The Way the Crow Flies

by Ann-Marie MacDonald

  Mike bursts out laughing.

  Jocelyn says, “God, Madeleine,” and sinks in her seat, crossing her arms.

  Madeleine has never noticed Jocelyn’s breasts before but she does now, they are perfectly round under her saffron T-shirt.

  Mike says to the waiter, “Don’t worry, we’re leaving. Thanks anyhow, what do I owe you for the table?”

  “It’s okay,” says the guy, “I’ll get the coffees.”

  Madeleine is possessed by remorse for her behaviour. As well as by a yearning to burn something down, blow something up. She often feels this way, and has no idea how to square it with her personal politics.

  On the tiny stage, someone is playing bongos and a woman has started reading poetry in a slow downward cadence.

  Madeleine’s sociology teacher sent her essay on Canada’s war guilt in Vietnam to the newspaper. In it, she calls for a boycott of Canadian companies that supply the American military-industrial complex, manufacturing everything from bullets to green berets, Agent Orange to ration packs, and employ one hundred and forty thousand Canadians. She entitled it “Workin’ for the Yankee Dollar.” It was published, and her father was proud, for even though he does not entirely agree with her point of view, “dissent is the well-spring of democracy.”

  “‘The country beneath the earth has a green sun and the rivers flow backwards,’” reads the poet—

  Burning huts and burning people, naked crying children. Her brother is going over there to do more of it.

  —“‘the trees and rocks are the same as they are here, but shifted. Those who live there are always hungry—’”

  He will participate in the obscenity of war, even though he will not participate in war crimes—but this war is criminal by its nature, so where is the line? She looks at his hands. Will he kill someone with them? Someone’s brother? She watches him sip his coffee and tilt his head the way Dad does, listening to the poetry. She is terrified for him. Disgusted. And envious. Nothing adds up.

  —“‘from them you can learn wisdom and great power, if you can descend and return safely….’”

  When the poet finishes, Mike applauds and turns to Madeleine. “That was great. I mean it.”

  Life is a series of random events, there is no such thing as morality, there are only collective delusions, occasional leaps of faith, and feats of self-interested discipline that prevent people from exploiting one another all the time. This is what she and Jocelyn talk about on Friday nights while listening to Ladies of the Canyon. By three A.M. they have dug out The Beach Boys and are talking about sex. Jocelyn has gone all the way. Madeleine has not.

  Jocelyn winds the beads of her choker around her finger and leans her ear close to Mike’s mouth to hear him above the bongos. She has a habit of covering her mouth when she laughs. She reminds Madeleine of Lisa Ridelle. There are really only about five people in the world.

  “Is he your boyfriend?” the waiter asks Madeleine, appearing with a carafe of coffee.

  “No, he’s my brother,” ready to go another round.

  “Do you want to come home with me tonight?”

  She looks at him. Guys are amazing. He’s giving her the look she has noticed lately. The one that gives her no room to look back.

  “I’m around,” says the waiter, and moves off through the tables.

  Mike takes Madeleine’s cup from its saucer, slides it under the table and tips a silver flask over it. He does the same with Jocelyn’s, then his own.

  They wind up across the river in Hull. At two in the morning, on the Québec side, she jives with her brother to a rockabilly band howling James Brown in French accents. The lead singer is skinny with prematurely false teeth and a cowboy hat. He plays accordion—“Get up there and show ’im a thing or two,” says Mike.

  No one in this bar gives them any attitude about Mike’s uniform, or raises an eyebrow at the sight of him with two underage hippie chicks. The clientele ranges in age from under to way over; guys from the pulp and paper mill, university students who chain-smoke and speak more intensely to one another than the students on the English side of the river—they’re messier and sexier too. There are secretaries and factory girls in low-cut polyester party dresses and slingbacks—they may have heard of women’s lib but they probably don’t care. Above the bar, a portrait of the King in uniform: Elvis as a GI.

  On their table, a forest of “gros Mols”—tall brown quart bottles of Molson’s beer—and here and there an empty chaser of Jack Daniel’s, “dead soldiers,” Mike calls them. He doesn’t say another word in English all night. Jocelyn keeps hollering to Madeleine above the music, “What’s he saying?”

  “He said, ‘My girdle’s killing me.’”

  “No, come on, what did he say?”

  Mike goes to the bar; the band plays “Havin’ Some Fun Tonight,” Madeleine grabs Jocelyn and they polka furiously.

  Madeleine hollers over the music. “He said, ‘Join the Marines. Travel to exotic far-off lands, meet interesting people. And kill them.’” Jocelyn screams with laughter. They hurtle into the table of empties; tall bottles topple and roll like bowling pins; a waiter with a Brylcreemed bouffant and the face of Methuselah springs into action, scooping them up, and they order another round.

  Jocelyn lounges at the table wearing Mike’s uniform hat as Madeleine jives with him, shooting at high speed between his ankles. He spools her back and forth to “Jailhouse Rock,” compliant spaghetti at the end of his grip.

  Mike is a good dancer; always out of step with his own generation but popular at weddings, those Sunday afternoons with Maman have paid off. His tie is loose, shirt untucked at the back and patched with sweat, his face aglow.

  When the song ends he walks up to Jocelyn, leans over the table, extends his hand and she takes it. Madeleine watches from her chair, remembering Lisa in the pup tent, confessing her love for Mike.

  She feels old, and world-weary too. The booze, the circumstances, her span of fifteen years all gang up on the moment to contain it. It means something. As though it were part of a story. Why is she thinking about Lisa Ridelle tonight? Where is Lisa now? She was hilarious. Or was it that she laughed a lot? Who was the funny one, me or Lisa? Auriel was; Madeleine feels a surge of warmth and longs to see Auriel again. That was only six years ago. It feels ancient.

  She checks a beer bottle for butts, then takes a long pull.

  The band is playing “Love Me Tender.” Jocelyn and Mike lean into one another, swaying slowly. Madeleine bums a cigarette from a young woman with a beehive and cleavage. Leaning forward for a light, she gets a close-up of pencilled brows, liquid eyeliner, and a whiff of lily-of-the-valley perfume.

  “Thanks,” says Madeleine.

  “Garde les allumettes,” says the girl and winks.

  They have nothing in common.

  They strike up a conversation in both languages, switching back and forth without noticing. Madeleine has never been drunk before and her French has improved mightily. They talk about the young woman’s fiancé, who is off cutting wood in Nouveau-Brunswick. She tells Madeleine she’d be pretty if she’d just do one or two things—offers to take her to the bathroom and do her makeup. Madeleine follows her.

  The ladies’ room is a pukey pink and reeks almost as much as a gents’. The Québécoise opens her patent-leather clutch and goes to work on Madeleine’s face with a brush and several tubes.

  “Que t’es belle, ma p’tite, tu me fais penser à ma petite soeur.”

  “Oh yeah? How old’s your little sister?”

  “Ben, chérie, she died, elle est morte.”

  “Shit,” says Madeleine. “C’était quoi son nom?” and immediately regrets asking because she knows what the young woman is going to say—

  “Her name was Claire.”

  “Shit,” says Madeleine. “What happened to her, what the fuck happened to her?”

  Madeleine never swears—she never drinks, either, or wears makeup or hangs around with tarty French girls who’ve probabl
y never heard of Simone de Beauvoir.

  The young woman answers, “She got sick, honey. The meningitis, she just goes like that,” and snaps her fingers. “Pauvre petite,” she adds. “Oh you are sad, baby.” Cupping Madeleine’s cheek with her hand. “Pleure pas.”

  “I’m not crying,” answers Madeleine, lifting her chin for a topcoat of clear gloss applied by the girl’s middle finger.

  Madeleine feels the graze of a nail along her lip, then the French girl kisses her on the mouth—taste of chemical cherry, cigarette juice, and so soft, a wet pillow—“Don’t be sad, eh?” she says to Madeleine, stroking her hair, and kisses her again.

  Madeleine kisses her back, melting into her mouth. The Québécoise slides her hand down Madeleine’s hip, around behind, and pulls her close.

  “You want to come home with me, baby? C’est quoi ton nom?”

  “I can’t,” says Madeleine, ducking out of the bathroom.

  Back at the table, Mike and Jocelyn are resting. Jocelyn is flushed, laughing. Mike takes a haul of his beer, allows it to trickle down his neck and pats it on like aftershave, singing, “‘There’s something about an Aqua Vulva man.’”

  Jocelyn turns and sees Madeleine. “Oh my God.”

  Mike takes one look at her and fumbles in his pocket for his hanky. “You look like a two-dollar whore.” He wets the hanky with his tongue the way Dad used to. “I let you out of my sight for one second—”

  He goes to dab at her face, but Madeleine escapes to the bar and checks herself out in the mirror—sacrebleu. Mike appears over her shoulder and laughs. She looks like a raccoon and her mouth is all smeary. She grabs his hanky, douses it in beer and wipes the lipstick off. The crotch of her jeans has gone smeary too, but thank goodness that’s invisible, thank goodness girls don’t get public hard-ons.

  Madeleine sees the young woman in the mirror—she has returned to her table and is necking with a big guy with a dirty blond braid down his back. Madeleine thinks of the waiter back at Le Hibou. I should do it with him. Why not? Someone’s got to be the first. At least he doesn’t go to her school, and she won’t have to let him be her boyfriend.

  At three-thirty A.M. Mike requests a song from the band. Little Richard and the Big Bopper give way to a French Canadian folk song. The singer laments, close in to the mike, “Un Canadien errant, banni de son pays….” Madeleine cringes—this is so corny. Any second now, a separatist is going to jump up and throw them out of here. “Parcourait en pleurant, des pays étrangérs….” A simple tune, like the best folk songs the world over—I have lost my home, I long for my home, my home exists now only in memory.

  Maman always sang the original, “un Acadien.” But Mike will soon be un Canadien errant. Vietnam—it doesn’t get more errant than that. And where are he and Madeleine from, anyhow? Say goodbye to the house, kids….

  Mike puts his arms around Madeleine and slow-dances with her. His hair is wet with sweat, the back of his neck pink. He drops his head to his sister’s shoulder. She laces her fingers together between his shoulder blades—he does have shoulder blades in there somewhere, beneath the muscle, soft and hard all at once, my big brother. He still smells nice even through the Hai Karate, the beer, the bourbon and sweat. He smells fresh—the freshness of hide ’n’ seek at night in summer, the smell of grass stains, of swimming in the lake, and sun-baked sand dunes, their sleeping bags side by side—where have those times gone? Qui peut dire où vont les fleurs?

  Madeleine is drunk for the first time in her life. She strokes the back of her brother’s brush cut—stupid idiot, Michel, why do you have to go away? Why do you want to hurt anyone? I know that’s not why you’re going, why are you going? His buzzed hair is soft, a thick and delicate carpet. They will not know you are different from the others, Mike. They will not know you are kind. She bites the inside of her mouth but it does no good, she is drunk, her famous ability to go neutral has dissolved, mascara traces clown tears down her cheeks. Sarge, I’m hit.

  Mike raises his head, beams into her face—kisses her on the cheek. “Stunned one,” he says, and holds out his arm to Jocelyn to join them. The three of them sway in place, arms around one another, to the rest of the song.

  They travel across the bridge back to Ottawa in the pockmarked Nova. Madeleine drives—she is the least drunk, and in no danger of losing her licence, because she doesn’t have one. She turns along the river and follows the curving parkway past the prime minister’s residence, past the governor general’s and through Rockcliffe Park. Jocelyn’s parents are divorced, she lives with her dad, she has no curfew—paradise. Madeleine pulls up in front of her house among the embassies.

  “Pretty ritzy,” says Mike. “I’ll see you to the door.”

  He and Jocelyn stand under the porch light, kissing. Madeleine is shocked. Jocelyn reaches behind, opens the front door and slides in, Mike slides in after her.

  Madeleine waits. She rests her head against the steering wheel, because she gets the spins when she leans back against the headrest. She falls asleep and Miss Lang, the Brown Owl, arrives in her wedding gown and Brownie beret. She smiles slyly and says, “Of course you know what hibou means in English?”

  Madeleine replies, “It means ‘owl.’”

  Miss Lang winks. “And what do owls say?”

  “Who.”

  “Who killed me, Madeleine?”

  Mike wakes her, pulling her from the undertow. “Move over, Rob.”

  He drives them back to the suburbs as the sun comes up—big lawns dewy and rich in the morning mist, backyard pools slumbering under blue plastic covers. He drops her just as their father pulls out of the garage in his Oldsmobile, the automatic door closing behind, his wheels yielding, cushiony, over the curb of the driveway. Jack turns to Madeleine and touches two fingers to his forehead in the old casual salute. He doesn’t look at Mike.

  Madeleine says, “He’s going golfing.”

  “Give Maman a kiss for me, eh?” says Mike. “Je t’aime.”

  Then he drove away.

  MIA

  HIS PARENTS CANNOT SAY, “When Mike died,” because if he is dead, he did not “die,” he was killed. But they cannot say, “When Mike was killed,” because they don’t know for certain that he was. They don’t say, “When Mike went missing,” because that sounds as though he simply wandered off.

  When is mourning?

  When you are waiting, watching to see a flower open, a leaf unfurl, or attending the slow folding down of a dear, dear one who seems so much better today, the waiting is painstaking. This long blossoming, or extinguishing of a beloved face feels endless; each small movement gauged, exaggerated, compared or denied, but one thing is sure—the plant will open, your dear one will die, it is only a question of when, and of many acts of loving vigilance.

  Absence is different. You can’t watch over an absence. Care for it, help it on its journey, love it. You can only watch life flow around both hope and dread, softening edges, eroding grain by grain all expectation, awaiting the merciful time, which may never come, when one can say, he is gone.

  The soreness deep in the chest. The falling asleep over a book, unable to keep one’s lids open, only to reawaken deep in the night with a fresh release of sorrow. Slow, warm, adrenal. Like a gentle hand. Wake up. Wake up, friend owl. Sore, sore sorrow.

  And still there is no funeral, no emptying of grief; no shaking droplets from the trees, followed by the steaming up of loss, gentle respiration of memory. Grief-in-waiting is a tap left dripping, the unstaunched hope, drop by drop, perhaps, he might, what if, it could. Friends can only do so much. Those who are experienced, unembarrassed by grief, know not to dispense bromides, wear long faces or chat with plastered grins. They behave like good dance partners. Life goes on. That’s the way it is. You do not forget, neither do you dwell; be there, that is all. Stop with the casseroles and too frequent phone calls after a while, but do not disappear. Be there.

  Waiting is exhausting. Like living in a language not your own. You translate
continually, filtering the present through the hypothetical, if Michel were here … when Mike gets home…. Soul and sinews poised. Prepared for sudden joy, or sorrow. It does no good to wish you had appreciated life more before the misfortune, we are not made that way. We are made to desire; to cherish and to disregard by turns. Some of us have a talent for happiness—this has little to do with circumstance. Few have a talent for waiting.

  Wincing at the sound of the phone, the knock at the door, the clank of the mailbox. But there is no news. No relaxation of soul or sinews. There is, instead, the loss of elasticity. The bow pulled back for too long, once released, sags or snaps.

  Grief is a fulcrum. The joint in time between the vanishing of hope and the beginning of loss. Missing link. Allows the living to move forward, and the dead finally to return, smile and open their arms to us in memory.

  There has yet to come a moment when his family has been able to say, he is dead. Instead, hope has shaded to the next phase, wherein his parents cannot recall when it was they began to say, “When we lost Mike.”

  “How did it go at the benefit Monday night?” asks Nina.

  “Fine.”

  “No problem with the ‘thing’?”

  “The what? Oh. No.”

  “What are you feeling, Madeleine?”

  “Absolutely nothing.”

  HIS

  The other was a softer voice,

  As soft as honey-dew:

  Quoth he, “The man hath penance done,

  And penance more will do.”

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

  JACK IS A MAN without a shadow. It died of neglect. Like a puddle on a hot day, it grew smaller and smaller.

  He listens to the news; reads and watches it constantly. More than a strategy of masculine retreat, it fends off curdling panic. He regards his wife warily. Like the keeper of one of a set of dual keys, she can trigger his grief. Her grief can end the world. But the news is soothing. Piecemeal and manageable, with a few sweeping arcs reminiscent of the narrative structure of soap opera—the world turns and nothing changes. The occasional twinge pierces the anesthetic—Walter Cronkite declaring that the war over there was unwinnable, And that’s the way it is…. Flick of the remote as Jack switches the channel.