Once More with Feeling
Also by the Author
Fiction
The House on Sugarbush Road
Nightwatching
Poetry
A Fine Grammar of Bones
Toward a Catalogue of Falling
Slovenly Love
A Walker in the City
Monologue Dogs
Essays
Writing Lovers
Once More with Feeling
Méira Cook
Copyright © 2017 Méira Cook
Published in Canada in 2017 by House of Anansi Press Inc.
www.houseofanansi.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Distribution of this electronic edition via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal. Please do not participate in electronic piracy of copyrighted material; purchase only authorized electronic editions. We appreciate your support of the author’s rights.
All of the events and characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Cook, Méira, 1964–, author
Once more with feeling / Méira Cook.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-4870-0296-1 (softcover).—ISBN 978-1-4870-0297-8 (EPUB).—
ISBN 978-1-4870-0298-5 (Kindle)
I. Title.
PS8555.O567O53 2017 C813’.54 C2017-902292-X
C2017-902293-8
Cover design: Alysia Shewchuk
Cover art: Winnipeg Neighbourhood © Miriam Rudolph
We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program
the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.
To Mark, once more and always
And in the turning lane
Someone’s stalled again
— The Weakerthans, “One Great City!”
Winter
One
Goodwill
Max Binder’s many friends tend to exaggerate the dozens of half-full glasses — and some of them considerably less than quarter-full, it’s been pointed out by a couple of the more sour and dill-picklish ones — that he has eagerly poured one into another until presto, not only is the glass full but it runneth right over. But for Max, hope is not merely a feathered thing, a bird, or an equation for water and glass. Hope is where he lives, where he hangs his hat and unbuckles his belt.
At the moment, hope is a place called Arrivals where he notices that, once again, the girl’s flight has been delayed. He buys a newspaper and a coffee and settles down to read and sip his way through another empty, irrationally heated half hour. In the time he’s waited he’s already greeted a university colleague and waved to a Magnolia Street neighbour. Hi there stranger, are you coming or going? Just meeting someone. Ha, thought you were sneaking off on us, Binder. Nope, you know how I’d miss you. Yup, yup, take care.
It’s a city with only two degrees of separation, according to the old chestnut. The idea of those couple of variant degrees is what the inhabitants want to believe about themselves, and like all fond myths it’s mostly true. Not the separations so much as the connections, the way strangers meet up at weddings or funerals, at summer festivals or fall suppers, waiting at the bus stop or in line at the movies. Your face is so familiar, where do I know you from? Didn’t you used to go to Ridgehaven High? Were you ever a Girl Guide? Let’s see, do you know the Binders, the Tergussons, the Boychuks? Yes? I thought so. Small world, eh, small world.
The truth is Max has never visited the airport without running into someone he knows, however tangentially. It’s not a cliché; it’s where the cliché comes from, his mother used to say, as if there exists a repository of truths so original they can’t possibly be squandered.
Is an airport such a place? Max wonders. A temporary place, a place of such transience that everything is always new again.
Apart from going away to university, he’s lived here all his life, so he’s used to running into friends and acquaintances at the convenience store or the bank machine. He has one of those perennially familiar faces — warm, well-used, kindly — people always think they know him. But more and more lately, all the long-time-no-see faces from his past seem to parade by him: a classmate from North Point High, one of his mother’s mahjong-playing cronies, a dad from his son’s long ago soccer team, a kid he went to summer camp with, a girl he once had a crush on, a customer from when his parents still owned the shoe store. Max Binder — This is Your Life!
Now, from across the terminal a sprightly old fellow hails him. The fellow saunters over to pass the time of day and Max recognizes the man whose name he can never remember because of his mother’s ironic habit of referring to him as Grace of God, on account of his vast wealth and the resulting perception among his coterie that God had been rooting for him from the start. And on account of his having grown up in the North End like the Binders — practically neighbours, his mother insisted — but where Max’s father made a living, more or less, the other man made a fortune. Good luck to him, Minnie Binder always said. We should all be so lucky. The man had God on his side, was her point. It was as simple as that.
Today Grace of God, natty in his leisure wear and Panama hat, is setting forth to winter in Florida but stops to shoot the breeze with Max and share a meandering joke about winning — or perhaps failing to win — the lottery. “There’s this old Jew haranguing God. ‘I’m so poor, I’m so luckless. Grant me a favour, just this once let me win the lottery,’” he begins. Grace of God — who, famously, won a bundle on the Extra with his very first ticket — chortles on. If the man has a flaw, it’s his inability to deadpan. He guffaws his way through the punchline, playfully punches Max on the arm, and waves goodbye. Max is stymied.
Poor, luckless, favour, lottery. And then what?
He gives up and returns to his paper but the news he has purchased is not good: prospective flooding this spring, another missing woman, a fatal collision out on the highway. Two confirmed dead but the driver of the Hydro truck seems to have escaped unharmed.
Hydro truck drivers lead charmed lives, he thinks. Must be all that electricity whirring through the muscle and flex of their high-wire lives. He’s still thinking about the effect of positive ions on the goofy good fortunes of union workers when he notices that the girl’s plane has arrived. “Flight AC 732 from Toronto,” reads the screen, the flight status changing directly from “Delayed” to “Disembarking,” without appearing to pause at the grounded equanimity of “Arrived.” In his haste, he overturns the last of his coffee and accidentally tosses his newspaper onto a moving baggage carousel where it revolves grandly for a couple of turns.
The girl’s journey has been beset by difficulties, so many and of such varied complexity that by the time she appears at the gate — late, bedraggled, tearful — Max is perversely certain that her visit will be a riotous success. He hastens toward her but she thrusts a travel sickness bag at him and sprints for the ladies’ room. Dreamily tossing the sealed bag from one hand to the other, Max admires her grace, her speed, her unerring instinct for intuiting the whereabouts of washroom facilities in foreign cities.
When the girl emerges, he sees that she has scrubbed her face and dried her eyes, but her colour remains poor, a grey pallor
of fatigue patching the brown skin. Beneath the airline blanket that she clutches about her shoulders, he glimpses a black skirt and white blouse that, in cut and colour, imply a crispness sadly lacking in their present incarnation. Indeed, the shirt is badly stained about the collar and a fairly important button — from Max’s somewhat bashful perspective — is missing. The skirt, too, is awry, its ragged hemline guiding the eye down a pair of bare legs that end in clattery white sandals.
“Where’s your coat, darling?” he asks. He advances, arms outstretched, but she backs away, appalled.
Max takes rapid inventory, comes to a decision. “Oh, this?” He tosses the travel sickness bag into a nearby receptacle, not noticing that it’s been allocated “for glass and aluminum only,” and tucks the girl’s hand firmly under his arm.
“Let’s go find your suitcase, darling.” He hauls her off to Carousel 3 where they watch the river of other folks’ luggage gradually diminish to a trickle of oddly shaped bags and duct-taped boxes. After a while even these misfits are claimed. Max and the girl stand before the empty baggage carousel, watching it revolve until, somewhere in the depths of the airport’s baggage handling facility, a switch is thrown and the conveyor belt hitches and stops.
Max, who had been temporarily hypnotized by the soothing rhythm of moving luggage, comes to himself with a start. “Whoops,” he says. “Looks like we have a claim to file.”
Undaunted, he turns and strides toward the Baggage Services counter and almost makes it when he is halted in his tracks. Somewhere between a stifled wail and a whimper — it’s the first articulate sound he’s heard from the girl, and it is such a hopeless small cry, such a hiccup into the whirling void, that he swivels, the over-polished granite of the airport walkway shrieking in sympathy.
Who, if I cried out, among the hierarchy of angels would hear me? Max kneels beside the girl. She has slid to the floor as if disconsolation has rendered her boneless and is weeping into her cupped hands. All he can see is the top of her small head, the hair clipped close to her skull. He puts an arm around her shoulders and tries to recall the rest of Rilke’s elegy. It’s only a distraction, a way to forestall the pity that runs through him as marrow through bone. He’s just gotten to the part where every angel is terrible and the poet is trying to restrain himself from the luring call of dark sobbing. But he’s in no mood to admire the high-spirited romp of life chasing art, a dog and its tail. The girl is bereft — she is a broom-swept heap of sadness and goosepimply flesh and all that has gone awry between home and here. So many borders to cross, so many forms to fill out, so many boxes to tick, so much blamelessness to declare.
“There, there, darling,” he murmurs. He’s not used to soft-hearted girls, being the father of two hard-hearted boys and the husband of a woman who prides herself on being a tough cookie, not the weepy sort. Even his mother, a widow of twenty years, is a fighter with plenty of snap left in her garters. His professional experience has made him wary of mishandling young women, but the girl is such a forlorn bundle of unclaimed despair that he throws caution to the winds, comes down firmly on the side of “what the heck,” and puts his other arm around her.
Oh, but there is nothing to her. Skin and bones! Beneath the threadbare fabric of the airline blanket and the girl’s thin cotton shirt, he can feel the row of bumps that is her spine, and the bump bump bump of what is knocking against it. She’s shivering with cold, so he wraps his winter coat around her. Vast and cumbersome, the coat envelops her once, twice, three times. It is a coat that has swallowed a girl and, for a moment, he is tickled at the sight.
The girl looks up and catches him laughing. Unexpectedly, she laughs too. “That’s better, sweetheart,” says Max. He’s feeling flustered, though. He can’t keep addressing her by these endearments, and in the flurry and dismay of their first meeting he has somehow forgotten to introduce himself.
“You know who I am, don’t you?” he asks. “And you must be Pat.”
* * *
Maggie always maintained that she’d been hoodwinked by those World Vision hucksters. When the door-to-door salesman came around with his full-colour pamphlets and his talk of mere pennies a day to feed a hungry child, his slippery, glittering words, a pen tucked behind his ear ready to be whipped out at a moment’s notice, she fell for it.
“Choose your country,” he said, unrolling a map of the world coloured in the strident shades of national emergency. “Any continent you like — Africa! Asia! South America! There are needy children everywhere.”
Maggie closed her eyes and stabbed her finger down and around. When she opened them again she saw that her finger had landed on a red-for-danger blood splatter.
“Ah, Zambia,” the gentleman said, apparently delighted. “Wells! Irrigation systems! Schools!”
“Yes, all right,” she said. “But I want a girl.”
The travelling salesman looked startled, as if she was accusing him of being a child slaver, a trafficker in human souls. “Girls, boys,” he started to say, triangling his arms in a God-bothering gesture. “All children are precious, all children are —”
“Yes, indeed,” she interrupted him. “But I already have two of the other kind and I want to see if girls are any better.”
He was a professional, that man, and looked only slightly shocked for slightly longer than the blink of an incredulous eye, and then he said, Ye-es, well, why not ma’am, and he thought it could be arranged, by jingo. And please sign here, and here, and initial on this page, and right there at the bottom, thatagirl.
Hence Pat. Pat Ngunga came to the Binders in the form of a blurry headshot and a nine-digit registration number, along with a magnetized photo frame into which Maggie inserted the photo. Then she stuck Pat on the refrigerator.
“Would’ve thought you’d have chosen a girl,” Max said when he came home that night, the mail fanned out in one hand, the other hand yanking at the refrigerator door in search of a snack to steady him for the long ride out over the hungry plains of six o’clock.
“She is a girl,” Maggie snapped. “Her name’s Pat.” Her blood fizzed through her veins, every nerve shorting.
Max looked at his wife. She had curly auburn hair (curls: genuine; colour: natural but enhanced) that she wore piled on top of her head and secured in place with whatever was handy (hair clips, pencils, bobby pins, chopsticks). Complicated, bright eyes, eyebrows like a couple of Spanish virgulillas so that she often looked like a comically troubled child when she was merely thinking deeply, a wide mouth and a general air of flashing energy that veered toward exasperation but could simmer down to natural good humour if circumstances were conducive.
She tapped the photograph, Look! Obediently, Max looked at the photograph inside the magnetized frame on the refrigerator door. Greetings From Your World Vision Child. She could be a girl. With cropped hair and deep-set eyes and a gamine, unisex smile. Maggie cut him a look but Max wisely said nothing on the understanding, strenuously earned, that it was better to be happy than right, or married than burn, or happily rustling through a refrigerator in search of German potato salad than arguing with your wife. But by the time the Binders received their September plea for extra funds necessary to “a successful school year for your World Vision child,” Maggie was distraught.
It was as plain to her as the enclosed snapshot of young Pat Ngunga sprawled in the front yard of the family dwelling that the longed-for daughter was a son. Maggie blamed God (instinctively), World Vision (peripherally), Pat (predominantly).
“Come now, Maggie. How could the kid possibly know he’s been pretending to be a girl inside a photo frame on our refrigerator all these months?” Max chided. “Or she,” he hastily amended.
Max, the sole inhabitant of the tiny principality of Hope, still believed that Pat could be a girl, but Maggie was an honorary citizen of a town called Unconvinced. “She’s a boy,” she repeated. “A boy called Pat.”
A boy called Pat. And Maggie was the Patsy who’d fallen for it. Oh those were dark days.
“I knew you were a girl,” says Max. “I knew it. My wife went through a period of, of despondency but —” He breaks off, uncertain of his ground. Pat, who has had no reason to suspect that she is not a girl, remains silent on the subject of her disputed gender.
They’re driving east to the Goodwill Store on Ellice in the old family Pontiac to procure a winter jacket and boots. It’s February, and the poor girl has come too far to freeze to death in a foreign land. Max cranks up the heat and laughs to see her small frame engulfed in his voluminous coat.
“Thank you, Mr. Macks,” she says.
“Just Max,” Max says. He used to request the same of his students. “Call me Max,” he’d say, but only the bravest or the most precocious would oblige, and the rest would call him Prof or Dr. Binder or even Sir (the rural kids), although most studiously avoided addressing him at all. She doesn’t look brave, though all he can see beneath the swaddling folds of his winter coat are her thin wrists and her thin neck and her compact, elegant head that at times looks like it’s been poured from some liquid metal and at other times droops sleepily, her skin clouding, turning matte, as exhaustion swoops in. She rouses herself to gaze out the window as the unfamiliar landscape plays out its continuous, repetitive loop: cloud, bird, building, boy. Cloud.
He asks her about her journey and she turns sideways to address him.
“Mr. Macks, it was a boon,” she says. “My thanks.”
“A boon!” He is delighted.
Pat nods with emphasis. So much emphasis, in fact, that it engages not merely her head on its long question mark of a neck, but her shoulders too, and even her hands. “Because I have never travelled by jet airliner before, Mr. Macks. It was very tight and hot in the airplane, and I did not feel well. But Father Michael says, ‘What is the good of remaining on the ground when we have been given wings to fly?’”