Red Plaid Shirt Read online

  One rainy afternoon Linda had the bright idea of rearranging the living room furniture to surprise Neil when he got home from the mill. The aqua-coloured couch and chair with arms at least a foot wide were unwieldy but simple enough once we threw our weight into it. Before moving the tv set we had first to take down the dozens of photographs in different-sized filigree frames which completely covered its top. This was a lengthy procedure which involved the identification of every person in every picture, who took which shot, and what the special occasion was and at whose house it was held that year. Dismantling the china cabinet where Linda kept her salt and pepper collection was even worse. She estimated the collection at two hundred pairs but it seemed more like eight or nine hundred to me, every set different, from cupids to corn cobs, from Santa and Mrs. Claus to Paul Bunyan and his blue ox, Babe. By the time Linda was finished fondling and explaining them, I was so bored, impatient, and somehow embarrassed for her that I went home, leaving her sprawled on the couch, sweating and self-satisfied.

  The one thing we had not touched was Neil’s gun collection. Arrayed in wooden racks against the wall, the smooth metal barrels were perfectly, endlessly polished, cool to the touch even in this unbearable heat.

  I did not go back for several days, and when I did, I found everything once again in its original position. Neil, obviously, had not been impressed. I was obscurely pleased, meanly imagining that he’d made her put it all back by herself. No one was going to push him around, least of all silly, fluffy Linda. It served her right. She could be so tiresome. Some days—mean, sulky days—I’d taken to wondering how Neil—quiet, sensitive, so-handsome Neil—could even stand her. I was beginning to understand why she had no other friends. And if I was too young for her, as my mother repeatedly pointed out, then she was certainly too old for me.

  I didn’t spend all my time that summer with Linda. In fact, I never saw her on weekends and seldom in the evening.

  Spending the day at home, I usually wanted to stay inside and read, but felt obligated to go out and suntan. I would spread myself out on a beach towel in the backyard, armed with baby oil, radio, and a pitcher of water to sprinkle on intermittently, believing this would speed the tanning process. I was essentially bored and uncomfortable but lying there made me feel more normal, doing exactly what I supposed all other girls my age were doing or wanting to.

  On weekends I lay there by the honeysuckle hedge hoping that Neil Anderson would see me and want me and go back inside and holler at pale gabby Linda. Whenever I heard a sound from that direction, I couldn’t open my eyes for fear it would or wouldn’t be him.

  I could not have said when I began to feel this way about Neil. It was all Linda’s fault anyway, I reasoned. She had made him seem so desirable, so serious and important, so perfectly male, the only man worth having. How could I help myself? I no longer wanted to be like Linda. But I did want everything she had, including her house and her husband. Linda, I imagined, was the only obstacle which kept him from me. Now I fantasized about their divorce.

  Evenings were usually spent with my best friend, Mary Yurick, who had a job in the kitchen of a nursing home downtown and so was not available to me during the day. I was not yet allowed to work and envied her mightily, foolishly brushing aside my mother’s wise words: “You’ll be working for the rest of your life — so what’s your hurry?”

  Mary and I passed the time at her house or mine, watching beauty pageants and variety shows on tv, playing Scrabble or poker, sipping lemon gin from her father’s well-stocked liquor cabinet whenever her parents were out for the evening. When the night was too warm, too long, too inviting, we went out and we walked, restless and uneasily innocent.

  We headed downtown, past those boring plump houses just like ours, with flowers, families, and fat dogs in the yard. Downtown where the dangerous young men were hanging in restaurant doorways, draped potently over parking meters or the hoods of hot cars, watching the bright street where something might happen to jerk them awake, something electric and clarion, like a siren. We were already aware of their power but not yet of the need to protect ourselves from it. We thought we could become part of it, did not know yet of the danger, of how they would use it over and against us, never offering a share.

  We browsed through the record store which was always open late and peeked through the glass doors of the Hastings Hotel bar, longing. Once there was a fight out in front, two men thumping bloodless and silent on the sidewalk. Once a young woman lay face down on the curb, stinking. But nothing could deter us. We walked the nights on a leash that summer, Mary and I, all dressed up and tingling, daring each other to be disgusted. The summer was almost over and we had wasted it.

  Some evenings I stayed home and read, not wanting to know. Alone in the hot house, I curled up on the couch in my nightgown with a new novel and just one light on, feeling safe and relieved. All the screens were open, hoping to catch a breeze, and I could hear June bugs hitting against them, falling to the ground on their backs. From all up and down the block came voices, thin music, the hum of sprinklers and lawn mowers. Once in a while I could hear someone else’s phone ringing faintly.

  My parents were out in the yard cutting peonies and roses just as it grew dark, their voices young and strong in the twilight. Sometimes they sat out front in the lawn chairs, citronella candles smoking in a circle around them to keep the mosquitoes away. I wondered what Linda and Neil were doing, wished I had never met them, would never be like them. Wished I could stay home here forever, here where they did not draw blood, here where you knew exactly what they expected of you, here where my father was coming in through the door and putting his arms around me for no reason. Here where I wanted to cry.

  Friday night the week before school started, Linda called and invited me over.

  “Neil’s gone out again, I’m all alone. We could make popcorn, I’ll do your hair.” She was begging.

  I was hard-hearted. “No, I can’t. I’m going out with Mary.” I wanted to hurt her. I wanted her to know that I had better things to do and was nothing like her after all. It was Friday and I was feeling frisky, thinking of what I would wear, who we might see, how late I could stay downtown without pushing my mother over the edge.

  Grocery shopping that afternoon, Linda had been careless and preoccupied, missing half the items on her list, spending her money instead with desperate extravagance on T-bone steaks, fresh asparagus tips, a precious can of lobster. Her dirty blonde hair was greasy and her out-of-style pedal-pushers were held together at the waist with a big safety pin. She perked up only once, just long enough to tell me the story of a marine in Michigan who had murdered his wife and three children and then turned the gun on himself.

  “It was a real bloodbath. You can imagine,” she muttered with grim satisfaction, fondling a sweet-smelling cantaloupe before tossing it into the cart. “All I really want is one of those little gadgets you make melon balls with.”

  I was barely listening, absent-mindedly examining the onions, not thinking of anything else in particular, but not allowing myself to be interested either. Linda, I had decided, no longer needed to be listened to. Her grisly gossip was merely her way of reassuring herself that things could be and probably would be worse. Everybody needs to be certain of something.

  In my smug, soon-to-be-undermined adolescent superiority, I pitied her. But I was shutting her off, cutting her out, moving glibly away. We could not do anything for each other anymore.

  On the way home we took a detour downtown, cruising several times slowly past the Hastings Hotel so Linda could squint intently at the doorway, looking for clues. Neil Anderson, I knew from eavesdropping on my parents, was in trouble for drinking at work (this from my father) and sometimes stayed out all night without Linda (this from my mother, who liked to keep track of things). I was interested but only mildly surprised. Linda was one of those women who expected the worst and got it. Neil was clever, sly, and volatile, capable of anything.

  Linda attempted
to confide in me. “I just don’t know what to do,” she began and then stopped.

  She tried again. “I just can’t believe that Neil would—”

  I was holding my breath, afraid to look at her. What did she want from me anyway? She was older, married, she wasn’t supposed to have problems anymore. I would not be drawn into her miseries. I would not talk about Neil behind his back anymore. It felt now like a betrayal or a shameful admission of helplessness.

  Downtown that night Mary and I hung around the Exchange Café for a while, spending our allowances on chocolate milkshakes and chips and gravy, and then we gravitated wordlessly toward the Hastings Hotel. We perched on the wooden bench out front where the winos slumped in the sunshine and sometimes slept under newspapers at night. The police would be by in half an hour or so, telling us to move along. We sat there smoking cigarettes stolen from Mary’s mother and talking, mostly about how easy it would be to sneak inside and have a beer. We were all dressed up, trying to look older in earrings and, despite the cooler nights, new white tank tops selected to show off our silky suntans. But we both knew we wouldn’t try it, not yet.

  The boarded-up bar door opened—someone had kicked in the glass again—emitting a belch of boozy laughter and a country and western chorus.

  Neil Anderson came out with his arm around the waist of a blonde woman wearing skin-tight slacks and white cowboy boots. She was quite stunning in an ornamental sort of way, smiling all-inclusively around her, proud of herself. Neil was just drunk enough to be expansive and flirtatious, not at all the way he was around the neighbourhood, not at all the way Linda made him out to be. Neither of us had the grace or good sense to look guilty.

  He came right up to me and threw his other arm around my neck, kissing the top of my head. “Hiya, honey!”

  Mary was impressed. Neil patted through the pockets of his black leather jacket, as if looking for matches or a gun. Exposing a gleaming buck knife strapped to his belt, he produced a mickey of rye.

  “For you, ladies!” he said and swaggered away.

  The bottle, of course, was a bribe, so I wouldn’t tell Linda. As if I would. I probably should have been indignant or afraid, but instead I was feeling privileged and ripe with our secret, winking and wanting to go with them. I was aching for adventure and convinced now that Neil, more than anyone, knew where to find it.

  Neil Anderson was the first in a long line of those handsome, charmingly doomed men who would inhabit my life for a time — those lovely lazy men who could get away with anything and I would never tell. For a few years anyway I thought I had it all figured out.

  Tickets to Spain (1985)

  “In the dream there was always a sound like bees, faint and far away, but then not really a sound at all, more like having water in your ears. It was the sound of thousands of people all in one place, all at once waiting.”

  I was telling Howard this dream this morning while he shaved. Leaning naked against the sink to get closer to the mirror, he pulled his face all out of shape and sighed. I was sitting on the edge of the tub in my housecoat, talking to his reflection, damp and steamy-looking from the shower.

  “At first we weren’t there and then we were, but we didn’t know for sure where we were until they brought out the bull and everyone was cheering and jumping around in a fever. They were all strangers, men mostly, doe-eyed and handsome with oily skin.”

  I am always having dreams about strangers, dreams that I’m not in yet or have just left. I handed Howard a towel, one of the red ones Robin gave us for our anniversary. We’ve been living together for three years. The towels were mostly a joke. We’d been arguing among ourselves for days—do bulls really charge when they see red? Robin said no, I said yes. Robin said, “How would you know?”

  “They were all speaking Spanish, things that aren’t in the phrase book, and eating, these men. They kept passing food over to me—ice-cream cones, olives, half-eaten oranges, hot dogs dripping mustard. They do have hot dogs there, don’t they?”

  “I think so, Miriam,” Howard said, around a mouthful of toothbrush and mint-flavoured paste. I watched him solemnly spit, wipe his mouth, put on his glasses, and start fixing his hair. Howard has always been particular (vain) about his hair. This is one of the things I would never have suspected about him when we first met because he had a convertible then.

  “It was so real—the bull shaking its head, twisting and lunging, forward and away; the picador up on his horse, tormenting and stabbing. You were making notes on a paper napkin and I was saying stupid things like: ‘Oh the poor thing! Does it know it’s going to die? I want to go home.’ The sky was so hot it looked white.”

  “It won’t be like that, Miriam. Don’t worry—you’ll love it. Everyone does—the drama,” Howard said, patting my knees and heading for the bedroom to get dressed.

  Howard and I have been going to Spain for a year and a half. It all started, I suppose, at that foreign film festival at The Plaza. The Spanish entry, A Night Sky, was melancholy and turbulent, dense with subtitles and classical guitar music. Juanita, the voluptuous overheated heroine, was falling in love all the time with swarthy political men who were everywhere in the unyielding countryside. They were all so intelligent and intense, with stomach muscles like rock.

  Then my sister, Robin, went to Spain for the summer and came back brown and spiritual, with intricate symbolic stories of revolution, renaissance, and throbbing hotel rooms. This was all the proof I needed. Spain was another world, the one I should have been in all along.

  It was more my dream than Howard’s to begin with. But then he swallowed it whole. In the way of young couples seriously in love, we were always assimilating. Sometimes it gets confusing, this Siamese-twin trading of tokens, blue jeans, and dreams.

  “At first I was sweating but then it was rain on my face.” The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.

  This summer we are really going. After so much anticipation we are determined not to be disappointed. I have been buying travel guides and studying the phrase book, Spanish in Three Months. We practise and practise until we can have whole conversations like:

  “I am very fond of apples. Me gustan mucho las manzanas.“

  “I prefer pears. Prefiero las peras.”

  “We like oranges best. Nos gustan más las naranjas.”

  We are always collecting mementoes of Spain: castanets, rough clay pots, a stuffed bull with a spear where its heart should be, posters of flamenco dancers and the young men running the bulls through the streets of Pamplona. In this picture there are eleven bulls altogether, two white ones, and the boys are running barefoot in a pack, all in white with red scarves wound around their waists. One boy is leaping, he could be dancing. Another is doing a somersault, or he could be falling and breaking his neck. It is all so dreamy and daring. Boys will be boys.

  Sometimes we buy bottles of good Spanish wine to drink with our friends. We put on the classical guitar tapes and show them our souvenirs, as if we’ve already been there. Sometimes I wish we had.

  “For a while in the dream I was wearing a white wedding gown with a rose in my teeth, a red one, of course, which means blood. You were wearing a black tuxedo with a white carnation and smoking a fat cigar. For a while it was like a rock and roll video and I thought we were going to dance. But then we were just normal again and no one was singing.”

  We used to talk about getting married. Sometimes now I think we did and I just can’t remember. Just as I can’t remember how, according to my mother, when I was five, my sister, Robin, who was ten, tried to drown me in the bathtub. Something like that you’d think would leave a permanent mark on you, distinguishing, if not disfiguring. But it didn’t, and I’m not afraid of water or my sister either.

  “The matador was like a ballet dancer, or a scrap of paper blown around by the wind, and then he was riding the bull instead of killing it.”

  The matador knows that his chance of meeting death in the ring is one out of ten, and the odds are one to f
our that he will be seriously wounded. His suit is called the traje de luces, the suit of lights.

  I was talking and passing over underwear, socks, clean shirt, suit pants to Howard in precise order, as if we were in surgery. Our bedroom is small and crowded with a matching pair of antique dressers with mirrors and, stuck in the middle like a raft, a king-size bed that seems to be spreading. The trees outside the window shed into it a greenish wavering light like that inside an aquarium. This is our morning ritual: I tell him my dreams and make the bed; he gets dressed up as a shoe salesman.

  “In the end, a team of mules dragged the dead bull out of the ring on its back like a giant insect.”

  I handed Howard the lint brush. We imagine that shoe salesmen are notoriously neat. Would you let them fiddle with your feet if they weren’t?

  We went into the kitchen to have coffee. I worked hard on that room, hanging plants in the window, wicker baskets on the walls, and pots and pans from the ceiling. Shiny bottles of spices and fragrant herb teas sit on open shelves above the stove, and the cupboard doors are yellow to match the floppy old roses on the linoleum.

  “The matador was a hero heaped with roses. The crowd went wild, smearing hysterical wet kisses all over each other and us.”

  It was one of those dreams that you think you’ve been having all night long and nothing will stand still and you wake up feeling scared of everything.

  “Do you see?”

  After Howard left for the store, I poured myself another coffee, turned on the TV, and curled up on the couch. I half-watched “The 20-Minute Workout,” where all those pliable nubile women get up early to contort themselves in their skin-tight leotards, sweating just enough to make their hair curl prettily. Three more, two more, one more. Synchronize crotches.

  This morning I mostly ignored them, feeling little compulsion to join them and almost no guilt. What’s the point? They have no breasts and do not eat french fries. Instead I studied the phrase book. I am learning to say, among other things: