Home from the Vinyl Cafe (4 page)

And Morley said, “Hi?” Like a question.

They landed in a heap.

Dave insisted on driving her to the hospital. She had three stitches just below her chin. Afterward, he took her out to dinner. And then he drove her back to the arena, where she had left her car. He invited her to the concert the next night. It was only as she was driving away that Dave remembered which concert it was. But by then it was too late. The next evening she was sitting beside him fidgeting, he noticed glumly, as Bobby Goldsboro stepped onstage.

They didn’t see each other again for six years, but they kept in touch by mail. Just occasional letters, and Dave’s never said much. But he sent her quirky things. The week after they met, Dave sent her a package of Silly Putty. When she opened it, Morley knew he was the man for her.

Another time he sent her glow-in-the-dark skate laces, and once, a newspaper from Thunder Bay. Morley, who was back in Toronto by then, read every page of the Thunder Bay
paper obsessively, looking for the significant article. Why had he sent it? She finally decided it was her horoscope, which said: “Your love life is on thin ice. Time to make a decision. Don’t let distance cloud your judgment.”

“No. No,” said Dave years later. “There was nothing special. I just thought you’d like to see it.”

When they started to see each other, Dave was sick of life on the road. He wanted to come in from the cold, and Morley seemed so normal.

When he told her these things, Morley was overcome with the irony. She was tired of being polite. She didn’t want to be normal. She wanted to lose control. But she loved him. And she had hope.

They got married before the summer was over and moved into an apartment near a large park. On their very first night together, when they were getting ready for bed, Dave said, “Do you want a little snack?”

Morley said, “You go ahead.”

He came back from the kitchen with four pieces of bread slathered in mayonnaise. There were four slabs of cooking onion. And there was a glass of buttermilk. Morley stared at him, and he said, “It’s okay. I haven’t brushed my teeth yet.”

A week later, when he had a sore throat, Morley said, “You should gargle with salt.”

Dave said, “No. No. Just throw me one of those socks.”

Morley said, “What?”

Dave said, “One of those white athletic socks—the wool ones.”

Morley stared in confusion at the heap of unsorted laundry in the basket at the foot of their bed. “What are you going to do with a sock?” she asked.

Dave was pulling the covers up to around his chin like a
small child. It seemed perfectly obvious to him. “You soak it in water and fasten it around your neck with a safety pin,” he said.

Morley stared at him.

Dave said, “You wring it out first.”

What Morley was thinking was, What am I doing here? But she wasn’t about to quit.

She was so young. She believed what they were doing was important.

On Saturday mornings Dave got up first and made them scrambled eggs. Ever since he was a child, Dave had loved scrambled eggs. Sometimes, when he was a boy, he could hardly wait to get to sleep on Friday night because he knew he was going to get scrambled eggs the next morning.

One Friday night as she was washing the dishes, Morley said, “I make the best scrambled eggs you’ve ever had.”

The next morning she squeezed fresh juice and got out their matching coffee mugs. Carefully folding their one pair of linen napkins, laying them out side by side, she whisked up six eggs and brought them to the table. Dave stared at them. There were little green flecks all through his scrambled eggs. Pieces of chives Morley had snipped from the back garden. In Cape Breton you don’t add anything to scrambled eggs. Except maybe ketchup. But this was his bride, and she had made these eggs. Dave picked up his fork. When he had finished, he said, “I love your scrambled eggs.”

The next weekend the eggs came with chopped-up mushrooms. The weekend after that, it was tomatoes and onions. Then spinach. On the fifth weekend it was cheese.

Dave had begun to hate Saturday mornings. He would lie in bed listening to the sound of a knife hitting a chopping board. How did I get mixed up with this person? he wondered.

By the middle of that first winter, they were both thinking, This marriage is a big mistake. Here it was, January of all things, and Morley was gloomy. Under a year married, and she felt like she had been sentenced to life with a stranger.

One night on television there was a news story about the canals in Holland. The reporter squinted awkwardly at the camera as he interviewed an old man smoking a meerschaum pipe at an outdoor cafe. The old man said it was the first time in ten years that the canals in the Netherlands had frozen. The newscast cut from the old man to pictures of a Dutch boy lacing up his skates on a canal bank and from him to three girls in folk costume skating hand in hand through an unidentified village.

Morley watched the entire report with her chin cupped in her hand. Then she turned to Dave and said, “I’ve always dreamed of doing that.”

Dave, who had been only half paying attention, said, “Really? That was your dream?”

Morley said, “Yes.”

Dave stood up and walked into the kitchen. When he came back, he was carrying a beer. He looked at his wife and said, “We should go.”

Morley said, “To Holland? Don’t be silly.”

Dave said, “Maybe this is our only chance. Maybe the next time it happens, we’ll have kids and a mortgage and we won’t be able to go.”

Dave had never said anything about kids before.

He smiled at her. And he went back into the kitchen and picked up the telephone. When he hung up, Morley was standing beside him. Watching. Nothing like this had ever happened to her.

“We leave tomorrow. We’ll be back on Monday,” said Dave. He was looking right at her.

The next morning they bought Dave a pair of hockey skates. At lunch Morley held out a present she had wrapped in newspaper. She said, “It’s almost finished. I was going to give it to you for your birthday. I can finish it on the plane.” It was a heavy blue wool sweater.

“This is a beautiful sweater,” said Dave. “I love this sweater.”

When the plane landed in Amsterdam, Morley had her face pressed to the window. She wanted to see everything. She wanted to make sure the canals were still frozen.

They went skating right away.

But the canals in Amsterdam were wide and windy and open, and the ice was soft and bumpy and treacherous. It wasn’t like Morley had imagined it at all. It was like skating on a freeway.

The man at the hotel said, “You have to go to Friesland.”

So on Saturday they rented a car and drove into the country. They parked at the end of a road and left their boots and coats under a long row of willows that stood bare and wispy along the banks of the canal. When Morley climbed down onto the ice, it was like her dream—the canal was framed by the high protective banks. She felt like she was a little girl again and had stepped onto her ceiling. She was standing on a narrow swath of ice that kept going as far as she could see. She could start skating and go on forever.

It was the greatest skate of her life. They sailed past farmhouses with roofs so low that they looked to be wearing great wool hats pulled almost to their eyes; past huge creaking windmills that Morley said reminded her of herons trying to take off. For an hour they saw no one, and then they went right through a village and saw an old man leading a donkey with panniers, and a dog pulling a cart, and a family pushing
a baby carriage on wooden runners. Once in the middle of nowhere, an old man passed them going the other way. He was sitting on a contraption that looked like a wagon on blades, and he was rowing it along the canal with what Dave swore were cross-country ski poles with toilet plungers fastened to the end. There were footbridges to duck under and frozen intersections, where smaller canals branched off toward villages and towns. At each of these icy intersections was a sign nailed to a tree—a white arrow pointing into the gray distance—with something like
LEYDEN
50
KM
painted on it in neat black letters. There were no automobiles. No Ski-doos. It was like being in the nineteenth century.

They ate lunch on the ice, at a cafe on a boat that was frozen under a leafless elm. No one could speak English, so they ordered by gesturing with their red fingers at meals on other tables.

Instead of getting what they thought they were pointing at, they each got a large meatball covered in gravy, a mug of thick hot chocolate, and a huge square of gingerbread. The waiter smiled at them as they ate. It was delicious. Dave could have sat there for the rest of the afternoon.

But Morley wanted to keep moving. She was thinking, Now I understand why people like to dance. Dave, who had been having trouble keeping up with her, laced up his skates wondering how to say “cardiac arrest” in Dutch.

An hour after lunch, Morley stopped for a rest. Dave was out of breath. “My feet hurt,” he panted. He flopped on the bank.

Morley said, “Stand up.”

Dave struggled up. Morley made him cross his arms over his chest. She skated behind him. “Lean back,” she whispered. He tipped his head back.

“All of you,” she said. “Trust me. I’m here.”

Dave leaned back into her arms, and she caught him and pushed him along the canal as if he were a statue. It started to snow. It was like skating through a painting. The snow was on their hats, their mittens, their sweaters. Everything was white, above and below them, the white sky and the white ice. Dave leaning back. Morley pushing, pushing.

They had waffles and hot cheese for supper, and bought a wooden toy that would move in the wind on their balcony.

On the plane, Dave carried the toy in his lap. He was being so careful not to knock it as he stood up to leave that he snagged the sweater Morley had knitted him on the side of his seat. He had taken four or five steps before he realized what had happened. The sweater had begun to unravel behind him. There was a strand of blue wool hanging from his waist that almost reached the floor. When he caught up to Morley, he was clutching the wooden toy and the line of wool was dangling behind him like a tail. He didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t say anything. He thrust the toy into her arms and turned around. They both stood in the middle of the walkway staring at the sweater. The man behind them said, “Excuse me,” and people started to push past them.

Morley reached down and gathered up the line of wool. They started to walk through the airport, Dave a step ahead of Morley like a kid on a line. They walked that way to the luggage carousel and out to the taxis. And they still walk like that today—attached, drifting apart sometimes, but never so far apart that one can’t reel the other one back.

               
T
here is something,” said Dave, “about standing at the bottom of the stairs and yelling at your kids to come eat dinner that I find upsetting.”

Morley was moving around the kitchen, straining potatoes, stirring beans, moving too fast for philosophy.

“Just get them,” she said, dropping a frying pan in the sink.

Stephanie was the first down, her hair tied half-up, a horrifyingly yellow potion setting on her face. She was wearing a pair of Dave’s boxer shorts and an oversize T-shirt that matched her face. She looked at the table, which Dave was in the process of setting, and said, “Why did you call me? It’s not ready yet.” Then she disappeared back upstairs.

An hour after dinner, she was still at the table, chewing on a stick of celery and painting her nails, balancing the brush on the table, picking up the celery, holding her fingers out in front of her, waving them in the air. Sam was sitting across from her, in another universe, chewing on a pencil and frowning at the math book in front of him. When the phone rang, no one moved. They all looked at Stephanie.

“Why are you looking at me?” she said.

Before Morley went to bed, she knocked on Stephanie’s bedroom door.

Stephanie was lying on her unmade bed, books spread
around her and spilling off the bed, where they merged with a pile of dirty clothes that stretched to the empty laundry hamper in the corner. Stephanie was talking on the phone, listening to music, and apparently, working on homework.