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Fluevogs
Beth has dinner at Mabel’s house tonight. It’s the usual gathering of stray friends, mostly misfits and singles, collected from various places: some that Mabel works with, others, like Beth, who Mabel met at the Safeway where Beth delivers milk for Dairyland.
It’s the colour of her skin, Beth thinks as she watches her move across the hardwood floor. Beautiful, smooth skin the colour of maple syrup, and not only that, but the pretty, able-bodied line that curves slightly from the bottom of Mabel’s breast down to her runner’s hips. Maple, Beth calls her in her mind. She reminds Beth of the trees in Kitsilano, the lovely trees, and the streets named after the trees in Vancouver: Chestnut, Walnut, Elm, Cypress, and Maple. Maple is half Japanese and half Croatian. She has a husband, Carl. He’s from Hamilton. He’s the colour of straw.
Maple is a scientist and does research for UBC. Beth isn’t sure what kind of research it is – stem cell, biomechanics or something – Beth can never quite remember, but she knows it doesn’t involve animals because Maple is a strict vegan. Beth notices nothing made at Dairyland ever finds its way into Maple’s shopping cart. One, because Maple knows how enzymes react with other enzymes and which ones are good to combine and which aren’t, and two, because Maple loves animals as much as she loves people. Beth is grateful for Maple’s loves.
As Beth looks around the dining room table at the group of women assembled there, she decides that Carl and Maple have made the decision that Beth may, in fact, be lesbian and this is the reason Beth is, at thirty-six, unmarried and working as much overtime as she can get her hands on. What Carl and Maple have based this conclusion on Beth has no idea; it’s been months since she’s dated either sex.
Beth has noticed that over the last few dinners the number of homeless (meaning merely renting) men has been on the decrease while the number of own-their-own-condominiums-on-False Creek women has increased. Maple and Carl live in Kerrisdale, but in an older, modest house. The six women around the table are mostly professionals like Maple: a CGA who works for CCRA and has hair like bleached spun sugar, reminding Beth slightly of an albino, with the exception of the mauve eyes on her whitish face. A divorce lawyer – in her late thirties, Beth guesses – who has sworn off unions of any sort completely, partially due to the negotiation of several thousand break-ups over the years, where no one save the lawyer comes out ahead. “And really, what is the point? It all ends badly, anyway.” The lawyer looks around the table. No one responds, except for Carl, who shoots a look across the table at Maple. Maple smiles and passes the lawyer a skewer of grilled oyster mushrooms and jalapeño peppers. “Try these,” Maple says, “you might like them.” A woman with a nose ring sits next to Carl and a couple of other congenial but resigned-looking women in their late forties who have worked in the offices at UBC for twenty years and will probably work another twenty without even noticing.
All the women at the table are remotely pleasant, but not one of them could hold a natural-made beeswax candle to Maple’s exotic looks and liberal heart.
Straw-coloured Carl passes the roasted red pepper dip across the table to Beth.
“How’s the cow business?” he asks.
“Moo-ing along,” Beth says. She doesn’t care anymore what people think of her job. She makes OK money: eighteen-ninety-four an hour. Nothing to sneer at but nothing to write home about to her three-time-divorced mother, either. Beth thinks about her mother and three-time-divorced like a competitor in the Olympics as if marriage is sport; marriage, which was, at this very moment, supposedly under siege by the gay community. The sanctity of marriage, what a sham. With an attrition rate of fifty percent, and her own Liz Taylor-like mother and the divorce lawyer across the table, Beth can hardly think of marriage as a safe haven in need of preservation by heterosexuals. Yet another good reason not to climb off the fence.
Maple settles down at the table and brings up tonight’s topic of discussion. The homeless. And Maple doesn’t mean men who only rent. There’s no particular agenda for these gatherings, and the clientele (Beth likes to call them, although she’s been coming long enough that she now considers herself friend) changes on a regular basis. A few regular couples with their young children careering around the living room because Maple has thoughtfully thought to feed them first so that they can ramble about the house terrorizing a) one another and b) Carl’s unsociable cat that won’t let even their own son, Mason, pet it.
Mason is nine years old in Grade Six. He skipped a grade based on his premature grasp of everything that came home in his Grade Four scribblers. Like he’d done it a million times already and frankly the review was overkill. But he’s a funny kid. Oddly quiet and extremely shy, wears a hoodie over his face most of the time, intensely intellectual and hugely aware of a large number of social issues for a nine-year-old kid. Although Beth supposes Mason comes by his knowledge honestly; both his parents are recycled-card-carrying environmentalists. Beth remembers when Carl had himself chained to a hundred-year-old tree last year up at Clayoquot Sound. Had himself chained to a tree by someone else, Carl explained, as opposed to chaining himself to a tree. Like he was the hostage, the casualty, the captive, much like the tree that was about to be mown down by MacMillan Bloedel and not the other way around – not simply another aggressive environmentalist.
“It has a psychological effect on the guys on the Cats. They aren’t really sure if you’re one of the protesters or just some poor stiff who’s been forced into sacrificing his own skin for the bark of a hundred-year-old tree,” Carl smiles. “They back off every time.” His picture was plastered all over the front of the Vancouver Sun, Carl chained to a tree and looking suitably worried, strictly for the drama, with a big Cat not three feet away.
Mason goes to a school that specializes in mathematics. For snack he takes Rubbermaid containers of roasted soybean and fresh-shelled garden peas while all the other kids feast on Fruit Roll-ups and Fruit Gushers, not an ounce of nutrition in them and look at how those sugar enzymes and Number 40 red dye go straight to the part of the brain that throws them into hyper-mode. According to science and straight from the lovely lips of Maple, sugar is Satan’s brother-in-law.
Mason is restrained and comes up to whisper in Maple’s ear. He’s at the age where his two front teeth look like a rabbit’s in comparison to the surrounding baby teeth. He bites his top lip constantly as if trying to cover them.
“Mason would like me to tell you about the man that lives behind his school. The man lives in a Styrofoam box that the janitor left outside from the new water heater they put in the school last year,” Maple says and hugs Mason to her side. Why no one has removed the box after an entire year escapes Beth, but she figures it might have something to do with empathy. The kind of school spirit that supports the disadvantaged.
“Mason and I pack an extra lunch every day for him to take for the man,” Maple says. Beth can only imagine what the lunch is: organic lentil soup with sun-baked rye bread and a couple of freshly peeled parsnips. Exactly what every homeless person requires after too many bottles of Baby Duck and Wild Turkey bourbon, and the odd Wendy’s Big Bacon Classic salvaged from the garbage. A veritable healthful feast in a brown paper bag delivered by a boy who cannot speak without his mother. Beth wonders how Mason manages in school. Mason blushes beneath his hood and stands there quietly enjoying the warmth of his mother. Everyone enjoys the warmth of your mother, Beth wants to tell him, surveying the table. And your mother’s kindness.
If it weren’t for Maple, Beth would be sitting at home watching another night of Discovery Channel or Bravo! or WTN, or heading down to Benny’s on Broadway to meet the same two single women she’s been meeting there for the last five years, Laurel and Gwen from Dairyland. Beth has never been very comfortable with children, not because she doesn’t like them but because she hasn’t been around many. She’s not quite sure what to do with them. They’re so spontaneous, unpredictable. She’s afraid they might combust and she won’t know how to put them out. Regardless, Beth smiles at Mason. He doesn’t smile back. Maple does because she knows Mason means to; she’s his official interpreter.
The dinner ranges from homemade humus and Indian flatbread to strips of marinated steak that Carl has generously grilled for the non-vegans. The discussion circles around the homeless. The woman with the ring through her nose, who runs Buddha’s Belly, a strictly organic vegetarian restaurant on West Fourth, thinks that being on the street is largely a choice you make. No such thing as bad luck or down-on-your-karma, or that life on the street might be better than life at home, or mental illness even. Just the sheer stupidity of your own bad choices. Nose Ring, who has eaten most of the humus and flatbread, and is sitting at the end of the table next to Carl, is in conflict with Carl’s bleeding-heart (her words) views. She has short-cropped orange hair and Beth is sure Dairyland would never hire her with that ringed piece of metal through her nose. Beth has a third glass of Cabernet, pushes the last piece of steak around on her plate, and tries to ignore Nose Ring and her Clairol Number 14.5 dye. Her hair looks like Halloween.
“I had a guy harass me for money once on Granville Street,” Nose Ring says. “He was so incensed that I wouldn’t shell out my hard-earned money to him, I thought he might punch me right there on the corner. I looked down at his shoes, his two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar Fluevogs. Fluevogs is a high-end shoe store on Granville.” Nose Ring adds for the two office women, who, from the look of their leather Reeboks, have never stepped foot outside The Bay.
“Anyways, I said, ‘sell your shoes, man.’ Let me tell you, that shut him up pretty quick. I have no sympathy for the homeless; they’re all drug addicts and crackheads looking for an easy way out. Why don’t they get a job like everyone else and buy their own damn wine?”
Nose Ring raises her glass of wine as if in a toast to the crackheads and drug addicts who are living the free and easy life on the streets of Vancouver, but she’s so obnoxious that even the disillusioned lawyer next to Beth, who might have agreed, doesn’t join in. Nose Ring drinks alone.
Carl looks sideways at Nose Ring and doesn’t venture anything in retort. From the expression on Maple’s face, she may not invite this one back again. No one says anything. Maple steers the conversation neatly off to the pros and cons of spiking trees. Eager to avoid further transgression from Nose Ring, the table jumps in.
But too late for Beth. Nose Ring has found Beth’s goat and has wrapped her stubby fingers around its neck. Beth finishes her glass of wine and pours another one. This is the Year of the Goat, Beth thinks. If there is one thing Beth is sure of, regardless of whether she will marry male or reside with a life partner, a Large Marge, a Big Judy complete with leather and lace, is her compassion for humankind in general. Clearly, Nose Ring has the empathy of canned smelts. Beth rises unsteadily to her feet and lifts her glass of Cabernet into the air.
“In commiseration of goats and the homeless, I am going to spend a night on the street,” Beth waves her wine glass around. Recently she read about a journalist who spent an entire year in a big city shantytown in order to write a book on the homeless. Mind you, Beth recalls, he’d had a series of life’s misdemeanors that eventually lead him to believe that living in Tent City in Toronto would be preferable to your own home.
The table stops in mid-sentence, tree spiking and Husqvarna chainsaws aside, everyone stares in amazement. Nose Ring is glaring holes on the wall behind Beth’s swaying body.
“Well,” says Carl, looking at her as if she’s either commendable or committable. Mason hovers around his mother again, whispering secrets in her ear to share with the world.
“I want to come, too,” Maple says, then stammers and looks at Mason. His cheeks are flushed. Beth’s heart does a tiny jig – Maple wants to go?
“I mean, he wants to go,” Maple says, and even Carl looks shocked.
Beth stares at Maple and thinks she sees a momentary gleam of apprehension, or is it admiration? And even though children have never before been on Beth’s radar screen, lately at Safeway Beth has found herself noticing the rash of fresh spring babies being pushed along in shopping carts by exhausted but elated mothers.
It’s admiration, Beth decides, looking at Maple. The path to a man’s heart is through his stomach, Beth thinks, watching Carl help himself to another skewer of Maple’s grilled oyster mushrooms. Then certainly the trail to a woman’s lies in the heart of her children. Mason. Beth can do this. She can do this for Maple. Lovely, beautiful-skinned Japanese-Croatian Maple. She rallies herself to the idea. “Of course, we won’t go homeless down in Oppenheimer Park or Victory Square off Cambie, or anywhere remotely dangerous,” Beth says. Victory Square, what a kick in the ass. Come to Vancouver, fall into the depths of humanity, get hooked on heroin and have nothing to look forward to other than getting fitted for dentures at age thirty-something when your teeth finally fall out. That is, if you can afford them. That and sleeping beneath benches in the park.
Carl rises to refill everyone’s wine glass and Maple busies herself passing out individual bowls of crème brûlée made miraculously with soy milk. No, they will not go anywhere hazardous, Beth thinks. After all a thirty-six-year-old woman who works at Dairyland and hasn’t dated anything in the last four months, and a nine-year-old boy who wears a hoodie over his face and whispers in his mother’s ear, may not, in actuality, have their street legs firmly beneath them.
Nose Ring remarks to Carl that Beth couldn’t last an hour on the street, let alone a whole night, but Carl is with Beth on this one. He ignores the woman.
“I think I know where Mason’s sleeping bag is,” Carl says, “and it’s a good one, too, a MEC we got on special. I can dig it out for this long weekend, if you like.” He looks at Beth.
Beth glances over at Maple. Maple looks tired suddenly, as if the years of protest have extracted their price from her lovely face. But surely this is their intent is, isn’t it? Aren’t Maple and Carl attempting to raise the bar on life issues? Issues that go straight to the heart of humanity? Straight to the heart of Mason’s global education? Really, what could be more fitting than letting a nine-year-old boy spend a night on the streets in the Homeless Capital of Canada?
Maple runs her smooth hands up and down Mason’s thin back like she is embedding the fortitude of motherhood within him to take out onto the precarious streets of Vancouver. On the same streets, Maple has protested pro-lifers and summit meetings, Expos and premiers who own fantasylands, seal hunts and Wal-Marts, logging companies and Starbucks. Maple is rubbing Mason’s back now with all the fervour of a massage therapist. The boy relaxes into her.
“Well, isn’t this terrific,” Maple says. Though to Beth’s eye, she’s not entirely convinced how terrific it is. Carl, she notices, seems to be hovering, waiting, perhaps for a cue from her. Maple smiles reassuringly and continues to stroke Mason’s spine with both hands. Carl smiles at Nose Ring, but Nose Ring ignores him and pushes her coarse, orange-dyed hair behind one ear, revealing a curved line of ordinary safety pins. Not earrings or studs or real silver but everyday out-of-the-bathroom-vanity safety pins. They look like they hurt. She’s got eleven in all.
Beth, at the other end of the table, is not sure either, but it’s flown out of her mouth and she’ll be damned if Nose Ring will see her with anything other than soy crème brûlée on her face.
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