What needed a new pantomime, at least new to me, was Em’s enactment of how manipulable American voters were. It was clear what Em was imitating when she squatted onstage, but Nora took some poetic license with her English translation.

“It doesn’t take a first-rate actor to manipulate American voters”—that’s my best guess at what Em’s pantomime was saying.

It was Nora’s way of saying things that would get Em in trouble, not only this time. “Even a second-rate actor is good enough to dupe the dumber-than-dogshit American people,” was the unfortunate way Nora interpreted Em’s pantomime.

No one laughed; even at the Gallows, there were murmurs of disapproval. The management of the Gallows would complain to Nora about it. “You can’t translate everything the Canadian acts out,” Nora was told. The dopes in charge blamed Em for it. Whenever Nora said something too anti-American, the management at the Gallows Lounge—speaking of dumber than dogshit—held the nonspeaking Canadian accountable. To anyone who ever saw Nora and Em onstage, the most inflammatory things Nora said were all in the way Nora said them.

You can’t call the American people dumber than dogshit—no one can. As Nora would say, the American people are the most sacred cows in American politics. No American politician can get away with saying anything derogatory about the American people, but Nora just let it fly—Nora wasn’t running for political office.

Em was the one who saw Ronald Reagan coming; she was the one who was worried about him. Em also saw how the audience at the Gallows reacted to what Nora said about the American people, and she was worried about that. She knew that the audience at the Gallows generally loved Two Dykes, One Who Talks, but not this time. Em was the one who saw the hatred coming.

Nora just let it fly. “What are the bananas for? Long time passing,” Nora kept singing. At first it was funny, but the way Nora sang it, it sounded like a dirge.

“Where have the bananas gone? Long time ago,” the snowshoer sang, in his beautiful but elegiac voice—in her beautiful but elegiac voice, I would soon (I would finally) learn to say. Like Ronald Reagan and the hatred, the elegies were coming, too.

32. A TURN IN THE ROAD