Ann-Marie MacDonald - Way the Crow Flies

When the McCarthys were set to move from Kingston, Aida took Madeleine aside, lit a fresh Gitane, inhaled and rasped, “Madeleine, you have a great gift, darling. But you’re funny. In the words of the immortal Dietrich, ‘you can’t help it.’ Don’t ever let anyone disparage you for it. Laughter bubbles from the well of tears, my cherub, and at the bottom of your well there is blood.”

Aida was the second person in Madeleine’s experience to invoke the top-hatted Deutsche Diva. Her inner eyes remained wide as saucers in awe-filled contemplation of the oracle. By the time she was a teenager, however, irony had loped in, lithe spike-collared beast, to ridicule the Aidas of this world. But when the mists of adolescence retreated, she recovered her memory and, though she still did not fully comprehend Aida’s prophecy, she recalled what she had always wanted to be when she grew up, and pursued it through her twenties. Funny. It runs on a harsh diet and requires a strong stomach. Popeye eats spinach to get his strength. A comedian eats the can.

“You coming for a drink, hon?”

Shelly stands in the doorway. She is reassuringly forty.

Madeleine pokes her head around the plastic curtain. “I thought we were doing notes.”

“We’ll do them at the bar.”

Shelly wrangles comedians. Makes them focus until something gets written, then shot on set. Like many producers, she seems not to have an iota of patience, but she could get a Chihuahua to double-ride a cat on a bicycle. She is trying to get Madeleine to write a one-woman show.

“Hurry up, McCarthy.”

“Order me some of those deep-fried — those fried — something fried, okay?”

It’s Friday. Dress rehearsal, then shoot in front of a live audience, then drink, debrief and start hatching next week’s show. Friday is fun, the peak of the week. It follows marathon Thursday, which is about rewriting, rehearsing, starting over, envying the misery and terror of the set and costume people, who are envying the misery and terror of the performers, and being grateful for a private dressing room with a bathroom of one’s own. Monday is full of laughter at new sketch ideas, Tuesday you work on the new ideas and no one laughs at them any more, on Wednesday only Shelly can tell if anything’s still funny. Saturday and Sunday are the days off, and the only ones free of gastrointestinal disturbances. Madeleine has the same mixed feelings about it all as the others do: she loves it.

Shelly leaves and Madeleine puts on an iridescent blue polyester bowling shirt with “Ted” stitched on the pocket, a low-slung pair of vintage pinstripes, a pair of battered orthopedic Oxfords so square they’re hip, and an Indian Motorcycle jacket of expensively distressed leather — she pictures a supermodel, clad only in the jacket, being dragged behind a Harley over gravel to achieve the fashionable patina. She feels what she often feels after a show: that she has removed one costume in order to don another. She spikes her hair, despikes it then gives up. Switches off the lights around her mirror, turns off the overhead and closes the door. It locks behind her.

The pieces of Maurice remain in her dressing room, ready to be reassembled and restored to life next time. But the flesh-tone bathing cap with the stuck-on grey hair that she fashioned herself — not with great craft, but with conviction; the black-rimmed glasses, perched now on the bridge of the rudimentary Styrofoam nose, smudged lenses obscuring blank eyes; the wide grey suit hanging limp from the rack next to the foam-core carapace of guts; and the big empty brogues, yawning caverns just right for hiding Easter eggs; these pieces of Maurice seem never to deanimate completely, no matter how far apart they are kept.

On some nights, when Madeleine pulls the door of her dressing room closed, she enacts a small ritual that she has never tried to explain to herself or anyone, because it is so trivial: she makes certain not to turn her back on the room until she has closed the door. She looks from the slack grey suit to the Styrofoam head, making certain to exhale through her nose as she does so, and to refrain from blinking as she pulls the door to. Then she tries the lock three times, click click click , turns, breathes and leaves. A harmless tic.

She performs similar rites when leaving her house: touch the doorknob three times, this assures her that she did indeed turn off the stove — an indispensable prerequisite to road trips, which are otherwise interrupted by a U-turn halfway to Buffalo, and it’s back to Toronto to find, “Of course I turned it off.” Her footfalls between the cracks of sidewalks are at times subject to baroque calculations, and when drinking a glass of anything she is careful never to exhale onto the liquid before sipping, and is often compelled to inhale first. If you say these things out loud, you sound nuts.

She looks more like a tired twenty-year-old than a thirty-two-year-old, which goes to show that low-grade obsessive compulsive disorder is good for the skin.

The television studio is located way up in the ’burbs of Toronto. She is the last one out, as usual. She says good night to the security guard and exits into the street-light sharpness of the April night, the hard gloss of manicured grounds, newly green. She jaywalks to an island in the middle of the six-lane suburban “street,” makes it to the other side and sets out across the parking lot of an immense mall which, like a mountain, seems to get no closer with her approach, as though she were moonwalking in place, until suddenly it’s on top of her and she can no longer see the entrance. She looks right, then left down the massive exterior, which might as well be featureless, its endless illuminated signs an optical cacophony. Light bleeds into the black sky and she closes her eyes, squeezing the yellow orb that appears on her inner lids like a lemon. Then she opens them again and sees it: the giant pickle.

Madeleine started stand-up by accident, when she was twelve. It was Jack’s idea. She was in a public-speaking contest. He had helped her write her speech, on the topic of “Humour: Its History and Uses.” She forgot her lines halfway through at the intramurals and had to improvise. He said, “Let’s build it in.”

As she advanced toward the provincial finals, he would identify some point at random within the speech and, depending on what was in the news that day, or what they saw from the car windows on their way to the hall, she would pitch a topical reference and see how far out into left field she could go before bringing it all back home. “Just get up there and do it your way, sweetie,” he said. She was eventually disqualified for “extemporizing,” but they went out for ice cream afterwards and he did a cost-benefit analysis of her public-speaking career on a napkin. She came out ahead because experience was worth its weight in gold. “If you want to be an entertainer,” he said, “you have to take every opportunity to hone your craft.” He always said “entertainer” and, even after she came to know it as a hopelessly outdated term, she never corrected him.

She majored in Classics at McGill University in Montreal, and moonlighted in a Québec-separatist guerrilla-theatre troupe. This involved terrorizing law-abiding citizens in public places from a leftist perspective, and “exploring her sexuality” with a mandolin player named Lise who was into iridology. Her French improved, along with her tolerance for dépanneur plonk, and though she was welcomed by the Québécoises as a quaint and feisty Acadienne, Madeleine felt like an imposter. Something had to give. She moved to Toronto, where she could comfortably resume her long-time disguise as an Anglo.

She quit university with her father’s blessing. “Anyone with a decent brain and self-discipline can make a living as a doctor or lawyer or glorified bean-counter like me,” he said. “It takes a gift to make people laugh.”