For a moment, Anastasia was concerned he may have been angry with them for their late arrival. “I’m sorry, Uncle Sergey,” she said apologetically, “but the train was extremely late.”
“That’s all right. I wouldn’t be concerned if you were having a good time or partying downtown. I’d be surprised, might even be worried, if you hadn’t.”
“But the train was late, extremely late.” She looked up at his fogged, weary eyes. “And you must be tired. You probably have to work in the morning, don’t you?”
Sergey almost could not resist chortling. “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about being to work on time.” When he first saw Anastasia, light-skinned, pale, and Donatella, darker, brown-haired, fully proportioned, in the light of the door, he was taken aback by their presence, their physicality. No sense of immaturity and girlishness lingered about Anastasia and Donatella, no air of childness, no chubby arms and pudgy hands, no baby fat, not much of a physical hint of adolescence, which was actually the last time when he had seen his niece, and their bodies were toned and tanned. He gazed for a period of time, maybe even longingly, at the pair of gorgeous young women. His eyes particularly fixated on Donatella—the litheness and shapeliness of her legs, which ended incongruously in construction boots, heavy duty work footwear, leather, with steel shanks, remnants of summer employment tree planting, and the muscular strength he saw in their hard, lean, curvaceous bodies. He made a mental note to ask his niece’s friend if she was working out much in the gym and weight training.
“Uncle Sergey, this is Donatella. You remember Donatella, don’t you?”
“Of course, how could I forget?” Looking down at her smooth, silky, shapely legs, he became self-conscious. He noticed how physically the girls had matured and how they must have worked on their legs. His palms were warm and moist, as he inhaled deeply, and reached out and took the hand she extended out to him. He firmly clasped her flesh, which was cool and dry. Meeting them at the arrival gate for the transcontinental train, he could see how they were excited by their final arrival into the city. They didn’t want to be weighted down with luggage, duffel bags, or backpacks. The urban environment, the hustle and bustle, of Toronto was novel to them, and they insisted on leaving their suitcases in the luggage department of the train station. Outside the massive historic landmark of Union Station, which frowned upon the extremely tall office towers clustered so closely and densely downtown, they bought hotdogs and canned cola from the street vendors, whose carts and propane charcoal grilles littered the broad boulevard. Then they looked around for the entrance to the underground station of the subway.
“Are you sure you don’t want to take the subway? We’re actually staring the entrance right in the face.”
Instead, they ended up hailing a cab outside the grand entrance and front of the historic train station, and the pair of girls insisted he drive in the front seat with the taxi-driver. They found the air surprisingly chilly, although he warned them it wasn’t unusual for the summer night to turn cool, particularly because of the city’s proximity to Lake Ontario. But they looked chilly, wearing short shorts, cut-offs, made from faded, worn denim trousers, which they had worn over the summer when they camped in the bush as part of a tree planting crew, far outside of Beaverbrooke, far from the normal realms of civilization. Through the night they chattered as the taxicab drove steadily north towards his modest house. They grew particularly excited, as they cruised through the downtown area, by the skyscraper office buildings, the busy traffic, the specialized retail stores and boutiques. They tittered as they rode the taxi through the buzz and a rush of seemingly endless kilometers of variegated city blocks. The city had an electrified ambience as they passed tall buildings, teems and masses of people, lines and trails of city lights, and the revelers, the nightclubs, the brightly colored fluorescent, halogen, incandescent, and neon lights, the storefronts, office buildings, billboards, cars, even early in the morning, at two am.
“The city of Toronto isn’t anything like Beaverbrooke.”
“I don’t care what anybody says and he doesn’t mean to be hateful, or critical, but in comparison Beaverbrooke is Hicksville,” Anastasia said.
“Believe it or not there are advantages to being small, isolated, and underpopulated. You get excited realizing you escaped a stifling town, oppressiveness attitudes and the smallness of the place,” Donatella said.
His eyes met those of the cabdriver as he glanced at the girls through the dimly lit cab in the rear view mirror. “You’re two smart girls, and I think you’ll go far.” When the cab arrived outside the house, Anastasia expressed surprised at the house, unexpectedly small and narrow, the yard the size of a postage stamp, which was significantly smaller than what she was used to and expected in Beaverbrooke. “I hope you weren’t expecting a mansion in Rosedale.” He reminded the duo he had been a parking enforcement officer with the city of Toronto.
“But you have all these university degrees. Anastasia says you even have a master’s degree.”
“Yes, and look how far it has gotten me. I’m a parking enforcement officer, which we call the most dangerous job in the city.” He possessed a bachelor’s degree, but he was also a bachelor, he joked, despite certain efforts he had made, in a city of thousands of attractive and unattached women. Indeed, his niece informed him a later that her mother, his sister, sometimes wondered if he was gay. For some reason, these suppositions made him defensive, and he felt the need to inform Donatella and Anastasia he wasn’t gay. He also told them he hoped they weren’t expecting the estate of a wealthy stockbroker, dressed in tweeds, smoking a pipe, walking his immaculately groomed schnauzers at night, living in a mansion, in the wealthy part of the city, which was actually only a few blocks up Eglinton Avenue West. He turned around and looked back inside the house, as if checking to see if he had left a stove element on, briefly debating if he should be frank. Earlier in his life, he might not have said anything about how he wouldn’t be going to work in the morning. Now Anastasia was an adult, and he thought she was steeled to be recipient of bad news, and he was a much older adult. He couldn’t see any virtue or even sense in holding the truth from her, and his openness and indifference to maintaining appearances, perhaps was an evil portend, in hindsight, of what was to come, in her.
