Red Plaid Shirt Read online

  Dark-and-Brooding wants to know if you’d like to go skating in the park with him sometime. Downtown the next day, you just happen to pick up a pair of Lynn Nightingale figure skates. You have not skated since you were thirteen, twenty years ago.

  The first afternoon he takes you over to the rink, they are watering the ice so you go back to your place for coffee instead. Dark-and-Brooding sits on your couch and reads last night’s paper with his jacket on—he is looking for a job. You pretend to read the Lifestyle section, which used to be the Women’s Page, but really you are watching him, the way his dark eyes move while he is reading, also his lips. He reads you the wedding announcement of a girl he dated in high school. You nod with appreciative interest, hopefully. In a dark season, everything seems significant.

  The next time you are supposed to go skating, it is on an evening which turns out to be the coldest night of the winter so far. Dark-and-Brooding drops by to tell you it’s too cold out for you, he’s going with his brother instead. You are not the least bit insulted. Rather, you think he is being considerate and you are also relieved that you will not have to make a fool of yourself in front of him. You stay home happily enough, and warm in the terry cloth bathrobe that Nice-and-Boring gave you for Christmas. You watch television and imagine Dark-and-Brooding out there on the cold ice under the lights, chasing the puck around the rink, clapping his mittens together to keep warm, grinning with rosy apple cheeks like a little boy. Nice-and-Boring calls just to say hello. You are feeling so good that you expansively ask him out for lunch tomorrow.

  At lunch you tell him you are taking up skating. He tells you he has weak ankles.

  In the pursuit of happiness, you and Best Friend have temporarily abandoned great literature in favour of trading back and forth paperback books with long titles like: Women Who Love Too Much: When You Keep Wishing and Hoping He’ll Change; Men Who Hate Women And The Women Who Love Them: When Loving Hurts And You Don’t Know Why; Women Men Love, Women Men Leave: Why Men Are Drawn To Women, What Makes Them Want To Stay; and Rapid Relief From Emotional Distress.

  Tonight you and Best Friend are putting rum in your coffee, analyzing yourselves and trying to figure Dark-and-Brooding out. You have read enough self-help books by now to know that your relationship is unhealthy but not uncommon. You are obsessed. He is inappropriate. Knowing this does not make him any less desirable, any less dangerous. You haven’t heard from him in nine days. You worry that he may be sick, seriously injured, in a coma, dead. You wonder if he has lost your phone number or forgotten how to spell your last name.

  You and Best Friend are trying to decide what you should do. You could go by the book and do nothing.

  Or you could call him. Except sometimes his brother answers and tells you Dark-and-Brooding isn’t home, even though you know damn well, you can feel it, he’s sitting right there, shaking his head.

  You could leave him a note. In which you apologize for whatever it is you’ve done wrong, even though you and Best Friend have been racking your brains and you can’t figure out what you’ve done wrong.

  You could call his mother. Who adores you and once said Dark-and-Brooding was a real asshole for the way he treated you. She regularly confesses that she doesn’t understand him either. His own mother.

  Flying in the face of self-help, Best Friend helps you compose the note. It takes hours. It is so good you keep a copy. You leave it on his car, tucked under the windshield wiper on the driver’s side.

  Dark-and-Brooding appears at your door, grinning with the note in his hand. You feel triumphant. You forgive him everything again.

  You are sitting alone at the kitchen table on Friday night. Your son has been sleeping for hours. The phone does not ring. You drink coffee with and without rum. You do difficult crossword puzzles, flip through the books you should be reading, put together and take apart and put together again your son’s wooden fish puzzle.

  You think about calling Dark-and-Brooding but you know you shouldn’t. You think about calling Nice-and-Boring but you don’t know what you want to say. Best Friend is out of town. You go to bed.

  You are still awake at two in the morning. The sheets are twisted around your sweaty neck. You get up and remake the bed. You check again to see if the phone is working. You drink ice water and pace around the kitchen quietly in the dark, trying not to wake your son. He turns and sighs softly in his sleep.

  You read a magazine article about the lonely plight of the single parent but it doesn’t tell you anything that you don’t already know. You remind yourself that nobody has ever died of loneliness but you are not convinced. You put on your terry cloth bathrobe and contemplate the bouquet of flowers which is wilting now, dropping pink petals all over the table. You realize that Dark-and-Brooding wouldn’t send you flowers even if you were on your deathbed. He would probably go skating with his brother instead.

  You pick up the phone and cradle the humming receiver against your cheek in the dark. You will ask Nice-and-Boring to come over and hold you, just hold you, that’s all you want.

  You dial his number and then you are whispering into his ear. You know you can ask him because you know he will come. And he does.

  Red Plaid Shirt (1988)

  RED PLAID SHIRT

  that your mother bought you one summer in Banff. It is 100% pure virgin wool, itchy but flattering against your pale skin, your black hair. You got it in a store called Western Outfitters, of the sort indigenous to the region, which stocked only real (as opposed to designer) blue jeans, Stetson hats, and $300 hand-tooled cowboy boots with very pointy toes. There was a saddle and a stuffed deer head in the window.

  Outside, the majestic mountains were sitting all around, magnanimously letting their pictures be taken by ten thousand tourists wielding Japanese cameras and eating ice cream cones. You had tricked your mother into leaving her camera in the car so she wouldn’t embarrass you, who lived there and were supposed to be taking the scenery for granted by now.

  You liked the red plaid shirt so much that she bought you two more just like it, one plain green, the other chocolate brown. But these two stayed shirts, never acquiring any particular significance, eventually getting left unceremoniously behind in a Salvation Army drop-box in a grocery store parking lot somewhere along the way.

  The red plaid shirt reminded you of your mother’s gardening shirt, which was also plaid and which you rescued one winter when she was going to throw it away because the elbows were out. You picture her kneeling in the side garden where she grew only flowers—bleeding hearts, roses, peonies, poppies — and a small patch of strawberries. You picture her hair in a bright babushka, her hands in the black earth with her shirt sleeves rolled up past the elbow. The honeysuckle hedge bloomed fragrantly behind her and the sweet peas curled interminably up the white trellis. You are sorry now for the way you always sulked and whined when she asked you to help, for the way you hated the dirt under your nails and the sweat running into your eyes, the sweat dripping down her shirt front between her small breasts. You kept her old shirt in a bag in your closet for years, with a leather patch half-sewn onto the left sleeve, but now you can’t find it.

  You were wearing the red plaid shirt the night you met Daniel in the tavern where he was drinking beer with his buddies from the highway construction crew. You ended up living with him for the next five years. He was always calling it your “magic shirt,” teasing you, saying how it was the shirt that made him fall in love with you in the first place. You would tease him back, saying how you’d better hang onto it then, in case you had to use it on somebody else. You’ve even worn it in that spirit a few times since, but the magic seems to have seeped out of it and you are hardly surprised.

  You’ve gained a little weight since then or the shirt has shrunk, so you can’t wear it anymore, but you can’t throw or give it away either.

  RED: crimson carmine cochineal cinnabar sanguine scarlet red ruby rouge my birthstone red and blood-red brick-red beet-red bleeding hearts Queen of fir
e god of war Mars the colour of magic my magic the colour of iron flowers and fruit the colour of meat dripping lobster cracking claws lips nipples blisters blood my blood and all power.

  BLUE COTTON SWEATSHIRT

  that says Why Be Normal? in a circle on the front. This is your comfort shirt, fleecy on the inside, soft from many washings, and three sizes too big so you can tuck your hands up inside the sleeves when they’re shaking or cold. You like to sit on the couch with the curtains closed, wearing your comfort shirt, eating comfort food: vanilla ice cream, macaroni and cheese, white rice with butter and salt, white toast with CheezWhiz and peanut butter. Sometimes you even sleep in it.

  This is the shirt you wore when you had the abortion three days before Christmas. They told you to be there at nine in the morning and then you didn’t get into the operating room until nearly twelve-thirty. So you wore it in the waiting room with the other women also waiting, and the weight you had already gained was hidden beneath it while you pretended to read Better Homes and Gardens and they wouldn’t let you smoke. After you came to, you put the shirt back on and waited in another waiting room for your friend, Alice, to come and pick you up because they said you weren’t capable yet of going home alone. One of the other women was waiting there too, for her boyfriend, who was always late, and when he finally got there, first she yelled at him briefly and then they decided to go to McDonald’s for a hamburger. At home, Alice pours you tea from the porcelain pot into white china cups like precious opaque stones.

  None of this has diminished, as you feared it might, the comfort this shirt can give you when you need it. Alice always puts her arms around you whenever she sees you wearing it now. She has one just like it, only pink.

  BLUE: azure aqua turquoise delft and navy-blue royal-blue cool cerulean peacock-blue indigo ultramarine cobalt-blue Prussian-blue cyan the sky and electric a space the colour of the firmament and sapphire sleeping silence the sea the blues my lover plays the saxophone cool blue he plays the blues.

  PALE GREY TURTLENECK

  that you bought when you were seeing Dwight, who said one night for no apparent reason that grey is a mystical colour. You took this judgement to heart because Dwight was more likely to talk about hockey or carburetors and you were pleasantly surprised to discover that he might also think about other things. You spotted the turtleneck the very next day on sale at Maggie’s for $9.99.

  You took to wearing it on Sundays because that was the day Dwight was most likely to wander in, unannounced, on his way to or from somewhere else. You wore it while you just happened to put a bottle of good white wine into the fridge to chill and a chicken, a roast, or a pan of spinach lasagna into the oven to cook slowly just in case he showed up hungry. You suppose now that this was pathetic, but at the time you were thinking of yourself as patient and him as worth waiting for.

  Three Sundays in a row you ended up passed out on the couch, the wine bottle empty on the coffee table, the supper dried out, and a black-and-white movie with violin music flickering on the tv. In the coloured morning, the pattern of the upholstery was imprinted on your cheek and your whole head was hurting. When Dwight finally did show up, it was a Wednesday and you were wearing your orange flannelette nightie with all the buttons gone and a rip down the front, because it was three in the morning, he was drunk, and you had been in bed for hours. He just laughed and took you in his arms when you told him to get lost. Until you said you were seeing someone else, which was a lie, but one that you both wanted to believe because it was an easy answer that let both of you gingerly off the hook.

  You keep meaning to wear that turtleneck again sometime because you know it’s juvenile to think it’s a jinx, but then you keep forgetting to iron it.

  Finally you get tough and wear it, wrinkled, grocery shopping one Saturday afternoon. You careen through the aisles like a crazed hamster, dodging toddlers, old ladies, and other carts, scooping up vegetables with both hands, eating an apple you haven’t paid for, leaving the core in the dairy section. But nothing happens and no one notices your turtleneck: the colour or the wrinkles.

  Sure enough, Dwight calls the next day, Sunday, at five o’clock. You say you can’t talk now, you’re just cooking supper: prime rib, wild rice, broccoli with Hollandaise. You have no trouble at all hanging quietly up on him while pouring the wine into the crystal goblet before setting the table for one with the Royal Albert china your mother left you in her will.

  GREY: oyster pewter slate dull lead dove-grey pearl-grey brain my brains silver or simple gone into the mystic a cool grey day overcast with clouds ashes concrete the aftermath of airplanes gunmetal-grey granite and gossamer whales elephants cats in the country the colour of questions the best camouflage the opaque elegance an oyster.

  WHITE EMBROIDERED BLOUSE

  that you bought for $80 to wear with your red-flowered skirt to a Christmas party with Peter, who was working as a pizza cook until he could afford to play his sax full-time. You also bought a silken red belt with gold beads and tassels, a pair of red earrings with dragons on them, and ribbed red stockings which are too small but you wanted them anyway. This striking outfit involves you and Alice in a whole day of trudging around downtown in a snowstorm, holding accessories up in front of mirrors like talismans.

  You spend an hour in the bathroom getting ready, drinking white wine, plucking your eyebrows, dancing like a dervish, and smiling seductively at yourself. Peter calls to say he has to work late but he’ll meet you there at midnight.

  By the time he arrives, you are having a complex anatomical conversation with an intern named Fernando who has spilled a glass of red wine down the front of your blouse. He is going to be a plastic surgeon. Your blouse is soaking in the bathtub and you are wearing only your white lace camisole. Fernando is feeding you green grapes and little squares of cheese, complimenting your cheekbones, and falling in love with your smooth forehead. You are having the time of your life and it’s funny how you notice for the first time that Peter has an inferior bone structure.

  WHITE: ivory alabaster magnolia milk the moon is full and chalk-white pure-white snow-white moonstone limestone rime and clay marble many seashells and my bones are china bones precious porcelain lace white magic white feather the immaculate conception of white lies wax white wine as a virtue.

  YELLOW EVENING GOWN

  that you bought for your New Year’s Eve date with Fernando. It has a plunging neckline and a dropped sash which flatteringly accentuates your hips. You wear it with black hoop earrings, black lace stockings with seams, and black high heels that Alice forced you to buy even though they hurt your toes and you are so uncoordinated that you expect you will have to spend the entire evening sitting down with your legs crossed, calves nicely flexed.

  You spend an hour in the bathroom getting ready, drinking pink champagne, applying blusher with a fat brush according to a diagram in a women’s magazine that shows you how to make the most of your face. You practise holding your chin up so it doesn’t sag and look double. Alice French-braids your hair and teaches you how to waltz like a lady. Fernando calls to say he has to work late but he’ll meet you there before midnight.

  You go to the club with Alice instead. They seat you at a tiny table for two so that when you sit down, your knees touch hers. You are in the middle of a room full of candles, fresh flowers, lounge music, and well-groomed couples staring feverishly into each other’s eyes. The meal is sumptuous: green salad, a whole lobster, homemade pasta, fresh asparagus, and warm buns wrapped in white linen in a wicker basket. You eat everything and then you get the hell out of there, leaving a message for Fernando.

  You go down the street to a bar you know where they will let you in without a ticket even though it’s New Year’s Eve. In the lobby you meet Fernando in a tuxedo with his arm around a short homely woman in black who, when you ask, “Who the hell are you?” says, “His wife.” In your black high heels you are taller than both of them and you know your gown is gorgeous. When the wife says, “And who the
hell are you?” you point a long finger at Fernando’s nose and say, “Ask him.” You stomp away with your chin up and your dropped sash swinging.

  Out of sight, you take off your high heels and walk home through the park and the snow with them in your hands, dangling. Alice follows in a cab. By the time you get there, your black lace stockings are in shreds and your feet are cut and you are laughing and crying, mostly laughing.

  YELLOW: jonquil jasmine daffodil lemon and honey-coloured corn-coloured cornsilk canary crocus the egg yolk in the morning the colour of mustard bananas brass cadmium yellow is the colour of craving craven chicken cats’ eyes I am fainthearted weak-kneed lily-livered or the sun lucid luminous means caution or yield.

  BLACK LEATHER JACKET

  that you bought when you were seeing Ivan, who rode a red Harley-Davidson low-rider with a suicide shift, his black beard blowing in the wind. The jacket has rows of diagonal pleats at the yoke and a red leather collar and cuffs.

  Ivan used to take you on weekend runs with his buddies and their old ladies to little bars in other towns where they were afraid of you: especially of Ivan’s best friend, Spy, who had been hurt in a bike accident two years before and now his hands hung off his wrists at odd angles and he could not speak, could only make guttural growls, write obscene notes to the waitress on a serviette, and laugh at her like a madman, his eyes rolling back in his head, and you could see what was left of his tongue.