Cinnamon Toast and the End of the World (2 page)

Cinnamon toast is my mother’s thing. Her background is Russian, so really we should be having, I don’t know, brown bread and
pickles or porridge made of old copies of
Pravda
or whatever they eat over there. It was all these British children’s books she’d grown up with. I read the same ones when
I was a kid. Taught herself how to make cinnamon toast after she read about the Famous Five or some other band of English
schoolkids preparing it on a campfire for one of their endless little picnics.

Cinnamon toast. She told me she’d loved the sound of the words. ‘Didn’t know what it was,’ she said, ‘but I knew I had to
have it.’

So there was Mark, chowing down on Enid Blyton food, in my father’s jacket with the leather patches on the elbows, big seventies
lapels. The physical fact of him was making me uncomfortable. He was shoving toast in his face – a mess of crumbs sprinkled
over the table and a light glaze of butter coating his chin. I leaned against the counter with my elbows grazing the sink.
Mom left the kitchen to check something in the wash.

Sun on his hair, big hands curled around a blue-striped mug with chipped edges. His shadow was cut out on a square of sunlight
on the
table behind him, with the shadow of the floating steam rising, and watery lines of heat from the cup’s surface. Mark looked
up at me and I turned away.

‘Hey, what happened last night?’

‘What do you mean?’ I pretended to rub my eyes.

‘You just took off. Had to get rid of all the butts and cans myself and I didn’t know what to do with them, so …’ He held
up his backpack, which was swollen with garbage. Our Sunday morning ritual of getting rid of the evidence from Saturday. I
had a hundred places around the house to stash it all. But today I’d left him to deal with that alone.

‘Fell asleep upstairs. Sorry.’ I stared into the yellow and green linoleum at my feet. I’d never had to work at having a conversation
with Mark before.

‘You’ll be late,’ I said.

He glanced at our clock, a plastic daisy on the wall.

‘Shit. You’re right. Ten minutes.’ Mark stood up, slung his backpack over his shoulder and stuck a piece of cinnamon toast
in his mouth. He mumbled something about returning the jacket and was out the door in seconds.

Striding down the driveway munching on a piece of toast, with the sun falling on the shoulders of my father’s coat. Off to
church. Mark’s belief in God tended to waver in and out depending on how he felt about himself and life in general. But he
never missed a service at St Andrew’s Presbyterian. ‘It’s forty minutes out of the week where you’re concentrating on
not
being a selfish dickhead,’ he’d told me once. ‘Everything else is mostly pushing in the other direction.’

I realised my mother was standing beside me. Weird how she’d always seemed so tall when I was a little kid, and now she was
barely up to my shoulder. At this rate I’ll be able to carry her around in
a shoebox by the time she’s seventy. Well, I’ll save on old people’s homes, anyway.

‘So, Mom. Is this some freaky hormonal thing, dressing teenage boys up like your ex-husband?’

She laughed and wrapped her hands around a mug of tea for warmth. My mother is fair-haired and light, fine-boned. It would
be nice if I looked more like her, but I’m dark and angular like my father, all bumping elbows and jutting knees. You’d want
to fold me up and stack me in a corner. Mom was in flannel pyjamas, with her hair down her back in light brown waves and a
bathrobe I remembered from early childhood. It’d been turquoise back then. I wasn’t sure what colour I’d call it now.

‘He didn’t have time to go home and change for church,’ she said.

‘He should just keep it. It’s not like I’m going to wear it.’

‘Doesn’t really fit you, does it? You don’t have the shoulders.’ She ambled over to the tape player and rewound the cassette.

‘So … what were you guys talking about when I came in?’ I said.

Mom tweaked opened a cupboard door, gazed into it for a moment and then seemed to forget why she was there. I had to ask her
again.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Mark? The usual. Cooking. He wants to make supper for his little sister tomorrow.’

The sounds of ‘Sunday Morning’ started to fill the kitchen once more, innocent musicbox notes of the intro, then Lou Reed’s
drifting drugged-up voice talking about wasted years and a restless feeling by his side, telling us to watch out. The world
was behind us.

We moved around each other. The room should have felt bigger with Mark gone, but I was still acting like he was there, sitting
invisibly at the table with a plate of crumbs in front of him. After a while, Mom decided she’d had enough cinnamon toast
and it was time to go off
and do something else. Left me alone with this empty feeling whirling around inside.

I felt drained, lifeless. I was sure that everything was ruined. I’d never feel the same way around Mark. It would never be
easy and comfortable between us again.

I was right, as it turned out.

Now, you tell me that’s not the end of the world.

So tired I felt like something freeze-dried, brine shrimp in an envelope sold off to children as Sea Monkeys. Mark would be
in church by now, talking to God. He’d be expecting us to meet up afterwards – it was almost time for the next phase of our
hectic weekend schedule, the part where we’d get stoned and then wander around town annoying old people. The guy in the Sherlock
Holmes hat was waiting with his wheezy dog outside Sunset Manor. Just another Sunday.

I stared into the sink, hypnotised by the shapes of mugs and dishes rolling against each other. Then I pushed them aside,
stuck my head under the tap, and turned on the cold water. It flowed over my neck and face, soaked my hair. Cold and perfect.
I shuddered. At times when I am a bit overwhelmed, I find that this is a very, very good thing to do. My skull sank to rest
on an empty tea mug and the water kept coming.

Then it stopped. My mother was gazing down at me.

‘Are you okay, honey?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Your head’s in the sink.’

‘It is?’ I started to laugh. Mom lifted her reading glasses so she could rub her eyes. I stared up at her like a landed fish.

‘Stephen. You can tell me anything, you know.’

‘Fine. Go away.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake.’

‘You just said I could tell you anything.’

She twisted the tap and the water rushed down at me again.

‘Don’t drown, you little so-and-so.’

After a minute, I turned off the tap, stretched out blindly and grabbed the end of a roll of paper towels so I wouldn’t get
soaked when I stood up. The daisy clock was still ticking forward. I padded into the sewing room and apologised to my mother
for being a jerk. She told me I was dripping on her and I should find something constructive to do.

So I sneaked out back for a cigarette.

I had to step carefully – in April our yard was mostly mud and flat yellowish grass, plus whatever had been stuck in the snow
banks all winter coming out to get to know us again. There were sheets hanging on the line. Good. It would keep me out of
view of the house. The sun was bouncing off them, flapping walls of white light. I had a seat on the big block of wood we
use for chopping up logs. It was cold, but I like to be a little bit cold.

Sun on my face. And the wind such a calm, patient thing moving through the tree branches. You could imagine touching it, like
a horse’s back.

This is where I lived. Riverside, Nova Scotia (population 1,816). The kind of place where all those movies about small-town
America seem to get filmed. You know the kind I’m talking about. The camera rambles down the street and you see people chirping
greetings and friendly chit-chat
at each other, waving from their houses, old people raking leaves, with a soundtrack of quick, bouncy notes on the strings.
For a horror movie just run the same scene but add a slow, tense cello.

I was falling asleep behind this maze of sheets with a lit cigarette in my hand.

So, was my life comedy or horror? I’d prefer a horror movie. At least you know what you’re dealing with there. Something low-budget
and tacky. Bad costumes, bad special effects.
It Came from the Commune
.

The commune. That was where I grew up, before we came to Riverside. Wasn’t really a commune, though, just a place we lived.
Down a dirt road on the side of the north mountain off the bay, me and my parents and about twenty others in ramshackle houses
a few minutes’ walk from each other. There were a couple of cleared pastures and abandoned farms – otherwise it was all trees.
My family lived in a dome made up of triangles of wood stuck together. The windows were triangles too, like eyes in a pumpkin
on Halloween. The electricity only worked sometimes. No TV, of course. My father hated it.

It was quiet there. I remember it was always quiet. You could hear the sea. You could hear somebody walking down the road
a hundred feet away or the horses swishing their tails or the goats nannering to each other. At night, the stars were huge
and if it was a full moon everything was lit up like day.

The last time I went down to see the old place, the roof had fallen in, and the triangle eyes just stared.

In the field behind the old Higgins farm, the grass used to be taller than your head. If you were seven years old, that is.
I remember this one afternoon in late summer. I was crouching there with the high, green sheaths all around me, watching a
grasshopper and trying to keep very still. School was over for the day. It was August, but I had school in the
summer and any time Mom wasn’t busy with her job in the Valley. We’d sit on the floor by the woodstove with books and scribblers
and rolls of newsprint to draw on, working our way through the Nova Scotia Elementary School curriculum, just the two of us.
My father was the one who was supposed to be doing this because he was brilliant and all, and he only had to be at the university
two days a week. But the whole thing bored him.

The wind had riffled the tall grass, tossed the Black-eyed Susans with their funny domed centres. The grasshopper was watching
me. I held my breath. Then I lunged and cupped my hand over the bug, slid my other hand under, tearing up bits of grass. I
could feel him jumping around in the space I’d made with my hands.

I ran to show my best friend Dylan and almost tripped over her, lying quiet and straight five feet away. The little girl from
down the road. I’d known her since I could talk. Her mom was always dressing her in sparkly head scarves and she was wearing
one that day, and a long flowered blue skirt over red sneakers. Dylan said we should go to her place and get a jar so it could
be the grasshopper’s house. We could name him Pigeon, she said. Very dumb. Rocket was his real name.

We were always together like that. If Dylan was going somewhere and she wanted me to follow, she’d wave her empty hand and
I’d come running up and take it.

When we got to the edge of the field, I realised Rocket was gone – no point in going to Dylan’s house now. We changed direction
and went down to the brook, where we lay with our faces on the water blowing bubbles and chewing on peppermint leaves. Dylan
remembered there were baby goats at her neighbours’ farm so we took off in that direction, but then we saw a group of the
big girls having an argument with Dylan’s sister Summer and we had to stop. It looked like Summer was
going to get a pounding and that would be very, very good to see. (The ‘big girls’ were really only about twelve or thirteen,
but to us at seven they were practically gods. And like gods, you had your favourites and the ones you’d curse with shaking
fists. Dylan and I had already spent a good part of our lives cursing Summer.)

They were all in a patch of woods at the edge of the pasture. Summer was scowling, with her back to a rock covered in patches
of papery yellow lichen.

‘Well, you’ve seen horses doing it, right?’

‘Yeah, but it’s different for people.’ A dark wispy girl named Andromeda was facing her down. The other girls watched.

‘You’re so stupid,’ said Summer, and she twisted her head scarf tighter. Andromeda spat her gum into the grass.

‘Come on, Summer. I saw my dad’s. It doesn’t look like that at all.’

‘It gets hard when they want to do it with a girl. It changes.’

Everybody laughed. Summer looked like she’d been cheated of something. She noticed me and Dylan at the edge of the group.

‘Oh, you think it’s funny?’ she said. ‘I can prove it. Stephen, c’mere.’

‘Whoa-no!’ I took off at a run. Summer tackled me, pinned me to the ground. I thrashed and Dylan kicked at her, and the other
girls seemed confused about which of us they should be helping. Dylan bit her sister on the arm. She screamed and let me go.
The two of us went pelting down the dirt road together.

Behind my old house there was a maple with a tyre swing and we clambered into the tree’s branches and waited for the big girls.
We decided to chew up leaves and spit them into their hair, did a couple for practice and watched them plop onto the ground.
Dark fizzy frogs dripping slime. I asked Dylan if we should tell on her sister.

She took a leathery wad of maple out of her mouth. ‘Nah. I don’t
think Summer was really gonna do anything to your wiener, Stephen. She just wanted to win.’

I had to agree. Usually stuff like this never happened. The worst about being practically the only boy was getting married
so many times when the girls played at weddings, but even that wasn’t too bad. You just had to stand there bored out of your
mind and say yes every time somebody asked you a question.

We stayed in the tree for a while. The sun dappled our hands and I watched an inchworm rearing up on a twig in front of me.
We spat a few more leaf bombs onto the ground. Then there was music coming from my house.

‘Oh, neato!’ said Dylan. We had to go in.

The dome of my house was a circle wrapping itself around us. We had rugs on the walls. We had a couch and a table and a record
player, a swing hanging from the ceiling. There was plastic over the triangle windows instead of glass – it made everything
seem fuzzy, like the people in the field outside were something you were dreaming. That day the whole place smelled like vegetable
soup.

My mom was in jeans and one of my father’s T-shirts, her hair coiled on top of her head and a pencil stuck in there to hold
it. Dylan leaped onto a chair behind her so she could take that pencil out. I was convinced my mother was the prettiest person
on the mountain, with her neat little face and narrow cat’s eyes. She’d leave for work at her office job in the Valley in
high boots and swirly skirts and thin tight sweaters and I was very proud of her.

Mom laughed as the pencil went sliding out of her hair. Dylan was bouncing on the chair. ‘Dance with me, Maryna!’

‘Well, all right.’ A little smile, my mother was almost blushing. She took both Dylan’s warm pink hands in hers and they swayed
and bobbed to the song on the record player – ‘S.O.S.’, Dylan’s favourite.

Then the screen door banged and my father was home, in his corduroy jacket with the patches on the elbows, a sheaf of folders
under his arm.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘this is quite the ruckus. Quite the ruckus you’re cooking up here.’ But he was smiling, in that absent way
he had. He walked in through the noise, hit a switch on the record player and the needle reared up and settled back on its
little stand. I jumped onto the table so I’d be tall enough to kiss him hello. There was only a small space under his eye
where you could do this; his beard was getting out of control again.

‘Hey, buddy-bear.’ My father rested his hand on my head for a moment.

‘Hi, Stanley.’ We put our foreheads together so it looked like he only had one big eye and I laughed.

I remember my father in those days as someone tall and twisty, long arms and legs and bright brown eyes, with wiry dark hair
he’d gather in a ponytail or carry in a cloud around his head. His friends called him Spider. He insisted I call him Stanley
or Stan. No father names. He wanted everybody to be on an equal footing in this family, he always told me. ‘Like friends.’

‘Not on the table, honey,’ my mother said. Stan picked me up under my armpits and lowered me to the floor, then pushed a chair
to one side so he could wrap his arms around Mom as she stood at the counter cutting slices of brown bread.

‘You had a shower,’ she said, breathing him in.

‘Course. Used the gym at school. Not like the rest of you savages out here.’

We didn’t have a shower in our house. We had to use the one at Dylan’s every few days, or else we’d just sponge ourselves
off over a tub of water heated on the woodstove. There was no flush toilet in the dome either: just a board with a couple
of holes in a tiny wooden shed out back – take a deep breath before you go in and hold it!

Stanley was talking about his classes, how well they were going. ‘Kids are all terrified of me. Should do something to make
it worse, eh? Put slow-burning fuses in my beard.’

‘Like Blackbeard,’ I said. We’d been reading about pirates together and I thought he’d be pleased I’d remembered. He glanced
back, asked me what Blackbeard’s real name was.

‘Edward Teach?’

Stan nodded at me slowly. I felt my shoulders start to relax.

Dylan went home and we ate soup at the table that Mom had wiped clean of my footprints. When it was dark, Stanley took out
his guitar. I sang with him. ‘Satellite of Love’ was our favourite because I liked the part about ‘Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday
and Thursday’. He was smoking marijuana. I knew what it was, of course, even as a kid. He’d told me over and over that it
was just for relaxing and only for adults. He didn’t need to say this because I hated it so much: the smell, and what it did
to his eyes and voice. He’d been really nice to us that night, though, so I didn’t run off like I usually did when he brought
out those thin white papers and plastic bags.

In bed that night I listened to my mother wash the dishes and waited for the moment when she’d throw the used-up water from
the basin into the sink and it sounded like it was going to fall on my head. I always loved that. Sound bounced around strangely
in our circle house. I could hear my mother humming, and the clear plastic on the triangle window of my little room puffing
out and breathing in with the wind, like a sail
on a ship. My bed was built into the side of the house. Nothing could move it. I fell asleep.

The next day was my birthday.

Eight felt older than seven. Something about those two circles sitting solidly on top of each other. A good number. My parents
took me and Dylan off the mountain to see
Star Wars
for my birthday treat. The Death Star blew up and the whole audience went crazy. My father jumped to his feet and cheered.
After the movie, I ran up and down the streets with Dylan, and we spied on the people in the stores and pretended to be Luke
in his X-wing fighter. We made a promise to have a day just like this for her birthday too, and every year after that until
we were old.