The Sky Is Falling

by Caroline Adderson

  I broke off a cluster of blossoms that, back home, I placed in a glass of water on my card table. Over the next few hours I kept glancing up at it, reassuring myself I hadn’t dreamed what I’d seen and felt.

  Mid-afternoon Sonia called up and asked what I was doing. “Reading,” I said.

  Ya chitayu.

  I got an idea. I plucked all the petals off the branch, waited a minute, then called her name. When she appeared under the grate, I released them, pink, liberated moths, watching as they fluttered down on her smiling, upturned face.

  One hundred and forty-nine pages later, Kitty, having been made physically ill when Vronsky abruptly transfers his attentions to Anna, is taken by her mother to a German spa. There she meets a Russian girl of her own age, Varenka, and Kitty, as often happens, felt an inexplicable attraction to this Mademoiselle Varenka.

  The similarities disturbed me: as young girls do, as often happens. Did it? I knew it happened now, because of Carla, but I had assumed that lesbianism was a modern phenomenon, that it had to do with feminism, with taking a stand against men, not with love. But now I read in a book more than a hundred years old that Kitty was aware, when their eyes met, that Mademoiselle Varenka liked her too.

  Five chapters are dedicated to Kitty’s obsession with Varenka, chapters that had apparently not seemed very important the first time I read the novel since I barely remembered them. Varenka, Kitty decides from a distance, while pretty, is not likely to be attractive to men. The two women see each other daily in passing but, not having been formally introduced, are obliged to communicate with their eyes. Kitty’s eyes say, Are you the delightful being I imagine you to be? and Varenka’s answer, I like you too, and you are very very sweet.

  Kitty begs her mother for an introduction until the Princess Shcherbatsky, weary of these entreaties, approaches the Russian girl at last. “My daughter has lost her heart to you.”

  Varenka: “It is more than reciprocal, Princess.”

  And so they finally meet. Kitty blushed with happiness, long and silently pressing her new friend’s hand, which did not return her pressure but lay passively in hers. The hand did not respond to her pressure but Mademoiselle Varenka’s face glowed with a soft, pleased, though rather sad smile. . . .

  Exactly the way Sonia’s looked when I showered her with petals! I remembered, too, how she had held my hand during that first NAG! meeting, and my confusion about what to do. I, too, had gone limp. Like Kitty, I blushed now.

  Kitty becomes more and more fascinated by her friend, enraptured by her. Soon she learns that Varenka has also been wounded in love. “Why, if I were a man, I could never care for anyone else after knowing you,” Kitty tells Varenka.

  “How good you are, how good!” exclaimed Kitty and, stopping her, she kissed her.

  She kissed her.

  I touched my face, feeling that tingle again. No, I couldn’t write about it. As I reshelved Anna Karenina in the milk crate, the word palpitations came to mind, though it felt more like my heart was hurling itself against the bars of its cage. Eventually these protestations subsided. I had other, more pressing things to distract me: our date with the end of the world, my long mental slog toward another essay topic.

  At our next house meeting we decided to have a party. After the requisite bickering, we reached consensus on a date—the following Friday—who, and how many people we would invite, and what each of us would do to get ready. Then, on Friday, I came home to an unusual domestic scene, Sonia on her knees angrily scrubbing the kitchen floor while Pete sat cross-legged on the table, well out of her way, shelling peanuts into his lap.

  “Let me,” I begged her. “I’ll do it.”

  “That’s not the point,” she said.

  The point was that we, the women, were yet again cleaning while they, the men, were not. Sonia glared at Pete. I hurried out with the teeming compost, knocking another rotting stave off the fence in my eagerness to stay in the we that included her. When I came back with the empty bowl, Pete waved me over and dumped his shells in it.

  Since hinting wasn’t working, Sonia sat up on her haunches and asked him outright: “Pete! Why aren’t you helping us?”

  “I got the snacks.” He waved the bag of peanuts.

  “When we said we’d get the house ready, we meant put the food out and decorate. We didn’t mean do everybody’s chores.”

  “So put the food out and decorate.”

  Her little nostrils quivered. The effect was charming. “You go around saying you’re a feminist! If you really were, you’d help!”

  “Wrong. I really am a feminist, therefore I refuse to treat you differently than I’d treat a man.” He cheerfully cracked another shell with his perfect teeth. “Ask Dieter. He’d be happy to patronize you.”

  This was why anarchism would never work, I thought. No one would ever want to wash the kitchen floor. When I made the mistake of voicing this, Pete replied, “Wrong, Zed. This is actually an example of how perfectly anarchism works. Someone always wants the kitchen floor to be clean. In this case, Sonia wants it to be clean, so she’s washing it. She’s washing it of her own free will. If I relinquished my principles and went ahead and washed it, even though I’m perfectly satisfied with the condition of the floor, I wouldn’t be an anarchist. Because an anarchist will not be limited in the exercise of his will by fear of punishment or by obedience to any person or metaphysical entity. He—or she—is guided in his—or her—own actions by his—or her—own personal understanding and ethical conceptions.”

  Dieter walked in then and Sonia got up off the floor and threw the sopping rag at him. It slapped his chest with a horse-dungy plop that made me laugh out loud. Sonia shrieked that she was on strike and ran out.

  “Asshole,” Dieter told Pete.

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  Dieter dropped his books on the table and, tugging his pant legs at the thigh, got down on all fours. I knew then that he still liked Sonia, though he hardly bothered her any more. His glasses hung off his face as he worked, clinging to his temples by the arms. Pete kept on cracking peanuts.

  I went after Sonia and, finding her lying on the meadow of her bedspread, sat down to watch the fortunate air filling her up, the unfortunate air leaving. I felt so awkward around her now, a different kind of awkwardness than when I had first moved in. Then I had felt invisible, but now I felt far too obvious, like the sleeve I wore my heart on was fluorescent or Hawaiian.

  “I’m exhausted,” she said after a minute.

  “You should have waited for me to get home. I would have helped.”

  “It’s not just that. Jane? After exams? After my practicum?”

  “Yes?”

  She was staring up at nothing. “Do you want to move out? We can get an apartment.”

  “Together?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  It was hours before it really sunk in and the euphoria hit. What she said and her proviso: “If we’re still alive, I mean.”

  We had said eight o’clock but no one came until almost ten, after which the house was full of noise. Some of Dieter’s amigos turned up, including Hector, back from Victoria in the hope that his refugee application would finally be processed. For this Latin American contingent we played music happy with maracas, buoyant with unintelligible choruses, until midnight, when Pete brought down his milk crate of tapes and put on Purple Haze. People from SPND and EAR were there, too, and every-one from NAG! Belinda and Carla had set up in the kitchen, Belinda straddling a backward chair while Carla wove tiny braids into her hair. Several times during the evening Pete came in and asked, “Are you done yet?” to which Belinda replied, “God,” without looking up.

  I tagged along while Sonia hugged everyone and made sure they had drinks. Everything she did—replenishing the chip bowl, stashing a six-pack in the fridge—she did with grace. I was fascinated, enraptured. Then Ruth came over. “Can I talk to you, Jane?”

  “I’m helping Sonia,” I said and blushed. The adoration i
n my voice. So obvious! I followed Ruth out in case she’d noticed.

  No one was in the living room despite all the effort Sonia and I had put into festooning it with cranes. Ruth closed the French doors after us then slumped on the chesterfield and, face in her hands, began to cry. I was supposed to hug her, I knew, but I didn’t. I waited until she had blotted her tears on her paisley scarf. Taking a few pulls from the bottle jammed between her thighs, she said, “I’d do anything, Jane.”

  “For whom?”

  She burped into her fist. “To get into NAG! I know you’re in now. Sonia told me. How did you do it?”

  I felt sorry for her and told the truth: “I live here.”

  “I knew it! I tried so hard. You have no idea how hard I tried to get in. I even sucked up to Dieter.” Ruth started to sob in earnest now and, embarrassed, I looked out the ponchoed window. Someone was coming up the walk in moon boots. More than out of season, the glowing white boots were out of climate, but I was accustomed to strange garb by then, to T-shirts that screamed slogans, to tie-dye in the full spectrum of purple, to work socks worn with long Indian cotton skirts, to Birkenstocks, buffalo sandals, huaraches, clogs. He set down the duffle bag he was carrying and removed something from it—a book.

  “I’m so depressed,” Ruth said.

  How strange that our roles should be reversed, that Ruth with her barely blue eyes and blond hair and her pretty peach-fuzzed face should be miserable while I was so exultant. Strange, too, that I had the power to save the night for her. All I had to do was tell her why I was so happy. Ruth was drinking with intent now. I said, “Sonia and I are moving out.”

  She looked at me. “When?”

  “After finals.”

  “Thank you,” she gasped.

  “Together,” I added, in case she hadn’t understood that I loved Sonia. There. I’d finally admitted it.

  “So two rooms will be free?” she said, incredulous.

  The doorbell rang and, tingling all over from my confession, I went to answer it. The book was under his arm now, the duffle on the porch, a dark grey parka with a fake fur–trimmed hood draped over it. I only noticed because it was the same coat that got so many boys through Alberta winters, that boys all over Canada wore, presumably, but that I’d never seen in Vancouver because parkas were unnecessary. His hair, brown and wavy, flopped in his eyes.

  “Does Dieter Koenig live here?” he asked in a voice thick with hope.

  I nodded and stepped aside; he whisked the duffle in with him. There was something so comical about how he did it, bowing and bobbing and brushing away the hair, that the people who were hanging around in the vestibule smiled. Or maybe it was the boots. “Go ahead,” I said. “I think he’s on the deck.” Just then Ruth came out of the living room, blotted and beaming, and I hurried after the newcomer before she had the chance to thank me physically.

  “Through that door.” I pointed.

  Sonia, tidying the counters, collecting empties, smiled at me. How good you are, how good! I thought, as Dieter’s friend in the boots came clomping back inside, the book clutched to his chest like a flat black breastplate. “I don’t see him,” he told me.

  We went out together where about a dozen people braved the chill. Dieter was in the corner with Hector, the two of them talking with their hands. When Dieter spoke English, even when Hector did, their arms hung limply at their sides. English seemed to bring on a semi-paralysis, while Spanish animated everyone who spoke it. I wondered what Russian did. Made you drink vodka probably. “Dieter!” I called over the voices, the boom-box maracas, and pointed to Moon Boots, who raised a tentative hand and smiled. Dieter waved back blankly. A joint that was circulating reached us just then and Moon Boots took it with wide eyes, looking from the person who’d passed it, to me, as though he’d won a prize.

  I went back inside where Sonia was telling a man in a Question Authority T-shirt about the renaming of the streets. “Far out,” he kept saying. “Far out.” Ruth was bubbling away to Pete, who unwound the scarf from her neck and draped it over her head like a dust cloth over a lamp. She carried on giggling and saying flirty things, even after Pete walked off. Then Moon Boots came in for a second time and, noticing Ronald Reagan hanging on the nail, stopped to put the mask on. The notebook slid out from under his arm and he stooped to retrieve it, almost tripping someone else coming in from the deck. He tugged the mask off, bobbed an apology, was just attempting an exit, seemingly before something else could go wrong, when Sonia nabbed him. “You don’t have a drink.”

  His eyes darted. “Milk?”

  Sonia poured him a glass out of her carton, handing it to him with a suppressed smile. We watched him glug it, saw the pump in his throat and the residue above his lip, the only moustache he looked capable of growing. His jawline was spackled with zits.

  Sonia: “I like your boots.”

  He looked down at them. We all cracked up.

  A siren woke me. I thought it was a scream until the fire truck rumbled past. It would be hours before anyone else got up, I assumed. But Sonia was at the kitchen table when I went down, in her pyjamas, cradling her headache in her hands. First I surveyed the devastation, then I put the kettle on. “Go back to bed,” I told her. “I’ll clean it up.”

  “Why should you?”

  Because I wanted to. Because I loved her. Because I wanted to make her happy.

  “It was fun last night,” she said. “I feel so guilty whenever I have fun. That’s when it’s going to happen. When we least expect it. Reagan’s just waiting for me to look the other way so he can press the button.”

  “Did you sleep?” I asked.

  “No. Tell me the truth, Jane. Is my insomnia honourable or am I just torturing myself?”

  This was a reference to Dr. Korolyov in “A Case History.” “So you’re not sleeping,” he tells Liza, the young, conscience-stricken textile factory heiress. “It’s lovely outside, spring has come. The nightingales are singing and here you are sitting in the dark, brooding.” Outside, the watchman bangs two o’clock, and Korolyov sees Liza tremble and notices that her eyes were sad and clever, and clearly she longed to tell him something.

  Korolyov: “Your insomnia is something honourable: whatever you may think, it’s a good sign.”

  “I want to be a Liza,” Sonia said. “I want it so badly.”

  “You already are one.”

  “I’m not. I’m not. I won’t be able to save anybody. The bomb will fall. We’ll all die.”

  She’d saved me. I wanted to tell her that but just then she turned away, toward the window. I brought the teapot and jar of jam over, clearing a space in the mess to set them down. Then I saw what she was looking at. Someone was coming up the stairs to the deck wearing a bizarre sort of robe, long and padded with a fur-trimmed hood. He walked like he was dragging one leg behind him. My first reaction was shock, that some crazy person had wandered into our yard. Then the robe detached from the hood and became the sleeping bag he slung over the deck railing. I saw the moon boots. “That’s Dieter’s friend,” I said.

  Sonia tapped on the window. He swung around and looked at us and, in that moment, hair flopping in his eyes, he seemed very, very young. It was hard to tell how old anyone really was. Sonia looked young too, because she was small, while Pete, so forceful, seemed older. Belinda always struck me as being at the height of maturity—maybe as much as twenty-five. Hector probably was that old, but all of us in NAG! were eighteen or nineteen at most. We may have called ourselves women and men but we were barely adults.

  Sonia opened the door to the deck for him. “Tea?” she asked, flitting to the cupboard for another mug. Sand rained on the floor as he shed the coat. He took the white boots off, then his socks, which were wet and, like the bottom of his pants, encrusted with sand. “Sorry.” He tiptoed to the sink and wrung them out.

  “Is it raining?” Sonia asked.

  “No.” He set the ball of socks on the table next to his mug.

  “We’ve been drin
king our tea with jam,” she said. “That’s how they drink it in Russia. It’s delicious.” She nudged the jar toward him and he added several spoonfuls, dipping each one again and again until the spoon came out clean and the tea looked like diluted blood. Sonia and I traded smiles the way we had the night before when he chose milk over beer.

  “I slept on the beach,” he said.

  “Wasn’t it cold?”

  “No. It’s like spring.”

  “It is spring,” I pointed out.

  “Really?” he said, which Sonia seemed to find funny. “Then, in the middle of the night? I woke up? There was water right up to my knees!”

  “The tide came in,” she said.

  “I didn’t know it did that.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Pascal.”

  2004

  The residue of a dream was still on me when I woke, not surprisingly, given my conversation with Joe Jr. the night before. As for the dream’s content, I remembered nothing; it was flying below the radar, low against the contours of my dread. My head ached at the temples and I lay there hoping the pain would pass. Eventually I gave in, put my slippers on, and went and took a pill. By then both Joes had already left the house. Joe Jr. must have had track practice. When I saw his empty bed, I felt even guiltier for having sat on him.

  I looked at Tuesday’s paper. (Tuesday—Maria was coming.) There was no mention of Sonia and Pete. It was old news now and I left it on the table for Maria to do with as she pleased. A second cup of coffee in hand, I went to my office and found lying on my computer keyboard the article that had caused so much agony the day before, retrieved by Joe, I guess. So I finally read it and, like he said, there was nothing new in it other than Sonia had completed her sentence and Pete had five more years to serve. It hardly warranted the fuss I’d made over it. It certainly didn’t tell me what I wanted to know.

  When I checked my e-mail, the promised manuscript was there to distract me, a novel, 528 pages long, partly historical, starting with the discovery of some letters in a Toronto basement. The headache intensified as soon as I started reading, not so much because the device of found letters always rings false, though it does. Why? I know my own mother has kept every letter I’ve ever written her and probably stores them in a proverbial trunk. There was nothing wrong with the writing other than it strained to be poetic and wasn’t by Turgenev or Tolstoy.