Radio Belly (12 page)

Lena places the rest of her pamphlets on the nearest table. Then she packs up her kidney stones and skulls, goes out to her car and, for the first time in decades, has a real grown-up cry.

BACK ON THE ROAD, with every station playing either Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen—all those high-highs and low-lows—Lena thinks back to the museum that got her started on this cross-Canada journey—the Michael Dunlop Memorial Museum. If anyone can be said to have vanished into thin air, it's Michael Dunlop. He was abducted in broad daylight from a playground half a block from his house. In grief and in hope, Michael's mother did the only thing she could: she gathered and organized every little thing relating to her son—every drawing and piece of writing, every photograph and home movie—and started a museum. She made lists of his favourite foods and colours and animals and teams. She documented his first and last words, first and last days of school, first and last birthdays and put all of these things on display for the public. From a distance it seemed desperate, but after visiting, you could understand why she had done it. You couldn't spend an hour in that room without feeling you had known the boy and, for the rest of your life, looking twice at every lonely kid with his ball cap pulled down low.

Driving into that part of Manitoba that is like being cradled in the palm of a hand, against that pure white backdrop, Lena can't help but fill her own memory theatre.

Her and Ama's first and only plane ride together: the way Ama gripped her seat and whimpered during takeoff; how, after she finished her meal, she carried her tray to the back and tried to do her own dishes; how she spent most of the flight sneaking stray cutlery and peanuts and sugar packets into her dress pockets, then, when the flight attendants invited them to visit the cockpit, as was the custom in those days, she stood trembling and crying before the handsome pilots, convinced they were going to throw her off the plane for stealing.

Those first days in Canada: the two of them rolling English words in their mouths like camels, blushing and staring at their hands every time someone asked them where they were from or how they were doing.

Their first apartment by the side of the highway: how suspicious they were of the fridge that shivered and the pipes that groaned and the lights that buzzed; how odd that a place could be so quiet and so loud at once.

Their first doctor's appointment: they were diagnosed with PTSD and given pills, pills, pills—a whole bag full of samples—but as soon as they stepped outside, Ama threw those pills into the nearest Dumpster saying only, “We don't have the
Psssst
.” It was the last time either of them saw a doctor for decades.

Their first TV set: stuck on the children's channel for months because they didn't know there were other channels; when Ama stepped on the remote and accidentally changed to the women's channel for the first time, the two of them stared open-mouthed at what they saw. Women in dresses and heels. Women in bed. Women in bars. Women with guns. Naked women. Policewomen.

How amazed they were, that first winter, by the snow so deep people had to dig tunnels to their cars, by the air so cold it froze their eyelashes together. That was the winter Ama put a homemade sign with a picture of a sewing machine up in the window. Clients would come in to have their hems and cuffs measured but before long they'd be telling Ama all their problems and offering up their palms. Within a year Ama had a thriving psychic business. “Canadians,” Ama used to joke, “hem their pants and they tell you everything.”

LENA HAS BEEN driving through the Prairies for days. She has seen so much horizon and listened to so much CBC, she is on the verge of deciding that it really
does
mean
something to be Canadian, that is has to do with heading all the way west and losing your mother or mother tongue or motherland, also something to do with knowing who you are not more than who you are, something to do with feeling your bigness and your smallness at once—when Ama calls.

“Ama, where are you?” Lena shouts.

“Jastrebarsko,” Ama says.

“Jastra-
who
-sko?” Lena asks.

In the background Lena can hear people yelling in the old language, arguing about the price of something. In the distance, she hears the clanging of pots and pans, dogs barking, a church bell. It all sounds distinctly un-Canadian.

“Ama, what's going on? Are you at a movie theatre?” Up ahead she notices a strip of black cloud squatting low over the road.

“I'm back home,” Ama says.

“What do you mean,
back
?”

“Old country,” Ama says.

The world pitches and whirls around Lena's head, spun off its centre. Up ahead, those black clouds are roiling. “But I thought there was no
back
,” she says. “I thought home was here, in Canada.”

“Your home,” Ama says. Then she coughs, wet and loose, like she's drowning in glue.

All the air rushes out of Lena's body as she recalls another fairy tale Ama once told, about an old woman who walked all the way home to die among her people.

Lena crumples over the steering wheel, momentarily hollow. Her stomach contracts. Her heart stretches out. So this is grief, she thinks. It is Canada-sized, a feeling so big it threatens to smother her.

“Lena, I must go,” Ama says. “They make a party for me.”

Lena thinks of Burt who vanished one piece at a time, of Michael Dunlop who was gone in an instant. “Wait, Ama,” she says, “what happened the day the soldiers came? How did we escape? Did I hide really well?” Her words echo down the line—small, growing smaller.

“Not you,” Ama says. “Little Yakov. Your brother.”

It's hard to say if those clouds are barrelling down on Lena or if she's just driving straight into them.

“All day they made him run in circles,” Ama says. “And when he fell, they shooted.”

Lena can suddenly understand why a person would choose to live here as the only spot of colour in such a vast white land. At least out here you can see things coming.

“I don't understand,” Lena says. “Where was I?”

Ama's breath is scraping in, scraping out. “You came later,” she says. “After.”

Lena can't tell where she is in relation to the road anymore. It's snowing up and down and sideways and in curtains. Her car is briefly airborne, the dashboard a constellation of lights.

“After what?” she asks, but Ama is coughing. In the background, the village dogs are going wild.

“Ha!” Ama says. “The dogs, they think I barking!” Then the phone cuts out. The car shudders and dies.

Lena steps out of the car, loose and herky-jerky, like a skeleton from a closet. Inching forward into all that white on white on white is like walking into static, only it bites her skin and whistles in her ears. She could float away in a wind like this, she thinks. She could shatter and scatter, to fall as bad weather somewhere far, far away. She heads toward an orange light in the distance, thinking of Yakov, the brother she never knew, of Ama led on a rope leash by her father. Then the ground gives way and she is up to her waist in a snowdrift. She can no longer move, but she doesn't mind.
What could be more Canadian than this?
she thinks. The snow whips at her and she doesn't mind that either. Her father was a bad man with a gun. She is a bad daughter who insisted on knowing. So let her be whipped. Let her fade away, as Canadian as a lost song, as a language without an alphabet.

LENA WAKES IN A crisp hospital bed. Right away a nurse is there to tell her she may never again have sensation below the ankles, but she is very lucky to be alive. The nurse reaches for a clipboard and arches her eyebrows way up as if she is about to say something startling or wonderful when Lena's phone rings.

She fumbles for it. “Ama? Where are you?”

“I here,” Ama says. “Home. Petrovska.” Her breathing sounds like slippers dragged across a hardwood floor.

Lena tells Ama about wandering into the storm, about the snowdrift and how she may never feel her feet again. She tells Ama she's no longer the “Museum Lady,” that her future is just like a prairie in a snowstorm—a blank white page and she has no idea how to fill it. Then she does what she has never done. She asks if Ama would, just this once, look into her future and tell her what she sees.

But Ama can't. Or she won't. Instead she tells a story of that first airplane ride so long ago, specifically of the moment they stood in the cockpit, with the thousand lights and dials and the clouds sliding over the nose of the airplane. She says at that moment she felt her entire past drop away, that her stomach became suddenly light and swimmy—a feeling she would later learn to describe as hope.

Lena is silent, trying to draw the connections.

“Everything, already you know,” Ama says. “Follow your nose!”

“Isn't that a line from a cereal commercial?” Lena asks.

“I mean,” Ama says, gentler now, “follow your senses. You will know the way.”

But Lena isn't so sure. When asked to list all of the senses once on a second-grade quiz, she filled the page:
thinking, knowing, not knowing, crying, singing, remembering, forgetting
... And the last time she thought she knew the way, she ended up in a snowdrift.

“Lena, I must go,” Ama says. “I feel like old goat.”

Lena can only imagine what they do with old goats in Petrovska, so they say their goodbyes. When she hangs up the nurse is there, still with those eyebrows.

“I have some news for you, if now's a good time!” she says.

WHEN AMA CALLS next, Lena is out of the hospital and driving through the Rockies.

She pulls over at a rest stop with a view as if from the top of the world and tells Ama she is pregnant, that there was one time before, but this time she's keeping it, she's going home to B.C.

“Oh my Lena!” Ama says and then there is a thud, like a sack of potatoes hitting the ground. Lena hears the phone swing on its cord, hitting the stool once, twice, and then Ama is gone. It isn't a sound that lets her know so much as a change in the air—something lost. Lena stays on the phone. She would give anything to know the look on Ama's face—whether it's a smile or a frown, shock or grace.

Finally, she hears a man approach. “Rosie, Rosie,” he says. He is weeping, kissing her. Who is this man who loves Ama so much? She hears him call for help and then the commotion of a small crowd gathering. Finally someone picks up.

“Lena? Lena, my God,” a woman says in English. Then in the old language: “Our Rosalie has gone around the corner.” Lena remembers now: in the old country people don't die, they just go up ahead a little ways, just out of sight.

She stays on the line while the woman, Mrs. Valdovsky, updates her: now the men are back with a blanket; now they're putting the coins over her eyes; now they're lifting her; now they're carrying her up the hill. She can picture the village, the hill, the men with their shovels. She can't picture Ama's face, but she's too afraid to ask.

“Can you come?” Mrs. Valdovsky asks once Ama has disappeared over the hill. But they both know Ama would want to be buried quickly, that it's the old-world way.

“No, Mrs. Valdovsky, I can't,” Lena says.

“Is okay,” she says, in English now. “We make special here.”

And so, while the men go off to prepare the grave, the women hold a makeshift ceremony. Lena imagines them standing in a circle as they pass the phone. Each person takes a turn saying how happy Ama seemed, how proud she was, how much she loved Lena. Then, they share a memory of Ama before she was Ama—how she once wrestled a runaway pig to the ground with her bare hands, the time she pretended to be a boy so she could enter an arm-wrestling competition, how she was the only girl to ever court men, leaving anonymous flowers on their windowsills at night.

“Ama did that?” Lena asks.

“Rosalie did,” they say. In death she is Rosalie.

When it's time for Ama to be buried, the whole village gathers around the phone to say a prayer. They sing a high, whining song and then say their goodbyes. They are off to bury Ama.

It is then, alone again—or for the first time—and with the world laid out like a blueprint far below, that Lena can sense her future. It's a feeling inside, a holding on and a spreading out, like a perfect April potato taking root. It is fluttery like fear and swimmy like hope. She puts her car into gear and follows her nose down the long steep hill toward home.

Walking into Ama's apartment for the first time in years, the air is so close and sweet and full of Ama, Lena has to check all the rooms and closets just to be sure she isn't hiding somewhere. She doesn't find Ama but when she walks into the spare bedroom and finds a crib piled high with baby clothes, she knows everything she needs to know. Above the crib a homemade banner reads,
Is a Girl!
in sparkly pink writing—it's Ama's final psychic act, one last “Ha!” from beyond the grave, or just up ahead, as the case may be.

J
OINING THE FIRST floor of Human Capital Inc., the second largest staffing firm in the city, was the only thing that could've saved me. It was the late eighties, the end of a naïve and dramatic decade, and I'd been dumped more times than I could count on all my fingers and all my toes. But at Human Capital, at least I wasn't alone.

We were all women on our floor, all wounded, disappointed and on the wrong side of thirty, which is why we'd been hired. We were skeptical and jaded in all the right ways. We could home in on inconsistencies and half-truths like lawyers or mothers. Not only that, we had the perfect Human Resources smiles—smiles that showed exactly ten teeth, that were exactly as warm as they were cold. We were killers and yet—as dictated by the men upstairs (the men who ran the show)—we were not allowed to deviate from the twenty-five-question intake interview script. Not under any circumstances. We were to wade through the chaff and send all the promising candidates upstairs for the “real, in-depth interviewing.” That was the eighties for you. All our shoulder pads and trendy blazers couldn't hide the fact that we were women living in a man's world.

No one knows who started it, which woman was the first to arrive at the end of Human Capital's twenty-five-question intake interview, look at the man across from her and decide
Fuck it. Let's do this.
I heard stories about a redheaded, big-bosomed woman named Judy Jefferson. People said she was thrice divorced—a real tigress—and looking for a fourth. Or she'd had a string of bad first dates. Or she'd just been dumped. Rumour is she reached into her desk one day—while shaking out her hair or kicking off her heels, depending on which version of the story you heard—pulled out her own private list of yearning, burning questions, cleared her throat, and started in on number 26. Whoever Judy was, whatever her reasons, by the time I arrived on the first floor of Human Capital Inc., we were all following in her footsteps.

Those were the days. We did our regular work when the bosses were looking and “Judy's work” when they turned away. There were always strapping single men wandering the hallways, back for third and fourth interviews. “I'm here for the Jefferson Account?” they'd say, waving their appointment slip timidly. Someone was always working through lunch with the blinds to her interoffice windows snapped tight. Someone was always wearing leather or leopard print or strappy stilettos. The perfume was thick, the pheromones thicker, but the men upstairs never said a word. Either they didn't care or we ran a good cover.

Can you blame us for making the most of an opportunity? Back then there was no such thing as online dating, no appropriate venue for a thorough grilling. It was all blind dates, singles bars and personal ads, all fumble and error. If we developed strategies, it was only to protect ourselves. If we got carried away, it was only a symptom of the times. In the eighties, putting a desk between you and a man, having him squirm in the interview seat, may have been the only way to get the upper hand.

We took Judy's work very seriously. It took great skill to lead a man through a detailed history of his dating life in a way that reassured him,
Yes, these are actual Human Capital questions.
Much science went into the scenario portion of our interviews—adultery scenarios, marriage scenarios, fatherhood scenarios. Our dream analysis was solid, our personality predictors as accurate as possible for the times.

Over the years I learned to spot an egomaniac the moment he sat down. It was all in the posture. If he sat like he thought he was Buddha, I wouldn't waste another second. I threw him to the boys upstairs and tried not to get any on me.

I knew the Peter Pans by their bright eyes and quick jokes, but our statistics didn't lie: they were always looking for a mother figure.

And I knew the victim types by their cowlicks and coffee stains, by the way they seemed to jitter at the slightest provocation, like the filament inside a light bulb. It would have been easy to fool myself into thinking,
Now here's a safe bet. Someone I can take home and smother,
but I knew it was just a matter of time until all that tension blew sky high.

All those interviews, all that inquiry, but nothing could have prepared me for the refugee lover.

I'D BEEN AT Human Capital a few years, interviewing for the “Jefferson Account” for nearly as long, when I first met Paolo. I was as ruthless and skilled as the rest of them. So what if I kept notebooks with the specific qualities I was looking for in a mate? So I wrote down a few of my romantic fantasies, made a few collages of swarthy men on sailboats, shirtless men on beaches—is that such a grave tactical error?

Our interview must've started with the usual: schools attended, best and worst qualities, extracurricular activities, but looking at his file now, I see I didn't take notes. I'm sure I stumbled over his name—Paul-oh?
Pow-low,
he would've corrected—his name so round and seductive when spoken aloud. I probably inquired about his accent—Mexican?
Argentine,
he would've explained. All of this must've led to some discussion about his visa status.

I remember him fidgeting in his seat, looking at the little scrap of paper in his hand, and asking, “Isn't this the Day Labour Office?”

“That's on the third floor, sweetpea,” I said, “but you're here now so let's do this. You and me: a real tête-à-tête.”

I was trying to act casual but I'd already noticed he had the posture of a question mark, hairy knuckles and the kindest face I'd ever seen—everything wide open, everything full moon and yearning upwards. I remember thinking these were both my favourite things about him and the things I most wanted to change.

We eventually reached the interpretive portion of the interview, “Gateway Questions,” designed to separate the spontaneous thinkers from the drones. Human Capital was big on the interpretive in the eighties:
If you were a tree/animal/vegetable, what kind would you be?
Here so many inter-viewees would relax and say the first thing to come into their heads. Normally there was nothing I could do to help the weeping willows, the pandas, the tomatoes. But it just so happened we were in the middle of a big hiring push.
Company-wide lowering of standards,
the office-memo had read that morning.

“Avocado,” Paolo said.

Creamy, wholesome, deceptive middle,
I wrote in his file.

I tapped my pencil three times, part of General Intimidation—
Never forget you are in an interview,
the corporate literature read.
Never allow the client to get comfortable. Remain skeptical, distant, judgmental.

I had a soft spot for this man before me. Here was a fresh-faced immigrant, so far from home, so alone, wearing someone else's corduroy jacket—too small in the shoulders, too big in the collar. I could rename him, take him shopping, teach him dirty words. I could mould him into whomever I wanted. The thought of having to send him upstairs made my stomach swim.

“I've got just the placement for you,” I said, reaching into my desk, “but the Jefferson Account will require extensive interviewing.”

Question 26. Some days it was a conundrum—
Your lover is burning down. What parts of her do you save?
Some days it was a challenge—
I am the last woman on earth. You have thirty seconds to convince me to mate.
And other days it was just a fragment—
I need
...

I read what was at the top of my list: “If you could save just one word from the English language”—not my best work, but I was still figuring things out in those days.

I recall he didn't ask, “Why just one word?” or “Save it from what?” the way other interviewees did that day. He just leaned forward, lifted one corner of his mouth and with a confidence unimpeded by his corduroy jacket said, “If.
If
is the best word.”

His Adam's apple dipping and bobbing. His puddle-brown eyes. How I wanted to splash in those puddles. How I wanted to make a mess of him and then tidy him up again.

It is, to this day, the most romantic interview I've had. How he teared up during the family values segment, the way he described his mother, the vulnerable self-portrait he drew—the foreshortened limbs, the fact that he forgot to draw feet—I still have it framed on my desk.

At the end of it all, he wiped the tears from his eyes and asked me out.

There would be no copying down his address, no “bumping into him” at various hotspots in his neighbourhood—the way we used to in those days. There would be no need to stage a follow-up interview.

“Feliz hora?” he said.

Happy Hour. I couldn't believe my luck.

IF. “IF” WAS a sweet little game we all liked to play in the eighties:
if
he hadn't stumbled into the wrong office that day,
if
I hadn't got my hands on his paperwork before he realized his mistake,
if
I hadn't stunned him and then worked him into a corner with my questions,
if
he hadn't been so gentle and awkward,
if
I hadn't been so well-trained—what then? Would we have met some other way? Would the fate fairies have twinkled down on little wings and somehow rearranged time and space to bring us together?

DECEMBER IS A month for catching colds on purpose so you can call in sick and worm around in bed. It is a month for peeling one orange after another and not even eating them, just sticking your nose into the heaps of peel on your bedside table and remembering warmer times. It is a month to turn up the heat and drink sangria in bed while recalling your best sunburn ever, your worst mosquito bite, and feeling you'd give anything to have your blood airborne just now. It is all of this, but it's a dangerous month to fall in love, a dangerous time of year to turn to one another and say, “Why pay two rents when we could pay one?” December weakens us, makes us foolish and sentimental. I know this now, but I didn't know it then.

In December he moved in. It was a decision based on necessity more than romance. We hadn't even slept together yet, but his roommate, Escobar, had forgotten to pay the rent three months in a row and Paolo had nowhere else to go. “But I still want to go slow,” he insisted, placing his four boxes at the back of my closet.

I bought new sheets, faked a thyroid condition and said I'd be working from home that week, administrative work and follow-up calls.

We had complete disregard for time of day. We stayed up late “getting to know each other,” making out, watching movies. I'd never met a man like this before. He wanted to know all about my childhood, my secrets, my heartbreaks. He was big on lists: top three biggest crushes, top five best days of my life, top ten worst fears. He wanted to play Truth or Dare and Twenty Questions into the early morning. Half the time it felt like he was interviewing me. I'd never felt so hopeful, so weak in the knees. We ate at midnight and slept into the afternoon. He drew pictures of me while I slept. I'd find them stuck to the fridge later with little poems attached. He insisted on painting my toenails. He'd meet me just out of the tub with a new bottle in hand, saying only, “Ravishing Red.” I'd pretend to be coy—“Who me?”—and then he'd tackle. It was the most wonderful, epic foreplay I'd had in years. I felt like a teenager, like a princess, like an exotic and extremely ripe fruit. Then he sat me down and explained that he wanted to wait until we were seriously committed to make love. “It's a religious thing,” he said. Then, “Do you want to play Twenty Questions again?” I agreed, because it was my number one all-time favourite game but also because I was confident I could break him.

He started to talk about the future a lot—
our
future. We would flip through lifestyle magazines, nailing down the details of our dream home. “Do you like window seats?” he'd ask. “Carpet or wood flooring?” He even started making collages: vacation spots, home furnishings, his and hers clothing, cars, espresso machines.

Looking back, something in me should have sat up alert at all this, but it was around this time he turned to me and said it, the actual word, out loud.

“Love,” he said. He screwed the cap back on the Ravishing Red, looked at me, into me. “I think I'm in love.”

Some parts of me fluttered. Some other parts ached.

It's not that I was surprised. I'd been checking the love line on my palm for changes and every morning it seemed redder, deeper, truer. I had been smiling at the chest hairs in my bathroom sink, using Crest when I really preferred Colgate, eating pizza even though I was lactose intolerant. I had let him have the better pillow. Why all this making way if I wasn't in love too? Why else this giving over of palms so that things could be written there?

But
love
was a word I was unaccustomed to hearing from the mouths of men. It was such a taboo word in the dating world back then, we of the first floor had undergone extensive hypnotherapy to erase it from our vocabularies entirely. And yet, here was a man saying it with such intention, the same way he'd slid his tattered blue Bible onto my bookshelf, the same way he moved through a room, planting each footstep solidly as if it were the only thing holding him to the earth. I wanted to say it back, but I couldn't. It went against all of my training. It was the third most romantic moment of my life, but I couldn't quite participate.

I took another week off work. We stayed indoors. He followed me room to room, composing songs on his ukulele, offering to wash and braid my hair, painting and repainting my toes, but still no sex. Eventually, when the only food left in the house was a watermelon, I went to put my shoes on. I was feeling bug-eyed, twitchy, with an itch I couldn't scratch.

“Why do you leave me?” he asked.

“Just getting some food,” I answered.