Loddy-Dah Page 3

  On the far corner, opposite the lighting board, Marvel’s Pad, a mini boutique, was always open for business. A spotlight anchored a collection of African Masks and a peace symbol the size of a tire. A series of tie-dyed scarves and T-shirts hung on the walls like frameless laundered works of art. A narrow rectangular table, clothed in burgundy linen, held an arrangement of handmade beaded necklaces and bracelets. Matching drop earrings cascaded like a waterfall over a jewel-encrusted box, overcrowded with miniature packages of cone-shaped incense. Nearby, an orderly assembly of hash pipes and accompanying paraphernalia completed the display. Rolls of psychedelic Howard Bernstein posters, tossed into an old conga drum, with the top gone missing, begged to be fondled. The entire cubicle was drenched in ultraviolet light, a black light, which captured a time capsule — the essence that was 1967.

  Loddy often used Marvel’s Pad as an escape hatch from her world and, on some evenings, she would burrow like a puppy under blankets, and inhale the sweet fragrance of burning incense. Intermission and the babble of an audience climbing the spiral staircase from the main floor to the mezzanine would jerk her back to reality and her duties as the coffee girl, the gofer girl, as Rita called her.

  The kitchen, a cubbyhole, which could only accommodate an apartment-size fridge and sink, was a measured five feet from Marvel’s Pad. Since The Garage Theatre was located in a dense residential neighbourhood near the downtown core, the city denied it a liquor license, so Loddy learned to concoct a medley of unusual non-alcoholic beverages, exotic teas, strong-aromatic coffees, breezy summer drinks and hot winter beverages.

  Everyone had someone waiting for them on the mezzanine after a show except Loddy. She always left alone.

  “I’ve been here since intermission. Do you know when Danny will come out?”

  ”Like, I don’t know,” Loddy said as she put away the coffee mugs.

  “Give him a few years.” Stanley couldn’t resist.

  Danny’s rule: date only gorgeous girls, or Birds, as they were called in the Beatles’ jargon. This Bird was flashy and sassy, sporting the latest mod fashion from Liverpool’s Carnaby Street: a short, sleek black Sassoon bob with a jag of bangs cut over her right eye, a white micro-mini skirt, wide as her belt, barely hiding her ass, and a black cotton jersey turtle-neck halter accentuating perky breasts and firm upper arms. Black liner, extending beyond her almond-shaped blue eyes, evoked Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, and the proverbial painted-on Twiggy lashes completed the look of a Vogue cover girl. Bird lit one of those slim brown ciggies, tilted back her head, and let the smoke coil towards the ceiling, then rolled her neck in an effort to unknot a kink. Danny changed girlfriends as often as he changed underwear, twice a day.

  Loddy didn’t catch Erica sneaking into Marvel’s Pad until she poked her head through the rattle of glass beads draping the doorway.

  “Hey!”

  “Just looking,” Erica said.

  Rita appeared in a flush of lateness.

  “Darlink!”

  “Erica’s in there and she might be stealing something,” Loddy lowered her voice.

  “My friends do not steal.” Rita, nonetheless, stepped inside to check the inventory.

  Loddy busied herself with wiping off the counter top, bending over from her waist in a gyration of circular movements, her bosoms following with a second rub of shine. Rita insisted on an immaculate counter.

  Samuel and Marvel sat on the floor in the middle of the mezzanine like Indian gurus about to enlighten the flock. Marcel had gone missing, disappearing in a pugnacious mood, shortly after his final scene. “Let him go,” Samuel had said when Percy broke the news.

  “Miss Rita, get your smart ass out here. Now! I want everyone here. Now!” Samuel, cantankerous as usual.

  Rita, puckish, eyes averted, slinked from Marvel’s Pad, with a pat to her over-teased, over-sprayed bouffant, and Erica in tow. Loddy scratched her back against the kitchen door frame like a bear scraping debris after a roll on the forest floor.

  “All right kiddies. You did a great job tonight — so great the cops down the street paid us a visit.”

  “Cool,” said Aretha.

  Samuel coughed as he took a toke from his cigarette, and passed it on to Marvel. Loddy thought it generous how he always shared his smokes.

  “Weren’t you scared, Samuel?”

  “Let me put it this way, Ulu, it was a Lenny Bruce moment. He would have been proud.”

  “Lenny Bruce?” Aretha furrowed her brow.

  “Look him up, dear.” Then Samuel turned to his troupe. “Now, some bad news. I have to close this show Saturday. I rented the space out for the rest of August to a church group, so you kiddies will have to find something else until September. Loddy, I’ll still need you in the box office and mezzanine.”

  “What are you planning for September, may I ask?” Stanley, sprawled on his back, dangled his left arm and leg over the bench.

  “Sit up if you want an answer!” Everyone stopped breathing until Stanley propped himself to a ninety-degree angle. “Okay, kiddies, there’s a part for everyone here, including you, Loddy.”

  Loddy jumped at the mention of her name, and gave Samuel her undivided attention.

  “We’re doing a psychedelic musical — The Resurrection of Robbie Rabbit. I know, I know. But the playwright is a good friend of mine and wants to enter it in the Dominion Drama Festival. It’s a favour, and I’m hoping if I do enough Canadian plays, I’ll get some grant money. It’s a small drama group, big cast though. So I need all of your able bodies.”

  “So what are we? Rabbits?”

  “You got the picture, Percy.”

  “You mean like Playboy Bunnies?” Loddy could not envision herself in a Playboy costume.

  “No, dear, nothing like that.” Samuel’s eyes skipped around the room. “More like hippie bunnies.” He ended the meeting with a clap of his hands, a signal that he was done. “Ok, kiddies, that’s it for now. See you all tomorrow.”

  They all left grumbling.

  “Bunny rabbits. What the fuck is that?” Percy asked in his whiney voice. “I didn’t study at the National Theatre School for this.”

  “Well, go try the Centaur then,” Stanley said, “or maybe Stratford is more your style. No one’s forcing you to put on a bunny costume.”

  “You coming with us to La Ronde, Loddy?” Dewey’s voice carried across the room.

  He was the only one who ever considered including her in anything, but Loddy just shook her head. “I’m tired, so like I think I’ll just head on home after I’m done here.”

  “Suit yourself, but you know where we are.”

  She listened to the chain of voices fading into the Montreal night, the door swinging shut behind them with a hollow thud. Erica was waiting in the lobby, but Rita sniffed around the kitchen where Loddy was finishing up.

  “Okay, like I’m ready. Let’s go.”

  Rita grabbed Loddy’s forearm in a tight karate hold to stall her, and then the words came dribbling out of the depths of her diaphragm: “Erica used to be Eric.”

  “What do you mean used to be?”

  “Darlink, you are so naïve, but that’s what’s so charming about you.” She released Loddy’s arm. “Erica is a man.”

  “I’m confused.”

  “Darlink, you’re confused? She’s confused.”

  “You mean ... you mean ... that woman downstairs wearing all that red lipstick and high heels is a man? She looks better than I do.”

  “Ta ta darlink.” And she was gone before Loddy could assimilate what Rita had just revealed. Erica equals Eric; Eric equals Erica.

  Loddy could hear both of them in the lobby clucking like hens. “Well, how was I to know,” she mumbled as she secured her transistor radio to her wrist.

  She was on the verge of leaving when Samuel stopped her. Here was a man with an
aversion to belts or suspenders, and had developed a compulsion to yank up his oversized trousers whenever he was nervous or late.

  “Loddy, dear, glad you’re still here,” Samuel said, tugging on his waist band.

  “Like, I know I shouldn’t have made that racket when you guys were dancing but I couldn’t help myself. That music, like, you know, drove me to it, and I fell all over the benches, not on purpose. Honest.”

  “Loddy.” Samuel had a face that could silence wars. “That’s not what I want to talk to you about. Marvel tells me you’re coming along in her dance classes. You move well, a natural turner, she says. So let’s try you out in Robbie Rabbit. You’ll be the big mama hare and we’ll give you a line or two, and maybe even a song. Think you can handle that?”

  “Like, wow, a song even! Yes! Yes! Yes!”

  “All right, dear. I’d like to see you lose some weight though. You have all summer.”

  “I can do it, Samuel. I heard about this boiled egg and tomato diet where you lose a pound a day. I know I can do it this time. I’m really motivated now.”

  Samuel patted her cheek as if to say, I know you’ll fail, but try anyhow. Five years ago, she had shown Samuel her portfolio of poems, wrapped and bound in a tidy scribbler. Loddy had just graduated from high school and here was her life — one hundred pages of adolescent angst and misery. Have a look. Samuel did and suggested she write about what she knew.

  “But this is what I know.”

  The next day, she was taking dance classes with Marvel, working the box office with Rita, greeting customers and handing out programs.

  “You’ll get used to an audience that way,” Samuel had said.

  Now, finally, a small part for her, only her, and even a song! She levitated with such joy that when she hit the pavement, she was unaware of the searing heat of the day, a marked contrast to the air conditioned interior of The Garage Theatre.

  xxx

  Loddy flicked on the transistor for company and resolved to walk home instead of taking the Metro, which would feel like a sauna. She examined the shop windows along St. Catherine then trolled the side streets — Mountain, Bishop and Crescent — up and down, up and down, amid a pollution of noise in a city seeking respite from a hot July night. Perhaps she would encounter The Blonde, catch her in the act of flirting with some of the Parisian sailors who had docked their ships in the old port near Bonsecours Market, or requesting a light from a stranger, head cocked to one side, the Gitane cigarette a kiss away. Oh, to be beautiful!

  She paused outside the Playboy Club on Mountain Street, and observed men in business attire slip through the door, their playboy keys a jangle of unlocked fantasies where stunning women served food and drinks alongside the illusion.

  “What’s your business, lady?” The bouncer noticed her body slumped against the edge of the brick building.

  “I’m waiting for a friend. She has long blond hair.”

  “They all have long blond hair. We have a reputation to uphold here. Move along, fatso.”

  She dismissed the cruel insult and continued along de Maisonneuve Street, taking a breather at five-minute intervals. She removed her sandals to aerate aching feet and hobbled the last block to Ben’s, a deli with the anonymity of a hospital cafeteria. Since the turn of the twentieth century, it had upheld its reputation as the premier tourist trap for a smoked meat sandwich on rye; however, some would argue Dunn’s as a close rival. Black and white glossies, autographed by both local and American celebrities from the forties and fifties, who had eaten there, plastered the walls like wallpaper — Magic Tom, Lilly St. Cyr, Sammy Davis Junior, Marvel and Samuel. The aging lemon Formica columns with their raked chrome siding, the gun-metal stools, and the oversized advertisements for smoked meat platters recalled a postwar time-warp in their kitschy charm. Loddy squinted through the sizeable windows. Old man Irving Kravitz, in his usual post by the cashier, beckoned her to enter as though he had been on patrol all day, and was now giving her the all-clear sign. The enemy had surrendered. Tomorrow she would start the boiled egg and tomato diet, but tonight she would splurge, just this once. After all, she was celebrating a promotion.

  It was after midnight and the deli was rowdy with an undercurrent of hungry misfits and night-shift workers. She settled into her usual seat by the window and

  ordered a smoke meat platter — a mound of thinly layered smoked meat folded into a ball in between two slices of rye bread, accompanied by fries, a humongous kosher pickle, and an Asian-size teacup of coleslaw. Everything washed down with a chilly cherry coke on ice. Still she requested a slice of strawberry cheesecake and another to go.

  “It’s for my boyfriend,” she said.

  xxx

  Loddy burped her way home, taking the short cut through McGill campus. That night the maples stood on guard, wordless, no breeze to ruffle their leaves. Only the glow of light from the street lamps guided her. She searched for stars and, there they were, strings of miniature bulbs pasted to the sky like decorations for a surprise party. Only the banner went missing:

  Congratulations! You Have a Part in a Show!!

  Midway, the trail diverged, but she maintained the footpath towards University Street, her shoeless feet now grazing an unfinished pebbled surface waiting for concrete. Loddy bent to fasten her sandals when she heard the whoosh of footsteps in the grass behind her.

  “Hey, hey, big buck. Wanna fuck?” Two of them. Drunk. Probably students from one of the residences, she thought.

  Loddy quickened her pace, a fast jog across the clear-cut lawn, sandals flapping against nude heels as she now made a run for University Street and maybe people.

  “Always wanted to know what it felt like to fuck a tub.” Too late. They blocked her way.

  Then her voice: “Leave me alone or I’ll scream.”

  Perhaps she should have kept running, but they tackled her. She tried to beat them off, biting and kicking, until one of them shoved her to the ground, holding her down. Loddy surrendered. It was always better that way. She felt swarms of shadflies seizing her, raw buttocks raking the grass beneath and the garbled voice of Aretha Franklin singing Respect on her transistor radio before she blacked out.

  When they were done with her, Loddy remained under the maple, stock-still, until she heard the explosion, the fireworks from the exposition ground, La Ronde, on the other side of the city. She strained to see the spray of colours between the branches, but there were none. She writhed side to side, her arms propelling her like bruised angel wings in dirt, crushing the box of take-out cheese cake, until she reached the tree. She pulled herself up against the trunk and removed her red slacks hanging over a low-lying branch as though they were laundry hung out to dry. She didn’t shed a tear as she forced them over trembling legs. Her wrists were scratched and swollen, her transistor radio gone.

  Loddy wedged her battered body into her apartment and switched on the lights. The cockroaches scurried to their usual hiding places — the crevices in the floorboards, behind the poster of the Mamas and the Papas, the bath tub drain, the toothbrush tumbler. She slid to the floor and bawled, not so much for herself, but because the cockroaches had returned. She staggered to the bathroom, bent over the toilet and threw up her feast from Ben’s, then stumbled into the shower and scoured her body. She wrapped herself in a clean, bath-sized towel, turned on the radio, and numbed the experience with a carton of chocolate fudge ice cream. Only a jar of boiled eggs and a bag of tomatoes remained in her fridge.

  The bombings were believed to have been perpetrated by a group of terrorists intent on causing a revolution ... supporting the separatist cause ... the FLQ ... a member of the bomb team ... dead ... several Cells ...

  Loddy fell asleep to the drone of the late night news. The next morning, when daylight scoped through the basement window, she woke up to an empty ice cream carton caught between the folds of her breasts and stomach. She had dreamt that a cockroac
h was trapped inside, trying to escape, climbing the walls of the container.

  SCENE 4:

  Alma and Bettina

  “There’s no love in the world,” Alma chirped in her European accent as she poured melted butter, and sprinkled fried bacon bits and chopped onions over Loddy’s Cepelinai. Alma shook her head side-to-side putting special emphasis on the word love. “No love in the world. No love.” Her head trembled in a trail of loves.

  “Yeah, Maw, there’s lots of love.” Loddy bit into her Zeppelin-size dumpling, sour cream squirting down her chin.

  “Eat, eat. I have more.”

  “I’m okay, Maw.”

  “I want more,” Bettina said.

  “Bettina love me, yah?” Loddy watched her mother add another two dumplings to her younger sister’s already overcrowded dinner plate.

  “Like, that’s five big ones, Bettina. You can’t eat all that.”

  “She have as much as she want. I have more. She too skinny.” And Alma reached over and slathered extra sour cream on Bettina’s Cepelinai as though she were icing a cake.

  “Va! There.” Alma stepped back to admire Bettina’s plate as though it were a work of art, a still life by Cezanne.

  Loddy regressed to being a child again, scarfing down the food to appease her mother. Alma’s feast cancelled out the boiled egg and tomato she had for breakfast. She would have to restart her diet and good intentions on Monday morning.

  It had been six months, six months of freedom when Bettina knocked on her door, worried about a mother who threatened to jump out her second floor window if she didn’t see her oldest daughter.

  “She’s, like, such a drama queen. Anyway, she hates me so I don’t get it.”

  “Loddy, she’s not taking her meds and she’s acting weird again.”

  “You trying to make me feel guilty?”

  “Well, you hurt her when you left.”