For Your Tomorrow (11 page)

I
T’S
1998,
THE SECOND
year of his master’s program, and the spectre of
the thesis
haunts the corridors of Jeff’s mind. He has always struggled with writing term papers. They are not vehicles of further comprehension for him, but boring exercises, drained of the joy of learning. So he usually postpones them until the last minute, then rattles something off to get them in on time. But a lot is riding on this thesis. He will use Foucault’s theories to examine the CBC’s role in generating a distinctive Canadian nationalism. He luxuriates in the reading, the research, the thoughts that leap and tumble around in his mind, the bright flashes of eureka moments. He sits for hours with his adviser, Dr. Alan Hunt, talking over piles of paper in Dr. Hunt’s book-lined office, or over mugs of beer at the campus pub.

As he contemplates Canadian identity, he ponders his own personal identity—that shape-shifting entity he’s never been able to pin down. It’s as if he, himself, occupies some liminal zone—always passing through. He’s not rooted in a particular city or region—the Maritimes, the West, or “Upper Canada,” but connected to all the places he’s inhabited, east to west.
I am a part of all that I have met
. First and foremost, he realizes, he is a Canadian.

But he procrastinates about the writing; has yet to tame his sprawling limbs of thought, and force them into the straitjacket of ordered paragraphs and chapters. A week before the deadline, he types all day and most of the night. He leaves his cramped apartment only to work out at the gym or to load up on triple-triples from Tim’s. Just before the office closes on the due date—April 30, 1999—he
hands over his one-hundred-page document to the secretary at the School of Canadian Studies: “Assembling the Nation’s Culture?: The Relevance of Foucault for Studying the Role of the CBC in Emerging Canadian Nationalism, 1925-30.” He does not beam with accomplishment, but sighs with relief:
Consummatum est
.

In late November, when the barren branches of Carleton’s maples are stark against a steel-grey sky, he returns to the office to pick up his laminated certificate:
Jefferson Clifford Francis, M.A
. He shoves it into his backpack with his texts and notebooks, wonders if he will ever see it framed, on the wall of a windowless office at some university. Not an overriding ambition, he realizes. He thinks of his grandfather’s Second World War service certificate hanging in his granny’s living room, and his own scroll emblazoned with the chancellor’s gold seal seems meagre, solipsistic. What do you do with an M.A. in Canadian studies? You go on to do a Ph.D., Dr. Hunt advised. So, wanting to resume his study of popular culture, he transferred to the Sociology Department and gained admission to the Ph.D. program. Those adult decisions about career path can be postponed for a few more years.

It’s been five years now that he and Sylvie have been living in different parts of the country. They make the two-hour flight between Halifax and Ottawa whenever they can, spend long weekends and summer holidays at Fanjoy’s Point, and manage to keep the flame burning—
tho’ it were a thousand mile
. In the back of his notebook, he writes,

Jeff strolls across the campus to the cafeteria and nods at a couple of students from his comparative literature seminar.
Sharks
, he thinks as he passes them,
out for blood—skewering other students in the seminar, boasting about their publications like so many notches on their mortarboards
. He knows he’s lacking that cutthroat competitive drive—to appear “intellectual” with scholarly presentations and articles in obscure academic journals.
Thank god Joselyn is still here
, he muses, settling in with his coffee to wait for her at his usual table in the corner.

She bustles in, her long brown hair dishevelled by the wind; a leather satchel slung over one shoulder and a stack of books under her arm. “Sorry, I’m late,” she says, setting a steaming cup on the table and collapsing into the chair. “There was a long line at the library. I had to get these books. A two-thousand-word paper due on Monday. I haven’t even started the research.”

“Having fun yet, Jos?” he chuckles.

“Fun? Who promised you fun?” She smiles, stirring her tea.

“Playing with ideas is great fun,” he says. “If it starts to feel like I’m training for a bloody marathon instead of enjoying the race, then I’ll know it’s time to quit.”

“Maybe I should’ve applied to do my Ph.D. in sociology too.” She frowns. “I’m discovering that historians stick their heads in the sand and ignore anything that smacks of innovative theory for as long as possible.”

“Well, here at the higher echelons of the ivory tower,” he says, rolling his eyes, “I’m finding an even greater gap between academia and the real world. A lot of the so-called knowledge that’s being created seems irrelevant.”

“Hard to reconcile sometimes.” She nods. “And you just turned twenty-nine. I remember that milestone … the big three-O just around the corner. Questions about purpose and contribution starting to nag you.”

He grins. “I thought the Ph.D. might give me a clearer sense of direction, but I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up,” he says, chuckling. “No idea where I’ll end up.”

“Hey, a dissertation looms on the horizon,” she laughs. “No problem with direction there.”

“Another bloody marathon,” he groans, sinking his face into his hands.

The white corner of an envelope peeks out of his mailbox. His grandmother’s familiar handwriting instantly lifts the gloom he feels in the cool darkness of his basement apartment, her words like rays of sunshine:

As with every letter, a single sheet of notepaper—
I Love You
written on the outside—enfolds a cheque, a welcome supplement to the pittance he earns as a teaching assistant and as a bouncer on the weekends.

He sighs, weary with the weight of ten years of student loans and the perpetual emptiness of his pockets. In exchange for taking classes at the Ottawa Martial Arts Centre,
he mops the floors and cleans the toilets. Living on $ 13,000 a year, he can’t afford to buy the kind of gifts he’d like to give to Sylvie and his family. He picks up the book that he just bought to send to his grandmother for her seventieth birthday—
The Royals
by Kitty Kelley. He opens it to the title page and inscribes,

I
T’S THE FOLLOWING
June, 2000. Sunlight streams through the kitchen window as Alma kneads dough for one of the big batches of bread that she bakes every week. Her kids want to buy her a bread machine. They say it could turn out loaves so much more quickly and easily. But she needs to make her six loaves by hand. It’s a ritual, an offering to her family. She thinks of them as she pushes and pulls the satiny mound on her wooden bread board, inhaling its yeasty fragrance. They’ll soon be coming home for the summer, and she’ll have lots of loaves in the freezer for them. Especially brown bread; Jeffy loves her brown bread.

The kneading is harder in the heat of summer. Her
forehead and hair grow damp with sweat. She pants with the exertion; her chest heaves. Gasping for breath, she collapses into her rocking chair. She knows she can’t continue, or even wash the sticky dough off her hands before she picks up the phone to call her daughter. Marilyn arrives in fifteen minutes and drives her to the Emergency Room. An X-ray exposes a sizable tumour on her left lung. She stopped smoking seven years ago; quit her pack-a-day addiction cold turkey, hoping she might beat the odds.

“Are your legal affairs in order?” the grey-haired physician asks, scanning her medical chart. “You’ll have to be admitted to the hospital immediately.”

“But I can’t right now,” Alma protests. “I’ve just set my bread to rise.”

Back in the kitchen of her quiet apartment, the daisy clock ticks. A mound of dough balloons on a floured breadboard for the last time.

J
EFF SLOUCHES AT HIS DESK
, staring at the blank white page on the computer screen. The black cursor pulses in and out, a mechanical heartbeat. He’s waiting for the circuits to fuse between his sparking synapses and his fingers on the keyboard, willing words to appear. Finished his courses, he’s now alone with his stack of books and computer, reading for his “Review of Literature” exam and attempting to write the proposal for his dissertation. He plans to explore the concept of
cool
in popular culture, to use Foucault’s methodology to
conduct “a genealogy” of cool—its evolution, its ethics, its geopolitics, its links to a political economy; cool as style, McLuhan’s notion of cool … But the words won’t take shape on the page. His head is too connected to his heart. All he can think about is his grandmother—the chemotherapy bombarding her cells, the chemicals shrinking her once robust body; her thick dark hair falling out in clumps into her white porcelain sink. When he talked with his mother last night, her fear filtered through the phone line.

He grabs a sheet of paper out of his printer and picks up his fountain pen. The blue ink flows onto the page, relieving the pent-up yearning in his heart.

By the time the oak trees in the Halifax Commons are tinged rusty orange, Jeff is settled in the study his parents have fixed up for him in their basement. His books and papers piled high on the cherry-wood desk that bears the nicks and scars of his childhood. He’s skimming through an e-mail from Alan Hunt, who is now his dissertation adviser. Jeff’s preliminary proposal is interesting and viable, Dr. Hunt writes, but conducting a genealogy of cool could be difficult: “Like so many other tropes within popular culture, its popularity lies in the fact that it can be deployed in a host of different ways.… Indeed, what are the texts of cool?” Jeff needs to clarify his position, convert his document into something closer to a proposal, develop his ideas on the structure of the thesis; include suggestions about subjects for his two comprehensive exams. Jeff shakes his head at the jumble of words. He can’t clarify, or convert or develop anything—he’s leaving tomorrow for Fredericton where his grandmother lies in an intensive care unit with pneumonia.