Red White Blue

a short story by Mary W. Walters. Originally broadcast on CBC Saskatchewan

A week or so after bin Laden’s henchmen took down the Twin Towers, my boyfriend started in on a bunch of chores he said he’d been meaning to do for years. He had a couple more weeks off work and he’d been thinking Cuba, but nobody was flying anywhere at that point. Not for the fun of it, at least.

First he replaced the light fixture in his dining room – it involved dozens of lozenges of pearlized glass and reminded me of one of those so-called money trees; he said he’d picked it up in Chicago just after his divorce, and never really liked it – and he put back the chandelier that had been there when he bought the condo. Then he installed a new refrigerator/freezer, with a recessed dispenser in the door where you could get ice for your drink any time of the day or night: crushed or cubed, your choice.

After that we went back up to his cottage in Muskoka, and he got out hammer and nails, a power saw and some lumber that was already the colour of pewter it was so old, and he went to work replacing boards on the dock that he and his then-wife-now-ex and kids had probably started trying not to fall through while I was still in high school.

I volunteered to sand the boards. He agreed, somewhat reluctantly. It would have been fine with him if I’d spent the whole time reading People magazine and sunbathing on the rocks, preferably within earshot of CNN so he didn’t have to keep running up to the cottage every half hour to check on the news himself, and also preferably in my nearly non-existent bathing suit because he liked to look at me when I was wearing it. I could understand why he liked to look at me: I’d seen some pictures of his ex-wife. It wasn’t that she was so bad looking, but she was old enough to be my mother.

My actual mother had been telling me for months that he treated me like I was some kind of Barbie doll or floozy: all boobs and legs, no brain. I’d been telling her it was nice to be pampered for a change, and she said find someone your own age to pamper you in that case, and I said none of them can afford it, trust me, plus the guys I know my age will never amount to anything and I refuse to end up with anyone like that. It wasn’t too kind of me to put it that way in light of what had happened to my dad’s career, but as far as my mother was concerned (and it might have been because of Dad, who knows?) no one was ever good enough for me. I was getting tired of it.

“If you settle down with a man that age, you’ll be sorry,” she’d said a while ago. “He’ll be set in his ways, and he won’t want any fancy ideas out of you. You can trust me on that one.”

But when I called her from the lake, it sounded like her tune had changed.

I asked her if she didn’t find it strange the way a date on the calendar was becoming a phrase that was being used to describe the dividing line between when there really might have been world peace some day, and when it was no longer a possibility. I figured there should have been a brand-new word to describe an event of that magnitude, not just two numbers strung together.

I expected her to make a dig before she answered—“Careful, dear. Don’t let your sugar daddy catch you dabbling in abstracts,” or something to that effect. But it was as though she hadn’t even heard me. She wanted to know if there were smoke detectors in our cabin up there in Muskoka, life preservers in our boat, clear skies above our lake. She said she couldn’t sleep for worrying about my brother, who was a baggage handler at the airport in Toronto; as far as I knew, that was the first time since he was in junior high that she’d worried about him. Then she asked if I’d give her the phone number I was at, up there at the lake. Only after getting through her little list of personal concerns did she reply to what I’d said.

“The Fifties are over,” was the way she put it, and I could almost hear her nodding. “That does seem to be the truth.”

I stood in water to my waist sanding the new boards and the old ones my boyfriend had decided were strong enough to keep. He worked ahead of me, crouching on the dock as he measured and fitted and hammered. As I moved along behind him, I saw the hairs on his hard tanned legs glint grey and gold in the sunlight that was licking off the crests of the little waves and making them go flashing all around us. Occasionally he glanced back at me, and not even to check out the place where my breasts showed over the top of my bathing-suit bra, but only to make sure I wasn’t missing any spots with the sander. I think it made him uneasy not to be doing it all himself but I was no slacker either, and as we neared the end, the dock looked as solid as if it were brand new.

My mother needn’t have worried about threats from the sky out there that week: it was brilliant the whole time, white and blue, and the water sapphire on indigo. I kept inhaling the sweetness of the air and noticing how clean the insides of my lungs felt.

It was very quiet out there on the lake. Most of the families had gone home the way my boyfriend’s kids had done, taking their children back to the city and to school. It was a relief not to have them anywhere around, especially not his daughter, who was about as keen on me as my mother was on him.

After we’d finished and stained the boards, my boyfriend extended one of the dock’s metal supports with a ten-foot pole and put a flag on it. He’d never before been so happy to be a Canadian, he said, and he held me tight against him with some emotion that was even bigger than the love he felt for me. Then he went back inside to watch the news at noon, leaving the silky red and white to flap over the bright blue water.

By the time we went back to the city, he’d sunk a proper flagpole into concrete closer to the road. He’d replaced a downspout on the cottage eavestrough, and we’d put a coat of white paint on the boat-house doors and trim. On the last night up there, he asked me if I’d marry him. I’d have said yes in an instant the day we had arrived, and then spent years spinning possibilities out from that proposal—creating a line that I could have used to snap at the ankles of my mother’s assumptions and presumptions.

But the luxury of time to inch across that landscape, generation by generation, was behind us. The vacuum that had been created by those two towers telescoping down into the ground was sucking the United States right into it, and it was creating a void into which the rest of the world was beginning to slip as well. I’d need to have my arms free and my wits about me so I could grab at projecting branches or bits of rebar that I might catch sight of as I went tumbling along. It would be each person for herself. So I had to tell him no.

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