Performance Anxiety

He said, almost shyly, “Winston Churchill Senior High. Cold Shanks.”

“You’re joking,” I said. He’d caught me completely off guard. I started to giggle. Cold Shanks to Cold Shanksians was one of those places that got instant tittering recognition from its citizens. Like Moose Jaw (euphemistically known as Moose Groin) or Biggar, Saskatchewan (with its sign that read, New York Is Big But This Is Biggar). We Cold Shanksians were a race apart.

“You really don’t remember me,” he said again. His disappointment was almost tangible.

“I’m sorry, I’m so bad with faces…”

“A few years have passed. I’m Patrick Tibeau.”

The sound of his name went through me like a childhood taboo, like a decade of old schoolyard chants. There was always that weird kid at school who everyone treated as a pariah because he didn’t have the same ideas as the rest of the herd, was content to eat lunch by himself in a far corner of the playing field, and stand up in class and expound endlessly on theories that only the teacher could appreciate. That was Patrick Tibeau. I really should have been more discreet but I blurted out, “Oh my God. I can’t believe it. You’re Patrick Tibeau? You’ve changed so much.”

“You used to sing at assemblies. I thought you had a really fine voice. You still singing, Miranda?”

“Just a minute. Just let me get a handle on this. The Patrick Tibeau? You’re a legend.”

He was laughing now.

“The same Patrick Tibeau that set Winnie Churchill High on fire?”

He nodded. He was still laughing.

“And got sent to reform school?” I said too enthusiastically.

He stopped laughing and sighed. “It wasn’t a reform school. Reform schools don’t exist anymore.” He seemed so instantly disillusioned with me. Sometimes, I just have the biggest, stupidest mouth in the world and can’t stop myself.

He no longer resembled the geeky, spidery, scruffy-haired, beetle-browed adolescent who I remembered. This was a full-grown, credible-looking man standing in front of me.

Then I had to ask. It was irresistible. I was going to be late for work but I did it anyway. “Can I buy you a coffee?” The chance to chin-wag about Cold Shanks with the Patrick Tibeau and get his side of the story was too good to be true. Tina, my best friend, also from Cold Shanks, would be emerald with envy.

“I’m in a bit of a hurry,” explained Patrick.

I was frantic. He was like a prize trout about to slip off the hook. I couldn’t let it happen. “Listen, Patrick.” I dug my hand into my purse and pulled out a pen and an old phone-bill envelope. “I’m having a dinner party tomorrow night. It would be really great if you could come…and bring your wife…or girlfriend…or boyfriend…or whatever.” I handed him the scrap of paper with my address scribbled on it.

He took it and smiled again. I noticed he had very white teeth. “We’d like that. What time?”

He was a We.

I said, “Seven. There’s going to be lots of food, but bring something if you feel like it. Extra never hurts. And some wine.”

“Wine. Right. See you then, Miranda. Tomorrow, Tuesday. Seven.”

As I finished pushing my cart around the supermarket, I had a flash of memory. Me and Patrick Tibeau, circa age fifteen, meeting up by accident outside the tin-roof movie theater after a showing of Cocteau’s La Belle et La Bête, walking home in the snow under a royal-blue sky full of stars and a bright disk of moon, and talking, talking, talking. Though, about what, I couldn’t even remember.

Still, I was elated to hook up with someone from Cold Shanks. I hated to admit that sometimes I got bouts of hometown nostalgia, but it was true, and Patrick had cheered me up. So I thought, to hell with Caroline, and bought every fruit I felt like buying.

Chapter 2

After the supermarket, I rushed back to my Bute Street apartment. Getting it had been a coup. In a street that was quickly giving way to modern monoliths, my classic building was an oasis in the futuristic desert. The place was a stately old redbrick three-story set among ornamental plums and evergreens. Ceramic tile, yellow with a black line of trim was featured in my kitchen, but in the bathroom stood the prize—the enormous, dangerously comfortable claw-foot bathtub.

I raced up the front steps and the other two flights, went in quietly so as not to wake Caroline, and put away my bags of fruit. Then I went into my bedroom to change my clothes, tossing off my old lounging-around jeans and pulling on my skinny black Levi’s bell-bottoms and a Calvin Klein men’s T-shirt I’d accidentally dyed coral but thought was nice. Miracle of miracles, the dye job had come out evenly. I shoved my feet back into my Adidas, and put my old Doc Martens into my black leather knapsack along with my rumpled work apron.

I ran out of the apartment and down the front steps. Patchy dubious sunlight had started to light up the dull morning. I hurried north to Robson. The neighborhood’s resident street people, who had shifted in their crannies as I jogged past earlier, had now gone, scared off by the working masses. I ran the whole length of Robson, past the restaurants and boutiques, right into Vancouver’s tall bright glassy business core, thinking I’d wait before telling everyone that I was leaving. Announce it when I’d paid off the whole ticket.

Mornings, I worked at Michelangelo’s. It was a spartan-chic coffee shop on Pender. Michelangelo or Mike—a big burly third-generation Italian—was always immaculate with a clean white shirt, polished shoes and a neat haircut.

That morning I could see him through the plate-glass window. He was checking the plain wooden tables, straightening the wrought-iron chairs, attacking imaginary dirt and grease spots wherever he thought he saw them. Then he turned his attention to polishing the big brass beast of an espresso machine, which was his pride and joy. I’m sure it was for the ninetieth time that morning. When I came through the door he waggled his hand at me.

“Thanks for letting me come in late, Mike,” I gasped.

“When have I ever not let you come late? Hey, Miranda. Got a story for you.”

“Shoot,” I said.

“See, this old guy, Italian guy, is lying on his deathbed, and while he’s lying there worrying about whether he’ll be allowed into heaven, he smells this great aroma of almond cookies. His favorite. So he hauls himself out of bed and with the last bit of strength left in his body, he crawls downstairs to the kitchen, and there on the tables are dozens of these almond cookies, still hot. My wife loves me, he thinks, she’s done this last wonderful thing for me. And he starts to get himself over to the table. He reaches out for a cookie with a trembling clawlike hand, and the hand gets smacked with a spatula by his wife. ‘Back off,’ she says. ‘They’re for the funeral.’”

I smiled.

“That’s my family all over. You want a capooch? A fast one? We’re gonna be slammed again in about two minutes.”

We were always slammed at Mike’s. The customers moved in like an evil storm cloud. A clot of professional suits were always first, then law books from the university, and finally, old bundles of rags looking for handouts and a warm corner. My shift normally started at seven. I liked to get there early to fix myself a latte on the house and drink it slowly before total panic set in. Mike knew how to create an environment that fostered returning customers: he was sanguine and shrewd, bellowing love and peace at everybody who came in as though they were his oldest and best friends in the world.

I always went into the back room before doing anything else. At a large steel table near the refrigerators sat Grace, the sandwich lady, buttering her way into heaven. She came into work an hour before the rest of us. Soft-spoken, devout and well past middle age, with rhinestone cat’s-eye glasses on a pearl-look chain and a complexion like wartime margarine, she arrived at dawn to slab together her creations and by the time the sun came out she had disappeared, making you wonder if she really existed.

She was constantly cold. Working in that dank room beside the kitchen with all that refrigeration humming away next to her meant she always wore an old pom-pom-covered rainbow sweater. It had once belonged to her mother. The pom-poms jiggled and bounced as she buttered.

Mike had unwittingly gotten a saint when he hired Grace.

Grace was still there when I entered. She’d waited for me. She slipped me a food gift in a brown paper bag and said, “Here, Miranda, honey, this is for later when you get hungry. Mike’s a nice guy but he’s sooo cheap. I know he pays you girls squirrel droppings.”

I took the gift and said, “Where did Mike find you, Grace?”

“It was the Lord’s doing, dear.” In Grace’s world, there was just the one, omniscient, celestial boss. “And Miranda…the opera was just lovely. I cried through the whole last act.”

“I’m glad you enjoyed it.”

“And I picked you out, too. You had a yellow kimono, didn’t you, dear?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, you looked just lovely. I’ve always said, and I’ll go on saying until they listen, you have a special quality.”

Grace was my biggest fan. Even if I was buried in the back of a hundred-voice chorus, she was there to witness my special quality. She got all my complimentary tickets. If I was singing anywhere, she was there in the audience beaming goodwill at me.

I stashed the paper bag in my knapsack, tied on my apron with its big print of Renaissance cherubs kissing, then went to take on the crush of customers.

My first cover was a group of men from the Vancouver Stock Exchange. Now, I should tell you, these are the kind of guys who are regularly held hostage by mirrors. They can’t pass one without getting frozen in front of it, momentarily sucked in by the vortex of their own fabulous reflections.

These men swaggered in like a bunch of action-movie stars and took up way more space than was necessary. You could see it all over them, like a kind of radioactive glow. Money. Money flowing like Niagara. They loved it. It was all-powerful, the perfect aphrodisiac.