Red Plaid Shirt Read online

  When Howard writes in the evening, I can hear him doing the dialogue out loud, running through one speech over and over until he gets it right. DAVID and DENISE have lately shown a tendency toward interchangeable lines. It hardly seems to matter anymore who says what. In the way of young couples seriously in love, they have embraced the theory of osmosis and turned themselves into an reversible jacket. They are, as Robin would say disparagingly, joined at the hip. And of course they will look alike when they are old. But, as always, there are difficulties.

  DAVID: I never really loved you.

  DAVID: I never really loved you.

  DAVID: I never really loved you. (He lights another cigarette.)

  DENISE: I never really loved you either.

  DENISE: I never really loved you anyway. (She heads for the bedroom.)

  But tonight when Howard got home, just after six, he had company. Which is not unusual. He has lately acquired the habit of bringing strangers home for supper, as if they were bag ladies in need of a hot meal. Howard has a way with people.

  Just coming out of the kitchen, it took me a minute to realize that tonight’s guests were the ordinary couple from across the street. Their names, it turns out, are Cindy and Mike. We had drinks and made neighbourhood small talk, Howard insisting the whole time that they must stay for supper. Finally Mike phoned over to tell the girls to order pizza.

  From childhood on, the average Spaniard has been taught to share—and share he does, quite often putting himself out in order to help the friend or stranger who stands before him. Politeness demands offering a meal to a stranger, who answers, “May it be good for you. Que aproveche.”

  Mike, looking even heavier up close, was wearing low-slung jeans and a greasy teeshirt which revealed a roll of hairy flesh that hypnotized me. In sandals, his stubby toes were hairy too. No wonder Howard is always washing his hands. Maybe he should have been a dentist.

  Cindy, the wife, was dowdy but inoffensive in an ordinary summer dress pulled tight across the breasts. Every so often she would let her little hands flop down limply into her lap, exhausted or resigned to the inevitable. She admired everything in our living room, especially the fake fireplace decorated in a mosaic of black, red, and white tiles. I put violets where the fire should be. She also wished she had a couch just like mine, old and overstuffed, reupholstered in grey and maroon stripes. Wiggling around on the couch, nervously sipping their drinks, she and Mike talked more to each other than to either of us.

  Mike experienced unpredictable moments of loquaciousness.

  “We went to Europe once. It was a wonderful experience, wasn’t it? So educational.”

  “That was before the twins, of course,” Cindy explained.

  Obviously Howard had already told them about the trip. Why is he always telling our secrets to strangers? (Since when was it a secret?) They are nice people, Cindy and Mike, so why do I hate them? I already know that no matter what happens, I will never like them.

  I did not want them to know anything about me. I did not want them in my house, in my living room, in my bathroom snooping through my medicine chest looking for contraceptives and prescription drugs. I did not even want them living across the street from me. I was feeling vicious.

  I waved the phrase book at them.

  “Would you like anything to eat? ¿Quiere usted comer algo?”

  “No thanks; I am not hungry, but I should very much like a drink. No, gracias; no tengo hambre, pero de buena gana beberia algo.”

  “Please pass me a clean plate. Sirvase pasarme un plato limpio.”

  “I do not like stale bread. No me gusta el pan duro.” They didn’t laugh.

  While I was in the kitchen trying to figure out what to feed these people, Howard put on a tape of Spanish guitar music. I danced briefly back into the living room, snapping my fingers and twitching my skirt, clenching a rose (wooden spoon) between my teeth. This time they laughed. Howard was showing them our souvenirs from the trip.

  When a Gypsy woman grows too old and fat to dance for a living, she can be found with the blind beggars, peddling castanets, charms, flowers, and photographs.

  I went back to the kitchen and Cindy trailed in behind me. “Do you need some help?” There was not much to do with leftover lasagna and garlic toast.

  Howard put on a tape of his play, a scene I hadn’t heard before, one that shouldn’t have been written yet. Howard was getting uncannily ahead of himself. Or playing tricks on me.

  DAVID and DENISE have had company for supper, some new people they’ve just met. DENISE is already in bed. DAVID enters. They are talking in the dark.

  DAVID: Are you awake?

  DENISE: Just barely.

  DAVID: Nice people, aren’t they?

  DENISE: Nice enough.

  DAVID: Why are you being so difficult?

  DENISE: I’m not sure. (She rolls over onto her back and stares at the ceiling.)

  DAVID: What are you afraid of?

  DENISE: Something. Sleep.

  DAVID: I don’t want to go to Spain anymore.

  DENISE: I don’t want to go to Spain anymore.

  “What a beautiful kitchen. I love those little baskets on the wall,” Cindy was saying. Another drink had loosened her up. “You remind me so much of my sister, she’s a poet.” I was tearing lettuce while she chopped celery savagely. I did not want to remind her of anyone.

  “Oh? Where does your sister live?”

  “She died two years ago. Drowned.” I felt instantly guilty, as if I’d killed the poor woman by not wanting to be like her.

  Encouraged somehow by my silence, Cindy continued, “I have dreams. In them she is going up the stairs for a long time and when she finally gets to the top, she turns and smiles down at me. But I can hardly see her, it is like opening your eyes underwater. And when she speaks, it is in some foreign language that I don’t understand. I feel like I am swimming. Sometimes there are candles. Her hair was the colour of the water when they found her and I wanted to think the fish swimming into her mouth were coming out poems, but they told me it couldn’t be true.”

  “Supper’s ready!” I hollered hysterically. I am afraid of this woman.

  We had just stopped exclaiming over the sudden change in the weather—a spring thunderstorm coming up quickly from the west, darkening the evening sky ominously—and started eating when the lights flickered and went out. I had been looking down at my lasagna, trying not to stare at Mike, who mashed everything on his plate together with a fork and then shaped it into a perfectly round pile before attacking it. Like a child, for a minute I thought I had been struck blind, punished once and for all. In the darkness Mike chewed steadily.

  Howard laughed and lit the two candles I’d set out on the table to excuse my earlier craziness and appease my guilt. But I hadn’t gone so far as to light them. Wavering in an imperceptible breeze, they threw long jumping shadows around the twilit kitchen. Cindy gasped, stretched her arms out, and took first me and then Howard by the hand, as if we were holding a seance. I thought I would scream in the silence.

  When the lights came back on a few minutes later, I thought there should be a noise but there was nothing, only the light, flooding.

  They went home early, I went to bed, and Howard went into his room to make notes. I forgot to ask him about the tickets. Just before I fell asleep, I could hear him talking, into the tape recorder or into the telephone, to some dark woman over the ocean feeding the bulls, with a rose or a candle in her teeth.

  There is never any doubt then that one has arrived in Spain.

  A Simple Story (1987)

  One night in a small city a man and a woman went out to a restaurant to celebrate. On the way back, they were nearly run down by a car that went out of control and rammed into the window of an apartment building. They were lucky. They could have been killed.

  DESCRIBE THE NIGHT:

  The snow begins in the early afternoon, big flakes falling like shredded paper and with purpose, patiently, so that
by dusk, it is drifting lackadaisically up against picket fences and unsuspecting parked cars. By the time the newspapers are delivered after supper, the wind is up and children all over the city are dawdling over their homework, peering outside every two minutes, praying that school will be closed tomorrow. Some men are already out shovelling. Others are generously offering to help with the dishes instead, feeling smug and practical because, if this keeps up all night and then the stupid snowplow comes, what’s the point?

  It takes this particular man, Richard, three tries to get out of his driveway in the suburbs, where there is always more snow anyway, according to a corollary of that law which causes tornadoes to hit trailer parks. He is one of those who will shovel in the morning, cursing and wiping his nose on the back of his gloves.

  This evening has required so many complicated advance arrangements that they are going anyway, come hell or high water. The dangerous driving conditions only add to Richard’s pleasure, making him feel calm and committed.

  This particular woman, Marilyn, is waiting for him in the lane behind her downtown apartment building, turtling her chin into her expensive fur coat, sucking on the collar. She is thinking of the time when one of her ex-lovers, Jim’s, ex-lovers came for the weekend.

  DESCRIBE THE EX-LOVER JIM’S EX-LOVER:

  Predictably pert, still on the loose, blessed with a name like Amber, Angel, or Anemone, something like that, the ex-lover Jim’s ex-lover spread her perfect thighs, boots, sweater, fur coat all over the ugly couch. Marilyn is thinking of what precise pleasure it gave her when the cat jumped up on the coat and sucked its heart out. She is still congratulating herself on the way she said, “Oh, isn’t that cute? He thinks it’s his mother! He must be part rabbit,” and stuck her head in the oven to check on the chicken.

  Marilyn is thinking that if Richard shows up now, safe, not dead in a drift, she will never be nasty again. She feels relieved but eternally obligated when he finally arrives.

  Once in the car, she asks stupidly, “Can you see?” and tries to peer through the blizzard by tilting her head at an impossible angle and pressing her face closer to the windshield.

  When Richard answers, “Sure, I can see. No problem,” she settles back into her coat and sighs, giving herself over to the experienced hands of a God who can always make the visibility better on the driver’s side.

  Richard didn’t buy her the fur coat, although that was the sort of gesture she’d expected at first. In the beginning, she had longed fleetingly for chocolates and flowers, arriving once a week, right on schedule, just when she was feeling the most guilty, the most neglected, or the most fed up with him. They both knew that he had to buy her something: the guilt-assuaging quality of gifts is universally accepted. She took to watching movies about married men, movies with words like confessions, secrets, and lies in their titles. But they never gave her anything to go on. The only thing these various married men had in common was that they were often found alone in shopping malls at odd hours, buying gifts for their wives and their lovers both, often on the same day in the same store.

  DESCRIBE THE GIFTS:

  When Richard does bring her gifts, which is seldom enough, he brings her books or records which, he once explained, are more intelligent, more dignified, less likely to give credence to the inherent clichés of their situation. Marilyn makes him sign the books and then leaves them lying around for anyone to see. She doesn’t read much but likes to dust them and study the authors’ faces on the back jackets. She likes to hold them in her lap like kittens. She plays the records only when Richard is there, for fear of the sadness and regrettable phone calls they might elicit if played at three in the morning with a bottle of white wine. If mink has become melodramatic and embarrassing, hysteria is even worse.

  So Marilyn bought the fur coat herself, with a small inheritance she received from her mother’s sister, Aunt Louise.

  DESCRIBE AUNT LOUISE:

  The oldest in a family of fourteen, Aunt Louise was the one who never aged, bought a new bicycle at eighty, got up at six in the morning to bake blueberry pies for the kids, refused to go to the Senior Citizens’ Drop-In Centre because why would she want to sit around and play cards with a bunch of old people? Aunt Louise could simultaneously make every one of her nieces, nephews, and grandchildren, Marilyn included, believe that they were her favourite.

  All of the women in Marilyn’s family expect to be just like Aunt Louise: growing old without illness, complaint, or other damning evidence of decline, kneeling down dead one Sunday morning in the strawberry patch, the juice like sweet blood on her hymn book and hands.

  Marilyn was completely surprised when the inheritance cheque arrived. It weighed heavily on her, crazily, dead money in a bank vault, growing interest effortlessly in the dark the way potato eyes grow those waxy white roots in the bin beneath the stairs.

  At that time, Marilyn had been sleeping with Richard three times a week for about six months and it was hard on her. She knew she wasn’t really cut out for this sort of thing. She was always wanting what she couldn’t have: she was always wanting to go grocery shopping with him on Saturday afternoon, to make him take out the garbage, to wash his socks, to wake up beside him in the morning and argue about whose turn it was to make the coffee. She was always wanting him to tell her how stupid his wife was this week, how she was always on him about something, how she didn’t understand him, how she was mean to him for no reason. She was always wanting him to say that he was going to leave his wife and then she hated him for saying or not saying it. They took turns believing and not believing that he ever really would.

  One day when Marilyn wasn’t believing anything Richard told her anymore, she went out and bought the coat without even trying it on. She wanted him to think some other man had bought it for her, some other man who really loved her and would quite happily crawl or die for her.

  He said she was silly to squander good money that way. She said it wasn’t good money, it was dead money.

  She wore the coat with a vengeance, modelling herself after a young woman back home, Mrs. Greene, who, when her husband, a dentist, was killed in a car accident, took the insurance money and bought herself a $50,000 Turbo-charged Porsche. She cruised all over the countryside with the sunroof open and the tape deck blaring rock and roll. The townspeople were collectively horrified, everyone keeping an eye on her now, asking each other knowingly, “Did you see Mrs. Greene today?” What did they expect her to buy: a hearse? Besides, it could have been worse: the Porsche could have been red instead of black. The more charitable among them suspected she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, the rest thought she was glad he’d died.

  All of these things happened in the small northern town where Marilyn was born and which now seems remote and symbolic, lush with significant memories, gothic.

  DESCRIBE THE MEMORIES:

  Street corners, weather, storefronts, furniture, meals: any of these are likely to come to Marilyn abruptly, whole and acute, when she is busy doing something else, not watching where she is going.

  Waiting for the bus to work one night in front of Mac’s Milk, she thinks about an old house on the corner of Cuthbert and Elm Streets, close to her parents’ house. She was just a teenager, running home late from a disastrous date with a boy named Desmond who would later marry a girl she knew slightly, Celeste, and who would still later be stabbed to death in a bar fight while Celeste, pregnant with their second child, looked on. The night she thinks about was in February and snowbanks were piled up against the old house. Warm squares of window-light were yellow in the middle of the night. Marilyn stood in front of the old house, lifting and putting down her cold feet like paws, wanting to go in and pour tea from the smoky blue pot she imagined on the table, wanting to pet the cat she imagined on the chair, a grey cat, the kind with fur like a rabbit. Next morning she heard the old man who lived there, Mr. Murdoch, had died in his bed in the night.

  Aunt Louise said dreaming of snowbanks was a portent of death
. But it wasn’t a dream. Those snowbanks around that old house were real as pillows, real and meaningless as these ones piling up all over the city tonight.

  DESCRIBE THE CITY:

  This is a small, old city which prides itself on its cleanliness, friendliness, and well-laid-out street plan, as most small cities do. Richard was born and raised here. His memories are pleasant but do not tell him anything in particular. He doesn’t expect them to, being, as they are, a continuum. He couldn’t tell you offhand what used to be where the Royal Bank building (twelve stories, tallest in the city, an incendiary issue when the developers first moved in, but once accomplished, it was found to have disturbed nothing much and those who had voted NO in the plebiscite did their business there just like everyone else) is now, although, in fact, it was a fish and chip stand where he was always bugging his parents to take him and which still figures occasionally in his dreams.

  DESCRIBE THE DREAMS:

  In the dream he is a tall teenager dousing his chips with salt and vinegar. His parents are standing behind him. His mother smiles indulgently, his father hands over a five-dollar bill. Behind them, over to the left, two boys he knows from school are fighting on the sidewalk, rolling over and over through cigarette butts, chocolate bar wrappers, ketchup. He steps smoothly around them, pretends he’s never seen them before, pretends the one boy, who will die the next spring in a motorcycle accident, has not reached out and grabbed him by the ankle. He shakes the boy’s hand off like a puppy and thinks about fish, just walks away.

  This is something that really did happen but something which Richard only remembers when he’s sleeping.

  He also dreams about going to the ballpark. In the station wagon on the way there, he is socking his fist into his new leather glove, breaking it in. Sometimes after they get to the ballpark and his father parks the car, Richard turns into a grown-up and pitches a no-hitter, while the fans scream and scream, so hot and so loud that they melt.