Cinnamon Toast and the End of the World (5 page)

Such a strange time, those first few years at the high school. I was always hyper and buzzing with too much energy, or else
I’d be exhausted, barely able to lift my head. And sometime in Grade Eight or Nine, it was like I woke up and I was taller
than my mother. It felt crazy and sudden, like everything else that was going on then, scary, saddening and out of control.

Poor Mom. Spending all day typing other people’s letters in an office two towns away, then back home for supper and TV with
me. Very occasionally there’d be a night out with a
new friend
, but nobody she liked enough to introduce. I don’t even remember seeing her with real friends much. And I wasn’t great company.

Sometimes I’d be in my room, doing my Saturday-morning impression of an abandoned corpse, and I’d look up to see her sitting
on the edge of my bed – shuffling through my cassettes, creaking open the little plastic cases and unfolding the lyric sheets.

‘Love is a Stranger,’ she read out once, in a puzzled monotone. ‘Okay. So this one’s about love in a car waiting to kidnap
you, I guess. Well, that’s interesting. But kind of sad, don’t you think?’

‘Mom, why are you even here? I’m trying to sleep.’

‘It’s two-thirty in the afternoon. And …’ A few uneven thumps as she knocked her heels against a box under my bed. ‘I’m a
little bored. Wanted some company, I guess. Can I borrow this tape?’

It was times like those that I wanted to hug her, but I didn’t.

All this upset would have been fine, more or less – if it hadn’t been for school.

Thanks to Mark, I stopped getting beaten up, but that didn’t make me what you’d call popular. It was like there was still
new-kid stink clinging to me, even after other new kids had appeared, taken root and turned into star athletes and class presidents.
I stayed outside it all. I wasn’t sure why.

Maybe it had something to do with gym class. That was where I seemed to go wrong the most. Our high-school gym was the size
of a city block. I looked out over it the first day in Grade Seven and felt this hopeless thudding inside. So many more opportunities
to get kicked or elbowed or slammed up against the wall or stepped on or sworn at, while out doing one’s best for one’s team.
And I was right. Screwing up would not only get the other kids screaming at me – the teacher would be in there as well. Mr
Richardson. He seemed to enjoy yelling at twelve-year-olds. I gave him lots of opportunities to enjoy himself.

This was also around the time being in the changing rooms with the other guys was really starting to freak me out.

Anyway.

The best day I had in Junior High was about halfway through Grade Eight. I was thirteen. I remember walking into the gym in
my usual state of low dread, taking in the familiar rising stink that came off the place – rancid gym clothes and stale sweat,
nausea and failure and fear. Here we go. Basketball, the one I hated most. I took a deep breath and started marching towards
the locker rooms with everyone else.

Then out of nowhere – a revelation. I was never sure what brought it on. Like a message from an angel, clarity descended from
a cold, perfect place.

You don’t have to do this
.

My God. It was true.

Nobody had a gun to my head. I was just a kid being asked to do something by a teacher. And I could say no.

I settled on a bench at the front of the gym and took out my math homework. Mr Richardson asked me what I was doing there,
and I replied in a bland neutral tone that I had that bug going around and couldn’t play today. He made a mark on his clipboard
and walked off. It was that easy.

I kept this up for weeks, on the sidelines doing homework for other classes or reading. Spaceships and aliens, swords and
sorcery. I read
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
so many times I practically had it memorised. I was also writing a really terrible science fiction novel about people on
another planet who had to keep taking this drug called Quargux or they’d all turn into gelatinous goo. When the plot got too
slow, my characters would just shoot at each other with ray guns for no particular reason. Usually this happened in restaurants,
because I figured when they weren’t fighting or dying, they’d be eating.

I actually spent hours thinking about this stuff.

And sex, of course, like everybody else. I thought about people doing it all the time. I wasn’t exactly sure how I felt about
it all, though I enjoyed dropping three-word sex scenes into my novel. It was a good way to end a chapter. If there was a
guy and a girl in the scene, I’d write: ‘Then they fucked.’ Or if there were more than two people involved, I might go for
four words: ‘Then they all fucked.’

Some of the kids in my class were doing it for real by the time we got to Grade Eight. Even at thirteen. Mark was – or at
least that’s what he told me. It made me feel a bit squirmy and weird, knowing this about him.

Anyway, so there I’d be, hunched over on a bench in Grade Eight gym
class, all this stuff cluttering up in my head. Reading, doing homework, writing bits of my terrible novel, lost to the world.
Then – whack! A ball would go slamming into the side of my face. And I’d think,
Bad spot. I better move
. But that ball would find me wherever I went. It was the usual guys, most of the time.

Then one morning I looked up from my book to see Mark firing a basketball right at me. Really hard too. My head jolted sideways
and the bridge of my nose got clipped by the spine of the paperback I was reading (
The Lathe of Heaven
, third time). He looked at me with no expression at all, as if the bench in front of him was empty.

I didn’t bring this up until we were walking home from school together, like always.

‘So … what did you do that for?’ No need to explain what I meant. He knew.

He didn’t answer. We’d stayed like that for a few tense minutes, Mark pushing on ahead, me taking in the back of him: heavy
khaki backpack, bulky winter coat, shoulders hunched forward, hands in fists.

‘Mark?’ My voice was a little kid’s squeak. ‘Why did you—’

He turned around. ‘Cause you’re a fucking embarrassment, that’s why. Everybody thinks so. I’m sick of it.’

I stared at my friend, creeping cold panic taking hold.

Then he told me the guys were all mad because I wouldn’t play sports, and I was floating with relief. But at the same time
I started getting enraged because this made no sense at all.

‘That’s stupid!’ I’d shifted my backpack, whacked myself in the shoulder blade. ‘I thought they’d all be happy I wasn’t playing.
Why would they want me out there?’

‘They don’t. But they don’t like seeing you
not
playing either. It’s like you think you’re too good for us.’

‘Too good? I suck. Everybody knows that. What is wrong with these people?’ I was wildly gesturing at nothing as we moved along
the cracking sidewalk. February. Snow for months, then rain. The ground was half-formed slush. The air was cold and wet, heavy
and almost unbearable.

‘It’s not just that. You walk around with a snotty look on your face all the time. People think you’re full of yourself.’

I didn’t know what to say to this. He went on. ‘You’re always getting good marks in everything.’

‘Yeah, sorry about that.’

‘And you don’t talk to people.’

‘Nobody fucking talks to
me
!’

He glanced up at the sky. Did not seem to enjoy giving me this information. ‘Well, don’t forget your dad acted kind of snobby
when he lived here. Maybe that’s another reason.’

Mark shouldn’t have brought up Stanley. This was against the rules. I stumbled on, kicking at things and glowering.

Then I exploded again. ‘Snotty! Fuck! And what exactly am I supposed to be so snotty about? We live in the shit part of town.
We don’t have any money. Everything I own is second-hand. Everything I fucking own is mine because somebody else didn’t want
it. I don’t even have a father. I mean, we don’t know where he is. Nobody knows where he is …’

I was throwing a fit about having no money. This was not allowed. Mom didn’t make a lot at her job, and we couldn’t find Stanley,
so there were at least three years back then when things were bad for money, really bad.

I marched along in silence with my head down.

‘I want to kill him.’

‘I know.’

‘I want to kill him with power tools.’

‘I can get you a drill if you want.’ Mark reached over and hit me a glancing blow on the shoulder. ‘Look, I shouldn’t have
chucked that thing at your head.’

‘It hurt.’

‘Yeah, I threw it kind of hard. But, you …’ He seemed to give up on what he was saying. Then he kicked a flattened beer can
in our path clear to the end of the street and tried again. ‘But you keep doing these stupid things. All these stupid things
to make everybody hate you. And they shouldn’t. They really shouldn’t.’ Mark took hold of my arm and turned me around to face
him. ‘Stephen. You have to do something about all this. Okay?’

It was obvious I had to do something about it. Mark wouldn’t have told me that otherwise. So I stopped sitting on the sidelines
during gym class. I spent the time wandering around the rest of the school instead, looking for a quiet place to read – and
later for a quiet place to read and smoke. I failed gym, of course, but I was fine with that.

The Stanley problem solved itself. We found him, just a few weeks after the basketball incident. Or he let himself be found.
All of a sudden he was in Montreal getting married, so of course he needed a divorce from my mother. There were lawyers’ letters
sent back and forth, child support and alimony arranged. We didn’t worry about money as much after that.

I never spoke to my father or got so much as a postcard while all this was going on. I suspected Mom was on the phone with
him, but I didn’t know how to bring up the subject. When I was little, I told her everything. Then later there was so much
I had to keep to myself.

It started with me trying to wipe the stuck-up expression off my face, like Mark said. First of all, I’d tried to figure out
if he was right.
I looked at myself in the toaster in our kitchen and concentrated on my usual school thoughts. What was on my mind, making
my way through a crowd of my fellow students as they herded past me?

Inbreeds. Morons. Backwoods assholes. Go fuck yourselves, all of you
.

Yeah, that was a fairly snotty look, all right.

I tried another expression. Something blank and agreeably vacant. I’d try to stick with that one.

Then there was problem number two: I didn’t talk to people much. Well, that wasn’t going to change, considering people didn’t
talk to me. How could I turn this into something I wouldn’t get hated for?

Maybe if I acted like I was shy. Nobody hated shy people.

It was easy. You look at the floor a lot. Smile vaguely and shuffle around when people try to talk to you. Don’t put up your
hand in class. Don’t make eye contact. If you get the urge to say something, don’t.

This seemed to work. People were nicer for a while, or at least less hostile. Maybe it was a good idea, this shy thing.

No, actually, it was a horrible idea. In fact it was probably the worst idea I’d ever had. Because after a few months I realised
I really was shy. And once I was in it, I couldn’t escape. I’d go to talk and find my face was made of cement. Nothing would
come out. On winter days, I’d feel myself turning grey at the edges and fading into the walls.

Was this defensive strategy? It was paralysing. And it went on for years.

So there you go. Started off standing up for myself and walking out of gym class, and finished by warping my personality completely
to keep them all happy. This game was hard and dangerous and confusing, and it seemed like everybody had a copy of the rule
sheet except me.

Fun. So much unbelievable fun.

I checked our mailbox at the post office after school. The vestibule with its rows of tiny grey doors and numbered keyholes,
like a morgue for elves. There were a few bills, Mom’s new copy of
Chatelaine
. And a letter addressed to me. It was from a college in Halifax. I tore it open.

‘Dear Mr Shulevitz … We are pleased to offer you a place … full scholarship … inform us of your intentions to accept or refuse
…’

I read the letter twice in the post office. I read it outside on the sidewalk. The walk home turned into a run.

When Mom got in from work I shoved the envelope at her without saying a word.

‘Well!’ she said, after she’d given my letter a quick up and down. ‘That’s really nice.’ Still wrapped in her coat with the
furry hood, too warm for April.

‘Mom, it’s a full scholarship.’

‘This’ll take care of your tuition, yes. But—’

‘Great programme too. Sort of an overview of western culture. Basically you get to read everything in a year – starts with
the ancient world and goes on until the twentieth century. You know. All the philosophers. The really important literary stuff.
Like Dante. And … Virgil. And …’

I realised I was lurching from side to side and waving my arms as I talked, practically dancing for her attention.

‘So when are you going to hear from Acadia?’ Mom stepped out of her boots and left them listing and empty on the black rubber
mat.

Acadia was farther up the Valley, maybe forty minutes away. They had a very good agricultural studies programme. I’d applied
there, but I hadn’t really meant it.

I told her I didn’t know anything yet.

‘Actually, this is kind of a coincidence.’ Mom seemed suddenly taller. ‘Because I’m waiting for a letter from Acadia myself.’

Of course. She’d been talking about going back to school for years. My mother didn’t want to be a secretary forever. Her plan
was to study psychology and then train as a counsellor or a therapist. The kind of person you could trust to make sense of
your problems.

‘I guess you inspired me,’ she said. ‘Oh, it’ll be wonderful, won’t it, honey?’ And she talked and talked, about how we could
drive to our classes together in the mornings, go shopping for textbooks, have lunch in the cafeteria. ‘But don’t worry,’
she said. ‘I realise you won’t want to be sitting at a table with your old mom. I could just, you know, see you there. With
your new friends. Such a relief not to have to worry. And it’ll be perfect for you. Right? No need to leave home. We’ll save
a fortune.’

Mom was smiling and waiting for my reaction. I told her all this was a lot to think about. Then I ran off to my room.

Upstairs, I lifted the vinyl cover from my typewriter and rolled in a blank sheet of paper. The machine gave off a low hum
of expectation, followed by light cricket taps as I hit one key and then another.

‘Please inform us of your intentions,’ the letter from Halifax had said.

‘I gratefully accept.’

But I realised I’d have to make another copy. I’d screwed up – typed the wrong first name over my address. The college didn’t
know about a guy named Stephen from Riverside. They were waiting to hear from Stepan Vladimir Shulevitz, who was me.

That was my official name, the one on my birth certificate. So weird seeing it in print. Even my last name looked kind of
whiskery and weed-like compared to what you’d find here in town.

Everybody in our town had names that made them sound like country singers or hobbits, I always thought. Cindy Meriwether.
Jimmy Whynott. Or you’d get all these Scottish and Irish families – people with ancestors who’d set themselves down like tree
roots digging into the soil. This was New Scotland. They belonged here.

And then there was me and my mother.

Shulevitz. Solovyov.

We lived in the same house and didn’t even match. She never took my father’s name. I was the one who was expected to keep
it. The name was Jewish, but that meant nothing to me. Stanley had rejected it all when he decided to run off and be a stupid
hippy, and then he’d rejected us too.

I wasn’t always that nice to my mother, growing up. But she’d usually turn it around and claim that she was the one who was
failing me. After Stanley left, she used to get completely stressed worrying about my cultural development, always coming
back from the library in Digby
loaded down with books on Judaism and Israel. I’d leave them on the kitchen counter until they were overdue. I told her I
didn’t want any culture. And if I did, why couldn’t it be from her side?

‘Well, that doesn’t seem fair,’ she’d said. ‘It’s not your father’s fault I’m here and he’s not.’

I’d stared at her. My mother blushed and pretended to be interested in the newspaper spread over the kitchen table where she
was sitting. She’d asked me a couple of clues for the crossword, but the words weren’t that difficult.

This was a few months before Lana moved to town – it must have been the fall of 1983, around October. I was fourteen. Mom
and I had just finished lunch and there was this weird no-time feeling in the house. Normally I’d be hanging around with Mark.
But this was his first Saturday on the job at Home Hardware. The minister at his church had arranged it for him and he was
very proud of himself. Outside, the sky was low and cloudy. The leaves were bright and the trunks of the maples were dark.

I could see the top of my mother’s head as I leaned against the counter by the sink. She’d dyed her hair over the summer and
now there was this expanding circle of light brown and grey growing out against the blonde, like something you’d see on a
monk. I used to imagine everybody in town was following its progress and discussing it.

I judged her pretty harshly in those days. But I couldn’t control how she made me feel – so helpless and frustrated. The way
she’d run for the garbage truck with the trash, in big flapping sweatpants and a pair of my sneakers under her chewed-up old
housecoat. She’d rub at a stain on her shirt in public, even if it was right over her boob, or carry reading glasses propped
on her forehead all day like a second set of eyes. Her tone of voice when one of the kids in town insulted her. ‘Excuse me?’
Polite, confused, friendly. I always wished I could inject myself with something that would keep me from noticing it all.

Culture. We’d been talking about culture that Saturday afternoon. I told my mother I was actually interested in her side of
the family, those Russians back in Toronto. Was there anything special she remembered? She’d stared into space for a minute.

‘Russian culture, Mom.’

‘Oh, I know. But it’s only my father who was Russian. Mama was Ukrainian.’

‘Didn’t think there was a difference.’ On the maps they’d give us to label in school there was just an enormous land mass
stretching across Asia and Europe. Put the letters USSR on it and you were done.

But my mother was laughing. ‘If she could hear you! Mama’s parents stopped speaking to her after she fell in love with my
father. Did you know that? They said they’d rather she were dead than married to a Russian.’

Mom went quiet.

I’d never met these people. I remembered her being away for a funeral when I was five and again when I was six. The second
time she’d come home loaded down with boxes, mainly books in Cyrillic. Stanley had waited until she was at work and then threw
most of them out.

She’d never cried for her parents in front of me. I was always kind of scared she would, and I didn’t have a clue how I’d
go about comforting her. When I was little, the thought of my mother as an orphan used to send me into corners weeping with
my arms over my head. She’d been the one telling me everything was okay.

Rain started to splatter against the window glass. I looked down at my sneakers with their flat muddy laces, kept my mouth
shut and waited for her thoughts to move on.

Then Mom taught me the only Ukrainian phrase she could remember just then:
tse kinets’ svitu
, which means ‘it’s the end of the world’.

‘You say it when everybody’s running around acting crazy,’ she said. ‘I heard this one a lot when I was a kid. A lot!’

She repeated the phrase for me until I got it right, or close enough. I liked the feel of the words. This was different from
the lines of smudgy French we used to copy into our workbooks at school.
Tse kinets’ svitu
. I said it to her. She said it back to me.

A few hours later, it was dark and we were side by side at the sink doing the dishes from supper. The kitchen was very quiet.
Just the drip of the washcloth, slow hollow clunks as cups and plates moved against each other, the floor giving off little
creaks under my mother’s feet. I got a fresh towel from the drawer, asked if there was any more Ukrainian she could teach
me.

‘Oh, honey. It’s complicated. See, I was never interested in that stuff when I was a kid. It was something my parents did
– mainly when they didn’t want me to know what they were saying. It embarrassed me, if you want the truth.’ She ran the tap
over a bright metal pot dripping with soap suds. ‘I just wanted to be like everybody else.’

October 1983 drifted into November. Trees reached up with their leafless branches that seemed to ache. We had a test in Grade
Nine Social Studies and there were a couple of questions about the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, where the rest of
my mother’s people were skulking around, aiming missiles at our heads, plotting to turn Riverside into radioactive sludge.
I filled in the blanks quickly, sat with my head bowed over the paper, trying to stay awake. But there
was one part I’d left unanswered. Near the top of the page, next to the date.

My name. I took my time, pressing hard on my stubby pencil as I dragged it around the loops of the letters: ‘Stephen Shulevitz’.
All around me the sound of people scratching away, erasers sawing through paper, a girl swearing under her breath.

I looked at the name for a while. Then underneath it, in light letters I could rub out when I had to, I wrote a different
one.

‘Stephen Solovyov.’ Her last name. It felt right, like the last jigsaw piece snapping into place. ‘Shulevitz’ was just proof
there was something missing in our house. And my father couldn’t give a fuck about me. So what was I going to do, carry his
name around my whole life, maybe pass it on to my kids? I was hers, not his.

I could change it. Why not? Maybe even get people to call me Stepan. I started to feel like a different person, staring into
the paper saying it in my head.

Mark coughed and I angled my test towards him so he could copy it. I rubbed my eraser over ‘Stephen Solovyov’ until it was
gone.

After school that day, me and Mark headed off for the usual place, the drop-off over the river, to smoke some weed he’d bought
off his cousin.

I was nervous. This was only the second time I got high, and I’d hated it so much when we’d done this over the summer on my
fourteenth birthday. To start off with, I was fairly resentful back then because smoking dope was one thing I’d always promised
myself I was never going to do. And I’d been certain I’d keep that promise – right up until Mark had put the joint in my hand.
Poisonous-looking snarl of a thing bundled into white paper, trailing smoke from both ends. I’d held it to my mouth and breathed
it in.

It stung my throat and my eyes, made my tongue go swollen and dry. I’d felt hot in the wrong places, and hungry and scared.
And stupid – sitting there drooling and fascinated by a strip of birch bark I’d peeled off the trunk of a tree, how soft it
was and the tiny changes you could see in the colour from one layer to the next. Mark had sat back laughing and told me I
was, like, so fucked up.

All I’d been able to think about was my father. The way he used to sit for hours wrapped in heavy smoke, eyes red and drowned,
breaking into helpless giggles over stuff that wasn’t funny. I’d looked at my hands then and half expected to see his, scratching
at the tree bark with their spidery fingers.

As soon as I got home, I’d showered the smell off me. For days I was too ashamed to look my mother in the eye.

But this time would be different. I wasn’t going to turn into Stanley. Not now, not ever. I told Mark my idea. The new name.

‘Solovyov.’ Mark rolled the word around like he had eggs in his mouth. He was wedged between the roots of a sugar maple with
the river behind him. The trees were stripped branches with a few flares of yellow leaves. They’d be gone soon. Mark started
to laugh, his whole body crumpling downwards.

‘What?’ My voice was thick and gluey. ‘Does it sound stupid? Too many
O
s?’ I was a couple feet away from him, leaning back on the heels of my hands. The ground under me was hard and my fingers
were numb.

‘No, it’s okay,’ Mark said. ‘Change it, man. Go ahead.’

I felt lighter. Mark was grinning at me, blond and blue-eyed, one of the natives. His face was red from the weed. It was like
he was full of live coals. I wondered what it would be like to have infrared vision, if the heat from his body would make
a new colour against the cold air.