The Push & the Pull

by Darryl Whetter

  • one tube Monistat-Derm (almost full)

  • one half-novel

  • one pair hiking shorts, breezy

  • one short-sleeved jersey (dirty)

  • one pair cycling shoes

  • helmet

  • sunglasses

  The sight of the helmet is unnerving. Yes, it’s necessary. Yes, he’s glad to have it, now more than ever — spare the brain from whatever gets thrown. But it alarms him to have to think of the helmet as a tool, as an asset. One piece of armour isn’t much.

  Despite his boredom and his need for distraction, the half-novel remains untouched for one quarter-hour after another. He knows too many of the novel’s phrases and scenes already, recalls its various trials and tests of loyalty. One remembered phrase, his moral editor, tempts him to burn the novel outright. Travel lightly. Again and again, he looks away from the ripped coverless novel that helped his parents fall in love. His parents, and then, despite or maybe even because of their romantic failure, he himself fell in love with advice from a novel he now won’t look at. On the uneven ground, he tries to sleep but fails.

  78

  On their ferry date in bright September when Andrew lied to Betty about how long Stan had been dead, when he hid this truth beneath what he thought was the better, more relevant truth of wanting her to move in, he didn’t yet know how uniquely wounding this would be to her. Only their slow talks of November and December began to show Andrew the additional costs of his September deception. Weeks before Betty left him, she told him about her mother and father falling for, then fighting over, a lakeside plot of her father’s land.

  Nearly a week after Elaine’s Easter departure from campus, her housemates, Barb and Megan, perked up at the rare sight of headlights in the driveway of their rented student house. Barb plugged in the kettle and asked Megan if she’d been able to keep herself away from the last bottle of Mateus.

  “Well?” they both asked as Elaine floated in from her first weekend away to Jim’s family land.

  “The lake is deep and dark, but clear.”

  “Get the chocolate.”

  “These huge pink rocks, they just seem . . . kind.”

  “Where’s the corkscrew?”

  “And the pine trees, so brave. Impossible pine trees growing up the sides of cliffs.”

  “C’mon, Elaine, quit with the star talk or we get ugly.”

  Sitting on a couch between the two closest friends she’d ever had, Elaine smiled from ear to ear. “He didn’t make one proposal; he made two. The second was would I design a house for us there on the lake.”

  Even Megan cheered.

  But after courtship became engagement, and as a wedding and house designs eclipsed graduation, Jim was torn between the land he had inherited and the life he wanted to build on it. Betty would describe the lakeside house her mother designed as “an argument with a roof.” Jim tried to tell Elaine that architecturally she had carte blanche, but she didn’t find the carte very blanche when he asked her to sign a pre-nuptial agreement guaranteeing him ownership of the land.

  Riled, Jim finally replied, “My great-grandfather cleared that land with an axe, a chain and a horse. Of course I think of us together, but the land —”

  “Needs a pre-nup. You say The Land like it’s a person. Right, The Land went off to this lawyer’s office for a pre-nup. What does The Land think of this baby going into French immersion?”

  “Elaine, I love you. We live together and this is a non-issue. We can build whatever we want. We can do anything.”

  “Except change. Except evolve.”

  “That land has carried two names, the Queen’s and my family’s. I can’t — no, no, you’re right — I won’t give it away.”

  “Oh, poor man’s worried about losing the family name and something precious.”

  “Elaine, I’m asking you to design our home.”

  “Your home.” Elaine stormed off.

  “The poor fools,” the narrating Betty had concluded, nodding yes please to the wine bottle angled in Andrew’s hands. “The lake where he spent his childhood summers. An architect designing her own home. Could the stakes have been higher?”

  “A pregnant architect. They ground it out until you were what, six?”

  “Almost seven. We’d already moved into the city by then. For a year we tried treating Black Rock like a summer place. When he moved out for good, at least Dad knew where he was going. And the arguments were great for my vocabulary. Modular. Labyrinthine. Unitized. Imprisoning.”

  “Such a head/heart debate.”

  “Dad doesn’t think so. How is it unemotional to protect your emotions?”

  “Yeah, but I can see her point — poison trees, poison fruit.”

  “Maybe, or maybe my mom just made a mistake. It was her first house. Notice she redesigns houses now.”

  “So, your dad’s bringing it all down?”

  “Yep. After two decades of renovations and adaptations and excuses for his moods or his career bounding, he’s celebrating his fiftieth birthday with a bulldozer.”

  “I got a light bulb joke to rework,” Andrew admitted.

  79

  In nameless woods outside Rivière-du-Loup, he waits for the cover of darkness. Waiting alone, scared yet bored, he thinks incessantly of the kick that has sent him here to hide, the kick he can still feel in his leg. A whip from hip to toe. Higher even. The tucking coccyx, the up-swept ribs, a pliant lung. And deeper than that, a kick forged by every metre of this ride and each of those that brought him to it. The body he remade through cycling, then again by cycling with Mark.

  He stands up, steps around in the piny heat, steps nowhere. Brought here by a body now made idle. Idle and itchy.

  Stand here. Stand there. Squat again. Dodge the sun. He does not read.

  His growing hunger displaces some of his guilt but augments his fear. If nothing else, hunger is reliably self-absorbed. And thirst is fear, that rusty ache in the mouth, that empty bite. His eyes tighten but do not stare. If he could see them, he’d notice his pupils reduced to pinpricks, even when his head’s hidden in leafy shade. Pine boughs, maple branches or dirt in his empty stare. Pine boughs. Maple branches. Dirt. And the inescapable sun. Although the heat won’t yet last through the night, here now is the staggered roast of direct and residual heat, the burner and its heated room.

  Without his own wind, without a distracting ache in thigh or lung, he feels imprisoned by the sun’s hot, red stare. Cheek and forehead burn. To turn away is merely to trade off the triceps or offer up the neck. Regardless of where the sun hits him, blasting shoulder, chest or neck, sweat gathers on his itching thighs and even trickles into his rashy crotch. Unfairly, sweat finds his yeast infection even though he’s hiding, not riding.

  He stands again, grateful for the distraction of a chore. With time on his hands he’s able to undertake a thorough quest for shade. Nonetheless, no matter how much he expands the radius of his search, no matter how distant the bike becomes, each tree he auditions still leaves some patch of him vulnerable to a prodding finger of burning sunshine. A red pinch on the ear, a hot stain on a pink thigh. Again he rises, squats, or strolls, amazed at the pure research of an investigation free from a ticking clock. He’s a military scientist, a scheming convict, nothing to do but think. Finally, he switches tack. If he can’t find shade vertically or perpendicularly, he’ll find it horizontally.

  Hunting out the largest, shaggiest white pine, he begins to raise its hemline with the saw blade of his knife. Only now does he really think of the book he’s not reading or the toilet paper he abandoned as starting out like these tree branches in his hands. At UNS, he met a young librarian who referred to books and paper journals as “tree-ware.” Hardware, firmware, software, treeware.

  Computers show you how other people think: the programmers who anticipate how you work, the designers who try to chart what you’ll do. All of the commerce and connectivity remind you that you are one of many. Hacking off long pine bou
ghs feels utterly removed from reading or the daily world of computer use and other people. He cuts away, piling the boughs beneath the shortening skirt of his chosen tree. Tree parts fill his hands, yet he won’t read the treeware of the family novel or, worse, Betty’s postcards. Witness and jury, the postcards sit tucked into the remainder of the novel off with the parked bike. Betty, would you still write me now, with blood on my cleats? To his every protest of self-defence against these random attacks of male violence, he can hear Betty or his more enlightened self reminding him that he alone chose to travel on the vulnerable side of the road.

  As a young teenager, when he began arguing with his mother on the phone, picking fights on the most irrelevant grounds, glorying in the sting of an accusation, she’d often reply with the word victim, smearing it with such disdain and revulsion that now, years later, he will not say that he was a victim of cigarette violence from the Mustang crew. He’s equally unwilling to say that he victimized the kid he kicked. They’d been pissing on his tent and shitting in his panniers. That was symbolic violence more than it was petty theft. But then Betty’s voice catches him again. Symbolic violence doesn’t require reconstructive surgery, though, does it? In each of their liberal arts educations they’d discovered how limited binary thinking could be. Victim or victimizer. Mother or whore. Heterosexual or homosexual. What about life in between? What of the intriguing shades of grey between black and white? And yet here he is, inconvenienced and disadvantaged but unharmed, awaiting night to avoid being a victim.

  The severed pine boughs make a half-comfortable bed, offering a dense layer of softness. His cycling jersey, however, is too thin for him to lie comfortably on the innumerable pine needles. His first thought about his bed of pine needles compares it to a funeral pyre. Now, nearly two years after Stan’s death, he can still hear that shockingly procedural question: Did he ever talk to you about funeral arrangements or discuss what he wanted done with his body?

  Amazingly, the familiarity of lying supine yet unable to sleep finally prompts a deep stirring in his still body. This sexual desire, his first since confronting the campsite sackers, lights up as suddenly and as brightly as a lamp after a power failure. His hiking shorts are quicker to enter than the now abandoned cycling shorts. With his eyes closed and his shorts open, he chases the one erotic image he has been given, so grateful for this reliable distraction that he doesn’t care that the fantasy and memories that currently drive his hand are of Mark, not Betty.

  80

  At UNS, Andrew learned more about the bicycle than he had ever thought there was to know. Early Chinese manufacturers made bikes with bamboo frames. A bicycle tire can support four hundred times its own weight. Today, the adult tricycle is the under-recognized workhorse of the megalopolises of the developing world. The nouveau riche entrepreneurs in New Delhi who want tricycles banned so they can get across the city more quickly in their BMWs forget that the vast majority of parts and goods they need to do business are shipped around the city on tricycles. In Manhattan, traffic and stoplights make the average car speed just ten kilometres an hour. The bike should be everywhere.

  Physics, sociology, geography and economics all ride along on the bike frame. Carry Freedom, a non-profit project to encourage the use of bike trailers in the developing world, argues that the panniers Andrew abandoned back in Rivière-du-Loup are actually less energy efficient than a low-mounted bike trailer. With every single stroke he made to Rivière-du-Loup, the force of one leg caused the bike to lean a little to one side. The weight of each pannier had grabbed that lean, deepened it, and forced him to pull the weight back to centre. His arms had to correct that lean thousands of times each day. No wonder his neck and high back ache.

  Now, utterly idle as he waits for dark, becoming delirious with thirst and fatigue, the image of bamboo bicycle trailers rolls down the old rail trail he took to get here and kicks up a childhood memory of a televised grammar lesson. The memory and the delirium invite him to ponder a single word with all the concentration that bored isolation can offer. Nearly twenty years after he watched a so-called educational cartoon commercial, he can still sing “Conjunction Junction, what’s your function?” He can’t remember all of the images, but he’s sure single words or phrases were presented as the boxcars on a train. Conjunctions — and, but, or — were the dramatically opened and closed couplings between these wordy boxcars. With his bike still beside him and the railway miles behind him, the word and its antonym, coupling and uncoupling, poke at him incessantly. Betty and Andrew had coupled as they shared their stories of parental uncoupling. By the time those parental uncouplings had been described in full, Betty — or Andrew — pulled the release lever on their own coupling.

  Describing his parents’ divorce to Betty, Andrew delivered details he was surprised to remember, details that immediately swamped him with questions, Betty’s questions as well as his own adult questions added to old questions remembered from childhood.

  Stan had a slow body and a quick mind. When he fell in love with Pat, part of what he loved was her bluntness, her honesty. But the young man who fell in love hadn’t been given as much to fear in life as the prematurely aged husband still in love with a woman who had worked late every night on Gordon Gamlin’s political campaign. In the few conversations he got alone with his wife during the campaign, that siege of pamphlets and phone calls, he never brought himself to ask whether she was having an affair. The closest he came was mentioning her endless hours away from home. Pat’s reply was accurate but unconsoling. “Children grow and change, so should families.”

  When the election was over, with Pat and Gordon victorious in public office, Stan knew what was coming in his private life. She left for a weekend away in Ottawa with no more warning than a brief note on the counter. On Monday, a private courier arrived to hand-deliver a slim envelope to Stan during the brief interval between Andrew’s leaving for school by bike and Stan’s leaving by car. These elaborate preparations dissolved his last shreds of doubt and hope. A laboriously delivered — but skinny — envelope, not even its contents, told him that divorce was no longer a question of if, just of how much it would cost. That male, early eighties dread of divorce’s financial ruin was his first misconception.

  Stan waited until he reached the Allenville Correctional parking lot to open the letter. One hooked finger dragged at the envelope’s thin seam. Unfolding the single sheet of paper he could, damn it, still see the old letters of memory, still see Stan my man heading notes and letters from their early days of clutching and joking.

  Stan,

  You’re smarter than I am, better than I am, but you have to be, don’t you? (There, that teary grin, hold on to that.)

  You have taught me more, of life and of myself, than anyone else alive. For this alone I shall always adore you. I can see the bridges I’m burning here, and wish friendship with you were not one of them. Of course that’s impossible; I do realize that. This letter is also an offer of undying friendship, affection and a kind of loyalty, should you ever want them. (Please reach past that snorting derision. Read this again in a month, six months, a year.)

  Our friends and family are starting to put a halo on me which you know I don’t deserve and I know I don’t want. You told me from the start that you wanted a wife, not a nurse. I’m prevented from being one and I’m gambling that it’s better if I’m not the other. Better, yes, for everyone. I’ve never risked more, and I’ve never admired you more than in thinking, at some incommunicable level, you agree I should go.

  Until you and I had Andrew, I could never have understood that bravery can be shared. Please believe that I think part of the compulsion I feel is bravery, and it’s a three-sided bravery: yours, mine and Andrew’s. No one else’s, ever.

  Respectfully but shamefully yours,

  Pat

  Hoping to blunt the wounds he knew this letter would deliver, Stan read it in the prison parking lot just before a shift, the time when he normally had to seal off all emotion. But h
e had waited in the parking lot too long. Another vehicle approached and idled. Stan looked up to a stone-faced prison guard idling in a rugged pickup truck. A mounted shotgun bristled the cab’s still air. To those who patrolled the borders of a prison, you were either going in or out; there was no in-between.

  81

  Back in their September and October, Andrew could barely pull himself away from Betty to go riding. He cancelled on Mark twice in a row and began to lose the hard edge of speed he’d sharpened all summer. Consenting to a ride late in October, riding behind Mark once more, Andrew saw his shaved calves again as if for the first time. One ascent shed trees, shrubs and grass as the trail climbed a giant slab of naked pink granite. This bank of Canadian Shield held just a few patches of soil and supported only the most tenacious of pines, the most gregarious tufts of cedars and then finally dead patches of grass as the incline increased. Direct sunlight and the rock’s store of ambient heat made the steep climb triply hot. Slower, they were finally caught by the sweat they’d been fleeing. Drooped foreheads poured. Arms and calves shone.

  Rational thought, let alone liberal thought, was too heavy for the hot climb. On flat land Andrew would never have agreed to a statement like, Women shave their legs; men don’t. Live and let shave. But here on the climb, two sleek category mistakes bulged and gleamed in front of him. Tiny sub-strands of Mark’s muscled calves glistened like facets of a jewel, individuated one minute in the late afternoon sun, then gathering into a cohesive whole the next. Even overweight men can have fit-looking calves. Hang thirty extra pounds between a man’s nipples and his knees, give him that heart-attack pouch, and his calves can still look muscular. For the lithely fit, take away hair and how different is the male calf from the female? Tanned and glowing in front of him was not only calf, but also the naked, hairless cleft behind the knee, that sweet spot of — Climb, Andrew, just climb.