Sputnik's Children

by Terri Favro

  Breakfast on Planet of the Mothers

  Late the next morning in my sunny bedroom, I awoke to the faraway sound of a ringing phone and Mom’s distant Hello?

  I tried to rub the blur out of my eyes, then remembered: I wore glasses now. My wire frames were staring at me from the night table. I put them on and the room was thrown into crisp focus.

  Something had changed overnight. The air in my bedroom seemed fresher. The traffic noises drifting in through my window, quieter. Instead of the revving of engines, I heard birdsong. I lay back on my pillow and stretched my arms luxuriously.

  I hoped the Trespasser would never, ever turn up. It was summertime. My family was rich. And I was in love.

  Maybe my time hop really was temporary amnesia caused by heat stroke. Maybe everything I thought I remembered — the Trespasser at the dentist’s office, the sudden jump from childhood to womanhood — were mirages, like Bugs Bunny seeing an oasis in the desert when he took a wrong turn at Albuquerque.

  Even if I really had been thrown forward in time, why did I have to be the one to save the world? Who said it even needed saving?

  I rolled on my side to look at Linda’s bed. Empty. I wrapped myself in my pink robe and padded barefoot down the hall, past the wall nook where the plaster Virgin stood sentinel in front of the telephone table, her hands spreading open her blue robe as if to say, Behold! Nothing to hide here, kid, how about you?

  When the phone rang, Mary’s lowered eyes caught mine.

  Go on, what are you waiting for — pick it up!

  I hesitated. What if it was the Trespasser, calling to coax me out of this pleasant state of inertia to do who-knew-what? Cautiously, I lifted the receiver.

  “Hello?”

  “Tell me everything — and don’t leave anything out!”

  “Hi, Sandy,” I said, yawning and scratching under my breasts. I was finding my 36Bs annoyingly itchy.

  “I am so jealous. Kendal’s so gorgeous and sweet and smart. Not that my folks would ever let me go out with a coloured guy.”

  I felt a glug of queasiness at the word coloured.

  “Are you guys in love?” she asked.

  “I guess so,” I answered, glancing at the kitchen door where I suspected my mother hovered.

  “Someone’s listening?”

  “You could say that.”

  “Call me back on an extension. I’ve got something important to ask you.”

  With a glance at the Virgin’s placid face, I hung up and headed down the basement stairs to where Dad had installed an extension phone in his workshop in 1969. It was still there. I dialled Sandy’s number.

  “Me again,” I said when she answered. “Not much to tell about Kendal, except he’s coming over.”

  “Your parents are going to freak,” said Sandy.

  “I don’t care if they do,” I answered.

  “I knew he’d dump that slut Angie for you,” Sandy said. “We can talk more when you come with us to Niagara Falls. My dad set up a meeting with a loan shark for next Saturday at Table Rock House. We want you to come along.”

  “What’s a loan shark?” I asked.

  “Like a bank, except it’s just one guy. Larry Kowalchuck. He told Dad to bring some cute girls to the meeting. Can you come?”

  I said yes, not thinking too hard about why Larry the Loan Shark would want girls around while he was doing business.

  “Hey, Sandy — how long have I been wearing glasses?”

  I heard a puzzled silence on the line, followed by laughter. “You don’t remember how long you’ve worn glasses? Man, oh, man, that boy really does have you going in circles.”

  “So, tell me,” I insisted.

  “I dunno. Six months, maybe? Which reminds me: when you come to the Falls, wear your contact lenses, okay?”

  “I wear contact lenses?”

  Sandy laughed again. “You’ve got it bad, girl. Catch you later.”

  I hung up the phone and was about to go back upstairs when I noticed a dull green metal door with a recessed latch set into the wall where a weathered wood door used to open into the cold cellar. I pulled at the latch, expecting it to be locked. The door slid to the side on a well-oiled track.

  Inside: darkness. I was scrabbling on the interior wall, feeling for a light switch, when a fluorescent tube buzzed to life, illuminating five bodies sitting erect on white laminated stools, hands on their knees. A family of metal and plastic people, relaxing in the darkness as if waiting for a movie to start.

  My heart pounding, I stepped in to look at them.

  They weren’t bodies, but full body suits — a lot like space suits, complete with face visors, helmets, gauntlets and boots. One black suit, two grey, one pink, one violet, each one with a small copper plate on its chest, inscribed with a name: DAD. MOM. NONNA. LINDA. DEBBIE.

  The violet suit was mine. It seemed way too big until I remembered: in the blink of an eye, I had grown a whole new body.

  Anti-radiation suits, one for every family member. The next inevitable step in personal survival in the event of a nuclear attack. Forget about bomb shelters: in an anti-rad suit, you were free to move around in an irradiated world for weeks, until fallout levels dropped enough to breathe the air. At least, that was the way Mr. Capitalismo had always described them as he tinkered with the idea of turning diving suits into radiation shelters. No one had taken him seriously in 1969, but Dad apparently did now. Five family members, five suits: he must have changed his mind about the pointlessness of survival of the fittest after a nuclear war.

  I noticed that the bum of each suit was connected to a thick white hose that led into a metal box marked WASTE. Behind the suits, floor-to-ceiling shelves held boxes of freeze-dried food labelled by type, along with row after row of Sparkling Sparrow bottles. Red and white plonk, sparkling rosé and mock champagne. This wasn’t a bomb shelter, but a nutrition and elimination room. As well as a place to get shitfaced drunk, if all else failed. I slid the door closed and shuffled upstairs to the kitchen.

  Mom stood at the sink, singing along with a song on the radio. Tie a mellow ribbon round pokey old me . . .

  She turned and looked at me. Smiled. Said, “Eggs for breakfast?”

  “Sunny side up, please. Where are Dad and Linda?”

  “They’re showing Nonna’s basement to some student who showed up at the door,” said Mom, taking a carton of eggs from the fridge. “Dad says the guy sounded like he’d make a good tenant.”

  I sat down at the table and listened to the sizzle of the skillet and the humming of my mysteriously happy mother. My eyes slid to the crisp bow on the back of her harvest gold apron. The perfect curls in her steel grey hair. Her blindingly white tennis shoes. What planet had I been teleported to?

  Mom placed a plate of eggs in front of me with a dollop of ketchup and buttered white toast points on the side. Just the way I used to like it, before I decided to purge away my weight the way Elizabeth Taylor did. I nibbled the crust as Mom sat down across from me at the table and folded her hands.

  “So, what’s this I hear about you and the paperboy?”

  I stopped mid-nibble. “What?”

  She scraped a splotch of dried tomato sauce off the edge of my placemat with her thumbnail, one of a set of four printed with famous paintings, a free gift with her annual subscription to Canusa Homemaker. I was eating off Van Gogh’s Sunflowers.

  “Bea Kendal called first thing,” Mom continued. “Said you and her son had been together yesterday. That there was an accident and he was hurt. That she found the two of you on the couch in the house, alone,” Mom paused for effect. “She thought Dad and I would want to know.”

  I shrugged. “Kendal and I met up at Cresswell’s to sell comic books. What’s wrong with that? Then we went for a bike ride and a car cut him off. I was just making sure he was all right. Besides, the Ship
Co Guardian Angel was listening in the whole time I was at his house.” I’d lost my appetite. The cooling eggs looked like big googly cartoon eyes staring up at me. “John Kendal is really nice.”

  “He is nice. And his mother is a lovely woman. But they’re different from us.” Mom glanced at my plate. “Eat your eggs, they’re getting cold.”

  I dipped the sharp end of a toast point in one golden eye. For a moment I thought I could hear it screaming: Augghhh.

  “I didn’t think you and Dad were bigots,” I said bluntly.

  Mom sat back in her chair. “Your father and I are not prejudiced,” she assured me. “How could we be? Look at what we put up with, growing up in this mangiacake town. They changed our names. Called us wops and garlic-eaters.”

  “Exactly. How would you feel if people didn’t want you being friends with their kids, just because you’re Italian?”

  “But cara, what if you and John fell in love and got married? Think of the children.”

  The one remaining intact eye on my plate started dripping golden tears. I stabbed it with a toast point.

  “What children?” I demanded. “We were talking. Just talking. Are you afraid his sperm’s going to jump out of his body and into mine from across the couch? I’m not Linda, you know.”

  Mom looked away. I had brought up the Topic That Must Not Be Mentioned.

  “We’ll discuss this later. Go get dressed,” she said curtly.

  She was just taking away my half-eaten eggs when Dad and Linda walked in with the new tenant.

  “And this sleepyhead is our younger daughter,” said Dad. “Debbie, this is Benjamin Duffy, but he goes by Duff.”

  Oh no.

  The Trespasser grinned at me, looking much younger than he had in the dentist’s office when he’d botched my time hop. His long hair had been freshly clipped and he had changed into a clean but wrinkled white shirt and a pair of khakis so crisply pressed that they were no doubt picked up yesterday at Woolco with some of the money he’d gotten from Cressie. A gold crucifix glinted around his neck. He gave off a whiff of non-threatening religiosity, in an intellectual, folk-singerish sort of way. As if he’d known exactly how to present himself to make my folks trust him. The biggest change, though, was that the middle finger of his left hand didn’t end at the knuckle. His hand was intact.

  “Hey there, little sister,” Duff said, and winked at me.

  I stared at his peeling pink face, like the worst sunburn ever. I could smell cinnamon on his breath. He appeared younger than he was on Halloween night in 1969, picking 45s at the candy-store party.

  There was no question now. The Trespasser had just hopped back into my life.

  six

  The Chronicles of Duff

  “What a coincidence. I just saw you yesterday, coming out of Cresswell’s,” I said, shaking Duff’s hand. He was doing a great job of acting as if we’d never met before.

  Duff winked at Dad, the way you do to the parent of a precocious child — trying to show that he had me all figured out.

  “There are no coincidences. I saw your father’s apartment rental sign at Cresswell’s,” he said.

  “I hope you’ll join us for breakfast,” said Mom, and she set a place for Duff, right beside Linda. She smiled at him but showed no signs of recognizing him as the man who had argued with Billy at the Halloween party.

  When Nonna Peppy toddled into the kitchen with Pepé the Seventh behind her, Dad formally introduced her to Duff as “Mrs. Pitalunga, your landlady.” Nonna peered up at Duff through her bifocals, shook his hand and said, “Pleasure to meetcha,” but didn’t sound pleased at all, until he said, “You sound like you learned English in New York City. Lower East Side, if I’m not mistaken.”

  Nonna Peppy raised her eyebrows and smiled. “You’re psychic. That’s right, I’m a New York City girl, but I still like a quiet house.”

  “Don’t worry, Mrs. Pitalunga, I’m the bookish type,” said Duff.

  Mom cleared her throat. “Why don’t you tell us about yourself, Mr. Duffy?”

  “Call me Duff. Not much to tell. I’m from Concord, Massachusetts. Did an undergraduate degree at Notre Dame.”

  “Good Catholic university,” approved Dad.

  Duff acknowledged this with a nod and continued, “I was doing research in graduate school at MIT when my birthdate came up in the draft lottery for the Domino Wars, so here I am in Canusa.”

  “What kind of research?” asked Linda. I was beginning to notice how intently she watched Duff. Like a beauty pageant contestant mentally undressing the host.

  He hesitated. “A little hard to explain, Linda. I was working in a new field, an offshoot of biology and engineering. Robotics, essentially.”

  Dad waved a hand in the air. “Robots! Hell, St. Dismas Collegiate would snap you up, with or without teacher’s training.”

  “Absolutely,” agreed Linda, looking at Duff adoringly.

  I sat back in my chair and observed my family. It was as if Duff had put a spell on them. My mom, usually suspicious of strangers until she knew them a decade or two, spooned another serving of fried potatoes and bacon onto his plate without even asking.

  “Now we’ll have to figure out what to do about those wine barrels in your living space,” said Dad. “My father-in-law had about three years’ worth of wine stored in them. Bottling it would take weeks, but I hate to just pour it down the drain.”

  Duff put down his fork and knife and made a little tent with his hands. “Simplest way would be to automate the process: pump the wine out of the barrels and across the yard into your basement for bottling. It’s all physics, really. All we need are a few hoses and a pump. We’ll need to fill and cork the bottles assembly-line style. It’ll probably require at least five of us.”

  Dad nodded at this. “You, me, Debbie, Linda . . .”

  “Don’t look at me,” said Mom. “The fumes alone would knock me for a loop.”

  I waved my hand in the air. “John Kendal’s looking for work.”

  “How much would he want?” asked Dad.

  “Carlo!” my mother protested. “Don’t encourage her.”

  “Five bucks ought to do it.”

  “Okay, done. See how fast he can get here,” Dad said and looked at Mom. “We need the help. And, frankly, I wouldn’t mind having that boy where I can keep an eye on him.”

  * * *

  Kendal borrowed a bike from a neighbour and rode over that afternoon. Even though Dad and Mom had met him at the door many times when he was collecting for his paper route, I made formal introductions.

  Dad shook Kendal’s hand, glancing at the mutilated one.

  “Sure you’re up to this? Not sure it’ll be easy to bottle one-handed.”

  I winced at Dad’s blunt reference to Kendal’s handicap. Kendal just shrugged.

  “Long as no one asks me to play the piano, I can use my hand just fine for most things.”

  Dad laughed. “I remember your father from the plant. I didn’t agree with his rabble-rousing, but he was a good guy. Now let’s get to work.”

  Duff got down to the business of emptying the wine barrels using a pump Dad had scavenged when a local machine shop had closed. Linda and I collected as many garden hoses as we could find and screwed them together to make a long rubber snake that would gulp down and regurgitate wine.

  Linda and Duff stood at the pump end; Dad, Kendal and I waited at the workbench under the window in our basement with an army of empty wine bottles and Nonno’s old corking machine.

  “Kendal and I will fill. You cork, Debbie,” ordered Dad.

  When the wine started flowing, we quickly discovered the problem with Duff’s plan — even with two of us bottling and one corking, we couldn’t keep up. Within minutes, our clothes were soaked and the thick purple wine overflowed onto the floor, puddling around our shoes. The fumes wer
e making me dizzy.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” shouted Dad. “Debbie, run next door and tell Duff to shut it down.”

  “He should try closing off the flow every few minutes so we can catch up,” suggested Kendal. “And maybe we should empty the hoses into cooking pots first, then into bottles — we can’t work fast enough this way.”

  Dad nodded. “Just what I was thinking, son.”

  Son?

  I ran next door to tell Duff the new plan. When I returned, it was obvious Dad and Kendal had kept up a stream of conversation, Dad pumping Kendal for information about what he wanted to do with his life. As I clattered down our basement stairs, I heard Kendal say, “I’m thinking of journalism, but my mom wants me to go to law school.”

  “Law is a good trade for a man,” nodded Dad. “You could always write books on the side, like Earl Stanley Gardner.”

  “Perry Mason? I’d rather write stuff like Fail-Safe.”

  Dad nodded. “I’m not one much for fiction but Fail-Safe was a page-turner. Scared the hell out of me.”

  “Think it could really happen? I mean, some glitch causing an accidental nuclear war?” asked Kendal.

  “Sure it could happen,” says Dad. “More a question of when than if.”

  I stood on the stairway, listening. It was a conversation Dad had never had with me. We’d never discussed my career ambitions — never got further than him telling me to keep my marks up.

  Once the last bottle of wine had been corked, and we were all sitting around the table in Nonna Peppy’s kitchen, Dad poured out glasses for each of us, a bottle of ginger ale handy to cut the sour taste of the local Canusa grapes. The vines were a tough northern variety whose only quality for winemaking was hardiness.

  “Saluté,” said Dad, raising his glass. “It isn’t up to Sparkling Sparrow standards, but not bad for backyard wine, eh?”

  Dad took Duff’s first- and last-month’s rent and headed next door to give Nonna Peppy and Mom a taste of Nonno’s final vintage. Meanwhile, Duff, Linda, Kendal and I went downstairs to Duff’s new flat, walking from one dark, cramped, airless, earthy-smelling room to another while Linda told Duff about her program at the University of Toronto, where she had just completed her second year.