Acting on the Island

And Other Prince Edward Island Stories, New and Selected

J.J. Steinfeld

• Publisher: Pottersfield Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781989725733
• eBook ISBN: 9781989725740
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Acting on the Island and Other Prince Edward Island Stories: New & Selected gathers together 21 stories set on PEI from the nearly 500 wide-ranging and eclectic stories that J.J. Steinfeld has written in his over forty years of living and writing on the Island.

Steinfeld's twenty-third book is a thought-provoking collection of Island stories embracing and exploring the themes and the psychological terrain that has pervaded all his writing, from the absurd to the existential, the surreal to the spiritual, the realistic to the fantastic. These stories are interwoven with the tragic, the comic and sometimes the darkly humorous as he grapples with the desire for meaning and sense in the human condition while confronting the chaotic, painful and sometimes strange aspects of history and people's lives, both ordinary and extraordinary. Steinfeld's work is concerned with the influence of the past and memory on the present; the significance of love, creativity and madness in the lives of individuals as they attempt to deal with their lives on the Island and within the larger world.

Estimating Distances

Eileen looks out her eleventh-floor bedroom window and can see the smoke of a distant fire. How many kilometres away? How long would it take me to drive that far? A small fire or a large fire? she wonders, realizing that it depends on the distance. She is terrible at estimating distances.

In the living room of her apartment are several of her friends, invited over to celebrate the fifth anniversary of her divorce. “Any reason to celebrate,” her ex-husband said to everyone in the room. They weren’t even friends any longer, but he is married to a close friend of hers – Of course you are both invited; I have no phobia about former husbands. “If you want to live in a high-rise, this is a good building, great view,” her close friend had said, remembering when her husband, then Eileen’s husband, lived in this building. That remark was after the argument over Eileen’s treatise on guerrilla warfare, as her ex-husband called it.

“Guerrilla warfare is as old as belligerency. If you’re at all interested in guerrilla warfare, read von Clasewitz. Read Vo Nguyen Giap and I’d strongly recommend Che Guevara,” she had told everyone in the room.

“Eileen used guerrilla warfare in our marriage,” her ex-husband explained.

“Only out of necessity. However, the conditions were not conducive to employing the strategies of guerrilla warfare.”

“When are you going to write the history of guerrilla warfare in Canada? You might as well tell them your silly story of how you were a guerrilla in the hills of Prince Edward Island.”

“You are twisting my personal history all out of shape.”

“Eileen, when she was a teenager on Prince Edward Island, wanted to stop some cottage development. Preserve the pristine shoreline.”

“Nothing’s pristine anymore, even back then …”

She had needed to get away from the friends, her ex-husband, the drinking, the accusations and insults and belittlements disguised as banter. The bedroom had seemed as safe as anywhere.

Eileen is looking at the flames. Brian. She thinks of Brian. The birthday card is on the dresser. She had bought it two weeks ago, a full month before his birthday. Bought it on her own birthday. Over the years she often thought of her childhood sweetheart, of the man she would have married had she stayed on Prince Edward Island. Brian is twenty in her mind’s eye – the last photograph she had of him, of them together, a piece of chocolate birthday cake on a fork she was holding, about to enter his mouth. His birthday or hers? She laughs sardonically: maybe Brian had set this fire. That was a lifetime ago.

What would Brian say if she called him? She could be anyone, he wouldn’t be able to tell. She couldn’t sound the same – years of smoking, heavy smoking now. Or she could say right away, “It’s Eileen. I hope you haven’t forgotten me …” She did send him a birthday card every year. A few words, best wishes, a hint of their youths together, an invitation to visit if he ever came to Vancouver. He would get updates on her life from her parents, who lived in rural Prince Edward Island – hardly satisfying information, as superficial as gossip – and there would be his birthday card to her, usually something oversized and ostentatious, a letter every few years, lists of the books he had read since the last letter, but she would never answer, only the yearly birthday card, no telephone calls, no e-mails, an understanding that distance had to be respected, hiding places not disturbed.

She goes to the dresser and signs the birthday card. It is a bland card, Best wishes on your birthday. Like a fine wine you improve with age … She writes: The old 4-H’er is 43. How’s your head … your heart … your hands … your health? I had to strain my memory to remember what the H’s stood for. I’m sure you haven’t forgotten the 4-H pledge. Back home, in the weekly community newspaper, if she was feeling mischievous, she might have taken out an ad, with his picture as a teenager or younger, the caption, The old 4-H’er is 43. What picture would he have used of her? She had turned forty-three two weeks ago. The detritus of the years, she thinks, shakes her head, remembers Marvin, her paternal grandmother’s second husband, talking about the detritus of his life. She traces out Brian’s name on the window, a nervous, questioning calligraphy. Then she goes to the bed, sits down, lights a cigarette, and picks up the telephone from the night table.

“It’s Eileen. I hope you haven’t forgotten me …”

“I need some hope,” Brian said, as he and Eileen walked back toward her parents’ house.

“You know the answer to that,” said Eileen, hardly wanting to respond to his familiar complaint. She thought of it as a complaint or a plea, had been unsympathetic to him only because he had squeezed all life out of the words, was wallowing, not swimming. At the time she was in her first year at the University of Prince Edward Island, unhappy, stifled, wanting to move to a larger centre. She had made the decision to transfer to Dalhousie University in Halifax, would tell him later, it wasn’t like she was going to the end of the world. There is little for you here, Brian. Your horizons are limited. I’m not staying here forever … Eileen, this is our home … Listen to yourself, Brian. No hope, our home … My whole family is here. I could start a business. I know I could run a good business. I could take business courses here as well as anywhere else … Not as well as anywhere else, Brian …

“Your cancer sticks enjoyable?” Eileen’s father said as she and Brian approached the dining-room table.

“We wish we could stop,” Brian said.

“There has to be some scuff in our perfection,” said Eileen, and her parents and Brian’s parents looked at her as if she had made a rude noise. “Where do you come up with these expressions?” Brian’s father said.

The seventh person at the table, a thin, fashionably dressed man – “He looks like a dandy, a fop, our very own Sir Percy from the Scarlet Pimpernel,” Eileen whispered to Brian – detected the mild disruption only through the reactions of the others. This was his first visit back in twelve years, last seeing Eileen when she was eight, and he was thirty, back on the Island, in those days, for his wedding to Eileen’s grandmother, a woman only two years from being twice his age, the family members were saying, until someone pointed out that she had lied about her age and was more than twice the age of her new husband. The publisher of the weekly community newspaper, a family friend, at the wedding said he wanted to run their photograph on the front page. And young Eileen suggested a caption: Love is blind to age …

Eileen told the newspaper publisher at the wedding that she wanted to be a writer, and he offered her a job when she grew up, and Eileen made the publisher put it in writing. Years later, Eileen wrote a reminiscence of her grandmother, first married to a much older man, then to a much younger man, which won a high-school literary prize – third prize. “Marital Convolutions,” she called it. She argued that she hadn’t won first or second prize because she used certain words. Words about her grandmother’s sexual vigour, the vitality of her libido, into her eighties. In the reminiscence she described Marvin as a fluttering, flamboyant, uninhibited Scarlet Pimpernel, a man it was hard to believe was born and had grown up in rural Prince Edward Island, characterizing the marriage as better suited to being a quirky, idiosyncratic film. Marvin and her grandmother were their own ongoing film. It wasn’t until a decade later, sitting with his wife and watching television, that Brian saw the Scarlet Pimpernel, realized what Eileen had meant. A few years ago she had noted on a birthday card that the Scarlet Pimpernel had been made into a stage play and she had seen it in New York.

There had always been debate whether Marvin was part of the family, especially when Eileen’s grandmother had died. Died in a small town in California, her ashes sent home with a friend who was going to vacation on the Island, no Marvin to accompany them. Mix the grey ashes with the red soil, Eileen had said when the ashes arrived on the Island. Speculation as to why he was back after twelve years: “I bet he’s dying” … “Wants to rub our faces in it” … “Returning to the scene of the crime” … But Eileen’s mother said there was no crime, Marvin had not done anything wrong. Getting married and moving to another country is not criminal. It might have been smart. “You never moved, Mom,” the daughter said. “People in our family did not like to leave the area, Eileen. Six generations have lived here. You know that …”

“I want to clean up the detritus of my life,” Marvin said, sounding more like the Scarlet Pimpernel than Sir Percy.

Eileen knew what detritus meant, said she preferred to use the word debris, the debris of my life. Brian said junk wasn’t a bad word, the junk of my life, and the family gathering turned into a search for the proper word to describe a less than adequate life. Rubble, discards, castoffs, slag …

Saturday afternoon. Her parents’ house – pancake lunch. Next Saturday afternoon, his parents’ house – rancher’s brunch, even though they lived on a farm and not a ranch. The week before they had attempted to determine how many of these Saturday-afternoon meals they had gone to. He said it had been over 750 and she laughed at his number, accused him of wild exaggeration. “We’ve missed weeks, come on …” The two families. Then Eileen and Brian got engaged and became part of it. “We knew you two would get married,” each parent said, one after the other. “When Brian’s mom and I were pregnant,” Eileen’s mother said, “we used to talk about what if one of us had a boy and the other a girl.” Eileen had once interrupted a version of the story by saying, “Like two royal families trying to solidify their fortunes and consolidate their power.”

“Name a Saturday we’ve missed,” Brian said and stuck his forefinger close to Eileen’s nose, and she snapped at it. She would have bitten it hard; had another time, during an argument over her academic plans, that living on the Island was stifling her creativity.

As she was doing a mental calculation of Saturday-afternoon meals, he described a few of the more severe storms they had gone through to make it to one family’s home or the other’s. When they got their driver’s licences they would go somewhere afterward, but no squirming out of Saturday lunch – Sunday-morning church they might be able to skip, but not Saturday-afternoon lunch, holy, entrenched, ritualistic. The cigarette … the walk past the barn … or into the barn … It wa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• What Reviewers Said of J. J. Steinfeld’s Writing
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Godot’s Leafless Tree
• A Television-Watching Artist
• The World of Our Hero in the Cradle of Confederation
• Reach Out to Anita
• The Existence of Posters
• Continuity
• Acting on the Island
• Flowers for the Vases
• In the Mind of Love
• The Führer’s Halloween
• The Heart
• Estimating Distances
• The Poetry of the Long Ball
• Conception
• Should the Word Hell Be Capitalized?
• Hanukkah / Godot / Christmas
• The Most Remarkable Experimental Filmmaker the World Has Ever Known
• The Semblance of Eternity on a Hot Summer’s Afternoon
• Historical Perspective
• Paintings
• I’m Waiting for You, My Dear Old Friend
• Acknowledgements
• Author’s Notes
• About the Author
• Books by J. J. Steinfeld