Sandy’s younger brother Timothy ran upstairs with orange juice in his hand on a Sunday morning and engaged his usual taunting. Sandy sat up in bed, the newspaper still thick and folded and unread (snatched before her father could find it), reading a book. Her curtains were drawn and her window open to the cool, autumn air. The book was a collection of stories by Alice Munro. She started the one called “A Wilderness Station” and moved her way easily through half. It had yet to be revealed that the one killed his brother with an axe. Up till now Sandy still thought, with the rest of the world, that it was a tree branch falling. Working in the bush, were they. Sandy looked up at her brother, who stared at her with his large almond eyes. He desired to taunt her, but his look was for the moment curious. “What are you reading?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“Well, I’m not drinking anything either.” And he sipped some of the fresh-squeezed orange juice that their mother always purchased from the market down the street. “We’re having breakfast and you’re not,” he said, in a singsong voice. There was a pause. “Pancakes,” he added.
“I don’t eat breakfast on Sundays.” Sandy was fourteen years old.
“All you do is sit in bed.”
“I’m never bored.”
“You bore me.”
“Go play.”
“We’re eating pancakes.” The voice of their mother called up the stairs. “Tim-o-theee! Getting cold.”
“Be right there mom!” and he shouted it louder than was required, on purpose. Sandy winced, her shoulders involuntarily shrugged.
“Jesus, Timmy. Please leave.” This a hiss.
“Mo-omm! Sandy’s cussing!” Another pause. “Do you want some of my orange juice?” he asked his sister.
“No, thank you.”
“Well, I wasn’t going to give you any, anyway.”
“That’s nice,” she said. Her eyes flicking across the pages. She said absently, not caring whether or not this influenced her brother, “I’m going to read a hundred books this year.”
“Your teacher won’t believe you.”
“I’ll have her quiz me.”
He sipped his fresh-squeezed. He began making slurping noises, those almond eyes looking over the glass, slurping and sucking as with a straw. He emptied the glass and set it hard to Sandy’s oak desk, again purposefully, leaving it there for the ring it would create on her desk and for her to carry downstairs when it was her time – in her own good time – to venture southward. Sometimes she and her brother played chess, Timothy growing bored and making a call for Chinese checkers. Sometimes Timothy yawned and then swiped all of the remaining pieces off the board and go “Oops.”
“Good bye-eye,” Sandy called without looking up from her book. She loved Alice Munro and read every word. Though she lived in Tarrytown she often imagined that she was from Ontario, a woman about to move to Vancouver. Sandy dreamed about British Columbia, about the Pacific, and imagined she would one day stand on that coast and look westward, not behind her, and always look westward. She dreamed of starting a magazine called “The Globalist.” The offices of “The Globalist” would face west, and they would include stories from the world canon and not just the western - from Africa and the Middle East and Asia, journalistic articles from correspondents based in Nairobi and Mumbai and Beijing and Tokyo and Cairo and Damascus. It would be a cosmopolitan magazine, modeled after her favorites The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly, and she would stand on the Pacific gazing westward and would get to New York finally after traveling around the world.
This opposed to the standard American version of always gazing East, toward the Big Apple, a retrograde gaze across the Atlantic to Europe. She would change the intellectual elite. She would have offices in San Francisco and Vancouver. She would be the editor-in-chief and the publisher. Publish books under the Globalist imprint. Write her monthly column and derisively lambast the current administration, and the construction of American capitalism as it stood during her time. Her mind wandered. She rested halfway through “A Wilderness Station” and the book lay open on her outstretched legs, and she gazed out the window, staring westerly, noticing the wind. She closed the book, her cloth bookmark from St. Petersburg in place, and reached for her notebook, open on the bed next to her, to her right, a pen ready and waiting.
Sandy wrote “We live in a jingoistic plutocracy,” and she underlined the last two words, dreaming of her magazine and who she would hire to run the business side. She imagined that she would ward off any takeover attempt by Bertelsmann and would never settle. She despised the downgrading of Random House, the, as she called it, “Koonzification of a great literary tradition.” She had no one with whom to share these sympathies. She read the “Book Review” and took notes on the books she wanted to buy and eventually read. Her mother took her to the library and had her check out all the books of her whim and pleasure.
Sandy stopped her daydreaming and began reading the Sunday Times. She was captivated by the rape case of the famous professional athlete. She desired gory details about bruises and bra straps, but found them in short supply. She imagined what she would do as a nineteen year-old concierge if a famous athlete wooed her. Nothing. But if Zadie Smith happened by, she thought, and her thoughts lost form and cohesion and she trailed off, continuing a forceful reading of the Sports section. She ended up, completely and entirely by accident, reading about a car called a Maibach, one of the highest-end produced by Mercedes. It is three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, with sleek lines and fourteen different types of exotic wood. She began to contemplate the people who made such a gas guzzler (she smiled at the federal three thousand dollar gas guzzler tax) and the trees that were now the exotic woods in the compartment, and she said, “Assholes.” In the same (figurative) breath of her propensity to daydream, she imagined herself to be a queen of high finance, publishing books in addition to a million other widgetical things, driven by her chauffeur as she sipped champagne and entertained Tracy Chapman.
Sandy never watches television, unlike the majority, but she knows who Jay Leno is. And in the same collection of Automotive articles there was a piece that concerned Jay Leno. The comedian is a fancy car collector. After the reviewer of the Maibach had Mr. Leno drive the thing (and they took the three hundred thousand dollar car to a McDonald’s drive-thru, which Sandra looked upon not as comedic, but scornful), there was a side article about Mr. Leno’s collection. Sandra imagined the two men masturbating together at Mr. Leno’s warehouse wherein sat 80 of his cars and 80 of his motorcycles, as she contemplated the wastefulness of overt consumption and unchecked wealth. “Wastrels,” she whispered, and there fresh on her mind remained their circle jerk.
The side article mentioned Mr. Leno’s Stanley Steamer. They got the boiler going, pulled levers and pushed gadgets, and then took the thing out for a drive in the drizzle. It wasn’t a complex description of the process, but it did set Sandra’s mind to imagining driving a Steamer around town now, at fourteen and not some juxtaposed version of her supposed future womanhood, and appreciating why the Steamer didn’t last.
And that was it for her moment and her cogitations. Her dad reminded her that they were going on a picnic with his brother’s family and her cousin Emily, who just had a baby and it’s time to see the baby, and Sandra ejected herself from the bed and got dressed in a hurry and went with the family downriver. Then it was night.
In bed, back in her pajamas, Sandra picked up “A Wilderness Station,” gasped when it was revealed that the brother axed the other brother and the wife had many bruises, and bore the words full-steam to Ms. Munro’s description of a Stanley Steamer. Sandra sat up in bed from her sleepy position. Ms. Munro’s description was much more eloquent and involved than the automotive reviewer’s had been, and the Steamer set in a much more beautiful setting, driven by a woman no less, and not the circle-jerk males. Ms. Munro took the character and the Steamer for a ride, the elderly wife now going to visit the murderous brother who got away with it and ultimately prospered, but who could no longer speak, and the Steamer bounced around a farmhouse plot, up in Ontario, a tad more cultivated and less the bush, driven by an independently-minded woman who inspired Sandra to be equally independent and quirky, and after the story met its peroration, she set the book down and thought about the day. She reasoned rightly that, because the Steamer (even after visits to car shows with her brother and father) had never in her long and entire life reached her cognition, no embrace whatsoever, and then on one day from disparate sources her daydreaming set her on an intimate course with the reference, she had to be magically and spiritually touched. She turned off the reading lamp and settled underneath her covers, staring at the ceiling, school the next day and she couldn’t sleep, one and then two worriless hours going by as she imagined a continuance of the graceful coincidences of her life. And she dreamed that she would dance on this tether forever.