Luck (16 page)

Nora can’t see putting out only her own laundry for Sophie to do. They’re in a new balance now.

What a mess
of stuff
, his possessions all over the floor and the bed. The ties, shirts, sweaters and some of the underwear she gathers up in her arms and staggers off down the hall. In her studio there are many overflowing baskets for potentially useful spare materials, scraps.

Too sudden? Of course. Maybe. Who’s to say?

In the studio what is already piled up and scattered—paints, brushes, embroidery threads, needles and glues, beads in jars and beads that have rolled into corners, heaps of displaced and unsorted fabrics, easels here, canvases there—looks chaotic. Disorder easily becomes the normal state of a large room belonging to only one person. This is the one space in the house that is Nora’s.

Except, she guesses, the whole house is hers now.

Is there a way to capture vacancy? To depict desolation?

It’s not so much the literal content of a sketch or a painting that’s important, as intention and style. Anyone can do thunder and lightning, shock, disaster, despair. It’s the selection of materials, the relationship of one thing to another, the singular eye, Nora’s particular interpretation and touch, not anyone else’s, that make all the difference.

So she picks up a sketchpad and pencil, and tosses a few shirts on the floor, and the ties, and begins—because this is all she can think of to do—tracing fast and slowly, carelessly and intently, lightly or with precise, concentrated detail, page after page, for quite a long time, the lines and wrinkles and discarded shapes of his absence.

T
he outdoors is a foreign country to Beth. The light seems to her either garish or contrastingly dull and diffuse, and in either case damaging to people like her, with their lives in their skins. The air is unpredictable and unfamiliar as well, causing her to sniff warily, trying to distinguish harmless from hostile like a small, tender animal. What is unknown is unnerving, and Beth has never in her whole life been familiar with the world beyond walls and doors. Even when she was a child, occasions to frolic in the open air did not much arise. So it’s not surprising if stepping outside now, all by herself, causes her heart to leap a few times in anxious distress.

It’s been fine living here, staying in, letting Nora bend and display her at will, turning her, in a way, into someone else altogether. Beth doesn’t need to know if the town is a good or a bad place, and doesn’t especially care except for how upset people got, upsetting Nora, and then a few times Beth herself was scared by raised, angry voices. But mostly Sophie takes care of daily necessities, and Nora and Philip have been in charge, and even in the bad times Beth was able to stay—Nora told her to stay—pretty much to herself, out of sight.

This will now end. But—here’s another spin on second days—what prospects instead!

At the front gate one turns left to follow the street slightly downhill into town, or one turns right onto what, within steps, becomes a highway into the country. Sophie would have gone left at the front gate, towards the funeral home, carrying the blue gym bag with Philip’s clothes. Beth, then, will turn right. She is restless in ways beyond the reaches of teas. Mainly, though, she’s stepping out in order to keep speechless; because who knows what would come out of her mouth if she started talking? To Nora, she means.

Besides, the loud slam of Nora’s bedroom door made it perfectly clear she prefers being alone. That’s all right. Except it means that for once being inside is too weird; really quiet, and lonesome. The thing about living with three other people is that usually a person’s only alone if she wants to be, and there’s almost always some rustle or step or voice that says at least somebody’s around. It’s not that Beth misses Philip, not at all, but she does find herself missing the way the house worked inside itself, and sounded, and smelled, up until yesterday morning.

The highway is fairly busy, a two-lane route much used by trucks, so to be safe Beth has to walk as far as possible off it, on gravel or in the long grass between the gravel part and the slope to the ditch alongside. Everything’s kind of shrunk in the heat. What were probably bright orange wild lilies a couple of weeks ago are now bald, brittle stalks. The ditch is empty of water. She must take care not to go so far she can’t comfortably get back. Thin sandals aren’t exactly good walking shoes. Transports roar past, reminding her fleetingly of her father, who repaired such trucks for a living. One, a silvery tanker, announces on its side that its rounded, steely belly
holds milk. Another, its separate compartments open to the air, is taking chickens someplace. That’s sad, all those birds crammed together, off on a trip, no choice in the matter and no good ending to their journey either.

Cars aren’t so bad, but these occasional trucks whip up the flimsy, fly-away skirt of her dress, green today with tiny white dots but in the same style, as are most of her dresses, as yesterday’s fluttery calf-length pewtery one. She wishes for a hat: one of those broad-brimmed kinds you see in movies, English movies, ladies strolling or gardening, sheltering their skin. Beth feels exposed and vulnerable to drying up, like the ditch, or the lilies.

If Nora gets pictures in her head, so does Beth.
Impulse control:
such a dry term, as if its very dullness has an effect. And maybe it does. “Take a hundred deep breaths,” they used to tell her. “Count and concentrate.” There are lots and lots of ways to practise. Counting a hundred breaths is one, because by the time you’ve done that the urgency of the impulse, if not always the current desire itself, should have vanished. Beth is pleased to have thought up for herself the idea of coming out here, removing herself from temptation altogether. Not to mention escaping that atmosphere that feels darker today, and lower, and sort of airless as well.

Now Beth sees that besides counting breaths for calm and restraint, it’s also possible to concentrate on her feet and their surroundings: the grasses and tiny white and yellow sticking-up flowers and little purplish ground-crawling ones. A good number of wild plants—burdock, dandelion, chickweed—are harvestable for teas. They heal or hearten, cure or calm, oh, there are all sorts of ways to use ingredients fresh from the ground, and if Beth had brought her new encyclopedia of useful plants and herbs with her, she could have sat by the
roadside and made a study of what’s probably right here at hand. She has never done this and now it may be too late. What she knows about the effects and components of teas comes from books, with their descriptions and recipes, their photographs and drawings of particular plants, good for this, useful for that. This is how she has learned that some teas require flowers, some roots, others leaves, and that some ingredients are supposed to be boiled down to essences while others must be hung up to dry.

It’s all really complicated, page after page and book after book of variations and consequences. Not easy, learning all that, but she had, as far as she knew then, all the time in the world, and if it turned out she didn’t have quite that much, still there were several years with little else to do except listen to sad voices or angry ones, and hear a good deal about
impulse control
, and try to tune everything out with nicer words like
infusion.

Out here, though, it becomes obvious that even so much study, and all those drawings and instructions, are vastly different from being in the midst of the actual greenery, which is more mixed up and untidier than it is on a page. How did people ever figure out what was safe and what wasn’t? Never mind what should be boiled and what must be dried? It had to be trial and error. Error would be terrible, but maybe back in those days individual lives weren’t so important and nobody especially cared.

Beth has been thinking recently about asking for some space of her own, maybe a corner of the kitchen or of Nora’s glassy studio, to grow some of her own herbs. Just a little garden of pots, nothing grand or wild. She was thinking this should be her next step just because real experts don’t do what she does, which is mail-order for ingredients and when they arrive, store
them in jars in the fridge and in a row at the back of the kitchen counter. Now any kind of herb garden anyplace is most likely out of the question. A missed opportunity? A matter for regret? Hard to say. Everything’s going to be different.

It already is different. Look where she is, walking in the air and light of the countryside, all by herself!

Sophie wouldn’t have been nice anyway about Beth using the kitchen to grow stuff, or about her bringing in armloads of things like burdock for cooking or drying. Sophie is sarcastic enough already about the teas Beth makes with the ingredients from her tidy jars. To tell the truth, Nora’s not always kind either, but Nora’s an artist and gets to have big unpredictable moods. Because whether they’re good moods or bad ones, she makes something with them, they don’t go to waste; kind of like Beth studying teas: making something out of large events, and fortunately, like Nora, something good. Beth perceives troubles and ailments and honestly does the best she can to alleviate them, if not always cure.

Sophie, on the other hand, has no excuse. She’s just a servant, like a hotel maid, and so what if she’s seen things other people have not? She’ll go on about the homeless and landless and stateless and hungry and brutalized and what they’re owed by everyone else as if all that isn’t just luck, like getting a good judge or a bad judge at a pageant. Good luck, bad luck. Karma, even, who’s to say the homeless and landless and stateless and hungry and brutalized didn’t earn their disasters in previous lives? You never know, is what Beth thinks. Sophie seems to believe she’s entitled to look down her nose at a lot of people, but especially Beth just because Beth is beautiful, even though Sophie herself most likely isn’t a truly good person either. With Philip, for instance. That wasn’t good, if it’s true.

Beth could shut Sophie up in a sentence if she wanted to. That’s a nice, secret kind of power to have, the kind that comes from silence, and not correcting wrong impressions. Sophie doesn’t know much about Beth. Neither does anyone else. Could Beth tell even Nora? No, the most wonderful person in the world would have to be inside every minute, each smell, word and sound, to know. Beth can’t even properly explain to herself, but she doesn’t have to. Doesn’t care to. “What’s done is done,” her mother used to say if Beth failed to come first, second or even third, “We’ll do better next time.”
What’s done is done
is a good motto in some situations.

The mothers always drank tea, plus coffee and wine, depending. The girls mainly drank bottled water, although sometimes unsweetened juices. Mothers could eat what they wanted, but not the girls.

Later, when the time came when plates were full and Beth could eat as much as she felt like, the food was unappealing, and she wasn’t hungry. She hasn’t been hungry for years, really. So her sense-memories aren’t tastes, they’re smells and sounds, sweetish and sticky: hairsprays and colognes and perfumes and powders and skin creams, voices rising high with tension, soft and sugary with praise and encouragement. “You were great,” girls, Beth included, told each other. And, “I love you in that dress,” and, “Oh, I wish I could wear that colour,” and so on. Friendships, maybe they were friendships, could be passionately real in their way, if sometimes brief, and girls did a lot of fun things together, like playing Hearts and Crazy Eights and euchre while they waited for this and that, and telling each other’s fortunes with Tarot decks and by examining palms. But everyone knew what the point was, which was winning not just tiaras or sashes or even big cheques, but a long, slim, creamy leg up on the future.

Such hopes, such dreams, such possibilities! Others might aim, or say they aimed, to be physicists, teachers, doctors or diplomats. “You,” said Beth’s mother, “you have your special beauty. More special than anyone’s.”

A person can look and look into mirrors and see their own individual features, but it’s still hard to detect a whole magic effect.

Beth remembers light, too: its sudden and radical shifts. There was the sharp glare of dressing rooms, for fixing or camouflaging last-minute flaws, a loosened strap, hinted zit; then the blackened spaces behind curtains, all anxious whispers and jitterings in the dark; and finally the blinding radiance of the stage, the stroll, the turn, the jut, the easy, brilliant smile. Also, out on the road, the darkness of highways between cities at night, broken by endless white lines and an occasional river of headlights; departures at dawn, sudden sun rearing up into the eyes. Driving into the light, leaving light behind.

Between these extremities, accidental days and weeks of grey: regular life, Beth supposed, for those not like herself. There were weeks when she woke and went to sleep in her own bed in her own little pink-painted room, heading off to school in the mornings. How did the other girls in the pageants and contests find the time and information to come up with desires like
physicist, doctor, diplomat?
But maybe those were as false as Beth’s aim to carry music to the world’s children. She dropped in and out of school to the tune of more essential demands, inaudible to anyone but herself and her mother. “Beth has a larger destiny,” her mother told irritable or maybe worried teachers. “She does her lessons while we’re away, doesn’t she? Can she read? Can she write? Can she do arithmetic?” Yes, she could. “Then what’s the problem?”

If Beth wasn’t always in class long enough to study a novel or a play right to the end, she could still finish reading it if she wanted to, or if she needed to turn out some kind of paper for her long-distance homework. If the idea of algebra’s unknown X was intriguing, there’d be time when she was old, maybe thirty, to look into its qualities, if she still cared. For the moment, her mother said, “Take advantage of what you have while you have it. I wish I’d realized that.”

Beth wouldn’t want to be bitter later on, angry about lost opportunities.

Now she hears,
while you have it.
That must have passed her by at the time.