Poached Egg on Toast

by Frances Itani

  Becky is married now to a man named William, a soft-spoken, gentle man. You wonder if William has anger in him; if so, you’ve never seen a sign of it. You wonder if William knows the story of Dirk shouting, “I know my rights!” It’s a story that causes you and Becky to collapse in laughter whenever either of you mentions it, although you both know that the story isn’t really funny.

  You have one more night at the lodge. You’ve read a book every day, and you feel as if you’ve walked hundreds of miles. You’ve sat motionless on the dock and watched small dark fish, lurking in the weeds. Every evening, from your room, you listen for the loons.

  You phone Alec. You talk to him and Zoe and tell them you’ll be home after lunch the next day. Alec says he’s glad you’re ready to come back. Zoe tells you that a new boy has joined her French class, even though it’s nearly the end of the school year. The girls chase him during morning break and try to tag him. She does not, she says, because she thinks they’re silly.

  You hang up the receiver and think about all the parts of your life. You tell yourself that you have to believe they come together to make one life, your life. The one you live every day. You insist that this is possible, that all the parts of your life can add up to one.

  Special meal tonight. Most of the guests will be leaving tomorrow, end of the week. There is an air of excitement in the dining room. Bert’s cheeks are flushed; he seems outraged as you enter. You are going to escape, having provided no explanation to HIM.

  “Here she is! “ he yells to his wife. “Why she would come to a place like this alone is beyond me.” You stare eye to eye, from the annex window. Is there something you should do? Something you should say?

  Bert is rising from his chair. He has finally worked himself up to some action. “I’ll find out about her,” he tells the others at his table. He stumps across the room, stands ten paces back, opens his mouth to shout.

  You touch your ears, you touch your lips. Are you deaf? Are you mute? Are you neither of these? You smile as you turn away. Your head is framed by the open window.

  Foolery

  In memory, I hold only momentary versions of my early childhood. When I was almost five, my parents suddenly announced to my older sister Jess and me (at least, looking back, it now seems sudden) that our family would be moving to Quebec. They pronounced this Kew-bec and told us we would have to learn to speak another language. Our father’s work was taking us from our own province; there was little choice—none, I realize now.

  We were transplanted to a tiny rural village on the Ottawa River, far from friends and family, even remote from the village itself. Our road was a kind of half-road, a ribbon of dust and gravel that contained one other house and led past one field and ended bluntly in another. The river rushed pell-mell into rapids, its roar a constant reminder of its attraction and its danger. During spring runoff, the navy-grey water even crossed the dirt road and lapped at our very step. It was on this step that at five years of age I began to teach myself French and I sat, daily, babbling and blathering to myself in unknown syllables that poured out of me as rapidly as the current that raced past the front of the house. No one could have convinced me that I was not speaking the new language at hand. And when my mother stood at the screen one day, behind me, and asked what I was doing, I wouldn’t tell for fear that she would laugh or tell my father or somehow diminish my efforts. I wholeheartedly believed that my private language had fooled my mother, and she never did say whether it had or not.

  Jess and I found many ways to amuse ourselves during those years in rural Quebec. We shared a bedroom, each of us with a single bed, and this made it easy for one of us to pretend to retire early, pad out the bed as if a sleeping body were within, and lie in wait beneath the opposite bed. Though we did not do this often, I remember that the feelings that went with being either on top of one’s own mattress or beneath the other bed, were exactly one and the same. It made no difference whether one was the feared or the fearful. There was always the burst of adrenalin, the pounding of the pulse, the holding of the breath. If I were to frighten Jess, I’d wait until she was well settled but not asleep, and then, from beneath her bed, I’d begin the far-away sounds one can make deep in the throat only when one is lying on one’s back on cold linoleum. A long silence would follow. Then, the noise again. Jess would finally say, as indifferently as she could, “I know it’s you, stupid. You don’t fool me.” But the trick was not to answer. By then, both of us would be frightened, and eventually Jess would call out to me for help as if I might, in fact, be in my own bed. And from the floor I would begin to shake and then to laugh.

  The ritual was the same when she lay in wait for me. Success was always dependent on the timing. One must hide when hiding was least expected—after a day that had been filled with unrelated events, for instance, so that the other could be taken by surprise.

  A long high-ceilinged closet had been built at one end of our bedroom. This was a narrow, open-ended passageway, and served many purposes. At our end, we hung clothes. Then, we met chimney and an even narrower space that we could squeeze past. After that, there were clothing racks, overhead shelving and a series of floor-to-ceiling cupboards set into the far end. The tunnel, certainly twenty feet long, spilled out into the living room and, for children, was a convenient, if dark, shortcut through the middle of the house. The best feature about it was that it was so dark, one could not see into it when passing either end.

  This was the space into which we dragged pillows and bedding and lay in wait for Santa Claus, or listened to Lux Presents Hollywood, which for years was broadcast later than our bedtime. And, on rare occasions, when our parents hosted parties, we positioned ourselves single file, lengthwise, head to toe in the passage, trying to find out what adults did and talked about when we were supposed to be asleep.

  During the summer holidays while our parents were at work, Jess and I would tack long dark curtains inside either end, preparing a Tunnel of Horrors through which we led the neighbourhood children. We blindfolded our victims, pulled back the dark curtain, and gave them a shove into the unknown. The victims had to walk the gauntlet with arms outstretched, through and past simulated cobwebs, cold-water dousings, dishes of fabricated brains, blood, wet porridge, all to a background of nasty cries and haunting calls. They emerged at the other end, spilling out into the living room, where a waiting figure jumped out at them as the final curtain was pulled.

  On Hallowe’en of my tenth and Jess’s twelfth year, the two of us prepared for an evening of door-to-door rounds in the village. We never tried to represent anything particular in costume; each of us dressed in leggings and jackets, and layered on top of those whatever remnants of old clothes and props we could find. That year, I wore Father’s long johns, the trapdoor leering. Jess wore a full skirt, a blouse many sizes too big and a bandanna round her head. Just as we were leaving, she ran back up the steps, and Mother stuffed a bolster inside the blouse, which already bagged over Jess’s jacket. As we hurried through the field and towards the centre of the village, the enormous bulge led the way as part of Jess’s anterior, and this kept us giggling steadily. We did not know how serious a gesture it was until we reached the third street on our rounds, a house we were curious to investigate because we knew that a man and woman had moved there within the past few weeks, and that this would be our chance to look them over.

  The door was unlocked from within, and we were beckoned inside and brought through the darkness of an enclosed back porch into a smoky kitchen. The man who had let us in had only three upper teeth. Two women and another man were at a kitchen table, where a card game was in progress. The table was strewn with ashtrays and quart beer bottles.

  The man who was seated spoke loudly.

  “Well,” he said, as much to his three companions as to us, “let’s see you do some tricks.”

  One of the women, perhaps his wife, left the table, gathering ashtrays to dump. We heard her say, not very convincingly, from the back of the room,
“Leave them alone for Jesus sake, they’re only kids.”

  “Come on, come on,” he said, “do something, sing, or dance, something.” He scraped his chair towards us and Jess and I backed away in the direction of the door. We had known as soon as we’d entered this room that there was something about his jollity that was not funny, something forced and hard-edged. He drew attention, with his laughter, to the huge bulge in Jess’s blouse, and looked to the other three for backup. But they appeared uneasy and glanced at us and then away, lacking the courage to be solidly on one side or the other. The woman of the house stood near the door, an apple in each hand and, as I looked at her, I knew that she wanted us to leave. At that moment, in the astonishment of realizing that she was as much trapped as we, I heard a noise coming from Jess, beside me:

  En roulant ma boule roulant.

  I was surprised, and then, not. Jess had been the first to recognize that this was the only way we would get out. Our voices joined as we sang together:

  En roulant ma boule roulant

  En roulant ma boule.

  The lines came out of our mouths like wisps intertwining with the smoke.

  Only one refrain. I could tell from her eyes that Jess would sing no more, though I might have gone on and on for the sake of escape. We turned, and were permitted to move to the door, not wanting the apples the woman had pushed into our hands. Indeed, we heaved them as far as we could up the road when we did get out. But the man who had made us sing followed us through the back porch. And after I had stepped outside, he pinned Jess to the door frame with one hand and thrust his other hand past the bolster, inside the oversize blouse, and rubbed hard against her chest. The two of us stumbled down the steps. It had happened so quickly, the door now being closed and locked behind us, we were unable to voice our outrage, or even to commiserate. We ran to the end of the street, near but not allowing tears, trying to resume normalcy, trying to regain our childish selves. We held our treat bags severely and, to calm ourselves, slowed at the last house where we looked up an outside staircase that led to an upper apartment. We were halfway up and had still not spoken when a man came out onto the landing. He was carrying a black wrinkled bag.

  “Someone is very ill here,” he said. “Someone is dying. You shouldn’t disturb the family.” He spoke as if he had not noticed that we were in costume or that it was Hallowe’en.

  We turned and went home, and never told our parents and never spoke of the evening again. Jess said only one thing on the way home. “If you make up your mind that it won’t bother you, it never will.” And though this sounded fine in theory, I knew that for weeks and even months, Jess had the same sick feeling inside her as I had, almost as if we ourselves had somehow been to blame.

  My memory takes me now to more recent times, a period during which I moved, with my family, to Germany and then to England, where we worked and studied for several years. During my stay in Germany, Jess and her daughter visited for one month. It was their first trip to Europe and we took short trips and long, and talked and caught up, and talked some more. I found a sudden and unexpected power, too. Throughout our formal childhood education, I had always trailed two years behind Jess, and it had seemed to me that I was always having to learn what she had already got to and assimilated before me. This must have irked me in childhood more than I’d realized, because I now took my sister about Germany introducing her (with laughter on all sides) as my mute sister.

  “This is my mute sister,” I would say. Of course by this time, I was fluent in my new language. Jess, as a visitor, was still struggling to interpret jawohl and Ausgang.

  “Now stop,” Jess said. “Stop introducing me as the mute.”

  But there was nothing to be done. I had become my sister’s voice. She could not ask for a basket of rolls without my help.

  We had decided to travel through some of the southern parts of the country and, with Jess’s daughter and my own, toured a town in a mountainous area some two hundred kilometres from our village. There was a Natural History Museum in the town, and the children asked to go in to spend an hour or so looking at exhibits. We decided to stay in the area overnight, visit the museum and perhaps hike into the surrounding trails late in the afternoon.

  We saw wonderful exhibits: shells and fossils, polished rocks, precious stones—even an elaborate collection of live leafcutting ants. But in the middle of the third floor, we were suddenly faced with the choice of continuing along the corridor, or stopping at a floor-length curtain of heavy dark material that had been hung across an otherwise unremarkable door frame. Crudely attached to the outside of the curtain was a cardboard sign, which provided information in three languages. The English message read:

  The parents must have to decid if the children would be better not to see behind this curtain. The child must be wit the adult.

  Of course, this meant no choice at all, and the four of us pulled back the curtain at once.

  We entered a small room, perhaps four feet across and six by length. Like the long closet of our childhood home, it had a curtained entrance (or exit) on the far side. And during those few moments, while we were trying to apprehend the exhibits on the surrounding shelves, startled heads and hands of other visitors continued to thrust their way in and around the curtains from both sides. When the curtains were still, it was difficult not to have the sensation of being wrapped in the inner folds of a deep cloak, a cloak in which we stood at the centre looking up, and jars of preserved human fetuses, transfixed by their own awe and terror, stared back down.

  All were a bluish colour. Each was detained by an arrested state of development, imprisoned within transparent bonds of fluid, the better to bear the interrogation of posterity. In a male fetus, the navel had developed to one side; there was only a hint of genitalia beneath an internal fold. A completely developed fetus had a cleft lip and palate, its mouth open in its watery jar; another, a rubbery-looking head that looked as if it had, at some terrible moment, collapsed in upon itself. There was a body with two heads and one torso, a third arm grown out of its middle, a single penis. And on and on, shelf after shelf, jar upon jar.

  If we began to feel smothered in that room, the experience prepared us, at least in part, for the next, several days later. We had been driving for an hour on a near-empty road, dominated on all sides by thick forest. It was an unpopulated landscape of rolling hills, narrow brooks and ancient trees. As it was a hot day, we pulled off the main road when we saw a weathered Fanta sign, and drove into a fenced yard that contained a house and roadside stand, even a small private park, unusual in that country. Several signs were nailed to fenceposts and I translated these for Jess, telling her that there was a museum on the grounds. We needed to stretch and walk, and we purchased cold drinks from a man who came out of the house. We decided to pay the entrance fee when he told us that his exhibits had something to do with local wildlife. I was not sure of the man’s dialect and instructions, but in curiosity we followed him to the museum building, converted from an old barn. The man unlocked the door; we stooped to enter and descended two shallow steps.

  The room was dim, but an occasional fluorescent bulb had been hung low along rough work tables arranged end to end. And the exhibits? Each was stuffed and mounted on a log, a branch, a piece of bark; each was prepared with the taxidermist’s devotion to perfection. A crow’s sleek black head was smoothly attached to the body of a rabbit; an adult hedgehog had a duck’s bill, its tail portion a curl of feathers. We saw a rabbit with the small horns of the reh deer; a stuffed pike, the pelvic and pectoral fins of which had been replaced by feet that might have belonged to a turtle; a creature that began as fox but ended as a hawk.

  In the short time we were in that place, the man, the owner, the taxidermist himself, followed us about, watching our faces, commenting in a low voice which I could not comprehend. The mutterings, I thought, of someone who was used to being alone. What was certain was that he expected praise, even admiration, for work well done, for the seams that di
d not show.

  And what thoughts would such a man have as he removed the gills of his fish and attached feathers in their place, as he stalked his quarry in woods that yielded its natural life to his alterations? Perhaps he worried over proportion, or attitude, or blending of colour. We were sorry we had entered, and we left as quickly as we could, the children as offended as Jess and I. It was as if our own childhood Tunnel of Horrors had somehow got out of hand. I suppose that if I had dropped in for a visit from another world, so perfect was the man’s work, I might have been fooled into believing that these unnatural combinations represented the inhabitants of this place. And were there subtle differences that I, during my short time in that room, had not discerned? Could he have fooled us by exchanging the otter’s paw for that of the fox? the hawk’s eye for the crow’s?

  Half a year later, after I returned to Canada, Jess was diagnosed and died within a two-month period. One day she began to drag her foot; by the end of the same week she had had brain surgery and her speech centre was partially destroyed. Between the time of her surgery (which marked the beginnings of aphasia) and her death, it seemed that she was able to speak for only a few moments. But I see now that my memory fools me, that this must have been a gradual deterioration, that events were so desperate and compressed it would have been impossible to measure and consider them.