Something shifts: something loosens inside her mind. It is the image, perhaps, of young Hugh, small Hugh, always ahead of her, always turning back to rescue her, to urge her along. She has shut herself off from that solicitous, tow-haired boy for so long.
They are on a grassy, flattened part of the slope: perhaps a cirque, scooped out by some ancient glacier, or perhaps just a ledge formed by a rockslide. A few stands of rabbit bush and some little prickly-pear cactus dot the still-green grass. Before them, the lake spills, a generous libation, between the long blue knuckles of the hills. How many gallons, how many molecules, of water? Sufficient and more to water the trees and vines, to wash the rocks of dust, to temper the summers and winters. The deep blue absorbs, contains, gentles the gaze. It parts and rejoins, seamlessly. It reflects the hills, drawing their blue down; it mirrors the sky.
“Shall we stop here and eat?” Hugh asks, “rather than go all the way to the top? I’m afraid the wine is getting warm.”
Though it is fall, the sun is warm; the rock outcroppings, with their colonies of lichen, are still radiating heat.
“Let’s,” Sidonie says.
Ingrid urges them all to sign up for yoga once a week at the community centre. Tasha signs up and persuades Sidonie to do so as well. “I don’t,” Sidonie says, “do well with terms like chakra and third eye. I’m a scientist. I really don’t speak that language.”
The class is hard: she finds herself grunting and stretching, struggling for balance. She notices that what is required is a strong feedback loop, the sort for which she has been developing therapies. Has anyone done work on yoga, in her field, she wonders, and then falls over yet again. The breathing, the focus on the position of her body: that is the challenge, the exercise. Can she train her mind to develop those paths? She will try; she will be her own experiment. There are moments when she experiences something different, something like highly improved reception, in herself. She will keep at it.
The class conflicts with the one of the nights Tasha waits tables at Sage and Plum, but Cynthia offers to take on that night. A food critic from a local tourism magazine visits Sage and Plum, and on his third visit asks Cynthia out. The family is abuzz, Sidonie sees: there is much speculation as to why Cynthia has remained single for two decades (the consensus is that she hasn’t wanted to saddle Justin with a stepfather), and much discussion over the worthiness of the food critic. He is not prepossessing; he is in his fifties, balding; he wears thick-lensed glasses. He has fine, small hands, rounded shoulders. But he signs and is a teacher, like Cynthia, and when he speaks, in a voice quieter than any Kleinholz’s or Inglis’s or von Täler’s, everyone stops and listens. All of them, Steve and Debbie and Kevin, Hugh, Sidonie herself, go around saying to each other, I like him. Sage and Plum gets a rave review in Valley Life magazine.
And then he is gone, and Cynthia is climbing up into the cab of Jack Rilke’s pickup truck to go down to the Legion for a beer.
“Do not play around with Jack Rilke,” Steve says. “The Rilkes have been our neighbours for sixty years.”
Our neighbours. Sidonie grins to herself.
The restaurant traffic is slower in the winter, but Kevin makes a pitch to a couple of wineries and the ski hills, and busloads of lunch customers help keep things afloat. Sidonie has taken to dropping by the place, to lend a hand on busy evenings, or to watch the boys. It makes a change from the little lake with the ducks.
Cashiel says, “Want to hear my myth?” He has been bouncing, literally, off the walls; Kevin and Celeste are too busy to pay him attention. Sidonie has been about to leave; she takes off her coat and goes upstairs instead to sit on Cashiel’s bed (her old bed-space!) while he reads out his assignment.
“It’s a creation myth,” he says. “We had to make one up.”
“Go ahead,” she says.
“A boy created a video game. He made an avatar, and then he made a world for the avatar to roam around in. He made a quest, so the avatar wouldn’t be bored, and he made monsters and traps, so that the avatar would get stronger.”
“Yes,” Sidonie says.
“The boy made some other friendly characters to help the avatar, so he wouldn’t be lonely or despairing.”
“Very good.”
“But then there was a storm and the boy’s computer got fried, and the avatar and his friends and all of the monsters got boosted up a million levels, and they escaped the computer and became real.”
“Oh, my!”
“So then the boy got his computer fixed, and tried to unmake them, but he couldn’t. They were all loose in the world. In a different world, not this one. And the boy worried about them, but he couldn’t help them. He only had to hope that they remembered all the rules and cheats that he had built into the game.”
“Yes, well: I guess that he would.”
“Do you like it?
“Very much. Tell me about the monsters. What they looked like. What powers they had.”
Cashiel shows her pages of tiny sketches, lists of attributes: pages of tiny drawings and crabbed writing. He has almost a book-sized manuscript of his drawings and lists. She thinks: And Cashiel is constantly in trouble at school for not writing enough, not doing the work. She contributes to his list of monsters, Lastrygonians, dracanae, hydrae, medusae, Cyclopes. Cashiel is impressed.
“But there are more monsters than these,” she says. “Talk to your grandmother.”
He opens his eyes wide. “You mean those old stories? I could put those into my myth?”
Fearon says, taking an interest from his own bed, “This could be a new kind of game. Not a platform or a maze game, but a web game. The screens could connect. . .”
“In three dimensions!” Cashiel says. “Or add in interface, there’s another dimension.”
“Yeah, it’s all about the connections, then.”
Around the two of them, energy: light.
Kevin says they’ve decided to close down the restaurant on Christmas Day and do a family dinner. “We’ll lose some business, yes,” he says, “but there haven’t been a lot of calls for reservations. It’s not like in the city, where so many people live alone.”
“Live alone and can afford to eat dinner out,” Sidonie corrects.
They will all come: Cynthia, Justin, who has finally returned from his walkabout, Steve and Debbie, Alex and Ingrid, Tasha, Sidonie. Hugh is flying out as well. Cynthia’s beau, as her brothers refer to Jack Rilke now, will not come; he will have Christmas with his parents and his ex-wife.
“Do you think it’s strange,” Cynthia asks Sidonie, “for a man to spend Christmases with his ex?”
“I do,” Sidonie says firmly, swallowing her own alarms. “Strange and wonderful.”
Tasha announces that she will be bringing a friend: “A person called Don,” Debbie says.
“Or Dawn,” Alex suggests, winking.
“Oh, dear,” Debbie says. “I know it’s really common now, but I hope. . .”
Sidonie, who has some idea, says nothing.
And Celeste’s auntie Edith will come, though no other family members. “There’s a better party going on at my uncle Roy’s,” Celeste says. “But Edith and Roy are on the outs.”
There is a vote, and turkey is not on the menu. “Thank you!” says Kevin, who has been cooking for staff Christmas parties all month. Instead, there is moose — a great rib roast, donated by Celeste’s dad — and quail.
“Not the little jobs with the topknots that run through the orchard!” Ingrid says, alarmed, and Kevin explains that they will be domestic quail. But he has a gleam in his eye, at her comment.
And crab, which is to be delivered, fresh off the boat, by a friend of Kevin’s who is driving up from the coast Christmas Eve.
Everything else will come from the farm or orchard: tiny Andean button potatoes in various colours, which seem to like the valley soil; grilled peppers, cherries and rosemary for the sauce for the moose, currants and walnuts for stuffing the quail (the currant bushes
and walnut trees discovered in the tangle of brush at the north edge of the property, by the gulley); pickles and chutney with Debbie’s label: Sage and Plum Moveable Feast.
A cake thick with dried fruit and nuts.
Only the chocolate, the cheeses, and wine are not from the Sage and Plum Gardens, though the cheese and wine are locally produced. “But I bought the chocolate where it was made,” says Justin, who has returned with several pounds in his backpack. And a beard.
Sidonie dresses for the dinner. She puts on, after her usual narrow black jeans, a thin black dress, which is quite lightweight, really. It falls to her thighs; the sleeves flutter. A pleasing dress, comfortable on the body. Tags cut out, as they scratched. Adam had bought it for her in 1967. She is pleased with the roll of the collar, the tiny, neat pockets and placket.
Then the tunic: this one patterned in a spectrum of oranges that she particularly likes: the colours of an Indian spice market, perhaps. Also, originally, a dress. Bought in 1972 for Adam’s parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary party.
And last, the vest, which she is even fonder of than the dress and tunic. This a fine, cabled wool knit, narrow, with deep armholes. It had been Adam’s: he had thought it too conservative, and she had taken to wearing it, in the late 70s, over large flannel shirts or turtlenecks: the Annie Hall look.
Such a strange assortment of garments; she would never, before this year, have considered wearing these things together. But she can see that the effect is salubrious, the sizes and colours of the rectangles made by the various items form a pleasing arrangement. And leaving her bedroom, she sees the zebrawood beads, a peace-offering, a traveller’s present from Justin, hanging from the row of hooks. Their satin texture, their warmth and weight pass through her imagination: dare she? She puts them on. Yes? Yes. There. She feels somehow robed, hallowed.
They have had by Christmas of 2008 much more than the normal amount of snow, and much colder temperatures. By all predictions, this winter of 08/09 will be more intense than those of the last ten or twelve years. Sidonie, wading through the new drifts from her car, feels buoyant, elated. It is a winter from her childhood, clean, airy, a clear demarcation in the year. She tries to form a ball in her driving gloves, but the snow is too dry to stick; then Fearon, who’s shoveling the courtyard, forms a loose missile with his bare hands and heaves it at her, overhand. She has to hold up her bag of wrapped presents to gain safe passage.
The gifts have been mostly for the children, a custom of both von Tälers and Kleinholzes. But there are some gifts for the adults too: practical and promissory. A goat for Ingrid: it will arrive in spring, but she receives a card with a photo of its mother, a pretty black-and-white Nubian. A separator for Debbie, to make cheese; also represented by a photo cut from a brochure.
Four large filing cabinets for Sidonie: these represented by a bill of sale from the auction house. A black iron object, called a spider, for Kevin, who handles it almost reverently.
“It’s an antique,” Alex says. “From Quebec. I found it on eBay, after six months of looking.”
For Tasha (whose friend is Dawn, not Don), keys to the elderly three-quarter ton pickup that Alex has used to take vegetables to the market all summer and fall.
“Since you’ve been driving it for the past few months anyway,” Alex says. “But I’ll need it to haul manure in spring.”
Sidonie has not known what to give anyone, and has resorted to distributing a pair of thick wool socks to each person. She has found out that her neighbour, she of the flat-faced dog and the casseroles, possesses a large bureau full of socks that she has knit, and that she sells for charity: for Stephen Lewis’s African grandmothers, she says. Sidonie has chosen for each family member: heavy grey merino, self-striped, lacy and patterned. A pair for everyone.
It would have been better if she had knit them herself, she thinks, but she has not. She never learned how to knit, though she had been given yarn and needles as a child, shown over and over. Her hands refused to pick it up; she had never got past awkward. And Alice had been so adept that Sidonie had been let off the hook. It is her brain wiring, really, she supposes, that has not got that aptitude. She does not use that layer of processing as well. She had traded it early for the ability to manipulate abstract things. Could she have learned, if she had tried harder? Would her brain have developed differently?
It is Cynthia who has given the best gift: she has found a company that will print and bind books, and provides a computer template to put them together, and Cynthia has, over the last year, created a scrapbook of photographs (captioned, dated) out of the albums in Sidonie’s files, the albums that Justin has painstakingly reassembled, and had a copy made for each of them. “But how did you do this?” Sidonie asks, and Cynthia explains about scanning the photos, choosing the coloured borders and titles. But the books are very professional-looking; Cynthia has a gift.
Here are Mother and Father, looking, at last, like what they were; an intelligent and disapproving Scotswoman, an expansive and indulgent middle-European burgher. And another photograph, looking like what they also were: North American orchardists of the mid-century. There are photos of parties, of children — Alice and Sidonie, Hugh, Graham, Walter and Karl, Masao. There are photographs of the house, of small trees, of pets. Photographs of groups of people at weddings, at dedications of buildings, on the beach.
And here is Alice, in a white dress and tiara, shaking hands with Princess Margaret. How funny; Sidonie remembers that dress so distinctly that just seeing this image of it she can feel the texture of the cotton whipcord, the batiste lining, bought in Vancouver; hear the sound of the shears, the rumbling whir of the Singer. She sees the dress growing slowly on the dining-room table. Alice pressing out seams, picking out basting, for hours and hours. The bodice recut three times before the fit satisfied her. It had been almost bridal, the most perfect thing seen in Marshall’s Landing. Mrs. Inglis had loaned Alice a pair of white kid slingbacks; Miss Robinson, a strand of real pearls. They had all looked at the dress, not touching it, awed. Mother had put on a white glove and turned the dress hem up to show the perfect stitching, the secret finished seams.
And Alice, wearing the dress, the short white gloves, her hair a smooth blonde chignon, her little hat, her slim white perfect self, her attending princesses, standing on the carpet to wait for the real princess.
In the photo you don’t see this. You see a very pretty slim girl, with an uncertain smile, a wisp of escaping hair, a homemade dress that strains a bit at the armhole seam. A provincial beauty, dimmed by Princess Margaret’s professional coif and couture, her formal bearing.
A little death, though she knows photographs do not always tell the truth.
They have all become a little older, a little more worn, in three years, Sidonie sees, looking around the table. Alex has lost his baby face, looks grimmer. Ingrid has put on weight, carries a lushness that for the first time truly recalls her paternal grandmother. Justin, just off the plane, is very thin, as well as bearded. (He’s picked up some intestinal parasite, Cynthia tells Sidonie.) He looks harder: he is harder. He does not make such an effort to be polite. His hair has darkened, too: she does not see in him her golden boy. She is punctured with loss, but she does not speak of this. Justin is not hers; has never been.
But relief, mixed with the loss.
Steve and Debbie, Kevin and Celeste, look simply tired. They have worked hard for people in their late forties. The enterprise has, overall, lost money. They will not see a profit for a year or two yet.
Only Tasha looks pleased with herself, paying exaggerated attention to the short, sulky, red-haired young woman sitting beside her: a ruffian if Sidonie ever saw one. Dawn. What had her parents thought, naming her that? She is dressed with exaggerated butchness, her hair aggressively spiky, her speech deliberately tough. What dreams of femininity has she disrupted, or is she demonstrating against?
There are arguments, after the joviality of the gifts. Hugh accuses Alex and Kevin
of working Ingrid too hard; Debbie and Cynthia exchange words over Justin’s appearance; the boys squabble over a new electronic game; Kevin yells at them and Celeste yells at Kevin.
Sidonie, sitting between Celeste’s aunt Edith and Tasha’s friend, has to hold up the ends of two conversations, which, she begins to realize, would be volatile if mixed. Edith is telling a slightly obscene and mocking story about her transgendered nephew, while Dawn is complaining about the line-ups at the liquor store where she works on “Indian cheque day.” Sidonie is human insulation. She is tickled. It is an amusing job.
Kevin cuts into the luscious dark cake, which is distributed in great, heavy slices: they are a family of fruitcake-eaters, rare, perhaps, in the world. The cake, Sidonie thinks, is like a geological sample, a chunk of earth, rich with geological time, or at least historical time: a midden of what their families have desired, found, made, over half a century or more. There are walnuts from the Sage and Plum tree, the Beauvoir tree; there are almonds and raisins from Italy; there is good wheat from the prairies, and the whole soaked in Bosnian apricot brandy, a gift from Debbie’s parents.
They toast with a thimble each of ice wine, Hahnenschrei’s first vintage of ice wine, a gift from their neighbours George and Katya.
“Late Bloomer,” Sidonie reads from the label, and Steve asks, “What is ice wine, anyway?”
“It’s made from grapes left on the vine until after the first frost,” Kevin says. “The frost concentrates the sugars, which are high, anyway, for the grapes being left longer.”
The wine is satin, cool, sweet as lilies.
“It tastes purple,” says Cashiel, who, like his brother, has been given a thimbleful.
“It tastes like I imagined wine would taste, when I was a child,” Cynthia says.
“A toast,” Debbie says, surprisingly, “to late bloomers.”
There is a knock at the house door, but nobody hears it for a while. In the end, it is Sidonie, getting up to use the washroom, who hears and answers it. She moves through the sea of boots that lie dripping, scattered, on the new tile floor in the hallway, stooping to line up a few pairs, to clear a path. Through the sidelight, she can see that there are no additional cars in the drive, but that someone has made a path on foot down the driveway. She can hear stamping on the other side of the door, snow being cleared from boots. A throat-clearing cough: a man’s. Through the patterned glass of the sidelight she can see the blurred figure of a man of around medium height. Light, or grey hair. Not bulky enough to be one of the Rilkes. Who is it, walking up their drive on Christmas Day?
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