TWENTY YEARS I’d been friends with Bec, but it was Lois and how she’d changed that finally got me to go to Toronto. I’d meant to go see Bec, but life got busy and I kept forgetting to actually set up a visit. My hands were cold as I stepped through the door from airport customs at Pearson, backpack on my shoulder. The first thing I saw was Bec’s bright face. Then she was hugging me, and I knew it didn’t matter how long it had been.
“I’m going to show you all over town,” she said, her eyes merry.
Hearing that familiar little thrill in her voice made me feel as though we were students again, setting off into the October night, ready for adventure.
Evan and Bec lived in the Annex, near the University of Toronto. We got off the subway at Bathurst and Bloor, coming up the steps to an intersection bustling with people of all ages, though mostly students. The corner was dominated by the garish façade of Honest Ed’s discount department store, a full block long, lit up like a carnival with blinking lights and huge signs.
“Holy smokes!” I couldn’t help saying.
“Yes, quite the landmark. Good place to get socks and tuques, though. That’s watchcap to you.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve lost your Baltimore accent already.”
Bec grinned. “Maybe we’ll go downey lake tomorra, hon, but the wooder’ll be too cold to swim.”
She led the way along Bloor, a major artery lined with storefronts, pubs and Second Cup coffee shops. When we turned onto a sidestreet, suddenly everything was utterly quiet. I felt as though we’d stepped through a door and shut it behind us. Shadows of trees loomed between the dim streetlights. Brick rowhouses hid behind deep porches.
We stopped in front of a rowhouse that was so much like the ones back in Baltimore that I had to shake my head. But then Evan was there to open the door, filling it, his arms wide. He was a bear of a man with dark hair and a closely trimmed beard. In his flannel shirt and jeans he looked more like a lumberjack than the college professor who would talk my ear off about urban planning if given half a chance.
“Daphne! At last,” he said as he buried me in a hug. “We’re going to show you what a real city’s like.”
“What? Baltimore’s just a small town?” I laughed as I pulled away.
“You bet. Nickel City, right?”
He stepped back revealing a hallway lined with overflowing bookcases and a living room off to my left. I glanced in, finding it comfortably cluttered like in our student days. More books were piled by the Mission-style chairs in pools of warm light cast by the mismatched lamps.
From behind me Bec said, “Have a seat, Daphne. Or would you rather come upstairs first?”
When I chose upstairs, she led me to the bedroom at the back of the house. There was a small florist bouquet on the bedside table.
“They’re from Evan. He wants you to feel welcome.”
“You’ve trained him well, Bec, no doubt about that.”
She laughed. “Just lucky, I guess. Dinner should be ready pretty soon and then we’re going out on the town, so get settled and come on down.”
After she left I looked around the room. It was small, not room for much more than the bed, a small bureau and a rocking chair with a couple of teddy bears. The walls were dark blue and the curtains the same as the bedspread: dark blue with golden-rayed suns. A brass lantern on the bureau picked up the sun motif.
I knew why Evan hadn’t been allowed to take over this room for a study and fill it with the books that were obviously taking over the house. I thought of nursery rhymes, counting games, the way things are supposed to be.
WE LINGERED OVER DINNER in the small dining room, finishing a bottle of Cabernet, and catching up. I wanted to know about all the changes their twelve years in Canada had wrought, but only shrugged when they asked about me. Same old, same old seemed to cover it. Eventually we roused ourselves and set off for a Friday night out on the town.
We went to the Blue Moon on Queen Street. Closer to downtown, that area seemed to have a lot of clubs and little shops. Knots of tattered people camped in empty doorways, sometimes with a dog, but always a can out for donations. Even as we neared the cafe, we could hear the talk and amplified music coming from it. Inside, it had an unfinished feel: black walls, a front window painted black with one round blue moon. Bec and I threaded through chairs and people to sit on a broken-down sofa along one wall while Evan pushed through to the bar along the other wall.
Bec said, her mouth to my ear, “The bass player is one of Evan’s students.”
I nodded. Conversation being pretty much out till the set ended, I worked on the pint that Evan brought back and thought about what a fool I was.
A fool for waiting so long to visit Bec. And a fool, too, for being upset at losing one friend when I still had this one. After all, Bec had been my friend twice as long as Lois. Bec remembered the same things that I did. When she smiled she made me feel as though the clouds had pulled apart to reveal hard stars like stones, always there.
I’d met Lois a couple of years ago in a dive like this one, a bar on Charles Street in Baltimore. I was there for a poetry reading – too many people packed into a room upstairs, pulling the tables and chairs around to sit with their friends. I’d come alone and sat at a table about halfway back. The mingled aromas of coffee and beer competed with patchouli wafting from the neighbouring table. There were few empty seats, so I wasn’t surprised when a small woman with spiky red hair put a hand on the extra chair at my table and asked if I’d mind her sitting there.
“Help yourself,” I said.
“Thanks.” She set down her coffee, slung her leather jacket over the chair, and sat down. She was dressed all in black: black turtleneck and tight pants. I was ready to dislike her and hoped I wouldn’t get the chance.
No such luck. She was a talker – introduced herself, told me about her job at a lawyer’s office: type type type all day.
She leaned forward over the table. “Have you ever heard this guy before or read his stuff? I haven’t, but he’s been published in some of the local rags, so he must be okay. Which poetry mags do you like to read? I stick mostly with the . . . Oh, I guess it’s time to shut up.”
To my amazement, she did, as the lanky young man with the shaved head slid onto the stool and started arranging his papers on the music stand.
She didn’t make a sound while the man read some of the worst verse I’d ever heard, about how horrible sex with ugly women was and how hard it was to be young. His poems were dressed up with sordid details about his apartment and the street corners outside. After a baffling pair of almost-identical poems about a woman sitting on a bus, he finally took a break.
Lois applauded enthusiastically and turned to me, saying, “Pee-you. What a stinker. Want to get out?”
We went downstairs to the bar and talked for hours. Mostly Lois talked and I listened, but whenever I opened my mouth to speak, she stopped talking right in the middle of a sentence. I asked her why she’d been so silent during the reading. I thought she’d really liked it.
“Oh, it was all I could do not to laugh out loud,” she said, rolling her eyes. “But that would have been too rude. Emily Post has very strong words to say about people who talk during performances.”
“Emily Post? Does anyone still read that stuff anymore?”
“Well, I do. You never know when you’ll need to figure out the correct seating in an opera box.”
An opera box was about the farthest thing from Toronto’s Blue Moon Cafe. Looking around at the pierced and black-clad crowd, I couldn’t imagine them consulting Emily Post before heading out for the night’s entertainment. As the music started up again, Evan went for refills.
MORNING CAME SLOWLY, for which I was grateful after our late night. The grey window paled gradually as the light grew stronger. It was quiet outside, even though Evan and Bec’s house was so close to busy Bloor Street.
After toast and marmalade and several cups of strong coffee, Bec and I set off walking downtown. We made our way through quiet streets lined with more rowhouses like Baltimore’s, but set further back with little gardens and wooden – not marble – steps. Trees stretched over the streets, their leaves already turning brown and falling, crunching under our feet and releasing that peculiar spicy smell.
“The best of all days,” Bec said, stretching her arms overhead.
“Saturday,” I said, agreeing, part of our old college routine. The wind picked up a little and swirled leaves around our feet.
We were on our way to the AGO to see the Group of Seven exhibit. Bec had told me about them the night before, during a break between sets: artists who first painted Canada’s rough landscape instead of the classical scenes of ruins and shepherdesses.
“I know,” Bec said as we waited for the light at Harbord, “that you with your jaded self would rather go to that performance artists’ exhibit at the ROM with their sand on the floor and bathroom tape loop – tinkle flush tinkle flush tinkle flush – sending everyone running for the washrooms.”
“Right on,” I said. “Why just look at paintings when you can have all your senses assaulted at once, not to mention your bladder?”
Bec looked at me, laughing, one hand pulling her sweater close at her neck, the other raking through her short brown hair. “Well, tough. The Group of Seven came first, so that’s who you’re going to see today. We’ll go to the ROM the next time you come.”
JUST LIKE THAT: the next time you come. Blithely ignoring the fact that this was the first time I’d ever come to visit her, my great friend, in all the years she’d lived here.
Bec had been my roommate all four years at college. The one good thing that Goucher College did twenty years ago was throw us together right from the start: Daphne and Bec. Baphne and Dec. We were a team. Bec came to school as Becky with a trunk full of frilly blouses and pleated skirts that her mother had made for her. She left them in the trunk and bought blue jeans and tee shirts. She’d come from a small town in western Maryland right out of old movies: pep rallies and church picnics, streets named after trees.
Although she lost her small town look and shortened her name to Bec, she never lost her direct gaze, the clear grey eyes that looked right through you. In class she had no use for the circumlocutions of the English majors or the behavioral theories of the Psych majors. “Look,” she’d say, “a story’s a story.”
She cut her brown curls short to save trouble, and they stood out like a halo around her head. She teased me about my pose of city-girl irony, my habitual cynicism. “You care,” she’d crow when she caught me crying in a movie.
Bec lugged that trunk of clothes back and forth to school and home for four years, so as not to hurt her mother’s feelings. I was not so kind, leaving my suburban family without a backward look. My mother was one of those women who only had children because it was what you were supposed to do. She didn’t see the four of us as people but rather as an extension of herself, appendages that she controlled and ordered about as unconsciously as she ordered her hand to pick up a coffee cup.
I spent my summers right there in Baltimore, subletting a room in Charles Village. Alone. Once I’d wrenched myself out of my mother’s control, I wasn’t about to give up my freedom for some fleeting passion. After graduation I found my own place in Charles Village, and when my mother called every November to ask me to come home for Thanksgiving, I always had an excuse.
I stayed on in Baltimore while Bec went to Boston for grad school and then on to Toronto with Evan. I had friends, fell in and out of love pretty regularly, but always preferred to come home to my quiet, empty apartment.
BEC AND I ROUNDED A CORNER into what looked like a market district. The sidewalks were full of people, some walking fast, others picking through the racks of clothes, piles of fruit, and wooden bins full of beans and dried fish that spread out from the storefronts. It was like being in a different country. Cars and vans pushed haltingly through the narrow streets.
On my left, Bec was telling me a story about Evan trying to fix the window ropes. With the sudden crowd and people walking toward us, she matter-of-factly slowed and stepped behind me, never pausing in her story.
I turned my head slightly so she’d know I was still listening, but I wasn’t really. I was remembering something.
We made it through the market with only one stop, in a Chinese herb shop for jasmine tea. The narrow streets opened up into a commercial area as we turned onto Dundas, with wide sidewalks where we could walk abreast again.
“Look, Bec,” I said.
“At what?”
“You know how you stepped behind me back there to let people go by?”
“Did I? So what?”
“Well, I was down in Fell’s Point with my friend, Lois, a few months ago and same thing. These people were coming toward us and I slowed down a little to move behind her, but she slowed down too. She was engrossed in this story she was telling me about the Waterfront bar. So I slowed down some more, and so did she, till we were both stopped dead on the sidewalk, and the people coming toward us had to step out into Thames Street onto the cobblestones to get around us. When she got to the end of her story, she looked around kind of startled and said, ‘Why are we standing here?’ I said, ‘Didn’t you see those people?’ and she said, ‘What people?’”
“Which one is Lois?”
“The etiquette hound,” I said. “The one who’s always quoting Emily Post.”
“Huh.”
“What does that mean?”
“Well, I guess if you know the rules, you don’t have to look them up.”
The wind pushed my hair into my face as I turned to look at Bec. She looked back, raising one eyebrow. I noticed she was getting fine lines around her eyes and across her forehead, which meant I was too.
I was troubled. “You don’t know her.”
“Only what you’ve told me,” she said.
AFTER THE POETRY READING where I met Lois, I started hanging out with her a lot. She called me all the time to do things, so I got out of the habit of seeing most of my other friends. Anyway, they were starting to pair off and have kids and disappear into their private lives.
Lois and I liked the same music and movies, and we’d always stop at a bar or coffee shop afterwards to dissect them. Smart and opinionated, Lois seemed to have read the same books I had and cared about the same causes I did. Best of all, she came up with silly, fun things to do, like going Irish dancing at a bar near Fort McHenry. I laughed at her obsession with etiquette and enjoyed her spiky red hair and eternally black outfits. We didn’t like the same kind of men, so that worked out well. Anyway, we both preferred casual affairs that didn’t last long enough to get sticky.
But then about three months ago, she met this guy at a concert, a benefit for some artists who’d been burned out of their loft. I wasn’t there, but our crazy poet friend, Joey, told me about introducing her to this guy, Wayne. Joey said it was a joke because he couldn’t imagine anyone who’d interest Lois less than Wayne, who had a crew cut and wore a blue Oxford shirt with khaki Dockers.
It was a good thing Joey told me about it because Lois never did. I haven’t heard from Lois since that night. I knew she screened her calls, so I left a message for her to meet me at the coffee shop the next Sunday at noon. She didn’t call me back, and she didn’t show up.
I saw Joey at a poetry reading soon after that, and he said he was as surprised as anyone that Lois and Wayne were seeing each other. I was happy for Lois, of course, but couldn’t quite imagine her in love. Also, I was kind of upset that I had to hear it from Joey. I told him to go mix some metaphors or spring some rhythm, even if it wasn’t his fault.
SATURDAY NIGHT, after our day at the AGO looking at art, Bec and I met up with Evan at the James Joyce, a pub on Bloor Street. It was pretty crowded, but Evan had saved us a table. We had sandwiches and big plates of fries with malt vinegar, washed down with pints of bitter. It was folk night, and there was a man up by the front window playing an acoustic guitar. Behind him, an ice hockey game played out silently on a large screen television. He bowed ruefully to acknowledge the roar that went up when a goal was scored. But he got a good hand at the end of his song. Some people sang along with one called the “Rattlin’ Bog.” It had a cumulative chorus, like the “Twelve Days of Christmas,” but with a different theme: tree, nest, bird, man, woman, child.
At the next table, a young man was reading a book. He was so tall and thin that he must have folded himself up like an origami crane to get into the chair. He never looked up, not at the music or the talk or the door opening. He didn’t even stop reading when the other team scored a goal and the crowd groaned. When he finally went to get another pint, I looked over to see what he was reading.
“Descartes?” I said to Bec and Evan. “How can anyone read Descartes in a bar like this?”
Evan looked at me kindly. “It’s called concentration, my dear. Some people have the gift for it and some don’t.”
I threw a fry at him.
“Some people take it too far, though,” Bec said. “This young guy who started working for me last month? He threw a tantrum the other day, started yelling at me, slammed papers down on his desk. And all because I asked him to take on a second project.”
“Some people are very linear,” Evan said. “They need to finish one thing before they start another.”
“But that was a pretty extreme reaction, not how Canadians are supposed to act at all,” I said; then added, “eh?”
Bec laughed. “Well, no, he’s not Canadian. Just moved here from New York.”
“I hope you told him no more Jolt Cola,” I said.
“Well, we did have a little discussion about office culture and the differences between Toronto and New York. He was pretty stressed out by the move, I think.”
Evan snorted. “You’re making excuses for him, Bec. He’s been here long enough to have picked up on that without you having to tell him.”
“Terminal self-absorption?” I asked.
“It may look that way,” Bec said, “but I think he just focuses so hard on what he’s doing that he doesn’t notice anything around him. Once he buckles down and starts coding, a bomb could go off and he wouldn’t notice. A couple of nights I’ve had to pry him off the computer and send him home.”
Bec and Evan exchanged a long look. I wondered if there was some argument going on about Bec working late and the baby that they didn’t have.
At the end of the next song, I said I needed to find the bathroom.
“You mean the washroom?” Bec asked, showing off her slang again. “Me, too.”
As we clattered down the wooden stairs, I said, “You know Lois and that guy, Wayne? It’s like she’s obsessed with him.”
“What happened to your other friends?” Bec said, holding the door open for me.
“Drifted away from them, I guess. They got married or moved away.”
“Is this about you being single?”
“All the good ones are taken,” I said lightly.
“So? You can always make new friends.”
“Baltimore’s not like Toronto. It’s a couples town.”
“Nobody’s forcing you to stay there.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” I said.
“Well, move here! Wouldn’t it be cool to live in the same town again?”
The music washed over us again as we reached the top of the stairs. Most people were singing along with a chorus, something about Cape Horn. It was easy to avoid thinking in the dark warmth of the pub. Evan was faithful about keeping our glasses replenished, so on the short walk home under the stars, I floated along. We walked down the middle of the street, Bec and I on each side of Evan, tucked close against his huge warmth.
I WOKE EARLY and decided to go for a walk till Bec and Evan woke up. The Sunday streets were empty in the dim morning light. Even Bloor Street. All of the colours were muted, the gaudy signs still.
I went up the stairs to Kilgore’s. Bec had said they had the best home fries in town; she’d tried every place to be sure. They made them the way they were supposed to be.
A hard-edged man dressed in black came from the kitchen. He had short black hair and grey eyes. He told me the cooks were late.
“I only want coffee,” I said.
The corners of his mouth turned up in a surprisingly sweet smile. “That’s easy,” he said.
To my relief, he didn’t say anything more but turned back to the kitchen. I chose a table and armchair in the front window and looked down on Bloor Street. The man brought my coffee without a word and left me to my thoughts.
I thought about Bec and Lois and doors that opened and shut. Then, oddly, my thoughts turned to my best friend in high school, someone who hadn’t entered my mind for years. Sasha was the only interesting person in the whole school. She had tiny bones and short dark hair; even her gestures were small: she moved in a curiously precise way. But most importantly, Sasha had a great imagination. We took over a short hallway where cartons of paper supplies were stacked against one wall. We would sit on the cartons before school and at lunchtime, sometimes drilling each other on French verbs but mostly telling each other stories, serial stories that went on for days, the two of us taking turns carrying the narrative, bringing in new characters, sometimes jumping in with ideas. The stories of course starred us in some guise or other: astronauts, spies, pioneers. We called each other by the names of our characters. Having a story running through the back of my mind made school bearable.
Then one morning near the beginning of our senior year, the hallway was empty. The boxes still showed scuff marks from where we’d been kicking them as we sat there the day before, but no sign of Sasha. She wouldn’t sit near me in the few classes we shared, and at lunch she sat with the Clique.
I didn’t catch up with her till late in the afternoon, in the hallway between classes, girls chattering around us.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
She looked at me coolly. “I’ve decided to be someone different.” And she walked away.
I saw one group of girls by Mrs. Cohen’s room watching us. They turned away, whispering and laughing.
It was a mystery to me. I went to the hallway every morning by myself, trying to figure it out. Finally Naomi, a brainy girl who didn’t have any friends, took pity on me. One morning she came to the hallway where I was standing and kicking the boxes morosely.
“I don’t care,” she said, doing the hair toss thing. “It was in the bathroom, third stall.”
I didn’t understand.
“You won’t see anything now,” she said. “Sasha inked it out completely.”
“What did it say?”
“Oh, you know, the usual idiocy: Sasha and Daphne are queer. Anyway, I don’t believe it. Friendship is just too hard for them to understand.”
I hope I thanked her. I hope I didn’t say: How would you know? I know I ate lunch with her the rest of the year, and we practiced for SATs together and did crosswords and brain teasers. I never really got to know her.
At Kilgore’s, I looked out of the window. Now there were people and cars on Bloor Street. My eyes came back to the tables around me. The cooks must have come in because there were a few people eating, and I could smell bacon. I thought about Lois. Maybe we’d be friends again after she got this man out of her system, maybe not. Maybe that was just the way things were supposed to be – tree, nest, bird – and I was the one out of step. It was time for me to head back to Bec and Evan’s for breakfast before I started for the airport. Maybe we’d fly over Niagara Falls on the way home.
I called over to the man in black, “Could I have the check, please?”
Barbara Morrison, who writes under the name B. Morrison, is the author of an award-winning memoir, Innocent: Confessions of a Welfare Mother, now available as an audiobook. Praised by Hillary Clinton and others, Innocent is a powerful coming-of-age story that dispels some of the myths and misunderstandings about those living in poverty. She is also the author of two poetry collections. Her work has appeared in anthologies and literary journals such as Little Patuxent Review, Tiny Lights, and elsewhere. She conducts writing classes and workshops and provides editing services.