This Side of Sad

by Karen Smythe

  It seems ridiculous that our days simply stop. All of this — the years of loving and wanting, of being and giving — and then the light goes out, poof — you’re gone. You go from being something, and turn back into nothing. Nothing.

  James put the family house on the market when it wasn’t safe for Lou to live alone anymore. Lou had given him power of attorney as a matter of course, but he didn’t think his son would use it. “Why do you get to decide when it’s time? What am I, vapour?” But James refused to discuss options with his father. “I’d like to know who made you God,” Lou said. That was a difficult day.

  I tell Lou I love him, and kiss his cheek. His sockets are sunken. His face is shiny where his cheekbones have stretched the skin taut. His lips are cracked, and dried saliva is caught in the corners, which I wipe away with my thumb. He closes his eyes.

  When Lou takes a breath, the oxygen tank hisses, and every few seconds it clicks, recording the hours the machine has been running. That’s important for some technical reason, this tracking of machine-time. I think of the apple-shaped timer James set when he baked chocolate-chip banana bread, my favourite, on a Sunday morning, and of the way our granite kitchen counter amplified the minutes ticking by, streaming the sound into the living room, where we sat reading the paper. Both of us would startle when the bell rang, even though we’d started to expect it as soon as the sweet, warm air began to waft its way from the oven toward us. I close my eyes and inhale deeply as if the loaves are close by, settling a little in the middle as they cool, and I smile.

  I look back at Lou and see that he’s been watching me remember Sunday mornings with James. He smiles, too, and I squeeze his hand.

  ***

  Lou’s friend Didi became angry near the end. The charm, the jokes, the outrageous self-presentation — all of that disappeared, and she was furious, just plain mad. People in their wheelchairs would get in her way, and she’d spit at them. Lou would ask if she wanted an instant coffee, and she’d say he must be stupid if he didn’t know her well enough by now to boil the damn kettle without her having to say so. At dinner, when a woman spilled a glass of water on the table, Didi said the worst thing she could think of: “You’re a nothing! A nothing!”

  ***

  A few other women at the gym belong to the subset I find myself in. They create their artisanal looks with unusual earrings, slant-hemmed skirts, ochre and plum handbags in oblong shapes, and wardrobes with depth in their palettes. Their dresses have waists. They half smile at each other, too self-contained to stop and compliment a hair style (the natural silver streaks like a licorice candy cane, angled bobs that swing and sparkle). But they know. They glance, and they know: they’ve escaped the bloated blurriness that befalls so many who are past their prime.

  I see one of these women and think, We should be friends. But we won’t become friends. It’s too much effort once you hit middle age, choosing which story you’ll tell to someone new or deciding where you’ll start the tale. You’ve lived so many of them, by then. Besides, speaking to strangers is far beyond my capacity at the moment. Getting myself to exercise in clean workout clothes is still enough of an accomplishment.

  Breaking the day into single steps is what it takes. Wash your face, I think. Paralysis so easily sets in, without these directions. There now, that’s done. Brush your teeth next. Good. Drive to the gym, tread on the mill, and drive home again. When I get home, I give myself permission to collapse. Put on your pajamas. It doesn’t matter that it’s only three p.m. Don’t vacuum tonight. It can wait. Pay the phone and the power bills later, pay them tomorrow, or next year. Put them back on the table. If you get hungry, order spring rolls or pad Thai, or eat a box of cereal. You can do that. You can.

  ***

  This is still the aftermath. It began last October, when James died; it carried on through November and straight into December; it baptized the new year, and it welcomed the summer solstice. A year later, “after” is all there is.

  nineteen

  A documentary about the Chauvet Cave was on PBS last night. What I thought when I saw the image of the hand-prints was this: Thirty thousand years just collapsed like an accordion.

  Had I seen the film with Ted, I would have tried to start a conversation about the ancient need to leave a mark, to say “I was here.” Ted would have acted like a cartoon caveman, pulling at my hair and grunting, and we’d laugh and roll around the floor and try to tear each other’s clothes off with our teeth. Had I watched the film with Josh, we’d have discussed the intelligence behind the art, the painter’s effort to portray the movement of animals through time and space by drawing a series of overlapping horses. I would have described for him the sensation that looking through ancestral eyes gave me — “It’s like a bellow’s breeze and it gives me the chills” — and he’d say something about blowing him, and we’d laugh, and then he’d make us a cup of tea. With James, I’d have said, “It’s like looking directly at the past — it’s right there on that wall!” and he’d smile and agree but not talk much, while I thought about what history means; how major changes to life on earth across huge swaths of time are so difficult to grasp; and how learning evolutionary facts can make less of an impact on us than seeing a single handprint made by one ancient human being. And about how easy it is for time, in one flinted moment, to evaporate.

  ***

  Sometimes the fact of James’s death blasts me full in the face, and I gasp for air as if it happened only yesterday; at other times, a sadness seems to sprinkle down like a shower of sifted flour — when I’m watching the news, or writing an email to Nancy, or thinking about calling my sister. At those times, it seems as if it’s an echo of grief, what I feel. The real grief is still there, and the memory of its initial impact — the flaying, the visceral ripping of my husband from my life, gutting my days — that is still there, too. But I don’t always respond in the same way. I might hear an inner shrilling, a shriek of tinnitus, for instance; more often, profound silence settles around me, and I become oblivious to sirens or children yelling outside on the street for minutes at a time.

  The world is emptier without James. It looks emptier, and it sounds emptier. I miss his voice: his good-nights and good-mornings, the love-you-Maslens. His hugs. I miss the CDs he played while he cooked, his singing “Come On in My Kitchen” with Robert Johnson, his bad Robert Plant impression of “Whole Lotta Love.” They don’t sound the same when I play them, those tunes. The house is so quiet now.

  I miss his voice the most, I think. Especially at night. I’m afraid that I’m going to forget what it sounded like.

  ***

  The first few nights we spent at the farm, the intensity of the coal-dark sky pierced me. Without pollution from lit-up office buildings and streetlights dimming the stars, I seemed to meld with the air while staring up at them. At night on the farm, there was just one thin sheet of skin, a single scrim of cells preventing me from evaporating into the universe.

  James tried to teach me the names of constellations, but I couldn’t remember them or identify the different groupings with certainty. I saw only sparkle, not patterns. No images of familiar objects or animals. And when I looked up on humid nights, I could make star halos if I blurred my eyes.

  The barometer was all over the place this summer. When it is so humid in the city that walking the asphalt streets is almost like wading, dawn and dusk play tricks on my eyes: clouds heavy with water seem to leak drizzles of fog, or to spit out white threads, like thrumming; rooftops seem to have a grey haze rising from their surfaces, like water ghosts.

  James said the Big Dipper is so far away in light-years that what we are seeing, when we look at it, is really a picture of its stars as they were eighty years ago. It’s a trick of time or light or space; I can hardly get my head around it. Now, when I look up at a night sky and see stars, I remind myself that I’m looking at the past. And even though the past I’m seeing happened long before James was born, I think of him, and I feel as though I’m look
ing up at him, and that he is still teaching me about light.

  ***

  James and I had gotten a deal on the property because it was an estate sale. All I wanted, a year later, was to break even. In April I went to the farm to clean the house before it was listed, and I asked the realtor to meet me there, to discuss its market value.

  The area had been identified by town council as ripe for development, he said, and a contractor he knew was already interested. He wanted to tear down the house and barn, and subdivide the fifteen acres into estate-size lots for commuters. The neighbours with the broken-spirited horse were considering a buyout offer, too. “Family farming is going the way of the dinosaur,” the agent said. “Lots of opportunities for investors up here now. Your timing couldn’t have been better.”

  ***

  I sit in the wingback, the green one that has always been mine. I sit in the other wingback, the blue one that has never been mine. I stretch out on the couch that is no one’s couch. Immediately I think of leaves, bronze and brittle leaves falling, in a rush, but never touching the ground.

  I close my eyes and imagine that crisp fall day at the farm. I imagine being James. I am looking through his eyes now.

  It hurts, that sun glinting off the quartz in the stones on the top of the wall. Almost done. What about the rocks at the end of the property that I haven’t looked over, though… should I start the car and load some empty buckets to bring them in? First I’ll use up the few I’ve left scattered about the courtyard.

  “Courtyard.” That sounds pretty grand for grass surrounded by a handmade stone wall. Mostly dry-laid. I dug up some clay near the edge of the pond, but I only used it in a handful of spots, where a loose join needed fixing. I scraped off the mud that oozed out as I worked, so you’d hardly notice there’d been a need for it.

  The farther away I get from it, the more perfect it looks. I’d like to look down at the wall from the sky, from an airplane or helicopter, to take in the whole of it — its curves and undulations and the land in the middle.

  Might as well do an inventory of the rocks I’ve missed back here. I’ll carry any I like back by hand. Where was that pile — which side of the property line? So much garbage has blown into the brush. You could trip on these tangled pieces of plastic. No wonder that horse got into trouble.

  Nothing here. Must have dreamed it. How long have I been back here — where’s my watch?

  Feels good to stand and stretch. The cool fall air in your lungs is bracing. The wall looks fine from back here —

  His heart stopped precisely then. His body dropped to the earth, thudded to the ground he’d spent so much time thinking about. In that split second before the bullet cracked him open, I imagine my husband happy, content.

  I rehearse the story with my eyes closed, night after night for weeks, until it begins to feel like the truth.

  ***

  Forever, it seems, we’ve wanted to believe that stars are the spirits of the dead shining down on us.

  On a dark night in April twenty-three years from now, if I am still here, I will be able to look up and see the fires in the sky that burned on the day my husband was born. And forty-two years after that, when I will be long dead and gone, light from the day James and I met will beam down to earth, unrecognizable to seeing eyes but seen, nonetheless.

  What will I think about when I am dying? Not an afterlife, not meeting those who left me bereft. There is no heaven to look forward to, I’ve known that since I was a child. Maybe I won’t think; maybe I’ll just sense, take stock of the moment. I think I will be greedy for the world, and will be sucking in all the colour, texture, sound I can get.

  ***

  When she was dying, my mother’s conversational range became very limited, reduced to confused imperatives. She issued instructions, and they had to do almost wholly with my father: Don’t feed him too much beef, for his heart. Take him to a movie at the dentist once in a while. Remind him to separate the whites from the waste, the organics from the colours.

  It annoyed me that my mother was about to disappear, but all she wanted to talk about was garbage. I had come from her, and part of me — the version of myself that no one on earth could know the way she did — would be going with her, too. Was there nothing more important to say to one another, before she left? Perhaps not. I can’t think of a thing that she could have said from her deathbed that would have made a difference to the life I’ve built for myself, anyway.

  ***

  “He had an eye for it,” the real-estate agent said when he looked out the kitchen window to the field beyond the house. “That is an impressive achievement. Your husband built it himself, you say?”

  “Yes. From the field stones that were around the edge of the property,” I said. But I could see that the wall was in disrepair. James had banked earth behind the wall to stabilize it, but the freeze and thaw of winter ice and spring rain had damaged parts of the foundation. Rocks were sticking out in a few places, like herniated discs in a spine. What was it for, James?

  I doubted that whoever bought this place would leave the wall standing. “Do you suppose the stones will be pushed back to where James found them, once the builders move in?” I asked the agent, but he was on his phone and hadn’t heard me.

  He drove away from the farm before I did. As I started my drive back to the city, a burst of birds filled the sky a half mile ahead of me, like flecks of floating black pepper. I pulled the car over to the shoulder so I could watch. They swarmed together then pulled apart, came back together and pulled apart, several times, as if choreographed. “Look at that!” I said, as if James were beside me. I sat behind the wheel, shuddering.

  ***

  Those birds were too small to be crows. A group of crows is called a murder, I knew that, but James would have known the name of this species, why they clustered that way in the air and what the flight pattern was called. He wouldn’t have told me unless I asked, which I usually did, because I liked to have answers to questions. James knew so many things that I did not.

  twenty

  Lou is buried next to his wife. He’d prepaid for the casket and made the arrangements himself, many years before, as people of his generation tended to do. “To know it’s done,” Lou said. “To make it easier on the family.”

  The obituary I placed in the Star on Lou’s death included his brief autobiography, which he’d readied for the newspaper and kept, with burial instructions, in the drawer of his nightstand.

  Louis Charles (Lou) H. was born near Barrie, Ontario, as was his wife, Adele (née Healy), who predeceased him in 1970. He became a farmhand at age eleven to help his family during the Depression, and was paid in beef and milk. An accident at age eighteen cost him a kidney, and kept him out of the military. He went into sales, where he stayed for the rest of his working life. On retiring from Schmidt’s Medical Supplies in 1975, Lou made and sold fine wood furniture at local markets. He also enjoyed playing cricket, ice fishing, and hunting. He is survived ^ was predeceased by his son James (Maslen).

  I hadn’t heard the story of Lou’s accident. There is so much about people, even those you are close to, that you have no idea about. No idea at all. Our minds are like invisible civilizations, full of complicated lives. We carry worlds in our head, and we people them with everyone we’ve known, making characters out of the bits and pieces they show us.

  The cemetery is in the town where James grew up. When his mother died, the face of her tombstone was divided in two by a vertical line. Her name and dates of birth and death were engraved on the left side, Lou’s name and birth date on the right. The blank would be filled in soon by the caretaker, a short man with broken, brown teeth who told me the adjacent plot was paid for, too. I hadn’t decided yet what I was going to do with James’s ashes, but I did know that I was not going to leave him next to his parents.

  ***

  I woke up one Saturday morning in October ready to do it — to create a crypt of clay. I turned to Finding One’s Way for
design ideas, and I chose a footed sphere. It will have my fingerprints all over it, and through it, and inside it. The top half will, one day, hold me.

  The book explained how to make the shape I wanted using pinch-balloons, a variation of the pots I’d learned to make. I bought the clay at an art supply store. I left it on the floor of the pantry, by the back door, for a few days. I needed to get used to it. I needed to walk past it, to live with it. To see it sitting there, solid and waiting, until I could pick it up and begin.

  I donned one of James’s aprons. He had six, all of them red, his favourite colour. Then I put my wedding ring in the hardboiled-egg cup I keep on the kitchen windowsill, where I put it when I do the dishes. In the quiet of the house, the amplified ping of the metal hitting porcelain startled me, and I knocked an empty tumbler to the floor. I could hear my mother saying, “Maslen-itis strikes again.”

  The cellophane package of the large block was airtight, and when I opened it, the smell of clay instantly took me back to the pottery classroom. I saw James looking through the window at the collapsed mess I’d made trying to throw a bowl. Smiling at me.

  I sunk my fingers deep into the clay body, and it was a physical pleasure. My hands hummed.

  ***

  To make pie crust, James always used an old hollow glass rolling pin that he’d picked up at a yard sale before I knew him. It had a cap on one end and could be filled with cold water — the water for its weight, the temperature to prevent the flour mixture from sticking to it. I thought the principle would apply to rolling clay, too, and it worked well. Soon I had enough kneaded and rolled to make a half-inch-thick wall. I shaped it, pinch by pinch, and as I worked I decided that I didn’t want the container to be smooth on the outside. I wanted to see ridges, bumps, crevices. I wanted texture. I needed touch.

  I had no proper tools, so I improvised. To get a level rim, fine waxed dental floss worked as well as cutting wire. With the bowl upside down, I attached four palm-rolled balls for feet.