Sonja & Carl

by Hillier, Suzanne;

  SONJA & CARL

  SUZANNE HILLIER

  For all the fallen ice warriors

  Light breaks where no sun shines;

  Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart

  Push in their tides.

  —Dylan Thomas

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1: The Tutor

  Chapter 2: The Student

  Chapter 3: The Golden Eagle of Davenport High

  Chapter 4: The University Student

  Chapter 5: The Academic Entrepreneur

  Chapter 6: The Christmas Party

  Chapter 7: Christmas Dinner with Ma

  Chapter 8: Comeuppance

  Chapter 9: Alternative Employment

  Chapter 10: Bertie and Priscilla

  Chapter 11: The Hockey Patient

  Chapter 12: Marrying Carl

  Chapter 13: The Honeymoon

  Chapter 14: The End of Summer

  Chapter 15: The End of Play

  Chapter 16: Déjà Vu

  Chapter 17: Homecoming

  Chapter 18: The Worst of Times

  Chapter 19: Seeing Dr. Anderson

  Chapter 20: Overtime

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  1

  THE TUTOR

  “PLEASE JUST SHUT UP.” FROM her desk in the second last row, Deborah Hanson’s irritated voice cut through the stale air of our Grade 12 classroom.

  “What’s yer problem, on the rag?”

  Carl Helbig was one of a group of boisterous boys who sat in the back of our class and seemed unable to concentrate for more than thirty seconds at a time. I thought of them as “The Choir” and assigned them to an eternity singing in a scalding, vacuous hell.

  “You will leave the room,” admonished Miss Hannelore Steinbrink, my favourite teacher, “and I’ll deal with you later.”

  As Carl swaggered out, Miss Steinbrink hissed at him, flushed, “You’re a disgrace to the German people.”

  I thought this was strange as both of them were born in Canada, first-generation Canadians.

  Carl Helbig didn’t care. He was Davenport High’s star hockey centreman and a Junior A superstar. He was said to be “poetry in motion” on the ice, though I’d never seen him—or anyone else—play. I was Sonja Danychuk, eighteen years old, the school’s number-one nerd, invisible in a school where slim, pretty girls were the popular ones. I was too tall and a little too heavy, so my white skin, ample breasts, and thick black hair, pulled back in a long ponytail and then folded into a large doughnut, went unnoticed.

  “Too many cabbage rolls, perogies, and fried cheap food,” I complained to my mother, who merely shrugged. A husband who drank himself to sleep each night and a night job cleaning offices meant she had little energy for or interest in cooking anything but familiar cheap food. So the weight and absence of friends continued. Besides, I was shy, although convinced of my own intellectual superiority while well aware I was at the nasty bottom of Davenport’s social barrel when it came to money and class.

  “If you got it, flaunt it,” my classmate Vivian had instructed, flicking open the first button of my white blouse that I wore every day, surrounded by T-shirts, revealing two inches of swelling breasts spilling from a bra at least two sizes too small. But I did not “flaunt it,” so when Carl Helbig, who had been told in early February that his chances of passing this year were remote, in fact non-existent, asked me to a movie, I was baffled. So he could make fun of me later, I was sure, or perhaps he thought intelligence was contagious. Yet our eyes had met after his crass rag remark, as if he cared what I thought.

  I had never liked him, with his smart-ass remarks calculated to make his choir buddies hoot with appreciation and his inability to give a straight answer to any question. His raw comments made me flinch so I avoided looking at him, never wishing to be the focus of his attention.

  “No, I’m busy,” I had said, standing by my locker, looking hard at the floor. Going out with Carl Helbig would be worse than never having a date at all.

  It was not that he was ugly. In fact, in a blond, large-framed way, some would think of him as good-looking and at least four inches taller than I was, which was a novelty and a plus. It was that mouth of his and his relentless playing the comedian before his chortling tribe that appalled me. I refused to be the butt of a hundred muttered wisecracks every time I answered a question in class that no one else could answer following some disastrous movie date.

  IN THE MIDDLE of February, Principal Percy Wheaton, known to the student body as “Wiley Wheaton,” who was scheduled for early retirement that June and whose habitual scowl had been replaced by a benign smile, had summoned me to his office during the lunch break.

  “Your name,” he said, smiling and showing stained dentures washed by dozens of cups of black coffee a day and an occasional smuggled menthol cigarette, “was brought up by Hannelore Steinbrink during a recent staff meeting where scholarship applications were discussed. It was thought by Miss Steinbrink—and by several other teachers—that you possess the originality of thought and the academic diligence that are the criteria for the Imperial Oil Scholarship. This scholarship pays up to five thousand dollars a year for four years’ tuition at a university of your choice—provided that you keep an eighty percent average.”

  I sat silently, my mind racing. Principal Wheaton, his pink forehead stretching into his receding grey hairline shining under the large fluorescent ceiling light, continued.

  “This should be no great challenge to you,” he said gently, “considering that in the standardized IQ tests taken in Grade 9 you placed in the top two percent in the province intellectually.” Then he added quickly, “Not that our school places undue emphasis on standardized testing.”

  Noting my shocked silence, he continued, his voice even more gentle and encouraging, “And before getting this news, what had your plans been?”

  I finally spoke, deciding to be straightforward. Foolish not to be when everyone in Davenport knew everyone else’s business, including dates of marriage, birth of first child, gross annual income, and extramarital affairs, which either took place in the back seat of a car parked near Georgian Bay or under assumed names at the Sinclair Hotel.

  “Money’s always been a problem,” I confessed. “I was planning to take next year off, get a job, perhaps take some night courses and save toward university. This makes a difference. I really appreciate you and the staff thinking of me, it’s very kind of you.” This last comment was said with a catch in my throat. I was appreciative.

  Principal Wheaton smiled his encouragement.

  “Your future career plans?”

  “I want to teach English,” I said.

  “Ah, teaching,” he replied, rolling his prominent blue eyes, “a noble profession.”

  Wiley Wheaton spent every available moment at the Davenport Golf Club, even during school hours.

  “You can do other things, of course,” he murmured, as if imparting a serious and confidential secret. “Someone with your intellectual gifts can go far. There are far more remunerative professions than teaching.”

  “I’ll talk to my parents tonight and think about what you’ve said.” We shook hands warmly, co-conspirators in my academic—and possibly lucrative—future.

  The scholarship news, together with my high standing in the standardized testing, gave me a surge of unaccustomed lightness and confidence as I tripped back to the classroom, my head buzzing and my heart beating in my ears. That afternoon, Miss Steinbrink asked to see me after class. She sat behind her desk, slim, blond, and smiling.

  “Principal Wheaton spoke to you about the scholarship application?”

  “He did,” I said, returning her smile.

  “And?”

  �
�I’ll be speaking to my parents tonight, but I may not apply. It depends on a lot of things.” I did not want to share with Miss Steinbrink our family’s constant concern with lack of money, not wanting her to feel sorry for me.

  “I hope, Sonja, they’ll be encouraging. Of course you’ll apply. Why not? You’re such an outstanding student, and so precocious: sometimes when I speak to you, I feel I’m speaking to a colleague—an advanced one.” She laughed her tinkling laugh that I loved so much.

  It was all the reading: Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, Catherine Earnshaw, even Dorothea Brooke—their worlds were more real to me than the world of Davenport High, and certainly the Danychuk apartment on Main Street. But I merely said, “I read a lot.”

  She laughed again. “It shows in your speech. Do you want me to speak to your parents?”

  “No, but thanks anyway. The way you’ve been . . . it’s meant so much to me.”

  We both got up and she walked toward me. For a moment, I smelled her perfume. It was like a meadow of wildflowers.

  “I’ll miss you,” I said. I adored her. She was, after all, my only real friend at Davenport High—Donalda and Margaret, with whom I ate lunch on occasion, not really counting.

  “We’ll always stay in touch,” she replied, rubbing my upper arm. It seemed in a way she felt sorry for me, but it was just a feeling.

  I WALKED BACK home from school that cold February afternoon taking a much greater interest than usual in my surroundings. This was a town I could now look forward to leaving, a prospect that I had relished for at least eight of my eighteen years.

  Davenport, population twenty thousand, nestled along the coast of Georgian Bay between Parry Sound and French River, was a three-hour drive by car north of Toronto. As such it was in the Snow Belt, and winters, which stretched from early November to late April, were spent huddling against stinging blizzards or at the very least the bitter cold. It had a main street, called Main Street, with one nine-floor apartment building, a Tim Hortons, spelled without the apostrophe, Henley’s Hamburgers, and a Swiss Chalet. There was also a string of small locally owned dress and shoe shops, Michelle’s Beauty Salon, and Davenport Hardware. O’Dare’s Bar, owned by Joseph Dare Manufacturing, known by locals as Dare’s Machinery, Davenport’s only manufacturing plant, was the busiest place on the street. All would be closed or moving, it was said, once the mall on the fringe of the town was complete. At the New Davenport Mall there would be a McDonald’s, a movie theatre, and perhaps even a Canadian Tire.

  Surrounding Main Street were several streets lined with weathered red-brick two- or three-storey houses, many at least one hundred years old, with white lacy eaves and shutters. Some were rooming houses, but a dozen had been renovated for the professional offices of doctors, dentists, and lawyers. On Queen Street stood the Sinclair Hotel, recently acquired by the Holiday Inn chain and advertised as “completely renovated.”

  Surrounding all of this were the new developments: communities filled with the retired who had been lured to Davenport as “the most affordable living in Ontario,” together with first-time home buyers. Then there was Knightsbridge, made up of rows of pastel houses, many of them bungalows, representing “the modern aspect” of Davenport. Behind Knightsbridge was Davenport’s proudest accomplishment, the Davenport Sports Stadium, right beside the Davenport General Hospital.

  We lived on the fifth floor of the only apartment building on Main Street. Prospective renters were assured it was central to everything, but that was its only attribute. It was a run-down and musty-smelling building erected during the Second World War with temperamental electricity and ancient plumbing. It was not a place where you would invite your friends—even if you had any.

  Pops was the superintendent. For his services in cleaning the common area and collecting rent from the sixty units, he was given a rent-free two-bedroom apartment and $1,000 a month. Actually, Ma did the cleaning and Pops usually just collected the rent. Pops, Ma had told me once, had led his class in Ukraine where they had been schoolmates, and in fact was entering university in Kiev when he became convinced his future lay in immigrating to Canada. After their arrival in Toronto in the early eighties, there had been one disappointment after the other, starting with a refusal to allow him to attend university unless he could complete a final year of high school in Canada. His pride would not permit it, and instead he drove a taxi until he lost his licence for drinking. They finally wound up in Davenport. Through it all, Ma had always worked, during her pregnancy, and even when I was an infant.

  “They want me to apply for a scholarship,” I informed them that night.

  They spoke to me in Ukrainian, but I usually answered them in English: no excuse to not speak English after twenty years. They sat looking at me blankly. The smell of that night’s dinner of fried pork sausage and home fries hung heavy in the air together with the Camels they chain-smoked. Pops had already placed raw garlic in his twenty-six of Smirnoff, “to clean his blood,” and sat it next to him on the table. By ten that night it would be empty, and he would lie across the table, comatose, until Ma, who left after dinner and returned home at midnight from her office-cleaning job, woke him up for bed.

  “If I do receive the scholarship, and I may not, it would cover most of the tuition, but I’ll still need money for residence and books. I’ll work every summer and get something part-time in Toronto during the year, but I might need some help.” I had switched to Ukrainian, pointless to stick to principle and not be understood.

  “We can’t help you,” said Ma, shaking her head and deeply inhaling her Camel from a hand that had seen too many pails of steaming water and strong detergent. “We’d hoped you’d be going to work to help us.”

  I felt myself flush with anger. The money that went to Camels and vodka alone would probably cover the cost of residence and I only needed a modest contribution. I sat with my arms folded, silent and accusatory, my eyes fixed on them. Guilt, I thought to myself cynically, their answer to everything: the dutiful immigrant daughter, seeing to her parents’ well-being, paying her mother back for all the cabbage rolls and perogies that had contributed to the buttery roll under her chin and those extra inches on her thighs and upper arms. The least she could do was to see that the Camels and vodka didn’t run out.

  Ma pushed the remaining inch of her Camel into the greasy aftermath of her dinner plate and got up reluctantly. Six hours of cleaning the five floors of 98 Maple Street were waiting. She was a small, thin woman with faded eyes and sparse grey hair showing patches of pink scalp and her tiny face seemed buried in mottled, puffy skin. On occasion she’d say to me, “Imagine a little scrap like me having a big girl like you.” It was the closest she ever came to affection.

  I watched her trudge from the apartment carrying her mop and pail full of bottles of cleaning fluids to supplement those already waiting in the basement of the Maple Building. The owners had told her she was a good cleaner, a compliment she had repeated with pride to Pops and me. And she was honest. When she found lost items, she’d place them in plain sight on desktops in the offices. I pictured her, a cigarette steaming from her pursed lips, driving across Davenport in our 1988 Honda Civic, along the frozen streets lined with grey-tinged snow under a sky too cold to show a moon, and I felt a nudge of compassion for this feisty little workhorse. The feeling did not last long.

  Pops had finished his first three ounces of vodka. I sat at the table with him although the dishes were waiting to be removed and spring midterms were to take place in five weeks. If I were to receive the scholarship, I could not waste time. But I waited for him to say something.

  “You must apply for the scholarship. Your mother does not understand: education is everything. I made a big mistake not continuing my education. I should have stayed in Kiev or done something here. You have my head.”

  He spoke English well although with an accent. He would never speak English in front of my mother in consideration of her feelings. “You have my head,” was an indirect rebuff to Ma
, who, by implication, was not scholarship material.

  “You must not end up like us.”

  I got up from the table, piling the plates and picking up Ma’s cigarette butt, holding it between forefinger and thumb, and dropping it into the garbage under the sink: a cleaner using her dinner plate as an ashtray, a defiant act against her hours of cleaning. I pressed Pops’ heavy shoulder with my hand. His swollen abdomen rose and fell and I could smell the sour of sweat. Later I wished I’d said something, although I knew he did not expect it.

  Two weeks later he was dead. Ma found him sprawled across the table, a huge whale with arms like fins sprouting hairs of black wire strangely assertive on pale dead flesh. An empty vodka bottle sat beside him. She woke me immediately. I pressed his cheek, chilled dough, and removed a final cigarette butt from his swollen yellow fingers. When they came to pick him up, I marvelled at his helplessness, his head bobbing from the gurney, and stifled a desire to tell them to be careful. “A massive coronary,” we were told later.

  Arrangements were made through The Reasonable Alternative, the region’s cheapest crematorium. There was no service or funeral, no prayers or tears. He belonged to no clubs and never attended church. Any relatives were still in Ukraine, most of them dead, and he had no friends. I stood with Ma in the small chapel with its stained-glass windows listening to the piped-in organ playing “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” Ma murmured that fifty was too young to die, and when I got up at two in the morning, unable to sleep, I saw her sitting where he always sat with his vodka bottle, chain-smoking her Camels and looking into the distance.

  There was no money except a death benefit from Canada Pension to cover cremation costs, plus a very small monthly amount. Ma wanted to stay on in our building as superintendent, claiming, quite truthfully, that she had always done all the cleaning. But when I relayed this request to the owner, he refused, stating it was a position only suitable for a couple. We were allowed to stay in the apartment for a month provided Ma continued with the cleaning.