This Side of Sad

by Karen Smythe

  ***

  What Ted did not do after we parted:

  – Find a cure for cancer

  – Fly into space

  – Look for me

  ***

  “You might be correct, when you say I sound more formal than I used to. I’m trying to avoid being flirtatious. I am trying to show respect for my wife. We both have seen online relationships lead people astray. I guess I’m overcompensating for that fear, sorry. Yes, let’s have coffee. It will be fun to share a story or two with you.”

  ***

  Ted’s wife’s interests: kitchen design, fashion shows, shopping local, yoga.

  ***

  When I wake from one of my new Josh dreams, I feel a wash of tingling sorrow settle into my entire body — my joints pain me, and my limbs, toes, and belly all ache. Limb-loosening, that’s what the ancients called such longing. It’s an earthward pull, a force like magnetism or gravity, but it’s specific to me, to my cells.

  ***

  Status Update: Two years ago today I was diagnosed. Three years to go, to be in the clear.

  Private Message to Ted: Remember that lump that scared us? It came back to haunt me.

  Subtext: Ask me what kind of cancer it was, Ted. Ask what happened; say that you are glad I am okay. Remember me. Our closeness. My body. Us. Ted — tell me. Tell me you do.

  ***

  “Tell”: a twitch or a blanching or a blush, something observed that blows the bluff. It “tells” the person looking at you what you are really thinking, what you are hiding. Gina spitting curses at me while denying that she’d stolen my clothes: her “I’m lying through my teeth” tell. Ted’s blush spreading across the bridge of his nose while he pretended to talk to me about dinner: his “turned on” tell.

  I must have one, a tell. I must give off signals like radio wavelengths that translate as “Go on, you can talk to me.” At the language institute I became the unofficial counsellor, the go-to person for anyone who needed confidential chats about homesickness, a new relationship, school worries — that kind of thing. My surgeon, blurting out that she wanted my advice about marriage, was another incident. And I’ve heard from strangers about more marital problems and nervous breakdowns and delinquent children than I can count. “I feel like I’ve known you for a long time,” they’ll say, in the middle of their confession. But usually I just listen.

  Yesterday a woman got on the subway at Bloor, sat down next to me, and said, “My god, I’m tired. I wouldn’t have to stand on my feet working all day if it weren’t for my bedridden husband.” I started to say, “Oh, I’m sorry,” but she cut me off. “Don’t be. He’s a mean bugger, and a gambler. He lost all of our savings, so I can’t retire. At least he can’t do any more harm on his back. If he still had the use of his legs, I’d have to kill him.”

  Well. What can you say to that?

  fourteen

  There were two uniformed officers at the door when I opened it that night, a man and a woman, both a lot younger than me. I thought there must be a neighbourhood matter they were dealing with, warning residents about break-ins on our street or seeking witnesses to a traffic accident; they’d knocked on doors for such things a few times, over the years.

  They stepped inside. What they said was nonsense. I stared as words spilled from their lips, fell to the floor, turned into runes. Obfuscating sounds, pell-mell utterances scrambled in my brain. Language and meaning had been ripped apart like the two rows of teeth in an open zipper.

  ***

  The police knocked on the door where Tanis and I were living. It was a three-storey walk-up in London, named “The Deidre-Anne,” after our landlord’s wife. Waiting for the bus, I’d look up at the italicized gold-scripted letters that swept across the transom window above the front door, and wonder what Deidre-Anne thought about having a squat beige triplex bear her name.

  The detective (Emmett something, I think, was the name on his card) told us he wanted to ask some questions about the incident that had occurred behind our building the night before. We’d seen two policemen assaulting Peter, our landlord, in the parking lot. Emmett said the officers had followed Peter’s car because he had gone through a stop sign; the report they filed described Peter as drunk and disorderly, and when they asked him to take the Breathalyzer test, he became violent, so they had to subdue him.

  This version did not describe what we had witnessed. Tanis and I were both studying for the Organic Chemistry final and eating bowls of popcorn for dinner when we heard voices shouting in the parking lot. We looked out the large window in the back stairwell and saw Peter curled up on the pavement, knees to belly in the fetal position, protecting his gut. Two male police officers were kicking him, front and back, and we ran downstairs. When we got to the parking lot, the patrol car was already gone. Peter was struggling to stand, yelling, “I have wi-wi-witnesses!”

  We didn’t like Peter. He had stringy, shaggy, dirty-grey hair and wore stained polyester suits that shone in the fluorescent hallway lighting. He collected rent cheques late in the evening, smelling like beer, and he pushed his way into the apartment as though he had a right to be there. But we felt sorry for him, too, because he’d had polio as a child and he limped; he also had a stutter, probably from being bullied, and both afflictions could give the impression that he’d been drinking. Peter was creepy, and utterly unattractive, but he wasn’t violent — in all likelihood he couldn’t be, with those uneven legs and a gait that forced his full weight to drop onto his right hip with each step.

  Emmett asked if we’d ever seen Peter drunk before. In the split second before either of us answered, Tanis and I looked at each other, and I was struck, in that suspended moment, by the knowledge that I could make things go either way based solely on the words that I chose to have come out of my mouth.

  ***

  Accident. Your. Hospital. Farm. Identify. Ma’am. Are you? Come. Husband. With. Investigation. Us. Neighbour. The. Sorry. Car. Field. We. Drive. In. Found. Will. Name? Tell. Call? No! For. Tony… Gina. No. Lou. Am. Me. Me. Wife. I. His.

  ***

  LeBlanc, that was it. Emmett LeBlanc.

  My father threatened to call the police about another driver once. He was taking Gina and me somewhere — where we would have been going, without our mother? — and the car in front of us stopped suddenly. We were in the back without our seat belts on, so when we hit the other fellow’s bumper, we were thrown forward and our foreheads smacked the vinyl seats in front of us. Dad blasted his horn and gestured with his hands before he got out. Then he yelled through the driver’s open window, “What do you think you’re doing? I should make a citizen’s arrest, goddamn it! I should call the police! You could have hurt my two little girls, you see them? You see them? They’re crying their eyes out!”

  We were only four and eight, and our father’s anger frightened us more than the accident. Dad decided we were all right and promised us some ice cream if we’d stop crying. On the way home Gina grabbed the last bit of my cone and punched my arm when I protested. Dad said that if we didn’t stop squabbling, he’d get out of the car and slam our heads together like bowling balls.

  ***

  Every two weeks, we’d wait at the Don Mills Centre for our mother to emerge from the salon, where she had a wash and set by Leonard, her hairdresser. Mom said Leonard was a confirmed bachelor. He had one of those pencil-thin moustaches and wore a patterned shirt, top buttons undone, tucked into black pants that were too tight. We weren’t supposed to joke about the way Leonard spoke or imitate his gait, the way he walked up and down the salon like a girl, because, she said, he couldn’t help it.

  When Leonard saw us sitting by the cash register one day, he sashayed over. “You girls are growing up fast. I bet you’re boy-chasing already, am I right?” “Well, Leonard,” Gina said, “I guess you’d know all about that.” Leonard turned red and gritted his teeth, but he didn’t lose his smile.

  When Gina was older, she went to Leonard’s salon by herself, to get a perm
anent using Mom’s account. She walked in the front door, stinking of hair spray, as I was coming down the stairs and Dad was walking out of the kitchen. Leonard had turned Gina’s long, thick hair into a helmet of frizzy Afro-tight curls. Dad started laughing so hard that he had to lean against the wall in the hall, arms splayed as if he were on one of those CNE rides he’d never give us money to try — the one where ten people at a time stand up, centrifugally plastered to the sides of the spinning pod, screaming because you know that nothing but air is holding you in place, laughing because you know the danger isn’t real, and squeezing your eyes shut so you can believe it.

  ***

  When I am exhausted and can’t sleep, my eyes won’t stay shut. I have to squeeze my lids together so hard that they ignite a light show: swirls of luminescent blue, green, yellow; neurons branching, sparking; cells exploding; stars. This is like being at the beginning of the world, I think. Maybe it’s like dying, too. Maybe the final release of energy from the neurons in your eyes makes you see stars, as it flares out into the stratosphere. I’d like to think James saw stars. I want to believe his last seconds were not excruciating.

  ***

  I smuggled in a small illegal kettle for Lou under my coat when he first moved to the home, and whenever I visited, I topped up his contraband supplies: jars of Maxwell House and Coffee-Mate, and boxes of Sweet’N Low packets. The mix was horrible and I couldn’t drink it; Lou got used to it, he said, the way you’d get used to the taste of cat food, if that’s all you could afford.

  His friend Didi grew to like it. Didi was Lou’s neighbour from across the hall on Blueberry Lane, and she sat next to him during meals. She and Lou had an instant coffee every morning before breakfast, and another at 4:00 in the afternoon, which they called Crappy Hour. If I was there, Lou would pretend he was a waiter and Didi and I were his customers at a café. One day she rolled in early while Lou was putting the new stock away. I plugged in the kettle and asked Didi how she’d like her coffee. “Black,” she said. “Like my men.”

  Didi was wicked — that’s what Lou said when he stopped laughing. He was taken with her. She was ninety and he was eighty-eight and Lou was smitten.

  ***

  Lou’s skin thinned as he aged, but his nails thickened. He paid twenty dollars every two months to have his toenails clipped with an instrument that would probably have worked better as a tree pruner. I’d arrange to arrive the next day with a large plastic basin, Epsom salts, coconut oil, talc, and a foot rasp, to finish his pedicure.

  On a bleak March morning, as I scraped his soles and powdered between his toes, I thought about how long it had been since I’d been pampered. When was the last time James rubbed moisturizer on my back or warmed my hands in his? I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t remember my husband’s touch.

  ***

  Me: When we have coffee, there’ll be no backrubs involved. Or suntanning, come to think of it. R

  Ted: I’ll bring the sunscreen just in case. J

  ***

  Gina planned to come over for coffee this morning, after she went to the bank to pay a bill, and she arrived in hysterics. The teller had paused before passing over the slip showing the balance of Gina’s account. “That’s strange. Did you know there was a twenty-five-thousand-dollar debit transaction yesterday?” Gina insisted there must be a mistake, the money was taken out of her account instead of another person’s by accident. The teller thought that unlikely, and noted the account is jointly held by Gina and Ben. “Could there have been a breakdown in communication with your husband?”

  ***

  Breakdowns happen to:

  1.minds

  2.bodies

  3.relationships

  4.communications

  5.language

  6.boxes

  7.buildings

  8.living tissues

  9.inorganic objects

  10.every known thing in the universe

  ***

  Just before sundown at the farm, the sky became an air painting. Homer’s rosy-fingered dawn had nothing on this dusk. Bright pink slashes mixed with oranges and blues drifted slowly, horizontally, trailing streaks of bruised clouds, and then, abruptly, like the lights on a stage set being switched off, the deep navy of night, with stars gleaming like nailheads, was upon us.

  ***

  When I saw blue contusions on Lou’s white-flaked arms and asked him what had happened, he shrugged and countered with a question: “Are bruises supposed to be itchy?”

  James had asked me that once. We were walking to the Film Buff on Queen East to pick up a noir when he let go of my hand to scratch his knee. It was before my surgery but after the diagnosis, and James had already begun to worry about minute changes he was noticing in his own body. I said it would make sense for bruises to itch, since cuts are itchy when they heal, and bruises are from broken blood vessels that have to heal, too. While we watched Bay of Angels at home that night, he rubbed his fingernails back and forth across his knee every few minutes, and by the end of the movie it was bleeding.

  ***

  Affliction, according to Simone Weil, is irreducible and indescribable. It takes possession of the soul, marking it.

  ***

  Lou watched as staff members went in and out of Didi’s room all night, checking to see if she had stopped breathing so they could call the funeral home for a pickup. “The nurses don’t like us to close our doors,” he told me. “That way they can check on us at night without having to come all the way in.” He would have been awake anyway, he said, because of Didi’s death rattle.

  Not long after Didi died, Lou’s legs started swelling. His heart was failing, and he wheezed with every breath. When I arrived with my chiropodist’s kit, his swollen ankles were hanging over the edge of a footstool, his soles up and ready for grating. I sawed the foot-file back and forth across his cracked heels, and shreds of dead skin fell on a brown paper towel I’d placed on the floor. Lou eyed the mound of grey-white powder, as soft as flour. “If I knew you were coming I’d have baked a cake,” he sang, his tiny voice hoarse and off-key.

  ***

  Ted’s wife, Sarah, is short and dark-haired, like me, but she reminds me of Tanis. Her eyes are dark and pinched tight when she smiles, and there is too much distance between her upper lip and nose, making her less attractive than she could be — the way a slight, porcine upturn of a nose can ruin a perfectly good face. Ted once asked Tanis out for a drink at the campus bar when they were lab-mates, long before he met me, but she was busy and he didn’t ask her again. (I thought that explained why she became so angry after she walked in on Ted and me, at our apartment, and found us naked on the chesterfield.)

  Recently Ted posted a picture from his and Sarah’s wedding: under moonlight, in Hawaii, he’s wearing a tux and lifting a white veil to kiss the bride. The whole shebang.

  ***

  In the wedding picture Tony took of James and me before our ceremony, we are standing outside City Hall holding hands; my hair a little longer than usual and flipped up a bit at the ends, sixties-style. James is wearing a new navy-blue boat-neck T-shirt under the jacket of his best suit, in beige linen. I am wearing a vintage lace dress in a coral shade, which I’d bought for twenty dollars at a consignment store, and flats in a complementary colour. The sunlight flashed off my mother’s pearls, which I borrowed from Gina for the occasion. They look like a string of stars around my neck.

  There was no swearing on the Holy Book for us, no invocation of the Father or the Son or the Holy Ghost. James had stopped going to church as soon as he was too old for Lou to drag him there, and my family hadn’t attended since we were christened as babies. Gina, who was married in the church her in-laws attended, told me she didn’t really promise to raise her children in the faith, despite her vows; while her left hand rested on the Bible, she crossed her right-hand fingers, which were buried in the folds of her gown.

  ***

  Ted and I used to laugh at the notion that God was
an old man up in the sky. One of our first conversations was about atheism, which was not so common then — at least, talking about it wasn’t. I couldn’t imagine staying with a religious person, I said. What would I have in common with someone who carried lessons from the Bible around in his head? Ted agreed, so I found it very strange to see that his wife wears a gold crucifix on a chain around her neck. Especially since Ted’s affiliation on Facebook is “Buddhist.”

  When I noticed that, I wrote a private message to ask Ted if he goes on retreats at monasteries, like Leonard Cohen did. “No,” he replied, “it has nothing to do with a deity. I’m just trying to be less materialistic, more mindful of being in the moment.” I wondered what that meant. Where was he, when he wasn’t in the moment, these days?

  ***

  “He bought a fucking house, Mazz!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It was Ben’s cheque, that $25,000 withdrawal! It was made out to Royal LePage Realty!”

  “A bigger house? For you, for Christmas?”

  “You’re not listening! He’s moving out! My life is a nightmare!”

  ***

  Last night I woke up from the dream I had throughout my childhood: I’m being chased through the streets of our neighbourhood by a man wearing a Hawaiian shirt and straw sun hat; and though I know better, I stop to pick up the quarters and dimes that keep popping up at my feet — coins he has planted there to attract my attention and slow me down. It’s out of my control, somehow I can’t not reach for them even though he is pursuing me — and I wake up, my pajamas damp from fear.

  When I was a teenager, that dream was replaced by another: I am upstairs in the bathroom, putting on my makeup, and Josh is standing at the bottom of the stairs, waiting for me. I can feel time passing, pulling me toward the door, but I resist, I am not ready; I can’t get my eyeshadow to blend properly, my foundation is too shiny, the part in my hair is uneven. One, two, three hours go by, and when I’m done, I find that Josh has gone.