The dark, his easy chair, the house asleep.
So what was missing?
~
The Chatham Jaycee Fair was a big deal. The anxiety its annual arrival engendered and the palpable relief provided by its eventual departure were hardly offset by the clanky, vomity rides and foregone games of chance and the overpriced, overly greasy food. But the Chatham Jaycee Fair was a big deal, no one over the age of twelve could deny it.
By the time you were a teenager you were supposed to ask a girl to go with you. When I was a kid I went with my parents and sister. For awhile it was just Julie and me, big-sister sentenced to look after her little brother and hoping she didn’t run into too many of her friends. In the last couple of years Dale and I had gone on our own, but although we were best friends, we weren’t ideal carnival companions. Just watching a rollercoaster rise and fall made me nauseous, so I’d wait by the ticket booth while Dale had fun scaring himself, just like he’d have to put up with me trying to toss a ring over a peg or knock the bowling pins over with a ball. You rarely won, and when you did, the prizes were mostly cheap plastic crap, but it was important to spend all the money you’d diligently saved for the fair somehow. You could only eat so many onion rings and corn dogs and candy apples before your stomach felt like you’d ridden the Zipper or the Salt-and-Pepper Shaker without ever having left the ground.
Besides, we were thirteen years old now, and going with your best friend to the fair was suspect, like sitting next to a guy friend at the movies instead of leaving an empty seat between you. I couldn’t wait to turn thirteen, but being expected to ask a girl to the Chatham Jaycee Fair wasn’t one of the teenaged things I’d been looking forward to. Not because I wouldn’t have wanted to show up on Saturday night with Lisa Evans or Jennifer Peterson or even her younger, less attractive sister Nancy, bumping into people I knew and acting cool about it, like, Hey, man, what’s going on? Lisa or Jennifer or Nancy and me are just checking out the fair, what’s going on with you? But for a girl to agree to go with you to the fair, you had to ask her. Which meant having to actually talk to her. Which was the problem.
Which was stupid, I knew, I wasn’t stupid. I talked to my mom (or at least I used to). I talked to my sister every day. I talked to teachers, women to whom I delivered the newspaper, cashiers, crossing guards, and even old ladies I passed on the sidewalk with a hello because it seemed like no one had said anything to them but Get out of the way for the last forty years. But you didn’t feel the sweat run down your back and into your butt crack when you said good morning to Mrs. Ginsberg, the elderly school secretary at school or tempt humiliation if your sister said no when you asked to borrow her copy of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was easy for Dale to tell me to just ask someone, anyone, so we could still go together, only this time with dates—he’d already been asked, by Sarah Smith, the daughter of one of his dad’s law partners. It wasn’t just the professional connection—Dale had feathered blond hair that parted naturally in the middle and blue eyes that all the girls said made him look like Leif Garrett, a comparison he pretended to dislike but I could tell didn’t—but it still didn’t seem right. Just because my hair was straight and stringy and wouldn’t do what I told it to and my eyes were matching boring brown and I didn’t look like anyone but myself, that shouldn’t have meant he didn’t have to do what I was so afraid of doing; not if we were really best friends. Don’t be a chicken, just go up to somebody and ask them, he counselled. It was like when I was five and still occasionally wet the bed: it was usually people who had never done something who were the ones most eager to advise you how to do it.
It was Saturday and I was at Coles Bookstore, which was two doors down from Murray’s Smoke Shop and right next to the big brick Bank of Nova Scotia building on the corner. My dad had set up a savings account for me when I began my newspaper route (getting me started with a twenty-five dollar deposit), and every month during the hockey season there was the Scotia Bank Hockey College News, which was glossy and free and always contained a two-page fold-out poster. I’d made my deposit and picked up two copies of this month’s edition—one for reading and keeping, one for plucking out the staples to remove the poster of Steve Vickers so I could hang it on my bedroom wall. I wasn’t a New York Rangers fan, and an article in last year’s Hockey Digest listed Vickers as one of the NHL’s ten most overrated players, but the poster was colour and eight-by-ten inches and nicer to look at than white paint. The bank was one of the buildings slated to be demolished for the mall. Mr. Brown said it had been the home of The Chatham Daily News’ predecessor, The Chatham Planet. When the time came for it to come down, I hoped I wouldn’t have to go too far to get my copy of the Scotia Bank Hockey College News.
“What’s going on, Tom?”
I looked up from the selection of notebooks I’d been considering to find Angie standing beside me. What’s going on, Tom? was her customary greeting. I didn’t know if the way she always made sure to rhyme my name with on was supposed to sound nice or nasty. Maybe that was the point.
“Reading outside the curriculum, I see,” she said. “I’m impressed.”
“I’m just looking for a book,” I said. No one but Mrs. Wakowski knew about my Journal of Consumption, and I hadn’t intended for her to know, it just happened.
“Well, it’s a bookstore, so it looks like you’re in the right place.”
I’d never seen her without my sister, so it felt strange, like running into a teacher at the grocery store. Although it was every day milder and drier and generally nicer, most people weren’t ready to commit to summer yet, still wore light jackets and boots and carried around umbrellas. Angie wore black high-top running shoes and black tights underneath blue-jean cut-offs and a white T-shirt with THE VILETONES stencilled across it. What she wasn’t wearing was a bra.
“They’re a Toronto band,” she said, mercifully misinterpreting my lingering eyes.
“Are they punk?” I said. Their name sounded punk.
She rolled her eyes. “Punk is dead. As dead as mohawks and safety pins. The Viletones play rock and roll. Real rock and roll. Loud, fast, and hard.”
Punk was dead? I’d only recently discovered what it was—primarily through the records that Angie loaned Julie—and now it was over? What’s the new punk? I wondered. I’d have to remember to try to find out.
“Don’t sweat it,” she said. “You wouldn’t have heard of them.”
“I might have. I think I might have actually heard one of their songs on the radio.”
Angie laughed. Not exactly like she was making fun of me, but as if she were amused by what I’d said. “Believe me, you did not hear one of the Viletones’ songs on the radio. Not on any of the shit stations you get around here, anyway. Gawd… ” She noticed the coiled notebook in my hand.
“What’s with the notepad? Are you a narc in training or something?”
“No,” I said, putting it back. Even if I’d known what a narc was, I couldn’t have been more emphatic that I wasn’t. “I told you, I’m looking for a book.”
“Really,” she said, folding her arms across her chest. “Which one?”
I almost said Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf—Angie was always loaning Julie novels, and it was the only one I’d ever read, earlier that year in English class—but I remembered a writer’s name that she and Julie repeated a lot, so assumed it must have been a favourite. I only hoped I’d pronounce it right.
“Eric Jong,” I said, pretending to peer over Angie’s shoulder in search of the J section. “I’m really not sure if that’s how you say his last name. It’s kind of a funny name, to tell you the truth, and I’ve only read it on his books, you know?”
Angie nodded a couple of times; looked at her running shoes; wiggled her toes and looked at them. Finally raising her eyes, “Yeah, he’s pretty good,” she said. “But you know who else is good?”
“Who?”
“I don’t want a sports book, I want a novel. I like novels.”
“It is a novel. It’s about a guy around your age. I think you might like it.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you think they’ve got a copy here?” I said. “It is Chatham, you know.”
“Maybe we’ll get lucky,” she said. “There’s only one way to find out, right?”
We didn’t get lucky. Staring at the row of S’s, where Salinger was supposed to be, “This is ridiculous,” Angie said. “Every bookstore carries Catcher in the Rye.” Every bookstore but this one, apparently.
“The manager might know,” I said. “Maybe we should ask her.”
“There’s no point. She’ll just tell us they don’t have it.” Angie stuck her thumbs in the pockets of her cut-offs. I did the same in the pockets of my cords. She drifted to the end of the fiction section.
“No way,” she said, pulling a book down from the shelf. I joined her in front of the small poetry section.
She showed me the cover of the paperback in her hand. “Spoon River Anthology,” she said. “We read it last year in English class. Some of it, anyway.”
Strikes one and two, I thought. First, it’s poetry. Second, it’s a school book.
“It’s not like regular poetry,” she said. “I mean, it is, but it’s not hard to read. It’s pretty cool, actually. It’s by this guy, Edgar Lee Masters, and it’s about all of these people who lived in this same small town, who talk about what their lives were really like—their secrets and stuff—when they were alive.”
“You mean they’re, like, zombies?” I said. Now she had my interest.
“No, they’re not like zombies, doofus. It’s like…” She handed me the book. “Just read it.”
It was poetry and a school book and it cost $2.25.
“Go on,’ Angie said. “Have a little faith. Take a chance. Live a little.”
I brought the book to the woman at the cash register and took out my wallet.
Water Finds its Level: Bookstore Manager and Failed Poet Discovers Something not Unlike Happiness
“Did You Ever Look at an Old Photograph and Have a Hard Time Recognizing Yourself?”
SHE READ THE right biographies and could recite from memory the best poems and didn’t make the sensible mistakes everyone advised her to make. She didn’t go to teacher’s college after completing her English degree—she was going to be a writer, not an over-qualified babysitter, and didn’t want to be distracted by responsibilities and respect. Once she received her master’s degree, she didn’t enter the PhD program because a lifetime of playing pin the tail on the literary reference wasn’t why she was put here; she was a writer—of poems, mostly, but her ambitions certainly didn’t stop there—and faithful to her vocation. The world was a swindling flirt who lied. All it had to offer was what it was, and that wasn’t enough. She wanted something else, something more. What exactly “it” was, she wasn’t sure, only knew that it wasn’t anything she’d seen or heard or felt so far.
She moved to Toronto and did what young poets who move to the city do: met other poets and had love affairs (not all of them with other poets) and wrote poems and collected rejection letters and lived in a series of damp, under-heated basement apartments and served people food for minimum wage and tips like most of the young writers and actors and musicians who come to the city and it was alright because the best thing about being young is not having to arrive, not yet. Being young is Becoming. And if you’re not becoming what you want to be quickly enough or not even at all, it’s okay, that’s alright, you’re young, there’s plenty of time.
Until you aren’t anymore and come home to your shitty apartment and still have to hear We regret to inform you from the Tamarack Review. She was sad of course when she found out that her mother was going to die, but it was almost a relief that she had to move back home to take care of her. Returning to Chatham wasn’t what she wanted, but it was at least better than not getting what she did.
The cancer was bad but quick and she was a good daughter but slow to leave town when the ashes were in the ground and all of the seemingly endless paperwork had been completed. An only child, she inherited the house and seven thousand dollars and enjoyed living above ground and having a bathroom window to open and not having to ask anyone if they’d care for more water or if they were ready to start thinking about dessert. When the money ran out, she got a job at Coles bookstore and told herself that it was a kind of adventure in normalcy that would broaden and enrich her work and that this wasn’t her life, was only a weigh station on the road to where she wanted to be. Was going to be. Someday.
She kept in touch with a few of her Toronto friends until there were fewer and fewer reasons to bother and kept writing poems and waiting four-to-six months to usually hear No Thanks. Being around books all day, even if only as a seller and not as an author, was a pleasant change. It wasn’t long before she was made manager and oversaw a staff of four and discovered that she was good at what she did. It felt good to be good at what you did. When she was thirty-five she met and married Jerry, a dentist who’d also attended the University of Western Ontario, and he encouraged her to join the Chatham-Kent Literary Society where her time in Toronto and her handful of published poems immediately made her the indisputable star of the group.
She discovered she was pregnant. She was nearly forty years old, but was in excellent physical condition and had a wonderful family doctor. She gave birth to a healthy, seven pound, six ounce baby girl. She didn’t write a poem about it.
~
It was voluntary, but you had to do it. I had to do it. I think I had to do it.
Mr. Brown said he wanted to make it absolutely clear to the class that this was not an official school field trip—no permission slips would be distributed or collected, no attendance would be taken—and that no one should feel pressured to be there, it was entirely up to each individual whether or not he or she would join him at the next city council meeting to debate the proposed demolition of Harrison Hall. The Save Harrison Hall Group’s successful courting of the Ontario Heritage Foundation had made city hall and the prospective mall builders nervous enough that ominous warnings about Chatham’s long-term economic health were everywhere. Pro-business editorials in The Chatham Daily News and affable interviews with pro-mall politicians and businessmen on CFCO became commonplace enough that Mr. Brown and his conserving colleagues felt that simply showing up at the latest meeting and presenting the same arguments wouldn’t be compelling enough, that they needed something more dynamic. This was where we, his grade seven history students, came in.
“It’s one thing for us to talk about how we’re trying to protect some of Chatham’s history for future generations,” he said. “It’s another thing entirely if the community can actually see what we’re talking about. You’re Chatham’s future, people. And by standing there in solidarity with us in council chambers two weeks from now you’ll make that fact as clear as the noses on the faces of everyone present.” He was sitting at the front of the classroom on a chair turned backwards, his chin perched on his forearms, as if to illustrate that this was all off the record and wasn’t something between teacher and students, but between concerned citizens. Then he told us the part about how we weren’t obligated to go, how democracy worked best when people acted on their personal beliefs and not according to what they thought so-and-so would think of them, and the bell rang for lunch.
I packed my binder and books into my Adidas bag, careful not to squish my wax-papered tuna sandwich. To save time, I’d already recorded it (plus an apple, four chocolate-chip cookies, and a can of apple juice my dad wrapped in tin foil to keep cool). Every day now, by usually no later than a quarter after twelve, there was a baseball game underway until lunch period ended. Yesterday’s gam
e had been suspended just as I was due up at bat.
“What are you going to do?” Allison Hamilton said, stopping at my desk.
Allison had a dark, dime-size mole on her chin and wasn’t very pretty, but she was captain of the girls’ basketball team and the 1500- and 800-metre track-and-field champion and had long, lean legs and tight muscular calves that went up and down when she ran. Running or jumping weren’t like scoring goals or hitting home runs—there weren’t any heroes in track and field like there were in hockey or baseball. There was Greg Joy, the Canadian high-jumper who won a silver medal at the 1976 Montreal summer Olympics, but he was only famous for a little while, and then only because, winter sports aside, a Canadian winning a silver medal was roughly the equivalent of an athlete from any other country earning gold. If track and field was your favourite sport, it wasn’t because you were inspired by what you saw on television or because you wanted to be rich and famous. I liked it that Allison was dedicated to something that you only did because you liked to do it.
I also liked her because she’d saved me from having to ask a girl to the fair by asking me during gym class if I was still going now that Dale was going with Sarah, her best friend. I said I didn’t know, and she said that was stupid, that we shouldn’t miss out just because those two thought they were Lee Majors and Farrah Fawcett, and suggested that we should go together, as friends. I knew she was telling the truth about the going only as friends part when, later on during our dodge ball game, she nailed me in the face with the rubber ball. She caught me rubbing my reddened left cheek as we were filing out after class and said she was sorry, though I noticed she was half-smiling as she said it.
“I don’t know,” I said. “What about you?”
Allison’s dad ran Hamilton Plumbing and Electric, which was just down the street from my dad’s shop, so she knew what I was up against, that our fathers wouldn’t be pleased to discover that their offspring had chosen to be cheerleaders for the very people the local merchants were warring with. But she liked Mr. Brown too—he was the cross-country coach as well as the girls’ basketball coach, the one who’d named her captain—and didn’t want to let him down. Plus, what he said about preserving Chatham’s past made sense. Just as long as you didn’t think about what everyone else said about Chatham’s future.
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