Wilderness Tips (29 page)

Marcia thinks about Noriega, crouching in some tropical thicket or camped out in the hills. She remembers the newspaper photos of him, the round, ravaged, frozen-looking face, the face of a dogged scapegoat. When he was a child it would have been much the same. He would have had those blanked-out eyes very early; they would have been inflicted on him. This is what makes her a soppy columnist, she thinks – she does not believe that children are born evil. She is always too ready to explain.

Marcia goes to the washroom to deal with her overload of sangrias, and to redo her face. It is far later than she has thought. In the mirror she is shiny-eyed, with flushed cheeks; her hair flies out in dishevelled tendrils. From the side – she can just see, rolling her eyes – she has the makings of a double chin. Her first husband used to tell her she looked like a Modigliani; now she resembles a painting from a different age. A plump bacchante of the eighteenth century. She even looks a little dangerous. She realizes with some alarm that Gus is not out of the question, because she herself is not. Not yet.

Marcia force-marches herself up the stairs of the Bathurst station. For a moment she pictures what these squeaky-clean tiled tunnels would be like overgrown with moss or festooned with giant ferns; or underwater, when the greenhouse effect really gets going. She notices she is no longer thinking in terms of
if
– only of
when
. She must watch this tendency to give up, she must get herself under control.

By now it’s after five; the three homeless men are gone. Maybe they will be there tomorrow; maybe she will talk with them and write a column about life on the street or the plight of Native people in the city. If she does, it will change little, either for them or for her. They will get a panel discussion, she will get hate mail. She used to think she had some kind of power.

It’s dark and cold, the wind whistles past her; in the storefronts the Christmas decorations twinkle falsely. Mostly these are bells and tinsel; the angels and Madonnas and the babes in mangers have been downplayed as being not sufficiently universal. Or maybe they just don’t sell things. They don’t move the goods.

Marcia hurries north, not dawdling to look. Her bladder is bursting; it doesn’t function the way it did; she shouldn’t have had that last cup of coffee; she will disgrace herself on the street, like a child in a soggy-bottomed snowsuit, caught out on the way home from school.

When she reaches the house she finds the front steps thoughtfully strewn with kitty litter. Eric has been at work. This becomes more apparent when she rushes to the bathroom, only to find that the toilet paper has been removed. It’s been replaced with a stack of newsprint oblongs, which she finds – once she is gratefully sitting and at last able to read – to consist of this morning’s
World
business section, neatly scissored.

Eric is in the kitchen, humming to himself as he mashes the turnips. He did away with paper towels some time ago. He wears a white chef’s apron, on which to wipe his hands. Earlier dinners have
left their tracks; already from tonight’s there are several cheerful smears of orange turnip.

The radio news is on: there is more fighting in Panama, there are more dead bodies, there is more rubble, and more homeless children wandering around in it; there are more platitudes. Conspiracy theories are blooming like roses. President Noriega is nowhere to be found, although much is being made of the voodoo paraphernalia and the porn videos that are said to litter his former headquarters. Marcia, having ghost-written the lives of other politicians, does not find any of these details remarkable. Certainly not the porn. As for the voodoo, if that’s what it would take to win, most of them would use it like a shot.

“Eric,” she says. “That cut-up newspaper in the bathroom is going too far.”

Eric gives her a stubborn look; stubborn, and also pleased. “If they won’t recycle at one end, they’ll have to be recycled at the other,” he says.

“That stuff will clog the toilet,” says Marcia. An appeal based on poisonous inks absorbed through the nether skin, she knows, will not move him one jot.

“The pioneers did it,” says Eric. “There was always a mail-order catalogue, on farms. There was never toilet paper.”

“That was different,” says Marcia patiently. “They had outhouses. You just like the thought of wiping your bum on all those company presidents.”

Eric looks sly; he looks caught out. “Anything new in the tar pits?” he says, changing the subject.

“Nope,” Marcia says. “More of the same. Actually it’s sort of like the Kremlin down there. The Kremlin in the fifties,” she amends, in view of recent ideological renovations. “Ian the Terrible is making them work in pods.”

“As in whales?” says Eric.

“As in peas,” says Marcia. She sits down at the kitchen table, rests her elbows on it. She will not push him on the toilet-paper issue. She’ll let him enjoy himself for a few days, or until the first overflow. Then she will simply change things back.

Along with the turnips they’re having baked potatoes, and also meat loaf. Eric still allows meat; he doesn’t even apologize for it. He says men need it for their red corpuscles; they need it more than women do. Marcia could say something about that, but does not wish to mention such blood-consuming bodily functions as menstruation and childbirth at the dinner table, so she refrains. She also says nothing about having lunch with Gus: she knows that Eric considers Gus – sight unseen, judged only by his feature pieces, which are mostly about Hollywood films – to be trivial and supercilious, and would think worse of her for eating deep-fried calamari with him, especially while Eric himself has been selflessly picketing the U.S. Consulate.

She will not ask Eric about this expedition, not yet. She can tell from his industriousness with the turnips that it has not gone well. Maybe nobody else showed up. There is a candle on the table, there are wineglasses. An attempt at salvaging what is left of the day.

The meat loaf smells wonderful. Marcia says so, and Eric turns off the radio and lights the candle and pours the wine, and gives her a single, beatific smile. It’s a smile of acknowledgement, and also of forgiveness – forgiveness for what, Marcia could hardly say. For being as old as she is, for knowing too much. These are their mutual crimes.

Marcia smiles, too, and eats and drinks, and is happy, and outside the kitchen window the wind blows and the world shifts and crumbles and rearranges itself, and time goes on.

What happens to this day? It goes where other days have gone, and will go. Even as she sits here at the kitchen table, eating her
applesauce, which is (according to the
Ontario Wintertime Cookbook)
identical to the applesauce the pioneers ate, Marcia knows that the day itself is seeping away from her, that it will go and will continue to go, and will never come back. Tomorrow the children will arrive, one from the east, one from the west, where they attend their respective universities, being educated in distance. The ice on their winter boots will melt and puddle inside the front door, leaving salt stains on the tiles, and there will be heavy footsteps on the cellar stairs as they descend to do their laundry. There will be rummagings in the refrigerator, crashes as things are dropped; there will be bustle and excitement, real and feigned. The daughter will attempt to organize Marcia’s wardrobe and correct her posture, the son will be gallant and awkward and patronizing; both will avoid being hugged too closely, or too long.

The old decorations will be dragged out and the tree will be put up, not without an argument about whether or not a plastic one would be more virtuous. A star will go on top. On Christmas Eve they will all drink some of Eric’s killer eggnog and peel the oranges sent by Marcia’s first husband. They will play carols on the radio and open one present each, and the children will be restless because they will think they are too old for this, and Eric will take wasteful Polaroids that will never make their way into the albums they always mean to keep up to date, and Noriega will seek asylum at the Vatican Embassy in Panama City. Marcia will learn about this from the news, and from the pages of the contraband
World
that Eric will smuggle into the house and shred later for emergency kitty litter – having used up the real thing on the front steps – and the cat will reject it, choosing instead one of Marcia’s invitingly soft pink sheepskin slippers.

Then Christmas Day will come. It will be a Monday, yet another Monday, pastel blue, and they will eat a turkey and some more root vegetables and a mince pie that Marcia will have finally got around
to making, while Noriega sleeps unmothered in a room in a house ringed with soldiers, dreaming of how he got there or of how he will get out, or dreaming of killing he has done or would like to do, or dreaming of nothing, his round face pocked and bleak as an asteroid. The piece of the Berlin Wall that Marcia has given Eric in his stocking will get lost under the chesterfield. The cat will hide.

Marcia will get a little drunk on the eggnog, and later, after the dishes are done, she will cry silently to herself, shut into the bathroom and hugging in her festive arms the grumbling cat, which she will have dragged out from under a bed for this purpose. She will cry because the children are no longer children, or because she herself is not a child any more, or because there are children who have never been children, or because she can’t have a child any more, ever again. Her body has gone past too quickly for her; she has not made herself ready.

It’s all this talk of babies, at Christmas. It’s all this hope. She gets distracted by it, and has trouble paying attention to the real news.

“The Age of Lead” previously appeared in
Toronto Life
(Canada),
Lear’s Magazine
(U.S.),
Neue Rundschau
(Germany),
The New Statesman
(U.K.),
Colours of a New Day
(U.K.),
Good Housekeeping Magazine
(Australia); “The Bog Man” in
Playboy
(U.S.); “Death by Landscape” in
Saturday Night
(Canada),
Harper’s
(U.S.),
New Woman
(U.K.); “Hack Wednesday” in
The New Yorker
(U.S.); “Hairball” in
The New Yorker
(U.S.), under the title “Kat”; “Isis in Darkness” in
Granta
(U.K.); “True Trash” in
Saturday Night
(Canada); “Weight” in
Chatelaine
(Canada),
Cosmopolitan
(U.K.),
Vogue
(U.S.); “Wilderness Tips” in
Saturday Night
(Canada),
The New Yorker
(U.S.); “Uncles” in
Saturday Night
(Canada).