The Madrigal

by Dian Day

  Why can’t I remember the things I want to remember? Sometimes I think about taking psychedelics or getting hypnotized, somehow giving my memory a boost. But it seems to me that the best a hypnotist would do is increase my susceptibility to hopeful suggestion. I’ve spent enough time in my mother’s nursing home to see how false memories can be created out of nothing but unfulfilled wishes and unlived dreams. And I would rather have no memories at all.

  The worst a hypnotist would do—helping to uncover all the things I’ve tried so hard to forget—would be unbearable.

  LUKE WAS OUTSIDE THE LIBRARY. “Want me to take your books in?” he asked, with a calculating look.

  “No thanks,” I said, and I ran up the steps without stopping. I guess I was pretty short with him. I didn’t want to commit myself to lunch. Who knew what kind of space I was going to be in when I came out again?

  Luckily, Luke doesn’t take offence easily. I guess that’s the good thing about living on the street; you just have to learn to ignore rudeness. I know most people don’t even look at him when he talks to them, let alone answer him back.

  I ran up the library steps, my books in the mailbag banging against my thighs. I’d taken a lot of books out in the previous weeks, but I hadn’t read any of them. I’d gone home at the end of my route and collected them all up, not even bothering to change. I had a new adult student coming to the shop at two-thirty, so I didn’t have much time, which was just as well. No time to hesitate.

  I pushed through the doors, inciso. I almost bumped into an old woman with a cane who was coming out, but I didn’t stop to apologize. I didn’t feel badly about it until I was walking out again. Right then I just needed to get to the circulation desk, get the thing over with, once and for all.

  I got to the desk so fast, I didn’t even notice that she wasn’t there until I got there. There was this other woman, no one I’d ever seen before, with lipstick showing on her teeth when she smiled. All I could focus on was that spot of lipstick, like it was under a microscope, and everything else was a blur. All the sounds in the library came at me like a swarm of bees, dangerous and insistent. The music of pages turning, patrons sniffing and coughing, a hollowness of echoes in the stacks. I thought the whole building would hear me if I spoke. There was nothing to do but reach into my bag and hand over the books, though I was cursing myself up and down. Had I got the day wrong somehow? Was she just on break?

  “That’ll be three fifty,” the vampire said, blood on her teeth.

  “I’ll pay next time,” I whispered. I didn’t have it in me to lurk about pretending to look at new acquisitions to see if she might appear from the staff room. I went right back out and gave Luke all my change—five dollars and ten cents—for lunch. He’ll probably buy a pack of cigarettes instead, but he gets to choose, right?

  AFTER AN OCTOBER WEEKEND where the clouds shuttled across the sky like they were late for God’s convention, it began to rain. After two days of rain I even heard thunder—though I looked for lightning to no avail. At the dentist’s office on a Monday afternoon, waiting for the dental hygienist to be ready to clean my teeth, I’d had the chance to read any number of old magazines that looked like they were discards from the library. I read about a guy named Tony Cicoria, who got struck by lightning outside a phone booth right after calling his mother. Up until then, he was an orthopedic surgeon who favoured rock and roll. Afterwards, he turned into a classical pianist and composer—though I think he kept his day job—and turned out a piece called the “Lightning Sonata” to some level of acclaim. It’s funny how different parts of stories stand out for different people. The writer made a lot out of the lightning bolt; I made more out of the fact that he was calling his mother.

  I DID WRITE TO MY MOTHER While I was at St. Mary’s, but they were dutiful letters, hard won from me by Annie, who threatened to withdraw her services if a letter wasn’t posted every month at the very least. Since it was Annie who taught me to play very well indeed on her grand piano, and Annie who kept the piano tuned well enough for the most discerning ear, I was perceptive enough to comply. I have to point out now that it was also Annie who housed me, fed me, did my laundry, and drove me to school when it rained, though these things seemed to have largely escaped my notice at the time.

  Consequently, once every month I sat at the dining room table with a thick piece of cardboard under my foolscap paper so I would not ruin the cherrywood finish, and I wrote two or three desultory and largely invented paragraphs about my friends at school, or our class trip to the museum, or the size and appearance of my new basketball shoes, but for some reason I never once wrote to her about music or singing.

  My mother did not write back regularly, but sporadically I would receive a crumpled envelope with a new stamp, the original address scratched out, and my name and Annie’s address written over the top in child-like handwriting. Inside were her few lines of mundane news in grammatically incorrect English, which I was careless about, with a torn and crumpled five-dollar bill inserted in the folds, which merely embarrassed me. She never wrote about any of my brothers. I didn’t find this perplexing. I assumed she didn’t want to relay the perpetually bad news; at the time, it supported my efforts to pretend that they didn’t exist—that none of them existed, even my mother herself. I wanted to believe I had been hatched by Music alone and let loose in the world to sing. She also never wrote to me about music, neither mine nor her own. It was as if we had made a secret pact to avoid the one subject that mattered most to both of us.

  YESTERDAY AFTERNOON, my mother told me this story: “Once, you knew the day it happened, but the fork slipped out and came to, but there was no other way but marmalade. You can put the fork where the children are, in cats. I went to see him. It was dark and hard, and orange. Dead on the table, my hand.”

  “Really? Dead?” I asked.

  “Where we went before along the table in the land of milk,” she answered.

  She’s talked a lot about food over the years, and cutlery, and cats, her children, and people from her distant past—who she sometimes remembers the names of, and at other times refers to by some quality of their being that is obvious enough for me to figure out who she’s talking about.

  Sometimes I still write her stories down. I have notebooks filled with her gibberish, with words highlighted, circled, or underlined, arrows slicing across passages if one thing seems to relate to another. For instance, if I were writing today’s sentences, I would circle “marmalade” and draw an arrow to “orange,” and insert a question mark to hover over the word, as these things may—or may not—be related. I’ve gotten good at picking out the bits that seem connected, even as she’s talking, even as I’m tuning out most of what she’s saying. The nouns jump to foreground, and the rest of her sentences—all the filler—recedes. What I might register from the above, then, is “Fork, marmalade, fork, children, cats, orange.” And then “dead.” “Dead” always gets my attention.

  When I was a boy, people always assumed I wanted to know something about my absent father. They were mystified when I showed no interest in him—neither his past deeds nor his current whereabouts. When I said I did not care, they assumed there was some suppressed rage deep inside me about being abandoned by him while I was the smallest of infants, that I couldn’t manage to communicate. But what I couldn’t communicate was that I felt no need to create a relationship out of thin air, with someone I had never known, just because we shared some questionable genetic material and a relationship with the same woman. I had spent much of my adult life strenuously avoiding most of the people I was related to and had known very well when we were all children together under my mother’s leaking roof. I had no illusions that biology guaranteed likeness, or connection, or understanding, or even respect.

  This position perplexed me somewhat when it came to my mother. Twenty years of Sundays—the long distance between young manhood and almost-middle-age—was no small investmen
t of time in a relationship of biology, if biology was of no account. While most college kids were going home to Sunday dinner to get fed their one home-cooked meal of the week, ham and scalloped potatoes or roast chicken and dumplings, I was going to the nursing home and feeding my mother with a plastic-coated spoon, minced beef and mashed carrots. Then, as now, all these years later.

  MAYA WAS RE-CAULKING HER FRONT WINDOW by the dull glow of her porch light when I got home. Even in the dim light I could see her hands were red, and she was making that funny shape with her mouth that people do when they are cold but, despite the pain, are determined to hold on long enough to get the job done. I was still adjusting to the early darkness. If I’d been any less tired, I would have gone back downtown for a coffee rather than have to pass her going in my front door. As it stood, I could see there was no way I was going to be able to get inside without a conversation.

  “Do you go to see your mother every Sunday?” she asked, as I was digging around in my coat pocket for my house key.

  “Yes, I do.” It seemed like a harmless enough question. With Maya I find I have to weigh the balance between civility and discourtesy to determine which is more likely to end the conversation sooner—always the goal at the forefront of my mind.

  “That’s very good of you,” she said. The scales tipped.

  “I don’t know if it’s good or not,” I said, shortly. “It’s just what I do.” I get fed up with people’s accolades. People seem to think I—and countless others in similar positions—do what we do for simple reasons like good or right. The reality is so complex, it’s impossible to talk about. It would take me my whole life to explain it.

  I couldn’t find my key. I put my bags down and unzipped my coat so I could check my inside pockets. Maya unzipped her jacket, pulled out a new tube of body-warmed caulking, and fitted it into her caulking gun.

  “Well,” she said, “I think it’s good of you. Nobody’s making you do it. Nobody’s holding a gun to your head, saying, ‘Go and see your mother.’”

  “Actually, it’s a condition of my inheritance,” I said. I finally gave up and found the key I kept tucked under a corner of my Welcome mat.

  “Is it?” She looked over at me. Her index finger, topped by a blob of white caulking, pointed to the heavens.

  “No,” I said. “There is no inheritance.” Of course, that was a lie, if we were talking about more than money. I put the key in the lock and turned it.

  “Does she know who you are?” she asked. She wiped her finger on a rag made out of an old sock.

  “Isn’t it a little cold for that?” I asked in return. She had cupped her hands around her mouth and was exhaling hot air.

  “Just getting a jump on winter,” she explained.

  I pushed the door open and stepped across the threshold.

  “That’s kind of an obvious place to hide a key,” she called after me. “Any idiot could find it there.” I closed the door behind me. “Just saying.” Her voice came after me through the mail slot. I stood in the warmth for a minute, my back against the closed door.

  I DIDN’T BOTHER TO TAKE MY COAT or shoes off, but walked straight through the house and out the back door. My rake was leaning up against the house, and I stood for a moment looking through the dusk at the fallen leaves, slick with decay. Maya’s whole tree was there, a million pieces of shed tree-skin, shrivelling against the fence. All that death in one place. And that was just my yard. How many billions and billions of leaves fall from Canadian trees every October? Leaves in my yard, I thought. My yard, my street, my city, my province, my country, my continent, Earth, the solar system, the galaxy, the universe. I used to write that on the insides of my St. Mary’s textbooks when I was a kid. We all did it; back then it felt like a testament of faith, a secure spot in the vastness of creation.

  Sometimes I miss God. He would have been good company raking leaves by the yellow light over the back door. If God were around, you could talk about astronomy, or electricity, or even belonging or not belonging. You could talk about anything at all that was on your mind, because he knew it all already. No secrets from the Big Guy in the Sky. You could watch the dark clouds sweep across the dark sky, obliterating the faint stars, and not feel that terrible fear in the pit of your stomach. The fear you feel when you know you are all alone, no matter what, and the scars on the sides of your hands are burning.

  The light over the door flickered and went out, and for a minute I was standing on the lawn, leaning on a rusty rake under a giant maple tree, and the unseen hand of God swept the cobwebs from the sky.

  And then Maya’s porch light came on, her back door screeched open, and her head appeared sideways, like a trick at a magic show, followed by her orange jumpsuit, right side up.

  “Hey,” she said, as if we hadn’t just had a conversation out front.

  “Hey,” I said, my lungs frozen, as if I could undo things by not breathing. As if I could undo Maya noticing that I was out raking in the dark. I leaned harder on the rake, and the tines bent underneath it. All the stars were suddenly gone, obliterated by clouds, and the wind picked up and tossed crumbling leaves over my head like confetti.

  “Want some help?” she asked. “The rain’s coming.” She sniffed the air like a farmer, but I imagined all she could smell was copper pipe and ABS solvent. “It’s my tree, really,” she added. As if her ownership of the tree was the reason I’d say yes or no.

  I only have one rake, I thought, in awe at my own flash of brilliance, and then said, “I only have one rake,” with relief. She disappeared inside, and the door screamed closed. I breathed out, looked up, and the wind blew leaf crumbs into my face.

  Twenty seconds later she kicked her door open again, came out onto the porch with her hands full of what I first took to be lengths of pipe, and pushed the door closed behind her with the flat of her foot.

  “Lots of bloody rakes,” she said. She leaned her collection against her side of the fence, chose one with some deliberation, then vaulted over the pickets with one hand.

  She raked like a whirligig. Leaves tumbled in miniature cyclones around her small frame; burnt orange ashes on an orange backdrop, everything back-lit in an eerie light on a wind-blown autumn evening.

  She wasn’t even out of breath. I held the brown paper bags while she piled the leaves in. I wondered if I could possibly feel any more useless than I did around her. When we had seven bags stuffed with leaves, leaning full of life up against the pickets as if they were seven convicts waiting for the firing squad, we both stood leaning on our rakes like something painted by Jean-Francois Millet. Totally pastoral. Except for Maya’s porch light and orange jumpsuit.

  “I was going to light up the barbeque,” she said.

  “It’s dark,” I said, surprised.

  “It’s not snowing,” she said, which explained nothing. There was a long pause, and she just stood there looking at me as if she’d asked me a question.

  “Won’t be too many days left,” she added. “You eaten?”

  “Oh,” I said, finally figuring out the answer. “Sorry. Ed’s coming over tonight. I have to go get ready.” I waved my rake in the direction of my burnt-out porch light. “But thanks for asking,” I added, for some reason. “And thanks for helping with the leaves.” Sometimes I wonder if I ever tell the truth to anyone.

  “Ed?” she said. “Is that his name?”

  “Live music,” I said. “Yeah.”

  “Can I come?” she asked.

  “It’s not a concert.” I said.

  “I don’t expect a finking performance,” she said. “I can sing too.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m sorry. I don’t sing—I really don’t sing in public.”

  “Public?” she repeated, narrowing her eyes. Her visible disappointment was the first sign of vulnerability I had seen in her face.

  ED AND SYLVIA CAME TO TORONTO to see Annie—an
d, I suppose, me, during the years I was there—every two or three months. Annie liked to make a fuss about the meal, cooking all day on Saturday in anticipation of their arrival. There was always a roast or a ham or a turkey, and more vegetables on the table at one time than I had eaten in months in my former life. At Annie’s house I ate things I hadn’t known existed, and I couldn’t imagine how or where they grew, nor how she transformed them into dishes that none of us could stop eating until our stomachs grew too close to the table and we pushed our chairs back to try to find some relief. I am sorry I didn’t have the foresight to ask her to teach me to cook, but at that time I was too busy consuming music to imagine that I would ever want such mundane and pragmatic skills as cooking food.

  “Annie,” Sylvia would say every time, “You’ve outdone yourself.” And Annie would be pleased. You could see it in the way her cheeks rose up to meet her eyes, and a dimple emerged on the right side of her face. Those evenings were when she was happiest, I think.

  “It’s lovely to have all the family here,” she said once. I never thought about the fact that her husband had died young or that they, like Ed and Sylvia, had had no children. To me Annie seemed utterly self-sufficient, and I was inclined to worry that an adolescent boy in her house was something she was suffering through for the sake of her only brother. I didn’t see that when she said the word “family” her eyes gathered up everyone seated around that gleaming cherrywood table.