After Sylvia

by Alan Cumyn

  “In front of people?” he said.

  “They’re just kids,” Owen said. “I’m their president and I told them you could come.”

  Lorne paused and finally said, “I can’t. I have to work on Friday.” Then he added, “But you’re fine for the loon. You teach them that.”

  Owen gulped and went quiet. Finally Lorne said, “You’re all right in front of people. You’ll be fine. Not like me.”

  Owen was all right in front of people. He found there was a special sort of nervousness that rushed through his body and made it exciting to stand up and say, “I think we should move all these desks over there!” and “Do we have enough cups for everyone?” just the way a real president would.

  At one o’clock on Friday everything was ready. Tables sat full of chips and cheese biscuits, nearly overflowing the big bowls that students had brought from home. There were cakes and brownies, and too many cookies, and other big bowls full of cherry-colored pop and orange punch and brown sludgy cola rapidly going flat. In a rash moment Owen declared that the party couldn’t begin until Dan Ruck’s father and uncles arrived with their fiddles. As soon as he said it he realized how foolish it was. The fiddlers could surely join the party whenever they got there. But Owen didn’t think that presidents were allowed to change their minds.

  And so the class waited in awkward silence, with everything decorated and laid out. The games sat on tables waiting to be played, but everyone just looked at the door.

  “Owen, is your uncle coming to teach us the bird songs?” Miss Glendon asked.

  Owen somehow hadn’t been able to tell the class that Uncle Lorne wouldn’t be there. Everyone was looking at him as if it was his fault the party was ruined — with no fiddlers and no bird caller to go along with no Japan.

  “Owen?” Miss Glendon asked.

  Owen knew now exactly how Michael Baylor had felt with everyone’s disappointment being packed into’ his own steaming neck.

  “I’m not — “ he said, but the words stuck. He coughed into his hand, and there was a gurgling sound, and he trilled just a bit to make sure his throat was clear. And then the unthinking part of his brain took over and in a moment he was standing in front of them all in full loon cry, his voice warbling through the room and gathering them all in. He closed his eyes to make it feel like he was back at the haunted house sitting on the red couch with night engulfing everything and the trees and the air so chilled and wild.

  He sang out like a crazy, lonely, presidential loon, knowing that no one in that classroom would ever look at him the same way again. His soul was opening up in front of them all. He didn’t have a secret left in the world. He was letting his true voice soar and cry and reverberate in everyone’s ears. They would all know everything about him as soon as he stopped.

  So he kept on as long as he could, as long as his breath held out. He sang until tears streamed down his cheeks and the door opened arid there were the fiddlers, as if he had summoned them.

  Then he stopped and gasped for breath while everyone’s attention was taken away.

  Dan Ruck’s father and uncles were tiny, gnarled, hard-skinned men. Miss Glendon went to greet them and help them set up in the cleared middle of the classroom, and she led the clapping and the dancing as if she’d been doing it all her life. She, dragged Michael Baylor out first and then Owen and whirled them around and around the dizzy floor. In time everyone was organized with partners and groups, and they were all looking at their feet and counting steps here and there, and linking and unlinking arms.

  It was sweaty, giggling, breathless work and the more he danced the more Owen was filled with a surprising and saddening sense of regret.

  As fine as this was, Sylvia wasn’t there.

  Sylvia was off in Elgin, where she couldn’t hear his loon call, and couldn’t stomp her foot to the fiddling, and couldn’t see Owen being presidential. He closed his eyes and tried to summon her but he walked into an elbow instead and had to sit down and hold his nose.

  Even this, he thought, would make a good story, if only she was here.

  Gloria Pork-Pie

  “IS there someone special you’d like to invite to your birthday party, Owen?” L Margaret asked as she served the beef stew. Steam was rising from the plates. Owen looked through it at everyone around the table, then ducked his eyes.

  “Eleanor and Sadie, of course,” Margaret said. “How about some of the boys from school?”

  “Owen is in love with Sylvia Tull,” Leonard said.

  Owen stabbed a piece of potato with his fork.

  “You shouldn’t bother with love stuff at your age,” Horace said, a chunk of mushy carrot hanging on his lip. “Save all that for when you can handle the misery.”

  “Horace!” Margaret said. “I think it’s wonderful that Owen has an interest in such things.”

  Owen found he could breathe in but not out.

  “Misery,” Horace muttered again, and filled his mouth with sauce-soaked bread.

  “Sylvia is in your class, isn’t she, Owen?” Margaret asked. Her face seemed very bright, like that of a doctor who has extracted a heart from a chest and is watching it beat on the table.

  “She moved away to Elgin!” Leonard chirped in.

  “Did she?” Margaret asked.

  Owen breathed out finally and stared at the food on his plate. He had climbed down from the drainpipe and seen the haunted house when it was invisible and become president and sung out as a loon in front of the entire class.

  He could do this, too.

  “I would like to invite Sylvia to my birthday,” he said quietly.

  “Wonderful! I am so looking forward to meeting her!” Margaret said. “We will all be on our best behavior.” She looked particularly hard at Leonard.

  “Well, Andy’s in love with Eleanor!” Leonard blurted in such a loud voice that everyone jumped.

  “Are you?” Margaret asked. Andy’s face was so full of outrage he couldn’t speak.

  “They sat together at the haunted house and almost held hands!” Leonard cried.

  Andy drove his fist deep into Leonard’s bony shoulder. Then both brothers stood up and Leonard s chair toppled into a potted plant.

  “Stop talking about me and Eleanor!” Andy roared. “You’re in love with Sadie! She’s always mushing up beside you!”

  Before another blow was struck, Horace thundered to his feet.

  “With me!” he said, pointing ominously to each of the boys.

  “Horace —” Margaret said. But then her face clouded and it seemed she wasn’t sure what to do.

  “I need to discuss some matters with my sons,” Horace said gravely.

  He marched the boys up the stairs to the bedroom and closed the door and had them stand at attention in front of the bed while he paced back and forth.

  “Gloria Pork-pie,” he said to them. He looked each of them in the eye during a prolonged silence. “I used to be in love with a girl named Gloria Pork-pie.” Leonard giggled and then looked guilty. “It wasn’t her real name,” Horace said. “Her last name sounded like Pork-pie but was something different. My father found out about her and called her Pork-pie and now after all these years I can’t remember who she really was.

  He paused and spread his fingers as if trying to grip the subject properly. “I was so in love with Gloria Pork-pie that my brain twisted around in my head. Everywhere I looked I saw her. She had red hair the color of autumn.” He seemed ready to launch into a poem about her, but then he didn’t.

  “When you’re young and have no ballast,” he said, “love can hit you like a wave and knock you straight into tomorrow. You roll over and get sand in your mouth, and stagger to your feet. Then you get hit again and choke on the water.”

  He paced in silence. Finally he stopped.

  “Any questions?” he said.

  “Whatev
er happened to Gloria Pork-pie?” Owen asked.

  “Precisely!” Horace said, with some excitement. “Whatever happened to her? My father sent me to camp for two months, and every moment I mooned over her. She got more beautiful and more intelligent and so special I couldn’t bear the thought of life without her. When I got back and raced up the street to see her, there she was... Gloria Pork-pie. I couldn’t imagine for the world what I’d ever thought was so interesting.”

  “Wasn’t her hair... the color of autumn anymore?” Owen asked.

  “It was just a dirty sort of red,” Horace said. “She looked so ordinary I went up and stared at her to make sure she hadn’t been switched while I was away. She thought I was crazy, and then she hit me.”

  Horace rubbed his bicep then as if it still hurt.

  “At any rate, I hope that’s cleared things up for you.” He looked thoughtful for a moment, then left the room.

  The boys stayed at attention for a few breaths, and finally Leonard said, “Sylvia Pork-pie.” But before Owen could fly at him, his brother scampered out the door.

  As the days passed, Owen didn’t know if he should invite Sylvia to his birthday party after all. He could imagine Leonard calling out, “Sylvia Pork-pie!” as soon as she walked through the door. Horace would be all polite at first and shake her hand and then tell a dumb joke, and Margaret would keep offering her cake and ask her what her father did, and Sylvester would slobber her up and down. And Sylvia would look at the thinning brown carpet with the stain from when Andy had bled after trying to juggle pocket knives. She would see the marks on the walls from indoor baseball, the furniture that had been ridden by the boys when they were bronco-busters in a rodeo. She would miss her white carpets and her swimming pool.

  And yet if he didn’t invite her, when would he ever see her? He might simply start to forget her again — to lose the details of her and have Miss Glendon’s face begin to replace hers as it had before.

  He went into Horace’s office and found Sylvia’s telephone number, then dialed and asked for her in a voice that was as presidential as he could make it. Her mother answered and said that Sylvia was out. She asked who was calling and whether she might take a message.

  “It’s Owen. Owen Skye,” he said.

  “Oh, Owen!” she said.

  “I used to be in Sylvia’s class.”

  “Yes! And you came to her birthday party last year. I remember you.” She said it as if she might never forget him.

  Owen managed to tell Sylvia’s mother the details of the invitation, and when he put down the phone he knew that a certain course had been embarked upon, and that he couldn’t take it back.

  Yet he could not quite tell his family that she was coming. When Margaret asked him if he had invited her he mumbled and looked away, and gave the impression that he hadn’t really thought about it.

  “Call her soon if you want her to come,” Margaret pressed. “You mustn’t leave it too late!”

  Owen stayed quiet.

  “We would all love to meet her,” Margaret said.

  “What’s her name again?” Horace asked, and Owen fled the room.

  The day of Owen’s party was sunny but cold. It was spring now and most of the snow had gone but the ground was still frozen and summer seemed a long way off.

  Margaret said to Owen, “I’d like you to wear something proper for your birthday.” And then came the long, painful process of finding formal clothes for all the boys: blue jackets, white shirts, gray flannel pants, black socks and dress shoes that fit. She even forced them into ties, and Owen felt like it was all his fault.

  “Why do we have to wear these strangle clothes?” Leonard muttered. “Nobody special is coming.”

  “Your cousins are coming,” Margaret said. “I know you think they’re special.”

  “But Owen didn’t ask his girlfriend,” Leonard said. “Sylvia Pork-pie,” he whispered.

  Owen glared at him, but Leonard was standing right next to their mother, looking ready to duck.

  “Well,” Owen said carefully.

  “You didn’t ask her, did you?” Margaret said.

  “Well...” Owen said again. And then in a little voice he added, “I might have.”

  “What do you mean?” Margaret exclaimed. “Did you or didn’t you?”

  Owen meant to say that he did, but that he might have made a mistake — told Sylvia’s mother the wrong time or the wrong address. Or per­haps her mother had forgotten to pass on the invi­tation. At that moment Owen couldn’t quite believe that Sylvia Tull really was going to show up at his house in a little less than an hour.

  “It’s possible that she’s coming,” Owen said.

  “Owen!” Margaret said. “You need to tell me these things. The house is... awful and I haven’t finished the food.” And she stormed off. It hadn’t occurred to Owen that Margaret might be nerv­ous about meeting Sylvia.

  Margaret raced through the house rearranging the pillows on the chesterfield, and refolding the napkins, and pulling all the messy boots from the front closet and hurling them down the basement stairs.

  “Sylvia Pork-pie is coming to Owen’s party!” Leonard announced gleefully.

  “Sylvia who?” Horace said.

  Soon Owen found his brothers and his father lining the front window to watch for the arrival of the guest of honor. Sylvester seemed to sense that something was up and started sniffing and whining through the house, as if his special rock might have sneaked inside when he wasn’t looking.

  Owen ground his teeth and wished there was no such thing as birthdays.

  At the sound of wheels on gravel Margaret ordered them all away from the window.

  “Act natural!” she hissed.

  Owen stood in the hallway staring at the door, unable to move. The bell rang and it was Leonard who flung it open.

  “Happy birthday, Owen!” Uncle Lorne said and stepped in with a gift wrapped in green paper. Lorraine was with him, so large she could barely squeeze through the doorway. She hugged Owen to her huge belly. Eleanor and Sadie came in, too, wearing pink candy-floss dresses that made Owen wince.

  What if Sylvia wore something like that?

  “Owen’s girlfriend is coming to the party!” Leonard called out. “Her name is Sylvia Pork-pie!”

  Owen buried his face in his hands.

  “Now we’re all going to be very pleasant company,” Margaret said in the general bustle of get­ting people in the house and settled. Owen con­sidered bolting out the door and never returning.

  But Sylvia was coming, and everyone knew, and there was no avoiding it.’

  “When the bell rang again Margaret said, “Owen, dear, would you get the door?”

  They all turned to look at him.

  He forced his feet to move, and as his hand was on the doorknob he imagined her, Sylvia Pork-pie, in a pink candy-floss dress looking ridiculous and forgettable.

  He opened the door. There she was in a blinding silver coat — not her orange one that he remembered so well — with smart black pants and her hair tied back with a red ribbon. Her eyes were shy but still blue as the sky in summer. She had a small gift in her hand and she stepped right up and kissed him on the cheek as if they’d known each other forever.

  Which they had.

  Then Sylvester burst by him and leaped up, barking. His long slobbery tongue slurped across her reddening cheek, arid two muddy paws imprinted themselves on the shoulders of her sil­ver coat as she staggered backwards.

  “Down boy! Down!” Horace yanked Sylvester by the collar. “Don’t mind him!” he said. “He just gets a little rambunctious.” Then to Owen he said, “Don’t block the door there, son!” and Owen felt himself being pulled back just like the dog.

  “Hello there, I’m —” Horace started to say, and then he switched. “Lee and Elizabeth!” he said. “I had n
o idea!”

  Horace shook hands with his clients, Sylvia’s parents, who were standing right behind their daughter.

  “Come in! Come in!” Horace said. “We’re having a party!”

  “No, actually, we won’t,” Sylvia’s father said. “We have to —”

  “We’re on the hunt for some new paneling for the rec room,” Sylvia’s mother interrupted. She looked nervously at the dog. Sylvester began to growl at her but Sylvia kneeled down and started stroking his neck and ears.

  “What’s all that?” she said, melting him into a quivering mass of friendliness.

  Sylvia’s parents kissed her good-bye and headed back to the car. Horace closed the door on Sylvester, leaving him whining and whimpering outside the house. Sylvia walked into the living-room with her eyes lowered. Someone had taken her coat.

  Underneath she was wearing a simple white blouse, completely free of paw prints. On her ears were tiny, perfect pearl earrings. And around her neck, almost hidden in the blouse, was Owen’s copper-wire ring on the thin gold chain.

  “Have a seat, dear. It’s so nice to meet you!” Margaret said, her smile stretched across her face like an elastic band. “I could just shoot that dog sometimes. Are you all right?”

  “Oh, yes, she said. “I love dogs. I wish I had one.

  Margaret pulled a chair for her into the mid­dle of the rug and asked what kind of juice she would like.

  The whole room seemed to hold its breath while Sylvia decided.

  “Apple,” she said finally.

  She sat down and others arranged themselves. Even Leonard seemed to be awed into silence.

  Margaret came back with a glass of apple juice and handed it to Sylvia, who seemed aware of all the eyes trained on her. Finally she took a sip, then looked around for a table upon which to place the glass. There was none handy, so she held the glass on her lap in both hands.

  Then she gazed around the room again, her eyes moving more than her head.

  “So, Sylvia. You used to live in the village, but now you live in Elgin!” Margaret said finally.