by Dian Day
“You mean this is live music?” she asked. She looked astounded, like she couldn’t believe it, like maybe she never heard people singing in their living room before.
I couldn’t think of how to answer that, so I just reverted to being polite. “This is my friend Ed; this is my new neighbour Maya.”
We all just stared at each other for a minute, and then finally Maya said, “Okay, I need two men.”
Ed might be an old guy, but he doesn’t get hung up on civility. “No you don’t,” he said. He laid his hands back on the keyboard longingly. I think he just wanted this weird interruption to be over.
“Look, I already tried Mrs. Halif, but she isn’t home. I don’t know anyone else yet.”
“Mrs. Halif is not one or two men,” I said.
“All right, all right, I don’t need a man, I need a person. I just thought that would appeal to you more, you know, invoking your manhood.”
“Appeal? What is it that you actually want?”
“There’s a squirrel stuck in my chimney,” she said. “I can see its foot sticking out of the clean-out cover.”
“Why didn’t you say so?” I said. “Come on Ed, Sciuridae in danger.”
Ed sighed resignedly, lifted his hands, and played a decisive E minor chord before getting up. “Will we get rabies?” he asked.
Maya led us over to her side of the semi. I admit I was curious to see the place; since she had moved in a couple of months ago there’d been a fair amount of hammering and banging. On a few occasions, I’d even heard her swearing through the walls. It didn’t look like she’d done much to the place, though, at least on the main floor. These are small houses with a lot of archways between rooms so you can see the living room, dining room, and kitchen with one glance, practically. She had regular worn-out furniture, and the place wasn’t exactly tidy. There were a bunch of open toolboxes cluttering up the hallway, and she’d haphazardly piled a dozen or so lengths of copper pipe along the wall.
The layout was the mirror image of mine—a reverse twin—so I didn’t need to ask where the basement steps were. We raided the kitchen for a woven bag and a pair of work gloves, size small, and some scrap pieces of cardboard from her recycling bin for prods.
On the way down I began to catch a familiar skunky scent, reminiscent of my brothers’ “science projects” in the damp basement of my childhood. “Smells like—” I began, but Ed had reached the bottom of the stairs, and stopped dead in front of me.
“Christ!” he gasped. The low room was filled with rows of five-foot-high marijuana plants, lined up under grow lights. “Damn good thing Mrs. Halif wasn’t home,” he said. It seemed to take him a while to get his legs moving again. Sometimes he is an old guy.
Sure enough, when we managed to beat our way through the jungle to the footing of the chimney, we spotted a skinny little grey foot sticking out of the air vent in the cast iron clean-out cover.
“Tickle, tickle,” said Ed. The foot wiggled. “Alive-alive-o. Rabies for sure.”
Maya put the gloves on, since they wouldn’t fit either of us; then she went and stood right back in the middle of the room. Plant leaves draped over her shoulders. Ed shook his head as though that what was to be expected, but I already knew that a dread of rodents was perhaps the only way in which Maya conformed to any out-dated stereotypes of the female sex.
Ed held the woven bag open underneath the edge of the cover. I lifted the door slowly off its hooks, and a whole bunch of black dust fell out onto the floor, pulled by Free-for-All’s scrabbling paws. Ed pulled the bag up around the grey body, and I pushed the scratchy little foot back in through the hole so the squirrel dropped down into the bag. Ed snapped up the top, and handed it across the room to Maya.
“Yeah, okay,” he said. “You needed two men.” Free-for-All stuck a tiny claw through the mesh.
“You guys want a Sleeman’s?” Maya asked, keeping the bag at arm’s length. I lifted my eyebrows in surprise.
“We gotta get back to the live show,” said Ed.
“He only drinks Red,” I explained. We went back up the stairs and out of her place, Ed walking the half dozen steps around on the path and me hopping over the railing that separated Maya’s part of the front porch from mine.
“We just left her standing there, holding the bag,” Ed said, solemnly, as he sat back down at the piano.
We just about pissed ourselves laughing. After a while I went and got him another beer and we started in on Gladys Knight and the Pips, where we’d left off.
WHEN I GOT UP IN THE MORNING, I put the empties out on the porch for Luke. He does this part of town on Tuesdays. I get up pretty early—well, I have to—but sometimes he goes by before I get them outside. I don’t like to put beer bottles out at night. I tried it once and a bunch of kids smashed them all over the road. It took Norman all morning to clean up the mess; Norman was the old guy who used to live in the other half of the house before Maya bought it. He started before I left for work, and he was still at it when I got back for lunch. He’d cut open his little finger picking up glass, and I ended up taking him to the hospital to get stitches. I even had to cancel the first few students at the store at the last minute, because the wait time was so long in emergency, and I really hate doing that. So, all in all, I learned in just one trial that the beer bottles go out in the morning, and only if Luke hasn’t been by yet. I can tell if I’m too late by looking across the road at Tamil’s; I know it’s okay if there’s still a pile of glass ghee and yoghurt bottles outside his place.
I put the bottles out; there was a whole baker’s dozen from the previous night. Maya was just coming out her door, too. She had on her coveralls—both of us in our uniforms ready for work—and was struggling with all the gear in her left hand because she had a giant thermos of coffee in her right. The aroma was so strong it made me weak in the knees. I’ve only seen Maya a few times in the mornings, and it’s not pretty. I thought it would be safer to pretend I hadn’t seen her, but she was making a racket with all those lengths of copper pipe she lined her hall with.
“Good morning,” I said. I really wish I could leave off with the compulsory politeness thing.
“Morning,” she grunted. Then she could have been on her way to blocked drains, dripping taps, and twisting old pipes in new ways. But no.
“I see you got Free-for-All outside okay,” I continued. He was in the gutter, fishing around in the debris for a stale peanut.
“Who?” she asked.
“The squirrel,” I answered, and pointed. She looked at me briefly then, the merest glance. I could see her realizing that I had a name for the squirrel and that I recognized it as the one from her chimney. I could see her thinking that was strange.
“Finking right,” she said. Saying “finking” is one of her quirks. Fink, fank, funk. She swears that she doesn’t swear. If you want to talk about strange, I thought to myself.
Maya staggered over to her truck and threw the clattering armload into the broken back window of the cab.
THE LONG STREETS OF MY CITY all seem to be going somewhere else. Ontario Street, Montreal Street, Bath Road, the Old Perth Road. They run like sunrays on a page: east, west, and north, and to the south we are bound by an inland sea and the oesophagus of a great river. As a child, those elsewhere-named streets lured me out of town to the promise of something else—it didn’t have to mean something better. Something else walking the streets besides ex-cons and mental patients and military cadets and drunken, snobbish students. Something else at home besides my six brothers charging through life like a herd of wild stallions. Something else besides a mother six times removed from her seventh child, a mother who hid her great talent in a mould-scented kitchen. Something else in my gawky heart besides being too skinny, and too weird, and too perpetually alone.
A couple of times, I took the city buses to their outer limits. I’d reach the fringes of town, w
here the increasingly-dilapidated houses tumbled into warehouses, barns, forests, and open fields. I’d get out of the bus and stand on the gravel shoulder and look down the curving highways; the future as invisible as the horizon. Sometimes I’d stand under the underpass of the 401, even in those days four lanes of frantic cars going somewhere else. I sang under the concrete: “Turn, Turn, Turn” by the Byrds and Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” and “You are the Sunshine of my Life” by Stevie Wonder. It was like singing in the shower, I imagined: the roaring in the air somehow purifying the notes that emerged, sostenuto, from my throat. I couldn’t go anywhere, but my voice travelled along those roads like a hobo, sleeping in outbuildings, building campfires in fields, begging at kind strangers’ back doors. My voice was always on the move.
I could never have sung in the shower at home. My brothers would have killed me for it.
WHEN IT WAS BEDTIME, I got sent to my room. I did not get tucked into bed every night and kissed on the forehead. I did not get read bedtime stories, but I knew the words of a thousand songs before I knew what any of them meant. I knew the words when they were mere syllables of sound, a Fa-Sol-La that, as I grew, became “My Bonny” or “O Brother” or “Frail Wildwood Flower,” and taught me more than Aesop or the Brothers Grimm ever could. “O Mio Babbino Caro” was both my adventure story and my lullaby.
I kept myself hidden for years while I watched my mother sing. It was like a spell I was afraid to break―or I should say she was like a spell, and the music she made wove midnight stories in our small kitchen that wafted down the hall towards me like musical tumbleweeds across a barren plain. It was the only joy that touched that house, with its drab and listless air, the cupboard door that wouldn’t close, the grime in every crack and seam, those scattered chairs whose screws unwound of their own accord no matter how often or how ineffectually she tried to tighten them with her lucky penny, or a broken thumb nail, or a dull knife. Her music made an otherworldly space around her that shone like the eyes of a cat at night, unblinking, full of a familiar strangeness. She was lit; she was alive. Singing made her tangible and real.
I thought if I moved the spell would break, my mother would break, the music itself would break. I thought the song would drop like glass and shatter into fragments, the Do-Re-Mi lost between the floorboards. I knew all the words from before I had memories of learning them, and for a long while I moved my lips as my mother sang. Then I would breathe music in and out, lightly. Then I began to sing with her softly, under my breath, my knees pulled up against my chest, my chest aching as if it would explode with the effort of containment. Finally, after years of this, something broke in me.
THE SUMMER I WAS ELEVEN, I started singing in the streets. I was driven there by a double desperation: to make some money for music lessons, and to make music differently than my mother did. The deserted kitchen would not be enough for me; I needed an audience. I was ready to be heard.
The first time, my heart hammered in my throat so fiercely, I don’t know how I managed to make any notes at all, let alone true ones. But in those days the music poured out of me like new light at sunrise pours out of the sun, and a glow seemed to be on every face that looked towards the east.
MY MOTHER GREW USED TO NOISES in the house at all hours of the night. My brothers travelled to and from the bars on Princess Street without any regard for her sleep or the neighbours’. The front door opening and closing in the hall beside her makeshift bedroom became part of her dreaming, and she never stirred until much later, gripped by her own peculiar insomnia. I expect during those years she was so tired, and perhaps so disillusioned, that she would have slept through anything, even had she found herself in the orchestra pit of a first-rate opera house on opening night—a thing I don’t believe she ever once experienced.
It was nothing for me to dress in the dark. I pulled my thrift store cadet cap down over one side of my head in the way I had practised endlessly in front of the tarnished mantle mirror. I thought it made me look older. I took the stub of a precious 4B pencil—who knows where it had come from—and darkened my upper lip. I had drilled holes in the bottom of my thick-soled boots with a rusty auger I’d found in the empty lot across the street, and filled the holes with bolts and nuts used as spacers. In this way I grew three quarters of an inch during my midnight escapades, and, when required, the metal studs striking the pavement were an accompaniment, vivace, to my songs. I walked out of the house solidly, sure-footed and courageous, so as not to give myself away by creeping. I didn’t think about the marks my boot-bolts made on the hall floor; they were indistinguishable from the countless dings and dents and scratches that already inhabited that ill-used wood. The front lock was never bolted, and in fact the door handle hung ineffectively in its socket and had no latch. To keep my mother dreaming, I even learned to slam the door behind me by pulling fiercely on the mail slot as I launched myself into the hollowness of the night. Once outside, I slipped along streets like a skinny wraith, gliding from bush to porch to parked car—hulking shapes of darker darkness that hid me along my eerie way.
As I approached the downtown streets, I stopped flirting with darkness and stepped boldly down the centre of the sidewalk. It wasn’t far; a seven-minute shadowy journey. I took my cap off and put it on the sidewalk in front of me, open side up. I stood under a street lamp, in front of the alley next to the Limelight Pub, where I could duck back into darkness at a moment’s notice. I opened my mouth, and the trembling notes emerged like candles when they are first lit, flickering and uncertain.
When I was a bachelor, I liv’d all alone
I worked at the weaver’s trade
It was early spring, and wisps of cloud moved across the moon and stars like a movie trailer for God. It was a big night, in the way that such nights sometimes are—the clouds and the moon and the stars way out there, and on this insignificant street corner in a third-rate city, an insignificant boy belting out the songs of his childhood. An insignificant, wavering noise, in all that endless space.
And the only, only thing that I ever did wrong
Was to woo a fair young maid.
Small gangs of university students staggered past me blindly, but in one group a pretty young woman looked back, and her eyes looked right into mine, clear and bright like a bird’s. In an instant, I was looking into the face of my first true love: fine features framed with curling, sand-coloured hair. I was a point of sound, a pinprick of life, a wisp of meaning. My song faltered as her face turned away. But the flame inside me sparked and grew. I was really on the street, singing my soul out. I forgot my mother; I forgot myself. I took a deep breath and sent my voice after the woman who was walking away with my light on her face. She turned back to listen, pulling on the arm of the man she was with.
I wooed her in the wintertime
And in the summer, too
And the only, only thing that I did that was wrong
Was to keep her from the foggy, foggy dew.
“Give me your change, William,” she said, and he grumbled sleepily, so she fished in his jacket pocket, and then he smiled. He handed her some coins from his pants pocket, and she stepped forward so she was brilliantly lit by the streetlight above, dropped a small handful of change into my upturned beret, and winked encouragement. I inhaled so deeply that my lungs completely filled with air; I inhaled the whole universe. I was suddenly bigger, older, better than I had ever been before.
I think that was the finest moment of my childhood.
It was also pretty much the most unqualified success I’ve ever had with a woman.
UNQUALIFIED SUCCESS. The idea is so foreign I’m not even sure what it would look like. Something longer than fleeting, I suppose. Some evidence of stability, a pair of serviceable women’s shoes in my closet, an extra jacket on a hook, a drawer in my dresser reserved for the artifacts of a burgeoning relationship: underclothes, a toothbrush, whatever it is that one needs for occasio
nal unplanned sleepovers. I’ve had those, the sleepovers, but no woman has ever been inclined to leave a spare toiletries bag in the bathroom cabinet or her old slippers by the front door or her favourite wine in the wine rack.
I’ve been on first dates and second dates and even, sometimes, third and fourth dates. Somewhere in there, we come home to my tiny semi-detached house and sleep together. Most of the women I go out with seem initially captivated by the idea of me, but it always turns out that it isn’t really me they want, it’s music. We walk reverently through my instrument-littered living room. I don’t turn the lights on, but even so, there are always earnest attempts to extract promises to play, and to sing. In my kitchen, we peer with futility into my nearly empty fridge for a midnight snack, and climb the stairs hungrily. It all seems fine.
I reassure myself that at least I am not a virgin.
I GO INTO THE LIBRARY two or three times a week, but never at the same time, or on the same day. I squeeze in a visit whenever I have books ready for pick up, or books overdue. Sometimes, when they are really overdue, I put the books in the mail bag, carry them along on my route, and drop them off before I head home. Technically, we’re not allowed to carry anything in our mail bags but the mail. I get around feeling guilty by imagining I’m posting my books back to their rightful home; in fact, I use and re-use an ancient collection of dilapidated manila envelopes to disguise the returns. Instead of paying for stamps, I pay penance with the straps cutting harder into my shoulders because of the extra weight. When I catch myself at this bizarre behaviour I always think, “This is so Catholic of you, Frederick,” and I snort derisively at myself, but I keep doing it all the same.
I have to walk right by the checkout desk to get to the hold shelf, so I can tell immediately if she is there. As I am walking along the street, before I go through the library doors, I practise. The look on my face, what I will say. The wind invariably whips up from the lake and tries to snatch out my soul, the way people used to think sneezing did. Breathe, I tell myself, since as soon as I think about it my chest starts to get tight and my throat closes up. It’s like I’m eleven again, standing on the corner of Princess and King for the first time.