The Sky Is Falling (2 page)

Afterward I went to the Student Union Building to buy a cookie, a detour that entirely changed my fate. I actually went for a newspaper, then, overcome by temptation, got in line at the cookie kiosk, hiding behind the paper the way I used to hide behind my binder, like some cartoon Cold War spy. A new study had just come out of MIT predicting that more than
50
percent of Canadians would be immediately killed in the event of a nuclear war. The pretrial hearing of the Squamish Five, a local terrorist group, had begun. The Great Lakes were an acidic broth. All of it reminded me why I never paid attention to the news. The line moved forward, bringing me closer to a bulletin board next to where the coffee was accoutred.
Rides. Used textbooks.
Accommodations.
I stepped away, losing my place, drawn by a notice with a fringe of phone numbers on the bottom.

A man answered immediately, like he'd been poised by the phone. “Did you hang up on me a second ago?”

“No,” I said.

“Sure?”

“Yes.”

“Fuck.”

“I'm phoning about the room,” I said. “Is there a good time to come and see it?”

I could almost hear him shrug. “Come right now.” Then he hung up, forcing me to dig in my change purse for another dime.

“
What!
”

“I need the address,” I whimpered.

It took fifteen minutes to get to the house, which was in Kits, one lot in from the corner, on a street otherwise lined with genteel homes. Next door was a knee-high garden statue of a black man in livery holding up a lamp, as though to illuminate the adjacent eyesore. I walked past the Reliant patchworked with political bumper stickers parked in front—
Extinction is Forever.
One nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day. Impeach Reagan
—and up the path that cut through a steppe of unmown grass, climbed to the wide, crowded porch—bicycle, wearily flowered chesterfield, cardboard placards with their messages turned to the wall—and knocked on the rainbow on the door, knocked several times until at last a young man appeared, shirtless, but wearing a kerchief on his head. The year before, fishing for a major, I had cast my net wide over many subjects, among them Art History. Only now did I understand what the professor had been saying about beauty and its relationship to proportion.

He looked right at me, unblinking, in a way I was unused to. “I phoned,” I said and he smiled. To show me he was capable of it, I thought, or to show off the investment (which was patently wrong, I would find out). In their perfect even rows, his teeth glowed. “Go ahead,” he said. “Look.” I stepped into the vestibule and, since he was barefoot, stooped to remove my shoes. By the time I straightened, he was gone.

To the right was a set of French doors, each pane painted with a dove or a rainbow or some other optimistic symbol. I kept thinking about the fifteen minutes. How my life would open up if I were living just fifteen minutes from campus. I poked my head in the living room. Shag carpet, beanbag chair, posters. A fireplace extruding paper garbage. On its hearth stood a statue identical to the one in the next-door garden except for the sign taped to the lamp:
It's payback time!!!
Instead of curtains, a poncho was nailed to the window frame. Then I started because someone was sleeping on the chesterfield, lying on his back with a beret over his face. I ducked right out.

Bathroom: chipped, claw-foot tub, tinkling toilet. The cover of the tank was broken, half of it missing, the workings exposed. It embarrassed me to see someone else's plumbing. Above it hung a poster buckled with damp.
Is Your Bathroom Breeding Bolsheviks?

I peeked in the bedroom at the end of the hall and, seeing it looked well lived in—there were stuffed animals on the bed—returned to the vestibule with its battered mahogany wainscotting and went up the stairs. None of the three bedrooms on the upper floor was empty either. All had bare fir floors and plank and plastic milk crate shelves. The front-facing room, the largest, had a view of the mountains and the ubiquitous Rorschach Che painted on one wall. The middle room was an ascetic's cell with a pitted green foamie for a bed, the end room a postered shrine to Georgia O'Keeffe and Frida Kahlo, reeking of incense. I went back downstairs to the kitchen, which also smelled but of a more complex synthesis—ripe compost, burnt garlic, beans on the soak—so different from the cabbage and mothball overtones at my aunt's. It was untidy too. Dirty, in fact. I glanced at my socks with their dust and crumb adherents. The fifteen minutes more than made up for it.

The shirtless one was outside on the deck smoking, leaning against the railing, his back to me. I could make out each distinct vertebra. They seemed decorative. When I tapped on the window, he waved me out through a door beside which a rubber Ronald Reagan mask hung on a nail. Out there in the overgrown yard the decorous history of the house still showed in the unpruned roses in their unmade beds and the old pear tree scabbed with lichen. The garage though, slouching and moss-covered, was practically in ruins.

“Which room is available?” I asked.

He exhaled his acrid smoke and pointed up to the window of the O'Keeffe/Kahlo room.

“I'd like to take it.”

“You have to come for an interview. There's a sign-up sheet.” He threw the cigarette over the deck railing and led me back inside where a loose-leaf page lay on the kitchen table, three names and phone numbers already written on it. I felt sick and made my writing neater than the others', only realizing after the fact that it would probably work against me.

“Jane,” he read off the paper before flashing his teeth again. “How do you say your last name?”

Most of the rooms that were advertised in the newspaper and still available were almost as far away as my aunt's, near Fraser Street or Knight. I went to look at a few only to leave undecided and anxious that someone else would get the place if I took too long to make up my mind. Then someone called “from the Trutch house,” she said, though the house I'd seen was actually on one of the numbered east-west streets. Trutch was the cross street. She told me to come at six-thirty.

I got there too early and waited on the steps. In the house across the street, the living room curtains were open and I could see through to the dining room, where a family was sitting down to supper. A child lobbed an oven mitt across the table. Someone and his dog walked past the stickered Reliant. The dog smiled but the man's straight-ahead gaze seemed to emanate hostility.

At exactly six-thirty, I rang the doorbell. A thin girl answered, her hair long and dark and not particularly clean. Despite this, despite dressing like a scarecrow and the deep shadows under her eyes, she was quite pretty, which made me leery and more nervous than before.

“Are you Jane?” She introduced herself as Sonia and led me in.

Pete from two days before was sitting at the kitchen table. Today he wore a shirt, almost a blouse, with full sleeves and a ruffled front and cuffs. He'd dispensed with the kerchief and I saw now that his hair was dirty blond and shoulder-length; he'd seemed Greco-Roman when we'd met previously, but my second impression was Renaissance for sure.

Two other men were at the table, one of them wearing glasses with big plastic frames and a T-shirt entreating the U.S. to vacate Central America. His hair was dark and wiry, nose very narrow, like it had been squeezed in a book. This was Dieter. The third man seemed cleaner than the rest. It took me a moment to notice the girl leaning against the counter, but as soon as I did she became the most obvious person there because of the deep coppery mane hanging halfway down her back and how her freckles contrasted with her creamy skin. Belinda, Sonia, Pete, Dieter, this other person—five complete strangers who didn't know anything about me, not my tormented high school years, not how I had blown it last year. Last year had been my chance to start over, to make friends, but I had forfeited it, blaming the bus ride. I couldn't imagine it had anything to do with me.

Seeing me hovering in the doorway, the cleaner man stood and shook hands smilingly all around. My heart sank when he picked a violin case off the floor and walked past without acknowledging me. He was my competitor. I felt like turning and running because no one would ever choose sweaty, bookish me over someone who could play the violin.

I sat and Sonia introduced everyone. Pete uncrossed one arm to wiggle his fingers at me. “This is Jane,” Sonia said.

“Jane Zed,” said Pete.

“That's easier,” I admitted.

Except for Pete, they looked everywhere but at me so I felt cut out of the picture, as I usually did. Then I was flooded with embarrassment, for I knew it was childish to want two contradictory things: to be left alone and to be included.

“I'm Belinda,” said the girl at the counter, who had not been introduced.

“Belinda's the one moving out,” Sonia explained.

Pete: “She needs her space.”

With two exaggerated tosses of her head, Belinda threw her hair over each shoulder. Years later, on nights I couldn't sleep (frequently, in other words), I would sometimes scroll the muted channels in search of a soporific. Belinda would flash past, executing this same ribbon dance, in the service of selling hair conditioner. But now she was indignant, telling Pete, “I do!”

“I know you do,” he said and it was impossible to decipher his tone, whether he was sarcastic or earnest. He could be acidly sarcastic, but I didn't know that yet.

Belinda humphed and leaned back with crossed arms. The other two, Sonia and Dieter, seemed anxious to keep the interview going. Dieter took over the talking, stapling his eyes to the place I always thought of as my upper right-hand corner. Theirs was a communal rather than a shared accommodation. They each participated equally in the running and upkeep of the house. “We have a chore sheet.” He got up to unmagnet it from the freezer door for me. I saw their different writing styles, Dieter's tight and precise, Pete's backward leaning, Belinda's too large for the space. Sonia had printed her name in a round, elementary-school hand.

“We rotate chores monthly. You do your assigned chore once a week. Every Sunday we put twenty dollars in the kitty. From that you buy the groceries when it's your turn to cook. We eat supper together. House meeting once a month.
Eso es todo
.” He pushed up his glasses with his middle finger.

I was not a serious candidate. His perfunctory delivery and the fuck-off adjusting of his glasses made this obvious. Sonia had been sucking on the little gold cross around her neck, but now she let it go to add, “We're vegetarian.”

“So am I,” I said. It just came out. I was surprised too, because I had just decided I didn't want to live there anyway so I didn't care about being rejected by them. But now everyone straightened and Sonia smiled, acknowledging this specious point of commonality.

They asked what I was studying. “Arts,” I said.

“Me too!” Belinda bubbled from her corner. “I'm in Theatre!”

“I'm in Education,” Sonia said. “Dieter's in Poli Sci and Spanish. Pete's in Engineering.”

Pete: “I'm an anarchist.”

Belinda: “I'm a feminist.”

“Me too,” Dieter seconded.

“Actually,” Pete said, “I'm an anarcho-feminist.”

“I'm a pacifist,” Sonia sighed, and Dieter tugged a lock of her hair twice, tooting, “Pacifist! Pacifist!”

Pete: “More precisely, I'm an anarcho-feminist-pacifist.”

Declarations winging by me, fast and furious. I nearly ducked. I was relieved they didn't ask because I, I was nothing.

I moved into the Trutch house officially the Sunday before classes started, after transporting my belongings in my suitcase over several trips throughout the week. My aunt didn't have a car and, anyway, I didn't want to involve her. Belinda was still occupying the room the first time I came; Pete was there, too, lolling gorgeously on the bed. He smiled right at me while, blushing violently, I stacked my things in the corner Belinda had indicated with a careless, freckled wave. Each time I came back there was a little less of her in the room and none of Pete.

On Sunday the bed was still there, the mattress stripped. I crept downstairs for a broom. Dieter was in the kitchen with another man, older, well into his twenties and dark-complected, who was reading but stood politely when I came in. He wore granny glasses, the gold rims of which matched one of his front teeth. “Ector.” He put out his hand.

Dieter was boiling coffee in a saucepan, watching it so intently I got the impression he was deliberately ignoring me. I asked about the broom, but then Pete came in and told everyone to freeze. “You and you and you. Come.”

Ector and I obeyed. We didn't think twice. We followed him out and waited in the vestibule while Pete took the stairs up two at a time. A moment later he and Belinda started down with the mattress between them. Ector snapped to when he saw Belinda, pulling a beret from his back pocket, donning it, then opening the door for them to hurl their burden out. He insisted on taking her place, then up he went with Pete. There was banging. From the swearing, not the fucks but the words I couldn't understand, I realized that the chivalrous Ector spoke Spanish, also, when Pete screamed out his name, that it was actually
Hector
.