Happiness of Fish (11 page)

Fragment: Ancestral Voices

In spring, in the city in Ontario where he grew up, George's family joined the flow towards the river. They joined the clumps of twos and threes and the giggling, officious tribes that went to watch the swollen river. They went to see the ice break up. They went for the annual morality play of the river flooding the house-of-cards shacks where people had camped on the edge of the wartime boom and stayed
.

In the prissy '50s, the shack dwellers seemed shabby, tattered and hung-over for whole seasons. However, in the summer when the ice was gone, they jumped triumphantly off bridges and ramshackle docks. They yelled defiance, with green Liberty torches of foam-trailing beer bottles in their hands. Their summer-night ferocity made their spring inundations seem a small price to pay
.

In the spring melt, the shabby-heroic cabins occupied a perilous no-man's land between the gnashing ice teeth of the river and the road where the water lapped complacently, halfway across one lane. Here and there, front and back doors were left wide open to let the water flow through
.

A five-year-old George walked in incongruous new galoshes beside his father, sidewalk superintendents of the flood. Years later he wonders why galoshes should have been new in the spring. He decides it was because they were on sale at winter's end
.

In summer, George and his family roamed the woods and dusty back lanes where the grass grew between the ruts. They commented on the wildflowers, the dust, and the frog chorus backstage in the marshes. They timed the long electric-razor swan song of the cicadas, telling them summer was almost over. In fall, they trekked into the hills to the north of their city to oversee the colour changes. George feels that he can remember them dragooning the blushing, self-bonsai-ed sumacs into ragged lines along the ridges. He dreams they held tuning forks aloft to trigger the sky-slide of golden poplar leaves in crisp afternoons where the frost still defied the sun under the trees

Occasionally George's four maiden aunts would travel considerable distances to babysit nature somewhere else. They drove, with plaid car rugs in a 1952 Chev, to discipline the tides of Maine and the autumn hillsides of Vermont. On liners, and later in airplanes, they journeyed to supervise the white cliffs of Dover, the Alps and at least one coral island. They tried Florida once, but gave up on it. You only got palms and sand organized when hurricanes blew them away, and there didn't seem to be any proper progression of seasons. The aunts were devoutly deciduous. They also said the fruit was overrated
.

“I'd have given my eyeteeth for a nice Mac apple,” one said, dismissing Florida for all time
.

It's not just by the ocean or on the fall hills that George remembers the magic proprietorship of the aunts. Aunt Louise looms largest, as she did in the flesh. She comes to him sometimes at the mall. Aunt Louise taught him about artefacts. She was the family keeper of photos, pressed flowers and old dance cards. Shrunken heads and scalps would have been her department too, if they'd had any
.

A sign on the booths near the food court seems to bark. “Photos! Four poses! Three minutes! Two dollars!” Next to it, another sign offers full colour in four-and-a-half minutes for just a dollar more. The curtains on the photo booths are cut short so you can't pop in and run off porn-to-go unless you can levitate or Yogic-fly above the hem of the short
curtain. Either that or you don't mind having your oeuvre, your style and your anatomy critiqued by the coffee drinkers in the food court
.

Years ago, he went with Aunt Louise to the photo booth at the old railway station in his hometown. The pictures are much more expensive now than they used to be. He seems to remember them being a quarter, although you only got one picture. That picture came out of a slot, newborn-wet with vinegar-smelling chemical, in a little chromium frame. When the cardboard backing dried, you pried out a prop-piece to stand your portrait up, or a cardboard loop to hang it. The picture was supposed to be art. Today's pictures are more utilitarian. They come in strips and can be cut up to put on licences and ID's or mailed to friends or stuck on the washroom wall
.

Next to the photo booth of fifty years ago stood a machine like a one-arm bandit. It had the alphabet and the numbers, zero to nine around its face. It had a pointer like a single clock hand and the bandit lever on one side. If you put in money and moved the pointer around, you could print letters on a metal disk, pierced with a star-shaped cut-out and stamped with a four-leaf clover and a crown. You could identify your luggage and purchase good luck for a quarter
.

George believed the machine actually transformed the quarter. He didn't think of it paying for the disk. He thought of it being widened, pierced, and engraved as a sort of free magic service. The silver of the quarter returned to you in the talisman
.

It's been fifty years since Aunt Louise and George made a talisman or had a picture clink down into the slot of the photo booth. The impossible-to-understand station loudspeakers intoned echoingly over their heads. George was about six, tagging along with the big woman in the tweed coat with the brooch of painted leather oak leaves and trillium that felt the way dried mushrooms feel now. Aunt Louise understood magic and history. She saw the sense of crossing the gypsy's palm with silver. She provided the money. History was frozen for a quarter while you waited and the loudspeakers made liturgical announcements about arrivals and departures. Their voices were underwater Latin in the big, echoing, Victorian temple of a railway station. They sounded like history: “Ancestral voices prophesying...trains.”

When Gerry cleaned out the family home he found an old railway station picture. The photo had turned almost khaki with chemical discolouration. His face was very low down in the khaki picture. The spinning swivel seat did not go high enough to bring his six-year-old face to the frame. His mother also gave him a metal baggage tag.

Why had she saved something like a gaudy aluminium washer for forty years?

Why does Gerry have it in his wallet as he sits in the Honda and watches the wind buffet the garbage container, high above the sea?

Gerry has never been quite able to figure out what sort of dynamic exists between his present wife Vivian and his former wife Patricia. From time to time Patricia seems to surface between them like an uncharted, derelict wreck, drifting through their day-to-day sea lanes. Most often, she breaks the surface when they are arguing, as they are on this early Sunday morning. They have just come home from a Valentine's party that Gerry found dull and endless. It was thrown by a woman Vivian works with. At some point in the evening, there had been nearly two hours of charades.

“We're a wild bunch, aren't we?” a lacquered-looking woman asked Gerry as they sat in a furnished basement watching a fat man in his sixties in a sweatshirt with a picture of a timber wolf on it. He was trying to act out the phrase “positive Pap smear result.” His hands fluttered vaguely between his crotch and his mouth.

Gerry looked at the woman to see if she was being sarcastic. She had an uncommunicative face. Possibly she couldn't move it for fear of cracking.

“Aren't we just a wild bunch?” he said. “I dare say the orgy will start
right after our friend there has a stroke and we all get through yelling ‘tits' and giggling.”

He said it with more brightness than he felt, but apparently not enough. It wasn't the right answer. She immediately suspected he wasn't a good sport.

“He's quiet,” she said, turning to Vivian and speaking in front of him. It was as if Gerry were unconscious and “quiet” were a fatal medical condition. She was the long-suffering nurse, breaking the bad news.

Patricia looms between them as they bicker in the car going home.

“I suppose you liked all
her
friends,” Vivian snaps. Gerry has just observed that hell is probably endless charades with the same herd of self-satisfied people.

“She had the honesty to admit that some of them weren't everybody's idea of an exciting evening,” he tosses back.

“You should have stayed together,” Vivian sniffs. “You're always thinking about her.”

At home, she pours herself a stiff nightcap but drinks only half of it before she goes to bed in silence. Gerry is left to contemplate what she said.

Patricia and her new husband, Brian, moved back to town some years ago. Brian teaches in the university's faculty of education. They have twins with the everything-old-is-new-again names of Charles and Charlotte. The twins were born a year after Patricia and Brian got married, a year and a half after she and Gerry broke up. They were in Winnipeg at the time. Brian was on some kind of academic exchange. In the world series of breeding, Patricia had slid home, just out of reach of her biological clock.

“Fertility drugs, probably,” Vivian muttered.

However they were conceived, the twins are nearly eighteen now and tower over their parents. Gerry and Vivian have run into them with Patricia and Brian at the mall. Charles looks at him with well-bred, dumb distaste. It's as if he feels that Gerry had ignored a “reserved” sign stuck on his mother. Charlotte is friendlier and more curious. She seems to be weighing him up, wondering about the decisions her mother made. For Gerry to exist, neither her mother nor her father can be as
straightforward and uncomplicated as they appear. Perhaps she's storing Gerry up for some future argument on choices, mistakes or fidelity.

Gerry would have to admit that he was interested to see Patricia when she first re-appeared, but he's sure there was no real stirring of desire.

“You had to feel something,” Vivian insisted at the time. She still does, occasionally, when they're bickering.

Actually, there was less of a pang than a deeply personal curiosity. He compares it to a kid with his tonsils in a bottle of formaldehyde, or a baby tooth in his pocket. It was morbidly fascinating to see someone you had been attached to floating free and untouchable in the pickle of a new existence. It's intriguing to find that old tooth feels alien if you slip it back into your mouth. It can't be made to fit the healed gap where something else is pushing in.

Gerry sits at the computer and pushes his characters, George and Paula, around the stage of his marriage to Patricia. Actually, he just pushes George around. Paula is off-stage and George is acting out Gerry's old indiscretions.

Fragment: Jane Doe

In the mid '70s, they had lived for a summer and fall in another city. George had got a job writing features for a plump and prosperous little weekly paper. Paula was away, finishing a summer course and going on to visit her mother and sisters in Toronto
.

George met the woman in a bar where not-very-successful journalists and business people hung out together. The mixture made the business people feel raffish. It gave the journalists the opportunity to cadge drinks. It was a Friday afternoon, Happy Hour, and her name was Jane
.

Jane was older than George, close to forty. She was divorced and normally hung out with an architect. George had even interviewed him once about something or other. He and Paula had met Jane and the architect in this bar as couples, but on this night, they were both alone
.

It was early summer and they drank gin and tonics and sang around a piano with an aluminium top to put drinks on. Talking about
drinks, they got onto quinine in tonic and tonic in India and curry
.

“I make a very respectable beef vindaloo,” George said. “I can do goat too, but it's hard to get goat.”

“Show me,” Jane had said and they left the bar and went hand-in-hand into a warm early evening. She giggled as they got into her car in a parking lot
.

“What?” George asked
.

“I was thinking about goats playing hard-to-get,” she said. She kissed him in the car the same way she drank gin, a long, determined draught of him, eyes open, appraising
.

They stopped at a downtown grocery store and a liquor store on their way to his apartment
.

“My daughter's at my place. She's seventeen,” she said. “I was twenty when she was born.”

She tossed this out, letting him do the math, perhaps as a last warning, a token attempt to see if he would back off
.

George had the wit not to remark that he was twenty-seven. He was ten years older than her daughter, ten years younger than she was
.

At his apartment, they were clumsy with bags of meat, rice and spices, a bottle of gin and tins of tonic. They felt they had to buy everything new. They played at unpacking their purchases together. They got in each other's way in the kitchen and by the time the curry was simmering they were leaned against the sink, necking, his knee forward and clutched between her thighs
.

“This isn't going to happen often,” Jane said as they fell apart briefly, like near-sighted fighters, refocusing on each other before they tangled again. “We're both other people, real people. This is just because we're pals tonight.”

George felt himself soar in the freedom that implied. He wanted to just be her pal. They made it as far as the dubious oriental carpet that Paula had found at a second-hand store. By then they had eroded each other's clothes away. They fitted themselves into each other, a deck of flesh cards being shuffled. A tin mobile George had made from old cans hung over them. The balcony doors were open and the asphalt breath of the summer street made the tin clink weakly
.

George remembered Jane now, as feeling fragile under a mushroom-soft skin. She felt like a bird or a Siamese cat, intimately woven to her own anatomy, with a small-animal heat and rapidity of pulse or teeth. Her coming cry was like the distant scream of a hurt rabbit, unreal, inconceivable until you heard it
.