16

Falling Away

THERE IS A FALLING AWAY IN all little families: families having a mother, a father, and one child. There is a new world for every child, sooner or later, no matter what kind of love has lived in the home. Strong love, love that has failed, complicated love, love that does its best to keep a child warm through layers of fear or caution. One day the layers begin to fall. Before his night in hospital, Wayne had not broken from his mother, but he had begun to yearn for the unnameable mystery young people want.

The morning after Wayne’s operation, Jacinta had woken on her own couch with a hangover. Why was the house cold? It was cold in a way she remembered from uninsulated houses of her friends, in winter, in St. John’s. A cold that pried into your joints and tormented you. Treadway never let the house get like this. Five thirty in the morning was late for him to rise. Every night he made sure there were dry splits ready in the box beside the stove. He twisted newspaper and set the splits in a pyramid. Then came pieces of slab from Obadiah Blake’s sawmill, and junks of the same black spruce that sent incense from every chimney in the cove. Jacinta rose, still in her party clothes. She had stumbled uphill at three in the morning and had noticed the truck was gone, but Treadway was always leaving it with Maynard White for one reason or another. He had said something at Eliza’s door about valves. And he had told her Wayne was sleeping over at Brent Shiwack’s, which was unusual. Wayne was not the most popular boy in Croydon Harbour, and Brent Shiwack was not his friend.

Jacinta went down the basement stairs and lit the fire herself. She cut soaked apricots into the little pot of oats and made fruit porridge for herself, and tea with the bag in the cup. When Treadway was in the bush for months at a time, and Wayne at school, she got into a routine of being alone. But this day she grew lonely, so when Treadway came in the door in the afternoon she was glad to see him. But he was not glad. He did not light up at all when she hugged him. His body felt like one of the cold logs out by the fence. He told her what had happened: the blood, the surgeon, the loss of their secret. But there was a new part he did not mention.

“Thomasina Baikie,” he said, “told Wayne everything. And told me more besides.”

“Where is he?” Jacinta felt elation, even while she could see her husband’s face might not recover from its careworn collapse. The life that had drained out of Treadway began filling her face. He saw it. Why was life coming into her when he felt this way?

“Goose Bay.” He opened the fridge, took out his bread, made himself a Maple Leaf bologna sandwich with mustard, and put the kettle on. He sat at the kitchen table, ate the sandwich, and waited for his kettle to boil.

“Is he by himself?”

Treadway shrugged, his mouth full. “There were nurses.”

Jacinta had slung her coat on Treadway’s La-Z-Boy when she came in, and now she put it on. The keys were beside his saucer, and she grabbed them and shoved on the easiest shoes and went out with no scarf, which she never did. Even in summer Jacinta wore a silk scarf or a thin cotton one around her collarbones, but not this day.

When she reached the hospital, she went straight to Wayne’s room and saw that he was so pale his freckles looked as if they were floating in cream. She hugged him and he clung to her, and it was the first time since he was a baby that she could allow love unimpeded to escape her heart and flow to her child. It buzzed like the power line on her old back lane in St. John’s. She had not freely loved the girl part of Wayne, as the girl had not been acknowledged to exist. Jacinta kissed her child on the forehead. She rubbed her own tears into her face and they stung the nicks that the wind had chafed, and she brought her child home.

But the falling away had started. When the child separates from its parents to explore the new world, the parents can do one of two things. They can fight it with rules, pleading, tears, and anger: “Why do you want to go out in minus-fifteen-degree temperatures in that T-shirt when you could wear the wool I’ve warmed for you over the woodstove? It’s so cosy.” Or they can admit the new world exists, dangerous and irresistible. Cosy is not what awakening youth wants. Safety is not what it wants. The material world is not what it wants either.

“Why does Dad watch the stock market report every night?” Wayne asked his mother. She was peeling carrots and he had been writing a poem about Remembrance Day for the annual school contest. “You know what his slippers remind me of?”

The blade on the carrot peeler was loose and it rattled. Jacinta kept the tap running to rinse fluffs of peel off her knuckles.

“You know the holes in them? Dad’s brown socks poke out right where a mole’s nose would be. I pretend his slippers are moles.”

Treadway ordered a supply of Torngat Heavy-Spun work socks from the Hudson’s Bay Company every spring and fall. “You don’t mind if you lose one,” he said, “when they’re all the same. I can never understand why people have socks in a dozen colours and sizes. People like to make work for themselves, I guess.”

“Why does he, Mom?”

“What?”

“Watch the stock market every night.”

“Your dad bought some gold and he likes to track it.”

”Dad bought gold?”

“A little bit. Enough to get by if there’s some sort of crisis in the world. Not for long. Just enough to pass through the crisis. So he likes to keep up on how the price fluctuates, and he likes knowing what’s going on with prices of other things while he’s at it. He’s just interested in it. People can be interested in things.”

But the moles, Wayne thought, were blind. He suspected they were dead. What was the good of having feet if all they did was act like dead moles?

“How come he does the same thing every night? He falls asleep in his chair and he snores. Doesn’t he find it boring?”

“That’s precisely why” — Jacinta flung a carrot in the sink — “your father goes on his trapline for six months of the year. He can’t stand it in here either. Your father is more interesting than you think. I suppose you wonder the same thing about me.”

Wayne looked at her guiltily. He had wanted to ask the night before, as Jacinta read Luke and then John through the stock market report, “Are you hoping God wrote something new in there since last night?” He had begun to wonder, as autumn darkness closed in, why both parents were satisfied with such quietness. With no brothers or sisters in the house, there was no one to share his restlessness.

“Anyway — oh, I hate this peeler.” She threw it down. “Where’s my little white knife? This makes the carrots fluffy. I hate fluffy carrots.”

She searched in a drawer with her back to him. “You might think I’m boring as hell too, but that’s what happens to people who get married and have a kid and buy carrot peelers and Mr. Clean and all the rest of it, and make sure everything goes okay for their kids at school, and go to the hospital in Goose Bay five times a week . . .” She grew louder. Medical follow-up had meant the two of them had been back and forth to see the doctors many times. Wayne got his stitches out and started a new regimen of hormones. They had to meet Dr. Lioukras and go over signs and symptoms: what to do if the abdominal swelling recurred.

“Women start out,” Jacinta said, “with all kinds of passion. Every time I saw an ordinary old starling I’d look at the gold line around every one of its little feathers. Gold. I saw everything like that. Sharp. Edges of leaves. Sounds. Rain. I loved going downtown with all the streetlights, looking at shoes in shop windows. Portholes all lit up on a big boat from England. But you know what kills me? I’m too tired to do that now, even if I could. Even if St. John’s Harbour was at the end of that fence where your father left his tent bag. Women don’t have tent bags, Wayne. Not Labrador women. Men have the tents. I wouldn’t mind my own tent. Mine would be different from your father’s, I can tell you that.”

“What would yours be like?”

Wayne was stuck on verse two of his Remembrance Day poem but didn’t dare ask her for help. His mother hated the way the school made assignments out of every holiday: Remembrance Day, Christmas, St. Valentine’s Day, even St. Patrick’s. “It’s the same every year,” she complained. “I think they do it because no one in that place has a scrap of imagination. If it weren’t for pumpkins and reindeer and bloody leprechauns all over the walls, they wouldn’t have a clue what to be doing with the youngsters.”

Remembrance Day nearly drove her insane: every child in the school trying to imagine what it was like in the trenches and asking their mothers what rhymes with poppy. Maybe, Wayne thought, that was what the matter was with her now.

“My tent? Well . . . it’d have a string of Chinese lanterns, for one thing, and I’d find a way to have music.”

Wayne knew it didn’t matter what rhymed with poppy. He knew the difference between real feeling and doggerel you wrote for homework. Why did there even have to be words? He sank more teeth-marks into his pencil and tasted the paint and wood. Names of things got in the way. What was a poppy if you didn’t call it a poppy? If you just watched one and refused to give it a name. Thomasina was a good one for naming things in a way that still let you ask questions. That night in hospital, waiting for Treadway, she had tucked the cool sheet around Wayne’s neck and talked about his operation. Thomasina had not called it an operation, or a surgery.

“Those waters rushed, didn’t they.” Her hand had cooled his forehead. “They rushed over the landwash. Our bodies are made mostly of water, Annabel.”

“You’re calling me that again.”

“I am. Is it all right?”

“I liked it when I was little. I thought it was Amble.” He remembered it had felt like a name you would call a newborn puppy or a child you loved. “But it wasn’t Amble. It was your little girl. Annabel. I like that too.”

“Your mother and I were good friends. There were things we both lost. Things that have to do with you and why you’re here. But you have to wait for the doctor. And for your father. It’s not my place.”

“What did you call the rushing thing?” He had been half asleep. Treadway’s voice was in the hall. Thomasina went out to him. “Rushing . . . what was it?” The hall grew louder. “Dad?” Was Treadway shouting? Treadway never shouted. Wayne had not discerned the words. Rushing. Landwash. Annabel. Lost. He slept.

Dr. Lioukras had done his best. He believed you could talk to any child over the age of eleven as if the fully realized person inside had begun to open, and he had tried to use words that were true. The limitations of medical language were no greater, in his mind, than those of language as a whole. Science, medicine, mythology, and even poetry shared a kind of grandeur, as far as he saw. He had two copies of Donald J. Borror’s Dictionary of Word Roots and Combining Forms, which broke biological terms into their earliest known fragments, and he read it just for fun. But even Donald J. Borror was having a hard time helping him now.

“This is one time,” he told Wayne, who sat propped up in bed balancing green Jell-O cubes on a knife and letting them melt on his tongue, “when medical science has given itself over entirely to mythical names. A true hermaphrodite” — he said it as if the state were an attainment — “is more rare than all the other forms. It means you have everything boys have, and girls too. An almost complete presence of each.”

“Only my balls aren’t the same as the other boys’. I saw in gym.”

“Right. You have only one testicle. And your penis. If you weren’t taking your pills . . .”

“My pills are about that?”

“Yes. Your penis wouldn’t be as large as it is now.”

“What would it be like?”

“Hermaphroditism is so rare. It’s not certain. You would become more like a girl than you are now. You’re already a girl inside.”

“Inside?” How could he be a girl inside? What did that mean? He pictured girls from his class lying inside his body, hiding. What girl was inside him? He pictured Wally Michelin, smaller than her real self, lying quietly in the red world inside him, hiding.

“You’ve been menstruating. That’s what the fluid was inside you. Menstrual blood that couldn’t escape.”

“Has it escaped now?”

“We let it out.”

“But it happens again, right?”

“In girls, yes. Every month. But in your case we don’t know how often.”

“Can it get out now? New stuff?”

“We’re hoping” — Dr. Lioukras had eyes you could see uneasiness in right away — “that with new medication, it will stop.”

“But if it didn’t stop, would it get trapped again?”

“You would have to come in again, like this time, if it happened. You would need another gynecological intervention.”

So it was with names — suture, true hermaphrodite, menstrual blood, gynecological intervention — that the doctor had done his best to acquaint Wayne with the story of his male body and the female body inside it. Dr. Lioukras was not happy with the talk. He had wanted it to be about life, and possibility, not blood and stitching and cutting. He had to remind himself that the work of a surgeon is poetry of a kind, in which blood is the meaning and flesh is the text. Without his work, he told himself, many people would be buried early among the stones on Crow Hill, over the slow, cold inlet, and would feel no more joy, or life, or love.

Now, after the operation, Wayne felt the power of names in a new way. His father ate his evening toast, sometimes with a kipper. Jacinta crocheted. They did not look outside at the night. Wayne tried to remember a time before he knew the word for sky. You explained away the mystery of the night, he thought, by naming its parts: darkness, Little Dipper, silver birch.

His mother did not find her little white knife. Wayne wished he could find it for her. He was glad after supper when he saw her open her tin of crochet hooks. The tin was oval, and decorated with a woman in a white robe.

“How have you forgiven me?” She broke a piece of new green wool for the edge of a hat.

“For what?” Wayne liked watching her make something. Treadway was pouring a bucket of cement down three weasel holes he had found in the root cellar.

“Keeping the secret.”

Though Dr. Lioukras had told Wayne the name of his condition, the family had not discussed it. They had come home and resumed their old life, as if everything was ordinary. “You let me order my bathing suit,” Wayne said.

“The suit” — Jacinta laid her hook on the hat — “was such a small thing. That was nothing compared to not telling you.”

“You gave me the Niblets box to hide the suit in. And now the suit’s getting too small. Dad’s the one who didn’t say anything. The dog . . .” Wayne had never been able to love the dog Treadway brought home the day he dismantled the Ponte Vecchio. He wanted to love the dog but he couldn’t, and he blamed his father. “The dog deserved love.”

“I know. Love gets blocked if you dam it. Your father builds dams in his sleep. He doesn’t know he’s doing it.” Wayne had a dog he could not love though he wanted to love it, and Treadway had a son he could not love though he wanted a son and he wanted to love that son. Father and son suffered from backed up, frozen love, and this ate Jacinta’s heart.

“I’m going,” Treadway had finally announced, “to give that dog to Roland Shiwack before I go trapping. Since no one here feeds it or gives it water besides myself. Roland offered me seventy-five dollars for it. You can use that while I’m gone.”

Working the hat edge, Jacinta said, “If I’d told you all the times I knew you were my daughter . . .”

“Tell me now,” Wayne said with such eagerness she lost her stitch count. It had not occurred to her that Wayne would want to hear about those times, as if they were beautiful stories. It had never entered her mind that the countless lost moments could be recovered by speaking about them.

“Tell me about when I was a baby.”

“I don’t know if I can remember individual times.”

“Can you remember any? Even one?”

“Well, I used to rock you in my arms and you had a green blanket and you looked like a little baby girl for sure.”

“I did?”

“And I sang you lullabies with the word girl in them.”

“Like what?”

“I can’t remember them, Wayne. Mothers forget things. Everybody expects them to remember everything. I guess I sang “Dance to Your Daddy.” That was one my dad knew.”

“Sing it.”

“Well, it goes, ‘Dance to your daddy, my little laddie, dance to your daddy, hear your mammy sing.’ If you’re singing it to a baby boy. And if you’re singing it to a baby girl you sing, ‘Dance to your daddy, my little lassie.’ And the rest is the same.”

“Did you sing lassie?”

“I couldn’t sing laddie. That was the thing. You and I were alone and no one heard. I felt if I didn’t sing to the part of you that was a baby girl she would feel so lonely she might get sick and die.”

“Are there any more verses?”

“Well the rest is, ‘You shall have a fishy on a little dishy. You shall have a kipper when the boat comes in.’ First it’s a kipper, then it’s other kinds of fish, and you keep singing it until you run out of kinds of fish or the baby girl is asleep.”

“What other kinds of fish?”

“You shall have a bloater. Then a mackerel. There were all kinds of fish, Wayne. I sang all kinds of fish you can’t get here. Fish they had in England, where the song came from. Fish I heard from my dad.”

“What other times was I almost a girl?”

Treadway came in then and said, “That should fix him.” He meant the weasel. Wayne was shiny-eyed, waiting for his mother’s next revelation, but he didn’t get it that night. Memories of when Wayne was a girl became a secret conversation held while Treadway prepared for his winter on the trapline.

“Your feet were slender,” Jacinta said as Treadway packed his World Famous bags and his caribou pouch in the yard.

“Are they still?” Wayne peeled his socks off.

“Certain parts of you were so feminine I used to think people were going to stop me on the road and tell me they knew you were a girl.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know, Wayne. Kate Davis for one, I guess. What mother can remember everything?”

“What parts, then?”

“What?”

“Parts. You said parts with an S on it. Other parts of me that were like a girl.”

“Before you started taking all the pills.”

“Then I wasn’t like a girl any more?”

“Not as much.”

“But before then, what parts?”

“Your face. Your whole face. I don’t know why the whole town couldn’t see what I could.”

“Because you were my mother and they weren’t.”

“I guess.”

“And they weren’t looking.”

“Maybe.”

“My clothes were boy’s. And everyone called me Wayne, except for one person.”

“Thomasina was the only one.”

“Annabel.” It was the first time Wayne had said the name out loud to anyone but Thomasina. “Mom?”

“What?”

“Are they going to let Thomasina come back and teach us?”

“I don’t know if she wants to come back, Wayne.”

“How long did Miss Huskins suspend her for?”

“Miss Huskins didn’t suspend her, Wayne. The Labrador East School Board did.”

“How long for?”

“A month.”

“That’ll be over soon.”

“But sometimes when there’s a break, a change in the way things are, even for a little while, it’s really a chasm.”

“Like the Gulch?”

“Yes. The change is only for a month, or even a week or a day, but it breaks something. It breaks the pattern and things aren’t the same.”

“I love Thomasina.”

“I know you do, Wayne.”

“I hope she comes back.”

“I know.”

“Mom — could you call me my girl name?”

“Annabel?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know.”

“Mom?”

“I can’t — what?”

“Do you remember anything else?”

“Your dad might hear.”

“Dad’s taking his Ski-Doo apart. We’ve got lots of time.”

“I thought he was packing.”

“I heard him laying out his wrenches.” Wayne’s ear was attuned to the clinking of metal on cement, and to all the sounds Treadway made inside and outside the house.

“When you were in kindergarten you cut a tarantula out of a National Geographic. Its legs were as slender as my hair. The teacher said no other boy could do that.”

Attuned though his hearing was, there was one thing Wayne did not hear Treadway do, one thing his father had vowed to do before his months on the trapline. It happened while Wayne was in school and Jacinta was buying sugar cubes, which Treadway preferred to loose sugar. Cubes cost more per weight, and it was not like Treadway to prefer a less economical choice. She had asked him, long ago, “Why do you want me to buy cubes?”

“I like cubes,” he said. “I like the way they fit together in the box. One cube is exactly the right amount in my tea, every time. You can’t spill them. If a rat puts a hole in a bag of sugar, you lose whatever spills out. Humidity will ruin a bag of sugar, but to ruin cubes you’d have to drop them in the river.” He had gone on like this, outlining the advantages of sugar cubes, astonishing Jacinta with his seriousness regarding such a small thing.

So Jacinta was buying sugar cubes, and this gave Treadway a chance to look at the phone book, which was difficult for him to do. Treadway could read Voltaire. He could wait eight hours in silence for a lynx and read the tracks of a dozen duck species and know each by name. He could find them in Roger Tory Peterson’s guidebook, and had read the journals of James Audubon, but the phone book was a torment to him, as were government documents, tax forms, insurance policies, bank statements, and telephone or hydro bills, all of which Jacinta dealt with. She looked things up for him in the phone book when she was at home, but he wanted to do this thing without anyone knowing.

He phoned the library in Goose Bay first. They told him to phone the A. C. Hunter Library in St. John’s, and A. C. Hunter said his best bet was to call Memorial University. By the time he found a woman named Augusta Furey in the office of the dean of music, almost an hour had gone by, and he was worn out as he wrote down the New York address she gave him out of the Albert J. Breton Catalogue of Sheet Music for Soprano, Alto, Tenor, and Bass Voices.

“The price might have changed,” she warned him. “This is last year’s catalogue. We keep asking them to send us the new one as soon as it comes out. But we can’t control everything.”

Treadway wrote Albert J. Breton a letter ordering a copy of “Cantique de Jean Racine” by Gabriel Fauré. He phoned the Croydon Harbour post office and got the number of Gerald and Ann Michelin’s mailbox.

Over the next week Treadway cleaned and reassembled his Ski-Doo. He filled his sled box and his reading case. He packed his Collected Works of Robert Frost.

“Sometimes,” Jacinta told Wayne, “you looked at me like you knew.”

“But I didn’t!”

“I imagined you did. People think all kinds of things when they are alone with a secret. They think what they want to think. Maybe I imagined the whole look.”

Treadway wrapped fourteen extra pounds of flour and cornmeal, and he hoped the woods would be lovely, dark and deep.

There was a tiny travel agency on the main road in Goose Bay. Thomasina thought of it as a hidden gate. The agent, Miriam Penashue, had spent all her summers in the bush near the Quebec border and had not finished high school. Miriam had not even finished grade six, and she had no plans of ever going to school again until she found out that if you took the travel agent course at the community college in Goose Bay, the government would pay for you to see six travel destinations. Once she had seen them, Miriam Penashue was no ordinary travel agent. She did not put up posters of Dominican Republic resorts or offer deals to Disney World. Her shop had one handbill on the door; Miriam Penashue had made it herself. It read, COME IN AND TALK TO MIRIAM PENASHUE ABOUT WHERE YOU WANT TO GO.

After the Labrador East School Board sent Thomasina its letter of suspension, something about Miriam Penashue’s sign appeared so unpretentious and so promising, she went in. She was carrying a bag from Happy Valley Northmart with six grapefruit in it that she wished were better grapefruit. They would be all right once she had sliced their membranes down to the drupes, but in their trip from California a layer of air had developed between the rinds and the fruit. When you have received a letter that says you have not acted in the best interests of the children you are teaching, it is hard not to feel ashamed. Thomasina felt ashamed and angry at the same time: ashamed because she should have done things differently. She could have been more discreet, more patient, instead of getting all righteous and hauling Wayne to the hospital in a way that attracted the attention of people who had no sympathy. People like Mr. Henry, who had caught wind of the hospital trip and had made a point of inquiring about it at the school office. The principal herself, Victoria Huskins, with her white pants and her intercom.

“There are two reasons I have no choice but to have you disciplined,” Victoria Huskins had said. “Taking a child off school property without adherence to a single one of the regulations we have in place. And lesser, but pretty important to me as someone who has to keep a semblance of order here, publicly ridiculing my reprimand of the child who wilfully left poo on the washroom floor. Filth. You should know better, Thomasina Baikie. For the children’s sake. People are going to think we don’t care about the children. I can’t have that at my school.”

Shame was what Thomasina felt the day she noticed Miriam Penashue’s handbill. It was undeserved shame, but it did its job nevertheless. It dampened her heart, then burnt its edges so she was left with a mess of charcoal and saddened fire. From Miriam Penashue’s handbill came a puff of freedom: COME IN AND TALK TO MIRIAM PENASHUE ABOUT WHERE YOU WANT TO GO.

Miriam Penashue was halfway between the ages of Thomasina and her grade seven students. She wore her hair in a bob and kept bubblegum in her mouth and had a coffee mug that said GRENFELL HUSKIES. She hired no one and her office was painted with turquoise paint left over from the fish plant where her boyfriend worked. The thing Thomasina liked about her was that she really did want to talk to you about where you wanted to go, and not where she wanted to send you. It appeared that she did not care whether or not she sold you a ticket to anything.

“Some places,” Thomasina said, “you go and you just feel like sighing and sitting down in an armchair like the one you’ve put right here.”

“Watch out for the spring at the back.”

“Its lumps are in the right places.”

“How are you doing?”

“You’ve probably heard.”

“When a hundred kids are going around with the news, you don’t need a story in the Labradorian. ’Specially if it’s about poo. And what’s wrong with taking a kid to hospital? Didn’t he have appendicitis? Maybe it would’ve ruptured if you hadn’t brought him in. Maybe you saved his life.”

“I should have done it differently. Victoria Huskins is not a well woman.”

“None of the parents blame you one little bit. They should go down to that school board and have you reinstated. But they aren’t going to. They talk about it but they won’t do it. What kind of a trip do you want to take?”

“When I sold my house, I got twenty thousand.”

“That’s the house the Michelins live in now, right? How come you sold it?”

“I paid my way through teachers’ college with four thousand. And I travelled on my own with another four.”

“Did you ever regret selling it?”

“I had no intention of selling it at first.”

Thomasina had begun, right after the drowning of her husband, Graham Montague, and their daughter Annabel, to clear out everything that might trap sorrow within the walls. For weeks she worked in the yard with a bucket of soapy water and a sponge, washing clamps, wrenches, sockets, and hammers, feeling them carefully with her hands the way her blind husband must have done, but knowing her hands could never interpret their shapes the way his had done. Part of her wanted to keep certain tools: his staple gun, his spirit level, the sixty-yard measuring tape in its leather case. But she had not kept them.

“Just like I had no intention of coming in here today.”

Thomasina had gone into her drowned daughter’s room and collected the dolls, the lavender sachets, the books. She had smelled Annabel’s clothes, then given them to Isabel Palliser for children along the coast. She had not kept the salmon pink cardigan with dog buttons.

“It was a house I couldn’t empty. I thought if I got rid of it . . . You’d think a grown woman would know better.”

“I wouldn’t think that. I think a lot of grown women hide a lot of different kinds of sadness.”

Thomasina Baikie found it hard to accept consolation. “I have twelve thousand left and I heard there’s a kind of ticket you can get where you can go around the world. You go to Heathrow and you can fly to Portugal and from there you can go where you want.”

“But you have to decide your route. You can’t backtrack. And you have to complete your trip within twelve months. It sounds to me like you might not want that.”

“I don’t know what I want.”

“You might want to sit in public squares and people-watch for an hour in one place and a month in another. I can tell by the way you’re peeling that grapefruit. You want to get lost. Somewhere where they have ordinary life you can join in. Slip right in there and have a bowl of soup in the clothes you have on now. Go hear a concert you read about stapled to a telephone pole. There are lots of places like that in the world.”