I needed a car. I could have driven to Davenport in three hours, listening to “easy jazz” on the car radio and stopping off for coffee at a McDonald’s or Tim Hortons in the various small towns on the way. Then I would not be inundated with what I mentally called “the great unwashed,” or the “toiling masses,” or was that from Karl Marx and his silly manifesto? I did not accept the Dickensian concept of mankind marching together in united humanity toward the grave. A motley army, I thought at the time. I could not think of myself as being part of this great fabric of humanity. I had once read of the rich inner life of the only child. What they meant was that you were forced to be introspective so that your mind, spirit, or whatever it was that made up your intrinsic essence curled inward like an ingrown toenail and festered its own way into eternity.
God, I thought to myself, this kind of thinking must stop. Better had I stayed at the residence with its skeletal staff, cleaned my own room, and eaten at Cultures, Murrays, or Swiss Chalet, going to the occasional movie at Manulife. Going back to Davenport was a step into the past: murky, chilling, and isolating—except for Mutti’s dinners and perhaps Carl. But then there was Ma. And I felt a certain veneer of confidence from my time in Toronto, a shimmer of glamour that made Davenport, and its inhabitants, even more loathsome.
It was four-thirty when the bus rattled into the Davenport Bus Terminal. It was already becoming dark and the snow, which had been floating down like white feathers all day, was increasing. I was the final passenger and I stood waiting by the door, a bag in each hand, with Ma’s coat in its plastic bag thrown over my shoulder.
“Sure you can manage all that?” the bus driver asked. “I could’ve dropped you off nearer your place. It’s gonna get worse an’ I gotta head back as soon as I have a butt an’ a piss. Where you get a coffee an’ a doughnut near here? Or do they even have a Tim Hortons?”
“Davenport’s even going to have a McDonald’s,” I laughed. “But it’s going to be at the new shopping mall. There’s a Timmy’s close to where I live. But it’s the Snow Belt, remember, so don’t delay too long.”
We trudged along together after I gratefully surrendered one of my bags, the one with the books.
“College girl, eh? Wish I didn’t drop out in Grade 10. Worse thing I ever done. Now I spend my life shuttling a bunch of losers from Toronto to Northern Ontario. Not even a decent pension when I do quit, an’ my old lady hates the hours.”
The snow was getting heavier, stinging my face and soaking my duffle coat. Above us the streetlights were smudged miniature suns. I waved goodbye to the driver at Tim Hortons, only a block from the apartment. He was without a doubt one of the vast army of humanity marching toward the grave. As a fellow traveller I felt sympathy, but little kinship.
Ma was home. Standing outside the door I could smell the smoke. It was a Friday and she’d probably just arrived from her house-cleaning and was bracing herself for the office-cleaning at seven. I would not use my key but surprise her, let her answer and see me standing there. I knocked lightly at the door but everything was silent. No one ever visited, so Ma was probably in shock. I knocked again, a more demanding knock. The security chain rattled, the door opened a few inches, and then fully.
“Sonja, you should have told me. I would have had something for you to eat.”
Ma was pleased, it was obvious. Not that she kissed or embraced me; that was not her way. Seeing her I felt a surge of sadness. Always small, she seemed to have shrunken more, and her face was as puffy as usual, her hair still in its sparse grey knot. Only her green eyes, looking out from their swollen purple sockets, had life.
“We can go out and eat. I’m not leaving ’til New Year’s and I’ll get some groceries tomorrow. Can you take the night off?”
Ma nodded thoughtfully. “I’ll have to work Sunday night to make up for it, but that’s all right. It’s good to have you here.”
It was strange to hear the Ukrainian after three months.
“I bought you a present, a great little coat, really expensive.”
I opened the bag from Holt’s with the same flourish used when producing my expensive essays. Showmanship, I thought. Who’d have ever thought it: a marketer of tainted goods, selling essays to the student plagiarists and now a secondhand coat to Ma. Good as new, a voice in my head mocked, good enough for a non-English-speaking immigrant cleaning woman.
“It beautiful, majestic,” Ma crowed in Ukrainian, unbuttoning the top hook and gasping at the price tag. “How you get money like this?”
The question was accusatory and in English. With me gone, Ma had been forced to speak English, and her thoughts were obvious. There was only one way such money could be obtained. Her studious daughter had become a hooker. I stifled the urge to laugh, but I knew I had better straighten this out immediately. I explained the source of the funds several times, describing it as a second job, something like I did for the Helbigs. Ma listened carefully, nodding her head.
“But, Sonja, these people, they use your work like it their own. You think that good?”
I was shocked—a morality check from my little cleaning woman mother. Incredible. I would never have believed or expected it.
“Better than what you were thinking.”
This time I did laugh and diverted her by forcing her to model the coat—a perfect fit, but inappropriately elegant, the fur collar overwhelming.
“Too grand for me?”
“No, Ma, not at all. You look wonderful. You just need a fox hat to balance it off and some new boots.”
Ma sat, the coat across her knees, caressing the collar as if petting some silent, sedated cat. She smiled at me, a rare happening.
Later we drove together through the snow in Ma’s crumbling freezing car to the dining room of the Sinclair Hotel, where Ma had her first meal out since her arrival in Davenport twenty years before. She was, I thought, very happy, and except for a couple complaining of her chain-smoking, it seemed to be one of the high points of her life.
Ma sat, her fur-collared coat on her shoulders, clumsily eating slices of lamb with mint jelly, canned peas, and mashed potatoes, sipping her glass of Niagara Sauvignon Blanc, just pausing long enough to look over at me and produce a tremulous smile. Later that night she patted my cheek with a hand rough as sandpaper and smelling of soap and smoke.
“You good girl, Sonja,” she said in English. Then again switching to Ukrainian, “And I’m happy you go to school. You right, I wrong.”
LATER I HEARD Ma hacking into her pillow and then smelled her cigarette. More of the same, I thought cynically.
“People aren’t smoking so much anymore now, Ma. I heard you coughing last night. You should try to stop.”
I waited for her usual speech on smoking being her sole pleasure and as such essential, but it didn’t come.
“I will try, at least cut down.”
Apparently gifted coats and dinners out opened new doors, perhaps with more yet to come.
I slipped into a routine. The refrigerator was empty save for the usual pumpernickel curling in its plastic, the jar of Bubbie’s Pickles, and luncheon meat, a candidate for ptomaine poison, turning a suspicious shade of green. I purchased eggs, fruit, chicken legs, fresh rye bread, tomatoes and milk, even a few baking potatoes with some butter and sour cream. When Ma arrived home from her cleaning I would have something prepared before she went to the office.
On the first night Ma arrived home, she smelled the chicken legs roasting and saw the table set with her sparse cutlery. She sat down at the table, head in her hands, her shoulders shaking.
“You shouldn’t have to do this for me,” she sobbed in Ukrainian.
“Oh Ma, cut it out. I have to eat too, you know, and you work so hard.”
I placed my hands on her tiny shoulders, which felt like skeletal birds, so fragile they would crush under pressure. I had never seen Ma cry before, not even at Pops’ death, which had merely made her silent and withdrawn, and now her wrenching sobs filled me with guilt. I
had been a real pig, so ashamed of her, treating her like a workhorse, sharing Pops’ intellectual disdain; well, I would make it up to her. I bent over, hugging and rocking her, which only increased the sobs.
“If you don’t stop, Ma, I’ll throw it all out and make you live on pickles again,” I threatened. The sobs finally subsided.
6
THE CHRISTMAS PARTY
IT WAS NOON ON CHRISTMAS Eve when the call came. Carl was home and Mutti was having her little party for him that night. “Sonja must come . . . she family. Carl, he ask for you.”
I accepted.
“Ma, Gerda Helbig phoned. She’s giving a party for Carl tonight and she wants me to come.”
“You got clothes?” Ma’s few English phrases impressed me. Necessity, the mother of invention, I thought.
I brought in the black dress hanging in the almost-empty closet. “On sale, half-price, you like?”
Ma shook her small head with enthusiasm. “Boo-tee-ful. You want drive?”
“No, no.” To be deposited via Ma’s decrepit vehicle would ruin my entrance. “They’re picking me up,” I lied.
Ma had been ordered to go to the office building to clean up after the pre-Christmas parties. They usually left her an extra hundred, a Christmas gift and a bonus for ruining her Christmas Eve, not that it was ever celebrated by the Danychuks.
My hair needed help. The shower in the new apartment was no better than that of the old one and Michelle’s Beauty Salon was at the corner.
“Do you know what day this is, and can you read?” exploded Michelle.
There was a sign on the door that said CLOSED.
“I reckon the fact that my kids won’t get no Christmas presents ain’t no skin off your back.”
Another clod from the army of humanity marching toward the grave, but I’d learned the value of a dollar, especially to the Michelles of Davenport.
“I’ve got a big date tonight—Carl Helbig the hockey player—and you won’t have to put me under the dryer, just use the extra-large rollers and I’ll dry it at home. I’ll give you an extra fifty toward the kids’ Christmas gifts.” A huge tip, when Michelle’s usual charge for a wash and set was $25.
Michelle’s face was a study: money or time?
“The stores are open until six,” I reminded her gently, “and they sell everything half-price after four.”
Money won. And I even got fifteen minutes under the dryer, not long enough to dry my thick bush of hair but enough to circumvent meningitis. Going out with wet hair in a Davenport winter would do it.
“I WANT TO see you in your dress before I leave.” Ma was sitting in Pops’ chair, sipping on her pre-work Camel, a smile of anticipation on her small, puffy face.
I had now forged a relationship with Ma: the coat, some baked chicken legs, and the meals out had started it. Sky-high marks and academic success meant nothing; what really mattered was food and clothes. But at least I was making Ma happy, a feat never before accomplished, and I was taking her out on Christmas Day to the Sinclair Hotel for their Christmas Day Turkey special, four courses at $19.95 a person. Ma would be ecstatic.
I brushed out my thick black hair, enhanced by the borrowed rollers into a wild bouffant, outlined my mouth with fierce red lipstick, labelled HELLION, and shaped my eyebrows with my thumb and index finger. My black eyes, I decided, looking into the stained bathroom mirror, were almost Asian—Slavic eyes, I thought, with my usual disgust—and my cheeks were too full for a sculptured effect, but the overall product was exotic, even arresting. I left the bathroom panty-hosed and spike-heeled, my full breasts spilling from the low square neck, my skin—and there appeared to be yards of it—as white and unblemished as milk.
“Well?”
Ma sat transfixed.
I laughed. “You like?”
“Boo-tee-ful, a movie star, every man there will be in love with you.” There was no mistaking the sincerity of her comments, uttered in a mangled mixture of English and Ukrainian.
“Let’s hope not, Ma. There’s no one there I want to be in love with me. I just want to show them I’m not the geeky dork of Davenport High anymore.” But Ma was not listening, and if so she didn’t understand, the words geeky dork not translating well.
“I was pretty as a girl, Sonja, not with all this.” She placed her hands on her non-existent breasts and jiggled. “But blond and tiny. I would sit on your father’s knee like a little doll, and for a while I used to look so young a few times they’d ask your father if I was his daughter, he was so heavy and stout. Then one day I looked in the mirror and I was old. It was all gone.”
I paused and looked at Ma for a minute, and my throat swelled in sympathy.
She got up reluctantly and offered her services again. “I drive you?”
“No, Ma, I told you they were picking me up. We’ll have a nice Christmas dinner together tomorrow. Good we’re going out: too depressing to cook a Christmas dinner with just the two of us.”
Ma nodded in agreement. “Have fun with the Germans.”
At least she didn’t say Nazis.
“YOU’RE NOT FROM here?” asked the cab driver after we’d driven halfway.
“No,” I lied. Neither was he, I thought; he was probably in Davenport hiding from the police.
“I can always tell the locals, knew right away you were a city girl.”
I tipped him more than I’d intended: the last remark was worth the cash. It occurred to me that I was going through my money too fast. After the exams I’d have to step up my business, no reason I couldn’t have enough to pay next year’s living expenses, and maybe make a down payment on a car, although I doubted whether in my officially unemployed state I could get credit.
Mutti’s bungalow—I always thought of it as Mutti’s; Carl Sr. and Carl Jr. were mere appendages—dazzled with dozens of Christmas lights. The lights covered the trimmed hedge and hung from the snowy eaves, mixing with the artificial icicles. Santa in his sleigh was illuminated, and Rudolph, a large red bulb glowing from his nose, pranced in metallic glory on the front lawn. A little much, I thought, but unmistakably festive.
“Some folks really go in for this Christmas crap,” commented the cab driver, pocketing his fare plus tip and then adding, his mouth curled in disdain, “Whatever turns you on.”
Ah, a sergeant among the marching army, and apparently as cynical and jaundiced as I sometimes was.
I touched the bell once and it promptly chimed, “Oh Come All Ye Faithful.” The door opened and Mutti appeared, a Santa hat perched jauntily on the side of her head.
“It’s Sonja,” she shrilled. “Ant she’s gorgeous.”
They surrounded me, the members of The Helbig Choir, Candace Stewart, Jerry Henley, Sophie Gallo, Gwen Andrews, all of them, as if I were a long lost-buddy. I smiled at Candace, whose red miniskirt displayed knobby knees and whose low-necked top displayed very little, and who was totally eclipsed by my own pneumatic splendour.
Carl stood in front of the blazing fireplace looking much the same except for two band-aids on his left temple. Clinging to him was a black-haired girl who looked borderline anorexic, but tanned and toned, with a wide Hollywood-white capped smile and two breasts, twin golden balls, blatantly synthetic, intruding into her plunging neckline. Not only was she clinging to Carl’s large upper arm, but I noticed she had entwined a muscled leg around his calf and was moving it up and down as they both stood together, giving him what I was sure she considered a seductive calf massage.
I felt an inward scratch of jealousy, even anger, but my smile never faltered.
“Oh my God,” she squealed in that sexy-baby voice I always found so repelling on the rare occasion that I watched the Red Carpet broadcasts and various talk shows. “This can’t be Sonja. She’s not one bit like you said. Not one bit.”
Carl looked embarrassed, disentangled himself, and walked over and kissed me on the cheek. I smelled the Aqua Velva and Irish Spring soap and felt the sting of long-remembered affection.
“Really glad you came,” he said. “I was afraid you wouldn’t. Mutti said you might stay in Toronto. This is Tula. She’s trying to break into the movie industry in LA, but right now she’s a personal trainer.”
“I was a backup dancer in Evita and Chicago,” Tula pouted, defending herself. “Tell it right, Carlie.”
The Choir exchanged glances. No wonder I had been welcomed with such enthusiasm: a Davenport alternative to Tula, with real breasts making a rare outing.
IN THE GUEST bedroom I was touching up with Candace Stewart, who was studying social work at Laurentian University and who had suddenly become my new best friend.
“Can you imagine his bringing home a cheap cunt like that for Christmas?” she hissed. “No respect at all for his friends and family. I’m shocked and disappointed.”
“She’s obviously what he goes for,” I replied.
I was more shocked at hearing the c-word come from this future social worker than by Tula herself, who’d I’d mentally characterized as a type—a type I detested—but I nodded in agreement with Candace. No need to alienate my new best friend. At this point, the object of our discussion appeared, the muscles of her tanned arms and legs rippling, as firm as the two golden balls that appeared glued to her chest.
“She must live on a tanning bed,” muttered Candace, “or on some other bed.”
But Candace had long been dismissed. Tula turned to what I suspected she saw as the real competition. “I don’t mean to be rude, Sonja, but do you know what I thought you’d be like? A frump—a real dog. Carlie was always talking about how smart you was, but never about what you looked like.”
Sonja & Carl Page 7