Red Plaid Shirt

by Diane Schoemperlen

  Afterwards, he told me about his teacher one summer at a writers’ workshop years ago in Edmonton and this teacher was a big influence on him, always telling him, “Life ain’t art.” I wasn’t sure how to apply this apparent truism to my own life/work but I agreed eagerly, as if it were something I’d known all along.

  It was shortly after this that Carlos in the story began to look less like Johnny Cash and more like the young George Gordon, Lord Byron. He admitted that when he retired from the music business, he might take up writing. Sheila recalled, but did not relate, the story she’d heard of a writer and a doctor chatting at a cocktail party and the doctor said, “When I retire and have nothing else to do, I think I’ll take up writing,” so the writer said, “That’s a good idea! When I retire and have nothing else to do, I think I’ll take up brain surgery.”

  Carlos told Sheila that everybody has a book in them somewhere just waiting to be written and Sheila wondered, briefly, where the book in her might be right now: lodged behind some major organ perhaps, her liver, her lungs? She had this recurring dull ache, sometimes in her left breast, sometimes in her right. It worried her occasionally, usually late at night, and then she would lie in bed beside Roger, feeling her breasts through her pink cotton nightie, looking for lumps, holding her breath. Roger, who, she was convinced, could have slept through Armageddon, sighed dreamily and draped his left arm straight across her breasts by accident, so that she lay there pinned and pleading with God. She had come to think of this pain as her “heartache” but now she wondered if it might just be a book trying to get out.

  I told Nathan this pink cotton nightie of mine had once belonged to my mother who was dead now, of lung cancer, though she’d never smoked a day in her life. He said he understood my not liking to sleep in the nude and I was relieved, as this is a point some men get funny about, as if it were an insult to intimacy or their masculinity. I told him that I might like to write a book about my mother someday, as she had led an interesting life, and he assured me that everybody has a story worth telling and I’d have no trouble finding a market for that sort of human interest thing.

  I told him how my first boyfriend had convinced himself that he would die young, tragically, in great pain, and alone. His name was Cornell and he suffered from migraines and whole days during which he could not climb out from under this escalating burden of impending doom. I felt guilty for dumping him but I could not let go of my own romantic fantasy of growing old beside my one true love and we would bring each other freshly fluffed pillows and cups of weak tea as the time drew near.

  Sheila touched her breasts and felt nothing. Roger in the morning was always cheerful and animated, so she never told him about the pain and the sad certainty of something that would come to her at five in the morning when the earth shifts imperceptibly on its axis and everything changes or begins to be the same all over again. When she told this to Carlos between sets at the bar, he said how his six-year-old daughter often woke screaming from nightmares in which she was afraid of everything and then he would lie beside her all night while she sighed and foundered feverishly.

  At five in the morning on Sunday, Nathan got up to catch a plane and I kissed him quietly goodbye without asking how old his children were.

  I am comfortable enough with the derivative aspects of Sheila’s story in relation to my own. I am accustomed by now to this habit fiction has of assuming the guise of reality. I am no longer surprised to go out one night for New York steak with baked potato (medium rare, sour cream, and bacon bits) and the next day my characters are enjoying the very same meal (well done, mind you, hold the bacon bits, yes, I’ll have the cheesecake please). I no longer find it unsettling to see the woman beside me in a bookstore leafing through a paperback called How To Live With A Schizophrenic and when I get home, the next thing you know, there’s a schizophrenic in my story and that book is really coming in handy.

  So the whole time I was putting Sheila through her paces, I was also thinking, with some other side of my brain, about Nathan. I wasn’t seriously expecting a letter or anything as incriminating as that. I did hope that he might get very drunk sometime and call me up in the middle of the night, begging and reciting love poems. I knew this wasn’t something he ever could or would (considering his wife, his kids, the prairies, and all) do sober. This just shows you how little I wanted, how little it would have taken, how very little I was asking for.

  But then again, in a different mood (more confident, more optimistic, very nearly jaunty), I was also thinking: Well, why not? Why couldn’t he, after sleeping with me just that one weekend, go back to his bungalow in Winnipeg, pack up his word processor, leave his wife, his kids, the dog, and the algae-eater, and come back to me with tears in his eyes and a lump of love in his throat? I would pick him up at the airport, of course (all good romantic fantasies should incorporate at least one airport scene or maybe a bus station at midnight, or rain, high winds, a blizzard, a taxi at the very least, with a surly, silent driver and the meter running), where we would float across the mezzanine and fall into each other’s well-dressed tingling arms while all around us dark-skinned foreign families wept on each other and tried to catch their luggage on that stupid whirligig.

  Well? Why not?

  Stranger things have happened. Which is another of those truisms that people will present you with just before they tell you about the time they picked up a hitchhiker on the highway halfway between Thunder Bay and Winnipeg and he turned out to be from Wabigoon where their friends, the Jacobsens, used to live and he didn’t really know them but he’d heard of them and he’d seen the same flying saucer they’d seen in 1975, August 17, 11:38 p.m.

  Many of these stranger things are duly documented in the weekly tabloids which I buy occasionally at the A&P when I think no one is noticing. I take solace from the headlines, tell them to my friends, and we all laugh, comforted to know that:

  MICHAEL JACKSON WAS THE ELEPHANT MAN IN HIS PAST LIFE

  FLEA CIRCUS GOES WILD WITH HUNGER AND ATTACKS TRAINER

  MARRIAGE LASTS FOUR HOURS — GROOM WANTED TO WEAR

  THE WEDDING GOWN TERRIFIED TELEPHONE OPERATOR CLAIMS, MY HUSBAND

  TRAINED ROACHES TO ATTACK ME HUBBY WHO GAVE KIDNEY TO WIFE WANTS IT BACK IN

  DIVORCE BATTLE MEN FIGHT DUEL FOR GIRL’S LOVE WITH SAUSAGES.

  So yes, stranger things have happened in the past. And the future, on a good day, extends eternally with the promise of more.

  About the time I got Sheila to the point in the story where she was actually going to get up on stage at The Hitching Post (Roger thought she was at a Tupperware party) and sing “I Fall To Pieces” (she had her satin shirt on, her fringed buckskin jacket, her cowboy boots, and everything), I accidentally thought of a girl named Sheila Shirley Harkness who was in my Grade Nine History class. She was not a friend of mine. In fact, I avoided her, because the one time we did have lunch together in the cafeteria, she ate half my french fries right off my plate and told me the story of how her Uncle Norman had killed himself by slamming his head in the car door. Sheila Shirley Harkness was older than the rest of us because she’d failed Grade Eight twice. Her mother was that woman who walked around the neighbourhood in her curlers and a mangy fur coat, twirling a baton, singing to herself, and waving her free hand like a flag. My mother said she should be ashamed of herself, acting like that in public, as if this bizarre behaviour were something we all secretly wanted to exhibit but we knew better.

  Sheila Shirley Harkness was so fat that she had to sit in a special desk. And she smelled, although this was something we girls never discussed among ourselves because maybe we were afraid that we smelled too.

  Sheila Shirley Harkness gave birth to a six-pound baby boy eight days before final exams. She was one of those girls sometimes written up in the tabloids who say they never knew they were pregnant: she thought she had something wrong with her, cancer, gas, or a blocked intestine. When the baby’s head came out in the bathroom at three in the afternoon, she
thought she was dying, turning inside out before her very own horrified eyes. She dropped out of school then, out of sight, and kept the baby, Brian, at home. There was surprisingly little speculation as to who the father might be. It was not unimportant; rather, it was unimaginable. Immaculate conception seemed more likely than Sheila in bed with a boy, any boy, moaning.

  This first Sheila (or this second Sheila, according to your perspective on such matters as fact/fiction, life/lies, and the boundaries or dependencies like veils hung between them) has receded fairly fuzzily into my memory now and so was probably not quite the girl I remembered anyway, was probably less frightening, less doomed, might well be working at this very minute as a high-level executive for a major advertising firm, living in a harbourfront condo with an original Matisse in the loft, brass end tables, and a marble Jacuzzi, rather than lying around all day in her underwear (yellowed or grey, the elastic shot), eating maple walnut ice cream and watching “I Love Lucy” reruns while her mother bangs her head against the wall in the basement and her illegitimate children run rampant through the neighbourhood in their dirty diapers, as we all, in the grip of our mutually hard-hearted, shiny-haired adolescence, assumed she would end up.

  Either way, the first Sheila was not at all like the second, like my Sheila, as I had come to think of her. My Sheila was, among other things, friendly, cheerful, clever, clear-skinned, well-educated, long-legged, ambitious, and sweet-smelling. Her last name was Gustafson and her middle name was Mary, although neither of these names actually appeared in the story. Her parents, for the sake of simplicity, were either dead or living on Ellesmere Island and so didn’t bother her much anymore.

  Being a fictional character, my Sheila was not obliged to explain herself to anyone or to divulge her darkest fondest secrets to total strangers. Unlike myself (with my disarming or disturbing tendency to spill my guts, to tell the worst about myself to anyone who will listen), unlike myself (me having yet to accurately determine the difference between revealing and defending yourself), unlike myself (me having only recently figured out that most people don’t tell the truth about themselves, not even to themselves, because they don’t know it, like it, or remember it), Sheila knew when to keep her mouth shut.

  Nevertheless, my Sheila started to subtly change. She started feeling sluggish all the time. She wore the same old dress three days in a row. She bought a baton. She ate two cheeseburgers, a large fries, and an order of chili and toast at one sitting in a greasy spoon in a bad neighbourhood. For a minute there, she questioned the meaning of life, if there even was one, if there even should be one. She sniffed her armpits in public. She was on the verge of a transformation, threatening to rewrite her whole life, not to mention the story. I was having none of this.

  It is for fear of exactly this sort of thing that I try never to call my fictional characters by the names of people I have really known, even just in passing. So I tried to change her name in the middle of the story. First I tried to call her Janet, then Beth, then Brenda, Delores, and Laura.

  But no. None of the new names would do.

  Janet was too responsible.

  Beth was too timid and kept threatening to die of scarlet fever.

  Brenda was too easily satisfied.

  Delores was the name of my friend, Susan’s, Irish setter bitch and her hair was red.

  Laura was the woman who came to demonstrate a talented but over-priced vacuum cleaner all over my living room for an hour and a half one Wednesday afternoon and she was sorry she’d never heard of me but she didn’t get much time to read anymore what with this new job and her two-year-old twins, not to mention her husband, Hal, and did I know Danielle Steel personally, and when I said I didn’t have $2,000 to spend on anything, let alone a stupid vacuum cleaner, she said, “Now that’s funny, I thought all writers were rich.”

  So Sheila stayed Sheila and I struggled to keep her on the right track, would not give her permission to gain weight, pick her nose, or stay in bed with her head covered up till three in the afternoon. I would not allow her, much as she tried, to dream about babies born in bathtubs, buses, or a 747 cruising over Greenland at an altitude of 22,000 feet. Against my better judgement, I did allow her one nightmare about her mother having joined a marching band, playing the bagpipes with a sound like a cat being squeezed, and the parade stretched from one end of the country to the other, but at the very last minute her mother turned into Tammy Wynette and everything worked out all right.

  Sheila got a little surly with me sometimes but that was understandable, considering her situation, her frustration, and human nature being what it is.

  One Friday afternoon, when I’d manoeuvred Sheila around to the place in her life where she either had to shit or get off the pot, I decided to go down to The Red Herring for a drink instead. Sheila had been a big hit at The Hitching Post. Carlos had professed his love and offered her a job with the band. She hadn’t vacuumed the house all week and Roger hadn’t even noticed. Two things remained unclear: what was Carlos going to do about his family back in Saskatoon and why was Roger so dense? Now Sheila either had to pack up her buckskin and join the band (Carlos was waiting outside in a cab with the meter running, off to the airport any minute now) or go home and cook a tuna casserole for Roger (who was stuck in rush-hour traffic at the bridge, fuming, sweating, and listening to the stock market report on the car radio).To the naked eye, this would seem like a simple choice, but Sheila didn’t know what she wanted to do and neither did I. I wanted to make her live happily ever after (if only because I thought this would bode well for Nathan and me), but happy endings have fallen out of favour these days — modern (or should I say, postmodern?) readers being what they are (that is, intelligent, discerning, and slightly cynical), they find them just too hard to believe, too much to hope for, fake. Could I really hope to convince any of them that stranger things have happened?

  I was tense and thought a drink or two might do the trick. Going to The Red Herring in the afternoon is not like going down to, say, The Sunset Hotel, where they have table dancing, four shows a day, and the regulars, in the manner of serious drinkers, gaze deeply into their glasses of draft between mouthfuls, dredging there for answers or hope because they don’t know where else to look. Some woman in gold glitter high heels and pink short-shorts is dancing by herself and the old guy in the back booth is sleeping with his head on his arms, having just wet himself or thrown up under the table.

  The Red Herring, on the other hand, is a classy place, and having a drink or even two or three there in the afternoon, especially on a Friday, is an acceptable enough thing for a real writer, even a female one, to do. I imagined that as I sat there sipping, my writer’s block would be hanging off me with a certain attractive, highly intelligent sheen.

  I mean, what can you expect of writers anyway when they are prone to sitting around all day with their heads full of events that never happened to people who never existed while conducting conversations that never took place in carefully decorated rooms that will never be built?

  Besides, it was at The Red Herring where I first met Nathan, so that was another good enough reason to go there. If I am fortunate enough to get the same table (toward the back, to the left), I can imagine that he is sitting across from me, we are drinking dry white wine and smiling, holding hands and making plans. In this fantasy, his wife is not, as you might expect, dead, confined to a sanatorium, or cheerfully giving him a divorce—she has simply vanished, vaporized, dropped off the face of the earth like rain. She might even be alive and well on another planet, having assumed a whole new identity with the papers to prove it, living out her life like a pseudonym.

  So I fix my eyes on the empty chair and construct long loving conversations with Nathan, who is always wearing the same navy teeshirt and white cotton pants because that’s all I ever knew him in. Sometimes I get carried away and catch myself nodding and moving my lips, smiling away to beat the band. I can only hope that the other patrons, on seeing this, take me for one
of those independent strong-minded women who is always inordinately pleased with her own company. But then I remember that Ann Landers column where someone complained about always being told to smile and Ann reminded her that people who walk around smiling all the time for no reason are often followed by unsmiling men in white coats.

  No such luck that day though—the only empty table was one to the right just beneath the magnolia tree. Our table was occupied by four cheerful young women in straw hats and lacy sundresses. They were eating elaborate beautiful salads and toasting the glorious day with Perrier and lime. I had no reason to resent, dislike, or envy them, but I did anyway.

  I ordered a peach schnapps with orange juice, which is called a Fuzzy Navel, so of course the waiter and I had a chummy little chuckle over that. Then I sat back to nurse my drink and read an article in Harper’s Magazine called “The Credible Word” by John Berger.

  At the very beginning, he said: Today the discredit of words is very great.

  And in the middle: A scarf may demand more space than a cloud.

  And finally: The pages burning were like ideal pages being written.

  I took this to be a validation of sorts and flipped through the rest of the magazine feeling lighthearted, encouraged, and close to inspired. (It is, I have frequently found, much easier to feel inspired in a nice restaurant, facing up to all that good cutlery, fine china, fresh pasta, and crisp lettuce, than it is in my office, facing up finally to the typewriter and all that blank paper.)

  Skimming next through the “Harper’s Index,” I could not help but feel secure and confirmed in the knowledge that the number of brands of bottled water sold in the United States is 535, the number of fish per day that a Vermonter may shoot in season is 10, the price of an order of sushi at Dodger Stadium is only $4.50, and the number of Soviets in Petrozavodsk who were crushed to death in liquor store lineups last year was 3.