The Governor of the Northern Province (21 page)

This was maintained openly when Jennifer's elevation was discussed at greasy spoons and in pharmacy-scrip lineups around town in the weeks thereafter, though not without some wonder from citizens at what they'd just done to themselves. Like signing up for a credit card because they were sick of getting the blaring bulging offers in their mailboxes and hoped that would put a stop to it. Most had already lost or pulled off their pink bracelets and forgotten why they had pink-ribbon stickers stuck on their trunks. The difficulty of peeling them off left a small streaked mess, gummy stains, a permanent semi-blank space waiting for the next vital imprint. These residuals of twenty-first-century political involvement.

While sitting in her bedroom in the immediate afterwards, Jennifer felt drowsy, drained from the campaign, from all the back-and-forths with Bokarie these past few months, and from everything before she stumbled onto him in the convenience store and let him join onto her and became his host and entree to Little Caitlin and wider Canada. She liked this little pause before she climbed onward and upward. Before the leech on the leg grew thicker and bolder with blood as by its very nature it had to. She was tired from the campaign and from all the campaigns and from all the readings and longings, but more than anything else, Jennifer realized, she was tired with the future. With knowing suddenly how much more there was she had to want and go after and gain.

That was when the bell went. The phone started ringing and her father hollered for her to come down and take it because it was long-distance and from Ottawa and this was doubly alarming to him. She dropped the curtains back in front of the window and went downstairs and accepted that she was in a new kind of race now. Answering, she rejoined the hunt, no longer as predator alone, but also as prey, pursued as she'd never been before. What Now meant the three Rs of politics.

The Reporters:
Good evening, Mizz Thickson, I'm calling from
The Ottawa Citizen
to speak with you about your election victory. Incidentally, I did a piece on your Little Caitlin tragedy a few months back, but I've moved on to Canada–U.S. relations since then while remaining interested in local events such as yours. I understand this drowned little girl was a plank in your platform. So can you tell me your views, please, on softwood lumber?

The Requesters:
Hi Jennifer, this is Joan from church. We're so proud of you. Congratulations. This is so exciting. Of course we know you'll be very busy in Ottawa, but incidentally, do you know that my husband Phil's trying to get on workers' comp? His file is over at one of the government buildings taking forever to get processed and Marie is the girl we've been talking to. Nice, but French, you know what I mean? Shall I run over some coffee cake and the chiropractor's report?

The Rasputins: (1)
Listen, you don't know who this is and this isn't for outside talking and I shouldn't even be using the phone like this given my involvements elsewhere, but I'm taking this chance for you and this community. Let me tell you what you need to do when you get to Ottawa. Let bygones be bygones from this campaign in terms of who was with you and who was against you and do your best for all concerned. And be prepared for everybody and his brother looking to give you advice about how you should vote and what you should support on the Hill, but listen to no one other than yourself and always feel free to call me if you need any sober second thoughts on that. You remember the number at the dealership. Have you thought about your vehicle options for the trip down? I hope you're not thinking about going to Ottawa of all places in that pink grapefruit of yours. A lovely vehicle for town and country driving and also, yes, a symbol of the moving tragedy of that little girl and all, but still. You can think pink but you don't need to drive it anymore! I have a beauty SUV on the lot, incidentally. Import and I know you like those. Low kilometres and lady-driven. Want to come down for a test drive?
(2)
Mon Jenniferal, I can only talk one moment because I'm on break and tomorrow's milk is coming soon. So please call me soon so we can discuss our plans from here. But congratulations on your glory, which the radio has just announced. You have run the race well and I have been honoured to be there as your every step. But before I go, tell me, when do we leave for the capital city?

The phone kept going like that and then came the knocks at the door, and things stayed this way right up until Jennifer left for Ottawa a couple of weeks later, crammed in the cab beside Bokarie with her father on the other side. Gus rented a U-Haul to take her down, along with her encyclopedia set, her African, and her desk, bed and dresser. After seeing a lease that in fact confirmed Bokarie was keeping separate quarters, he agreed to let him put his few bags in the back and join them in the cab. Jennifer had kept her promise and invited him along. When she had called him back and told him that, yes, he would be going with her to the capital when the new Parliament was called to order, she had been confused by his immediate response. But Bokarie quickly explained that saying
finally
had meant he could at last quit his job. He had grown tired of all the countertop chit-chat and cherry syrup.

II.

Barb Thickson had stayed back from this first trip, promising to come later and bring Dad and drive the Mary Kay car separately. To see Jennifer's first speech in the Commons. But before the U-Haul left, she pulled Jennifer to the side, while Bokarie easily followed Gus's lead and made up the empty time they had together by scrutinizing the trailer. The two traded man noises about the strength of particular knots and the virtues of never having enough twine and then each muttered compliments on certain angle choices for furniture pieces that the other had suggested and thus they reached a reasonable accommodation. Only if Jennifer came home in a few months showing anything more than some pictures with the prime minister, Gus told Bokarie before letting him into the truck, he reserved himself the right to do what needed to be done with a shotgun wedding—hold the wedding. Bokarie nodded respectfully and told Gus not to worry. His interest in Jennifer was purely political.

Gus thought he had misheard the fellow. Must have said purely
platonic
. He knew this term to mean “just friends,” as his buddy the gas station man explained it to him a while back, when Gus mumbled to find out about that gym teacher's type of interest in Jennifer, after that one dinner party. He hadn't called for another date. Platonic friends, the gas station man explained, plus, the poor bastard, he had a baby on the way with some girl he worked with. What with Bokarie's accent and all, Gus decided, it wasn't his fault, the misfire on the word. Gus could grant that much charity—he even felt a little progressive in coming to think of it on his own without prodding from Barb or a television movie.

Meanwhile, by the passenger door, Barb put her hands up on Jennifer's shoulders. She knew what she wanted to say to her daughter, about what winning this election meant for her, for them, for all women like them. She didn't like that first go. This was no women's lib silliness, Barb wanted Jennifer to understand, just something like a not unhappy feeling, that Jennifer had done what others perhaps had wanted, had denied themselves even trying at, from fear and always that next load of laundry to get to. But that was all Barb would say. A crinkle in the nose coming and Gus calling out from the cab that he still needed to gas up before the highway and the price had probably gone up another quarter a litre while they traded sewing secrets made her give a squeeze and send her off.

But Jennifer wanted to say something too, something that reached past casseroles and even ice cream cakes and went all the way back to
Britannica
. To let her mother know that, that— Her face, always so blank and ready to be formed as others wanted it, was close to crumple at this. But genetics being genetics, Barb didn't need
that
to know what it meant between them, and so she nodded with harsh Protestant love and told her daughter to wear extra dress shields her first day in the House so she wouldn't show them any fear.

There wasn't any such fear when Jennifer made her maiden speech in the Commons, at least after she changed her tactics. She had thought having Little Caitlin's family in the gallery, wearing solemn salmon hues and ribbons and wristbands, would be an immediate and great success as her entry onto the national stage. She gestured up to them in the gallery at a key moment in her drainage security plea. While they, exhausted with thanking Miss Thickson again and again for all she'd done for them and their beloved daughter, rose again and nodded and gripped each other's shoulders and sat down and hoped this would be the last of it.

Only this came off as rather banal, since the House of Commons visitors' gallery, Jennifer learned her first day, was chockablock with sad courageous stories waiting to be recognized and redeemed into legislation. Recovering child brides from Vancouver, recovering male ringette players from Flin Flon, recovering real estate agents from Montreal. The drowned little girl's family from Nipissing–Renfrew– Pembroke was just one more occasion for golf applause. The independent member's proposal for a free vote on a drainage security bill, with a codicil for public safety concerns to be set up across the country during the spring thaw, was duly noted, remanded to committee and sent to an unremarkable death in an unmarked file folder.

Not that she minded, in the end. Because she saw her father, boiled in his Sunday best suit and wearing a new shirt to boot, get up from his perch in the gallery and exit, looking irritated when Jennifer was cut off and thanked for her contribution to the day's business. It was only later that afternoon, while giving her parents a tour of Centre Block, during which time Gus and Barb managed to touch absolutely nothing, that Jennifer learned that Gus had been afflicted by pricks from a missed pin in the collar of the fancy button-down shirt Barb had bought him for the occasion of their daughter's parliamentary debut. And this she took as
finally
evidence of her father's love: that he'd endured the little pricks and pocks into his neck-flesh so he could hear his little girl say her piece in the country's fine proceedings, and he only got up to leave when she looked to be done, so he could see about the nicks.

But when Gus got up, Jennifer saw that Bokarie was seated behind him, had been blocked out by his navy blue bulk. Watching, waiting to be unfurled. She had forgotten him for a moment or two, but when she caught his face it came back to her, what she'd been thinking at her rally about Africa, and also from her recent reading in the parliamentary library about the fragile mystique of immigrants' homelands and the necessary importance Canadians placed on hearing their stories. This was material she had been waiting to use at the Governor General's tea for new MPs that she had been invited to attend a couple of weeks later. But why wait? There had already been a few speeches about peacekeepers that afternoon and a few non-partisan crescendos about the need to start a discussion about how to do more than simply talk about Africa. She had material to work with in spades. So she didn't sit down. She cut Mr. Speaker off mid-sentence like the glorified middle school hall monitor he was and then told the House about Bokarie and the pink dawn of his homeland, and there was some real listening in the chamber for a minute or so and then hole-in-one applause when Bokarie, asked to stand and smile and wave, gazed down on them all from the gallery, so beatific and blessed to be part of this little pageant.

III.

She was feeling a little light in the head, like back when she was a child and would go with her father to gas up the truck. She liked the plastic bubble with the fuzzy red balls. These, her father told her, were gas station Adam's apples, and when they were moving, it meant the pump was feeding. Like a bird, she had thought then, swallowing something. She had wanted a touch, a taste of them badly, but then Gus Thickson would come out from paying and she would go with him back into the cab, already gorged on the sweet low-slung smell of the pumps at their business. In Ottawa now, this was what she did— not thinking about home, but thinking from home. To make sense of things while adjusting to these surroundings, to have no newness to deal with, to face only recall.

She was, at present, fumed up by being in Rideau Hall for the first time, with its sprawling, sweetish fragrance of fresh carnations and thick, figured carpets and pinkish, high-browed butlers and, more than anything else, by waiting to meet the Governor General. But also by the aftershave and breath mints and new-suit smell squirming beside her.

To avoid charges from the West and from Quebec about Ontario MPs monopolizing the premium face time, the Bytown mandarins had made a point of shuffling geography in arranging the place cards for this year's Governor General's New MP Tea, which took place shortly after the opening of Parliament. Accordingly, Jennifer had been placed beside a short, loud, toothy Nova Scotia lawyer and part-time boxing promoter. He had a special interest in juvenile delinquents with violent streaks. George Damariscotta Jr., QC, MP for Pictou–Antigonish–Guysborough. He had been elected by a riding split between satisfied clients and outraged opponents, who were now collectively hopeful that he would do in Ottawa what he had done for and to them. The closest thing to a challenger had been a divorced lady high school vice-principal who ran on the old pro-Native/anticasino platform. She had received Christian applause during debates.

Listening to him thump on a table and list his community service awards and Rotarian spheres of influence, Jennifer studied his crackling cockscomb. It looked like a greasy grill done over in powdered milk. And he couldn't keep still, shifting back and forth as his tongue grooved on and the polycotton pinstripes of his pants went swish and swoosh against his bellied thighs. He wasn't worth much, she decided. Small fry. Baitfish. Jennifer wondered if everyone from Down East was just this way. With rapid-fire monologue and much jostling and jigging and
come here and listen to this, buy,
and
just between you and me
and compulsively wiping the nose. She couldn't think of anybody like that back in the riding, except Judas Hollerwatty or maybe that gym teacher Romeo. The comparison did little for any of them, and anyway, now wasn't the time to be thinking about anything other than the great flutter coming her way.