Home from the Vinyl Cafe

by Stuart McLean

  In the middle of September, the cast of The Seagull moved from the rehearsal space across the street into the theater. An outline of the set had been marked off on the black stage floor with masking tape. Without flats, and with all the curtains raised, the stage looked like an empty aircraft hangar. You could see the dirty brick wall at the back of the building and the iron stairs leading to the catwalks. Standing alone on the stage, Morley was struck, as she always was, by the space above her. The black bars holding the rows of lights seemed impossibly high.

  Thursday afternoon was a technical run-through. Anna Lindquist arrived carrying a large mirror. She played the entire first act holding the mirror no more than six inches from her face. Her eyes never left the mirror.

  No one said a thing. Not even Martin Tidmarsh, who was playing her young lover. He leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek, pushing his lips around the mirror as if she always carried it, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

  This was how crazy she had made them.

  Ralph, the director, knew what she was doing. She was checking the lighting.

  “She has approval of the lighting,” Ralph said to Morley when she slipped into the theater to see how things were going. “If she complains, I think Gordon is going to quit.”

  They were sitting in the middle of the empty theater. Ralph had his feet jammed against the row of seats in front of them. Morley was holding a large green binder.

  “Why,” said Morley five minutes later, “is she facing that way? If she’s talking to Martin, shouldn’t she be facing him?”

  Anna Lindquist had her back to the entire cast. Everyone else was stage left except Anna, who was delivering a passionate soliloquy, to stage right.

  “This way,” said Ralph, “her left profile is facing the audience.”

  “She said my lights make her look old and crumpy,” said Gordon to Morley an hour later. “We don’t have to take this, you know.”

  Morley was sitting in her office working on the first draft of the next season’s budget. “Come in, Ralph,” she said, flipping off her computer. “I was just going to get a coffee. Do you want one?” She could work on the budget at home.

  Thursday night at nine, Morley went upstairs, announcing she was going to take a bath and go to bed early. As she passed Stephanie’s room, she stopped and said, “Have you hugged your mother today?”

  Stephanie rolled her eyes and got up from her bed and leaned her arm around Morley’s shoulders and then slouched back into her room.

  Dave was downstairs helping Sam with math homework when Morley screamed.

  Dave said, “Stay here,” and ran up the stairs. Two at a time.

  Morley was standing in the bathroom. She had her bathrobe on.

  “It’s happening again,” she said. “There are more toothbrushes in this bathroom than there are people in this house.”

  She assembled everyone and lined up the toothbrushes. “Where did this purple toothbrush come from?” she asked.

  Nobody would look at her.

  Friday, Dave phoned Morley at lunch.

  “I think I’ve solved the toothbrush mystery,” he said. “I think that during the day, when the house is empty, there are people coming into our house to brush their teeth.”

  Morley said, “This isn’t a joke, Dave.”

  On Tuesday morning, Ralph came into Morley’s office. He sat down beside her desk. When he began to speak, it was with uncharacteristic intensity.

  He said, “She refuses to hold hands during curtain call.”

  It struck Morley that Ralph didn’t look well.

  “I am not going to tell you what she says about Martin,” he said. “I am going to tell you this instead. If you don’t get her to hold Martin’s hand during curtain call, then I’m leaving and I am never coming back.”

  He stood up carefully. Morley noticed that the act of standing required more thought on his part than usual. He pushed the chair deliberately behind him. He turned at the door. “One more thing,” he said.

  His deliberate calmness was starting to worry Morley.

  “You tell her that if she slaps Melissa for real in Act Two, I am going to press charges. No more of this ‘heat of the moment’ crap. And I don’t care if she needs time off to be Rolfed. There is a rehearsal tomorrow morning, and if she can’t make it, we’ll get Joanna to play the part. And if Joanna plays tomorrow morning, Joanna opens tomorrow night.”

  Anna Lindquist opened Wednesday night. Gordon was on the lights; Ralph was in a seat at the back beside Morley.

  The next morning all three papers weighed in favorably, two with raves. The play was a success. The mood at the theater was buoyant.

  Friday morning, Morley decided to stay at home. The house looked like it needed bulldozing.

  Morley had been so preoccupied with the theater and Anna Lindquist that she hadn’t noticed how bad the house was.

  When everyone was finally off to work and school, she wandered into Sam’s room. There were dirty clothes everywhere. She felt a heaviness descend upon her as she bent over to pick up a blue sweatshirt.

  By eleven o’clock she had done seven loads of wash.

  One more, she thought, and maybe I’ll have time for a load of my things.

  She was doing fine, thought she had broken the back of the laundry, until something made her look behind Stephanie’s door. She found another pile of dirty clothes.

  The relentlessness of the task overwhelmed her.

  She could wash everything she could get her hands on, she could clean everything in the house, and no one would ever notice, no one would thank her. They would just put on the clothes and get them dirty again.

  The washing machine, open beside her, seemed to understand what it was doing. It seemed to be saying, “I’m a bottomless pit. You’ll never be done with me.”

  Morley started to cry. And then she started to struggle out of her shirt.

  “Take this,” she said, throwing it in the black hole at the top of the washer.

  “Have more,” she said, pulling off her jeans.

  She was really crying now, pulling off her socks. “Have it all,” she said.

  At that precise moment Dave walked in the back door.

  Morley quickly wiped the tears from her face and turned slightly as Dave walked into the kitchen to find his wife standing there with no clothes on.

  He had read about things like this.

  A goofy, lopsided grin spread across his face.

  He winked at his wife.

  He started to unbutton his own shirt.

  There are small moments of misunderstanding in a marriage that can be cleared up with a simple apology. There are other moments that require elaborate explanations and fast talking. And there are moments when neither an apology nor an explanation will do.

  These moments require time and patience and great faith for the air to clear. Sometimes they require even more.

  Morley had to get up at five-thirty the following Friday morning to take the limousine to the airport with Anna Lindquist, on their way to L.A. for Emma Thompson’s birthday party.

  “I left a note,” Morley said to Dave as she got out of bed, “by the phone. The meals are all written out. They’re all in the freezer.”

  Dave read her note an hour after she left. He was standing in the kitchen in his pajamas, squinting at the paper, waiting for the coffee to brew.

  Friday night, he read, lasagna and salad.

  Saturday, lasagna and salad.

  Sunday, lasagna and salad.

  I’ll be home at noon on Monday.

  We’ll go out for Chinese.

  When Morley got home, they went out for Chinese food. She told them all about the impossibilities of traveling with Anna Lindquist. And about Los Angeles and the birthday dinner. She sat beside Candice Bergen. Opposite Ron Howard. She barely said a word all night.

  “Those people,” she said, “they don’t know a thing about laundry or kids or running a house.”
/>   She seemed happy to be back.

  “They’ve all had face-lifts and tucks. You know what they served for dinner? Sunflower pilaf with guava relish.”

  She laughed with delight as she said it, and reached for another spring roll.

  School Days

  September is the most beguiling of the months. It is the month that won’t let go of summer, and it is the month that calls from the crow’s nest of the year and announces, in the thinning air and morning dew, that summer is gone and autumn is already here. One day September will lull you into believing that you should assemble your things and mount a picnic on a Saturday afternoon—September is made for Saturdays. But when Saturday comes, you spend the morning fumbling around in the attic, looking for sweaters, because it is raining and cold. You look at the picnic supplies you gathered and wonder how you could have been so misguided.

  September is a month for plans and a month for no plans. The month of full shelves and empty fields. A time for leave-taking and taking stock. It is the end of summer and the beginning of all that is to come. It is the month that Morley still uses to mark the progress of the years.

  This September, Morley had to be at work early every morning. An American production house was using the theater to shoot scenes for a made-for-television movie. The agreement was that they would move in every night at midnight, wrap by eight, and be struck and gone by ten in the morning. On their first Wednesday, no one from the theater was there at eight to lean on the director, and the last lights weren’t packed away until after eleven-thirty, and they almost didn’t have the theater ready for a matinee of The Seagull.

  Morley didn’t mind coming in early. She liked the texture of morning—the color of the light, the peaceful feeling of moving around the house while everyone was asleep. She bought a pastry on her way in, a chocolate croissant. When she got to the theater she brewed tea, walked around to let everyone know she was there, then went to her office and got a start on the day.

  Although she enjoyed these early mornings, it meant she missed, for the first time ever, the kids’ first giddy days of school. Dave was looking after things at home. It would have broken Morley’s heart to see her husband and son walking along the sidewalk every morning, hand in hand. Though she might have felt a pang of jealousy for the lost intimacy of this early-morning ritual that had always been hers, if she could have seen them walking along together, she would have also thought, I should have done this years ago. Sent them off together. Her son’s canvas backpack. Her husband’s leather briefcase.

  The morning walks caught Dave by surprise. On Tuesday night he told Morley that walking to the school yard with his boy was like walking through a house of mirrors. You bump up against reflections of your past in the most unexpected places. You are hurrying your child to school, and you turn a corner and look across the street and see a seven-year-old version of yourself standing on the opposite corner.

  Dave grew up in the town of Big Narrows in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada, third planet from the sun, the Milky Way, the universe, et cetera.

  This September the kids in Big Narrows were picked up at their doors and bused to what Dave still thinks of as the new school—only twenty-five years old and under forty miles out of town. When Dave was a boy, he went to school in town, to the Big Narrows Elementary School on High Street. Which was not only, worse luck, the same school his sister attended, but also the school where his own mother—in one of the greatest treacheries that can be perpetrated on a child—worked as one of four teachers.

  Dave had to walk the best part of a mile to get to school, and he can’t remember ever walking with his mother, not once, even though for seven years they left the house at the same time and were heading for the same place. Dave had his own route, and his mother afforded him this independence. It took him down dirt lanes, through vacant lots, and along residential streets. It was a route carefully designed to pass the Pattersons’ woodshed, where kids would gather every morning to talk and scuffle and sometimes smoke, if someone had cigarettes.

  Because Dave was Margaret MacNeal’s son, every year, on the first day of school, he would have to endure what every other kid in the Big Narrows Elementary School still remembers and cherishes as Miss MacNeal’s greatest moment. Because every year on the first day of school, the entire student body—all sixty of them—was assembled in the basement lunchroom and Dave’s mother climbed onto one of the six picnic tables they kept down there, and to the great amazement of the kids in kindergarten who had never seen this before, and to everyone else’s delight, Miss MacNeal would burp the alphabet from A to Z.

  Many of the kids in kindergarten actually stopped breathing when they witnessed this extraordinary feat. Their mothers had told them many things about school, but they hadn’t told them about this wonderful woman. Some of them were away from their mothers for the first time ever. They would stand with their mouths hanging open and think, The world is so immense, and I have so much to learn. It was a performance that would damage live theater for many of them. “It was good,” they would say many years later of a play they had just watched—but, they would think, not as good as the morning in September when Miss MacNeal burped the alphabet. Even Nora MacDonald, who as an adult went on to play in the woodwind section of Symphony Nova Scotia, had more than once stood squinting into the audience after a concert, bowing, thinking how much better the concert would have been if Miss MacNeal could have been there. It was true art.

  Every September, after she was finished, and before everyone was sent to their classrooms for the first morning of school—sent up to find their seats, to get their readers and workbooks and pencils, and to contemplate the year stretched ahead of them as fresh and full of possibility as a field of snow—every year before they went upstairs to do these things, Dave’s mother would demonstrate how to burp the alphabet the way she did. They would try it in unison, the entire school together.

  Most kids never got past C, although not for want of practice. It didn’t in fact seem to be a matter of practice; it seemed to be more of a gift that would appear every few years, usually in some grade-one kid with a skinny neck and a large Adam’s apple who could do it just like that, as if there were nothing to it.

  If you were in kindergarten at Big Narrows Elementary, you didn’t see Miss MacNeal again for five years, until you got to grade five, and then you had her for three years straight: grades five, six, and seven. And for three years you got to take part in the other ritual she is remembered for—the morning challenge. Every morning, before anyone was allowed in her classroom, Miss MacNeal wrote the morning challenge on the blackboard. When the bell rang, she expected her students to take their seats and work quietly on the quiz. Everyone did, because everyone knew that whoever scored best on the quiz would be let out of class fifteen minutes early at lunch to ride his or her bike into town and buy Miss MacNeal a package of cigarettes. They got to spend the seven cents’ change on penny candy. It was a ritual that made children so happy that even parents who didn’t approve of smoking didn’t think to question it.

  Dave never got to do this, even on the six mornings when he scored highest on the quiz. His mother did not want to appear to be favoring her son, so on those six occasions when she could have legitimately sent him, she sent the child who had come in second. Dave was once, however, allowed this—the exquisite joy of drifting along Main Street when every other kid in town old enough to have a two-wheeler was still in class—when the principal, Mr. Ormiston, sent him to the hardware store to pick up a hunting rifle he had ordered.

  “We were so free,” said Dave to Morley one night. “Nothing was organized. There was a creek behind the school. We spent hours catching frogs. God, that was fun.”

  “All I remember,” said Morley, “is pain. Pain and humiliation.”

  On her first day of kindergarten, Morley was told to lie down on a piece of long brown paper while the teacher traced her outline with a thick black pencil. Then Morley was given a box of crayons and
told to color the life-size outline. Morley started with the eyes. She put the first eye smack in the center of her forehead. She knew it was the kind of mistake you couldn’t come back from, and she asked for another piece of brown paper. But no matter how hard she tried to explain about the eye in the middle of her forehead, her teacher wouldn’t let her make a fresh start.

  Instead of turning the paper over and starting again, Morley sat on her spot on the floor and refused to do anything. At the end of the morning, when everyone’s pictures were put up on the wall, Morley’s went up, too, with no mouth and no hair and no clothes, just one huge brown eye staring down from the middle of her forehead and her name written at the bottom of the paper in big black letters. The portrait glared down at her every day for a month before it was removed.

  “It was humiliating,” said Morley, “having to look at the eye every morning. I felt like it was watching everything I did.”

  That, thought Dave, is the essence of elementary school. You walk around the school yard, up and down the corridors, you sit at your desk, and wherever you go, there is someone with a great big eye in the middle of their forehead staring down at you. Sometimes it’s your teacher, sometimes it’s your friends or your family—most often it’s the quiet voice in your mind that compares you to everyone else and weighs in with its inevitable and unforgiving judgment.

  Last year, when he was in grade three, Dave’s son, Sam, had his own meeting with the unflinching eye. After Christmas each student in Sam’s class was assigned a pen pal from a school in the suburbs. Sam was assigned Aidan. Most of the letters written back and forth between the classes were stiff and a long way from real, but somehow the stars were aligned when Sam and Aidan were paired. They developed that most rare of modern relationships—they became correspondents.

  Through the mail, Sam and Aidan learned they liked the same television shows, played the same video games, read the same books, and felt the same way about much of it. They even had the same birthday.

  “Maybe,” said Sam, “Aidan is my twin brother. Maybe there was a mistake at the hospital or something.”