Red Plaid Shirt

by Diane Schoemperlen

  I did not tell this to anyone, knowing instinctively that fear was something to be ashamed of.

  I was not afraid of monsters or magic: it was, I had decided early on, only people and thunderstorms that were seriously dangerous. One night at supper my mother was telling, with great amusement, the story of how her boss at the bank, Mr. E. Ingram, was on the toilet Tuesday night reading Reader’s Digest in a thunderstorm when the lightning came in through the window and danced all around the sink while he just sat there, what else could he do? It was attracted by the water, my mother said.

  This was the same summer that lightning struck the chimney of the Hatleys’ house across the back lane and their television exploded. When the fire trucks arrived, Mrs. Hatley was standing in our backyard with the heads of her three children buried in her white nightgown, all of them crying. Water and chimneys, my mother said, electricity, lightning conductors.

  After supper, she and my father went out (a rare occurrence in itself and I can’t think now where they might have gone) and I was left in charge of cleaning up. The minute they left the house, another storm blew in and the thunder began. I roamed through the rooms of our suddenly flimsy frame house, unplugging the electrical appliances, and avoiding the windows. I imagined my face flung down into the hot soapy dishwater when the lightning came out of the ceiling and struck the sink straight through the back of my head. I sat at the kitchen table with my eyes closed for an hour, praying.

  When my parents came home and found the dishes not done, my mother slapped me across the face because I was too big to spank. The humiliation of fear was inexcusable.

  In my bed that night, I could not sleep and I lay there contemplating my dolls, which were hung by their necks from a pegboard on the far wall, me being too old to play with them anymore but not ready yet to give them away. Their plastic eyes in the half-light were like those of an animal caught in the headlights of a car on the highway. Their boneless legs were still pink but useless. I could hear my father snoring wisely in the next room but could no longer convince myself that he would be, at any given moment, braver than me. He was afraid of snakes and Ferris wheels: this was not comforting at all.

  I used to know a woman who was afraid of moths, the powdery-winged white ones my mother called “dusty millers,” and this woman had nightmares in which the moths flew up her nose and suffocated her with their twitching trembling wings.

  Andrew’s father was afraid of horses and pigs, although he lied to me about this (he lied to me about many things, most of them equally irrelevant) and said he loved animals of all kinds, especially horses with their handsome legs and pigs with their pink snuffling snouts.

  In order to understand, it is not necessary to know that I am afraid of snowmobiles, needles, caterpillars (especially the furry black and yellow ones), down escalators, short blonde men with beards, and other people’s mothers. (And—not many people know this about me — I am also afraid of libraries.) It is only necessary to know that I am more afraid of pain than of death and sometimes this seems sensible.

  Melody says she is not afraid of anything and I believe her. Melody does not think about things the way I do, which is probably why we were best friends then and are still close now. She is unsuspecting, unquestioning, and her conscience is clear. She has not heard that the unexamined life is not worth living and she thinks the aphorism, There is nothing to fear but fear itself, is actually true. Her clarity is contagious, and when I am with her, I too feel weightless.

  While I have black coffee for breakfast and read last night’s paper, Andrew is once again refusing to eat the meal I’ve made for him (oat bran, raisins, yogurt, cantaloupe, healthy, healthy, healthy: he’d rather have red licorice and a hot dog).

  The newspaper headlines this morning are still about the pair of human legs discovered last week in a green garbage bag on the highway west of town. The severed legs were discovered at seven a.m. Thursday by a man on his way to work who saw a foot lying in the middle of the road. Despite the fact that the limbs had been badly mutilated by predators, it has now been determined that they belonged to a twenty-five-year-old local woman named Donna Dafoe who had been missing for a week. They are looking for her estranged husband, Stuart Steven Dafoe, and for other body parts. The sergeant on the case has commented that it’s like putting together a jigsaw puzzle.

  Almost everyone I know is disturbed by this story in one way or another. It undermines the imagination. On the street, in the grocery store, the drugstore, the bank, everywhere I go all week, I overhear strangers discussing it. Their voices are soft, frightened, or outraged. They are all shaking their heads.

  Two nights ago my boyfriend, Joe, came over after Andrew had gone to bed. We played three games of Scrabble and then we were watching the news and I said, “It’s so sick,” and Joe said, “Everybody’s sick.”

  “Well, yes, probably,” I said, “but not like that.”

  Joe said, “Yes, you’re right.”

  But am I?

  Right after the news, we got ready for bed and, while Joe was brushing his teeth, I put pot lids over all the ashtrays like I do every night.

  Curled into his back in the bed, I said, “I smell something burning. Do you smell something burning?”

  “You always think you smell something burning,” he said, but not unkindly.

  “I can’t help it, I’m afraid of fire.”

  “I don’t smell anything,” he said. “There’s nothing burning but your imagination.”

  “When I was a child, I always thought I could smell the gas,” I started to say, but Joe was making that deflating endearing little sigh he always makes just as he’s falling asleep, so I wrapped my arms and legs around him and hung on.

  Now, as I get up for more coffee, Andrew dumps his breakfast on the floor. Feeling too defeated for the moment to be angry, I say, “You hurt my feelings when you do that,” and he says, “Do you have feelings, Mommy?”

  In the bathroom, putting on my makeup and trying to tame my hair which has gone completely out of control in this humidity, I see by my face there is no way of knowing. The black eye is long gone and the broken finger on my left hand, the one that had to be mended with a metal pin, only hurts now when I knit or the weather in winter turns damp. There is no way of knowing that, in what I think of as my former life, I was once thrown to the floor by a man I loved, and while he kicked me in the head, I made a sound like a small animal with soft brown fur and beady eyes.

  By the time I’ve located a clean pair of pantyhose without a run and Andrew has spilled his milk twice, we are both bitchy in the heat and I am yelling indiscriminately about the toys scattered everywhere and I keep tripping over them, about the cracker crumbs all over the floor and they are sticking to the bottoms of my bare feet, about his fear of flying insects which I think is foolish because he screams his head off every time we go out to work in the garden and I’m afraid of bumblebees but I haven’t let it ruin my life and now there’s no more milk.

  Andrew says seriously, “I’m a person too you know.” I take him on my lap in the sticky morning and his hair smells like sleepy trees. His damp eyelashes on my naked neck flutter like butterfly wings or a baby bird scooped off the sidewalk, fallen out of its nest, and you hold it in your palm like a heart and you know it will die no matter what you do.

  I want him so much that I weep.

  I take him to daycare and then drive downtown. Going along Johnson Street, I see a pretty red-haired woman in a black jacket and grey pants coming out of the funeral home smiling as she steps around the hearse which is running. Her immunity is evident, even from across the street.

  I get to work on time as usual. I am co-owner of an arts and crafts store called Hobby Heaven. We sell paint-by-number kits, model airplanes and cars, embroidery hoops, and the like. There is a large market for this sort of thing these days and the business is flourishing.

  This morning I am unpacking three cartons of rug-hooking kits. As I stock the shelves, I hear a
female voice behind me saying, “And then he pulled a gun on me.” A second female voice sighs.

  Looking around as discreetly as I can manage, I see two elderly women with carefully curled hair wearing polyester dresses, one beige and one navy blue, with matching square plastic purses hooked over their arms as they riffle through racks of knitting patterns for baby clothes. The woman in the beige dress has in her shopping basket several balls of baby-blue wool and a pair of size twelve needles. As I turn back to my rug-hooking kits, she is telling the woman in the navy dress about her new grandchild, her sixth, a boy who was breech, nine pounds, nine ounces, and they named him Hamish, of all things.

  The morning passes slowly.

  As usual, I am the first to arrive at the restaurant. Melody, who is a medical secretary, has the day off and so is coming from the other side of town where she and Ted have recently rented a two-bedroom apartment in a building on Driscoll Street. It is the kind of squat flat-topped yellow-brick building with black iron balconies deemed modern by builders in the fifties. But Melody has a flair for decorating and so, inside, their apartment is strikingly cluttered with coloured cushions, wicker baskets, and fresh-cut flowers.

  Eighteen months ago, a woman was murdered in that apartment. This is not the sort of thing that would bother Melody, but every time I go over there, I think I can see faint brownish stains on the carpet in the hallway leading to the bathroom. This is where, according to the newspaper reports, the murder took place, the woman stabbed twenty-seven times by her husband while her two children slept. The police took the children out past the body with blankets over their heads. The woman’s name was Janice Labelle. Why do I remember her age, the date, the number of wounds? Why did I cut the articles out of the newspaper and save them in a big brown envelope? I didn’t even know her.

  I imagine Melody and Ted living out their lives in that apartment, cooking meals, reading magazines, listening to music, making love, taking a bath, and they would never notice how even the fresh-cut flowers smell sinister sometimes.

  Van’s is always busy on Friday but I have arrived early enough to get a table by the window overlooking Lewis Avenue. The restaurant, with its white furniture, pale green walls, and the air conditioning on full-blast, is an oasis. I order a coffee, with lemonade on the side. It is fresh-squeezed and comes with a pink umbrella in a frosted glass.

  I’ve brought along some new product information pamphlets to read while I wait for Melody, who would be late even if she lived next door—I am both irritated by and envious of this because it seems to me to embody a carefree attitude which I know I will never be able to muster.

  I pretend to be reading while I watch the people going in and out of the building across the street, a high-rise with copper-tinted windows which houses the offices of various insurance companies, lawyers, travel agents, and architects. Most of these people are women, stylishly dressed in pastel summer suits and white sandals. They come out of the building in confident clumps, chatting and smiling, making their lunch-time plans. Even from across the street, I can see how clear-eyed and fresh-faced they are — there is no way of knowing anything else about them.

  The people at the next table, two women and a man, are talking about the severed legs. The one woman, it seems, the one wearing the diamond jewellery, knows someone who knows someone who knew the Dafoes when they were still married. There were signs, she is saying, there were signs all along. Someone turns the music up and I cannot hear her clearly anymore. She is saying something about jealousy, alcohol, arguments, death threats, jail. The other woman and the man are nodding seriously, satisfied somehow, ordering another coffee, another glass of wine. Is this how it is done then—sorting through the past to find premonitions, portents, and signs, until you have convinced yourself that you knew what was going to happen all along, until you can say, I knew it, I just knew it. But then of course you didn’t really know it, couldn’t, were too far away, too busy, too tired, asleep.

  I feel the fear come winding around me again. Maybe there were signs, maybe I just wasn’t paying attention at the time, maybe there were signs all along and I missed them.

  Melody arrives at 12:17 p.m. and does not apologize. She has brought me a bouquet of daisies. The waitress brings us a big glass of water to put them in.

  Melody orders the soup of the day, which is cucumber with yogurt, and a small Caesar salad. I order the chicken pasta with cheese and garlic bread.

  I am feeling jumpy, but try to match my mood to hers. We talk about her husband, Ted, and his promotion at the lumberyard. We talk about my boyfriend, Joe, and how good he is with Andrew. We talk about the new words Andrew is learning and how he is almost tall enough now to pee standing up.

  I try to remember Melody drinking beer at The Belvedere, dancing and flirting with strangers, one time climbing up on a table to sing the national anthem just for fun. But it does not seem possible that she ever did those things. She is attended now by a blissful aura of amnesia which renders the past innocuous and the future bright.

  When the food arrives, we fall silent except for occasional sighs and murmurs of appreciation. The people at the next table are leaving now, laughing and flashing their charge cards around in the cheerful argument over who will pay the bill this week.

  After the coffee arrives, I try to talk to Melody about the severed legs. She’s not sure at first what I mean. I tell her the whole story as far as I know it, including what the woman with the diamonds said about signs, there were signs all along.

  Melody says, “Don’t think about it. You just can’t think about things like that.”

  I want to say, How can you not, how can I stop? But she has already launched into the story of a woman named Martha, a patient at the clinic where she works. Martha is a young woman, pregnant with her first child and also dying of cancer. She does not cry. She goes out and buys baby clothes, a crib, a teddy bear named Tex. She is knitting a yellow baby blanket and a green sweater set, which she works on in the waiting room until her turn comes. There is no way of knowing if she will live long enough to deliver, but, to look at her, there is no way of knowing that she is dying either. She does not cry but sometimes, as she’s leaving the office after her weekly examination, she grins and shakes her fist at the sky.

  Saying goodbye in the parking lot, Melody and I make plans to get together next weekend. Joe and I will go over to their apartment for a game of Scrabble and a pizza. Then she hugs me and brushes her soft cheek against mine and I too am weightless again.

  The afternoon passes quickly and I am friendly to all the customers, even the ones who will not look me in the eye.

  After work I pick Andrew up at daycare. He has had a pretty good day, having only had to stand in the corner once, for calling one of the other kids “shithead,” one of his new words.

  We are both in good spirits and, as I wind through the rush-hour traffic along Montreal Street, I am humming “Summertime” and Andrew too is singing in fits and starts: “Old MacDonald had a farm,” or his own version, “Old MacDonald had a hamburger.” We are pointing out the passing sights to each other: “truck,” “bus,” “dog,” “smoke.” I tell him that tomorrow we are going to meet Janie and the twins at Burger King. I imagine that he too likes to have something to look forward to.

  We idle briefly at the red light at Railway Street and the man in the silver bmw in front of us is talking on his car phone, waving his hands, and picking his nose as if he were invisible. He’s not paying attention when the light turns green and all the horns behind me start to honk.

  A flock of fat glossy pigeons flies up from the roof of a yellow-brick apartment building. Through my open car window, the sound of their wings is like sheets on a clothesline, drying in the wind.

  Andrew, excited, cries, “Birds, birds, birds!", reaching his arms up as if to catch them.

  I drive around a running shoe lying like a dead animal in the middle of the intersection and I think about those severed legs and pray that Andrew will
never be hurt or unhappy. There is no way of knowing, there is nothing I can do. For the first time I fully understand that having given birth to him guarantees nothing, gives me no power, no shelter, no peace save that to be found in the sound of the birds.

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

  Mastering Effective English (A Linguistic Fable) (1989)

  You tell me to close my mouth when we kiss. Think “man” in English, you say. In your language, it starts with the lips together and opens slowly the way love should begin.

  —Linda Rogers, “Devouring”

  Words describe features of the world judged stable. Something that appears to be a slice of cheese for a split part of a second, the tone of a violin for the next, then a prairie dog, a painting, a toothache, then the smell of garlic could not be given a name.

  —J. T. Fraser, Time, The Familiar Stranger

  A. PRONOUNS

  1. She

  The woman is named Naomi Smith, after her mother, her mother’s mother, her great-aunt, her third cousin twice-removed, and so on. In fact, there are so many Naomis in her family that, in order to keep track of themselves, they call each other things like Big Naomi, Little Naomi, Old Naomi, New Naomi, Naomi the Pianist, Naomi the Nurse, Naomi the Manicurist, and so on. This Naomi is Naomi the Teacher. She is young and strong, intelligent and honest, but she has never been very attractive to men. She has puzzled over this repeatedly. It must be her mouth, she thinks sometimes, which is too big and always open so that her silver fillings show. Or it could be her eyes, which are too small, too close together, and colourless, like the white eyes of those dogs which give many people the creeps. Either way, she is still a virgin. She suspects that’s what the other Naomis call her behind her back, some saying it with pride, others with pity: “Here she comes, Naomi the Virgin!” Privately, she thinks of herself as Naomi the Anachronism.