Ann-Marie MacDonald - Way the Crow Flies

Madeleine’s bike has fat tires — there is no such thing in Canada. Her bike looks like a little blue motorcycle, with an aerodynamic swell in the sloping crossbar that sports swift white letters, Zippy Vélo . It doesn’t look like a girl’s bike, nor does it look like the faux pas of a boy’s bike, it’s European. A Volks Bike.

The sun winks down on the road. Across the street and a few doors to the left, at the tan house on the corner, the mother of the Hula Hoop girl is unloading groceries from the orange VW van, but the girl is nowhere to be seen.

The neighbours who live in the other half of the McCarthys’ white duplex are a dead loss. Maman calls them a “lovely young couple.” They have a screeching infant at which they spend all their time gazing. The wife looks puffy and damp — Madeleine’s mother has told her she is beautiful. Madeleine plans never to have babies, never to marry. She intends to live with her brother and never become doughy and moist.

The intimate weight of sun has muted the entire PMQs. As though everyone in the kingdom had fallen asleep. Madeleine feels the heat on her head like a hand. She stares across at the wheelchair. Light splinters from its steel frame.

At first sight it made her feel a bit queasy, the way things like that can. Crutches and leg braces. Strange twisty people in wheelchairs — you feel guilty and grateful not to be them or to be in an iron lung. Say a little prayer for them , says her mother, and don’t stare . But Madeleine is staring now because the wheelchair is empty, there is no one around to get their feelings hurt.

“Where’s Mike?” asked her father when he left this morning. Even then Madeleine was already wearying of her moving-van vigil.

“He made a friend and they took off.”

“Why don’t you go find some pals?”

“There isn’t anyone.”

He laughed his gentle incredulous laugh. “The PMQs are crawling with kids, old buddy.”

Dad is so innocent. He thinks you can just go up to a group of kids and say, “Hey you guys, can I play too?” He talks of impromptu games of shinny back in the hometown streets, gangs of buddies roaming the New Brunswick woods, fishing, jigging from school, terrorizing the nuns, having a great time growing up together. Madeleine doesn’t know a soul here, and how are you supposed to get to know anyone when school doesn’t even start for a week? Mike always makes friends right off the bat. Boys don’t care so much if you are new. Girls look at you like you’re some kind of bug until they decide whether or not they want to play with your hair.

Madeleine despairs of the moving van and begins to leave the driveway. Taking baby steps, one foot in front of the other, heel to toe, because it will take longer to cross the street that way and the moving van will come sooner.

Nancy Drew and the Case of the Mysterious Wheelchair . Maybe they have a crippled mother. Imagine if your mother were crippled. “Come here, dear, so I can dress you.” You would always have to obey her and answer nicely because how cruel to talk back to a crippled mother or to run away out of her reach. Imagine her making your sandwiches with her weak hands, wheeling over to the fridge for the mayonnaise. It makes Madeleine appreciate her own mother. It’s good to appreciate your mother. She imagines her mother dead in order to appreciate her better: imagine if it were just me and Mike and Dad. Eating fried chicken every night and going to air shows. I’d wear Mike’s hand-me-downs and people would think I was a boy. She reminds herself that the prerequisite for this all-boy Shangri-La is the death of her mother, and cuts the fantasy short. It’s just not worth it if your mother has to die.

She breaks and runs in a heartburst of speed that takes her halfway down St. Lawrence Avenue in the direction of the school before she stops to catch her breath. On her left stands an empty green bungalow. She walks up to it and peeks in the living-room window.

Polished wood floors, fresh white walls. After the new people move in, she will remember spying on their empty house. She flops onto her back on the bungalow’s overgrown front lawn and moves her arms and legs as though she were making a snow angel in the grass. Are there other worlds? Is it possible to sail to a place where there are towns under water, and talking animals? Sometimes Madeleine believes so fervently that she gets tears in her eyes. She stares up at the clouds. A mountain. A camel. Milton Berle— Good evening, ladies and germs . The mountain moves — a door opens up like a mouth. What was inside the Pied Piper’s mountain? Was it like Aladdin’s cave, full of treasure? The mountain flattens and drifts apart to reveal the moon. It looks like a Communion host way up there, flavourless. Madeleine would rather go to sea than to the moon, would rather travel to the olden days than to the future. She would sneak up on Hitler at the Eagle’s Nest and push him over an Alp like the wheelchair in Heidi , and she would warn Anne Frank not to stay in Holland. She plucks grass with both hands and sprinkles it over herself. If she stays here long enough she will be totally buried and no one will find her. Think how worried they all will be when she doesn’t come home. Mike will be terribly sorry, and pray to God to bring his little sister back. Imagine the rejoicing when they find she isn’t dead after all. And none of it will be her fault, because she just lay down in the grass quite innocently … and closed her eyes … in the valley of the jolly, ho ho ho, green giant .

On the back porch Mimi finishes a letter to her sister Yvonne, and starts one to Domithilde. Mimi holds nothing back from Yvonne, but Domithilde entered the convent years ago and can’t be expected to appreciate the minutiae of family life. Chère Domithilde, on est enfin arrivé à Centralia… .

When she finishes the letter to Domithilde, she starts one to their German friends. Liebe Hans und Brigitte, Finally we are here. Willkommen in Centralia!

“Mrs. McCarthy?”

She looks up. A slim woman, a little older than herself, in spectator pumps and crisp belted dress, tastefully dyed strawberry blonde hair.

“I’m Vimy Woodley, welcome to Centralia.”

Mimi gets up, reflexively touches her hair with one hand and extends the other. “Mrs. Woodley, it’s so nice to meet you, please call me Mimi.”

The CO’s wife, and me in my ugly old shorts!

“Call me Vimy, dear.” She’s holding a plate covered in tinfoil. “Now it’s not much, but you’re to serve them warm.”

Piggies in a blanket. “Oh, mais c’est trop gentil.”

Vimy smiles and Mimi blushes at having addressed her in French.

“You’re in good company, Mimi, you’ve got a French Canadian neighbour just up the street. Have you met the Bouchers?”

“Not yet.”

“We’ll have you over once you’ve settled in. Now a lot of people are away, and the Wives’ Club won’t be up to speed for a few weeks, but I’ll pop a package in your mailbox to help you get your bearings. Just bits and pieces about the station and the area and the school and what-not.”

“Thank you so much — Vimy?”

“That’s right, dear.”

“You’re French?”

“I was named for an uncle who fought at Vimy Ridge. I’m just grateful they didn’t call me Passchendaele.”

“Or Big Bertha,” quips Mimi and turns beet-red because nothing could be less apt, and it’s too soon to joke so familiarly, but Vimy Woodley laughs.

“Vimy, will you come in for a cup of — for a glass of—?”

“Mimi, I wouldn’t dream of it.”

Both women know that the best Mimi is likely to do at the moment is a Thermos of Tang.