by Lisa Moore
Don’t buy those running shoes, he says.
Excuse me? she says. And he leaves her at the counter and approaches the mother of the prostrate seven-year-old who wants the shoes with the red lights in the sole, who is still screaming and now down on her stomach hammering her fists and kicking out, and whose mother is grabbing her by one elbow trying to lift/drag her out of the mall.
I’ll buy her the goddamn shoes, Steve/Aiden says.
What?
Fucking right I will, he says. Right out of my paycheque.
But you realize I win then, Cathy says. The trip to Toronto and the tickets to the musical.
The child, still trembling, has gone still. She stands, straightening what she can of her snowsuit, and retrieves the giant lollipop, abandoned on the vinyl bench in the centre of the store. It’s dyed red and white, and the colours spiral toward the centre of the saucer-sized candy like op-art.
It looks like a storm or an evil eye and it’s gleaming with saliva and has been licked all over.
Cathy: You’d do that?
I’d do that. You’re the goddamn manager, says Steve. You deserve it.
Cathy is still on her knees and the little girl approaches. She touches the lollipop down then, against Cathy’s hair, like a sceptre, anointing her.
Visitation
I started having visions in late July, just as things were starting to heat up. The visions were preceded by the kind of optical disturbances many people experience. Floating prisms in my peripheral vision. Unaligned rainbows, or shimmers that sometimes drifted in front of my eyes as if carried on a light breeze. They were radiant but opaque splotches, so if I were looking directly at someone’s face, the mouth might be obscured. If I darted my eyes, fast, to the right or left, I could sometimes shift the spot so I could see the person’s mouth, but then an eye would be obscured, or a cheek. I thought early migraine symptoms, or detached retina, but there was no firm diagnosis.
I began to experience these floaters, or whatever they were, a month or so before the first vision. I don’t know if the man I saw was in any way connected to the minor visual disturbances that preceded his presence. I say man; he was corporeal. But that is all I can say for certain.
The vision was accompanied by the stink of rot; it smelled like our dog after he had rolled in the remains of a moose carcass someone had dumped in the woods. It was a stink that wafted in — simultaneously piercing and blunt, like a hammer that hits a thumb — but the smell was whipped away when the wind changed direction. I didn’t think supernatural at the time. I didn’t think evil. But I felt uneasy almost at once, a fluttering in my gut. And after only a moment, I was very afraid.
The first time I experienced the vision, or visitation, was at the Low Point beach. I thought stress. The collapse of my marriage. My husband and I had been separated for a little more than a year and had recently finalized the divorce. Psychotic episode, I thought. I hadn’t been eating very much. I was working long hours. I thought fatigue. Though at first I thought the man was an ordinary stranger who had stopped at the beach because of the strange phenomena with the fish. The bay was thick with cod. Half the community had come out to see. There were cars lining the harbour, people standing around in small groups, trying to get a good look.
* * *
A marriage is this: My husband likes the glasses with the glasses, the cups with the cups. Every morning I unload the dishwasher and put the cups and the glasses together. He comes down and moves the cups.
The bath running, pipes shuddering, lolling surges of water, the scrudge of a calf or buttock along the white enamel of the cast-iron claw-footed tub we salvaged from an abandoned house in Low Point, a house collapsing into the long grass.
We are: Daily walks along Duckworth Street in the late afternoon together; occasionally, change for the homeless of downtown St. John’s, mostly kids with dogs, sleeping bags draped over their shoulders and cardboard signs that say they’re trying to get home; lattes from Fixed; past the Devon House, raku pottery in the window and hooked rugs, up to the Battery where there are seven black cats, mostly on the picket fence or the porch of the last house before you get to the lookout. We are the dog let loose in the Anglican Cathedral on the way back home, rippling through the chest-high snow at dusk. A mutt, mottled like an old mirror, an undulation, sniffing the graves; and my husband, with the black nylon leash wrapped around one of his puffy Gore-Tex gloves, letting the metal hook of the leash slap against his thigh.
We are roast chicken dinners with chicken seasoning that we bang out of a tin can with the flat of our hands. The chicken from a frozen package of three, purchased at Costco, frost-burnt and plump. We cook with haste. Long as it isn’t raw. We buy the jumbo Party Mix and shovel handfuls into our faces while we cook and do the dishes.
We tell each other stories, outrages from my husband’s office, flecks of pretzel flying as he says about this one or that one. Or I talk about the customers at the store; the new Excel spreadsheets I’m using for inventory, glitches in software.
I type, I say. Then there’s a delay.
These are fillable forms?
A delay and then the letters and numbers flick across the screen, meanwhile I’m not doing anything. These are fillable.
You’re not touching the keyboard?
And the letters pour across the screen, seconds later, like, thirty seconds maybe.
My husband doesn’t like the gloves I use for washing the pots and pans. Yellow rubber gloves.
You leave them all over the place, he says. Put them away at least.
They’re gloves, I say. Grease, what do you call, globules in the water.
You leave them on the counter.
Clots of dog food, pork fat, a soggy toast crust. I don’t want my hands touching that.
The feel of those gloves inside, he says. Wet, icky.
And then, I say. Like, a half sentence of text ticks out all by itself across the screen.
Turn the machine off and turn it back on, my husband says.
I do.
Do you turn it off?
I do, I tell him.
Marriage is: you buy a cabin (a “cottage,” they’d call it on the mainland, with a veranda and garden, a lilac and an apple tree, blossoms all over the ground) in outport Newfoundland, maybe an hour or two from town. Canoes, barbeques, an ATV. Before long, you invest in a small business, buy a convenience store down the road from the cabin. A commercial property with a gas bar, soft-serve machine, beer; sell firewood to the crowd who come in from town for ice fishing on the ponds.
When the store came on the market we saw it as extra income to supplement my husband’s retirement, maybe six or seven years away. We thought: opportunity. We thought I could commute for part of the week, manage the store from town the rest of the time. An hour and a half drive.
We thought when my husband retired we’d live around the bay most of the year. Solar panels, maybe even thermal heating, a greenhouse for tomatoes, basil. He’d apply for a moose licence; get one of our neighbours to take him out. We thought off the grid, maybe. Or partially off the grid. Turn our house in the city into an Airbnb.
* * *
We are: a box comes in the mail. Something rattles around inside it; I have to slit the packing tape with an X-Acto knife. Here, let me get you a knife. I got it. No, use the knife. Okay, give me the knife.
Even then, I have trouble ripping open the heavy cardboard. Present for you, my husband says. Guess what it is. No idea.
What’s the occasion? No occasion. You can’t guess? I’ve no idea.
A dildo, bright purple with ridges, a smiley face at the tip. Hilarious.
Set in a bed of Styrofoam S’s. I twist the wheel on one end and the vibration is industrial. The S’s squeak against each other, writhing in a pelt of static electricity. Twist the dial back the other way, a gentle hum.
Giv
e it a whirl, he says.
We are the neighbour’s snow blower at dawn. Trips to the dump. We are the new surveillance system I have installed at the store. A camera pointing in every aisle. The simultaneous feed on a flat screen at the cabin and the video footage, three months after the system was installed, of the first break-in. A young woman with long dark hair and a round rabbit-fur hat, pixelated and flaring white like a halo. A young man loading cartons of cigarettes into an army surplus bag, cleaning off the shelves with a sweep of his arm. I’d phoned the cops by running out onto the road with the phone until I found reception. Only two bars, halfway to the river out back, but they answered. They blocked off the highway on both ends, the only two ways out of Low Point if you’re driving.
Marriage is: You should get that windshield wiper fixed. I will. Don’t go on the highway with it like that. I won’t. Stop at Canadian Tire. I will. Did you stop at Canadian Tire? No. You drove like that? Yes, I did.
The wiper with the rubber blade torn away from the metal arm so that the strip of rubber wiggles over the glass like a maddened eel. The metal arm scratching an arc in the glass.
Sucking his cock; the vibrator on roar.
How was it? Oh my god. Was it good? Oh my god.
* * *
A marriage is: remortgaging the convenience store in Low Point after the divorce and the condo fiasco. I work more shifts at the store and live in our cabin, to which you say: Okay, until we figure out something else.
You got the cabin in the divorce. We split everything down the middle, the accretion of a life, the worst being the doodads; the worst being the Aerolatte from Bed Bath & Beyond for milk foaming; the worst being the Dirt Devil, and all the handheld devices for cleaning to which I’d inexplicably formed an attachment.
The glass decanter your mother gave us, and the popcorn maker; the worst being the Christmas decorations, dragged from the basement in the heat of summer, the needlepoint Santa my sister did which naturally went to me, the pewter reindeer.
The very worst was the tin salamander from Mexico City with plastic jewels on its back and you could put a tea light behind it. The salamander you bought after we’d stood over the graves with the Plexiglas covers embedded in the stone of the courtyard outside the Metropolitan Cathedral. Unable to see what was below because of the condensation on the Plexiglas, the murky depths of the graves, and the febrile moss of decay.
And the wild fucking in the hotel room behind the cathedral and the bar when the Mexicans stood, one at a time, stood up from tables squashed with relatives, maybe fifteen at a table, all ages, and sang out folk songs, and the enchiladas and old grandmothers.
You took the salamander. We fought over the salamander and I threw a plate at your head but I missed, smashed it against the cupboards. You got the salamander.
I had lost my entire share in the condo fiasco; that was not us, it was me. But after thirty-two years of marriage what could you do? You would not have me say I was put out on the sidewalk. For a time, until I got on my feet, I could stay at the cabin in Low Point. You refinanced the convenience store. Of course this was not us. This was my lawyer and your lawyer.
* * *
I was a dancer until I was twenty-seven. Once I performed in a dance that began at dawn in the graveyard of the Anglican Cathedral. We dancers lay face up on the graves. Many of the headstones in that graveyard lie flat on the ground, and the words and dates are smoothed away, gouged by centuries of rain and sleet.
We were wearing long gowns and petticoats, the colours too brilliant for period dresses. A troupe of fifteen young women. We rose from the graves as the sun came up, yawning, stretching our arms in the air. We each had a big silver tray with heaps of cut fruit that we offered the audience. Fog crawled around the graveyard. The trains of our dresses left streaks of bright emerald in the dew-greyed grass. I was wearing a ruffled dress with a stiff lace bodice; the smell of baby powder and the comforting scent of some other actress’s stale underarm sweat; lying in a faint depression in the earth because the coffin below me had rotted through and collapsed.
Dancers live by their bodies; they know the muscle and gut, ache and attrition. It’s a short stint, dominated by youth and strength, and sexual appetite. Ungovernable hunger. When we accept the idea of decay we are no longer dancers. We hold the simple tenet: everything moves.
* * *
The divorce had come through, and then, at the Low Point beach, the vision. I hadn’t been to town in more than two weeks. I had to be at the store when gas was delivered for the tanks, to see the Atlantic Lottery rep, the Central Dairies delivery, the man from Labatt’s restocking the fridge. I was discovering discrepancies in the accounts: small sums, sometimes significant sums, but I could see no pattern, make no sense of what was missing. Almost everyone in the community ran a tab, and everything they bought was written down by hand in Hilroy exercise books. I was transferring the accounts to spreadsheets but there were glitches in the software. Some customers complained they had been charged for things they hadn’t bought. They said things like this had never happened under the former owner. One woman said it was as simple as the nose on your face. If it wasn’t written down you never bought it.
The man at the beach was in a too-tight plaid jacket and jeans with the crotch hanging low enough on his thighs that it seemed to pinch his gait. He walked with a cordoned strut. He was standing with his phone out, trying to take a picture of the water.
The ocean was teeming with cod. They were so dense near the shore I could see their backs breaking the surface, piled on top of each other, their violent writhing. They formed a solid sludge. Some had been left on the beach when the waves withdrew. The sun was setting, turning the water a streaky orange, and close to the beach it was a bloody violet. All the windows in the houses along the shore glowed deep yellow. It was only a matter of minutes before the sun disappeared into the horizon. Fish were dying all over the sand, flinging themselves up, sometimes as much as a foot in the air, and wriggling.
I smelled the alcohol off the man, and the stink of rot or sewage so strong it made my eyes water until the wind changed and the smell was gone. His face was slack except for a ridge of cheekbone, high and sharp under his deep-set eyes, the corners of which radiated white lines in his tanned face as if he had been squinting into a permanent glare. His forehead swooped back, a receding hairline. The pate spattered with brown patches. He had a beard, tufts of thin hair, almost colourless. He was bone with hard knots of stringy muscle and very short. I’d never seen him before.
People said with the downturn in the economy, strangers were coming from St. John’s to cause trouble, break into homes, vandalize, steal what they could get. This was new in a community that slept with their doors unlocked.
What’s happening? I asked.
Fish, he said. I saw that there were cars lined up on both sides of the harbour with their headlights on. People standing at the edge of the cliff. I had never seen anything like it. It was unnatural. The water churning.
I was trying to post a picture, he said. But you got no reception here.
Sometimes you get one or two bars, I said. Up near the church.
You don’t belong here, he said. What are you? From town? He ran his eyes over me and slid his phone into the back pocket of his jeans. He started to walk beside me toward the road, where his truck was idling. He took a flask out of the inside breast pocket of the jacket. The bottle was in a paper bag, soft with thousands of fine wrinkles from reuse. He tilted the mouth of the bottle toward me. A truck up on the hill pulled out of the line of trucks and headed down the dirt road. Its headlights, for a brief instant, made the man a silhouette. Light punched through his crooked elbow and between his legs and over his shoulders and when the truck had gone past there was a shimmering floater hanging over the man’s mouth. I blinked hard but I couldn’t get rid of the blinding spot of light. Then my stomach flip-flopped like the fish on the beach and
I felt very afraid of him. It was a paranoia that I recognized, even in the grip of it, as being entirely unreasonable. But the fear was a quickening, solid and instinctive; I could neither make sense of it nor stand another minute in the man’s presence. He was befouled. But it was only later that I understood he hadn’t existed. That he was a visitation, a violation.
A few weeks after the first vision there was the fire at the Bay de Verde fish plant. Down the shore a few miles from my cabin — the cabin my husband was letting me stay in free of charge until I could get back on my feet, until his good will ran out — a whole community went up in flames.
* * *
The smell of fresh paint in the condo; fifty-six people defrauded of their life savings. A chalky vanilla scent. They are scenting interior paint these days. But I’d stepped inside the one-room condo in St. John’s with Marion Sullivan that day and I’d felt nothing out of the ordinary. I am not a good judge of character. Even in hindsight it is hard to believe that Marion is not the well-meaning, never-stops-talking but canny person I thought she was.
She intuited the divorce when we were getting a coffee at Tim Hortons, though I hadn’t said. But at Tim Hortons, the pressure I’d felt. Preparing to sign the papers for the condo at the bank. My husband would have known about Marion Sullivan. He can smell a false, bright confidence as surely as I could smell that vanilla paint.
I had my son, Kevin, with me the morning I signed for the condo. He’d been skateboarding outside the bank with friends but the security guard came out to make them leave. All Kevin’s buddies dispersed with the slump-shouldered lag of kids who don’t respect authority but would find anything other than sluggish compliance unstylish.
Kevin stepped on the tail end of his board so it seemed to leap into his hand, and then he followed me into my meeting at the bank without a word.