“How are you?” says Dekker, drawing back, coughing slightly.
“Illegitimi non carborundum,”
answers Jim. His voice is heavy, full of phlegm and gravel.
Dekker grins but doesn’t seem to know how to respond. “It’s good to have you back,” Dekker says. “It’s good to have you back,” he repeats when Jim doesn’t answer.
Jim allows the dusty silence to hang a moment longer. “I want to thank you,” he says finally, deflating as he sighs the words out.
“Oh, Jim,” balks Dekker, “for what?”
“I heard about your letter.”
“It was nothing.”
“No,” says Jim. “You stuck your neck out, Bryant.”
Dekker looks around, shaking his head, trying to form words.
“You stuck your neck out. For me.”
Dekker raises his hands, still speechless.
“I want you to know that I know that. And that I appreciate it.”
Dekker, it would seem, is as tongue-tied around Jim as everyone else is. He flails around a bit more before his eyes light on me.
“Lawrence,” he says, and Jim turns, nods funereally.
“Hi, Larry.”
“Hi, Jim!”
“It’s Lawrence you should be thanking,” says Dekker.
My jaw drops in preparation to deny it. Jim’s forested eyebrows plunge—his most intimidating gesture, because you know it could mean anything. He looks that way when he talks of poems he loves. He looks that way when he talks of poems he hates.
“Is that right?” interrogates Jim.
Dekker beams his relief from the weight of Jim’s gratitude, explaining, “He and some other students have initiated a—a sort of campaign.”
Jim’s eyebrows descend practically to the tip of his nose.
“We’re just writing a letter,” I say. “Like Professor Dekker.”
“He’s going to get all the students to sign it.”
“All the students?” says Jim. His brows ease up. His mouth opens.
“All the students in the department, at least,” Dekker amends.
“No!” I say, and Dekker’s lips twitch in surprise.
“All
the students. We’ll get the whole student body involved.”
Jim takes a step toward me, eyebrows and overbite looming.
“We’ll take it to the president’s office,” I babble. “We’ll take it to Waldine Grayson if we have to. We’re behind you, Jim. All of us—”
And then I can’t talk, I’ve got a mouthful of wood-smoked jacket.
There’s music in my head instead of poetry now. I’m jiving down Bridge Street toward Carl’s Tearoom. “Rock & Roll,”
by the Velvet Underground. A guy named Luc from Montreal blasted it day and night in Hadwin House last year until inevitably some football player would yell at him to turn off his fucking faggot music before he shoved his entire record collection up his ass,
and not sideways either, you French faggot, I’m not gonna just slip it in like a letter in a mailbox
. I remember that particular threat so well because it was Chuck Slaughter who made it and I spent around twenty minutes trying to figure out what it was supposed to mean. Chuck’s rage was often of the incoherent variety.
But Luc never stopped. He played whatever he wanted because he knew the football and hockey players wouldn’t touch him or his turntable. He played the Doors and the New York Dolls and David Bowie. He was the only guy on the floor with a decent stereo, which meant girls always came to Hadwin House parties. And on those nights, out would come the Elton John and the Stevie Wonder and they all bowed down to Luc’s power and genius.
I am so into the song I’m practically singing out loud, lips moving, spreading my hands wide on
FINE FINE music
, getting threatening looks from passersby. Hello everybody. Hello town of Timperly. Jim Arsenault loves me. Despite all the amputations, just like Lou Reed says. Amputated personality. Amputated literary ability. Amputated power of coherent speech in his presence. I’m grooving down the sidewalk in my curling sweater with the moose and hunter on the back. Past the Sub Stop, where I get my all-meaters. Past Razors Sharp, where I get my hair trimmed about once a year. Past Rory Scarsdale Holdings with its stupid, meaningless flag—
“Ask For Rory!” 362–9130
—made all the more infuriating by the arbitrary quotation marks.
It doesn’t bother me so much today, of course, but the flag was like an insult when I first arrived.
It’s a university town! Whom are they quoting? If it’s Scarsdale himself, then why
quote? It’s his flag
. On and on, I ground my teeth over it countless times on my way to the tearoom. I could have stayed in Summerside for pointless quotation marks. The sign outside the Legion:
“Ham Dinner” Friday!
Is it a ham dinner in theory? A euphemistic ham dinner of some kind? Notes left on the table from my mother:
Larry give Aunt Maudie a “ring.” Give lawn a “trim.” Don’t forget to “pick up” new putters
. Her letters are the same—quotation marks jumping around all over the page like ticks.
Anyway, I don’t care. I love Timperly. I love quotation marks. I love my mother.
Ring-a-ding
goes the bell above the door at Carl’s Tearoom. Sherrie’s not here yet. I boogie my way into a booth. I’d like to go and play the jukebox but know from experience it’s all country and western, with a little bit of Don Messer and Stompin’ Tom thrown in to remind us where we come from, and I’m not in a twangin’ mood today. I order tea and french fries with Beef Gravy with a jaunty sort of flourish, looking the waitress straight in her remarkable amber eyes, taking the time to ask how she is today. She has a tag over one breast reading
Brenda L
. I say,
How are you today, Brenda L.?
and it goes over well. She tells me she is just dandy. She looks like she’d like to lean over and ruffle my hair, maybe kiss the top of my head. I watch her shuffle away, energyless, like a lady in a housecoat. I think Brenda is maybe around thirty. Quite old. A body that Jim would call
overripe
in one of his poems. But I find Brenda nice, comforting to look at. I bet the underneaths of her arms would wobble whenever she reached for things. To me that seems nice. Soft. Soft eyes. Soft soft soft hand—that’s from Joyce, I think, the only novelist so good he’s practically a poet. Soft and white. Smelling heavy and soft, like grandmother’s soap. Maybe she has children. Maybe
I could have an affair with Brenda L., instead of bothering with girls from school. It would be iconoclastic. An older woman, maybe with a neglectful husband. It would be theatrical. No one else has wanted to kiss me since I got here. On the head or anywhere else.
Overripe
. How does Jim mean it? Like a banana? An overripe banana isn’t bad. I look over and see Brenda L. balancing an entire tray of food on her hip.
I take out my notebook and am writing
overripe can mean sweet
when Sherrie sits down.
“Hi,” she says.
“Heyyy,” I say.
“What are you so happy about?”
I smile. Sherrie flaps her enormous eyelashes. Tweety Bird, that’s who she reminds me of.
“Maybe I’m just a happy kind of guy.”
Sherrie smirks elaborately at this. Do I not seem a happy kind of guy? Then Brenda L.’s heavy, overripe presence is hanging above us. She stands with her order pad poised as Sherrie looks down at the placemat where the tearoom menu is writ.
“Tea,” says Sherrie. I am concerned that Brenda will think Sherrie is my girlfriend.
“That it?” says Brenda. “No fries?”
“No, thanks,” says Sherrie.
Look at me, Brenda L.
, I am thinking. And she does.
“Yours is coming,” she tells me. I nod.
Sherrie starts laughing once Brenda goes away. She puts a pompous look on her face and bobs her head a few times.
“What?” I say.
“You!” she says. “You’re Mr. Cool today.”
My neck begins to burn when I realize all Sherrie’s bobbing was supposed to represent my nod at Brenda. I rub at it and hunch my shoulders.
What’s
your
deal anyway, Tweety?
I
want to say to Sherrie.
Girl poets don’t look like you. They’re gaunt and sucked-in and wear hippie clothes. They’re ethereal, sexless. The only thing you’ve got down is the frizzy hair
.
“I’m just kidding,” says Sherrie, ducking her head to catch my eye. “You just seem like you’re in a good mood.”
I remember my good mood and sit up. “I saw Jim.”
“Oh! How is he?”
I can’t remember the Latin thing Jim said in Dekker’s office, so I try to come up with something equally sombre and elegant. “He is bowed … but unbroken.”
“What?” says Sherrie.
“He’s good,” I say fast.
“Really?”
“Well,” I say, “he says he’s coming back to work. And I think he was really, really touched to hear about what we’re doing.”
“Oh, you told him what we’re doing?”
“Yeah. Dekker did.”
Sherrie smiles, nestling back into her seat. A pink smudge appears on each cheek. Pink and white—her face is like a valentine. “Oh, good,” she says. “Oh, good.”
Brenda sets two aluminum pots of tea down in front of us, and then two identical cups and saucers. “Fries’re on their way,” she says.
“Thank you, Brenda L.!” I call. And she bestows her nurturing, head-kissing look before going away. It fortifies me.
“What did he say?” says Sherrie.
“About what?”
“About us.”
All I really remember is a wall of eyebrow coming at me, a faceful of wool and sawdust.
“He just said thank you,” I answer, floating on the memory.
“Thank you?”
“Yeah—‘thank you, thank you so much.’ He was a little choked up.”
“Was Todd there?”
“What? No—Todd dropped the letter off, remember?”
“So it was just you?”
“No, it was me and Dekker—” I stop and peer at Sherrie. Vast and blue as her eyes might be, they don’t give much away. Still, I get it. I get it because I know what I’d be thinking if I was her.
“Oh,” I say. “But—you know—he knows it’s not just me, Sherrie.”
Sherrie pretends to look around for Brenda, concerned about my french fries.
“No, no,” she says, flipping a hand as if to say fiddle-de-dee. “It’s fine.”
“I mean, he knows I couldn’t do this alone.”
“You told him …?”
“Dekker told him it was a bunch of us.”
I can see Sherrie trying to figure out a way of asking if she was mentioned to Jim by name without sounding like she cares. Trying to shrug herself into a Claude-demeanour. I let her work at it for a couple of seconds—in fact, we’re both struggling minutely, fumbling for what to say.
“Dekker will tell him all about it,” I grope. “I had to take off and meet you, but I’m sure they’re talking about it right now.”
Now Sherrie has her chance. “Did you say you were meeting me?”
“Um,” I say. “Oh yes. I think I did.”
We are both adjusting ourselves in the booth, attempting to get comfortable, when it occurs to me to pass Sherrie the edited version of our letter with Dekker’s suggestions. He suggests we keep things “positive.”
Never accuse
, he has written in the margins,
never make it sound as if you’re blaming
them for anything
. Say “we encourage” instead of “we demand.” We are “sincerely hopeful,” as opposed to “deeply disappointed.” Brenda brings my fries. Sherrie sees them and decides she wants some too.
We drink our tea and dip our fries in a rather companionable silence after that. Sherrie wants to talk poetry by way of changing the subject, but because I don’t care for her poems it strikes me as awkward terrain. She talks about Margaret Avison a lot, and Margaret Atwood, and I start to wonder if it’s all a bunch of Margarets writing orgasm poetry in Canada these days. Maybe Sherrie should change her name to Margaret. She should change it to something, last if not first, because Sherrie owns perhaps the worst name for a poet this side of Adelaide Crapsey. Her last name is Mitten. She signs her poems Sherrie Ann Mitten.
“Why the Ann?” I interrupt Sherrie. She stops talking about
The Journals of Susanna Moodie
and switches conversational gears without even a flap of her lashes.
“I thought it would look more serious,” she admits. “Sherrie Mitten. Sherrie Mitten. It just looks like some girl’s name on the page. It has no authority.”
“So you stuck ‘Ann’ in there?”
“I felt it needed something to sort of
temper
the kind of … yearbook-picture sound of it. ‘Ann’ has a seriousness.”
“Why not just Ann? And drop the Sherrie?”
“I thought of that. I don’t like the meter.”
“The meter?”
“Ann Mi-tten. Ann Mi-tten,” she recites, emphasizing the rhythm for me with a lilt of her hand, like a music teacher. “It’s too—” she shakes her head “—staccato. It’s harsh, somehow. I don’t want to be harsh.”
More companionable silence, during which I feel sorry
for Sherrie. The problem, really, is all in the
Mitten
—there’s just no getting around it. She could be a Margaret and it wouldn’t help—the alliteration would make it all the more ludicrous.
“What does Mitten mean?” I ask. “Is it French-derived or something?” I figure if I can help Sherrie with her name—if we can work together to get it just right—I won’t feel quite so awkward about the fact that Jim invited me to his home for dinner before I left Dekker’s office this afternoon.
I HAVE THIS COUSIN NAMED JANET
. She’s here, in Timperly, in her last year at Westcock. She started out in a General Arts program but in second year switched to Political Science, and then to Psychology mid-term. My parents were keen for me to spend time with Janet when I first got here because of course it was the big bad town of Timperly and my first time going to big bad university, and the sophisticated and worldly-wise Janet, who’d been living and studying here an entire two years already, could act as my guide and mentor. Therefore I made it my business to avoid Janet whenever possible. On my first day in town, she and I and my parents all had dinner together at the Crowfeather Inn. Janet went on and on about the library’s new catalogue system and how unbelievably complicated it was and how it took her forever to figure out, reassuring my parents she would walk me through it however many times it took to sink into my pulpy high-school brain.