Ann-Marie MacDonald - Way the Crow Flies

“Are you mad at me?” asks Marjorie, folding her hands, bouncing them against the front of her dress.

“Why should I be mad?”

“Well, are you going to make friends with Grace?”

“No.” Madeleine can hear her brother’s voice in her own. A note of masculine impatience with stupid girls. She always defends girls when Mike criticizes them, but sometimes they can be really dumb.

“Will you be my best friend?”

Madeleine doesn’t know how to answer. Kinda soon to be poppin’ the question, ain’t it, doc? She mumbles, “I don’t know.”

Then Marjorie tries to hold hands! Madeleine takes off, running to the swings, hops onto one like a cowboy onto a waiting horse and pumps till she is flying high.

Marjorie waits patiently below. “I suppose you’ve met the Froelichs,” she calls in her grown-up sarcastic voice.

Madeleine watches as Marjorie fans her dress out like a ballerina and tiptoes in a circle. Madeleine stands up on the wooden swing and pumps harder.

“The Froelichs are trash, I’m sorry to say,” says Marjorie. “Except for Ricky, he’s a dreamboat!” She shrieks and runs to the teeter-totters.

Madeleine lets go at a great arcing height and sails through the air to a perfect landing. She joins Marjorie at the teeter-totters — at least they are doing something normal now. They rise and fall, politely avoiding giving each other the bumps.

“Whatever you do, Maddy, keep away from his sister, and I don’t mean the retarded one, I mean the mean one, Colleen, she has a knife and she’ll murdleize you with it.”

Madeleine is starting to feel ill. According to Marjorie, the PMQs are full of reeking, retarded and dangerous kids, all of whom she may already have accidentally made friends with. Not to mention Marjorie herself. Madeleine experiences a pang of longing for Germany, for the base at 4 Wing, the clean fighter jets — young pilots who swung her up into the cockpit and saluted her father. The occasional B-52—part of United States Air Force Europe, USAFE — lumbering down the runway. There is a flight of B-52s in the air at all times, they are up there now, big blind dinosaurs, landing gear closing like pincers, hard segmented bellies full of bombs. Keeping us safe.

“And they have a vicious dog,” says Marjorie, teeter-tottering sidesaddle.

“No he’s not, he’s friendly.”

“He’s a German shepherd, Maddy,” says Marjorie sharply. “They can turn on you.”

Madeleine closes her eyes and pictures the beautiful trees, rose bowers and fountains of the town near 4 Wing: Baden-Baden, in the heart of the Black Forest, the Schwarzwald. A spa town full of rich old ladies and their poodles — full of spies, said her dad, “reading newspapers with eyeholes cut out.” The smell of pastry in the day and charcoal fires at night, the taste of mountain streams on a Sunday Wanderung , the language that smells like rich earth and old leather, du bist wie eine Blume… .

“Oh Maddy I feel sorry for you, you have to live right across the street from the Froelichs, I hope you’re going to be all right.”

“I have to go home,” says Madeleine, dismounting, careful to hold the teeter-totter still for Marjorie.

“How come?”

“I have to have lunch.”

“But my mum is making it for us,” says Marjorie. “I already asked, and she’s made cupcakes and everything.”

“Oh.” As soon as you feel sorry for someone, you are trapped. “Okay.”

It’s only one half-hour of her life, then she’ll be home with Mike. He’s making a model airplane with his normal friend, Roy Noonan. And Dad will be there. They’ll play Chinese checkers and she will breathe the clean air of her own house. What will I say the next time Marjorie comes to call on me?

They walk across the baking green field and up St. Lawrence Avenue. Madeleine keeps her hand in her pocket in case Marjorie tries to hold it again. Marjorie lives in a yellow bungalow across the street from the little green one — it’s still empty. She runs up her front steps and opens the screen door. Madeleine follows.

Inside the house, it is dark. Madeleine’s eyes take a moment to adjust. It’s stuffy. Cigarettes, but not the refreshing kind. Stale. Plastic covers on the living-room furniture, the curtains drawn. “Right this way,” chirps Marjorie.

In the kitchen, the blinds are pulled down. “My mother gets headaches,” Marjorie says, as though she’s telling Madeleine that they have a maid and a grand piano.

Madeleine doesn’t say anything. She sits at the brown Formica table and wonders if Marjorie has any brothers and sisters. There is nothing on the table. No dishes in the dish rack, no newspapers lying around, no junk. When Madeleine’s house gets messy, her parents say, “Don’t worry, it looks lived in.” Marjorie’s house does not look lived in.

Marjorie opens the fridge. “Hmmm, let’s see.” Madeleine sees past her into the brightly lit fridge, the stainless grille of shelves. Almost empty.

Marjorie makes them peanut butter sandwiches on white bread, cut into four with the crusts off. Garnished with pimento-stuffed olives from a jar. There are no cupcakes.

Marjorie pats her mouth with a cocktail napkin. “That was delicious if I do say so myself.”

Madeleine flees without seeing Marjorie’s room. “Thanks,” she says. And runs all the way home.

“You forgot the milk.” Mimi is unpacking the groceries onto the kitchen table.

“Can’t make head or tail of your writing, Missus,” he says, biting into an apple.

She pulls out the two bags of potatoes. “Jack McCarthy, how many potatoes do you think we can eat?”

He grins. “Make poutine or something.”

“‘Make poutine,’ I’ll make you!”

“Is that a promise?”

Mike bursts through the door and up the steps. “Can Roy stay for lunch?”

“B’en sûr mon pitou.”

Mimi is ladling out the last of the tomato soup, the pyramid of ham sandwiches on the table has dwindled, Roy is on his third and Mike is reaching for another, when Madeleine arrives.

“Where were you?” Mimi asks. “Where’s your friend, does she want to stay for lunch?”

“Who?” asks Madeleine, then, “Oh, I went to her house for lunch.”

“You ate already?”

“Yeah but I’m still starved.” One last half a sandwich remains on the platter. Madeleine takes it and puts it on her plate, where it’s joined by another half. She looks up at Roy Noonan, who grunts, “You can have it, I’m full.”

“Thanks,” she says, and catches sight of Maman winking at Dad. “What’s so funny?”

Jack says, “Go ahead and eat up, sweetie, it’ll put hair on your chest.”

ON THE MCCARTHYS’ LAWN, the potluck is in full swing. Betty Boucher arrived with a platter of hamburger patties ready for the grill, a potato salad and a coconut cream pie, and her husband, Vic, followed with their barbecue, their kids and a clanking burlap bag. Jack already had hot dogs on the go over the coals, with a chicken on the rotisserie, Mimi brought out devilled eggs, a shredded carrot and raisin salad, a poutine rapé and a pineapple upside-down cake — not up to her usual, but this is day two, so arrête! Vimy and Hal Woodley came with a lasagna, a tossed salad and a bottle of German wine they’d saved from their last posting. Hal is a tall, fit man in his forties, with a salt-and-pepper moustache and close-cropped grey hair. “What a pleasure to meet you, Mimi.” “Would you like a nice cold beer, Hal?” He is “Hal” to the ladies and “sir” to the men — unless he is in someone’s backyard or on the golf course, but even then it’s for him to say. The Woodleys’ eldest daughter is away at university and their younger girl is “off with her friends.” Auriel Boucher brought Lisa Ridelle, whose mother showed up to make sure it was okay and threw her arms around Mimi.