Falling Angels (28 page)

Our work regime went like this: we would clear our calendars and map out a two-or three-week period when we could immerse ourselves completely in the script. Since we live a ten-minute walk from each other, we alternated houses, one day at my kitchen table, the next at Barbara’s. Punctually, at ten a.m., we would sit down with our fresh notebooks and special feminine screenwriting snacks: green grapes, smoked almonds, dried apricots, dark chocolate, tea, coffee and mineral water. There were always tissues nearby too, although we never cried. But Barbara approaches ordinary life the way a survivalist plans for an ice storm, and she prepares herself for any contingency. She is the most highly organized and practical person I
know. I am a foggier multitasker who likes to toggle back and forth delinquently between several projects. I sweated a bit under this focused regime, but it was good for the work.

Barbara’s passion in fiction is truthfulness—if a moment or a word or a line doesn’t ring true, it’s out. Since writers are, by definition, control freaks, when two of them have to agree on whether a character says “whatever” or “hardly,” an interesting tension can develop. A dash or a comma? A sigh or a snort? It was an exotic sensation to work with someone who cared so much about such details.

Sitting across the table from each other, we would talk our way through the story, scene by scene, then line by line. We took turns being the designated daily secretary. We would regularly spin off into tasteless digressions. We laughed a lot, but we were diligent. After three or four hours of scene-hammering, interrupted by lunch (girly, vegetarian), we would retire to our respective computers, where the note-taker would type up the day’s work. This was emailed back and forth, as we added or subtracted changes in boldface until seven, eight or ten p.m.

This meant we were in a continual process of editing each other, all day, every day. It worked remarkably smoothly, because we both recognized the bits that were solid, and left them alone. On the inevitable days when we were bogged down, stalling over single lines or words, it was hard. Our ways of working are very different. Barbara is a terrific mime and a natural performer; she can imagine scenes on her feet, acting them out with her quick gestures and instant accents. I am less silver-tongued, and often my ideas

“Barbara is a terrific mime and a natural performer; she can imagine scenes on her feet, acting them out with her quick gestures and instant accents.” ►
only kindle when I’m writing onscreen, tethered to the computer. I like to go at things sideways and keep myself a little in the dark. Barbara likes to shine a bright light on where the story is going and why—a sensible approach to a screenplay, where structure rules. But screenplays are fluid. In her novels, Barbara builds up her narrative line by polished line, whereas a screenplay tends to develop as a series of preliminary sketches.

One thing we discovered was how much of a screenplay, like an iceberg, exists below the surface of the page. Development is not so much about moving words around as it is about growing the nine-tenths of the story that will never be seen or heard onscreen. Now we’re almost finished with the screenplay (or so we tell ourselves). We have learned a lot about the black art of screenwriting, and our friendship not only survived, it deepened. And thanks to our collaboration and Barbara’s unmatchable narrative gifts, I now have some inkling of what it is like to spend time in the divine realm of a fictional universe: you build it like a house and live inside it while the writing goes along. That’s the good, quiet, gratifying time. Then the book is published, or the screenplay is produced, and you must set your characters free, to enter the alarming noise of the world.

—Reprinted by permission of the author

Watch “How to Survive: Life in a Fallout Shelter,” a September 17, 1961 news segment from the CBC archives. It features the McCallum family emerging from a seven-night stay in a shelter outside the CBC studios.
archives.cbc.ca/IDC-1-71-274-1464/conflict_ war/cold_war/clip5

For another story on fallout shelters in Toronto, read writer William Burrill’s description of his childhood in the nuclear age:
www.eye.net/eye/issue/issue_06.18.98/ news_views/naked18.php

Quill & Quires
profile on Barbara Gowdy, in which
Falling Angels
and her other books are discussed, can be found here:
www.quillandquire.com/authors/profile. cfm?article_id=2564

The feature film
Falling Angels,
based on the book and directed by Scott Smith, opened at the 2003 Toronto International Film Festival and went on to win numerous Genie Awards. Visit the following sites for commentary, reviews and interviews about the film:
evalu8.org/staticpage?page=review&siteid =5120

www.filmmovement.com/filmcatalog/ index.asp?MerchandiseID=23
►

In her essay in this section, Marni Jackson mentions that she and Barbara Gowdy were contributors to
The Journal of Wild Culture.
Read “Call of the Wild” at the following link to learn more about the magazine:
www.rrj.ca/issue/1991/summer/132/

Descant
cultural magazine devoted its entire Spring 2006 issue to Barbara Gowdy. For information on this issue, visit:
www.descant.on.ca/issues/d132.html

Chapter One

Joan Canary was the Reincarnation Baby. Big news at the time, at least in the Vancouver papers. This is going back, 1956. Joan was that newborn who supposedly screamed,“Oh, no, not again!” at a pitch so shrill that one of the old women attending the birth clawed out her hearing aid. The other old woman fainted. She was the one who grabbed the umbilical cord and pulled Joan head-first onto the floor.

Joan’s mother, Doris Canary, attributed everything to the brain damage. Joan’s inability to talk it goes without saying, but also her reclusiveness, her sensitivity to light, her size, her colouring … you name it. Joan’s real mother, Sonja Canary, attributed everything to Joan’s past-life experiences. Sonja was there for Joan’s famous first cry, and it’s true she had thought it was one of the old women screaming,“Flo! Flo! She’s insane!” but that didn’t make any sense because the woman who could have screamed it had throat cancer. If Joan was either brain-damaged or reincarnated, Sonja preferred reincarnated. She would, being the real mother.

To be fair, though, there was something unearthly about Joan. She was born with those pale green eyes, and the hair on her head, when it finally grew in, was like milkweed tuft. That fine, that white. And look how tiny she was! Nobody in the family was tiny. Nobody in the family was anything like ► her, her real parents least of all. Sonja was fat, and had dark brown corkscrew hair and brown eyes. The real father was an orange-haired giant, eyes a flat creamy blue like seatcover plastic. He had remarkably white skin, and Joan did, too, but without the freckles, pimples and hair. Flawless. Joan was flawless. Another way of saying not like any of them. Sonja, of course, went further, she said that Joan was not of this world, and it drove Doris Canary crazy. Baloney! Doris said. Braindamaged, brain-damaged, brain-damaged! she said. Face it. Ask the neurologists.

Doris even told strangers that Joan was brain-damaged. Her husband, Gordon, never publicly contradicted her but he winced and sighed. “It’s the truth,” Doris would say then, as if normally she wasn’t a brazen liar. As if Gordon had ever agreed with the brain-damaged diagnosis let alone that you could point to anything and call it the truth. “The truth is only a version” was one of his maxims.

(Which Sonja heard as “The truth is only aversion” and, although she had no idea what it meant, automatically quoted whenever the subject of truth was raised.)

Chapter Two

Gordon and Doris were Sonja’s parents. They had one other child—Marcy—who had left for kindergarten that June first morning in 1956 when Sonja vomited into her cereal bowl.

“We’ll say I’m the one who’s having it,” Doris announced once the cards were on
the table, these being that Sonja had missed three menstrual periods, that she had been bringing up in the toilet for weeks, that the young man she’d had intercourse with was someone she’d known only for an hour, that what this young man had told her to call him was Yours, and that “Try the slammer” was the superintendent’s suggestion when, a week ago, she’d gone to his apartment hoping to find him.

“We’ll say it’s mine and Dad’s,” Doris said. “When you have a baby at our age it’s referred to as an afterthought.”

By now Sonja was sucking her fingers and sitting on Doris’s lap, and Doris was patting Sonja’s belly and feeling like the biggest Babushka doll in a nest of dolls within dolls, although she and Sonja were both the same height—five-foot-two—and tomorrow, at the doctor’s, they’d find out that they now weighed the same, as well—153 pounds.

(The doctor would be chosen randomly out of the phone book for the sake of secrecy. He would keep mixing Sonja and Doris up, that was how alike the two of them were. Small, flat-featured faces like faces painted on balloons. Dark, curly hair. For the appointment they would hide behind sunglasses, and since only Sonja would remove hers the doctor would assume, wrongly, that her dopey expression was inherited. He’d assume that they were both putting him on—Sonja acting dumber and more innocent than she was, Doris pretending to be overjoyed—and he’d be wrong again. They were putting him on, all right. Sonja was fifteen, not nineteen, and there was no husband overseas. But Sonja was innocent. In ►
all of those fifteen years, maybe ten minutes had been devoted to thinking about sex and another minute or so to having it. And, no, Doris wasn’t overjoyed, but that was how she always sounded. Thrilled, bursting with news that would knock your socks off.)

Even that morning at the breakfast table, if you didn’t know Doris you’d think that having a daughter pregnant out of wedlock was her dream come true. In her breathy littlegirl voice she said that as soon as Sonja was out of school, the end of the month, the two of them would go stay with Aunt Mildred in Vancouver until after the baby was born.

“She’s starting to lose her marbles,” Doris said about Aunt Mildred. “She’ll hardly know we’re there. We’ll tell everyone here she’s on her last legs and needs us, her only living relatives, to look after her, and we’ll just keep stringing that out.” She clapped her hands once. “Play it by ear!”

“Okay,” Sonja said dreamily.

Gordon went along, too. Out of being stunned, out of no choice. He stood just inside the kitchen doorway (he’d been about to leave for work, he had his coat and hat on) and kept reaching up and touching the ceiling to reassure himself that he still could, although being a stringbean wasn’t something that normally heartened him. At the part when Doris said they would tell people the baby was theirs,“Now hold on” came out of his mouth, and Doris waited, but he was a desperado pretending that the finger in his trench-coat pocket was a gun. Abortion, adoption … he couldn’t even say the words.

This was his daughter.

Their other daughter they would keep in the dark. Doris pointed out that you couldn’t expect a six-year-old to hold in a secret as big as this one. Marcy would stay in Toronto with Gordon, and Doris would hire somebody to babysit her after school.

“Can we afford all this?” Gordon asked when Sonja was out of the room. Doris was the one who banked his salary and handled the bills.