The Cursed Canoe

by Frankie Bow

  “So Pat, you’ve been doing okay financially, yah?” Emma asked.

  “Yeah, I guess I have.”

  “So why didn’t you come to the race with me and Molly on Labor Day Weekend? Molly thought it was cause you couldn’t afford to pay for a room!”

  “Oh no. I could afford to go. If I wanted.”

  “You could?” I turned my attention from the car's interior back to Emma and Pat. “So why didn’t you? It would’ve been fun to have you there.”

  “Yeah, we shoulda had someone there to keep Molly out of trouble! What’s the deal?”

  “It was going to be a whole weekend with you and Yoshi, and Molly and Donnie. I wasn’t up to sitting through the extended director’s cut of the Patriarchal Heteronormativity Show.”

  “Oh, Pat,” I sighed, “Heteronormativity? Is there any more ungainly, cobbled-together non-word than Heteronormativity?”

  “Do you have a better one? Besides, I happen to know you used ‘heteronormativity’ in your dissertation.”

  The ensuing debate took longer than expected, and by the time I had noticed what time it was, I was already late for my lunch date with Donnie.

  I had skipped eating at noon so I could enjoy my late lunch, and I had to pace myself. If Donnie hadn’t been sitting right across from me, my gnocchi in gorgonzola sauce would have been a delicious memory by now. Donnie was there, however, and I was struggling to maintain the ladylike image that I had been cultivating for his benefit. Impulse control, I reminded myself (as I often find myself reminding my students) is the foundation of a functional society. The effort of restraining myself made it impossible to keep up my end of the conversation, so I dined in dainty silence.

  "Heard from Davison today," Donnie said.

  “So his semester is starting off well?”

  “Not especially.”

  Having grown up among people who were frank, if not operatic, about their complaints, it’s taken me a while to get used to Donnie's communication style. But I’ve learned. When he tells me everything's fine, I can be sure it isn't. And if he says things aren't going especially well, that means disaster.

  “Not especially?" I asked. "Is something wrong?”

  “He told me he has one semester to bring his grades up. If he doesn't, he could lose his eligibility.”

  “Lose his eligibility? That sounds serious.”

  “Davison can’t stay on without his athletic scholarship. I couldn’t afford it.”

  “So what are you going to do? You don’t want him coming back here! I mean, he’s got such a great opportunity where he is!”

  “I told him to add a couple P.E. classes and drop econ. Do you think that was the right thing to tell him?”

  “He should also think about retaking any classes he’s failed, if his school has a policy where the new grade overwrites the old one. That’s the quickest way to raise your GPA.”

  “Good point. You should tell him the next time you talk to him. So what’s new with you?”

  “Me? Well, I just—I mean, I don't know, let's see."

  I searched for something to talk about, that didn’t have to do with Pat. It was a shame. Pat’s new car could run on leftover cooking oil from restaurants, and I know Donnie pays to dispose of his used oil. But I knew better than to suggest the two of them cooperate in any way. I’d found it was best to keep them apart as much as possible.

  The last time Pat and Donnie had spent any time together was at the Pair-O-Dice Bar and Grill. Donnie and I had met up with Pat and Emma for sunset happy hour. Donnie had started to tell us about his recent trip to a restaurant supply trade show in Cremona.

  “I always enjoy Italy,” he had declared. “The food is wonderful” —here he put his hand on mine—“the people are beautiful—”

  At which point Pat had interjected,

  “Hey Donnie, wouldn’t it be funny if Molly actually turned out to be from some Balkan hellhole? OW!”

  Emma and I had kicked Pat under the table at the same time. And Emma didn’t hold back.

  Afterward, Donnie had remarked that Pat didn’t seem to approve of him. Was Pat jealous, Donnie wanted to know?

  “Pat has kind of a caustic sense of humor,” I had explained. “He’s like that with everyone.”

  Which was true. Pat hadn’t liked Stephen either, when I’d dated him.

  In any event, I certainly wasn’t about to prattle on about Pat’s new car. What else was there to talk about? I couldn’t say anything about Sherry. Or, worse, Sherry and Davison. And I was pretty sure Donnie wasn’t interested in getting into an argument about the word heteronormativity.

  “Wasn’t this weekend lovely?” I took a piece of bread and dabbed the last of the cream sauce from my plate, hoping he wouldn’t bring up that unfortunate episode with Davison.

  “I’m glad you enjoyed it. It seems like I hardly saw you except for the drive back. And you were asleep for most of it.”

  Donnie didn’t like being left alone. I shouldn’t have been surprised by that, but I was.

  “Driving makes me sleepy,” I explained. “And your music selection was so nice and soothing I must have drifted off. I have to listen to something upbeat if I’m going to stay awake in a moving car.”

  Donnie likes the same kind of music Emma does. Smooth vocal harmonies poured over a bed of languid slack-key guitar. He may as well have had sleeping gas seeping out of his car speakers.

  “Anyway, you know how Emma is. She insisted on having me around for moral support. I thought our sunset dinner was, um, what a wonderful view of the sunset.”

  “Actually, Molly, there was something I wanted to ask you.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  “DO YOU REMEMBER THE computer program Davison was talking about at dinner?” Donnie asked. “The one that recognizes faces?”

  “Maybe,” I answered, cautiously.

  “Davison showed it to me after we got back from watching the manta rays. It was quite interesting, to say the least. Technology is amazing, isn’t it?”

  I set my fork down. The gnocchi sat on my plate as plump and chewy as ever. But I had lost my appetite.

  “I didn’t think you’d brought a computer with you,” I said. Donnie still uses a flip phone. He’s not exactly someone who buys himself all the latest gadgets.

  “Davison had his tablet with him.”

  “I see.” I tried to appear calm. “Davison showed you the website?”

  “He did,” Donnie said.

  “Has Davison thought of majoring in information technology? He’d probably enjoy working with computers. Maybe you should suggest it to him. It’s a very practical major.”

  I hoped it wasn’t obvious I was trying to change the subject. Or maybe I should have tried being more obvious. Either way, no success.

  “Who is ‘Alterity Jameson?’ ” Donnie asked.

  “Who?” I heard myself squeak.

  “Tell me about it.” Donnie leaned back in his chair and waited.

  “Why didn’t you ask me about this on the drive back?”

  At least that way we could have ended things cleanly, instead of ruining a perfectly nice lunch.

  “I didn’t want to wake you up,” he said.

  I closed my eyes and rubbed my temples. “Fine. Alright. I was in grad school. I was writing my dissertation, Reproducing and Resisting: Hegemonic Masculinities and Transgressive—anyway, you don’t need to hear the whole title. It had to do with punk rock, basically.”

  “You wrote your dissertation on punk rock? I thought you said your degree was in English.”

  “It was in the English department. So I was immersed in the scene, doing a lot of my field work in Orange County.”

  “Orange County? You mean Newport Coast? Laguna Beach? Tough job, Molly.”

  “More like Huntington Beach. And don’t laugh. Those G.G. Allin fans could be pretty scary. Anyway, some of my grad school friends and I thought, well, that looks like fun, and how hard could it be? So we put together our own
punk band.”

  “And now you’re in charge of the management department in the College of Commerce. Quite a life change.”

  “I think ‘in charge’ might be overstating things a little. You know something? I thought it was the greatest day of my life when we got our picture in the music section of the weekly paper.”

  I had cause to reconsider that “greatest day of my life” thing a few years later when someone put all of the archives of the now-defunct alternative weekly online. Our photo is now On the Internet, Forever. Fortunately, our real names weren’t used in the story. My embarrassing little secret was safe, or so I thought. And then this facial recognition technology came along.

  “Does the name mean anything?” Donnie asked. “Alterity Jameson?”

  “Alterity has to do with being ‘other’, the out-group, coming from a different perspective,” I said. “When you’re young and earnest and reading about postmodernism in grad school, it’s a word you end up using a lot. It sounded much more hip and subversive ten years ago, believe me.”

  “And Jameson? Davison thought it had something to do with Irish whiskey.”

  “No. Davison is completely wrong about that. It’s a nod to Fredric Jameson. You know Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism?”

  “Of course,” Donnie said.

  “Really?”

  “No.”

  “Anyway, there it is. Now you know my embarrassing secret. I was in a no-hit-wonder postmodern punk band.”

  “Phallus in Wonderland. Right?”

  I winced. So much for my ladylike image.

  “For the record, the name was not my idea. I wanted ‘Pacmanistan’. You know, sort of referring back to the Eighties. It would have been a nice reference to the fragmented recycling of trends that goes along with a civilization’s transition from modernism to postmodernism.”

  “Sure,” Donnie said.

  If I didn’t know better, I would swear Donnie was trying to stifle a laugh.

  “Unfortunately,” I continued, “the other band members were afraid the name ‘Pacmanistan’ could get us sued. Also, Melanie Polewski was very much into Lacan, and she lobbied hard for her idea of having an all-female band with ‘phallus’ in the name. Obviously, Melanie won that one. It’s more, um, intellectual than it sounds.”

  “Were you the lead singer?” Donnie asked. “In the picture, you were front and center.”

  “No, I actually played bass. I think the photographer put me in front because he liked what my hair was doing. Melanie never forgave me. She thought she should’ve been the one—no, wait, I did sing one time. Melanie, her stage name was ‘Shock Derrida’, because, you know, Derrida and Lacan, right?”

  “If you say so.”

  “She’d wrecked her voice from all the shouting. I guess there are tricks you can use to save your vocal cords, but we didn’t know anything about that. So one time I did the vocals for ‘(Judy) Butler Did It.’”

  “Could you sing it for me? Do you remember how it goes?”

  Donnie was grinning now. He seemed to be taking this a lot better than I had expected.

  “No. It was hard to memorize the words because they weren’t intended to make any kind of linear sense. That was the whole point. It’s a reference to the performative act as distinct from the content, right? Anyway, I was a disaster as a lead singer. I mean, it’s punk rock, so it’s not like the bar is terribly high, but I didn’t even rise to loud, fast and—and awful. In my defense, I was trying to sing and play bass at the same time. Melanie didn’t play an instrument, so all she ever had to do was sing.”

  “It sounds like you had fun. In spite of Melanie.”

  “You know what? We did have fun. We all thought we were being super transgressive.”

  “Do you still do anything musical?” Donnie asked.

  “No. I lost interest when I realized how hard it is to write anything original. There are only so many chord progressions, so many bass lines, and so many melodies. It’s impossible to be completely original and still be listenable.”

  Donnie got up. “Coffee?” he asked.

  “Yes, thanks!”

  Do you stay in touch with your bandmates?” he asked.

  “No. I’m not even sure what they’re up to anymore. The last I heard of Melanie, she was freelancing for an essay-writing company. Term-papers-for-sale-dot-com or something.”

  At the doorway to the kitchen, he turned back and grinned. “When does your Behind the Music episode come out?”

  I let out a long, relieved breath and followed him into the kitchen.

  “Donnie, I’m so glad you’re not upset.”

  “Upset about what?”

  “Well, you know, the band, the whole thing. It’s undignified. I thought you’d disapprove.”

  The conversation paused for the whirring of the coffee grinder.

  “Disapprove?” Donnie said. “I think it’s kind of cute.”

  “Did you say cute?”

  “Sure. You’re usually so...you have such high expectations. For yourself, and for everyone else. I don’t mean it in a bad way. You have very high standards”

  “Are you calling me uptight, Donnie?”

  “Not uptight. More like...persnickety.”

  “What?”

  “I take it as a compliment. After all, you chose me, didn’t you?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  DONNIE PULLED ME INTO a tight hug. I wasn’t sure how to react so I left my arms limp at my sides.

  “It’s nice you let yourself do something silly once every decade or two,” he murmured into my hair.

  “Donnie, can you tell Davison that photo is not actually me? If my students ever catch wind of this I’ll have to join the Federal Witness Protection Program.”

  Donnie released me from the hug and busied himself with the coffee.

  “You want me to tell Davison that isn’t you in the picture? Are you asking me to lie to my own son?”

  “Fine. Tell him I told you it’s not me. That wouldn’t be a lie.”

  “That’s a creative approach to the truth,” he chuckled.

  “That’s exactly what Pa...”

  “Exactly what?”

  “Nothing. I forgot what I was going to say.”

  I was going to point out Pat would say the same thing to me, about being creative with the truth. At some point during Mrs. Flanagan’s visit last summer, she had said about me (while I was sitting right there), “This one’s kissed the Blarney Stone, so she has!” And Pat had replied, “Ma, the Blarney Stone would kiss Molly if it could!” Of course, they both thought that was hilarious. Pat doesn’t realize if everyone subscribed to his literal-minded idea of total-disclosure honesty, society would collapse in a matter of minutes.

  “Balkan hellhole.” I wanted to kick him again, just thinking about it.

  While Donnie prepared our espressos, I picked up the newspaper lying on the counter and scanned the front page. I had tried taking the local paper for a while, but the issues kept piling up unread. Taking the papers down to be recycled was an extra chore I didn’t need. I never found the paper’s classifieds to be of much use; the online classifieds were more up-to-date, they were searchable, and they had color photos. People like me are probably why the County Courier ended up having to lay off people like Pat.

  “Anything interesting in the paper?” Donnie asked.

  “They found a body down in Kuewa.”

  The headline had caught my attention because I was afraid it might be Sherry. Neither Emma nor I had heard anything from her. I was relieved to see the deceased was a man, but then I felt bad about feeling relieved about someone being dead.

  “Shame,” Donnie said. “Another meth lab explosion?”

  “No, not this time. A hiker got disoriented in the jungle and couldn’t find his way out. See, that’s why I never go hiking.”

  “Any good news in there?” Donnie asked.

  “Here’s the cruise ship schedule. Want to hear the days and times you ca
n expect crowds of hungry tourists at Donnie’s Drive-Inn?”

  “Visitors, Molly. Visitors. Never tourists.”

  “Right,” I said. “Visitors.” I glanced at his wall clock. It was almost time for my afternoon meeting. “Oh no, I didn’t realize it was so late! Donnie, I’m sorry, I have to run.”

  “No worries.” He transferred my espresso to a small paper cup. “Take it to go.”

  “Thanks. You’re so thoughtful.”

  “Have a good meeting.” Donnie sent me off with a kiss on the cheek.

  I was heading down to the Bayfront. I guess you could say I was going to a “meeting,” in that I was “meeting” Emma when she came in from paddling practice. Emma didn’t know it yet. My real reason for being there was to avoid Cyndi from the Student Retention Office.

  During one of our Student Retention Office Faculty Development Seminars (or maybe it was a Retreat or a Celebration or a Professional Development Session), the faculty were enduring the usual hectoring about being more “customer oriented,” “honoring” each student’s “unique way of knowing,” and so forth.

  If students are truly our customers, I had finally asked, and the customer is always right, why don’t we let them assign their own homework and pick their own grades? That would make them happy, wouldn’t it?

  To my horror, my offhanded jibe had somehow metastasized into a full-blown, honest-to-goodness Student Retention Innovation. The Student Retention Office had been pestering me ever since, in hopes of coopting an actual faculty member to use as a figurehead for their latest Trophies-For-Everyone initiative.

  Today I begged off once again, citing an off-campus meeting I couldn’t miss. Cyndi was in a different department from Linda, and not in a position to help me find Sherry. So here I was, hiding out in the damp shade of the canoe halau, with a few minutes to kill before Emma and her crew came in. I was sure I could think of some urgent academic matter to discuss with Emma when the time came. I didn’t see anywhere clean to sit down, so I stood and watched the bright blue day outside.

  Something rustled behind me. I hoped it wasn’t one of those huge cockroaches.