Sputnik's Children

by Terri Favro

  Fortunately, there was plenty of booze. The St. Dismas Catholic Ladies’ League had mixed up a spiked punch, heavy on the rum, grenadine and ginger ale. Bridal Veil Punch, they called it. After my sixth cup, feeling an urgent need to empty my bladder, I teetered down a set of stairs and along a hallway until I found a door.

  You’d think I would have noticed the lack of a LADIES sign or a universal female figure in a triangle skirt — maybe it was all that grenadine-sweetened rum. Instead of a bathroom, I found myself in the room being used to store piles of my new brand-name kitchen appliances and home decor products. All two hundred and fifty of them, each one a lead ball shackled to my legs. Hard for a girl to hurtle to the stars with six avocado-green fondue pots clanking along behind her.

  Surrounded by my new toaster oven, Cuisinart food processor, KitchenAid mixer, Hamilton Beach blender, reclining lounge chair, quadraphonic stereo system, colour console TV and assorted crockpots, I screamed. One long, loud scream. Followed by another. And another.

  I waited for Mom to rush through the door, demanding to know what was wrong. All I heard was women’s laughter and the click, click, click of high heels on the linoleum floor outside.

  I wiped my eyes as I walked out of the room, still needing to pee. Urgently.

  Down the hall, I finally found the bathroom. Pushing open the door, I was hit by a shower of chatter and synthetic fragrance, the sounds and smells of tipsy women putting their faces back on. I slipped into a stall, hiked up my dress and released a stream of Bridal Veil Punch into the toilet bowl as tears wrecked my makeup. I wasn’t just crying over the fact that I now owned three industrial-size slow cookers, but because I had cheated on Kendal with a guy I’d met in the weight-training room. Bob O’Something. There were so many Bobs at U of T. This one was a varsity wrestler. He couldn’t figure out how to retract the spring-loaded bar on the leg extension machine; there was a trick to it. It was all physics, really. No matter how strong you were, if you didn’t pull it back just the right way, it was immovable. Seeing him grunting and straining, I waltzed up in my ballet leotard, grabbed the bar with one hand and pulled it down, thunk, as though it were nothing. The football players working out on the weight machines started laughing. So did Bob after I explained the trick to him.

  I could tell he was a little embarrassed and kind of shy, by the way he stood running his hand through his curly dark hair. From the weight room, we went to a coffee shop, then a pub, then his room — mercifully, a single — in Tartu College.

  I slept with him only once. I’m not even sure why, although he did bear a strong resemblance to the Modern Bride “groom I would fuck” whom Sandy and I had picked out that night we got hammered on homemade vodka. I was up and out of his bed before dawn, walking home through the empty streets of Toronto.

  The very next day, Bob and I bumped into one another at the cafeteria and he asked me out.

  “I’m afraid I can’t,” I told him, glancing around to see if anyone was watching us.

  “You’re not, you know, mad at me, are you? I’m sorry, I know I got a little carried away last night . . .”

  As if I had nothing to do with it.

  “I’m engaged,” I told him.

  Bob shook his head. “You’re marrying the wrong guy. He doesn’t even know you.”

  I almost laughed. “He’s known me since we were kids.”

  “That’s my point. He still thinks of you as a little girl.”

  “How can you say that? You don’t even know him.”

  “I know more than you think.” His bulky shoulders tensed up. He looked hurt, angry, confused. “Well, fine, then! Go marry the guy. I hope you have a swell life together,” he said, and walked off with his tray.

  Yes, I felt guilty. Yes, I knew it was a warning sign that I wasn’t ready for marriage. Kendal was the only man I’d ever slept with, before I met Bob. I lay awake nights, asking myself why I had let it happen. I knew I wasn’t happy, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.

  I loved Kendal. Who wouldn’t? Eight years earlier, he had been a devoted friend in the months it took me to pull myself together after my sister’s disappearance. He had been dumbfounded but loyal as I tearfully ruminated about my broken body image and the way my family equated food with love as I went through treatment for bulimia. When I turned sixteen, we finally had sex: real sex, not the half-assed kind that leaves you a technical virgin. We did it in his bed while Mrs. Kendal was away for a landscape painting weekend and I was supposed to be sleeping over at Sandy’s. He’d even borrowed a copy of Your Body, My Body from one of the feminists at the Z Street Youth Drop-in Centre and read the bits about female pleasure. How could I not love a man that considerate?

  I was still sitting on the toilet, my snot-streaked face in my hands, when someone banged on the stall door.

  “Deb? You okay?” Sandy’s voice. She must have recognized my gold velvet platform shoes.

  I hesitated. “No.”

  “Open up.”

  “I’d rather be alone.”

  “Open up or I’m crawling under the door.”

  I opened up. When Sandy saw my face, she shooed away the women crowding in to see the weeping bride-to-be and walked me back to the storeroom I’d just left. She found a box of Kleenex and poured me a glass of water, and we both agreed that the Bridal Veil Punch had quite a kick, considering it had been concocted by a bunch of sixty-year-old Italian ladies. Sandy chalked up my tears to that quintessential woman’s problem: a case of nerves. I told her that my nerves were just fine but that I had doubts. And guilt.

  “Why guilt?” asked Sandy, frowning at me. Her face was so close to mine, I could have kissed her. Even thought about doing it. Instead, I fished a crumpled Kleenex out of my pocket and blew my nose.

  “I cheated on Kendal.”

  Even as the words were leaving my mouth, I knew that telling Sandy was a mistake. I felt a subtle change in the pressure of her arm around my shoulders. Her eyes narrowed to sharp blue checkmarks.

  She didn’t say, You really must be unsure of this wedding, Deb. Maybe you should call it off. Or even that old standby: What’s your hurry? Maybe you’re just not ready yet.

  Instead, she said, “How could you fool around on a great guy like Kendal? Are you fucking crazy? He’s, like, the perfect man.”

  Looking back, I can see now that I tripped over that moment as if it were a bunched-up section of carpet. I switched tactics and agreed with Sandy that I was indeed suffering from nerves; why else would I commit such a disloyal act? What sane woman would betray a fine man like Kendal? I tried to explain to Sandy that I wasn’t sure myself why it had happened: the man meant nothing to me. It was as if my brain and my heart had gone into suspended animation for a night.

  “Just pretend it never happened. Let’s not talk about it anymore,” Sandy suggested. “This is too fucked up.”

  And so, I began a hesitant march toward our wedding day.

  * * *

  With my hair coiled into snoods on the sides of my head, I looked like a medieval princess in an ivory Qiana double-knit gown while Kendal stood straight and tall and handsome beside me in a three-piece dark blue tuxedo — to his credit, he had turned down Tuxedo Royale’s efforts to put him, Bum Bum, Rocco and the other groomsmen into trendy powder blue and ruffles. My attendants, Sandy, Jayne-Mansfield and Judy-Garland, were in unapologetic burnt orange with bell sleeves and high waists, the mound of Judy-Garland’s pregnancy sticking out like the prow of a ship. A week after the wedding, she would give birth to fraternal twins, whom she would name after those prewar style icons, Clark Gable and Katharine Hepburn.

  After kissing me passionately to the tinkling of five hundred glasses filled with pink champagne, Kendal stood and made a funny yet moving speech that had both my mom and his wiping their eyes. Bum Bum — or as most people now called him, BB — made the toast to the bride and joked about how
one of the perks of being our best man was that he got to go with us on our honeymoon. To save money, he had agreed to chauffeur us to our romantic hideaway — not to a champagne glass bubble bath in the Pocono Mountains, but a place that had become synonymous with grit and crime and urban breakdown: New York, New York. I owed Nonna Peppy that much.

  two

  Out-of-This-World Honeymoon

  Ten hours on the New York State Thruway. That’s all it takes to travel from Shipman’s Corners to the dystopia of New York City. All the way down the Hudson, we passed through one small town after another, stopping to pump gas and eat at greasy diners where Kendal, Bum Bum and I sometimes drew stares. White girl, black man, and a gay Italian guy in gold satin gym shorts, muscle shirt and earring — let’s just say we stood out. Those towns felt a lot like Shipman’s Corners, except for the American flags everywhere, snapping in the wind in front of schools and fire stations and on bumper stickers reading America, love it or shove it. Somewhere near the New Jersey border, we started to hear the low, steady thrum of the Hotwire Hum, as the small towns turned into the suburbs of a broken-down megalopolis. Through the windshield we stared down the esophagus of a giant gorging itself on car-choked malls, junkyards, chemical silos and empty billboards. When we emerged from the exhaust-fumed gloom of the Holland Tunnel, my first glimpse of Manhattan was a garbage can on fire in the middle of a vacant lot that gaped incongruously between two rows of buildings, like a mouth with its front teeth punched out.

  * * *

  Check-in time at the Hotel Excelsior in Greenwich Village was three p.m. Bum Bum dropped us out front at noon.

  “Where you staying, BB?” Kendal asked.

  “At a friend’s place. I’ll leave you his number. Call me when you get sick of all that tourist shit and I’ll get you into the best disco in the city.” He drove off, waving at us in the side-view mirror.

  A double amputee perched on a barstool at the hotel entrance held open the door for us. He was wearing a bandanna over his long hair and a ragged denim jacket embroidered with the American flag. When all he got from us was a polite thank you, I heard him mutter, “I left my legs in New Zealand for you cheap assholes.”

  The lobby reeked of old tobacco and fresh fumigants: the acrid smell of cockroach killer reminded me of Sputnik Burger on a Monday morning. From a giant polished wood radio in the corner, a horse race ran itself out while a morbidly obese man in a size four hundred sports shirt nodded over the Daily News, his flesh spilling over the sides of a cracked red leather recliner. A girl about the size of one of the man’s legs rocked back and forth behind the barricade of a steamer trunk, eyes fixed and mouth open. Her head had been shaved at the sides, a strip of hair down the centre of her skull moulded into an alert mohawk, tinted parrot blue.

  The front desk clerk stared at us. His eyes strayed off in different directions on the sides of his narrow head. Like a fish.

  “We run a clean house here,” said the clerk. “You ’n’ your bimbo kin get thuh hell out!”

  Kendal said, “We have a reservation. Mr. and Mrs. John Kendal.” I placed my left hand, with its Grantham Plaza Discount Jewellers wedding ring, on the counter.

  The man tipped his flat head to focus on the ring and made a jerky little bow. “No offense. Gotta be careful these days is all. Stay alert, like the guv’ment says.” He riffled through a box of index cards. “We putch youse on the sixth floor. Honeymoon suite. Not ready yet. Still cleaning up from the previous party.”

  I didn’t want to think about what the previous party had been doing.

  From a cubby behind the desk that reminded me of the cash at Cressie’s, the clerk took out an envelope and a heavy iron key that looked as though it would open the door to Frankenstein’s castle. “Letter for choo.”

  The envelope was addressed To the Newlyweds. Inside, a note from my second cousin in Brooklyn:

  Hi there, Mr. and Mrs. Kendal. Hope married life’s treating you well. If you get tired of that shithole you’re booked into, we’d be happy to put you up. In the meantime, here are tickets to Evita, the best musical in town, and an invite to treat you to dinner at Patsy’s Restaurant this Friday. (Sinatra eats there.) Talk soon, Donnie

  I folded the letter and slipped it into my purse. “If we can leave our bags here, we’ll go for a walk for a couple of hours. How do we get to the Lower East Side?”

  The fish-eyed clerk pulled out a badly Xeroxed map of Manhattan, much-handled and rendered in a tiny scale that turned the city blocks into hamster droppings. He rattled out rapid-fire directions. I nodded, lost in all the numbered streets and avenues, but Kendal followed the whole thing.

  “Oh, and by the way, air-raid drill, three times a week. We geddit oudda da way before cocktail hour.”

  “This hotel’s actually got a shelter?” asked Kendal, an edge of disbelief in his voice.

  The clerk turned his flat head to fix Kendal with one rolling eye. “Sure. A hardened shelter, down in da basement.”

  I knew that anywhere in the States we went, we’d be facing this. New nuclear attack preparedness drills. They were talking about reactivating them in Canusa, too. Even the Emergency Broadcast System test signal had reappeared to interrupt television shows.

  “Youse two gotta funny accent. Where ya from?” asked the clerk.

  “Canusa,” Kendal and I said together.

  The clerk muttered, “Land of milk ’n’ honey.”

  I couldn’t tell whether or not he was trying to be funny.

  * * *

  On Bleecker Street, the smoggy Manhattan sun leered at us. A yellow cab cruised by and slowed to a crawl, the driver angling his mirrored aviators in our direction. “Special price today for out-of-towners,” he shouted. Kendal and I kept walking.

  Heat radiated off sidewalks full of little girls in hot pants and tube socks flying along on four-wheeled roller skates, guys rolling racks of polyester shirts out of sweat shops, old men hitching up their pants in doorways, looking up and down the street with paunchy arrogance. Hustlers in leisure suits and sunglasses sold watches from cardboard suitcases, keeping an eye out for cops. And then there were the Conspiracy Freaks with their The End is Nigh sandwich boards, selling access to hardened shelters in midtown and anti-radiation suits in every style and colour. Back home, even Cressie’s was starting to stock second-hand “rad suits,” as they were known. The ad campaign claimed, “Now you can take your bomb shelter with you!” but everyone knew that all the suits offered was a day or two of protection while you watched everyone around you die.

  Over the traffic noises and the blare of transistor radios, we could hear the Hotwire Hum everywhere we went, a steady, low drone like a sustained bass note on an organ. The thrumming sound even reached inside buildings and down into the subways. Unnerving, at first, but like the native New Yorkers, we were getting used to it.

  It took us an hour to reach the Lower East Side, the Brooklyn Bridge looming on a skyline dominated by a jumble of grim warehouses that would have been at home on Z Street. Apartment blocks in dingy brown-grey brick, cross-hatched by iron fire escapes, turned the streets into shadowy canyons.

  “This is the place. Twenty-seven Orchard Street,” said Kendal in front of a boarded-up tenement. On the front stoop, a weathered man of no particular age — he could have been anywhere from twenty-five to sixty-five — pulled a ring of keys almost the size of a hubcap out of the pocket of his baggy overalls. “You looking to get inside?”

  “Are we allowed to?” I asked.

  The man shrugged. “I’m the caretaker. If I allow you, you’re allowed.” He made a show of looking up and down the street. “Who’s gonna stop you, the FBI? They got bigger fish to fry, sweetheart.”

  “My grandmother used to live here,” I said. “We’re from Canusa.”

  I was discovering that being from Canusa was like a get-out-of-jail-free card; in New York, no one thought we were c
apable of doing anything interesting enough to be bad.

  The caretaker unlocked the door. “Watch your step. No one’s lived here for better’n forty years, except cats and rats and pigeons.”

  “Rats?” I said as the caretaker unlocked the peeling wood door.

  He handed Kendal a flashlight. “Yous’ll need this.”

  An arch of metal grillwork framed the inner foyer, as if inviting us into a grand entranceway, instead of a steep set of broken stairs clinging to the interior wall. We climbed, carefully, breathing in dust and the sharp tang of urine.

  “Cat pee?” I asked the caretaker.

  “Yeah, ’n’ people’s, too. They sneak in here sometimes to squat in the flats. That’s most of my job, keeping trespassers out.”

  Kendal pushed open a door into a tight little room with a window giving out onto another tight little room, which gave out onto a boarded-up window. A weak ray of sunlight pushed through, picking out a rumpled carpet so thick with dust that all trace of a definable colour had vanished.

  “I guess we’re trespassers, too,” I said.

  “Nah, youse are just tourists. Don’t see many. Hardly no one wants to visit New York no more.”

  “We’re on our honeymoon,” said Kendal.

  The caretaker coughed. “Interestin’ choice.”

  “So why are you guarding this abandoned building?” I asked.

  “Some rich bitch is raisin’ funds to renoovate this place, turn it into a moozeum. A moozeum to what, I got no idea. Like those fruitcakes who want to fix up Ellis Island. You been out there? Jesus, it’s just about fallen down and sunk in the ocean.”