Feeling the borders between his warm core and his cold extremities, he doesn’t think of the concrete highway overpass growing in the distance as an evolutionary milestone until a leaning motorbike becomes visible at two hundred metres, then its reclining rider at one. An idle motorcyclist sits on the concrete embankment, sheltered from the rain and watching Andrew’s approach.
Cars are alien. Their gratuitous speed. Their vulgar girth. The blindness. But the motorcyclist is in between, a wealthy cousin with better teeth. Licensed by the same seasons, given and taken by sunned asphalt, they too ride with a bit of fear clamped behind their rear molars. Their tires are also thin sleeves of air. Watch them closely, watch them from the reduced speed of a bicycle, and you’ll observe their camaraderie, see them open their hands to trade small waves, or watch one stranger pull off the road to offer tools to another. Only here, beneath the veil of rain, does he see his edge on the biker. The rain that inconveniences me could kill you.
Andrew gulps cold water as hordes of raindrops slip past his collar. The marooned biker leans back on a concrete incline under the overpass, bulbous helmet and duellist’s gloves resting beside him. Andrew must be a slow and boring parade as he limps along at twenty-seven kilometres an hour.
Trying not to stare up at the reclining motorcyclist, Andrew looks instead at the motorbike as he slogs one stroke after another. Their bodies mirror their bikes. Andrew’s tires are a third of the width and depth, and he rides a single skeleton of metal not the motorcycle’s triangulated frame of conjoined metal. Andrew’s membranous layers of Lycra are designed for warmth with the minimum thickness, while the other guy’s layers of denim, leather and Kevlar pile protective thickness upon thickness. Andrew wears a skullcap helmet to the other’s hydrocephalic dome, wears sunglasses to his face shield. And there’s the engine — the herbivore of self-propulsion and the carnivore of a burning engine. Fixated on this shifting border of similarity and difference, staring at the motorbike but not at its rider, Andrew is surprised to hear him speak.
“Game of cards?” the idle rider calls out. “Smoke a hooey? You can’t like riding in this.”
Andrew doesn’t pedal two more strokes without admitting that he’d push the bike off a cliff to stop. Stepping from bike to concrete incline, shaking Richard’s thick hand, he stretches out his sopping back on the filthy concrete. The bridge above protects them from rain but not dampness.
“What are we doing?” Andrew asks.
“Me, I understand. You guys are crazy,” Richard replies.
Andrew can smell his accumulated sweat. Can Richard?
“I may be slow,” Andrew replies, “but I’ll finish with all my limbs.”
Then, with the flick of a lighter, they add another layer to the fug under the overpass and get high on pungent grass. They play cribbage on a little travel board Richard keeps in his bike’s toolbox. Skunk line, Andrew thinks when another motorcyclist approaches, then passes in the pouring rain. If he ever steps onto the bike again, he’ll ride from cribbage in the Maritimes to euchre in Ontario, jacks and queens and kings fluttering in his spokes.
Richard shakes his head at the other motorcyclist content to press on unsafely in the pouring rain. The passing whine of the other engine is still fading when he says, “There are only two types of riders: those who have been down, and those who are going down.”
With the marijuana loosening the vise of his trapezoids and relaxing his hamstrings, Andrew has his first moment of nostalgia for this trip. Thirsty for more than just water, thinking that a puff is great but that a puff and a pint would be heavenly, he thinks back four days ago to his private send-off in Halifax. After friends had wished him well the night before his departure, after the last of his apartment things had been mailed on ahead to Kingston, he shed his civilian clothes, stepped into his shorts and jersey and began his trip across half a country by first crossing the city for a beer. Parking the loaded bike outside a brew pub, he tried not to be too self-conscious with his shaved legs, his bright jersey and the scrotum tray that is a pair of snug cycling shorts.
Once, in Kingston when Andrew was chauffeuring Stan, his father the English teacher taught him the difference between a traditional pint drawn off a hand-powered beer engine, and “the kind of machine piss you’re drinking at student bars.” Stan had directed them to what he said “used to be a proper old fart’s pub before it got trendy.” Andrew hauled Stan out of the car’s passenger seat and guided him into a pub dimmed by stained glass and a contagion of dark wood running from the bar through the floorboards and into the tables and chairs.
Stan surprised him by saying, “The books I’ve read in here,” then directed them to a corner table to start his disquisition on hand-drawn beer.
“Draft means pull. Most of the so-called draft beer in this city, on this continent, is dispensed with compressed gas. Tell me, you little scholar, how can a gas pull?”
Around this same time, Andrew was learning to bike, to really bike, single track off-road trails, or twenty-five-kilometre road circuits out of the city. Mark, his unofficial cycling mentor, once slowed his pace on a road ride and deigned to go behind Andrew. “I’ll ride in your draft for a change.” Andrew didn’t tell his dad about all of Mark’s lessons.
In the pub, Stan had ordered for the pair of them, then invited Andrew to watch as the waiter returned behind the bar to work the tall porcelain handle of a beer engine, filling their glasses with slow, even squirts of beer.
“See that? No gas, no electric regulators, just an arm and an ale.”
So that’s exactly how Andrew began this bicycle odyssey, with a hand-pulled beer and the start of a question that had taken the four days since to crystallize. High, dirty and exhausted, staring from his self-propelled bike to the dozing motorbike, Andrew wonders if memory is pushed or pulled. Pushed at us unconsciously by forces and emotions we can’t quite name, or pulled up consciously — obsessions, worries and excuses ordered up from our private archives? Still more than a thousand kilometres from Kingston, Andrew recalls again that the English word nostalgia is derived from two Greek words: one for homecoming and one for pain.
Another time with a bike, when Andrew was a boy and being ungrateful as his mother attempted to teach him to ride, Stan tried to coach Andy verbally in the skill that Pat had spent a precious hour trying to do physically.
“Take it from me,” Stan had said, “on a bike, in life in general, you either push or get pulled.” Stan had been standing crookedly in an upstairs hallway of the family home, both his wife and his son sulking behind two different closed doors.
18
After his eventful September ferry ride with Betty, Andrew’s clock was bent. Yes, it was Friday, but he’d been drunk, fooled around and then napped, all by four p.m. By nine, when he returned from the public library, the beer store and three trips to the hardware store, it already felt like Saturday morning. Saturday morning wasn’t too early for the first email.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: post
(1) do you mind if I call you Bet?
(2) are you checking email at mumsie’s?
andrew
Thankfully, he had a long list of renovations to keep him distracted while he waited for a reply. Speed the time with busywork. The undoing (fill, sand, paint) was dusty, tedious and entirely within Andrew’s acquired skills. As for the pantry-cum-bathroom, beer and Zeppelin might get a wall down, but how would he make a new doorway?
His mother had called the main-floor washroom the straw that broke the camel’s back, but Andrew had long ago decided a camel was far too large and stubborn an animal to symbolize his parents’ marriage. More like the rotting acorn the chipmunk couldn’t be bothered with, or the new litter unappealing to Mr. Meow-Mow. Still, at times he did agree with Pat’s description of the ground floor’s two pairs of adjacent rooms as “the shunting yard.” The kitchen and underused dining room sat opposite the living room an
d a perpetually dark entranceway incised by a wide staircase. For a few years he had heard his mother refer to the ground-floor rooms as twinned or symmetrical. The finite grid of rooms was originally overlooked by a Pat enchanted with the house’s coved ceilings, tall baseboards, endless hardwood and especially “that darling pantry.” Then both her voice and her diction soured. The paired ground-floor rooms became locked or constricted or, there it was, repressive.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: In Cephalonia
Perhaps we should see each other exclusively on ferries.
Greece would be a breeze.
Yes, Bet’s fine.
Ciao
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Meet me on the highest passenger deck facing the sun. Travel lightly.
What do you do chez Mom? Flop? Scratch aging pets? Resume biathlon training?
— Andrude
Work, Andrew, work. Fill one door, cut another. Simple. But how do I know I’m not cutting into wires? By the time he had found and disengaged the appropriate circuit and dug out an extension cord to wire Stan’s aging circular saw from another room, he’d rechecked his library books enough to realize he needed to open up most of the living-room wall just to make a single doorway into the bathroom. Rough-stud opening. Is that architecture or a job ad?
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Lesbos
Scratch old friends. No, sadly I made the mistake of telling Mom I’ve left Dave. She must have taken the cordless with her when searching out “that special white,” because she returned to the table with a whole Ottawa Valley Social Tour. Pumpkin Soup at Doug and Irene’s. Tea at Cheryl’s. A Drink at Rachel’s. (Thanks to Martha Stewart, a dish is now an event). I might just have to schedule a private Pound Vodka in the Kitchen.
Remind me to tell you about the Chardonnay Mafia. (Burn this letter.)
Placing my bets,
He added one sheet drywall to the list for tomorrow morning’s trip to the hardware store, not quite admitting that this would mean digging out the ski rack and bungee cords and not yet knowing that he would drive home unsafely at sixteen kilometres an hour.
Pantry. Where does that come from? Panty re-entry? (No more beer until you’re done with the saw. Yes, Dad.)
When stairs became more and more mountainous to Stan, and his fading sense of touch numbed his bladder, he coveted his wife’s neighbouring space and proposed converting the pantry into a downstairs bathroom.
“Stan, it’s a kitchen! Even animals know not to shit where they eat.”
It was Andy who said “most animals,” but he was talking alone in his bedroom, his door almost closed. Architecturally, Stan was right. The pantry was the only non-invasive, unobtrusive place for a downstairs washroom. But atmospherically, Pat was also right. The stove was now just a metre from the bathroom door. When the door was left open, one cooked in sight of a toilet. The toilet was so close to the stove that, a decade after it was installed, Stan and the teenaged Andrew referred to it as “the spittoon.”
One more email to Betty.
From: [email protected]
If you were in a fairy tale, not your mom’s house, what colour would the magic door be that transported you out of the Nine Circles of Mom/Martha?
Tap. Tap. Andrew sank a new pry bar, its sticker still shiny and un-wrinkled, into the moulding around the bathroom door frame, sharp metal biting easily into the soft old wood. He couldn’t have seen many meals with Pat and this bathroom, but he does remember once standing behind her while she worked at the stove. He couldn’t see her face, but he could see Stan’s as he walked out of the bathroom, and that had been enough. Stan wore his usual mask of resignation, his getting-by face. Then Pat sent him back a look Andy couldn’t see, some jab or lash that immediately swamped Stan’s face with a mix of confusion, helplessness and rage.
“What, Pat? What do you expect?”
Andy continued to see his mother from behind. He saw the hand she calmly reached out to turn off the stove burner and then the oven mitt she wrapped around a pot handle. She removed the pot from the heat and then herself from the kitchen.
“What is it you would do?” Stan called after her. “What is the solution you can see that I can’t?” Stan had been yelling after Pat, but only Andy was in the room.
Now Andrew stood at the same kitchen/bathroom doorway, hammer and pry bar in hand. Wham. Wham. The bar bit deeper and deeper with each tap of the hammer. A black seam opened between wall and wood. He had spent years strolling past this cream-coloured wall and its wide moulding and never once thought of them as separable pieces, let alone of the moulding as two strips of wood, not just one. He leaned a shoulder into the sunken bar. The first strip backed away from the wall in two-foot sections, nails hanging like bared teeth. In seconds the entire length of moulding was free, and its straight, sharp nails rode snugly in the dusty air. Looked at individually, each nail appeared efficiently vicious. Secure in the moulding, though, each nail was but a tiny splinter compared with the hard, tooled bar in his hand.
From: [email protected]
Definitely an orange door. Drunken orange. Burnt orange. No,
no — scorched orange.
When the door frame finally released into his hands, he danced it across the room.
From: [email protected]
149 Collingwood. $10 cab. I’ve planned a small Ice Cream Straight From the Carton With Two Spoons. (The fuck-me caramel in Dulce de Leche is decidedly orange.)
This was more than just a binge clean before a date, more than just shaving the toilet and sandblasting the stovetop. To Undo: The giant handles on each side of every door frame. Wood-filler. Railings beside the toilets. More drywall mud. The shower rails are fine. Do the taps look like handicapped taps? Where do I shut off the water for new taps? Hacksaw for the old pipes? How do I rejoin?
More than a decade after Andy had watched that half-wordless exchange between his parents in the kitchen, when he had seen Stan’s face but not Pat’s, he finally asked Stan if he remembered that day. What kind of look had she given him that had angered him so much?
“Pity,” Stan answered. “Pity and fear.”
19
In the damp air under the overpass, Richard the motorcyclist shakes his head in exasperation and asks Andrew, “How do you stand going so slowly?” Biker and cyclist are wet and dirty and pleasantly high.
“Any faster hurts too much,” Andrew replies. “And it doesn’t feel slow when it’s yours. You see more.”
“Trees, trees and trees. How much more is there to see?”
“My dad had two big jokes,” Andrew says by way of explanation.
“Two bulls — one older, one younger — crest a hill. Below them is a green valley full of grazing cattle. Sweet, the young bull says, let’s run down and fuck some of the cows. No, the old bull says, let’s walk down and fuck them all.”
Staring down the concrete slope to a bike he’d have abandoned an hour ago, Andrew sees through a pannier to his one book from the family library and thinks of another. On his eighteenth birthday, the most tender of Stan’s gifts had been a copy of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts, the memoir of an impecunious collegiate youth whose attempted walk across Europe was cut short by World War Two. Which is the time of gifts, travel or youth? Stan’s spidery inscription still asks inside a box inside a stuffed storage room in the Kingston house.
“It’s loaded with recurring questions,” Stan had continued over the birthday dinner. “These gifts, are they given or received? Are they exchanged during the trip or because he’s young? If there is a time of gifts, when does it stop? Why?”
Now, wet, dirty and hungry under an overpass, Andrew asks Richard, “So, what do you have to eat?”
“Pepperoni sticks,” comes the dreaded reply.
Stomach growling, head adrift
on multiple breezes, he contemplates asking Richard whether motorbikes still have tuned exhaust. One of his later undergraduate essays, those private dances, compared someone’s evolutionary, revisionist poetics to the harmonically tuned exhaust systems of older motorcycles. Grossly inefficient port-engines, such as those on motorcycles or snowmobiles, routinely lose as much as one-third of their fuel as uncombusted exhaust. Knowing that the belched gas exits the exhaust pipes in a series of waves, motorcycle engineers replaced cylindrical exhaust pipes with conical ones to create an internal vacuum. Waves of unignited gas would then leave the combustion ports like swimmers, and some kick-turned off an inverted centre-point to swim back up the pipe and return for one more chance at explosion. Instead of asking, though, he simply stares down at the still cough pipe, the cold gun barrel, the exposed bone.
High, he also sees through the grey air and his damp panniers to one of Betty’s Turkish postcards.
Dalyan, Turkey
Christian/Islam. Greece/Turkey. Fresh water/salt. Arrived from Greece and am so glad to leave the sandy nipple tourism behind. Much more polite here. On the little van-buses whipping around a city, you board and the driver takes off, entirely confident that you’ll hand up your fare and others will hand back the change.
Went to an island’s turtle beach today. Not the right time to see them, but the island’s their breeding ground. Darwin started with turtles on islands. You?
Not in a shell,
You fucking bet.
20
If Betty arrived at all that Sunday, after their Friday kiss and weekend emails, she would be arriving with one knapsack, not a moving van, and he wanted her to have the (promised) option of her own bed. He’d give her his room, as it was the cleanest, the most recently painted and the only room that didn’t, he suddenly saw, look like part of a 1970s museum exhibit. Okay, yes, she’d get his room, but which bed? His own mattress was fine, but Stan’s was speckled with pee stains. Another motive to give her his room was seduction by immersion, as if her spending time in a room thick with layers of Andrewness would make her more likely to cross the hall and seek him out. And then what? If she crossed the hall to find him in Stan’s old room, the sheets of that bed would be more likely to get pulled off. He’d have to double-sheet Stan’s bed.
The Push & the Pull Page 5