February (25 page)

Steam had risen up thick and torn apart, and there was the stink of sulphur that you could forget for a moment before the breeze brought it back twice as strong.

Anthropology, Jane said.

He said, remind me.

The study of humanity, Jane said. Ritual, symbolism, magico-religious practices, class, genre, kinship, taboo. The way we move and talk, she said. What we eat and drink and dream and what we do with our shit. How we fuck and raise the children. All that.

It’s Jane, she had said on the phone. As if he would remember.

You’ve lost someone in the past, the psychic says. Then she grabs John’s hand. Her fingernails are digging into his wrist, hard enough to break the skin. It’s as if she’s having a mini-seizure. Her eyes have rolled back in her head and the eyelids quiver. The whites of her eyes. It lasts maybe twenty seconds. Then the muscles in her face go slack. John sees a bit of drool in the corner of her mouth. Her pupils are dilated.

The psychic presses her thumb and fingers against her eyes and bows her head. When she finally looks up, she is disoriented. Or you are going to lose someone in the future, she says.

She sees that she is holding John’s wrist, and drops it.

. . . . .

Wedding Dresses, November 2008

HELEN HAS A
commission to be completed by the new year. Each dress is one of a kind. They are simple and flattering dresses. Her clientele are mostly in their late forties or fifties and they do not want virginal and they do not want foolish. Nor do they want the stiff suits they have worn to boardrooms for the past twenty years. Her clientele are radiologists or engineers or surgeons, or they are at the university.

Lace scares the hell out of them. Lace or anything soft, it makes them feel young again and pretty. This is a tremendous risk. They would have to remember they were giving in to love; they would have to lay down their scalpels and gavels and chain mail.

Weddings have become expensive. The flowers are tropical, waxy, swollen and vaguely anthropomorphic. The videographers are young men who have gone to art school in Montreal or Nova Scotia, young men with longish hair. Helen gets the impression they listen to softer, more lyrical forms of punk. The kind of young men who are always nodding just slightly out of sync with what you’re saying to them. Nodding absently, just before you make your point, like they want you to hurry up with it.

Helen’s clients are mostly friends of friends, and often she goes to the weddings. She has a feeling about the wedding dresses she makes; they are sacred. They matter to Helen. Not the prom dresses, although she loves the emeralds and magentas and reds and cobalts that came in this year. The prom dresses are all cleavage and puffed skirts. The prom dresses are boisterous, innocent and sluttish in equal parts, almost ironic.

But the wedding dresses matter. Every stitch. Off-white or coral or pearl grey, nothing shiny, dresses that move and are comfortable to wear and durably built, covering more than they expose.

Today as Helen sews in the kitchen, Barry is working on the floor in the living room. For a while in the beginning she had offered Barry whatever she was having for lunch but he said he didn’t like to stop.

I don’t eat until I’m done for the day, he had said.

Barry had an ethic about working until the job was done. He liked the idea of toughing it out during the lunch hour.

I’m stubborn, he’d said.

He presses a line of caulking into a crack in the door frame and he smoothes it down with his thumb. She sits at her sewing machine and watches his thumb move over the crack. Someone calls him on his cellphone, she thinks, who needs a ride. Someone feels free to demand of him, to ask. It must be a lover or a wife.

She watches Barry’s thumb press the caulking into the crack and she thinks again the thing every adult woman thinks of herself—that she is still her sixteen-year-old self.

It is not a thought. Helen becomes sixteen; she
is
sixteen: the shyness and wonder. It comes over her briefly. And then it is gone. She is forty-nine, fifty, she is fifty-two. Fifty-six. The world has betrayed her, arthritis in her wrists.

How deeply she craves to be touched. Because what follows not being touched, Helen has discovered, is more of the same—not being touched. And what follows a lack of touching is the dirtiest secret of all, the most profane: forgetting to want it.

You forget, she thinks. You forget so deeply, desire is obliterated. A profound and altering chill befalls.

The only cure is to chant: I want, I want.

She is sixteen and she notices Barry’s worn belt and his jeans bespattered with plaster, and his hair is more silver than grey and there is still some black and it is longish, and he is not speaking. An old hippy. He has already let on that he enjoys the odd draw. He is not a drinker, or he has been a drinker and left it behind. She senses he has left many things behind, and in this way they have something in common.

They are too old for love. It is laughable. For an instant she sees them fucking: grey pubic hair, puckered skin, creaking joints. It is a grotesque comedy, this hunger. She is starving for physical tenderness—the shock of it buckles her knees, there at her sewing machine, and she pauses over her stitch, holding the fabric, the shock of it dizzying her; she is dizzy with lust.

But she and Barry are not too old for carpentry, for making a living, for sewing dresses, for snowstorms and night sweats and threats from the bank and children and crying grandchildren. They are called upon. They are expected to participate. Maybe it should be over but it is not over. It is not over.

And here is the blunt truth of it: Helen would like to sleep with him. She doesn’t care what she looks like (she actually looks not too bad in some lights), she does not care about anything except that she wants to maybe have sex with this man, who is a stranger, who smokes, who answers the phone. And how dangerous, how dangerous: I want, I want.

She and Barry have been together like this in the empty house for weeks. Tim Hortons for coffee mid-morning, and again in the afternoon. Barry doesn’t come up to the second floor; he doesn’t use her bathroom. Helen guesses there is a secret carpenter code about these things: don’t encroach. He smokes on the back deck. And Helen has found herself watching him from the third-floor window. The top of his black and white baseball cap.

She is sewing pleats into a waistband and pricks her finger. Her realization: she has been satisfied just to watch him smoke.

. . . . .

Helen Sunbathing, 2007

THE CHILDREN HAD
bought Helen an airline ticket for Mother’s Day.

Mom, you’ve got to see Europe, Cathy said.

Enough of florida, lulu said.

And so there she was on a beach in Greece with Louise. She watched a young man sailing a catamaran, the belly of the sail almost touching the water, his body leaning out on the other side, leaning, just the bottoms of his feet on the boat, tugging hard on the sail.

Isn’t he too far out, she said to Louise. But Louise was asleep.

There was a fishing boat anchored just beyond the catamaran. The fishing boat bobbed up and down, working vigorously against the slapping waves. Every time the bow rose up a sheet of water fell off the rope that anchored it.

The beach wasn’t crowded but there was a couple a little farther down. A man and a woman, about Helen’s age. They lay side by side, absolutely still.

Finally the man rolled over and reached into his knapsack and pulled out a bottle of water. Helen could hear the plastic bottle dent and crinkle as he drank.

The catamaran slapped down hard and turned, and the sail flew out the other way, and the man ducked fast under the boom.

I just don’t think he has control of that thing, Helen said. But Louise didn’t move.

Then the woman down the beach sat up next to the man and took the bottle of water from him and drank and passed it back. She had short hair dyed a brassy blonde, and the wind blew it off her face and the dark roots showed around her forehead and she squinted into the wind. Her face was darkly tanned. She looked as though she had been on vacation for a long time. Helen watched the catamaran fly towards the beach. It bounced hard on the waves.

The woman had an apple and a paring knife, and she turned the apple and a ribbon of peel flapped in the wind. She cut the apple in half. The man removed his navy baseball cap and smoothed his hand over his head and put the cap back on. The woman handed him half the apple and she ate the other half, leaning forward, squinting into the wind.

And the catamaran hit the beach and skidded up out of the surf, and the man jumped off and trotted beside it and dragged it hard onto the shore.

The couple sitting down the beach from them might have been her and Cal, Helen thought. She and Cal might have turned out that way, not having to speak until the apple was gone, drifting off to sleep on a beach, and waking, one after the other, and then talking, taking up where they had left off hours ago.

The couple had talked and come to some kind of agreement, Helen thought. They had said something about one of their children, or a neighbour back home, or some banking matter or something to do with their car. The wife had finished some story she’d started hours ago, picking up mid-sentence. Then they stood and shook out their towels. The towels snapped noisily. They put everything in their bags and walked off down the beach. The woman stopped and put on one sandal and then the other one, and after a few steps bent and fixed her strap over her heel. The man waited for her.

If Cal were here on the beach with her, Helen thought, he would be thirty-one. He was thirty-one when he died. And she would be as she was now, the skin on her chest wrinkly like old tissue paper, and tanned and freckled with age spots, and the flab of her underarms, and her arthritic hands and the deep lines at the corners of her eyes. Thin etched lines over her mouth.

Helen would feel a profound embarrassment about how old she was and she would marvel at Cal’s beauty.

We have grown apart, she thought. She’d gone on without him. She would have sat next to him and peeled the apple and she would have felt like his mother. The dead are not individuals, she thought. They are all the same. That’s what made it so very hard to stay in love with them. Like men who enter prison and are stripped of their worldly possessions, clothes, jewellery, the dead were stripped of who they were. Nothing ever happened to them, they did not change or grow, but they didn’t stay the same either. They are not the same as they were when they were alive, Helen thought.

The act of being dead, if you could call it an act, made them very hard to love. They’d lost the capacity to surprise. You needed a strong memory to love the dead, and it was not her fault that she was failing. She was trying. But no memory was that strong. This was what she knew now: no memory was that strong.

What are you doing, she said. Louise was taking off her bikini top. Her breasts flopped out white as potatoes, the dark liver-coloured nipples hard as stones.

When will these tits ever see the sun if I don’t do it now, Louise said. She lay back down, nudging her shoulders into the sand under her towel.

The youngsters came, bang, bang, bang, just like that, Helen thought.

Get the diapers out of the way, her mother-in-law had said. Have them all at once. And it was like the snap of a finger. The whole thing was over. At first it had seemed to last forever. Then it was over in a snap.

. . . . .

The Kite, 1977

LET GO, CAL
shouted. Let go, let go. He was out on the lawn with four-year-old John and the child let go of the kite when he was told, and the kite leapt up in the air and cut through the sky, this way and that, over his head. John put his arms over his face.

When the kite met the air it sounded like a sharp intake of breath—surprise or fear or elation. Then the
snap
and ripple of the plastic. The kite sliced the air again, and this time it rose higher, and with another leap, higher, and then it was very high.

Cal yanked the line, flinging his arm behind him. He gave hard little tugs or he yanked with his whole body, bending back as if doing the limbo.

The kite dipped down, and then, out of spite, cut up even higher.

It dipped and rippled.

Cal tied the string to the clothesline and he went around the corner of the house. Helen could hear the
chink
of his shovel hitting stone. For a while the kite line was slack, but then it went straight and the kite was nothing more than a speck. The lawn was big and dew-soaked and sparkle-riven, and there was fireweed swaying in the back of the garden. The seeds floated across the lawn.

Their house in Salmon Cove. Helen has a picture of John from that time. A royal blue T-shirt and red shorts and his blonde ringlets, and the stain from a purple Popsicle on his lips.

Cal had taken the children down to the beach to give Helen some peace. He’d found a plastic Barbie Doll kite stuck between the rocks, torn and faded. It was pink and showed Barbie’s blonde hair and white smile.

Lulu was on Cal’s shoulders, and Cal had John and Cathy in a wooden cart he was pulling, and he had the broken kite in his hand, coming up over the dusty gravel road.

This is the kind of thing Helen remembers, bits of afternoons that sharpen in focus until they are too bright. Just moments. Tatters. How the kids climbed on Cal. Flung themselves. How they clambered over him. He tickled them. Gave them horseback rides. Told stories. He did the airplane. Lying on his back, his legs in the air, their little rib cages resting on his grey wool socks. Soaring.

Cal repaired the kite in the garden with duct tape and John was watching Cal intently and Cal was talking to him all about fixing a kite, aerodynamics, and maybe the strangeness of Barbie and her brilliant, bleak smile.

Helen was in the kitchen window looking at the ocean with the binoculars. She could see Bell Island, a smudged, smoky blue across the bay, a few windows along the coast flashing like mica. Then the loud glitter of the ocean. She thought she could hear whales and she was trying to find them. The binoculars were heavy and smelled new, like the expensive leather case they had been kept in. When she looked through and twisted the wheel in the centre, the fuzzy burrs of light on each wave sharpened, every sparkle hard as a diamond, and after a long time she finally saw the whales. The tail of the mother slapped the water. It was a blue-black tail and shiny, and the water fell off it in a clear sheet, and the whale blew up spray and beside the mother was the baby whale, a small black blur under the skim of water, born a few days before, a fisherman had told them.