Once More with Feeling

by Méira Cook

This too shall pass, some damn fool tells her. One of her buddies at the paper, most likely. La-la how the life goes on. Nobody loves a platitude or an old Beatles’ song better than a journalist. It’s true though, probably. Passing being the primary attribute of time, that crazy assassin. One day she’ll glance out of the window and it will be February again. A year will have passed, her forty-first birthday approaching, the dwindle setting in. Twenty-eight days and an extra day to leap over.

  Not so fast, Private Schwartz.

  Better get in line, Max sings. His wife is seldom far from his thoughts and this is especially true today. Today is Maggie’s fortieth birthday, a day she’s accepted as the fulfillment of all the cranky displeasure with which she has anticipated it. Max admires her simple talent for outrage.

  Max’s talent is for forgetfulness. All day he’s been tugging at a joke he can’t quite get to the end of although the refrain — poor, luckless, favour, lottery — runs across the bottom of his mind like a news crawl. And now he remembers how, birthday after birthday, he always seems to get his wife’s gift slightly wrong. The wrong shape, the wrong size, the wrong colour.

  “This must be for your other wife, kiddo,” Maggie says every year, rolling her eyes. Now Max has brought her a girl.

  The girl is sleeping beside him, her head lolling forward no matter how he tries to prop her up. He worries that Pat will have a stiff neck when she wakes; he worries about her lost suitcase, her stolen passport. Unaccustomed to such varied and sustained anxiety, Max wonders if this is what it’s like to have a daughter.

  But the highway is an arrow shot into the future, and the sun is low and wintry yet hanging in there. The familiar wobble in the Pontiac’s front axle is a comfortable nudge, a reminder that life is just another commodious but flawed vehicle to get from here to there. Along the highway, telephone poles slam past, their lines converging on an artist’s sketch of perspective. Some way out of town, the fields lay down and spread out a little, get comfortable. They pass the Joliecoeur Motor Hotel, its “Vacancy/No Vacancy” sign flickering indecisively. Somewhere between “Full up” and “Come on in.” Somewhere between “Keep on trucking” and “Welcome home.” High above them the sky is crammed with silence and space.

  All that drive-thru coffee has dripped through and now Max’s bladder is full. There’s no traffic coming or going so he pulls up on the shoulder of the road, dives down into the ditch, and signs his name in the snow. He’s damn proud of his signature too, a young man’s autograph, although when it comes time to close up shop he finds that his zipper is broken. The little metal doohickey won’t snag the two pieces of cloth together but runs vainly up one side and then the other. He makes a note to get rid of his trousers before Maggie sees.

  Back in the car the girl has somehow wriggled free of her seatbelt and is slumped across the front seat. Max surveys her tenderly. At least she won’t wake up with a stiff neck, he thinks. He remembers her astonishment at the drive-thru window, when the disembodied voice suddenly crackled through the speakers. “Can I take your order, please?”

  “Wonders!” she’d exclaimed, so overcome that he’d had to order for her. He smiles at the memory and casts a weather eye about him.

  A couple of sun dogs, one on either side of the sun, catch his attention. A lucky sighting. The snow in the fields and all three suns in the sky are flashing light. Far away a Hydro truck is coming toward them, flashing light off its windscreen. Max knows he’ll have to turn around and head home soon but, by God, not yet.

  A Break in the Weather

  Two

  The Riverview News

  Half past March and the earth was hurtling toward spring and thaw, whirling out of control. The staff at the Riverview News felt the season’s bilious pitch and yaw as if the entire office had been set spinning.

  To his surprise Shapiro found that he missed Maggie. He’d grown accustomed to her face, even to the ones she pulled at him behind his back. Without the whetstone of her stroppy presence he felt shaggy and unkempt. But when he finally phoned to ask how she was doing, she insisted on telling him all about a movie she’d seen, or maybe it was a play. The point seemed to be that someone had gotten shot, as unlikely as that seemed. Shapiro couldn’t be sure. The connection was bad and Maggie’s voice sounded uncharacteristically hoarse.

  “Come in whenever you’re ready,” he told her, ringing off hastily.

  Like Maggie, the time was out of joint. Miss Leonard, the ancient bookkeeper who had once worked for Shapiro’s father, rattled her swear jar and wondered aloud at its relative emptiness.

  “Good work, people,” she said, without conviction.

  Shapiro, too, was feeling oddly unstable these days, restless and unmoored. He’d wake up most mornings with an oily stomach and a tongue like a chamois cloth, his head clumsily wired and much larger than he remembered it being. It was your classic hangover, minus the alcohol or the sense of being justly shriven for his sins. But if he was being punished, Shapiro had no idea what he’d done wrong. Time seemed to be skipping tracks, a favourite song played once too often on a scratched disc. One minute he’d be staring into the mirror applying shaving cream to his jaw and cheeks, the next he’d come to with a start, his eyes blank, the razor clogged with stubble. Added to which, his wife seemed more remote than usual, the weather was anything but remote, and the atmosphere at the office, much like the weather, was subject to all manner of advisories and watches, alerts, warnings, and moderate to severe risks.

  Something was awry, but what? And when had it all begun?

  As near as damn it, Shapiro reckoned that it had started with his first sighting of the man he’d come to think of as the kidnapper. If he had to stick a pin in a calendar, that’s where he’d stick it. Since this made no sense at all, Shapiro was encouraged. Given the course his life was taking, no sense made the only kind of sense there was.

  Meanwhile, the city roared with the sound of meltwater running in the gutters, everything dissolving, transforming from one element to another. From solid to liquid, from ice to water. From indifference to its opposite, whatever that was.

  * * *

  Some weeks ago, Shapiro spotted a man using a public pay phone on the corner of Broadway and Sherbrook. Oddly, he’d never noticed the pay phone before, but there it was, grimy and unimposing, on the windswept street. The man wore a long black overcoat and braced against the wind as he tipped a Slavic river of swiftly flowing anguish into the receiver. His dilapidated bike leaned against a nearby lamppost, untethered. After all, who would want to nab such a beat-up machine? The man was gesturing so violently that he kept yanking himself away from the steel cable of the pay phone and then being yanked back in like a fish. For a moment he looked slightly sinister, but the moment passed.

  “Why sinister?” asked Shapiro’s wife that evening at dinner. Allie prided herself on being able to zoom in on the beating heart of the matter without flinching.

  “I think he was a kidnapper,” Shapiro said.

  “How so?” she asked, zooming.

  “Who uses pay phones these days?”

  But Allie was shaking her head and tapping her fork on the side of the plate like a United Nations diplomat calling for order. But not a very diplomatic diplomat: Khrushchev with his shoe.

  “Kidnappers always use disposable phones,” was her assessment.

  Shapiro demurred. He remembered the man’s glossy black beard from which the winter sun had picked out a scattering of wiry silver strands. He wanted to tell her about that beard; surely there were few beards of such lustrous angora weave. The kidnapper looked young and old, youthful in his posture and imprecations yet old in all the ways that a beard confers gravitas — wisdom, solemnity, the high-collared mantle of good stewardship. Shapiro felt certain that the fellow wasn’t the sort to squander the earth’s resources in the way of disposable cellphones and getaway SUVs.

  “I suppose he
cycles from pay phone to pay phone making his fiendish demands,” his wife taunted, reminding Shapiro how much he preferred irony to sarcasm. One had an andante touch; the other was a hand in a wooden glove thumping out “Heart and Soul” in double time.

  As the din of his wife’s irritable after-dinner cleanup commenced, Shapiro dawdled beside her in the kitchen, dishcloth in hand, his eyes distant and unfocused. He was thinking of his kidnapper cycling furiously through the melting city — head down, the lapels and cuffs and hem of his long black overcoat slamming against the wind. Time sped up and blurred like revolving bicycle spokes. From pay phone to pay phone he raced, laying down his terms and hedging his bets and threatening to rough up his limp, sock-mouthed victims.

  The kidnapper was one thing, but what was wrong with his colleagues at the Riverview News, not to mention his readers? So many letters of pique and complaint. In all his publishing career Shapiro had never encountered such readerly ire. Such nitpicking insistence that he’d gotten everything wrong and ought to apologize, now, this very minute; there wasn’t a moment to lose. But what was at stake? Shapiro liked to think of himself as a newshound, an inky-fingered hack, his necktie permanently askew and his cuffs smudged with newsprint.

  “Not so fast, slick,” his old man would have said. “Don’t pretend to sell yourself short, boychick.”

  He was right, of course. Shapiro was the publisher, managing editor, and hinky dog’s body of a community newspaper with a subscription list of almost thirty thousand, a number that had fallen by half since the plummy peak of the market days when his late father ran the paper. Lately, though, many of their long-time subscribers had been dropping off the list and reappearing on another kind of list entirely. Indeed, these days, the Riverview News seemed entirely composed of salutes to old friends and bygone patrons, edged out by the usual birth and wedding announcements, congratulations to special graduates, notices of socials and garage sales, along with the various bureaucratic shenanigans of city councillors, school board trustees, and traffic court judges.

  Sometimes Shapiro wondered how one city — medium sized and moderate in most things — could sustain such a flurry of earnest-minded commerce: the buying of outboard motors and selling of bread machines and lawnmowers, of gently used wedding dresses trailing their homey melodramas of desertion, divorce, and general hard-up-edness. The same old stories of “Shouldn’t oughta,” and “Gone done and did it, anyway,” and “Will again, most likely.” Sometimes he forgot that the citizens were known for their glittery-eyed individualism and that the city itself was situated inside a province that resembled the outline of a raised freedom fist.

  Perhaps it was simply that Shapiro still felt guilty about the story they’d run following Max Binder’s accident, his tragic death. In deference to Maggie, they’d forgone idle speculation about her delinquent husband’s supposed tomfoolery and concentrated instead on the mysterious young woman who’d been in the passenger seat. “Who Was The Mysterious Hitchhiker?” ran the headline, above a photograph of frozen fields lashed together with yellow police tape, behind which the blurry shape of a savagely crushed motor vehicle could be glimpsed. As always, opinion in the newsroom had been divided. Miss Leonard pointed out that the News (as she called it) was a community paper and therefore not obliged to concern itself with current affairs. In rebuttal, Stan Brodsky, copy editor and sometime columnist, pointed out that Miss Leonard was a bookkeeper and therefore not obliged to offer her lousy two cents.

  In the end it came down to an editorial decision and Shapiro, running his eye down last month’s balance sheet and the previous year’s shoelace-narrow profit margin, handed down his judgement. We’ll pitch it as a public service thing, he consoled himself. “Who Was The Mysterious Hitchhiker?” Perhaps someone would come forward.

  But no one, it seemed, knew the answer to the question the headline had posed, and no one phoned in to the tip line they’d provided (although it later transpired that a couple of digits in the tip line phone number had been transposed, so who the hell knew). And since the slight uptick in that month’s sales figures could be attributed to the inclusion of the annual Bridal Supplement, the whole incident could be filed under the usual sleeping dogs clause, Shapiro was forced to conclude.

  A big hoo-ha, his father would have called it. A right old howdy doody.

  But, as always, there was more than one fire to piss on. Reader’s complaints and corrections had reached an all-time high and matters were not improved by the slipshod style, the touch-and-feel go-luckiness of Aunt Betsy’s Country Recipes. She was the most popular food columnist they’d ever had but also the most erratic — outrageously careless of weights and measures, inclined to omit essential ingredients, and over-fond of folksy idioms. She sent her recipes in on time but they were seldom free of query and puzzlement. “Add a peck of cinnamon to a bushel of apples, honey,” was this week’s conundrum.

  “What the fucking expletive is a bushel?” yelled Brodsky.

  In deference to Miss Leonard there was a zero tolerance swearing policy in the newsroom, but Brodsky always got it slightly wrong. Perhaps they ought to change their policy to “low tolerance” or “amber alert,” thought Shapiro. “Try your best not to,” or “Don’t, if you can help it.” In all honesty, zero was an intolerant number: it was a knothole in the Tree of Life, a wormhole in the wind, a dense black hole swallowing all the starry numerals to the left and right of it. It was the pursed mouth of God withdrawing from the world, whistling Dixie.

  Shapiro shrugged sadly. Brodsky ought to put a quarter in the swear jar but these were exceptional circumstances. Shapiro was sympathetic to the man’s outrage. What, after all, was a bushel? What was a peck? A biblical measure of subsistence farming or the best way to gather a harvest of pickled peppers? A small ornamental shrub or an unenthusiastic kiss?

  The fact of the matter was that Brodsky was bitter about pies, all kinds and all fillings and all spices, on account of last week’s Saskatoon Berry Rhubarb Pie, which unhelpfully avoided any mention of rhubarb. Readers wrote in imploringly but Aunt Betsy was unresponsive. It was the chocolate-less brownie debacle all over again. As a matter of fact, Shapiro was pretty sure that “Aunt Betsy” was an inventively crafted cipher wreaking her culinary mayhem under an assumed name. He suspected that Aunt Betsy’s real name was Miss Leonard, although it occurred to him that even Miss Leonard must have another name. Not Betsy, but Maud perhaps, or Jane. But whatever her real name, the avatar called Betsy sent in her country recipes then, like the tiny dot at the centre of a TV screen after you clicked off the remote, she disappeared until the next month’s issue with its skinned-teeth deadlines and skimpy, digressive copy. “Who are we and what are our dreams?” asked the sportswriter every year during Grey Cup season.

  Enraged, Brodsky stamped out, flinging a quarter into the swear jar. It was an unremorseful quarter, so who knew if it counted? He was angry at Betsy, angry at Shapiro, but mostly he was angry at himself. Ever since last year’s lucky Thanksgiving save (“Here it is, folks — ‘The Best of Cornish Game Hens!’”), he’d caught every no-show turkey, every inadvertently cheese-free pizza, every boomeranging fruitless pie that Betsy had thrown at him. But he wasn’t the same since his parents’ divorce.

  Where were they? March? No, middle of February, it must have been. It was the week Shapiro took Brodsky to lunch at Resnik’s Diner so that his buddy could unburden himself, relate the next installment in the epic maternal saga entitled “Alienation of Affection.” Shapiro frequently ate lunch at Resnik’s. He appreciated the two-handed heft of three-inch sandwiches stacked with interleaved layers of deli meat cut thin enough to turn transparent. You could almost read the Riverview News through a slice of Resnik’s pastrami. Mustard so sharp, so yellow, so like a warning light blinking through the fragrant steam of hot brisket on rye.

  And then there was Resnik himself. Resnik the showman, Resnik the vaudevillian of smoked meats and Russian dres
sing. Resnik the keeper of the flame, who’d loved Shapiro’s father like a brother and tolerated his son like a slightly disappointing nephew. He met Shapiro, party of three, at the door and ushered them to the usual table, ousting the poor slob already seated and about to bite into his Reuben, the saliva springing to his mouth.

  “Get along there, my friend,” barked Resnik. “Shapiro eats here.”

  They were three because Maggie had insisted on joining them.

  “You barely pay me so you might as well feed me,” she told Shapiro.

  She cracked up over the advertised Valentine’s Day “tasting menu,” ordered the Bachman Turner Over-Easy Platter, then stabbed a couple of plastic forks through her wild auburn topknot in an attempt to keep her gravity-laden curls in check. Mostly, though, she distinguished herself by failing to act with the appropriate sang-froid on discovering that Brodsky’s baleful mother was pushing eighty-five. (And winning. Winning!) The old girl was in the middle of her second round of chemotherapy yet appeared anxious to shrug off her husband of sixty-odd years.

  “Very odd years they must have been,” Maggie giggled.

  “I’m too old for this,” Brodsky lamented. “Now I’ve got to adjust to being the child of divorced parents. The guilt, the divided loyalties. The whole broken home shebang.”

  Maggie shook her head. “Nah, they’ll both be showering you with stuff — taking you to the movies, buying you baseball gloves and hockey cards.” She patted him kindly on the arm. “Um, it’s a cancer divorce, right?”

  Shapiro hadn’t heard of this sort of divorce but Maggie didn’t have time to fill him in.

  “Hey, maybe it’s something I can write about!” She looked flushed and absorbed, the way she always did when she thought she’d found a topic for her slice-of-life column.

  “What kind of cancer did you say it was?” she asked sweetly.

  But Brodsky was enraged. He broke open the swear jar inside himself and let it all spill out.