The Sky Is Falling (17 page)

She'd asked me for a note, so I'd written a word in Cyrillic and slipped it in her shoe. Now that she wanted me to translate it for her, I didn't know which to say,
actor
or
actress
. She'd claimed that words weren't important, but that was simply untrue. Not just at the Trutch house, but in my classes too, there was often a feminist cabal enforcing correct usage. Kopanyev had a terrible time in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature in Translation—not that he didn't deserve or enjoy the frequent ideological lashings he received. He got all twinkly when voices turned shrill. There was a small, seething faction in our already small seminar that loathed him. In Russian, though, everyone adored him, which seemed odd to me. Was literature inherently more controversial than language? But wasn't it language itself that feminism sought to reform? Perhaps there wasn't any point in even trying to remake a gendered language like Russian. In any case, I was as far from mastering—mistressing?—the politically correct English lexicon as I was from speaking Russian, though I was learning fast.

Belinda waited. “Actor?” I hazarded.

Delight! Incensey hugs all around! She waved us inside and in a single glance I understood why she wanted to move from Trutch to Blenheim Street despite its militaristic connotations. A brown tartan behemoth filled half our living room. The shag had alopecia, the walls were a four-sided bulletin board. Here everything was homey and neat. We followed Belinda to the kitchen, where I almost had to shield my eyes from the rare, bright sight of dishes gleaming in the rack. There were curtains, too, and four matching chairs around the table, the radiation suits heaped over the back of one. Then Carla appeared from some other immaculate room for another round of hugs.

At the Trutch house we wouldn't have been able to work on the kitchen floor. The chore sheet notwithstanding, it simply never got washed. Now we set up an assembly line, Carla using a homemade stencil to draw the radiation symbol on the backs of the suits, the rest of us colouring it in with markers.

“Tell them what Dieter said,” Carla told Belinda.

“God! He asked me to talk to Pete for him. I asked why. ‘You're his
girlfriend
,' he said. I said, ‘What do you mean by that?' ‘What do you mean “what do you mean”?' So I actually had to tell him. ‘I'm nineteen. I'm not a girl. I menstruate. Are you a boy or a man?'”

She flipped her hair, indignant all over again.

Sonia was surprised. “But he's good about saying ‘woman.' He corrects me all the time.”

“So he says”—Belinda thrust out chest and voice—“‘I'm not going to be manipulated by semantics!'”

Sonia: “The poor guy.”

“Why? Someone's got to tell him he's sexist. I don't mind.”

I said, “There are two words in Russian,
dyevushka
for young woman and
dyevochka
for girl.” I worried I sounded pretentious until I saw they were in awe.

Belinda said, “This one's done. Put it on, Jane. Let's see how it looks.”

I went to the bathroom. As I was climbing into the suit, I noticed pillows of calico fabric hanging on the towel rack. I had no idea what they were for but because in size and shape they resembled menstrual pads, I felt embarrassed, the way I used to last year when my aunt would carry her wooden clothes rack into the back yard and drape it shamelessly with her nylons and underpants and gallon-cup brassieres, the way I had a minute ago when Belinda said
menstruate
. In the mirror, I adjusted the particle mask over my mouth and nose and drew up the hood. When I opened the door, a girl—a
woman!
—with cropped hair and a silver charm dangling from one ear was passing by. The charm was an axe, which made me think she must be in Forestry. Without even glancing at the suit she introduced herself as Nellie, Carla and Belinda's housemate.

I pulled the particle mask under my chin. “Jane.”

“Oh, you're the Russian! I've heard about you.”

I blinked at her. Then I remembered something. My aunt calling the house before Christmas and Sonia whispering, “She's
Russian
,” when she passed the phone to me. Pete and Dieter glancing at each other. Even Dieter looked impressed as I toted the phone away. Now I smiled a lie at Nellie and went back to the kitchen where they oohed over me in the suit. I certainly didn't put them straight about my dull Canadian mother and my cranky, Polish-born, anti-Communist father, and the Sloppy Joes and frozen pizza.

Afterward, as Sonia and I walked the dark streets home, I mentioned how clean the Blenheim house seemed compared to ours. “Our house is gross,” I said.

“Yes but—” Sonia squirmed. “Some things are gross there too.”

It turned out that the calico pillows in the bathroom that I thought could not possibly be menstrual pads were. They laundered and reused them. “And did you see the chart on the fridge?” she asked.

“The chore sheet?”

“It's not a chore sheet.”

“What is it then?”

“They record their periods.”

“No!”

“I'm still a feminist,” Sonia avowed.

We reached our street, the exact spot where I had let go of the bed last fall. In the corner house a child was practising the piano, the same plunked notes over and over. Televisions strobed in living rooms. “Carla's a lesbian,” Sonia said.

Confusion. Sonia clogged blithely ahead, hands in pockets, chin high, the flaps of her funny toque like blinders. A few paces on, she stopped to wait and, when I caught up, she acknowledged my distress. “I didn't know either until Belinda told me. Apparently I'm naive.” Then she changed the subject. “I hope Belinda and Pete don't break up.”

“Are they fighting?” I asked.

“They're always fighting. But if two people really love each other? They can work it out. What hope is there for the world otherwise? How can we expect strangers and enemies to get along when people who are actually in love can't? Also, it would be bad for the group.”

We went up the front steps. On the porch, Sonia turned to me. “Have you ever been in love, Jane?”

“No,” I said.

“Me neither.”

A strange thing happened that week. I opened my book and, as was often the case with Chekhov, I fell right in, tonight into the first story, “The Kiss.”

Off the top Chekhov sets up Staff-Captain Ryabovitch as a poor foil to his superior, Lieutenant Lobytko, a
tall, strongly built
officer
whose
ability to sniff a woman out from miles away
earns him the nickname
the setter
. By contrast, Ryabovitch is a
short, stooping
officer, with spectacles and lynx-like side whiskers
. The ladies call him
vague
.
Timid and unsociable
Ryabovitch, the
most modest and
most insignificant
officer in the brigade.

The officers are invited to the local manor house. After tea, everyone moves to the ballroom where
the grand piano suddenly
thundered out. The sounds of a sad waltz drifted through the wide
open windows and everyone remembered that outside it was spring,
an evening in May, and they smelt the fragrance of the young leaves
of the poplars, of roses and lilac.
While the other officers flirt and dance, Ryabovitch,
filled with sadness
, wanders off, soon managing in his bumbling way to get lost in the big house. He enters a darkened room and it is here that an anonymous woman rustles forward and, encircling his neck with her fragrant arms, delivers the eponymous kiss. But when she feels his lynx-like whiskers (Chekhov implies), she shrinks
backward in disgust
. Ryabovitch flees, but as the shame lifts he begins to give himself up to a
totally new kind of sensation
.
Something strange was happening
to him
as a result of the misplaced kiss. Feeling almost drunk, he now boldly enters the party. The tingling
peppermint drop
sensation on his left cheek, just by his moustache, persists so that by the time he arrives back at the barracks that night, he has abandoned himself to an
inexplicable, overwhelming feeling
of joy
.

Sonia called that supper was ready.

I brought the giddy feeling in the story down with me, the high point I had left off at when I tossed the book aside, though I knew for Staff-Captain Ryabovitch disappointment would prevail. “The Kiss” was one of Chekhov's most banal tragedies.

Pete was just coming in off the deck, pink-eyed, wearing a sarong. “What are you smiling about?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“Is it my dress?” He started jigging around the kitchen and Sonia and I laughed, Sonia hefting a heavy pot of soup onto the table before going back for cornbread. Pete peered in the pot. “Stuff's floating in the soup.”

She rushed over. “What?”

“Solids. Potatoes. Carrots. Don't tell me. The Americans finally ratified SALT II.”

She dropped the two large pans of cornbread on the table so she could assault him with the oven mitts. “Jane says I have to keep my strength up.”

“Zed. Let me kiss your hand.”

“How sexist,” I said and Dieter, taking his place at the table, laughed.

Dieter wasn't so bad. We had too much in common, were on the same pole, I decided that night as we talked over supper. That was why we repelled each other. Last year Dieter had come to UBC from Saskatchewan and, like me, had been overwhelmed by the beauty of the place. Then the skies had lowered and covered it all like dust sheets over the furniture. He couldn't get out of bed. He had SAD. His girlfriend at the time (“so-called”) dumped him. One of his dorm mates was in SPND and dragged him out. The scales fell off his eyes, just like mine had, but also plunged him deeper into depression. His involvement in Peace and Justice for Central America was what snapped him out of it. “Latin Americans have passion,” he told us. “Not a common trait in Saskatchewan.”

Each of us could trace the provenance of our commitment like this. For Sonia it was seeing a lamb euthanized when she was a child, for Pete his years at a private boys' school watching the lone black kid get hazed year after year. In the woods behind the stone walls, they warmed their hash over a lighter. Pete said, “My dad made this.” He meant the little foil bowl, but when he looked into the pink, sorrowful eyes of his black-skinned friend it all came together—aluminium, South Africa, and nasty, brutish prep school boys in faggy blazers.

Pete dredged his bowl with the cornbread and bowed to jam the soggy mess in his mouth. Dieter, too, had entered the race for seconds but when they both reached for the ladle at the same time, the strange thing happened: each insisted the other go ahead. I looked at Sonia and she at me. Could it be true? I gave Chekhov partial credit for my mood. Also, tomorrow I would take part in my first real action. Pete had smoked a joint. Sonia was indulging Dieter with guilty smiles because she felt bad Belinda had been so hard on him. So, yes! Provided there was enough food to go around, we could be the harmonious, decentralized, voluntary association Pete dreamed of.

He said, “We should play Monopoly tonight.”

This, I learned as I helped Sonia clear the table, had been a favourite pastime during the last academic year. Dieter went to get the board.

“The object of the game—” he began pedantically.

“I've played before,” I said.

“Not like this.”

Sonia was shuffling the title deeds and divvying them out.

“You divest yourself of everything. Give it all away. So if you land on Park Place, for example, the owner will pay you what it's worth and give you the first hotel. If she's out of hotels on that property, you get a house. No houses, you get the deed.”

“What about Chance and Community Chest?”

“They stay the same. Whoever's the biggest capitalist in the end loses.”

Out of the handful of die-cast tokens of militarism and greed, Sonia chose the thimble, Pete the iron, Dieter the wheelbarrow. Naturally, I took the shoe.

The year before, even the month before, nothing short of a catastrophe would have kept me from the lecture hall. But now that I understood an unimaginable catastrophe, while not yet upon us, was alarmingly imminent, that the time to act to prevent it was now, I did. On an abruptly sunny morning, the elements aiding and abetting our plan, I skipped class for the first time in my life and, with my housemates, piled into Pete's car.

At the Blenheim house I watched Carla swagger down the walk. She always dressed in cords or jeans and today wore a plaid shirt like my father favoured, buttoned high. As she neared the car, the urge to stare was so great I realized I wouldn't be able to look at her at all, which was, of course, the same problem I had. People sensed my awkwardness and averted their eyes. But Sonia and Pete, Belinda and Carla—they didn't. Not even Dieter did any more. I was a Nagger now.

Belinda handed the bundle of suits off to me before getting in the back with Carla and Sonia. Timo was biking down.

Pete said, “Why don't you sit in the front?”

Belinda closed the car door. “I'm already back here.”