Memory returns very slowly. I haven’t had such bad amnesia since I first learned to abuse alcohol when I was thirteen. Where am I? Only the east end could be this sad. It’s just a part I never really knew; east of the Don River there are still pockets where the fifties and sixties and seventies live on, bordered now, so locked in misery they’ll never be able to catch up to the rest of time. In the store windows there are aspidistras with leaves that need wiping, and the ubiquitous layers of yellow plastic. I don’t know what all that yellow plastic is for, unless it’s to protect the plants from UV, not that they need much protecting, what with the dank grey skies. Why don’t I just get on the streetcar, go back to the west side, our old apartment, our friends, our bars, our jobs?
I can’t. We gave all that up, late summer. Came here. It’s the in-between part I’ve forgotten, and I still don’t know where Martin is. I go to the Dew Drop for dinner again, order ham with canned pineapple rings. As always, the place is empty except for me, as though only I know the way in. Denise waves distantly, sighing, but doesn’t join me this time.
When I get back I see someone’s been there while I’ve been gone, made the bed, worked on the masks. It’s happened before. Who?
I take a westbound red rocket, what they call the streetcars here. I’m full of trepidation, and when the route passes through my old Spadina neighbourhood I don’t even get off, my limbs suddenly leaden. Who would I visit? Who even knows me anymore? I feel out of place again, only in a different way. Where do I really belong, or when? It seems like when people or neighbourhoods get stuck, they create little pockets of frozen time around themselves. Denise got stuck in the fifties, even though she’s too young for it. At the Dew Drop Inn, I guess the fifties never stopped. I wonder when I’m stuck in. A bad time with Martin, most likely.
I get off the streetcar and stand on the other side of the road, a faint feeling of panic rising in me. The west side looks wrong, gives me a vertiginous feeling as though I’ve stepped through a mirror and the world’s reversed; everything has different meanings. I can barely wait for the streetcar to take me back to the other side, to run upstairs, coat tails flying, sit at my bench and cut doll eyes out.
On the way back from the streetcar stop I see Louise. “Hey, Louise,” I say, grabbing her arm.
She shakes me off, glares.
“Where’s Martin?” I demand. “I still can’t find him. You know him, have you seen him? And how come he never mentioned you? What’s going on?”
“Maybe he doesn’t like you anymore,” she spits. “Maybe you’re too messed up for him. Maybe he’s got someone new.”
“Messed up? That’s a joke. He’s a way worse abuser than me.”
“You don’t really have the same name as me.”
“Course not. I’m Petra. That was a joke.”
“I thought you were her. Where’s your lost five months, Petra?”
Where?
She’s wearing a white satin party dress over her jeans. She doesn’t make any sense. Her frizzy ponytail, her strapless dress over her dirty T-shirt and satin old lady pumps. Maybe if I’m nice to her she’ll tell me what she knows.
“Look,” I say kindly, “you can’t even get the zipper done up. How is your prince going to recognize you looking like that?”
“You stay away from me,” she hisses. “You’ve always said you didn’t even want to be on this side. And you can’t come without your mask.”
“What is with your crazy outfit, then?” Some Carnival thing going on this year that I don’t understand.
But she snaps her silver purse shut and runs.
She’s running again.
What’s she so afraid of?
Can there be such a thing as a wrong neighbourhood of the soul?—a time in life (for all feeling displaces time—although often in unusual and unprecedented ways) when one is continually doubling back on one’s tracks, meeting, it seems, none of the right people, everything taking place in fits and starts and going nowhere? And, if so, is there a reason for this, a purpose behind it that we, in our diminished state, cannot comprehend but only intuit? And why is everything a mirror of everything else? And why does my heart quake so unexpectedly and how beautifully the winter light falls across the snow, and that does lift my spirits.
Someone has washed and ironed Martin’s burgundy shirt. I see it now, hanging from a rod amidst the clutter on the far side of the room. Martin himself would have ironed only the front and the sleeves—he always wore a vest with his shirt—a paisley brocade waistcoat from a vintage suit, covering the shirt’s still wash-wrinkled back.
“It’s the memory thing that bugs me the most. I’ve lost months, and if I could just figure out what they were, I’d have Martin back.” Denise shakes her head, sighs distractedly and looks out the window at the trashiness of the passing parade, humming a dance tune from the fifties. Poor Denise. Still singing the same song, over and over, like a wind-up jewellery box ballerina.
“I think you mean you wonder where you lost them?” she says.
“What do you mean?”
“Seems to me it’s a location, much as anything. You were used far worse than she ever was. At least she’s awake for it.”
Sleeping Beauty awake? I ponder that, ask what she means, but she shrugs, sighs as if I’m a dirty business, she’s said too much. I pay and leave, thanking her for the clues, such as they are. I don’t know if I should pay her any attention, but then, I’m not getting much help from anyone else. Besides, I like her dottiness: half oracle and half crazy-old-lady, perhaps even something to aspire to. She’s my fairy Godwaitress, this time around.
That night I take the streetcar to my old west side local, the Fishbowl. I don’t really want to but I make myself, thinking it’ll be good for me. I run into Martin, of all people. I’m so relieved to see him I pretend nothing weird is going on. We talk and drink all night, dancing and leaning our heads on one another’s shoulders. It’s the beginning all over again, like when we first fell in love.
“Hey listen, Louise,” he says. “I’ve got this really great idea for a mask. I think it’ll sell like crazy, for Carnival, you know.”
“How come you called me Louise?”
“I did? Oh. Isn’t that what you call yourself now? Hey, tell me what you think. Darth Vader. You remember Vader. He’s out of an old movie, Star Wars.”
“Yeah, I know. Funny, but I’ve been thinking about him too.”
“Great minds think alike,” he says. Snow falls as we go outside and hail a cab. “You know I love you, don’t you, Louise?”
“Sure,” I say, closing my eyes, leaning into his shoulder in the back seat. I’m so happy to have him back I ignore his name calling.
Together we tramp up the now familiar stairs. We’re dressed alike, in old black sweaters and jeans. His are corduroy. He’s wearing the pointy shoes I remember from the first day and when they’re lying on their side on the floor I see they have a hole in the bottom. After we’ve finished making love Martin goes to sleep. I lie there for a while, just thinking. The lingering sexiness carries me into a dream where everything is pleasure, where the moment is all that exists, like at Hamilton Beach. The window high above is turning blue.
In the morning he’s gone, but I find I don’t much care. I have orders to fill, Denise to talk to over dinner, my lost months to uncover.
My window is bleak, wintery, star filled. I read old magazines, stir my instant coffee. There is never enough sun in the wintertime, never half enough damn sun. It’s so hard to even remember ever having had any other life than this one. You wake up going “Where am I?” and you end up forgetting there ever was a Before. Kind of like life.