Dreaming Sally

by James Fitzgerald

Well, anyhow, I got sidetracked about what I bought. I got this other neat dress. It’s navy blue with a white rim around the sides and hem. It’s sleeveless and has a zipper right up the front. I step into it like a coat and zip zip zip. Well, I got it with the idea that I could wear it as a sundress but to my horror (you’ll love it and me too), I found the fly started right at the bottom of my crotch. From the crotch down is open space. So I have to settle for wearing it as a bathing suit cover up. But maybe for you I’ll wear it as a dress. We’ll see. You can tell what you think, OK, love?

  Well, it was really sad leaving Florence. I thought it was a great place and I’d really love to go back but only with you. So we left Florence and went to Venice. While I think of it, here is Willy’s address. I’ll be there Aug. 16–20.

  Miss Willy Tijs

  BURGEMEESTER VAN DE MORTELPLEIN 70 TILBURG (N. Br.) THE NETHERLANDS

  Sorry about the sidetrack again but I just remembered that you wanted it. Venice was quite a weird city. Venice proper was a nice place to visit but I sure wouldn’t want to live there. I got kicked out of my first church there, St. Mark’s. They said my dress was too short and I had on a long one. Oh well, I didn’t want to see any damn church anyhow. It was really weird to go driving down the canals in a boat and look around and see the houses with their back door facing the sewage water. Could you imagine saying: “Hey, Mum, can I borrow the boat tonight? I want to take Sally out.” I tell you personally I wouldn’t like that set-up.

  But the Lido where we were staying was really kinda neat. It was a little island, but a beautiful island. All tourists. The beach was beautiful but the sand was kind of dirty. In Venice I bought a really cute bikini, it’s kinda coral pink and lime green. It sounds awful but it’s really cool. The top is about normal size but the bottom is a small as I can get it. It just covers me and I mean just. Also it doesn’t bag in the bum like my pink one does so I think you’ll like it: oh yeah. It has a bow right in the middle of my crotch. The bow sticks out and it’s very conspicuous. But it’s cute. And I’ll even let you pluck my bow cuz I love you. I also bought a gondola T-shirt. It’s really groovy. I should have got you one but I forgot. Sorry. So Venice was nice but I really didn’t mind leaving. Then we had one night in Milan.

  We stayed in the poshest hotel in Milan. It was like the Ritz, no kidding. Everyone had a bathtub. My tub was so big that when I stretched out my toes wouldn’t reach the other end. But was it ever nice to lie back and relax. We went to the zoo there. It was really neat, much better than the Toronto zoo. It had giraffes, kangaroos, polar bears, penguins and all kinds of great animals. I also got kicked out of another church but I didn’t want to see it anyhow. So we left Milan and drove to Nice. What a drive, an all dayer. It was beautiful up on top of the cliffs but the roads were so windy. By the end of the trip which was about eight hours I really felt sick.

  I just got back from the beach and guess what, I’m going brown. But we rented gondola kinda surfboards and I was out on them for about two hours and I got burned in my back and damn it I’ve got strap marks on my back. My chest is getting really brown and my boobs are even getting brown. I’ll probably be all faded by the end of the summer, damn, but I think it looks nice.

  Anyhow we are now in Nice. It’s very nice but very touristy. It’s kinda neat though because you can walk around in grubs. Well, yesterday I went to the beach but only for one and a half hours cuz I didn’t want to get burned. It was really blowy and rough. The waves were four to five feet high. Great to swim in. I think it was the first time I’d been swimming since the day before I left and I was swimming at your house. I didn’t think any other place was worth swimming in but this place was out of this world. The beach was rocky and all that but it was nice. Nice in Nice—get it?

  So I left the beach early with a couple of other girls and we came back to the hotel, showered, cleaned up and took off bikini shopping and guess what I bought—not one but two. One for me and one for Gerrie. I’ve learned over here that you either get a small bottom and big top or vice versa. The small bottoms are really small, so small that it covered half of me. So forget me in the small bottom. The small tops are not exactly what I thought the small top would be. It’s quite like the half bra that you bought me, as low as the U goes in the bra.

  Well, anyhow, the bathing suit I got for me is light green flowers on a cream-coloured base. There is a tie kinda bow but not a real bow in between the boobs and there is one at each side of the bottom. The bows are shocking pink. It’s really cute and the girls say it looks OK on me. Gerrie’s bathing suit is basically orange, yellow and green. Tell her the top fits me almost perfectly like I could get away with it if I had to and the bottom is about one size too big for me. It is not too, too small. The top is fairly low and the bottom covers everything that has to be covered and that’s it. So that’s what I did yesterday.

  Today I went to the beach for about three hours. It was quite flat (the water I mean) and very, very hot. The beach just fascinates me. People make out, people get changed, people do every damn thing imaginable. I really like this Riviera, super gorgeous. This is another place I’d like to come back to but only if you came too. So that’s what I’ve done for the last week or so since I wrote you.

  I’m sorry I haven’t been writing very much but it’s so hard to find time. I’ve only written my parents two postcards and one letter. I have to write them a letter as soon as I finish this. However I did send them a telegram. The same time as I sent you one, so at least they know I am still alive.

  Hope all is well, and Spotz survived her plumbing excursion to the vet’s. Give my love to your parents and Mike and I guess even to Passionflower if she’s still around.

  Take care of yourself, hon. I miss you but I’m being very good. Nobody has touched me yet and nobody is going to except you when I get home. So don’t forget, think horny cuz I will be. I’ll write you again when I can. And remember that I love you and I’m very happy that we are almost officially engaged.

  Love always, Sal XXOO

  On the envelope: I.M.Y.A.L.Y.A.W.Y.A.N.Y. Use your imagination and you can figure this one out.

  TEN

  Sleeping Together

  I didn’t know what I did to deserve it, but here I was, the only guy in an all-girl bus—Sally, Jane, Kat, Nikki, Barb and Tammy at the wheel. I plunked myself smack dab in the middle seat in the middle row, a girl on either side, two in front, two behind. I was a willing captive in a day-long chatterbox on wheels. Magic bus. Seventh heaven.

  I flashed an English flick I’d seen only months ago, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, in which a seventeen-year-old named Jamie struggled to lose his virginity in the dawning era of free love, yet another celluloid-dream made just for me. In the opening scene, Jamie was riding his bike and musing aloud: “I have a problem, Doctor. If the bus were to go on forever, full of birds and me the only bloke, what order would I have them in?”

  We sang songs and slapped around every subject under the sunroof. I felt sunny and funny beyond words: in my next life, I was going to an all-girls school. We made frequent, dallying pit stops, stuffing coins in a jukebox, winging snowballs at each other in the July heat. When we stalled on a steep mountain pass just past the Austrian border, a flock of angel-winged American youth poured out of a tour bus ten times our size and pushed us to the side of the road.

  Dusk was falling as we dawdled into Innsbruck, tucked in an alpine valley. In the Hotel Maria Theresia, Sally and I scarfed down a schnitzel as our bodies hummed with sensuous fatigue. When Nick prepped us for a full morning hike up a mountain trail—“Piece of cake, but bring your sweaters, it might be cold”—I failed to detect a set-up.

  Innsbruck hosted the 1964 Winter Olympics, so Will, Sean, Dave and Steve turned the climb into a race for gold. My hard-won anticompetitive streak was hitting an all-time high, so I hung back with the girls. “Because it’s there” cut no ice with me. As the Tyrolean freshness surrendered to a furnace heat, I inched up the last aching m
ile, sweater knotted round my waist, dehydrated by the four-hour trek. As we lolled on the summit, flies orbiting our sweating heads, I guzzled three Cokes in succession. “Young ladies do not sweat,” Barb insisted. “They glisten.” We were visually rewarded by the panoramic quilt of inns and towers, castles and parks, but I was still cursing Nick the Trickster and his fake promise of cake.

  Ferreting out a nightclub with a killer English rock band, all leather and smoke and hair and electricity, Sally and I plumbed fresh reserves of energy, sinking into another dance-trance. When they ripped into “The Letter,” she yelled, “That’s my song!” We shut the place down. By the stroke of three, trying not to disturb the unconscious John in the opposite bed, I wobbled my pen over the pages of my diary: “Best night ever with S.”

  * * *

  —

  On the morning of August 1, we headed to Salzburg, the capital of Austria, fatherland of Hitler, Mozart and Freud. The air was cooler, the skies greyer. Why did every country have a different set of clouds?

  Nick’s bus was a buzzing seminar on sports and war, the pendulum swinging away from Tammy’s singsong girly bus. Passing close to the German border and the Bavarian alps, I spotted a signpost to Berchtesgaden, the home of Hitler’s infamous Eagle’s Nest. A World War II buff, I pulled up from my mental archive the colour films shot by the brainless Eva Braun of her beloved führer playing with a German shepherd and his equally obedient, happy gang of mass murderers.

  I asked Nick if we could bend our itinerary for a quick reconnoitre, but he shot down the idea.

  “Come on, a non-smoking, vegetarian teetotaller who loved kids and dogs can’t be all bad,” I said.

  Explosive laughter. Direct hit.

  In the Hotel Goldener Löwe, we celebrated John’s nineteenth birthday. No one had ever seen him smashed—I think he saw the rest of us, quite rightly, as less than mature—so we enjoyed chalking up a convert to our religion. Wally told me that John earned his flying licence before his driver’s licence and he was dreaming of renting a plane and flying over the fjords. He was technically qualified to drive one of the buses, but Nick felt he was not ready.

  A bunch of us walked up to a castle and later settled into a bar. The trip was now a month old, halfway gone, and some of the girls were openly pining for their boyfriends back home. Sally fell quiet and I felt our connection die like a pulled plug. She seemed pissed off for no visible reason and abruptly left. She was not one for making scenes, but this qualified. Was it something I said? Or didn’t say?

  I was sharing with Steve, and a landslide of bodies elected our room as Party Headquarters. When the hotel manager gave us grief for the racket, we scattered into smaller groups. Nikki stayed behind, flirting with Steve. He countered with a dare of his own: come across, or get lost. Growing impatient, Steve finally turned to me: “Fitz, I’ll give you 10 pfennigs if you toss Nikki out of here.”

  Obedient as a Hitler Youth, I scooped up Nikki like a silk purse. She meekly thrashed her arms and legs, pretending to resist, or so I thought, and as I deposited her in the hallway, the pfennig dropped. First Sally, now Nikki. Was the honeymoon finally over?

  At breakfast, Nikki slapped Steve in the face. It was official: she still liked him.

  Despite the steady rainfall, we headed off to the seven-thousand-year-old Hallein salt mines, first operated by Celtic tribes. But the lineup was crazy long so we drove around in circles until we were stopped dead in a traffic jam. Jumping in and out of the buses, we slapped barefoot along the autobahn in the downpour, playing Chinese Fire Drill. Forks of lightning skewered all hope of touring a Baroque church, so we holed up in the hotel for the duration. A hard rain kept falling, a vertical river of gushing and pounding, an exhilarating natural rush such as I’d never known. I saw no sign of Sally—we had been inseparable since day one—and buzzing with a full-body agitation not entirely my own, I ripped off my shirt and dashed into an open courtyard to join a half-clad Tammy in a tribal dance. At each applauding thunderclap, we cut loose with banshee screams.

  When the girls decided to throw a hen party, barring the boys, I realized we were being punished for Nikki’s humiliation. Stripping down to their bras and panties, the girls spent all afternoon tossing back rum and Cokes and slabs of apple strudel—Trojan women withholding the sex that they had yet to dish, at least to me. At dinner, when Margi fell off her chair not once but twice, Nick threatened to send us home. As threats went, we knew this one was idle.

  After a full-day boycott, Sally casually spoiled my breakfast with too much information: several of the Rainy Day Women had overdosed on crème de menthe, with catastrophic slime-green results. Our twenty-hour stretch of cabin fever had turned our rooms into wall-to-wall dumpsters: empty bottles, cigarette butts, burned carpets, ripped pillows, stained eiderdowns, hairballs, peanut shells, dirty underwear. A hard day’s night.

  On the autobahn to Vienna, I finally scored the front seat as navigator. Not that I was paying attention: we ran out of gas, and Nick had to come to the rescue. The Hotel Central was a shabby, one-star dive of rock-hard mattresses, bedbugs and one can per floor; worse, the girls were stashed in another wing. I was no complainer, but five nights there seemed cruel and unusual punishment.

  Breaking into small groups, we wandered the cool, overcast city randomly seeking the sights. The facades of stone and wrought iron conjured the Great War and silent film images of our grandfathers, and I wanted to surrender to a dead sleep on the pavement, laid low by High Culture. I knew Vienna was a city of avatars: here the secret of the dream was revealed to Freud; here a young Hitler trod the pavements as a tramp, dreaming of revenge. But the place made me feel as if I had been consigned to a boxcar chain of bleak, rainy, agnostic Sunday afternoons, past and future, sandbagged by mounds of incomprehensible math homework. Arrogance, rigidity, repression, repetition, suffocation, stultification. I heard the melancholic melodies of my grandmother’s classical grand piano, the soundtrack of a dead-as-dust marriage; I saw my mother’s stymied stab at Jazz Age rebellion; I saw the next victim in line, and he looked too much like me.

  Something good followed something bad: after dinner, we drove the buses to the Prater, Europe’s oldest amusement park. Sally had thawed, and we ran wild like kids at the Ex in Toronto. The sixty-five-metre-high Ferris wheel is an 1890s beauty, one of the world’s oldest, taller than Niagara Falls, a luminescent O revolving in the night sky. Even with its secure enclosed gondolas, I was not brave enough to test my fear of heights, so we hit the go-cart track, spinning dozens of laps past midnight.

  I followed Sally over to the far wing of the hotel, emanating the forbidden aura of a girls’ boarding school dorm. Under a clothesline of drying bras and undies, Marywinn was asleep, or pretending to be, and as I squeezed beside Sal on her narrow single bed, it finally dawned on me why Nick rarely entrusted us with single rooms. Night after night, I’d been staying just a little bit longer, hour by hour, 2 a.m., 3 a.m., 4 a.m., 5 a.m., and here I was again, freely associating with Sally, the tops of our heads touching like jumper cables. Be on my side, I’ll be on your side.

  Sally was asleep. Or was she? Roving the map of her head, I connected the ski-hill contours of her brow and nose, ear and temple, cheek and chin, the strands of hair brushing the eyelids, the pores of the skin, as rhythmic breaths escaped the upturned lip. A delicate charge came in simply lying still by her side, watching, wondering, waiting, wishing. Sometimes poetry was found in the doing of nothing; even if I lost, I won.

  I fell asleep, then awoke with a start, the grey light of dawn inching across our blanket, delivering that desolate, where-the-hell-am-I feeling. I dreaded early mornings as fiercely as Count Dracula: night-life birthing morning-death. Shock jolted my system: my God, it was seven o’clock. If Nick doesn’t kill me, George Orr will.

  Sally was dead to the world, so I weaved over to Jane’s room where Sean was sacked out beside her: partners in crime. Sean and I took a long walk, stalked by a headaching ennui. Did we peak at
the picnic in the French alps? Then, at dinner, the all-knowing Nick lost his cool for the first time.

  “You and Sean left the door of your room open all night. You disturbed the other guests. You slept with the girls. I’ve given you guys lots of leeway but you’ve let me down. Enough is enough and tonight you’re grounded. If you act like kids, I’ll treat you like kids. If you act like adults, I’ll treat you like adults.”

  I had no comeback. I was suffering from esprit de l’escalier—what I wish I’d said as I headed up the staircase to bed: Yes, Nick, but don’t adults sleep together?

  * * *

  —

  Two days earlier, Peter, Stanfield, Kat and Kathy had scored some visas and crossed over the Iron Curtain by train for a day and night in Budapest. A part of me hadn’t expected to see them again, but now they were back, unraped and unmurdered, braver—or dumber—than me.

  Passing through a militarized zone into Hungary, they saw soldiers in towers with dogs and machine guns, right out of the movies. The four of them floated romantic notions of sleeping in a park but stayed in a cheap hotel and signed up for a tour of Buda and Pest. Soviet tanks were massed on the Danube like a car show, poised to invade Czechoslovakia and crush the protesters of the Prague Spring. Bullet holes in the buildings from the 1956 Revolution. Big red stars. Nothing working right. On the train out, they were unnerved by the psychodrama of border guards harassing a young Hungarian woman whose papers were not in order. Barking dogs, pointed guns, screaming blue murder in her face.

  I realized I was cowardly-glad to have stayed where I was: with Sally in an August nightclub, killing two bottles of Henkell Trocken between us, awash in a carnal maze of strobe-streaked smoke and sweat, the personal trumping the political. Even as I was scaling fresh peaks of Sally-joy—let’s never go home!—we turned to see Margi dancing alone beside us, a third wheel, her round face a riot of tearful desolation. We pulled her off the floor and talked her down. She was homesick.