Liberty Street (28 page)

Her mother clarifies: “I have no interest in going back.”

A neighbour drives into the yard just then, the one who has made an offer on the farm, and Alice goes outside to speak with him.

Frances sits at the table by herself, feeling like an orphan.

W
HEN SHE RETURNS
to the city, she is relieved to find that the apartment she'd shared with Rudy has not been cleaned out and rented to someone else. She boxes up the belongings that Rudy left behind—textbooks, a few clothes, his gym bag and soccer ball—and as she's going through the drawers and closets, she finds her mother's white overnight case. She should hang on to it, she thinks, take it back to her, but it reminds her of the day when her mother came and Rudy was still here, and she moves it to the pile of things she's getting rid of. When she's finished sorting, she takes it all to the Salvation Army in a taxi. Afterward, she climbs out the bedroom window and sits on the roof. It's April, spring, but the
air has not yet warmed up and she watches her own breath rise as though she's smoking a cigarette. If she had a cigarette, she thinks, she
would
smoke it. Music comes from the house across the street—Joni Mitchell. She guesses that Joni is the choice of the gypsy in the long skirt.

She returns to school for the spring session. Although she'd been given an incomplete grade in all her classes the previous semester, the dean allows her to continue her study of general arts and science because of extenuating circumstances. When she's asked to choose a major, she selects psychology. She doesn't know why, maybe because she suspects she's a lost cause and wants to find out the reason. She registers for two spring classes, but she begins sleeping in every morning, and by the middle of the session she's hardly going to school at all. She fails both classes, and she doesn't bother registering for the summer.

She goes back on the pill and begins going out in the evenings, to a hotel bar near the university, where students congregate. She sits by herself until some boy—there's always a willing boy—picks her up, and then she goes home and sleeps with him, never in her apartment, never staying the night, walking home afterward by herself along some dark city street. She doesn't care what the boy's name is. In fact, she tells them not to give her their real names, and she calls them all Steve McQueen, after the actor who'd dropped out of Hollywood and was travelling around the country in a motorhome. He might be in Canada, who knows. She makes up different names for herself: Lulu, Maggie, Isabel. There isn't one boy who ever asks to see her again, and she likes it that way. Once, when she's sitting by herself at a table in the bar, she overhears a group of girls talking about another girl (“She
gives them whatever they want”), and she realizes she's the one they're referring to. Later, when she's leaving with a new Steve McQueen, they pass the table of girls and she stops and says, “For your information, it's not what
they
want that matters.” They look at her as though she's crazy and she says, “Come on, Steve. Let's go figure out what
I
want.”

One boy after another. Frances is drunk every second night. A tough-looking waitress at the bar, an older woman named Josie, takes her aside and says, “Careful, honey. You're going down a bad path here.” Frances says, “Thanks, but mind your own business.”

Until she wakes up one day at the end of August, and she's in her own apartment, in her own bed, and there's a boy in the bed with her. He has curly blond hair. It's hot in the room and his hair is sweaty, sticking to his forehead, making him look vulnerable, like a child. Somehow, she knows that he's a nice boy, or at least nice enough, and she recoils from this knowledge, slips quickly from the bed as though she's discovered a spider under the sheets. She doesn't want to know anything more about him than what she's already sensed, doesn't want to know his name, but she sees his wallet on the floor next to his jeans, and she looks inside and sees that his name is Daniel. She remembers a conversation, laughter. The fact that Daniel plays the bagpipes. She doesn't want to know this either. She puts his wallet in his jeans pocket and then wakes him up and says, “Go home, Daniel. Right now. Don't talk. Don't say a word. Just go home and don't call me, and don't come back.” Daniel slips out of her bed and quickly dresses, and when the door closes after him, she gets in the shower, and begins to feel as though she's walked through a dark and dangerous
tunnel and has emerged, in spite of herself, at the other end. She strips the sheets from her bed and makes a trip to the coin laundry to wash them. When she gets home, she flushes her birth control pills down the toilet, not caring that she's in the middle of a cycle. She takes the bus to the university and registers for the fall semester—she's on probation, they tell her, because of the failed classes. She buys a new bathing suit and starts to swim every day at noon in the university pool. One day in the middle of the afternoon, Frances stops at the hotel bar where she'd met all the Steve McQueens and finds Josie there waiting tables, as she hoped she would be. She thanks her for trying to save her from herself. Josie pretends she doesn't remember, but Frances knows she does.

She stops watching the mail for a letter from Rudy. She realizes that one isn't coming and gives up hoping that he will come back, accepts that he will not be a part of her life, that she will not get a chance to tell him there is no baby. She does send a letter to him, explaining what has happened, care of Professor Bustani at the college in New England, but she has no way of knowing if Rudy ever receives it. She hopes he does because she wants to relieve him of any guilt he feels for not being able to come back.

In the fall, she changes her major.

Three years later, she graduates with an honours degree in microbiology. After working at a summer job in a city hospital lab, she is hired to a permanent position. Her mother places a notice in the Yellowhead paper:
Congratulations to Frances Moon upon her graduation with a bachelor of science degree. Frances's future: hospital laboratory technician. Way to go, Frances.

She sends Frances the clipping and attaches a note that says,
I knew you could do it.

Frances leaves the clipping on the table and catches the bus to the university and goes for a swim. For that one hour in the pool, she feels content.
Remember this
, she tells herself.
This is a feeling to strive for.

On the way home afterward, it starts to spit rain. The late-summer leaves on the trees shine, the way the sun hits them through the clouds. When she gets home, she steps out the window onto the roof with an umbrella, a cup of tea and the newspaper clipping her mother sent. She reads the notice over several times, trying to decide if happiness and contentment are the same thing. She's not sure she knows what happiness is, or whether it matters as long as you're not
un
happy, which right now she isn't. She sips her tea and enjoys one last hour on the rooftop, and when she begins to shiver in the damp air, she tears the newspaper clipping into shreds and lets them drift over the edge of the roof. Then she climbs back in the window and calls the landlord to say she's moving out, and she starts looking in the paper for a new apartment.

A resolute Frances moving up in the world.

Stepping from the ruins of a life that didn't happen.

H
E
'
D BUILT THE
screen porch—the summer porch, he calls it—for days just like this, warm days that you dream about all winter, that your skin longs for. On this day, he sits at the picnic table, waiting, playing checkers against himself.
Damas
, the game was called in Mexico, meaning “ladies.” Whenever he plays against himself, he makes up a name for his opponent. Today, it's Lady Clara. She makes her move while Dooley thinks, not about game strategy but about penitence: step eight, back up, revisit the wreckage. Every act of penitence counts, they tell him at meetings; where there's a possibility of forgiveness, there's hope. Hope is a rumour about town that's caught his ear, one that has him on edge with expectation. He sits in the porch all day, playing checkers with Clara, drinking coffee after coffee until the caffeine—one foot twitching and his knuckles rapping the tabletop—forces him to switch to iced tea.

The next day, his opponent's name is Valentina. She chooses the red checkers, normally a disadvantage to Dooley, since he has better luck with red, but in truth, neither one of them is paying attention. Every time Dooley hears a vehicle cross the tracks, he looks for it to turn up Liberty Street. When no car does, he returns to the game. Valentina's move,
or is it his own? He can't remember. Doubt goes to the lady. Later, when he gets hungry, he plucks a few cherry tomatoes from the hothouse plant he has staked in the porch, then he goes inside and makes himself a sandwich, puts it on a plate along with a pickle and the tomatoes, and eats it at the banquette for a change of scenery.

At sunset, as usual, he carries his disc player outside to thank the sun for another day, or at least he thinks that's what it's all about. Angela knew. He just followed her lead. He looks to the west, where the sun is red from the fires burning farther north, and remembers the red steel ball sinking into the Pacific. He hasn't seen that for years now and probably won't again. He puts on the music and begins to move. It would be called dancing if Angela were doing it, but he's well aware that what he does is an insult to the art form. If anyone were to ask, he would say he's trying to keep his old body in shape, but no one does ask. There's no one here to see.

Half an hour later, he's back in the house, away from the horseflies that glom to the sweat on his skin, into the shower, and then back to the porch, where he plugs in the patio lights for the evening. Red, yellow, and green plastic globes from the dollar store in Yellowhead. Creedence and the Grateful Dead on the disc player. He puts on the headphones and stretches full out on the picnic table and thinks about that other life, the one he made for himself, fuelled by drugs and tequila and a perfect climate. People who disapproved back then—the ones who didn't get the miracle of throwing away your watch and toking on a nice fat doobie—would say, “It's not real; you're fooling yourself,” and he would think,
That's the point, suckers. It's not real. I've had my fill of real.
His ears tuned to the sound of the ocean. His skin in love with the
comfort of the sun. Waves slapping rhythmically on the long sandy coastline, or sometimes crashing like cannon shots. A beach populated by refugees from snow and other, more bitter kinds of cold. Those were days of freedom, and he was a man released into a new life. A life that officially came to an end when Angela left, although truly it had ended much earlier, and many more years went by before he began to dream, mysteriously, of snow, and made his own exit.

Such nostalgia, he thinks, rolling over him like waves on a beach, threatening to wash him off the table and into the surf. One of the patio lights blinks on and off, the yellow one. The bulb must be loose, but he doesn't bother to get up and fix it, trapped as he is by the tide of memory.

Mañana. There's always mañana.

The picnic table (he made that himself too, when he built the summer porch) reminds him of another picnic table, in San Clemente, California, in a campground not far north of the Mexican border. His last night before he entered his new life. It was late in the year, December, too late in the season for tourists to camp in Southern California. Just he and a boy and girl, also hardy Canadians, a few years younger than he was, who thought the weather, compared to home, was warm enough for sleeping in a nylon pup tent. They had escaped from university, they said, but had decided to go back to Canada for the winter term rather than cross the border into Mexico the way he was about to do. They'd been to Disneyland that day and hadn't known that the last bus south left Anaheim at six o'clock, and they'd had to hitchhike along the Coast Highway back to the campground. They'd been picked up first by a vanload of sun-blond surfers, and then by a man who'd advised them they should be carrying a
blade
if they were going to hitchhike that highway. He'd scared the bejesus out of them because surely he was carrying one, and was he just checking to see if they would resist if he pulled it on them?

The three of them—Dooley and the Canadian couple—pondered the man's intentions. He was a Vietnam veteran, they decided, driven into paranoia by the horrors of an unjust war. Then they walked from the campground to the edge of the cliff overlooking the ocean because they'd been told you could see Richard Nixon's house from that vantage point, and sure enough, there it was. They stood high above the beach drinking beer and staring across the bay at the compound, and the girl said she felt as though she were looking at the home of someone evil. How, she wondered, could he be the sitting president of the country they were in? Dooley said he thought they were likely being watched by Secret Service agents with high-powered binoculars. They talked about the draft. They didn't understand it—how a country could force its young people into public service, any public service, but especially one that involved weapons and killing people. Dooley had grown up where there were lots of guns, so he didn't have the same aversion to guns
in principle
as the other two, but he agreed about the forced military service and killing people, other than yourself, on purpose. He didn't tell them that he himself had considered joining up as a means of escape after he'd learned there were Canadians in the U.S. forces. It was a brief, misguided moment for several reasons, not least because of his limp and the metal plate in his head. The girl said Richard Nixon and the other war presidents—who were they? Eisenhower? Lyndon Johnson?—were criminals, they had to be. Johnson was the president when My Lai
happened. Dooley didn't know what that was. Kennedy was the only U.S. president he knew anything about. He knew he'd been assassinated in a convertible in Texas. They'd listened to the news coverage on the radio in school that day.

When a cold wind began to blow off the ocean, the three of them returned to the campground, sat at the picnic table near the pup tent, and smoked themselves blind on Dooley's pot. They tried to smoke all he had because he didn't want to carry drugs over the border, but they couldn't do it, and so in the morning he'd left what remained in a plastic baggie on the picnic table, along with a note wishing the couple luck, wishing himself luck, not really thinking about how pissed off they'd be when they found it there because what if the park warden had found it first? At sun-up he'd packed his sleeping bag and walked away from the campground, down an access road and into San Clemente, where he waited for the bus in a little waiting room with a dozen boys with shaved heads—that's all they were, just boys, younger than he was, younger even than the couple he'd left sleeping in the tent—on their way to San Diego, next stop Vietnam. He tried not to think about them, tried not to think about the Vietnamese they would be sent to kill and the fact that he had considered volunteering himself. From the scared faces he could tell these boys thought they were doomed, and he was glad he wasn't one of them.

In San Diego, they all got off the bus, and the recruits went to a military bus that was waiting for them while Dooley found the Greyhound that would carry him to the border. He was sure he felt the eyes of the recruits on his back as he walked away from them, imagined their envy, but he didn't look back, didn't want to see his own face reflected in a military
bus window. He boarded his Greyhound and placed his backpack on the seat beside him because he wasn't going to let it out of his sight. It contained all his possessions, everything he owned, everything he wanted to own. At the Mexican border, he got off the bus and walked through customs and no one stopped him or asked him for anything—not ID, his name, a reason for his visit. Nothing. They just waved him through. He was surprised by how easy it was. No one knows I'm here, he thought when his feet hit Mexican territory. No one but the couple in the campground, whom he'd told about his plan to disappear—but they didn't know his name, Dooley Sullivan, or where he was from, Elliot, Saskatchewan. He'd told them his name was Dewey, like Donald Duck's nephew.

As he walked across the bridge into Tijuana, he looked down along the riverbank at the cardboard-and-tin makeshift houses, the cooking fires and sewage ditches, the dogs and dark-skinned children and poverty. This wasn't what he'd expected. He'd expected . . . what? Mariachi music and cheap tequila. He wondered if he could really do this, but he told himself,
Keep going.

He wasn't sure where to go, so he followed the tourists and he found himself walking past the stalls of trinkets and Mexican blankets and sombreros and huaraches, past the cantinas and massage parlours, the calls and shouts of “Hey, hippie gringo”—
heepee greengo.
He didn't realize at first that the catcalls were for him (he didn't think of himself as a hippie), but the taunts
were
for him, and he tried to ignore them, did ignore them, even when the vendors stood in his way. When one of them said, in heavily accented English, “Gringo, what happened to your leg? Did you get bit by a dog? I have a cure for that, special for gringos,” Dooley
couldn't stand it and he stopped, and there must have been something in his look, some body language the man understood, because he put up his hands and backed away. “Have a nice day, hippie gringo,” he said, and was gone.

When Dooley came to a sign that said Fernando's Hideaway Cantina, he believed he had found a clue to his future. He knew what “Hernando's Hideaway” was, a song from a musical that his grandfather listened to on the record player. Dooley decided to go inside, ask for a
cerveza
—about the only word he knew in Spanish other than
si
and
amigo
and
gringo.
Spanish, he thought, as he pulled open the door to the cantina, an important step to survival.
Learn it
, he told himself,
as quickly as possible.

Inside, he immediately spotted a group of young people sitting at a table in the corner, drinking and laughing and speaking English. They had backpacks with sleeping bags piled up beside them, a table laden with half-full glasses and bottles of beer. He locked eyes with a laughing girl with the whitest skin he had ever seen and long, dark hair, and he walked right over and sat down with her and her three friends, and they squeezed together to make room for him, no questions asked, as though he were part of the adventure they were on. He thought of the couple with the pup tent, who had made it as far as San Clemente and Disneyland before deciding to spend their student loans on university rather than a trip farther south.

Suckers, he thought.

“
Cerveza
,” he called to the man behind the bar. He wondered if his name was Fernando.

“
Por favor,
” said the girl, whose name was Angela Mazlanka. She poked him in the ribs as though she'd known him for a
long time and hadn't met him just thirty seconds ago. “Didn't your mother teach you manners? Be polite.”

He almost said, “I have no mother,” but instead he called, “Sorry,
amigo.
” He asked Angela, “How do you say that—sorry?”

“
Lo siento.
”

“
Lo siento, amigo. Cerveza. Por favor.
”

And the man—an American named Karl, not a Mexican named Fernando—brought him a beer. Angela directed Dooley to say
gracias
, and Karl answered in Spanish
—de nada
—and Dooley added that to his vocabulary. Then he held up his beer to clink bottles, and thus began his new life. Angela and her friends didn't actually know much Spanish, so Dooley found himself at the bar talking to Karl, asking him how you say this and how you ask for that . . . How much? What time? How far? And where, Dooley asked Karl, does someone go who wants to disappear?

Karl told him about a couple of places.

The five of them—Dooley and the three girls and a guy named Dave—spent the night in a hot room above the cantina. Dooley was happy to learn that Angela was not
with
Dave, although one of the other girls apparently was, because he heard them going at it in the night. They were all sleeping (or not sleeping) on top of their sleeping bags because it was so hot. They were covered in bug bites by morning.

“Who cares? It's Mexico,” said Angela, scratching her arm, her dark eyes laughing, looking at Dooley, her hair wavy from the humidity, and
right in front of him
she took off the pink tie-dyed T-shirt she'd slept in and changed into a peasant blouse she'd bought the day before. Dooley noted the small breasts, the ribs he could see when she lifted her arms.
Her skin was so remarkably white. He thought she would make a good angel in a Christmas pageant and wondered if that's why her parents had named her Angela, if she'd looked that way when she was born, small and white.

“How old are you anyway?” she asked Dooley as she adjusted her blouse, gathered in the neck and then tied the strings in a bow.

“Twenty-four,” he told her. “Next up, twenty-five.” Cocky, as though twenty-five made him a man.