The Madrigal

by Dian Day

  I get in there, through the library doors, and I look across to the desk, and if she is there my heart stops beating for a minute, and I know that all my efforts to appear nonchalant are going to be hopeless. I tell myself, breathe, breathe, lento, but whatever I have practised only half comes out. Like, if I was going to pretend to ask about the large print books for my mother, I think about how I could tell her all about stroke and idiosyncratic memory and engage her in intelligent conversation for several minutes, even if there is someone waiting behind me in line. Instead I say, “Where are your large print books?” And I sound stuffy and officious and boring. She points me in the right direction, with half her face turned up towards me, and her dark hair falling over her cheek. And that is the end of it. So I stand in the rows and rows of Harlequins with hugely-lettered titles, and half my mind kicks the other half, over and over. Sometimes I catch myself knocking my head lightly on the edge of the metal shelving, and when I come to, I realize that now she will think I am taking these books out for myself. Even if she isn’t already taken, what self-respecting librarian would ever go out with a guy who reads the abridged versions of romance fiction in 18-point?

  AFTER MY FIRST SUCCESS, there was almost always a bit of a crowd when I sang in the streets at night. Even when drunk, the students slowed and stopped for a few minutes under my street lamp, their glassy eyes glazing over even more with some kind of misty memory of home. The night folded close around me then. I could look up in the sky at the pin-poked stars, and around at the faces of my transitory audience, and I could feel the earth turning beneath me. I sang in a kind of bubble, self-contained and protected, while the passersby were part of the larger world, strung on a great web of invisible filaments. Without Filander, I was separate from everything. But I found it comforting to reach out with a tune and touch this face or that one in the crowd, and turn it towards me, as if some kind of musical telekinesis was at work.

  They liked mournful Irish lullabies and lively French Canadian folk songs and the tunes from all the musicals that were big hits at the time: “Touch Me, Feel Me” from Tommy, and “Could We Start Again, Please?” from Jesus Christ Superstar. My entire repertoire was made up of songs I’d heard my mother croon in our deadbeat kitchen, Cole Porter’s “Don’t Fence Me In” and “Ol’ Man River” from the play Showboat. There was an intermittent chink and clink of coins dropping against each other in my cap, the donors leaning forward unsteadily, trying with all their might to focus. Even then, the coins sometimes rolled into the gutter.

  I sang with my hands in my pockets, and every fifteen minutes or so, at the end of a song, I’d pick up my hat and retreat into the dark doorway behind me and push the coins down into my socks so they slid underneath the arch of my foot, and I’d layer the rare bills carefully along the inside waistband of my underwear. When my brothers came by, as they always did, on their way between bars and pubs and the back doors of restaurant kitchens, they’d cuff my shoulder, tousle my neatly-combed hair, and pick the meagre change from the cap like magpies, before I could stop them. Four of them still needed fake IDs, but already they were accomplished thieves and drinkers.

  I COULDN’T KEEP MONEY AT HOME. If my brothers found it they bought beer. If my mother found it, she bought skim milk powder. Either way, I learned quickly. I’d come home to find all my hiding places empty: the toes of my extra pair of boots; the hole behind the panelling that was revealed by lifting the curling corner; the hollow length of my metal bedpost, capped by a broken black knob—you had to turn the whole bed right over to get the coins out. I’d find the bed up-ended regularly, my thin sheets tangled and boot-marked, my blanket trailing into the hallway like the tail of a coiled snake. I’d find the knob days later, hidden by discarded school books or dirty laundry.

  So I started to keep my money in the storeroom at the shop. I didn’t tell Ed. Even in those years there were places he never looked, and it only required feigning a trip to the toilet to either hide or redeem funds. I slept at night with my coin-filled socks on, and by day put those metallic feet into shoes always worn one size too big. I walked from Saturday to Monday with people’s spare change digging into my arches, and hobbled to The Whole Note glad of the serendipitous scheduling that put my voice lessons so close to the weekend.

  There were no sound-proofed rooms in those days. We stood in a back corner of the shop, and anyone who liked could stand pretending to look at banjos or metronomes or sheet music and hear us sing: A free concert punctuated by corrections. That first Monday night, in between “Watch the bump in your phrasing, Frederick” and “Lift the breath! Lift the breath!” I slipped away from the handful of other children in my voice class—all of them always girls—and made my way to the counter to ask Ed for directions.

  That first time, Ed came to the door of the storeroom and pointed. Then, as now, the path to the washroom was lined with haphazardly-piled boxes. I was shorter then, of course, so it seemed even more of an impenetrable cardboard jungle.

  “Clean up a little while you’re back there, okay?” Ed said, and then he went back to the music book he had open on the glass surface of the display case, following the notes with his left hand, his right hand tapping silently in the air.

  I didn’t know if he meant it. I didn’t even know if he meant me, or the room full of boxes. To cover all possibilities, I washed my hands diligently after I flushed the toilet, and I wiped the inside of the stained sink with the damp paper towel. After that I went quietly back through the storeroom and found a small box that held a set of harp strings and placed the packaged contents into a slightly bigger box, flaps open, that held guitar capos. I can remember I had a moment of wondering if Ed would ever find them there, but I looked around and didn’t really know how he found anything, so it seemed not to matter.

  I pulled off my boot and my sock and put those first savings into the stolen box, and I crawled behind the tallest tower of cardboard and hid the makeshift bank behind a flaking cast-iron radiator. By then I was so nervous that I went back out into the shop with my sock and boot still in my hand, but Ed did nothing more than raise his left eyebrow a quarter of an inch before returning to the Miles Davis Songbook.

  “I’m looking for your middle voice here, Sandy,” said our teacher.

  I PICKED UP THE Globe and Mail tonight on my way home from The Whole Note. I don’t often buy the paper—I usually read the headlines online these days, at the shop—but I did tonight because it had been a pretty busy day, every student coming early and every lesson running late. It’s strange, because on the front page there was a little story about conjoined twins that had been born in the Dominican Republic, but I didn’t even look at the paper before I bought it.

  Surgeon to remove girl’s second head.

  I still read these things; I don’t know why. I always know how they’re going to end.

  Most people read articles like this out of morbid curiosity. They want to know about freaks. I guess people always have.

  They’d been flown to Los Angeles—they are always flown somewhere, the U.S. or the U.K. or somewhere big and important with a need to show off. I expect competing teams of doctors who specialize in separations wait with bated breath for such babies to be born. I don’t know how these things are decided, or who decides. Maybe it’s simply a matter of who gets to the poor parents first, and the doctors have scouts or spies out all around the world. I imagine they may even open bottles of champagne if they find themselves holding the successful bid.

  I say “they” were flown, although most people would say “she.” There’s a twoness to twins, even those born conjoined or parasitic, despite everyone’s best efforts to make it look straightforward, as if one baby’s life is being saved. It’s almost never true. The extra part is a whole person. A whole person in a leg, an arm, a head, a little finger. Cutting off the extras leaves a shadowy twoness without the two.

  I cut the article out and taped in into the sc
rapbook I keep on the kitchen shelf with the twin books from my childhood. My brothers abandoned them at my mother’s, where they sat for years, collecting dust. I found them there After, when I was called home and left on my own to clean everything out.

  They are stacked beside the stove like recipe books on how to make humans of all different shapes and varieties, for every taste.

  I PUT UP A NEW CURTAIN ROD in the living room. The old metal pole sagged in the middle so much that it was getting hard to open the curtains in the morning; they just kept sliding closed back towards the centre.

  I had the wrong bit on the screwdriver, and I opened the end of the tool and poured the bit selection into the palm of my open hand.

  It’s easy to understand, now, how my brothers so consistently overlooked me: a singleton, a keening baby, a timid toddler, a strangely taciturn small child. And then for a brief moment in middle childhood I imagine I was simply a Voice floating in the streets of their carousing, disembodied and unconnected to their lives. I doubt they gave one thought to where I’d learned such songs—not from their blaring AM radios, to be sure. Soon enough I was swept away from home into the current of my life, and they hurtled into the tempesta di mare of theirs.

  To them I was at best a brief source of minor puzzlement and spare change. I don’t know if they ever really stopped to notice me, or to listen to me sing when they found me on those midnight streets. They held firmly to their own lives and to each other, a six-pack of assimilation. Now that I have some perspective on my own self-absorbed adolescence, I can hardly blame them.

  I fiddled with the screwdriver, the chair underneath me rocking slightly on its one short leg.

  We had, all seven of us, settled happily into virtual non-communication as adults as well. When I had to tell them something about our mother—that she had fallen and broken her wrist or that her doctors were trying a new, experimental medication—I never called, but sent an e-mail to the garage from the computer at Ed’s shop, asking the Ns to forward the information to the others. One of them, Nicholas or Nathaniel, would e-mail back a confirmation, with sometimes a line or two about the weather, or how many cars they had backed up waiting outside the bays. That was pretty much it. We never used each other’s phone numbers.

  I felt a draft and heard the floor creak and I turned around to see Maya standing in the doorway watching me, dripping from the rain. I dropped the screwdriver and just about fell off the chair.

  “Door was open” she explained, shrugging a half apology. She was looking at the curtain rod that I’d just fit into the second bracket.

  “Crisp, that’s crooked.” Weaving carefully around the covered harp, she crossed the hardwood with her boots still on, picked up the fallen tool, and waved me off the chair.

  I just stood there in the middle of my own living room and watched her take the bracket off the wall again, level the pole by eye, and re-drill holes for the wall plugs. It didn’t seem like she was rushing, but she worked quickly and carefully—preciso. When she finished, she took the pole down and handed me one end to thread the curtain tabs over it. She was all business; we didn’t have a conversation or anything. She used hand signals to get me to do what she wanted—hold the pole, pass her the drill, find the screw—like a choir director calling forth music. It was music, senza misura. Before I could really think too much the curtains were back up on the new, perfectly-horizontal pole and she was gone. I was left staring at the seat of the dining room chair, where there were gritty little puddles left by her wet construction boots.

  “WE’LL GO TO THE BEACH TODAY,” my mother announced. She had been out late the night before, and was now manically exuberant. It was mid-morning—breakfast time for my brothers on weekends and during vacation—and it was summer in Eastern Ontario. The air was still and already almost unbearably humid. My brothers were eating overflowing bowls of cereal sprinkled with powdered milk and sugar stolen from the Eat-Rite Diner. The kitchen was littered with puffed wheat.

  They all looked at her like she was crazy. The word “beach” had never once been spoken in our family; I myself only had the haziest notion of water, sand, and sky, and I’m not sure where even that much had come from, since I wasn’t yet in school.

  “You’ve all got trunks,” she said. “Nick and Nat can wear their cut-offs.” There was a rare excitement in her voice, like an echo of Twinsburg. “And Fred,” she added, “you can wear—”

  “Are you kidding?” asked Salvador.

  “Beach?” Alistair shook his head emphatically.

  “There’s no beach for this dude,” said Abraham.

  “Anyway, we got things to do,” said Nathaniel.

  “You could take Fred, though,” suggested Samuel.

  “Maybe he’ll even drown,” added Nicholas hopefully.

  The year before I started kindergarten, after a rash of drownings in the town—including that of Courtney Glass, author of the undefended Madrigal dissertation—there was a community water safety campaign. Every elementary school child was to be given swimming lessons, and every high school teenager was to learn boating safety. In practical terms, this meant that four of my six brothers had been given free bathing suits the previous spring—garish tartan trunks with a drawstring at the waist—and had been taken to the community pool during school time, where they probably learned more about water torture than lifesaving. Instead of swimming suits, the oldest two, the Ns, had each been given a plastic whistle on a lanyard in case they ever found themselves in a boat about to capsize. They had immediately, and carelessly, lost them.

  “Suit yourself,” my mother said. “But there’s a canteen.” And she reached down the front of her dress, took a ten-dollar bill from her cleavage—the only place her money was safe from my brothers—and waved it confidently in the air over the table.

  They took notice, and added up the hot dogs and fries in their heads. My mother thought she had them.

  “Get your suits on,” she said. “Or your shorts. Or—” she looked at me thoughtfully. “You’ll have to swim in your underpants, Fred.”

  “Underpants, Fred!” mimicked Salvador.

  My brothers hooted and howled with laughter. I was used to that, but, even so, my face burned in humiliation. I was old enough to know that some things were private and not to be seen; underwear would be bad enough, but underwear with holes would be mortifying.

  “Go on,” scolded my mother. “Go on now and get ready. And bring the towels!” She replaced the bill for safekeeping, and my brothers’ chairs screeched and their feet shook the stairs. My mother and I were alone in the kitchen.

  “Get your shoes on,” she said, even though she knew I couldn’t tie my laces myself.

  In a rare mood and with remarkable energy she rustled us all up. My brothers tumbled down the stairs empty-handed, looking no different than when they’d gone up. She asked to see evidence of their bathing trunks and cut-offs under their jeans. When instead she caught sight of the elastic of their underwear she sent them back up to put them on “for real.” She sent them back up again for all the towels my family owned, three thin turquoise-grey bath sheets that smelled permanently of sweat, which she rolled up and put in a paper Dominion bag to carry.

  “Fred should have a pail,” she declared.

  The house was ransacked for something pail-like. In the end, she fished an empty margarine container out of the garbage and, without washing it, put it in the bag with the towels and rolled down the top to make the bag easier to carry. We were ready to go.

  We walked across Princess Street and turned down Clarence. It must have been a Sunday, because the shops were all closed. We walked down to the water, then turned right and followed the curve of Lake Ontario. My brothers either ran way ahead or lagged far behind. My mother called after them constantly, and tightened her grip on my wrist. Heat rash prickled my neck, the backs of my knees, and the skin of my arm under her ha
nd.

  I think I whimpered for much the journey—the farthest I believe I had ever travelled on my own two feet up to that point. I could walk that route now in little more than twenty minutes, but at not-quite-five it seemed interminable. After every block I walked rallentando, slower and slower, and dragged my toes so much I began to make holes in the tips of my shoes. One long lace had come undone and dragged behind me. By the time we reached MacDonald Park, even my mother’s high spirits had wilted.

  We walked through the park to the lakeshore, past a massive whitewashed red-roofed tower that my brothers ran around like demented soldiers firing canons during the War of 1812. There was no sand. Instead, a narrow strip of rocky shore curved back to the right and forward to the left, like a giant S. The park was sparingly scattered with families sitting on picnic blankets on the grass. No one was swimming, or even sitting on the rocks.

  Undeterred, my mother spread the towels on the rubble, where they lay like lumpy graves. She passed me the margarine container, and I knelt and filled it entirely with two of the smallest stones I could find.

  “Where’s the canteen?” Salvador demanded after a final frenzied loop around the tower, looking around dismissively at the rocks, the lake, even the handful of sailboats languishing in the windless bay.

  “Over there,” said my mother. I looked where she pointed and could see a small hut in the distance through the trees, and a short line of people that looked like specks of dirt. “But swim first,” she added. She gathered her pink sundress around her knees and sat resolutely on the rocks facing the water. Her shoulders were already pink from the sun.