by Laure Baudot
But swimming with Charles and Vee will help Sonya fit right into the Remington family. And this year, there is Charles to think of. When she makes it around the island, he will smile at her. Well done, he will say, his jaw set in a way that echoes his father’s. She will feel the whole of herself, her fears and her sadness, contained in the square of that chin.
Across the bay is Kingston, where they all come from, and where they have left Sonya’s mother, Joy, behind in her studio.
“I’ll join you guys one of these days,” says Joy. “Once I’ve finished this run.”
Joy is a painter, and by “run” she means paintings. Her mother’s been working on the same group of paintings for years, as far as she can tell. Sonya isn’t sure if she wants her mother to come to the island. Surely Joy will want to leave after two or three days, itching to go back to what she calls her “life’s work.”
“Life,” said Joy to her friend Asta, Charles and Vee’s mother. “That’s an apt expression.”
Kingston is in fog, and from their angle they can only see two kinds of grey — charcoal and feather — where water meets shore.
Tangy sweat floats off Charles. They’ve only been here for two days, having crossed over after the end of the school year, yet his skin is already brown. Beauty marks are constellations on the whole of his back.
“Okay,” says Sonya. “Let’s try.”
Sonya had been packing when her mom came into her room. She had Cyndi Lauper playing on a tape deck that Charles and Vee’s parents had given her for Christmas, which, unlike Sonya, they celebrate. Joy turned the sound down and sat down on the edge of her daughter’s bed, her small frame dipping the mattress only by a quarter inch. “Did you stay as long as that last year?”
Sonya picked up a shirt that had slid off the bed. “It’s the same every year.”
“I was thinking you might want to see your friends here instead.”
“What friends?”
Her mom didn’t touch that, of course. As usual she couldn’t take what was actually going on in Sonya’s head. Maybe that’s because what’s going on in Joy’s head fills it up to the brim, leaving no room for anything else. A distant cousin once told Sonya that the Holocaust leaks into everything. Which made no sense to Sonya because Joy didn’t actually go through the war; Bubby and Zaide did, over forty years ago.
“Asta and Arnold might want to be with their kids. As a family, I mean.”
“They don’t mind.” Sonya didn’t put the shirt into her suitcase.
She knows this because she has overheard things. At the Remingtons’ cottage, she often tiptoes on the landing and leans over the upstairs banister; one time last year, she heard Vee complain to Asta about an extra place setting. “Why does she have to be here all the time?” she said. Vee was eleven years old then, and thought she could still get away with whining. But that time, Asta sent her to her room and called Sonya down to help her set the table.
Sonya hopes that her mother won’t keep her from going. She knows she loves her mother, for sometimes, alone in her bed, she cries about Joy, with only a vague sense of what lies at the root of her grief. But every time she goes to the Remingtons’ house, she feels relieved, as if she can breathe again.
“I won’t stop you,” Joy said as she left the room. In her voice were two things: sadness, probably because Sonya was leaving her again; and a twangy cord of anticipation that meant she was already thinking of whatever task she had planned for her latest project. She spends most of her hours in the attic, surrounded by large canvases, the smell of turpentine, and the sounds of Beethoven from an old tape deck.
Each summer the Remingtons have a family venture, and each summer Sonya joins them. Last year they’d built a shed. At first, as she handed Arnold Remington a nail gun and helped Charles and Vee carry lumber, she imagined she was being kept occupied so she could feel included. By the end of the summer, though, she was climbing up on the roof and shooting nails into the shingles, all under Arnold’s approving eye. Arnold is originally American. He left his parents and siblings when he was young, under circumstances that nobody talks about. He is something she has overheard adults say is a rare thing: an academic who is also a handyman. He believes that children should be self-sufficient, and that every one of them should learn useful, even dangerous skills.
The island, Sonya loves. The long grasses, the wild-flowers, the dandelion puffs. The Queen Anne’s lace and the purple loosestrife. When they were younger they played hide and seek in the grasses, holding in their pee until they couldn’t, running to the outhouse a few metres from the cottage. The outhouse was papered with the covers of old New Yorkers. Compared to Joy’s books on Bosch and Kokoschka and Picasso, the New Yorker cartoons seemed silly, even though she understood none of the jokes.
Charles and Vee have always taught her things, and it is Charles who takes the lead. When she was eight, he tried to take the training wheels off her bike so she could learn to ride for real, though he couldn’t manage the bolts and had to call his dad. In the end, he and Arnold pushed her off on her bike, and she cycled a good few metres before falling.
Now they stand on the sloping rocky shore a few hundred metres from the cottage. This is where they will practice.
“You’ll have to go in for real,” Charles jokes. “Not like last year.”
“I did!”
“More or less.”
The point where the lake water meets her calves seems to her to be a threshold. Above the water, her legs are unmasked in the sun. When she steps down, her feet stir up silt and disappear.
“If you swim the distance from here to the rock over there,” says Charles, “you’ll know you can circumnavigate the island.”
“Pardon?”
“Go around.”
She slips in further. The water rises to her neck like a cold glove.
She tries to remember the front crawl she learned long ago in the overcrowded community pool where she took swimming lessons. She kicks away from the shore and executes a few strokes. Her limbs start to ache almost immediately.
He calls out to her. “Don’t slam your hands in the water. Bring them down on the knife-edge and stretch them out. You’ll glide forward.”
She gets tired halfway to the rock and treads slowly, trying not to extend her legs too far down to whatever grows up from the bottom. She turns around so she can see the shore.
Behind the cottage, on rich green grass, Asta sits on a beach chair and reads a murder mystery. Unlike Asta, Joy doesn’t rest. Joy is always standing up, painting. When she eats, she sits only as long as it takes to shovel some food into her mouth before going back to work. Sonya has only seen her prone after she’s been up all night, working. Then, she sits on the paint-splattered floor of the attic, her legs in a loose cobweb pose. When Sonya found her like that one morning, Joy smiled sadly at Sonya and said something she didn’t understand at all. “I’m not even sure I should be trying to get this right. A spotlight on evil. I don’t know what I’m doing.”
Still in the water, Sonya wishes Asta would look up from her book and tell her to come back, that she doesn’t have to do this ridiculous swim. She would actually say “ridiculous,” for she uses the same words as her husband. Instead, she sits, her short, dirty-blonde hair spiky from an early morning dip. A triangle of sun drapes itself over her left knee. Soon she will move her chair a few inches over so she can stay in the light.
Each evening, after Sonya, Charles, and Vee have put away the dishes, the family goes to the living room. Arnold sits in an armchair and reads a biography of Franklin Roosevelt. Asta leans back into a worn love seat and reads an old Vogue. She is originally from Denmark. A long time ago, before she gave up a job to raise her kids, she was a hairdresser or something like it — Sonya knows only that her work involved taking care of women.
The girls are lying on a faded Ikea carpet, painting their n
ails using Asta’s mother-of-pearl polish, their heads almost touching. Vee is teaching Sonya to apply nail polish just so, not quite at the cuticle, so it doesn’t spill over.
Books on famous swimmers are scattered on the floor. Naked from his waist up, Charles kneels and puts his hands on either side of a book. He rises on his hands and knees to read the top of a page, his back arching like a bridge. “Who could beat this kind of time?”
“Charles wants to be Kutral Ramesh,” Vee says. Ramesh is the youngest person to swim the English Channel.
Asta looks up to gauge which way the conversation is going, to see if Vee is picking a fight. Vee finds her brother annoying. In the water, Vee is as quick and light as a skating bug. It irritates her that her brother always beats her in races. “Ramesh was thirteen. Charles is too old.”
“Vee,” Asta warns.
Arnold glances at Vee. “When you are as hardworking, you may tease your brother.”
Vee blushes and concentrates harder on applying nail polish to her smallest toe.
Throughout July, they practise twice a day. Vee is always the first one in, tiptoeing on the rocks as if they are too hot to linger on, then sliding in. Charles moves slowly but efficiently. Sonya is the last one in, and only after a good minute or two of stalling by pretending to adjust her bathing suit. The suit is one of Vee’s old ones. Asta gave it to her after seeing Sonya shiver in her own. She had only brought one bathing suit, which she had to wear while it was still wet from the day before.
Each day, Sonya increases the number of lengths she swims by almost one. Some days her muscles ache and twice Charles tells her to take an afternoon off. “Your muscles need recovery time.” After each day of rest, she swims further than ever before. By August, she can swim fifty lengths. The water is no longer frightening. With each stroke she creates a wall between herself and things that lurk.
One day, she catches her reflection in the mirror of the room she shares with Vee. Her fingers are long and brown, her fingernails are smooth as beach stones. At home, she’s often trying to figure things out — how to interrupt Joy’s work to ask her to sign a permission slip; what they will eat for dinner, and whether mac-and-cheese two nights in a row will give her a stomach ache — and she’s in the habit of biting her cuticles while she thinks. On the island, she hasn’t bitten them once.
Sometimes, when Sonya gets home from school, Joy sur-prises her by being in the kitchen, frying chicken breasts or stirring a bubbling soup on the stove. On those evenings, she plays a card game of war with Sonya. There are moments when, caught in a flurry of card moves, she laughs, and Sonya studies her mother’s face, unused to seeing it so happy. Seconds later, her mother frowns. “I forget,” she’ll say. “What does the joker do in this game anyway?”
When Sonya turns and studies herself in the Remingtons’ mirror, she sees that her upper back has developed muscle. She is beginning to resemble, not Vee who is lithe like her father, but Asta and Charles, whose large-boned Scandinavian bodies give off an impression of reliability.
Neighbours, Jean and David Thomas, are expected for dinner. Everybody knows them: five years before, their daughter was the youngest person to swim around the island.
To host them, Asta wears an old Sixties-style dress with enormous flowers. When she appears at the living room door, Arnold says, “That’s a bright piece.”
Asta frowns. She makes Sonya think of a piece of yellow glass polished by the sea. So unlike Joy, who is so thin she almost disappears. Whenever Sonya makes dinner for Joy, Joy says, “God! If it weren’t for you, I’d forget to eat!”
Jean Thomas is a compact woman with blunt fingernails who wears a blue anorak at dinner. Their daughter isn’t with them, she explains — she is on a sailing trip for exceptional teenagers. “Ah yes,” she says when introduced to Sonya, “the daughter of the artist.” Mrs. Thomas keeps each food item separate on her plate.
She peers down her long nose at Sonya. “And what tradition does she work in?”
Sonya tries to remember the words people use to describe her mother’s work. Broad strokes in navy and brick red. Skeletal faces whose black pupils almost fill the whites of the eyes. Those canvases that her mother tried to hide by putting them deep into an attic crawlspace. For a moment, the feeling of dread she experiences whenever she sees Joy’s paintings obliterates her thoughts. “Reality?” she asks.
“Joy has a growing reputation,” says Arnold. “She is a descendant of survivors. What the Jews call the Shoah.”
“I always forget that you’re a historian,” Mrs. Thomas says. “I wonder, though, if there’s anything else to say about the Holocaust.”
Sonya sees herself as a tiny figure pummelling Mrs. Thomas’s face, which is as dense as an acorn. Words fly within her mind like mosquitos and she has trouble choosing which ones to put to Mrs. Thomas. It’s always like this, not finding the thing that fits, not being able to defend her mother when people say things about her.
“A resurgence,” Arnold says. “Spiegelman puts a spin on it. Cathartic, I would think.”
“If someone is saying something more about it, then there’s more to say,” says Asta.
“Well.” Mrs. Thomas picks up her fork and tidies pork chop bundles into her mouth.
Sonya wants to hug Asta, for being on her side. She also wants to hide from her, for she is ashamed of what Asta knows. Asta knows about Joy’s big sister. But can she be called a sister when Joy never met her? When she died before Joy was born, even before Zaide was married to Bubby? Sonya turns this question over and over, even while she knows that this question isn’t the important one. When she was little, her mother said, “You should know this. I won’t do with you what my parents did to me.” Sonya doesn’t remember the exact conversation, just those words, floating on dark lake water.
Asta once asked Joy, “You haven’t shown her that painting, have you?”
Sonya tried to decide which canvas they were talking about, and whether it had been one of the ones in the crawlspace.
“No,” her mother’s voice answered.
“I should hope not. There’s a limit,” said Asta.
But what was the limit? Sonya wondered. And how did you paint one?
Joy paints in a tradition she calls expressionist, figures bent over or broken, all suffering in some way. Sometimes she paints over them in bursts of red and yellow and fiery orange until almost nothing is left, only a pinprick of black or grey, a cut-off shin or bone. One day, she says to Asta, she will suffuse the canvas with light and it will take over everything.
Sometimes she tells her art dealer over the phone that her latest paintings didn’t work out.
“I tried for O’Keefe and ended up with flowers painted by Bosch. Horrifying.”
Those paintings, which were spread around the studio for a few weeks last fall, were of enormous flowers — red poppies mostly. The flowers were menacing; Sonya didn’t want to stay in the room with them. Joy said, “nobody wants these hanging in their living room.” Sonya agreed.
Just before summer, Sonya overheard Asta and Joy talking over tea. Joy was saying, “You don’t know what it was like. My dad and his moods. He used to shut himself up in his office with his war journals. When Sonya came along, he either ignored her or wouldn’t let her out of his sight. Just like when I was a kid.”
Sonya remembers her Zaide helping her cross the street, and her telling him that he didn’t really need to do that, that she’d been going to Charles and Vee’s house by herself since grade one. Zaide standing on their porch, his gaze a spotlight on her. Although her mother was supposedly somewhere in the house, Sonya could feel her presence, shadowing her Zaide but keeping herself hidden behind a curtain so that no-one would know she was watching. “Children should have some independence,” she would say to her father, but Sonya wasn’t so sure that she believed it.
“Your daughter needs you,” As
ta said to Joy.
“I know, I know. I get carried away. But I’m getting closer. I finally figured out the painting had to be from the perspective of the child. A baby who stares at her murderer. Complete ambivalence.”
For a split second, Sonya didn’t get the word “murderer.” Wasn’t a soldier just a soldier? But then, a short lesson she’d had in grade seven history, along with the film clips they had seen, came back to her, and she made sense of the word. She waited to see whether her mother would continue speaking and clarify the question, explain what had happened to the child. But her mother didn’t say anything more.
“What are you going to do?” Asta asked.
“With Sonya? She wants to be with you this summer. As usual.”
“Oh, Joy. If you want her home. But what I meant was, with your work.”
“It’s really progressing. But no, she should go. I’ll keep at it,” Joy said. “It’s for Sonya, you know. Maybe after this summer, we can leave it behind. We can live more lightly, you see.”
At the start of the summer Joy painted all night, every night. Her eyes were red-rimmed; much of the time, she looked anywhere but at Sonya. Her eyes flitted this way and that, Starlings fluttering from one tree to another. She alternated between ignoring Sonya and bringing her close, embracing her until Sonya’s bones felt brittle and her arms sore. For a rare moment, while in her mother’s company, Sonya was afraid both for her and of her. She was glad to leave her mother for the Remingtons, who, even-tempered, neither overlook nor smother her.
Sonya and Vee suntan on the shore that faces away from Kingston. Here there are no cottages, only the rustle of grass, the crackling of pines, and the occasional rumble of a motorboat.
They close their eyes against the sun. Vee wears a purple bathing suit. She is on her back, her budding breasts thrust toward the sky. Sonya lies on her stomach with her head turned and her chest up against the bed of the warm stone.