Liberty Street

by Dianne Warren

  I got back in my car, but my one foray into an unknown part of the city didn’t seem to be enough. I drove south on the expressway until I came to the new Walmart, then I parked in the lot and walked around in a brand-new subdivision, one with monster houses with double or even triple garages and bare dirt waiting for landscaping. Sometimes I had to walk on the newly paved road because there was not yet a sidewalk. House after house I saw, with people obviously living in them but no signs of life on the streets. I came across one child, a boy who was simply inert in front of a house, sitting on his bicycle in a Spider-Man suit, going nowhere. I had no idea how to speak to children, but I gave it a try anyway.

  “Hello there,” I said, but he looked away from me and at his house, as though checking to see if his mother—or a babysitter, perhaps—was watching. An orange cat wandered down the dirt driveway toward the boy.

  “Is this your cat?” I asked. “He looks like his name should be Marmalade.”

  No answer. His parents had wisely taught him not to speak to people he didn’t know.

  The cat meowed at me and brushed up against my legs. The front door of the house opened and a woman poked her head out.

  “So long, then, Spider-Man,” I said and walked on. The boy followed me for a ways on his bicycle, and I heard the woman calling for him to come back.

  I made my way to the Walmart where I’d left my car, and I went inside and bought a houseplant, which I placed in the kitchen window when I got home. I listened to the phone messages and learned that Ian was not coming home for dinner. I didn’t bother cooking anything. I didn’t feel hungry.

  At dusk, I got in my car once more and drove up the block where I’d lived with a Greek family when I first came to university, and then several blocks over to the street where I had lived with a boy named Rudy. The house was gone, torn down and replaced. The owners had tried to make the new one fit into the neighbourhood, but it stood out with its faux brick facing and its ostentatious columns on either side of the front door. The house across the street, where an evolving stream of art students had lived, was still there, but it was rundown and I supposed that in no time, the whole block would be developed with infill houses. Student housing in these neighbourhoods was no longer needed. The university now had many residence buildings on campus.

  As the city settled into darkness, I found myself on a street near the hospital where the homeless man had died. I pulled into the parking lot by the emergency entrance and there it was, the makeshift memorial, up against a fence. A bored-looking security guard stood nearby with his hands in his pockets. A few candles in glass containers had been placed in front of a framed picture of the dead man. Perhaps the security guard was there to prevent a fire. There seemed to be no other reason for his presence, since there were no mourners or spectators that I could see.

  As I stopped my car to look, he came to my window and motioned for me to lower it.

  “Have a look and move along,” he said. “This is still the emergency entrance.”

  “It’s touching,” I said to him. “The memorial.”

  “They’re tearing it down tomorrow. Have a look and move along.”

  And so I did. I drove slowly by the fence and saw the dead man’s face flickering in the candlelight. He had a pleasant face, at least in that photo.

  I left the parking lot and joined a line of traffic that took me through downtown and to an area known as the warehouse district, where the clubs were. I had never been in one, and I had no desire to go in now because I could hear the pounding techno dance music even as I passed by in the car.

  I came upon a junkyard, well lit to prevent theft, although I wasn’t sure who would want to break into a junkyard. I could see the outline of rusty piles of scrap metal through the chain-link fence. Another pile of nothing but bathtubs. Two German shepherd dogs on patrol sniffed the periphery of the fence, bored by the lack of action. What was the real business of a junkyard with dogs? I wondered. A front for drugs, one of my colleagues at work would always say whenever a questionable licence application came to the attention of city hall. I did a U-turn so I was on the same side of the street as the dogs, and I pulled up to the curb and rolled down my window. The dogs stopped and looked at me, alert now, and went back to sniffing their way along the fenceline only when I put the car in gear and moved off down the street.

  As I turned back toward the city centre, I checked the time. It was almost midnight. I’d had nothing to eat since the hot dog in the Safeway parking lot, and I was now hungry. I wondered if Ian would be home yet. I could see the lights of city hall up ahead, and I drove there and parked the car in front of the building, and I imagined a cocktail party taking place beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows of the main floor, the genteel tinkle of champagne flutes, myself in a black dress, snow blowing into impossible drifts in the courtyard.

  My office was on the tenth floor. I looked up and saw the lights on in the office below mine, as though someone was working late, which would not be unusual. I often worked late, one spreadsheet or another on the computer screen in front of me. I could leave the car right now if I chose, use my access fob to open the front door and enter the elevator, step onto the tenth floor, and turn the light on in my office and go to work. On the other hand, I could just quit. It seemed like such a good idea, I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it before. I started the car and drove to a Tim Hortons and picked up a sandwich and a coffee, and then I went home.

  The bedroom door was closed and I assumed Ian was behind it, asleep, so I lay down on the couch rather than disturb him. Half an hour later, I heard a key in the front door and he came in, drunk and stumbling, dishevelled in a way that I had never before seen him.

  “Go to hell, Frances,” he said when he saw me on the couch, and then he went to the bedroom. But half an hour later, he came back and sat down on the couch by my feet and stared out into the dark room. He said, in a drunken voice, “Do you remember that I once asked you to marry me? No, that’s not right. I didn’t quite ask, because I was hedging my bets. I suggested we get married, and you did just what I thought you would—you blew it off like dust, as though it wasn’t worth discussing.”

  Before I could speak, he got up, stumbled back to the bedroom, and closed the door.

  I knew the time he was talking about. People he worked with had been getting married, having babies. People his age. He was right that I hadn’t taken his suggestion seriously. I was over forty. And I was already married, which he now knew, but he hadn’t then.

  I heard sounds coming from the bedroom and realized that Ian was crying. I had never seen him cry. I was five years old the only other time I’d known a man to cry, when my mother briefly left my father and me, and I heard my father crying in the night. I’d woken up alone in my parents’ bed and heard a strange, muffled noise coming from the living room, and when I figured out it was my father crying, I thought my mother must have died. In the morning I’d fished for information by saying, “I wonder what Mom is having for breakfast,” and my father had said, “I suppose she’s having Cheerios, as usual,” and then everything seemed to be okay again, even though my mother was still not home.

  I heard another sob coming from Ian in the bedroom, and then it was quiet.

  If he hadn’t told me to go to hell—if he hadn’t left me on the couch the way he had—I might have gone to him, but I did not believe he wanted me to.

  I lay down again. All night, pictures of the city kept coming back to me—not familiar places where Ian and I had been together, but mysterious places and dark streets filled with strangers I would never know, or never remember if we did meet in a brief exchange. I felt as though my entire adult life here had been a series of brief exchanges. Even the people I worked with every day would remember me for only a short while if I left. “Remember Frances?” someone might say six months later. “She was difficult, aloof, not much interested in the rest of us.” I was surprised the thought had come to me so easily, that I would be remembered for
being difficult, and so, I reasoned, it must be true. I could only hope that someone might jump in and say, in my defence, that I was smart, or right, or at least cared about public health and safe drinking water.

  In the morning, early, I got up and emailed Mavis to let her know I was on my way to Elliot and I wanted to sell the house. Then I wrote a letter of resignation, and sealed it in an envelope along with my access fob. A short time later I heard the shower running, and then Ian came from the bedroom with his carry-on, wearing a crisp and fashionable suit. I asked him if he wanted a ride to the airport and he said no, he would drive himself and leave his car there. I found it hard to believe that he had been such a mess the night before.

  He picked up my empty takeout coffee cup from the floor where I’d left it and threw it in the paper recycle bin. When he was on his way out the door, he turned and said, or rather asked, “You know that you are a person who resists happiness, right?”

  “That’s not true,” I said.

  “It is true. You don’t trust it.”

  Then he closed the door and left.

  I didn’t want to think about what he’d said. I did not believe it. I retrieved my suitcase from the front hall, and emptied out the dirty clothes and packed clean ones. I took only what I thought I would need for a brief stay at a time of year that could be either hot or cold: jeans, shorts, T-shirts, walking shoes, sandals. A rain jacket. A book and my laptop. Toiletries. I put the dirty clothes in the laundry, collected my suitcase, and left the house. On my way out of town, I stopped at city hall and dropped off the envelope containing my letter of resignation.

  I hit only green lights as I drove out of the city. Once the lights were behind me, I called our home voicemail and left a message saying that I was on my way to Elliot to take care of some business regarding the rental house, and I would call again when I’d arrived. As I dropped the phone on the seat beside me, I realized that it should have been included in the package I’d left at city hall, and that it would be disabled when my account was cancelled, and then I’d be without one.

  As I looked at the city skyline in the rear-view mirror, I began to wish that I hadn’t left Ian the message I had. There was an assumption built into it—that is, that he would be relieved to know where I had gone. Perhaps it wasn’t true. Perhaps I was a stranger to him now. I thought back to the moment when the marriage and the baby had slipped from their hiding places. I was like one of those women who commits a bank robbery and then goes into hiding as someone else, marries a doctor, becomes a soccer mom, and does volunteer work with the Girl Guides or the Humane Society, until it all comes tumbling apart when she is recognized from an old newspaper photograph by a neighbour in the suburbs.

  Only I hadn’t been recognized by anyone. I had done this to myself.

  When a number of semi-trailers passed me in the left-hand lane, I realized I was driving too slow. I stepped on the gas and turned my attention to the road ahead, to where I was going, or rather from where I had come.

  2. We Two Girls

  IT’S NOVEMBER, A cold day. Five-year-old Frances Mary Moon, wearing new blue mitts and a matching toque her mother knit for her, sits on an old tractor tire filled with sand and surveys the yard around her: the white house that used to be just a log house but now has a modern addition on the back; the red barn with its hayloft on top and Kaw-Liga, the wooden Indian, standing guard by the side door, the one you can use to avoid walking through the cow muck; the bins and sheds and machinery, all lined up neatly along the fence; the caragana hedges and poplars that surround the yard and line the approach from the road. Everything is in its proper place, ready for winter. The sky is grey, as though today is the day winter might come, and even Kaw-Liga looks cold. The cows out in the pasture are all standing in one direction, facing away from the wind. Frances doesn’t like cows. She’s allergic to milk (which her father says is tragic for a dairy farmer’s daughter), plus she doesn’t trust them not to kick in that sneaky way they have, out to the side. She doesn’t like her mother’s chickens either, because of the time the rooster escaped and came at her, talons bared and wings flapping, and her mother materialized out of nowhere and grabbed it and strangled it right there, and then later made soup. Ha. So much for that rooster, but Frances hadn’t known which was more fierce: the rooster or her mother. She decides it’s a good thing to have a mother who can win a fight with, say, a nasty rooster or an ornery cow.

  Frances shifts herself around on the tractor tire so she can better see any cars or trucks that might come up the road, besides the milk truck, which has already been. She examines her new mitts and wishes they were pink, but her mother says blue looks better with red hair. Frances loves pink, and she’s decided red is a terrible hair colour to have if it doesn’t go with pink. Besides having terrible hair, she has no front teeth—none at all—because the orthodontist in Yellowhead pulled them. Frances had thought he was going to give her new ones, but her mother has since explained that she has to wait for them to grow in, and when they do she will have to wear a retainer to make sure they grow straight and not crooked like the old ones. It’s been months since they went to Yellowhead and stayed with her mother’s friend Doreen (who is called a war bride), and still no new teeth. Doreen isn’t there anymore. She and her son, Joey—the one her mother thought was such a nice boy; the one who tried to put his hand in Frances’s underpants, but she ran away and her mother didn’t believe her when Frances told her later—moved back to England, without Joey’s dad. Frances didn’t know a mother could do that. She hopes her mother is planning to come back from wherever she’s gone, which is probably not England but might be almost as far away—a place called Nashville, where people go when they want to be famous singers. She also hopes that she will have new teeth by Christmas. Her father has assured her she will, but her mother says she won’t and her teeth will arrive in their own good time. This is not unusual, for the two of them to have different opinions. Her mother always says, “What kind of world would it be if everyone agreed? Pretty boring.” Her father says, “Well, maybe just once in a while.”

  Here are some other things Frances Mary Moon knows about her parents, gathered in equal measure from stories they’ve told her and from conversations not meant for little pitchers and their ears. Her father is Basie, short for Basil, and her mother’s name is Alice. Her mother comes from a family of tossers in England, which is not a good kind of family, and she might be the only mother in Elliot—and who knows, maybe all of Canada now that Doreen is gone—who speaks the way she does, that is, with an accent. She used to work in a cheese-and-curio shop in London, but it was bombed to smithereens one night during the war, which meant she didn’t have a job anymore. The nice people who owned the shop gave her a gift of expensive cheese and an antique mahogany tea caddy, so it wasn’t all for naught. She met Frances’s father—who also has an accent, but people say he’s easier to understand—in London. He couldn’t be a soldier because of his poor eyesight, but he served the war effort by working in a government office. After they were married, they made a plan to move to Canada so that any children they had would not be in danger of turning out like Alice’s family (this fully admitted to by her), and also because Basie had grown up reading Hopalong Cassidy books and secretly longed for a frontier life (not admitted to by him).

  In 1955—a year Frances does not remember because she hadn’t yet been born—they bought a farm in western Canada with some money they got when Basie’s father died, and they crossed the ocean on a boat with their two steamer trunks, two suitcases, and some taped-up cardboard boxes. Once they got to Montreal, Basie bought them each a cowboy hat for the train trip west, assuming that everyone beyond the Ontario border wore a Stetson (this also not admitted to by him, but reported to Doreen anyway). There’s a picture taken by a coloured train conductor (what does “coloured” mean?) of the two of them standing on a platform with their belongings, wearing their new hats. Alice told Doreen that she took hers off as soon as the picture was sn
apped because she was already certain there would be no cowboys or hitching posts on the high street in Elliot, Saskatchewan. She had done her reading. Even after they were settled on their new farm (dairy, not beef) and Basie had traded his own hat for a cap like the ones the other men wore, he went to an auction sale and purchased a sofa-and-chair set with wagon-wheel arms, two table lamps with western scenes on the shades, and an old cigar store Indian that he thought Alice would welcome into the house, but she did not. The sofa set and lamps stayed, but the wooden Indian ended up outside by the barn door. He got named poor old Kaw-Liga after Hank Williams’s famous song on the radio. While Frances waits to see which of her parents will come home first, she studies Kaw-Liga across the yard and wonders if he can feel the cold. She wonders if Hank Williams can feel the cold now that he’s dead. He fell asleep in the back of a car and didn’t wake up. (What? Can that happen?)

  Snow begins to fall. Frances looks at her hands and sees that it is clinging to her mitts. She can feel it on her eyelashes. She looks up at the falling flakes—growing bigger and bigger as they drift down toward her—and sticks out her tongue. She wonders how far her mother has got on her way to being a singer, and whether she is singing right now, driving south, as the crow flies. Her mother sings when she thinks no one is listening: along with the radio, when she’s in the bathtub with the door locked, when she’s cooking, or sterilizing, or doing barn chores. Skeeter Davis is her favourite singer, and in fact, Frances is named after her. Mary Frances Skeeter Davis. Frances Mary Moon. (Her father hadn’t liked the Skeeter part.) Frances believes her mother could be a famous singer like Skeeter Davis or maybe Kitty Wells, who both live in Nashville, which is where you go if you want to be on the radio.