The red cobra, p.20
Cocktail, page 20
Cocktail
Stories
A John Metcalf Book
Lisa Alward
biblioasis
Windsor, Ontario
Contents
Cocktail
Old Growth
Hawthorne Yellow
Orlando, 1974
Bear Country
Hyacinth Girl
Maeve
Wise Men Say
Pomegranate
Bundle of Joy
Little Girl Lost
How the Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
For my parents
Was there no safety? No learning by heart
of the ways of the world? No guide,
no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping
from the pinnacle of a tower into the air?
virginia woolf, To the Lighthouse
Cocktail
The problem with parties, my mother says, is people don’t drink enough. This is a joke. My mother is not a lush. Her fingers never shake when reaching for her coffee cup or laying down a trick at bridge. She doesn’t ring up old friends at night, slurring into the mouthpiece, It’s Marrrgo how arrre you? Like most of us these days, she sticks to wine — no more than a glass or two — or occasionally a beer in summer. Even the bottles of Grand Marnier and cassis that she used to bring out for special occasions, like my unexpected wedding at thirty-nine, are gathering dust in the sideboard now that both her own husbands are gone.
No, this is just her stock response to my complaints about going to parties, the ones where all the married couples stand in well-lit kitchens and talk about their vacations or their home renovations or the academic or athletic or toileting triumphs of their children. Her meaning is that if people drank more, they’d loosen up. Parties would be more fun, like they used to be. And I laugh along. Yes, I say, letting her top up my glass of Chardonnay. That’s it, not enough booze.
But I’m thinking about Tom Collins.
* * *
My parents threw a lot of parties in the sixties. Everyone drank hard liquor (wine in those days was thought of as a dinner drink). In a cubbyhole of my father’s desk once, I found the tally of expenses for the very first cocktail party they held in the house that I grew up in. These were, in descending order, neatly reflecting their priorities,
liquor $136
food $25
bartender $8
maid $5.
Next to the amount for bartender, my father had added in block letters tony. For $8, this Tony, whom I remember standing at attention in a white jacket beside our blue Formica kitchen table, not only mixed and served the drinks but also did the purchasing based on his intimate acquaintance with my parents’ cocktail set. These drinks had exotic and often slightly suggestive names, like Mai Tai, Sidecar, or Hanky-Panky, and they involved special ingredients and tools. In the door of our refrigerator, there were always jars of olives and pickled onions and red and green maraschino cherries. Extra ashtrays were stored in a cupboard above the sink, while another higher cupboard held the glasses: marble-bottomed Old Fashioned glasses, tall highball and even taller Collins glasses, delicate martini glasses with bowls splayed wide like spent tulips. A drawer in our telephone nook hid a collection of miniature plastic swords that my brother and I were not allowed to play with, as well as toothpicks with sparkly tassels, and packs of invitations. Cocktails! these small rectangular cards shouted in eager, crushed-together letters, the dot over the i a stuffed green olive or luscious red-stemmed cherry that I longed to pop into my mouth.
Sometimes my mother would let David and me watch as the first of her guests took off their coats, revealing dark suits with narrow lapels and dazzling shift-style dresses in emerald and tangerine. We always had to be sitting on the stairs, though, bathed and changed for bed, our teeth brushed, ready to turn and go the instant she gave the wave. Every time the door opened, I would tug my nightdress around my ankles and lean excitedly into my brother, who might be rapping a rolled-up comic book against his knee or clicking a pair of swords he’d snatched from the kitchen when Tony wasn’t looking. But we never spoke to my parents’ friends, even the ones we recognized as the mothers and fathers of our own friends, and my mother didn’t introduce us. The cocktail party world lay at a remove: the grownups put on their party clothes and seemed to forget us. Certainly, David and I knew not to come back downstairs to fetch a glass of water from the kitchen or say we couldn’t sleep, had had a bad dream. Instead, we lay under our covers thinking about the bared shoulders of the women, the stale cigarette smell that clung to the men’s overcoats and listening to their voices: clinking and burbling at first, then swelling, seeming at times to almost rush against the floorboards. The harsh, sudden laughter that meant they were having fun.
At least, I listened. I never knew for sure what David did in his room across from mine. He was two years older and already sinking into the sullen impenetrability that would muffle him from us. Maybe he read his war comics inside the tent of his bedspread, a flashlight pointed at his knees. Sgt. Fury trapped in Hitler’s Reichland: Awright, you heroes! We got us a war to win!! Or maybe he slept through the voices. The darkness between our two rooms was a river that only kept rising as the night wore on. It tore at my sheets, threatening to carry me out past the linen closet and the low hall bookcase, slowing briefly by the window that looked out on our yard, and then, before I could grab the banister or cry out, tossing me, like a leaf or a stick, down the narrow staircase to where I knew I shouldn’t go — to where, even then, I didn’t want to go.
I did go down once. I was ten or eleven and it was no longer the sixties. My parents’ parties were changing. They started after our bedtime now and my mother put on records late at night: Sgt. Pepper, the soundtrack from Hair or Easy Rider. Instead of spending her day making tidbits on toothpicks from the Joy of Cooking, she often just filled bowls with Bugles or party nuts from a can. She had more time now to talk on the white push-button phone in her bedroom and even went out occasionally on party afternoons, leaving me with one of the ladies from City Sitters. Except for very large parties, my parents didn’t bother hiring Tony anymore. They set out the liquor bottles and the mix, the jars of cherries and pickled onions, and people helped themselves. There was no maid either. In the mornings, David and I nudged aside glasses on the kitchen table to make room for our bowls of Froot Loops. We drank our Beep from tiny crystal sherry glasses, shaking these clean first in the sink. Then we watched Saturday-morning cartoons in the den until one of them came and found us, usually my father, looking oddly helpless in his wrinkled pajamas, his thin black hair sticking to the air.
That night I must have sleepwalked, reaching out to touch the sides of the stairwell on my way down. The nightmare was always the same: something was wrong, out of place. I would try opening my eyes wide, but the walls of my bedroom continued to expand and contract, rushing away from me, then pressing in again so fast I felt I might be crushed. It was as if there were some complicated adult problem I was expected to solve and even the walls were taunting me — but I was too young, I needed help. At the bottom of the stairs, I could see our telephone nook, its wooden shelf crowded with lip-smudged glasses and crumpled cocktail napkins. The party, though, had receded elsewhere, its din like the echo in a shell, blurry and contained. I wandered into the front hall, my feet gliding forward by themselves. Except for an evening purse, its long gold chain looped over a chair, the hall was empty. And yet not empty. In the small adjoining passageway that led to our powder room, a woman in a baby-blue hostess dress stood very close to a man in a grey suit.
The man was my Tom Collins, but I didn’t know this yet. The woman was Mrs Goodwin. She had twin boys the same age as David (we called them the Goodwin Twins) and was often in our kitchen smoking when I came home from school. She also lent my mother novels: Book of the Month club ones with bold lettering and bored-looking couples on their scuffed paper jackets. Mrs Goodwin and the man in the grey suit didn’t look bored though. The man’s mouth drifted near her neck, and her face was flushed, gleaming with sweat, her breasts pushed up against the deep V-shaped opening in her dress.
I twitched for flight, but my feet were in control and this time stayed fastened to the rug. Anyway, it was too late. The man had seen me. He had a long, angular face covered in freckles, though his hair was brown, not red like mine. When our eyes met, the ends of his lips curved up as if there were some running joke between us. But I had never seen him before, not at any of the family skating parties or summer barbecues where I observed my parents’ cocktail-party friends for longer than it took for them to take off their coats. Before I could look away, the powder room door swung open and my father staggered into the passageway. His suit jacket was missing and his white dress shirt starting to pull from his belt. In one hand, he held a crystal tumbler with some brown liquid at the bottom. He didn’t see me and seemed only barely aware of the couple blocking his way as if he too were sleepwalking. Groping past Mrs Goodwin, he stumbled, his face sloshing forward with the liquid in the glass, and it was then that the man winked at me.
How I got to the den at the other end of the house I don’t remember, only the reassuring glow of the table lamp as I stepped down onto its orange carpet. Someone else may have been in the room as well, but I can only picture my mother sitting in an armchair, relaxed and calm, as though she’d merely been reading a book
I was mistaken. Things were already moving out of place. Only a few months earlier, my mother had moved all her clothes into the guest room. Your father snores, she explained, and as my father’s room took on more of the smell of shoe polish and Old Spice, it seemed as if they had always slept apart. My brother was also on the move, biking through distant neighbourhoods with the Goodwin Twins and, when he was home, retreating to his own room with family-sized bottles of Pepsi. Here come the seventies, bragged our television set on Thursday nights. Welcome to the Space Age, to the twenty-hour workweek, to no more teachers, no more books. I knew I should feel excited too, yet all this anticipation for what lay just ahead, the sense that life was about to become an endless party, worried me. Would every decade from now on have to have its own TV show? Lying on the den carpet, I would sometimes tighten all my muscles as if to stop the seventies from coming. But I could only hold on so long before I had to let go, my body flooding back into the room again.
* * *
For there was no stopping any of it. Tom Collins showed me that the night he came upstairs. The knock was nothing more than a drunken finger tap. Then light was pouring in through a crack in my doorway and I could hear the party voices floating up the stairwell. I knew him from the freckles, though months had passed since the night my mother found me sleepwalking.
“Sorry,” he said. “I was looking for the little boys’ room. You know, just like the little girls’ room but for —”
His lips curved the way they had downstairs when he’d tried to share the joke with me. “Wait, this is a little girl’s room, isn’t it?”
I sat up in my bed, pressed my back against its knotted wooden spools.
“The bathroom is downstairs,” I said in my best approximation of the tone my mother used with pushy store clerks. But he didn’t leave. Instead, he slipped through the crack of light into my room.
He was carrying a tall glass, which he settled behind him on a pile of library books on my dresser. He crossed one long leg in front of the other, rubbed his palms together, then reached back for his drink.
“What’s that?” I asked, hoping I still sounded haughty.
“A Collins.” He raised the glass and took a sip. “You want to try?”
I said nothing.
He gave an exaggerated shrug. “Your choice. But you’re missing out on one of the most famous cocktails in all of history.”
He swooped the glass toward me in a one-sided toast. Through its swirling liquid, I could see a maraschino cherry and a slice of orange and several melting ice cubes. “So, you want to hear why?”
I kept my face blank.
“Little girls like to hear stories, don’t they?”
“I’m not a little girl.”
“My mistake.” He drew back in pretend embarrassment. “How old are you?”
“Fourteen,” I lied.
“No, not a little girl then. Do you have a boyfriend?”
“No.”
“Well, well.” He paused to take another sip, and I inspected him more carefully. He was not handsome, his chin too small, his other features too fluid, and he was very thin, his shoulder blades propping up his suit jacket like a wire hanger. “Just make sure you don’t wait too long,” he said. “Or the boys might not wait for you.”
“I don’t care.”
“Oh, you will in time. It’s the nature of things, my girl, and there’s nothing you can do about that. Nope. No escape. You can resist all you like, but one day some boy’s going to catch you off your guard, pour you a little drink.” He took yet another sip from his. “Whisper a little sweet talk in your ear, and bingo.” He grinned. “Boyfriend.”
No one had ever talked to me like this. Surely my parents wouldn’t approve, even if he was their guest. I thought about calling out to my brother. But I knew David wouldn’t hear unless I yelled.
“Don’t be mad at me, Ginger,” he said then, more softly.
No one had ever called me that before either. I found myself playing with a piece of my hair. I tangled it around my finger. He showed no sign of leaving.
“Tell me that story,” I said. “The one about the drink.”
“Ah, well, that’s a good story. The Great Tom Collins Hoax. Ever hear of it? Nope? Well, I know you’re going to like it. Are you ready? You sure? Okay, so you see, there was this guy in New York City named Tom Collins, a real loudmouth, and he was known for going into bars and saying stuff about people he’d just met and even stuff about people he hadn’t met. A friend would come up to you and say, ‘That Tom Collins, he just said you’re a monkey’s uncle,’ or ‘Thought you should know, Tom Collins is saying your mother wears combat boots.’ And naturally you’d rush over to whatever bar Tom Collins was supposed to be in, ready to knock him down. But he wouldn’t be there. He’d have moved on to the bar down the street or the bar around the corner, so you’d have to keep chasing him or drown your sorrows where you were. It even got into the papers, all these headlines about Tom Collins. Last Seen on Fifty-Seventh Street!”
He smirked and drank some more. “But turns out there was no such person. It was just a stunt by a liquor company to sell more booze.”
I gave him my most withering look. “That’s not much of a story.”
“Good drink, though,” he said, and drained the rest. He pulled the pieces of fruit out of the glass, peeling off the flesh of the orange slice with his teeth and handing me the bright red cherry. “Try it. Won’t poison you, I promise.”
The cherry tasted nothing like the ones on top of sundaes at Dairy Queen. Those were sweet. This one was unexpectedly sour, at least the skin. “What’s in it?” I asked.
“Oh, you like, I see,” he teased. “Two ounces gin, hint of lemon, teaspoon of sugar, ice cubes. Then soda water to the top of the glass. That’s how you’re supposed to make it, but your father buys the Collins mix. Not as good. Still —” He tipped the empty glass over on my carpet before placing it back on the dresser. “Not bad.”
“Do you know my mother?” I asked, thinking of Mrs Goodwin in her hostess dress.
“Yes, I know your mother.” His tone became cagey. “I know your mother and your father.”
“How come I’ve never seen you then?”
“You’ve seen me, Ginger.”
“I mean, before that.”
“Well, maybe you’ve never snuck downstairs before.”
I frowned and tried another tack. “Are you a friend of Mrs Goodwin’s?”
He gave a low whistle. “What is this? The Spanish Inquisition? They seek him here, they seek him there, that damned elusive Pimpernel! You like to read, right?” He picked up one of the library books from my dresser. “What’s this? An Old-Fashioned Girl? That looks way too babyish for a smart girl like you, a girl old enough to have a boyfriend. You should be reading the classics. Like The Scarlet Pimpernel. Or what about a modern writer, like John Updike or Philip Roth? Your parents have got a few of those downstairs.”
He put my book down and swayed closer to the bed. “But to answer your question, a good question. It’s like this, Ginger. People can be married. Like Mrs Goodwin, she’s married to Mr Goodwin, and your mother is married to your father. And they can have a couple of cute kids and a nice house and a new car every two years and throw fun parties, even if they do settle for Collins mix. But all that, sometimes it just isn’t enough. They want a little extra excitement. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“So Mr Goodwin knows about you and Mrs Goodwin?”
He laughed drily. “There’s nothing to know.”
“Why isn’t it enough?”
He frowned. “You don’t need to worry about any of this, you know, Ginger.” He gave me a quick military salute. “The grownups have it all under control.”
