Red Plaid Shirt

by Diane Schoemperlen

  You would come riding up in a noisy pack with bugs in your teeth, dropping your black helmets like bowling balls on the floor, eating greasy burgers and pickled eggs, drinking draft beer by the jug, the foam running down your chin. Your legs, after the long ride, felt like a wishbone waiting to be sprung. If no one would rent you a room, you slept on picnic tables in the campground, the bikes pulled in around you like wagons, a case of beer and one sleeping bag between ten of you. In the early morning, there was dew on your jacket and your legs were numb with the weight of Ivan’s head on them.

  You never did get around to telling your mother you were dating a biker (she thought you said “baker”), which was just as well, since Ivan eventually got tired, sold his bike, and moved back to Manitoba to live with his mother, who was dying. He got a job in a hardware store and soon married his high school sweetheart, Betty, who was a dental hygienist. Spy was killed on the highway: drove his bike into the back of a tanker truck in broad daylight; there was nothing left of him.

  You wear your leather jacket now when you need to feel tough. You wear it with your tight blue jeans and your cowboy boots. You strut slowly with your hands in your pockets. Your boots click on the concrete and you are a different person. You can handle anything and no one had better get in your way. You will take on the world if you have to. You will die young and in flames if you have to.

  BLACK: ebon sable charcoal jet lamp-black blue-black bruises in a night sky ink-black soot-black the colour of my hair and burning rubber dirt the colour of infinite space speeding blackball blacklist black sheep blackberries ravens eat crow black as the ace of spades and black is black I want my baby back before midnight yes of course midnight that old black dog behind me.

  BROWN CASHMERE SWEATER

  that you were wearing the night you told Daniel you were leaving him. It was that week between Christmas and New Year’s which is always a wasteland. Everyone was digging up recipes called Turkey-Grape Salad, Turkey Souffle, and Turkey-Almond-Noodle Bake. You kept vacuuming up tinsel and pine needles, putting away presents one at a time from under the tree. You and Daniel sat at the kitchen table all afternoon, drinking hot rum toddies, munching on crackers and garlic sausage, playing Trivial Pursuit, asking each other questions like:

  What’s the most mountainous country in Europe?

  Which is more tender, the left or right leg of a chicken?

  What race of warriors burned off their right breasts in Greek legend?

  Daniel was a poor loser and he thought that Europe was a country, maybe somewhere near Spain.

  This night you have just come from a party at his friend Harold’s house. You are sitting on the new couch, a loveseat, blue with white flowers, which was Daniel’s Christmas present to you, and you can’t help thinking of the year your father got your mother a coffee percolator when all she wanted was something personal: earrings, a necklace, a scarf for God’s sake. She spent most of the day locked in their bedroom, crying noisily, coming out every hour or so to baste the turkey, white-lipped, tucking more Kleenex up her sleeve. You were on her side this time and wondered how your father, whom you had always secretly loved the most, could be so insensitive. It was the changing of the guard, your allegiance shifting like sand from one to the other.

  You are sitting on the new couch eating cold pizza and trying to figure out why you didn’t have a good time at the party. Daniel is accusing you alternately of looking down on his friends or sleeping with them. He is wearing the black leather vest you bought him for Christmas and he says you are a cheapskate.

  When you tell him you are leaving (which is a decision you made months ago but it took you this long to figure out how you were going to manage it and it has nothing to do with the party, the couch, or the season), Daniel grips you by the shoulders and bangs your head against the wall until the picture hung there falls off. It is a photograph of the mountains on a pink spring morning, the ridges like ribs, the runoff like incisions or veins. There is glass flying everywhere in slices into your face, into your hands pressed over your eyes, and the front of your sweater is spotted and matted with blood.

  On the way to the hospital, he says he will kill you if you tell them what he did to you. You promise him anything, you promise him that you will love him forever and that you will never leave.

  The nurse takes you into the examining room. Daniel waits in the waiting room, reads magazines, buys a chocolate bar from the vending machine, then a Coke and a bag of ripple chips. You tell the nurse what happened and the police take him away in handcuffs with their guns drawn. In the car on the way to the station, he tells them he only did it because he loves you. The officer who takes down your report tells you this and he just keeps shaking his head and patting your arm. The police photographer takes pictures of your face, your broken fingers, your left breast, which has purple bruises all over it where he grabbed it and twisted and twisted.

  By the time you get to the women’s shelter, it is morning and the blood on your sweater has dried, doesn’t show. There is no way of knowing. There, the other women hold you, brush your hair, bring you coffee and cream of mushroom soup. The woman with the broken cheekbone has two canaries in a gold cage that she carries with her everywhere like a lamp. She shows you how the doors are steel, six inches thick, and the windows are bulletproof. She shows you where you will sleep, in a room on the third floor with six other women, some of them lying now fully dressed on their little iron cots with their hands behind their heads, staring at the ceiling as if it were full of stars or clouds that drift slowly westward in the shape of camels, horses, or bears. She shows you how the canaries will sit on your finger if you hold very still and pretend you are a tree or a roof or another bird.

  BROWN: ochre cinnamon coffee copper caramel the colour of my Christmas cake chocolate mocha walnut chestnuts raw sienna my suntan burnt umber burning toast fried fricasseed sautéed grilled I baste the turkey the colour of stupid cows smart horses brown bears brown shirt brown sugar apple brown betty brunette the colour of thought and sepia the colour of old photographs the old earth and wood.

  GREEN SATIN QUILTED JACKET

  in the Oriental style with mandarin collar and four red frogs down the front. This jacket is older than you are. It belonged to your mother, who bought it when she was the same age you are now. In the black-and-white photos from that time, the jacket is grey but shiny and your mother is pale but smooth-skinned, smiling with her hand on her hip or your father’s thigh.

  You were always pestering her to let you wear it to play dress-up, with her red high heels and that white hat with the feathers and the little veil that covered your whole face. You wanted to wear it to a Hallowe’en party at school where all the other girls would be witches, ghosts, or princesses and you would be the only mandarin, with your eyes, you imagined, painted up slanty and two sticks through a bun in your hair. But she would never let you. She would just keep on cooking supper, bringing carrots, potatoes, cabbages up from the root cellar, taking peas, beans, broccoli out of the freezer in labelled dated parcels, humming, looking out through the slats of the Venetian blind at the black garden and the leafless rose bushes. Each year, at least one of them would be winter-killed no matter how hard she had tried to protect them. And she would dig it up in the spring by the dead roots and the thorns would get tangled in her hair, leave long bloody scratches all down her arms. And the green jacket stayed where it was, in the cedar chest with the handmade lace doilies, her grey linen wedding suit, and the picture of your father as a small boy with blonde ringlets.

  After the funeral, you go through her clothes while your father is outside shovelling snow. You lay them out in piles on the bed: one for the Salvation Army, one for the second-hand store, one for yourself because your father wants you to take something home with you. You will take the green satin jacket, also a white mohair cardigan with multicoloured squares on the front, a black and white striped shirt you sent her for her birthday last year that she never wore, an imitation pearl
necklace for Alice, and a dozen unopened packages of pantyhose. There is a fourth pile for your father’s friend, Jack’s, new wife, Frances, whom your mother never liked, but your father says Jack and Frances have fallen on hard times on the farm since Jack got the emphysema, and Frances will be glad of some new clothes.

  Jack and Frances drop by the next day with your Aunt Jeanne. You serve tea and the shortbread cookies Aunt Jeanne has brought. She makes them just the way your mother did, whipped, with a sliver of maraschino cherry on top. Jack, looking weather-beaten or embarrassed, sits on the edge of the couch with his baseball cap in his lap and marvels at how grown-up you’ve got to be. Frances is genuinely grateful for the two green garbage bags of clothes, which you carry out to the truck for her.

  After they leave, you reminisce fondly with your father and Aunt Jeanne about taking the toboggan out to Jack’s farm when you were small, tying it to the back of the car, your father driving slowly down the country lane, towing you on your stomach, clutching the front of the toboggan which curled like a wooden wave. You tell him for the first time how frightened you were of the black tires spinning the snow into your face, and he says he had no idea, he thought you were having fun. This was when Jack’s first wife, Winnifred, was still alive. Your Aunt Jeanne, who knows everything, tells you that when Winnifred was killed in that car accident, it was Jack, driving drunk, who caused it. And now when he gets drunk, he beats Frances up, locks her out of the house in her bare feet, and she has to sleep in the barn, in the hay with the horses.

  You are leaving in the morning. Aunt Jeanne helps you pack. You are anxious to get home but worried about leaving your father alone. Aunt Jeanne says she’ll watch out for him.

  The green satin jacket hangs in your front hall closet now, between your black leather jacket and your raincoat. You can still smell the cedar from the chest and the satin is always cool on your cheek like clean sheets or glass.

  One day you think you will wear it downtown, where you are meeting a new man for lunch. You study yourself in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door and you decide it makes you look like a different person: someone unconventional, unusual, and unconcerned. This new man, whom you met recently at an outdoor jazz festival, is a free spirit who eats health food, plays the dulcimer, paints well, writes well, sings well, and has just completed an independent study of eastern religions. He doesn’t smoke, drink, or do drugs. He is pure and peaceful, perfect. He is teaching you how to garden, how to turn the black soil, how to plant the seeds, how to water them, weed them, watch them turn into lettuce, carrots, peas, beans, radishes, and pumpkins, how to get the kinks out of your back by stretching your brown arms right up to the sun. You haven’t even told Alice about him yet because he is too good to be true. He is bound to love this green jacket, and you in it too.

  You get in your car, drive around the block, go back inside because you forgot your cigarettes, and you leave the green jacket on the back of a kitchen chair because who are you trying to kid? More than anything, you want to be transparent. More than anything, you want to hold his hands across the table and then you will tell him you love him and it will all come true.

  GREEN: viridian verdigris chlorophyll grass leafy jade mossy verdant apple-green pea-green lime-green sage-green sea-green bottle-green emeralds avocadoes olives all leaves the colour of Venus hope and jealousy the colour of mould mildew envy poison and pain and snakes the colour of everything that grows in my garden fertile nourishing sturdy sane and strong.

  Stranger Than Fiction (1988)

  Any number of people will tell you that truth is stranger than fiction. They will usually tell you this as a preface to the story of how their Aunt Maude was frightened by a bald albino juggler at the East Azilda Fall Fair when she was six months pregnant (the juggler, himself frightened by a disoriented cow that had wandered into the ring, lost control of five airborne bowling pins, and one of them hit poor old Maude square in the back of the head) and later she gave birth to a bald brown-eyed baby, Donalda, who was allergic to milk and her hair grew in so blonde it looked white and now she’s unhappily married to a man who owns a bowling alley in downtown Orlando.

  Or they will tell it to you as an afterword to the story of how Rita Moreno appeared to their best friend, Leona’s, first cousin, Fritz, in a dream, doing the Chiquita Banana routine and feeding the fruit off her hat to a donkey, and sure enough, the next day, Fritz, who was an unemployed actor, got his big TV break doing a commercial for Fruit of the Loom underwear and he was the grapes.

  Oh sure, lots of people will tell you, and with very little provocation too, that truth is stranger than fiction. But I, now I have got the proof.

  I was writing a story about a woman named Sheila. Apropos of nothing, the name Sheila, I discovered, is an Irish form of Cecilia, from the Latin, meaning “blind.” In the story, Sheila was thirty-two years old, slim, attractive, and intelligent with blue eyes and straight blonde waist-length hair. (I often give my fictional characters blue eyes and blonde hair because I have brown eyes and brown hair and I don’t want anyone to think my work is autobiographical. Also, my hair is naturally curly, short.)

  Sheila was married to a handsome brown-haired man named Roger, a bank manager, and they lived in a ranch-style bungalow in Tuxedo Park. Sheila amused herself by taking aerobics one afternoon a week, doing volunteer work at the senior citizens’ home, and having long lunches a lot with her friends. She and Roger got along well enough, although every once in a while Sheila would remember that they hadn’t had a meaningful conversation in four years. They lived an easy life, gliding gracefully and politely around each other like ice dancers.

  So then I made Sheila unhappy in her heart of hearts: because what’s a good story without a little angst?

  The thing was, Sheila wanted to be someone else. Sheila wanted to be a country and western singer. She knew all the words to all the best songs, which she practised by singing along with the CD player while Roger was away all day at the bank. She had a special secret wardrobe stashed in the back of her walk-in closet off the master bathroom. On the cover of her first album, she wanted to see a picture of herself astride a white horse in her chaps in the wind. Having never been much bothered by either self-doubt or self-examination, it did not even occur to her that she might very well be crazy or untalented.

  Then she met a man named Carlos in a specialty record store called Country Cousins. Carlos bore a startling resemblance to Johnny Cash in his younger days. Of course they hit it off right away because they were both looking for that old Patsy Cline album with “I Fall To Pieces” on it. They went for a beer at The Hitching Post, a nearby country bar where, as it turned out, Carlos’s band, The Red Rock Ramblers, was playing. They were only in town for the week, having just spent two months on the road, and now they were heading home to Saskatoon. Feeling gently homesick, Carlos talked a lot about the prairies, which Sheila had never seen, about the way they’ll change colour in a thunderstorm or a dangerous wind, the way they’ll make you think of things you’ve never thought before because you can see them forever and they have no limits. So by the time he got around to also telling her he had a wife and three kids out there, it was too late to turn back now, because he already had his hand on her thigh and his tongue in her ear.

  I was having a bit of a time of it in my own life right then. Three and a half weeks earlier I had fallen in love with a man named Nathan who was from Winnipeg and also married. This was in July and it was hot, humid, and hazy; it was hard to concentrate. I was downtown Friday night having a drink at The Red Herring, which is an outdoor patio bar with a magnolia tree, orange poppies, handsome waiters, and blue metal tables sprouting red and white umbrellas advertising Alfa Romeo, Noilly Prat, and OV. The regular clientele consists largely of writers, painters, and jazz piano players who are just taking a little break in the sun. Nobody ever really gets drunk at The Red Herring: they just relax, recharge, have pleasant informed conversations about postmodernism, Chinese ast
rology, and free trade. They are intense and innocent.

  Nathan was drinking alone and so was I, leaning against the stand-up bar inside. I’m not even sure now how we first got talking but, lo and behold, the next thing you know, he’s telling me that he’s a writer too! Well, you can just imagine my joy at discovering we had the whole world in common. He wrote poetry, mind you, whereas I write fiction, but I was willing, for the most part, to overlook this minor discrepancy. He was in town for a weekend workshop at the university. He was dynamic, sensitive, intelligent, funny, clean-shaven, tall, fairly well off, very supportive, unhappy in his marriage, and he’d even read my books. So what else could I do? (Caught now in the act of recollection, I recognize how flimsy all this sounds, but at the time it was compelling.)

  We found a table on the patio and drank a bottle of expensive white wine while talking about our favourite writers, books, and movies, our favourite foods, colours, and seasons, and the worst reviews our respective books had ever received. We congratulated ourselves on being so much alike and ordered another bottle of wine.

  He did not talk about his wife, except to say that she wasn’t fond of wine, and her name was never mentioned. (I already knew from Sheila that a married man who does not call his wife by her name is pretty well ripe for the picking.) So it was easy enough, sad to say, to keep forgetting about her.

  I forgot about her as we walked back to my house arm in arm at midnight, singing a slow country song, and he was the slide guitar. I did remember her as he undressed me in the living room, but I forgot about her again as he took me in his arms and his skin was so cool. I remembered her when he sighed in his sleep, but I forgot about her again in the morning when we had a shower, some coffee, and he read to me from The Norton Anthology of English Literature.

  Then I read him the story of Sheila so far and he said he really loved it. I took this to mean that he loved me too.