The Push & the Pull (19 page)

This is what I wanted, beauty that doesn't give a damn.

—
B.

Running scared but also a little elated, more self-reliant than he has ever been, Andrew finally has to wonder if Betty was the first or the second woman he let go. When his parents had divorced, they each told him repeatedly that he could choose whether to continue living in Kingston with his dad — same house, same school — or he could move to Ottawa with his mom. Just as frequently as they told him that the choice was his to make, they also told him that he'd still have two parents, no matter what, still be loved by each of them, that things wouldn't be so different. “If everything was really going to be the same, I wouldn't have to decide where to live!” he yelled back at them on one of the rare occasions when he had them both within earshot.

Given the way he'd been told about the divorce, he didn't take the schoolyard advice and sobbingly ask for a dog as a consolation prize. Nonetheless, some of the schoolyard wisdom did prove accurate.
You'll definitely get a video game upgrade. Ask for a new Superbox
. Check.
The first Christmas, you won't be able to count the toys.
True.
Your Mom's new guy will give you money. Not stepmoms; they're too cheap. They'll feed you and try to hug you, but any new guy's an easy touch for money.

When he chose to stay with his dad, Andy could not have said then how much of the decision was to stay with friends, how much to stand by his dad and how much to avoid Gordon Gamlin, the man he'd seen drive his mother home more than once. For all the honesty he did meet during the divorce, he now wishes that someone had assured him adults generally don't know why they do what they do any more than kids do. Pat came closest, telling her son, “Sometimes you want what you want, regardless of why,” but instead of listening he used a glittering piece of fresh injustice to pry himself away from her. He definitely couldn't bear to hear her talk about
want
.

Go with Gamlin
was definitely Patricia Day's slogan, the catch-phrase that moved her front and centre in Gordon Gamlin's esteem
and election campaign. In hindsight,
Go with Gamlin
was also her resumé, calling card, battle cry and prophecy. Gordon, a man with an MA in the 1970s and an undefined job with the school board, was a distant colleague of Pat, a woman with a BA, a palpably higher IQ, a lower salary and less career mobility. When Gordon won the nomination for a federal political party with vaguely centrist policies and unprecedentedly deep pockets, Pat followed him, dropping to part-time teaching at Foulton Elementary to manage his spring election campaign, for starters.

Pat's going with Gamlin found Andy and Stan in the kitchen working their way through a limited repertoire of fish sticks, bacon sandwiches and omelettes draped in processed cheese slices. For two. Andy earned praise by learning to make coffee. Pat shoved things in the nearest drawer or cupboard on Tuesday nights before the new cleaning lady arrived on Wednesday mornings. She didn't ever quite show her grade four class the draining math in which two “part-time” jobs were more consuming than one full-time job.

For an election campaign before computers, Pat often drove typed press releases to the mail slots of the papers (at ten p.m., eleven p.m., twelve a.m. or later). She quickly learned that the Whig building was only dark and silent at the front. Around back, men in caps and greasy coveralls smoked in nearly flammable air and steadily went deaf among the clattering presses. The noisy oily press room became an oasis for Pat. Last night, before the pamphlet catastrophe, she had wanted to lay on the horn until someone opened up and she could charm her way in for a drink from one of the many bottles she knew were secreted in desks and cabinets. When she did leave, she sped home close to prayer, the bed ahead of her just a shelf to set an overused tool.

Then morning. Alarm. Coffee. Muffin and banana for the drive. The high brown boots. Lesson plan? Lesson plan?
(The teacher who fails to plan plans to fail.)

Still in his pyjamas, Andy radiated a gauzy kind of heat. She looked into his face in the mirror while she slid in an earring.

“Are you still taking me biking after school?”

“I said I would.”

She continued to discuss her life at the school with Stan. She never
stopped wanting to talk to him. Stan, not Gordon, was the perfect audience to hear about how Nancy, the school's youngest secretary, lorded the intercom over Pat. “Mrs. Day,” Nancy was now saying regularly over the crackling intercom, “you have a phone call.” Mrs. Day, the intercom wanted to know, are you going to leave these children unsupervised, again, as you tend to your moonlighting? Striding down to the office — yikes, one boot is going — Pat saw a teacher's face in every doorway, correctly inferring that Nancy had paged the entire school rather than just her classroom.

With or without the principal hanging beyond his door, Pat fired at Nancy from the doorway, “Nancy, I don't hear it when other teachers get phone calls. Surely I'm not that special.”

“I can't keep track of your running around, now can I?” Nancy launched the swift carriage return of her electric typewriter, eyes tightened by that high school diploma she'd missed by half a year, by the bus she took to work, by her unpaid summers.

“Three-twelve, Nancy. I run around room three-twelve.” At that, Pat picked up the blinking phone to the breathless, irate, pleading Gordon whose voice she'd been waiting to hear.

Two hours later she had a coffee stain on one thigh of her skirt (and possibly a mild burn beneath), a kink in her neck from endlessly cradling a phone and Gamlin's son Ben drawing in blue ink on parliamentary reports. A glitch at the printer's, some inconsiderate bastard's mangled arm or burst hernia, some traffic jam non-delivery, meant another delay on the pamphlet or running without proofs. She'd argued for the delay and would be returning tonight to recheck the pamphlet and prepare questions for tomorrow morning's visit to the aluminum plant. Returning, she'd been adamant, after a meeting with her son (and a change out of these boots).

At home, she couldn't do anything — explain her lateness, order Chinese, break the news that she'd be going back in just two hours (Don't wait up) — until she had clawed her way out of those boots, had a drink and flopped, however briefly, onto the couch. Andy's unanticipated absence made a ten-minute flop on the rocks entirely doable until she reached for her boots. The zipper tab on the already torturous left boot broke in her fingers, broke painfully and then jammed. Free leg shorter than the trapped one, she hobbled down
the basement stairs. She should at least have mixed a drink first, but she was down now and the hunt for needle-nose pliers was becoming an even bigger priority than gin. Stan didn't use the fucking things, so why should he have been more likely to know where they were?

“Mom!” Andy bellowed from the doorway. “I'm ready. I was at Kenny's and saw you drive by so I ran home. So I'm ready.”

“Okay. Say, do you know where the needle-nose pliers are?”

“Oh no. My bike's fine. Let's go.”

“Yep.”

Sinking her other leg back into the one obedient boot — twenty-seven when she bought these; what was she doing? — she honestly contemplated a swig of gin from the bottle. Instead, she slipped out into the garage and was ruined by the sight of Andy holding the next door open for her.

“This time I can make it,” he said.

In the sunny driveway, Pat didn't quite say, “Bike away from your own fear” but relied instead on old standbys like, “I've seen you almost make it” and the vaguely hepcat, “Just keep going.” Now, twenty years later, Andy would be cinched into a bulbous helmet and bike-savvy parents would yell out practical encouragements like, “Look where you want the bike to go.” And they'd practise on grass or a forgiving recreation trail made from recycled tires and fine gravel. Here, all they'd had was the side of a quiet residential street, Andy's thin moth skull and Pat's distant but distinct memories of herself riding.

You never do forget. Somehow, surely, she could get the memory of riding out of these boot-trapped legs and into his little body. Standing alongside, she could hold the bike at both ends, but this demanded a brisker sidestep she would have had trouble executing in sneakers, let alone boots. Worse, she couldn't see much of Andy's body and so had no idea why he barely lasted a single bike length whenever she let go.

“Mom's going to have to go behind.”

“No.”

“I need to see what you're doing.”

“Then the handlebars won't go.”

“You control the handlebars, kiddo, not me.”

Andy abandoned verbal protest for some bottom lip work, and Pat
gripped the seat under his little coconut rump. Sadly, her skirt and the back tire didn't get along, leaving her in a hunched run no faster or more convenient than the sidestep.

“Andy, you're putting your own foot down. You've got to pedal.”

It wouldn't be until he met Mark sixteen years later that Andrew would fully abandon this boy's timid instinct with the foot. “If you can choose to put a foot down, it's going down too soon,” Mark would later tell him. The quick-drawing body will always get a foot down if it can.

“Pedal, Andy,” Pat coached with diminishing patience.

“I am.”

“Andy, I can see that you aren't. You've got to keep going. That's how it's fun.”

They tried and failed. Again and again. She understood that he was lying because he was afraid, but that didn't make his snappiness any easier to handle, his imperious, bike seat-throne snappiness. The hobble of her boots was worsening by the minute. The weight of bike and boy was firmly registered up her arms and into her phone-cradling neck. She didn't need this sweat behind her knees. So, yes, she was impatient and did push a little extra. He needed to feel the bike move. Andy, meet inertia.

Sadly, Andy met a ditch, a full ditch. Pat couldn't even think to yell, “Steer,” and just watched the silent slapstick comedy. A bike was moving toward a watery ditch. Boy. Ditch. Boy. Ditch. C'mon, kid, they're handlebars, not handcuffs. Thankfully, his total refusal to steer meant that he entered the ditch on the angle at which he had approached it, so the abrupt stop of front tire meeting submerged ditch bottom sent his body northwest instead of north. Yes, he landed in green, scummy water, but at least he didn't hit the handlebars first.

The sight of the algae-speckled water rising in one small wave up his arms to his chin sent the words, “Oh, Andy, I'm sorry” out of her mouth. She disagreed with
sorry
as it passed her lips, but in an abstract way. A fleck of cartoon-bright algae clung to Andy's quivering chin. His small eyes were stretched fully. She was stepping forward to ask if he was hurt, where? She was bending down.

“My mom pushed me in the ditch,” he hollered, looking away from her to the road he began to run down. “My mom pushed me in the
ditch.” She was left to retrieve the slimy bike. She limped home to a fading, “My mom pushed me in the ditch.”

Back at the house, Stan had none of Andy's speed. Using one arm to lift the other onto the railing, raising one leg, then the other to climb each stair after the returned Andy, this took just enough time for Pat to come back, drop the wet bike in the yard and head for the stairs herself. When she stepped out from behind Stan at the top of the stairs, she realized that she had seen Andy do this dozens of times, squirm past his dad.

With both parents in the hall, Andy whipped open his door to scream, “Mom pushed me in the ditch.” Pat took a sharp right and headed for the bathroom, neither closing the door nor looking back down the hall, just scrubbing her hands.

“Andy,” Stan coached from the middle of the hall, “the only way to stay up is to pedal. Pedal, then steer. Take it from me, kid, in life you either push or get pulled.”

The bastard.

Betty's postcards are now his only map. Fleeing the phantom Mustang, he barely sees the signs counting his way down to New Brunswick's Botanical Garden / Jardin Botanique, doesn't yet appreciate that this garden near the Quebec–New Brunswick border is one of the places where the Trans-Canada Highway and Trans Canada Trail flirt enough to briefly kiss. He remains in the dumb hamster wheel of the chase even after he sees the public garden emerge in the distance.

An entrance building is thrust out from a high green fence over which tall lamps peek their heads like giraffes. When he is close enough to see that the fence is not solid as he had thought, but rather a standard diamond-wire fence with strips of tough green plastic braided through, when he sees that this fence is designed to quarantine beauty for paid admission, he thinks of one of the Germany cards riding just inches from his burning left knee.

Munich.

Am I for or against Dachau being on a municipal bus stop? (Dostoevsky: Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel.)

I knew about Nandor Glid's memorial sculpture here, lecture knew, book knew, but am really smashed by it. The simplicity: a mass of starved limbs = a barbed wire fence. Knees = barbs = elbows. You stand here and think
fence
over and over and over. In here, the absolute worst. Out there, buses, shops, radio every night.

Learning,

—
B.

This garden fence moans in a warm breeze. In flight not fight, he needs to go to ground, why not well-tended ground? He, too, will hide behind the admission-price-only fence. Provided he can get the
bike in. He rides past parked cars and small beds of cheap flowers that border the parking lot and front the entrance building.

In a grad school seminar, someone once tried to paraphrase Aristotle's notion of aesthetic logic with a half-remembered, possibly apocryphal, Monty Python line, something like: there's no problem if three men walk on stage dressed as carrots, but the one guy dressed as a piece of celery will have to explain himself. Celery-Andrew wants to take his vehicle inside a garden with a parking lot. Because he can, this may be a problem.