-From Big Bertha’s Total Baby Guide
I joined Susan, George and Eddie for dinner. Becker was still away in Calgary, and I had not heard from him directly, except for a brief message sent to Susan’s email account from an Internet café.
From: [email protected]
Subject: Pls. Fwd to Polly
Date: October 25
Dear Ms. Kennedy,
I would have called, but there was no point, as Polly doesn’t have a phone up in her cabin, and I didn’t want to put you to the trouble of trying to find her. My father passed away yesterday, and the funeral is on Saturday. Please tell her I will be back in Laingford on October 31.
Sincerely,
Mark Becker
How’s that for a nice intimate note? Second-hand, no less. “Have some compassion, Polly. He’s just lost his father,” Susan had said, seeing my reaction.
“It’s not that I don’t sympathize with him in his grief,” I had said. “I just wish he’d sent something a little more personal, that’s all.” Anyway, I asked Susan to send a message back with my condolences, which I assume she did.
I would have liked to have met Becker’s father. What’s that Oscar Wilde line? “All women become like their mothers, that’s their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.” That may very well be true, but I’d never had the chance to check it out, as Becker’s mother had died three years previously. Now that Becker was an official orphan, like me, his resemblance to either of his parents, in terms of temperament, could only be a matter of hearsay. However, I suspect that many men resemble their fathers to some degree. Becker hadn’t talked about either of his parents much, and I hadn’t felt comfortable pressing him on the subject, as I’d made it quite clear that I wasn’t interested in discussing my own. I’d made a careful study of his parenting techniques, though, the previous summer, when his son Bryan had stayed with him for a week while his ex was away on a trip. I wasn’t pregnant at the time, but I was considering marrying the guy and had put him under the powerful lens of the Polly-scope.
Bryan was a cute kid, as kids go, and obviously devoted to his father—almost pathetically eager to please him. Becker had appeared to be a loving father, too, but there was a hard edge to him in his dealings with his son—a kind of no-compromise sternness that made me wonder if his own father had been a trifle strict. What I did know about Becker Senior (Edward) was that he had been born somewhere in England, the only son of an air force captain. He had been evacuated to Canada during the Second World War and sent to live with a family on a farm near Calgary, which was where he met Becker’s mother. I figured that if Edward had undergone the trauma of being sent away, alone, at a tender age, to a foreign country, it might well have left him with some parental/abandonment issues and rendered him undemonstrative.
There you go—a canned psychological assessment of a man I’d never met, patched together from scant information extracted from his son. Edward might have been the most doting, adoring father in the world, of course, but now I’d never know. Becker hadn’t appeared terribly eager to take me out to Calgary to meet him. He’d said it was because his father had never forgiven him for divorcing Catherine, Bryan’s mother, and still treated her as his daughter-in-law. “We’ll have to ease him into it,” Becker had said. “It would help if I could introduce you as my fiancée, and not just my girlfriend.” Which, as you can imagine, had turned into a bit of a tiff, as that felt an awful lot like pressure from my perspective.
It was Eddie’s night to cook. He was pretty good at it, having been in the culinary arts program at Laingford High since Grade Nine. Susan, George and I sat in the living room, enjoying the scent of frying garlic emanating from the kitchen. He was bashing around in there, singing a Shepherd’s Pie tune and obviously having a great time. I know what that’s like—cooking when you’re slightly stoned is wonderful fun.
George was sitting in his favourite chair next to the woodstove, puffing on his pipe and scratching the tail feathers of Poe, his pet raven. Poe had been around forever—a massive creature, far more intelligent than Lug-nut could ever hope to be. The bird perched on the armrest of George’s chair, emitting little croaks of pleasure as George fiddled with his nether regions. Poe would never let me do that. The bird was picky when it came to human contact. He obviously considered George a kind of honorary raven, but the rest of us were roadkill as far as he was concerned. He had perched on my shoulder a couple of times in the past, a distinction that always made me feel grateful, but if you were smart, you’d never reach out and kind of offhandedly pat his head. At least, if you did, the term “off-hand” would become painfully literal. Luggy and Rosie had the sense to give him a wide berth, and anyway, the two-legged person throwing food around in the kitchen was far more interesting to them than the malevolent creature by the fire.
“There’s some snail-mail for you as well, today,” Susan said, getting up suddenly and going out to the bureau in the hall, where the day’s post was stacked in a wicker basket by the door. She had been completely bewitched by the computer age and seemed to take great delight in dissing Canada Post, which I found rather unfair. After all, getting an email message from somebody isn’t half as much fun as receiving a mysterious envelope, bedecked with stamps (especially if they’re foreign) that you have to open physically before you can find out what’s inside. For me, real mail is like getting a Christmas present, all wrapped up in sparkly paper and lots of tape, whereas email is like someone saying “here” and handing you an unwrapped widget with the price tag still on it. No comparison.
Susan returned with a large manila envelope, a fat one. “Looks like it’s from the U.K.,” she said, obviously intrigued. It would have been mean to wait until I got home to open it, so I didn’t. I knew what it was about, anyway, though I hadn’t told anybody yet.
As I’ve mentioned, I’m a puppet maker. That’s my job, or at least that’s the way I make my living, which perhaps doesn’t mean the same thing, these days. I don’t do the nine-to-five dance, I spend a great deal of time staring off into nothingness (we artists call that “conceptual development”), and my skills, though specialized, allow me to squeak by with the minimum of mainstream interference. I build commissioned puppets for theatre companies, mascot costumes for sports and corporate organizations, and marionettes for fun and profit. All this is one of my main reasons for living as I do, in a log cabin in rural Kuskawa with little in the way of modern conveniences—I don’t need ’em, and I can’t afford ’em. It’s a fine life, although it had occurred to me since acquiring a passenger that my income needs might be due for re-examination. Maybe I’d have to start churning out cutesy, mass-produced hand-puppets and selling them at Kuskawa craft fairs to help pay for diapers and strained carrots. O joy, o bliss.
Back in June, I’d seen an article in The Puppetry Journal, a trade magazine I subscribe to, about a big, international puppetry conference planned for February, taking place in Canterbury, England. It sounded truly amazing—with speakers, workshops, displays and performances, a whole week of it, and I had fantasized about going. The article had mentioned that there were a few subsidized spots available for those professionals in the field who might have something unique to bring to the event but didn’t have the cash to make the journey. Normally, I don’t go in for stuff like that, my theory being that my work, while adequate and solid in its way, wasn’t of the calibre to win any awards, so why set myself up for disappointment? However, in this case, I’d felt a weird surge of High Self Esteem, and acted quickly before it went away. I called up my friend Dimmy Cox, a photographer, who had agreed to prepare slides of some