Heroine

  What’s that sound? The heroine’s bare feet that were curled up under her rapidly hit the floor. A click, click. Then … nothing. She gets a flash of her bloody corpse laid out (before she has published, too) on the rug. This is funny, no, she won’t give into fear. Instead of wasting precious time (if something happens, it happens) she opens her black book and jots a note from some reading she’s been doing: ‘They signalled the death of the nature god Pan just as Christianity was about to be victorious.’ From Michelet’s La Sorcière, comparing that Greek period to the later one when witches were destroyed by the Age of Reason. All her feminist friends are reading it.

  She hesitates and writes again: He’s well in the background now. Just good friends. He’s sympathetic when I’m down. Sometimes I wish he didn’t need so much from a woman that it takes two to satisfy him. Actually, the scarring process is progressing nicely. There it is, that noise again. It MUST be something in the street. Oh God, something in the street that’s walking up the stairs. Her friend Marie’s words are ringing in her ears: ‘Il faut écrire. Prends pas cette job de militante.’ She’s so scared, she feels like shitting as the door bursts open and Anne comes in. She says: ‘Greater friendship hath no woman than this.’ And laughs. Tossing her long blond hair back over her shoulders the way she does. Taking the heroine in her arms and giving her a hug. Then filling glasses with the brandy she’s brought in her bag. Putting some music on. ‘Moon of Alabama.’

  ‘Oh, not that,’ says the heroine, pretending to wince.

  Anne (settling on the sofa, a cigarette between her perfect pink lips): ‘To change the subject, what do you hear from Jon?’

  The heroine (albeit pushing down the memory of Violette’s cards): ‘D’you know, my not sleeping with him is driving him nuts. And he can’t ask why because everyone does what they want. Ha ha I’ve really got him this time.’

  Anne’s face clouds briefly, but she only pours another drink, then launches into some fairly humoristic story about her and her lover having a hair-pulling match on Jeanne-Mance. While the Hasids returning home from synagogue in their black silk hats walk gingerly around. Because she’d gone over and found Claire in bed with him again. ‘I said if he could do it with her he could bloody well come home and do it with me as well. Finally he did. Left her waiting up there. But nothing happened. He couldn’t get it up.’

  The heroine’s astounded. How could she be so generous with her body when a guy behaves like that? It’s true she’s the kind who can forget everything and really take off. She even said once that at seventeen, she found out if she turned the cross with the pink ribbon over her bed in Manchester to the wall, she could really come. In fact she couldn’t stop.

  ‘Anyway,’ cracks the heroine out loud. ‘Why are two feminists crying over spilt milk?’

  They must have been getting drunk. Because they start laughing at that wonderful dirty joke. And it’s not until the chilly red dawn that the heroine opens her eye on the sky blushing between the crack in the curtains. And thinks (for some crazy reason): EASTER.

  They step into the street with the energy that follows une nuit blanche. Past the cookie factory the air smells sweet. Up a path covered with old leaves to the mountaintop with its cross. Arm in arm. Through a dale where the new buds trim the boughs with pale-green lace. Emerging at a chalet. Birds are singing with the tenderness of spring. From a bench on the chalet’s veranda they let their ruined faces warm like stones in the sun. Behind them some wooden squirrels sit silent in the chalet’s rafters. An old man with a magnificent cane goes by singing the praises of Israel. Watched, with cat’s eyes, by a young guy in high boots and long coat. The heroine’s head seeks out her friend’s chest, so wide and solid. But Anne’s saying: ‘We better get a move on.’ She means, to catch the bus for the abortion march on the Québec National Assembly. They’re announcing thousands of women. Perhaps the biggest one in history. Climbing down the mountain toward the city, Anne says thoughtfully: ‘Problem is, we’re stuck with new men. The rare ones who make love right and help around the house, so every woman wants them.’

  ‘Not lesbians,’ answers the heroine. But the black spot rises. She pushes it down, the better to hide the king and blue-eyed queen. ‘Shhh,’ she adds as they arrive at Parc Jeanne-Mance where women are running to catch the bus, ‘we have to enjoy every minute.’ They survey the scene. Bright sweaters. Bottoms of all shapes. Multicoloured sneaker boots. Hair of every colour fresh and shiny in the April air. The heroine admires the down over a rosy lip. And other sensuous mouths under flying banners that read: NOUS AURONS LES ENFANTS QUE NOUS VOULONS.

  Yes, sisterhood is paradise. She snuggles under her coat, taking in the ripe-sweet smell of women on a bus. By the side of the road grass speeds past. And flowers pushing through the gravel with the energy of early summer. Behind them a friend of W’s, all tensed up about something, swallows Valium. An Italian woman balances on the arm of her chair, telling about a women’s occupation of a Roman castle. They set up a whole community in it. Abortions on one floor, battered women on another. And on the top floor a newspaper called Quotidiano Donna. When the fascists attacked, they just unleashed their Doberman pinschers on them. (One dog for each of the thirteen doors that surround the courtyard.) ‘Après ça,’ says the woman, pushing back a long tress of silk-brown hair, ‘tout était tranquil.’ Everybody laughs. The bus bumbles on past St-Hyacinthe (known for its apples), past Drummondville (for its pianos), toward old Québec. The heroine stretches out, feeling good as always when surrounded by the energy of women. Yes, sisterhood is …

  Oh, Sepia. What destructive devil suddenly made me swing round and ask W’s friend where the girl with the green eyes was?

  ‘Didn’t you know?’ After all those pills W’s friend’s eyes are finally nonchalant behind her glasses. ‘She’s gone to the country with Jon and Marilù.’

  I’m ashamed to say I snapped back: ‘Well where’s her sense of feminist duty? This is supposed to be our most important demo.’

  W’s friend shrugs. ‘Maybe she felt like it. I know it doesn’t seem right. But at this point she’s trying to control her life.’

  I sit back, overwhelmed with such betrayal. How could she abandon her sisters to spend a day with you, my ex? Beside me I see Anne’s face is white with sadness. For me, for all of us. To cheer her up, I crack out of the corner of my mouth:

  ‘Brecht never said what Mother Courage did for sex.’

  The tourist continues down St-Denis. He steps into a large café built around a courtyard. By the fire, a frozen smile. A finger unwinds and points at his cigarette package. He offers one to the young woman, whose lips are purple. An old bag in a filthy suede skirt is half sitting on the woodpile. He has a flash, as if he’s seen her somewhere before. Anyway, the smell is unforgettable. She’s mumbling to herself in English against the cacophony of French. Her words sound like a bad cartoon (loony-tune, he thinks) about the north: when she fell through the river ice, they were not at all content I pulled her back again they would have preferred that she never went through it’s true that after she was never the same she saw everything backwards.

  She stops.

  The tourist, faute de quoi faire, prods her a little: ‘Then what?’

  She looks through him and says: ‘Her mother, the music teacher, poured tea on the frozen spot.’

  I’ve got to get out of the tub right this minute. Because listen, there’s someone at the door. The welfare woman. No, it’s too late. Desperate junkie. Shhh, don’t be silly. My heart’s beating so loud I can’t hear anything. Try and listen … Nothing. I’ll have to watch the paranoia. The heroine of the novel has the same problem. She just can’t seem to march on the bright hard edge of future very long without the dark side creeping up on her. Sepia, what if for some women Utopia isn’t natural? Cassandra saw the dark side, too, blaming it partly on the march of history. She didn’t mince her words about it either, which is why she wasn’t popular. Summer nights, pour combattre ce vide, the heroine
and her friend Anne drink in various cafés. In one of them (August ’79) a black-clad clown appears. His act consists of trying and trying to get his limp little white rope to stand up. It keeps falling down. The two women roll their eyes and move to the terrasse outside.

  It’s so hot, they’re drinking diabolo menthe. Over their heads a jet suddenly appears, uncharacteristically low in the black night sky. ‘Skylab,’ chime several clients in unison. They’re wearing loose shirts and light trousers instead of jeans, in the spirit of the coming decade. One of them explains that on the news at 6 p.m. they announced a falling Russian satellite will touch the earth tonight somewhere in Canada. ‘Chicken Littles, we are,’ says Anne. ‘The sky is falling in and we don’t know where.’ The heroine says thoughtfully: ‘I can see how we women might one day create something entirely new. I mean, it’s true there’s something in women that spontaneously refuses militarily oriented space races and torn holes in the ozone layer. No doubt our desire to nurture children. Problem is, individually, how do we definitively keep reality from fanning the despair in us?’

  Anne says quietly: ‘I guess we just keep trying. Collectively. We have to maintain a protective circle.’ Then she says to the waiter: ‘Non, pas un diabolo menthe; UNE CRÈME DE MENTHE. Sur glâce. Make it a double, please.’

  Oh, I wish I’d asked Marie that question about melancholy versus progress in a modern heroine. I mean, could the heroine, in the whole picture, lean even more to darkness than to light? Becoming a tragic figure? We could have had one of those interesting conversations like we used to have Sunday afternoons in that St-Denis Street Café. With coffee bubbling, music playing, and in our favourite; a fire burning reassuringly in a corner fireplace.

  Yes, I should have got out of the tub and sat on the sofa beside her. We could have even ordered in some dinner. Poulet barbecue, pizza, submarine sandwiches, mets chinois, spaghetti, or lasagna. I suppose none of that would please her.

  Anyway, she changed the subject just as I was about to ask. I even turned off the water the better to hear. For a minute the room was deadly quiet. A drip fell softly. The green light put her at a distance. Then she said: ‘For no one else would I do this. My film is in its final editing. Do you know what that represents? But people say you’re in a bad way. Dis-moi que tu commences à être un petit peu moins déprimée.’

  I lifted my leg out of the tub and examined it thoughtfully. Wanting to point out she had a role in this. That when my image of cool, exotic anglaise (i.e., fair curls, a cute accent, and genes imprinted with the formula of success) began to tarnish, she lost interest. When I got pneumonia she didn’t mother me. When I was headed toward the disastrous reconciliation, she didn’t try to stop me. No, she may have inadvertently encouraged it. For she came into the flat on Esplanade just after we (my love) got together again for the last time. And seeing me lying there, waiting for you to come, in my white sweater and long red skirt on the cushions on the rug, she said: ‘So you’ve done it. Well, if you have to you have to. Vis-le au fond. And above all, don’t forget to write it.’ She didn’t need to tell me that. I had just started a new section in the black book called: UNDER THE LINE OF PAIN. In which I’d written: Hélas, a little tipsy one night and … now we’re ‘together’ but with ‘no commitments.’ Your terms completely. I guess my problem is, physiquement t’es le genre qui me plaît.

  Never mind, this is the eighties. Some even call it post-feminist. Outside white snow glows like Roxy paint under the black night. Oh. The ripples jerking up the stomach. Don’t stop. Get it while you can. Damn. Just a tickle. After I always feel like crying. Then some starving Africans walk across the television screen. Reminding me that in larger contexts, North America is like a soap opera for the white and educated. The heroine, to balance her particular brand of pain, must constantly strive to find other forms in life and art to express the diffuse and varied tones of poetry in her. That’s why, when she can’t sleep (although it’s less often now, for Polly has relieved tension at the shelter by fleeing to Vancouver), she takes long walks to study the graffiti and other night images. ONLY THOSE LEFT STANDING WILL HAVE TO FALL. ABOLISH MONEY, FREE THE COMPUTER, FEMMES VIOLENTES. Or the guy leaping out of the flower market toward her, before suddenly veering off into the dark. Against a background of the rhythmic screech of cars with their glaring lights. And hundreds of black tires piled up against a garage wall.

  One November morning she opens her eyes and thinks (without knowing why): ‘This is a turning point.’ She writes in the black book: Seems to me this should be a nice date. I’ve found a rhythm for my short story about the kid and her shoplifting mother. That of a car idling unevenly – because they’re on the run. Hurrah. And what if, in a story, the words had equal value for their sound and even colour as for their ‘meaning’? While waiting for her espresso coffee pot to bubble up, she thinks of an old Indian her grandfather knew. He’d watch her boyfriends walk by his shack (near the railway tracks at the edge of Lively). With one glance he’d read their faces. As if lips and eyes and nose were another kind of language. And tell Grandpa everything about them, past and future. She smiles, she sips her coffee. Feeling good.

  The only disappointing note is her slightly scratchy throat. Also that errand she has to run before she starts her morning’s writing. Walking to the bank she notices the sky has a flat and shiny quality, like a knife-blade. Opening the bank door, she senses the air inside is thin as cellophane. The woman next in line, with hooked nose, curly hair, and coat open over enormous breasts, immediately starts talking. Complaining about how the bank is exploiting ordinary people with its long lines. Eventually she discloses her father was a socialist journalist in Vienna.

  The heroine nods sympathetically. Wondering if she should share that private fantasy where she walks into the manager’s office. And butts her cigarette in his hand when he sticks it out to shake.

  Except the woman’s getting nosy. ‘What do you do?’ The heroine replies briefly to show her disapproval. ‘So you’re a writer are you? I write at night and on holiday in Morocco.’

  ‘Yeah,’ says the heroine, out of the side of her mouth: ‘Well, you’ll have to watch out for those Arab guys.’ The woman says she’ll watch out all right. She loves them. They’re so beautiful, so willing. Especially the young ones. ‘The way they nibble at your ear.’

  The heroine can’t help smiling again. In fact a vision of sex on the beach at Agadir rises out of the thin bank air. Or is it some other association? Oh God, oh no, it’s Polly shuffling by. How come she’s here and not out in Vancouver?

  ‘What happens next?’ W asked later, sitting at the table in the bleak albeit yellow shelter kitchen. The heroine coughed and answered:

  ‘Polly looks at me with her dead expression. Her body’s leaning forward, swaying slightly. As if so empty, gravity can’t hold it. Then she says: ‘He got the boys. And now they won’t even cash a goddamned welfare cheque for $160.’ I couldn’t believe it. I mean, we thought she’d be safe in Vancouver. And it was such a relief when she and the kids got on that bus. We weren’t wrong to let her go, were we? How else could she have escaped from her husband’s thugs?’

  W: ‘It was her decision. I think we just feel guilty because we were glad to get rid of her. I mean, the constant threats from those louts made it unbearable. I have my ideas, too, about how they got the number.’

  The heroine (coughing harder): ‘Yeah, none of us could sleep. Anyway, she turned around and started shuffling out. You should have seen her. She was wearing a greasy suede jacket and was as slumped over as an old woman. Naturally I followed. We went into that Greek restaurant near the laundromat run by the born-agains. I ordered baklava and coffee for her. She only smoked. A woman who has lost her children only smokes.’

  The heroine stops and coughs until she can hardly get her breath.

  W: ‘Calm down, are you sick?’

  The heroine: ‘So I ask: “What happened, Polly?” She answers: “What difference does it make?” In such
a faint voice, I could tell it hurt to talk. Her face was so white and expressionless. And it took her a long time to get to the part that hurt. She said the kids weren’t too bad on the bus, considering the trip took four days. Which was a good thing because she couldn’t have managed. Not bad but not good either, the way they’ve been uprooted lately. After a few days in Vancouver she was sure she’d done it. No sign of HIM. She couldn’t believe her luck. The place was like paradise with flowers blooming and birds singing. She got a little attic flat (under a false name) with a nice garden. Then one evening the doorbell rings. And he walks in out of nowhere. Without even waiting for her to answer. With him is the driver of a taxi parked below. She fights and screams but nobody comes. It’s all over in two minutes. One of the kids is clinging to her, but they just grab him and run. Two minutes and her boys are gone. She finds out later he flew there and back in the same day. She got right on the bus for the long return trip. But she knows she’ll never be able to kiss them again.

  ‘I said to her: “Oh, Polly, you’re just distraught. We’ll go to court and get them back.” And she said, sarcastically: “Sure, you’ll be able to help me now just like you did before.” That really got me.’

  W: ‘Nonsense, we’ve got that good feminist lawyer.’

  The heroine (leaning forward on the table, looking a little weak): ‘Polly says no lawyer’s any good against the expensive show he can put on. His boss even has a certain judge completely in his pocket. He’ll show up in court in beautiful clothes with his well-dressed girlfriend. And tell the judge he’s going to marry her to give the boys a family. He’ll say Polly left home with the kids to live in that crummy trailer and peddle uppers and downers. He’ll even have proof. If she tells the court the pet shop’s a front, she’s as good as dead. She’ll lose custody. And who’s going to make him grant her visiting rights even if they’re awarded?’