But an effort had been made. Yasmin saw that. The sliced cherry tomatoes lining the serving dish; the paper frills slipped onto the ends of the sprawled bones; the sprigs of parsley that sat like a stand of baby bonsai in the central stuffing. “It looks lovely,” she said.
“It is a bit of a mess,” Mrs. Summerhayes said, not apologetically, as Yasmin thought at first, but with mock bemusement.
Jim, sitting beside Yasmin, missed the humour. “Oh, it’ll be fine, Mom,” he said in a tone dismissive with impatience.
Mr. Summerhayes, summoning gallantry, said, “I’m sure it’ll be delicious as always. Now come on, my dear, sit yourself down and let’s get on with it.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Summerhayes said, abruptly taking her seat across from Yasmin. “Let’s get on with it.”
The lamb turned out to be tough, juices expelled, the flavours of the garlic and rosemary flowing off with them.
But the chewing around the table was determined. Mr. Summerhayes’s the most vigorous. As he helped himself to a clutch of lettuce and quartered artichoke hearts — wielding the salad spoons with one hand, as if they were chopsticks — he explained that he had learnt long ago to approach meat with caution. At a dinner function one Christmas — what with all the chat and laughter and whatever — a piece of steak had wedged in his throat.
“Do you know what that’s like?” he said, his dark eyebrows rising at Yasmin. “I’ll tell you what it’s like. It’s as if someone has suddenly slammed a door shut in your windpipe. You feel the air leaving your lungs — with nothing, absolutely nothing, to replace it. Airtight. You can’t even gasp. Everything starts going dark. Your eyes water. And you know, with absolute, undeniable certainty, that you’re about to die.”
He paused, filled his mouth with lettuce, speared a chunk of artichoke heart.
Mrs. Summerhayes, eyeing her plate, said, “My dear, must you —”
Jim concentrated on his food, slicing dutifully into the lamb.
“I vaguely remember half standing, unable to explain, of course, but as luck would have it my neighbour at the table, a French-Canadian fellow, recognized what was happening. He wasted no time in delivering a powerful uppercut to my solar plexus. The blow sent me flying several feet, but the meat was dislodged — and I’ve never forgotten what that first breath felt like. It was like sucking in life itself.
“Some people thought a fight had broken out and came running from around the room, making directly for the poor fellow. I’m afraid he absorbed a fist or two before I could explain that I was probably the only anglophone in the province who will be eternally grateful to a French-Canadian for belting him one.”
Mrs. Summerhayes, her food barely touched, suddenly rose as abruptly as she had seated herself moments before. Her chair slid silently backwards, and in silence she bustled out of the dining room.
Mr. Summerhayes’s eyes froze in her wake. He crossed his cutlery on his plate, dabbed at his lips with the napkin and, mumbling pardons, followed her out, his pace leisurely but measured.
“You have to understand,” Jim said after a moment, with a sidelong glance at Yasmin. “It’s the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to him. He loves that story. But Mom — it’s a whole other matter. If that guy hadn’t punched him, Mom would’ve been left with a two-year-old, no job, no insurance, and a new house mortgaged to the sun. So she hates that story. But he tells it anyway. She thinks it’s his way of telling her, and me, to be grateful.”
He paused, and she followed his gaze out the window above the buffet: through the points of light in the lace, to the slats of fencing that appeared somehow even closer now than they had outside.
“And one other thing. That guy who punched him? The company eliminated his job a couple of years later. Dad had the task of firing him. Couldn’t have been easy. I’m sure he lost at least a couple minutes’ sleep over it.”
Yasmin took a sip of her wine, a nondescript Chilean red purchased at the corner store. “Aren’t you being harsh?”
“No harsher than he’s ever been. I don’t hate him or anything.”
“Her?”
“Her either.” He shrugged, sipped at his wine, grimaced. After a moment, he said, “They’re like this wine. Drinkable, but with an uncertain bouquet. A personality that’s ill-defined, hard to grasp. Not unpleasant by any means, but still, not a wine you could ever grow fond of.”
An unsettling simile. Yasmin took another sip. The wine slid warm over her tongue, lapped pleasantly at her cheeks; but as she swallowed, an underlying coarseness tightened the skin, imposing a sensation of rapid aridity.
His parents returned, a new quietness to them. They took their places and the meal proceeded in the silence of an assumed tranquility.
Afterwards, as they lay in bed at the hotel watching the news on television, Jim said, “I have been trying hard, you see, all my life. Trying hard not to be like my parents. But what I don’t know, what I’ll never know, is whether I’m just kidding myself. You see how they are. What they’re like. Were they always like that, or did the years make them so? I can’t picture them young, you know. And photos don’t help. I still don’t really know what my dad did for a living. He spent his life working for CN, in the payroll department. When I was young, before I knew what the payroll department was, I had this fantasy that he was a train engineer, that he stoked fires and drove a powerful locomotive. Then I found out what payroll meant. I know it’s not fair, but he never recovered from my disappointment.”
He turned in the bed, pulling the blanket higher on his shoulders against the cold of the air conditioning.
“You know, Yas, I can take as many cooking courses as I like, I can learn everything there is to know about wines, I can daydream about light as much as I want — but I can’t shake this feeling that there’s something I’m not getting, something insidious, that’ll win out in the end.”
Yasmin, seeking to lighten the moment, said, “You could have told me this before we got married.”
“But you mightn’t have married me,” he said. “And then how would you have saved me?”
“Have I? Saved you?”
“We’ll see.” He reached over to brush a curl of hair from her forehead. “You might yet.”
Moments before they fell asleep, Yasmin said, “I know why your father’s hydrangeas won’t grow.”
“Why?” Jim mumbled.
“Not enough sunlight.”
46
LIGHT FROM THE table lamp pools around the telephone, the bulb reflecting in the plastic like a distant sun.
“Hi, it’s me.”
“Yas. Everything okay? You sound …”
“Everything’s fine. But you got your wish.”
“What wish?”
“I’m at my relatives’. I’ll be staying here for a couple of nights, until I come home.”
“How come?”
“It’s a long story. Problems at the hotel. I’ll tell you all about it when I get back. Everything okay with you? Anything new?”
“No, just the usual. You?”
“Well …”
“Oh-oh.”
“No, no, it’s just a little weird, that’s all.”
“How weird?”
“You tell me.”
And she tells him about Penny and the box that now sits across the room from her on the dresser, beside the smaller box that holds the urn that holds her mother’s ashes. Tells him how, after offering her the use of the empty dresser — which she will not accept, for it implies an intimacy she finds unsettling — Penny had left her alone; how, after a few minutes, she had returned with the box, of plain cardboard, unlabelled and taped shut. Tells him how Penny had slid the box onto the dresser and said, Here it is, is what you really come for, not so? And, on seeing Yasmin’s puzzlement, had said, Is some of his things, is all we have left. Odds and ends. Vern’s. Your father’s.
Telling the story leaves Yasmin breathless.
After a moment, Jim asks whether she’
s opened it yet.
Not yet, she replies. In a curious way, she’s savouring the moment. “It’s the first time in years we’ve all been together in the same room.”
“Don’t be macabre,” Jim says, and Yasmin pictures the face he is making: a grimace decades old and thousands of miles distant.
“Does it sound macabre?” She knows she does not intend to be macabre. What she does not know is what she does intend. The word “completeness” occurs to her. It is for now just a word, though, weightless but resonant. Because of this, she says, “Sleep well, Jim.”
And as if he were lying groggy beside her on the bed, Jim replies, “You too, Yas.”
47
NO, MY DEAR Mrs. Livingston, I fear your leaves refuse to offer any recognizable shape — recognizable, at least, to my eye. After all, shape and form, even more than beauty, for they come first, are in the eye of the beholder. What to me is shapeless may to another be wondrous.
To discern the fine contours of each other, to define each other’s shapes and grasp each other’s realities, remains the supreme challenge to all human ability. And today at least, my dear, your leaves are of no help to me. They are good — but only for brewing. This is no reason for despair, or skepticism, however. Just the opposite. As my husband once wrote in a note that became famous, dawn follows midnight. So, on we go. Agreed?
My dear Mrs. Livingston, what’s that look on your face? If you’re tired, we can call it a —
What is that noise? Is it you? Why are you gurgling —
Mrs Livingston?
Mrs. Livingston!
Can you hear me?
TWO
I
SHE BURROWS INTO the bedsheets seeking the darkness.
Burrows, ageless, away from the light seeping grey through the ill-fitted shutters.
Burrows deeper into the mattress, seeking out the warmth that is her own infused into the fibres.
Deeper into the scents that are unfamiliar and comforting. Detergent. Steam. The absorbed warmth of the sun that suggests the bright outdoors, and wind, and the brush of fresh-cut grass.
Slides into scents that seduce her whole into worlds of image quickened by sensation.
Night. The air cool and taut, becoming whole again after the searing day.
Above, a veiled quarter moon and stars — clustered, strewn — pulsing like pieces of shattered silver with a chill, radioactive beauty.
His touch — fingertips, lips — sure and gentle, urgent: an exploration that aroused her nerves.
And her touch — palms skittish, fingers afire — incorporeal with eloquence: reaching into him, grasping at an essence that could not be held, like seizing at joy itself.
Sounds — his, hers — liquefied and muted, severing her from herself, moulding her into him, him into her: shaping a multiplicity of one, with no beginning, no end, conjoined by a swirling fierceness.
Electricity as subtle as starlight wove webs between their skins, binding them to the blanket, to the rumbling earth beneath: an electricity feeding on itself, cannibalizing, nourishing, enlarging appetite even as it is satiated.
The night rustled, whispered, trilled a distant chant.
She could smell the grass, the soil, rogue traces of the lilac bush. She knew herself to be alive in a way, with a depth, she had never known before, flesh and mind fusing, weaving themselves into an intricacy of hysteria and desire.
When he entered her, it was as if the glittering sky itself were gathering its immensity into her.
Her body slipped from her grasp, senses soaring.
In a final flash of lucidity, she thought: He is a man made for moonlight.
It grows hot under the sheets, and stale with her own breath. She stretches her neck, letting her head slip out, to air insensate with enclosure.
She reaches for the water glass sitting on the night table, takes a sip. But the water is too warm, too glutinous. It glides thick over her tongue and down her throat. It does not slake her thirst.
In the distance, the sound of an engine. A car, or perhaps a truck.
She offers herself a deep and steady breathing, but does not open her eyes. She is not yet ready to surrender the sweet moulding of the sheets to her body.
The light that invested the city was cruel: a light that rose from the water with an almost excruciating clarity. A biblical light, Jim once said, the kind of light that could hearten or incinerate.
In the newer suburbs, the light splattered a chaotic brilliance over the unsmudged houses, the fresh lawns, the uncultured shrubs. It left nothing unseen, not the machined beauty nor the spare ugliness, not the possibilities among the clutter.
But in their suburb, older, more overgrown with shrubbery, at a remove from the water, the light extended itself with greater discretion, making its way along streets, past hedges and among houses like a timid voyeur, leaving behind a subtle construction of shadow and revelation, an aqueous and elegant chiaroscuro of privilege.
Summer evenings offered shadows, neighbours distanced by a layered darkness and the occasional congestion of barbecuing odours: scents of singed steaks, potato salads, warmed rolls, cold beer. All the surreptitiousness of the good life ritualized to gentle parody. Even the colours of their houses were muted by bylaw to what Jim declared a reticence offensive only to style. The approved pastels, he once said, were to houses what ketchup was to food.
The suburb had grown steadily through the years, its initial anonymity acquiring a genteel personality that Charlotte, touring the house after the acceptance of their offer to purchase, had deemed “introversion with a slow pulse.” She gave Yasmin a searching look, and Yasmin saw her disappointment.
What? she said.
But Charlotte’s hesitations were formless, her unease vague. She said only, “This area. This house. It’s all so … safe.”
Yes, Yasmin had agreed. This area, this suburb, was safe. And the house too was safe, conventional. But it was spacious, and not without possibilities. Besides, she said, acquiring it had made Jim feel more anchored.
“And you?”
“You know me, Charlotte.”
Charlotte had nodded, not in approval but in confirmation. “You’ve found another slipstream,” she said.
And when, one evening, Jim’s new security translated itself into a nocturnal adventurousness on the darkened lawn, Yasmin thought of Charlotte and her tendency to underestimate those different from herself.
Charlotte’s skepticism she wrote off as jealousy unbecoming a friend.
Warmth and safety. She gathers her fist in under her chin, pulls her thighs in tight against her belly.
She makes herself small. So small she is as if reduced to timelessness.
2
WELL, MY DEAR Mrs. Livingston, this is quite the place you find yourself in. So … utilitarian. The curtains do lend a nice touch — even if their giant sunflowers are faded almost colourless. Your son tells me that this is among the best of the private facilities. Hmph! That being so, the public ones must be quite the horror. I mean, my dear, do you know — and you won’t believe this — do you know that they drink tea here from Styrofoam cups? Can you imagine anything more barbaric?
Oh, all right, you probably can. And I’m quite aware that this is not a hotel. Still, standards, you know. Life can be so shoddy sometimes …
In any case, we must all do whatever we can, mustn’t we. So, you know what I’ve done? I’ve brought some of my finest china, two cups and two saucers — you know, the ones with the rose pattern you like so much — and some fine Sri Lankan tea, a silver spoon each, a drop of milk, some sugar packets and a sliced lemon. I know that taking tea is out of the question for you at the moment, but I want to have everything here and ready for you when you … wake up.
Hearing, I am told, my dear Mrs. Livingston, is the last sense to go. I hope you can hear me, my dear, not for me but for yourself. I hold your hand, I even hear your voice, but I have no way of knowing whether you know me to be here with you.
>
You know, someone once said to me that growing up means realizing that your parents are not indispensable. I have learnt that about my grandparents and my parents, all of whom have stepped into that formless void that awaits us all. I suppose that, in the natural order of things, I am next. You can never get used to burying your contemporaries, you know, for to bury a contemporary is to bury a little bit of yourself. Perhaps for this reason, I’m not afraid of what will one day come. In some ways, it’s like anticipating an injection. You know that the pain, if pain there is, will last only a few seconds, the staggering enormity of the end hardly an eye-blink in eternity — but one dreads those seconds more than anything else. I am convinced, you see, that leaving this life is not so bad. Leaving it alone, though: Now that is the horror.
My dear Mrs. Livingston, can you hear me?
3
SHE IS AWARE that she is not fully conscious; is aware of her senses submerged and hovering.
The sheets lie light on her — on her skin that feels dry and powdery — and the temperature beneath the blankets achieves the cool warmth of Indian summer.
Her muscles lose petulance, grow pliant and calm: She pictures them in gentle palpitation beneath her flesh.
Mummy. Mummy! Make room. Let’s snuggle.
Yes, baby, here, come on …
She feels the mattress rock, feels her daughter’s warmth against her own, feels her daughter’s head on her shoulder, her arm around her …
Ariana.
Then she hears herself mumble: No …
Feels revolt rising within herself. She begins to struggle, muscles suddenly taut and trembling.
Her right arm breaks free, tossing the sheets back, slicing a path through illusion. The air turns rugged, rude on her skin, and yet she must put effort into forcing her eyelids open, effort into seeing and feeling the world around her — the sunlight diffused and whitened, the dresser with its boxes and half-burnt candle, the ceiling scored by hairline cracks — and not that other one that hovers within, as seductive and perilous as the sun to Icarus.
The Worlds Within Her Page 13