Nights Below Station Street

by David Adams Richards

  This idea that it would not be proper fascinated Ralphie. What was supposedly proper and what wasn’t was a part of their make up more than any other sailors Ralphie had ever met.

  Adele said she did not like them ever since the 1972 hockey series. She saw how some of her friends – and some radio and television commentators – started to lose heart in the Canadian team, and even took to ridiculing it. At her young age, she did not understand that criticism of your own in Canada was often considered fashionable expertise. It was her and Joe’s favourite game – one which she still watched every Saturday night – she could never understand the criticisms that were levelled against it Adele told Ralphie that she had to stay in the bathroom throwing up during much of the games, and when the Canadians lost a game she would go about the house like a ghost refusing to eat, and prayed, her lips moving slowly: “Oh God – let Pete Mahovlich get a goal.”

  Nor could she read the reports in the paper about it, or listen to the radio – because, to her, so many of the reports seemed wrong. There was hardly a thing about September 1972 that she remembered, except that we played eight hockey games against the Russians, which we won – and she met Ralphie Pillar for the first time.

  For Adele who had always loved hockey, and especially the Montreal Canadiens, this 1972 series between the Canadians and the Russians, was the one spiritual happening she could think of. It might have seemed silly to a few, but the greater majority of Canadians thought like she did. And she felt betrayed by anyone who happened to downplay the event in any way. Especially when those who didn’t know what it signified downplayed it to show their level of expertise and fair play.

  Adele with her feet thrust back and her toes wiggling would make up names for Russian hockey players while Ralphie went around the apartment.

  “How about,” Adele would say, with her innocent complexion and a spot on her nose, “Alexi Snipmyweineroff. Or,” she would continue mischievously, “Symka Feelmyarseoff.” Then she would look at Ralphie through her eyelashes and grin. “As long as you are going to add ‘off,’ Ralphie, you can get a pretty good Russian name, like, ‘It’s Feelmearseoff who passes over to Snipmeweineroff, back to Blowmeholeoff.’” And with this, she would sit there, wiggling her toes.

  And after a suitable pause she would say: “Seaman Rotchercockoff.”

  Once Myhrra went to the ship alone. It was at night. There was oil on the water, and the wind was blowing heavily. She could smell tar, and her hair blew against the left side of her face. She went down to the ship using the old path, crossed the ditch with its ice, and the road. Some sharp snow hit her eyes and they watered. The ship’s lights cast a glow over the front streets of town.

  The ship was ready to go the next day and Terrisov was expecting her. But she felt uncomfortable. She had been to the ship for the last two weeks and now felt foolish. For some reason, she did not know there would be women and children on the ship – and Terrisov, once she got there, seemed indifferent toward her, and even indignant about something. Tonight, one woman kept looking at her, as if she assumed she knew all about her and Myhrra was guilty of something. Myhrra’s platinum blonde hair, which was wet and looked darker, and her large round earrings – which she had put on because she thought they made her look good – now felt ugly.

  One of the women wanted to protect Terrisov from her – probably she thought for his own good – and Terrisov, who might have once thought it was a great idea to have a woman come aboard, was now nervous. He showed her a picture of a small town outside of Leningrad, and talked about his wife who was studying engineering. Then he looked at Myhrra, and for some reason, with her dyed hair and blue slacks, which were carefully upturned at the cuffs, and the zipper of her pants, which seemed to protrude as if she had a paunch, she felt belittled. It had been a long time since she had felt this way. She sat on a chair in his room and looked at him, and smiled and looked about when he said anything. Two men came by, and they stood in the doorway, and she smiled, and they stood there for a few moments watching her. Then one man went, and another man came. He said something in Russian, and the first man grinned, and then their shoulders shrugged as Terrisov said something to them which sounded unpleasant.

  There was a chess game going on and Terrisov took her to watch it. She didn’t know anything about chess. The room was crowded with people, and when she turned about, the same woman who wanted to protect Terrisov from her was staring straight at her, and Myhrra became frightened. Once when Terrisov said something to her she laughed loudly and coarsely – but only because she laughed that way when she was nervous.

  Then they went back along the galleyway, passed some doors to Terrisov’s room, and she sat back down. His whole neck and face were red, and for some time he kept looking about, as if he didn’t want to put his eyes on her. Her whole dressing up and getting ready seemed terrible at this moment.

  It was all so different from how she thought it would be, and all so different than he himself had led himself to believe it would be.

  She lit a cigarette, which she held in the sort of affectation of sophistication she had learned from childhood until this moment, and she, too, began to talk. She spoke of her ex-husband Mike, and how she was sorry for him, and how he was getting married to this young girl – and how she was going to go to the girl and warn her all about Mike the next day. (Myhrra said she was going to do this although she knew in her heart she wasn’t) And she gossiped about her friends. She told him she couldn’t get anywhere in a town like this and the whole river was just as bad. Then with that affectation of sophistication that she had learned from childhood, she smiled, and butted her cigarette carefully.

  “Ah what a sad person you are,” Terrisov said, because, quite by chance, he realized as she spoke that he would have an opportunity to say this – and the line, for some dumb reason, stuck in his head. The little woman with the shiny black hair passed and looked at them just as Terrisov spoke, and it sounded as if he was lecturing her. Then Terrisov quite suddenly looked out the doorway and waved at her, joyously, as if to let her know he too understood some sort of reprimand toward Myhrra was needed.

  Joe got up at five every morning. He would look out the window, wonder what type of day it was going to be, smoke a cigarette, and then go downstairs and put on the kettle. Then he would go about town playing punch-boards and sit in the malls.

  Each day Joe would go downtown and see how people were doing. Then he would go to the unemployment office to see if there were any jobs. Then, on those days Rita was out, he would come back and do the housework, make lunch, and then go back downtown again. Sometimes he would stand about the corner listening to men talk, and then he would go up the hill once more, walk along the highway, and back to his house, where he would peel potatoes and wait for Adele.

  Adele would come into the house, look at a bit of dust on the table or a piece of bread with some gnaw marks in it left by Milly and look very sceptically at him. Then she would smile slightly and go up to her room, put on her Led Zeppelin album, and call Ralphie.

  Ralphie would show up, and help Joe and Milly find her skates. Every day Milly would lose her skates, and would have every pot and kettle and mitt and sock on the kitchen floor, looking for them. Then after they found her skates, away they would go to the skating rink.

  Joe would tie Milly’s skates, and lift her over the boards and watch her go. She would go like a dynamo around the rink three or four times on her ankles, yelling and screaming and falling down, and then they would head off home again.

  By the time they got home, Rita would have supper ready and Adele would have already disappeared downtown with Cindi. They would all have supper; Rita would get ready and go curling, which she had started to do this fall, and Joe would do the dishes and wait for Adele to come home. Usually he had a meeting at eight o’clock and Adele would make it in anywhere from ten to eight until ten after.

  She would come in and he would be able to tell immediately how she was faring with her new
friend. She would walk in without giving him a chance to speak and would say: “Well are you going to your meeting or not?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well go,” she would say. “Go to your funny meeting.”

  He would go to his meeting. Generally he sat along the left side of the hall at a table with two or three other men. Joe did not know why this simple meeting of forty or fifty men and women alcoholics would keep him from drinking for another day. He only knew it to be true.

  There were some people there, however, whom Joe did not like, and could only try to like. A very few who had gotten sober talked about having money now. When they spoke Joe would often fidget or look about discontentedly. But he found out that the other men and women put up with them and didn’t seem to mind, so he should not mind either.

  At first one of these men, Henry, had promised Joe a job. Now, though, he had seemed to have forgotten all about it. Every time he saw Joe, Henry smiled and patted him on the back and asked him how he was doing and Joe would nod. “That’s good, that’s good – you come to the round up this month and bring your wife,” the man would say.

  Henry wore a toupee, and since it was ill-fitting, it made his forehead look unusually wide and the top of his head looked like it had two different types of hair. The man was completely unconcerned that this made him look funny, and didn’t care if it made him look better or worse. When he walked in front of you, the first thing you looked at was the top of his head.

  He would always be laughing, his toupee just off centre, which, because it was off centre, suddenly made you notice his false teeth. He had not had a drink in five years. He had no stomach because he had drunk it away. He had almost bled to death twice. He had taken fifteen thousand dollars to the bank for his accounting company, and then had drawn out the whole thing and gone away with his girlfriend. Then he had come home, run the car off the road, and had scalped himself. It was the last drunk he had been on.

  Now, sitting here in this room, with its smell of smoke, he kept telling Joe that he was content that he had gone through all of this.

  “What do you mean?” Joe would ask hesitantly.

  “You don’t stutter in here as much as you do outside,” the man would say, patting Joe on the back and laughing loudly.

  Joe, at first, was furious with this. Why would anyone say those things to him. His initial reaction was that he had made a mistake, that this sobriety business was foolish, and he would have nothing to do with it. He would go out and get drunk. But something kept making him come back.

  He also found that there were men who had drunk far more than he did, who were much tougher, who had lost much more, and now not only did not drink anymore but looked at everyone in simple kindness.

  But Henry took a special interest in him. In fact he never left him alone, and Joe got used to him being there. This was the man who bothered Joe, and whom Joe disliked, and yet it was to this man Joe wanted to prove more than anyone else that he could stop drinking.

  Every time Joe thought of taking a drink that first little while, he thought of that man with the brown toupee, and he would say: “If he can stay sober, so can I.”

  After a while, Ruby and Janet tired of Adele and stopped going to the apartment. Adele would meet them on the street.

  “Hey girls – there’s beer at Ralphie’s,” she would say. “He bought it for you.”

  She would try to say it in exactly the same way that two months ago would have them all hugging her and walking arm in arm with her (hugging was very important amongst these girls). However it didn’t matter now how she said it.

  “Well, Delly, we have things to do,” Janet would say.

  “My name’s not Delly, it’s Adele,” she would whisper, though she was suddenly frightened of them. They all laughed as if this had always been the joke – and this was the one irreverent joke that they had always held dear and one that she knew nothing about. Even little Cindi, who was always taking fits, and whose mouth was too wide, and whose father tried to get in her pants, laughed with her faint eyelashes closed, catching the snow on them.

  Janet, who talked in a sort of whispering shriek and who always wore a pleated skirt, with nylons, and a birthmark on her knee, her ears sticking out from her combed hair like two half-moons, said: “Oh why don’t you tell us some stories about your sick father and family.”

  “I don’t have a sick father and family,” Adele said. Her mouth was a pencil line. “I have a good family.”

  “Not the way you talk,” Ruby said, as if this again was the major point in everything that had passed between them these last two months, even though these stories were told with the idea that she was becoming part of the group when she told them, and was doing everything everyone else did.

  “Cindi,” Adele said, blinking under her knitted hat while snow fell upon it in the dark.

  “Don’t Cindi her,” Ruby said. “Ya always made fun of her as being a fit-taker.”

  “I – I never did,” Adele said.

  Cindi suddenly looked reflective because she was being talked about. “An epileptic,” she whispered.

  Ruby smiled, her teeth white in the cold air outside the store. More than Janet, she had always unnerved Adele because Adele was in love with her and everything she did.

  They looked at her – they were all standing near Zellers and people were coming and going through the doors – old men were walking by, and ladies in snow boots, with their perfume smelling of wet fall snow. Across the street Myhrra was looking out the beauty shop window at them, her nose pressed into the pane. Adele was sweating under her arms, as always whenever she got nervous, and yet the cold blew on her face and made her dizzy. There was a smell of lights and fish and chips.

  “You’ve said too much already,” Ruby said. “About us – god knows what you said about us – called us a bunch a whores and said we screw boys and talked behind our backs and everything else –”

  Cindi sighed and looked about. On her back was a great big peace sign, printed with red magic marker, and she had drawn two of them on her knees as well, so when she walked the first thing you saw coming towards you was two peace signs.

  After a moment they turned and walked away, leaving Adele standing there.

  It was just about this time that Ralphie’s sister came back home. Her name was Vera. She was about twenty-five. It was 1973 and Ralphie had not seen her in four years.

  Vera was tall and thin, and she wore a pair of granny glasses with golden frames and big long flowery dresses. Vera often came into the apartment and sat down on the beanbag chair they had in the corner, listening to a conversation. After the conversation went on for a certain amount of time she would get up and leave, walking away in silence with her boyfriend Nevin, age thirty-two, following her, wearing his flowered shirt, medallion, and bell-bottom pants.

  Vera would stare at Adele, and after a while Adele, without knowing that she was doing it, found herself sitting exactly the same way as Vera, and speaking in the same tone of voice, although Vera had affected a sort of British accent from a year at Oxford that Adele could not muster.

  As a little girl Vera had read all of Jane Austin. She began writing poems, and they had a poetry group at noon hour in the school. She was interested in all kinds of things. (Nevin hadn’t read anything but because he grew a beard everyone assumed he had) Vera always seemed to be alone. Ralphie would watch her coming up the lane, as a schoolgirl carrying her books in her arms, with her big round glasses fogged up and snow falling on her hair. Because she always ate oranges the boys used to call her sucker. And she was always looking for new friends. And there was a great deal of silence about her. Once she had a pen pal, but then after a while the letters stopped coming. Vera would walk down to the post office to make sure there was not some mistake, but finally after about ten months realized that she wasn’t going to get a letter again.

  She stayed at home. She never went out anywhere. Sometimes her father would get angry with her and tease her
about being a stick in the mud. He would walk by her and shout out “Stick in the muck,” and she would be stubborn enough to stay in days at a time because of this. For a while, because Ralphie was doing science projects, she gave up writing poetry and began to study biology. Then she would come home and talk about reproduction – which embarrassed Thelma. Then Vera became very clinically minded about reproduction. It was reproduction this, and reproduction that. She had a Bristol board where she put United Nations speeches. And she wrote an essay on selling wheat to China, which won a prize. She thought for a while she was going to go to the United Nations, but she never got to go. Ralphie at that time, and still, had a tremendous affection for her – they once built a fort in the gully together – but at the same time he felt she would not or could not be close to him.

  “I’m not like I used to be, am I, Ralph?” she sometimes asked, while she sat in his apartment.

  “No,” Ralphie would say, scratching his ears and blushing.

  “Why are you blushing then?”

  “I’m not.”

  “I suppose you are the same old person you always were, Ralphie.” She would look at him over the top of her glasses and smile so quickly, and then frown right after it, that Ralphie was never sure whether he’d seen a smile or not.