“Oh, for God’s sake,” I muttered, rubbing my face, “this is so ridiculous.” I looked at my cousin. “How do you manage to take my nutty life and make it certifiably insane?” I jabbed a finger at her. “Your penance for this mishap, Kate, is that you have to surrender those other tabs to me. You must forfeit your box of Smarties.”
Kate was nothing if not scrupulous in her sense of justice. Still, she hesitated. “Oh, give it up, Kate,” I argued. “There’s a law somewhere, surely, that prohibits you from getting two unsuspecting people stoned on the very same day.” She sighed, gave a dramatic shiver, and placed the Smarties on the windowsill. I plopped down in my chair and took a sip of tepid coffee. “Is Larry reliable with drugs?” I suddenly asked. “Like, how do we know that Avery didn’t just swallow a hit of talcum powder cut with speed?”
Kate raised her eyebrow, and made a dignified show of rewinding her scarf. “Larry uses MDMA in his shamanic practice,” she said with mild indignation. “In exactly the way it was originally designed and approved for psychiatric use before it got banned. He’s very careful.”
“Okay.” I nodded, appeased. Avery was pacing again, trying to shake off the shock of what he’d done to himself at the outset of a busy Tuesday morning. I watched him for a moment, and then glanced at Kate, shaking my head. He had not, as far as I knew, ever experimented with a synthetic drug. I had tried Ecstasy once in New York with my friend Marina in Central Park, an experience that left me so peaceful and grass-stained that when we attempted to cap the afternoon with our customary cocktail at the Algonquin, I got asked for ID. That was the first time it occurred to me that looking old had less to do with being old than with feeling burdened by the dead weight of the world.
“Look, don’t worry, Avery,” I said. “You’re not going to take a spooky trip and think you’re seeing spiders. Or anything like that. I’m sure it will be fine. It’s more like an opiate than anything.”
Kate hastened to agree, and then left, after scribbling down her cell phone and pager numbers and apologizing to Avery. She promised to take him out for roast turkey “deluxe” at Canoe. A date with her would be his consolation prize for a day of being stoned out of his mind.
Fifteen minutes later, Avery still felt normal, so the two of us resumed working at our desks. Maybe the whole incident would go away. At ten-thirty or so I was picking up my phone to call a potential reviewer when Avery remarked from his end of the room, “Well, I can’t say I’m familiar with drugs, Frannie, but I do find it interesting that my legs feel really good in my pants.”
“That’s nice, Avery,” I said, and put the phone back down and gazed at him curiously. He placed his hands palm-down on his desk and stretched out his fingers, studying them.
“Really, when you think about it,” he reflected, “wood has a remarkably smooth texture. Especially when you flatten your hands against it. It feels very harmonious and welcoming.” He seemed to consider that for a moment, and then he had an idea. He slowly lowered his head and laid his cheek on his desk. “It works with your face, too,” he announced after a few minutes. “I don’t know why I never thought of this before.”
“What about when you walk around?” I asked, amused. “How does it feel on your feet?” He stood up and took a few steps. “It’s wonderful,” he said, marveling. He hopped experimentally. Did a few jumping jacks. Then, abruptly, crouched down and carefully executed a forward roll. He sat up smiling. “Frannie, you should try this. I never realized you could roll over on your head on hard wood.”
“Well, it is an intriguing discovery, Avery,” I offered cheerfully, “but I was actually just about to make a phone call.” He ignored me, intent upon his own small pursuits. For the next little while, I tried to think about the Must Reads for spring and juggle phone calls and e-mail while my associate editor felt objects and provided me with a running commentary on their wonderful intrinsic traits.
A publicist called, wondering if I would include a review of a particular author. “Well, I’m certainly considering it,” I said, cupping my hand over the receiver to block her from hearing Avery, who was just then expressing his admiration for the gentleness of paper towels.
Finally I gave up and closed my notebook. “How’s it going, Avery?” I asked. He was lying on the floor, bent at the hip with his legs pressed up along the wall.
“It’s funny how much you take for granted,” he replied. “Here I’ve been in this office for a good three years, and I don’t think I’ve ever really noticed it before. It has so much to offer. Why haven’t we ever thought to have our editorial discussions over at this wall before, I wonder.”
I laughed. “I’m quite jealous of you right now,” I said. And I was. What a sweet experience to get out of one’s tormented head, and instantly achieve what the shamans and hypnotists and yogis so tirelessly aim you toward.
“Why don’t you take some of this stuff?” Avery asked. “Kate left it here, didn’t she? On the windowsill. I think you have to, Frannie. I need you to understand what I’m saying about the wood.”
I looked at my watch. I didn’t have to collect Lester from Tweedle Dee until six. “Okay,” I agreed, feeling a surge of daring. “But only if you barricade the door. There’s no way I’m dealing with Hilary or Sherman. Or a courier, or something.”
“Alright,” Avery said gamely. He swung his legs over his head, rose to his feet, and went off to the closet beside Goran’s desk. He retrieved a pair of my high-heeled shoes, and placed them carefully in front of the door.
“I don’t think so, Avery,” I said, chuckling. I followed him over and slid the bolt across. Then I leaned my head against the door and sighed. “I can’t do this.”
“Why not?” he asked, taking up a position on the windowsill, which he proceeded to proclaim the most comfortable four-inch-wide perch he had ever had the honor of resting upon in his life.
“I can’t get stoned, Avery. It would be cheating. I’m in the middle of a whole lot of sobering things. I need to stay in control of myself.”
“Ah, Frannie,” he mused, tilting his head back as if he were sunbathing, there on the windowsill on a rainy Toronto morning. “Do I look out of control to you? Or do I look relaxed?”
I returned to my desk and sat down, pondering him for a minute. “You look relaxed,” I allowed. “You haven’t scratched your neck or twisted your arms in at least an hour.”
“Weren’t you the one, Frannie,” he continued, “who theorized to me that the people who insist on absolute explanations and strict standards are the ones who fear losing control?”
“Yes,” I answered, “but I’m not talking about a lifeview, Avery, I’m talking about not getting stoned today, because I’m responsible for rather a lot at the moment, and it seems ill-advised.”
“Ah, Frannie,” Avery said again, and then he went on a brief tangent about how the sound ah felt really wonderful coming out of his mouth, and he understood why yogis liked to say om. “Anyway,” he said to himself. “Where was I? Oh. Yes. Ah, Frannie. Here’s what I wanted to ask. Has it ever occurred to you that this God you seek eludes you because you’re afraid to lose control?”
“Jesus, that took you a long time to spit out.” But then I considered what he had said.
“Okay, Avery,” I finally answered. “I’m going to do this for you, and for the practice. To rehearse what it’s like to open up and let go.”
For forty minutes after I chased a tablet of Ecstasy with tepid coffee, I soberly listened to Avery’s observations and insights, and was fascinated when he elected to explain his thing about turkey. “It’s one of the only things I remember about her,” he said. “The roast turkey I helped her prepare for Thanksgiving, the month before she died. I don’t know what it was about that, whether it was the goodness of the meal, or the excitement of the occasion or the fact that I did a commendable job cutting up the parsley for the stuffing. But I remember it. And I hunger for it again and again.”
Moved beyond words, I went over to h
ug him, which caused him to remark upon how soft a hug can feel. And then I joined him in this world of being present, and surrendered. The two of us lay side by side on the floor of our office, feeling as flat and still as two body shapes chalked at a crime scene, and for the next few hours talked about the people we loved, and how much we loved them, including Bono of U2 and William Thackeray and the guy at my local Starbucks, and then of the people we forgave, for all of us were nothing if not stumblingly human, and finally of the unheralded gentleness of a hardwood floor, as shared between lifelong friends.
37
Lester and I flew back out to Cape Breton when March blew in like a lion, pelting our Jetsgo airbus with frigid rain. Unperturbed by the weather, my son sipped his ginger ale and inexpertly colored a picture of Spider-man while I reflected on the last time I had seen Bernice living her life with Stan.
It had been early September—the Labor Day before last. We had all gone out together to visit, and one afternoon, Calvin took Lester to the New Waterford playground while I lay on the couch, felled by a stunning headache, with Stan sitting nearby on his easy chair and watching a ball game.
“Oh … my … God!”
We both heard her tremulous protest waft out of the kitchen. But Stan didn’t rise from his chair, just registered her voice with a mild flinching uplift of his hand, which clutched the remote.
“Stan?”
She had come into the archway that separated sitting room from dining room, kneading the gnarled backside of her hand. Her pink terrycloth bathrobe was stained in purple blotches from her pie-making.
“Stan, the microwave’s broke! There’s air blowing out of it, look.” She gestured backward. “I’m cooking your bacon and I can feel this little wind coming out. Oh my God. It must be radiation escaping.”
“It’s the way those things work, Bernice,” Stan said irritably, but he got up anyway, shuffled to the kitchen in his corduroy slippers and had a look.
“Can you feel it?” she asked.
“Sure I can.”
Bernice sank into a kitchen chair, plump feet crossed at the ankles, staring wanly at the floor. “Well, that’s not the way it’s supposed to work—why would it work that way, eh Stan? Makes no sense! Shirley says there’s a sale at the mall, got herself a toaster oven for half-off yesterday. I think you should get another one, get a replacement.”
“What am I supposed to do with the bacon?” he asked, peering dubiously into the gleaming white box.
“I’ll just make some fresh in a pan.” She raised herself, looking formless in her billowy robe. He’d make the bacon, himself, he told me later, “don’t like the way she fries it, too greasy, but she won’t let me. She needs to keep in motion, she says. What the hell for? I ask her.” He shook his head in bemusement. “What’s she cooked already today, Fran? Eh? Two loaves of bread, strawberry pie, it ain’t even mid-morning.”
He retired to the bathroom with the National Enquirer. The phone rang, searing my temples, and Bernice went to answer it.
“Stanley?” she called, after a moment’s conversation.
“Well, hold on there,” he yelled back, “I’m in the john, not running nowhere with my pants down.”
“Dr. Richardson’s on the phone, I won’t talk to him,” she cried.
Stan came hopping out, tucking his plaid shirt into worn brown pants. “Come on, Bernice, you’re waving the phone like a damn live grenade.”
It was true, I noticed from my vantage point pretending to sleep on the couch. She practically threw it at him before plopping down on a dining-room chair with her eyes squeezed shut. He held the receiver to his good ear and gazed out the window at the KFC.
“How you doin’, Johnny?” He listened for a beat, then: “I’m not getting down to the hall much this year, no. I miss the games, sure I do, but it’s hard gettin’ out with her so nervous, you know.”
Whatever Richardson told him then, I knew Bernice was expecting some blood test results, for something or other. High-blood pressure, as I recall.
“Sure, I do,” said Stan. “Oh, I’ll try to bring her in, sure.” He sounded noncommittal. Last time they went up to the Regional, he told me, Bernice clung to the doctor’s doorway like a cat about to have a bath. Occurred to him he should have brought her in a carrying cage, she was that uncooperative. Now he glanced down at his wife, at the tight little curls on her head interspersed with patches of shell-pink skin. I wondered what he was thinking, that she had straight hair once, straight and thick and lovely. That he missed the woman who had that hair.
“Hand me that pen there, will you, Bernice?” he asked.
She stared up at him, miserable, her mouth such a trembling upside-down crescent she was almost cartoon-ish. I felt a heated anger within me somewhere, fleeting as a spark. I hated it that you could see right through her sometimes, like you could a little kid.
After jotting something down, Stan hung up, and Bernice made herself busy again, as if the world would end if she didn’t keep moving. She started poking around in the blond-brown cupboards she’d had Stan install that summer, finally pulling out a jar of flour. She whirled around, lips moving silently, heading for the fridge to see if there were any eggs left. “I got eggs,” I heard her mutter, “I got oil, I got water, maybe I should put something else, I could put in some coconut maybe, like Shirley was sayin’, tasted real good in brownies.” She sank to her knees and started rifling through odds and ends in the side panel, maraschino cherries and such.
“Stan? Can you get down to Sobey’s for bananas and some coconut, the shredded kind, comes in a little bag in the spice section, then go over to Mayflower and see about the microwave sale Shirley was telling about. And get one of them filters too, for the humidifier.”
He obeyed without remark, reaching for his raincoat, patting his back pocket for his wallet. He lifted his tweed hat off the stand and slipped away.
“Stanley?” I heard the soft whuff of the door pulling shut against the wind.
Bernice knelt before her meat crisper and frantically imagined supper: meat pie or roast—Stan said he was tired of fish cakes. “What about you, Nancy? Does Lester like meat? I could do up a ham.”
“Whatever’s easiest for you,” I called from the couch, as if ease had anything to do with it. I switched off the TV. Now I could hear Stan’s favorite country music station playing on the radio in the kitchen, the little transistor spitting static and twang from the counter beside their new stove. A commercial announced a sale on boxsprings at Sleep Country, and then the news came on. “Hurricane Don continues to bear down on North Carolina today, with forecasters predicting landfall somewhere between Charlotte and Wilmington late this afternoon.” This news provoked wide-eyed attention from Bernice. “The storm is expected to reach the Maritimes possibly as early as tomorrow,” continued the radio man, “bringing gusting wind and heavy rain to coastal areas.”
“Oh … my … God!”
The ham she’d pulled out of the fridge rolled heavily out of her lap as she heaved and floundered on the floor, scrabbling along the linoleum to hoist herself up by Stan’s breakfast chair. “It’s gonna flood my basement and ruin the dryer.”
I couldn’t follow her logic, but her muttering became a mantra—“the dryer oh my God”—as she headed for the basement door. I got up, my head pounding, and followed her to make sure she was okay. Down in the basement, she was caught up wildly in frantic, cockamamie schemes to keep things dry, yanking plugs out of the cold wall, throwing towels around, dragging at bags of grass seed as if she could sandbank the cellar, muttering her mantra, getting dizzy until finally she careened against the bottom steps and ran aground, perspiring.
“Bernice?” I ventured, hovering beside her with a towel in my hand in case she wanted me to mop her forehead, which was the least of her concerns.
She began crying, her shoulders rising and falling in shudders. “Hurricane’s gonna ruin my dryer,” she sobbed.
“What hurricane?” asked Calvin, sudd
enly behind me, halfway down the stairs. “There isn’t going to be a hurricane, Mum.”
“Hurricane Don!” she bellowed at him over her shoulder, righteous and grieving. “It’s comin’ up the coast.”
“What are you talking about?” he retorted, sounding like his father. “It won’t be anything to worry about by the time it gets up here. Come on, Mum, come on up. I’ll make you a cup of tea.” He descended the stairs to take her hand.
Later that afternoon, with Stan back and on his knees playing with Lester, Bernice had another hurricane-related revelation.
“Oh my God, the patio furniture! It’ll blow around and break the windows!”
She pushed past me, wild-eyed, and headed outside, where the sea wind batted at her dressing gown and whipped her white curls. She grabbed up her plastic chairs and waved them around like a lunatic lion tamer fending off ghosts in the salt air. The pinwheels she’d planted in her marigolds spun their wings as fast as hummingbirds, backward and forward as the gusts switched directions. Her chimes kicked and danced, her butterfly feeder bounced, the lantern held by her little black sambo swayed madly, and she seemed to understand all this as Don’s approach, his menacing howl coming up the coast from Halifax.
“Bernice!” called Stan, holding open the kitchen door, with Calvin right behind him. Stan stepped outside and reached for her chairs, easing them from her grasp and storing one atop the other before carrying them across the lawn to the shed, a lock of gray hair on his forehead held aloft like a cowlick by the wind. Wordlessly, he and Calvin carted all the furniture to safety: four chairs, a table with an umbrella sticking out of it which Calvin had to cartwheel over the grass, a little side table, waterproof cushions. Then they brought in the new microwave, and boxed up the jams Bernice had made so that Stan could drive them over to the soup kitchen.
Evening came, and with it the remnants of Hurricane Don, an intemperate but not particularly ferocious squall. Bernice was in the kitchen surrounded by pans and cookbooks and a dusty cloud of flour. Her panic swelled and receded with the sound of her chimes in the yard, but she could clearly calm herself with cooking: the ham needed glazing; the potatoes scalloped just so; boiled parsnips, that would be good; and a pan of coconut brownies. She wouldn’t let me help her, kept shooing me away, “Oh no, dear, no, no,” stirring and slicing till her fingers ached.
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