Kicking Tomorrow

by Daniel Richler

  At midnight they move on, sluggish, smuggling a bottle of St. Antoine Abbé apple cider into the Westmount Roxy, the air musky with passion flower and hashish, and get blotto watching Woodstock. (It’s Robbie’s nineteenth time. Ivy used to work here, and in the good old days he always got in for free.) Rosie sucks his fingers and makes them sticky. He’s vaguely aware of this. She lays her head on his shoulder, lifts it, lays it down again, lifts it, lays it down; weird, he imagines he has a large feathered wing, just one, restless, ruffling, twitching heavy on his shoulder. He concentrates hard on the movie, wishing after all that he’d been a part of that whole groovy business, that whole exuberant crowd. A crowd with a purpose, doing its own original thing. And he might have been part of something today, but for Rosie’s emotions. He rocks out, although by three a.m. he finds himself melancholy once more, unexpectedly so, given that he knows every frame in the film by heart. Ridiculously sad in fact, weeping - as he discovers when his lips taste salt – to see that field of garbage during Hendrix, for it looks exactly like what he feels has been bequeathed to him as a seventies guy. He feels so ambivalent, he hardly knows himself. People were part of something back then, or so it was reported. All he senses he’s a part of is some Great Hangover; he’s grabbed at the end of the sixties and, like a lizard’s tail, it has come off in his hands.

  3

  THE COTTAGE SEASON IS REVVED UP, MIRIAM AND BARNABUS are out of school for the summer, and Mom’s back. Where has she been? A certain continent. Truth is, Robbie’s stoned again, and wasn’t really paying attention that closely when she plopped her luggage down, and got it all confused when she described the documentary she’d been making about, about – spices… species?… faeces? Same difference; whatever it was, knowing Mom’s show, it was probably bad news for nature.

  Anyhow, now it’s rush rush rush to get out of this hot smelly town, and the Bookbinders nod to the other Westmount families packing up their cars in their driveways sprinkled with apple blossom. A routine Robbie despises, and he makes no bones about it. Dad has to tell him, “Sorry, Robbie, but in this fam–I, this house is out of – look, we’re locking up for the summer. That is non-negotiable. I don’t want you having some, some–”

  “Some whut? Some whut?”

  “Some harsh party,” Barnabus says. “I heard him tell Mom.”

  “Hushed party is what he said, STUPID,” Miriam says. “As is your wont, Rob.”

  “Won’t whut?” Robbie demands. Fists on hips, red-eared and steaming, he shoots the Rubinsteins a withering stare clear across the street, tosses his hair off his shoulders, rests the knuckles of one fist on the hood of the car, instantly yanking them off the burning metal.

  “Look,” he spits. “You can tell Dad I’m wasting my teens away slaving over a hot lawnmower. It’s the wilderness out there, not a croquet lawn. It’s futile, I’ll tell you that much for free–keeping that place the way Mom and Dad like it is like digging a hole in the ocean.”

  “Dad says you’re too angry about nothing and that we need quality-intensive time together,” Miriam says snittily, going back to her Owl magazine.

  “Hard family labour, he means.”

  “And Mom says next time we’ll buy the Alexis Nihon Plaza so you can hang out in the mall.”

  Grumbling, he stuffs a sack full of groceries (he’s been forced to do this) under the hatchback and squeezes in the back seat with his brother and sister. Mendoza the boxer jumps in too, slobbering on his lap. Robbie slams the door extremely hard. It’s suffocatingly hot as they wait for Dad to switch on the air-conditioning. The car has the familiar stink of sticky coffee at the bottoms of Mom’s Hello World! TV-show mugs, the reminder of last week’s french onion soup that slopped over during the dirt-road stretch of the trip, and the repulsive memory of Barnabus’s abruptly reviewed lunch, all three courses.

  “Oh. Now. Chrissake. SBD. Who’s the dirty pig?”

  “He who smelt it dealt it,” Miriam says.

  “He who denied it supplied it,” Barnabus says.

  Robbie rolls down his window and hangs himself out. A breeze cools the damp creases in the crooks of his arms. Puh PUH duh duh PUH, he taps out a demon rhythm, gingerly, on the shell of the car. Puh PUH duh duh DUH All families must die…

  … at last they’ve driven off. And Robbie’s won a victory: he’s waved goodbye and is strolling back down the garden path now like he’s the owner of this big old house. Turns up the stereo to rock the foundations and sings along at the top of his lungs, churning his throat up hot and raw, all alone in the place that from the neighbours’ point of view must have just become a jumping jukebox.

  The doorbell rings. It’s Ivy, fresh from the hospital. Her skin is tender and white, as her petroleum jelly-soaked bandages have only recently been removed. They feast on pizza and agree the clams on it look like little denuded vaginas. They drink freely from Dad’s liquor cabinet and in the living room play Ivy’s favourite game, the one in which they take on mystery characters and meet for the first time, again and again. On this woozy evening she’s a writer of erotic literature living in Paris at the time of Debussy and Cocteau and Gide, although Robbie wouldn’t know what that means if you spelled it out for him. She’s sitting on the tapestried couch, squinting against the setting sun, the smoke from her cigarette hanging in the light like a nest of crafty thoughts. He’s pinned to the carpet like a hairy butterfly, twitching, hands fluttering, fishing for flakes of cork on the surface of his wine. Reluctantly he settles on Keef Richards of the Strolling Bones, but then, with shame, realizes he can’t think of a thing to say in order to become Keef Richards, to pull on the heavy mantle of his glory, to adopt the supreme voice of a generation.

  Robbie loves Ivy, but how he’s starting to hate her, too. She just sits there with the cool of the Sphinx, her legs drawn up and her knees tucked under her chin, her skirt tantalizingly slipped off her thighs. She’s sizing him up through her otter-brown eyes, head cocked insouciantly as if she were unaware he can see her labia squeezing out in the shape of a plum pit, wrapped in the tissue of her panties like fruit on display. When she knows perfectly well…

  … he sighed and shifted in his seat, for the car, vibrating steadily on the highway, was causing the thickly stitched seams of his far-out sprayed-on bell-bottoms to pinch his scrotum.

  They drove two hours from Montreal through the Eastern Townships to Kilborn Centre, the car’s shadow rippling and tumbling over the drab flat fields, the Madame Patates, the gas stations, and the farmhouses advertising worms. Now, in Robbie’s humble opinion, regardless of what the Quebec Tourism brochures said, Kilborn Centre was an oily little armpit boasting a row of burger joints and tacky souvenir stores on Main Street, and a fish canning factory on a lakeshore crawling with foam. Motorbikes clustered together in the mangy central park next to a Baron Bulgingburger’s franchise. Bikers hung out drinking beer and listening to music – the old ladies with PROPRIÉTÉ DES HELL’S ANGELS on their T-shirts, the brothers with their stitched-on colours and studded leather vests and stupendous beerguts and psycho mountain-man beards. They peed, too, against the war memorial plastered with bird droppings, a bra dangling aloft from the soldier’s upstretched hand. Dad said, “Jesus, look at those smelly, aum…” and remarked that the statue had no right to be there because, during Conscription, the French Canadians had disgraced themselves by fleeing the towns and hiding out in the bush.

  “Chickenshit pea-soups,” Barnabus said, and Mom turned to give Dad an almighty look. Just like on TV! Grilling some industrial-strength polluter. Robbie sank low in his seat.

  The Bookbinders had to drive through Kilborn Centre to reach the heart of the Townships. Lush, rolling, contented, the last rural bastion of Quebec’s well-to-do Anglophones, the Townships were drawn together by great Kilborn, whose southernmost tip touched Vermont, U.S.A., where fancy restaurants served seafood specialties on boardwalks with a view. The cottage was on the lake, situated near a Benedictine monastery that once produced Stilton a
nd apple cider. Mom commented that their Stilton had never been aged properly, and the cider had always been unpalatable, and the architecture of the monastery itself was impossibly gaudy, but that as long as the monks had owned all that land, at least the bay had been quiet. Not like now.

  “Play with me, Rob,” Barnabus pleaded. “Like you used to. In the old days when you were nice.”

  “Oh, shut up, Barn,” Robbie snapped. “It’s not my fault if Mom’s ruining the atmosphere.”

  When Mom just commented on things off-handedly like that, you always knew there was more to follow. Mom’s casual comments were, in Robbie’s view, tips of icebergs, fins of sharks. And sure enough, as Barnabus sulked and Mendoza panted with his great chops wobbling, she got her shit in a knot. If you were a regular viewer of Hello World!, you’d know why already, for only last week, standing on the family’s own shoreline, she’d detailed the failure of the monks’ operation: if their Stilton hadn’t been quite so rubbery, she reported, the cider so unpalatably sweet, etc. etc., they might never have had to sell their land; now the EPX Chemicals Corporation spelled way worse trouble for the Townships. Spell that P-O-L-L-U-T-I-O-N.

  Robbie stared at the horizon. Start with monastery, end up with provincial politics and a whole lot of gobbledegook like chlorophenols foliage erosion inhibited nitrogen fixation by symbiotic bacteria heavy metals in the soil fecula on the beach acid loadings all over Quebec and thanks to elevated levels of mercury in the sediments, worsening breakdown in the foodchain. You couldn’t match the degree of Mom’s rage, you could never catch up. So, if you were Robbie, you just shrugged your shoulders and brooded like an old factory under clouds of toxic thoughts, and waited for Dad to really get her dander up by telling her further studies were – that acid rain and, aum – may be preventing – that nature does, nature kills more species than hu – that the monks were just as bad as EPX, pumping their raw sewage into the lake, and so on.

  “Yes,” Barnabus said. “Poolution.”

  And after that the inevitable brittle silence. Mom should know better, Robbie thought. This is the way it always ends – not with a bang but a simmer. Mom thought too much; she never allowed things to simply be what they seemed – they were always propelled by devious invisible mechanisms, rife with Machiavellian schemes, tragically booby-trapped. In her forensic view, it never just rained – someone was seeding the clouds. There was never just a thaw – it was nuclear experiments in the Soviet Union, Birds never just flew south – it was NASA screwing around with magnetic north. Robbie was never just out late – he was doing drugs, abusing nature like everyone else these days,

  “It’s S.P.E.C.T.R.E.,” he said. “The evil empire. They’re behind it all. We’re all gonna die. Anarchy and destruction is their goal.”

  “Oh, is it, really?” Mom said, retrieving her sense of humour at last. “Well, that’s OK, then. I thought it was something serious.”

  “Poo is their goal,” Barnabus said.

  When the Bookbinders bought their place, it had been a weed-rich wilderness, all rocks and spiky fern and maple trees. Hunters must once have lived or roomed in the cottage, for when Robbie had first been sent out to battle the tall grass, spent cartridges were snapped up clanging into the teeth of his mower. If he’d of known what was in Mom’s mind as far as landscaping plans, eh, he would of applied for a transfer to some other family, in an inner-city ghetto maybe. Knee-deep in bracken, eyes streaming, sneezing like a demon, he’d knotted a Cannabis Sativa T-shirt around his face for protection against the clouds of aphids, airborne pollens, spores disgorged from the mouths of dock and pokeweed, silky dandelion pappus, and vintage Canadian thistledown, frisking in his wake like malevolent nose-nymphs.

  When the Bookbinders moved in, there had been a patch of runner beans in a corner, and that was about it – a rusty two-handled saw, some old taps on the maples blocked with hard sap. But Mom had said, “I want a proper garden,” so she marked off a bramble-choked area as big as a hockey rink with a temporary electric fence, borrowed some pigs from the neighbouring farmer, threw pignuts in there, and the undergrowth was gone in a month. But that was not all.

  “Symmetry,” she said. “We need to set the axis of the garden to avoid monotony, and our new French windows want a clear view onto the lake.”

  If a thing was six inches out, they had to dig it up and move it over. If a beloved plant wouldn’t take well to moving, everything else had to move. And weed-killer was an environmental no-no; it was hand-weeding all the way.

  “Did serfs of old suffer like this while scything the hay?” Robbie demanded. “How come evilution hasn’t taken care of allergies? You should put in your show how pollution’s making our noses devolve.”

  “We need a tranquil space,” Mom had said absently. She stood by a heap of prunings with her hands on her hips, squinted around, and spat a mosquito from her lips. “The drama of a hidden hedgenook, Robbie. Think, the mystery.”

  One year she went crazy for golden privet, the next for muted colours and variegated leaves. One year, she despised little herb gardens, the next she was growing cinnamon, allspice, pepper, castor beans, sago, and guava. By this time there was a cobbled forecourt, little statues – stone angels, stone pigs – and a summerhouse with climbing roses, clematis, and honeysuckle, and the garden had become the set for Hello World! You’d think the show could have afforded a gardener by then but no, the only thing the network was trimming were costs.

  How he despises the country! While Dad lies prone indoors, watching the Olympics, Robbie lounges in a deck chair overlooking the lake – The Sneezable Kingdom – beside a mounting pile of soggy Kleenex. His eyes sting, he has streaming catarrh, his throat’s inflamed, the roof of his mouth itches like mad, his teeth throb. He watches a bumblebee so plump with pollen it has to drag itself across the hot stones to the shadow of his legs for relief. The great white legs of Robbie, Cruel Lord of the Bees. Mendoza there too, sweating saliva from his tongue, plip, plip.

  Out on the glassy water a Laser’s sail luffs in the wind. Down the hill Mom’s bent over a clay urn encouraging chives to grow, her bottom raised to show off the label on her jeans to all of nature, mosquito netting wrapped over a broad-brimmed straw hat and tied with string around her neck. Humming to herself in a samba rhythm, “I’m Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band, yes I’m–”

  Robbie honks again with the sound of a trumpet being cleared of spittle, and she looks up – like a cow interrupted at her grazing, he observes unkindly – the mosquito net casting a soft shadow across her cheeks and nose.

  “There are solutions, you know,” she calls up, and begins to list homeopathic cures for hay fever sufferers, like Arsenicum album and Pulsatilla, but Robbie knows all about that thank you very much; he’s already been through her catalogue of wild poisonous plants to identify the psychedelics indigenous to the Townships: out in the fields and forests around Kilborn, foraging with Mendoza, he learned about Lycium halmifolium the Matrimony Vine, Morning Glory, Jimsonweed, Angel’s Trumpet, and a variety of magic mushrooms with juicy names like A. phalloides and G. esculaenta, although the only thing he dared try was something called Black Henbane. The dog was smarter; he turned his nose up at that, too. Not only is it foul-smelling, but also seriously toxic, as the quantity you need to ingest for recreational purposes is dangerously close to the quantity that soon had Robbie lying under the eaves of the boathouse with no saliva at all in his mouth, trying to retch onto the sandy ground. Finally he did upchuck, right into Kilborn Bay, neatly beside some stiff trout that had washed up on the beach. Then a motorboat zoomed by dragging three dazzling babes on water-skis, and their wake slopped the puke back onto his bare feet.

  He passed part of draggy, swollen June planting marijuana seedlings among Mom’s vibernums, observing to himself that here at least was one plant to which he was not allergic. The rest of June he spent leaving taps around the house running, wearing odd socks and, one evening, forgetting to gather up a sheaf of love letters h
e had written to Ivy, spilled beer on, and laid out to dry on the kitchen table; the letters were drenched in a bilious mixture of hops, rage, devotion, and lust, each blotted word like a miniature Rorschach test for all the family to see. And when he came down to breakfast the next day – lunch, really – they all looked at him funny.

  Thus June crawled, and July, and Robbie mourned Ivy all the while. Lingering in bed, lurking in the bath, sprawled on the lawn, he thought about that metaphor they use in those lavender-coloured booklets you suddenly find lying around the house when your sister is entering her Difficult Phase: that vaginas are like flowers. He had seen a similar thing in a book of pastel paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe, a favourite of Mom’s which had been lying around the house a lot longer. Ivy’s labia minora were large and ruffled, as Robbie remembered them, and made him think of speeded-up films of lavish dewy flora blossoming in the space of seconds: her sex flowering beautifully into womanhood, Nature preparing her pistil for the penetration of his proud stamen.

  He skulked around the house, soft and swollen as a stewed fig, sneaking looks at the thirty-five varieties of bras and nylon nighties in the weekend supplements. He thought of those devices Victorian parents once forced adolescent sons to wear – a spiked penis collar with a bell – alerting everyone to their unnatural stirrings. It made him crazy to be so muzzled up. He wanted to strip down all free and naked, to leap and frolic in open fields, his penis wagging as happy as a puppydog’s tail; he saw himself hurtling through the air like a sperm whale, leaving a trail of milk and honey on the fields below.