The Madrigal

by Dian Day

  I stopped at a rare pay phone near an Esso station, fished in my pockets for change, and made two calls. The first call was to the nursing home, to ask them to get my mother ready to go out. The second was to Kathleen. Car trouble, I told her home voicemail; I had neglected to bring her cell phone number. I often thank God for voicemail. I didn’t apologize too much about my inability to arrive. I suggested to her safe, airless, cyber-message that she give me a call when she got back into town, but I don’t know if I meant it.

  Somebody had pulled the plug on the anxiety that had been building as I drove west. East seemed a safer direction for a Saturday afternoon. The wind scattered leaves across the highway in eddies of red and rust; I watched a murder of crows fly up into a giant hardwood and perch like ripe black apples ready to fall. I counted them as I went by: seven for a secret never to be told. Relief filled the car, and I could breathe deeply again.

  When I got to the nursing home, I parked in the circular drive where it said “No Parking, Fire Lane.” As soon as I got out of the second-floor elevator, I was accosted by Marilyn, whose curious brand of dementia causes her to think the common room outside of the locked ward is the living room of her former house.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head regretfully. “I’m not up for guests right now.” She was blocking the hallway with her canes stretched out like arm extensions and cocked like duelling pistols. Her wispy hair was dyed blonde, but it hadn’t taken very well, and she was thin and reedy, but at the same time wiry and muscled, like a stray dog. You could easily imagine her with a shotgun in her hands, standing on a derelict porch, guarding her property, baring her teeth.

  “Hi Marilyn,” I said. “It’s Frederick.” I was eyeing the locked ward door behind her, maybe twenty feet away, on the other side of the common room entrance. The television was blaring, but the room was empty, sofas sitting vacant. Despite the noise, it looked like a place that should have white sheets on the furniture. The whole place smelled of death and desertion.

  “I don’t care if it’s God,” she said. “I’m watching my show now. You’ll have to come back later.” I am sure I heard a little growl from the back of her throat.

  “What show are you watching, Marilyn?”

  “Star Trek,” she said. Space Cowboy this week, I thought. Last week she’d told me her favourite show was Friends. Gossip Girl, I’d thought then.

  “Oh, I love that show,” I said. “It’s my favourite. Can I watch it with you?” How we lie so easily to the old, I thought. I was still eyeing the ward door.

  “I don’t know,” she said petulantly. “I wasn’t expecting visitors. I haven’t done my hair.” She lifted her thin hand up to her forehead, and pushed the hair from her face. This small action called back a shadow debutante.

  “You look just fine,” I told her. “Really fine.” A memory flashed across her eyes, herself at twenty in front of an oval mirror, perhaps, and she softened. Her eyelids were translucent blue, and sagged over her eyes as if they were over-weary of looking out.

  “Are you sure?” she asked.

  “I’m sure. Better than fine. Beautiful, in fact. You’re beautiful.” And then there was a look in her eyes that was beautiful, as if we—any of us—have the power to call up beauty by mere words.

  I ended up sitting there with her for a full twenty minutes, holding too-tightly to the elongated triangle of wilting gerbera daisies I had bought for Kathleen, watching the Enterprise float through deep space, because I didn’t have the heart to slip away any sooner. I patted Marilyn’s arm and left the flowers on the seat beside her, but she didn’t look at me at all when I got up.

  I punched in the code, four-three-two-one, and opened the door up. It always amazes me that even four-three-two-one is too complicated for the demented mind. As I stepped into the locked ward, the light changed, and I had a vision of Kathleen arriving at her cottage with an armful of groceries—kalamata olives, prosciutto, roasted bell peppers, and other antipasto, I imagined—and not seeing her phone flashing my message until she got home on Sunday. Guilt is such a familiar emotion that I don’t always notice when another slice gets added to the sandwich. But this time I did. I thought, no, not bread, but rusks from Belgium. Lay the guilt on the rusks with the provolone, Frederick, I thought to myself. Lay it all on, and eat it all up. Trouble is, it’s indigestible. There’s no way to get rid of it. It stays in our bodies like toxic waste.

  WHEN I GOT NEAR MY MOTHER’S ROOM, I could hear her voice, that rousing tune:

  Of all the money that e’er I had

  I spent it in good company

  And all the harm I’ve ever done

  Alas it was to none but me.

  Louise must’ve started her off. She was standing just inside my mother’s door, leaning on an unused IV pole, shaking her head in some faintly awestruck way.

  “Love to hear your mother sing,” she said, wistfully. “My father used to sing this one when he came home after losing his shirt at poker.” The curls of her hair fell over her shoulders like an advertisement for youth. She’d only been working there a few weeks but she knew enough to keep trying the first lines of songs until she found one my mother knew, and to stay still at the edge of the room if she wanted my mother to keep singing.

  And all I’ve done for want of wit

  To memory now I can’t recall

  So fill to me the parting glass

  Good night and joy be to you all.

  And then I remembered my own rented good ship Enterprise, parked outside in the fire lane for the past half hour. I went in to get my mother.

  “Louise,” I called back over my shoulder, “can you help me get my mother ready for a drive? I called ahead but I guess no one—”

  “Money?” asked my mother.

  “You don’t have any,” I told her, and pulled open a drawer to look for a sweater.

  I REALLY DON’T KNOW IF I MEANT IT about her calling me again. I thought about it, walking home from the car rental place on Princess. The place is on my mail route, so I kept going into shops by accident—my automatic pilot—as I walked along, even though it was already getting dark. I’d found a ticket on the car when my mother and I got out to it. A little passive-aggressive message from the nursing home staff.

  Did I mean it? Why had I driven almost all the way to Kathleen’s cottage and then turned around? Or maybe the question was better put like this: why didn’t I turn around on Princess Street, or at the Townline Road intersection, or at the diner in Sandhurst? Maybe the question should be why didn’t I drive straight to the nursing home to pick up my mother? Why did I waste all that gas?

  I stopped in to see Ed.

  “Hey bro,” he said, when the bell had stopped tinkling. He tries hard to be a holdover from the sixties.

  “Hey pops,” I said. I don’t let him forget his age.

  There was no one in the shop except a young couple looking at a banjo; she was cradling it in her arms like a baby she didn’t know how to hold—no mothering instinct there—and he was saying, “Go on, Stacy, try it,” and looking at her like she was the Madonna herself.

  I looked at Ed and cocked my eyebrow.

  “We’ve been doing this for seventeen and a half minutes already,” he said valiantly, under his breath. “Go on, try it, try it, try it!” His eyes bulged a little as he spoke.

  “You want to come over later, drink some Red?” I asked him, laughing.

  And then he remembered.

  “Whoa,” he said, looking at my new Scottish cable sweater, pure virgin wool, hand-knitted. “You’re kinda dressed for success. Didn’t you have somewhere to go today? Aren’t you supposed to be there, uh, now?” He looked at his watch. “Twenty-two minutes,” he amended. The young couple were still at it.

  “I don’t know, Jason,” she was saying. “It’s so, like, intimidating.” She had her hand on the strings and w
as patting them as if they were attached to a small dog that had just been sick on the carpet.

  “You could close early,” I said to Ed, ignoring his question. We did that a lot with each other; knew the unsaid line was, Don’t go there. You can’t get away with that with women. Give them a gentle “back off” message and they just get more determined to find things out.

  “That’s a great idea,” he agreed.

  “You have to just let yourself get a feel for it,” said Jason.

  “SIR?” I SAID. I HAD GONE TO THE SCIENCE TEACHER. He wasn’t a young man, but I thought his subject would make him more open to possibility. I might have gone first to the English teacher, but that was a woman. “Sir?”

  “Hm?” He looked up from his desk, where he had been marking our lab reports. The skin under his eyes sagged, and he had a habit of rubbing his rough chin. Outside his classroom windows, the dirty snow announced the spring of my first year. There was an empty Tim Hortons cup beside his left hand, with the rim rolled up. Please play again, it suggested. “Ah, Madrigal,” he said. “You still here?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Briefly, he went back to his marking, but, when I continued to stand beside his desk and stare at him, he put his narrow finger on a page to keep his place, and gave me his full attention.

  “Need something?” he asked. “Problem with your ride home?”

  “No, sir. I take the subway.”

  “Then what?” He rubbed at his five o’clock shadow.

  “It’s the toilet,” I finally said.

  “The toilet?” he repeated. “If there’s a problem with the toilet no doubt the janitor will see to it this evening.” He was not angry, but dismissive.

  “It’s the walls,” I explained. “There are things written—” But I didn’t want to tell him what. “I tried to wash it off, but it’s in ink. Black marker.”

  St. Mary’s is a small school, so there was only one student washroom, on the second floor. Four urinals, two stalls, two sinks, sunflower yellow walls, an automatic hand dryer that didn’t work, and a wall mirror with a chipped corner.

  When I’d gone in after lunch, I’d seen it.

  “This is a boys’ school, Madrigal. There are bound to be rude things written on the walls.”

  “Can you get it painted over, Sir?”

  “Just ignore it, Madrigal. Ignore it. After a while you won’t even see it.” He put a red checkmark on the page.

  THE PAPER RAN A PHOTOGRAPH OF AN X-RAY of the twin girls’ fused skulls with the story of the failed surgery. Not one or two now, but none. There were two heads stacked on top of each other: brain building blocks. On the bottom skull, I could clearly see the eye sockets, jaw, neck bones, clavicle. There was the assumption of a whole body below, not captured by the x-ray lens. On the very top of the top skull, looking upward, a tiny face with condensed features. But, the article said, lips that sucked, eyes that blinked, a brain with firing synapses.

  I thought about how our assumptions limit us: this child has a body; this child does not. So, this part is an appendage to that part. This part is the real part; this part is a parasite. This part deserves life, and this, other, is careless about death.

  I stared at the paper a long time, scissors in hand. Craniopagus parasiticus. The label was almost like a spoof, too strange or silly to be true. Finally, I cut out the article, then cut carefully around the photograph, and, in some kind of fugue, cut around the outline of the girls’ skulls, two heads together, two faces, one assumed body. Then, with a decisive single movement of the scissors, snipped along the thick fault line where the two heads joined. The pieces floated down and lay separately on the table, one face down so the used car ad from the other side of the page was visible.

  I turned it over quickly and arranged the heads so that they faced each other. Then I imagined them singing.

  “NO, NO, NO,” I SAID. “Really.”

  “Look,” said Salvador, “I’ll get Johanna on the phone. She’ll ask you.” There was a bump, and a knock, and some urgent whispering at the other end of the line.

  “Hello, Frederick,” said a woman’s voice, lyrical and unmistakably upper-crust English. “It’s a little odd meeting you for the first time by telephone, but, well, I’m pleased to meet you, I’m sure.” There was nothing about this voice that I could connect with my brutish brother—past, present, or future.

  “Yes,” I agreed, “it is strange.” And then I realized my gaffe and added, “Nice to meet you, too, Johanna.” The really strange thing was that it was true; just listening to her speak one cheerful sentence had infused my surroundings with weightlessness. The phone receiver threatened to float away out of range.

  “Salvador wanted me to impress upon you how much we want you to sing at our wedding.”

  “Look, I’m not really sure I can get there for the wedding. I have commitments on the weekends: my students, my mother—”

  “I’ve heard so much about you; it would be such an honour.” She continued as if I hadn’t spoken.

  “I don’t know how much Salvador has told you,” I said, “but—” I didn’t quite know how to continue.

  Johanna was gracious. She also utterly ignored my aborted explanation. Our meeting, she said, was seriously overdue. She assured me that it wasn’t a mere formality that they had asked me; she placed the highest value on family ties, and she had heard so much about my “lovely voice” from not just Salvador, her intended, but from every one of my brothers.

  I realized then I didn’t actually know anything of substance about Salvador’s present or future, and I knew only one angle of our seven-sided past.

  I did manage to keep declining the request to sing, despite the siren’s luring. It was so far from what I considered possible that I couldn’t even think about it. I didn’t think about it. I was not able to be quite so categorical on the question of my attendance at the wedding, so when I got off the phone that element was still, for me anyway, up in the exosphere. Johanna, I am sure, felt she was able to report some success to Salvador. I could imagine the two of them, at the other end of the cut line, planning their next assault on what they might see as my weakening resolve.

  LUKE FOUND HIMSELF an ancient rusted-out wheelbarrow. The front wheel squeaked and squealed when it was pushed along, and the metal tray rattled. I heard him coming all the way down the street. I winced, worried on his behalf about the complaints of the neighbourhood, people unhappy to be woken an hour before their alarms were set to go off, and middle-class-uncomfortable with the thought of someone so unclean going through their garbage—and perhaps even more uncomfortable to think that he could make a little money out of what they had so carelessly discarded.

  I was out in the front, just about ready to pull the door shut behind me and leave for work, when the squeaking made me look up to see Luke wheeling around the corner. I’d forgotten it was Tuesday. I went back through the house quickly and out the back door to grab the empties stashed on the back step. There were two cases of Rickard’s Red. Once my hand was on the front door knob again, I had another thought, put the clinking cases down on my small front porch, and went back in to get a spray can of WD-40 from the basement.

  I tucked it under my arm and went out to meet him in the middle of the road, beer cases dangling from each hand and the can of lubricant in my armpit. It was a crisp morning with the faintest daydream of frost, and our breathing left cloud traces in the air like small banks of fog. Luke was dressed in the three jackets he wore through most seasons, and he had a wildly-striped stocking cap pulled right down over his eyebrows. He had no gloves, and when he laid down the handles of the wheelbarrow—oh, sweet silence!—he beat his hands against his thighs to try to warm them up. I didn’t need to ask him if he’d slept outside overnight; this small action gave me the answer.

  “Good find!” I said, admiringly. Luke smiled a half smile, on the right
side of his face.

  “Guy put it out for the garbage,” he said, shaking his head. “Perfectly good.”

  I admired it some more, its once-yellowness, its worn rubber-treaded wheel, the shredding comfort grip on the left handle. A number of Luke’s colleagues worked their routes in confiscated shopping carts, but Luke had consistently refused to use one himself, saying it was worse than stealing groceries. I am not sure how someone with those kinds of scruples ends up on the street—or perhaps he ended up on the street precisely because of his moral standards. It appears that Luke doesn’t believe in getting something for nothing, unless it’s from me.

  “Well, thanks for picking these up,” I said, as I always do. “Saves me a trip to the depot.”

  I added my cases to the wheelbarrow, lowering them carefully onto the piles of loose bottles and cans. I hesitated with the WD-40, not knowing if I should just spray the wheel axle myself, or let him do it. In the end I decided to hand the can over, and I motioned at the metal hulk.

  “I thought you could use some grease on that wheel,” I told him, a little self-consciously.

  He looked at me very seriously, nodded a few times, and stopped slapping his thighs. He reached for the can, tucked it underneath his arm, picked up the wheelbarrow handles, and continued on his way down the street, the wheel listing and complaining, leaving a trail of metal rust flakes on the whitened pavement. I stood looking after him for a minute with my hand still held out, then I collected myself and went back to my porch for my shoulder bags. I walked the other way to work, so Luke and I didn’t pass each other again, but I could hear his new old wheelbarrow stop and start up again, decrescendo, a number of times before I got out of earshot.

  DELIVERING THE MAIL IS AN OCCUPATION some two and a half thousand years old. I wish I could say that it was always an honourable one, but it seems that some of the earliest postal systems may also have been refined mechanisms for gathering secret intelligence regarding the activities of more remote populations. It’s that old thing again, about how military inventions go on to become so widely used that everybody forgets what we were fighting about in the first place.