by Anne Degrace
He got up and strode to the washroom before James could respond. On the stage, a young man with long sideburns settled himself on the stool, adjusting guitar and harmonica with the mics. Neither James nor Myra spoke while he began, in a quavering, haunting voice, to sing about lost childhood.
“What happened to peace and love?” James said.
Myra stared at the stage. The noise in the bar had risen, and it was hard to hear the musician’s words. Finally, “He’s had a rough week, James,” she said. “First, TCCEWV doesn’t want him to speak at the rally. I don’t know why, it’s some kind of inside politics. Then, this guy who came up from Maine about a month ago has been hanging around the office every day, getting weirder and weirder. Fig had to call the cops when he started smashing stuff, and you know they hate calling the cops; it just gives the authorities ammunition, like you’re all undesirables. Turns out he’s got some multiple personality thing. He’ll get sent home, I guess. He’ll get out of the draft, anyway.” She looked towards the washroom, where Fig had gone. “And this other guy he was helping got busted for trafficking,” she continued, running a finger through the wet ring from her glass on the tabletop. James watched as she made a series of lines imploding into the centre, then wiped it clean. She looked at James. “Are you okay? You look messed up.”
“I’m fine,” James lied. He peered at Myra. “Is that a bruise?” he asked.
“I tripped getting off the streetcar,” she said.
All at once James’s stomach lurched against dinner, beer, and the events of the day. He met Fig at the door to the washroom. “Fucking coward,” Fig muttered. James couldn’t tell if the shove Fig delivered was accidental or intentional, but he pushed past into the washroom, where he flung himself into the only free stall.
“Fucking asshole,” James said when he came up for air. From the quiet of the washroom he could hear applause as the musician finished his song.
TWO DAYS BEFORE the October rally, James and Myra argued outside the print shop.
“Look, James, you have to get political sometime. This demo really matters: the more exiles that come out, the stronger everyone’s going to be. There’s a whole bunch from Baldwin Street coming. Yesterday there was a sign paint-in at the church.”
James crossed his arms. “It’s great for them. They’re landed. I’m nowhere — and probably wanted. My time’s up, and I haven’t figured out what to do. I get arrested, I’m deported, and next thing you know I’m burning Viet Cong villages full of kids and old people. Or rotting in some prison.”
“It’s gonna be huge, James. You need to be there.”
“I’ll do it once I get landed. I’ll march in every fucking demonstration. I’ll be so political you won’t even recognize me.”
“Fig says you need to shit or get off the pot.”
“Fig can go fuck himself.”
“You can go fuck yourself.”
ON THE DAY of the rally, James couldn’t keep himself from the street, but he hung back, out of the thick of the crowd, so he could make a quick exit if he needed to. The streets were choked with demonstrators, including, as Myra had said, exiles, identifiable by their “we refused to go” placards. The Yorkville residents had not been successful in getting the street closed to traffic, but nothing was going to be moving today.
The press had been less than positive in recent months, and there appeared to be antagonism on all sides. Draft dodgers were labelled cowards by the pro-war faction, and now Fig was calling James a coward for not speaking out as a war resister. Was he a coward? Standing now under the awning of a bookshop and looking across the sea of people, James didn’t know. He could feel the anticipation and tension in the air like an animal presence. Anything could happen.
He looked for Myra, but with thousands in the street it was futile, and anyway, he hadn’t seen her since their fight outside the print shop. The noise of the crowd — movement, voices, guitar, and, somewhere, a saxophone — swelled; he felt claustrophobic, and longed for open space. The pocket of sidewalk on which he stood was now filling. He found himself pushed against the wall of a building. A girl he didn’t know grabbed his hand, pulling. “C’mon — they’re starting,” she said. He wrenched himself away and tried to move in the opposite direction, but the current was against him. The girl was gone, and around him was the press of bodies.
From somewhere down the street someone was speaking through a microphone, but he couldn’t make out words, only an onslaught of disjointed, booming sound. He put his hands over his ears, and someone nearby said: “Hey, you trippin’, man?”
The microphone sounds separated, and converged, and then became words, and through it James recognized Fig’s voice. Moving forward on the tide of people, he was pushed towards the podium. Fuck, he thought. When he reached the stage, James saw Fig still trying to belt out his message. Clearly, he wasn’t welcome: a scuffle had broken out, Fig shouting at the bearded man trying to wrestle the microphone away.
“Get the fuck off me!”
Fig kept his feet, and James, now at boot level, saw organizers arguing at the back of the stage. A voice said, “Just let him speak, man,” and the bearded man backed off.
Fig’s chest heaved, eyes wild; from where James stood, he could see the veins pulse in his neck, the sheen of sweat. Fig’s gaze darted through the crowd, and then he saw James, and pinned him. He pointed. “There’s the real thing, people,” Fig shouted into the microphone. “We have here a bona fide American Vietnam Draft Dodger. Come up and say something, draft dodger.”
There was a push from behind, and James was hoisted up and onto the stage. Fig shoved the mic at him; from the corner of his eye, James could see Fig surrounded, being encouraged off the stage. From somewhere in his peripheral vision he caught a glimpse of Myra pushing through the throng of people, but she wasn’t coming towards James; she was trying to reach Fig.
On stage, with the microphone in his hand, James looked out at the crowd. The sea of people appeared to James like an uneasy ocean under a brewing storm. A weird silence had descended, vaguely threatening; James could not tell how to read it. He felt the suffocating crush of expectation.
The air stilled as the assembled protesters waited for the figure on the stage to say something. “Let him speak,” came a voice from backstage, just as someone had said for Fig. James felt the thudding in his chest grow quiet. From somewhere in the crowd, a baby cried.
“I am a draft dodger,” he began.
“Right on, brother,” said someone near the stage.
“Speak up!” called someone else.
“Some might call me a coward,” he continued, his voice rising. There were more shouts; James couldn’t discern the words. “Others, an opportunist.” He took a deep breath. A girl near the stage gave James an encouraging smile.
“But mainly,” he said, “I’m just a guy who doesn’t want to kill anybody.”
A roar went up, the mic was handed to the next person who’d climbed the podium, and he stepped down. One of the organizers took the mic, but James no longer heard the words. His eyes were following Myra. At the side of the stage fists were flying, and within moments Fig’s arms were pinned from behind. Myra was trying to reach Fig, James trying to reach Myra, around them the crush of bodies. James shoved, and someone shoved back.
Myra reached Fig as James tried to push through a half-dozen people in the way. A woman James had never seen before was already there, shouting at the guys holding Fig to “Let him go.” Fig shook them free; from the podium, a new speaker had started a chant: One, two, three, four! We don’t want your fucking war!
James watched as Fig turned to Myra, now at his side, saw rather than heard Fig’s words, saw Myra’s face as he said them. And then Fig, and the woman, were gone.
James saw Myra go down, then, pushed or simply fallen, he couldn’t tell, and he shoved against the
bodies in front of him to reach her.
“Let me through!” he yelled at the biker who blocked his path.
“No entry,” said the biker.
James lunged. He saw the biker’s fist like a cartoon, expanding as it came towards him. Then he saw legs, feet, pavement, nothing.
IN MYRA’S APARTMENT, James made tea and brought it to her in bed.
“You look like hell,” Myra said as she took the cup.
“So do you,” said James, climbing in beside her. It wasn’t easy to smile.
He leaned against the wall, listening as she blew across the cup. The smell of oolong mingled with the patchouli scent she always wore and the must of sheets that needed laundering. The only light came from the lamp beside the bed. From the window’s open half-inch a cool wind blew, bringing with it the smell of leaves and something else.
“How early does it snow here?” James asked Myra. “Can it snow in October?”
“I remember it snowed one Hallowe’en when I was a kid,” she said. “You never know.”
James thought about getting up to close the window, but he felt battered and weary from the events of the day, and far too comfortable beside Myra. “What was that you said about Vancouver?” he asked. “It’s not as cold?”
Myra smiled slightly, but didn’t answer. Her eyes were red. “Fucking Fig,” she said. Then she began to laugh.
James laughed too, relieved by the sudden release in tension. “Yeah, fuck ’im,” he agreed, but Myra put a finger to his lips.
There was no sound from the street below, the whole of Yorkville remarkably quiet. This, he thought, is peace, even if it comes at a price. He had seen the movement reduced to its parts. Now, in the slow-motion universe of the room around him, he felt a tentative solace.
Myra shifted beside him, then set the cup down on the blue plastic milk crate beside the bed. “It rains a lot,” she said.
It came as a non sequitur, and James turned, an eyebrow raised. “Huh?”
“In Vancouver. It rains a lot.”
He thought for a bit. “Do you think they need people to do stuff there?”
“What, now you like the mic?”
“It was — okay. It was even good. I don’t know that being in the spotlight is really my style, though.” James put a hand to his swollen lip. “Maybe something more behind the scene?”
“Right now, I think behind the scene is absolutely where it’s at,” Myra said.
She took his cup and set it on the table beside her own. Outside on Scollard Street, a gentle snow began to fall.
NINE
NORMAL
·1970·
HER NAME WAS Wanda Wysnowski, but we called her Wombat.
She was everything we weren’t and nothing that we were: we all wore tartan skirts or the new polyester pantsuits recently allowed within the grade five dress code; she wore shapeless dresses that looked like they’d been scavenged from the Goodwill bin. Her leotards were pilled, covered in little balls of yarn that made them look diseased.
While we all brought our lunches in the handy zipper lunch kits with the matching thermoses, hers came in re-used brown paper bags. And her food: unidentifiable things wrapped in waxed paper. “Wombat’s eating goulash again,” we’d say, not really knowing what goulash was. We unwrapped our bologna-and-white-bread sandwiches, smug. Wanda would sit a little away from us on the school playground, intent on her lunch. And the way she said things, carefully enunciating, as if her words were fighting to get past her overlapping teeth. Why did she talk so funny?
“It’s like she has rocks in her mouth,” Donna Pistecky said to me as we walked home together after school. Donna’s parents came from Czechoslovakia, but Donna was born in Canada. She knew what was what.
“Yeah,” I said.
THERE WERE THREE neighbourhoods within our Ottawa school district. Ours was a pleasing labyrinth of crescents and cul-de-sacs, two-storey houses with long front walks and big backyards. All the streets were named after places in Britain. Even in 1970, with a modern young prime minister and real hippies protesting in Confederation Square, we were still children of the Empire.
My friends and I knew all the best places to hang around in the walking paths that bisected the neighbourhood. We knew the best coasting hills for our bicycles, and we knew where the dogs lived who sometimes gave chase when we tore around corners. We knew all the shortcuts. There were four of us: Andrea, Donna, Mandy, and me. “One-third of the Dirty Dozen,” my dad joked.
The army kids who lived on the Base were a pack unto themselves, the constant shift of families who could be posted away at a moment’s notice creating a special bond, more intense for its temporary nature. The army kids didn’t mix with kids from our neighbourhood, and nobody mixed with the kids from Gilmore Park, which consisted of low-income row housing, faded Ontario brick with peeling white trim. Windows without shutters. Gilmore Park kids, our parents told us, had a reputation for being a bad lot.
WANDA’S FIRST DAY of school was almost three weeks after the start of the school year. Indian summer had made us all lazy that day, the boys shooting spitballs, the girls writing notes, all of us gazing through the windows at the playground bathed in autumn light. Wanda came to the classroom door with her mother. She knew enough to drop her mother’s hand, but she didn’t drop it soon enough for us not to see. We all looked at the newcomer, a short girl with mousy hair.
“What a baby,” Andrea, sitting at the next desk, whispered. Andrea already had breasts, small buds that you could see poking out under the fabric of her ribbed turtleneck. This gave her a claim to maturity, as if she had graduated to a league far above the rest of us. She tucked her hair behind her ears and looked at me conspiratorially. I took solace, reassured. For the moment, I was still in the club.
Self-consciously, I adjusted my glasses. They were new, and they left painful red spots on the bridge of my nose that sometimes wept sticky fluid. At home I tucked tiny bits of toilet paper under the oblong plastic pieces, but of course I couldn’t do such a thing at school. I was terrified someone would notice these sores, which in my imagination were enormous. I had learned that acceptance was precarious, something that could change in a heartbeat. I kept my head down and my glasses in place, smiling back at Andrea, who was watching the new girl with disdain.
“I’ll bet she still sucks her thumb,” I whispered.
My left thumb tingled as I said this. Another secret.
“Boys and girls,” Miss McGrath began loudly. The new girl stood alone at the front of the classroom, her mother gone. “Attention, please. You have a new classmate. Please say hello to Wanda Wysnowski.”
“Hello Wanda,” we intoned. Two of the boys drew out the final syllable, so there was a baritone finish, like a dirge. Somebody laughed. Wanda looked at her shoes. We all looked too. They appeared too big for her feet.
Miss McGrath was old, but she was on the ball, as my mother liked to say. She sized us up and then looked straight at me. “Meg, will you be Wanda’s special friend for the first few days?”
I didn’t want to look at Miss McGrath, who often singled me out for things. When I complained about it, Mum, who knew Miss McGrath from the Hospital Auxiliary, said that the teacher chose me because she sensed she could count on me. When my mother said that I had felt proud, but now I just felt self-conscious. I didn’t want to be Wanda’s special friend, and I didn’t want to be singled out by Miss McGrath for anything.
“Margaret?” Miss McGrath prompted.
I could hear Donna snigger behind me. Andrea was grinning, looking straight ahead. Nobody called me Margaret except my mother when I was in some sort of trouble. Everybody called me Meg and although it sounded old-fashioned to my ears I liked it a whole lot better than Margaret, which was my grandmother’s name. Granny, who lived with us, read Winnie-the-Pooh backwards or up
side-down and embarrassed me when friends came over by saying things like “No flies on Charlie!” to nobody in particular.
I could hear Mandy, in the seat beside Donna, whisper “Go on, Margaret.”
“Okay,” I answered, not looking up.
I could feel my friends watching. I smiled at Wanda reluctantly, a flicker. She didn’t smile back, but her eyes were hopeful.
THIS IS WHO we were:
Donna, large-mouthed and corkscrew-curled, lived in the row housing that perched on the border between our neighbourhood and Gilmore Park, a mini-neighbourhood of row houses in a horseshoe configuration. These were the nicer row houses. The yards were bigger. The trim didn’t peel. There was a communal pool in the courtyard with a chain-link fence around it, just for the people who lived there, and if you knew someone you could go in. When the summer heat settled into a ceaseless swelter, Donna was everyone’s best friend. You didn’t want to fight with her and lose access to the pool, and so Donna managed extraordinary arrangements during this time: loans of favourite shorts sets, just purchased in Ogilvie’s and hardly even worn yet; the Archie Super Summer Digest, the one you wanted to read over again, even though Veronica always won and you liked Betty better.
Mandy had three younger brothers whom she called, collectively, the Brats. They were all blond, as was Mandy, who had an elfin face that freckled so much in the summer the spots all joined in places like a tan. Her spritely personality matched her short, bouncy physique, and this endeared her to teachers and parents who could not see her devious nature under her perky demeanour. She could be your best friend or your worst enemy. Mandy lived in a two-storey two-tone house on Essex Avenue. She had an English Setter called Polkadot. Her parents, she told us, were once tennis champions.
Andrea had straight brown hair and a tall, solid build. She had an older half-sister who came from her mother’s previous marriage, and that made her mother seem slightly dangerous, a Woman with a Past, which in our neighbourhood was a strange and exotic thing. Andrea’s sister Gina still lived at home and went out at night to bars and sometimes, when we’d all sleep over in a tangle of sleeping bags on the rumpus room floor, she would come in late at night and flop on the leatherette couch, not yet ready to sleep herself after a night on the town. She’d sit and smoke and tell us things that sounded scary and sexy. I learned new words, things I would never, ever, hear at home, things that surprised me but didn’t seem to surprise Andrea at all.