Ann-Marie MacDonald - Way the Crow Flies

Madeleine had been on the phone with her father when the final conflict flared. They’d been arguing and she had resorted to out-talking him, asking how he could object to American foreign policy, yet laud Reagan’s bogus Star Wars plan, “the product of a cryogenically preserved brain! George Bush is actually running the country from a CIA desk littered with GI Joes and conversational Arabic tapes, oil, that is, black gold, Texas tea!” and Jack was laughing and egging her on. Christine came in with a pastry box and new highlights in her hair. She stood smiling for an instant, and Madeleine glanced up—“My dad says hi.” When she got off the phone, Christine had already dragged the forty-gallon knapsack from the attic.

Madeleine was grateful for marathon Thursday, sailed through shooting Friday, laughed and heckled at the Pickle Barrel while Ilsa gave her a scalp massage with her blood-red talons, and filled three foolscap pages for Shelly. No one suspected that her life was falling apart. She felt like a high-functioning alcoholic: slithering down the drapes at three, greeting hubby, bright-eyed and breath-minted, at five.

For three nights she cried into her air mattress — canvas, silty water smell reminding her of the Pinery campgrounds and Lake Huron. She wept for Mike at twelve, she wept for her smiling self at nine, she grieved the smack of a good catch, baseball arcing from glove to glove like a dolphin in the after-supper sun; she wept for childhood, and for anyone who had ever been a child. Amazed, even through tears, at the thematic sweep of her grief. Concentric bands of sorrow radiating outward from ground zero. Centralia.

At a quiet moment — tears on empty, not yet dawn — she pulled his string. He spoke, wise-crackling and unintelligible like a transmission from outer space. She hugged him and fell asleep. Don’t tell .

On Saturday morning she went to Honest Ed’s for cutlery and came home with a portable black-and-white TV, the kind they have in hospitals and taxicabs. She has spent the day cross-legged on the carpet, watching infomercials and The PTL Club and letting the answering machine take the calls. Shelly, her mother, Tony, Janice, Tommy, five others and Olivia. Ring… . She ignores it. She has ordered an all-purpose cleaning agent not available in stores, and responded with a hundred-dollar pledge to Goldie’s plea on PBS. Ring… . She switches to Secret Storm — klachunk . “If you have a message for Madeleine, please leave it after the beep; if you’re looking for Christine, call 531–5409.” Bee-eep . A voice through the machine: “Good day Mrs. McCarthy? My name is Cathy? And I’m calling from Consumer Systems Canada? And I wonder if you would be kind enough to phone me back at 262–2262 extension 226 and consent to participate in a brief questionnaire concerning certain well-known consumer items—?”

Madeleine grabs the phone—“Hi, Cathy?”

“Oh, hello Mrs. McCarthy—?”

“Look, I’ve just been diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer.”

“Oh my—”

“Yeah, so I drowned the kids in the bathtub.”

Silence.

“Cathy?”

“Um … I–I can call back.”

“Sure, why don’t you do that, I’m just wrapping them in the shower curtain.”

Click .

Poor Cathy.

On Sunday morning, by dint of supreme effort, Madeleine reaches forward and switches off the television. In a display of strong-mindedness, she decides to take a shower. She finds The Pregnant Virgin behind the toilet, its pages fanned into an accordion. Did Christine drop it in the bath on purpose? She sits on the porcelain edge of the tub and starts reading: “Analyzing Daddy’s Little Princess.” Oh please! Not to mention you can tell right away it’s written mainly for straight women. Oh well, to be gay is to be on simul-translation from day one, finding the universal in the particular and ingesting the distilled nourishment; like any minority that hopes to eat from the big table. “Integration of Body and Soul….” She starts reading. She reads until she has a crick in her neck and moves to the floor with her back against the tub. She reads until she is hungry. She reads until she has finished the book.

Madeleine knows that while she had Christine, she could be the unfucked-up one. Now, in the wake of Christine’s departure, Madeleine’s friends and colleagues will see through her crumbling facade, smell the bodies amid the rubble and turn away. Anyone foolish enough to stick around would have to be an idiot.

“No, McCarthy,” says Olivia, “you’re the idiot.” They are on the phone. Olivia says she’s coming over.

“No, I’ll come over to your place.”

Madeleine climbs the fire escape, past a cat or two. Dingy bricks cooking in the mellow light of five o’clock, peeling black of the iron stairs that ring out low like church bells; visible between the slats below, drift of garbage in the grease-slicked alley, old cushions, dog-torn plastic bags, smell of pot and lilacs; the bar and grill at the front is playing Annie Lennox … . Look up. Olivia is sitting at the top of the steps, on a milk crate, in a slant of sun, smoking Drum tobacco, roll-your-own.

“Success without college,” says Madeleine.

Olivia reaches down her hand.

The housemates are out. There is half a bottle of bad white wine in the fridge, along with blocks of tofu, mysterious Asian greens and murky tubs of things.

“How many people live here?” asks Madeleine.

“That depends,” says Olivia.

How can she bear communal living? The bathroom alone. Madeleine sips and is ambushed by a complete happiness. What are these unreasonable happinesses? Like the lilies of the field who neither toil nor weep. The way the light leans in from the balcony down the hall to lounge against the walls painted pale pink, the softness of a gust of air, one’s sudden weightlessness. Ecstasy. State of grace in a friend’s apartment on a Sunday evening in May. Everything is going to be all right.

Olivia walks past her with a watering can. After a moment, Madeleine hears music. Strings — attenuated, patient. Baroque strands like hair drawn through a comb, untangling the market sounds outside. She follows the music to the front room. Olivia is on the rickety balcony watering the plants.

Madeleine joins her. Olivia turns to her.

“No,” says Madeleine, “it would be like kissing my sister.”

“You don’t have a sister.”

Olivia’s secret identity is revealed in the kiss. The amazing transformation works in both directions: she turns back into Madeleine’s friend when they are talking. Colleague, critical, argumentative. They go inside. They kiss against the wall outside Olivia’s bedroom. They stay standing for quite a while, in deference to Madeleine’s desire to avoid a “rebound” relationship.

“We don’t have to have a relationship,” says Olivia, “we can just have sex.”

“Is that what you want?”

“No, but I think it’s better if we think of you as a swinging bachelor for the time being. You should date for a while.”

Madeleine sees herself in a Matt Helm apartment — remote-control bed and bar, shag rug. “I don’t think so,” she says.

Olivia leans, one shoulder against the wall, shirt open, devastatingly sensible underwear. The Maidenform Woman — you never know where she’ll turn up.

“‘Date,’” says Madeleine. “I don’t even like the word.”

“Okay, then we can just have sex. And be friends.”

“That’s called a relationship.”

Olivia kisses her again. “You’re not ready for a relationship.”

They lie down on the dreadful futon, field of lumps and crabgrass, and Olivia resumes her secret identity, pink-tinted titan.