by Lynn Coady
Suddenly her hands darted to her scalp. She looked down at her palms like they had come away bloody.
SHE’D BEEN TO these retreats before, both as a mentor and mentee — to use Terry’s jargon — and there was always at least one person in attendance who was the person everybody talked about. Once it had been a young instructor who systematically slept with every female member of his group and then went on to infiltrate the others — it was like he had a checklist. Once it was a fiction student who refused to talk to any of the other participants and just sat staring at them with his eyes slitted like a cat’s and his fingers forming a steeple when everyone came together for meetings or mealtimes. It got so no one was able to eat in his presence. Once it was a woman who was believed to be shrieking every night in her sleep, until someone reported that she wasn’t sleeping at all — she was making these noises wide awake.
That is to say, there was always an odd person out at these things, always a weirdo.
She was clean for the reading with Marguerite, having sat under the shower for twenty shame-soaked minutes after talking to Terry. It hadn’t turned on immediately. She was just thinking she would have to march her filthy-headed way back down the hall to his office when the nozzle hacked up a few squirts of tobacco brown, and finally silver jets began to spray out.
How could she have gone five days without taking a shower? She wondered if something had happened when she was up on the plane — if some fundamental part of her brain containing the instinct to bathe had been fried by the lightning jolt. The flight attendant told them the bolt had come out of nowhere — there’d been no indication of lightning anywhere in the sky before it hit. But what happens sometimes, he explained, is that the plane causes the lightning to occur. It flies through a charged cloud and the lightning actually originates from the plane.
“It came from us,” said the flight attendant into his little intercom.
MARGUERITE GOT UP and read a poem about Marie. She was nowhere near the poet Betty was, and read like she was reciting from a grocery list. Plus, the poem was bleak. It was clear Marguerite wasn’t kidding herself when it came to Marie’s likely fate. There was a line about the winter fields screaming up at the sky that made Sara wince. One person noisily swallowed a sob and Terry stared at Marguerite, the fatherly cheer gone out of his eyes.
“Um,” said Marguerite when she was finished. Behind her glasses she had a sweet, round face with a bow mouth like a fifties starlet. “I’m sorry if that was unexpected, I know poetry isn’t my forte.”
“It was wonderful,” said Betty and started clapping. A couple of people in Betty’s group made noises of agreement and picked up the applause.
Marguerite looked around, gathered up her pages and left the podium, which was awkward because she was expected to read for another fifteen minutes or so.
Sara was in the middle of a glass of wine, so took it to the podium with her after Terry’s listless introduction. It was up to her to salvage the mood, which was fine. Sara was good at readings. She had a standard twenty minutes of all the most compelling bits from her short story collection, tightly arranged and well rehearsed. She knew just which phrases to punch, precisely how long to make her pauses for maximum comedic effect. It was the same little song and dance she’d been putting on for quite some time in the hope of getting people more interested in her fiction.
She held up the book and was happy to disappear behind it for a while. She was better at reading than she was at talking — or even writing, she sometimes thought. Everyone laughed at the spots where she knew they would laugh, and clapped with apparent sincerity when she was done. She shut her book and drained her wine, smiling.
“What about questions for Sara?” called Terry. Mac’s big hand poked up like a gopher’s nervous head.
“I would really appreciate,” said Mac, “a quick reading from Escaping Eden.”
“Yeah!” said Betty, clapping, clattering her bangles.
It was Marguerite’s fault for finishing early — leaving Sara all this extra time. “I don’t have a copy with me,” she protested. But Terry was already on his feet and at the book table.
“It would mean a lot to me,” said Mac.
She took the copy from Terry, opened it up to the first page and started plowing through the first paragraph. This, she remembered, was how she used to do readings when she was starting out. It never occurred to her to comb through the book, picking out the best-written sections. In Sara’s opinion, there were no particularly well-written sections in Escaping Eden. People liked it because it was about teenage girls and sex and God and suffering. It was, in other words, a soap opera.
She read the words like they were someone else’s — stumbling, missing key inflections, having to go back and start entire sentences again. The book started at the end of the story — a fairly conventional structure, suggested by her editor — with the night of Sara’s escape. The rest of the chapters would fill in the background of her grotesque upbringing. When the book was released, she remembered, no one could believe such a community still existed. People were appalled — that is, they purported to be appalled, even though Sara remembered how gawkers from Creston and other nearby places used to cruise the village daily wearing faces of delight. She had said this in interviews.
Back then, she told everybody everything — every shameful detail. She couldn’t have shut up if she tried. And people believed her, they heard her, they were every bit as angry as she was. She was soaring on outrage, the energy of having it released, as if she’d been flung from a slingshot.
She remembered the feeling of swooping across the country like a giant, avenging eagle. It was a dumb, obvious image, but that’s how she remembered feeling — she’d grown up watching eagles, making mini-gods of them. She didn’t know enough back then to reject them as hackneyed. She wrote about eagles in the diary that became her book — their lizard eyes and pitiless heads. But her editor told Sara to take the eagles out. It was overused, amateurish symbolism, the editor said.
Sara hadn’t read this bit in well over a decade, and found herself becoming fascinated, despite her clumsy reading, by what was happening in the pages — how the girl just climbed out of bed one night and left under cover of darkness. Where, Sara wondered, did that girl find the strength? She’d been told all her life she didn’t have any — why didn’t she believe it? She moved through the night without a doubt in her mind, jumped into one stranger’s car and then the next. How did she get so sure of herself? Why wasn’t she afraid? How could she be so certain she was right and they were wrong?
Afterwards, Betty unveiled a bottle of gin and bag of limes. Everyone had one more workshop left, but it wouldn’t be until tomorrow afternoon and they were all too psychically exhausted to prepare. They acknowledged this to each other before starting to drink. The final workshop, everyone agreed once Terry was out of earshot, would be a hungover formality.
“I never imagined this would be such a wringer,” said Alison, who looked like she might start crying for about the seventh time that week. “I thought — you know — it will be a nice little break, I’ll learn some tricks. I wrangled PD money out of my company and everything — they’re going to want to see results.” Alison laughed like Betty — a desperate bray. “I can’t very well come back and tell them, well, my copy hasn’t really improved, but I spent ten days, you know, marinating in despair.”
“Marinating,” someone murmured. “That’s good, I like that.”
“Thanks for doing that,” Mac said to Sara at one point, looking ashamed of himself.
Marguerite was sitting drinking red wine beside a couple of poets who were engrossed in conversation with each other. Sara came and sat beside her.
“Ah!” she said as a way of announcing herself.
Marguerite looked up, glasses like a shield. “I enjoyed your reading very much,” she recited.
“Yours too,” said Sara.
“I think it was a mistake,” said Marguerite.
“Oh, it’s all a mistake,” said Sara, waving a hand. She was flying on the dregs of her pre-reading adrenalin.
“I’m just tired of the weirdness around it,” said Marguerite. “All those posters, the fixation. I just want people to let her go, to quit messing with her.”
“Like a balloon pushing at the sky,” said Sara, surprising herself. She had produced a quote from Marguerite’s poem.
“Ugh,” said Marguerite. “I’m just not a poet. But what do you do when you’re not a poet?”
“No, it’s a good image,” said Sara. “It’s a simple, childhood image.”
Marguerite’s bow mouth puckered slightly. “Surrender Dorothy,” she said. “We need something like that, some announcement. Written in the sky so everyone can see it. Surrender Marie, everybody. Give her up. It’s time.”
Sara folded her arms like her brother would have done and grunted as if from beneath a moustache: “It’s about time they started bombing something.” Blushing as Marguerite, in her confusion, looked down and then away.
ONCE, SHE USED to put herself to sleep like this:
There is no family. There is no Eden. There are no mountains. There is no Heaven. There is no Earth. There are no people. There are no places. There are no names.
It was the names line that worked best, that brought her to the next level, caused her body to feel as if it had gently pulled itself into fragments, which now were drifting in opposite directions. The next level went:
There is space. There is only space. Black, empty, infinite, all. There is I. I am space. Black and empty. I am all. Stretching, infinite, everything. I am everything. I am all. I am space.
SHE WOKE IN that darkness with a boom and a flash. People screamed and cursed convulsively, craned their bodies toward the windows. A distant alarm went off, low but insistent. Sweat blossomed from her pores, blotting against her clothes. There was laughter. It was still dark. Sara fell out of bed. Smoke filled the cabin. No it didn’t. It seemed to — the seats and heads and stewardesses before her eyes went fuzzy. She couldn’t smell the smoke. She bashed her hand against the corner of her desk. Something fell off the wall that had to be a picture of Christ, because that was the only thing they had on the walls. This is the nightmare, said Sara to herself. This is the thing that people say is like a nightmare.
There was a boom and a flash as she jerked open the door. One Easter, as a child, she woke in terrified, ecstatic tears after dreaming of the crucifixion all night long. She was Simon Peter and Jesus had flung himself into her arms. He was afraid; he didn’t want to go. The social worker hadn’t been able to hide her disgust. The EXIT signs glowed red. Sara moved through the red dark, trying to remember which room it was, the hallway crammed with smoke and panicked voices. She went from one door to the next, grasping and then releasing doorknobs, moving down the hall, in search of him.
THE NATURAL ELEMENTS
Cal’s daughter was always telling him what he could and couldn’t say. She kept reminding him that he was retired — unlike every single one of her friends’ fathers — therefore unacceptably old, therefore doddering around in a kind of anachronistic limbo that was deeply mortifying for those forced to live in close proximity to him. One thing he wasn’t allowed to do, she’d informed him, was to say that his tenant had a silly name. Rain was his name.
“How is that spelled?” Cal asked, when he met with Rain’s wife to have her sign the lease. He couldn’t remember the wife’s name because he’d been so bowled over, when they met, by the fact that her husband’s name was Rain.
“Rain,” said the wife. “R-A-I-N.”
“Like rain from the sky,” said Cal.
“Yes,” agreed the wife.
Cal thought she looked a bit embarrassed.
Cal had never met Rain. In July the couple moved into the tiny post-war house he owned (bought in 1989 for $30,000 and now with a market value, everyone kept shrieking at him, of at least $300,000). Rain had just been hired by the political science department at the university, and was never home. Cal only ever dealt with the wife.
“She’s a stay-at-home wife?” demanded his daughter, Terry.
“Yes,” said Cal. This new term: stay-at-home wife. How was it different from housewife? Who had found it necessary to make the change? This was something else he was not allowed to say.
“But she must do some kind of work,” insisted Terry.
“Well, I don’t know,” said Cal. “Maybe she’s looking.”
He stood up from the table to find the HP Sauce and paused to pet his daughter’s head a couple of times. He didn’t know how else to show affection anymore. Anyway, it was instinctive with him. Her hair was so straight and smooth; it invited hands. Sometimes, petting her head, he would sigh dreamily, “I wish we had a dog,” and leap out of reach as Terry whirled to punch him. Soon she would move away from home. She wanted to go to an elite arts college in Montana to study dance. The only reason he’d held on to the house near the university for so long was so that she could live in it while she attended school in the city.
“Whatareya gonna do with the house?” everybody slobbered at him. Big money! Big payoff! To own property that close to the university was, this past year, like sitting in your backyard and having the ground suddenly start to rumble and spew oil like on The Beverly Hillbillies. It was a city of Beverly Hillbillies lately — everyone cashing in. But Terry still could change her mind. Surely someone out there — not him, but someone at school, some adult she actually looked up to, her band teacher maybe — would talk her out of studying dance. He’d made the mistake of calling it dancing once, in front of some relatives who’d been passing through town. “Terry thinks she’d like to study dancing.” The thinks had been bad enough. Calling it dancing, however, he still hadn’t lived down.
Cal had a knack for tenants. As a rule, he didn’t rent to undergraduates. Not that he had the instinctive loathing and distrust of them that some of his property-owning neighbours did, but just because he knew that if he wanted to keep the place in decent shape for Terry, he couldn’t have kids in their early twenties living there. He rented to graduate students — most often couples — or sessional instructors, or new professors like Rain. People in training for home ownership and the middle class. Good tenants appreciated reasonable rent at a time when everyone living near the university was being milked like cattle, so when they moved out they recommended equally good tenants, who would appreciate it in turn. If you treated people fairly, they returned the favour. You didn’t just gouge people because you could — because it happened to be the thing to do.
Cal would never forget his first landlord. He’d gone up north on a construction job and rented a basement from one of the managers. The manager had stipulated no smoking and no drinking.
“Fine,” said Cal.
“No visitors,” added the manager about a month after Cal had moved in.
“Pardon?” said Cal.
“No visitors.”
“Oh, okay,” said Cal, who didn’t know anybody anyway.
“No music,” added the landlord shortly thereafter.
“I’m sorry,” said Cal. “Was I playing the radio too loud? I can turn it down.”
“No,” said the landlord. “You don’t turn it down. You turn it off.”
Three months into the rental, Cal realized he was brooding about the landlord almost every waking moment. Whispering outraged comments to himself on his way down the hill to the site, gritting his teeth over the circular saw, breaking into a frustrated sweat at the thought of going home in the evenings.
I hate going home, he kept thinking to himself. He has made it so I can’t stand to go home.
So Cal started staying out.
“No staying out past ten,” the landlord said to him one morning when Cal was on his way down the walk.
Cal stopped and turned around. The landlord was standing by his Honda, key in hand. He had offered to drive Cal to work every morning, but Cal had made excuses abou
t enjoying the walk — the site was just down the hill. It was what had made the rental so attractive in the first place.
Cal walked over and stood on the other side of the landlord’s Honda as if he had changed his mind about the drive and was about to climb into the passenger’s side.
“Pardon?” he said.
“No staying out past ten,” repeated the landlord. “We can’t have you waking us up at all hours.”
“That’s ridiculous,” said Cal.
“Well, that’s the rule, I’m afraid.”
“You can’t treat people like this,” said Cal. His armpits blasted sudden heat.
The landlord looked astonished. “I own this property,” he told Cal, gesturing at the house behind him. “This is my property.”
The way he made these statements — as if they were even pertinent, as if they answered for everything — stayed with Cal for years. When Cal built his own home — and then, on a whim, purchased the house near the university — he made a vow to himself with his first landlord in mind.
“I’m here to pull some snow off the roof,” he said to Rain’s wife.
“You’re here to … ?” she repeated, looking worried.
I should have called first, thought Cal. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I should have called. It’s just that it’s not good for all that snow to be piled up there.”
“Oh!” said Rain’s wife. Now she looked guilty.
“It’s my job to look after this sort of thing,” Cal assured her. It wasn’t really. But Rain and his wife, Cal knew, were from somewhere unspeakably cruel, considering the deep-freeze they had moved to. Santa Cruz, California. Terry had been excited by this. It was the reason she wouldn’t leave him alone about the tenants. That magic word: California.
So Rain and his wife couldn’t be expected to understand the culture of cold and all it required. Moments ago when he approached the house, for example, he’d almost dislocated a hip slipping on a frozen sediment of snow that had caked up on the second step. They hadn’t shovelled, and there had been some melt, and the snow had solidified into ice.