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~
BRUNSWICK
why do all beer halls smell the same? Spilled beer and cigarettes and old puke and ancient carpet – why do they have carpet? – saturated with the above, plus a hint of piss. More than a hint. Gail wanted them to meet up at The Brunswick on Bloor and the coin flip was heads. Yes. Even though Sarah doesn’t like drinking. Doesn’t like cigarette smoke either. Maybe she’d like drinking more if she didn’t have to cope with the cigarette smoke. Worth considering.
Can she be drunk? Nobody can be drunk on one beer, but who knows, her threshold is low. Sarah hates beer, that nasty bitter taste in her mouth, but it’s the cheapest thing you can order, so beer it is. Gail’s several pints ahead and she’s holding forth on the situation in the Middle East, Israel’s bombing of Palestinian targets in southern Lebanon. The Israeli ambassador in London has been shot and badly wounded by an Arab terrorist group headed by someone called Abu Nidal. Almost thirty Israelis have already died in PLO attacks.
Thirty Israeli Jews dead in the PLO attacks versus 300 hundred Arabs killed in the Israeli bombing of the West Beirut PLO headquarters. Ten to one. There’s a school of thought that would propose that’s the right ratio, ten to one. Ten equals one, a Jewish death counts for ten times what a Palestinian or Arab death counts for. Haven’t Jews learned anything about counting the dead? This endless hideous ledger of casualties on both, all, sides.
Sarah listens as Gail marshals more facts, General Gail: the PLO are heavily armed with Katyusha rockets, surface-to-air missiles, tanks. It does sound like enough to ‘drive the Jews into the sea,’ as the PLO have vowed to do. Can Gail be defending Israel? Not likely, but the beer, not to mention Gail’s fervour, is making Sarah fuzzy. Fizzy, too.
The rest of Gail’s comrades, it’s the same crew as last time at the Rivoli – Caroline and Sharon and Barb, plus a couple of other women who may or may not have been introduced – have fallen into stiff silence as Gail ploughs ahead. This is not their story. Or maybe it is: are any of them Jewish? Sarah doesn’t know, can’t tell. What is a Jew?
The topic has swiftly changed, someone else leading the charge, heady stuff, something about radical feminism, and Sarah is having even more trouble following the tense, intense discussion. She swallows more beer, trying not to make a face at the taste. The other women, Gail included, are way ahead of her, little arrays of empties on the sticky wooden tables in front of them, the circles from their bottles perfect little Venn diagrams of what has and has never been thought before. Now they’re talking about someone named Dworkin, and she’s afraid to ask Gail who this person is, though she can deduce, through the increasing fog of talk and booze, that she must be an American feminist.
One of the women is leaning into the table and explaining how our concepts of ‘woman’ and ‘man’ are caricatures, social constructs. Too reductive. Okay, but only girls get to have abortions. Or miscarriages. Only girls get to be clinically depressed because no one, no one can help them when they have to carry their dead baby in their body for weeks, weeks and weeks because science and medicine have failed them.
She must have said this out loud because everyone is looking at her.
“Please don’t tell me you’re into that Essentialism shit,” Caroline – this one with a curly cloud of blonde/grey hair may be Caroline – says. “Have you even read Dworkin?”
Sarah never even heard of her before this evening.
“If you’re going to start defending men…”
“That wasn’t what Sarah meant,” Gail butts in.
“If she’s going to start defending men,” the woman turns away from Sarah, sets her beer down in front of Gail, “the least she can do is read Woman Hating.” And then she and Gail are locking horns about the dangers of heterosexuality. The beer has sloshed onto the already soggy table and is starting to edge towards the curly cloud woman’s sleeve, but she doesn’t seem to notice. Sarah takes a paper napkin from the crummy little tin holder – what genius designed these things? – and starts to dab at the spill but she isn’t accomplishing much.
Sarah finds she has a second beer in front of her; someone must have ordered her another. Or is it a third at this point? Possibly. Maybe that’s why she was dumb enough to open her mouth. Should’ve flipped the penny. The penny would’ve given her the right answer. No. Keep your stupid mouth shut.
“Look, Sarah –” this is Gail butting in yet again, “heterosexual women can be seen to be sleeping with the enemy. If you look at it structurally…” Gail isn’t really talking to Sarah, she’s focused on the others. Despite their snippy disagreements, the other women are on the inside and she, very clearly, is out.
Sarah takes another swallow of beer. So she and Rose are sleeping with the enemy. Or are they in fact the enemy? Heterosexual women. Who is Gail sleeping with these days? For all her speech-making, all her personal is political, she’s been pretty quiet on the personal front. Maybe she’s sleeping with Caroline, maybe that’s why they’re so cosily embattled. Not that she cares if Gail is sleeping with women. But she wishes Gail would just tell her, not imply her superiority on every front, including who she likes to sleep with.
Sarah wants to get up and leave, but now it’s Barb talking about the media, about how on the news they’ll describe a murder victim as known to police. That phrase. How do they know her? What do they know of her? There’s an acronym the cops use, NHI, they designate some homicide cases NHI – no humans involved. Meaning it was a prostitute or drug dealer who got killed, so no big deal.
Sarah gets up. Barb is okay, but enough is enough. Enough beer, enough feminism, enough Gail.
“Where you going?” Gail asks. “The woman cannot hold her liquor,” she says to Barb, who smiles. “Heading for the Ladies?”
Sarah nods a yes.
“Me too.” Gail gets up from the table.
Just the two of them, washing their hands in the sink. “You okay?” Gail asks over the roar of the hand dryer.
Sarah rinses her hands, dries them.
“Sarah, would you please answer?”
“It’s a bit much,” Sarah says.
“What?” Gail bristles again immediately.
“That Caroline woman. I don’t know why I opened my mouth. And you. Sleeping with the enemy. Come on.”
“Sarah.” Gail’s using her Big Sister voice. She even slows down, to make sure her dumb little sister can follow. “You need to look at these things systemically.” Sarah must have twitched or something, because Gail starts to go off again. “Or maybe you’re just not that interested. Maybe you don’t even call yourself a feminist.”
Sarah slumps against the sink. She doesn’t know what to call herself. Can’t she want something, anything? Can’t she want Michael? Does she want him? And what about Rose? What about what she wants? Is David the enemy? “What if all Rose wanted was a kid? Was that so bad? Does she have to feel so bad because of what she wanted?”
“What are you talking about, Sarah?”
“Why do you hate David? Why do you have to hate Michael?”
“David? Michael?” Gail leans on the sink, staring at them both in the mirror. “I’m not talking about them. I didn’t – Look. Sometimes I don’t know what I’m talking about. David is a sweet guy, and even Michael – in spite of the suits and ties and the crease in his pants – Michael Scott is decent through and through. For Pete’s sake, I was the one who introduced you two.”
She did. Gail met Michael at law school. At first Sarah thought Gail was going out with him, she seemed to like him so much. But she kept inviting Sarah along and soon it was Sarah and Michael dating.
“He might be going back to Paris. For six or eight weeks.” Michael’s Paris project is taking off. It’s some huge office tower in La Défense, the modern suburb that sits just outside the city limits of Paris, which is why they get to build skyscrapers there. His firm is representing the Canadian
developers. The negotiations are going to go on for a while, and they might want him to be in on them. If they pick him, he’ll get up to two months in Paris on the company dime, starting at the end of June, maybe early July.
“No shit. Lucky ducky. Is he taking you along?”
“He hasn’t asked me.”
“You worried?”
“About what?”
“Him losing interest. At some point, he’s just going to give up on you.”
Sarah shakes her head.
“How many times does your dreamboat boyfriend have to ask you to move in before you say yes?”
Sarah turns the penny in her pocket. Yes. No. What would Gail say if she knew it was hard for Sarah even to stay the night with Michael?
“The guy’s solid, Sarah. At least give him a whirl. Move in before he stops asking. Toute de suite. And the tooter the sweeter.”
The tooter the sweeter. Their dad Abe’s awful old pun. “I don’t know…” Sarah says.
“You don’t know what?”
Sarah fidgets the penny.
“What? What? Don’t give me the mute treatment. Speak!”
They both have to smile at that one.
“Speak! Like this…” Gail barks like a cartoon dog: arf, arf, arf. They’re both giggling now. A woman comes out of one of the stalls, raises an eyebrow, grins.
Sarah stops giggling, sighs. “I just…I don’t do that kind of thing. I don’t live with other people. I like being by myself.”
“Do you? How come?”
“It’s simpler. Besides, I don’t deserve to live in a place like that. Not on my salary.”
“Oh Jesus, Sarah. Deserve? Why do you have to deserve anything? The guy’s crazy about you, even if you do drive him around the bend.” She turns to Sarah, hugs her, whispers into her neck. “C’mon. Stop living this half-life.”
“Half-life?”
“Yes. The half-life of Sarah Levine. And yes, even though I wasn’t as good at chemistry as you, I know I’m not talking about the time it takes for half of the radioactive atoms to decay. It’s a metaphor. Your life. I don’t get why you’re so stuck. Take a chance. You don’t have to mete out your life in teaspoons.”
“I couldn’t pay my half of the rent on that place. I don’t want to owe him anything.”
“So work something out that’s fair. What’s the deal with owing him?”
“Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.” Sarah’s muttering into Gail’s neck.
Gail holds her at arm’s length. “What’s that?”
Sarah shakes her head.
“Speak! Good girl!” They start to giggle again.
“You don’t remember Hebrew school?”
“Not as well as you.”
“Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin. From the Book of Daniel. It was the writing on the wall that only Daniel could read: I have counted and counted, and all has been accounted for, and you have been found wanting.”
“You remember that shit? Why? Why’s it important?” Gail rubs some water on her face. “I think I’m sobering up.”
“Me too.”
“Tell me how you get drunk on two beers.”
“I think it was three.”
“Sure. So what’s the deal with mene, mene?”
“I keep this ledger in my head. Adding everything up, trying to make everything balance out in the end.” So she’s safe; in control. So the nightmares are tamed. “I wish I didn’t have to.”
“I wish you didn’t have to add everything up either. Too. Maybe I haven’t sobered up.” Gail scrubs at her face again. “Anyway, quit calculating. Give the guy a chance. Enjoy for a change.”
Laila
My father’s shirt was a blue flag. When I was a little girl he would sing me songs of our country, though we don’t have a country. Songs of lives wasted for no reason, of dreams killed in the messengers’ hands, call without response.
But there were songs of weddings, too, of the bridegroom and his beloved, moonlight and doves. His voice a warm rumble: How beautiful are the doves and how beautiful their children. Lovely nonsense, my mother would tell us, smoothing the blue shoulder of his shirt. I come to the house of my beloved, my skin scented with cardamom. I come to the house of my beloved to greet him. Nonsense, she would say again, but still she would smile.
In our country, he would tell me, you slaughter a lamb for the wedding, you shave the groom with a golden razor in front of all the village, you paint the bride with henna.
His shirt a flag.
We don’t have a country.
~
Call
sarah is curled on her side, dreaming of the yellow carpet in the living room of her family’s house on Rupertsland, when the phone rings. She reaches for it though she’s still mostly asleep. “Hello?”
Sobbing on the other end of the line. She’s awake. It’s not another nightmare. Sarah checks the clock; it’s 4:00, which means 3:00 in Winnipeg, if it is Winnipeg. “Rose, is that you?” No answer, just the sobbing. Then her name.
“Sarah?”
“Yes, it’s me. Who is it? Rose?”
Choked sounds, more sobbing.
“Rose? Rose?”
More choked sounds. Sarah feels her own throat tighten. Feels herself begin to float outside of herself, tethered only by the phone and its cord.
“Rose?” How many times will she have to say her sister’s name before she answers?
Now it’s quiet on the other end of line. Could it be a prank call? No, it has to be Rose. The sobs return. “Rose. Please. It’s Sarah. I’m right here.”
Silence again. Then muttering. She can’t understand the words. “Please, Rose. Tell me what’s wrong. I’m here.”
No words this time, just the sadness of those gasps, swallows. Sarah’s standing in the darkness, so little light coming though the blinds from the streetlights outside, even the traffic noise quieted. She feels alone and feels, just now, the tether let go, and she’s spinning out into an orbit distant from the surface of the earth. “Please,” she says. “Tell me what’s wrong. Tell me; let me help.”
Now at last Rose has started speaking but the words she chokes out don’t make any sense. David’s not there; Rose doesn’t know where he is. He may be gone. Everything’s gone, everyone’s gone.
“It doesn’t count.” Rose’s voice is clearer now but she’s still not making sense. “That’s what they said. But if this doesn’t count, what does?”
What’s she counting?
“They said not to look back. David’s gone. They say it doesn’t count.”
“Rose, I’m sure David’s not gone. And I’m right here.”
“You’re not. You’re not here and I need you.”
She’s right. They’re miles from each other. Half a continent.
“How can it not count? I need to count it.”
“Rose, I don’t understand you. You need to rest. You’re so tired you’re not thinking straight.”
“That baby counted. How could they say that?” Rose’s voice is clear, unshaken.
Then Sarah hears another voice, muffled, in the background. Please, he seems to be saying, please.
“Rose, is that David? Let me talk to him.”
More indistinct noise and then she hears the receiver rattling, then David’s voice, sounding groggy. “Sarah?”
“She doesn’t sound good, David. She said you weren’t there. She was talking about the baby.”
“The baby.” A silence. David’s silence now.
“David, are you there?”
“Yes.” His voice comes back. “Sorry. Rose was tossing and turning so much and it’s been a couple of days now since I got a good night’s sleep. I went to the basement, fell asleep on the old couch down there and then it took me a while to realize she was on the phone.” He sounds apologetic, fuzzy.
“What’s happening?”
“She just can’t seem to sleep. I really want to get her onto antidepressants. She’s lost so much weight. I don’t know... Rose,
it’s okay, I’m just talking to Sarah. She’s worried. I’ll take you right back to bed. I have to go, Sarah. She’s having a bad time. Yesterday she couldn’t get out of bed; she said she felt paralyzed – No, no, you’re okay. You’re not paralyzed. You just felt that way. Listen, sorry, Sarah. I got to go. I’ll try to call tomorrow if she’s doing better.”
~
That evening Gail is sprawled on the comfy sofa in Michael’s apartment. She hates Sarah’s rooming-house room, has always hated all of them. She’s only been to the current one a couple of times, always finagles meeting anyplace else. She came to Michael’s bearing churrasqueira, roast Portuguese chicken with juicy little potatoes that the three of them hoovered back in about ten minutes. Now Michael’s off to the gym and the sisters are on their own.
Gail’s taken off her linen jacket – a sophisticated, cream-coloured affair that Sarah is sure she’d ruin in two seconds – and is picking at an invisible spot on her black capris.
“Why so glum, Chum?” Gail asks. Another of Abe’s sayings.
Sarah misses her dad. “Glum. Well, yeah.”
“Tired too?”
“I didn’t get much in the way of sleep. I did think about calling in sick, but I feel better when I’m working.”
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