by Kyra Wilder
I crept once, when I was a girl, in the middle of the night into my parents’ bedroom and opened up my mother’s dressing-table drawer which, to me at the time, seemed like the secret key to everything about her. The drawer was filled with her tubes and bottles, her tiny glass jars. I loved to watch her take a dab of one thing, a pinch of something else. I loved to watch her looking at her own face in the mirror, making it, as I watched, beautiful. It was like when the peel falls from the apple whole, without breaking, her true face emerged like that.
In the dark that night, that night that I was sneaking, I pulled open her drawer and grabbed a handful of tubes and tubs and bottles, all small things of various shapes. I meant to take them back to my room and examine them. Out in the hall though, I slipped and fell and the bottles crashed to the floor and spilled everywhere. When I got up I was standing on a handful of sharp little things. I made it back to my room and switched on my desk lamp and found several baby teeth stuck to the bottom of my foot. Afterwards I had a very particular horror of stepping on things and insisted on wearing slippers always in the dark, even under the covers of my bed. Children can be strange for all sorts of reasons.
E wasn’t tall enough to make a mess like this though, she couldn’t possibly reach up into the medicine cabinet or reach high enough to have been the one to have written with the lipstick on the walls up near the ceiling. It was my name anyway, that was written up there on the wall. It really was! And E couldn’t spell. Perhaps M had left for work in a rush. Perhaps he had been feeling unwell. Perhaps he had been upset. I cleaned the bathroom. Returned it to order, screwing the caps on the bottles, wiping down the sink, the faucet, scrubbing until everything was perfect. Standing on the toilet I could just reach the lipstick writing and wipe it away but it was quite hard and I almost lost my balance several times.
There were two trees that stood in a field across the street from the apartment I lived in with my mother. When the rains came as they often did, and clouds hung like a heavy grey ocean over the field it looked to me like the clouds, the ocean-clouds hung directly above these two trees, as if they, poor scraggly things, were the anchor for the whole world. It looked also, when the rains came, as if they, the trees, were about to be destroyed. The birds that lived in the field would fly to the trees and beat their wings just before the rain fell and their wings, then, as the colour drained from the field and everything grew dark, would look like black leaves shining, wet and slick and glinting in the last shreds of light.
The reason I loved and hated to watch them though, the birds, was that they could never decide which tree to shelter in, the one on the left or the one on the right. They could never decide which of the two would save them. Because it was plain that they knew, the birds, that one, but only one, would. They would settle in one tree, calling to each other, screaming almost as the winds came, and then one would leave, make the desperate flight to the other tree, and all the others, screaming, would follow. Perhaps I thought so often of these trees because my mind felt like this now that I had children, my thoughts so often screaming and beating their wings, flying uselessly from one tree to the next. Should I be worried now about the coffee cup or the pills? Was there some other thing I couldn’t see? Some disaster that I could not now imagine? The only safety, the only shelter, seemed to be to stay in the air, in constant flight.
I took a shower. Steam filled the little room, beading on the sink, the mirror. I let the water run over my skin until it began to lose its heat. I dried myself slowly, obstinately taking my time. I wrapped my hair in a towel and opened the bathroom door. B was crying in his crib, E was calling for me.
After lunch we escaped out the window to the little park. I couldn’t face the front door, the concierge, the freshly scrubbed walk, the garbage bins. None of it. The surfaces would be clean now of course of footprints, of fingerprints, of breath. Restored, and I didn’t want to see them restored. I didn’t want to see it cleaned up somehow, what I had done. Besides, it was quicker to go to the park through the window, more direct. If we went through the window we could be there so much faster, there, in the park where we could love each other and play.
So when we left, we slid out of the apartment through the back window and dropped down to the soft green grass that wasn’t ours, that was on the wrong side of the little fence. We’re so fast! I said to E, to make her run across the grass. Look at us! I said to her, holding her hand, holding B in my other arm, his soft little baby head pressed to my chest. No one can catch us! We’re birds, we’re flying!
Well we were a bit like birds just then I suppose, the way they hop hop hop before they fly. Anyway I tried to make it into a game. The game of course being designed to make her hurry, to make her just the right amount of afraid. The fox will eat the baby birds who fall behind, I told her while we streaked across the lawn. The greedy greedy fox will gobble them up.
When we got to the park, I set B down on our blanket and gave him a toy to play with. I settled E with her tools, her pail, and listened to her list of endless duties regarding the proper care of her animals. The baby giraffe was feeling poorly. E seemed pleased to announce this. She flew off to bury it neck-deep in sand. A treatment, she said.
The mother giraffe will be worried, I said. Take her too. E refused and this hurt me somehow. Smiling, I took the mother giraffe to the edge of the sandbox and set her down next to the baby. There, I said, now she can watch. E moved her game to the other side of the sandbox leaving the mother giraffe staring out at nothing, balanced on her spindly plastic legs. It bothered me, really bothered me, to see her like that. I even felt for a moment as if my own eyes were made of paint, as if I were trying desperately to see past a thick smear of acrylic, move legs that would never move, as if my baby might depend on me doing this impossible thing. It was a horrible feeling. E buried the baby, covering its head with a final shovelful of sand. It would almost certainly be lost.
Rain clouds had been gathering even as the heat rose and now the sky crackled with the coming storm. The other women had already gathered their children, calling to them in long and lovely strings of words that I could never hope to follow, and left the park, heading back to their unimaginable homes. On y va. On y va. À la maison.
All except Nell. She wasn’t leaving. She lay on her back on her blanket playing with her baby, kissing his fingers, stopping to whisper in the older boy’s ear. The blanket is a ship, perhaps she said, or maybe, the blanket can fly. We can make this happen if we lie here still together and never leave this one place that we are right now. Perhaps she whispered things like that to him. I had been determined to stay as long as she did, but I saw now that she had no intention of leaving, even as great fat drops of rain began to fall, dotting the sandbox, staining the front of her dress. I didn’t know the word for lightning, couldn’t make light of the weather, couldn’t ask her why she wasn’t leaving.
I called to E to come, to come now. I gathered B, who was beginning to cry, grabbed the blanket. The clouds opened. There would be lightning and plenty of it. E screamed and I pushed her forward, back to our apartment, the still open window, tripping, barely catching myself, B in my arms, all of our things in my arms too. Running away was such an awkward business.
Back in the apartment I dried E’s hair, B’s. Unpacked our wet things, hung the towel up to dry. When I looked back through the window to the park, Nell was still there with her children. They were lying on their backs in the rain.
An hour later, when I looked again, I saw a man standing over them with an umbrella, it looked as if he were yelling at her. He pulled her to her feet, really pulled her. He took the baby. He could have been yelling, she could have been, the rain would have covered up any sound. She could have been screaming and I wouldn’t have heard it. I didn’t think she was screaming. When I looked again they were gone.
After the rain stopped we discovered that the mother giraffe had been left at the park, but when I ran back to get her, I found the sandbox empty, only sticks
and rocks and wet sand. E was sad when I told her this, but not overly so. The treatment had, after all, worked. The baby had been cured.
There was a woman’s shoe lying beside the sandbox, an expensive looking ballet flat. It occurred to me that Nell must have lost her shoe, that she must have stumbled home in the rain with one bare foot. There was nothing to do of course but leave it there. Nothing to do but hope that she was fine and would eventually come and find it. When I jumped back through the window I lowered the shutters so I couldn’t see out onto the little park anymore. It seemed better that way, safer. I had never had a man pull my arm the way that man had pulled Nell’s, never in my life. Thinking of it made my skin sting in the places where he had touched her.
We couldn’t go outside that afternoon, I couldn’t, though E wanted to go to the store for ice cream. So I prepared the last of what was in the fridge for dinner. A fish I’d bought at the market, tomatoes, more lemons, more heat and flies and sugar. I cut the fish into pieces and pounded them into the wooden rental-company cutting board. When I picked up the pieces they were still studded with scales, scales that would, if she ate the fish, catch in E’s teeth, that would make her cry, that would cause her real pain, that would stick sharply in her gums and her teeth. I watched it all fry in the pan, the scales, the smashed pieces of fish. The oil speckled my wrists like teeth, while the fish crisped, then hardened into a burnt shell, and the pan became a wasteland strewn with glistening scales, as if the fish had, after death, grown a thousand eyes. We waited for M but he didn’t come. I threw the ruined, blackened fish away and E and I had crackers and cheese and tomatoes for dinner and we all three slept together, exhausted, in the same bed. I saw the coat hanging on M’s side of the closet before I fell asleep, it was as beautiful as I remembered. In the morning I found a rumpled suit in a pile beside the bed, as if M had collapsed there. As if he’d become suddenly so exhausted that he’d fallen out of his clothes and disappeared.
February
I think about you all the time. All the time I do. I think about you and I think about Wait and I think about Let Me Explain, and then I think again about you and then I think again about Wait and then I think again about Let Me Explain. Like that.
Can I tell you about the woman who sleeps in here with me? In the bed under the window? I’m so glad we have a window. Any day there could be a bird. And really it’s the windows that are important. Don’t you think? For houses? Without a window, well you could be anywhere.
Anyway, I wanted her bed when I got here but they wouldn’t let me take it. They said no. I asked why but they just said no.
That was before I understood. Or maybe that was the moment when I was beginning to understand. Understand, I mean, what kind of place here was. What kind of house. How I wasn’t owed an explanation. And I see that now, the purpose of that. Of the saying No. But, back then, back before I understood what I understand, when they said No, I said What, like this: What??! and screamed and yelled a bit and I see now why they did what they did when I did that. I want you to know that I know that. That I see it clearly.
Are you telling them what I’m telling you? Well, if you are, you can tell them that I know and see that now.
Oh. Could you not clean under there? Under the bed? Please don’t look under there. I’d feel so grateful. I really would. You don’t have to worry. There’s nothing there. It’s not like that. There’s nothing under the bed.
It’s just that I would feel better if I knew there was some place in here, in this room, in this place, if I knew that there was some place where nobody but me ever looked. Ever. And see? It could be under the bed. The place. The private place. It could be there because, see? It’s already dark.
You’re always here so early in the morning. I see you come in because I’m awake early always too, even though I’m supposed to be practising staying in bed and breathing deeply and going back to sleep and not jumping up and running about when I wake up. I’m not though, practising. So, in the mornings, when the door at the end of the hall goes beep and clangs open and you walk in, well I’m always already watching. From in here I mean, with my face pressed up tight against the little plastic window in the door.
It’s the dreams. Once I’m awake, I’m so relieved to have escaped them that, well, it makes no sense to lie down again and try to sleep. Lord, lead us not into temptation!
My grandmother would say that before we ate Christmas dinner. That was the last little bit of grace. Lord, lead us not into temptation! And I could see it, sitting in my faux velvet dresses that were a different colour every year but always otherwise the same and my hair pulled into braids. I mean I could see temptation, like a gingerbread house all done up in icing and gumdrops. I could taste it in my mouth, temptation, and I would know, with my guts turning to ice and concrete, that I was already there, inside it, inside temptation. And I would think, how do you get out when you’re already there? Well, you can understand how my grandmother never liked having me for Christmas and would say over me to my mother, I don’t know why I ask you two. I cook all day and no one eats.
But I meant to talk to you about the woman in the bed under the window. The bed that was empty when I came here and isn’t now. Well, it’s empty now obviously. She has an appointment, but you know what I mean. What I mean to say is, she snores! What can they be giving her that she sleeps like that? Could you ask for someone to change it? Because she snores and I can’t wake her to tell her to stop.
I leapt up on her bed last night when I finally couldn’t stand it anymore and screamed, There’s a fire! There’s a bloody fire and we’ll all die in here if you don’t wake up! But they only came and scooped me off her and gave me medicine and new appointments. But, don’t you see? It was just the snoring!
So if you could tell them that, I would appreciate it, because I’d really rather not have any new appointments. And I can’t take medicine that will trap me in my dreams. I have to be able to wake up. I have to know that I’ll be able to wake up, or I’ll never sleep. Never! And I’ll begin to spin round and round like water going down a drain, and then, I’ll be gone. Gone! Like the dodo! No, I’m all right, please don’t go, you don’t have to call anyone, really. See? I’ll sit still like a lady.
I know it’s not for me to say, I know that, but really, it was, last night I mean, it was really just because of the snoring.
9
Today M needed his beautiful suits to be beautifully clean. I wanted to be helpful, I had my purple dry-cleaning zip-bag. We could make a day of it. If every minute went just right I could clean the apartment, drop off the suits, stop by the market for the dinner things and spend the afternoon beside the pump. Every minute was a card and I could build the most beautiful house out of the day. I could buy raspberries at the market and eat them with E while B napped, we could carve out little secrets together like that if we were careful. Little secrets could be ways to love each other. I drank two or three glasses of wine every day at five o’clock. Little secrets could be ways, too, to love myself.
M wouldn’t be back for dinner, he had said this crawling into bed, latelatelate the night before, smelling of red wine, maybe cigarettes. Or maybe I just imagined that he did. Maybe I hoped he did have dinner somewhere nice, a steak, a glass of wine, leaning back in his chair discussing something important with other important people, people who would understand important things. Or discussing something unimportant, laughing, and that being a break, a much needed break, from thinking about and discussing important things. How could I have not hoped for this?
He couldn’t come home for dinner at all anymore, not for a little while. He said this, his hand finding my shoulder in the bed in the dark, his finger brushing over the small place where there was just the thinnest layer of skin over bone, and moving on, wanting something, a pillow maybe. We were sometimes like this, waymarkers, even if just a shoulder, weren’t we? Wasn’t that what we had, after all, promised always to be for each other?
Anyway he couldn’
t come, he was needed for interviews, meetings, drinks after work. Water beading along the side of a cocktail glass set on a table overlooking the lake. Ice-cold martinis, highballs, glasses clinking together, business cards, beautiful suits.
So we would not need to wait for M in the evenings and E and I could eat cream and melon and crackers if we wanted to. When M came home, whenever he came home, we would all be there breathing the same air. I drifted back into my half-sleep, waking, turning, slipping the other nipple into B’s mouth. Sleep was like a dragonfly in my hands, always fluttering, always trying to get away from me.
My mother had terrible insomnia when I was growing up, she would go through periods of not sleeping so profound that she would begin to hallucinate, the edges of the house beginning to fall away, what was left beginning to bend around her. Not sleeping could be like that, could take you away, remove you to a place over which you had no control. The approaching night became a terror, so many hours to be alone in the dark. She tried various treatments but the one that I remember was the smiling therapy. She liked it, my mother, she thought it worked, and so for years she practised it, the therapy, in the evenings. The idea is to smile, even though you are afraid, or tired, or beginning to see the corners of the ceiling fill with bats, to smile continuously for minutes, for many of them, at various times throughout the day but especially at night. I remember finding her sitting still by herself with her mouth pulled into a wide grin, or cooking us dinner and smiling and smiling without stopping even though I could see that she was afraid. I tried this now sometimes at night, the smiling for many minutes, I imagined my teeth were like the bright phosphorescent things that float on the surface of the ocean at night. I imagined that and other things. The nights were so long sometimes. It would be good if M could make it home before too many hours had passed.