by Karen Smythe
With Ted, the saucy side of me quickly subsided. When he and I were talking about what we’d give each other for our next birthdays, the first we’d spend together, I said, “I’ll come up with a list for you, Bear. There are lots of things I’d love to get from you.” I kissed him. “You know me — give me an inch, and I’ll take six or seven.” I thought he’d be amused, but he didn’t crack a smile. Nor did he get that rosy flush across the bridge of his nose, the way he did when he started to unbutton my blouse, so I felt foolish. I’d forgotten about that, about the number of times I ended up playing the fool, with Ted.
***
Last spring, when James and I picked up the keys from the lawyer, he reminded us it was April Fool’s Day, and foolish was how we felt when we walked into the house. It had been rented to an old farmhand for years before it went on the market, and it was a mess. We spent a solid week painting and cleaning the kitchen alone, after we took possession. The kitchen walls were spattered with red polka dots of tomato sauce. The bathroom sink was thick with years of dried grime and soap scum, and it took another two full days of scrubbing to make its porcelain shine. My hands were raw from the bleach that somehow seeped into the plastic gloves I wore, turning the powder inside them to slime.
The linoleum that covered the first floor was cracked, curling at the edges, and filthy. It would all have to be replaced and new baseboards put in, too, but I knew James would put that off as long as he could.
***
The old, cheap flooring at the farm was identical to what the landlord installed in Gina’s apartment, where she lived alone while she went to Western. I visited her there a few times in my last year of high school, after Josh went abroad and I’d become lonely again. We spent most of these weekends shopping, watching Saturday Night Live with Ben and his roommates, and eating breakfast at a greasy spoon called the Paragon, where students tried to eat off their hangovers.
But one trip was different. It was Saturday night and I was already in my nightgown. I’d followed Gina into the kitchen, where Ben was opening the drawers and slamming the cupboard doors closed. He’d been out with some friends; it was very late, and Ben was extremely drunk. When he started yelling at Gina, complaining that there was no food in the place, my sister grabbed a pound of sugar from a shelf and said, “Eat this, asshole!” She threw the bag in Ben’s direction, but he stepped away and it missed him; then he pushed Gina hard enough that she fell backwards, bashing her head on the corner of an open drawer.
After Ben left, I tore sheets of paper towel from a roll and pressed them against the gash on Gina’s skull. We sat on the floor next to the split-apart bag for a long time. The red-inked brand name was torn into two words, “Red” and “path,” and a river of white crystals flowed between them. Granules had sprayed all over the linoleum, and when I tried to stand up, the skin of my bare thighs was glued to it. In the morning, I told Gina she should charge Ben with assault and get a lawyer, but she laughed. “You don’t know anything about men, Mazz. He’ll be sorry, you’ll see. He’ll show up soon with chocolates, and we’ll kiss and make up. We do this all the time.”
***
When summer came and James was living at the farm full time, I felt like a hired nurse keeping tabs on a man I didn’t know. I was losing patience for my patient. I remember that. I wish I didn’t, but I remember that now. We’d been so much more than that for so long, but that summer I’d never been so irritated by my husband.
James would sit on the edge of the bed in front of the fan at night, letting the cool flow crash into his chest. I could see him there, across the hall; he’d be facing the door, his eyes closed, inhaling deeply with his mouth open. I knew without looking when he stood and walked around the room, because the register of the whirring sound changed.
Not sleeping, seeing him not sleeping: yes, I was aggravated. And it was disturbing to me, to be aggravated at him. He had every reason to be relieved — I was well! He should have been happy. He should have been enjoying his retirement. He should have trusted in our life. He was healthy, too: the tests showed nothing wrong. James had not lost weight yet (that happened later in the fall, after he’d spent weeks and weeks working in the field behind the house), so he didn’t look sick then, either.
***
The longer Josh modelled, the less well he looked. His agency had him lose weight for a bathing-suit shoot in Capri, and when I saw the spread in Vogue Italia, I thought he looked gaunt and pale. By then the newspapers were starting to report that AIDS was striking homosexual men by the thousands, and when I showed the latest pictures of Josh to Gina, she said, “He’s gay, all right.”
I didn’t think so, but I was scared. I was terrified that Josh might be ill and had a sinking feeling that a life-changing fault, something I had no control over, was opening up in the ground between us.
***
There were times at the farm when James was more himself, when we seemed to be close again. One afternoon a bird on the roof slid down the flue and jumped out of the flap on the furnace in the basement; we heard a horrible squawking noise and saw it hopping on the gravel floor when we opened the door at the top of the stairs. We left it open to draw the bird up to the daylight, and it worked; James threw a large towel over it and carried it out the kitchen door to release it. He gently placed it on the deck and when he slowly lifted the corner of the towel so the bird could fly away, I was surprised at how small its body was; after all the racket it had made when it was trapped in the dark, I’d expected something the size of a hawk, or at least a raven.
When the same thing happened the next day, James was less patient. “Again? God, these birds are stupid!” James had never lashed out at any animal, in all the time I’d known him. “I don’t know,” I offered. “I’d say they’re pretty adventurous. Maybe they’re bored. Maybe going down the chimney is like a Disney ride for birds.” James forced a smile, and we waited for the prisoner to find the light at the top of the stairs.
That night, he was tense again. “I have to do something with that yard. If I don’t, you won’t be able to tell it apart from the hayfield out back. It’s wild.” I said I didn’t mind wild. “Why don’t we leave it?” He didn’t answer. “Like the English do,” I said. The expression on his face as he paused, just before he answered me: he looked determined, as if he had a problem student to deal with. “This property’s too big to be a flower garden, Maslen, English or otherwise,” he said. “We have to get a hold on this. Rein it in.” I nodded as if I understood James’s new need to tame the land, when the whole point of the farm was to let go, to embrace the outdoors without worry. I hope we don’t live to regret buying this place, I thought.
***
I didn’t regret cutting off my breasts. And I didn’t think I missed them, either, until those dreams started: dreams of mouths and tongues and wet, warm affection, my nipples standing at attention. Awake, I missed the weight of them in my hands, slight as it was. They were small, yes, James used to say, but they were eager! He used to pinch pleasure from them with a gentle squeeze, catching them between the knuckles of two fingers, as if holding a cigarette.
In bed with myself, I traced the scars with my index fingers and thought of the first time with Ted, rolling over mid-massage and seeing the surprise on his face, the deepened creases by his eyes when he smiled, the tickle of his fingertips on my breasts. The moment of my self-presentation, the ease of it — of the self, serving up the self. Soon he would say he loved me. He said he’d never felt that way before, he couldn’t help himself. The ecstasy of finding each other made us feel like we’d side-stepped our ordinary selves and become two new, extraordinary beings.
Sometimes I think about Ted professing his love to me, asking me to love him always, to promise I would marry him. That need turned out to be a fever that ran its course. But I’d like to know when it was, exactly, during our last year together, that satisfaction and affection started to drain away from him, and for how long he’d had to keep that secret
to himself.
That first scar, marking that part of me that Ted had been so worried about until the pathologist determined the cells were normal — it’s gone now. As if the scare had never happened to us. I used to touch it tenderly, that wide, whitish symbol of our best intimacy, of Ted’s fear of losing me.
***
I “lost” James. How weak, how soft that sounds. James died. It was not soft. The ground gave way and I fell steeply, landing full force on stalagmites. My entire abdominal cavity felt bruised, for days and days and days.
Weeks into my mourning, when my lungs could expand without my gut revolting, the pain of James’s absence became duller. Not less significant, but less like a harpoon between my ribs. A new sensation arrived, an ache that told me I’d lost my way.
***
“So much loss ahead.” James’s father said this on the day his house went on the market. And he was right; it was the first of many losses for him. When he moved into the care facility, he’d lose most of his belongings. He’d lose his ability to clean his own clothes, his choice of what food to eat. Lou hoped it would take a long time to sell his house, but it sold quickly — so quickly that he had to take the only room available at the home, on a floor they referred to as “mixed.” Lou was one of the few at the upper end of the lucidity scale.
When James and I arrived there to celebrate Lou’s eightieth birthday, he was seated at the head of a small table in the activity room surrounded by his “compatriots,” as he called the other residents. Many tilted, round-shouldered, in their wheelchairs. They wore food-stained sweaters — layers of them, even in the summer. Especially in the summer, because of the air conditioning. These people had lived whole lives, decades full of events and emotions that no one would guess at, seeing them now: they’d run households, had affairs, broken hearts, and fallen in love; danced and gotten drunk and raised children; held jobs and driven cars, and had favourite foods, music, sports. There they were, reduced to wrinkles and sour smells and familial abandonment.
That day, they waited their turn for a piece of stale, white slab cake and a scoop of vanilla ice cream. We all sang a round of “Happy Birthday” to Lou, and James joined in, though he looked as unhappy as I’d ever seen him. Lukewarm coffee was poured into Styrofoam cups. Its smell floated above the pervasive odour of unwashed hair, wet wool, fresh urine, and reheated gravy. That’s loneliness, I remember thinking. That’s what loneliness smells like.
When you’re young, you count the days until the date of an event you’re looking forward to: Christmas, graduation, reunion with a lover. You can afford to wish your life away when you have so much of it ahead of you. I can imagine being very, very old and wishing I could stop time, stop it dead in its tracks. I imagine going to bed at night worrying that this might be it, thinking this could be the end. I think I’d feel grateful, opening my eyes the next morning, for having one more day.
Or not. Maybe instead, if you live long enough, you tire of the limitations, of the sameness, that age imposes on your days. Maybe you begin to detach yourself from time, from its measurement, before you take that ride into nothingness, so that when it begins — the death slide — it doesn’t frighten you the way it would when you are younger. Maybe the idea of non-life is not so bad, by then.
***
James couldn’t really have been afraid of losing me, at least not for long. He knew I’d be fine, the surgery made sure of that. But maybe he’d been thrown off course by confronting the plain fact of mortality. Mine at first, but also his.
***
When I was five years old, I saw a teenager die. It was a summer with record-setting levels of heat and humidity that would not break; even the water in the hose we attached to our backyard sprinkler was warm by the time it sprouted thin streams into the air for Gina and me to run through. Our ever-frugal father finally gave in to our pleas one Saturday and took the family to a hotel near the highway that had an outdoor swimming pool. We were going to stay overnight, to get two days’ use out of it, but we ended up leaving a few hours after we arrived, because a boy dove into the pool and did not come back up.
The newspaper said he was seventeen years old and that a congenital heart defect had killed him, but it was years before my mother could get me to take swimming lessons. I was nine years old when I registered for a ten-week program; during the fifth or sixth lesson, I saw my mother standing next to Julie, the instructor, looking at the clipboard she carried with her to keep track of the Guppies. “Julie put a nine next to your name and everyone else had a five or a six,” Mom said in the car, on the way home. “You’re a star, kiddo!” “Those are our ages, Mom.” I was oldest kid there, but my mother thought that was a coincidence. “You’re always so negative, Maslen. I wish you’d look on the bright side sometimes.”
Maybe she was right. Maybe I did see a glass half-empty. But when I told James the story and what my mother had said about me, he disagreed. “You were just stating the facts,” he said. “She shouldn’t have made you feel bad about being right.” He started talking about the optics of a glass of water — the liquid surface is not really flat anyway, because of the tension that makes it curve, so you have to account for the meniscus when you measure the water level, etc. etc. etc. James’s teacher-talk could bore me, sometimes, but I liked the way he presented that memory back to me.
Once in a while during the long winter before we bought the farm, I thought about what it would be like to lose James — about how I’d feel living alone again, if his symptoms were real and terminal. And each time I imagined being alone, I had to admit that I thought I could manage. Yes, I remember thinking, I’d be fine. I’d be fine without James.
***
I would hit James on the back when he started to choke up, and that seemed to help. But one night he couldn’t catch his breath, and panic was making it worse, so I tried to distract him. I told him about having the wind knocked out of me once, when I was a kid, and that I knew how frightening it felt. “I was a Brownie, and we were playing something like Red Rover, in the gym. Everyone on our team had to run as fast as they could and rush past the girls on the other team to reach the other side, without being caught. So I ran and ran, and I was so happy that I wasn’t caught that I forgot to slow down. I hit the cement-block wall at top speed, and slid to the ground, flattened like Wile E. Coyote.” By the time I finished talking, James was breathing normally again, but he was looking at me as if I’d told him the saddest story he’d ever heard.
“Cheer up, hon,” I said, rubbing his back. “I was okay! I thought you’d laugh.” I’d told him lots of stories like that about myself before, so I reminded him of a few. “I was such a klutz! I broke my leg on that ski trip, remember that story? And the bruises I always had that made my teacher suspect child abuse? My own mother made fun of me for it, you know that.”
***
I often sat with Mom in the evening after I got home, the summer I finished high school. She was still lucid but in serious decline. We’d not spent much time alone together, and like my father she didn’t talk about feelings, so we reminisced about safe topics like family vacations. “Remember the time Dad drove us to Marineland?” She certainly did. “Once he found out how much four tickets were going to cost, he almost turned around and went home,” she said. “That’s why I stayed in the car. Dad would have stayed, too, if you and Gina had been old enough to go in alone.” I smiled, and then she said, “At least he left the windows down for me!” I laughed so hard that my stomach muscles locked up with lactic acid and the pain forced me to stop.
“Mom,” I said, before I left that night, “these visits mean a lot to me. But they’re going to make it harder to say goodbye, too.” The pitch of my voice started to rise, as it still does when I speak if I’m upset, and my mother became annoyed, as she always did when I was upset. “Well. When I was your age, I was out with my friends having fun all summer.” My mother knew that I didn’t go to bars or parties; that Josh was moving to Italy that September; t
hat even Gina was all but gone from my life, since she’d set up house in Mississauga after her wedding in June. “Anyway,” she added when I didn’t respond, “I didn’t ask you to do this. You didn’t have to spend time here for my sake.”
***
When I visited Lou by myself, he’d take me on walks to see his friends. “They’re dropping like flies,” he said on one of the last of our rounds, but not with any sorrow. They named corridors like streets, in Lou’s facility, and his room was on “Blueberry Lane.” Lou would roam the hallways, hunched over and pushing his walker in front of him like a shopping cart, as if he were going up and down the aisles of a grocery store.
James didn’t come with me to see Lou very often. I thought it was because of the grudges he bore against his father. But maybe he felt guilty, too, about having sold his father’s house and moved him into the home. Or maybe James avoided the nursing home because he’d simply grown tired of his father, of being responsible for him.
Is it instinctive, this tiring of people you are close to? Perhaps it’s a primitive safeguard built into our reptile brains. Elderly parents, aggravating teenagers, long-time spouses — perhaps it’s a primal kind of coping, a natural weaning, a gradual hardening of heart before the end comes. Perhaps it makes for a smaller hole to fill after they’ve gone. I don’t know.
eleven
Prof. L. told me over a glass of wine that he’d been hospitalized the year before I met him. I nodded, thinking, This is like a Bergman movie, and quickly changed the subject. I assumed he’d had a nervous breakdown, not only because he was neurotic — he talked about the decades of psychoanalysis he went through, but lightly, mostly in the context of discussing Woody Allen characters — but also because he seemed embarrassed to be speaking of it. To me being neurotic was nearly normal, a source of humour among friends, but a breakdown was another matter. I wasn’t prepared to be pulled inside of someone else’s vortex. Not Prof. L.’s, anyway.