“Maybe we could get that boy, that one in that band, to sing something. I know,” the teacher’s eyes grow wide, as if on cue, “maybe you could have me on your show to talk about all the plans. Then maybe people would even fly in all the way from Toronto!” The woman’s hands. That was it. This woman teacher had been a man, a tall nervous man. Dot is suddenly delighted and makes a mental note to ask one of the chase producers to find a slot for the teacher on that upcoming “Dot!” on gender issues and forgiveness.
All around them fans are clamouring for Dots autograph. And her musky Jôvan-scented embrace.
When the call had come, Dorothy was trying to get some shut-eye after a double shift of bagging groceries at the Supervalu for long, snaking lines of customers who looked like they were on day parole from Oakalla. She was lying over the far edge of the bed with one arm hanging down to the floor, as the middle sagged so badly with her weight the old mattress often threatened to flip up on either side of her to make a Dorothy sandwich. Sweat pooled off her in the freak mid-October heat.
Dorothy had last seen her daughter lounging on the couch with a box of Crackerjacks, watching a video. “Don’t stay up too late,” she’d said. Gloria said something Dorothy couldn’t make out, the kid’s mouth was so full of caramel corn. “Chew and swallow before you speak,” Dorothy said. This was something Dorothy herself always tried to do, no matter how hungry she felt. She’d chew slowly and swallow and then speak. The first step on the road to thinness and elegance. That and the mid-Atlantic accent she practised in front of the bathroom mirror. Something she learned from an Audrey Hepburn movie, the one with all the singing where Audrey started out poor and a mess, but later wore her hair in a humdinger of a bun like a princess. Dorothy tried to sound both adamant and girlish at the same time. She tried to send friendly fireworks rocketing from her eyes while smiling whimsically, but only managed to look churlish and mildly constipated. What had her mother always said? “Can’t make butter with a toothpick.” It had meant something at the time.
She lay there in bed waiting and waiting to sleep, the clock radio on the floor beside her flipping its digits so slowly each second felt like a single hair being yanked from her scalp. Her whole life was like that. Like a form of Chinese water torture. Waiting to get thin. Waiting for the bus. Waiting to win a lottery. Waiting for her kid to stop being such a moron. Waiting for the right moment to lock her boss in the meat locker and claim it was an accident.
Later, what she tells people, because that’s how she remembers it, is that she picked up the phone before it even rang. A mother knows.
One of the cameramen stops and gives Dot a high-five. She has to do a little hop to even make contact with his hand—she’s so short (petite!) her lacquered fingernails barely touch his palm. Its their flirty game, but that’s as far as it ever goes. In her Dorothy days he was the kind of lanky man she would have given up anything for if he’d even bothered to eyeball her name tag above her left boob when she handed him his change at the checkout counter. The kind of guy who’d look good climbing slowly down a ladder with a toolbelt slung low across his hips. Now he was just another techie and she was … Dot! Although Liz Taylor had married that construction worker, that Larry somebody with the Ukrainian name, who made a big deal about still working after they got hitched (like those lottery winners who say they’ll keep on working at the factory, just keep glue-gunning the stripes onto Adidas sneakers or whatever, just because they like the routine, maybe get a new car, something with air-conditioning so they don’t drop dead driving to Regina in August for the family reunion).
When Dot gets a break she hangs onto it with both hands, with her teeth if she has to, like those women at the circus who spin in the air with their jaws clamped tight onto a leather strap at the end of a high wire.
On one of the TV monitors, a man and woman slowly circle a car in a showroom. The man peeks through a window and sees a babyseat in the back and then looks over the roof of the car at the woman who’s smiling right at him. He circles over to her and swings her around in his arms while all the salespeople and other customers at the Saturn dealership burst into applause.
Dot hates this ad. She hates the woman’s downcast eyes, her shy Di half-smile, and the coy way she’s picked to tell her husband (yes, they’re married of course, her tasteful little ring glints conspicuously as she cradles the telephone receiver while calling the Saturn folks to set up the babyseat-in-the-new-car scheme) that they were going to have a kid. And she especially hates the way everyone applauds as if they’d done anything out of the ordinary that pigs or hamsters or people who don’t drive Saturns couldn’t do. She should know.
A couple of weeks ago, Dot was in Avanti’s, a sports-bar in her old neighbourhood, being interviewed by someone from Chatelaine who was doing a profile on her. “When I was a large Marge and thought life sucked a wad,” she told him, knowing her fans liked her to be salty but not actually swear, “I used to come down here and play electronic Trivia. Of course, that was before what happened to Gloria.”
Beside them, Dot overheard a pregnant woman telling a friend about breaking the news: “I just went to the drugstore and got the kit and told him, ‘Just a sec, I’m gonna go pee on the stick.’ Then I came out and said, ‘See.’“ The woman, who had on a spectacularly fringed suede vest with nothing underneath, held up a french fry pocked with gravy to demonstrate.
Her friend clutched her arm, “What did he say!?”
“He goes, ‘No way So I’m like, “‘Yes way.’“ She took a swallow of beer. “Didn’t see the sperm donor for almost two weeks.” Dot had swivelled around on her stool, feet dangling above the rungs, and invited the woman to come on her show.
“Dot!” always started with a light, mildly humorous item, before moving on to the serious stuff. This segment featured squabbling neighbours, family spats, and the increasingly popular “forgive a stranger” bits like a paraplegic forgiving a woman who always parked in a handicapped spot at Costco to get closer to the entrance.
A week later, the pregnant woman, now in a tidy blouse with a Peter Pan collar, much to Dot’s disappointment, sat in the green room admiring the furniture. “Everything in here matches,” she said, “even the pictures.” Beside her sat her reluctant boyfriend who was wearing a cows skull bolo tie and grumbling aloud that he wasn’t going to say sorry, especially as he wasn’t. “You don’t have to say anything,” a chase producer assured him. Dot popped in to wave hello to all the guests (who included a six-year-old boy who had brought a peanut-butter sandwich to school, causing a classmate to have a fatal anaphylactic reaction). Dot said to the boyfriend, “This isn’t the apology show. This is the forgiveness show.” She squatted down in her high-voltage red cashmere suit that felt so good against her skin she almost had to take a cold shower to keep from screaming with joy and rested her fingertips on his knees. “You just have to sit there while she forgives you for being a big oaf.”
“Crying is optional,” the chase producer said.
“If you cry,” his girlfriend told him, “we get an extra mug.”
Back in her office, Dot’s hand still tingles from the cameraman’s touch. On the monitor directly in front of her that ad is running again. The couple spin around in slow motion in each other’s arms. The showroom staff beam and applaud. She decides she will ban the Saturn commercial from airing on “Dot!” She’ll say it reminds her of that terrible night the mad swami and his preppy girlfriend, that teen terrorist, commandeered the car with the babyseat in the back, and, yes, though it’s true she’s forgiven them, the image is seared into her brain. Flashbacks, you understand. Her daughter. The empty babyseat. Doesn’t take a rocket scientist. Need I say another word. Covers her face with one hand, flaps her would-be consolers away with the other.
She glimpses herself practising this in the mirror hanging on the back of her office door and can’t help but think she looks rather fetching.
The first thing Dorothy noticed as she was guided to her seat at
the trial, a box of three-ply Kleenex under one arm and the strange buzzing in her head that had started the night of the explosion and still hadn’t gone away, was that it seemed a lot like church, what with all the people filing into the pews and something that looked like an altar up front. There was even a guy whose job it was to carry the Bible around, like some kind of altar boy, although he mostly kept it tucked under his arm like a newspaper. The second thing she noticed was that people were looking at her, not through her, and not like she was some kind of animal in the zoo (Holy smoke, lookit the size of that thing! Get the camera!), but right at her with something that looked alarmingly like sympathy.
That was enough to start her sniffling, but what really set Dorothy off was the bright-blonde teen terrorist with the clear skin and the raccoon eyes. So assured. So smart. So ladylike. She sat with her hands in her lap, didn’t fiddle, and even when those big-shot lawyers grilled her, she never once hung her head, hair covering her eyes. One by one, witnesses were trotted out to attest to her character. A crumbling piano teacher, all hoity-toity with her tea-biscuit accent, shaking as hard as the bug-eyed dog under her arm; a nurse pushing some really screwed-up kid in a wheelchair who started waving his balled-up fists over his head and laughing in great honks as soon as he saw the girl. Well, don’t have a conniption, Dorothy couldn’t help thinking, although she knew you’d have to be a numb-bum not to be impressed by this cheerleading section. But the whole time the blonde girls mother just sat at the back of the courtroom and never looked directly at her daughter. Dorothy found this so tragic she started crying and once she got started she just couldn’t stop.
She cried because she’d had a daughter like Gloria rather than this pretty little thing who was like a doll or a character right out of a movie. She could even play piano, for God’s sake, and she’d won a national essay contest—an essay contest, yikes! Gloria couldn’t write Happy Birthday, Mom on a card without making a mess. Dorothy had tried with the kid, she was sure she had, but didn’t a kid have to try, too? She had even, once when Gloria was little, taken her for a pony ride in Stanley Park—three bus connections and Dorothy with all her spring allergies acting up—but the kid had started bawling and gone as stiff as a board when the attendant tried to put her on and Dorothy had had to carry her back to the bus stop under her arm like a plank. A wailing plank that she felt like just dropping into the duck pond while no one was watching. Behind them, children with hair like dandelion fluff rode the ponies around and around.
She cried because she wanted to believe that Gloria had been in the pizza place where she’d worked part-time (“pizza parlour,” Dorothy had told Margo at work, which helped make it sound like it wasn’t just a hole in the wall), trying to save a cat, because that’s what the police said, that’s what that growing crowd of animal activists in Gloria! T-shirts who gathered each day outside the provincial court building believed, and that’s what Exhibit C, the charcoal calico in a plastic Ziploc bag with Glorias blood type dried onto one of its front claws, seemed to indicate. And yet, a mother knows.
She cried because she did believe the father of the almost dead man lying in St. Pauls burn unit—the mastermind who had been driving the getaway car—when he put his hand on the Bible and swore that his son was a pacifist, a follower of Gandhi. One side of his mouth sagged as if he’d had a stroke and he had dusty brown skin, but Dorothy figured he was all right. The type of guy she wouldn’t mind for a neighbour. He looked kind. Which got her thinking of that movie with Marlon Brando and wishing she was the sort of woman who could stand up and say—with a dreamy Southern accent like she’d just got out of bed and was wearing a wrinkled but 100 percent silk slip—I always rely on the kindness of strangers.
Dorothy cried through the remaining forty days of the trial, didn’t eat, didn’t sleep, just kept on crying, weeping so profusely the flesh began to melt away from her bones. And when it came time for her victim-impact statement she finally noticed none of her clothes even remotely fit any more and she had to go to Value Village to get a new outfit. She came out of the change room in a size eight, an acrylic knit (a clingy knit!), and couldn’t keep from smiling a watery little smile, even though the hem was unravelling and she had to roll up the sleeves so that a spot of fabric near one elbow that had melted—fused together and turned brown—wouldn’t show.
Just before Dorothy took the stand, a blast victim who now had a plastic disc in his skull told the court how lucky he was. The man had been the janitor at the laundromat next to Tony’s that had also been destroyed. He’d gone outside for a smoke and saw someone he would later identify as the teen terrorist (“she appeared out of nowhere”) throw something through the back window of Tony’s. He remembered lighting another cigarette and thinking the girl had nice hair (“it sort of floated out behind her as she ran down the alley”) and that’s the last thing he remembered.
“I was going to quit, my girlfriend really wanted me to quit. But now I’ve realized it’s my karma to smoke,” he said, smoothing his shaved scalp with yellowed fingers. Then he glazed over and the only sound in the courtroom for almost a full minute was Dorothy’s crying, which had by now become a kind of white noise. “Sorry,” the guy said when he came to, “that’s just the inner-ear damage. I wish I had a metal plate.” He paused and smiled. “Can’t pick up too many stations with this plastic one.” A couple of people laughed. “Kidding” More people laughed. “What I really want to say is that I’m not bitter. They did something they believed in and now they’re paying the price.”
Dorothy thought the guy was nuts not to be pissed off—and what with part of his brain lopped off, maybe he was—but a murmur of admiration rippled through the spectators and some of the regulars even began to clap.
So when Dorothy stood in front of them, tears streaming down her face, and said that she, too, wasn’t bitter, the reaction was thunderous. It was true, as some of the news reports had put it, that her Gloria had been killed by friendly fire, what with animal lovers killing another animal lover. “It’s like shooting the puck into the net behind your own goalie, eh?” She got even more laughs than the brain-damaged guy and Dorothy realized she somehow knew, intuitively, how to play to a crowd. Then she said, because she remembered it from a movie and because it seemed the thing to say, “I just hope Gloria didn’t die in vain.”
Outside, the two former anarchists, who earlier had announced their decision to renounce violence to go into nursing so they could help improve living conditions on northern native reserves, dropped to their knees in front of Dorothy on the courthouse steps following their conditional discharge and begged forgiveness. And Dorothy, in a gesture that would become her trademark, opened her arms wide and hugged them, clutching them against her so that she could feel their hearts racing, smell their smoky, nacho breath, the faint animal odour from their nervous, bushy armpits. She couldn’t remember the last time she had willingly held another body against her own, the last time she’d hugged her own daughter. She almost couldn’t let them go.
The crowd of people gathered outside spontaneously burst into applause. Then dozens of whooping spectators surged up the steps and hoisted, first Dorothy, then the man with the plastic disc in his head, into the air like the bride and groom at a Jewish wedding. Soon the two former anarchists were bobbing about on the shoulders of the crowd as well. And although Dorothy was worried her underwear and the network of exploded veins in her thighs would show, she had to admit that the view from on top was really something.
During the following days and weeks, the media tried to make sense of this unexpected outburst of goodwill in the wake of such tragedy. “Dawn of the Nice Age,” more than one headline read. An evolutionary biologist from Simon Fraser University weighed in with a piece in Macleans on the possibility of the forgiveness gene. “The Journal” had on a psychology professor from York who told Barbara Frum, “The victim forgiving the victimizer—not in a mytho-religious sense, but in its pure, undiluted form—is a terrifically empowering
force, equal to, or even surpassing, vengeance. I’ve worked it out mathematically.” He shoved a sheet of paper at her which she examined politely, nodding her head. And “Morningside” featured a panel, including Eugene Whelan, who argued, congenially, that this kind of forgiveness was a uniquely Canadian phenomenon.
But Dorothy, who had watched the coverage that first night after squeezing several drops of Visine into each of her eyes and squirming against the pinchy feeling as it dripped into the back of her nose, recognized it for what it was. Entertainment.
She hadn’t sat glued to the couch watching all those years of daytime TV for nothing.
That old teacher of Glorias is right, she has to do something really special to mark the tenth anniversary of her daughter’s death, Dot thinks, reaching under her desk to massage her toes. No matter how exquisitely crafted her shoes are, her feet always hurt. A phantom pain, her therapist has told her, as if they’re still carrying her now phantom weight.
The parks board had finally approved that statue for Stanley Park that the SPCA & Friends had lobbied for. The bombing site was now a free walk-in veterinary clinic mostly used by squeegee kids for their inevitable dogs, although Dot thinks the vets should delouse the kids, with their gnarled hair and wasps-nest clothing, while they’re at it. (Once, a few months after the fire-bombing, Dot, then still Dorothy, had stood at the edge of the small crater and stared hard into it, but it was like looking into space when you didn’t have a bloody clue what you were searching for. In a movie she would’ve found something, a locket? a bracelet? a watch stopped at zero hour? that whispered of lost possibilities. Or, at the very least, a bloodied hand would’ve shot up out of the earth and tried to claw the heart out of her chest. But nothing.) Then there’s the group that’s written to the pope about beatifying Gloria, which Dot understands is like being an apprentice saint, sort of like an assistant electrician, or the first runner-up in the Miss Universe pageant. And should the winner not be able to fulfill her term … She likes the sound of it, beatifying, like sending Gloria off to some swanky spa for a complete makeover. Dear John Paul Two, while you’re at it, could you do something about her complexion if its not too much trouble?
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