I got there too early and waited on the steps. In the house across the street, the living room curtains were open and I could see through to the dining room, where a family was sitting down to supper. A child lobbed an oven mitt across the table. Someone and his dog walked past the stickered Reliant. The dog smiled but the man’s straight-ahead gaze seemed to emanate hostility.
At exactly six-thirty, I rang the doorbell. A thin girl answered, her hair long and dark and not particularly clean. Despite this, despite dressing like a scarecrow and the deep shadows under her eyes, she was quite pretty, which made me leery and more nervous than before.
“Are you Jane?” She introduced herself as Sonia and led me in.
Pete from two days before was sitting at the kitchen table. Today he wore a shirt, almost a blouse, with full sleeves and a ruffled front and cuffs. He’d dispensed with the kerchief and I saw now that his hair was dirty blond and shoulder-length; he’d seemed Greco-Roman when we’d met previously, but my second impression was Renaissance for sure.
Two other men were at the table, one of them wearing glasses with big plastic frames and a T-shirt entreating the U.S. to vacate Central America. His hair was dark and wiry, nose very narrow, like it had been squeezed in a book. This was Dieter. The third man seemed cleaner than the rest. It took me a moment to notice the girl leaning against the counter, but as soon as I did she became the most obvious person there because of the deep coppery mane hanging halfway down her back and how her freckles contrasted with her creamy skin. Belinda, Sonia, Pete, Dieter, this other person—five complete strangers who didn’t know anything about me, not my tormented high school years, not how I had blown it last year. Last year had been my chance to start over, to make friends, but I had forfeited it, blaming the bus ride. I couldn’t imagine it had anything to do with me.
Seeing me hovering in the doorway, the cleaner man stood and shook hands smilingly all around. My heart sank when he picked a violin case off the floor and walked past without acknowledging me. He was my competitor. I felt like turning and running because no one would ever choose sweaty, bookish me over someone who could play the violin.
I sat and Sonia introduced everyone. Pete uncrossed one arm to wiggle his fingers at me. “This is Jane,” Sonia said.
“Jane Zed,” said Pete.
“That’s easier,” I admitted.
Except for Pete, they looked everywhere but at me so I felt cut out of the picture, as I usually did. Then I was flooded with embarrassment, for I knew it was childish to want two contradictory things: to be left alone and to be included.
“I’m Belinda,” said the girl at the counter, who had not been introduced.
“Belinda’s the one moving out,” Sonia explained.
Pete: “She needs her space.”
With two exaggerated tosses of her head, Belinda threw her hair over each shoulder. Years later, on nights I couldn’t sleep (frequently, in other words), I would sometimes scroll the muted channels in search of a soporific. Belinda would flash past, executing this same ribbon dance, in the service of selling hair conditioner. But now she was indignant, telling Pete, “I do!”
“I know you do,” he said and it was impossible to decipher his tone, whether he was sarcastic or earnest. He could be acidly sarcastic, but I didn’t know that yet.
Belinda humphed and leaned back with crossed arms. The other two, Sonia and Dieter, seemed anxious to keep the interview going. Dieter took over the talking, stapling his eyes to the place I always thought of as my upper right-hand corner. Theirs was a communal rather than a shared accommodation. They each participated equally in the running and upkeep of the house. “We have a chore sheet.” He got up to unmagnet it from the freezer door for me. I saw their different writing styles, Dieter’s tight and precise, Pete’s backward leaning, Belinda’s too large for the space. Sonia had printed her name in a round, elementary-school hand.
“We rotate chores monthly. You do your assigned chore once a week. Every Sunday we put twenty dollars in the kitty. From that you buy the groceries when it’s your turn to cook. We eat supper together. House meeting once a month. Eso es todo.” He pushed up his glasses with his middle finger.
I was not a serious candidate. His perfunctory delivery and the fuck-off adjusting of his glasses made this obvious. Sonia had been sucking on the little gold cross around her neck, but now she let it go to add, “We’re vegetarian.”
“So am I,” I said. It just came out. I was surprised too, because I had just decided I didn’t want to live there anyway so I didn’t care about being rejected by them. But now everyone straightened and Sonia smiled, acknowledging this specious point of commonality.
They asked what I was studying. “Arts,” I said.
“Me too!” Belinda bubbled from her corner. “I’m in Theatre!”
“I’m in Education,” Sonia said. “Dieter’s in Poli Sci and Spanish. Pete’s in Engineering.”
Pete: “I’m an anarchist.”
Belinda: “I’m a feminist.”
“Me too,” Dieter seconded.
“Actually,” Pete said, “I’m an anarcho-feminist.”
“I’m a pacifist,” Sonia sighed, and Dieter tugged a lock of her hair twice, tooting, “Pacifist! Pacifist!”
Pete: “More precisely, I’m an anarcho-feminist-pacifist.”
Declarations winging by me, fast and furious. I nearly ducked. I was relieved they didn’t ask because I, I was nothing.
I moved into the Trutch house officially the Sunday before classes started, after transporting my belongings in my suitcase over several trips throughout the week. My aunt didn’t have a car and, anyway, I didn’t want to involve her. Belinda was still occupying the room the first time I came; Pete was there, too, lolling gorgeously on the bed. He smiled right at me while, blushing violently, I stacked my things in the corner Belinda had indicated with a careless, freckled wave. Each time I came back there was a little less of her in the room and none of Pete.
On Sunday the bed was still there, the mattress stripped. I crept downstairs for a broom. Dieter was in the kitchen with another man, older, well into his twenties and dark-complected, who was reading but stood politely when I came in. He wore granny glasses, the gold rims of which matched one of his front teeth. “Ector.” He put out his hand.
Dieter was boiling coffee in a saucepan, watching it so intently I got the impression he was deliberately ignoring me. I asked about the broom, but then Pete came in and told everyone to freeze. “You and you and you. Come.”
Ector and I obeyed. We didn’t think twice. We followed him out and waited in the vestibule while Pete took the stairs up two at a time. A moment later he and Belinda started down with the mattress between them. Ector snapped to when he saw Belinda, pulling a beret from his back pocket, donning it, then opening the door for them to hurl their burden out. He insisted on taking her place, then up he went with Pete. There was banging. From the swearing, not the fucks but the words I couldn’t understand, I realized that the chivalrous Ector spoke Spanish, also, when Pete screamed out his name, that it was actually Hector.
“Hector! Hold it!”
They manoeuvred the heavy frame down the stairs, further distressing the walls, out the front door and down the steps with Belinda directing them like an air traffic controller. “Jane and I will take the mattress,” she said when they dropped it in the long grass. “You guys take the bed.”
Pete turned to me. “What do you think of that, Zed?” I didn’t know what he meant. He was the one who had recruited me. “A real fair-weather feminist,” he said, pointing his chin at Belinda. “All for equality until there’s something heavy to carry.”
Hector squatted, ready. “Come on, Peeete.”
“Oh no. We’ll all carry it.”
“God,” said Belinda, rolling her eyes.
Single-handedly Pete threw the mattress on the frame, then we each took a corner of the bed. It was heavy. We shuffled down the walk and straight into the middle of the stre
et. When a car came up behind us, we moved to the side to let it pass.
“How far?” Hector asked.
“Blenheim Street,” Belinda said.
Hector looked across the bed at me. “I’m forgetting your name.”
“Jane.”
“I’m Ector.”
“Yes,” I said.
At the corner we set our burden down and breathed collectively for a moment before struggling on another block. By then my hands were screaming. I wanted to stop, but didn’t. Hector voiced my feelings. He said carrying the bed was killing him. Belinda said that if we died, it would not be in vain, she would erect a plaque.
“To the Glorious Committee of the Bed-Carrying International!” Hector cried.
Another car came up behind us. “Keep going,” Pete told us. “Move to the side,” Belinda said. “God.”
The car honked. We were panting now.
“Why?” asked Pete. “Why should cars have the right of way and not beds? If beds had the right of way—do not let go, people!—this world wouldn’t be so fucked up!”
The driver craned out the window. “Excuse me?”
“Get a bed!” Pete yelled. “Make love instead of polluting the world!”
I dropped my corner. Everyone stumbled forward, and Pete, using the momentum, tackled Belinda on the bed. It seemed he couldn’t let her go after all. She shrieked, then succumbed, letting him twine his body around hers, squid tight, as they necked, demonstrating for her, or us, their interconnection. He flipped onto his back so she was on top, her astonishing hair falling around them, a privacy curtain. Hector burst into applause. When the driver got out of the car, I turned and ran.
My main occupation that first day was putting together the futon I’d bought as a kit and alternately dragged and carried on my back like a peddler all the way from Fourth Avenue without any help from anyone. I found the broom and swept, opened the window to uncloy the air of sandalwood, piled my books against the wall in alphabetical order. Now I lay on the futon trying to read Anna Karenina, but mostly fretting as suppertime approached. I didn’t know why they had picked me. Were there so few vegetarians around? When I went downstairs, would I be accused of letting them down when I let go of the bed? I truly couldn’t have held on a moment longer. Then why did I run away, they would want to know. Because I was scandalized. Was that how people really acted?
“Supper!” one of the men called.
I was first to arrive except for Dieter, who was at the sink dumping the contents of a pot into a colander, the lenses of his glasses opaque with fog. Maybe he really didn’t see me this time. “Supper!” he screamed.
Sonia appeared next, pretty and unbrushed, fingering her cross, then Pete, who skated across the floor in socks. As soon as Dieter thumped the pot of spaghetti down in the middle of the table, Pete lunged for it while Dieter waited, poised to get the tongs next. It surprised me, the carnivorous way vegetarians ate; Sonia and I had yet to serve ourselves. She gestured for me to go first. I took half of what remained, she a few tangled strands. The moment the tongs were returned to the pot, Pete snatched them and claimed the rest.
No one spoke—because of me, I presumed. Because I’d dropped the bed. I fixed my self-conscious gaze on the flayed face of Ronald Reagan on the opposite wall, the nail jutting from his empty eye socket. The men seemed intent on their food, Sonia too, but while they ate with gusto, she was a baby bird grappling open-throated with a very long worm. I suspected, though, that if I got up and left the room they would probably start twittering like birds at the precise crack of dawn. Twittering: She dropped the bed! She dropped the bed!
Dieter inflicted a goofy smile on Sonia, who grimaced and turned her tired eyes to me. “Are you all moved in?”
I gulped some water so I could speak. “Yes. There wasn’t much to move.”
Pete had already cleaned his plate! He went to the fridge for a loaf of bread and a tub of margarine, slapped a nubbled slice down, painted it with the spread. There was a jar on the table full of yellow powder, which he dumped on his bread. Only now did he and Dieter begin to talk, heatedly, as though they were picking up an argument they’d called a truce on before supper. When Dieter called, I’d been reading that scene in Anna Karenina where two prominent Moscow intellectuals come to Oblon-sky’s for dinner. They respected each other, but upon almost every subject were in complete and hopeless disagreement, not because they belonged to opposite schools of thought but for the reason they belonged to the same camp. Dieter was defensive, emphatic, offended, Pete aloof. “You agree?” Dieter asked. “Don’t you?” He would glance over at Sonia every time he made a point, to see the effect it had on her.
When Sonia pushed away her plate, Pete used the excuse of scooping the remaining noodles off it to end his conversation with Dieter and go out on the deck, the strands hanging from his mouth, like hay. Dieter began stacking the dirty dishes. He paused to tug Sonia’s hair and say, “Ding dong, Avon calling!” which drove her immediately from the room. That left just me sitting at the table. It was over, the agony of my first supper, with no one mentioning the bed. I’d hardly been required to speak at all. “Thank you,” I said to Dieter before slinking out, relieved. He looked blankly at me through his big plastic frames.
Back upstairs, in my near-empty room with Anna Karenina, I thought that if it was going to be like that every night I would probably survive, which was, anyway, all I ever expected.
The year before, I’d come to Vancouver with only a general idea of what I wanted to study. I’d made a shopping list of possible courses, but when I showed up to register I discovered it really was like shopping, my least favourite thing, the gym a marketplace crowded with hundreds of students. For every course you had to stand in line to receive a computer card, first-come, first-served. It was a hot day and I was perspiring madly in the crush. At the Slavonic Studies table the line was negligible. I’d always wanted to read War and Peace.
Later in the year Professor Kopanyev told me he’d assumed I’d enrolled in his survey course because of my Polish background, but this was not the case. My father had come to Canada when he was my age, eighteen, so had lived most of his life here. He never talked about his childhood. When I came to stay with my aunt, she told me cabbage rolls were his favourite dish, but we always ate Canadian—pork chops with Minute Rice, Sloppy Joes, McCain frozen pizza. Other than an unpronounceable last name, nothing remotely Polish could be said about me.
In the first semester of Slavonic Studies we covered the history, geography, and economy of the Soviet Union. I wrote a paper on the emancipation of the serfs. We turned to literature in the second semester with Kopanyev presenting a biographical lecture on the greatest writer who ever lived—Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Solzhenitsyn—depending on the week. We read a sample work by these authors, discussed them in tutorials, then selected one as a subject for a paper. At the end of the year someone put up his hand and asked, “How can they all be the greatest?” It seemed obvious to me by then.
Kopanyev was tall and bearded, always tweedily dressed in shades of brown. One day he asked me to stay after class, which was when he commented on my surname. He said that my paper on Chekhov was both entertaining and insightful and he hoped I would continue in the department the following year. Ours was a small class, not even a dozen students, so I knew not to take his praise too much to heart. But I did. All year I had slunk from lecture to lecture praying that no one would notice me but now I was both thrilled and grateful that someone had.
My paper was titled “Boredom and Sadness in the Short Stories of Anton Chekhov.” I’d chosen a collection of eleven of his stories in a popular translation and counted how many times he used words associated with these emotions. Bored appeared sixteen times, bore three times, boringly once. Not interesting, uninteresting, and uninterestingly once each. People, society, life—these were described four times as dull, and a further seven as monotonous. Monotony was used three times, dissatisfaction twice, dissatisf
ied once. One character gazed apathetically at her empty yard. I didn’t count the condition of the yard, but I did include her later feeling of emptiness. Also the fact that on first impression Dmitry Dmitrich Gurov thinks there is something pathetic about Anna Sergeyevna, “The Lady with a Lapdog,” soon to be the great love of his life. I interpreted pathetic as sad, an emotion referred to ten other times in the collection. Sadly (3). Sadness (2). Unhappy (2). Sorrow (1). “Were these depressed (3) characters full of melancholy (3) and despair (3) because life was boring (5), or does perpetual boredom (3) lead to a mournfully (1) depressing (1) and despondent (1) life?”
Kopanyev flipped through my handwritten pages. “I read some out to my wife. We had good laugh.”
“Really?” I said.
“This word skuchno. It implies boredom, of course. But also sadness, desolation, gloom, yearning. Russians are always sad and it’s boring. Aren’t you?”
I stared at him.
“No?” He rolled my paper into a tube and poked me with it. “Come back next year. Take Russian.”
And so I did.
Kopanyev assured us learning Russian would be easy because, he claimed, it was a phonetic language. But right from hello, from zdrastvuytye, I realized this wasn’t always the case. There was the matter of stress, too, how an unstressed O will convert to an A, for example. If you stressed the wrong syllable, the meaning of the word would change. “Like with pismo. PisMO. Letter. PISma. Letters.”
He seemed even more ursine this year as he handed out the alphabet. Cyrillic, he explained, was named for the Byzantine monk who gave the Slavs a written language. He’d had to draw on Greek, Hebrew, and old Latin. Three full alphabets plundered to represent all the Russian sounds. My eye went straight to the familiar letters, but only five of these actually corresponded to their English equivalents. An Mmight have sounded like an M, but B was V, P was R with a roll, X a truncated gargle. A gargle! A and O were ostensibly the same, but then Kopanyev was shouting at us, “They are long! Long! Open your mouths! Open them!”
Pleased to Meet You / The Sky is Falling Page 20