Sweet things, p.3
Sweet Things, page 3
On rainy days we weren’t permitted to play spies inside Jane’s house. Her mother would tell me I was unkempt if a shoelace was not neatly tied or my shirttail was hanging out. Peering around corners was uncouth.
As Jane’s only friend, I was invited to a restaurant for her eleventh birthday. Her mother scolded me for the way I held my knife. Mr. Paulsen wanted desert. His wife said, “Not for children.”
The movie was Gigi and told the story of a girl whose aunt reminded me of Jane’s mother. We had to sit in the loges so Mrs. Paulsen could smoke. Half an hour into the film, the smoke nauseated me. Mr. Paulsen escorted me to the washroom.
“I think I’d better take the boy home,” he said to his wife
“Useless bastard,” she replied.
Mrs. Paulsen grabbed Jane by the wrist.
Jane cried.
All the way home, her mother chastised me for not coming from a sophisticated family where smoking was a sign of class.
When Jane graduated to junior high school, we drifted apart. I don’t think she forgave me for her birthday.
A year after Jane ran away, I woke one Sunday to an ambulance’s flashing lights at the Paulsen’s. I was certain Mrs. Paulsen had finally died, but when I knocked on their door to offer my condolences to Mr. Paulsen, Mrs. Paulsen answered with tears in her eyes. She said nothing then lit a cigarette.
Vikings
When my wife hung up the phone she said, “That was your cousin Claudia.”
“What does she want,” I asked.
“She doesn’t want to be a Viking.”
“There are worse things,” I said.
“That’s what I told her.”
“What’s wrong with being a Viking? Some people spend their entire lives being Vikings. It works for them, especially when they’re with other Vikings.”
“She asked me to ask you to do a DNA test.”
“Is she paying for it?”
“She didn’t say,” my wife said. “
“I don’t want my DNA floating around. It could be used for anything.”
“She thought she was Scottish. She had the kilt custom-made in the clan tartan with a sporran but the pipe band she joined is insisting she prove she’s entirely Scottish – not Irish, not English, not even Welsh. She has to be one hundred percent Scottish or they won’t let her in.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “The Scots never struck me as being into hegemony. I don’t think they care about that stuff.”
“She’s in South Carolina and the pipe band is organized by some guy who insists everyone should be pure Scottish.”
“You don’t have to be Scottish to play the bagpipes. They’re played all over the world. The Irish play bagpipes. You know –‘O Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling?’ People play them from the Andes to the Pyrenees and the Urals, especially on mountains where they’re less likely to hurt anyone. Lebanon, Yemen, Pakistan. Heck, even the Romans. I saw a Medieval illumination of a pig playing them.”
“I told her that but she’s inconsolable. The band made her take a DNA test and it came back Viking. Many Scottish people, especially in the north, have Viking ancestry. She wants you to do the test.”
“Gunn’s a Viking name. Our ancestors left Scotland. They couldn’t stand the squeal. If pipes are badly played they aren’t friendly. Did you tell her I’m learning recorder? You don’t need a blood test for a recorder. You just need to be far away from everyone.”
“She’s calling back.”
I sighed. Maybe I should play Claudia the recorder over the phone.
Claudia reiterated the plea my wife endured. I stopped my cousin mid-sentence.
“If people want to get together and make horrible noises, who they are shouldn’t enter into it. Hire yourself out as a lease breaker.”
“I need to be Scottish. I don’t want to be a Viking,” Claudia wept.
“Oscar Wilde said: Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.”
“Vikings don’t have marching bands,” she whimpered.
“They have marauding bands,” I replied. “I was thinking of going pillaging this evening. If we lived nearer you could join me. Bring your own torch.”
Claudia slammed the receiver. I hadn’t taken her seriously, but as the dial tone trumpeted in my ear I was certain I heard the sound of gulls and cold grey waves, and I imagined sailing off the horizon at the end of the world.
Nessun Dorma
When Melanie was ten she saw an art deco poster for Turandot in a shop window and knew she destined was to play the princess.
Her grandmother Cho owned a scratchy 78 of the opera. The old woman played the discs in the misplaced belief the narrative was Chinese. Puccini’s story, alas, was a European knock-off.
There weren’t many parts in opera for Chinese sopranos. Madame Butterfly was out of the question. She had to play Turandot. Turandot is a rarity in that it features not just one but two Chinese sopranos. The role gave her hope she would meet her own Prince Calaf.
Melanie and Hua were married while performing The Pearl Fishers in Amsterdam. An Artistic Director had the bright idea to cast the son of a real pearl fisher, albeit a Vietnamese one, in the role of the Sri Lankan diver.
The night before Melanie’s London debut, Hua went missing.
The empty space in their bed was all he harder to bear when he appeared for rehearsal, clutched his chest, and dropped.
She glared at him as he sang the opening bars of “Nessun Dorma.”
The performance was canceled. Melanie and Hua, opera’s new power couple were unavailable. Enraged her breakthrough had been thwarted, she grabbed her husband his hospital gown and shrieked, “Do you know who you’ve screwed with? If I find out I’ll torture her to death.”
Hua begged to sleep.
“No,” she shouted. “Not until I have my answer.”
The Other Side of the World
After my father showed me how the Earth worked I wasn’t afraid of fire. I respected it because I knew what power it held and how it changes not only landscapes but people’s perceptions. I have learned how fire walks through the bush, how fast it travels as if it is in searching of something to satisfy its hunger. Fire hunts. It is startled when it meets another fire and changes direction, sometimes, rather than join hands with it. Fire is what we see in the sky first thing in the morning and at the end of the day.
He gave me a globe for my fifth birthday and on it, each country was a different color with the major cities, mostly the political capitals, written in tiny letters. The pinkish-red countries, for instance, had once belonged to the British Empire but he explained those countries didn’t anymore because they found their independence. Independence meant a country retained the same color on the map but the color no longer mattered. The French nations were mint green and most of Africa had not sorted itself out yet so there were vast areas known as French West Africa. I asked him if the French were afraid of independence and he answered, “Yes,” because there was still a war going on in Algeria.
The way the world worked had to do with a flashlight. Flashlights are useful because they help us discover things in the dark such as the other side of the world. My father turned off the light in my room. The bulb with its batteries seated like bobsledders behind the contact point provided just enough light to imitate the sun. When half the world was bright, that portion of the Earth was in the daytime. The parts that were hidden in darkness were night. The earth was spinning and because it turned somewhere in the world the sun was setting and boys my age were getting ready to hear bedtime stories or science explanations from their fathers before falling asleep. Somewhere else, a day was always beginning. “It never ends,” he said, and I asked him if Jesus knew this because he kept saying, “World without end, Amen.” My father nodded.
After my father had turned off the light I lay in the darkness and thought about daylight on the other side of the world. I imagined a boy my age being called to get dressed and come and eat his breakfast because otherwise he’d be late for school and wouldn’t learn new words that day or be able to color maps of the world green and pinkish red. But in the dark, I could also imagine what the world might be like if it stopped turning. The sun would shine so brightly on the forests it would act like the magnifying glass my father held over a piece of newsprint to show me how the sun’s rays, if focused, could set fire to the point where the beam fell like a tiny star. I was also told not to hold a magnifying glass over ants or bugs because they would burn to death.
My teacher had told us all a story about how the sun was pulled by a chariot through the sky. Each day, well before dawn, Apollo who was in charge of light would get into his cart and his horses would race across the sky until they exhausted themselves in the west and night came.
One day his son got to the chariot before him and took a joy ride across the sky except that he did not know how to handle the sun. He almost set the Earth on fire, the people below, writhing like tiny ants in the intense heat and beam of light, were terrified they might burn to death beneath the blanket of even the most protective cloud. I told the teacher she was wrong.
I told her the sun was a flashlight and it was too far away to set fire to the world unless someone had a giant magnifying glass and treated us like ants. She made me stand in a corner with my face to the wall for the last hour of the afternoon.
Burning up was the worst possible thing I could imagine. Most of the kids in m class were afraid of monsters – some wouldn’t say so though I knew they were – and they would accidentally admit they had met huge fanged beasts in their bad dreams. I never had bad dreams about monsters or the Earth catching fire. All I had to do to prove my father right and the teacher wrong was to go out at recess on a sunny afternoon and point my face to the sun.
My eyes would go blind from staring into the bright light. When I came inside, the classroom would appear dark as night until my eyes adjusted. The heat of the sun on my face would turn my skin the color of the former British Empire on my globe, and I would sneeze uncontrollably because my aunts and uncles said they sneezed if they were out in the sun.
The teacher summoned me the next day and told me I had to agree with her version of the truth. The story made no sense. The sun was not a chariot. I had examined it long and hard. There were no wheels. The light in the sky, my father said, came from a ball of fire, from the nuclear explosions like bombs they were testing in the desert. A single sunbeam, he said, could wipe a city off the map. I wasn’t sure who I should believe. Sunbeams were small. They drifted across our living room on winter afternoons although my mother said they were just particles of dust lit up by the light through the window. I stood by my father’s version of events. The teacher sent me back to the corner for another afternoon. She said she would punish me until I apologized for saying she was wrong.
That is when I got the idea of smuggling the magnifying glass to school. The classroom had large windows that ran from the heating registers to the ceiling. The curtains had been taken down because, the teacher said, the sun had eaten holes in them. I didn’t believe her. Maybe it was the horses that ate the curtains. My mother said she’d seen old plow horses munch on just about anything. During recess, I wasn’t permitted to go outside because I was being punished.
I went to the cloakroom and took the magnifying glass from my coat pocket, stopping in front of a mirror the girls used to make sure their hair was tucked into their caps before they left for home. My eye appeared huge. I loved that. The giant eyeball said, “I can see everything you are up to!” The teacher’s desk was beside the window. The afternoon was clear and bright. I held the glass over the papers on her desk and a thin, twisting whiff of smoke curled upwards from her notes. I stepped back and put the glass between my shirt and my undershirt and went back to the corner with my face pointing inward to the angle.
Within minutes, just as the other kids were returning from recess, the fire alarm sounded. The teacher ordered the students to turn around as fast as they could and gather at a safe distance in the play area outside. She hadn’t even noticed I was left behind in my corner.
Soon, the halls were empty. The firemen had not arrived yet. The hatch to the school’s flat roof was open because the janitors had been doing work up there all day with a tar box that melted the black asphalt over an open flame. The tar box was directly above my kindergarten classroom, and the fire below had already punched a hole in the roof through which flames were licking.
I found myself looking down on the students. Some were crying. The teachers were trying to push them farther and farther back from the school walls. I crouched down and hit behind a large duct where I thought I wouldn’t be seen. My teacher was counting heads. She turned around, looked back at the classroom door, and realized I was still somewhere inside, perhaps frightened by the sound of the fire truck that pulled up to the school like a red chariot. She walked backward, still facing her students, toward the door.
That is when she reminded me of an ant and when the sun flowed through my magnifying glass and focused on the back of her neck in one small precise spot, I imagined that I had the reins of the chariot. My father would be angry, though when she slapped the spot on her neck and looked up. I was careful not to be seen. I crawled across the pebbled roof and down the ladder to the hall where a fireman met me and put an oxygen mask over my face. The fire, the principal said later, started on the roof. The tar box had malfunctioned. That is how I remember the world catching fire.
I have worked with crews of men who fight fire with shovels and axes rather than fire. We dig and hack. We try to cover the advancing fingers in dirt and the fingers simply flick it off most of the time. We set firebreaks with flame throwers so the backdraft will stop a larger wall of flame from moving forward.
I think of my crew members when we have had to lie down in the bush and let the fire walk over us as we huddled beneath a silver blanket. Some of my friends have tried to hide from the flames and when we found them they had been touched by a night without a heaven above it because forests try to make their own stars when they shoot embers into the sky.
A charred tree is both horrible and fascinating. The outer layer of bark burns off and often exposes the watercourses beneath the skin. Those damp channels save the base of the tree so sometimes, a year or two after a forest fire has passed through, the strongest among them, mostly the old oaks and maples, sprout new shoots and try to restart their lives. The scar of the water channels that fire leaves behind resembles an open would in a torso. The intestines of the tree are bright orange and they twist in the pattern of a tangled hose that is both awe-inspiring and insidious to see. Everywhere and everything that has been touched by fire is both beautiful and horrific in a way that artists attempt to express the impossible vision of failure and success in one stunning work of art.
Fire does that whenever I find myself in the middle of it, surrounded and fighting for my life and digging non-stop to make a way out of the ring of fire. As I work and my entire body aches and sweat from exertion and the heat almost drowns me where I stand, I ask the flames why they want to change the landscape. The flames are the bristles in an artist’s brush. They are painting a canvas that sums up the contradictions of this world – the analytical, calm, rational understanding of a flashlight and the chaotic rage of a stolen chariot.
When there is a parting in the smoke, and sometimes that is not a good sign because it means the wind is shifting and me and my crew might get caught in the wrong place, I look up at the sun as swoops low on bright yellow wings before dropping a load of lake water, fish and all, on the slope or the brush ahead of us. The flames speak their own language and they tell us what they want, and most of the time we cannot give it to them. They are greedy.
We are told to stand our ground, told to protect an important hydro clearing or a highway where people are frantic to get out of the way of the fire. I have traveled the world and as some people see beaches everywhere they go, I see flames. We become entrenched and refuse to budge. From there, we advance, even after dark, and continue our struggle in a new position the way soldiers struggle not merely to kill each other but to gain a tactical advantage. We aim to take the high ground.
When I see the glow from flames that are so bright and rising as starry embers in the night sky, I am certain the flickering can be seen on the other side of the world. The shadows that I am casting appear on the walls of frightened children who must be soothed to sleep and told the truth about what shadows are.
I often ask myself in the middle of a nightmare where the light is coming from if what I see is locked inside the darkness of my mind and my eyes are closed. I call that light the illusion of fire. It comes from nowhere and it shows us only what we are permitted to see the way a flashlight in the dark reveals only the morning side of a child’s globe. That glow is what illumines their minds if they wake to the sound of hooves printing on the clouds of smoke and have no idea what they have heard or why the noise startled them from their sleep.
Guide
I have had a long time to think about what happened, how Tommy Gill turned and stuck his tongue out at me as he ran into the valley then vanished. It was my responsibility to walk him home from kindergarten
Tommy Gill started kindergarten late. His parents moved into the neighborhood during the mid-autumn of my Sixth grade. I was entrusted to be Tommy’s guide. My responsibility was to walk him the eight blocks through the twists and turns of our suburb and deliver him to his front door.
Tommy knew very little about the suburb where we lived. The area was an intricate knot of streets. Some of the prestige lots backed onto a ravine, but the ravine didn’t end where the houses stopped. The old river course went into a wilderness of overgrown bushes and scrub pine.
