Red Plaid Shirt Read online

  I felt myself to be having, after all, one of those dizzying days in which everything can be connected, all ideas can be conjugated and then consumed whole, sense and significance are dropped into your lap like gifts, and the very cast and camber of the air on your cheek is meaningful.

  Stranger things, yes.

  I ordered another drink and an appetizer, the liver pâté and some French bread.

  I eavesdropped intermittently on the couple at the next table who were talking about their old dog, Shep, who was going blind, poor thing, about their new vacuum cleaner, and a misguided woman named Lisa who was looking for trouble and she was sure going to get it this time, couldn’t she see that guy was no damn good?

  I felt a tap on my right shoulder. I was feeling so happy and self-absorbed that I thought, without wonder, that it must be Nathan or God. It was a woman in a pale pink pantsuit, carrying one small grocery bag and a white wicker purse. She looked to be in her sixties. She said, “Please may I join you? There’s nowhere to sit.”

  What could I do? I nodded as she took the chair beside me. She ordered a screwdriver and some escargots in mushroom caps. She said, “I like a long lunch with my friends.”

  I could see right away there was something good about her, something motherly and kind. A pair of bifocals lay on her chest, hung from a golden chain, and she’d put a blue rinse in her white waved hair. I thought of my own mother once saying that sometimes all she really wanted was a place to lay her head but why was it so hard to put it down there in the first place? This was after my father had left her for a younger woman.

  I was glad enough for the company of a stranger. As opposed to family and friends, strangers will believe anything you tell them and they are less likely to ask you what’s wrong right when you thought you were doing just fine. They will not tell you that you look tired on a day when you thought you felt terrific. A stranger will tell you any story as if it were true. Often I have envied total strangers on the street: just the inscrutable look of them makes it obvious that their lives are better than mine, more normal, more simple, and perfect, yes, perfect … perfect strangers.

  “Hello,” the woman said, “my name is Sheila.”

  I, rendered helpless in the face of coincidence, said, “Hello.” It was the kind of thing that if you put it in a story, nobody would believe it. I recovered myself quickly enough because, after all, what possible harm could there be in exchanging pleasantries on a pleasant afternoon with a kind woman who happened to be, through no fault of her own, named Sheila?

  It made little difference that I’m no good at small talk because this third Sheila (or was she, chronologically speaking, because of her age rather than her advent, the first Sheila?) proved to be exceedingly talkative. In the course of the conversation, I had to tell her very little about myself, virtually nothing in fact, except to say once, when her momentum was interrupted by the arrival of dessert (chocolate almond cheesecake) and her story was stalled, that I was a writer, single, no children, said to be successful.

  She told me with detailed delight about a recent trip to the mountains she’d made with her younger sister, Serena, who had the glaucoma, and how you see things differently, more clearly, more brilliantly, bright, when you have to describe and explain them to somebody else, the blind or a child.

  She confided that one of the hardest things about getting older was the feeling that your body was turning on you, falling to pieces one thing at a time, and also the hair, which got thinner and thinner and she never ever wanted to become one of those sad old ladies that you can see through to their pathetic pink scalp. In high school, she said, she had been much envied for her hair which was long and lustrous, a deep burnished red, and when she marched in the school parade twirling her silver baton, her hair swung and bounced, beautiful in the sun.

  She talked about her children, three of them, two boys and a girl, who were all grown-up now and living in other cities. She understood that but still, she missed them.

  Mostly she talked about her husband, Victor, who had died tragically in a car crash in a snowstorm in December 1963, four days after they’d bought their first home, a brick bungalow on Addison Street downtown. She still lived in that house and every day she thought about her Victor, wondered if he’d have liked the new wallpaper in the bedroom, the beige shag carpet in the front room, the placemats, the blue towels, the new tuna casserole recipe, the microwave.

  No, she’d never remarried. Things were different in those days: a new husband had never occurred to her. With her Victor gone, she just figured she’d had all she was ever going to get of or from love, for better or worse. She was satisfied, she said. She’d lived a lovely life, she said. For some things, yes, she agreed, yes, it was too late now. It was too late now to turn back. It was too late now to turn her back on what she had created: three children, the house, those long-felt heart-held memories of her Victor who, like all the young dead, had never aged, never betrayed her, never ever broke her heart again. Why would she want to change anything after all?

  Why indeed? Why did I find all this so hard to believe: me with my constant chronic longing, my searching, my secret sadness at those moments when I should have been happy, me with this annoying ache always stuck in my heart or my head? “Why create trouble where there isn’t any?” I’d asked myself often, asked myself now.

  “Now I have this pain,” she said unexpectedly. “This funny pain, here,” she said, pressing the palm of her hand to her breast, which was draped with a silk scarf dramatically patterned with bright large tigers in various predatory poses.

  My own hand twitched with wanting to reach across and touch her but I was afraid there would be nothing there …

  … no woman

  … no breast

  … no scarf

  … no tigers

  … just air

  … the palpable eloquent air pushing down from the swollen storm clouds which were gathering above us.

  The patio was emptying quickly under the threat of rain. All around us, women were scooping up their purses and packages like prizes, gaily preparing to just disappear.

  I walked slowly back to my car in the underground parkade where I’d left it.

  I was tired suddenly and rested my head for a minute on my arms wrapped round the steering wheel. I thought of a morning not long ago when a navy blue Oldsmobile had pulled up suddenly in front of my house while I sat at the breakfast table in my nightie, hovering over my third cup of black coffee. The driver, a stranger, a bearded young man in a plaid shirt, sat there for a full five minutes with his head like this on the wheel. Then he drove slowly away, leaving me alone again, alone again to speculate in the dappled moted sunlight.

  I hesitated as I left the parkade, not sure which way I wanted to turn, which route home I wanted to take. A man in a baseball cap in a brown van behind me leaned so hard on his horn that my eyes filled in an instant with angry insulted tears.

  I turned left into the rush hour traffic and drove on.

  Sometimes on my way home from The Red Herring these days, I can imagine a car (red with black interior, air scoop, chrome, shining) running the red light at 100 mph, rocketing through the intersection, hitting my car on the driver’s side so that I am flung up and over, flying, then finally coming down face first on the asphalt, so mutilated that no one will be able to identify me. I can imagine this so clearly that unconsciously I brace myself for the impact, for the sound of ripping metal and breaking glass, as I roll through each intersection.

  Sometimes I imagine that I am one of the poor pedestrians in the crosswalk at the time. I am mowed down right alongside the rest of them …

  … strangers

  … young woman, Wendy, pushing baby in stroller, pulling toddler in harness, has a headache and hates the way her hair looks like straw in this heat

  … bank teller, Jane, on lunch, carrying roast beef on rye with pickle and cheese in small white bag while worrying about varicose veins, humming sad song about
cheating and hearts

  … old man, Ed, with white cane and dog, wishing he was dead or his wife was still alive or his children, at least, would call

  … businessman, Martin, with briefcase, nice teeth, green tie, has not a thought in his head, no reason to suspect that anyone else has either

  … stranger things have happened.

  Sometimes I imagine that I am the driver of the car, with the radio on and my foot to the floor, and the bodies scatter from me like pages or petals, unleashed. Or then they are not bodies at all but balloons, of all colours, full of wonder, words, and hot air, bobbing up and away, bouncing off asphalt, the rooftops, the pain, and a cloud.

  Railroading or: Twelve Small Stories with the Word Train in the Title (1988)

  LOVE TRAIN

  For a long time after Lesley and Cliff broke up, Cliff was always sending her things.

  Flowers.

  Red roses by the dramatic dozen.

  Delicate frilly carnations dyed turquoise at the edges (which reminded Lesley of a tradition they’d observed at her elementary school on Mother’s Day when each child had to wear a carnation, red if your mother was alive, white if she was dead—there were only two kids in the whole school whose mothers were dead—and what then, she wondered, was turquoise meant to signify?).

  A single white orchid nestled in tissue paper in a gold box, as if they had a big date for a formal dance.

  Cards. Funny cards:

  I thought you’d like to know that I’ve decided to start dating seals again, and …oh yes, my umbilical cord has grown back!

  Sentimental cards:

  I love wearing the smile … you put on my face!

  Funny sentimental cards:

  You You You You You You You You You You You You … These are a few of my favourite things!

  Apology cards:

  Please forgive me … my mouth is bigger than my brain!

  and:

  I’m sorry, I was wrong … Well, not as wrong as you, but sorrier!

  Pretty picture cards to say:

  Happy Thanksgiving!

  Happy Hallowe’en!

  I’m just thinking of you!

  I’m always thinking of you!

  I’m still thinking of you!

  Letters. Mostly letters.

  Often Cliff would call during the day and leave a message on Lesley’s answering machine, apologizing for having bothered her with another card or letter when she’d already told him, in no uncertain terms, that she needed some space. Then he would call right back and leave another message to apologize for having left the first one when she’d already told him to leave her alone.

  He did not send the letters through the mail in the conventional way, but delivered them by hand in the middle of the night. Lesley never did catch him in the act, but she could just picture him parking his car halfway down the block, sneaking up her driveway in the dark or the rain, depositing another white envelope in her black mailbox. Where she would find it first thing in the morning.

  At first it gave Lesley the creeps to think of Cliff tippy-toeing around out there while she was inside sleeping, but then she got used to hearing from him in this way. She took to checking the mailbox every morning before she put the coffee on. Waiting in her housecoat and slippers for the toast to pop and the eggs to poach, she would study the envelope first. Sometimes he put her full name on it, first and last; sometimes her first name only; once, just her initials.

  Inside, the letters were always neatly typewritten on expensive bond paper. They began with phrases like “Well no …” or “And yes …” or “But maybe …”, as if Cliff were picking up a conversation (one-sided though it might be) right in the middle where they’d left off, or as if he still thought he could still read her mind.

  One of the first letters was dense with scholarly historical quotes on the nature of war. Cliff had set these erudite excerpts carefully off from the rest of the text, single-spaced and indented:

  In quarrels between countries, as well as those between individuals, when they have risen to a certain height, the first cause of dissension is no longer remembered, the minds of the parties being wholly engaged in recollecting and resenting the mutual expressions of their dislike. When feuds have reached that fatal point, all considerations of reason and equity vanish; a blind fury governs, or rather, confounds all things. A people no longer regards their interest, but rather the gratification of their wrath. (John Dickson).

  And later in the letter he wrote:

  The strange thing about this crisis of August 1939 was that the object between Germany and Poland was not clearly defined, and could not therefore be expressed as a concrete demand. It was a part of Hitler’s nature to avoid putting things in a concrete form; to him, differences of opinion were questions of power, and tests of one’s nerves and strength. (Ernst von Weizsäcker).

  Lesley could not imagine that Cliff actually had a repertoire of such pedantic passages floating around inside his head, just waiting for an opportunity to be called up. But she couldn’t imagine that he had really gone to the library and looked them up in order to quote them at her either.

  Still, this letter made her mad enough to call him. When she said on the phone, “I don’t take kindly to being compared to Hitler, thank you very much,” Cliff said, “Don’t be ridiculous. That’s not what I meant. You just don’t understand.” And she said, “Well no … I guess not.”

  He apologized for making her mad, which was exactly the opposite, he said, of what he was intending to do. But the more he apologized, the madder she got. The more he assured her that he loved her even though she was crabby, cantankerous, strangled and worried, hard, cynical and detached, mercenary, unsympathetic, callous, and sarcastic—the more he assured her that he loved her in spite of her self—the madder she got. Until finally she hung up on him and all day she was still mad, also feeling guilty, sorry, sad, simple-minded, and defeated. She promised herself that she would send the next letter back unopened, but of course there was little real chance of that. She tried several times that afternoon to compose a letter in answer to his repeated requests for one. But she got no further than saying:

  What it all comes down to is this: in the process of getting to know you, I realized that you were not the right person for me.

  It should have been simple.

  In the next letter, two mornings later, Cliff turned around and blamed himself for everything, saying:

  At least understand that all of this was only the result of my relentless devotion to you.

  Lesley took a bath after breakfast and contemplated the incongruous conjunction of these two words.

  Relentless.

  Devotion.

  After she’d dried her hair and cleaned the tub, she looked up relentless in the thesaurus. Much as she’d suspected, it was not an adjective that should be allowed to have much to do with love:

  relentless, adj. unyielding, unrelenting, implacable, unsparing; inexorable, remorseless, unflagging, dogged; undeviating, unswerving, persistent, persevering, undaunted; rigid, stern, strict, harsh, grim, austere; merciless, ruthless, unmerciful, pitiless, unpitying, unforgiving; unmitigable, inflexible, unbending, resisting, grudging; hard, imperious, obdurate, adamant, intransigent; uncompassionate, unfeeling, unsympathetic, intolerant.

  The next letter was delivered on a windy Saturday night when Lesley was out on a date with somebody else. It was sitting there in the mailbox when she got home at midnight. The weather had turned cold and her driveway was filling up suddenly with crispy yellow leaves. When she opened the back door, dozens of them swirled around her ankles and slipped inside. She imagined Cliff crunching through them on his way to the mailbox, worrying about the noise, which was amplified by the hour and the wind, then noticing that her car wasn’t in the garage, and then worrying about that, too.

  In this letter, Cliff said:

  I love you like ten thousand freight trains.

  Lesley thought she rather liked this one, but then sh
e wasn’t sure. She thought she’d better think about it. She hung up her coat, poured herself a glass of white wine, and sat down in the dark kitchen to think. The oval of her face reflected in the window was distorted by the glass, so that her skin was pale, her eyes were holes, and her cheeks were sunken. She did not feel pale, hollow, or sunken. She felt just fine.

  I love you like ten thousand freight trains.

  This was like saying:

  I love you to little bits.

  Who wants to be loved to little bits?

  This was like saying:

  I love you to death.

  Who wants to be loved to death?

  I love you like ten thousand freight trains.

  Who wants to be loved like or by a freight train?

  The more she thought about it, the more she realized that she knew a thing or two about trains; railroading; relentlessness.

  DREAM TRAIN

  As a young girl growing up in Winnipeg, Lesley lived in an Insulbrick bungalow three doors down from the train tracks, a spur line leading to Genstar Feeds. Trains travelled the spur line so seldom that when one passed in the night, it would usually wake her up with its switching and shunting, its steel wheels squealing on the frozen rails. She would lie awake listening in her little trundle bed (it wasn’t really a trundle bed, it was just an ordinary twin bed, but every night at eight o’clock her mother, Amelia, would say, “Come on, little one, time to tuck you into your little trundle bed”).

  Lesley liked to imagine that the train outside was not a freight train but a real train, a passenger train: the Super Continental, carrying dignified wealthy people as carefully as if they were eggs clear across the country in its plush coaches, the conductors in their serious uniforms graciously bringing around drinks, pillows, and magazines. She imagined the silver coaches cruising slowly past, all lit up, the people inside riding backwards, eating, sleeping, playing cards with just their heads showing, laughing as if this were the most natural thing in the world. She imagined that the Super Continental could go all the way from Vancouver to St. John’s (never mind the Gulf of St. Lawrence — there must be a way around it) without stopping once.