Close to Spider Man (6 page)

Oh, well. She was always looking for proof that I was, indeed, an asshole. I try to be helpful.

I was just helping myself to more food – I forgot how much food there is at these functions – and this cute little old Irish lady struck up an interesting conversation with me:

“Couldn't help but notice how much you're enjoying my broccoli cheese casserole there, dear.”

“Did you make this?” I said. “This is some of the finest broccoli cheese casserole I've ever come across. I guess I should leave some for everybody else though, huh?”

She laughed and asked me if I played in your band, if that's where I knew you from.

“No, not exactly,” I said.

“Did you work with her at the restaurant then?” she asked.

“No. No, I did not,” I said.

“Down at the pub then, you work together down at the pub?”

“No, no we didn't work together down at the pub, either.”

She looked puzzled, so I blurted it out. “We were lovers for a couple of years. That's how we know each other.”

She didn't blink a wrinkled eye or skip a beat.

“So you take about a pound of broccoli and steam it, just a little, because you're going to bake it all for a while, once you've made your cheese sauce. You'll need some cream, not milk, and I find the older cheddar has more of a snap to it.”

I laughed all the way out to the backyard, after one of your brothers rescued me and we all snuck out back to smoke a spliff.

I always liked your brothers. I see shadows of you in them sometimes, when they turn their faces just so; they feel like family, remind me of my cousins.

Your oldest brother was drunk, had his tie off already, and was feeling sentimental. “We always liked you the best, you know,” he whispered, one arm slung around me, like it was a secret. “We thought you were the best of all of them.”

Your little brother was stoned, self-reflective. “Ironic, eh?” he pondered. “She dumps you, to marry a guy in a kilt. Sorry, dude, no offense, but you know what I mean?”

You looked beautiful today, getting married. “She looks just radiant.” Everyone kept saying it, and it's true. You did.

Your face alive with that kind of wide-eyed love that used to make even me wish that I could want that picket fence as much as you did. I could never believe like you could. We broke our hearts, you and I, figuring that one out.

But the truth is, I could never give you this. A wedding that makes your grandmother happy. What's it like? “Legitimate” love, I mean. The gifts and congratulations and tax relief, not to mention the relief in your father's face, what is that like?

Because I can't even imagine it, and reality provides that I probably won't ever be that blushing bride, and I don't quite cut the husband mustard, either. Motorcycles and nonmonogamy, or a mortgage and a mini-van: I am old enough now to know that none of this is your fault, or even mine.

There will be no church bells for me, but I cannot bring myself to mourn the loss of something I never wanted. Toasters and linen and casserole dishes, the blessings
bestowed when one does as our mothers did, I will never know, and you always had the option.

Did I mention how beautiful you look today? Happy and hopeful, what more could I wish for you? I mean, what more could I wish?

IT SOUNDED LIKE SHE WAS CALLING from a pay phone, what with all the background traffic and passers-by. I had to listen to catch all the words.

“So, Ave have to get together to do this thing. Call me and we'll go do this thing.”

We had decided to go together, for moral support. It is an intimidating task, involving forms and government agencies, unfeeling civil servants poking blank-faced into one's private self.

But it has to be done. We need to finally legally change our names. This should be easy, this should be free, but it is not.

Who came up with the plan to legally name a child the day he or she was born? Whose bright idea was that? So many mistakes to make, such a wide margin of error.

The exhausted young mother cradles her still sticky newborn to her heaving chest. She lets her head rest against the sweaty forehead of the dry-mouthed new father, and they both watch, incredulous, as this tiny life form opens and closes her
still wrinkled fingers and they exclaim together
:

“Let's call her Dorothy. After her grandmother.”

But they have no means of foretelling young Dorothy's future. In fact, they know nothing about her at all. They only want the best for her, her parents, but she's only minutes old and they've already burdened her with a weight she will carry for years, perhaps for the rest of her life.

Because what they don't know is that Dorothy is not a Dorothy. This name will appear on birthday cards, and be felt-penned on stickers she will be forced to wear on the first day of pre-school, but it will never ring true to her ears. People will call it out and she will be obliged to come, scabby knees and baseball hat on backwards, because that is her name, and someone has called it out. But she will know that something is wrong, that someone made a tragic mistake, someone wasn't thinking straight, and now she, Dorothy, must pay for it.

Until Dorothy is old enough to stand in line at the office called Vital Statistics and name herself again.

“Her heart beat and blood pressure seem normal, doctor, it looks like the sticks and stones just missed her bones, but someone named her Dorothy. Is there anything we can do?”

Dorothy is a mechanic, one hundred and seventy-five pounds of biceps and brush-cut, and looks more like her father than her brothers do.

So, you stand in line, you fill out some forms, take out a
couple of ads in the paper, no big deal, right? You just change your name if they got it all wrong.

I'll tell you what I'm worried about: do they make you explain yourself? Does the form make you say why you feel you must change your name? State reason below. Choose one of the following. Provide documents. Use a separate sheet of unlined paper if necessary. Please print in black or blue ink only.

I can see myself, palms sweaty and stammering.

“My legal name doesn't fit the rest of me. It never has, Your Honour. See, here, how I was born with no hips at all, and how my t-shirt hides my tits? I have hair on my chest, too, and well, everyone makes mistakes. I just need one more chance to get it right, if you will just allow me to write Ivan down on this form, if it pleases the court, I would be much obliged. I just turned thirty Your Honour, and it's time something about me matched.”

This is a dramatization, of course. It probably won't be all that bad. And my name is not Dorothy.

August, I974 † Whitehorse, Yukon

FIVE YEARS OLD AT THE QUANLIN MALL, Saturday shopping, and I was holding open the swing door for my mom and the cart. I remember I had half a cinnamon candy stick in my mouth and a red baseball hat with the plastic thing in the back pushed through a hole that was smaller than the smallest hole in the strap, a hole I had to make myself with the tip of a heated bobby pin.

So the rest of the strap stuck oddly out from one side of the back of my head, but I didn't care, because it was my Snap-On-Tools hat that my dad had given me, just handed it right over to me when the guy at the tool place gave it to him, he was buying rivets or concrete pins or something, and the hat said Northern Explosives too, in black block letters in an arch over the hole in the back part, and come to think of it, what I wouldn't do now for that hat.

So enough about the hat, this American tourist sees me holding the door open, and of course he assumes it's for him,
so he won't bump his cameras together pushing past his belly to open it for himself, and he steps through the door, right in front of my mom and her groceries.

He thanks me down his nose in heavy Texan “Thank you, son,” and sucks more fresh Yukon air through his teeth. He is about to speak to me again, to meet the people, to engage in a little local colour, in the form of a polite little boy, and perhaps, via a patronizing conversation with him, get to meet his lovely young mother, too, who also had my little sister in tow, perpetual snot on her upper lip, even in summer like this.

My mom interrupts this quaint northern moment, pushing the puffed wheat, two percent, and pork chop-laden cart briskly through the door. “She is not your son,” she shoots out the side of her mouth and the door slams shut behind the surprised Texan. I can't see him anymore, there is just myself reflected in the dusty glass, and the back of my mom smaller in the background, as she pushed the cart and dragged my little sister to my dad's Chevy, where he was smoking behind the wheel.

We could hate the tourists a lot more back then, before the mines all shut down.

The pavement was so hot in the parking lot that the bottoms of my sneakers stuck to the tar that patched the cracks on the way back to my Dad's truck.

April, 1992 † Vancouver, B.C
.

The van was packed when the call came.

“Is this the girl named Ivan?”

How much can you really guess about a stranger's voice on the phone, but I listened to the soft, smiling lilt of hers rise and fall as she explained that she had been at a going away party for me the night before, a surprise going away party that my friends threw for me because I was driving up to the Yukon today to work for six months. Except the surprise part of the plan had worked just a bit too well, because what nobody besides myself knew was that I was teaching twelve inmates at the Burnaby Correctional Centre for Women how to make leather belts all night, and this was the first I had heard about my own party, and it was over. Quite the surprise it was.

“Great party,” she explained, and the sound of her laugh made me think of leprechauns. “Anyway, I was going to take the bus up to Whitehorse today, and well, how do you feel about some company? I cooked a whole ton of pasta salad for the bus.”

Now, no amount of gas money and pasta salad can pay for four days on the Alaska Highway with someone who is starting to get on your nerves, because after Prince George you really are in the middle of nowhere, but I liked her voice. I said I'd pick her up in an hour at her sister's place on my way out of town.

Of course, driving over, the doubting began. Just me and the open road home – and a perfect stranger. What if she doesn't smoke, or wants to talk about co-dependency or something like that for two thousand miles? She-ll be so glad she's not stuck on a Greyhound that she won't actually say anything; she'll just silently roll down her window in a disapproving fashion and say things like, “I should give you my therapist's number. She specializes in addiction issues.”

But I picked her up, she bungee-Corded her beat-up momitain bike to the roof, loaded in her pasta salad, lit a smoke, and smiled with an elf mouth that matched her leprechaun laugh as she surveyed my van and said:

“So if she breaks down, I guess I'll just double you the rest of the way on my bike.”

Three nights later, in a campground somewhere just outside of Fort Nelson, she slipped her tongue into my ear and her right hand into my Levi's and whispered, “I've wanted to do this since we left Kitsilano.”

Six months later, I drove back to Vancouver to go to electrical school, and she stayed. She had met a sweet-faced French-Canadian boy who I thought looked like Leif Garrett, and she was, unbeknownst to all of us at the time, pregnant with their first son.

“You gonna write me, Chris?” I asked her as we loaded the last of my stuff back into my van.

“Probably not, but I'll think about you whenever I eat
pasta salad, and if that's not love, then I've never been in it.”

This is the closest thing to a commitment you will ever get from a leprechaun, and I knew this at the time.

†

November, 1998 † Whitehorse, Yukon

It is a balmy November day at Chriscabin, about three below zero and still no snow. The grass is frost-frozen, sparkling under a sun that shines, not cold, but heatlessly, if there is such a word.

Chris wants to get the kids together and dressed and go into town, about a half-hour drive in a four-by-four. You could still make the road right now in a car, but not after a good snowfall.

I haven't seen Frances, her middle son, since he was a babe in arms. He is now three, and his red brown curls and round face were the first thing I saw at six this morning, when I was still scotch and cigarette sandpaper-mouthed. He pulled the covers off my face and pronounced in a matter-of-fact falsetto: “I'm not sure who you are, but could you help me out?” His one hand still held the end of the sleeping bag up, and his other hand held a strip of toilet paper, which trailed across the cabin floor and into the cold storage room where I assumed he'd just performed his morning's first production.

Because Frances performs everything. He has just pranced out of his and his brother's bedroom, in a pair of emerald and blue-striped tights, red wool socks, and what looks like part of a sleeve from his dad's old orange sweater stretched up and over his chest, like a tube top.

“Dat dah da dahhh . . .” sliding in his socks on the bare floor, his smile flits and then disappears, and he comes to a full halt in front of Chris.

“Frances. Warmer clothes. It's minus three.”

His shoulders drop like sandbags, and he stomps, his censored artist head down, back to wardrobe, to change. Thirty seconds later, sliding socks and all, he is back out for act two, but with a purple hippie scarf he is whirling around his neck and twirling . . . his red socks making circles and figure eights, he knows no fear of slivers. . . .

“A sweater. For chrissakes, Frances, don't you want to go into town with Ivan?”

Again with the shoulders, and eventually he is forced to compromise his ensemble altogether and submit to a sweater, and a toque as well. I know how he feels – nobody wears a toque and a tube top at the same time, and then to have to cover it all with a sweater?