Crow Jazz

by Linda Rogers

  “Well, here we are, Mum, treating you on your special day and you are not behaving.”

  “What is treating? Is treating paying for an opportunity to be condescending, ageist?”

  “You’re just upset because you’re a year older.”

  Not at all. She embraces her age, as clearly they don’t. They are clearly terrified of her liver spots and wrinkles, her buckled knees and crumbling hips. She looks from background to foreground and sees the cracks they fill in with potions and treatments. Her eyes fill up. Poor things. Their coddled generation keeps on believing in its own immortality while their own children plan their ultimate catch and no release.

  Two tosses her package. “Here, I brought you something to cheer you up.”

  It lands in her lap, and she carefully removes the ribbon. Damn her arthritis. The bride-coloured pink-and-ivory bow is a bugger, but she’s damned if she’ll let on, just pretends she’s building suspense. Then comes the tissue, layers of cream and pink petals.

  “What is it?” The thing is green with glittering scales. “Is it a pickle, no, a flashlight?” She could use a flashlight for her late-night visits to the toilet.

  “Warm, but no cigar.”

  “Is it an e cigar then, a big doobie?

  “Funny you should ask.”

  “Push the button, Mum.” One shows her where.

  “Oh,” she says, “it’s an electric pickle.”

  “Yes,” her girls sing in unison.

  “I looked for yellow because you taught us how to…”

  “Put a condom on a banana,” she finishes. “Yes, but I could only find a pickle.” “Because I told you that you’d be in a pickle if the condom failed.”

  “Right.”

  Things have taken a turn for the better. While her daughters drain their glasses, she opens her armadillo roadkill purse and pops it in. It just fits, like a hand in a glove, her biology teacher told the class when he was explaining human reproduction.

  “To me,” she says, and tosses her drink back.

  “And these,” One says, handing her two smaller packages, one is squishy and one not. “Guess.”

  “This one is for the pickle.” She gives it a squeeze.

  “Yes.”

  “And the other is a small cigar.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Should we light it up?”

  “You mean here,” more unison.

  “Why not? I’m heading for my holy bridegroom, best sex ever. Who would suspect?”

  “The smell, Mum.”

  “We’re outside, semi-outside. It could be skunk cabbage. She unwraps the joint and holds it between her fingers, like a real cigarette.

  On Hell is there before she can say, Welcome daughters of wormwood. Let the holy river explode, and he has a lighter.

  “Allow me.”

  She leans into him, what was your name again, looks up at the sky, inhales deeply, and the golden tunnel convulses, her heart shuddering as the pastel light contracts. Blink, the aperture closes.

  The daughters react in treble unison, a scream, the high note filling her portal, the unbirth canal one step closer to their own. Her children could be Queens of the Night as the afternoon goes dark. They stand and reach for her as she falls, but the waiter, the one called Angel, puts his hands out to stop them, then lifts her up in his arms.

  “Make a wish,” he says.

  BLINK

  I try not to blink. If I close my eyes, he will disappear and there are so many unanswered questions. Is that why we grieve? My father’s eyes are open, but he’s looking somewhere else, and that may be the answer I’m seeking, a matter of technique rather than distance. I remember the advice he brought from a great ballerina.

  “Keep your eye on the place you want to end up, and you will arrive there.”

  Alternately dozing and pacing, I don’t entirely agree. Life and art are not always identical. I took that advice to the turning point in my life, the night my best friend drowned in an icy river.

  It’s like the dumb show in prison when loved ones are separated by glass. I willed him to keep looking at me as I swam toward him, my arms numb with cold; but he quit. One moment his eyes were alive, and the next, nothing.

  Before the drowning, I was most terrified of fire. In my dreams, I fell into cracks in the Earth, but my father said, “It’s just other worlds down there,” and he made up beautiful stories in that charmed interval between relaxation and insobriety.

  Fire took my Wettums doll after a leak in her pipes made her insides rot. The letter from the doll hospital said she had a remarkable death. My dad told me about Vikings and the cautionary tale about Hindu suttee, widows burned with their husbands beside holy rivers.

  “Not to worry, I’ve been there. Some day the Earth will move for you and you will like it.”

  In the beginning, I was his paper doll. He put on our favourite record and rode me to bed on his slippers, then disappeared into the dark. I fought sleep, but sleep grabbed me and threw me into the fire in Middle Earth.

  My mother got to be God. One night, she burned all my worn-out dolls in the garden. The souls of the dead fell through holes that went all the way to China, the playground of lost toys.

  For a while, I slept with my cap gun, fighting fire with fire. When he realised I was just starting new ones, my father gave me my favourite toy, a music box with a ballerina on top. “She’s made of china,” he said. “She’s fragile but strong, just like you.”

  He placed her on my bedside table, turned on the lamp, wound her key, and together we watched her shadow dance on the wall. I wondered what could be on the other side, where discarded dance partners waited another turn. My ballerina, pirouetting en pointe to the tune of Tchaikovsky’s “Rose Adagio” from Swan Lake, reached out. I don’t recall my father leaving. That was invisible.

  “Turn off the fucking news,” my mother says in one of Dad’s final moments. She can’t stand to watch. Because my father drools and drops Kleenex like confetti on the carpeted floor of his tenth-floor apartment at Sunset Lodge, the screen is covered with spit. Why rest homes have carpets is a mystery. Perhaps they’re breeding germs for the war against Hong Kong emigration and the mega houses my father called a stucco rash on Shaughnessy Heights.

  It’s after six. I turn down the sound, but leave the picture. Pamela the news anchor keeps speaking, moving her mouth in prime time/mime time, opening and closing the final curtain. Will my father be taking a bow with his ballerina or crawling past Pamela’s luxuriant lips, red satin sheets, into his encore performance, or non-performance because we all know what alcohol does to libido?

  We are all waiting for the adagio movement, my mother, my father and I. Soon we get to find out who is the angel of death and who swallows first.

  My father is in love with Pamela on Channel 8 and Margot, prima ballerina assoluto, one vicarious and one unquestionably ephemeral dream girl, and that is the family blend, the game of who’s who that rules our ménage de trop. Now, the news anchor is a dyed blonde, but years ago she began as the six o’clock raven-haired shape-changer.

  He’s no longer waiting for the new wife to come and give what she promised when they got married without inviting family to the ceremony. She has possession of the new house and the new car, and he’s in the rest home, still anticipating the first conjugal visit, or any visit at all for that matter.

  My sobered-up dad looks good in God’s waiting room; skin as smooth as A Baby’s Bottom, his favourite brand of pipe tobacco, eyes wide open, blue circles in saucers of milk, his mouth the surprised O, the final portal, last round door. The morphine is working.

  My mother, flipping through the latest Vanity Fair, chewing gum, has less hair, more spunk. She is butch, her present incarnation. She came for her karma, and to protect his assets from the second wife should she arrive in time to snatch Dad’s precious things (first editions) and the stack of hundreds he keeps in his bedside drawer.

  He is not supposed to tip the staff, but
he does, generously, “Can’t take it with me.” He certainly doesn’t want too much left over for the extortionist wife. Tips or no tips, the nurses love him. He is handsome, Cary Grant handsome, with a full head of distinguished silver hair, a manly cleft in his chin and lots and lots of hundreds.

  He knew Cary. The nurses love Dad’s celebrity stories and admire him for his books and the framed photographs of his famous friends: Cary, Zsa Zsa, President Ford, the Mills Brothers, Errol and Margot.

  In Margot’s photo, she is dancing the “Rose Adagio,” the song in my music box. It is signed, “je t’adore.” My mother has exactly the same picture with exactly the same dedication hidden under her bed where her hideous Peterbald cats wait to pounce and shred my ankles. My photo says, “Keep working at the barre.” She knew the most I would get out of ballet would be better posture. I am much too tall for the chorus, and not everyone gets to be a soloist.

  I am the daughter of soloists, and it is not a position I aspire to.

  I brought my knitting and a book, but I can’t focus. My father is doing that for all of us, his blues fixed on the near distance, possibly looking for the news anchor to reach out of the television or for the seagull that visits his balcony to take him for a spin. “My last friend,” my father said, defying the house rules against feeding birds that defecate on the building.

  He might be giving up the notion of romance in this world as he peers into the next.

  My mother told me she had a dream in which Margot Fonteyn spun around her bed. “I heard wood. I thought it was woodpeckers.” That was when I found out she too had a passion for ballet.

  “Does she have a wooden leg?” I asked. I was not yet en pointe and had no idea how toe shoes are constructed. We knew a war amputee who hid chocolate in his leg. “No,” she said.

  “No,” she says now to my brother who is holding a pillow over my father’s face. She sees him too. He is the merciful one in spite of being called ballet boy by my father. He loves opera, and now I suppose he’s a Valkyrie sent to collect the dead.

  “That was then,” our father has apologized, then being the period of grieving for courageous friends who died in the war that lasted to the point of indulgence.

  The ballerina on my music box had china legs and a china body, and her tutu was layers of the palest rose. She had perfect porte de bras and never wavered, just turned round and round on one toe, one hand reaching out to her invisible suitors.

  I was ten years old, not quite wise to the connection between the Earth moving and my lady’s pirouettes. “This dance defines a great ballerina.”

  They called Margot Peggy. Her real name was Peggy Hookham, not a good name for a ballerina when all the others were Russian and French.

  “Hooker,” my mother said, derisively.

  Nevertheless, she took me to see Margot and Soames, Margot and Nureyev. “They are lovers,” she said, fixing her opera glasses on whichever beautiful man bottom, “You can tell.” That made sense to me. Ballet is romance. Romance is boys and girls, or so I thought then. Nevertheless she went to London to stay with Margot, information she has only shared today.

  My father must have been angry with my mother for taking her turn.

  “Why not?” she said. “I am entitled to know what it’s like.”

  The ballerina had many dance partners, Soames, Nureyev, my parents, all of them stepping into the music and spinning until they vanished like the tigers in Little Black Sambo.

  She blinked and she disappeared.

  My parents argued. They used words like “obsession” and “adultery.” My father said “sick,” and later I realised he was being territorial. That night I over-wound my music box and my ballerina refused to dance, so I punished her by putting her under my bed.

  When I came home from school the next day, she was gone.

  “Margot is dead,” my father said. My ballerina had danced into a crack in the floor, taking Margot with her. I’d killed both of them. But still I waited. Miracles happen. Lost things come home like dogs that travel thousands of miles.

  I stopped dancing, and my great time of reading began. I read every book in my father’s library under the covers, ruining my eyes. My parents separated.

  After the longest time, my brother puts down the pillow. My mother rolls her eyes and jingles the keys in her pockets. I wonder if some of them are my father’s keys. My high-school biology teacher told us animals mated successfully because their sexual parts fit like keys in locks. I close my eyes and imagine how my father might have wound her up, making my mother dance.

  The six o’clock news has ended. Pamela signs off. Do I see a light go out in my father’s eyes? Has he missed his chance to hitch a ride to the stars? I recently watched a child who wanted to hug Barney attempt to crawl inside the screen of a big TV at Costco. It broke my heart.

  My mother, like a magician’s sleeves and Lady Murasaki’s, is full of surprises. She pulls something wrapped in a scarf out of the backpack filled with provisions for my father’s farewell party—toothbrush, apple, granola bars, Kleenex—unties it and sets my music box on the bedside table.

  Everyone in the room knows what it is.

  “You had that thing all along?” I am incredulous. “I can’t believe it.”

  “I never liked girls, except for sex,” I once heard her confide on the phone from my hiding place in the closet with louvered doors. I already knew that. Until my brother arrived, she’d dressed me as a boy. Then I got my first leotard.

  I needed to be in a love story, and ballet is all love stories.

  “What is love?” Prince Charles famously asked on television the day of his engagement, because he knew his mistress was watching. They are all the same. My grandmother danced with the last Prince of Wales and so did several of her friends, one of whom claims he fathered her child.

  Some say dance is foreplay. I thought it was love.

  It is growing dark. I try not to blink in the moonlight that filters through the blinds. My mother is dozing. She will wake up with pleather creases in her cheek. “Braille farewell,” I will say. It sounds like a tune for bagpipes, a Highland fling.

  I turn on the bedside lamp when a nurse comes to check my father’s pulse and his blood pressure. “It won’t be long,” she says. He’s showing all the signs of approaching death. I am surprised by how young his legs look. It is as if he is moving backwards, back to the time when he used to ask me, who is the handsomest dad in the world?” and I stepped on his feet for a waltz while he headed for the door. “See you later, Alligator.”

  The sound of the winding key is a comfort in a room full of snores, my mother asleep and my father saving his breath. My ballerina stands on her little rose box, eyes on the prize, fixed on the spot where she’ll end up, no matter how dizzy. That spot is the dark corridors in my father’s eyes. I wonder where they lead, maybe to a big descent, German Wings, a crash in the mountains, or possibly Paradise where the cooking is superb and every innocent touch sets off a beautiful earthquake.

  She spins and her shadow on the wall reaches out. My father’s eyes open even wider.

  The eyes are everything. My father breathes in and out like a woman in labour, giving birth to himself. I watch him exhale and leap into shadowland, but instead of holding her steady, he begins to turn with her so I can’t tell who is who, and I can’t look away.

  But I do and they are gone.

  “Magical thinking,” the widow wrote when she dialled back the day her husband died, “See you later, Alligator,” but imagine all you like, gone is gone. The music box is still. The curtain on his window moves, and I see the seagull that has been hanging around on his balcony waiting for leftovers fly off, her beak full of something, maybe the “Rose Adagio” written by a confused composer.

  “He’s not there,” I say, turning on the overhead light when my mother wakes up and looks toward the empty bed.

  “He never was,” she says.

  Photo: Darshan Stevens

  ABOUT THE
AUTHOR

  Linda Rogers is a novelist, essayist, editor and songwriter, past Victoria Poet Laureate and Canadian People’s Poet, and President of the League of Canadian poets and the BC Federation of Writers. She has published twenty-nine books, appeared in a number of anthologies and been awarded national and international literary prizes, including the Leacock Prize, the National Poetry Prize, the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, the Gwendolyn MacEwen Prize and the Milton Acorn Award in Canada; the Cardiff Prize, the Bridport Prize and the Petra Kenney Award in Britain; the Prix Anglais in France, the Rukeyeser Award in the United States and the Voices Israel Award for Poetry.

  Rogers has written songs for children with her husband, mandolinist Rick Van Krugel, who also accompanies readings, and lyrics for various songwriters. Her song for Terry Fox marked the thirtieth anniversary of his run. She wrote the screenplay for the award-winning film Legend of the Dolphins and the play Warhol for the Ontario Gallery of Art. She is currently writing a children’s book, Hello. Wiksas? with Kwakwaka’wakw artist Chief Rande Cook, whose primary interest is also in the rights and rites of children.

  Rogers writes literary criticism and profiles of many Canadian artists and is currently involved in an ekphrasis project, women poets responding to women painters, with Mexican artist Maria Luisa de Villa.

  She teaches, performs and reports from Victoria, taking dictation from her crow friends.

  THANKS

  A few years ago, in the middle of some other tune, Michael Callaghan teased me with the challenge of writing a short story, something I had never thought of as the right music for my solo thé dansant.

  Accustomed to sips and gulps, poems and novels, the challenge of short fiction was like asking a nude bather to wear a girdle.

  Now I am addicted to la vita breva.

  Thank you to Exile Editions, Michael, Barry, and Nina Callaghan, Gabriela Campos and Gloria Vanderbilt, for showing me that, with the right people: gloves on, veils adjusted, unmentionables mentioned, writing can be high tea.