Street Symphony (10 page)

~ • ~

When Annie had gone to choir practice,
Joy lay down on the futon couch and considered the move she’d been planning for eighteen months. She’d got beyond downright revenge and only wanted to make the unfairness of the settlement clear to Grant. Truly it had been wrong to slap him in front of his colleagues that evening, but when, for about the twentieth time, he’d said, in that smirking, patronizing way, “My wife’s something of a musician,” she’d lashed out. She didn’t have to say, as he stood there holding his bloody nose, “My husband’s something of an asshole.” But she did. Why he couldn’t have simply got over it and moved on in a decent, mature way was a mystery.

It was time to go and put on makeup and the not-so-little black dress: her evening uniform. The hotel guests who came and leant on the bar’s baby grand to make jokes and leave meagre tips would never recognize her as the street evangelist. As she listened to the undercurrent of chat and laughter, she played the kind of wallpaper music that allowed the customers to imagine they were having a good time. Now and then she interjected a classical fragment, and a face here and there would light up with pleasure. When she took a chance and sang, very softly, one of her
own lyrics, a man came across from the bar and said, “That’s Adele. One of hers.” Joy smiled and nodded and asked if he had any favourites. It’s what she was paid for, to pander.

Annie thought she and Errol were messianic idiots. It was not as though their admonishments to the public even came under the heading of “someone has to do it”. She didn’t understand either why it had taken Joy all this time since the divorce to get herself together. But Joy saw the steps she’d taken in that direction as a progression. The work at the women’s shelter, baking bread for the desperate, trying to learn French. Carrying Errol’s sign about had also helped with her recovery and had the added bonus of research. She hadn’t expected it to be inspiring too. She’d listened as she walked, and absorbed the rhythms of the street: footsteps slow and quick, broken phrases, impatient engines, a woman yelling at a TV set in a store window. It was a gift, and now all she wanted was time to make it hers. It wouldn’t be as short as a song. Once she had her piano, the form would impose itself on the music.

Someone was saying, “Come on, Joy. You’ve been playing that same tune over and over.” It was Evan, who sometimes stayed behind to drive her home. The bar was empty.

She went to bed and repeated her prayer.
I will have a better home, a better bed, a piano.
Grant’s lawyer had been too quick and sly for poor Richard. Never employ a friend as your representative in court! Shakespeare must have written that warning somewhere in his vast work.

On Saturday she left the sign behind and took the bus to Ferndale.
She watched Judy come out of the house that had been her house: high-heeled boots, swirly orange cape, briefcase. Joy turned away till the Hyundai had gone past and then she walked up the path and rang the bell. Grant opened the door and tried to close it when he saw her. She pushed him hard and he fell back. She was inside. He cowered.

“What have you done? “ she said. “The wallpaper? That ugly mirror?”

He held the door open and said, “Get out. You. You’ve been annoying my wife. I saw you in town. I’ve seen you in the bar. What do you want?”

She moved into the living room that now appeared to be an office. “For one thing, Grant, I want my piano. I doubt that Judy has time to play it.”

“You’re stalking. I’ll call the cops.”

“Please do. It’ll take them some time to get here and I have a lot to say.”

“I won’t listen to you.”

“This room is a mess. What happened to comfort?”

“We’ve made the spare room into a lounge.”

“Can I see?”

“No!”

She went upstairs and found the room. Functional furniture. Stark colours.

“How about coffee, Grant?” she shouted down the stairs. “We have some things to discuss. I have a better lawyer now but I’d rather not get him in on this unless I have to.”

He returned with two mugs. No sugar. No milk.

“I’d like you to taste mine first.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Joy.”

“You didn’t have to make such a fuss.”

“You could’ve broken my nose.”

“It was your fault. I was aiming for your cheek. You moved.”

~ • ~

“We’ll miss you,” Errol said to Joy
the following month.

“I’ll miss your cooking,” Annie said. “Come back and visit before we’re thrown out.”

Joy left the stick behind but took the piece of hardboard with her to the new apartment on Cook Street. She hung it on a nail in the back of her clothes closet. Every now and then she’d catch a glimpse of the words that were, really, she knew, directed at herself. Carrying the sign around had been a penance for being feeble and stupid. The piano was hers again. She sat down and played a few bars of Beethoven’s Ninth to celebrate her new life. Then she tried out that defiant refrain, “Yes, we are.” It was a start. Everything she’d heard and learned as she’d walked round town in the last few months would be poured into the notes of her own composition: Street Symphony.

Ash

“If you hadn’t turned the car in,
Agnes.”

“If I’d only known, dear, I’d’ve asked for an amphibious one.”

“I’m only saying we could’ve driven to Paris and then taken the train.”

“Listen, Belle. Look at all these people. We are all, literally, in the same boat. Right now, there’s nothing we can do.”

“It’s all very well for you. You’ve no one waiting for you at home.”

“Thank you.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Dawn looked at them, these two strangers who were her sisters, standing together on the deck. Agnes tall and managing to look smart in her beige slacks and jacket, her scarf perfectly tied in spite of the hours on the crowded train, the waiting, the lack of a proper
bed for two nights in a row. Belle, on the other hand, looked ap
propriately rumpled. Her navy coat was creased and her blond hair hung in limp strands round her thin face: a castaway. Dawn pictured a remote island, the three of them hoarding food, building a shelter, a raft: separate huts, single-seater rafts.
Who took the last coconut?
She listened to them, the oldest sister and the youngest, arguing the way they’d done all their lives.

“We could have done this at home.”

“He thought it would be a nice trip, a vacation.”

“Well, we should have waited.”

They had waited. They’d waited at the airport in Quimper for two days expecting that at any moment planes would take to the air again. They’d waited for a train. They’d waited for a bus. They’d waited at the ferry terminal and rejoiced when they were allowed to board the second one of the day, the
Angelique
. They had even been happy to queue for coffee and a snack. But now they were stranded on a stationary ship in the middle of the ocean.

“I think this must be where the Atlantic meets the English Channel,” Agnes said, as if there were a visible boundary, a line where the sea changed colour.

A man near the lifeboats was giving his wife hell as if it were her fault the ship wasn’t moving. His words floated up towards the circling seabirds and then fell back down around them:
Would have. Should. Mother. Who could have? Why?

“Dad wanted us to have an adventure. So here we are,” Belle said.

“I don’t think, in his most malicious moments, he would have wanted this.”

“Dad was not malicious. Mischievous now and then, okay.”

“There’s a difference?”

Crackling noises introduced the captain: “Hello everyone. Another boat is on its way from Plymouth. The engines…” The crackling sound erupted again. “And we have alerted other vessels. The engineers are hopeful that…”

The crowd’s moans drowned him out. “Ship was overloaded.” “That’s why it’s broken down.” “Weight wouldn’t affect the engine.” “They don’t take on more than is legal.” “Wanna bet?”

“I am calm,” Dawn said to herself. “Calm in my becalm-ment. Unwashed, unkempt, longing to sleep in a real bed and stuck on a ferry halfway between Brittany and Devon. Three hours away from England. Thousands of miles from Canada, from home.”

Belle said again, “Why did we come all this way?”

“We came because we could. Not everyone has the luxury, the money to take off and travel to Europe on the whim of a dead man.”

“He was alive when he wrote his will. And are you saying it’s better to be poor?”

“I’m saying poor people have no choices. No options. Their lives are fixed on survival.”

Like that village, Dawn thought. Trees. Men and women and children, nearly naked, living in tree houses at dizzying heights above the ground and spending their days tracking down food including live grubs to stave off starvation. No question there about which school to send their kids to or how to keep Johnny from spending sixteen hours a day texting and twittering. It must have been the damn American missionary who’d introduced the camera into their lives. By what right was he there at all? And why had the villagers not eaten him? Anthropologists, missionaries: There must be a ring in hell for the most intrusive ones. She began to feel furious about it all over again and stopped herself. Energy had to be conserved.

“If we drown, I will agree that we had a choice,” Agnes was saying. “Because we could afford it, we chose death.”

“Well, we are poor. Poor now. Because we have no choice except to wait and hope we get rescued before this crate sinks.’’

“The ocean isn’t a vast empty space. There are thousands of ships and this one is light years from being a ‘crate’.”

But on all sides, all points of the compass, to the dim horizon, Dawn could see nothing, not a light anywhere. Only hovering birds. And the darkening sea around them did indeed look like a “vast empty space”. If their father had been here, he would first have suggested that they go below and sit in comfort. The crew was competent. The ship was sturdy. The preacher in him would have pointed out that it was an opportunity to learn patience. But then he might have laughed. She pictured his face, that grin, when he saw the absurd in a situation, or an argument.
You are stuck here because of me, girls. Ha ha!

“We could have scattered him on Lake Muskoka for heaven’s sake, and had a weekend in Huntsville. How many of us believe that the dead know whether we do what they want or not?” Belle said.

“‘While you’re there, go to Pointe du Raz.’ I can hear him saying it. He said it more than once.”

“When I’m dying, I might say, ‘Trek across the Sahara on camels. Here’s the money.’ Will you do that?”

Dawn tuned out. Whatever dumb thing Agnes and Belle wanted done with their cold remains, they should keep to themselves. The opportunity might come sooner than expected. Watery graves could be theirs without the option. How tidy that would be. Except that Ben would be motherless and Jack might marry again and then Ben would have a stepmother who disliked him and would drive him to drugs and life on the street.
I will be home soon, guys.
She took a deep breath of the salty air and tried to will herself back in their house in Riverdale. It didn’t work.

What group or single other would I have preferred to be with
in this predicament? Who could have made me feel fine while ex
hausted and uncertain of return? Pick one.
For simple hand-holding, Bernie, next door neighbour, affectionate would-be lover, rejected but not bitter about it. For laughter and encouragement, we-will-survive Marcia, teenage cheerleader grown up into teacher
and colleague. For everything else, including perhaps some desperate last sex, Vladimir Chevadnatze. He’d sung “Una furtiva lagrima”
in a way that brought tears to her own eyes. The subscription was a birthday gift from Jack, a single seat because he didn’t care for opera. But the beautiful tenor belonged to another world, and Bernie had found a girlfriend.

“I told them I’d be back in the office by Friday,” Agnes said.

“Good God! We’d better be home before that.”

“Start rowing then. Ask for a lifeboat and some oars. Be the first thirty-nine-year-old woman to cross the Atlantic solo. Canada is probably over there.”

Dad had taught them geography, pushed them through math, watched over their homework. Yes, Dad, I’ve read the books. Done the exercises. Let me check. Your last report card. No slacking for the Fremmer girls. He had, though he mentioned it rarely, set aside a possible career in music to devote himself to his salaried job at the bank and to them. To friends they heard him say, “It’s not easy being a single parent.” The reverse of that had never crossed his mind. Pressure? They were pressed. Close to oppressed. His girls had to be top girls. Agnes had delighted him by her rise in the corporate world. Belle’s decision to stay home with her child and write columns for a household journal had mystified him. From Dawn he had expected no more, no less: She was the designated teacher.

“No signal,” Agnes said, shaking her BlackBerry for the fifteenth time.

A passenger took the microphone from the captain and said, in French, that he wanted to make a statement: “People who are on this boat by right, had reservations, should have first claim to the food and the accommodation below. Those who have been taken on because of the volcano must wait.”