Vinyl Cafe Unplugged (14 page)

“I never look good in hats,” she said, shaking her head. She pushed Stephanie playfully on the shoulder. “But that snowboarder sure was drop-dead gorgeous.”

That night Dorothy came home from the convention with a
Due South
poster and a Polaroid snapshot. She passed the photo around at dinner.

In the picture she had her arms around a large husky.

Dave glanced at the picture and handed it to Stephanie. When he looked back at Dorothy he noticed dog hairs on her blouse.

“A nice dog,” she said. “I was thinking I could get one like him back home.”

When they were finished eating, Morley brewed tea. She made a fuss of warming the pot before she added the boiling water. Then she self-consciously counted each teaspoon of tea leaves aloud so Dorothy could see she was doing everything properly.

“. . . three, four and one for the pot.”

After the tea had steeped for four uncomfortable minutes, Morley picked up the pot with a flourish and began to pour the steaming mahogany liquid into the china cup she had borrowed from Gerta Lowbeer.

Dorothy waited until she finished.

“My dear,” she said. “We ALWAYS put the MILK in first.”

Then she looked across the table at Stephanie. “If you don’t put the MILK in FIRST, you could CRACK the cup.”

Dave tried to show her around town.

He suggested a museum of Canadian art. He tried a historical tour. She wasn’t the least interested.

“Do you know where they shot the headquarters?” she asked. “Do you know where his apartment is?”

Every night she had things to show them at dinner, more photos, souvenirs she had bought. And stories of her fellow conventioneers.

“I met a girl from the Philippines,” she said.

Dorothy had spooned a mound of mashed potatoes onto her plate and was using her fork to work a wedge of butter the size of a cookie into the middle of the pile. Sam watched in awe as she turned her potatoes into something that looked more like pudding than vegetable.

“Her mother is dying of cancer,” she said.

She was eating and talking. Loading her fork with potatoes and meat, waving it in the air while she talked and then popping it in her mouth during pauses when she might otherwise have breathed.

“It’s funny,” she said. “I have watched some of the programs fifteen times. I have them on tape. You get to know the dialogue.

“There is a show when Benny, he’s the Mountie, when Benny is shot in the leg. At the end his friend Ray is teasing him. And Benny says,
‘That’s not amusing, Ray.’

“After she told me about her mother, I looked at the girl from the Philippines, and I said, ‘That’s not amusing, Ray.’ We both started to laugh and then we started to cry. It was very odd but it was very nice too. I felt like I had known her for ever so long.”

That was the last day of the convention.

The next night at supper Dorothy seemed lost. She had nothing to tell them. As they were eating dessert, she suddenly said, “I had to sell jewelry to come here.”

They all stopped eating.

“I sold a diamond ring and two gold bracelets,” she said. “They were my grandmother’s.”

No one said anything. But she didn’t look at all embarrassed.

“I’m not much for jewelry,” she said. “I kept it in a box at the top of my cupboard. I never wore any of it. I hadn’t even looked at it for years. So when I heard about the convention I thought,
I am going to turn those things into money
.”

Stephanie nodded approvingly.

She had a week left before she had to go home.

Dave asked what she wanted to do.

“Niagara Falls?” he asked.

She shook her head. No.

An hour later she came downstairs and said, “I want to see a REAL Mountie.”

Dave assumed a real Mountie meant a Mountie in red. The only place Dave could think of finding a Mountie in red was on Parliament Hill.

They left late on Saturday afternoon—Stephanie stunning her parents by announcing her willingness to come with them. It was the first family trip she had
offered
to be part of for over a year.

They left so late that Dave gave up on the idea of getting to Ottawa before dark.

They checked into a set of cabins on Lower Rideau Lake.

“If we get an early start,” said Dave, “we can still have a full day.”

The cabins were built in the thirties—white clapboard with a small screened porch, built in a semi-circle under a stand of pines.

Dave bought three beers from the woman in the office. They ordered pizza from the only pizzeria in the phone book. There was an above-ground swimming pool under the trees. Dave dragged three wooden Adirondack chairs over to the pool and they sat there, Morley, Dorothy and Dave, and drank their beers while the kids swam.

They ate their pizza outside. A rusty pickup truck with a dumpy camper on the back bounced up to the cabin beside Dorothy’s. The driver jockeyed the truck around the pines—he was pulling a boat in a trailer, a large indoor cruiser. When he parked, he climbed out of his cab and stretched.

He was wearing a plaid work shirt and blue jeans so dusty they were turning brown. He hadn’t shaved for a few days. His cheeks were sunburnt, weathered. He smiled pleasantly and said,
“Bonjour,”
as he walked by them on his way to the motel office.

The sky was blue and gray and purple and orange—the light soft and dimming. The green neon No Vacancy sign flipped on. Dave looked at the sign and at the cars buzzing by on the highway. He felt relaxed and peaceful.

If it wasn’t for the mosquitoes, it would have been perfect. The mosquitoes had come when they were eating the pizza.

“
This
is Canada,” said Dave to Dorothy as he slapped at his neck. “Now you know what we’re all about.”

They went into Dave and Morley’s room and watched a movie on television. Then they went to bed.

“We’ll start early,” said Dave. Again.

Dorothy had a cabin to herself. She lay on her bed and stared at the water stains on the unpainted wooden ceiling. One of them reminded her of the Queen Mother. She began to organize the boards on the ceiling into groups of five, using her fingers to keep track. Then into groups of three. It was hard to concentrate. There was a rip in the screen in her bedroom window and her cabin was full of mosquitoes. She had never heard anything like it—the drilling buzz of the bugs as they dove around her head. She had to stop counting every few seconds and brush at her face.

At midnight she got out of bed and put on the red Mountie long johns she had bought at the convention. She stuck her head under her pillow, but the mosquitoes wouldn’t leave her alone.

She didn’t look at what time it was when she finally got up and opened the cabin door. The night was dark and starry. The pine trees stretched toward the stars like black towers. The air seemed thin and young. Dawn was still hours away.

The city had seemed like home, like a home away from home—but this was different.

She slapped at the bugs and, in an effort to escape them, began to walk around, trailing her hand against the things she passed—the picnic table, the Adirondack chairs, the wall of her cabin, the boat on the trailer in front of the cabin next to hers.

She walked around the boat three times. Moving faster and faster to stay ahead of the bugs. Marching almost. Singing. “Waltzing Matilda,” of all things. She had to keep moving or the bugs were going to drive her crazy.

It was on her third trip around the boat that she noticed the ladder hanging over the stern.

She stared at it for a moment and without stopping to think climbed the four rungs and struggled over the transom onto the deck.

There was a door and three steps leading down into a cabin. It didn’t feel as if she was doing anything wrong; it didn’t feel as if she was trespassing when she opened the door and ducked down the steps. When the door closed behind her there were no bugs for the first time in hours.

She breathed a heavy sigh of relief and sat down on the bench. The next thing she knew she was dreaming of the ocean. Dreaming of the gently rocking sea. She was happy and sailing home on a rolling sea.

Eventually, however, the sea seemed to be getting rougher. As if maybe there was a storm, and she thought she should do something about that. Shouldn’t she batten down the hatches or something? Wasn’t that what you did when you struck stormy weather at sea? The boat was hit by a monstrous wave. A wave that washed over the ship and almost scup pered her.

She woke up confused—without the faintest idea of where she was. She crawled off the bench looking for a clue and then out of the cabin and onto the deck, standing there dazed in her red long johns, squinting in the bright morning light as the boat bumped by the motel sign.

She was just in time to see Sam, still in his pajamas, standing barefoot on the dewy grass in front of his parents’ cabin, rubbing his eyes, staring at her. She raised her arm, involuntarily reaching out for the boy, as if he might be able to rescue her. But as the trailer bounced over the gravel shoulder and onto the highway, she lost her balance momentarily and had to reach for the railing. When she looked up, she saw Sam holding his arm up too. Waving goodbye.

Dave got the licence plate number of the pickup from the motel register—Pierre Boisclair. He had marked his address Saint-Michel-des-Saints.

They waited at the cabins—Dave getting increasingly agitated with each passing hour. At noon he looked at the motel manager and, for the hundredth time, said, “Why hasn’t she phoned?”

The manager shrugged. “I told you. I don’t know. How could I know? Maybe they know. Maybe you should phone
them
.” He was pointing to a pile of brochures for a psychic hotline.

Dorothy hadn’t phoned because she was still trapped on the boat, which at that moment was swinging from side to side off the back of the truck as it rolled past miles of pine trees. The forest growing darker and thicker and closer to the highway with each passing minute.

Before long Dorothy found a cellphone in the galley kitchen and used it, but when she did, she didn’t phone the motel where Dave was pacing, because she didn’t have the faintest idea what the motel was called, or for that matter, where it was. Until she found the phone, however, all she could think of doing was huddling in the galley.

Occasionally one of the wheels of the trailer wandered off the pavement and bit sickeningly into the gravel on the edge of the road, and it felt as if the entire enterprise had had it, and Dorothy had to grab on to whatever was at hand or be thrown to the ground. The first few times this happened she cried out loud, but after a while she became used to it. She endured an hour of this and finally thought,
Enough is enough
. She decided to head onto the deck to see if she could attract the driver’s attention.

Before venturing above, she strapped herself into two orange lifejackets, which she hoped would protect her if she was thrown overboard. She brought the first one down over her head, fastening it the way it was designed to be fastened, and stepped into the second and tied it around her waist like a diaper. Crawling towards the bow in her red underwear and orange lifejackets, she looked like some kind of a fungus moving along the deck.