by Louise Ells
“Dorothy.” Norma looks directly at me and I let myself believe she still shares my memories, that she plays the music for me as well as for herself. “Dorothy means gift from God.”
I nod. “Yes,” I say. “Gift from God.”
“Chet chose the name.”
“Uncle Chet? Chose my name?”
“Chet loved our baby. He jes loved her.”
In the face of all we’d lost, no one thought about Uncle Chet’s spider bite. Never a complainer, he said nothing for days, just started in with the clean up, rebuilding the barn. By then his neck was black and split wide open, oozing pus, although I assumed the doctor could make him well, so he’d come back from logging camp the following May, in time for my birthday, just like every year.
It must have been a brown recluse, the doctor said, a fiddleback, as if naming the creature could provide comfort.
“Our baby-? Norma-?”
But there’s the last of her smile, fading as quickly as the echo of her final notes, and her next words are gibberish. ‘Loxoscles. Reclusa.’
Fruits of the Nightshade Family:
Most of all you miss that moment last thing at night when he put his hand on the small of your back and said goodnight, Mrs. Potato Head. You used to believe that meant something, that so long as he briefly touched that curve at the base of your spine and whispered that silly nickname, you, your marriage, would make it. For eighteen years that ritual survived.
But this time when he is away ‘on business’ you go to the Farmer’s market to buy a smooth vegetable, the colour of a week old bruise and discover you can’t say its name, too close to hers. You move your hands around an empty space until they meet and you are cupping them together. Then you leave holding nothing, except the knowledge that this time you can’t forgive him.
Step One: Add Tabasco to his Caesar, so much so that your eyes sting.
Pass it to him as soon as he walks through the door, as if you are welcoming him home, like a tv wife from the fifties. When he gags, wonder out loud how mistakes like this happen. How can she live with herself when she’s fucking another woman’s husband?
Before he recovers his power of speech, continue. I feel sorry for her. Who christens a daughter Eggberta? Shake your head, as if he too is ridiculing the name.
Will you feel better? Maybe for an instant, maybe not even that. But he’ll find it difficult to sleep (why should you be the only one to be exhausted every morning?) and it will get his attention, let him know that you no longer believe his denials and lies.
Who has an affair with a woman called Eggberta?
Step Two: Take control.
Make this affair different: make this time the last time he cheats on you. Admit to yourself that at some level you’ve always worried one day one of you would leave: it may as well be you, it may as well be now. Your freedom is your prize - it’s all you’ll get, accept that. Listen only to the advice you are given that you might find helpful. Hire a lawyer and learn enough of the lexicon (pededent lite, ex parte, bifurcated) to communicate, but expect nothing. There are words from the glossary you don’t need to learn: party, relief, resolution. You will not win, there is no winning, but know that he has lost because he has lost you.
Step Three: Breathe.
You no longer need to tip toe across the eggshells, brush your hair just so, tone down your lipstick, read first the books he wants to talk about. Maybe you’ll take up running, start training for a marathon. Or rediscover a hobby you abandoned years ago. Grow vegetables. Make pasta by hand and crush fresh tomatoes for sauce, squeezing the pulp and juice through your fingers. Start with one of those blank pages you love so much; write a list knowing he’s not looking over your shoulder.
Know that you have to navigate a period of pain and there is no way to make it hurt less, no way to make the time go by any more quickly than the time goes by.
Continue to breathe.
Step Four: Balance.
Chop chillies and onions, even if they still make you cry.
Do not forget all the things he did that made you sad. But balance them with the happier memories.
Do you remember balance? That was you and your kid brother on the teeter-totter in the schoolyard forty years ago. They still exist, teeter-totters - next time you pass a playground and see a little girl on one end, imagine your daughter.
Step Five: Mourn the children you never had.
Step Six: Rejoice.
You do not have to fight for child support, make custody arrangements, remain civil, allow that woman to help raise your children. You can cut all ties.
Step Seven: Cut all ties.
Step Eight: Allow him to keep Bailey.
You’ve lost your night time foot warmer, your motivation to get up some mornings, the reason you went for two walks every day. Suddenly you can stay in bed on Saturday mornings, stay inside on rainy days, leave for a weekend with no notice, move away.
Maybe she is allergic to dogs. Maybe she came with baggage that will challenge him, maybe some day in the future he’ll feel stuck.
See again Step Four: Balance. Maybe he will marry her and have her children and they’ll be happy. (You don’t need to believe this, really, but you can feel proud of yourself for even pretending not to wish them ill.)
Step Nine: Delete.
All the emails, texts, saved phone messages. Have several glasses of wine and then be very brave: disappear all the photographs. That time is over. Now cull the shoeboxes of old snapshots, sticky with dust. If you can’t name your then-friends, the location, or the approximate year, the photo is meaningless. It may come as a shock when you realize that you are not a reliable narrator of your own history. Conserve only the stories you wish to tell.
Don’t read his Twitter feed or find her Facebook page. Buy tomatillos and jalapeños and make for your true friends the Mexican dishes he’d never eat.
Step Ten: Start knitting.
It’s what your grandmother did. Afghan throws and mittens every Christmas and gifts for each baby and child at his or her birthday. A pale yellow sweater the year you were three, a green scarf when you were sixteen that you still wear. Now you understand what it means to have something to do with your hands, holding things, and holding them together.
(Don’t look for a metaphor or missed opportunity - there was no way you could have knitted your relationship into something it wasn’t.)
Step Eleven: Move away.
A new job, a new town, a new country where the morning air isn’t heavy with the smell of woodsmoke. In a foreign place they speak of things that don’t include you as half of a broken couple. Submerge yourself in the accents of strangers, the local slang, the names of villages. Stand in the queue at the greengrocer’s market stall and ask for an aubergine. Smile when he teases you about your Canadian accent.
Step Twelve: Be open to possibilities.
When your new friend suggests a double date, laugh, but agree. Go on many such dates, knowing most of them will only be good for funny stories, later. But.
Step Twelve, continued:
Buy a new lipstick in your new favourite colour, goji berry bold. In telling stories from your past, confidently choose the memories worth sharing.
When he asks what he can cook for you, request his speciality, stuffed peppers.
There is a different rhythm to your life, you have forgotten what routines you thought you’d miss. (You don’t miss them.)
Now. Listen. Tonight, just before you fall asleep, your head on his shoulder. ‘I love you, Darling.’
Congratulations. You have learned a new language.
And all it took was time.
Milk Rime
What I do remember: the sound of the crack in the ice and the eerie silence the morning after the blizzard.
That winter we skated all through the Christmas season. It was a year when the lake freezes all the way across on a single day with no hint of wind or snowfall - a thing that happens only once every seven years. At lea
st, that’s what I grew up believing, as I believed it was necessary to wear a hat in winter because eighty percent of all heat loss is through your head, and the Inuit had 52 different words for snow.
True or not that it happened this way every seventh year, that year it was magical: sixteen days of ice. (I stop myself from saying ‘mirror smooth’ because it never really was.) I don’t recall that it was sixteen days, but I’ve heard the story so many times since, I often forget I was not yet six, too young to remember all the details. And yet-
I think I do. The ones that matter. Such distance, but if I pause I am right there: the metallic taste of cold air, the sharp sound of blades on ice, the smoke from bonfires dotting the shore, smoke that so permeated my snowsuit I carried the smell with me for the rest of the winter and into the fall, despite my mother’s repeated washing. That scent stayed with me until I grew up a size and I’ve no idea what my mother did with that suit; she might have been too embarrassed to send it to my younger cousin, smelling as it did.
Boys played hockey, using cow patties as pucks. It had been my job to collect the roundest, flattest, deepest-frozen ones from the fields in the weeks between frost and snow and even now when I’m out walking and pass cow dung I assess its worth as a puck. Everyone knew a famous or soon-to-be-famous hockey player who’d started his career this way; anyone could be next, though it was an accepted fact that the First Nation community who lived downriver from our town were the best skaters, best hockey players. Their reserve was on a bay which was the first to freeze over, sometimes as early as mid-November, and they were keen enough to shovel a rink, flood it if necessary, and keep it cleared all winter.
None of the town kids were allowed to skate on that rink because the bay was too dangerous. Too close to the unfrozen lake in fall, too close to the river that fed our lake as well, so often wide open with angry water. Once a kid skated off the edge, racing after the puck, and drowned, dragged under by the weight of his coat. Maybe that was only another myth - like the unexploded bombs in the cranberry bog, but it scared the mothers who scared their kids.
It wouldn’t have affected me - their bay was far too far away. I walked to the end of our road and out on to the lake in front of town, where the big girls jumped and twirled, showing off fancy boot covers and matching hats and mittens, while the boys played their hockey games and the little kids like me just tried to get the hang of balancing and moving.
And the men - the factory closed, giving all the workers two weeks of holiday - I suppose they showed off just as much as everyone else. One afternoon Pa and another man were horsing around with an ax. How thick was the ice, who was stronger, who had worked harder that week, I don’t know. Pa whacked the edge of the lake and, with a boom that must have echoed for a full minute, a thick black crack rushed across the ice, as far as we could see. Aaron was on the other side of the crack and I was scared that it would open up, grow into an uncrossable chasm, separating him forever from the rest of us. Boom. I remember that sound. Boom.
This was long before video games and all-day TV - when all the kids spent every day outside, but there are the usual indoor holiday memories too: putting up the tree and baking and studying the Wish Book, turning down the corners of all the pages with the most-wanted things. Even Ma turned over a corner - one in the home furnishings section, showing a happy family sitting in a living room with a three piece suite in pale green. The little girl had blonde ringlets and she and her mother were wearing matching red dresses. I wanted to be her, not me, with my brown hair in braids ‘to keep you out of mischief’ Ma said, though I never knew what she meant. That girl with her pierced ears - I knew it - would have bright white skates, and an ice dancing dress with pink and silver accessories. Not Aaron’s old dark hockey skates, with an extra pair of thick socks to make my feet drown inside them a little less.
But as soon as I closed the Wish Book I forgot the white skates. I loved the bonfires glowing in the late afternoons and the ice etched with scrolls and listening to the big kids bragging about how far they’d gone. Miles. Miles. It was the biggest skating rink in the country. Probably the world. As my world comprised Ma and Pa and my hero, my big brother Aaron - I didn’t understand a mile. After the ax incident Pa and his friends skated past the middle of the lake, five, maybe six miles they guessed, so far that I couldn’t see them anymore and I cried, my mother says, until they came back into view. There was talk, then, of a day spent crossing the lake, all the way to Quebec and back, but I don’t believe that ever got past the planning stage.
It was Aaron who taught me to skate properly. I held on to the blade of his hockey stick and we set off, one push at a time, and he pulled me along until I was steady on the two thin blades, then he held my mittened-hands in his and slowly skated backwards. Ma says I was skating by myself at the end of the fifth day. Remarkable she says, the patience. I’m not sure if she is referring to mine or my brother’s. Maybe both.
Without his hands I fell, I fell often, but laughed and got up and skated on, chasing after him and his big kid friends, trying to catch up to them, to him. This is the story my mother tells me now, how he only ever skated a short distance out of reach, letting me catch him as often as not. Remember, she says of our childhood. Remember. The first a question, the second an order.
I do, I always answer, even if that’s a lie. I do.
There’s a single photograph of the two of us on the lake, carefully posed. Christmas afternoon: Aaron wearing his favourite present, the oversized blue and white Toronto Maple Leafs hockey sweater, standing next to me on the grey ice, his right arm slung over my much lower shoulder, his left hand gripping his hockey stick, his face a study in teenage nonchalance. My big grin shows the gap where I’d fallen two days earlier as I stumbled from ice to shore, my blades catching in the crusty snow, my first two baby teeth vanished and unrecoverable against the white. (I cried, thinking the tooth fairy wouldn’t visit. But Aaron dried my tears, told me he’d write a note to the fairy, not to worry I’d get two shiny dimes. And I did, the twin bluenoses tucked under my pillow to greet me on Christmas Eve morning.)
Another photograph, that morning: Ma on the pale green sofa. The first matching suite she’d ever owned, it was the biggest, most extravagant present Pa had ever bought her. We hadn’t been allowed to sit on it that morning until she’d put down towels, and no food, no drinks, no crayons, no pens - the sofa and chairs arrived with a long list of rules, every one of which started with the word no.
It was Boxing Day when Dwight showed up. We saw him coming from far off, must have known he was a kid from the reserve from the way he skated, elegant and confident at the same time. We would have watched as he didn’t slow at the crack but jumped right over it and into the middle of a hockey game, stealing the puck and scoring a goal in seconds.
That was the moment I lost my brother. From then on Aaron was only interested in skating with Dwight, imitating his movements, begging him to teach him trick shots. He even lent him his brand new Leafs shirt. Never before had I had to compete for my brother’s attention, never before had the ten years between us been so evident. He had always shared everything with me, let me hang around with all his friends, but Dwight was different. They became a team of two, taking on everyone else and started speaking in a short-form slang I couldn’t translate.
By New Year’s Day I was tired, worn out from the weeks of excitement plus a too-late night and too-early morning, and feeling especially abandoned. I fell a dozen times, and gave up. My snowsuit kept me warm enough but it didn’t have padding able to compete with the ice, hard as the tarmac that had scraped layers of skin from my bare legs the past summer when, against Ma’s instructions, Aaron taught me to ride a bicycle without training wheels.
I told Ma I was going home to use the toilet, and would be right back, but when I had taken off my snowsuit I took two baby oranges into the living room to eat in front of the Christmas tree, forgetting entirely about the new sofa. It was only when I stood up that I notice
d all the juice that had dripped on to the cushion when I peeled them. I rubbed at it with a wet cloth, but that didn’t help.
Ma would be mad. Really mad.
She seldom got angry at us, but when she did she’d shout, grab our heads, entwine her fingers in our hair, and bang our heads together. (This was an era when spanking children was accepted as the norm.) The bicycle incident only earned us a shouting - though praise and an ice cream cone two days later, when Aaron took off the newly attached training wheels and I rode all the way down the street and back without a wobble.
We had merited a head bashing that summer. The day before our holiday, a drive out West to a family reunion, Aaron and I were fooling around in the back of the station wagon, all packed and ready for an early morning start. I suppose Ma had done a last minute shop for en route picnic supplies. In any event, my brother and I managed to break two cartons of eggs without noticing and then kept on playing on until every scrap of white and yolk had slithered its way across suitcases and the car’s carpeted floor. By the time we realized what we’d done, or perhaps Ma came looking for the groceries, the eggs had cooked themselves into every nook and cranny of the car, the cases, the camping equipment. I can feel her fingers gathering my hair, knocking my skull to my brother’s.
The clearest detail of that incident my memory chooses to retain - there could be no photograph: Ma, having stripped down to her bra and panties, is hosing out the car in the driveway. In the background, the tent hangs from the washing line. I see Pa walking home from work as he does every evening at twenty to six, forty minutes after the factory’s whistle blew, shocked by his wife’s behaviour and hustling her inside before any neighbours see her half-naked.
She was tired the next morning when we set off. She must have stayed up all night to wash and dry all the clothes and camping equipment, re-folding, re-packing. For the duration of the holiday the car smelled as rank and sulphuric as the hot springs we stopped to visit. “Last one in is a rotten egg!” Aaron shouted every time we raced for the water, both of us cracking up at the joke.