At first, I said moving to DC was like stepping inside a candy wrapper. That seemed right at the time but, then - not. A candy wrapper isn't necessarily humid or sticky inside. DC's summer was the wrapper with the chocolate melted in your pocket, all over your keys and your loose change. When I found out Washington had actually been built on a swamp, I imagined dark woods with simmering ponds, toads on toilet paper lily pads.
Written in the Key of Cormac McCarthy: I Love You, Season 1, Episode 2.
Interviews Tommy Lasorda – Upstate New York – The War – Ally Takes Cookie –Asks “Where are you going with that cookie – Scares Tommy Lasorda because he was eating a cookie
He came out onto his porch and there was some hippy mother changing her baby on his lawn. On a Hudson's Bay blanket, the mother was wiping and dabbing at the muddy rolls and creases of her little girl. A gust of wind whipped up leaves around the two, and it was like last night on TV. Some pear-shaped Spanish grandma had been crammed into this glass booth with money being blown all around her. The grandma grabbed at the bills, stuffed her clothes with money and wore twisted look of desperation on her face. She looked so stupid. He couldn’t tell if the point was to degrade the grandma, but he could tell that this particular grandma didn’t care. When the wind in the booth was turned off all the money dropped and lay in a pile at her feet. All that money just right there, but not for her. She had gotten some, but not enough. Never enough. The brittle and wet leaves stuck to the hippy mother’s dreadlocks and onto the swamp of the little girl.
In the Gatineaus, where they’d rented a cottage, the days were an early summer medley of leaf green and lake green. It was the season’s first heat wave and Martha and Gray swam naked in the green lake. She floated on her back watching the bright sky. He dove off the dock and swam over, then dipped underneath her and bobbed up in bubbly swirls. They made sandwiches for each other, scooped big bowls of ice cream, cracked open beers from the fridge. They lounged on the deck with a view of the glinting lake through the trees.
Of course I remember the local Louisiana TV commercials. My favorite was for an army surplus store called Rambeaux. That’s right: R-A-M-B-E-A-U-X, upstanding the pop-Cajun love of ending o-words in eaux. Just a matter of time before we’re heading down to the bingeaux hall and eating peauxtateaux chips. Rambeaux had a song, of course, because every commercial had to have a song. But instead of using the prissy little “I’d like to buy the world a Coke,” let’s-all-hold-hands thing the national commercials used, Rambeaux used a military jingle. It’s a song about the store, but to the tune of “Sound Off” - the Marines’ one big hit if you don't count "Ballad of the Green Berets".
They worked at one of the hotels. He cleaned the mirrors and mopped the floors, and she was a chambermaid. They had a small room tucked in the corner of the third floor, where they lived rent-free. The room had a double bed, a small table fit for two, a television bolted to a chest-of-drawers, a mini-fridge, an art deco lamp and a hot plate. There were no books in the room, and the light bulbs seemed to flicker in agreement. The curtains were a shade of okra. The walls mustard blush. The linen, however, did match nicely. A window looked out over the alley and into another window, which looked out over the alley. There was a washroom, which he kept spotless, and which she disliked.
The sun rises. As it must. And the sky is cloudless and the kind of blue you want to see in the eyes of a good-looking woman. From real close. Like close enough that you could blow into those blue eyes and she would slap you playfully and giggle and you’d once again be amazed that you were being so intimate and playful with such a gorgeous woman. That kind of blue. That’s how beautiful the sky is today.
And the sun freaks me out. I’m not talking cancer either. I mean, the thing is a star and one day it’s going to die and cosmology or astrology – one of them’s about religion, I’m getting my ologies mixed up here – but the sun’s a big thing and it fills me with big ideas and dread and it makes me feel so small when I think about the reality of the thing. Because thinking likes this opens a hole inside me that lets bad things in, they stream in, and what am I going to do to close it? It freaks me out. When I think about it. So I try not to. I really try.
This is the parable of Bryan Dong. It is somewhat parabolic. Back in the day, in a very specific suburb of Winnipeg, specifically Transcona, when Leslie Mackie was an elementary school student, from the age of six, he used to go to Bryan Dong’s house every weekday for lunch. Leslie was a latchkey kid. Bryan was the greatest person in the world. Leslie was perfectly aware that he sometimes annoyed Bryan. It was hard not to be somewhat overenthusiastic in Bryan’s presence. Leslie felt a real sense of dedication to his best friend. Not only was Bryan one of the most popular and physically attractive boys at Harold Hatcher, but his parents, Roy and Deandra, were the Block Parents of Allenby Crescent. Every livable street in Winnipeg had a house that was designated the Block Parent home. If a child were to be in danger of any kind, they could find safety and solace in the arms of a Block Parent. Leslie felt especially lucky that his mom had brokered the lunchtime deal with Mrs. Dong.
I’m at the corner of Bloor and Ossington and, all of a sudden, it's really hot. The sun is hitting me directly in the eyes. When I look up, all I see is the dullness of everything around me—the buildings, the sidewalk, the garbage cans. If this is what it’s like to come down, I have to get back up. I rest my head between my legs and for a second it feels good—until I remember I’m wearing a skirt. It’s 8:30 in the morning and my lace underwear is in full view of the intersection. My friend Tina, who is also in second year at York University, comes running out of an alley and the colours around her blur and she seems to be coming at me. If I didn’t know her, I swear, I'd scream "get the fuck away from me, asswipe!" I do know her though, so I say calm the fuck down, Teen. "Ok, beyotch," she says, slamming into my side. "I love you, Jenny."
After we had been married for seven years we fell in love. Although not with each other. And not even with others. We fell in love with horses, with the track, with the way the horses, like beautiful women, walked to the gate, and this unexpected love affair of ours began on the cold day in May that our friends Luc and Odette invited us to go with them to the Hippodrome. They drove over the mountain to pick us up in their tiny foreign car and once we had squeezed ourselves onto its back seat, we were off, driving west. We didn’t know either of them all that well yet, but we hoped to become friends with them as a couple. After all, they both seemed to approve of both of us. This was a surprising thing in itself since most of our friends belonged to two opposing camps: those who couldn’t fathom what I saw in my husband and those who couldn’t fathom what my husband saw in me. These new friends were also older than we were.