Ann-Marie MacDonald - Way the Crow Flies

The opportunities for scorn are as endless and absorbing as the comics are seductive. The pup tent begins to feel like a den of iniquity. Madeleine is frozen, fascinated and appalled when Lisa closes her eyes, crosses her arms over her chest and says, “Oh Ricky, I’m dying, please kiss me.” And Auriel does, right on the lips. Then Auriel dies, and Lisa is Ricky kissing her. Madeleine says, “Pretend I’m a spy and you’re torturing me, okay? And I kill you and escape and Auriel is waiting with a stolen Nazi uniform….” Mrs. Boucher always calls them after about half an hour. “Come and get some fresh air now, girls.”

It is not wholesome to spend the entire afternoon in a pup tent.

These are the dying days of summer. This time next week, we’ll be writing compositions entitled, “What I Did on My Summer Vacation.” Our mosquito bites will still be itchy, still chalky pink with calamine lotion, but we’ll be wearing shoes and socks, packaged into our new clothes, inserted at our desks in a row in a grade four classroom. Grade four. The bewildered days of kindergarten are so far behind. We are losing sight of the retreating shoreline of early childhood. It felt like the whole world; it was merely a speck. On the horizon is a land mass called adolescence. And between here and there, an archipelago of middle childhood. Swim from island to island, find the edible fruit, luxuriate in lagoons of imagination but don’t get caught in a riptide close to shore, do not yield to a warm current; you’ll be swept away with the sea turtles, who live so long and swim so far and don’t know how to drown. When you are eight going on nine, you get stronger every day. You wake up more and more into the real world and yet it’s as though, around your head, there still float remnants of fairy tales, tattered articles of faith in talking animals and animated teacups. A rag-halo of dreams.

Madeleine was kneeling next to her father on the couch, rubbing his head while he read Time magazine. She asked, “Dad, what’s a dyke?”

“You know what that is, you saw them in Holland—”

“No,” and she reads over his shoulder from the cinema listings. “‘When a rake and a dyke fall in love with the same girl, almost anything can happen—’”

“Oh, that’s a — that’s a — a type of garden tool.”

Unconvinced but reluctant to hurt his feelings, she asked her mother while she was helping to set the table.

“It’s a woman who’s sick in the head,” answered Mimi flatly. “Where did you hear that word?”

Madeleine replied, in the aggrieved tones of the wrongfully accused, “I read it in Time magazine!”

“Lower your voice. Jack? What’s she been reading?”

Jack said he figured it was about time to plug in the television set. Madeleine cheered and ran outside to find her brother.

When Jack adjusted the rabbit ears, not one but three channels came in clear as a bell, a fourth snowy but watchable. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation — CBC — and three from New York State: NBC, ABC and the fuzzy one, CBS.

Maman’s rule: “There’s to be no eating dinner in front of the TV in this house.”

Dad’s: “There’s to be no TV while the sun’s shining outside.”

Then the whole family settled in to watch Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color , in black and white.

For Madeleine, it is exquisite agony to watch the child actors who befriend the curious and resourceful young cougars and stray dogs. She burns as boys in dungarees become trapped in abandoned mine shafts, and girls nurse injured horses back to blue-ribbon health. How did those kids get to be in those shows? How can I get there? They are American, for one thing.

“When you’re older you can move to Hollywood and become an entertainer,” says her father. But Madeleine doesn’t want to wait. She yearns for a career now. In show business. It keeps her awake at night. Television fuels the flames. Bob Hope and Bing Crosby in their striped jackets, straw hats and canes, cracking jokes and tap dancing. George Jessel and his cigar. Baleful Rodney Dangerfield, sorrowful Red Skelton; Don Rickles barking, Phyllis Diller carping, Anne Meara deadpanning, Joan Rivers rasping, Lucille Ball wailing. Madeleine doesn’t get most of the jokes but she gets the big thing, which is: they are funny.

Afterwards, in bed with a book, the spell of television feels remote compared to the journey into the page. To be in a book. To slip into the crease where two pages meet, to live in the place where your eyes alight upon the words to ignite a world of smoke and peril, colour and serene delight. That is a journey no one can end with the change of a channel. Enduring magic. She opens Peter Pan .

The intoxication of television, the passion of new friendship, the yearning for Neverland and the smell of new clothes on the racks at Simpson’s in downtown London, Ontario. All combine and accelerate to lift and spin her through the last weekend before school.

After back-to-school shopping in London, the McCarthys buy a picnic lunch at the big Covent Market building in the centre of town. Wurst and Brötchen from the Bavarian Delikatessen, where the ruddy-cheeked owners make a gratifying fuss over Madeleine and Mike. The smell of smoked meats and cheeses, fresh bread and mustard — it’s the smell of a Sunday drive through the Black Forest, right here in southern Ontario.

“Small world,” says Jack, when he finds out that the store owners knew the German bartender at the officers’ mess in 4 Wing. Son of a gun.

They eat their picnic at Storybook Gardens. A park at the edge of town, on the Thames River, it resembles a miniature Disneyland. There is a wooden castle with drawbridge and a little choo-choo train that runs on a real track and carries passengers under twelve around the park. There are life-size figures from nursery rhymes — the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker rock in their tub, Humpty Dumpty teeters on his wall, a dish runs away with a spoon. A big bad plaster wolf threatens three real live pigs who root about and live in miniature houses of brick, wood and straw, and a life-size witch smiles from the door of her candy-coated house. Unlike the Pied Piper, there is no room for hope that the witch may be good after all. Madeleine is disconcerted by the conspicuous absence of Hansel and Gretel. It implies that either the witch has succeeded in eating them, or they have yet to arrive; in which case, “Come here, little girl, you’ll do very well.” On the grounds there is also a greenhouse with tropical flowers, of interest only to adults.

When they return to the parking lot, a sticker has been applied to the rear bumper of the Rambler. Mimi finds it presumptuous — nothing like that would happen in Europe. Madeleine gazes at the sticker: bright yellow, it features the turreted outline of Storybook Castle and the path leading up to it, paved like Dorothy’s yellow brick road.

On their way home, Jack takes the opportunity to happen onto Morrow Street.

“Why are we turning here?” asks Mimi.

“Just getting the lay of the land. You never know, we might want to retire here one day.” He feels Mimi’s hand stroke the back of his head, and he slows as they pass a yellow brick low-rise at the end of a leafy cul-de-sac. Number 472. Manicured lawn and hedge, kidney-shaped flower beds. Mums. A circular drive leads to the front doors, which are sheltered by a porte cochère.

“I don’t know if I’m ready for that kind of excitement yet,” says Mimi.

The place is like a mausoleum. Perfect. As the building recedes in the rearview mirror, Jack feels a butterfly stir in his stomach. He says, “Who wants ice cream?” A cheer goes up in the back seat.

“Jack,” says Mimi, “we’ve had a lot of treats today already.”