“I like your mother,” said Sabrina. “I wish she was my mother.” Her speech was slurred and the pitch of her sentences wavered.
“Oh Christ,” I said, “you don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t even know my mother.”
But Sabrina showed a drunk’s persistence in getting a point across. “I know your mother. She’s a good person. You know what she said to me one day?”
“How the hell would I know what she said to you one day?”
“I was walking down the street and she stopped me. She said, ‘You’re Sabrina Koenig, aren’t you?’ And I said I was. And she said, ‘I remember you when you were just a little thing, pulling yourself along on crutches with a brace on your leg, and look at you now, how well you walk, how well you’re doing. You just keep going, girl. Don’t you ever let anything or anyone hold you back.’ ”
I saw that she was crying, and I took this to mean I was heartless, didn’t appreciate my own mother. “Okay, I’m a horrible person. My mother is so much nicer, so much kinder than I am. But you don’t have to live with her or live with the consequences when she goes around pissing people off.”
“I don’t think you’re a horrible person,” Sabrina said. “You think I would have come over here and helped you out if I didn’t think you were a good person? Just like your mother?”
More blackmail. What I wanted to say was, So, okay, have my mother march into that fucking gym with you. Arm in arm. Just let me off the hook, why don’t you? Instead, I said, “You know what? I think you better lay off the booze. It’s making you stupid.”
She gave the coffee table on which the bottle sat a petulant shove, skidding it out of reach. “Okay, deal. No more booze. But you’ve got to tell me why you won’t take me to graduation.”
“You’re drunk. Nobody can talk to a drunk. Let’s leave this for some other time.”
“No, I need to know right now. What’s it going to take?”
“What’s what going to take?”
“For you to agree to be my escort. What do you want in exchange? Because I need an escort. Everything will be worthless unless I have an escort.”
“Graduation’s a long way off. Just lay off. I said I’d think about it.”
“What’s it going to take, Billy?”
“This is getting old,” I said. “It’s getting ancient.”
Sabrina heaved herself off the sofa and tottered out of the living room as fast as her bum leg could carry her. I was expecting to hear the back door slam, but it didn’t. I assumed then that the rye had caught up with her and that she had headed for the bathroom to chuck her cookies. But I heard no retching, no gagging, nothing.
I sat listening for a long time but the house remained strangely, unnervingly quiet. Maybe she had passed out in the can. I went to investigate. She wasn’t in the bathroom. That left the bedrooms as possible crash sites; she might have flaked out in one of them. I headed for my parents’ bedroom, worried that she might puke on their mattress, that would take some fancy explaining. No Sabrina.
I turned down the hallway to my bedroom. It was completely dark. I hesitated in the doorway. “Sabrina, are you in there?”
“Yes.” Her voice was faint and shaky.
“Look, you aren’t going to be sick, are you? You haven’t barfed in my bed, have you? Don’t barf in my bed, okay?”
“No.”
“I’m going to turn on the light. Just to make sure you’re okay.”
“No, don’t! Don’t turn on the light!” she cried, but by then it was too late.
I caught a glimpse of small, white, pink-nippled breasts, a cirrus cloud of pubic hair. A hand flew to cup her privates, an arm flung itself across her breasts, crushing, flattening them. The only mildly sexual territory left exposed was her thighs, which were equally plump, but the calf below one of them was shrunken and wasted, a streak of scar from an operation ran from her knee to her ankle.
The light snapping on seemed to have locked us in place, me hanging in the doorway, Sabrina lying frozen on the bed, her eyes squeezed tightly shut. “Okay, here’s the deal,” she said in a lifeless voice. “You can do anything you want. Just don’t stick it in me.”
Those words unglued my feet from the floor. I backed away slowly, then fled to the living room. I sat there, trying to drive the images of those breasts, that wispy, vulnerable V of hair at the juncture of her thighs out of my brain. Once, she called out, “Billy?” but I didn’t move, didn’t answer her.
A few minutes later I heard Sabrina moving down the hallway, the back door opening and closing.
Sabrina never came back to my house. But at the end of August my mother did. She was just beginning to swim up out of the depths of a profound depression; hour after hour she sat and smoked, toying with and twisting a book of matches. The night before school started, the phone rang some time around midnight. Mother was in bed so I picked up. It was Sabrina. In a quick, urgent burst she said, “You’ve got to promise me one thing. That you won’t say anything to anybody at school about what happened. You do that, I’ll murder you. Or kill myself. I’m not kidding, Dowd. I mean it.”
“I won’t.”
“Swear it, Billy.”
Mother wailed, “Who is it? Who’s on the phone? Is it your father?”
“No, it isn’t! Forget it! It’s a friend of mine! Go back to sleep!”
I lowered my voice. “I swear it. Okay? Now are you satisfied?”
“I thought maybe that was the thing you wanted. I thought it might make a difference to you, how you treated me. My mistake.” The line went dead.
School got underway. The first time I met Sabrina Koenig in the hallway, I acknowledged her with a nervous bob of the head, but it was as if I didn’t exist, she sailed by me without a glance. Several times over the next few months I considered phoning her, but I always found an excuse not to. Also, I was preoccupied with my mother. The series of shock treatments she had had in hospital had wiped out everything that had occurred over the past year, and I spent hours coaching her, rebuilding her memory. My father was still away, working on the bridge-building crew; I was responsible for Mother.
Months went by and then it felt as if it was too late to call Sabrina or to try to make another approach to her at school. She was a proud girl and I was a scared boy. Like so often happens, our friendship died a slow death because nobody intervened in time to heal it.
May rolled around and with it graduation. Sabrina wasn’t the class valedictorian. Maybe she had misjudged her chances in the first place, or maybe she was offered it and turned the honour down. By July she was gone from Groveland. Where she went I never heard.
It wasn’t until last year, forty years after Sabrina’s departure into the wild blue yonder, that that blank got filled in. I was on a business trip to Toronto, lying on my hotel room bed turning over the pages of The Globe and Mail. Normally, I never read anything but the financial and political news, but this time something on the front page of the Arts section caught my eye. My Sabrina, the celebrated Sabrina Koenig, was having a show at a gallery that, I gathered from the reporter’s knowing tone, was favoured by collectors, was very high-end. The opening was that night.
Apparently this was big news, apparently Sabrina was the real thing. The article began with a sketch of her career. Two years as a drama major at the University of Saskatchewan, then a transfer to the Ontario College of Art. After that she moved to England, where she fell in with the Art & Language group and began to make a name for herself as a conceptual artist. But as the clipping from the Globe that I still carry in my wallet puts it, “Koenig’s gifts and interests were too varied, too protean to confine themselves to any one theory, practice, or mode of art production.” She designed soundscapes that were played in abandoned grain terminals, “aural universes by turns haunting, whimsical, mordant, terrifying; gorgeous constellations of sound ranging from the lush to the stark.” Her performance pieces were said to “bear comparison with those of Marina Abramovic.” When
the Berlin Wall collapsed, Sabrina moved to the former East Germany, where she became the de facto leader of a group of guerrilla artists who occupied a defunct factory, turning it into an atelier of 16-millimetre film production. The group made a specialty of short films that were outrageous, slapstick parodies of the fashion and art worlds. They presented bizarre fashion shows in which they paraded their hand-sewn costumes before the camera to the accompaniment of breathless commentary, staged elaborate fake art openings where the work of various “art stars” was caricatured. Before long this pack of pranksters became known as Koenig & Company. An Abbott and Costello influence, maybe?
How all this acclaim and notoriety had escaped my notice only highlights the possibility that just like when Sabrina and I had isolated ourselves in a world of our own making, I had withdrawn into my own closet, a cubbyhole so thoroughly wallpapered from ceiling to floor with financial statements and prospectuses, divorce papers and settlements that not even a crack or a pinhole admitted light from the outside world.
It seemed the only thing that the girl who had once liked to draw had not done was paint pictures.
The photograph of Sabrina in the paper filled me with restlessness. I got off the bed and went to the window, peered down at the rush hour traffic streaming down York Street, the clamour of horns and motors gusting up to me. I thought of her photograph in the newspaper, a photograph of a woman whose face was remarkably smooth and serenely confident, her cat-eye glasses and lacquer-black beehive hairdo ironically situating her in a past more distant than the days of our adolescence, suggesting that she had escaped the limits of both time and geography. She struck me as alien and ageless.
I wanted to see her again. But that wasn’t going to happen. Her picture indicated the distance that had opened up between us, a distance that could never, probably should never be attempted to be bridged. If I went to the opening at the gallery I knew that I would most likely never get a chance to speak to her and if I did, what would I be except another insignificant voice in the chorus? I had had Sabrina to myself for a summer and I preferred the recollection of that to discovering what a tiny memory I was for her. Sabrina had been right all those years ago. To be a success in business, you need a selfish streak. I admit it, I’m a selfish man. I decided I’d rather miss a chance to see her than have my time with Sabrina rationed, than to have to share her.
But I give people their due. I am happy, glad to know that Sabrina took my poor mother’s advice, that she never let anything or anybody hold her back, that she is a going concern, a thriving concern, and that Koenig & Company is out there in the big bad world, flaunting the family name, sticking it squarely in everybody’s eye, mine included.
1957 Chevy Bel Air
IN SEPTEMBER 1968, Reinie Ottenbreit returned to high school for his senior year. A teenager with frank blue eyes, a scallop of toffee-coloured hair artfully arranged on his forehead, and a pair of downy sideburns bracketing a ruddy, docile face, he passed down corridors waxed and buffed to so high a gloss that they swam with a flickering, watery light. As the fluorescent tubes hummed industriously overhead, rude boys who had been amusing themselves at his expense for as long as he could remember called out, “How’s it hanging, Ottenbreit?” or “How’s tricks?” Reinie’s sheepish response was always the same. “Can’t complain.” This was an answer patterned on his father’s style. Karl Ottenbreit had raised his two sons to take life in stride but not to tempt fate.
The truth was, Reinie felt pretty much on top of the world. In ten months he would be done forever with school. His feet were set on the straightest of paths. Soon he would be farming with his father. Reinie’s older brother, Edgar, was in his third year of commerce up at the university in Saskatoon – he had turned his back on a career in agriculture – so Reinie had no rival for the role as his dad’s right-hand man.
But what pleased him most in that year of unalloyed promise was that he finally had himself a car, and not just any car but a beautifully preserved 1957 Chevy Bel Air. Ever since he had turned twelve, Reinie had worked for his father, serious, adult jobs involving the operation of tractors and combines worth a small fortune. For this, his father paid him a small wage because Karl Ottenbreit believed children ought to learn responsibility and the value of a dollar. Year after year, Reinie’s nest egg had grown and, along with it, his manly satisfaction whenever he opened his bank book.
Still, obstacles had to be overcome before his parents relented and gave him permission to buy the car. Reinie’s mother, Mabel, had been the most strenuous in her opposition. Endless family discussions circled about Reinie’s headstrong desire to own an automobile, but in the end he carried the day – with a caveat attached. The Chevy was not to be driven to school. Mabel pointed out what folly it would be to waste money on gas, tires, and oil when the Ottenbreits already paid taxes for the school bus that stopped at their gate every morning for the express purpose of transporting Reinie to Waddell High. Her son yielded to the logic of this argument, even though he dimly suspected his mother had other reasons for her objections.
What really worried Mabel Ottenbreit was that indulging Reinie might give rise to talk he was spoiled, even show-offy. A pillar of the Augustana Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, she knew that a teenaged Martin Luther would never have been caught dead driving pointlessly here and there all over the countryside just to pass the time, as so many young people did, singing along to the horrible sort of songs you got on the car radio nowadays. Yet after much troubled reflection and soul-searching, she reluctantly waived her opposition, reminding herself that Reinie had always been a good boy. Nevertheless, second thoughts still clung to her. That is why she insisted Reinie take the bus. To keep at bay temptation, the toils, the allurements of sloth and soft living.
Three days of school had passed. Reinie was marking them off on a calendar with the singlemindedness of a jailbird counting down his sentence. That morning he sat at the back of the pumpkin-coloured school bus, as always, alone. Usually he passed the hour-long ride to and from school plowing through reading assignments in useless, bewildering subjects such as English and social studies. But so early in the year teachers were holding off assigning homework. Still, Reinie’s parents had always drummed into him that an hour wasted was an hour forever lost, so with rapt concentration he was studying a Department of Agriculture bulletin. The Ottenbreits prided themselves on being progressive, up-to-date farmers. Karl Ottenbreit often observed to Reinie that the times were changing. There was nothing Bob Dylanesque in this remark, the nonsense disrupting the rest of the world only impinged on Karl when certain offensive programs appeared on the television, and when they did, he promptly switched the set off. It was the business of farming he alluded to. “I figure you got to be flexible. No sitting back on your heels waiting on the pitch. Better to take a swing and miss than just let the ball blow by.” To this, Reinie would nod sagely, seconding the motion.
The bus stuttered to a halt, bucking Reinie’s eyes up from the pamphlet and his happy absorption in modern tillage practices. He squinted out at a lovely fall day. Harvest had been early that year; most crops were safely stowed away in granaries. Wheat stubble bristled on nearby fields, a blond brush cut sweeping over a knobby cranium. A deep, unfathomable blue sky was wiped with a few smears of high, thin cirrus cloud.
The bus doors flapped open, turning Reinie’s gaze to a girl making her way up the aisle, a girl he had never seen before. Barely five feet tall, she wore the briefest of black corduroy mini-dresses, black tights, a pink sweater. The last bit of wave had been ironed out of long chestnut hair that fell from a precise part to frame a heart-shaped face.
When he realized the strange girl was going to park herself beside him, panic bobbed in Reinie’s throat. Without a word, she plopped down next to him. The impact of her bottom on the seat jolted a gust of perfume from her body. It swirled up Reinie’s nostrils, jerking his head back to the window. While the bus rumbled away, gathering speed, he desperately counted cows. Then
he counted grain bins.
She had to come from a rural one-room elementary school. Each year such schools passed on a handful of students to Waddell High. Fresh faces that brought an element of the unknown, of new possibilities to a student body so sunk in tedium that it felt eternal. Reinie stole a furtive glance at her. Seen up close, she was even more exotic than viewed at a distance. There was an odd feline cast to her eyes, a provoking lift to their corners. She wore an awful lot of green eyeshadow and pale, frosted lipstick. A solemn consideration arose in Reinie’s mind. His mother wouldn’t approve of this much face paint on a grown woman, let alone on a girl who couldn’t be more than fourteen.
She was pointedly ignoring him, looking directly ahead, her face ingeniously managing to register both profound boredom and profound disgruntlement. Turning over the sticky tumblers of his mind, a burglar coaxing a combination from a safe, Reinie struggled to marshal words, string them together in arresting phrases, even interesting sentences. He was labouring to be smooth. The problem was he hadn’t had much practice at it. Reinie Ottenbreit had always had better things to do than chat up girls.
“I haven’t seen you before,” he said at last.
The girl swung her head towards him, eyes slits of contempt, triangular chin tilted imperiously. He saw that the colour of her irises exactly matched the eyeshadow. Both were a dark, haunted green.
Blindly, he attempted to grope through the fog of her withering silence. “I mean, today is Thursday. School started Monday. I would’ve thought I’d have seen you before now. Riding the bus, I mean.” His voice ebbed away.
The pale, frosted lips wrinkled, baring tiny, hostile teeth. “I don’t want to go to your puking school. They made me.” Her eyes slid off his face. Reinie was left to ponder who they were. Her parents? The school board?
Daddy Lenin and Other Stories Page 7