Red Plaid Shirt

by Diane Schoemperlen

  Black city spotted with blue and white lights:

  There was a station wagon stopped at a crossing. It was filled with suitcases, babies, and basketballs. For a minute, I wanted to scream: “Stop! Stop! There’s a train coming! We’ll all be killed!” Then I remembered that I was the train and I didn’t have to stop for anything. Trains are so safe from the inside.

  Yellow field of wheat:

  What else is there to do on a train anymore but remember? I thought of a witchy woman who lived on the corner of Cross Street and Vine, in a wooden shack with pigeons on the roof and chickens in the porch. She watched me through the window when I walked by to Sunday school. The winter I was eight she got hit by a train. For a time I had nightmares …

  Here she ran out of room on the card and finished up her message on the next one. Purple mountain:

  … about arms and legs broken off like icicles, about a head rolling down a snowbank wearing a turquoise toque just like mine. Then I forgot all about her till now. I remember rocking my cousin, Gary, in his cradle, the way he couldn’t hold his head up yet, and now he’s the chef at a fancy French restaurant.

  Sitting at her Aunt Helen’s kitchen table in Winnipeg, surrounded by relatives, neighbours, warm casseroles, and frozen pound cakes, she wrote on the back of a sympathy card:

  I’ve still got the sound of the train in my head. It makes it hard to think of anything but songs. Tomorrow.

  WAR TRAIN

  In Lesley’s parents’ photo album, there was a picture of her mother and her Aunt Helen seeing her father and her Uncle Mel off at the train station. The women were waving and blowing kisses from the platform, stylish in their broad-shouldered coats and little square hats with veils. The men were grinning and walking away, handsome in their sleek uniforms and jaunty caps. They were all very young then, and splendid. The silver train was waiting behind them, its windows filled with the faces of many other young men. They went away to the war and then some of them came back again.

  After her Uncle Mel’s funeral, Lesley’s father told her about the time he’d ridden the train all across France with Mel’s head in his lap, Mel nearly dying of ptomaine poisoning from a Christmas turkey, but he didn’t.

  TRAIN TRIP WEST

  All the way back to Ventura after her Uncle Mel’s funeral, Lesley slept fitfully or looked out the train window and thought about how everything looks different when you’re passing through it in the opposite direction. On this return journey, she was riding backwards, facing where she’d come from, as if she had eyes in the back of her head.

  The train whistled through the backsides of a hundred anonymous towns, past old hotels of pink or beige stucco, past slaughterhouses, gas stations, trailer parks, and warehouses. Children and old men waved. Dogs barked, soundless, powerless, strangling themselves straining at their chains. White sheets tangled on backyard clotheslines and red tractors idled at unmarked crossings.

  Lesley never knew where she was exactly: there are no mileage signs beside the train tracks the way there are on the highway. There is no way of knowing how far from, how far to. No way, on train time, of locating yourself accurately inside the continuum. You just have to keep on moving, forward and forward and forward, or back, trusting that wherever you are heading is still out there somewhere.

  HORSE AND TRAIN

  One year for her birthday in Ventura (or could it have been Christmas … could it have been that same year when Lesley bought Bruce the guitar he’d been aching after, the Fender Stratocaster, and when she couldn’t take the suspense a minute longer, she gave it to him on Christmas Eve instead of in the morning, just to see the look on his face, and then they stayed up all night playing music and singing, drinking eggnog till dawn … when Bruce took the guitar to bed with him and Lesley took a picture of him cuddling it under the puffy pink quilt her mother had sent, and then she kept him awake even longer, telling her theory that if men were the ones who had babies, then there would be no more war … the best Christmas ever, it could have been then), Bruce gave Lesley a framed reproduction of the Alex Colville painting Horse and Train.

  In the painting, a purple-black horse on the right is running headlong down the tracks toward an oncoming train on the left. The landscape around them is gravel and brown prairie grass. The ears of the horse are flattened, its tail is extended, and the white smoke from the black train is drifting across the brown prairie sky at dusk.

  Bruce hung the painting over the couch in the tiny living room of their basement apartment and Lesley admired it every time she walked into the room.

  After Bruce left Lesley and moved to Montreal with Analise, Lesley took the painting off the wall and smashed it on the cement floor, so that she was vacuuming up glass for an hour afterwards, weeping.

  When Lesley moved back to Winnipeg a few months later and rented the little stucco bungalow on Harris Street, she had the painting reframed with new glass and hung it on her bedroom wall. She liked to look at it before she went to sleep at night.

  She looked at it when she was lying in bed with Cliff, who had his hands behind his head and the ashtray balanced on his bare chest, who was talking and smoking and talking, so happy to be spending the night. She looked at it as she tried to concentrate and follow Cliff’s train of thought, but really she was thinking about how they’d been seeing each other for three months now and it wasn’t working out.

  But really she was thinking about an article she’d read in a women’s magazine years ago, and the writer, a marriage counsellor, said that in every romantic relationship there was one person who loved less and one who loved more. The important question then, which a person must face, was: Which would you rather be: the one who loves less or the one who loves more?

  When Lesley asked Cliff this question, she already knew what his answer would be.

  Which would you rather be: the one who loves less or the one who loves more?

  This was like saying:

  Which would you rather be: the horse or the train?

  It should have been simple.

  The Look of the Lightning, The Sound of the Birds (1989)

  You, who have lived your whole life believing

  if you made enough plans

  you wouldn’t need to be afraid …

  —Bronwen Wallace, “Into the Midst of It,” in Common Magic

  Fear is the general term for the anxiety and agitation felt at the presence of danger; dread refers to the fear or depression felt in anticipating something dangerous or disagreeable (to live in dread of poverty); fright applies to a sudden, shocking, usually momentary fear (the mouse gave her a fright); alarm implies the fright felt at the sudden realization of danger (he felt alarm at the sight of the pistol); terror applies to an overwhelming, often paralyzing fear (the terror of soldiers in combat); panic refers to a frantic, unreasoning fear, often one that spreads quickly and leads to irrational, aimless action (the cry of “fire!” created a panic).

  —Webster’s New World Dictionary

  An excessive secretion of adrenalin arising out of fear eventually produces shock, a constriction of small arterioles in the body, lowered blood pressure, loss of blood fluid to the tissues, dehydration, increased heart beat, and ultimate death.

  —Kimble and Garmezy, Principles of General Psychology

  If a story is not to be about love, then I think it must be about fear.

  I am meeting my friend Melody at Van’s for lunch around noon. It’s Friday and the relative humidity is 100 percent, so that upon waking, I find the sheets wadded in a damp ball at the foot of my bed. On the clock radio, the weatherman is cheerfully promising another unbearably hot day and then they play “Summertime.” I groan and try to remember how snowflakes feel, falling on my face.

  Melody and I made these arrangements earlier in the week on the telephone. I noted them in my appointment book and also on the calendar on the kitchen wall. I am fond of calendars and like to have one in every room. The one in the kitchen, under the clock, features,
predictably, milk recipes. The one in the bathroom, over the white wicker clothes hamper, features classic cars in well-polished poses struck upon black asphalt, wet cobblestones, or circular driveways in front of cathedrals, wheat fields, or stately white mansions. The one in my bedroom, next to the vanity, features contemporary female artists, their paintings with names like Cabbage in Bloom, Chernobyl and Navajo Medicine, and Apple Blossoms, 1987.

  Melody and I have lunch together at least once a month and we always meet at Van’s on a Friday around noon. Melody, who is once again (or still) trying to lose that ten pounds she gained over the winter, will order the soup of the day and a small Caesar salad. I will have the chicken pasta and a side order of cheese and garlic bread. We will drink black coffee before, during, and after the meal.

  When I have lunch with my other friends, we go to different places on different days. Ellen and I always go to the White Spot on a Wednesday. We both have the steak sandwich and a beer. Janie and I always go to the Burger King on a Saturday with our kids: my son, Andrew, and her twin daughters, Ashley and Kate. All of our children are three. At the Burger King, I have a Whopper, a large order of fries with gravy, and a chocolate milkshake. Andrew only eats the onion rings.

  What I mean is: I cannot imagine being at the Burger King on Saturday afternoon on Princess Street with Melody.

  At one time, close to ten years ago now, Melody and I were roommates. We were best friends then. Now we are close, but no longer a conspiracy or a cartel.

  At that time, Melody and I were both single and spent all of our evenings in bars. For three solid years we were drinking and partying like mad fiends. We were good-natured and resilient enough then to have hangovers which lasted for fifteen minutes at the most, rather than for two whole days the way they do now. We were going through a phase together: that was how I thought of it then. We were in disguise, playing at self-destruction. Or we had a new hobby. Or we had spring fever. We were generally pleased with ourselves, especially when we walked into our favourite tavern at The Belvedere Hotel and Billy, the bartender, would tease us, saying, “Here comes trouble!” We didn’t even have to order, he knew what we wanted. He would let us write cheques if we got carried away and ran short of cash.

  We sat around The Belvedere night after night, drinks and cigarettes in hand, talking about the time to come when we wouldn’t be doing this anymore. The bar would be filling up around us: there was a country and western band on stage, people dancing by themselves, minor altercations around the pool table, somebody sending us another pitcher of beer, and, over the twanging guitars, we could talk glibly about the future because the end of the pointless present was always firmly in sight. We were just waiting to get tired of it. We were going through our mid-life crises early or our adolescent rebellions late.

  We were never in real danger, or so we thought. There was always a part of us that didn’t enter into it, that didn’t get drunk. Much as I liked to drink, I always assumed that I would be sober when the time came: sober when my real life began. And now here we are.

  Melody has no children. She does have a husband (his name is Ted) whereas I don’t: this, however, is not a reason for anything and can hardly be construed as her fault. I did have one once, for a little while, and now I have Andrew.

  Sometimes along about midnight or later on a Friday or Saturday night, I catch myself longing for those irresponsible old days, longing for a blast of loud brainless music, an elongated bloated beer drunk, a party all night with Richard falling into the stereo three times, Evelyn spilling a fish bowl full of strawberry daiquiris into the piano, Donny dancing naked like he always did, his underwear like a bunny hat on his head. Then breakfast in the morning, the birds are already singing and we’re all down at Smitty’s at six a.m. where they were tolerant, the waitress was benign or blessed, the coffee pots were bottomless, and Melody, yelping at the sunrise coming pink all over the sky, said, “Wow! Wow! Wow! WOW!", and the construction workers ate bacon and eggs in their yellow hard hats silently and Melody said, “Think of it, just think of it, all of these guys have been home, been to bed, been to sleep already and everything, and here we are!” I was poking at Hugh, who was falling asleep with his dreadlocks resting against the plate-glass window as if he were riding crosscountry on a Greyhound in the rain.

  I am no longer the woman who does these things. Perhaps I am no longer the woman who did them. I have become the woman who can always find, fix, or reach things.

  This is from the hard-drinking days when new friendships were frequent, instant, emotional, and brief. I have no idea what became of those people who seemed so important, so bright, or so clever at the time, those people that I bought beer for, whose terrors and troubles I listened to, then decanted a few of my own, and sometimes the woman weeping by the window was me. They wouldn’t know me if they knew me now. They are like the young dead, never changing, struck like statues back in time. I imagine them still drinking, still partying, in some other bar now, as if nothing ever happened, nothing ever changed. I think of them as witnesses, waiting and watching a woman who used to be me.

  There were often near-strangers sleeping in our living room on Saturday morning: a man on the couch snoring, still wearing his jacket, his sunglasses, his pointy-toed shoes, or a woman fully clothed face down on the carpet with her right elbow resting in an ashtray and her long red hair spread around her like a peacock’s tail.

  The residue of the night before would be spread through the entire apartment: beer bottles, caps, and cans covering the kitchen table, dirty ashtrays, empty album covers, and somebody’s socks strewn around the living room, a dirty handprint on the bathroom wall, and long black hairs in the sink.

  Even then, as I cleaned up the butts and the bottles while Melody vacuumed, I knew better than to mention the other residue, the disquieting dread which clung to me all the next day, which had something to do with staying up so late, then crawling to my bed while the party continued downstairs, the stereo raging, the bass notes crashing, the conversation flapping drunkenly around the room, me not drunk enough to stay awake, but not sober enough to sleep either, or was it the other way around? The anxiety hummed through me all day, striking a honed high note upon hearing, for instance, the news that a small plane had crashed into a bookstore in Atlanta, Georgia, and everyone on board was killed, everyone in the store, too, those patient browsers swiftly incinerated while fondling crisp copies of The Shining, The Velveteen Rabbit, or Six Memos for the Next Millennium. I was certain then, in my spike-edged angst, that I too was bound to suffer heartbreak, loneliness, and terror forever, bound to be the victim of a random, ridiculous death, someday, somehow, soon.

  The only thing to do then, it seemed to Melody and me, was to head back down to the bar where, if you got there early enough and helped put out the ashtrays, they’d give you the first round free. In the morning, we drank Bloody Caesars, which we called “seizures,” our stomachs queasy, our furry tongues stinging with black pepper and Tabasco sauce, my spirits lifting by increments until by noon it appeared that another day might actually be passed without panic or punishment. I was once again cushioned by that false sense of security, that expansive illusion of well-being you get on your third drink and then you have ten more trying to recapture the feeling and end up wondering why you’re crying in your beer at three a.m.

  It was there, at The Belvedere, that I met Andrew’s father, who appeared to be a brown-eyed handsome man, gentle, polite, olive-skinned in a pink striped shirt. He was only unusual in the sense that he was nothing like the men I usually went for: the scruffy disreputable ones, unemployed, with a propensity for alcohol in large quantities. It was also there that Melody met Ted, who, unlike most men you meet in bars, turned out to be exactly what he seemed to be: kind, generous, and sane. The Belvedere is closed down now, bankrupt, scheduled for demolition in the fall.

  That was a long time ago and now I understand about the comfort to be found in fear, also the power. Sometimes now I think it i
s the fear that keeps me safe; sometimes now I think the fear is all that keeps me safe. When I am scared of everything, the fear becomes a gauze bandage around me and I am convinced that if I stop being afraid, if I let my guard down for just one minute, all hell will break loose and fly apart in my face like a shattered windshield. On airplanes, I am so scared that I think if I relax and let myself enjoy the flight, the movie, the drinks, the conversation of the interesting woman beside me, we will crash for sure. It is my fear alone that keeps us airborne. All the other passengers can do whatever they damn well please: they have no responsibility and so no power. I realize there is a pumped-up kind of vanity in this, a perverse delusion of grandeur in the belief that I could single-handedly avert disaster and save these smug, stupid strangers, not to mention myself.

  The power of fear lies in its conceit or the conceit of fear lies in its presumption of power.

  Even as a child, I never thought that terrible tragedies could only happen to other people. I never acquired or accomplished this particular form of delusory armour with which most people gird themselves. I was a nervous child. I was quite confident that disasters could only happen, naturally enough, to me. Maybe it was selfish to be so afraid, but at a very young age I had stopped believing in protection, no longer expected to become safe, grown-up, or immortal. There were too many things to worry about: car accidents, plane crashes, kidnapping, fire, explosions, cancer, burglars, guns, knives, the bomb. The other girls at my school in their pastel angora sweaters and their A-line skirts, they didn’t worry, I was sure of it. They didn’t worry their pretty little heads about anything except their hair.

  My flagrant fear, I figured, must single me out as the conspicuous choice for a catastrophe. The persistence of my fear was like a song stuck in your head first thing in the morning and it won’t go away all day.