Bluebeard's Egg (21 page)

Don didn’t, but the man with the cameras did. They watched while he cut the top out of the can, knelt down, moved a loose platform board so he could get at the water, scooped, dumped brown water over the side. Then the other men started taking the tops off their own beer cans, including the full ones which they emptied out. Christine produced the Pepsi can from her bag. The Mennonite woman had her pint juice carton.

“No mosquitoes, at any rate,” Don said, almost cheerfully.

They’d lost a lot of time, and the water was almost up to the floor platform. It seemed to Christine that the boat was becoming heavier, moving more slowly through the water, that the water itself was thicker. They could not empty much water at a time with such small containers, but maybe, with so many of them doing it, it would work.

“This really
is
an adventure,” she said to Lilian, who was white-faced and forlorn. “Isn’t this fun?”

The Viennese woman was not bailing; she had no container. She was making visible efforts to calm herself. She had taken out a tangerine, which she was peeling, over the embroidered handkerchief which she’d spread out on her lap. Now she produced a beautiful little pen-knife with a mother-of-pearl handle. To Lilian she said, “You are hungry? Look, I will cut in pieces, one piece for you, then one for me,
ja
?” The knife was not really needed, of course. It was to distract Lilian, and Christine was grateful.

There was an audible rhythm in the boat: scrape, dump; scrape, dump. The men in baseball caps, rowdy earlier, were not at all drunk now. Don appeared to be enjoying himself, for the first time on the trip.

But despite their efforts, the level of the water was rising.

“This is ridiculous,” Christine said to Don. She stopped bailing with her Pepsi can. She was discouraged and also frightened. She told herself that the Indians wouldn’t keep going if they thought there was any real danger, but she wasn’t convinced. Maybe they didn’t care if everybody drowned; maybe they thought it was Karma. Through the hole the brown water poured, with a steady flow, like a cut vein. It was up to the level of the loose floor boards now.

Then the Mennonite woman stood up. Balancing herself, she removed her shoes, placing them carefully side by side under the seat. Christine had once watched a man do this in a subway station; he’d put the shoes under the bench where she was sitting, and a few minutes later had thrown himself in front of the oncoming train. The two shoes had remained on the neat yellow-tiled floor, like bones on a plate after a meal. It flashed through Christine’s head that maybe the woman had become unhinged and was going to leap overboard; this was plausible, because of the dead child. The woman’s perpetual smile was a fraud then, as Christine’s would have been in her place.

But the woman did not jump over the side of the boat. Instead she bent over and moved the platform boards. Then she turned around and lowered her large flowered rump onto the hole. Her face was towards Christine now; she continued to smile, gazing over the side of the boat at the mangroves and their monotonous roots and leaves as if they were the most interesting scenery she had seen in a long time. The water was above her ankles; her skirt was wet. Did she look a little smug, a little clever or self-consciously heroic? Possibly, thought Christine, though from that round face it was hard to tell.

“Hey,” said one of the men in baseball caps, “now you’re cooking with gas!” The Indian in the bow looked at the woman; his white teeth appeared briefly.

The others continued to bail, and after a moment Christine began to scoop and pour with the Pepsi can again. Despite herself, the woman impressed her. The water probably wasn’t that cold but it was certainly filthy, and who could tell what might be on the other side of the hole? Were they far enough south for piranhas? Yet there was the Mennonite woman plugging the hole with her bottom, serene as a brooding hen, and no doubt unaware of the fact that she was more than a little ridiculous. Christine could imagine the kinds of remarks the men in baseball caps would make about the woman afterwards. “Saved by a big butt.” “Hey, never knew it had more than one use.” “Finger in the dike had nothing on her.” That was the part that would have stopped Christine from doing such a thing, even if she’d managed to think of it.

Now they reached the long aisle of mangroves and emerged into the open; they were in a central space, like a lake, with the dark mangroves walling it around. There was a chicken-wire fence strung across it, to keep any boats from going too close to the Scarlet Ibis’ roosting area: that was what the sign said, nailed to a post that was sticking at an angle out of the water. The Indian cut the motor and they drifted towards the fence; the other Indian caught hold of the fence, held on, and the boat stopped, rocking a little. Apart from the ripples they’d caused, the water was dead flat calm; the trees doubled in it appeared black, and the sun, which was just above the western rim of the real trees, was a red disk in the hazy grey sky. The light coming from it was orangy-red and tinted the water. For a few minutes nothing happened. The man with the cameras looked at his watch. Lilian was restless, squirming on the seat. She wanted to draw; she wanted to swim in the pool. If Christine had known the whole thing would take so long she wouldn’t have brought her.

“They coming,” said the Indian in the bow.

“Birds ahoy,” said one of the men in baseball caps, and pointed, and then there were the birds all right, flying through the reddish light, right on cue, first singly, then in flocks of four or five, so bright, so fluorescent that they were like painted flames. They settled into the trees, screaming hoarsely. It was only the screams that revealed them as real birds.

The others had their binoculars up. Even the Viennese woman had a little pair of opera glasses. “Would you look at that,” said one of the men. “Wish I’d brought my movie camera.”

Don and Christine were without technology. So was the Mennonite woman. “You could watch them forever,” she said, to nobody in particular. Christine, afraid that she would go on to say something embarrassing, pretended not to hear her.
Forever
was loaded.

She took Lilian’s hand. “See those red birds?” she said. “You might never see one of those again in your entire life.” But she knew that for Lilian these birds were no more special than anything else. She was too young for them. She said, “Oh,” which was what she would have said if they had been pterodactyls or angels with wings as red as blood. Magicians, Christine knew from Lilian’s last birthday party, were a failure with small children, who didn’t see any reason why rabbits shouldn’t come out of hats.

Don took hold of Christine’s hand, a thing he had not done for some time; but Christine, watching the birds, noticed this only afterwards. She felt she was looking at a picture, of exotic flowers or of red fruit growing on trees, evenly spaced, like the fruit in the gardens of mediaeval paintings, solid, clear-edged, in primary colours. On the other side of the fence was another world, not real but at the same time more real than the one on this side, the men and women in their flimsy clothes and aging bodies, the decrepit boat. Her own body seemed fragile and empty, like blown glass.

The Mennonite woman had her face turned up to the sunset; her body was cut off at the neck by shadow, so that her head appeared to be floating in the air. For the first time she looked sad; but when she felt Christine watching her she smiled again, as if to reassure her, her face luminous and pink and round as a plum. Christine felt the two hands holding her own, mooring her, one on either side.

Weight returned to her body. The light was fading, the air chillier. Soon they would have to return in the increasing darkness, in a boat so rotten a misplaced foot would go through it. The water would be black, not brown; it would be full of roots.

“Shouldn’t we go back?” she said to Don.

Lilian said, “Mummy, I’m hungry,” and Christine remembered the chocolate bar and rummaged in her bag. It was down at the bottom, limp as a slab of bacon but not liquid. She brought it out and peeled off the silver paper, and gave a square to Lilian and one to Don, and ate one herself. The light was pink and dark at the same time, and it was difficult to see what she was doing.

When she told about this later, after they were safely home, Christine put in the swamp and the awful boat, and the men singing and the suspicious smell of the water. She put in Don’s irritability, but only on days when he wasn’t particularly irritable. (By then, there was less pressure; these things went in phases, Christine decided. She was glad she had never said anything, forced any issues.) She put in how good Lilian had been even though she hadn’t wanted to go. She put in the hole in the boat, her own panic, which she made amusing, and the ridiculous bailing with the cans, and the Indians’ indifference to their fate. She put in the Mennonite woman sitting on the hole like a big fat hen, making this funny, but admiring also, since the woman’s solution to the problem had been so simple and obvious that no one else had thought of it. She left out the dead child.

She put in the rather hilarious trip back to the wharf, with the Indian standing up in the bow, beaming his heavy-duty flashlight at the endless, boring mangroves, and the two men in the baseball caps getting into a mickey and singing dirty songs.

She ended with the birds, which were worth every minute of it, she said. She presented them as a form of entertainment, like the Grand Canyon: something that really ought to be seen, if you liked birds, and if you should happen to be in that part of the world.

The Salt Garden

A
lma turns up the heat, stirs the clear water in the red enamel pot, adds more salt, stirs, adds. She’s making a supersaturated solution: re-making it. She made it already, at lunchtime, with Carol, but she didn’t remember that you had to boil the water and she just used hot water from the tap. Nothing happened, though Alma had promised that a salt tree would form on the thread they hung down into the water, suspending it from a spoon laid crossways on the top of the glass.

“It takes time,” Alma said. “It’ll be here when you come home,” and Carol went trustingly back to school, while Alma tried to figure out what she’d done wrong.

This experiment thing is new. Alma isn’t sure where Carol picked it up. Surely not from school: she’s only in grade two. But they’re doing everything younger and younger. It upsets Alma to see them trying on her high heels and putting lipstick on their little mouths, even though she knows it’s just a game. They wiggle their hips, imitating something they’ve seen on television. Maybe the experiments come from television too.

Alma has racked her brains, as she always does when Carol expresses interest in anything, searching for information she ought to possess but usually doesn’t. These days, Alma encourages anything that will involve the two of them in an activity that will block out questions about the way they’re living; about the whereabouts of Mort, for instance. She’s tried trips to the zoo, sewing dolls’ dresses, movies on Saturdays. They all work, but only for a short time.

When the experiments came up, she remembered about putting vinegar into baking soda, to make it fizz; that was a success. Then other things started coming back to her. Now she can recall having been given a small chemistry set as a child, at the age of ten or so it must have been, by her father, who had theories in advance of his time. He thought girls should be brought up more like boys, possibly because he had no sons: Alma is an only child. Also he wanted her to do better than he himself had done. He had a job beneath his capabilities, in the post office, and he felt thwarted by that. He didn’t want Alma to feel thwarted: that was how he’d attempted to warn Alma away from an early marriage, from leaving university to put Mort through architectural school by working as a secretary for a food-packaging company. “You’ll wake up one day and you’ll feel thwarted,” he told her. Alma sometimes wonders whether this word describes what she feels, but usually decides that it doesn’t.

Long before that period, though, he’d tried to interest Alma in chess and mathematics and stamp collecting, among other things. Not much of this rubbed off on Alma, at least not to her knowledge; at the predictable age she became disappointingly obsessed with make-up and clothes, and her algebra marks took a downturn. But she does retain a clear image of the chemistry set, with its miniature test tubes and the wire holder for them, the candle for heating them, and the tiny corked bottles, so appealingly like doll’s-house glassware, with the mysterious substances in them: crystals, powders, solutions, potions. Some of these things had undoubtedly been poisonous; probably you could not buy such chemistry sets for children now. Alma is glad not to have missed out on it, because it was alchemy, after all, and that was how the instruction book presented it: magic.
Astonish your friends. Turn water to milk. Turn water to blood
. She remembers terminology, too, though the meanings have grown hazy with time.
Precipitate. Sublimation
.

There was a section on how to do tricks with ordinary household objects, such as how to make a hard-boiled egg go into a milk bottle, back in the days when there were milk bottles. (Alma thinks about them and sees the cream floating on the top, tastes the cardboard tops she used to beg to be allowed to lick off, smells the horse droppings from the wagons: she’s getting old.) How to turn milk sour in an instant. How to make invisible writing with lemon juice. How to stop cut apples from turning brown. It’s from this part of the instruction book (the best section, because who could resist the thought of mysterious powers hidden in the ordinary things around you?) that she’s called back the supersaturated solution and the thread:
How to make a magical salt garden
. It was one of her favourites.

Alma’s mother had complained about the way Alma was using up the salt, but her father said it was a cheap price to pay for the development of Alma’s scientific curiosity. He thought Alma was learning about the spaces between molecules, but it was no such thing, as Alma and her mother both silently knew. Her mother was Irish, in dark contrast to her father’s clipped and cheerfully bitter Englishness; she read tea-leaves for the neighbour women, which only they regarded as a harmless amusement. Maybe it’s from her that Alma has inherited her bad days, her stretches of fatalism. Her mother didn’t agree with her father’s theories about Alma, and emptied out her experiments whenever possible. For her mother, Alma’s fiddling in the kitchen was merely an excuse to avoid work, but Alma wasn’t thinking even of that. She just liked the snowfall in miniature, the enclosed, protected world in the glass, the crystals forming on the thread, like the pictures of the Snow Queen’s palace in the Hans Christian Andersen book at school. She can’t remember ever having astonished any of her friends with tricks from the instruction book. Astonishing herself was enough.

The water in the pot is boiling again; it’s still clear. Alma adds more salt, stirs while it dissolves, adds more. When salt gathers at the bottom of the pot, swirling instead of vanishing, she turns off the heat. She puts another spoon into the glass before pouring the hot water into it: otherwise the glass might break. She knows about this from having broken several of her mother’s drinking glasses in this way.

She picks up the spoon with the thread tied to it and begins to lower the thread into the glass. While she is doing this, there is a sudden white flash, and the kitchen is blotted out with light. Her hand goes blank, then appears before her again, black, like an afterimage on the retina. The outline of the window remains, framing her hand, which is still suspended above the glass. Then the window itself crumples inward, in fragments, like the candy-crystal of a shatter-proof windshield. The wall will be next, curving in towards her like the side of an inflating balloon. In an instant Alma will realize that the enormous sound has come and gone and burst her eardrums so that she is deaf, and then a wind will blow her away.

Alma closes her eyes. She can go on with this, or she can try to stop, hold herself upright, get the kitchen back. This isn’t an unfamiliar experience. It’s happened to her now on the average of once a week, for three months or more; but though she can predict the frequency she never knows when. It can be at any moment, when she’s run the bathtub full of water and is about to step in, when she’s sliding her arms into the sleeves of her coat, when she’s making love, with Mort or Theo, it could be either of them and it has been. It’s always when she’s thinking about something else.

It isn’t speculation: it’s more like a hallucination. She’s never had hallucinations before, except a long time ago when she was a student and dropped acid a couple of times. Everyone was doing it then, and she hadn’t taken much. There had been moving lights and geometric patterns, which she’d watched in a detached way. Afterwards she’d wondered what all the talk about cosmic profundity had been about, though she hadn’t wanted to say anything. People were very competitive about the meaningfulness of their drug trips in those days.

But none of it had been like this. It’s occurred to her that maybe these things are acid flashes, though why should she be getting them now, fifteen years later, with none in between? At first she was so badly frightened that she’d considered going to see someone about it: a doctor, a psychiatrist. Maybe she’s borderline epileptic. Maybe she’s becoming schizophrenic or otherwise going mad. But there don’t seem to be any other symptoms: just the flash and the sound, and being blown through the air, and the moment when she hits and falls into darkness.

The first time, she ended up lying on the floor. She’d been with Mort then, having dinner in a restaurant, during one of their interminable conversations about how things could be arranged better. Mort loves the word
arrange
, which is not one of Alma’s favourites. Alma is a romantic: if you love someone, what needs arranging? And if you don’t, why put in the effort? Mort, on the other hand, has been reading books about Japan; also he thinks they should draw up a marriage contract. On that occasion, Alma pointed out that they were already married. She wasn’t sure where Japan fitted in: if he wanted her to scrub his back, that was all right, but she didn’t want to be Wife Number One, not if it implied a lot of other numbers, either in sequence or simultaneously.

Mort has a girl friend, or that’s how Alma refers to her. Terminology is becoming difficult these days:
mistress
is no longer suitable, conjuring up as it does peach-coloured negligées trimmed in fur, and mules, which nobody wears any more; nobody, that is, like Mort’s girl friend, who is a squarely built young woman with a blunt-cut pageboy and freckles. And
lover
doesn’t seem to go with the emotions Mort appears to feel towards this woman, whose name is Fran. Fran isn’t the name of a mistress or a lover; more of a wife, but Alma is the wife. Maybe it’s the name that’s confusing Mort. Maybe that’s why he feels, not passion or tenderness or devotion towards this woman, but a mixture of anxiety, guilt, and resentment, or this is what he tells Alma. He sneaks out on Fran to see Alma and calls Alma from telephone booths, and Fran doesn’t know about it, which is the reverse of the way things used to be. Alma feels sorry for Fran, which is probably a defence.

It’s not Fran that Alma objects to, as such. It’s the rationalization of Fran. It’s Mort proclaiming that there’s a justifiable and even moral reason for doing what he does, that it falls into subsections, that men are polygamous by nature and so forth. That’s what Alma can’t stand. She herself does what she does because it’s what she does, but she doesn’t preach about it.

The dinner was more difficult for Alma than she’d anticipated, and because of this she had an extra drink. She stood up to go to the bathroom, and then it happened. She came to covered with wine and part of the tablecloth. Mort told her she’d fainted. He didn’t say so, but she knew he put it down to hysteria, brought on by her problems with him, which to this day neither of them has precisely defined but which he thinks of as her problems, not his. She also knew that he thought she did it on purpose, to draw attention to herself, to collect sympathy and concern from him, to get him to listen to her. He was irritated. “If you were feeling dizzy,” he said, “you should have gone outside.”

Theo, on the other hand, was flattered when she passed out in his arms. He put it down to an excess of sexual passion, brought on by his technique, although again he didn’t say so. He was quite pleased with her, and rubbed her hands and brought her a glass of water.

Theo is Alma’s lover: no doubt about the terminology there. She met him at a party. He introduced himself by asking if she’d like another drink. (Mort, on the other hand, introduced himself by asking if she knew that if you cut the whiskers off cats they would no longer be able to walk along fences, which should have been a warning of some kind to Alma, but was not.) She was in a tangle with Mort, and Theo appeared to be in a similar sort of tangle with his wife, so they seemed to each other comparatively simple. That was before they had begun to accumulate history, and before Theo had moved out of his house. At that time they had been clutchers, specialists in hallways and vestibules, kissing among the hung-up coats and the rows of puddling rubbers.

Theo is a dentist, though not Alma’s dentist. If he were her dentist, Alma doubts that she ever would have ended up having what she still doesn’t think of as an affair with him. She feels that the inside of her mouth, and especially the insides of her teeth, are intimate in an anti-sexual way; surely a man would be put off by such evidences of bodily imperfection, of rot. (Alma doesn’t have bad teeth; still, even a look inside with that little mirror, even the terminology,
orifice, cavity, mandible, molar.…)

Dentistry, for Theo, is hardly a vocation. He hadn’t felt called by teeth; he’s told her he picked dentistry because he didn’t know what else to do; he had good fine-motor coordination, and it was a living, to put it mildly.

“You could have been a gigolo,” Alma said to him on that occasion. “You would have got extra in tips.” Theo, who does not have a rambunctious sense of humour and is fastidious about clean underwear, was on the verge of being shocked, which Alma enjoyed. She likes making him feel more sexual than he is, which in turn makes him more sexual. She indulges him.

So, when she found herself lying on Theo’s broadloom, with Theo bending over her, gratified and solicitous, saying, “Sorry, was I too rough?” she did nothing to correct his impression.

“It was like a nuclear explosion,” she said, and he thought she was using a simile. Theo and Mort have one thing in common: they’ve both elected themselves as the cause of these little manifestations of hers. That, or female body chemistry: another good reason why women shouldn’t be allowed to be airplane pilots, a sentiment Alma once caught Theo expressing.