Kicking Tomorrow

by Daniel Richler

  Anyway, now Robbie was the guest of a solemnly Christian family, whose few joys were being summed up in a prayer and a supermarket meal. He was wondering how he was going to finish this glutinous mess – a slice of a deboned turkey sitting in a pond of just-add-water potato mash, some sugary gravy, and a bank of diced mixed vegetables that are paler than they appear in the colour supplements.

  Is this all?

  He knows the whole do will set the parents back enough to ensure their January Blues last at least two months, and he can see that Ivy’s elder sister, Julie, for one, is filled with simple joy and forgetting herself in all this luxury, but he can’t stop the hot, vomitty voice in the back of his head. Is this it? If this is the best they can come up with…

  He wants to slap his own face. He doesn’t want to think these thoughts. He’s not like this.

  This place stinks. They’re ugly, too.

  Chrissake, stop.

  The dining room was two rooms really, cut in half by a fanfold wall on a floor-rail; since this was the big Xmas meal, and ten people were eating, they’d opened up the wall, laid out tables end-to-end, and now right behind him was the parents’ bed.

  Olly was there with Karen and the two kiddies. “Hi,” Robbie said, pumping Karen’s hand, “Remember me? I’m Mr. Big Balls.” She looked more surprised than shocked, but Robbie was satisfied that he’d scored as the NEW! IMPROVED! him he was planning to be for Ivy from now on – an armoured, insensitive Robbie, giving nothing away for free. Meanwhile he gathered that Mr. and Mrs. Mills thought Olly was in real estate. Olly had brought gifts. For Ivy, The Trembling of a Leaf by Somerset Maugham, and something even for Robbie – the Bones’ Cambodian Relief charity album, autographed by Keef himself. Robbie thanked him, but avoided his eyes (so much for the NEW! ARMOURED! Robbie); since Olly had apparently done so much for him the last time they had spoken (and Robbie had said so little, been so nnspecific), he was afraid just exchanging glances might have some deadly consequence. And Ivy had given Olly a present in return – a batik scarf, with intricate kala mask designs and TV sets and hockey sticks. Robbie watched as he proudly wrapped it around his neck.

  Ivy’s younger brother, John, had a family method Robbie could relate to – he holed up with a coil heater in the alley garage, tinkering with a chemistry lab which he financed by holding down five paper routes – another way of keeping clear of home, and who could blame him – plus, apparently, Olly paid him for the occasional assignment. Out in the garage, John showed Robbie his latest explosives experiment, utilizing just everyday chemical products.

  Julie was troubling Robbie, meanwhile; she appeared just a few degrees too full up with delight at this Xmas banquet. Her teeth were creamy, she rolled her eyes a lot, and, horror of horrors, she seemed to be flirting with him.

  Mr. Mills sat at the head of the table, carving the turkey with frightening enthusiasm. Mrs. Mills was flushed with merry energy, intoxicating herself with her own chitchat. “So this Cuckoo movie, how fun it was!” she called out from the kitchen in her bleating voice, a voice that rode hysteria bareback, always threatening to break, “It remind me of birds, how cruel to putting them in cages, like those hostage in Amsterdam, hein? Are you kids see the big Stroll and Bone show next week?”

  Robbie’s mouth was stopped up with a lump of hardened potato powder. He tried to swallow. His cutlery felt heavy in his hands. He thought of how dwarf stars are so dense, that a teaspoon of their magma weighs a million tons. Mrs. Mills bent down to pull a dish from the oven.

  Mr. Mills found his opening. “You are idiots,” he said, his smug smile wet with wine, “lining up all night just for a rock show.”

  “AYOI!” Mrs. Mills screamed. She dropped the dish full of pudding, buttered glass scattering around the floor, and vigorously shook her fingers in the air.

  “Hey, hey, let me do it, Ma!” Olly said, leaping out of his chair. “Sit down, OK. Maybe you’ve had a little – “

  “I am NOT DRUNK,” Mrs. Mills shouted gutturally, her face as red as her fingers, “so SHUT UP.” Then she turned pleasantly to Robbie, awaiting his answer, and placed a spoonful of glass-spiked pudding on his plate.

  “Well, um,” Robbie said. Now the potato was lodged in his throat, and squeezing down like a croquet ball in an ostrich’s neck. He avoided Julie’s lopsided, attentive, admiring face. “I think it’s interesting to see the city come alive – delivery trucks, workers coming into the greasy spoon for their coffees and dogs and westerns.…”

  “We had once a dog,” Mrs. Mills started, “a chi –”

  “That’s my point,” Mr. Mills said quickly. “If you found the same time and energy – kids today are all over the place, like an old woman’s piss. What have you got to be angry with? When I was your age I worked at that greasy spoon. Every morning I had to haul buckets of chicken, giblets, legs, livers, breasts, into that same kitchen –”

  “Oh, chéri” Mrs. Mills butted in. “Not buckets, you telled me – pails.”

  “What, chérie?”

  “Not buckets – pails of chicken. That’s what you telled me.”

  “Buckets, pails, what’s the –”

  “Oh there’s a big difference. They’re not the same.”

  “OK, pails, if it means so much to you.”

  Robbie dug a trench in his muddy turkey. Ivy nudged him with her knee below the table.

  “Well, it does. I think a person must speak properly well.”

  “Yes, of course, ma bonne femme, but I –”

  “If you don’t have command of the good English, how can you earn respect? You said that to me much times.”

  And Robbie thinking, This is not a well family. How could a person as imaginative and beautiful as Ivy have sprung from the loins of these Nazi humanoids from outer space. I must rescue her from all this.

  “You should call them pails,” Mrs. Mills warbled.

  While the family bowed their heads to say closing Grace, Robbie looked around: a set of Coronation plates up on the wall, a stumpy Eskimo sculpture on the coffee table, a set of Russian doll-eggs, set along the mantlepiece in diminishing size, and unbelievably (but someone must be buying these things, so you have to believe it) a portrait of a weeping clown on black velvet. There were dozens of Hallmark cards with doe-eyed angels, pussycats playing with Xmas baubles, and gauzy portraits of the baby Jesus. Plus a plastic light-up Santa Claus face and a scrawny aluminum tree on top of the TV set. It was all enough to make you very sad. And, Robbie thought to himself, What have they received that they’ve got to be so truly thankful for?

  As soon as the prayer was over, John climbed out of his chair. He left the room without a word; off to the lab.

  “I’m so anger with him,” Mrs. Mills said to Olly.

  “Aw, relax, Ma,” Olly said, good-naturedly, little Cissy bouncing on his lap. “Give the kid a break. Give him time.”

  “Time. I’m run out of time. I’ve waited long enough for the respect. I want it now.”

  “The whole family’s here, Ma. What more do you want? Merry Christmas, OK?”

  But Mrs. Mills wasn’t listening. She was tickling Julie in the ribs. “Ayy ma pauvre minoune, would you like one of my chocolates now? Oui? Well, come and give Maman a kiss, first.” Julie squirmed, and cackled with delight. Mrs. Mills tickled her harder and Julie, her eyes rolling wildly, her teeth in a froth, tried to squirm free. Now it was clear she was hurting. She sent her head back and bonked her mother on the nose. Mrs. Mills tossed Julie to the ground, and now the tender moment was spoiled. Mr. Mills sat and watched. Ivy sat, looking at her lap, scrunching her hair. She hadn’t spoken in an hour. She was drinking wine, nose in her book, she was in Java. Karen was changing a stinky diaper on the bed.

  “French Canadians are incredible,” Mr. Mills announced pleasantly. “Did you know that 75 per cent of them have not read a book since high school, much less a French book? Statistics show they watch seven hours of TV a day – American sitcoms. They refuse to give up their big Americ
an cars, they holiday in Miami and Maine, and they talk about French heritage – HA! – the way they’re going, they’ll be calling the energy crisis theirs, and end up trying to make Florida independent.”

  Silence around the table at that one. Ivy sipped her wine. Even Mrs. Mills was quiet.

  “What d’you think? This language commission they’re proposing, the French language cops, it’s an inquisition, isn’t it? Don’t tell me none of those FLQ thugs and murderers got jobs with the party.”

  No one said a word, though Robbie was wondering if he really said, Whajew think, or if he was only slurring his words because he was drunk. Ivy scrunched her hair, gripped her wineglass tighter. Mr. Mills moved his glass to his lips, but poured too soon and wine spilled down his chin. He took a different tack. “What’s your family doing today? Working?”

  Robbie jumped. “Who, mine? Oh, no, not today. We have Xmas, sort of, Bookbindermas really. We have Easter, too, and Passover, the whole shebang. It’s just my parents feel you shouldn’t have one single religion stuffed down your throat before you’re old enough to decide.”

  Ivy’s leg under the table.

  “The problem with you kids, is,” Mr. Mills said, little pig tails appearing in his cheeks, twisting his chunky wine glass (the kind of goblet you get FREE! after purchasing ten litres of gasoline) between his thumb and forefinger, and examining it like some precious jewel, “you’re not aware of how short life is. You just screw around, devil may care, when you have no idea. You think that money grows on trees –”

  “ – but,” Mrs. Mills jumped in, “you won’t shake a limb to get it! That’s not your joke, isn’t it, chéri?”

  “Yes, chérie, that’s my joke,” Mr. Mills said, wearily. And his stitched-on smile completely unravelled.

  “Let’s dance!” Mrs. Mills exclaimed, and yanked Robbie up by the arm. She was strong, and her breath was as warm as the bottom of her stomach. The room whirled around, she was whooping. Robbie caught a glimpse of Ivy as he turned. She had snapped the stem of her wineglass in two. Her fingers were bloody, and she was licking them calmly.

  A dull POOM from the back of the apartment. Everyone jumped. Olly leaped from his chair again, hopping over other chairs to get to the door.

  By the time the whole family had stamped down the back stairs and gathered at the door of the garage, Olly had already picked John off the floor and was holding him in his arms.

  “I knew I put in too much potassium permanganate,” John said, with a stupid smile. The family looked stupidly back. The skin was burnt right off John’s stupid face. The Stupid family, Robbie thought. The Stupid family have a very Merry Christmas.

  He felt pretty grown-up, sitting in this taxi with his luggage on his lap. It was the first time he had ever paid for one himself. He was watching the meter with an eagle eye now, too amazed at how quickly it clicked by to enjoy the moment fully, but riding high and proud as if the cab were a royal carriage, and seeing the world renewed in the light of love. Two days after Xmas they were taking a secret holiday trip. To Montreal. It was Robbie’s idea. He was asserting himself in this relationship, now. He had sold a hundred more of his beloved records, and Ivy had borrowed money from Olly, lying to her parents that she was staying in the burbs with him. They checked into the grandest hotel they could afford – the Hotel Bonaventure, a poured-concrete mammoth of a building situated above the Bonaventure shopping mall.

  They stood on street corners, making a show of being lost; holding their street maps upside-down and squinting at them and thanking people for their help in wild accents. They bought postcards with Mounties on them, fumbled with foreign currency Robbie had stolen from the parents’ dresser. They were loaded with brandy and laughing helplessly. Robbie posed for a picture outside Ben’s smoked-meat restaurant. He stood with his hands on his hips and breathed in deeply, savouring the illusion cold air has of always smelling clean, even in downtown traffic. They went to the planetarium, and the Musée des Beaux Arts, visiting sights in town they had taken for granted all their lives. They bought swimsuits for the hotel pool. Robbie was full of joy that their relationship was so rejuvenated, and at one point, when Ivy was looking the other way, he looked at the sky and winked heavenward, real chummy, like, thumbs up, man.

  How humiliating to be treated like a child, at his age. Moments after they had sat down in this snooty hotel restaurant, with its suffocating drapery and undead waiters, the maître d’ smoothly inquired if Robbie was paying cash or credit. Cash, Robbie answered pleasantly, and only after the vampire asked if he’d like to pay in advance did he feel a creeping sense of indignation. He had nicely combed his hair, parting it down the middle. Now he sat with it drawn close to his cheeks, which made the long face he pulled look even longer.

  “When Hell’s Yells are a big success,” he promised Ivy, “I’m gonna stitch together a jacket of hundred-dollar bills and wear it specially for dumps like these.”

  It was no fun here at all. You couldn’t shout or burp or eat sitting on the floor in front of a TV if you wanted. And old people were everywhere, murmuring. Even the air seemed like old air. All this formality. His shoulders felt as stiff as a coat hanger. People pay for this?

  Ivy wasn’t enjoying herself either. She rolled one cigarette after another, making vertical creases between her eyebrows as if this was a punishment Robbie was imposing on her like a parent, as a prelude to a spank. She was doing her best to make him feel responsible for everything that was ugly and pretentious about the place; each time she made sneering faces at the luxury-liner decor, or shot her eyes over at some snatch of artificial conversation, it was as if she were saying he had done this to her on purpose.

  It was coming over Robbie, like the first twinge of nausea, that this so-called relationship was still as delicate, as uncertain, as a hungover stomach. Maybe Ivy had been right all along; they just weren’t made for each other. He skimmed over the menu. He could make out about half of it, but just to prove to the seethingly solicitous waiter that he didn’t need help with the rest, he ordered the most expensive item: riz de veau.

  “Fifteen bucks for rice,” he grumbled to Ivy, after the waiter had strode away. And he knew now he was competing with her to be pissed off the most, as if finding fault here was a special mark of sophistication. “What’s the point of being rich if everything you buy costs more? Life is really fucked.”

  Ivy absently brushed breadcrumbs into rows on the tablecloth. She said, “ – ”

  All right, so riz de veau turned out to be calves’ brains, which took him by surprise, but even Robbie could tell that the gazpacho was cold and the crème caramel was barely set. The espresso coffee was shitty too, served in an insultingly tiny cup with mud at the bottom, and the bill arrived much faster than any of the courses had; the Night of the Living Dead waiter plopped the vinyl folder on the table and gave him a look of royal disdain, as he lingered. Braiins, Robbie thought, and said, “I s’pose you think we’re just gonna take off, like run out on you.”

  “Yes, monsieur,” the waiter said, bowing politely with a smile like the crease in a starched napkin.

  The hotel’s rooftop swimming pool was the best place in the world to air your head out after a nightmare like that, and even better because Robbie and Ivy were the only ones there. They swam out through a tunnel and emerged beneath the night sky in an emerald pool sliced with underwater scimitars of light. The surface steamed thickly, as if it were boiling and evaporating into space, and the sides of the pool were piled high with snow. Craning their necks, Robbie and Ivy could see the tops of Montreal’s skyscrapers illuminated, and the aerial beam atop Place Ville-Marie stirring up drifts in the refrigerated heavens. To the south, FARINE RED ROSES FLOUR blinked on and off in red neon, and that was the factory you drove past on your way to Kilborn and the Eastern Townships.

  “Later, I’ll read from my diary,” Ivy said to him, nose to his nose. She was panting as she paddled, blinking water from her eyelashes, her otter eyes all icy and dark
.

  Robbie now with the curious sensation of swimming with an erection, like a rudder below him. Rolling over, and his swimming trunks looked like a shark’s fin slicing the surface. He lay still in the mist and watched the stars twinkle above him. By narrowing his eyes to eclipse his peripheral vision, he could feel as if he were floating alone in ripply space, unravelling time, erasing memory, expanding in all directions at once, convulsing ecstatically.

  “I wonder what that calf’s last thoughts were,” he said, still feeling queasy.

  They swam back to the changing area and, shivering, hugged. He grasped Ivy’s wet rubber body and was seized with panic; this was all too beautiful, he feared, surely it couldn’t last. He held her tenderly, taking care not to squeeze her breasts too hard, or crush her thigh, lest her precious flesh be accelerated on its road to softening and decay. Desperately, he thought that if he held her gently like this, for as long as possible, maybe time would cease for them both. But then Ivy wriggled free.

  He changed and waited for her where they had hugged. After ten minutes he went back to the pool and asked the attendant if he had seen anyone. The attendant shrugged. Robbie went down the hall to the women’s locker room. No answer. He pushed the door open cautiously and peeked in. No one there. There was Ivy’s gym bag, there were her clothes and shoes, but there were no other signs, not even wet foot marks on the floor.

  He felt sick. Had she been kidnapped? Had she gone off with someone else? Downtown, for a straight fast fuck. She was capable of it, but in her swimsuit? Was it a game, then? Where could she be hiding? He went down to the hotel room, but she wasn’t there. He sat on the bed, and despondently watched TV. And Mom was on, of course. A rerun: about the way dry cleaners routinely pump masses of chloroethylenes into the atmosphere; the piece started off breezily – Paris runways, flashbulbs popping, Eurobeat music, women shopping and wearing the new styles – just to suck you in, but ended sneakily with a shot of a toxic cloud. Rain fell; women got drenched, their clothes went to the cleaners, and then Mom laid on the fact that these and other emissions contribute to the contaminated atmospheric sink, and may soon add up to cleaning bills no one can afford to pay.