by Terri Favro
“I was adopted,” he says.
Darren tells me what he knows. He was born somewhere in Southern Ontario. June 1970. Mom, an unmarried teenager. He says he’s been trying to find her through an agency that helps adoptees find their birth parents. So far, she’s refused contact.
“What about your father?”
Darren yawns. “His name was left off my birth records. Not a good sign. It means my mother either didn’t want to identify him or didn’t know who he was. I’ve never had a good feeling about who he might be. Only piece of information my adoptive parents got was that I might’ve inherited a weird blood anomaly,” says Darren.
I sit up. In the world of Sputnik Chick — correction, in my world — there are no coincidences. “What kind of anomaly?”
He yawns and stretches. “Some kind of allergy to surgical drugs. I’ve never been under, so I’ve never had to dig into it. Anyway, it’s rare.”
“Pseudocholinesterase deficiency,” I suggest.
He rubs his eyes. “Maybe. Only time it comes up is when I go to the dentist. He always knocks me out with gas instead of giving me a shot of novocaine.”
When Darren finally falls asleep, I get up and dress in hiking gear, the warmest I can find, then step outside to watch the wheel of stars above me. Meteors are still falling. They must be laughing at me. I have fallen in love with my sister’s lost son, and I have only myself to blame.
One tragedy averted, a thousand others rushing in to take its place.
The next morning at dawn, before Darren is awake, I slip into a sweatshirt and jeans, pack a bag, fold up my telescope and walk out of the campground to the highway. In the morning mist, a big rig approaches and I stick out my thumb.
The trucker takes me as far as the Little Finlandia Hotel, just north of Lake Superior Park. From the front desk, I phone the co-op store in Wawa and ask them to deliver a drafting table.
Time to pick up the dropped threads of Sputnik Chick’s origin story.
I get back to work.
one
Modern Bride
Shipman’s Corners, 1979, A.M.T.
On the day of Richard Nixon’s suicide, I saw a cardinal in our backyard, perched in a plum tree, the first time I’d seen one that wasn’t on a Christmas card. It was as scarlet as fresh blood, smaller than I thought it would be, with the piercing cry of a train whistle.
“They’re highly territorial,” Dad said, passing me the binoculars he kept on his desk. He’d taken up birdwatching, having retired from Sparkling Sparrow and selling his shares back to ShipCo. “You should see his wife! She attacks her reflection in the window, thinking it’s another female horning in on her mate.”
I ignored my father’s anthropomorphization. He just couldn’t resist giving human emotions to other species.
“I’ve never seen one before,” I said.
“It’s because we don’t use DDT on the vines anymore. The songbirds are coming back.”
I took the bird’s flashy presence as a sign of hope, even as the news of Nixon’s suicide filled me with a mixture of sadness and dread. The gravity of the disgraced president’s death was pulling everything toward the newscasts like a tractor beam. On the kitchen radio, the deep, respectful voice of a Canusa Broadcasting Corporation announcer described the tragedy for the hundredth time that day, as Mom washed dishes, the hot and cold taps going off and on, scrub and rinse, rinse and scrub. Housework had to be done whether ex-presidents were dead or alive.
Why did I care? It wasn’t as if Nixon was a beloved figure, but I wondered whether the reason for taking his own life wasn’t depression or shame over impeachment, but because he wanted to escape what he knew was coming. Say what you will about Nixon; he may have lacked insight into his own personal failings, but he had enough foresight to know that 1978 would be the year to cut and run — literally: first, he’d run a hot bath, then he’d opened the arteries in his wrists with a straight razor.
I was twenty-two and in my final year studying biosciences at the University of Toronto, perfect for a woman whose career plan was to go to the moon. Since the year Duff and Linda disappeared, I had lived what some might call a charmed life: good grades, good family, good looks and reasonably good health, despite occasional relapses into bulimia. I’d been helped by a psychiatrist who put me on a calming drug called Valium. Now, if I could only kick the Valium.
Best of all, I had the perfect boyfriend. Correction: fiancé. Kendal and I had set the date. Sadly, my beloved Nonna Peppy did not live to see me engaged. In my final year of university, she broke her hip climbing the cellar stairs with her arms full of washing, developed pneumonia and died in hospital. Her last dog, a schnauzer named Pepé the Eighth, passed away of a broken heart a few weeks later. To honour Nonna Peppy’s memory, I promised myself that I would make a trip to New York City. It would be a journey I would make with the husband Nonna told me society would never accept.
No woman buys more than one issue of MODERN BRIDE in her lifetime. Same holds true of Wedding Belles, ATOMIC BRIDES and Canusa Bride. One weekend, Sandy brought a stack of the shiny bridal bibles to my house, along with a bottle of bootleg onion vodka. Mr. H had started selling his homemade hooch under the table at Sputnik Burger, now the most popular fast-food joint in Shipman’s Corners.
I cast an eye over pages of blow-dried, moustached men and soft porn, hot-rollered blondes leering at one another across bubble baths in giant champagne glasses.
“Seriously? People do this on their honeymoon? No wonder Kendal thinks we should elope,” I told her.
“What, and deprive your moms of their one and only chance to buy matching mother-of-the-bride and -groom outfits? How inconsiderate.” Sandy raised her glass in a toast. “Mnohaya lita! Many years!”
We tossed back the vodka shots and got to work looking at pages of double-knit wedding gowns, feather-trimmed capelets, gloves, garters, veils, rings, lingerie and cakes shaped like the Taj Mahal as Bowie blasted on the stereo.
Still best friends, Sandy and I had spent almost four years in different cities — Sandy in Guelph studying nutrition and I in Toronto — but we had stayed tight, the kind of friends who not only finished each other’s sentences but read each other’s minds. By the end of the evening, just before we fell asleep side by side on the rec-room floor, we had started scribbling thought balloons over the heads of dewy-skinned brides, their doe eyes downcast before their ruffled-shirted, velvet-tuxed, page-boyed grooms. Show me your dick, big boy! I’m only marrying you for your vintage beer-can collection. As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again! You can lead a whore to culture but you can’t make her think.
Before the evening was out, we’d both picked the male model we’d most like to sleep with: a strawberry-blond, bearded Viking in a tartan tux for Sandy (we agreed he’d definitely look better out of the tux than in it) and a bulky body-builder type with curly black hair and a sweet smile for me. He was wearing that year’s most popular colour for tuxes: powder blue.
“Looks like a nice Italian boy,” pronounced Sandy.
“Not that nice, I hope,” I said.
Our sarcasm not only helped us undermine the saccharine silliness of the magazines, it distracted us from world events that were getting scarier by the day. After Amchitka, the Cold War had gone down for a nap, waking up with a start in 1977 when NATO discovered that the Soviets had been brazenly building up missile silos on their border with Finland, shiveringly close to the edge of the Iron Curtain.
Meanwhile, Western science marched on, synthesizing music and cheese and aerosolizing underarm deodorant. The Amchitka activists organized themselves into a group called Greenpeace and warned that pollution and pesticides would kill us as surely as the atomic bomb, just a lot more slowly. They spoke of the Earth in spiritual terms, as if the planet was being stripped, flayed and burned alive, like a medieval saint. The government tolerated them. ShipCo ignored them. The co
mpany’s new approach was to pretend to be in favour of arms limitation and environmentalism. By then, they knew how dozily complacent we’d all become.
As Duff had predicted, scientists had discovered that the planet was heating up: they blamed chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, for gnawing a hole in the ozone layer that protected the Earth from the sun’s radiation. Predicting an epidemic of skin cancer, Greenpeace issued a manifesto demanding that we immediately give up our CFC-laden aerosol hairsprays. The Donato twins responded by stockpiling cans of Final Net in their basement. ShipCo launched an ad campaign that promoted green living while gently pointing out how many Canusians fed their families and paid their mortgages by working for the good folks in the CFC industry.
In the busy year leading up to our wedding, the Cold War plunged even further into the deep freeze, relations between the Eastern and Western Blocs getting icier than ever. Nixon’s suicide caused so much soul-searching in the States that the sympathy vote unexpectedly swung the election in favour of Gerald Ford. Meanwhile, the world’s longest undefended border got a lot less friendly after Pierre Trudeau finally won an election and married a Cuban socialite. Who wants to do business with Castro’s brother-in-law was the way Vice-President Reagan put it.
Most worrisome of all, NASA’s space station, Skylab, was lazily losing orbit like an old man falling out of bed; everyone knew that a ton of space junk was going to crash somewhere on Earth in mid-1979. The Soviets claimed the falling station was a ploy to disguise an attack from space on the USSR. I thought it sounded like a simple case of technical incompetence. Skylab seemed to have been doomed from the start, losing a heat shield when it was first sent into orbit. Ever since, it was one damn thing going wrong after another. Not surprisingly, NASA decided to let the station fall to earth — burning up on re-entry, they hoped — rather than pour more money into what was already obsolete technology. Some scientists urged the space agency to send the station deeper into space to float with other dead satellites like Vanguard and Telstars I and II. But that cost money, something NASA suddenly seemed to be short of. Instead, they paid for a public relations campaign to reassure the citizens of Earth that the chances of any one human being being hit by Skylab were six hundred billion to one.
In large cities, an unnerving low-level buzz that no one could identify became the background noise of day-to-day life; the newspapers dubbed it the Hotwire Hum. In New York, Con Edison claimed the hum wasn’t electrical in nature. Finally, a Jungian psychotherapist wrote a book theorizing that the Hotwire Hum was the sound of suppressed anxiety leaking out of the collective unconscious, and someone had T-shirts printed up with the words: I survived the Hotwire Hum. Doctors began to notice an uptick in heart attacks during the nightly news. No wonder the discos were packed.
All through those tense months, as missile silos sprang up like brush bristles and Skylab moved closer and closer to Earth, Sandy, Judy, Jayne and I conducted high-level negotiations with caterers and weighed the merits of traditional vows versus the poetry of Rod McKuen.
Then there was the question of the first dance. Should Kendal and I start our lives together to “Reunited” by Peaches and Herb or the Bee Gees’ “How Deep Is Your Love”? The day we finally settled on Barry White and the Love Unlimited Orchestra doing “Love’s Theme,” a news flash on CBC Radio informed us that U.S. negotiator Kissinger had abandoned the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks after getting into a fistfight with his Soviet counterpart. No one was negotiating in good faith, not even on his side, said Kissinger, nursing a broken nose and two cracked ribs. The SALT talks were dead. Détente, an elegant word used to describe the process of getting both sides to relax and take a stress pill, became a bitter punchline on late-night talk shows.
As I placed an order for five hundred monogrammed white matchbooks, the Doomsday Clock of the Atomic Scientists ticked thirty seconds closer to midnight. But Kendal refused to give credit to Duff for anything more than a lucky guess.
“I never said the guy was stupid. He may even have been prescient. But at the end of the day, are we headed for World War Three? Don’t think so, Deb. You’re not going to get rid of me that easily.”
* * *
The day of my shower at St. Dismas Church Hall, Kendal and my father stayed home and watched the Stanley Cup playoffs. Dad liked the Toronto Maple Leafs; Kendal, the Buffalo Flames. They sat in the basement rec room, drinking beer and arguing over stats. Bonding.
The ink hadn’t dried on Kendal’s master’s degree when he’d started working for a community newspaper out in Louth Township while freelancing for big dailies outside Canusa, in cities like Hamilton and Toronto. But journalism just didn’t seem like man’s work to Dad, who thought Kendal had more of a future as a criminal lawyer.
I’d watched Kendal flirt with Dad, leading him on. “Yes, I suppose I have the marks for law school. I’ll give it serious thought, Mr. Biondi.”
“Call me Dad,” my father said, his hand on Kendal’s shoulder.
And then there was Kendal’s mother. Whenever we were at her house on Z Street, there was a script the three of us would follow:
MRS. KENDAL: Debbie, how wonderful to be in a profession where you could find the cure for cancer! You should think about that, John.
KENDAL: Journalism is a profession, Ma.
MRS. KENDAL: Still, I think you should listen to Mr. Biondi. If only your father were alive to see you go to law school! He’d never believe it.
Once Mrs. Kendal had played the dead father card, neither Kendal nor I knew what to say. But I could tell that Kendal sort of liked the idea of law school. And once he was a lawyer, it was just one small step into politics. Which Kendal would have been great at: he was good-looking, articulate, popular and sociable. And funny. And smart. My university friends loved him — “Oh, Deb, you are so lucky, Kendal is so wonderful,” et cetera, et cetera.
In my mind’s eye, I could see us at our ranch house in some upscale Toronto suburb, Kendal watering the lawn while I took our adorable mixed-race children off to Montessori school.
Problem was, I wanted to go to the stars.
It could happen. NASA had started recruiting women scientists as mission specialists, a Canadian neurologist among them. It was only a matter of time before some lucky girl found herself sitting on a highly flammable hydrogen-oxygen fuel mixture, hurtling into the region of maximum dynamic pressure. Why not me? I had the science education required of astronauts. Now I just needed to get into peak physical condition. I’d started running laps at Varsity Stadium, and when I was back home in Shipman’s Corners, I ran beside the canal, from Lock 2 to Lock 4 and back. Sometimes, the sailors on the lakers and salties cheered me on. In an effort to turn myself into a bundle of taut, high-twitch-fibre muscles, I had even started going to the testosterone-laden weight training room at Hart House. Always the only woman working out on the machines, I felt every pair of eyes in the room crawling up and down my little black ballet leotard. At least the younger guys pretended they were indifferent to my bench presses and chin-ups, even if the conspicuous bulges in their gym shorts proved otherwise. I got less respect from the fifty-year-old coach of the university boxing team — “I don’t want to fight,” I explained, not entirely truthfully. “I just want your help to condition myself the way boxers do.” Instead, he gave me a condescending leer and dismissed me with, “You women’s libbers think you can do anything, but you’re still just girls,” then sent me on my way with a pat on my bum.
Rather than sparring and skipping with the boxers, I took up marathon training with the track team, running in the smallest men’s running shoes I could find. I jogged up Spadina Road to the steps of Casa Loma, then sprinted uphill toward the St. Clair Reservoir. I was getting faster, fitter and stronger. When I crooked my arm like Popeye, a hard knot of muscle popped out of my skinny upper arm. I was sure I had a future in space as long as I didn’t get myself caught in a subdivision, with kids and a mortgage, par
ent-teacher interviews, a busy husband to keep house for and an aging parent to look after, like Mom did. Until Nonna Peppy died, my parents could barely go away for an afternoon, let alone to outer space.
Despite my ambitions, when Kendal proposed, I said yes. And yes to the big traditional church wedding my family wanted.
By that time, Linda had been gone for seven years. At first, Dad had tried to involve the police, who shrugged and said Linda was an adult. They suggested we try searching the hangouts in Toronto’s Yorkville district or the Yonge Street strip where desperate girls went on the stroll. To the cops, Linda was just another runaway. Nonna Peppy had hired a private investigator from Buffalo who took her money but said the trail had gone cold. In his opinion, Linda was probably living somewhere under an assumed name with Duff and his radical friends — Yammer tree-huggers, in the detective’s words.
I was, for all intents and purposes, an only child, dragging my family’s future around with me. If I didn’t marry and have kids, what had been the point of my parents and grandparents immigrating to Canusa? To keep the family line going, that’s why. Now it was all up to me. Otherwise, as Mom pointed out, Nonno Zinio and Nonna Peppy might just as well have stayed in Italy and been murdered by the fascists.
No pressure.
* * *
That June, I wore a floral print Gloria Vanderbilt wrap dress on the stage of St. Dismas Church Hall, unwrapping shower gifts as Mom and Mrs. Kendal looked on proudly. This was no cozy cucumber-sandwiched function where you could get away with wrapping up a set of measuring cups and a couple of tea towels. Mine was a full-on orgy of decadent consumerism, a celebration of crystal stemware and place settings and his ’n’ hers anti-radiation suits, each lavish gift breathlessly described by Jayne-Mansfield at the microphone while a heavily pregnant Judy-Garland taped gift bows to a paper plate hat that I would wear for photographs. Sandy logged each gift in a journal so that she could help me write two hundred and fifty thank-you notes. I felt as if we were in an alternate reality where women’s liberation had never happened, not that the movement had picked up much traction in Atomic Mean Time. In 1979, I didn’t even have the right to keep my own name. Once married, I’d officially become Mrs. John Kendal, and Debbie Biondi would cease to exist.