Ann-Marie MacDonald - Way the Crow Flies

Jack said, “Well, we beat them.”

Mimi threw up her hands. “What did he just say?! Bon D’jeu , Jack, you talked over him.”

“They’ll rerun it.”

They saw the earth reflected in the glass of a NASA helmet. They watched as the astronaut lumbered weightlessly, as blunt as a child’s drawing — his glossy round head; the rudimentary movements of arms and legs encased in white, segmented at the joints; a slow bounding caterpillar poised with the American flag, which he planted in the Sea of Tranquility. It was really happening. Up there. While we were watching down here on Earth, in the rec room.

Jack shifted his chair to the upright position with a thunk , rose and headed from the room. Mimi ignored him but Madeleine called, “Dad, aren’t you going to watch?”

“What for? He did his job, over and out.”

Madeleine was shocked.

“It’s a sideshow,” said Jack.

Mimi reached for a cigarette, and Madeleine tensed. She hated it when they bickered. Her mother was like one of those Hitchcock birds, pecking, pecking at her father’s head with red talons. No wonder he had no patience with her. She’s going through menopause — like one giant endless “time of the month,” thought Madeleine uncharitably, staring at her mother’s tight face. Things had been calmer since Mike had left home, but constricted, too. Arid.

Her father continued, referring to the television so Madeleine would know he wasn’t directing his bitterness toward her. “These guys’ll splash down — if they don’t burn up on re-entry — and they’ll get a big tickertape parade and all that good stuff, and we’ll all pretend to be interested in moon rocks, but no one wants to know the real story.”

“What do you mean?” Madeleine could hear something in his voice — either it was new or she was recognizing it for the first time. A self-pitying note. It repelled and embarrassed her.

“No one wants to know what it took to get them up there.” He jerked his thumb at the ceiling, dry red patches appearing on his cheeks. “While the hippies have been moaning and bellyaching about police brutality and free this and psychedelic that, it’s all been happening right under their noses.”

This voice didn’t belong to her dad. Her dad gave opinions, sometimes adamant, but always with an expansive quality, inviting argument. This man was whining. “You want to know where the rocket program started?” he asked, thin-lipped.

Madeleine was confused. “Okay.”

“Ever hear of Dora?”

“Who?”

“What do they teach you in school anyhow? Sociology and basket-weaving, God help this generation—”

Mimi said, “Shhh.”

Walter Cronkite had established contact with the Marshall Space Flight Center, where Wernher von Braun was standing by. Jack left the room.

Later that evening Madeleine asked her father who Dora was, but he waved his hand dismissively. “Ancient history.”

“Dad, are you mad at me?”

He laughed. “Naw, what gave you that idea? I’ll tell you something, you’re lucky to’ve been born into a generation of yahoos. You’ll be able to set them all straight.” He asked if she wanted to go to a movie. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid . Mimi didn’t go with them. She never did.

When they got home, Mimi was in bed. Jack made them a snack of sardines on toast and a cucumber broken in half and doused, bite by bite, with salt. Food of the gods. They talked about the origins of life; about whether or not there was a purpose, a design for it all; about the nature of time and the illusion that it moved forward. He poured her a Scotch, taught her to sip it. The Scots were the most civilized people on earth, second only to the Irish, from whom they sprang; they gave us golf, single malt and accounting. He laughed and she could see his gold tooth. He asked her where she wanted to be in five years.

“On TV,” she answered.

He reached for a napkin, found a pencil stub in Mimi’s coffee can next to the phone, licked the tip and drew a flowchart. “What’s your first step?”

The man who whined reappeared from time to time, but she kept him separate from her dad. It never occurred to her that the woman who criticized and complained was anyone other than her mother.

Madeleine walks her bike home through Kensington Market after her session with the therapist. She has chosen not to ride, aware of carrying something that ought not to be jostled. She pictures a collection of old wooden blocks painted with letters of the alphabet — faded red A, blue M, stolid D…. They are in a precarious pile, as though they have recently been played with and may collapse at the slam of a door, an adult footfall.

The sights and sounds of the market envelop her, she is comforted by the ramshackle opulence of it all. Feathers lilt up with the breeze of passing feet, narrow streets are gridlocked with cars at the mercy of pedestrians as disregarding as pigeons. Madeleine looks up; buds are on the trees, and the thousand market smells have begun to blossom too, in the warmth of the April noon — empanadas, chicken shit and Brie. West Indian, Portuguese, Latin American, Granola, Punk, Dowdy Artist, Old Lady Who Has Lived in That House since 1931, Korean, Italian, Greek, Vietnamese, South Asian…. Toronto’s politicians are on a “world-class” kick, and monuments to eighties prosperity have been going up — gold-plated bank buildings, the CN Tower. But this is where Toronto is truly world-class, because so much of the world has chosen to live here.

She turns from Augusta onto Baldwin Street, already appreciating the shade of musty awnings. Even if most of the live animals are destined for the chop, at least you can hear them squawk, see them strutting freely in courtyards. In the fishmonger’s, giant turtles stir like living rocks; doomed lobsters crawl over one another in their tanks; bright trout and tuna bask on their beds of crushed ice, united in their one-eyed stare across the great fresh/salt water divide; in the window of the butcher shop a stencilled trio of smiling pig, calf and chicken preside over the pledge Live and Fresh Killed; bunnies hang upside down, stripped of flesh, resembling cats; there is no pretence here. Nothing comes in a Styrofoam shell emblazoned with a logo, history of hoofs and ears erased. The most processed thing you can buy is a jar of Kraft Sandwich Spread, wipe the dust from the lid first. Vegetables tower, the bins of nuts and rice could suffocate a grown man if they ever tipped over, and you can buy a complete wardrobe of Doc Martens, plaid flannel jacket, orange safety vest and polyester sundress for under fifty bucks.

Kensington is bordered on the east by a Chinatown that’s advancing up Spadina Avenue, following the prosperous retreat north of the first wave of Eastern European Jews, kosher delis giving way to Peking duck, bolts of textiles to embroidered dragons. Bagels are now toasted and draped with lox by women fresh from Hong Kong. Businesses and dwellings are tucked in tight, their painted signs abrupt translations of the mother tongue — restaurants, funeral parlours and weight loss clinics, “Eating Counter,” “Danger Figure Centre,” “Wing On Funeral Home.” And a curious concentration of driving schools.

On the corner, a wooden telephone pole bristles with staples, some biting into nothing more than dog-eared wads, the corners of flyers long since torn away to make room for fresh chatter— Refuse the Cruise, A Woman’s Right to Choose, Learn to Think in Spanish! Reg Hart Retrospective, Sunny Basement Apartment, Have You Seen Our Cat? The Vile Tones at the Cameron, Hamburger Patty at the El Mocambo, Abortion Is Murder! Thursday Is Dyke Night . A glossy new poster catches her eye — three women in matching power suits, stylish, almost film-noirish, the thrusting semicircle of city hall in the background. The race for mayor is on. The favourite to win is a politician called Art Eggleton. The women in the poster are part of a multimedia alternative theatre company called Video Cabaret. They are running as one candidate. Their slogan: Art versus Art .