“In my basement now.”
“Oh,” Cynthia says, in her slightly guttural speech. Then: “I wonder if you would be willing to let Justin or I help you sort the things out.”
Justin or me, not Justin or I. But she does not correct her niece this time.
“I’ll think about it,” she says.
What Alice has left behind. Well, it’s out of her control, except for those boxes in her basement, the little odds and ends of a life. Those she can deal with. She will take them on. It is her duty. She sees, too, that what is required of her is something more than sorting through the boxes that half-fill her basement. What Cynthia wants is a history, a background, a past. Understandably, perhaps. Sidonie has always been taciturn on the subject of Cynthia’s parents. With good reason, of course.
But now more is required. Sidonie can understand that, though she herself is suspicious of this kind of investigation. What one is likely to turn up is rarely useful, and usually only what one already knows. It is the nature of human beings, as well as other sentient things, to try to fit anything new into the patterns they already know.
Yes, a dubious exercise, this knitting up of narratives. Very few have the perception, the curiosity, the courage, perhaps, to really discover anything useful.
But she will begin to sort through the boxes. She hasn’t the excuse of a shortage of time, and it would be churlish not to. Also, she would very much prefer, now that she thinks of it, to do this herself, rather than to have Cynthia or one of her reprobate brothers, or any of their children, take it on, either before or after Sidonie’s demise. She might as well face facts: she will not be around forever. At some point, someone will have to deal with these things. And there are things that she wants to protect them from, things they likely should not see. As well as things she wants to protect from their eyes.
She allows Justin to fetch her in Cynthia’s car, drive her to the mall, where they may rent, for a nominal sum, a wheelchair, and travel up and down the corridors with their polished stone floors: temples, she thinks, to materialism and conspicuous consumption. She can see that even to someone Justin’s age, there is something faintly embarrassing about the mall; something bourgeois. Clara and Anita disapprove, highly, of shopping malls. Yet how open and accessible, compared to the fusty department stores of the city when she had been taken to shop here, as a child. Fulmerton’s, Bennett’s, with their smell of rubber boots, their utilitarian racks of drab dresses, their supercilious sales clerks. At the mall, she buys socks, underwear. Buys herself some blue jeans, which she has not worn in nearly fifty years, so long ago that they were called dungarees.
She sits with Justin, in the long afternoons when he has no classes, in cafés, as she and Adam — or more precisely, Adam — had sat with Cynthia in cafés twenty years ago, and lets him talk. Justin, like other eighteen-year-olds she knows, does not know what he “wants to do,” as he puts it. He gets good marks in all of his subjects, he says. None appeals to him more than the others. She sees that there is a gap, a disconnect, between his sense of what he likes to do and what he knows or imagines work to be. This state, too, is not uncommon in his generation — a generation of dilettantes, she thinks. We have provided too much. They have not learned the discipline of work.
She recalls her parents and their friends saying the same thing.
In the mall, she sees Justin surreptitiously looking at displays of clothing with skull decorations, loose, long, hooded jackets, and short pants and high-topped sneakers.
“What is it?”
“Nothing. The hoodie, there.”
“Do you want to go in and look at it?”
“No. . . no. It’s too young for me.”
“Oh, for crying out loud,” she says, surprising herself, her mother’s voice rising through her. She makes him turn around, wheel the chair into the store, between the electronic sensors. He explains to her the motifs of skateboarding culture. She offers him the word “iconoclasm,” watches him store it carefully. She buys him the jacket. She supposes that she feels an attachment for Justin because of those early months of close association, when he and Cynthia had lived under her roof, when she had helped to care for him. She does not think of this time often — it was a short time, less than two years. It had been difficult for various reasons, including the practical difficulty of having a baby under the same roof. She had not been used to babies. She had been a great deal worried about Cynthia at that time, and about other things.
It is not especially fondness or pride or protectiveness that she feels, though. She perceives him, necessarily, as healthy and thriving in a transparent bubble. An odd conceit. She has never spoken of it to anyone. She is careful not to speak of Justin to anyone except Cynthia, and then only cautiously. She does not wish to invite scrutiny or censure, or to encroach on someone else’s territory. She will not be proprietary.
She had, many nights, walked Justin, a colicky infant, up and down the length of her apartment while Cynthia, still more or less a child herself, had slept. She had tried not to become attached to him, knowing that the arrangement was temporary, that Cynthia would finish her degree and leave. And believing or suspecting at some level that Justin represented some deep, unimaginable betrayal.
She has Justin drive downtown, right to Water Street, to see how the new bridge is progressing. She has seen, in the newspaper, the architectural drawings, the proposed span — an arc like a flattened bell curve, an unusually broad distribution, in statistical terms. Now there is only a great deal of metal grid work, like a spiky, angular sculpture: reinforcement or scaffolding, she cannot tell.
“I remember the old bridge, the first bridge, being built,” she says to Justin. “It had the largest floating span in North America.”
“Yes, I have heard that,” Justin says. Politely.
“The middle section, the part that rises, was also innovative. People used to drive up to watch it open, at first. It would open at regular times, I believe, to let sailboats with their tall masts through. It was very modern.”
“It looks very steampunk,” Justin says. “The counterweight and so on. Like a drawbridge. What did people do before the bridge?”
“There was a ferry.”
“That must have been slow,” Justin says. “I can’t imagine a ferry transporting all this traffic.”
Of course, there had not been nearly so much traffic. The bridge had made the expansion, the travel across the lake feasible. And the new, wider bridge would, presumably, open the floodgates even more.
A phenomenon she has seen in her lifetime: the proliferation of the automobile, and the attendant growth, if that is the right word, of cities, towns. What will happen, then, to the land, the earth and trees, the countryside that lies at the feet, is known through the feet? What will happen to the small catchments of humans who recognize and are recognized by each other, in the context of the folds and valleys, the plants and trees? Will it matter?
How will people properly locate themselves in this man-made world? But what effort, what great effort to try to preserve a little paradise. How much planning, how great a cost, how much reliance on timing and fruition.
Justin says, sounding middle-aged, “I think all of this development spoils the landscape. Where is it going to end?”
His fine-boned neck and jaw emerging from the heavy hooded cotton jacket, the one she bought him. His long, fine fingers on the steering wheel.
As a child, she had not known what the valley looked like, in geological terms. The big ordnance maps that the high school geography teacher had unrolled for them — school atlases, in those days, hadn’t contained detailed maps of British Columbia — had shown the irregular outlines of the lakes, and the meandering canals that connected them. The flattish foreshore of the smallest lake, where she now lives, marked in the three-stemmed symbols that represent marshland.
But the maps’ contour lines had not translated themselves in her imagination into the landscape she knew: the steep arid hil
lsides with their gullies, their sparse ponderosa, rabbit bush, yellowed bunchgrass; the marshaled green rows of fruit trees, their lush under-story; the flat bottoms of the valleys, where rows of tomatoes and cabbages and onions grew from the black soil, and cottonwoods shaded the lakeshores. And later, flying in or out of the valley, she’d caught only glimpses: the plane slipping below the clouds to reveal a slab of lake and sparse forest and the rows and loops of streets like diorama miniatures.
But now she has seen the whole of the valley, its clefts and tendons, its coloured-resin bodies of water, spread in a patchwork of satellite photographs across her computer screen. She has flown, virtually, across and along the valley, skimming trees, rooftops, the wrinkled cobalt surfaces of the lakes. Has seen that the three smaller lakes, in their chain, are one lake, interrupted. Or were, a few millennia ago. That all the lakes were one, even further back in time: a single inland sea, filling the whole valley, extending further south, where now still more small lakes form a kind of coda as the valley drains into the Columbia basin.
The peaks and highest ridges must have been islands in a great blue expanse. Then, as the lake slowly receded, arms and inlets forming where now the smaller lakes lie, cut off. Or had it happened suddenly: a cataclysmic rush as the glacial stopper at the valley’s southern neck suddenly popped? Roaring water scouring deep holes, carving a channel through to the Columbia, and then south and west to the sea?
Justin has downloaded the link, set up the icon, the little blue and white marble on the screen. She has flown up and down the valley, has skimmed in over the long central ridge, has searched out the grids of green dots that are the orchards, the patches of random scrub and ponderosa, the yellow grass of the slopes. She has found out the gullies, the rock outcroppings. She has found out the dips where natural springs hide — the thickets of willow and fir and saskatoon that burrow there for water. She has followed the paths of the alkaline ponds, the unlikely turquoise and emerald of the ponds, as they string across the hillsides, drawing up bitter salts, giving back no life. She has discovered how green spreads up from the valley basins, from the lakes, carried artificially by the hidden arterial pipes. How the green stops abruptly at the edges of steeper slopes and gullies, where the natural arid life of the region reasserts itself.
She has spent much time in this virtual travel. She is grateful to Justin for his enablement.
She thinks, sometimes, that Cynthia does not appreciate Justin as she should, that she doesn’t see what a miracle it is for grace and intelligence to come together in so young a person. How unusual, how valuable the boy is. Her mother and father would have seen him as she does: the heir to all they built.
It is not reasonable to make a boy the anointed one. She can attest to that. But he will be the one to take it on. If not Justin, then who?
“Can you drive a manual shift?” she asks.
“I can,” Justin says, with, she thinks, more bravado than accuracy.
She arranges for him to be dropped off at her house by Cynthia, gives him the keys to her new BMW, lets him drive around the townhouse complex, then up and down the highway, to show her that he can change gears without taking his eyes off the road. With great effort, she maintains a calm posture, a relaxed expression.
“You can use the car,” she says, “in exchange for driving me around.”
His joy fermenting, sealed down, only his widened eyes speaking. She breathes deeply through the adrenaline-rush of her risk-taking.
Mid-February: St. Valentine’s Day. The 5:40 jet shakes her windows. She crutches her way to the kitchen, slides the black plastic dish into the microwave oven.
The ringing of the phone startles her; for a few seconds she confuses it with the sound of the microwave timer, so unused is she to the phone ringing, so unexpected a call, and answers only on the third ring.
“Took you long enough,” Hugh says. “Six rings. I almost hung up.”
“Three rings,” she says.
“At least five. Do you always go to bed this early?”
“Hugh. It’s not even six o’clock here. I am making my supper.”
She is not so surprised to hear from Hugh. They had kept in touch, as people do, via Christmas cards and then Christmas emails, for the last few decades. But now, since her move back to the valley, he has been calling every few weeks, has promised to visit. He’s consulting on the new bridge, or claims to be, though she has not seen his name connected with the engineering companies mentioned in the newspaper articles. Still, Hugh is supposed to be retired.
She wonders, though, what it is Hugh wants of her.
“I am watching the news on the Internet,” Hugh says. “I tried to Skype you, but you aren’t online. Why don’t you leave the computer on like a normal person?”
“Distraction,” she says. “What’s on the news, Hugh?”
“Have you been paying any attention to what’s going on in Rhodesia?”
“You mean Zimbabwe?”
He ignores this. “Three thousand percent inflation, for god’s sake. What do you think it’s like to live with that economy, Sidonie?”
He sounds like he’s accusing her of something, but she knows him too well to take his tone personally. “I can’t imagine,” she says, “although my father could have told you.”
Hugh is distracted for a moment. “Eh? Oh, yes. Well, that makes it worse, doesn’t it, seeing where it can lead. I’m just back from Harare, you know. What a mess. I tell you, I’m alarmed.”
Why is he telling her all this? She feels it is nothing to do with her. Hugh is addicted to the Internet news.
But she remembers then: his youngest daughter lives in Zimbabwe still, with her mother. Hugh likes to talk about his offspring; he has five or six. It is the kind of topic she finds boring, from friends or colleagues. Almost as bad as stories about dogs.
She changes the subject. “How is the work on the bridge progressing?”
He growls, and there’s a tirade against the other engineers, the city council, the province, and the whole bridge project. She doesn’t understand half of his terminology, but he isn’t paying much attention to whether she’s following him, anyway. She can picture him, pacing his apartment, wearing his headset, his lower jaw thrust out, his clipped ivory mustache, like an Eskimo carving, riding his lip, twitching. She can hear in the background what sounds like two competing voices; either he has two computer screens on or one and the television.
“The work seems to have started,” Sidonie says. “They’re building the on-ramp on the town side. I’ve seen photos on the news. Do you like the design?” she asks, and Hugh stops his rant abruptly.
“Yes. Very much!”
She does not know why he should sound so surprised by her question.
Surprising to her, still, that Hugh is part of her life again. Hugh, solid, blunt, grounded. She cannot remember not knowing Hugh, though he claims to remember a time before her advent. Not the same Hugh, of course: Hugh-the-boy, who is now erased by the white hair and leathery arms of Hugh-the-man.
Her earliest memories must be of the back of Hugh: his tow head, his grey knit shirt and short pants ahead of her. She has always known him, and he has always taken charge of her. “No dawdling, now!” he’d always called to her, over his shoulder, as they’d trudged up and down the hills. “No faltering, men!”
Hugh is the bridge to her earliest self. He is the only one left, she thinks, who knew her, who remembers growing up in the orchards, remembers the hills and the lakes as they were, remembers the small universe of their school and playmates, their childhood pleasures. Hugh remembers her parents and Alice — as she remembers his parents and Graham. She does not think about the past often, but she does not like to think that she alone remembers it. Hugh is necessary for that connection. But what does he want from her?
She has kept her distance from him these past few months; it has been Hugh who has initiated all the conversations. But now, housebound, on crutches, in the cold dirty end of winter,
the uncertain, messy beginning of spring, she finds herself taking somewhat more of an interest in his calls. She can see that if she pays too much attention, she will step over some invisible line, and then the existence of Hugh will begin to take up too much of her time.
The time she divides, now, between randomly springboarding between Internet sites — videos and blogs and obscure articles — and hanging out with Justin in malls and cafés. She has become a disaffected youth, to use the term popular in her own youth. Which had been not at all disaffected.
“I’ll be out next month,” Hugh says. “April at the latest.”
Her microwave oven beeps for the third time. How long has she got before the ragout dries out? Should she just say to Hugh, I’m cooking my dinner right now; I’ll ring you back?
She finds cooking only for herself boring and pointless: she does not think much about food. The refrigerator that came with the townhouse has a capacious lower freezer drawer in which she keeps neat stacks of prepared entrées in plastic and cardboard boxes, from the frozen food section of Safeway. They can be warmed quickly in the microwave, and are not at all unpleasant, though of course they do not compare with the meals she was accustomed to in Montreal, which she usually bought at the deli on her way home. Every two weeks, she buys a dozen different entrées and stores them: it’s much more logical for one person than obtaining ingredients and cooking.
It is true that when Cynthia and Justin have come for dinner, Sidonie has had to buy great quantities of dishes. She sees that mini-meals might not be a feasible option if she were to have guests on a regular basis. Her cupboards, though, contain the necessities: coffee, wine, olives. Apples in the refrigerator, and cheese. And packages of pre-washed lettuce and greens. (Her mother’s astonishment and disapproval if she were to see a handful of baby arugula and butter lettuce leaves packaged in a cellophane tub and sold for six dollars.) But how convenient, how easy, to open the tub and mound the leaves on a plate. How easy it is to be nutritionally virtuous, with vegetables already washed, sorted, and de-bugged.
After Alice Page 5