The Way the Crow Flies

  Mimi is looking forward to meeting God. He will have some questions for her, but she has a few for Him. He doesn’t know everything, He can’t. He’s not a mother.

  WHEN DO I FIND TIME TO WRITE?

  I’M WRITING RIGHT NOW

  “WHAT ON EARTH is this?” asks Christine.

  “It’s a barbecue.” Madeleine is on the balcony, tilted back on a kitchen chair with the phone and a mongrel accumulation of notes, trying to write.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, it even bakes cakes.”

  Christine stares at her. “Why would anyone want to bake a cake on a barbecue?”

  “I thought you might like it.”

  “I’m not your bloody wife, Madeleine.”

  If you are an aspiring alcoholic, if you were abused by your parents, if you have a mysterious chronic condition and wish to find a reason for it, move in with someone who is trying to write. You need never look farther for the source of your pain.

  Madeleine says, “I’ll cook supper, I’ll make paella.” She gets up, lifts a rounded lid in the centre of the barbecue. “See?”

  Christine turns and goes back inside. Madeleine experiences guilt, fear, pathos—the food groups. The beaded curtains sway provocatively in Christine’s wake, a housewarming gift from Olivia.

  Madeleine has spent the afternoon writing, having promised to come in with a revised shape for the “Breaking News” sketch. She’s working on an idea for a war criminal thing—it’s all over the news, a recent rash of decrepit Nazis arrested while pruning their rose bushes in suburbs across Canada. She has also sworn to give Shelly a paragraph for Stark Raving Madeleine, and has a good excuse to figure something out because she told her friend Tommy she’d do five minutes at an AIDS benefit next Monday—Love in the Time of Latex. Conveniently, she has no time to write because evening workshop sessions have been scheduled this week on The Deer.

  “Bring Olivia over after,” said Christine this morning.

  “We’re working till midnight.”

  “I thought you were finished at nine.”

  “The schedule changed. I’m sorry, sweetie, it’ll all be over soon.”

  Christine smiled. “Wait, stay in bed, I’ll bring your coffee.” She paused at the door in her burgundy robe. In the light filtering through the blinds, she looked just as she had when they met. For that first date they had planned to go to a film festival movie—Madeleine had already bought the tickets—but they didn’t make it out of Christine’s apartment for three days. They saved the movie tickets. Put them in the album with the photos that traced seven years. Holidays, birthdays, friends. The Story of Madeleine and Christine. “You know what?” said Christine. “Everything’s going to be okay. All your work. This project with Olivia is exactly what you need right now. It’s going to feed into the thing you’re working on for Shelly. It’s going to help give you your new show. And that’s going to change everything.”

  “Come here.”

  Christine snuggled back next to Madeleine.

  But that was this morning. And who knows by what series of incremental snags and toe-pinching minutiae the day progressed to the point where they fought over a wretched barbecue?

  Madeleine is due at the Darling Building in ninety minutes. No time for paella—what was I thinking? Having no time to write is almost as important as having all the time in the world. She had all day. She procrastinated elaborately, virtuosically. While cleaning the fridge, she noticed an overdue bill stuck to the door with an Emma Goldman magnet. She dutifully wrote a cheque, and stepped out to the post office for stamps.

  She and Christine live in the top half of a Victorian house in the Annex, a leafy downtown neighbourhood of artists, students, immigrants and lefty yuppies. On her way down Brunswick toward Bloor she breathed deeply of spring, and noticed that the sidewalks were packed with look-alike couples. There were identical lesbians with neatly pressed sweatshirts and big glasses. There were gay men with matching sideburns. There were straight couples in khakis and windbreakers—stick a canoe on their heads and it’s anyone’s guess. Twinsexuals. At the post office in the back of the pharmacy, she reached into her pocket for money to buy stamps and found a “Final Notice” for a delivery—funny how one never receives a “First Notice.” She handed it across the counter and the elderly Korean lady gave her a brown-paper package about the size of a cereal box. She opened it—a bran flakes carton, mummified with masking tape. Inside, a dozen stale muffins and a note in her mother’s hand, “Ma chérie, bon appétit. No news, love and prayers, Papa et Maman. P.S. Remember Mr. McDermott across the street? He died. Papa bought a new Olds.” Madeleine smiled in private oblation to love and absurdity.

  She doesn’t really have time to do the AIDS benefit, but doesn’t want to say no to a good cause. And Tommy is persuasive. She went to her high school graduation prom with him. Tomasz Czerniatewicz. She’d had paralyzing crushes on two people—Stephen Childerhouse and Monica Goldfarb—but was too shy to approach the former burnished god, and her desire for the latter dark lady simmered behind a fire-curtain of denial. It was not hip to be queer, it was perverted, and not a single rock star had yet admitted to bisexuality. She tried to escape the “bad feelings” but it was like outrunning a cartoon bullet that passes you, skids to a stop midair, turns and nails you. She saw The Children’s Hour at fourteen, while babysitting, and went home with a temperature and stomach flu. She had watched, bathed in shame, yet riveted by the desire palpable in the boarding-school air between Shirley MacLaine and Audrey Hepburn. Shirley felt so “sick and dirty” she hanged herself, freeing Audrey to seek solace in the manly embrace of James Garner. Madeleine sought solace in James Garner’s manliness too, but couldn’t quell the broken record of svelte Shirley sobbing, “I feel so sick and dirty!” Like George’s parrot, “sick-and-dirty, sick-and-dirty, grawk!” Supposedly the film is a metaphor for the Communist witch hunts of the fifties. Tell that to the lesbians.

  She had intended to boycott the prom and spend the evening scoffing at it with Tommy and the other marginals from the drama club, but she was so shocked by his invitation that she said yes. Her mother was thrilled and worked for weeks sewing Madeleine a formal. “Ah, Madeleine, que t’es belle! We’ll take a picture to show your brother when he comes home.” Tommy wore a baby blue tuxedo with a hot pink cummerbund, anticipating disco by a good few years.

  They had bonded over the fact that Madeleine was not allowed to wear jeans to school and he was not permitted to grow his hair, even to a length acceptable in the Dutch army. He wore glasses that made him look like a physicist, which was what both his parents were at the National Research Council. The whole family wore identical Nana Mouskouri glasses, and they all had short hair except for the mother, who wore a scraped-back bun. Mr. and Mrs. Czerniatewicz were Polish immigrants, they had survived the war. So much for the sixties; the older Czerniatewicz brothers listened to classical music, excelled at math, wore flood pants, and had pocket protectors and bone structure to die for. They were at university, but had played high school football with Mike and, like him, were all-star athletes. Except for Tommy, who’d been born with a hole in his heart—“that’s why I got piano lessons.”

  He reminded Madeleine of Gordon Lawson—a perfect gentleman, with the hanky to prove it. But with a wicked streak of humour; when she went to his house after school and met his parents, he told them she was Jewish, and she could hear their chiselled smiles atrophy with a clink.

  She suffered torments of guilt, but Tommy begged her to keep up the ruse and soon she was in too deep to back out. Mr. and Mrs. Czerniatewicz grew fond of her, queried her about her culture and beliefs, and it was all she could do to fend off their desire to meet her wonderful parents who had survived the camps and changed their name to McCarthy to facilitate immigration. Stymied in their efforts, the Czerniatewiczes struck up a friendship with a Jewish scientist at the stark lab where they hunted for particles, and wound up at a Passover Seder the following spring. Tommy pranc
ed and clicked his heels together: “We’re like the Littlest Hobo and Lassie, spreading love and understanding.”

  He tutored her in math, and they spent hours belting out Broadway tunes while Tommy pounded the piano and Madeleine danced like a Gumby Gwen Verdon.

  Her best friend, Jocelyn, went to the prom with the captain of the football team, the impossibly good-looking, strong and silent Boom Boom Robinson. His sandy curls lapped at the collar of his midnight blue tux, and before dawn, when she and Madeleine ditched their formals and dived into the backyard pool, Jocelyn confessed that he was nice enough but he “didn’t even try anything.” They dried off and ate a loaf of Wonderbread fondue: take a slice of Wonderbread, squish it into a ball, dip it in a bowl of melted chocolate chips.

  Tommy and Boom Boom ran into each other ten years later, at Woody’s Bar in Toronto, fell in love and moved in together. Boom Boom died six months ago and Tommy has been raising funds and awareness ever since. That’s how he and Madeleine hooked up again. His hair is even shorter than it used to be, platinum buzz cut. He teaches at a high school for the performing arts.

  “I had a huge crush on your brother, Madeleine.”

  THE FEW, THE PROUD

  To the tune of “The Colonel Bogey March”:

  Hitler! had only one big ball

  Goering, had two but they were small

  Himmler, had something sim’lar

  And poor old Goebbels had no balls at all!

  Anon.

  MADELEINE IS STARING at a spot on the taupe carpet. Feels her mouth in the shape of an upside-down smile, her cheeks striped with tears, nose red with crying, is that the real reason clowns have red noses?

  Nina puts a glass of therapeutic spring water into her hand.

  She drinks, feels tadpoles in her stomach, contents of a swamp, thickening, things hatching. “I feel sick,” she says, and drops her forehead to her hand.

  “Madeleine. Can you close your eyes for a moment?”

  She does. Tears seep out.

  “What is it?”

  “My brother,” she says, and weeps.

  “He died,” says Nina.

  “We don’t say ‘died,’ we say ‘missing.’” She reaches for the tissues and covers her face with her hands, sobbing. “My poor dad.”

  “Were they close? Your brother and your father?”

  Madeleine shakes her head, blows her nose and almost laughs. She lobs the sodden wad into the wastebasket, pulls a fresh handful from the box and tells a story.

  In the spring of ’69, when Madeleine was fifteen, Mike came home to Ottawa in a United States Marine Corps uniform.

  “What the hell are you wearing?” said Jack.

  He was supposed to have been out west, working on an oil rig in Alberta. Instead, he had completed basic training at Parris Island. His head was shaved. He was newly muscled, neck straining against his collar.

  “Have you got a brain in your head?” asked Jack, white around the mouth. “Are you that stupid?” Smacking his newspaper down on the kitchen table.

  “I thought you’d be proud,” Mike said.

  “Why in God’s name would I be proud?”

  Mike had thought his father would be proud the way he had been proud of the comparatively few Canadians who had fought in Korea—

  “They fought as Canadians, not Americans, they were part of a U.N. force!”

  “They were fighting Communism,” Mike yelled back, “it was the same!”

  “You’ve pledged allegiance to a foreign power!”

  Madeleine leaned against the kitchen counter, glazed with shock. Her mother didn’t even light a cigarette.

  The Few, The Proud—a slogan of the Marine Corps. Canadians were the few among the few. The invisible among the despised. While scores of young American males objected, stayed in college or fled to Canada to avoid an insane war, Mike was one of a hefty handful of Canadians who volunteered. Many came from Québec and the Maritimes—a preponderance of working-class boys, Irish, French and Native Canadians. They enlisted at recruiting centres located deliberately close to the Canadian border. Mike joined up in Plattsburgh, New York. Shit, shower, shave! This time next month he would be “in country.”

  Jack’s hands dangled at his sides. “Go on, get out of here.” He turned and walked away.

  “Jack,” said Mimi—Madeleine could hear the shock in her voice.

  “He’s Canadian, not American, it’s a foreign war and it’s a foolish war. It can’t be won, they’re not fighting it to win it, he’ll be killed.”

  Mimi cried out and covered her mouth.

  “Maman,” said Mike, “c’est pas vrai, maman, je reviendra, calme-toi, eh?” He looked at his father. “See what you’ve done?”

  Jack rolled his eyes.

  Madeleine was rooted to the spot. She was wearing a pewter peace sign on a leather string around her neck. Last week she and Jocelyn had joined a protest in front of the American Embassy against the atrocities at My Lai.

  Jack pointed at his son and said, “You’re to stay out of it, mister.”

  “You’re just jealous,” said Mike.

  “What?” said Jack.

  Madeleine shared her father’s incredulity, but she could not bear to see her brother’s cheeks inflamed with humiliation. She was terrified he would cry. She bit the inside of her cheek.

  “I’m going to be flying.”

  “Flying what?” said Jack.

  “A chopper.”

  “A chopper.” Slow disdain. “Killing a whole bunch of peasants. From a helicopter. I’m impressed.”

  Mike turned scarlet. “At least I’m fighting for something. At least I’m not flying a fucking desk.”

  Jack struck him across the face for speaking that way in front of his mother. Mike gasped back his shock—Madeleine could see tears in his eyes, what would be worse? If Mike cried? Or if he hit Dad back?

  Mike turned to his mother and said, “Excuse-moi, maman. I didn’t mean to swear.”

  Mimi was crying. She reached up and put her arms around her son, hugged him and said, “Va avec Dieu, hein? Mon petit homme.” Stroking his back the way she used to when he was a kid. “P’tit gentilhomme.”

  Madeleine could see her brother’s jaw and mouth working as he held their mother, but still he didn’t cry. All she could think was, You big idiot. Stay home.

  “You’re to stay home,” said Jack.

  Mike turned and left.

  Nina says, “Is that the last time you saw him?”

  Madeleine smiles. “No. I followed him out of the house.”

  He is pulling away in a battered Chevy Nova, pockmarked where rust has been sanded off. She runs after him. He sees her in the rearview mirror and stops.

  They pick up Jocelyn.

  “Are you for real?” Jocelyn asks him, climbing into the back seat.

  “Surprise, surprise, surprise!” bleats Madeleine in Gomer Pyle’s voice.

  They drive into downtown Ottawa. It’s surreal—Mike’s crisp summer uniform and bean shave in contrast with the jeans, frayed hems and split ends everywhere—the only people with hair shorter than his are the Hare Krishnas with their orange robes and tambourines.

  They walk through the airy light of the early June evening, down Sparks Street Mall—thronging now with tourists, civil servants and hippies, past “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” piped from a record store, past buskers and jewellery vendors, through a gauntlet of stares.

  Madeleine is in a cold and lucid dream, on a wagon en route to the stake, naked but for her hair and smock, the crowd may spit and jeer, she will not seek to justify herself. She holds her head up and walks in step with the U.S. Marine at her side.

  “Where do you hang out?” Mike asks.

  “A little place down on Sussex.”

  She doesn’t really frequent the place, but the thought of walking in there with her soldier brother is mortifying, so that’s where she will take him. They walk past the Parliament Buildings, turn left down Sussex Drive and
come to a coffee house called Le Hibou.

  He opens the door for them. “Ladies first.” Jocelyn rolls her eyes at Madeleine, Madeleine rolls hers in agreement.

  Jocelyn looks like an Arthur Rackham fairy in blue jeans. Madeleine wishes she could be ethereal too, but she is stuck being strong instead. A gymnast’s body. The difference between a unicorn and a pony.

  They enter and sit down; candles flicker in wax-withered Mateus bottles, on checkered tablecloths. Beneath the acrid smoke of Gauloises and Gitanes, an odour—Mike is wearing Hai Karate. It mingles with patchouli oil and incense. Oh God, why did we come here? People stare as they find a table and sit, Madeleine in the middle between Jocelyn and Mike.

  Mike leans across and asks Joss, “Are you a women’s libber?”

  Jocelyn doesn’t bother to look at him. “That depends,” she says, smoothing her straight blonde hair behind one ear. “Are you a male chauvinist pig?”

  Mike grins. “Nope, I’m a hippie, I believe in free love.”

  “You’re a Neanderthal,” says Madeleine. “Move over.” Shoving him away.

  Mike looks up and says, “Can I get a beer?”

  The guy serving them pauses before answering, “We’re not licensed.”

  “No problem,” says Mike, “I’ll have a coffee.”

  But the waiter lingers. He stares at Mike. “Do you enjoy killing people?” he asks.

  Madeleine stiffens, can feel the wooden wheels of the cart rattling beneath her feet, how many more miles to the stake?

  Mike chuckles. “I don’t know, I haven’t killed any.” And turns away, unbuttoning his tunic.

  “But that’s what you’re trained to do,” says the waiter.

  He has no discernible hairline or facial features, he is all black curly fly-away and pasty white skin. He stares at Mike. Mike smiles, big fist relaxed around the car keys.

  Madeleine’s long dark hair is parted in the middle; her peace sign, her tie-dyed peasant blouse, faded bell-bottom jeans and water-buffalo sandals—the sartorial reflection of her belief in passive, non-violent resistance. She says to the waiter, “Why don’t you go fuck yourself and, when you’re done, bring us three coffees and a spoon so I can shove it up your ass.”