On the day of Richard Nixon’s suicide, I saw a cardinal in our backyard, perched in a plum tree, the first time I’d seen one that wasn’t on a Christmas card. It was as scarlet as fresh blood, smaller than I thought it would be, with the piercing cry of a train whistle.
“They’re highly territorial,” Dad said, passing me the binoculars he kept on his desk. He’d taken up birdwatching, having retired from Sparkling Sparrow and selling his shares back to ShipCo. “You should see his wife! She attacks her reflection in the window, thinking it’s another female horning in on her mate.”
I ignored my father’s anthropomorphization. He just couldn’t resist giving human emotions to other species.
“I’ve never seen one before,” I said.
“It’s because we don’t use DDT on the vines anymore. The songbirds are coming back.”
I took the bird’s flashy presence as a sign of hope, even as the news of Nixon’s suicide filled me with a mixture of sadness and dread. The gravity of the disgraced president’s death was pulling everything toward the newscasts like a tractor beam. On the kitchen radio, the deep, respectful voice of a Canusa Broadcasting Corporation announcer described the tragedy for the hundredth time that day, as Mom washed dishes, the hot and cold taps going off and on, scrub and rinse, rinse and scrub. Housework had to be done whether ex-presidents were dead or alive.
Why did I care? It wasn’t as if Nixon was a beloved figure, but I wondered whether the reason for taking his own life wasn’t depression or shame over impeachment, but because he wanted to escape what he knew was coming. Say what you will about Nixon; he may have lacked insight into his own personal failings, but he had enough foresight to know that 1978 would be the year to cut and run — literally: first, he’d run a hot bath, then he’d opened the arteries in his wrists with a straight razor.
I was twenty-two and in my final year studying biosciences at the University of Toronto, perfect for a woman whose career plan was to go to the moon. Since the year Duff and Linda disappeared, I had lived what some might call a charmed life: good grades, good family, good looks and reasonably good health, despite occasional relapses into bulimia. I’d been helped by a psychiatrist who put me on a calming drug called Valium. Now, if I could only kick the Valium.
Best of all, I had the perfect boyfriend. Correction: fiancé. Kendal and I had set the date. Sadly, my beloved Nonna Peppy did not live to see me engaged. In my final year of university, she broke her hip climbing the cellar stairs with her arms full of washing, developed pneumonia and died in hospital. Her last dog, a schnauzer named Pepé the Eighth, passed away of a broken heart a few weeks later. To honour Nonna Peppy’s memory, I promised myself that I would make a trip to New York City. It would be a journey I would make with the husband Nonna told me society would never accept.
No woman buys more than one issue of MODERN BRIDE in her lifetime. Same holds true of Wedding Belles, ATOMIC BRIDES and Canusa Bride. One weekend, Sandy brought a stack of the shiny bridal bibles to my house, along with a bottle of bootleg onion vodka. Mr. H had started selling his homemade hooch under the table at Sputnik Burger, now the most popular fast-food joint in Shipman’s Corners.
I cast an eye over pages of blow-dried, moustached men and soft porn, hot-rollered blondes leering at one another across bubble baths in giant champagne glasses.
“Seriously? People do this on their honeymoon? No wonder Kendal thinks we should elope,” I told her.
“What, and deprive your moms of their one and only chance to buy matching mother-of-the-bride and -groom outfits? How inconsiderate.” Sandy raised her glass in a toast. “Mnohaya lita! Many years!”
We tossed back the vodka shots and got to work looking at pages of double-knit wedding gowns, feather-trimmed capelets, gloves, garters, veils, rings, lingerie and cakes shaped like the Taj Mahal as Bowie blasted on the stereo.
Still best friends, Sandy and I had spent almost four years in different cities — Sandy in Guelph studying nutrition and I in Toronto — but we had stayed tight, the kind of friends who not only finished each other’s sentences but read each other’s minds. By the end of the evening, just before we fell asleep side by side on the rec-room floor, we had started scribbling thought balloons over the heads of dewy-skinned brides, their doe eyes downcast before their ruffled-shirted, velvet-tuxed, page-boyed grooms. Show me your dick, big boy! I’m only marrying you for your vintage beer-can collection. As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again! You can lead a whore to culture but you can’t make her think.
Before the evening was out, we’d both picked the male model we’d most like to sleep with: a strawberry-blond, bearded Viking in a tartan tux for Sandy (we agreed he’d definitely look better out of the tux than in it) and a bulky body-builder type with curly black hair and a sweet smile for me. He was wearing that year’s most popular colour for tuxes: powder blue.
“Looks like a nice Italian boy,” pronounced Sandy.
“Not that nice, I hope,” I said.
Our sarcasm not only helped us undermine the saccharine silliness of the magazines, it distracted us from world events that were getting scarier by the day. After Amchitka, the Cold War had gone down for a nap, waking up with a start in 1977 when NATO discovered that the Soviets had been brazenly building up missile silos on their border with Finland, shiveringly close to the edge of the Iron Curtain.
Meanwhile, Western science marched on, synthesizing music and cheese and aerosolizing underarm deodorant. The Amchitka activists organized themselves into a group called Greenpeace and warned that pollution and pesticides would kill us as surely as the atomic bomb, just a lot more slowly. They spoke of the Earth in spiritual terms, as if the planet was being stripped, flayed and burned alive, like a medieval saint. The government tolerated them. ShipCo ignored them. The company’s new approach was to pretend to be in favour of arms limitation and environmentalism. By then, they knew how dozily complacent we’d all become.
As Duff had predicted, scientists had discovered that the planet was heating up: they blamed chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, for gnawing a hole in the ozone layer that protected the Earth from the sun’s radiation. Predicting an epidemic of skin cancer, Greenpeace issued a manifesto demanding that we immediately give up our CFC-laden aerosol hairsprays. The Donato twins responded by stockpiling cans of Final Net in their basement. ShipCo launched an ad campaign that promoted green living while gently pointing out how many Canusians fed their families and paid their mortgages by working for the good folks in the CFC industry.
In the busy year leading up to our wedding, the Cold War plunged even further into the deep freeze, relations between the Eastern and Western Blocs getting icier than ever. Nixon’s suicide caused so much soul-searching in the States that the sympathy vote unexpectedly swung the election in favour of Gerald Ford. Meanwhile, the world’s longest undefended border got a lot less friendly after Pierre Trudeau finally won an election and married a Cuban socialite. Who wants to do business with Castro’s brother-in-law was the way Vice-President Reagan put it.
Most worrisome of all, NASA’s space station, Skylab, was lazily losing orbit like an old man falling out of bed; everyone knew that a ton of space junk was going to crash somewhere on Earth in mid-1979. The Soviets claimed the falling station was a ploy to disguise an attack from space on the USSR. I thought it sounded like a simple case of technical incompetence. Skylab seemed to have been doomed from the start, losing a heat shield when it was first sent into orbit. Ever since, it was one damn thing going wrong after another. Not surprisingly, NASA decided to let the station fall to earth — burning up on re-entry, they hoped — rather than pour more money into what was already obsolete technology. Some scientists urged the space agency to send the station deeper into space to float with other dead satellites like Vanguard and Telstars I and II. But that cost money, something NASA suddenly seemed to be short of. Instead, they paid for a public relations campaign to reassure the citizens of Earth that the chances of any one human being being hit by Skylab were six hundred billion to one.
In large cities, an unnerving low-level buzz that no one could identify became the background noise of day-to-day life; the newspapers dubbed it the Hotwire Hum. In New York, Con Edison claimed the hum wasn’t electrical in nature. Finally, a Jungian psychotherapist wrote a book theorizing that the Hotwire Hum was the sound of suppressed anxiety leaking out of the collective unconscious, and someone had T-shirts printed up with the words: I survived the Hotwire Hum. Doctors began to notice an uptick in heart attacks during the nightly news. No wonder the discos were packed.
All through those tense months, as missile silos sprang up like brush bristles and Skylab moved closer and closer to Earth, Sandy, Judy, Jayne and I conducted high-level negotiations with caterers and weighed the merits of traditional vows versus the poetry of Rod McKuen.
Then there was the question of the first dance. Should Kendal and I start our lives together to “Reunited” by Peaches and Herb or the Bee Gees’ “How Deep Is Your Love”? The day we finally settled on Barry White and the Love Unlimited Orchestra doing “Love’s Theme,” a news flash on CBC Radio informed us that U.S. negotiator Kissinger had abandoned the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks after getting into a fistfight with his Soviet counterpart. No one was negotiating in good faith, not even on his side, said Kissinger, nursing a broken nose and two cracked ribs. The SALT talks were dead. Détente, an elegant word used to describe the process of getting both sides to relax and take a stress pill, became a bitter punchline on late-night talk shows.
As I placed an order for five hundred monogrammed white matchbooks, the Doomsday Clock of the Atomic Scientists ticked thirty seconds closer to midnight. But Kendal refused to give credit to Duff for anything more than a lucky guess.
“I never said the guy was stupid. He may even have been prescient. But at the end of the day, are we headed for World War Three? Don’t think so, Deb. You’re not going to get rid of me that easily.”
* * *
The day of my shower at St. Dismas Church Hall, Kendal and my father stayed home and watched the Stanley Cup playoffs. Dad liked the Toronto Maple Leafs; Kendal, the Buffalo Flames. They sat in the basement rec room, drinking beer and arguing over stats. Bonding.
The ink hadn’t dried on Kendal’s master’s degree when he’d started working for a community newspaper out in Louth Township while freelancing for big dailies outside Canusa, in cities like Hamilton and Toronto. But journalism just didn’t seem like man’s work to Dad, who thought Kendal had more of a future as a criminal lawyer.
I’d watched Kendal flirt with Dad, leading him on. “Yes, I suppose I have the marks for law school. I’ll give it serious thought, Mr. Biondi.”
“Call me Dad,” my father said, his hand on Kendal’s shoulder.
And then there was Kendal’s mother. Whenever we were at her house on Z Street, there was a script the three of us would follow:
MRS. KENDAL: Debbie, how wonderful to be in a profession where you could find the cure for cancer! You should think about that, John.
KENDAL: Journalism is a profession, Ma.
MRS. KENDAL: Still, I think you should listen to Mr. Biondi. If only your father were alive to see you go to law school! He’d never believe it.
Once Mrs. Kendal had played the dead father card, neither Kendal nor I knew what to say. But I could tell that Kendal sort of liked the idea of law school. And once he was a lawyer, it was just one small step into politics. Which Kendal would have been great at: he was good-looking, articulate, popular and sociable. And funny. And smart. My university friends loved him — “Oh, Deb, you are so lucky, Kendal is so wonderful,” et cetera, et cetera.
In my mind’s eye, I could see us at our ranch house in some upscale Toronto suburb, Kendal watering the lawn while I took our adorable mixed-race children off to Montessori school.
Problem was, I wanted to go to the stars.
It could happen. NASA had started recruiting women scientists as mission specialists, a Canadian neurologist among them. It was only a matter of time before some lucky girl found herself sitting on a highly flammable hydrogen-oxygen fuel mixture, hurtling into the region of maximum dynamic pressure. Why not me? I had the science education required of astronauts. Now I just needed to get into peak physical condition. I’d started running laps at Varsity Stadium, and when I was back home in Shipman’s Corners, I ran beside the canal, from Lock 2 to Lock 4 and back. Sometimes, the sailors on the lakers and salties cheered me on. In an effort to turn myself into a bundle of taut, high-twitch-fibre muscles, I had even started going to the testosterone-laden weight training room at Hart House. Always the only woman working out on the machines, I felt every pair of eyes in the room crawling up and down my little black ballet leotard. At least the younger guys pretended they were indifferent to my bench presses and chin-ups, even if the conspicuous bulges in their gym shorts proved otherwise. I got less respect from the fifty-year-old coach of the university boxing team — “I don’t want to fight,” I explained, not entirely truthfully. “I just want your help to condition myself the way boxers do.” Instead, he gave me a condescending leer and dismissed me with, “You women’s libbers think you can do anything, but you’re still just girls,” then sent me on my way with a pat on my bum.
Rather than sparring and skipping with the boxers, I took up marathon training with the track team, running in the smallest men’s running shoes I could find. I jogged up Spadina Road to the steps of Casa Loma, then sprinted uphill toward the St. Clair Reservoir. I was getting faster, fitter and stronger. When I crooked my arm like Popeye, a hard knot of muscle popped out of my skinny upper arm. I was sure I had a future in space as long as I didn’t get myself caught in a subdivision, with kids and a mortgage, parent-teacher interviews, a busy husband to keep house for and an aging parent to look after, like Mom did. Until Nonna Peppy died, my parents could barely go away for an afternoon, let alone to outer space.
Despite my ambitions, when Kendal proposed, I said yes. And yes to the big traditional church wedding my family wanted.
By that time, Linda had been gone for seven years. At first, Dad had tried to involve the police, who shrugged and said Linda was an adult. They suggested we try searching the hangouts in Toronto’s Yorkville district or the Yonge Street strip where desperate girls went on the stroll. To the cops, Linda was just another runaway. Nonna Peppy had hired a private investigator from Buffalo who took her money but said the trail had gone cold. In his opinion, Linda was probably living somewhere under an assumed name with Duff and his radical friends — Yammer tree-huggers, in the detective’s words.
I was, for all intents and purposes, an only child, dragging my family’s future around with me. If I didn’t marry and have kids, what had been the point of my parents and grandparents immigrating to Canusa? To keep the family line going, that’s why. Now it was all up to me. Otherwise, as Mom pointed out, Nonno Zinio and Nonna Peppy might just as well have stayed in Italy and been murdered by the fascists.
No pressure.
* * *
That June, I wore a floral print Gloria Vanderbilt wrap dress on the stage of St. Dismas Church Hall, unwrapping shower gifts as Mom and Mrs. Kendal looked on proudly. This was no cozy cucumber-sandwiched function where you could get away with wrapping up a set of measuring cups and a couple of tea towels. Mine was a full-on orgy of decadent consumerism, a celebration of crystal stemware and place settings and his ’n’ hers anti-radiation suits, each lavish gift breathlessly described by Jayne-Mansfield at the microphone while a heavily pregnant Judy-Garland taped gift bows to a paper plate hat that I would wear for photographs. Sandy logged each gift in a journal so that she could help me write two hundred and fifty thank-you notes. I felt as if we were in an alternate reality where women’s liberation had never happened, not that the movement had picked up much traction in Atomic Mean Time. In 1979, I didn’t even have the right to keep my own name. Once married, I’d officially become Mrs. John Kendal, and Debbie Biondi would cease to exist.
Fortunately, there was plenty of booze. The St. Dismas Catholic Ladies’ League had mixed up a spiked punch, heavy on the rum, grenadine and ginger ale. Bridal Veil Punch, they called it. After my sixth cup, feeling an urgent need to empty my bladder, I teetered down a set of stairs and along a hallway until I found a door.
You’d think I would have noticed the lack of a LADIES sign or a universal female figure in a triangle skirt — maybe it was all that grenadine-sweetened rum. Instead of a bathroom, I found myself in the room being used to store piles of my new brand-name kitchen appliances and home decor products. All two hundred and fifty of them, each one a lead ball shackled to my legs. Hard for a girl to hurtle to the stars with six avocado-green fondue pots clanking along behind her.
Surrounded by my new toaster oven, Cuisinart food processor, KitchenAid mixer, Hamilton Beach blender, reclining lounge chair, quadraphonic stereo system, colour console TV and assorted crockpots, I screamed. One long, loud scream. Followed by another. And another.
I waited for Mom to rush through the door, demanding to know what was wrong. All I heard was women’s laughter and the click, click, click of high heels on the linoleum floor outside.
I wiped my eyes as I walked out of the room, still needing to pee. Urgently.
Down the hall, I finally found the bathroom. Pushing open the door, I was hit by a shower of chatter and synthetic fragrance, the sounds and smells of tipsy women putting their faces back on. I slipped into a stall, hiked up my dress and released a stream of Bridal Veil Punch into the toilet bowl as tears wrecked my makeup. I wasn’t just crying over the fact that I now owned three industrial-size slow cookers, but because I had cheated on Kendal with a guy I’d met in the weight-training room. Bob O’Something. There were so many Bobs at U of T. This one was a varsity wrestler. He couldn’t figure out how to retract the spring-loaded bar on the leg extension machine; there was a trick to it. It was all physics, really. No matter how strong you were, if you didn’t pull it back just the right way, it was immovable. Seeing him grunting and straining, I waltzed up in my ballet leotard, grabbed the bar with one hand and pulled it down, thunk, as though it were nothing. The football players working out on the weight machines started laughing. So did Bob after I explained the trick to him.
I could tell he was a little embarrassed and kind of shy, by the way he stood running his hand through his curly dark hair. From the weight room, we went to a coffee shop, then a pub, then his room — mercifully, a single — in Tartu College.
I slept with him only once. I’m not even sure why, although he did bear a strong resemblance to the Modern Bride “groom I would fuck” whom Sandy and I had picked out that night we got hammered on homemade vodka. I was up and out of his bed before dawn, walking home through the empty streets of Toronto.
The very next day, Bob and I bumped into one another at the cafeteria and he asked me out.
“I’m afraid I can’t,” I told him, glancing around to see if anyone was watching us.
“You’re not, you know, mad at me, are you? I’m sorry, I know I got a little carried away last night . . .”
As if I had nothing to do with it.
“I’m engaged,” I told him.
Bob shook his head. “You’re marrying the wrong guy. He doesn’t even know you.”
I almost laughed. “He’s known me since we were kids.”
“That’s my point. He still thinks of you as a little girl.”
“How can you say that? You don’t even know him.”
“I know more than you think.” His bulky shoulders tensed up. He looked hurt, angry, confused. “Well, fine, then! Go marry the guy. I hope you have a swell life together,” he said, and walked off with his tray.
Yes, I felt guilty. Yes, I knew it was a warning sign that I wasn’t ready for marriage. Kendal was the only man I’d ever slept with, before I met Bob. I lay awake nights, asking myself why I had let it happen. I knew I wasn’t happy, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.
I loved Kendal. Who wouldn’t? Eight years earlier, he had been a devoted friend in the months it took me to pull myself together after my sister’s disappearance. He had been dumbfounded but loyal as I tearfully ruminated about my broken body image and the way my family equated food with love as I went through treatment for bulimia. When I turned sixteen, we finally had sex: real sex, not the half-assed kind that leaves you a technical virgin. We did it in his bed while Mrs. Kendal was away for a landscape painting weekend and I was supposed to be sleeping over at Sandy’s. He’d even borrowed a copy of Your Body, My Body from one of the feminists at the Z Street Youth Drop-in Centre and read the bits about female pleasure. How could I not love a man that considerate?
I was still sitting on the toilet, my snot-streaked face in my hands, when someone banged on the stall door.
“Deb? You okay?” Sandy’s voice. She must have recognized my gold velvet platform shoes.
I hesitated. “No.”
“Open up.”
“I’d rather be alone.”
“Open up or I’m crawling under the door.”
I opened up. When Sandy saw my face, she shooed away the women crowding in to see the weeping bride-to-be and walked me back to the storeroom I’d just left. She found a box of Kleenex and poured me a glass of water, and we both agreed that the Bridal Veil Punch had quite a kick, considering it had been concocted by a bunch of sixty-year-old Italian ladies. Sandy chalked up my tears to that quintessential woman’s problem: a case of nerves. I told her that my nerves were just fine but that I had doubts. And guilt.
“Why guilt?” asked Sandy, frowning at me. Her face was so close to mine, I could have kissed her. Even thought about doing it. Instead, I fished a crumpled Kleenex out of my pocket and blew my nose.
“I cheated on Kendal.”
Even as the words were leaving my mouth, I knew that telling Sandy was a mistake. I felt a subtle change in the pressure of her arm around my shoulders. Her eyes narrowed to sharp blue checkmarks.
She didn’t say, You really must be unsure of this wedding, Deb. Maybe you should call it off. Or even that old standby: What’s your hurry? Maybe you’re just not ready yet.
Instead, she said, “How could you fool around on a great guy like Kendal? Are you fucking crazy? He’s, like, the perfect man.”
Looking back, I can see now that I tripped over that moment as if it were a bunched-up section of carpet. I switched tactics and agreed with Sandy that I was indeed suffering from nerves; why else would I commit such a disloyal act? What sane woman would betray a fine man like Kendal? I tried to explain to Sandy that I wasn’t sure myself why it had happened: the man meant nothing to me. It was as if my brain and my heart had gone into suspended animation for a night.
“Just pretend it never happened. Let’s not talk about it anymore,” Sandy suggested. “This is too fucked up.”
And so, I began a hesitant march toward our wedding day.
* * *
With my hair coiled into snoods on the sides of my head, I looked like a medieval princess in an ivory Qiana double-knit gown while Kendal stood straight and tall and handsome beside me in a three-piece dark blue tuxedo — to his credit, he had turned down Tuxedo Royale’s efforts to put him, Bum Bum, Rocco and the other groomsmen into trendy powder blue and ruffles. My attendants, Sandy, Jayne-Mansfield and Judy-Garland, were in unapologetic burnt orange with bell sleeves and high waists, the mound of Judy-Garland’s pregnancy sticking out like the prow of a ship. A week after the wedding, she would give birth to fraternal twins, whom she would name after those prewar style icons, Clark Gable and Katharine Hepburn.
After kissing me passionately to the tinkling of five hundred glasses filled with pink champagne, Kendal stood and made a funny yet moving speech that had both my mom and his wiping their eyes. Bum Bum — or as most people now called him, BB — made the toast to the bride and joked about how one of the perks of being our best man was that he got to go with us on our honeymoon. To save money, he had agreed to chauffeur us to our romantic hideaway — not to a champagne glass bubble bath in the Pocono Mountains, but a place that had become synonymous with grit and crime and urban breakdown: New York, New York. I owed Nonna Peppy that much.