Ann-Marie MacDonald - Way the Crow Flies

Once there was a golden age. Post-war, green dream, people raised families and there was more than enough of everything to go around. People from all over the world came to find freedom, peace and prosperity. The Great Experiment worked. Never have so many lived so peacefully, never has so much diversity thrived, never has dissent bred so much opportunity. This beautiful idea made gloriously concrete, this raucous argument, ungainly process, cacophony of competition and compromise; this excellence that emerges from disarray like a smartly dressed woman from a messy apartment in time for work. This precious mess. Democracy. How much can be done in its name before, like an egg consumed by a snake, it becomes merely a shell?

Once upon a time in the West.

WHEN SHE ARRIVES, her mother says, “What’s wrong?”

“Nice to see you too.”

“Je suis ta mère , you can’t fool me.”

She steps inside. “Maman, it’s just spur of the moment, that’s all, I had the day off.”

Mimi raises an eyebrow, then hugs her. The condo is high-ceilinged, its foyer leading past the kitchen and opening onto a spacious dining and living room. The halo of newspaper around the gold La-Z-Boy lowers and her father’s head appears around the side. “Whozat?” he says playfully, staring down his reading glasses.

“Hi Dad!”

Mimi closes the front door behind her—“We’re not paying to air condition the outside”—and ushers her into the kitchen, which overlooks the foyer as well as the dining and living area from behind a waist-high wall and several decorative pillars. “Come and eat, you’re too thin, what’s that you’re wearing? I’m taking you shopping.”

Madeleine follows her mother, thoroughly annoyed, deeply reassured. She hugs her father, who joins them in the kitchen and laughs to see her so unexpectedly.

She eats a “heart smart” version of Maman’s fricot au poulet . How’s After-Three? How’s Stark Raving Madeleine? Are you still planning on going to the States? “Jack, let her eat.” He moves slowly to the fridge, fumbles in a compartment and, with a wink, brings out a foil-wrapped brick.

“Mon D’jeu, qu’est-ce que c’est que ça?” cries Mimi.

Crack cocaine, a human skull — a pound of butter. This house has become a cholesterol-free zone, but Jack has obviously been hiding a stash. He plunks the butter on the table in front of Madeleine with a wheezy chuckle—“For you. Some skin on your bones”—grins himself mauve and returns to the living room.

Mimi shakes her head and says, “You have the nicest papa in the world.”

The kitchen is immaculate. The one patch of chaos flourishes around the phone: stacks of rubber-banded envelopes, a jumble of pens — most of which, her father claims, are out of ink — the old dented pop-up tin address book, whose entries he swears would flummox a Bletchley Park code-breaker, and a Maxwell House Coffee tin jammed with mysterious essentials impossible to inventory. It strikes Madeleine for the first time that her mother’s filing system — her way of working — is not dissimilar to her own. In this kitchen, you don’t dare throw anything away unless your name is Mimi.

Her mother is loading the dishwasher, effortlessly executing a spatial feat the equivalent of cramming twenty-five people into a VW bug. She pauses and holds up a mug stamped with some sort of impressionistic painting. “A lesbian gave me this mug.”

Madeleine looks up, at a loss. “… That’s nice.” Is this the breakthrough? Are we going to have the Movie of the Week reconciliation now?

But Mimi asks, “What are you doing this summer?”

“Working probably.”

“Why don’t you come with your father and me to Bouctouche? Your cousins would love to see you.”

“Maybe I will.” Sure, I’m thirty-two years old, why wouldn’t I take a holiday alone with my parents? By the way, Maman, I’m divorced and in love.

The Pope, Queen Elizabeth II, Charles and Diana and The Blessed Virgin Mary look down from a row of commemorative plates on a plate-rail that runs the upper perimeter of the kitchen, their ranks bolstered by the Acadian flag, the Eiffel Tower, the crest of 4 Fighter Wing and a New Brunswick lighthouse. The cuckoo clock is mounted over the stove as usual, the same faint apprehension hovering about its closed door.

Past the kitchen — at the far end of the living room, by the patio doors with their sheers — Madeleine can see that the television is on and muted— Murder, She Wrote , a rerun. On the coffee table the crystal roosters still duke it out and, above the door to the master bedroom, Dürer’s praying hands preside. The stereo is playing a cassette of east-coast fiddle music, Grandmaman’s hooked rug with the cooked lobsters in the waves hangs over the couch, and in pride of place above the mantel of the gas fireplace is the oil painting of the Alps. Plus ça change .

Madeleine tries and fails to wedge her plate into the dishwasher, so rinses it in the sink and joins her father in the living room. He sits half reclined in his gold La-Z-Boy, newspaper fanned out in front of him, several more washed up around his chair. She sinks into the couch to his right and is tempted to turn up the TV, stretch out and veg. Why did she come here again? Wasn’t it so she could rest? Regress? Hey Dad, want to play Chinese checkers? She pulls her eyes from the screen to the side table, about to reach for the remote when she sees it. Tucked under the table, an oxygen tank. Industrial green with a transparent plastic coil and mask, it hits her like an obscenity.

She finds her voice and asks casually, “When’d you get this groovy accessory?”

“What? Oh that, little while ago. Keeps me fit for my jog around the block.”

She wills her smile to hang in place, like a picture too heavy for its nail. “That’s good, so it helps, eh?”

He shrugs. “It’s more for show. I take a little nip now and then to please Her Nibs.” He grins and gestures with his thumb toward the basement stairs, where Mimi has gone to look for something.

Madeleine smiles back. She doesn’t question the charade.

Why didn’t her mother tell her that Dad is on oxygen now? That changes things. When you see the oxygen van pull up in front of a house, you know someone in there has had it. Don’t think that . She swallows. “Just as well to have it on hand, eh?”

“Oh yeah,” he says, picking up the paper.

“Dad?”

He drops the paper, looks up suddenly and says, “Wait now”—clears his throat of reediness. “I just remembered.” And gets up.

She can tell he is moving spryly on purpose, for show. For her. What’s worse is that she wants him to. She doesn’t want to see him shuffle the way he did in the hospital, with his bracelet and gaping blue gown. Hospitals are where people go to shuffle, and when they no longer need to shuffle they go home. She doesn’t want to see him shuffle here. It would mean he was sent home shuffling. Sent home to die. Don’t .

She watches him disappear into the bedroom with the deliberate spring in his slippers. On the TV, Angela Lansbury talks to a nervous man with sideburns and confronts him with a titanium letter opener. Jack emerges from his bedroom and tosses her something. She catches it.

A silver cross suspended from a red-and-white-striped ribbon. The Air Force Cross.

“That’s for you,” he says.

She looks up. “Wow.”

He says, almost sighs, “Thought you’d like that,” returns casually to the La-Z-Boy and reaches for his newspaper.