The Sky Is Falling (7 page)

No more Hiroshimas!

We worked for half an hour then all of us but Pete were done. “I need a smoke,” he said. “I'll finish later.” When Dieter tried to read one of his messages, Pete pounced, slapping his hand over it. “Do you
mind
?”

Dieter stalked away, offended. I stayed and offered to help Sonia fold the cranes. “Did you write this?” she asked, reading one of my banal messages.

“Yes.”

“That's good, Jane,” she said.

“What did you write?” I asked.

She showed me.

Give peace a chance
.

Later that night as I lay reading in my room, something made me look up from my book: a green square sliding under the door, fed slowly through from the other side. Then an orange square, then a red.

In the morning I woke to find a whole paper mat of squares at my door. I read them while I was eating my toast in my room. By the time I'd finished folding them into cranes, Pete's music had come on (The Doors) and, with the men jockeying for the bathroom, the day's fresh disputes began.

“Zed!” Pete called to me later as I was coming down the stairs. “Did you see what I put under your door?”

“Yes.”

He stepped out of the kitchen, peanut butter jar in hand, and, taking the spoon out of his mouth, asked, “What did you do with them?”

“I turned them into birds.”

He threw his head back and let loose a peanutty peal that filled the hall. “Did you read them?”

I'd barely recovered from mid-terms and now I sensed another test. He'd stopped Dieter from reading what he'd written, but I settled on the truth. “Yes.”

“And?”

I zipped my jacket, hefted my texts onto my back. “You really want my opinion?”

“Yes.”

“I laughed.”

I thought he might be offended, but he looked pleased.

Pete had a suit! At supper, it induced a fit of giggling in Sonia every time she looked at him. “What?” he asked, deadpan. “It's Halloween.”

“What are you supposed to be?” I was innocent enough to ask.

“A capitalist,” Sonia told me.

Pete smirked as he margarined his bread. “You can say that again.”

We were still eating when the first chorus sounded. “Trick or treat!” Pete got up, plucked Reagan's face off the wall, snugged it over his own, and tucked his hair in.

Dieter: “You should have said you were dressing up. I would have been Margaret Thatcher.”

“You'll scare them,” Sonia said.

Reagan: “That's the whole idea.” The mask distorted his voice. He didn't even sound like Pete, and I recoiled though I had only ever thought of Ronald Reagan, if I thought of him at all, as affable and doddering. Pete threw open the front door, booming: “Who have we here?”

“Trick or treat!” UNICEF boxes jingled furiously.

“Here's a little something for each of you.”

“What is it?”

“A peace crane. And there's a special message inside it. When you get home, ask your mommy and daddy to read it to you.”

“Thank you, Mr. Reagan.”

“You're welcome. Now be careful tonight. You never know when I'm going to drop the Big One.”

He shut the door and came back to the kitchen, still the president. Dieter had gone for the belt of his bathrobe and was tying a tea towel over his wiry hair. “Who are you?” Reagan asked.

“Arafat, you Yankee scum.”

Sonia and I went to the living room where, kneeling on the chesterfield, we watched the procession out the window. Voices rang out all along the street, screeches too, then a firecracker discharged, and Sonia cringed. “Oh God. It's like a war.” As soon as she said it, I saw it too, a tattered exodus, pillowcases stuffed with belongings, dragged along. They carried on right past our house, though our porch light illuminated a welcome. When a pirate broke free and started for us, an adult called him back. Finally a few older, unchaperoned kids took a chance. Reagan and Arafat answered.

“What's this?”

“It's a peace crane. Inside there's a special—”

“Don't you have any candy?”

“No, you ingrate. You're fat enough already.”

“Fuck you!” said the child.

Sonia leapt off the chesterfield. “What do you guys think you're doing?”

The kids fled down the walk. Two of them were playing with the cranes, using them as bombers, flying loop-the-loops, colliding mid-air. Sonia dismissed Pete and Dieter. “Go. Leave. Jane and I will hand them out.”

We put on coats and shoes and took the bowl of cranes with us. From our new post at the end of the walk, we intercepted the next group that came along, Sonia crouching before a child in a hooded coat with rouge-appled cheeks. “Hello, sweetheart. Are you having fun?”

“I'm cold,” the girl said, and Sonia cupped both her hands and breathed on them until a smile appeared.

“Do you want a birdie?”

I had relieved Sonia of the bowl so she could conjure the smile. Now I thrust it at the child. Her mother asked, “What's that you're giving out?”

“Origami cranes.”

“What for?”

“They're pretty,” I said.

She frowned. “Okay,” she said to the little girl, “just take one and say thank you. Jeremy! Wait for us! Say thank you.”

“Thank you,” the girl told Sonia.

“You're very welcome,” Sonia told her, standing again. “Stay warm.”

As soon as the woman turned her back, Sonia stuck out her tongue. “She doesn't want her kid to have a paper crane. It's okay, though, to rot her teeth with candy. People are so stupid. They hate us on this street. Have you noticed? They never talk to us. The woman next door gives me a dirty look every time I walk by. They think we're Communists. If you want peace you must be a Communist. It's stupid.”

“Are you Communists?” I asked.

“No!”

More children came. Sonia stepped in front of them too and, scooping a crane from the bowl, flew it, twittering it into a sack. The children watched her, rapt. I watched their father, saw him take note of the house, its psoriatic paint and overgrown yard, then Sonia—her
mournful
hair, the button on her anorak:
Think
Peace
. She was speaking to his children in birdsong, exuding harmlessness, but his lip curled anyway and he bustled them along.

And so it went, all Sonia's overtures rejected. Then a loud
WEEEE
!!
sounded, followed by a
BANG
!
, and she grabbed the nearest child and clutched too hard. She only wanted to protect him, but he started wailing; his outraged mother snatched him back. The bowl was empty anyway so we went back inside where I put the kettle on. Sonia gnawed her nails, looking miserable.
Don't
, I wanted to say, just as a single voice called out from our darkened porch, “Trick or treat!”

We both went to the door. “Oh, God! What are you
doing
?” Sonia cried.

The fruity weight of the breast, nipple projecting into the cold air. The left one. The other side was draped in filmy white fabric that hung off one shoulder and fell in folds around her Birkenstocks. “Come on,” Belinda said. “You have them too.”

“Not like that!”

The freckles petered out on her chest, making her look snowed on. She raised her arms. White feathers were attached and, in her armpits, aigrettes of auburn. “I am the Goddess,” she intoned, flapping.

“Inside,” Sonia hissed. “The neighbours.”

Belinda followed us in and through to the kitchen. “How did it go with the cranes?”

“Okay, I guess. Jane helped hand them out.”

“Did she?” The Goddess glanced at me through judgemental slits.

“Please,” Sonia begged. “Put it away.”

And the general mood was autumnal
, Chekhov wrote. My umbrella was on the porch with the old placards, drying out. A beaded curtain of rain poured off the ruined eaves. Things had changed. I thought it was that fall had officially come and with it the infinite rains, the dirty batting of cloud, the sadness. I looked forward to the sadness. It made me feel like I shared something with other people, even though it was just a mood. I went down the front steps, past Pete's car. The next-door neighbour was standing in her front window in her flowered housecoat, hugging herself, face resigned. I felt like calling out, “Me too!”

At the bus stop I joined the ranks of the damp, our small shivering group physically separate but united by this resigned melancholia. Soon the bus came, but as it neared we saw that it was full. No one was surprised, not even when, in passing, it sent up a tidal wave of dirty water. By the time I got to campus, my hair would be stringy, my runners saturated. My feet were already cold and would be for the rest of the day. I could switch the hand that held the umbrella and warm the other in my pocket, but my feet were defenceless. If I'd been a character in a Chekhov story, I would have put on galoshes. (It was the same word in Russian:
galoshe
.)
Ga-losh-es
.
Losh
like
slosh
. Sloshing through puddles. Through
luzhi
. Galosh, galosh. A comical word, yet how sad they actually looked on a person's feet!

And so, standing in line for public transit, I found a subject for my first Russian Lit paper of the year. Chekhov and shoes. The stories are filled with them—galoshes, felt boots, slippers. Dr. von Koren in “The Duel” challenges the dissipated Ivan Layevsky partly because he wears slippers in the street. Podorin in “With Friends” (I'd read the story the night before) feels at home with the Losevs only when he borrows a pair of slippers. Later, weary of the visit, the slippers define his estrangement.
Then he sat silently in one corner, legs tucked under him, wearing slippers
belonging to someone else.

The following Sunday, when I came home from my aunt's, I stood staring at the jumble of shoes in the vestibule, wondering what I could discern about the group behind the closed French doors based on what they wore on their feet. Sonia's clogs were set neatly against the wall. I already knew she was from
100
Mile House, that both her parents were high school teachers. Her mother taught Home Ec and her father Math. She had a younger brother, Jared, and a Sheltie named Skipper. They lived on an acreage where they raised sheep. But the clogs allowed me to imagine her slipping them on in spring and running out to the barn to greet the lambs that had been born in the night. Kicked in the corner were Pete's Birkenstocks, the cork soles crumbling, plastic bread bags stuffed inside them, his trust fund untouched. Dieter's Adidases were there too, a Marxist-leaning red. As for the other shoes, including a giant's rubber boots, I couldn't begin to guess who owned them because what had really changed with the season, with the arrival of autumn, was that my housemates were starting to become fleshed-out characters.