Surfacing (10 page)

The next scrapbook was mine. I searched through it carefully, looking for something I could recognize as myself, where I had come from or gone wrong; but there were no drawings at all, just illustrations cut from magazines and pasted in. They were ladies, all kinds: holding up cans of cleanser, knitting, smiling, modelling toeless heels and nylons with dark seams and pillbox hats and veils. A lady was what you dressed up as on Hallowe’en when you couldn’t think of anything else and didn’t want to be a ghost; or it was what you said at school when they asked you what you were going to be when you grew up, you said “A lady” or “A mother,” either one was safe; and it wasn’t a lie, I did want to be those things. On some of the pages were women’s dresses clipped from mail order catalogues, no bodies in them.

I tried another one: mine also, earlier. The drawings were of ornately-decorated Easter eggs, singly and in groups. Some of them had people-shaped rabbits climbing up them on rope ladders; apparently the rabbits lived inside the eggs, there were doors at the tops, they could pull the ladders up after them. Beside the larger eggs were smaller ones connected to them by bridges, the outhouses. Page after page of eggs and rabbits, grass and trees, normal and green, surrounding them, flowers blooming, sun in the upper right-hand corner of each picture, moon symmetrically in the left. All the rabbits were smiling and some were laughing hilariously; several were shown eating ice-cream cones from the safety of their egg-tops. No monsters, no wars, no explosions, no heroism. I couldn’t remember ever having drawn these pictures. I was disappointed in myself: I must have been a hedonistic child, I thought, and quite stodgy also, interested in nothing but social welfare. Or perhaps it was a vision of Heaven.

Behind me someone came into the room, it was David. “Hey lady,” he said, “what’re you doing in my bed? You a customer or something?”

“Sorry,” I said. I put the album back on the shelf but I took the scrapbooks into my room and hid them under the mattress, I didn’t want them spying.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

At night Joe kept turned away from me, he wasn’t going to compromise. I ran my fingers over his furry back to show I wanted a truce, the borders restored to where they’d been, but after he twitched me off and grunted irritably I withdrew. I curled up, concentrating on excluding him: he was merely an object in the bed, like a sack or a large turnip. There’s more than one way to skin a cat, my father used to say; it bothered me, I didn’t see why they would want to skin a cat even one way. I stared at the wall and thought of maxims: two can play that game, marry in haste, repent at leisure, least said soonest mended, traditional wisdom which was never any help.

At breakfast he ignored me and the others too, hunching over his plate, mumbling replies.

“What’s with him?” David said. His new beard was sprouting, a brown smudge on his chin.

“Shut up,” Anna said; but she glanced at me, inquisitive, holding me responsible for it whatever it was.

Joe wiped his sweat shirt sleeve across his mouth and went out of the house, letting the screen door slam behind him.

“Maybe he’s constipated,” David said, “it makes them grouchy. You sure he’s been getting enough exercise?” Then he went “Arf, arf” like Popeye, wiggling his ears.

“Stupid,” Anna said fondly; she rumpled his hair.

“Hey, don’t do that,” he said, “it’ll all fall out.” He jumped up and went to the mirror and rearranged the hair down over his forehead; I hadn’t noticed before that he combed it that way to cover the patches where it had once grown.

I gathered up the bacon rinds and the crusts from the toast and took them out to the bird tray. The jays were there, they saw I had food and told each other about it with hoarse cries. I stood quietly with my hand outstretched but they wouldn’t fly down; they winged overhead, reconnoitring. Perhaps I was moving without knowing it, you had to convince them you were a thing, not an enemy. Our mother made us watch from inside the house, she said we frightened them. Once people believed the flight of birds was a portent: augury.

I heard the mosquito whine of a motor approaching; I left my handful of crumbs on the tray and went out on the point to watch. It was Paul’s boat, white-painted and squarish, handmade; he waved to me from the stern. There was another man with him, sitting in the bow, backwards.

They pulled in to the dock and I ran down the steps to greet them; I caught the rope and tied it. “Careful,” I said as they stepped out, “it’s rotten in places.”

Paul had brought me a huge wad of vegetables from his garden: he handed me a bouquet of swiss chard, a quart basket of green beans, a bundle of carrots, a brain-sized cauliflower, bashfully, as though the gift might not be acceptable. The proper reply would have been an equally large or perhaps larger assortment. I thought with dismay of the spindly broccoli and the radishes already gone to seed.

“Here is a man,” he said. “They send him to me because I know your father.” He stepped backwards, effacing himself, and almost slipped off the dock.

“Malmstrom,” the man said as though it was a secret code; his hand shot towards me. I transferred the swiss chard to the crook of my arm and took the hand, which squeezed mine confidentially. “Bill Malmstrom, please call me Bill.” He had trimmed grey hair and an executive moustache like the shirt ads, the vodka ads; his clothes were woodsy, semi-worn, verging on the authentic. Slung around his neck was a pair of binoculars in a suede case.

We walked to the land; he had taken out a pipe and was lighting it. I wondered if he was from the government. “Paul, here, was telling me,” he said, looking around for Paul, “what a nice place you have.”

“It’s my father’s,” I said.

His face drooped into the appropriate downward curve; if he’d been wearing a hat he would have taken it off. “Ah yes,” he said, “a tragedy.” I distrusted him: I couldn’t place the accent, the name sounded German.

“Where are you from?” I asked, trying to be polite.

“Michigan,” he said as though it was something to be proud of. “I’m a member of the Detroit branch of the Wildlife Protection Association of America; we have a branch in this country, quite a flourishing little branch.” He beamed at me, condescending. “As a matter of fact that’s what I wanted to discuss with you. Our place on Lake Erie is, ah, giving out so to say. I believe I can speak for the rest of the Michigan members in saying we’d be prepared to make you an offer.”

“What for?” I said. He sounded as though he wanted me to buy something, a magazine or a membership.

He swept his pipe in a semi-circle. “This lovely piece of property,” he said. “What we’d use it for would be a kind of retreat lodge, where the members could meditate and observe,” he puffed, “the beauties of Nature. And maybe do a little hunting and fishing.”

“Don’t you want to see it?” I asked. “I mean, the house and all.”

“I must admit that I’ve already seen it; we’ve had our eye on this piece for quite some time. I’ve been coming up here to fish for years, and I’ve taken the liberty, when no one seemed to be here, of having a stroll around.” He gave a small harumph, a voyeur of good social standing caught in the act; then he named a price that meant I could forget about
Quebec Folk Tales
and children’s books and everything else, at least for a while.

“Would you change it?” I asked. I foresaw motels, high-rises.

“Well, we’d have to install a power generator, of course, and a septic tank; but apart from that, no, I expect we’d like to leave it the way it is, it has a definite,” he stroked his moustache, “rural charm.”

“I’m sorry but it’s not for sale,” I said, “not right now; maybe later.” If my father had been dead he might have liked the proposal but as it was he would be furious if he returned and found I’d sold his house. I wasn’t sure I’d be the owner in any case. There must be deeds hidden, property titles, legal papers, I’d never had any dealings with lawyers; I would have to sign forms or charters, I might have to pay death duties.

“Well,” he said with the heartiness of a loser. “I’m sure the offer will still be open. Indefinitely, you might say.” He drew out his wallet and gave me a card:
Bill Malmstrom, Teenie Town
, it said,
Togs for Toddlers ’n Tots.

“Thank you,” I said, “I’ll keep it in mind.”

I took Paul by the arm and led him to the garden, as though to reciprocate for the vegetables: I felt I had to explain, at least to him, he had gone to a lot of trouble for me.

“Your garden, she is not doing so good, ay?” he said, inspecting.

“No,” I said, “we just got it weeded; but I want you to have …” I gazed desperately around, seized on a withered lettuce and presented it to him, roots and all, as gracefully as I could.

He held it, blinking, discouraged. “Madame will like that,” he said.

“Paul,” I said, lowering my voice, “the reason I can’t sell is that my father’s still alive.”

“Yes?” he said, perking up. “He came back, he is here?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “He’s away right now, on a sort of trip; but perhaps he will be here soon.” For all I could tell he might have been listening to us at that moment, from behind the raspberry canes or the burn heap.

“He went for the trees?” Paul said, hurt that he hadn’t been consulted: he used to go too. “You saw him first, before?”

“No,” I said, “he was gone when I got here; but he left me a note, more or less.”

“Ah,” he said, glancing nervously over my shoulder into the forest. It was clear he didn’t believe me.

For lunch we had Paul’s cauliflower and some tins, corn and fried ham. During the canned pears David said “Who were those two old guys?” He must have seen them from the window.

“It was a man who wanted to buy the place,” I said.

“I bet he was a Yank,” David said, “I can spot them in a crowded room.”

“Yes,” I said, “but he was from a wildlife association, that’s who he was buying it for.”

“Bullshit,” David said, “he was a front man for the C.I.A.”

I laughed. “No,” I said; I showed him the
Teenie Town
card.

But David was serious. “You haven’t seen them in operation the way I have,” he said darkly, invoking his New York past.

“What would they want up here?” I said.

“A snooping base,” he said, “bird-watchers, binoculars, it all fits. They know this is the kind of place that will be strategically important during the war.”

“What war?” I asked, and Anna said “Here we go.”

“It’s obvious. They’re running out of water, clean water, they’re dirtying up all of theirs, right? Which is what we have a lot of, this country is almost all water if you look at a map. So in a while, I give it ten years, they’ll be up against the wall. They’ll try to swing a deal with the government, get us to give them the water cheap or for nothing in exchange for more soapflakes or something, and the government will give in, they’ll be a bunch of puppets as usual. But by that time the Nationalist Movement will be strong enough so they’ll force the government to back down; riots or kidnappings or something. Then the Yank pigs will send in the Marines, they’ll have to; people in New York and Chicago will be dropping like flies, industry will be stalled, there’ll be a black market in water, they’ll be shipping it in tankers from Alaska. They’ll come in through Quebec, it will have separated by then; the Pepsis will even help them, they’ll be having a good old laugh. They’ll hit the big cities and knock out communications and take over, maybe shoot a few kids, and the Movement guerrillas will go into the bush and start blowing up the water pipelines the Yanks will be building in places like this, to get the water down there.”

He seemed very positive about it, as if it had happened already. I thought about the survival manuals: if the Movement guerillas were anything like David and Joe they would never make it through the winters. They couldn’t get help from the cities, they would be too far, and the people there would be apathetic, they wouldn’t mind another change of flag. If they tried at the outlying farms the farmers would take after them with shotguns. The Americans wouldn’t even have to defoliate the trees, the guerillas would die of starvation and exposure anyway.

“Where will you get food?” I said.

“What do you mean ‘you’?” he said. “I’m just speculating.”

I thought of how it would appear in the history books when it was over: a paragraph with dates and a short summary of what happened. That’s how it was in high school, they taught it neutrally, a long list of wars and treaties and alliances, people taking and losing power over other people; but nobody would ever go into the motives, why they wanted it, whether it was good or bad. They used long words like “demarcation” and “sovereignty,” they wouldn’t say what they meant and you couldn’t ask: in high school the right thing was to stare fixedly at the teacher as though at a movie screen, and it was worse for a girl to ask questions than for a boy. If a boy asked a question the other boys would make derisive sucking noises with their mouths, but if a girl asked one the other girls would say “Think you’re so great” in the washroom afterwards. In the margins around the Treaty of Versailles I drew ornaments, plants with scrolled branches, hearts and stars instead of flowers. I got so I could draw invisibly, my fingers scarcely moving.

The generals and the historic moments looked better framed. If you put your eye down close to the photograph they disintegrated into grey dots.

Anna was squeezed in beside David on the bench, playing with one of his hands while he talked. “Did I ever tell you that you have Murderer’s Thumb?” she said.

“Don’t interrupt,” he said, but when she made a whimpering face he said “Yep, you did, almost every day,” and patted her arm.

“It’s spread flat at the end,” she said, explaining to us.

“I hope you didn’t sell out,” David said to me. I shook my head. “Good girl,” he said, “your heart’s in the right place. And the rest of her too,” he said to Joe, “I like it round and firm and fully packed. Anna, you’re eating too much.”

I washed and Anna dried, as usual. Suddenly Anna said “David is a schmuck. He’s one of the schmuckiest people I know.”

I looked around at her: her voice was like fingernails, I’d never heard her talk that way about David.

“Why?” I said. “What’s wrong?” He hadn’t said anything at lunch that could have upset her.

“I guess you think he’s hot for you.” Her mouth stretched down tight with the lips inside, a toad’s.

“No,” I said, bewildered, “why would I think that?”

“Those things he says, you know, like about your ass and being fully packed,” she said impatiently.

“I thought he was teasing.” I had thought that too, it was just a habit like picking your nose, only verbal.

“Teasing, shit. He was doing it to me. He always does stuff like that to other women in front of me, he’d screw them with me in the room if he could. Instead he screws them somewhere else and tells me about it afterwards.”

“Oh,” I said. I hadn’t deduced that. “Why? I mean, why does he tell you?”

Anna brooded, her dishtowel slack. “He says it’s being honest. What a turd. When I get mad he says I’m jealous and possessive and I shouldn’t get uptight, he says jealousy is bourgeois, it’s a leftover from the property ethic, he thinks we should all be swingers and share it around. But I say there are these basic emotions, if you feel something you should let it out, right?” It was an article of faith, she glared at me, challenging me to affirm or deny; I wasn’t certain so I didn’t say anything. “He pretends he doesn’t feel those things, he’s so cool,” she said, “but really it’s just to show me he can do it and get away with it, I can’t stop him; all that theorizing about it is coverup bullshit garbage.” She raised her head, smiling, friendly again. “I thought I should warn you so you’d know if he grabs you or anything it won’t have much to do with you, it’s all about me really.”

“Thank you,” I said. I was sorry she’d told me; I still wanted to believe that what they called a good marriage had remained possible, for someone. But it was kind of her, thoughtful; I knew in her place I wouldn’t have done it, I would have let her take care of herself, My Brother’s Keeper always reminded me of zoos and insane asylums.