She was still on the phone, murmuring below me. I heard her sigh and say, “Ma? I’m so scared.”
Then Pete came up. I could differentiate their footsteps now, Pete’s stomping, Dieter’s soundless sneaking, the creak of the wood giving him away. Pete was the door-slammer. Slam! He put his music on (Hendrix). When Dieter banged in protest on the adjoining wall, Pete, out of principle, cranked it up. By the time he relented, Sonia had hung up and I still didn’t understand what she was so afraid of.
On the weekend, I took the long bus trip back to Burnaby to have supper with my aunt, fulfilling the promise I had made about Sundays, which assuaged both her hurt feelings and my guilt. This actually worked out well because every Sunday there was a potluck at the Trutch house, followed by a meeting, neither of which I was invited to.
My aunt answered the door, throwing open her arms, pulling me to her size Z bosom. I smelled her perfume, Eau de Thrift Store Sweater. “I made your favourite,” she said, and I knew she intended to lure me back.
I piled on the sour cream, the fried onions, the bacon. Lots and lots of bacon that probably straddled the Best Before date, but I didn’t care. My aunt took note. When I moved out, she had inflicted on me doleful glances and squashy, overlong embraces, their implication being I would not thrive. Beyond her protection there awaited only loneliness and constipation. Now her cheeks, squiggled with capillaries, glowed in triumph.
“Have you been eating?”
“Of course,” I said, but the truth, we both knew, was not enough. I hadn’t really felt full since I’d moved to the Trutch house. I wasn’t getting the protein I required. Also, competition for food was fierce.
“You look thinner.”
“I’m not thinner.”
Though I was always conscious of her accent, strangely, I never heard my father’s any more. She was older, in her late fifties, the one who’d sponsored him to come to Canada all those years ago. Briefly they’d lived together, then my father went to Alberta where there were more jobs. He didn’t like Vancouver. People were unfriendly, he said, and the red two-dollar bills looked phoney and it rained all the time.
“How are you sleeping?”
“Fine.”
“And?” She meant my bowels.
“Yes, yes.”
“Your studies are coming along?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me about the girls you’re living with. Are they nice?”
I hadn’t mentioned that two of them were boys. And while I didn’t think of my new housemates as nice, neither did I consider them unkind. Unkind was names scrawled on my locker, papier mâché projectiles fired through an empty Bic. In high school these torments had come erratically, and I was by no means the only one who suffered them. In fact, on the scale of universal adolescent suffering I might not even have attained a rank. It was the haphazardness that caused the most damage. For weeks some other victim would suffer, then it would start up again, usually under some friendly guise—“Jane, do you want to eat lunch with us?”—so I learned always to be on my guard, like some armoured wallflower with its tin petals tightly closed.
As for my housemates, I never expected to make friends with them. I had my books and the people in them were more than enough. Except for supper, I ate toast in my room. Toast was quick to prepare and I could get out of the kitchen fast. But I definitely wasn’t getting enough protein.
What to tell her? Belinda was around a lot, having sex with Pete. She stayed overnight several times a week because, I’d overheard, the house on Blenheim Street was “Women Only.” I talked about her as though she were still living there—leaving out the sex. “She’s very dramatic.” I said she walked like she was doing an interpretive dance and got up to imitate her gliding step. As for Pete and Dieter, apart from the phone idolatry and the fact that they argued all the time, I had a slight impression of them, hardly more than Pete was an anarchist as conceived by Botticelli and the owner of the patched Reliant. Dieter was a zealot for composting (I’d learned by mistakenly throwing a banana peel in the garbage), and possibly a Marxist. Both more or less ignored me, but I still didn’t want my aunt to know about the anarchism, or the possible Marxism, or that the house wasn’t “Women Only” but a locus of premarital sex. She’d surely write my father.
I said Sonia was pretty and very nice. My aunt retorted that I had “beautiful eyes.”
Sonia was pretty, yet she neglected her appearance and, since the airliner incident on Thursday, she seemed in distress. Anti-Soviet demonstrations were taking place across the country. In Toronto, performances by the Moscow Circus were cancelled. The circus business seemed especially to wound Sonia, causing her to stare uncomprehendingly at her plate all through Friday’s supper. In “Lady with a Lapdog,” Chekhov wrote that Anna Sergeyevna’s long hair hung mournfully on either side of her face. He wrote, It was obvious she was unhappy.
“I’m glad it’s working out,” my aunt said. “You’re young. You should be having fun.” She dabbed at her eyes with her napkin.
After dinner we cleaned up. There were a number of dented cans by the side of the sink, which I rinsed and stripped of their labels. Then my aunt removed the tops and bottoms with the opener and took them out on the back porch where she savagely stamped them flat in readiness for her basement repository. This was how we’d spent Sunday evenings last year: she in front of the TV unravelling the old sweaters she would later reknit into odorific Christmas and birthday presents, me studying in the kitchen. Tonight I joined her for the start of The Wonderful World of Disney until I could politely escape.
When I got back to the Trutch house, the porch was more crowded than usual due to additional bicycles. “Oni velosipyedy,” I said out loud, to no one. They are bicycles. (I was starting to form sentences.) I hoped to stash the care package of perogies in the freezer and slip up to my room unnoticed, but there was no need to tiptoe around. The double glass doors to the living room with their floraed and faunaed panes were still closed. I knew what their meetings were about because of the leaflets and petitions foisted upon apathetic students like me almost weekly. Voices overlapped, several conversations going on at once, while, in the kitchen, the dirty dishes from the potluck stood around on the table daring me not to do them. Then someone began singing. It was a woman’s voice, quavering and strange. “We shall live in peace, we shall live in peace . . .” Others joined in. “We shall live in peace some da-a-ay!”
I shivered and hurried up the stairs.
The bus stop was two blocks away, on Fourth Avenue. In the morning buses came at convenient intervals, though sometimes, if one was too crowded, it would speed indifferently past. Every time this happened, I took it personally, which was what I was doing when Sonia came around the corner nicely dressed for once in a skirt. Not until she was almost at the stop did she realize it was me. “Oh! Hi,” she said.
I wanted to say something consoling about the airliner, but had no idea of the etiquette in that particular circumstance so, as usual, I defaulted to saying nothing and feeling awkward. The bus arrived and we got on and Sonia followed me to the back. All the seats were taken there too. She could barely reach the strap, so I wordlessly gave up the pole and we do-si-doed, exchanging places. “What time is your first class?” she asked.
I told her. She said she had to go out to a school and observe a grade two class that day. “That’s why I’m dressed up like this.” Meanwhile the bus lurched along, accumulating more passengers before making a run for the hill. When it reached the top, a view opened over the plated ocean. I lived mere blocks from it now, but had yet to go and see it. Sonia glanced at me from time to time, as though deciding whether or not to speak. At the campus loop, we were disgorged, and with everyone pushing to get off, she got ahead. I didn’t expect to see her again until supper, but she was waiting when I stepped down.
“Did they shoot it down on purpose?” I asked.
She knew immediately what I was talking about. “They thought it was a spy plane.
Now who knows what the Americans will do? Probably start firing.” She pressed her fists into her temples. “Which way are you going?” I pointed and she walked with me toward the Buchanan building. “I don’t know what to do about Dieter,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“He always sits next to me at supper. Haven’t you noticed? He knocks on my door for no reason. Now he’s started pulling my hair. It’s driving me crazy. I don’t like him. I mean, I like him. I like everybody. He’s in my group! But I don’t like him that way.”
So what I’d always suspected was true: other people’s problems were shockingly trite.
“His father died last summer.”
“Really?” I said. “That’s terrible.”
“It makes it hard, though, to say I’m not interested. Last night he came in and lay on my bed and said he’d protect me.” She turned to me, exasperated. “How does he think he’s going to do that?”
Outside the library she plucked entreatingly at my sleeve. “Jane? Sit beside me tonight?”
I thought of that little tug as I took a seat in my seminar. The fabric pulling against my arm, her plea for my presence. The other students meandered in with their backpacks and throwaway coffee cups, chatting, but not to me. No one talked to me. I always sat in the same chair, at Kopanyev’s right hand, and always the seat on the other side of me was empty. No one wanted to sit next to the overeager girl. Keith, the punk, clomped in. They were completely freaked out by him. Then Kopanyev arrived, folders bursting under his arm. He was not the most organized lecturer. Frequently his tangents tangled us up and, in this, a second-year course, Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature in Translation, he seemed to recognize that he was an unreliable driver and so threw the reins to us. We were given a reading list and assigned a date, not to make a presentation per se, but to offer a passage, a character, or simply an observation, as a topic for discussion.
He ticked our names off with a massive fountain pen. “Now, my conversationalists.” Looking around the table, rescrewing the cap. “Michael? Ha! Did you see him jump? What have you brought for us to talk about today, Michael? What have you been reading? Speak! Speak! We are waiting.”
A wing of blond hair hung over Michael’s eyes. He performed the affectation, sweeping it aside. “Chekhov.”
“Ah. The greatest writer who ever lived. And?”
“I notice, well, a couple of things. First, the stories are unbelievably gloomy. Second, the characters always, or often, seem to be in love with people who don’t love them back.”
“Unrequited love,” Kopanyev sighed.
“They’re even married to people who don’t love them back.”
Kopanyev: “Example?”
“‘Three Years,’” I said.
“Remind everyone, please, Jane. Summarize story.”
“Go ahead,” I said to Michael but he only made a face.
“Laptev is in love with Julia, a friend of his sister Nina,” I said. “Nina’s dying of breast cancer. Actually, Nina’s also a victim of unrequited love because her husband lives in another part of town with his mistress.”
“Men!” expleted the ponytailed girl at the end of the table and everyone laughed, except Mohawked Keith who generally limited himself to expressions of contempt.
“Laptev proposes. At first Julia refuses because she doesn’t love him. Then she agrees. Because Laptev’s rich and she doesn’t see any other opportunities for herself. The story basically relates the first three years of their marriage.”
Michael swept his bang away again. “Their unhappy marriage. It’s completely depressing.”
“Chekhov is funny too.”
“What’s funny about that story? Find me one funny thing.”
“I don’t have the book with me.”
“Cancer? Ha ha ha.”
“Doesn’t their baby die?” someone asked. “That’s the same story, right?”
“That story is more sad than funny,” I agreed, “but others are really funny. The people are funny.”
“And we have two cases of unrequited love,” said Kopanyev. “Can anyone think of other stories with this element?”
“‘Lady with a Lapdog.’”
“That’s not unrequited. That’s doomed.”
Turgenev’s Bazarov and Odintsova were proposed, but Kopanyev asked that we restrict our discussion to Chekhov. The heavy girl who kept poking at her cuticles said, “There’s that story. I don’t remember titles. Where the creepy husband pisses off the wife who’s trying to help the famine victims.”
“‘My Wife.’”
Another professorial nod for me.
“‘His Wife,’” I added.
Blank looks all around.
“Where he finds the telegram from his wife’s lover saying he kisses her sweet little foot a thousand times?”
“Ha ha ha!” roared Kopanyev. “So wife can be villain? I thought women could only be victims.”
The three other girls in the class rolled their eyes but wouldn’t take the bait, not even Ponytail. “The wife’s the villain in ‘The Grasshopper,’” a male pointed out.
“‘The Grasshopper’!” Michael moaned. “I read that last night. Another riot.”
At Kopanyev’s request, Michael summarized it: wife runs off with arty friends while doctor husband pays for everything, catches diphtheria, and dies.
“That’s actually quite a funny story,” I said.
“But in that story,” the heavy girl said, “the wife didn’t hate the husband. She just thought he was boring.”
“She was having an affair.”
“But she still liked her husband, so I don’t think you can call that”—four fingers with ragged cuticles, two from each hand, went up and scratched the air—“unrequited, per se.”
“‘The Kiss’!” Keith blatted.
“Most definitely.” Kopanyev asked for a summary.
“This army captain? He goes to a ball. Hangs around feeling like a loser. Later he goes into a dark room where this lady’s waiting for her boyfriend. She kisses the loser by mistake. This pathetically transforms the guy’s life. He spends months fantasizing about the mystery lady, hoping for a chance to go back to the house. Finally the opportunity comes up and he goes and realizes what a complete and utter loser he really, truly is.”
Kopanyev stroked his beard for a full minute. Sometimes he treated his facial hair like a living thing, a cat clinging to his face. It seemed to help him think. “You don’t sound very sympathetic, Keith.”
“He’s a loser.”
For some time we talked about “The Kiss,” whether being in love with a hypothetical person could even be considered unrequited love, whether Staff-Captain Ryabovitch was indeed worthy of sympathy or merely deluded, and when the majority expressed scorn, Kopanyev declared that we were either preternaturally hard-hearted or had been remarkably successful in love despite our youth. He went on to confess one of his own early trials—he had adored a classmate and was rebuffed—regaling us with humiliating details until he noticed his watch. “You’re not serious!” He clapped his hands. “My dear little children. My pupils. My timepiece has been unkind to us, as usual. Thanks to Michael for excellent topic, which we have barely scratched.”
And, sighing, he rose just like a bear being prodded to stand upright.
Chekhov began his career as a writer of comic stories in order to support his family. I was baffled that my classmates couldn’t see the humour in his work. That evening, searching for something funny in “Three Years,” I underlined the passage where Julia is travelling back home from Moscow by train with her philandering brother-in-law, Panaurov. “Pardon the pub simile,” he says to her, “but you put me in mind of a freshly salted gherkin.”
And later, when Laptev’s friends, Yartsev and Kostya, walk drunkenly back to the station, unable to see a thing in the dark: “Hey, you holiday-makers!” Kostya suddenly shouts out. “We’ve caught a socialist!”
Sad (5), sadly (4), unh
appy (4), miserable (1), lonely (1), depressed (2), depression (2), disgruntled (1), boring (9), bored (5), dull (1), monotonous (2), apathetic (1).
Sonia tapped and looked in. “Supper.”
Downstairs, a pot of soup and a tray of airy, row-provoking biscuits waited on the table. “Sit,” she said, before taking the chair beside me and shouting to the other two. They thundered down. Supper was the only time they ever responded promptly to a call.
Dieter: “I usually sit there.”
Sonia said nothing, while Pete, who was loading biscuits on his plate, exhaled a single word. “Fascist.” Dieter took the chair across from Sonia and knuckled up his glasses. “I’m a creature of habit I guess.”
“You’re a creature,” Pete said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You are. I’m a creature, you’re a creature. Zed’s a creature.”
Sonia: “Her name is Jane.”
“She’ll let me know if she doesn’t like what I call her.”
“Whoa!” said Dieter, taking two biscuits off Pete’s plate and returning them to the tray. “We’ll divide these up evenly. What do you say?”
While Dieter was busy divvying up the biscuits, Pete ate his entire ration. Then he double-checked the empty pot. “Sonia?”
“What?”
“You’ll never eat three. Give me one.”
Dieter: “No.”
“I’m not asking you.”
“Three each.”
“I’m asking Sonia.”
Sonia kept her head low to her bowl, blowing ripples across her spoon.
“Sonia?”
She was by far the best cook. The biscuits were buttery, cloud-light. Dieter wasn’t touching his; I assumed he was saving them for last so he could eat them in front of us when ours were gone.
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