The Scarlet Macaw

by S. P. Hozy

  maris_cousins@yahoo.com

  To: dinahstone@hotmail.com

  Cc:

  Subject: Update from Canada

  Hi Dinah,

  Just wanted to let you know that I’ve been in BC for about a week, staying with my brother and will probably go and visit my mother for a while. I’ve enjoyed being with Ray but I have a feeling I could just stay and stay — in a kind of vegetative state — and never get my shit together. He’s been really good, talking about things and helping me keep them in perspective. A big problem for me is that I feel like I’ve lost my “artist’s” eye somehow — that thing I told you about before I left S’pore. I’m having trouble seeing the colour in things and that tells me there’s something terribly wrong with me. We’re all still reeling from Peter’s death (I can’t seem to use the M word) and I’m not sure whether removing myself, at least physically, is the solution or not. I only know I had to try it.

  Let me know what’s happening on your end. How are you coping? Is the shop still open? And, not that I really care, but where’s Angela? Is she giving you some room to operate the business?

  I miss you, Di. I’ll keep you posted.

  Maris

  * * *

  dinahstone@hotmail.com

  To: maris_cousins@yahoo.com

  Cc:

  Subject: Re: Update from Canada

  Hi Maris,

  I miss you too and really wish you were here (no pressure!). I’m managing things okay but am mostly on autopilot a lot of the time. The whole shock thing is a drag — I want it to go away but it just won’t. Some days I wake up and feel great and then I remember and I don’t feel so great. It’s like I’m in a jar and somebody puts the lid back on. Maybe if Peter had died of old age it wouldn’t be like this. But I keep thinking he should be here, he wasn’t finished whatever it was he was doing with his life. Not fair.

  I have hired Lim, a distant cousin, to help me in the shop. Angela wasn’t too happy about it but I reminded her I couldn’t be in two places at once, i.e., in the back unpacking stuff and in the front selling it, so she gave in. Lim is working out fine. She’s a good worker and does most of the packing, shipping, and unpacking. Plus, she’s great with a duster. Maybe a little compulsive sometimes, but it’s better than the opposite (which I suppose would be lax or lazy — what great words!). She’s good company, too, and doesn’t mind running errands or making tea. So, lucky for me.

  Angela is Angela, and even more so, if that’s possible. She’s back in Germany but calls me at least fourteen times a week with a million questions and orders, which she calls “requests,” but you and I both know Angela doesn’t request, she demands.

  There is still no result from the police. They assure me the investigation is ongoing, but you wouldn’t know it. I guess at a certain point there are no more clues lying around, and they have to hope someone will confess or something will come out of left field. Someone comes into the store every day asking about it, so it never goes away. Peter had a lot of friends and the customers really liked him. How can I replace him? For now the shop runs on reputation and maybe a bit of the “ghoul” factor, but at some point both of those will fade, and then it will either make it or it won’t.

  A couple of people have been in asking for you — Mr. Choy, do you remember him? He bought Blood Red Reverie last year. And Anna Wong said to say hello.

  Keep in touch, Maris.

  Miss you,

  Dinah : - (

  Chapter Ten

  On Friday, Maris took the bus from the Greyhound depot to visit her mother in Roberts Creek. She insisted on taking Peter’s trunk with her, so they lugged it by taxi down to the bus station. Ray grumbled but he understood why she wanted to take it. She needed to feel connected and the trunk was full of connections.

  “Thanks,” she said. “I guess I’ll see you soon.” The bus was about three-quarters full and would be leaving in a few minutes. “Might as well get on.” She gave him a quick hug and climbed into the stale air of the idling bus. She found a seat near the back and sat down beside the window. Ray was still standing on the platform, feet apart so his legs formed an inverted V, his hands jammed in the pockets of his jacket. He’d been doing that since he was a kid, she remembered. Like it was a part of his DNA.

  The bus ride took Maris to the Horseshoe Bay ferry terminal and across to Langdale, then along the Sunshine Coast Highway through some of the most spectacular scenery in the world. The forty-minute ferry ride and the scenery kept Maris from thinking about what she would say to her mother when she got to Roberts Creek, but it didn’t stop her from thinking about why she was making this trip. She was going for more than a visit, she knew. She was going for some kind of sustenance. There was something she needed, and the combination of her mother’s particular view of life and the world, plus the remoteness and physical beauty of her surroundings, drew Maris toward her former home. Growing up in a hippie commune in the sixties and seventies had prepared Maris for some things in life, but had not prepared her for others. She was prepared for the life of an artist, for the isolation, the non-conformity, even the part that involved being judged by people who didn’t always understand what she was trying to do. But she was unprepared to grieve her loss. And she knew that was what she was trying to do: grieve for Peter and come to terms with the way he had died.

  The commune had been all about celebrating life and oneness with your extended “family,” but there had been few real losses during those years. Yes, Arthur had left them, and that had been hard, but Spirit had — at least in the beginning — been able to make it seem like a life-affirming move for them all. Their father, she said, was growing into his potential, his selfhood. It was only right that he be allowed to live his true life, and they, meaning his family, should give him this chance. It would be their gift to him. This was how Spirit had explained it to them, and they were too young to detect the bitterness that his betrayal had spawned. The unfinished part of what she was saying to them was that his “potential,” his “selfhood,” was really that of a deceitful, uncaring, selfish, self-absorbed piece of shit. Spirit had never forgiven Freedom Man for his duplicity. She had married an ideal and it had been ripped from her in the most inconceivable way. Freedom Man had chosen conventionality, a suit and tie, a car dealership, for God’s sake! He had not just rejected the life they had built together, he had stomped on it, pulverized it, and flushed it down the toilet like excrement.

  This was the way Spirit had grieved — in resentment and anger that became a festering sore on the inside that she would not let others see — because Freedom Man’s actions were not just a reflection of his own shallow, worthless self, but, she believed, a manifestation of his contempt for her and everything she valued.

  Maris hadn’t known any of this until she was nearly thirty years old. So well had her mother hidden her feelings that it had been a shock to learn that the always serene, even-tempered Spirit had been harbouring a huge reserve of contempt and loathing for the man who had fathered her children. She had revealed it to Maris during a night of drinking Spanish wine, a particularly vicious Rioja, the effects of which lingered for several days. It had drawn things from Spirit’s cache of hidden sorrows the way a syringe draws blood from a vein. Maris had listened as the waves of bitterness washed over her mother and wondered how she had never sensed even a fraction of what was there.

  This had been her induction into the act of grieving. You hold the pain and the sorrow inside and let it fester for years until, one day, it bursts like a ruptured boil and infects whoever has the misfortune to be nearby. Was this what she was doing now? Internalizing her anger at Peter for dying, burying her sense of betrayal because his life had been taken from him so arbitrarily and so unfairly? Was she eating her grief the way her mother had? Eating it every day but never digesting it? And if she was, why, exactly, was this a bad thing? Spirit had survived, hadn’t she? She had made a life for herself, raised her children, become a first-class potter who made a living fr
om her creativity. If there was a downside, Maris couldn’t see it. Except that maybe, if this was what it felt like to grieve in such a way, it wasn’t a good feeling. In fact, it was achingly unpleasant, like having stomach flu and being forced to stand in the middle of an empty room for the rest of your life.

  Maris closed her eyes and tried to focus on the moment. She felt the vibration of the bus’s motor from her feet to the top of her head. She listened to the thrum of the tires on the asphalt highway and the soft murmur of conversation around her. The elderly Chinese man sitting next to her ruffled the pages of his newspaper as he turned them. She listened to her own breathing, lengthening her breaths by inhaling deeply and exhaling slowly. As a sense of calm came over her, she turned her head toward the window and slowly opened her eyes. Just look, she told herself, look and absorb, but don’t think or analyze. Just be.

  She allowed herself to see only the shapes at first: the spiky pines, the flatness of the highway, the jaggedness of the mountains in the distance, the blooming puffs of cloud overhead. This was the way she had trained herself to see, beginning with the surface and then homing in on the details: the softly fluttering needles on the pines; the pitted asphalt of the road; the striations of the Rocky Mountains as they climbed above the tree line and into their snowy peaks; the crisp outline of the clouds contrasted against the dense sky.

  But when she tried to absorb the concentrated blue of the mountain sky, as she drew her eyes down to the textured green of the trees, the black smoothness of the rock, she felt nothing. That was how Maris needed to perceive colour. Not just with her eyes, but with her gut. And right now, in the midst of the Cosastal Range, truly one of the world’s beauty spots, there was no colour for her empty palette. She only saw what everybody else saw: blue sky, green trees, black rock, white snow and clouds. It was not enough for her artist’s soul. It left her with nothing to say.

  Spirit was waiting at Roberts Creek Road in her 1989 Taurus station wagon. She loved the old car and was reluctant to give it up, even though it had just barely passed its latest emissions test. She justified keeping it by saying that since her environmental footprint was so small on all other counts, she could afford to lose a few points on a car that was a borderline pollutant. Spirit knew this was bullshit, but anything she could afford to buy would not be half as comfortable as the Taurus. Nor would it feel as solid, or be as quiet, at least from the inside.

  She saw Maris get off the bus and watched her as she spotted her mother’s car across the road. Spirit hadn’t seen her daughter in four years and was struck, as if for the first time, by how much she resembled her father. She had always been lanky, and as a child this had translated into awkwardness; she was a kid who was always tripping over her own feet. Now, at nearly forty, Maris carried herself with a kind of grace, as if she’d finally grown into her height and knew how to manage her long legs. She was still lean but not as thin as she once had been. As she watched Maris walk toward her, Spirit noted that her hips were a bit wider and her thighs a bit fuller in the tight blue jeans. Her hair, once a light brown colour, was now streaked with blonde highlights that caught the sun. She had cut it to chin length and it emphasized the square lines of her jaw, the same jaw as Arthur, who had hidden the squareness under a growth of beard when she first knew him.

  Maris was waving at her, indicating that her mother should get out of the car and come over to her. She pantomimed carrying luggage and Spirit understood that she needed help with her bags.

  She got out of the car and jogged over to her daughter. When they hugged, Maris put her arms around her mother’s shoulders and Spirit, shorter by a good six inches, wrapped her arms around Maris’s waist. They stood like that for a full minute before Maris disengaged and looked at her mother’s face.

  “You look great,” she said.

  “It’s the new sixty,” said Spirit. “Haven’t you heard? Instead of ending, life now begins at sixty.”

  “Well, it suits you.”

  Spirit laughed. “You look pretty good yourself. The new forty, eh?”

  “Ha ha,” said Maris. “No. Still the old thirty-nine for a few more months.”

  “Okay,” said her mother. “I’ll let you have that.”

  They walked back to where her bags were being unloaded. Maris’s wheeled suitcase was lying on its side and the trunk was being pulled out of the second compartment. It took some heaving, lugging, and dragging, but they managed to get the bags over to the Taurus and into the back.

  “I can’t believe you’re still driving this old piece of junk,” said Maris.

  “It’s not a piece of junk. It runs just fine.”

  “I hate to think what it might be spewing into the atmosphere. Aren’t you embarrassed?”

  Spirit thought about trotting out the footprint argument, but thought better of it. Maris would see it for what it was and she’d be forced to come up with some other feeble explanation for her irrational decision to keep the car long past its sell-by date. It probably didn’t even count as a trade-in anymore.

  “Your ex-husband owns a car dealership, you know. Maybe he could get you a good deal on a new one.”

  “Maris,” she said, a note of warning in her voice, “he sells BMWs to spoiled rich kids. He’s the last person I’d buy a car from, new or used.”

  “It doesn’t have to be personal,” Maris pursued, ignoring her mother’s tone. “It’s just business. Can’t you use him to get something you need?”

  “No, I can’t.” By now, Spirit’s tone was icy. “I don’t want to be beholden to him in any way.”

  “Mom,” said Maris, “it’s been nearly thirty years. Can’t you let it go?”

  Spirit was silent. No, I can’t let it go, she thought. It wasn’t ever going to go away. “I hold grudges,” she finally said. “Haven’t you noticed?”

  Maris laughed. “No, you don’t,” she said. “You hold one grudge. And nobody cares anymore, so why do you?”

  “It’s the principle,” she said. But she was tired of this conversation already. “Come on. Let’s not start your visit with this dead horse. It’s been flogged enough times.”

  “Okay,” said Maris. “Truce. I won’t mention it again.”

  “I wish,” said her mother. “It’s bound to come up a few more times. It always does.”

  Maris smiled, and Spirit thought once again that her daughter had the warmest green eyes she’d ever seen. They were like the sea, boundless and deep, and maybe a little dangerous, too. Maris only revealed what she wanted to. It came out in her painting, but it also came out in her eyes. It took a long time to be able to read her — and a lot of patience.

  “How’s your brother?” Spirit asked. “I haven’t seen him in months.”

  “He’s still the unconfirmed bachelor, supposedly waiting for Ms. Right to come along, but making no effort to help her find him. He lives like a student, in digs, you know what I mean?”

  “I do. Men are not nesters, Maris. They prefer a permanent state of impermanence. The always temporary way of life. That’s why women were, unfortunately, put on the same planet. To save men from themselves.”

  “Ah,” said Maris. “A divine plan.”

  “Well, not so divine for us. But a good deal for them.”

  “You kill me,” said Maris. “Don’t ever change.”

  Her mother’s house hadn’t changed since the last time Maris had been there, except that there was more stuff, mostly artsy-craftsy knick-knacks, more paintings, mostly by her artist/hippie friends, and pottery, her own and other potters’. Still, Maris had to admit it was comfortable. My mother is definitely a nester, she thought, an über-nester, and it never occurs to her that she could move or move on. When Spirit dug in, she dug deep. Change was something she was uncomfortable with. Even though her once luxurious chestnut hair was streaked with grey, she still wore it like a hippie, long, parted in the middle, and pulled loosely back in a ponytail at the base of her skull. She saw no reason to dye it or have it cut. It was par
t of who she was. She still wore jeans and gypsy blouses and ponchos. Long beaded earrings hung from her ears. The glasses that partially obscured her grey eyes were wire-rimmed, not the fashionable little oblongs now in style, but the round granny glasses she had worn for over thirty years. I suppose I should be comforted, thought Maris, that something in this world has stayed the same.

  They had dragged her suitcase and Peter’s trunk up the fourteen stairs that were the only way into the house from the driveway. The house had started as a two-room cabin set on the flattest part of the lot. Since the lot rose to 120 metres just beyond the back of the house, the only way to expand was from the front and to the sides. The last thing that had been added to the now six-room dwelling was a wraparound cedar deck that looked out over a rugged and rocky slope that met the road some 60 metres away. Spirit had planted perennial herbs between the rocks, and the sage, chamomile, lavender, rosemary, comfrey, lamb’s ear, and tarragon grew in wonderful profusion.

  Maris’s old room had been dusted and fresh sheets were on the bed. Her books were on the shelves exactly as she had left them — from her Nancy Drews to Anne of Green Gables and Catcher in the Rye. Drawings and paintings from her teens, that her mother had framed herself, were still hanging on the walls. It was both unsettling and reassuring; it reminded her of who she had been and it told her how far away from that person she had ventured in the last twenty years.

  She unpacked while her mother made tea, and tried to centre herself in a present that was so completely suffused with the past. Who was she at this moment? Twelve-year-old Maris who created still-life drawings out of the stuff she found around her, like her mother’s utilitarian pottery, her brother’s baseball, a few pieces of fruit, and the cat they all called Joan Baez? Or the forty-year-old artist who had found success of sorts in a place halfway around the world? This was yet another disconnect for Maris; it felt like she was holding two extension cords with the same end and had no way of joining them. I need to slow down, she told herself. Things are happening too fast and I’m just not assimilating them. Events are bouncing off me like ping-pong balls. I barely notice them.