Once More with Feeling

by Méira Cook

  Strangely, the memory of kneeling before her and zipping her into her new jacket assails him. It’s an oddly freighted memory, as if it’s still about to happen. A memory not of the past but of the future. Such nonsense, Max shakes his head hard as if he has water in his ears.

  He glances at her, at this girl whose self-sufficiency is unaffected by what she has or lacks, what she owns or loses. She is Pat, and the snowflakes catch like white burrs in her hair and on her thick dark lashes. She’s beginning to look like the ghostly imprint of a girl he once knew. A long ago girl in a place called Arrivals. As he watches, she starts to transform: she’s a photo negative, a snow sculpture, the winter afternoon spinning forever in place on the tips of its skates.

  “Come on, darling,” he urges. “Let’s go home.” He hurries around to her side of the car and ceremoniously opens the jimmied door, then hands her in. Once inside he watches as she drips repentantly upon the Pontiac’s stained upholstery. He cranks the heat and turns the radio to a country music station. Some guy is singing a song about honky-tonk bars and pickup trucks and cheating hearts. About moving on and messing up. If you want to bring me down better get in line. Max knows how the fellow feels.

  “Mr. Macks?”

  Max startles. He feels as if he’s just dozed off, but Pat is still talking, lost in a rush of words. She slows some when he turns to look at her, his big hands gripping the steering wheel as if to give himself ballast.

  “But so you see my quandary, Mr. Macks?”

  He doesn’t, quite.

  “It is the wonderful something which now I cannot acquire for Mrs. Macks. How can I visit this lady, this wife, without a gift to offer? Father Michael said ‘useful,’ and Mama said ‘well made,’ but now that I have met you, Mr. Macks —” The girl falters, at a loss to express her thoughts. But Max, who knows himself to be neither useful nor well made, finally understands.

  “You see, it is not every day that one celebrates a birthday,” the girl explains.

  “Quite right,” Max says. “You want to buy my wife a birthday present?”

  “A wonderful something,” she assures him.

  “But my dear, you are her birthday present,” Max says before he can stop himself.

  What is a good mistake? Over the years Maggie had pondered Lazar’s question from every angle, even taking suggestions from the peanut gallery. Her mother-in-law told her about the time she ran out of butter for her pie crust dough. “I substituted margarine,” Grandma Minnie said, “and I’ve never looked back.” (It wasn’t technically a mistake, thought Maggie, but as close as Minnie would ever come to admitting domestic liability.) As for her boss, he just shook his head: “There’s no such thing as a good mistake in the newspaper business, Maggie. You should know that.”

  “Original sin leading to free will,” Max offered another time, winking at her over a stack of third-year Paradise Lost essays, and Lazar, still hooked on his father’s sports analogies, cited the time he’d taken a soccer ball to the head, gone down, but immediately leapt up. “The crowd went wild,” he reminisced fondly. Once she even asked Imee, but the poor woman, who could barely speak English, said she had never eaten a good steak.

  Only Sams took her question seriously, or at least sensed the panic behind it, though she thought she sounded lighthearted enough when she asked, “Ever come across a good mistake, Sams?”

  He barely paused. “You know that scene where Charlotte and Jerry are talking for the first time and he lights her cigarette?” He’d been watching Now, Voyager over and over, making notes. “There’s four or five main cuts and each time the camera goes back to Charlotte, she’s holding her cigarette differently. At first you think it’s just camera angles, but no. The most important mistake comes after the third cut when Charlotte balances the cigarette between her middle and index fingers and then, after the cut, she’s twirling it between her thumb and pointer like she’s playing a tiny flute, a piccolo almost.” As he talked Sams demonstrated, puffing on his pencil, twirling and gesticulating.

  Maggie sat down beside him on the sofa. “That’s certainly interesting, Sams. Sort of a continuity error, right?”

  “No, see that’s what people think, but the cuts show that Rapper isn’t interested in continuity. He’s cutting time into little pieces and Charlotte is trying to blow the pieces together again. It’s like a battle over who gets to control time.”

  “Why, Sams, that’s beautiful. I’ll have to watch that movie again. It’s certainly an interesting mistake.”

  Sams didn’t reply. He’d thought of something else — direction of smoke exhalation or a way to measure time differentials on the in-breath — and he was bent over his notes, scribbling. Maggie leaned back, her eyes closed. She was thinking of Bette Davis, her lips pursed in o-shaped awe at the pleasure of that first good draw. Charlotte Vale and her cigarette holds! It was certainly an interesting mistake but it was only later that she began to wonder why Sams thought it was a good mistake. For a long time she couldn’t work it out, until one day it came to her. Sams thought that all mistakes were good mistakes. They reminded him of who he was.

  Pat cheers up considerably after Max explains that she’s been brought out on a birthday visit.

  “So I am Mrs. Macks’s gift?”

  Max thinks of Maggie’s terrible mood these last few months, her sense of injustice, her yearning for a daughter. Maggie is turning forty, but forty has got Maggie all bent out of shape, and she was always a mite angular to begin with. He’s talking metaphysical shapes, here. Max loves the shape Maggie’s in, the Maggie-shape, so familiar he could find her in the dark if there were a million others to sort through.

  By the time he breaks the news that Pat is to be Maggie’s birthday gift, the girl is already vastly enlivened on account of the drive-thru window they’ve just negotiated and the Happy Meal she is clutching. That a meal can be “happy” appears to strike her as the perfect coincidence of the gleeful and the edible. Max sips his coffee and enjoys her delight — hasn’t she ever had a takeout burger before? She has not.

  “Go on, open it,” he urges. The salty, meat-greasy smell of fast food fills the car with an almost audible thwock. Pat closes her eyes. Her lips move as if she is praying. She is, in fact, praying, he realizes.

  They’re parked at the far end of the mall, Max looking on as Pat grapples with her Happy Meal. At last Max, who has ordered his own burger, stuffs it into his coat pocket so that he can help her. But his native klutziness is no help at all, and after a moment he throws up his hands. Valiantly, Pat grapples on, drops her burger, catches her fries, fumbles both, but eventually manages to steady herself between the various components of her takeout meal — burger and fries, bright, warring packets of ketchup, mustard, and vinegar, wads of paper napkins, and a pink plastic puppy that lurches about when placed on the dashboard, yelping halfheartedly. Pat finishes her meal in the time it takes for the world-weary animal to jerk itself to the furthest reaches of mechanical exhaustion.

  Devours, actually, thinks Max proudly. Pat: 1; Happy Meal: 0! The only evidence of this instant moveable feast is the wrappers and boxes, transparent with grease, that he bundles up and lobs out of the car window into a garbage can before swinging a left out of the mall parking lot. That and the ketchup licks on the girl’s face. Oh, the poor hungry child!

  Now that she has squared matters with her dinner, Pat turns her attention, once again, to Maggie’s upcoming birthday.

  “So I am to be Mrs. Macks’s birthday gift?” she asks.

  “We’ll put you in a box tied up with ribbon,” he says. “Or would you prefer to jump out of a cake?”

  “A box,” says Pat seriously. “I have never been inside either a box or a cake, but I do not like to waste food even for such a cheerful occasion as the birthday of Mrs. Macks.”

  Chastened, Max promises her that neither a box nor a cake lurks in her immediate future. For
the first time he feels the impropriety of what he’s been planning. How can a girl be a birthday present? he wonders. And why has this thought never occurred to him? The truth is, he was taken up by the idea and then overtaken by the idea’s execution — he’s barely given propriety a thought. And then there were all the arrangements to make: the Byzantine web sites and conflicting instructions on how to obtain a travel visa, the bureaucracy and hoop-jumping, the forms filled out in triplicate (and the immediate disappearance of those forms somewhere in the system), the greasing of wheels and wiring of money orders and transferring of funds, all undertaken in the interest of uxorious love.

  Of course the World Vision people were at first incredulous and then suspicious — he would have expected no less from such an earnest crew — but they put him in touch, at last, with Father Michael who was neither incredulous nor suspicious but instead exhibited a coldhearted efficiency that chilled the blood.

  “And you would like the girl when? And for how long?” he had inquired, before calculating a handling fee, half of which, he assured Max, would go to the girl’s parents.

  There were visas to arrange, a task complicated by the last-minute intelligence that Pat didn’t own a passport although, he thinks, why should she? Indeed she didn’t even have the identity photograph necessary to acquire a passport (briefly Max remembers the smiling girl inside the magnetic photo frame). Through all these details, as numerous as trees in the forest he could no longer see, Max was patient, persistent, buoyed by optimism. And when the passport was finally issued, the airline ticket purchased and painstakingly delivered by bicycle messenger, he had nothing to do but look forward to the girl’s arrival and Maggie’s wonder.

  Today is his wife’s fortieth birthday and Maggie has not, so far, approached even the outer rim of wonder. All the better when it comes, thinks Max. He is hopeful.

  According to her passport, Pat is seventeen years old, but she looks younger, slight and girlish. She dozes on the seat beside him and Max, loath to wake her, finds himself driving aimlessly west on Portage. Her head lolls to one side and he tries to prop her up so that she won’t get a stiff neck. Her face, at rest, is pliant and childlike; it lacks the commotion of her lively waking self. He fishes his handkerchief out of his pocket and wipes the ketchup from her lips. The white cloth comes away stained red and he curses himself for a fool but stuffs his handkerchief back into his pocket. He’s approaching the horseracing track at the perimeter of the city when a familiar excitement overtakes him. He wants to keep going, to hear the hitch of wheels on highway, the breath-hitch of a hurting song on the radio, to feel his fond old heart take flight.

  “Would you like to take a drive?” he asks the girl. She’s asleep but nods at the sound of his voice, smiles and murmurs.

  Max doesn’t notice. He’s already turned the car around.

  Maggie is not in the mood for a birthday but she has one anyway. She is not in the mood to turn forty but she does. Ob-la-di, ob-la-da, as they say.

  All morning her friends phone to wish her happy birthday. Happy fortieth, old gal! “How’s it going?” they ask. “Are you having fun yet?”

  “I’m old,” she says. “Other than that —”

  Other than that, she wants to snap, Mrs. Lincoln and I enjoyed the play, thank you very much.

  But the horror of her fortieth birthday turns out to have little to do with the baggy misery of ageing. The drift, the dwindle, the drag. In fact, for reasons unrelated to birthdays, this is unquestionably the worst day of her life. Hands down. So far and henceforth and forever after. As the years pass, she will manage to grind down the edges of this terrible day, sheer pluck wearing off the corners, one by one. When that finally happens, Maggie will be able to laugh: “Well, at least it wasn’t a leap year.” The implication being that pain has a season, can be discarded as one tears a page along the perforated edges of the kitchen calendar.

  She is confused when the police arrive to tell her there’s been an accident. “Not Sams,” she cries.

  “I’m sure Sams is fine,” the officer says, looking at his notebook. So she knows it’s not Sams. Someone is dead and the present tense is her ally.

  “Sit down, ma’am,” says the officer who looks like he would rather be anywhere else but here. Anywhere else in the world, quite possibly the universe. But the poor fellow’s not about to shirk his death-knock duty. “Can we get you a glass of water?”

  “Lazar!” she cries. “Where? What?” She is all interrogatives, cycling through “How?” and “When?” and “What the hell?” although, for some reason, she does not ask “Why?” Perhaps she is saving Why? for the days and weeks and years to come, the everlasting proof that pigs can’t fly, the crooked letter that no amount of wishing can straighten. Because is why.

  “But Lazar is at school,” she keeps repeating. “Why isn’t Lazar at school?”

  “I’m sure Lazar is fine,” says the officer. “We can send a car to collect him, if you like.”

  “Sit down, ma’am,” he says again. “Can we call someone for you?”

  “Call my husband,” Maggie says. The officer tells his partner to get this lady a glass of water stat, and suddenly Maggie panics. Why does she require water? Why is she being called a lady? Why the goddamn hurry? She begins to run in tight, comical circles (no one laughs), she pulls at her hair. She has wet her pants although no one seems to notice until she jumps up from the sofa. Then they all stare at the sodden patch and the officer’s partner hastily snatches back the glass of water as if loss of bladder control is a function of too much to drink rather than a siren going off in her head, rather than her heart crashing through her ribs, rather than the rush of adrenalin swerving through her racetrack veins.

  “Call my husband,” Maggie says.

  “Someone else,” says the officer.

  So she knows.

  Bizarrely, she remembers a joke Max used to tell, badly but with gusto. Private Schwartz’s wife dies while he’s away on active service and his sergeant volunteers to break the bad news. “Line up, men,” he says. “Now, all those who are married, take a step forward. Not so fast, Private Schwartz.”

  “Someone else,” the officer repeats to Maggie.

  So she knows.

  For a moment that’s all she knows: the knockout punchline of a shaggy joke. The old one-two. Then the officer begins to fill her in on all the things she doesn’t know. “There was someone with him,” he says. “No, we don’t know who she was, ma’am. There were no identifying documents at the scene.”

  “No, we don’t have a photo, ma’am. She wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, you see.” His voice is low and steady as if set to the thermostat of Keep calm, lady, but he stretches out his hands in a helpless gesture. Do you understand? he seems to be asking.

  She understands nothing. Nothing!

  “Yes, a female,” he confirms.

  “Yes, a female,” he confirms again. “I don’t know why she wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, ma’am.”

  “We don’t really know why she wasn’t wearing a seatbelt,” he repeats. “They were both still in the car when we got there,” he adds, as if this is the final clue he is at liberty to provide.

  “Yes, ma’am, the Jaws of Life,” he repeats.

  “Prone across the front seat,” Maggie will later read when she demands a copy of the police report. “At the time of impact the adult male, later identified as Max Binder, was in the driver’s seat. The unidentified adolescent female victim was prone across the front seat. The male victim’s fly was disengaged.”

  “Yes, ma’am, paramedics,” the officer confirms in his thermostat voice, but with an odd emphasis made odder by his attempt to banish oddness from his tone. Nothing going on here, folks. Move along, please.

  That year, February has only twenty-eight days, but March has thirty-one and April drags the usual wheezing train of thirty days behind it, so.


  “So what?” asks Lazar. “What’s your point?”

  Counting is her point: mental arithmetic. Days adding up to months divided by money in the bank. Cigarettes multiplied by the square root of insomnia. One sleepless night she perversely decides to count her blessings. There is only one and it has stalled on the lucky eight ball of “could be worse.” At least it isn’t a leap year, she thinks. Other than that . . .

  Other than that, she rages when her friends call to say, “How’s it going, honey?”

  Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln and I enjoyed the play, thank you very much. Other than that, Mrs. Kennedy and I appreciated the motorcade.

  Actually, she tries not to be such a goddamned bitch. “We have to take it day by day,” she comforts her devastated mother-in-law. “One step at a time, Minnie. Remember to breathe.” Blood, war, famine, flood, she thinks. Kill, kill, kill.

  The forensic report comes back negative. “No semen was found in the interior of the automobile. No semen was present upon or near the body of the middle-aged male victim. No semen was present in the oral, vaginal, or anal cavities of the adolescent female victim.”

  “No semen” seems to be the consensus, but Maggie knows that the presence or absence of semen has nothing to do with the intention to commit hanky-panky. That unspeakable bastard who didn’t even buy her a birthday present and the cunty bitch with her Electrolux mouth were undoubtedly up to no good. She doesn’t give a fig about the girl but she wishes that she could bring her low-life, despicable, no-account husband back to life so as to have the rare pleasure of killing him again. Slowly and with painstaking attention to detail. Once more with feeling.

  Some days she wants to share the joke with him, and some days she wants to snag his penis in his disengaged, adulterous fly. She wants to run him down and reverse over what’s left of him but, sadly, this is no longer possible. It seems the old Pontiac has been totalled.