Way the Crow Flies (87 page)

Lorne is putting together a new “less famous” cast for next season and has asked her to come back, and bring Maurice, Roger and Lou—lose weight
in front
of the cameras this time, which, when you’re writing, always seems easier. Her producer, Shelly, has congratulated her but warned her about trying to join “the boys’ club. You’re a dyke,” she says, “so it helps you get buddy-buddy, but you’re not going to sleep with any of them and, no matter how good you are or how much they like you, you’ll never be one of them. You’ve got your own stuff going on, like Lily, except …”

“Except what?”

“She doesn’t need all the crutches and bullshit you do.” Shelly has been pressuring Madeleine to shed the props and costumes.

“What about one-ringy-dingy, what about Edith Anne, the hair, the chair, gimme a break!”

“She doesn’t need that stuff to do them.”

“Well I don’t need the costume to do Maurice—”

“So do him that way.”

“My point is, you can’t do The Cone Heads without cone heads.”

“So do cone-headesque stuff for the rest of your life.”

Regardless of which way Madeleine goes, she is poised to join the “Canadian invasion.” Funny Canucks who head south of the border because, while it’s no longer impossible to get anywhere at home—Canadian-content laws having begun to pay off, not to mention tax breaks that have turned Toronto into Hollywood North—there is no limit to how far you can go by leaving. This makes sense, Canada being small, but performers are also targets of the Canadian syndrome: the cultural inferiority complex that prompts their fellow
citizens to confer authenticity on those who blow this northern Popsicle stand. Because, if you’re so great, why are you still here? And its inverse: what kind of lousy Canadian are you, up and leaving like that?

English Canadians; stealth Yankees. Yanks in sheep’s clothing. People who seem perfectly American but who know that Medicine Hat is not an article of apparel. People who can skate, holiday in Cuba and speak high-school French; people who enjoy free health care, are not despised abroad and assume that no one in the restaurant is armed. Cake-eating-and-having Americans. After-Three is straining under the pressure of its own success. Madeleine has no reason to feel guilty.

“It’s not that I feel guilty.”

“Then what?” says Shelly. “Shit or get off the pot.”

“You’re so sensitive and nurturing.”

Shelly’s hand is on the door of her station wagon; she looks exhausted, her kids will be up in six hours, she says to Madeleine, “You’re my pony, you’re the one, I want to see you go for it.”

Madeleine hugs her, wishing she harboured a shameful craving to see Shelly naked but for a clipboard. The fact that Shelly is straight and Madeleine is in a long-term relationship are details they could work out later.

“G’night Momma.”

“G’night Mary Ellen.”

Madeleine gets into her old Volkswagen Beetle. Dirty white eggshell with red interior. She turns the key, coaxing it to life with a prod of the gas pedal, tender release of the choke. She pats the dashboard, “good little car.” She turns on an oldies station and heads home to Christine.

On the way, the thing happens again. When it first happened, a week or so ago, during a live performance, she wrote it off as nerves or flu, or—most reassuring—a small stroke. But what does one call “the thing” when it happens during a drive on a quiet city street, toward home in a light rain?

T
HE OVER-ARCHING SHAPE OF TIME
is always there, like the unseen sunny day above the clouds. And above that endless day, an infinite darkness into which our warp of time loosens and drifts, the slow dispersal of a jet stream.

Ruptures in time. When they lost Mike. When their daughter announced that she was gay. “I know, it’s a horrible word,” said Madeleine, grimacing.
“Lesbian
. All snaky and scaley.”

Mimi was crying, Jack had compressed his lips and was looking down. Their daughter made a living out of being different, being flippant.

“I’m not taking this lightly,” Madeleine said, biting her lip, grinning. “I feel sick.”

“You feel sick,” said Mimi, “you
are
sick.”

That was 1979, Mimi remembers the date, two weeks before they got the kitchen redone. Her son ate standing up at that counter, hugged his mother goodbye standing on that spot. Retiled now.

It’s important for Mimi to be able to take responsibility so she can cope. One child gone, the other blighted. Mimi is a modern Catholic mother. She knows it’s all her fault.

Copers also need to cherish what remains. My husband. The part of my daughter that still shines. Faith that the damage is not irreversible.
“Viens
, Madeleine, I’ll take you shopping.”

“It’ll end in tears.”

Scrabble. Food. Shopping. The things they can share.

“Maman, why don’t you come to Toronto one weekend and we’ll go shopping?” But Mimi cannot set foot in that apartment. Not while her daughter is living that way with another woman. That is not a home, that’s … not a home.

Something must have happened to my daughter to make her like that. Jack is no help there. He refuses to discuss it with her.

After all those years of unwrapping Jack’s gifts to her, saying, “It better not be a you-know-what,” one Christmas it was. But she no longer wanted a mink coat. She wanted what she’d had. She wanted to
want
one.

For years she longed for him to confess his stumble. She didn’t know how to tell him that, if anything, she would love him more if he shared it with her, took it away from that woman in Centralia, made it theirs alone. She longed to say, “It’s not your fault we lost our son. I forgive you.” But those two sentences didn’t add up. And he never mentions Michel’s name.

Sometimes she fails to tell him when she has topped up his cup with hot tea, or fails to readjust the driver’s seat if she has used the big car, fails to notice that he has immaculately trimmed the hedge and ingeniously solved the bird-feeder-versus-squirrels problem. On these occasions, he takes her out for dinner.

He teases her about how she always makes friends with the waiter or waitress, but in fact she does it for him. He’ll end up talking about everything under the sun with the chef, the owner, other diners. The old Jack—the young one. Otherwise, he reads his paper. Pretends not to hear.

Mimi does a lot of volunteer work. The Heart Fund, the Liberal Party, the Church. She took a refresher course and went back to work, too, and she still plays bridge. She enjoys Ottawa, the fact that she can shop and get her hair done in French, enjoys the outdoor concerts in summer and skating on the canal in winter—she even gets Jack out now and then. She has a lot of friends, but that’s just it: they’re hers not theirs. Numerous ex–air force people, old friends from previous postings, have retired in Ottawa, there are card parties, dinners, curling. But Jack declines to “live in the past.”

They used to go to Florida every year. He had his first heart attack down there, on the golf course. It was expensive; thank goodness for Blue Cross. Mimi goes to New Brunswick two or three times a year to visit her family in Bouctouche, but her husband hasn’t come with her since Mike went away. Her sister Yvonne is widowed now, she spends most Christmases with them in Ottawa, and Jack likes being spoiled by her. But Mimi rarely has people over any more. It takes too much out of her. Placating him, dreading that he may withdraw into himself once the guests arrive, enduring his criticism of them in advance, his muttered hope that “Gerry won’t plunk himself down at the head of the table again, and foist the photos of his latest trip to the Galapagos on us,” and
that “Doris won’t rattle on about her grandchildren.” “Not Doris, Jack—
Fran.”
Then the guests arrive, and Jack laughs and chats and teases Mimi about being uptight when she brightly directs the guests to their place cards at the table—interrupting her to say, “Sit anywhere you like, Gerry.” He has a wonderful evening—and is irritable for days afterwards.

They are still an attractive couple. Jack hit sixty with scarcely a grey hair. Mimi still has a twenty-six-inch waist when fully dressed. She dyes her hair, having no intention of looking older than her husband. Fine lines are visible through the makeup but she has avoided the full extent of the smoker’s crenellated upper lip by forty years of careful puffing and moisturizing. Calves still very good, hands still soft, nails perfect. Extra folds of skin at the elbows and knees—that’s what sleeves and hemlines are for.

She has never told anyone about her daughter’s “lifestyle.” She hasn’t had to. Everyone’s read about it in the national newspaper—the Entertainment section.

She has a job as staff nurse at the National Capital Commission downtown. She is the confidante of the entire department. A woman in accounting recently “came out” to her; “You’re the only one I can talk to about this, Mimi.” She gave Mimi a coffee mug with a Chagall print on it, in gratitude: “I could never talk to my mother like this.”

Mimi knows that had she never left New Brunswick; had she never entered nurse’s training and earned money of her own; never married a handsome
Anglais
, learned to give cocktail parties and wear clicky high heels; had she never danced beneath a chandelier, and had her wedding dress remained her only ballgown; had she remained Marguerite—God would have blessed her with a third child, who might in turn have had children by now.

At least He would have allowed her to keep the two she had.

Eventually, there comes a time in Jack and Mimi’s life when the television is always on, even when they are not watching it.

W
E ALL NEED
to look under the rock from time to time. We are all afraid of the dark, and drawn to it too, because we know that we left something there, something just behind us. We can feel it now and then, but fear to turn lest we catch sight of what we long to see. We wait that critical moment, allowing it to flee before we turn, saying, “See? It was nothing.” We are scared of our own shadow. A good comedian scares the shadow. Aided and protected by speed, comedians can turn so quickly that, from time to time, they actually glimpse the shadow as it flees. And so we do too, from a safe distance. If you had to make Dante’s trip into the Inferno nowadays, would you go with Virgil or John Candy?

“Incomplete classic migraine,” the eye doctor tells Madeleine. “Visual phenomena unaccompanied by pain.”

An ophthalmologist is not going to tell you that you are seeing your shadow. This kind of doctor will not say, “Don’t be afraid. Turn around slowly. Talk to it. It wants to tell you something.”

Comedy slowed down is terrifying. This is what is happening to Madeleine.

She was afraid to pull over because that would have been to admit there was something wrong. It was raining, her face was too hot against the cool window when she pressed her cheek to it, her heart was light and rapid like a propeller and she didn’t understand where she was going. She knew in her head where she lived, that she was going home in her car after the Friday night taping; she had all the knowledge of life that she’d had one second ago; but something had receded like a transparent layer. The thing that
allows us to agree on all the pieces of the world. The thing that make things one thing. She was seeing everything separately, piece by piece. A street light nothing to do with a street. A sidewalk nothing to do with a curb. She didn’t understand why anything was anywhere. She saw what was behind everything—nothing.

Her heart accelerated, a creature trapped in her chest; was she going to die? An inky feeling like shame in her stomach. A person was hurrying toward her car from the gas station on the corner. Had he realized that she no longer knew how to be? No, he continued past.

Her heart slowed to a walk. The windshield wipers smeared light around the glass and she looked away, but the yellow smear followed her gaze.

“Maybe I just need glasses.”

“Has this kind of thing ever happened before?” asks the therapist.

The room is panelled in fabric and wood, soothing terracotta tones, spatial sedative. On a side table is a pitcher of spring water, a shallow box of sand with a miniature rake, and a box of Kleenex. There is a couch with a big pillow for punching, there are seashells, a crystal, an air purifier, several degrees on the wall, a Georgia O’Keeffe print. Madeleine takes a deep breath and mumbles, “Few weeks ago.”

She hears in her voice the sullen muffle of adolescence. Regression proceeding on schedule.

The therapist waits, serene in her swivel chair. Some sort of handmade-without-cruelty earrings dangle discreetly from her ears. Nina. Madeleine sits crunched in an armchair opposite. She is cottoning onto the therapy game: therapist oozes impersonal compassion until client can’t take silence any more and blurts, “I killed my mother!” But first the disclaimers: “I’m exhausted. After-Three is in production, plus I’m doing a workshop of an original alternative-theatre piece for no money—why? Because the director has pink hair.”

The therapist waits. At a dollar twenty-five a minute.

Madeleine tells what happened the last time she did stand-up:

The old Masonic Temple in downtown Toronto is packed. Light spills from the stage onto the heads and shoulders of the standing
crowd. Ceiling fans spinning overhead do nothing to dispel the heat generated by hot bands, arid performance art, flaming flamenco and The Diesel Divas, a choir of heavy-set women in plaid shirts and brush cuts who sing a repertoire of sacred music by Bach. A sold-out benefit for a downtown battered women’s shelter.