Marcia has been dreaming about babies. She dreams there is a new one, hers, milky-smelling and sweet-faced and shining with light, lying in her arms, bundled in a green knitted blanket. It even has a name, something strange that she doesn’t catch. She is suffused with love, and with longing for it, but then she thinks, Now I will have to take care of it. This wakes her up with a jolt.
Downstairs the news is on. Something extra has happened, she can tell by the announcer’s tone of voice, by the heightened energy. A disaster of some kind; that always peps them up. She isn’t sure she’s ready for it, at least not so early. Not before coffee. She considers the window: a whitish light is coming through it, maybe it’s snowing. In any case, it’s time to get up again.
Time is going faster and faster; the days of the week whisk by like panties. The panties she’s thinking about are the kind she had when she was a little girl, in pastels, with “Monday,” “Tuesday,” “Wednesday” embroidered on them. Ever since then the days of the week have had colors for her: Monday is blue, Tuesday is cream, Wednesday is lilac. You counted your way through each week by pantie, fresh on each day, then dirtied and thrown into the bin. Marcia’s mother used to tell her that she should always wear clean panties in case a bus ran over her, because other people might see them as her corpse was being toted off to the morgue. It wasn’t Marcia’s potential death that loomed uppermost in her mind, it was the state of her panties.
Marcia’s mother never actually said this. But it was the kind of thing she ought to have said, because the other mothers really did say it, and it has been a useful story for Marcia. It embodies the supposed Anglo-Canadian prudery, inhibition, and obsession with public opinion, and as such has mythic force. She uses it on foreigners, or on those lately arrived.
Marcia eases herself out of bed and finds the slippers, made from dyed-pink sheepskin, which were given to her last Christmas by her twenty-year-old daughter, out of concern for her aging feet. (Her son, at a loss as usual, gave her chocolates.) She struggles into her dressing gown, which has surely become smaller than it used to be, then gropes through the pantie drawer. No embroidery in here, no old-fashioned nylon, even. Romance has given way to comfort, as in much else. She is thankful to God she doesn’t live in the age of corsets.
Fully dressed except for the bright-pink sheepskin slippers, which she keeps on because of the coldness of the kitchen floor, Marcia makes her way down the stairs and along the hallway. Walking in the slippers, which are slightly too big and flop around, she waddles slightly. Once she was light on her feet, a waif. Now she casts a shadow.
Eric is sitting at the kitchen table having his morning rage. His once red hair, now the color of bleached-out sand, is standing straight up on his head like a bird’s crest, and he’s run his hands through it in exasperation. There’s marmalade in it again, off his toast.
“Ass-licking suck,” he says. Marcia knows that this is not directed at her: the morning paper is spread out on the table. They cancelled—Eric cancelled—their subscription to this paper five months ago, in a fit of fury over its editorial policies and its failure to use recycled newsprint, although it’s the paper Marcia writes her column for. But he can’t resist the temptation: every so often he ducks out before Marcia is up and buys one out of the corner box. The adrenaline gets him going, now that he’s no longer allowed coffee.
Marcia turns down the radio, then kisses the bristly back of his neck. “What is it today?” she says. “The benefits of Free Trade?”
There’s a tearing sound, like fingernails on a blackboard. Outside the glass kitchen door, the cat has dug its claws into the screen and is sliding slowly down it. This is its demand to be let in. It has never bothered to learn meowing.
“One of these days I’m going to kill that beast,” says Eric. It’s Marcia’s belief that Eric would never do such a thing, because he is tenderhearted to a fault. Eric’s view of himself is more savage.
“You poor baby!” says Marcia, scooping up the cat, which is overweight. It’s on a diet, but mooches in secret from the neighbors. Marcia sympathizes.
“I just let the damn thing out. In, out, in, out. It can’t make up its mind,” says Eric.
“It’s confused,” says Marcia. The cat has wriggled free of her. She measures coffee into the little espresso machine. If she were truly loyal to Eric she would give up coffee, too, to spare him the torture of watching her drink it. But then she would be asleep all the time.
“It’s picking up on the national mood,” says Eric. “Yesterday it shat in the bathtub.”
“At least it didn’t use the rug,” says Marcia. She peels an envelope of moist cat kibble. The cat rubs up against her legs.
“It would have if it had thought about it,” says Eric. “Some grovelling hymn to George Bush.” He’s back on the editorial page.
“What’s he done now?” says Marcia, helping herself to Cheerios. Eric won’t eat them because they’re American. Ever since the Free Trade deal with the States went through he has refused to purchase anything from south of the border. They’ve been having a lot of root vegetables this winter: carrots, potatoes, beets. Eric says the pioneers did it, and, anyway, frozen orange juice is overrated. At lunches out, Marcia furtively eats avocados and hopes Eric won’t smell them on her breath.
“This is the Panama invasion,” says Eric, distinguishing it from a multitude of other invasions. “You know how many they’re up to this century? Down there? Forty-two.”
“That’s a lot,” says Marcia, in her mollifying voice.
“They don’t think of it as invading,” says Eric. “They think of it as agriculture. Sort of like spraying for bugs.”
“Were you cold out there? Did you freeze your paws?” says Marcia, picking up the cat again, which has turned up its nose at the kibble. It gives a piglike grunt. She’s missing the children. Tomorrow they will be home for the holidays, they and their laundry. The children are hers, not hers and Eric’s, though even they don’t seem to notice this anymore. Their real father has become a figment, somewhere in Florida. For Christmas he sends them oranges, which is about all Marcia ever hears of him.
“It’s a drug thing,” says Eric. “They’re going to arrest Noriega, and presto, ten thousand poverty-stricken junkies will be cured.”
“He hasn’t behaved well,” says Marcia.
“That’s not the point,” says Eric.
Marcia sighs. “I suppose this means you’ll be picketing the American Consulate again,” she says.
“Me and a few assorted loonies, and five superannuated Trots,” says Eric. “Same old bunch.”
“Dress up warm,” says Marcia. “There’s a wind-chill factor.”
“I’ll wear my earmuffs,” says Eric: this is his one concession to sub-zero weather. “Trots are a nuisance.”
“The Mounties think that you’re one,” says Marcia.
“Oh, yeah, I forgot—and two Mounties disguised as bag ladies. Or else those jerks from Ca-Sissies. They might as well wear clown suits, they’re so obvious.”
Ca-Sissies is Eric’s name for C.S.I.S., which really means Canadian Security Intelligence Service. Ca-Sissies taps his phone, or so Eric believes. He teases them: he’ll phone up one of his pals and say words like “sabotage” and “bomb,” just to activate the tapes. Eric says he’s doing Ca-Sissies a favor: he’s making them feel important. Marcia says it would interfere with her ever having an affair, because they might listen in and then blackmail her.
Eric is not worried. “You have good taste,” he says. “There’s no one in this city worth having an affair with.”
Marcia knows that lack of worth has never stopped anyone in this regard. The reason she doesn’t have affairs, or hasn’t had any lately, is simple laziness. Too much energy is required; also, she no longer has the body for it, for the initial revelations and displays. She would not have an affair without doing something about her thighs, and buying appropriate underwear. In addition, she would not risk losing Eric. Eric can still surprise her, in many ways. She knows the general format of the schemes he’s likely to come up with, but not the details. Surprise is worth a lot.
“Love is blind,” says Marcia. “Well, I’m off to the temple of free speech.” She’s glad he’s going to picket. It means he’s not too old for it, after all. She kisses him again, on the top of his rumpled, sticky head. “See you for dinner. What’re we having?”
Eric thinks for a moment. “Turnips,” he says.
“Oh, good,” says Marcia. “We haven’t had those for a while.”
Marcia puts on her cardigan and her heavy, black wool winter coat—not fur, Eric is against fur these days, although Marcia has pointed out that fur is the native way of life and is also biodegradable. She barely gets away with the sheepskin slippers: luckily, their vibrant color makes them look fake. She adds her boots, her scarf, her lined gloves, and her white wool hat. Thus padded, she takes a breath, clenches all her flesh together, and heads through the door, into the winter. The cat shoots out between her legs and immediately thinks better of it. Marcia lets it back in.
This is the coldest December in a hundred years. At night it hits thirty below; car tires are square in the morning, frostbite cases crowd the hospitals. Eric says it’s the greenhouse effect. Marcia is puzzled by this: she thought the greenhouse effect was supposed to make it warmer, not colder. “Freak weather,” Eric says tersely.
There’s ice all over the steps; there has been for days. Marcia has suggested that the mailman may slip on it and sue them, but Eric refuses to use salt: he’s in pursuit of some new product that Canadian Tire never seems to have in stock. Marcia holds on to the railing and takes tiny steps downward and wonders if she’s getting osteoporosis. She could fall; she could shatter like a dropped plate, like an egg. These are the sorts of possibilities that never occur to Eric. Only large catastrophes concern him.
The sidewalk has been chiselled free of ice, or at least a sort of trail has been made in it, suitable for single file. Marcia makes her way along this, toward the subway station. When she comes out onto Bloor Street it’s less treacherous underfoot, but gustier. She breaks into a slow, lumbering trot and reaches the Bathurst station wheezing.
Three of the city’s homeless are staked out inside the door. All are young men; two of them are Native Indians, one isn’t. The one that isn’t puts the twist on Marcia for some change. He says he just wants to eat, which seems to Marcia a modest enough wish: she knows a lot of people who want a good deal more. He is pallid and stubble-faced, and he doesn’t meet her eyes. To him she’s just a sort of broken pay phone, the kind you can shake to make extra quarters come out.
The two Indians watch without much expression. They look fed up. They’ve had it with this city, they’ve had it with suicide as an option, they’ve had it with the twentieth century. Or so Marcia supposes. She doesn’t blame them: the twentieth century has not been a raving success.
At the newsstand she buys a chocolate bar and a True Woman magazine, the first Canadian-made but bad for you, the second an outright Yankee-land betrayal. But she’s entitled: she gets enough virtuous eating and reality principle in the rest of her life, so for half an hour she’ll play hooky and wreck her blood sugar and read escapist trash. She squashes onto the train with the other wool-swaddled passengers and is adroit enough to get a seat, where she thumbs through the holiday fashions and the diet of the month, licking chocolate from her fingers. Then she settles into a piece entitled, with misplaced assurance, “What Men Really Think.” It’s all about sex, of course. Marcia has news for them: the sum total of what men really think is quite a lot bigger than that.
She changes trains, gets off at Union, slogs up the stairs to street level. There’s an escalator, but looking at all those slender bodies has made her worried. Eric thinks she has nice thighs; but, then, Eric leads a sheltered life.
There are underground mazes downtown, underground shopping malls, underground tunnels that can get you from one building to another. You could spend the whole winter underground, without ever going outside. But Marcia feels a moral obligation to deal with winter instead of merely avoiding it. Also, she has a lot of difficulty locating herself on the “You Are Here” diagrams placed at intervals to help out those lacking in orientation skills. She prefers to be aboveground, where there are street signs.
Just recently she got thoroughly lost down there; the only good thing that happened was that she discovered a store called The Tacki Shoppe, which sold pink flamingo eggs and joke books about sex in middle age, and bottles of sugar pills labelled Screwital. It also sold small pieces of the Berlin Wall, each in its own little box, with a certificate of authenticity included. They cost twelve ninety-five. She bought a piece to put in Eric’s stocking: they still keep up the habit of jokes in their stockings, from when the children were younger. She is not sure Eric will find this gift funny; more likely, he will make some remark about the trivialization of history. But the children will be interested. The truth is that Marcia secretly wants this piece of the Wall for herself. It’s a souvenir for her, not of a place—she has never been to Berlin—but of a time. This is from the Christmas the Wall came tumbling down, she will say in later years; to her grandchildren, she hopes. Then she will try to remember what year it was.
More and more, she is squirrelling away bits of time—a photo here, a letter there; she wishes she had saved more of the children’s baby clothes, more of their toys. Last month, when Eric took an old shirt that dated from their first year together and cut it up for dishcloths, she saved the buttons. No doubt, after the Berlin Wall fragment has been fingered and exclaimed over on Christmas morning, it will end up in this magpie cache of hers.
The wind is worse here, funnelling between the glassy high-rise office buildings. After a block of walking into it, bent over and holding her ears, Marcia takes a taxi.
The paper Marcia writes for is housed in a bland, square, glass-walled, windowless building, put up at some time in the seventies, when airlessness was all the rage. Despite its uninformative exterior, Marcia finds this building sinister, but that may be because she knows what goes on inside it.
The paper is called, somewhat grandiosely, The World. It is a national institution of sorts, and, like many other national institutions these days, it is falling apart. Eric says that The World has aided the national disintegration in other areas, such as Free Trade, so why should it be exempt itself? Marcia says that, even so, it is a shame. The World stood for something once, or so she likes to believe. It had integrity, or at least more integrity than it does now. You could trust it to have principles, to attempt fairness. Now the best you can say of it is that it has a fine tradition behind it, and has seen better days.
Better in some ways, worse in others. For instance, by cutting its staff and tailoring itself for the business community, it is now making more money. It has recently been placed under new management, which includes the editor, a man called Ian Emmiry. Ian Emmiry was promoted suddenly, over the heads of his elders and seniors, while the unsuspecting former editor was on vacation. This event was staged like a military coup in one of the hotter, seedier nations. It was almost like having a chauffeur promoted to general as the result of some hidden affiliation or payoff, and has been resented as much.
The journalists who have been there a long time refer to Ian Emmiry as Ian the Terrible, but not in front of the incoming bunch: Ian the Terrible has his spies. There are fewer and fewer of the older journalists and more and more of the newer ones, handpicked by Ian for their ability to nod. A slow transformation is going on, a slow purge. Even the comic strips at the back have been gutted: for instance, “Rex Morgan, M.D.,” with its wooden-faced doctor and its impossibly cheerful and sexless nurse, is no longer to be found. Marcia misses it. It was such a soothing way to start the day, because nothing in it ever changed. It was an antidote to news.
Marcia wanders through the newsroom in search of a free computer. There are no more typewriters, no more clatter, not much of the casual hanging around, the loitering and chitchat that Marcia links with the old sound of the news being pounded out, drilled out as if from rock. Everything is computers now: Ian the Terrible has seen to that. He is big on systems. The journalists, the new breed, are crouched in front of their computers at their open-plan desks, cooking up the news; they look like pieceworkers in a garment factory.
Marcia does not have her own desk here, because she’s not on staff: she’s a columnist on contract. So, as Ian said (placing a well-kept hand on her shoulder, his eyes like little, zinc nails), she might as well work at home. He would like her to have a computer there, where she would be safely quarantined; he would like her to beam in her columns by modem. Barring that, he would like her to drop her copy off and have it keyboarded into the system by someone else. He suspects her of seditious tendencies. But Marcia has assured him, smiling, that Eric will not allow a computer in the house—he’s such a Luddite, but what can you do!—and that she would never expect anyone else to deal with her messy copy. Who could read her handwritten alterations? she has said, diffidently. No, she really has to type the column into the system herself, she tells Ian. She does not say “keyboard,” and Ian notices this holdout. Maybe he grits his teeth. It’s hard to tell: he has the kind of teeth that appear to be permanently gritted.
Marcia could have a computer at home if she liked. Also, she could bring in clean copy. But she wants to come down here. She wants to see what’s going on. She wants the gossip.
Marcia’s column appears in the section of the paper that still calls itself “Lifestyles,” although surely it will have to think up some new heading soon. “Lifestyles” was the eighties; the nineties are coming, and already steps are being taken to differentiate the decades. Summings-up clutter the papers, radio and television are droning earnestly on about what the eighties meant and what the nineties will mean. People are already talking about a seventies revival, which puzzles Marcia. What is there to revive? The seventies were the sixties until they became the eighties. There were no seventies, really. Or maybe she missed out on them, because that was when the children were small.
Her column, which is read by some men as well as by many women, is about issues. Social issues, problems that may come up: caring for the aged at home, breast-feeding in public, bulimia in the workplace. She interviews people, she writes from the particular to the general; she believes, in what she considers to be an old-fashioned, romantic way, that life is something that happens to individuals, despite the current emphasis on statistics and trends. Lately things have taken a grimmer turn in Marcia’s column: there’s been more about such things as malnutrition in kindergartens, wife beating, overcrowding in prisons, child abuse. How to behave if you have a friend with aids. Homeless people who ask for handouts at the entrances to subway stations.
Ian does not like this new slant of Marcia’s; he doesn’t like her bad news. Businessmen don’t want to read about this stuff, about people who can’t work the system; or so Ian says. She’s heard this through the grapevine. He has called her style “hysterical.” He thinks she’s too soppy. Probably she is too soppy. Her days at The World are probably numbered.
As she opens a new file on the computer, Ian himself appears. He has on a new suit, a gray one. He looks laminated.
“We got some mail on that column of yours,” he says. “The one about free needles for junkies.”
“Oh,” says Marcia. “Hate mail?”
“Most of it,” says Ian. He’s pleased by this. “A lot of people don’t think taxpayers’ money should be spent on drugs.”
“It’s not drugs,” says Marcia irritably, “it’s public health.” Even to herself she sounds like a child talking back. In Ian’s mind another little black mark has just gone on her chart. Up yours, she thinks, smiling brightly. One of these days she’ll say something like that out loud, and then there will be trouble.
Marcia wonders what will happen if she gets fired. Something else may turn up for her; then again, she’s getting older, and it may not. She might have to free-lance again, or, worse, ghostwrite. Usually it’s politicians who want the stories of their lives graven in stone for the benefit of future ages, or at least these are the ones who are willing to pay. She did that sort of thing when she was younger and more desperate, before she got the column, but she isn’t sure she has the stamina for it anymore. She’s bitten her tongue enough for one lifetime. She isn’t sure she still has the knack of lying.
Luckily, she and Eric have the mortgage on their house almost paid off, and the children are within a few years of finishing university. Eric makes some money on his own, of course. He writes engorged and thunderous books of popular history, about things like the fur trade and the War of 1812, in which he denounces almost everybody. His former colleagues, the academic historians, cross the street to avoid him, partly because they may remember the faculty meetings and conferences at which he also denounced everybody, before he resigned, but partly because they disapprove of him. He does not partake of their measured vocabularies. His books sell well, much better than theirs, and they find that annoying.
But, even with the royalties from Eric’s books, there will not be enough money. Also, Eric is slowing down. It has come to him lately that these books have not changed the course of history, and he is running out of steam. Even his denunciations, even his pranks, are rooted in a growing despair. His despair is not focussed on any one thing; it’s general, like the increasingly bad city air. He doesn’t say much about it, but Marcia knows it’s there. Every day she fights against it, and breathes it in.
Sometimes he talks about moving—to some other country, somewhere with more self-respect, or somewhere warmer. Or just somewhere else. But where? And how could they afford it?
Marcia will have to bestir herself. She will have to cut corners. She will have to beg—in some way, somehow. She will have to compromise.
Marcia has almost finished typing her column into the computer when her friend Gus drifts by. He says hello to attract her attention, raises his hand in a glass-lifting motion, signals her with a finger: one o’clock. It’s an invitation to lunch, and Marcia nods. This charade goes with their shared, only half-humorous pretense that the walls have ears and that it’s dangerous for them to be seen too openly together.
The restaurant, their usual, is a Spanish one, well above Bloor Street and far enough away from The World so that they don’t expect to run into anyone from there. They arrive at it separately, Marcia first; Gus makes an entrance for her with his coat collar turned up, pausing in the doorway to do a furtive skulk. “I don’t think I was followed,” he says.
“Ian has his methods,” says Marcia. “Maybe he’s a Mountie in disguise. Or C.I.A., I wouldn’t put it past him. Or maybe he’s subverted the staff here. He used to be a waiter.” This is untrue, but it’s part of an ongoing series of theirs: the former jobs of Ian. (Washroom attendant. Numismatist. Gerbil breeder.)
“No!” says Gus. “So that’s where he got his unctuous charm! Well, that’s where I got mine. I did six months of it—in Soho, no less—back when I was a beardless youth. Never be rude to a waiter, darling. They’ll spit on your steak in the kitchen.”
Marcia orders a sangria, and settles her widening bottom thankfully into her chair. Here she can eat imported food without feeling like a traitor. She intends to order blood oranges if she can get them. Those, and garlic soup. If Eric cross-examines her later, her conscience will be clear.
Gus is Marcia’s latest buddy, and mole, at the paper. Her latest and her last: the others have all been fired or have left. Gus himself is not one of the Old Guard. He was imported only a few months ago to edit the Entertainment section, in one more of Ian the Terrible’s attempts to shore up the credibility of his eroding paper. Even Ian knows there’s something wrong, but he’s failed to make the connections: he’s failed to realize that even businessmen have other interests, and also standards. They’ve figured out that you can no longer read The World to find out what’s going on, only to find out what’s going on inside Ian’s head.
He made a mistake with Gus, though. Gus has his own ideas.
Gus is tall and barrel-shaped and has dark, curly hair. He might be in his mid-thirties, or even younger. He has square, white, even teeth, the same size all the way along, like Mr. Punch. This gives him a formidable grin. He is English and Jewish, both at once. To Marcia he seems more English; still, she isn’t sure whether his full name is Augustus or Gustav or something else entirely. Possibly he is also gay: it’s hard for her to tell with literate Englishmen. Some days they all seem gay to her, other days they all seem not gay. Flirtation is no clue, because Englishmen of this class will flirt with anything. She’s noticed this before. They will flirt with dogs if nothing else is handy. What they want is a reaction: they want their charm to have an effect, to be reflected back to them.
Gus flirts with Marcia, lightly and effortlessly, almost as if it were piano practice; or that’s what Marcia thinks. She has no intention of taking him seriously and making a fool of herself. Anyway, he’s too young. It’s only in magazines like True Woman that younger men take a severe erotic interest in older women without making invidious comparisons involving body parts. Marcia prefers her dignity, or she intends to prefer it if offered the choice.
Today Gus’s flirtation takes the form of an exaggerated interest in Eric, whom he has never met. He wants to know all about Eric. He’s found out that Eric’s nickname at the paper is Eric the Red, and asks Marcia with false innocence if this has anything to do with Vikings. Marcia finds herself explaining that it’s just the way The World people think: they think anyone who doesn’t agree with them is a Communist. Eric is not a Communist; instead he’s a sort of Tory, but not the kind they have in England. Not even the kind they have now in Canada: Eric thinks the Canadian Tory government is made up mostly of used-car salesmen on the make. He is outraged by the Prime Minister’s two hundred new suits, not because there are two hundred of them but because they were ordered in Hong Kong. He thinks the taxpayers’ money should go to local tailors.
Gus quirks an eyebrow, and Marcia realizes that this conversation is becoming too complicated. As a sort of joke, she says that Gus will never be able to understand Eric unless he studies the War of 1812. That is a war Gus clearly does not remember. He gets out of it by saying that he used to think “interesting Canadian” was an oxymoron, but that Eric is obviously an exception; and Marcia sees that what he is in search of is eccentricity, and that he has made the mistake of deciding that this is where Eric fits in. She is annoyed, and smiles and orders another drink to keep from showing it. Eric is not so eccentric. About a lot of things he’s even right. This doesn’t always make him less maddening, but Marcia does not like having him patronized.
Now Gus turns the full force of his attention onto Marcia herself. How does she manage monogamy? he wants to know. Monogamy is something Marcia and Eric have a reputation for, as others have a reputation for heavy drinking. Monogamy, Gus implies, is a curious anthropological artifact, or else a sort of heroic feat. “How do you do it?” he asks.
No, Marcia thinks, he is not gay. “I wasn’t always monogamous,” she wants to say. She did not get from one marriage to another along a tidy route. She got there by bad judgments, escapades, misery; Eric himself began as a tumultuous and improbable scuffle. But if she confesses to any of this Gus will only become nosy, or—worse—skeptical, and beg her to tell all. Then, when she does, he’ll assume the polite, beady-eyed expression the English get when they think you’re too quaint for words, or else boring as hell.
So Marcia avoids the subject, and entertains Gus in other ways. She trots out for him the story of the panties embroidered with the days of the week, and her mother’s warnings about being run over by a bus. From there she goes on to construct for him the Canada of old; she describes the dark and dingy Toronto beer parlors with their evil-smelling Men Only sections, she describes the Sunday blue laws. Marcia isn’t sure why she wants to make her country out as such a dour and Gothic place. Possibly she wants war stories, like other people. Possibly she wants to appear brave or stalwart, to have endured the rigors of citizenship in such a country. She is suspicious of her own motives.
She tells on, however. She describes Mackenzie King, the longest-ruling Canadian Prime Minister, deciding state policy with the help of his dead mother, who, he was convinced, was inhabiting his pet terrier. Gus thinks she’s making this up, but no, she assures him, it’s entirely true. There are documents.
This brings them to the end of the garlic soup. When the deep-fried calamari arrive, Gus takes his turn. What he has to offer is gossip about The World. “Ian the Terrible is trying to organize us into pods,” he says. He looks delighted: he has something to add to the list of local absurdities he is compiling, for when he returns to England. He doesn’t know yet that he will return, but Marcia knows. Canada will never be a real place for him.
“Pods?” says Marcia.
“As in killer whales,” says Gus. “Three writers to a pod, with a pod leader. He thinks it will promote team spirit.”
“He might as well write the whole paper all by himself,” says Marcia, trying not to sound bitter. She thinks the pod idea is extremely stupid, but at the same time she is feeling left out, because she herself has not been included in a pod. She will miss out on something, some of the fun.
“He’s working on it,” says Gus. “He’s cut back on the Letters to the Editor to make space for a new column, written by guess who?”
“No,” says Marcia with dismay. “Called what?”
“ ‘My Opinionzzzz,’ ” says Gus, grinning his alarming grin. “No. I lie. ‘The Snorey of My Life,’ by Ian Emmiry.”
“You’re cruel,” Marcia murmurs, trying to disguise her approval.
“Well, he deserves it. The man should be hanged for the willful infliction of grievous terminal boredom. He wants the Entertainment section to put on a bun-fest called The Critical F0rum. He thinks we should all come in on free overtime to listen to some moldy old university professor rabbit on about how to keep from going stale. This is not a fabrication.”
“My God,” says Marcia. “What’ll you do?”
“I’m egging him on,” says Gus. “I smile, and smile, and am a villain.”
“They won’t stand for it,” says Marcia.
“That’s the general idea,” says Gus, grinning from ear to ear. He’s mobile. He does not have a mortgage, or children, or monogamy.
Marcia has downed her second drink too quickly. Now she has lost the thread. Instead of listening, she is staring at Gus, imagining what it would in fact be like to have an affair with him. Too many witticisms, she thinks. Also, he would tell.
She looks at him, shining as he is with naughty pleasure, and all of a sudden she sees what he would have been like as a small boy. A ten-year-old. With that grin, he would have been the class joker. Nobody would have got the better of him, not even the bullies. He’d have known everyone’s weak place, where to get the knife in. How to protect himself.
She often thinks this way about men, especially after a drink or two. She can just look at a face and see in past the surface, to that other—child’s—face which is still there. She has seen Eric in this way, stocky and freckled and defiant, outraged by schoolyard lapses from honor. She has even seen Ian the Terrible, a stolid, plodding boy who must have known others thought of him as dull; she has seen him studying hard, hoping in vain for a best friend, storing up his revenges. It has helped her to forgive him, somewhat.
Marcia returns to the conversation. She seems to have missed several paragraphs: now Gus has switched focus and is talking about Noriega. “He’s hiding out in the jungle,” he says. “He’s thumbing his nose at them. They’ll never get him—he’ll be off to Cuba or somewhere—and then it’ll just be back to the old graft and squalor, with a brand-new C.I.A. flunky.” He lifts his glass, signals for a refill. He’s drinking white wine. “A year from now it’ll all be fish-wrap.”
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 ghostwritten 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 acknowledgment, 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 anymore, or because there are children who have never been children, or because she can’t have a child anymore, 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. ♦
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