Fiction

Intersections

by Ann Fothergill-Brown

Last night, I dreamed of Mark. And when the busy urban intersection where we stood was ripped away by unprovoked, unwanted waking, I lay watching the dawn-sculpted outlines of my room with brimming eyes.

Should I believe in harbingers? Portents? Astral travels? Was my psyche simply looking for release from unfinished business? Or is today’s persistent mourning a fitting tribute for a White Knight lost?

* * *

To a student winding down her senior year of high school in Quebec in the spring of 1969, the preceding tumultuous summer—the "summer of love" in the U.S., which had culminated in anti-war protests and violence during the Democratic national convention in Chicago—seemed quite remote. I was more concerned with the immediacies of provincial exams, summer job prospects, and my upcoming birthday, than with Richard Nixon’s strategies for Southeast Asia.

Also, there was Mark.

Mark was new to Cedar Grove High. He had joined the graduating class in October, after the official start of classes. The son of a peripatetic American trade official and a Canadian ministerial aide, Mark was twenty to my sixteen, held dual citizenship, and, to me, appeared a paragon of sophistication. By Christmas, not only I, but every girl in the school was swooning over him, even though he lacked the dark good looks and cynical sneer that the idealized male of that time was expected to exhibit.

In contrast, Mark bore the sun-burnished aspect of a farm boy. He was tanned and fit. His light brown hair looked perpetually windblown, and his eyes crinkled at the corners when he smiled.

I wasn’t usually the recipient of those smiles. In fact, I didn’t even rate as a hanger-on in the popular crowd of which Mark was a prominent member. I just happened to sit in the grade 11 geometry class that Mark was forced to take because moving from posting to posting had left him in Euclid’s dust. There, I dreamed unlikely dreams. Unlikely, that is, because Mark seemed pretty solidly attached to Peg, a lithe, attractive blonde.

But fantasy retained its charms.

I remember how, in early January, during a class change, I accidentally left behind a notebook whose cover exhibited a mass of doodles centred around Mark’s name and mine. On recovering the book, I discovered that someone had written in big, bold letters: You’re a hopeless case...forget it!

The mortification of having my daydreams aired almost in public haunted me up and down the school corridors for many days: watching faces, wondering who had caught me out. Still, I continued to build unlikely castles in the air. I just undertook the construction a little more privately.

Unable to compete with Peg’s diving digs on the volleyball court, or her poise and diction in Drama Club, I employed other methods. By February, I had started sleeping on wire-and-brush rollers so that my rat-tail straight hair would be freshly curled each morning. I changed my perfume from Yardley’s "Spring Flowers" to Nina Ricci’s "L’Air du Temps". In early spring, I began to park myself in strategic spots on the school grounds, attractively arranged, hoping that Mark would walk by. I might be able to say hello, start an innocuous conversation, charm him with my warmth and intelligence.

Amazingly, this last stratagem occasionally worked. In his gentle, polite manner, Mark would sometimes stop to chat. While his body language made it plain that I wasn’t even close to competing for his affections, he seemed genuinely pleased to share a word or two on neutral topics—student council issues, gossip about teachers, or opinions on the latest book we had had to read for English (the second of the two subjects he needed to complete his year). He didn’t seem to resent being trailed in this puppy-dog fashion. In fact, he was unfailingly kind.

This "encouragement" naturally made me even more tenacious in the pursuit. I started going to church regularly, because Mark’s family were unfailing attenders. A few words on the church steps after the service would send me home to moon around the house all Sunday afternoon. (Not being interested in baseball games on television, I found this particular side-effect most gratifying.)

Now, with May winding down to June and exam time, I desperately wanted to do something that would draw his notice to me yet again—maybe even change the nature of our (non-existent) relationship. Where or how I dredged up the nerve to contemplate giving Mark a folder of love poetry, I’ll never know. Maybe it was my feeble attempt to penetrate the mystery of his reserve. I surely wouldn’t be revealing anything he didn’t already know.

So, I copied out some of my favourite poetry. Prime on the list was "O Tan-Faced Prairie Boy" by Walt Whitman. I thought it expressed my thoughts about him perfectly. I included some of my own stuff, too. Doggerel, for the most part, but not too dreadful, because I was acknowledged one of the best writers in English class.

The day of the geometry exam—an exam that I knew Mark must write—I gathered all the pieces into a portfolio and tucked it into my book bag. The exam was scheduled for the morning. Neither of us had another in the afternoon, and, because we weren’t permitted to remain on school property, we both had to walk home at noon.

It was one of those perfect June days that you would like to grasp and hold for the entire summer: bright, hot, but with enough gently moving air to make the heat bearable. I timed my approach perfectly. I caught up with Mark at the rear exit and asked if he minded me walking with him for as long as we were going in the same direction. He amiably agreed.

As we walked, we rehashed the exam. Mark thought he’d pass with a good enough average to finally receive his high school certificate. I kept looking for a place in the conversation to introduce the portfolio, but I could never quite get around to it.

"You’ve got a birthday coming up, right?" he said.

"Yes. Seventeen this year. No big deal. The big party was last year for sixteen."

"My birthday’s in June, too, you know. It’s a big deal for me this year: twenty-one. The U.S. won’t let me keep my dual citizenship anymore. I’ll have to choose whether to drop the Canadian side or not."

This quiet revelation of how the decade’s political shadows hovered over Mark were slow to sink in. "Have you decided what to do yet?"

"It’s a problem. Dad won’t be exactly thrilled if I drop the American passport. People at the embassy will talk...But if I drop Canadian citizenship, I’ll probably get a draft notice right after I graduate."

The implications underlying these simple words finally drove home, and Chicago and American elections suddenly seemed less remote. After all, I saw the television news each night; I read the magazine and newspaper stories. Vietnam. An ugly jungle war fought for uncertain motives. Body bags piling up. Protests in the streets. Veterans’ hospitals stuffed with wounded. Sure, middle-class kids could often find ways to escape or defer, but nothing was guaranteed.

All the air in my lungs suddenly seemed to have been displaced by great, clotting heaps of inexpressible questions. We had just reached the Lemieux’s corner lot. Here, we were forced to part ways. The portfolio now took on a different sense of urgency.

As Mark turned towards home, I managed to blurt out that I had something to give him. I fished the portfolio out of my bag and handed it over. I don’t really know for sure, but I probably flushed crimson as he opened and scanned "O Tan-Faced Prairie Boy" on the top. Then, a marvel. He closed the portfolio, leaned down, and kissed me softly on the cheek. "Thanks," he said. "It’s great." And we parted.

I didn’t see Mark again after that. I guess that his dad got posted somewhere else that very month, because I never saw the family at church again either. And I never heard what choice Mark made about his citizenship.

* * *

Last night, I dreamed of Mark.

Was it really only a dream? Standing on that bustling concrete corner, I see Mark driving a truck. I call and wave. He pulls over and hops down from the cab. We stand talking, and I tell him how elated that kiss made me. How I bounded home, every fibre in me alive to the sun, to the breeze in the huge old elms and maples, to the lingering feel of his lips on the soft down of my cheek. How grateful I am, in retrospect, that he made an effort to acknowledge the feelings of a silly, love-struck sixteen-year-old. How I’ll never forget the depth of sweetness in that gesture. "That’s okay," he is saying as he and the traffic disappear, overtaken by the much less vivid reality of the marble mantelpiece in the used-to-be Victorian parlor that is now my bachelor flat.

And as I keen and sob and rock myself in bed, cursing Mark’s loss a second time, I wonder if I have been talking to a ghost.