Guy Vanderhaeghe - Homesick

Change of any sort, even the passing of autumn into winter, always had the effect of temporarily lifting Vera’s spirits. Now the stinging wind which burned her cheeks braced and energized her. She went forward briskly, the rapping of her heels on the sidewalk sounding crisp and metallic in the frosty, clear night. Only the occasional late-night diner showed any signs of life. In them Vera could see cabbies arguing and drinking coffee at the counters. These were the same men who prowled their hacks back and forth in front of the theatre when the movies let out, hoping to snap up a fare. But tonight the hunting had been bad, a sparse crowd for a bad movie. So they were sitting on their duffs, trying to make up their minds whether to call it a night and go home to the little woman or to keep trying to scare up a buck against the odds. Vera might have joined them for a cup of hot chocolate if the wind hadn’t felt so good in her face. It was blowing her head clean of the reek of cheap perfume, men’s hair oil, and the close, hot, overpowering smell of bodies packed shoulder to shoulder so they could be entertained. She turned up her collar, hugged her coat to her bosom, lengthened her stride.

After five minutes at this determined pace, Vera turned into a narrower, quieter street of small shops over which their proprietors and families lived. For almost a year Vera had passed this way each day on her way to and from work but its strangeness had not worn off; it still seemed to her foreign and a touch romantic. Sometimes she imagined it was a street in Europe because she knew this was as close to Europe as she would ever get, and her walk home became a stroll in Vienna, Budapest, Prague. What helped this illusion was the look of the stores and the immigrant storekeepers, most of whom were Jews.

Vera always shopped on this street out of a sense of adventure, to hear the nervous, dark-suited men serve her in English accented by Polish, Russian, German, Hungarian, and Yiddish. She was secretly disappointed when she was waited on by one of the sombre, responsible children who deftly wrapped parcels and climbed onto stools to ring up sales and make change with decision. It was difficult to preserve the illusion of Vienna or Budapest when the children spoke to her in their ordinary, everyday Canadian voices. Neither the Stars of David, the Yiddish signs in the windows, nor the young boys with their beanie hats stuck on the crowns of their heads could help recapture the dream that language had shattered. No, what was more to Vera’s taste was some shrunken old man bent over his counter late at night, poring over a newspaper, a single light burning in the shop for economy’s sake, and the rest in shadow. That could be Russia.

There were no such sights to be seen tonight. The bad weather had long ago blown out hope of customers in even the most stubbornly optimistic. Blinds were drawn and doors were locked. The rings in the window of the shabby jewellery store were covered with a cloth, the sausages were removed from the hooks in the butcher shop; the pawnshop, the shoe store, the corner grocery were all dark.

It was on her favourite street that the absence of traffic allowed Vera to hear footsteps closing quickly on her from behind. A glance over her shoulder told her it was who she thought it was. Only one light showed on the street, a window burned on the second floor above a men’s wear shop across the street. Vera fluttered toward it like a moth. She hurried across the street, coat flapping, eyes lifted to the light. Someone was up there, awake.

Behind her she heard feet break into a run, a patter of leather on asphalt.

Brought up short by the storefront, Vera jerked around, an animal at bay. When she whirled about, Thomas checked his headlong pursuit in the middle of the street. Briefly he hesitated and then came on in a stiff, self-conscious amble meant to suggest a man confident and completely at ease. Over Vera’s shoulder four shadowy mannequins watched his approach, saw him snatch off his tweed cap, ball it in his fist, and stuff it in his pocket when he was just yards from her. He came on like a sleepwalker and only halted when he was so close to Vera that it was all she could do to stop herself from visibly shrinking away, backing herself up against the plate-glass window. The light from the window above revealed perspiration gleaming on Thomas’s upper lip and a ghostly dab of shaving lather on the lobe of his left ear. The run had quickened his breathing. Vera saw him pant white smoke in the cold air.

“What do you want?” demanded Vera, feigning assurance. “Why are you following me, Thomas?”

Thomas did not appear to know how to reply. He started to lift his arms and then let them collapse helplessly against his sides. He shook his head, began to rock back and forth on his toes, swaying like a man overcome by vertigo on the brink of a precipice.

“What do you want?”

Thomas’s answer was to lurch blindly forward, fall on his knees, fling his arms convulsively about her waist, and burrow his face into the front of her coat. The theatricality, the extravagance of this gesture, paralyzed Vera with numbing embarrassment. My God, she thought, what if someone is witnessing this performance? How ridiculous. She cast her eyes apprehensively up and down the street.

“Stop it,” Vera said, her voice lowered now in such circumstances, almost a whisper. “Stop this, Thomas.”

He only clung to her harder, tightening his arms around the small of her back and working his face against the cloth of her coat. The strength of this embrace almost toppled her, and she had to reach out and steady herself by placing a hand on his head, but at the touch of his hair she withdrew her hand as if it had brushed fire. The grinding of his forehead against her pubic bone was becoming painful.

“Stop it!” she cried angrily, shoving at his shoulders. “Get away!”

Which only spurred Thomas to clench her even more suffocatingly close, to crush her spine with the jutting bones of his wrists. It was the squeezing pain, the panic of being robbed of breath, that made Vera strike Thomas smack dab on the dried shaving lather plastered to his ear. Her roundhouse slap rocked him but didn’t break his grip so that when she tried to tear herself free she only succeeded in losing her balance and crashing back against the plate-glass window. The store boomed hollowly, like a drum.

Vera recovered and came up fighting. She pummelled his head and shoulders with both hands, snapped her body backward in an attempt to break free. Thomas was dragged along her line of retreat, scrambling on his knees, his forehead bouncing off her pelvis and his hair shooting up in bursts of shock whenever Vera landed one of her haymakers. Whenever she missed and caught air Vera reeled and slammed against the window, striking the sound of distant thunder out of it.

Then a light burst on behind the mannequins, a lock rattled, and the door to the shop was thrown open. Vera and Thomas froze. Thomas remained on his knees, neck craned around to the door, mouth hanging open stupidly and eyes squinting against the sudden brightness. A man in a vest undershirt, trousers, and stockinged feet stood in the open doorway, a look of gentle, bemused perplexity on his face. He was middle-aged, very tall, stoop-shouldered, and had faded, reddish hair. Something about his manner made Vera think of Jimmy Stewart, her favourite actor. He had the bewildered innocence of Mr. Smith. A slow smile of amusement spread over his face as he took in the scene, Thomas down on his knees before Vera.

“I hope I haven’t interrupted a proposal,” was all the man said.

With that, Thomas got to his feet and began to strike ruthlessly at the dust on the knees of his trousers.

“Not likely,” spat out Vera. She jabbed an accusing finger at Thomas. “He followed me. He chased me. I ran here because I saw a light was on.”