Agassiz Stories

by Sandra Birdsell

  I have been immersed in classical music lately and just going nuts, CBC plays gorgeous operas on Saturdays and every other day from dusk ’til dawn. And Mom, I’m half melting and half dying because I’m not singing these days. When I go to the piano rooms after I run, my voice is loose and supple and I sing at the top of my lungs. Bev and I still go to the symphony. It’s not as good as the Winnipeg Symphony, but it’s still nice to go. When I come to Winnipeg I want to take in as much good music as possible.

  Sorry to hear about Dee’s report card. Yikes. I hope she starts to work soon. Do you think she might be having too much time to herself down there in the basement room? I think she’s the kind of person who should be kept busy. Why isn’t she involved in any school activities?

  I think you should try and keep the booth at the Craft Show. Garnet (remember him? He’s one of Bev’s Anglophone finds) thinks your work is unique. He’s never heard of a heritage box. He would like you to design one for his parents’ twenty-fifth. I didn’t promise.

  Let me know.

  Andrea.

  ps/I have signed up for seven courses next term. No sweat. Maybe just a bit. Grammar test on Wednesday. Time to study. Garnet is coming over tonight and we’re going to study together and listen to music. Did I tell you he plays the piano?

  Hi Mom,

  I shouldn’t be writing. I should be reading but at times I find Quebecois Lit so stifling that I need a breath of fresh air. I was at Garnet’s last night and read some of his collection of Al Purdy’s poems. I just felt like crying, perhaps it was because they made me smell the Prairie and made me feel that I should be studying Western Canadian Literature and not this narcissistic Quebecois stuff. I am literally suffocating on it and the lectures affect me physically: I get a lump in my throat, my neck starts to ache, I have a nervous reaction everytime the prof comes up with another cliché about these authors who are “omniscient, innovative, geniuses, giants, gods.” I refuse to believe this is possible in a 17-year-old melancholic crazy child. I start to want to get out of here because it’s so intro-introspective. These people have been spending 300 years trying to know themselves. It’s like walking up a down escalator. Maybe it’s just me. I want to hop on a plane for Europe or a third-world country just to be assured that there exists a world outside of Quebec. I don’t know what I’d do if it wasn’t for Garnet. We have so much in common.

  I have been wandering around the apartment all day, thinking and doing little knicky-knacky things. The kitchen is my favourite room, so big and colourful, especially with my new Van Gogh poster and a big food collage I made. The room is white with the cupboard doors painted a rich, sea blue. And I’m feeling funny, wondering about myself and sex and relationships and ambition and body and spirit. Whew. What a mouthful. Perhaps it’s just the wind.

  I feel sad. I have been talking a lot and intensely with many people, written umpteen essays, got back into running and into (not sure if I’m happy or sad) a “relationship” with Garnet. He’s been such a close intellectual and fun friend and I’m worrying that this is going to wreck our friendship. But mostly, I have mixed feelings about breaking my celibacy pact. I feel as though I’ve said goodbye to an old friend, that single independent me that I’ve finally grown to like. Why does it feel as though I have signed over my body and therefore my mind and soul with the act of sex? That’s why I’m so sad. I don’t want that. I’m afraid that it will destroy all my goals and ambition. That I’ve lost all my self-determination by crossing that line. And so then, I’m wondering, will I ever be able to be married or live with a man without being swallowed up completely? Even someone as open and understanding as Garnet from whom I receive immense comfort and friendship. I still feel sad.

  Anyway, I’ve applied at the school of music. Garnet believes I’ve done the right thing. I can hear you groan. If I’m not accepted, I’ll finish my degree. If I am, well, the economy is so rotten, the best place to be is in school anyway. I’m just giving you warning, that’s all. This is my hope, to study music. I don’t know where Garnet fits in in all of this.

  Take care. Tell Dee I love her.

  Love Andy.

  Andy,

  Ten days to the Def Leppard concert and no tickets yet!! Brenda said her Dad had bought the tickets and it turns out he decided he didn’t want her to go to the concert and so he didn’t buy the tickets. And she didn’t tell me!! All the good seats are gone. Dad says he is going to try and get some but Dad is a Pig and I don’t believe anything he says!! This can’t be happening to me. God just can’t let this happen. I will never speak to Brenda again. What a slut.

  I’m writing this letter in detention. I accidently sewed my shirtsleeve to the apron I’m making. But that’s not why I got the detention. The witch expected me to just sit there and take it while she screamed at me and called me stupid. So I pointed to myself and said, “See this? This is the face of someone who cares.” It was worth it. I hate her. Some of the teachers are okay. I’ve been thinking lately that there’s just so much pain in the world and we are all busy running towards it. Why do we do that? And then when our life is over we’ll realize what we missed by always running to the pain. And we will be sorry.

  Last weekend, Mom let me go to this girl’s house for a sleepover (she wanted to get rid of me). Her name is Carla and she’s new in school. Carla’s mother wasn’t home because it was her father’s weekend to have her and he was supposed to supervise the sleepover but he never showed up. Carla phoned these guys who drive a car and they came over with beer. We got drunk. It was great. We laughed and ran around outside until two o’clock in the morning. One of the guys started smoking you-know-what and passing it around. I wanted to call Mom to come and get me but it was too late and so I said I was going over to the 7-Eleven for cigarettes and I walked around the neighbourhood until about five o’clock and then I went home. Mom was still up. She was sitting on the couch listening to records, waiting for Dad to come home. I told her what had happened and she didn’t yell. She said I should have telephoned but she was glad I came home. When she tried to get up off the couch, she couldn’t. Mom was drunk. She tried to hide it by yawning and saying she was really tired, but I can always tell when she has too much to drink by the way she swings her arms around when she talks. I made her eat a bowl of Rice Krispies and helped her to bed. I poured the rest of her vodka into the sink and put the bottle back in the cupboard. Do you think it was God who sent me home to look after Mom? The next morning, she opened the cupboard door and took the bottle out, looked at it and threw it into the garbage, but didn’t say anything. Then she starts to pull this Big Mother play and asks me a thousand questions about what I did last night!! I can’t stand it.

  I’m going to quit school. My marks aren’t that great anyway. I’m not like Brenda who can read anything and remember it. I can’t. I’m not like that. I can feel Catcher in the Rye, but I can’t tell you what it’s about. I can understand people. That’s why everyone comes to me for advice. I know what people are thinking. I know the future. I even know what people are going to say and do before they speak. I write things down when they come to me just so I can prove to myself that I didn’t imagine it, that I really can know things before they happen. And a long time ago, I predicted Mom and Dad would split again. And I predict another thing. Dad is going to move in with that Debbie. I had a dream about it. I dreamt he was sitting at a table in the kitchen with her and she said to him, “Now I understand why your wife couldn’t live with you.”

  Are all men nerds? The boys in my class sure are. I see right through them, too. Will I always be able to do that? How can you fall in love with anyone if that’s the case? Oh well, at least I will always have RICK SAVAGE. And I don’t care what I have to do, anything. I’m going to get to the concert. He’ll be looking for me. It’s destiny. If you don’t hear from me in a long time, the next time, it’ll be in an English accent!

  Bye. Dee.

  Greetings and Hallucinations!

  (As they used t
o say in the 50s or 60s. Bad sign. I’m losing track of decades.)

  Well, you did it. Glad to hear that you’re glad to be going back to Laval and that the music department is also glad to have you. I can hardly wait to see what will happen now. Get into dedication and all kinds of things could go right or wrong. You could get fat or thin. But, as your Dad’s mother used to say, “If you want to get drunk, get drunk, but don’t inflict your hangover on me.”

  I’ve been to my counsellor today (am I getting possessive about him?) and I’m in a strange mood because of it. I’ll spare you the gory details. I’ll not bash and bitch through my childhood, puberty, etc. I’m too old for that kind of nose-picking thing. I’ll just say that he gave me instructions to set aside a certain amount of time each day to feel sorry for myself instead of doing it all the time and trying not to. Like Dee in the shower with a washcloth stuffed into her mouth so I won’t hear her crying. I said to Dee, “If you hear me crying, don’t worry because I have given myself permission to do that now,” and she said, revealing inherent genes, “just so long as you don’t come crying to me!” (Just kidding, she said.)

  I received your lovely, comforting letter and all the praise and encouragement which I will put on and wear like a glove for several weeks. Note the attempt at creativity. Which probably means I shouldn’t be writing but working on my new design. I’m going to make my next box the shape of a house.

  I can’t explain how I’m doing or whether or not my sessions with the counsellor are helping any. Right now, they serve to demonstrate to me how stupid I am while I continue to do stupid things. How do you know when your husband has a lover?

  1. He begins to study you when he thinks you’re not watching.

  2. He affects an aloofness, an absent-mindedness so that he can think of her.

  3. He suddenly has a great deal of energy and enthusiasm and treats you with strained friendliness.

  4. He can’t concentrate and isn’t interested in the kids’ problems, or else he over-reacts out of guilt.

  5. He buys new underwear.

  There. Take it and frame it.

  I don’t think this lifelong feeling of being a fish out of water will ever leave me. It grows stronger. “They” tell me (the counsellor is not a person but a collection of conclusions gained from hundreds of women who continue to do stupid things) that I’m feeling worthless, rejected and unloved. If that’s the case, then let me tell you, it’s a weightless feeling, a blue and white room, a stepping down and the ground moving away. It’s constantly looking for a container to give me some shape.

  Last week while walking through Eaton’s store in search of a perfect shower gift for someone I don’t even like, I came upon a television set which was turned on. An advertisement for a K-Tel record was on. “Learn to do the bird dance,” the voice said and people were actually doing it, flapping their elbows and pecking and they were smiling as though they had just died and gone to heaven. Were they paid to smile? Fat people, skinny people, young and old dancing the bird dance and discovering a new lease on life. It made me feel sick. It made me feel as though I had also been doing that bloody bird dance for the past twenty years and was still doing it; in search of the perfect shower gift for someone I don’t even like. Something for the couple to argue over in court two years down the road. And that I’m not going to be able to stop doing it. I looked for a place to jump from. I called Carol and asked her to meet me for lunch. I wanted to tell someone that I was thinking of jumping. But instead, we talked about sex, unfaithfulness (hers), guilt, and never about dying. Her glasses were a mirror and I could see myself, distraught but covering up, eating and listening to myself in her frenzied gulping conversation, she not saying what she wanted to say anymore than I. It could have been a scene in a Monty Python skit. And then I got my idea to build the next box in the shape of a house. But instead of squares for photographs and family mementoes, I would have eyes in the box, different shapes, colours, staring out through the glass.

  When I got home, I wrote my idea down and filed it and then laughed myself silly. On one hand I think of dying, on the other of collecting material. Like the man who once sat across from me in a cafeteria, bemoaning the state of affairs in the world, saying that life was not worth living and then worrying aloud whether or not the apple he was about to bite into had been washed.

  The fly in the ointment, as my Dad used to say, the pebble in the shoe, is that your father is doing so well. He can drink and, seemingly, handle it. He’s started up the garage again and I understand, if I can believe him, he’s making it work. He’s living with that Debbie person who is very understanding and never asks questions and he is getting laid regularly. The bitterness is that men seem to be able to skate from relationship to relationship and never fall in. The counsellor says that the main reason why there are more women at singles’ affairs is that when a marriage begins to falter, a man goes out and lines someone up, so he has someone to go to when it breaks apart. If your Dad was miserable and unhappy, then I wouldn’t feel quite as bad as I do.

  I went to Agassiz last weekend to visit Grandma and while the men were out, she and Aunt Betty read “Dear Abby” columns to each other. They were searching for instances of men who in the end, “got theirs.” Men who had in some way damaged their families and ended up dying lonely deaths, unloved, filled with regret (you know). They pounced and held up examples to the window to better trace the outline of the life behind the words, aha, serves him right, look at him suffer now. They were comforting themselves, perhaps me, with the idea that there is justice. I didn’t say anything because they have only just begun to accept that perhaps some marriages should end. But that acceptance has to be based on someone being wronged and someone paying in the end. I didn’t tell them that men burning up in cars, men of “no fixed address” are the exception, not the rule. Because we need to believe what we read in “Dear Abby” even though life demonstrates differently.

  People say to me, Lureen, how come you don’t date? I never see you with a man. I don’t tell them about those singles’ clubs, overweight Polish and Italian men in white shoes, stamping out their territory on the dance floor. It leaves me cold. Jamie says, come on, Mom, you won’t find a man in the Yellow Pages. I wish, he said, that you would have had as many men as Dad has had women since he’s left. Jamie thinks to challenge me into action. But I say, shame on me. For sure that means I’m to be pitied, worthless, etc. What a piss-up. And where shall I find these men? Go out, they say, trample over the other women, stick my foot out and trip up a man. Buy a push-up bra. And I tell them forget it. It’s too easy.

  But it’s been wonderful to have Jamie home. He’s a real sweetheart to have around, although if he says “life begins at forty” one more time I will break his arm. He is calm and quiet and loving and caring and all that. And willing to listen. He fixes things, makes them work again. Does his own laundry. He lends Dee his records and they argue about what is good and bad music. He took her to the David Bowie concert and consequently I’m not hearing quite as much about Def Leppard, but too much of Bowie. Jamie has begun to draw once again. I think, like us, he will live.

  Say hello to Garnet.

  Cheers, Mom.

  ps/ I have a job interview tomorrow. Don’t hold your breath.

  pps/ Dad just dropped by. He sends along his hello.

  KEEPSAKES

  t’s like the old Eaton’s mail-order. You don’t always get what you expect, kid.” Mika hears one of her daughters speak in a dry, jesting tone. They’re playing Scrabble in the living room, but as usual, doing more talking than anything else. Who said it? Betty? No, Betty doesn’t joke as easily as the younger ones do. Amazing, she really can’t tell who said it. Where once their voices and features were as varied as her teenaged granddaughters’ (who have painted their eyelids purple, put on tight jeans and gone walking downtown. It nags at Mika that their mothers appear oblivious to the way the girls flaunt themselves), now there is a certain sameness, a flat safe look
in her daughters’ faces. She’s noticed as well their readiness to agree, to paraphrase one another’s ideas. When they’d gathered noisily around the breakfast table, she’d studied them, wanting to connect them with the things in the keepsake chest upstairs. Why did I bother to save all those things, she wonders, if in the end, they don’t tell me anything?

  The china cups rattle sharply as she sets them in place on the table. As if by magic, the dining room draperies slide open. Beyond, the bare branches of her pin cherry bush bend against the wind. The men, she thinks, will they be safe up there in this wind? The draperies slide shut just as suddenly. She discovers the culprit and leads him over to the living room door where he might catch sight of his mother. They have all come home for the weekend. She borrowed a rollaway cot and bunked the younger ones on the floor in the TV room. She’d heard them several times, up and prowling like cats about the house, into the refrigerator and the cupboards. She worried. What junk had they been watching on the late movie? Then, the child’s croupy cough had kept her awake most of the night. She had listened for his parents to get up and go to him and when they didn’t, she knew she would only lie there stiff and fearful over his ragged breathing and so she got up. While they’d slept all about her in the house, below in the TV room, she had dragged the chest from the closet and fulfilled the promise she’d made to herself, to get rid of things for once, to stop saving and divide what she had among them.

  Laughter rises in the living room. “Remember,” someone says, “how Dad would make us stand on a piece of brown paper and then trace our foot so he could order our shoes from Eaton’s mail-order? I used to wonder what they must have thought when they got ten cut-outs of feet in the mail.”

  “You’re kidding,” the new daughter-in-law says. “What a great idea.”

  More laughter. Their exaggeration rankles. There were never ten at once, she thinks. Some of you had already left home, flown the coop, as your dad used to say all the time. The three girls.