The great Lamar Cleveland, running back for the Riders, used to date the older sister of my best friend, Jan Vanderhoek. It was 1968. Jan and I were in the same class at school and we lived across the street from each other on Vancouver Avenue in the south end off Bank Street, the rougher end of Alta Vista Drive near Charles H. Hulse Public School and Ridgemont High. The Vanderhoeks lived in a little white bungalow. It was tidy looking and solidly built, although the driveway needed repair and had tufts of grass and weeds sprouting between cracks in the pavement.<\/p>\n
Lamar Cleveland drove a white Mustang. Whenever I would see him parked outside on the street with the engine running, his radio would be playing loudly, tuned to CFRA, which had General Grant as its morning anchor. We would eat breakfast to the sound of The General exhorting us to get a move on, brush those teeth, here\u2019s some rousing martial music to spur you on. It wasn\u2019t John Philip Sousa we\u2019d hear coming out of that white Mustang with the red-leather interior, though; it was what we later came to dismiss as lounge-lizard music\u2014the crooning, smoky, boozy, early Las Vegas sound of the Rat Pack.<\/p>\n
One day, Jan started singing \u201cStrangers in the Night\u201d while we were in his back yard pretending to blow up his G.I. Joe. It was the same song I\u2019d heard as I watched his sister Leda hurrying out the front door in her full-length honey-blonde fur coat, its fine hairs riffling in the cold wind.<\/p>\n
She minced outside in black thigh-high leather boots with spike heels, her coat open to reveal a turquoise mini-skirt and white Angora wool sweater. Halfway to the car she stopped, executed a multi-step turn on the icy sidewalk, skittered back up the front steps, and disappeared into the house. Lamar pressed his car horn, which played a rendition of the first six notes of \u201cMy Way\u201d so that \u201cRegrets, I\u2019ve had a few\u201d was repeated three or four times. Mrs. Vanderhoek, a stout woman in a floral-print dress too small to be comfortable for her, came to the doorway and opened the aluminum storm door.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe is coming right away, Lamar, in two minutes and a half or less. Would you like to come inside?\u201d<\/p>\n
Lamar took a long minute to lean across the front seat of his car\u2014its paint job dulled by slushy spray to match the grey of the snow banks, the soot-embedded, crystalline, salt-rimed berms that grew and grew higher than we were tall, hardening all winter, narrowing the street and obscuring the sightlines of cars backing out of their driveways. We dug vertical holes in the banks until we hit ground or impenetrable ice. Then we would tunnel horizontally, carving out a chamber. Sometimes, if we were lucky, our shaft would be so deep that we would need a ladder to get in and out.<\/p>\n
Lamar rolled down the passenger-side window. He filled the little car the way Mrs. Vanderhoek filled her dress. She repeated her invitation from partway down the walk. She seemed impervious to the cold, wearing no coat or sweater even, just that short-sleeved dress, a watercolour blue with delicate red roses, the cuffs of the sleeves biting into the flesh of her upper arm. She had on a pair of dainty, emerald-green, fuzzy mules with a bit of a heel, which I thought was strange because she was a large woman. Her voice was guttural and deep, the kind that rumbled quietly in the lower register, outside\u2014let\u2019s say, in a courtyard in Rotterdam, which is where the Vanderhoeks were from\u2014with the other women of her apartment building as they hung their laundry and chatted. They were really exchanging information about how to get food and which of the soldiers assigned to their street were pushovers, which would look the other way when someone\u2019s boy kicked a ball past one of the barriers and let him retrieve it without shooting him, and which were vicious and took delight in humiliating the weak.<\/p>\n
Lamar stayed in the car. Mrs. Vanderhoek came all the way down the walk to where he was parked. She had to squeeze through the narrow passageway Jan and I had made by hacking through the snow bank one Saturday morning for a quarter apiece, which his father paid reluctantly. Jan got to use the machete that his father had been issued during the war and which he smuggled into the country in a duffel bag full of clothes. \u201cStand back,\u201d Jan had ordered and I did; then with two hands grasping the leather grip of the weapon he raised the thing over his head and brought it down with the force of an executioner, so hard that he lost hold of it and the big knife went rattling into the street. We chopped and hacked into the hard-pack for hours, the mid-morning sun helping to soften the first few inches, and we cut straight walls on either side. Jan said he wished he had some lumber, nails, and two hinges with him, because then he could build a gate with a latch. I thought that was the best idea anybody had ever had. We didn\u2019t make the passageway quite wide enough for his mother, though, and she had to turn sideways to make it through. There was no question of her getting into the car, and so she leaned her head into the open window.<\/p>\n
From my snow foxhole across the street, I watched and listened. Lamar turned the radio down. The music had changed from Neil Diamond\u2019s \u201cCrackling Rose\u201d to the Green Line, Lowell Green\u2019s call-in show, and Lamar had no interest in listening to people call in with their opinions on the teaching of math or the government\u2019s apparent arrogance at ramming official bilingualism down the throats of the electorate. I had to agree with the gridiron star on that point. Any time I had listened to the radio show, the host ended up insulting someone or telling someone to stop calling in, that they were becoming a nuisance, or that they were now embargoed, banned from the airwaves, or black-holed, as they say today. Give me \u201cNorwegian Wood\u201d or \u201cI Am, I Said\u201d over that \u201cjimmer-jammer\u201d any day of the week.<\/p>\n
Leda Vanderhoek finally did come back out. I couldn\u2019t see what was different about her, if her reason for dashing back inside was to change an item of clothing or fix her lipstick and makeup. Back then, I prided myself on my powers of observation because I was training to be a spy, and a spy must have, along with the patience of a stone, the ability to discern subtle changes in the expression and attire of those he is charged with observing. One of my training exercises\u2014as outlined in the particular manual I was following, one I had on loan from the public library under special dispensation because I wasn\u2019t yet old enough to take out adult books\u2014was to remember as much as possible about a person: approximate height in feet and inches, hair colour, facial hair, expression, clothes, distinguishing marks and mannerisms, way of walking, objects carried, dialect spoken, voice intonation, etc. I got pretty good at it and longed for the day when I would witness a crime so that when asked to identify a perpetrator I might give the police a stunningly accurate description.<\/p>\n
Leda Vanderhoek reappeared in her mini-skirt, fox coat, and go-go boots, her anxiety intensified, if the speed of her short strides and agitated dance of her many-ringed fingers in the air was an indication of her state of mind. Why, I wondered, were they making such a fuss over this man, who didn\u2019t even get out of his car? A good part of my curiosity stemmed from never having seen Lamar Cleveland standing to his full height while he was out of uniform.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy do you think he never gets out of his car?\u201d I said to Jan one day.
\n\u201cAre you really that stupid?\u201d he said. \u201cDon\u2019t you know anything? Lamar is from Detroit.\u201d
\n\u201cSo?\u201d I knew where Detroit was and that cars were built there and that Gordie Howe played for the Red Wings, making Detroit my hockey city.
\n\u201cSo, dumb-head, if a brother is in a white neighbourhood in Detroit he probably gets arrested or shot. Didn\u2019t you hear about the riots?\u201d
\n\u201cA brother?\u201d
\n\u201cThat\u2019s what they call each other. Don\u2019t you know anything?\u201d
\n\u201cOh,\u201d I said, wanting to add, \u201cBut we\u2019re different here, aren\u2019t we?\u201d<\/p>\n
\nI didn\u2019t pursue it. He had planted a seed of possibility. It could happen. I knew that Jan never played with Stefan Schultz, because Jan\u2019s father had a hole in the palm of his right hand from a piece of German shrapnel. Jan said that when he was little he would watch his father push a pencil all the way through his hand, but now it was closed over and all you could see was the scar. In our neighbourhood Mario Galliano could conceivably pull out a gun and shoot Julio Estevez. The Ayoubs crossed the street rather than talk to the Heintzmans. The Maloneys thought the Lancasters were stuck up and the Lancasters called the Maloneys a seething den of filthy criminal brats. The more I thought about it, the more dangerous my neighbourhood seemed, and now, with the appearance of this star athlete, the perils of big-city American life were as close as the width of our street, the distance from my observation post to the Vanderhoeks\u2019 machete-carved walkway entrance.<\/p>\n
Leda, who was one of the Riderette cheerleaders, embodied one of my first fantasies that year and for the next couple until I discovered my father\u2019s stash of Playboy<\/em> magazines. In my fantasy she comes out of her house, but instead of getting into Lamar Cleveland\u2019s Mustang she crosses the street and climbs up the embankment beside our driveway and down the ladder into my snow cave. There I have a lantern and a bed big enough for two and a down-filled sleeping bag that we snuggle under. She has white frosted eye-liner and lipstick, pink pantyhose, a white mini-dress, white vinyl boots and the fur coat, all of which she keeps on because of the cold. I tell her that I notice she walks with a bit of a limp and she says that is because she has one leg shorter than the other.<\/p>\n \u201cWould you like me to show you?\u201d<\/p>\n I say yes, of course I would, trying to sound like a concerned doctor.<\/p>\n \u201cTurn on your flashlight,\u201d she says and I do, and under the Woods Five-Star, good to forty below, she pulls off her boots to reveal the difference. Sure enough, one leg reaches about a quarter of an inch farther than the other down the bed and to me this is fascinating. Then she asks me if I would like to remove her pantyhose and I say yes then no then yes, and usually that\u2019s as far as it gets, that particular dream.<\/p>\n She came down the sidewalk and I heard, \u201cMa, where did you put my\u2026\u201d the rest obscured by the wind. So occupied was she with the misplaced item that when she got to the end of the walk she realized she couldn\u2019t get past her mother. They did a little exasperated dance. Go back, her mother gestured. \u201cNo,\u201d said Leda. \u201cThen how?\u201d They scrutinized the impasse. If Leda refused to retreat and her mother was trapped between her and the car, the only way out was for Lamar to move the vehicle so that Mrs. Vanderhoek could step down into the street. She was by this time beginning to act cold, her hock arms mottled red and white. She turned and indicated that Lamar should move his car forward or back so that some progress might be made. Either he didn\u2019t understand or didn\u2019t think it was a good idea. He reached across the bucket seat and opened the passenger-side door, but it would open only slightly before hitting the snow bank. This is insane, the good woman seemed to be saying, in her expression, her gestures, her language of canals and tulips and spotless front stoeps.<\/p>\n Girl, turn around this instant and let me pass<\/em>, I imagine her saying.<\/p>\n \u201cNo, Mama, I\u2019m late. Lamar has been waiting too long now. You don\u2019t know how he gets.\u201d Lamar sat upright and hit the steering wheel with the heels of both open palms. He refrained, barely, from sounding the musical horn again. Somewhere warm breezes were blowing. Somewhere a sprinkler was spritzing and kids were taking turns running through the spray. On a wide whitewashed porch a woman flapped the hem of her skirt to pull cool air up over her burning thighs. She rolled a glass of iced tea across her forehead.<\/p>\n The women began pushing each other. \u201cYou move. No, you!\u201d The light was thinning under wisps of cloud.<\/p>\n I was getting cold and had to go to the bathroom and debated leaving my post, but I didn\u2019t want to miss anything. I wondered what Jan was doing. Mr. Vanderhoek, tall, thin, with a severe crew cut, appeared briefly like a spectre in the doorway to see what the commotion was about.<\/p>\n \u201cDo you want to drive him away? Is that what you want?\u201d Lamar leaned across, rolled the window back up, scraped an oval of frost away from the inside of the windshield, hit the accelerator, making the back wheels spin uselessly, eased off, braked, and pulled away. I saw him drive off, but Leda and her mother didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n \u201cI have never hated anyone or anything as much as I hate you right now.\u201d \u201cYou want me to meet somebody from around here, a nice boy from a good family. A doctor or a diplomat. Right, Mama? An intelligent, good provider with a pipe and slippers and all the right social connections. Well I don\u2019t want intelligent, and I don\u2019t want slippers. I want Lamar. He\u2019s fun. He\u2019s got money. He\u2019s got this great car. We go wherever we want and we never stand in line. It makes you crazy to see me with him, doesn\u2019t it?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNo, Leda, it makes me a little bit sad and a lot nervous. To tell the honest truth.\u201d Leda turned, stomped and skittered back up the walk to the front steps, turned right, followed the path a short distance to the driveway, and came, mincing and sliding and falling twice, to the end of it. She stepped into the street to get beyond the snow bank.<\/p>\n She stood, her arms crossed, looking up and down the street. She was separated from her mother by the length of the snow wall. They could see each other\u2019s heads, that was all. Mrs. Vanderhoek was nodding hers in an erratic, shivering way, the look on her face ambiguous, a grin or a grimace. Leda stood, mouth agape, eyes wide, hands held palm-up in a sideline gesture of the sincerely, rapturously, uncomprehendingly astonished.<\/p>\n Me, I couldn\u2019t wait any longer. The show seemed to be over, so I crawled out of my foxhole and went inside our house to pee and get warm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Regrets<\/strong>
\n\u201cWell, my smart, my beautiful, my perceptive, tell me, what am I supposed to do?\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\u201cHe won\u2019t drive away because of me, that\u2019s for sure.\u201d
\n\u201cWhat do you mean by that?\u201d
\n\u201cOh, just think about it.\u201d
\n\u201cI am. I have no idea.\u201d
\n\u201cOf course you have no idea. You always have no idea. What is it, do you think, that keeps him coming back?\u201d
\n\u201cYour mind is sick, Mama. Let me get by or I swear I will scream.\u201d
\n\u201cGo ahead. I\u2019d like to hear it. You don\u2019t know what a scream is. You\u2019ve never heard a real scream in your life.\u201d
\n\u201cPlease, please, please, mother, you are ruining my life.\u201d
\n\u201cMaybe I am saving your life, did you ever think about that?\u201d
\n\u201cI can wait as long as you can.\u201d
\n\u201cGood, so can I\u2026. I\u2019m not trying to ruin your life.\u201d
\n\u201cThen how do you explain this?\u201d
\n\u201cIt\u2019s not wide enough.\u201d
\n\u201cNo, I meant\u2026\u201d
\n\u201cIt\u2019s a passing fancy.\u201d
\n\u201cA what?\u201d
\n\u201cHe\u2019ll grow tired of you. They always do. As soon as they get what they want they move on.\u201d
\n\u201cThey?\u201d
\n\u201cYes. Men.\u201d
\n\u201cBlack men, you mean.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\u201cYou don\u2019t mean that. You don\u2019t know what hatred is.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\u201cScrew your honest truth, Mama.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nThe women began pushing each other. \u201cYou move. No, you!\u201d The light was thinning under wisps of cloud. I was getting cold and had to go to the bathroom and debated leaving my post, but I didn\u2019t want to miss anything. I wondered what Jan was doing. Mr. Vanderhoek, tall, thin, with a severe crew cut, appeared briefly like a spectre in the doorway to see what the commotion was about.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3129,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2143"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2143\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3130,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2143\/revisions\/3130"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3129"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}