April 1984
It was getting strip-searched that
finished Carol. Jail she had been
prepared for. She still hadn’t slept and
it was almost noon. Four hours ago they
were released from the drunk tank, the only facility that could hold all of
them. They were demonstrating
against the visiting U.S. secretary of state.
Then two of the younger males tried to break through the police
cordon. The ensuing pandemonium did not
respond to Carol’s strident calls for restraint. One thing led to another, but no one was
injured. Nuclear proliferation would
accelerate until the earth was deader than Mars, a cold, dark cinder twirling
alone in space. She lay now on her bed--
a mattress on the floor--from where she stared up at her white, slightly
cracked ceiling. It wasn’t really
cracked but a thin hairline fissure that ran across the paint like a mapped
river. Outside the jail this morning,
Carol had to dodge some creepy looking journalists. When she got home there were three more
waiting outside for her. A nice looking
young man with an open face approached her.
She tried to extinguish her cigarette on his forehead. As he shrank back Carol ran inside, bolted
the door then ran up the stairs to her little suite on top.
For six years
she had lived in this house, having lived for two years on each of its three
storeys. For two years she had shared
the main floor with Stan her ex-husband.
They married each other more than six years ago for the convenience
of getting generous student loans and bursaries. They slept separately, and Carol had remained
a virgin throughout. She had always
assumed that her husband, who was just leaving a sugar daddy of his when they
first met, was gay, until he began seeing Suzanne, who lived with him now on
the main floor of the house. It was to
the good Doctor Richard Bertholdt that Carol soon after offered up her
maidenhood. In the poorest slum of
Vancouver he was practicing in a free clinic.
Now he was a medic in Nicaragua, dodging bullets and bombs while
treating the injured Sandinistas and their families. Carol had gone to live with him on the second
floor of the house just as Suzanne was moving in to replace her on the
first. Now, in this beautiful room and
kitchen on the top floor, Carol enjoyed an uneasy solitude with windows on
three sides, a view, and cherry trees that reached past the roof. Richard, last she had heard, had married a
diplomat’s daughter in Managua, and was now the father of a little girl.
Carol had less
than twenty-four hours to finish writing her speech. She was filling
in for a certain nuclear-physicist turned anti-nuclear activist from Berkley,
who’d just been refused entry into Canada.
When he phoned Carol to give her the highlights of his speech, the line
went inexplicably dead. She was going to
mention this in her speech.
Her hand brushed
idly over her left breast. She examined
it by touch, then her right breast. No
lumps. Two years ago, Carol’s mother
lost her left breast in a radical mastectomy.
It ran in families. Her father
had lifted his ban on her in order to permit Carol to come back and take care of her
mother. She recovered well, and Carol
learned that she was bottle-fed as a baby.
Her mother had never told her this before. It wasn’t that she couldn’t, nor that she
didn’t want to—Carol’s father had commanded it.
With his horror of things pertaining to the flesh, he was not going to
countenance breast-feeding under his roof.
He had formerly been a Catholic priest, Carol’s father. He saw the light and became a Baptist, and
now he was a minister. According to her
mother, he was the real cause of her cancer. Carol was almost certain that
her mother and father had never seen each other naked.
Richard had loved
Carol’s breasts. He called them
perfection, comparing them to two delicate white kittens. He left her the day after her mother’s
mastectomy. She started to cry. Carol lay alone on her bed. Always alone.
In the two years since Richard’s disappearance and the loss of her
mother’s left breast Carol had remained alone, chaste and unloved. She lived now like a nun, like a justice and
peace anchoress, and now, all of a sudden,every cell in her body seemed to be
screaming for Richard’s delicate touch.
She slept. She dreamed.
She was climbing a mountain, clinging to a sheer rock face with a
thousand foot drop. A golden eagle
soared past her, slowly, for Carol to climb onto his back. She was afraid, and clung tightly to the
rock. She woke and a flash of golden
green light dazzled her from the teardrop crystal that hung in her window. With her eyes she traced the profusion of
shattered rainbows on the white wall and at the sepia wizened face of Gandhi
that smiled serenely from the huge poster that her mentor, Doris Goldberg had
given her. Richard had given her the
crystal one Christmas. Carol was never
in the habit of buying nice things for herself.
She wanted a cigarette, but didn’t feel like moving. She struggled into an upright posture, swept
her luxuriant dark blonde hair from her face and lit a cigarette. She wanted badly to pee, but first that first
critical rush of nicotine.
After a shower
she toweled herself dry, her perfect breasts staring at her from the
half-steamed mirror. She always watched
them, closely, for the first signs of sagging.
Even at age thirty-one they still had the buoyancy that had turned a
number of male heads when she was eighteen—when she was thirteen! At the age of twelve Carol already had the
body of a young woman, for which reason her mother would dress her in shapeless
and ugly clothes. At her father’s
insistence, Carol had grown to suspect.
Even though she did nothing to exploit this—she still seldom wore
make-up—Carol had come to know that she was extraordinarily pretty. Just over thirty, time still had done nothing
to mark her. Her skin was still a
uniform creamy white, like the product of daily milk-baths. Even as she waited for the nymph to give way
to the matron, Carol had come to wonder if she might be one of those favoured
ones whose physical beauty didn’t have an expiry date. She had lost weight since Christmas, which
did look good on her, though she also held the belief that any body and image
manipulation was a bourgeois preoccupation unworthy of a woman who lived for
world peace, social justice and the universal establishment of human
rights. But that was fifteen pounds
ago. She toweled her hair dry. Later she would wind it into a tight knot, as
always, which would give her face a severe, school-marmish aspect, sharpening
her already prominent cheekbones. The
hairstyle did nothing for her. Her
penance for being beautiful.
She pulled from
her old fridge a jar of natural peanut butter and a loaf of multigrain bread.
She peeled a ripe banana, its brown spots suggesting the forearm of an aging
woman. Then, remembering that peanut
butter sandwiches deep-fried in a pound of butter had been a favourite comfort
food of Elvis Presley, she nearly lost her appetite. While growing up Carol had never known the
music of Elvis, nor the Beatles, and certainly not the Rolling Stones. All but the most strictly devotional hymns
had been forbidden in her father’s household. At eighteen, when Carol escaped
to Victoria where she could wear whatever the hell she wanted she completely
immersed herself in the music of her lost youth. Elvis, neither Presley nor Costello, never
did quite take with her.
“Am I speaking
to Carol Harley-Atkinson?” asked a young male on the phone.
“You are…”
“Derek Merkeley.
I’m with the Sun—”
“And you would
like me to make a statement.”
“Only the women
were strip-searched?”
“Was that you
standing outside my house this morning?”
“I was, as a
matter of fact.”
“And you’re
about five foot ten?”
“Six feet,
actually.”
“You have short
dark hair and hazel-green eyes?’
“You have an
excellent memory.”
“And you were
wearing jeans and a Harris Tweed jacket.”
“I’m still
wearing them.”
“And I tried to
extinguish my cigarette on your forehead.
Well, Derek, let me tell you something.
Next time, the lit end of my cigarette goes straight into your
eye.” She hung up on him. She was
shaking. Carol ignored her half-eaten
sandwich and reached for a cigarette.
She phoned Doris.
“Carol. Are you all right, darling? I saw everything on TV.”
“I
think I’ll live.”
“Don’t
do the speech if you’re not feeling up to it.”
“I
think I can pull it off.”
“It’s
not a priority.”
Carol
silently railed against this genteel challenge to her sense of
indispensability. “Are the banners
finished?” she said.
“They
are, but Carol, please get some rest.”
“What
about the speech?”
“It
isn’t a priority, dear. Perhaps you
might take things easy for a while.”
“I
have every intention of being there tomorrow.”
“You
know that you don’t have to.”
“I
want to. And I will be giving the
speech.”
“That
is very wonderful of you, Carol. I just
want to assure you that you don’t have to. That you needn’t feel
indispensable.”
“It
isn’t about being indispensable. It has
absolutely nothing to do with feeling indispensable. But I want to honour my commitment.”
“Are
you getting flack from any journalists, Carol?”
“Yes. They were standing right here in front of my
house this morning. Just after I escaped
a bunch of others at the jailhouse.
Fuck—I mean, pardon my language, please.
“It’s
all right, dear, you’ve been under a lot of stress. Were you treated all right?”
“All
the women were strip-searched. All of
us. Just the women.”
“Carol,
get some rest. Please.”
“I’m
still doing the speech.”
“By
all means, dear, by all means. But in the meantime rest. I’m going to speak to our lawyer about the
strip-search.”
“Like
a lot of good that’ll do.”
“Carol,
please get some rest. You’ve been having
an awful time.”
“I
will, Doris.”
“Promise
me?”
“I
promise.”
“Oh,
and Carol. There is one journalist that
I would like you to beware of. His name
is Derek Merkeley.”
“He
just phone me a minute ago.”
“Tell
him nothing. Whatever you do. He is very
dangerous. Alice has been having a
dreadful time with him lately.”
“Alice?”
“McItyre. Glen’s mother—oh, that’s right, you two
haven’t met. But Carol, do be careful of
Derek. He has been known to be very
abusive towards women. And while we’re
on the subject of Glen McIntyre, Alice’s son, I think that he would be an ideal
candidate for viewing those writings of Richard’s.”
“Really?”
"Glen
is a type of mystic, shall we say? I
have known him since he was a boy. If
there’s anyone to unlock the riddle of those writings, I believe that he could
do it.”
“If
you say so.”
“As
a matter of fact, he is here sitting right now in my livingroom. Do have a word with him if you will.”
“Right
now?”
“He
is interested in volunteering with the Peace Coalition. I was going to have him phone you anyway.”
“Okay.”
“Hello?”
said a young male voice.
“Hi,
Glen?”
“Yes. And you’re Carol?”
“That’s
right. Doris tells me that you’re
interested in volunteering with us.”
“Yes,
I am.”
“Well,
are you any good at folding things? We
have tonnes of leaflets that need to be gotten ready for the Walk For Peace tomorrow. Interested?”
“I
am, actually.”
“Good. Well, let’s meet somewhere, shall we? Do you know the Sun Ray Café?”
“On Seventeenth
and Cambie? Didn’t you used to work
there?”
“I
was a waitress there last year. Meet me
there at four thirty. Five is better.”
It
was Doris Goldberg who had created for Carol her job at the Peace
Coalition. When Carol moved to Vancouver
from Victoria and enrolled at Langara College, Doris was her English Lit
instructor. She had been recently
widowed by the death of her husband, a renowned Holocaust survivor. Doris was already in her sixties, a Quaker as
well as a Jew who had devoted much of her life to trying to build bridges of
reconciliation and peace between Palestinians and Israelis. She had also become Carol’s surest and most
reliable friend, once Carol had got over her initial terror of this woman. She still wasn’t sure exactly what her duties
were at the Peace Coalition. She
supposed that justice and peace had become her vocation.
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