by Karen Smythe
***
Gina was always the beautiful one. We never did look like sisters, even before her plastic surgery last summer. Gina always had big, round green eyes, thick chestnut hair, and a curvy build, which she sometimes hated. She would pound on her hips and ask why she ended up with the big butt instead of me, though she knew that with my flat chest, I would have traded bodies with her in a flash. Most of the time she’d tell me I was ugly, that I’d never find a boyfriend, I’d never get married. At twelve, when I was reading my father’s copy of Great Expectations, I immediately understood what Pip meant about his sister’s contempt for him: “[it] was so strong that it became infectious, and I caught it.”
By the time I started university, the fall after my mother died, Gina had softened toward me. She’d been married to Ben for a few months and was hosting her first Thanksgiving dinner at their house, in Ajax. At the table, Ben offered to say grace, but none of us wanted him to. I suggested we each make a statement about gratitude, instead, and I offered to go first. “Gina, thank you for having Dad and me over today. I am grateful that you and I have become friends, now that we’re both adults. Also,” I added, half joking, “I forgive you for your general nastiness toward me when we were growing up.”
Ben laughed, but Gina said she didn’t know what I was talking about. I don’t think she’d simply forgotten what she’d been like, and I don’t think she was attempting to manipulate me or make me doubt myself, either. I think she believed that her version, her memory of her own behaviour, was the truth. Dad chose not to comment, other than to say he was grateful for the food before us. Then he asked me to pass the mashed potatoes. They were made from flakes that came in a box, so I knew he wouldn’t like them. Mom wouldn’t have served such fare to a dog (I could actually hear her saying this — “I wouldn’t serve that mush to a dog, Gina!”). Neither Dad nor I wanted to set Gina off, so we each ate as much as we could and hid the rest under half slices of bread.
***
I didn’t see Gina very often after James and I married. There was no falling-out between us, but she was busy with her kids and her house in Ajax, and James and I liked to spend our Saturdays walking along the Danforth, or through Little India, or, in good weather, on the boardwalk in the Beaches. We saw more of Gina when her children got older, and James liked to impress her by cooking dinners at our place, when Ben was away on business. Her favourite meal of James’s was spaghetti with brown sugar, chili pepper flakes, and red wine in the tomato sauce; she also copied out his easy chicken-and-crab-soup recipe, with fresh tarragon, cream, and sherry stirred into the packaged mix, but I’m sure she never made either dish for herself.
Gina drove out to the farm to visit us once, when Ben was away and the kids were at day camp. I made tuna sandwiches for lunch and used James’s trick of stirring a little white sugar into the mayonnaise to cut the fishy taste. I put a couple in the fridge for James to eat later.
That day in the kitchen, Gina said, “Too bad James doesn’t cook anymore. Maybe retirement isn’t good for him. Maybe he should sign up for substitute teaching or something.” Everyone, including Gina, thought James had taken early retirement because of my “journey,” as the oncologists liked to call it. James did not want his private medical information shared with anyone, and I didn’t betray his trust.
“He’s had enough of teaching,” I told her. James didn’t retire as much as recuse himself from regular life. Buying the farm was a gamble, but we were running out of options. “We bought this place for him. He’s earned the right to play a little, at this point in his life.” What I said to Gina was true; but whatever was bothering James, and whatever the wall meant to him, I knew that he wasn’t playing a game.
***
With Ted, I played my hand, and won. Making choices, I thought, was one of the easiest things in the world to do. I felt so powerful when Ted and I were together, when he was responsive and giving, and wanted to be with me forever.
We spent every evening and every weekend together, for nearly a year, in London. We alternated between apartments based on our roommates’ schedules. I kept clean underwear and an extra set of my makeup and toiletries at his place, instead of putting them into an overnight bag when I planned to stay over. When we were at my place — at the apartment I shared with Tanis — Ted did his best to change my roommate’s opinion of him, but she wasn’t having any of his charm. “Let me put it this way,” she said when I asked why she didn’t like him. “If he becomes a doctor, I bet he’ll specialize in gynecology. Face it, he’s a flirt and a jerk.”
But he wasn’t those things with me. He brought me gifts — a hardcover edition of Mrs Dalloway, when I told him it was my favourite novel, inscribed in his hand: “To Mazzie, the love of my life, for all time — T.” He wouldn’t let me get out of bed in the morning because he didn’t like to say goodbye. When I eventually got dressed, if we’d spent the night in his room, he would hide my keys and wallet from me. At the pub on campus, where we’d meet after his evening biochemistry lab, he’d hold my hand and ask what I’d eaten during the day, who I’d spoken to, what I’d been reading while I waited for him. We wanted every moment of each other. We were children who wanted what we wanted, now and now and now.
I used to think back to my early days with Ted to remind myself what it felt like to fall in love. This was before I met James, and for a few months after, too. When I thought about falling for Ted, it was not with nostalgia; it was almost a re-enactment, a reactivation. In an instant, I’d become the person I was with him in that place, at that time. I was in that mood, wearing those clothes and hearing his voice say those words. Feeling his skin against mine, the temperature of his hands. For a long time, it was a relief to find those scenes were still there, to have my inner life waiting for me to peek into, like an enveloped indulgence. But as James and I became stronger, I had to stop going back, for James’s sake and for mine.
***
In an essay for my Modern Lit professor, I argued that Virginia Woolf challenged her day’s gendered understanding of the inner life via her character, Peter Walsh: “First, she renders Peter’s mind in the act of remembering decades-old scenes with Clarissa, revivifying emotional experiences in the present — a ruminating tendency not usually ascribed to men, in literature; second, she feminizes the rhythm and language of Peter’s haunted thoughts using long, run-on sentences, multiple clauses separated by commas, heightened descriptions of the senses,” etc. etc. It was a game of sorts, I knew it was, but it earned an A+. Ted thought I was some kind of magician, creating convincing sentences that he could barely understand. I’d put a spell on him, he’d say, in the months leading up to our first summer together.
I don’t want to think about Ted. I wouldn’t be thinking of him now, if this hadn’t happened to James — if I’d not been forced to look back, to look inside, to weigh the invisible and the absent. And I am ashamed by some of my thoughts: even now, I can’t imagine Ted dying without feeling as though there is a small, hard lump burning in my chest, a pain that sears much more than it should for the relatively short time he’d spent in my life. I know it’s wrong to feel this way about Ted. Especially now, after having had James in my life for so long. And after losing him so soon.
***
Every day, for most of the day, James drove the beat-up Volvo station wagon we’d found abandoned in the barn to retrieve rocks — field stones, pushed out of the way when settlers cleared the land for farming. He harvested hundreds and hundreds of them from the end of our long, narrow property. He’d fill up large plastic buckets by hand and drive them back toward the house, to add them to his quarry. He unloaded them slowly, assessing their general size and shape and sorting them into piles: this one for the interior of section two, that for the exterior of the top row of section seven, and so on.
I watched from the window as he worked, because if I went outside, he’d stop. He didn’t talk to me about his project, and I worried that asking why he was obsessed with it might
make him feel judged or questioned, which would not be helpful. And after a few months, his symptoms began to wane — at least, he no longer talked about them, so I assumed they had.
***
That was the beginning, I thought, when I tried to piece the recent past together for the insurance company: it was during James’s final few months teaching that a crushing anxiety would come out of nowhere and grab at his throat. When it happened, he’d call me at work and I’d have to take the subway up to Finch Station; Tony would pick me up and drive back to the school where he and James both taught. James was always waiting for me in the parking lot, sitting on the passenger side of his car, looking ashamed.
That was where I always started it off, the story of James’s disappearance; for months after he died, I still believed that those panic attacks were the beginning of the end.
***
James’s first marriage ended after four years. He married Andrea because he thought he could help her become “who she was meant to be,” he said. She had so much potential! The way he talked about the marriage made it sound like an extracurricular project, and I thought James was something of a condescending ass for talking about it that way. From the pictures he showed me after we moved into our bungalow, Andrea seemed attractive in a natural sort of way: no makeup, ivory complexion, blond hair pulled back into a ponytail. But she was needy and negative, James said, and she wrapped herself in a cloak of melancholy. Then she told him she changed her mind, she wanted children after all; she wanted them so badly that she had a hysterical pregnancy. When James wouldn’t capitulate, Andrea turned para-spiritual on him. Accusations came with her new belief in reincarnation: James had tried to kill her in a former life, one in which they were, bizarrely, also married to each other. They didn’t grow apart, James said, they broke apart. “‘Irreconcilable differences’ didn’t even begin to explain what happened with us.”
***
“No wonder people start wars, when two sisters in the same family can’t even get along,” my mother would say, walking away in disgust whenever Gina and I fought. So she didn’t see what happened when Gina pushed me out of a chair onto the hardwood floor and I broke my tibia, at age four; or when, at seven, my left radius cracked after Gina stuck her foot out to trip me; or when two of my toes were fractured, at ten, because Gina’s textbook-filled knapsack “slipped off” the kitchen counter. I was brittle-boned (I hated the taste of milk), I was often preoccupied, and I was very clumsy; my mother was sure that these traits explained my injuries.
Eventually it was my father who stepped in when he couldn’t stand listening to our yelling matches anymore. This was after I’d found my favourite turtleneck with its arms ripped off and my new midi-skirt cut into a mini on the floor of Gina’s closet. Dad put a lock on my bedroom door to keep Gina out, and I added the key to the string necklace I wore with my bicycle-lock key, until I left junior high and took the bus to high school. My clothes were safe by then, since my unusual wardrobe was of no interest to Gina, other than as fodder for insults. “Maslen,” my father advised, when I still reacted to my sister’s taunts, “you can’t wear your heart on your sleeve all the time. You’ll have to toughen up.”
***
One Saturday the spring before we found the farm, James and Tony went for a hike north of the city, and I visited my father. I didn’t see him often; we’d never been close, and it was fine with me that he apportioned his late-found interest in maintaining family ties among Gina and her kids.
We didn’t know how to talk to each other, Dad and I, so we spoke of Gina’s children, our only mutual interest. He thought Gina and Ben were raising them without enough discipline; whenever he went to their house, he said, meals were completely chaotic. Then he surprised me and said he remembered my friend Josh coming to our family dinners, which made me smile, though I was also sad; I hadn’t thought about Josh for such a long time. I had an urge to reach out, to try once more to track him down. When Dad turned the television on to watch the golf game, I called Josh’s grandmother’s number, which I thought I’d fixed in my brain. But I must have forgotten it after all, I thought, because the line was out of service.
On my way home I decided to drive over to Josh’s house, to say hello to his grandmother in person. As soon as I got there I became anxious, just as I used to when I was getting to know Josh, spinning myself into a state of terrible anticipation, certain that everything I’d planned was about to go wrong. This anxiety was not entirely without basis: our first try to see a movie together was derailed when his neighbour, Rachel, showed up at his place (she needed to talk); another time, I waited at school for two hours, certain that he regretted saying he’d meet me for lunch (he’d gotten the days mixed up).
I was getting out of my car when a man and woman opened the front door of the house and led their two children to the minivan I was blocking in the driveway. I apologized for intruding, and said I was looking for the family of a friend who had grown up in this house. The wife told me they’d bought the place years before, in an estate sale. And with that my mood — which had risen gently when Dad talked about Josh, half an hour before — dropped into a crevasse. I was so stupid! Of course she’d be dead by now, Josh’s grandmother! How had so much time passed? And where could Josh be now?
***
After Josh called in response to the Letter, that potent piece of paper, I remembered one of his calls to me from a year or two before. His model-girlfriend-of-the-month (he didn’t give a name) wanted him to move in with her; his grandmother wanted him to come back home, to help out (he didn’t say with what); and his modelling agency wanted him to fly all over the world (anywhere, anytime). He didn’t know what he wanted. At the end of the call, he said he was grateful to me for listening. What he loved about both me and Rachel was we accepted him without question, moods and all.
***
During his final year of medical school, it was Ted who became moody. He expressed this through anger, which I attributed to overwork: like all of the senior students, he did thirty-six-hour shifts in hospital rotations while preparing for the national Board exams. His class’s hockey team suspended its games for the interim, which meant he couldn’t skate and play-fight his stress away. I tried not to put any of my needs at his feet for those final months of his program. He had always been my confidant, and I’d shared everything with him about work, friends, family — you name it; but I reminded myself that keeping emotional distance from Ted would be necessary only for the short term. That made it easier to get through the episode of melancholy I’d begun to slide into.
All through the summer of that year I’d been thinking about my mother. It was almost the anniversary of her death, and though he’d never met my mom, Ted had always come with me to put flowers on her grave in August. When he forgot about it, I didn’t mention it to him, and I went alone. That night when I got home, Ted said he wasn’t going to stay over, and I broke down. He gathered up his things and told me to pull myself together. It wasn’t fair to let my mood barometer go up or down based on where he happened to be. If I couldn’t help it, then that was my tough luck. People were always telling me I had to be tougher, harder than I was, it seemed.
***
I knew that being annoyed at James for his moods and anxiety attacks was not fair, so I tried not to show it. I compared it to his fear of flying, which hadn’t lasted. “Remember when you had tremors and shortness of breath on takeoff? We never think of that anymore!” I expected that he’d snap out of it soon, because he was still James, and that was what James would do.
I let James think I’d always been on an even keel, but the truth is, it was James who grounded me. Without him, without his emerging, persistent presence in my life all those years ago, I think I’d have remained stagnant, locked in a vacuum of absence, mulling myself to sleep at night thinking of the past. Which is where I seem to be, by necessity, now.
Hannah Arendt said that thinking is a fight against time, because the activity of refle
ction brings that which is absent — the past — into the mind’s present. You would think it might console, this resurrection, but it hasn’t yet, for me. Because it’s not reflection, what I’m in the midst of, now: it’s an attempt to forget, it’s a peeling away, it’s a lifting off. It’s an attempt to see James, and our marriage, anew.
***
I have to admit that whenever I left James alone on the farm, I didn’t miss him. Not in the way I knew I should. And what I did feel, instead, was relief. Going home was a reprieve from not understanding what was wrong with him, with us.
***
Things James stopped doing after my diagnosis:
– lifting weights
– going for his daily jogs
– cooking meals
– scouting for organic produce at the St. Lawrence Market
– reminding me to take yogurt and fruit to work
– wanting sex
– making lists
But the stones, their weight and their waiting to be found, soothed James somehow. He worked for hours at a time, for days on end, with those stones, the spring after my surgery. This pleased me, even though he seemed farther away. Some kind of equilibrium was establishing itself, I thought, both in James’s mind and in our marriage.
When I was there with him on the weekends, we ate silent meals of eggs, salads, fresh bread from the market, things that I could manage. It didn’t disturb me that we had so little to talk about in those days; we’d been together for too many years by then to be worried about that. James seemed calmer, to me, and that was enough. It seemed like enough to me then.
***
Unless I was travelling for work, Ted and I mostly saw each other on the weekends from September to April for the four years he spent in medical school. Every time he left my apartment to go back to his shared one, I’d stand at the window, half-hidden behind the curtain, and watch him walk down the sidewalk until he disappeared. I’d have the urge to run after him and felt a push within myself to remember, to cement the details of how we spent the previous two days together: shopping in Kensington Market for vintage purses (for me) and fedoras (for him, but I wore them), eating lunch in subterranean Chinatown restaurants, or listening to a set at the Rex on Queen West. Over a beer or two, we’d talk about moving somewhere like Belize, where we could live on next to nothing; Ted imagined opening a clinic, and I thought about starting a small English school. “I don’t want to be like my dad,” he said, “and stay around here running a family practice for my whole life. He thinks taking a cruise with continuing education for doctors is travelling. A cruise!”