her—“Here, you can have these, I plan never to be that thin again.” But Olivia has a fixed address now, and last month she had them over for dinner. She cooked a vegetarian chili, and they sat at a long sawhorse table with the five grungy housemates. Madeleine has never understood the appeal of communal living and, although Christine respects vegetarianism, she woke up starving in the middle of the night, made BLTs and teased Madeleine, “Olivia’s got a crush on you.” Madeleine knew better. “She’s way more interested in you, babe. Besides, she’s not my type.”