Both women know that the best Mimi is likely to do at the moment is a Thermos of Tang.
“Call if you need anything.”
After lunch, Jack walks with Vic Boucher back across the parade square. A group of cadets emerges from the rec centre looking freshly scrubbed, gym bags over their shoulders. A number of cars are parked out front of the PX, women coming and going, some with strollers, others balancing groceries and toddlers, stopping to chat. Jack says, “Better double-check what the wife wanted me to pick up,” as though using the pay phone were an afterthought.
But a cadet slips through the glass door and dumps a pocketful of change down the slot before Jack gets there. A Malaysian lad. Longdistance sweetheart—this could take a while.
“Come into the rec centre with me and use the one in the lounge, I’ve got the keys.”
“Naw,” says Jack. “I’ll remember once I’m in there.” And heads toward the PX.
“À demain,” says Vic.
Till tomorrow? Right, dinner. Jack must remember to tell Mimi the moment he gets home. We’re having guests tomorrow night. He stands in the entrance and gazes into the grocery store. Strolls up one aisle, then down another. Buys a pack of gum.
When he comes back out of the store, Vic is gone. Tiny lies the size of splinters, they must be business as usual for Simon. SOP. Jack glances at the phone booth—still occupied. He heads home. There’s no rush.
Madeleine runs as fast as she can up St. Lawrence Avenue, leaving a wake of green cuttings—it’s here! Christopher Columbus’s yellow ship rocks merrily across a painted sea on the side of the green Mayflower moving van. The rear door is already open, the ramp is down and a man in overalls is wheeling off her bike. She can feel already the spring of the saddle, pedals firm beneath her feet, trusty handlebar grips—oh my bike!
“Whose is this?” says the mover and winks, holding up the little blue bomber. He smells like tar; it’s a friendly smell.
She rides over the grass, around the house and down the driveway, her legs working like pistons, before returning to the van, torn between the open road and the open truck where all their stuff is stacked in boxes and under blankets. She watches, seated on her bike, feet flat on the ground—she will have to ask her father to raise the seat, she has grown.
Mike is there with his new friend, Roy Noonan. Madeleine can tell they are making their voices sound deeper than they really are—shortening their sentences, forcing down their pitch. Roy has a black brush cut and braces and round pink cheeks. He is holding a balsa-wood airplane and Mike is holding the remote control. They have serious blank expressions on their faces. Madeleine knows better than to hope they might let her play with them. Who cares? The moving van is here!
Men carry down huge boxes and pieces of furniture—a quilted pad slips aside to reveal Maman’s vanity table, that most intimate of altars momentarily on public view, like a lady passing a window in her lingerie. This is the first time the McCarthys have seen their own furniture since they moved from Alberta to Germany. It has been in storage. Here comes the couch where Madeleine curled up with her dad and read the paper before she could read, and that must be the glass top for the coffee table, marked FRAGILE! And what could be in the big box marked RCA VICTOR THIS SIDE UP? The television set! Cabinet of delights, last illuminated four years ago.
Things you forgot you owned are in those boxes. Our stuff. All the things we packed in Germany and all the things that slept in storage, reunited, first with one another, now with us. Toys and dolls that have made the incredible journey will emerge dapper and refreshed, “Of course we didn’t smother.” The cuckoo clock will awaken, mounted once more above the stove, a perpetual air of suspense hovering about its little door. Our own kitchen plates will smile up at us from the table, “We made it.” Our cutlery, which will sleep in new but familiar berths in the kitchen drawer, and remember those little egg cups shaped like hens? We’ll use those tomorrow morning. Here comes your own bed, borne shoulder-high in triumph down the ramp, and in that box are the precious photo albums that have evolved from black and white to colour—the next time we lift a cover, it will be to look on memories that are yet once more removed from the present. All these things have found their way to this specific spot on earth, 72 St. Lawrence Avenue, Centralia, Ontario, Canada. Our stuff.
As usual, kids gather tentatively around the van. A couple of kids who don’t count because they’re too young—their bikes still have training wheels. And the Hula Hoop girl.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
They watch the van for a while. The Hula Hoop girl has curly copper hair, freckles and cat-eye glasses. She turns and asks, “What’s your name?”
“Madeleine McCarthy. What’s yours?”
“Auriel Boucher.”
They watch the van some more.
“Where did you just move from?” asks Auriel.
“Germany.”
“We lived there too.”
“Neat. I was born in Edmonton.”
“Neat, I was born in England.”
“Neat.”
It turns out that Auriel is hilarious, and she doesn’t care if she’s fat. Plump, that is. She’s not really fat anyway, once you get to know her. And freckles are nice.
“I like your bike.”
“Thanks,” says Madeleine. “I like your top.”
“Thanks,” says Auriel. “It improves my bust.” They burst out laughing.
You can’t tell if Auriel actually has a bust behind her polka-dot pop-top, but that’s beside the point. Another girl joins them, Lisa Ridelle, in brand-new Keds.
“Hi Auriel.”
“Hi Lisa.”
“Hi,” says Madeleine.
Wispy white-blonde pageboy, pale blue eyes, Lisa laughs at everything Auriel says. Soon she is laughing at everything Madeleine says.
“You laugh exactly like Muttly on Penelope Pitstop,” says Madeleine, and Lisa laughs her rasping laugh.
“She’s right, you do!” agrees Auriel, imitating her. Madeleine joins in and they all do the wheezy laugh like the cartoon dog. They have known one another for five minutes and already they have their own laugh.
“What grade are you going into?”
“Four.”
“Me too.”
“Me three!”
Lisa can turn her eyelids inside out, it’s really creepy. “Do it again, Lisa.” Auriel knows how to paralyze your hand. “Squeeze my thumb as hard as you can. Okay, now let go but don’t straighten your fingers….” Then she tickles your wrist lightly. “Okay, now try and open your fingers.”
Madeleine can barely get them open. “Wow, I’m paralyzed.”
“Do it to me now, Auriel.”
“Want to set up a lemonade stand, you guys?” It’s a hot day, they could make a fortune. But Lisa and Auriel are going to a baseball tournament overnight in the Bouchers’ van. Auriel is catcher and Lisa plays shortstop. You can easily picture Auriel wearing the leather chest protector, the face cage and a backward cap—she would look exactly like a turtle. In a good way.
“Auriel, come get your tea, pet, Daddy’s on his way.” Auriel’s mum is calling from the Bouchers’ driveway. She stands next to the open VW van with an armload of baseball bats and shin pads. She has the same curly hair.
“Coming, Mums,” calls Auriel.
Oh, to be like Auriel Boucher and Hayley Mills, and call one’s mother “Mums.” Mrs. Boucher is a war bride, you can tell from her English accent.
The moving van is almost empty. Madeleine watches her new friends run up the street to the Bouchers’ house, just as her father rounds the corner. “Dad!” She hops on her bike and rides to him, pedalling furiously. “Dad, look!” He smiles and leans forward with his arms open as though to catch her, Zippy Vélo and all.
Everything is going to be fine, Centralia is going to be great.
“I’m glad to hear that, sweetie,” says Dad as she leans her bike against the porch and follows him in. Boxes and furnitur
e crowd the rooms, awkward herds as yet untethered to walls and corners. “Mimi, I’m home.”
Already the echo in their voices has abated, absorbed by their things which have caught up to them, the rest of the family. Alive with all they have taken in over the years, these things will exhale memories of times gone by, filling the house with that untranslatable well-being the Germans call Gemütlichkeit, making it a place that is not a place at all: home.
For supper, the McCarthys have driven five miles north to the town of Exeter for burgers and shakes. Exeter is neat and prosperous, but if you hope to find an A&W you have to drive in the other direction, toward London. There is a good family restaurant, however, and the four of them slid into a booth.
The people in the restaurant knew right away that the McCarthys were from the air force station. When it comes time for dessert, they move from their booth to the counter, and Jack and Mimi chat with the owners. They always make a point of meeting local people, whether they are in Alberta or Alsace. People are people, let’s make the most of life. And they usually get a warm reception, even from those locals who are suspicious of the stream of temporary neighbours who reliably enrich the local community chest, but can otherwise unnerve the stable population. It never takes Jack and Mimi long to belong. But it is not meant to last and it usually doesn’t, beyond a Christmas card or two after the next posting.
“How’s the pie?” Jack asks.
“Homemade,” replies a woman of few words behind the counter.
“Say no more,” says Jack, and orders a slice with cheese.
Madeleine watches the man at the grill flipping burgers. Is he the woman’s husband? He is thin and she is fat. Jack Sprat….
“What’ll it be, Madeleine?” her father asks.
She looks up into the pasty face of the woman. “Um. Do you have Neapolitan please?”
“With a cherry on top?” asks the woman, without cracking a smile.
“S’il vous plaît,” says Madeleine without planning it.
The woman smiles and says, “Come-on-tally-voo?” then pinches Madeleine’s cheek, but not painfully. Ladies behind counters are similar the world over. They like to give you things, they like to feel a hunk of your face between thumb and forefinger.
Belonging and not belonging. Being on the outside and the inside at the same time. For Madeleine it is as natural, as negligible, as breathing. And the idea of growing up in the midst of your own past—among people who have known you all your life and believe they know what you are made of, what you are capable of—that is a suffocating thought.
“What about your IGA here?” asks Mimi. “They have a good butcher?” A rich vein of conversation opens. Butchers from here to London are discussed. This leads to children’s shoes, the school board, Prime Minister Diefenbaker, whether we’re in for a cold winter, and the space race.
“Well, Kennedy says he’s going to do it and I wouldn’t be surprised if he did,” says Jack.
“What do we want to go to the moon for, anyhow?” asks the man at the grill.
Jack replies, “’Cause if we don’t get there first, the Russkies will.”
“Well, that’s my point, eh?” says the man, wiping his hands on his white apron. “Gettin’ crowded up there.”
“Dad,” says Mike. “Not we, the Americans.”
“That’s right, Mike, and don’t you forget it.”
“Vive la différence,” says Mimi.
The woman puts a parfait glass in front of Madeleine, Neapolitan topped with chocolate sauce, whipped cream and a cherry. “Wow, thanks,” Madeleine says. The woman winks at her.
Madeleine picks up her spoon. Though she is at home everywhere and nowhere, there is the occasional sense of having misplaced something, someone. Sometimes, when the family sits down to dinner, she has the feeling that someone is missing. Who?
Jack asks where the best swimming and picnicking is to be found. Nearby on Lake Huron. He already knows this, but people like to be asked about where they live. And Mimi loves meeting people. They love her French accent and she loves that they can never guess where she is from. France? Québec? They pronounce it “Kweebec.” No, and no. Where, then? Acadia. L’Acadie. Site of le grand dérangement—the great disruption of almost two hundred years ago that inspired Longfellow’s romantic poem Evangeline. Mass expulsion of an entire nation from Canada’s east coast, a human tide that flowed south, pooled in Louisiana to fertilize a Cajun culture, then trickled back up to thrive in pockets across the Canadian Maritimes, with roots that reach back to the seventeenth century. Mimi says, “That’s why I’m so good at moving.”
She laughs with the people behind the counter, and neglects to add that it was the maudits Anglais who kicked her people out in the first place. Americans tend to be more responsive than English Canadians to that part of the story, having seen fit to kick the damned English out themselves.
Jack enjoys teasing her when they’re alone. “You’re my prisoner,” he’ll say. “My rightful booty.” If he really wants to get a rise out of her, he describes the French as a defeated people and says, “It’s lucky for you the British were so superior or you and I would never have met.” He knows he has won if he can get her to whack him. “That was always the trouble with the French. Too emotional.” That’s Mimi. Spitfire.
Jack and Mimi both come from New Brunswick’s Atlantic coast. But they didn’t meet there—she was French, he was English, why would they meet? He was working in a cardboard factory alongside three older men. At seventeen, he was the only one who still had all his fingers. When he realized he was also the only one who could read and write, he left. Lied about his age, joined the air force, crashed and remustered. When he and Mimi met in ’44 at the dance in Yorkshire, where he was a supply officer and she was a nurse’s aide at Number 6 Bomber Group, it seemed like a very small world indeed. Small world, big war. Lucky for them.
“This sure is a beautiful part of the country,” says Jack to the man behind the counter.
“Oh, this is God’s country,” replies the man, topping up Jack’s coffee.
It’s simple, really: if you like people they will probably like you back. It helps that Jack and Mimi’s children are polite and answer in full sentences. It helps that their daughter is pretty and their son is handsome.
“What are you going to be when you grow up, young fella?” asks a man in the booth behind them, a farmer in rubber boots and John Deere cap.
Mike answers, “I’m going to fly Sabres, sir.”
“Well now,” says the man, nodding.
“That’s the stuff,” says Jack.
It helps that Jack and his wife are attractive. Not just because Mimi is slim and stylish with her pumps and pencil skirt. Not because he is blue-eyed and relaxed—effortless gentleman, a natural polish that goes well with his mill-town respect for work and working people. They are attractive because they are in love.
It has worked. The dream. Post-war boom, the kids, the car, all the stuff that is supposed to make people happy. The stuff that has begun to weigh on some people—alcoholics in grey flannel suits, mad housewives—it has all made Jack and Mimi very happy. They couldn’t care less about “stuff” and perhaps that is their secret. They are rich, they are fabulously wealthy. And they know it. They hold hands under the counter and chat with the locals.
Madeleine says, “I’m probably going to be in the secret service,” and everyone laughs. She smiles politely. It feels good to make people laugh, even if you are not sure what’s so funny.
Dessert is on the house. Welcome back to Canada.
They pull into their driveway as the sun begins to undo itself across the sky. Madeleine’s interior movie music swells at the sight of its slow swoon over the PMQs; light spears the windshield, piercing her heart. Tonight they will sleep in their own beds in their own house for the first time since Germany.
In the basement, her father roots around in one of the boxes and Madeleine watches as he comes out with something more miraculou
s than a live rabbit. “The baseball gloves!” He tosses her one and they go out behind the house into the grassy circle. Mike is off with his new friend so she has Dad and the game of catch all to herself. The good smack in the palm, just this side of painful; the whizzing overarm return that he plucks easily from the air. The sun sinks between them so neither has it in their eyes, because when you play catch with your dad, everything is fair.
Oh no, here comes Mike with Roy Noonan. They have baseball mitts, they’re going to wreck the game.
But they don’t. The circle widens, the four of them toss the ball and an easy rhythm is established—thwack, pause, lift, whish, the ball cresting from glove to glove like a dolphin. Neither Mike nor Roy seems the slightest bit embarrassed to be playing with a kid sister, and the fact that Madeleine is a girl occasions no comment until, when the sun has faded to the point where they can no longer see the ball, and they follow Dad back to the house, she hears Roy Noonan say, “Your sister’s pretty good for a girl.”
And Mike’s reply, “Yeah, I know.”
What, about this day, has not been perfect?
When the kids have gone to bed, Mimi makes tea and Jack plugs in the hi-fi they bought in Germany. The station comes in crystal clear. “‘Unforgettable … that’s what you are.’” She sets the mugs down on the floor, he opens his arms and they dance under the sixty-watt bulb, swaying slowly in a clear patch among the boxes. “‘Unforgettable, though near or far….’” Her fingers curl through his, she brushes her face against his neck, his hand finds the small of her back, she is perfect.
“You want a baby from Centralia?” he says.
“I wouldn’t mind a little Centralia baby.”
“A little chipmunk?”
“I love you, Jack.”
“Welcome home, Missus.” He holds her closer. She kisses his neck lightly in the spot where the soft bristles of his hairline begin. “Je t’aime, Mimi,” he whispers in his shy French, bad English accent; she smiles into his shoulder. “‘That’s why, darling, it’s incredible, that someone so unforgettable….’”
He could take her upstairs now, but Nat King Cole is singing and, just as on their honeymoon in Montreal, there is the delicious confidence of putting off the moment. Life is long, I am going to make love to you for years and years…. “‘thinks that I am unforgettable too.