Way the Crow Flies (97 page)

“You call them,” said Christine, dragging her bike down the wooden steps. “They were never really my friends anyway. You’re the shiny one, Madeleine.” Then she rode off on her beautiful old Schwinn Glyder with the generous gel-pad Drifter saddle.

She returned the next day, with a U-Haul and an undergrad. Madeleine helped. Now she has no furniture. She has a beach towel. A Melmac plate, bowl and mug; a knife-fork-spoon combination. At least she still has a bed. She has been to Honest Ed’s and bought a
complete set of pots and an ironing board. She brought it all home on her bike, having had no need for the car when she nipped in with the intention of buying bagels. She forgot the bagels. She is as pathetic as any deserted husband. More so, having no home-repair skills.

“Why don’t you just go to her, that’s what you’re going to do anyway.”

“Go to who?” asked Madeleine. “Whom?”

Christine just shook her head and went into the bedroom. Madeleine followed like a spaniel. Christine started yanking open drawers.

“What are you doing, Christine?”

“What does it look like?”

Madeleine said robotically, which was how she knew she was in trouble, “I love you, Christine, please don’t leave. Don’t leave, Christine.”

“You’re incapable of feeling, Madeleine.”

The two of them had been drawn together by one another’s sadness. Residue of childhood in the eye. The problem is, neither was particularly compelled by the other’s idea of happiness.

“You hate it when I’m happy, Madeleine. You always choose that moment to stick the knife in.”

That’s not fair. Madeleine can’t bear to hurt her, so she always waits until Christine is up before … raising issues.

“You’re too cowardly to confront me,” said Christine, folding, flinging clothes onto the bed.

Maybe she was right and Madeleine did prefer the sad Christine. The helplessly angry one. The one who strangled.

Christine slammed her drawers shut, eyes flaming. Madeleine wanted to laugh because Christine was so worked up, full face flushed with rage like an angry doll.

“What’s so funny, Madeleine?”

Madeleine formed a serious expression, and Christine turned away in disgust.

Not disgust
, says Christine,
sadness. I’ve never been so sad in all my life
.

Madeleine saw two dark splotches appear on the mauve duvet cover.
Don’t cry, Christine
—but who the hell is Madeleine to say such a thing?

Why isn’t love enough?

“I hate myself when I’m with you,” said Christine, wiping the corner of her eye, still packing with the simple vigour of a hausfrau.

Madeleine clung to her for seven years because she believed Christine could really see her, right down to the bottom.

“You’re so much fun with everyone else, but with me you’re always in a crappy mood,” said Christine.

With you I am myself, Madeleine would have replied at one time, but that was no longer true. With you I lead a double life. Chuckle and Hide. “Why are you leaving?”

“’Cause you don’t have the guts to leave me.” Christine almost spat it. “What are you waiting for, Madeleine? Go to her.”

Madeleine, honestly stumped, stood—not rooted, but slumped on her strings.

Christine muttered to her gaping drawers, “That bitch.”

What bitch?

Christine said, “She’s been after you from the start, pretending to be my friend too, coming over for dinner. I cooked for her! Now she’s got you in that stupid project and you’re neglecting your own work.”

Olivia
.

“You think Olivia and I …? She’s
my friend
, babe.” Madeleine felt the foolish grin of masculine guilt creep over her features, masking her already unreal face. “It’s not true!” Then why does this feel exactly like a lie?

“I quit, Madeleine. I’m sick of this codependent bullshit.”

But what will I do without you? Now that I am more and more successful and beloved. No one else will ever know how bad I am. No one else can possibly see me as you do.

Madeleine watched, immobilized, while Christine stuffed clothes into a knapsack. “Why don’t you use the suitcase?” asked the robot. “It has wheels.” Christine ignored her. Christine had never understood that when Madeleine was most “real”—feeling most acutely—she turned into a puppet. Painted wood. Christine was tired of sharing a bed with a grown woman who still perched a grimy old Bugs Bunny on the pillows.

Madeleine had been on the phone with her father when the final conflict flared. They’d been arguing and she had resorted to
out-talking him, asking how he could object to American foreign policy, yet laud Reagan’s bogus Star Wars plan, “the product of a cryogenically preserved brain! George Bush is actually running the country from a CIA desk littered with GI Joes and conversational Arabic tapes,
oil, that is, black gold, Texas tea!”
and Jack was laughing and egging her on. Christine came in with a pastry box and new highlights in her hair. She stood smiling for an instant, and Madeleine glanced up—“My dad says hi.” When she got off the phone, Christine had already dragged the forty-gallon knapsack from the attic.

Madeleine was grateful for marathon Thursday, sailed through shooting Friday, laughed and heckled at the Pickle Barrel while Ilsa gave her a scalp massage with her blood-red talons, and filled three foolscap pages for Shelly. No one suspected that her life was falling apart. She felt like a high-functioning alcoholic: slithering down the drapes at three, greeting hubby, bright-eyed and breath-minted, at five.

For three nights she cried into her air mattress—canvas, silty water smell reminding her of the Pinery campgrounds and Lake Huron. She wept for Mike at twelve, she wept for her smiling self at nine, she grieved the smack of a good catch, baseball arcing from glove to glove like a dolphin in the after-supper sun; she wept for childhood, and for anyone who had ever been a child. Amazed, even through tears, at the thematic sweep of her grief. Concentric bands of sorrow radiating outward from ground zero. Centralia.

At a quiet moment—tears on empty, not yet dawn—she pulled his string. He spoke, wise-crackling and unintelligible like a transmission from outer space. She hugged him and fell asleep.
Don’t tell
.

On Saturday morning she went to Honest Ed’s for cutlery and came home with a portable black-and-white TV, the kind they have in hospitals and taxicabs. She has spent the day cross-legged on the carpet, watching infomercials and
The PTL Club
and letting the answering machine take the calls. Shelly, her mother, Tony, Janice, Tommy, five others and Olivia.
Ring…
. She ignores it. She has ordered an all-purpose cleaning agent not available in stores, and responded with a hundred-dollar pledge to Goldie’s plea on PBS.
Ring…
. She switches to
Secret Storm
—
klachunk
. “If you have a message for Madeleine, please leave it after the beep; if you’re looking for Christine, call 531–5409.”
Bee-eep
. A voice through the machine: “Good day Mrs. McCarthy? My name is Cathy? And I’m calling from Consumer Systems Canada? And I wonder if you would be kind enough to phone me back at 262–2262 extension 226 and consent to participate in a brief questionnaire concerning certain well-known consumer items—?”

Madeleine grabs the phone—“Hi, Cathy?”

“Oh, hello Mrs. McCarthy—?”

“Look, I’ve just been diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer.”

“Oh my—”

“Yeah, so I drowned the kids in the bathtub.”

Silence.

“Cathy?”

“Um … I—I can call back.”

“Sure, why don’t you do that, I’m just wrapping them in the shower curtain.”

Click
.

Poor Cathy.

On Sunday morning, by dint of supreme effort, Madeleine reaches forward and switches off the television. In a display of strong-mindedness, she decides to take a shower. She finds
The Pregnant Virgin
behind the toilet, its pages fanned into an accordion. Did Christine drop it in the bath on purpose? She sits on the porcelain edge of the tub and starts reading: “Analyzing Daddy’s Little Princess.” Oh please! Not to mention you can tell right away it’s written mainly for straight women. Oh well, to be gay is to be on simul-translation from day one, finding the universal in the particular and ingesting the distilled nourishment; like any minority that hopes to eat from the big table. “Integration of Body and Soul….” She starts reading. She reads until she has a crick in her neck and moves to the floor with her back against the tub. She reads until she is hungry. She reads until she has finished the book.

Madeleine knows that while she had Christine, she could be the unfucked-up one. Now, in the wake of Christine’s departure,
Madeleine’s friends and colleagues will see through her crumbling facade, smell the bodies amid the rubble and turn away. Anyone foolish enough to stick around would have to be an idiot.

“No, McCarthy,” says Olivia, “you’re the idiot.” They are on the phone. Olivia says she’s coming over.

“No, I’ll come over to your place.”

Madeleine climbs the fire escape, past a cat or two. Dingy bricks cooking in the mellow light of five o’clock, peeling black of the iron stairs that ring out low like church bells; visible between the slats below, drift of garbage in the grease-slicked alley, old cushions, dog-torn plastic bags, smell of pot and lilacs; the bar and grill at the front is playing Annie Lennox
…
. Look up. Olivia is sitting at the top of the steps, on a milk crate, in a slant of sun, smoking Drum tobacco, roll-your-own.

“Success without college,” says Madeleine.

Olivia reaches down her hand.

The housemates are out. There is half a bottle of bad white wine in the fridge, along with blocks of tofu, mysterious Asian greens and murky tubs of things.

“How many people live here?” asks Madeleine.

“That depends,” says Olivia.

How can she bear communal living? The bathroom alone. Madeleine sips and is ambushed by a complete happiness. What are these unreasonable happinesses? Like the lilies of the field who neither toil nor weep. The way the light leans in from the balcony down the hall to lounge against the walls painted pale pink, the softness of a gust of air, one’s sudden weightlessness. Ecstasy. State of grace in a friend’s apartment on a Sunday evening in May. Everything is going to be all right.

Olivia walks past her with a watering can. After a moment, Madeleine hears music. Strings—attenuated, patient. Baroque strands like hair drawn through a comb, untangling the market sounds outside. She follows the music to the front room. Olivia is on the rickety balcony watering the plants.

Madeleine joins her. Olivia turns to her.

“No,” says Madeleine, “it would be like kissing my sister.”

“You don’t have a sister.”

Olivia’s secret identity is revealed in the kiss. The amazing transformation works in both directions: she turns back into Madeleine’s friend when they are talking. Colleague, critical, argumentative. They go inside. They kiss against the wall outside Olivia’s bedroom. They stay standing for quite a while, in deference to Madeleine’s desire to avoid a “rebound” relationship.

“We don’t have to have a relationship,” says Olivia, “we can just have sex.”

“Is that what you want?”

“No, but I think it’s better if we think of you as a swinging bachelor for the time being. You should date for a while.”

Madeleine sees herself in a Matt Helm apartment—remote-control bed and bar, shag rug. “I don’t think so,” she says.

Olivia leans, one shoulder against the wall, shirt open, devastatingly sensible underwear. The Maidenform Woman—you never know where she’ll turn up.

“‘Date,’” says Madeleine. “I don’t even like the word.”

“Okay, then we can just have sex. And be friends.”

“That’s called a relationship.”

Olivia kisses her again. “You’re not ready for a relationship.”

They lie down on the dreadful futon, field of lumps and crabgrass, and Olivia resumes her secret identity, pink-tinted titan.

“I’m actually in crisis,” says Madeleine, looking up into the most familiar, most radiant face—most amused too. “In pain. I’m on the brink of a nervous breakdown. How come I’m having such a good time?”

“Because you’re a happy person,” says Olivia. “That’s your guilty secret.”

Madeleine smiles. Closes her eyes, tastes sweet water. “You’re so sweet,” she says.
You run so sweet and clear
. She opens her eyes, keeps them open.
“C’est pour toi.”
Don’t talk.
Take what you want
.

In between, there is the guided tour of small scars. Have you ever noticed that many people have a tiny one over an eye? At the outer edge of brow, the bony orbit doing its job, taking the brunt of whatever was hurtling toward the eye—a branch, a ball, hockey stick, a paw—

“I got this playing badminton when I was nine,” says Olivia. “My mother put a butterfly Band-Aid on it and I felt really important.”

“Wounded in action,” says Madeleine.

“Where’d you get this?” She holds Madeleine’s left hand, palm up, tracing the lifeline and its pale shadow with her finger.

“
Ci pa gran chouz,”
says Madeleine. Olivia smiles but doesn’t ask what kind of French that is. “A knife did it.”

Olivia raises an eyebrow. “Presumably someone was holding it at the time.”

On guard!
“Colleen.”

“Who was Colleen?”

“My best friend,” says Madeleine. Says her heart. “We became …
seurs de san.”

Olivia hesitates, then, “Blood sisters?”

Madeleine nods. “When I was nine. Colleen Froelich.”
Pellegrim
. The name arrives from the back of her mind, dusty but intact.

“Where is she now?”

“I don’t know.”

“You have a sister out there somewhere.”

Olivia smells like sand and salt, a tang of sweat and Chanel. Old-fashioned feminine. Skilfully juxtaposed with the pink hair and multiple earrings.

The aroma of smoked sardines floats in. Olivia joins Madeleine at the window, chin on the sill. On the next balcony over, small silvery bodies hang pegged like socks to the clothesline. Olivia calls, “Avelino! Hey, Avelino!”