Once he took her to a street festival in Toronto. And stayed with her every minute, pincer-grip on her elbow, steering firmly. And sometimes, like tonight, he took her to official dinners where he needed a wife beside him. Usually she stayed quiet and didn’t screw up.
Tania’s bottom is frozen to the lawn chair, despite her coat and blanket and the unseasonably mild night. Damp seeps into her shivering, still-waiting form. A semi-crushed Slims she had stashed in the kitchen drawer for emergencies dangles from her fingers. When she finishes, she stubs it out in the flowerbed, pulls on a pair of black gloves, and resumes her wait.
It’s two-thirty when the Leonids arrive, sparking over the empty pool, lacerating the basalt bowl of the cold night sky, too swift for a telescope. Tania smells burning, but no, that can’t be. She listens for an electrical crackling or the hiss of a storm, but there is no sound. She debates if she should wake Philip — a couple of years ago, she might have tried, invited him to watch this display of natural fireworks with her.
Never mind Philip.
There should be celestial music, music — a tiny laugh puffs from her nose — that Philip could dismiss as New Agey. Meteors have edged out the stars now, and still they fall. Her soul thrills. Waves of faint, fast-moving points, the meteors rise as if from a common origin, set the sky ablaze. Light streaks arc as they fall. Their smoke trains linger through the cold night. The Leonids come from so far beyond, beyond anything she has ever seen, anything she has ever felt, sparking, falling, fizzing … what would it feel like to be one of them? Flying up — oh joy, joy — higher, higher, high as she can go. At the top top top of the curve she knows the terror-fall of the meteor, feels herself begin to fall fall fall toward the dark yawn of the pool, flying with one small fragment that has hurtled out of its assigned orbit, streaming particles of itself everywhere, screaming through the heavens with the ferocious pain, the burn and shock of entry as it comes down. Then another one, up up up …
Tania stands on tiptoe, now laughing out loud. Every sense is awake, every nerve afire, every synapse smoking. She holds up her hands as if to catch one as it showers its trail of stardust over the planet.
When the last of the smoke trains fades, Tania is trembling. She hasn’t felt such joy in five years, in this someone-else’s life.
Every moment, every moment should be lived like that. With that passion. Yeah! With intensity. Yeah! And awareness. Yeah! Like that! Live like you’re on the path of a fireball.
Tania pulls her gloves off. She swings the telescope toward her and adjusts it to focus on the pool. The Movado cuffing her left wrist glows to equal the gold bracelet cuffing her right — each came in a Birks blue box, one for their third, the other for their fifth anniversary.
Happiness doesn’t always come in a blue box.
If, impossibly, a fireball did crash in that dark pit, it would be lost till morning. CBC said that if you came upon a fragment, you’d miss it completely, think it an ordinary rock. That in the light of day, there would be nothing beautiful about a single Leonid particle.
Even meteors leave parts of themselves in places they don’t want to be, run into pits they can’t get out of. Even meteors can’t go home the way they came. And look spent and ordinary in the morning.
But oh the beauty, the beauty along the way.
It’s a sign. For her, for Ma, for Philip, even Philip’s mom — the rise and fall of the meteors is a sign.
I gotta have pain. I gotta have fear, danger, terror, ugliness and ordinariness along with beauty and comfort and joy. Nothing beautiful and no joy happens without pain.
Mrs. Philip Trent has been standing very still on the patio for hours. She’s wearing black gloves again. The coat she wears is open. The blanket is draped around her.
Tania wants to tell her if she does not go now, this minute, on the heels of this night, she will never leave.
If Mrs. Philip Trent stays now, she will never again feel a meteoric exhilaration nor the terror of despair. She will stay in this house, bounded by fear, till she feels nothing deeper than a gentle melancholy to be alleviated by Prozac.
Mrs. Trent will then progress to the age when living is a chore. The worst that will ever happen to her might be a washer breakdown. Perhaps sickness, later the irritable regrets of a well-medicated old age.
But Mrs. Philip Trent seems to have something left to do here. She is dropping her blanket on the patio and going into the kitchen. She is peeling off her black gloves. She is taking a very sharp knife from the drawer by the sink. Is that Mrs. Trent who is holding her arm out before her, Mrs. Trent opening the patio door? A dripping arm leads Mrs. Trent down the stone path, down the steps into the empty pool.
Perhaps Dr. Philip will find Mrs. Trent in a few hours, wake her with a princely kiss, bring her out of stasis, like a patient etherized upon his table.
Or perhaps he won’t know how to switch her on again.
Tania zips her coat, closes and locks the patio door and returns to the kitchen. She stops briefly in the hall to lace on a pair of running shoes and pick up the keys and her handbag. Off come the gleaming Movado and the Birks bracelet. In a few minutes she’s behind the wheel of Philip’s Merc, swinging out of the driveway and away.
She hums out loud, Tracy Chapman, not opera. And so what if she sounds crazy — who cares! Just imagine Philip’s face when he finds his car gone.
Red and pink streaks appear like burst vessels across corneal blue. The illumination from her headlights merges with the dawn.
This Raghead
Larry Reilly slides open his balcony door and takes a seat overlooking the lawn. Only a week since he unpacked his boxes in number 101. He doesn’t miss the rake or shovel he left behind. The music teacher who bought his ranch home must have inherited money — Larry would never have paid as much. He’s not going to miss climbing ladders to clean leaves from clogged rain gutters, descending basement stairs with the laundry or having to fix the furnace. At the yard sale, his grandpa’s crank telephone brought in more than the computer his grandson Ronan gave him. And now Larry is content in his newly minted two-bedroom condo. His Social Security is automatically deposited every month, along with the company pension that has kept on trucking for eighteen years, since he was sixty.
Gertrude no longer disturbs him with her snoring — he has his own room and a new bed. It took a while, but Larry has brought Trudy the joy of a dishwasher at seventy-six, and a kitchen so open she can watch the TV in the living room as she cooks. And if she’s not feeling up to cooking, he can escort her down to the dining room.
Larry never misses Mass each Sunday with Trudy. Unlike the kike in number 109 down the carpeted hall, or the Lutheran kraut in number 111. He’s pretty darn sure Trudy is going to heaven and he wouldn’t want to get left behind — no one else would know all the little stuff he needs. Besides, the night the kamikaze hit his ship in the Pacific, the force that propped him and his mates up in life preservers till rescuers found them had something of the supernatural about it.
A young black man in a jacket with gold lettering waves as he rides a lawnmower across the front lawn.
There was a time when a strong coloured buck like that wouldn’t have it so cushy, wouldn’t be doing much more than washing dishes.
Larry, he tells himself, you live in the best country in the world.
Larry goes exploring. The hobby room is on the third floor. Needlepoint and knitting at one end, workbench with tools at the other. A slender young woman in spike heels comes out of a small office. He would have preferred someone with her neat classic looks for his son instead of the dumpy bo-he-me-an that boy married. The woman says her name is Ann. He tells her his. She is the Activities Coordinator and can teach him to use “the net.”
“What do I need a net for?” Larry says. “Ain’t goin’ fishing.”
She waits till he’s stopped laughing.
“Most people want to check the obituaries,” she says, as if promising a child a treat.
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bsp; He sits down in the chair beside hers, facing the monitor. He notices her bare ring finger. Up close, her skin is like Trudy’s when Trudy was between thirty and forty. This woman should be married. He wishes he had a younger son to whom he could introduce her.
“Your perfume — what’s it’s name?” He’s always had a sensitive nose.
“Celine Dion.”
“Frog perfume,” he says. “Knew it.”
“She’s French-Canadian.”
“Same difference.”
“You want to learn?” she says.
He may as well find some old friends. “Make sure my name isn’t listed,” he tells Ann. She pecks at the keyboard.
“You can go right by the ones with that Star of David beside them,” Larry says. “Don’t have any Jew friends.”
Larry’s own obit will be like his older brother Eddie’s, with the Stars and Stripes beside his name. After that he won’t have to see the flag burned or trampled by un-American peace “warriors” moaning about unilateralism and flying the UN flag higher than the flag of their own country.
When he leaves, Ann shakes Larry’s hand and tells him her last name as if he were deaf, which, despite his other ailments, he is not. “Bernstein.”
Jews can be so over-sensitive.
A few days later, the woman across the way in number 102 is talking so loud Larry comes out into the hall in his skivvies. She doesn’t want the young administrative assistant sticking up an eight-by-ten photo of young Bush on the wall near her door.
“Put it up with the Halloween decorations,” says the woman.
The boy bites the inside of his cheek. Like Eddie when he didn’t know what he was supposed to do.
“Let me have that,” Larry says. “I’ll put it up in our living room.”
The boy shrugs, hands it over and slouches away.
Larry stands with his belly hanging slightly over the waistband of his shorts, wishing the hall felt warmer. He points to his scar and tells the woman from 102 how he got his Purple Heart from taking a bullet after the kamikaze, during the strafing. He was fighting the Good War, sacrificing time he could have spent drinking beer and kissing Trudy. Eddie was killed in action off the coast of North Africa, he tells her. “We get behind our President in a time of war. The government always knows something we don’t.”
“You line up right behind Bush along with the other sixty-two percent, sheep all of you,” she says. “You approve of him, just like the Germans got behind Hitler. And look what happened to them — they followed that madman right over the edge. I didn’t vote for your smiley warmonger, nor did the majority in this country.”
“So Al Gore would have done a better job of dealing with terrorists?”
“It’s Bush who’s the terrorist,” she says, and slams the door.
Larry takes the Bush photo in and tells Trudy all about it. He gives it to her, but Trudy doesn’t put it up in his living room or outside his door. Not that day, nor the next. And she smiles at the peacenik next time she passes her, smiles with Larry right beside her as he escorts her to the dining room. That smile is good for an hour of bickering like he and Trudy haven’t had in years.
Larry thinks “terrorist” again when he visits Dr. Bakhtiar, the raghead at the adjoining medical clinic, who has checked his pacemaker every month since he and Trudy got on the waiting list for their condo. He can’t not think “terrorist” — he’s been watching enough Fox and CNN to hear it every three minutes. He gives his Medicare and Medigap cards to the terrorist’s secretary, the girl who calls herself a medical assistant.
“Just don’t send the bill to me,” he says, and laughs.
She doesn’t look up.
Nothing’s free. Larry would like to tell Dr. Bakhtiar that freedom isn’t free, either. It took young men like Eddie — strafed by the Luftwaffe — and him with his Purple Heart to hand it to the likes of the raghead. On a platter.
He takes one of the straight-backed chairs in the waiting room and grabs a Newsweek. The cover photo shows a GI standing someplace in Iraq, whining, “What’s Plan B?” That man probably can’t imagine things Larry can, like being captured by Germans and digging trenches or being tortured in a POW camp in Japan.
Dr. Bakhtiar’s pension’s going to be bigger than his own, and Larry doesn’t like that one little bit. He bets the raghead got a scholarship someone like Ronan could have gotten, if Ronan had ever wanted to go to college. Larry is glad there won’t be much left in Social Security for the raghead’s retirement — except that means there won’t be much left for Ronan either.
Goddamn immigrants nowadays, they have it easy.
Larry’s pacemaker kicks in. He’s remembering how his grandpa bought a hundred and sixty acres from the land office for ten dollars after he passed through Ellis Island, how he paid two dollars to the land agent, cleared the land, built a home and farmed five years to keep it. Larry still has the land patent that transferred the title for six dollars, signed by Abraham Lincoln.
Doctors didn’t send their bills to Medicare in his grandpa’s day, either. You got sick and you paid. Often you — or the doctor, if he was a soft touch — went bankrupt. Medicare is progress, even if the pharmacist gets Larry his Coumadin pills from Canada.
Sitting alone in Dr. Bakhtiar’s examination room, Larry’s almost bicepless arms dangle from a blue cotton smock tied behind his neck.
Maybe the raghead kills Americans slowly, turning up the heartbeat, turning up the pace, till millions of hearts drop dead from exhaustion.
His son’s going to drop dead from exhaustion — moving so fast he doesn’t have time to get his computer to remind him to call Trudy.
Dr. Bakhtiar comes in at last.
The raghead doesn’t apologize for keeping Larry waiting. Brown hands flip through Larry’s chart. Dr. Bakhtiar’s black brush moustache bobs as he purses his lips.
Larry has never noticed Dr. Bakhtiar’s touch the other times he’s been examined, but today the doctor’s hands feel as soothing as Trudy’s on his chest.
Larry pulls away: the raghead could be gay.
Dr. Bakhtiar says the cholesterol that has hardened the walls of Larry’s coronary arteries is thickening, “like an octopus squeezing your heart. Be more careful — eat margarine, take walks.”
Larry says, “I haven’t eaten margarine since the war.”
“Which one?” the raghead says.
Larry realizes he’s serious.
“World War II. You’ve heard of it?”
“Ah well, we’ve had so many since then.”
“Skirmishes,” says Larry. There’s the ship he so often sees in his mind, Eddie at the rail, with that Rhett Butler moustache he was growing back then. Eddie standing on a deck by the lifeboats, waving his cap. That moment before the explosion and the smoke.
Dr. Bakhtiar says nothing.
He has nothing to say.
• • •
A week later, Ronan comes to visit. Twenty years old, in his McDonald’s cap, the logo shirt stretched tight across his muscles. The Elvis grin he had at three. He tells Larry his heart is telling him to marry his girlfriend.
Twenty years old and just dying to hand over his freedom to a wife and babies.
“What’s her name?” Larry asks, stalling. This is what Ronan, his grandson Ronan, wants to do with his freedom — the freedom that cost him a bullet, cost him a brother who could have shown him how to grow this old?
It gets worse: the girlfriend’s name is Maria. “You’re going to marry a Mexican?”
“She’s Catholic,” says Ronan.
“So’s the Pope,” says Larry, “but we don’t have a lot of wops in our family. Older than you, I bet?”
“No, she’s eighteen.”
“I was eighteen when we got married,” says Trudy. Larry yearns for the old closed kitchen. “And you were twenty,” she finishes.
The boy isn’t asking Larry’s permission. He’s telling him.
Ronan puts his arms around Larry. �
��Bye, Granddad.”
All the times Ronan put his arms around him before. All the times he carried Ronan when that boy got tired.
When Ronan is gone, Larry goes up to the hobby room.
He has learned to Google. He can’t find a law against them getting married.
There has to be one. There ought to be one.
When he returns to the apartment, Trudy says she thinks Ronan and Maria have already been sleeping together.
“That’s her problem,” says Larry.
“Oh, it’ll be his too,” Trudy says. “A paternity test is all it takes.”
He could swear Trudy is feeling better than he is, but she doesn’t feel up to cooking much. She wants to go downstairs to the dining room every time there’s music, which is almost every night. But the residents’ talk kills his appetite — their organs have lives and histories of their own.
“It costs us six ninety-nine apiece,” Larry says. “I can’t afford it every night.”
“Remember when we’d jitterbug till three in the morning? You held me up on the floor.” says Trudy. “It’s not like you have to learn tap-dancing. Just live a little.”
That’s what Eddie used to say. Maybe she’s still Eddie’s girl.
After lunch the next day, Trudy is taking a nap. Larry cannot stand one more nap. He doesn’t want to be babysat by television. He doesn’t want to play Bingo in the lounge. He’s read Prevention and all his Reader’s Digest magazines. It’s raining and he can’t go for a walk like the raghead advised.
Back to the hobby room, to the white screen, the little box at its centre. He sits down in the plastic chair in front of it.
Trudy, Eddie. Eddie, Trudy. All Eddie had to do was last a few more hours in the water and rescuers would have picked him up. And he would have come home.
Trudy might have married him, even if he had been wounded. Then she might have lived a little. Jesus.
Larry takes his glasses from his pocket and polishes them against the ribbing of his shirt.
We Are Not in Pakistan Page 17