Jane knows the story of Hannibal’s ambush. Roman legions straggling along the shore at dawn, their lines dishevelled. All around them, the creaking of war wagons. The smell of fear in their horses’ nostrils. Near the top of a far hill they could see the glow of Hannibal’s campfires.
“Then Hannibal’s men burst out of the forest behind them. Thirty thousand Romans caught without their armour, cut down where they stood. Three hours was all it took—a single morning. Tell me this is not amazing!”
(This is not amazing, Jane thinks.)
“The rivers turned red with the blood. They named towns after the bones and skeletons. Even today, farmers unearth collarbones, thigh bones, bits of armour.”
Her mother looks up. Once upon a time she had a braid stretching all the way down to the small of her back, but now her hair is cut in a shag. The mole on her cheek is fingerprint-sized, and when Jane was little she liked to put her finger over it. Her eyes are deep brown, almost black, like the mouse pictured in Jane’s old school reader. She smiles bountifully at them both, holding a piece of ham on her fork like a lollipop. “To me,” she says, “it isn’t actually about Hannibal at all. Or Scipio Africanus, or Flavius.”
“Gaius Flaminius Nepos.”
“The story–”
“It’s not a story.”
“The history, then. It’s not about the generals. Or even the dead—”
“Ossaia, Sanguineto, Caparossa, Pugnano.”
“I see it all”—Jane’s mother straightens her back—“from the elephants’ perspective.”
Jane laughs.
“Imagine”—her mother lowers her voice—“how shocked they must have been, coming from Africa, across the Mediterranean, shaken back and forth in the hold of a boat. Then up over the Alps, and what do they see? Snow!”
“They must have been freezing,” says Jane.
“Nothing prepared them. Though perhaps an old elephant—some elephant guru two hundred years before—foretold the catastrophe, passing down the knowledge from elephant to elephant: ‘A day will come, my children, when the sky will turn white and fall to earth in little pieces.’”
Her father watches his wife carefully. “Ex Africa semper aliquid novi.”
“They must have gotten frostbite on their feet.”
“Thirty thousand Romans caught without their armour.”
“The skin of the elephants turned milky in the moonlight.”
Jane’s father pushes scalloped potatoes onto his upturned fork. A pea rolls away but is captured. “But why stop there, my love? Why not see it from the perspective of the camp dogs.”
“Why not, indeed?”
“Or the cockroaches. Or the maggots. This is only the greatest military tragedy in history that you’re ridiculing. In fact”—her father places his napkin by his plate—“you could be one of my students, Gretchen, because this is what I put up with all day.” Before Jane’s mother can speak again, Patrick stands. “The potatoes were over-salted,” he says, “and you, my love, have had too much to drink.” Then he is gone, to watch the television news downstairs.
Jane keeps her head down, examining her plate, which is stoneware with flecks across the surface like faraway birds. Her mother begins to clear the plates, pausing to press a crimson palm to Jane’s forearm. Jane brushes it away. After a moment she hears her mother moving in the kitchen, ankle bracelet chiming like a lament.
Jane and her parents. They were conjoined like the Holy Trinity, but with her father always on top, interpreting the world for them, which was ridiculous, because Jane could clearly see that her mother, Gretchen, was the deeper one. When a hollow ache woke Jane at night, a fear of death that threatened to swallow her whole, only her mother knew the cure: she lay down, holding Jane’s body with the length of her own, in her nightgown with its ribbon of apricot satin at the neckline, which left marks on Jane’s cheek. Linked hands. Linked fingers. Said these words: Life will feel very long. And slowly, with the pressure of palm on palm, fingers enmeshed, smells—yeasty, earthy—rising from her skin and hair, her mother could make even the wild abyss of death disappear.
Gretchen also had subtler talents, which Jane did not wholly understand or respect.
After her father flounced from the table, Jane pushed back her chair and went into the kitchen. Why, Jane wanted to know, did her mother let him pronounce on everything that way? Why must the conversation always be about his work? And what about the elephants? Did her mother actually care about them—their hoary frozen toes, their terrible fate tumbling from Alpine cliffs, legs chained together—or was she just pretending?
“Why does this always happen?”
Her mother closed the refrigerator. Her eyes, meeting Jane’s, were watery, humiliated, and for a moment Jane saw, really saw, that her mother did not have an answer.
“It’s hard to understand when you’re young.”
“Yes, it is.”
Once, when Jane was much younger, seven perhaps or eight, her father asked her (again this was at the dinner table) to name which of her parents she loved more. Later, when Jane was an adult, she wondered if this could even have happened. It felt less like a memory than like the fraught opening scene of a Greek tragedy, or a dream where everything spins calmly out of control. Jane remembered dancing around the table, grasping her mother’s braid like a bell pull, and giving it a mean tug. When her mother threw her wineglass against the wall and ran to the bathroom, her father had shrugged sheepishly. “I think,” he murmured, “we went too far.”
Oh, they had made Jane complicit, an actor in their drama, the hair-puller! And that was what burnt. Even two decades later, when Jane was married, with a daughter of her own, and lived two thousand miles away, in Toronto, she remembered those scenes and she felt a burning in her throat, as though she were back there, held captive between them. It really shocked her, how out of control they had been, that was the truth of it: their lust for revenge, their parries and counter-thrusts, their sorrow.
Of course, she had to remind herself, it had been another age. Back in 1968 spontaneity had reigned. Women screamed and hurled china. Men got drunk and groped their students. Children threw themselves from the cliffs at Lighthouse Park, landing ramrod straight in the churning water. Everybody wanted things. Everybody asked and dug and jabbed and screamed—got stoned, got drunk: wanted.
But now the Age of Aquarius was over, and a new age had been ushered in: the Age of Boundaries. If Bruce, Jane’s partner, felt the need to discuss their relationship, he arranged a meeting. He called her on the telephone, or told her over supper that he had things to discuss (and she did the same), and then they arranged a sitter for three-year-old Cara, and went to a coffee shop, or a wine bar, agendas in hand, and talked over their difficulties, carefully employing non-inflammatory language. Bruce was a scientist, a geologist. Once he caught hold of Jane’s system of conflict resolution, he stuck to it with a rigour that verged, Jane occasionally thought, on the punitive.
Bruce’s specialty as a geologist was the Niagara Escarpment. It seemed that some of the oldest trees in the world lived on the escarpment, holding on by their roots to pockets of soil compacted in the cliff walls. Some trees were over one thousand years old but only four feet tall. Some, the most gnarled and picturesque, were in danger from bonsai poachers.
Although Bruce, like Jane, worked for the University of Toronto, he headed out each morning wearing hiking boots and with a pack on his back, looking a bit like Charlie Brown (perhaps because of his round head, which made him look young, even in his late thirties). They were both, Jane and Bruce, ginger haired and blue eyed, a fact that embarrassed Jane. She hoped people didn’t think they had chosen each other for that reason.
Jane was a historian in the Women’s Studies Department. She focused on the Neolithic matriarchal societies (partnership models, she called them) of Anatolia and Thrace, which had been subjug
ated by waves of horsemen descending from the steppes: Kurgans (5,000 BCE), Ubaids (4,000 BCE), Hittites (2,000 BCE), Aryans (1,000 BCE). All these destroyers thundered down from the grasslands, brandishing swords and battle-axes, worshipping gods of the sky. Jane worked hard to make the terror real for her students. Imagine, she said, that you are out collecting shells, or bent over a well of indigo, and you feel the shaking of horses’ hooves rising out of the ground. You run, but the chariots bear down on you with war cries and screaming, slicing of iron weapons; rape; dismemberment; your beloved son dragged behind a chariot by his hair. The Scythians, Jane told her class, attached pouches made of human faces to their reins, displaying them as trophies.
“How goes the war?” Bruce sometimes asked when she got home from work. Or: “How are things at the front?” This was a joke they shared, after coming across a volume of James Thurber sketches in a second-hand bookstore. The series, called “The War Between Men and Women,” had really made them laugh. Line-drawn men with egg-shaped heads clubbed startled women with umbrellas. Gangs of dowagers retaliated by hurling canned goods down the aisles of the grocery store. Several women met in a lantern-lit barn to plan their next ambush. It was like the Second World War—that was why it was funny. As though everything subverted between the sexes could be made public in the carnival of battle. Jane had photocopied the drawings and taped them to her office door, where they remained until a colleague mentioned pointedly that the cartoons didn’t seem to validate women’s struggle. Jane was up for tenure, so she took the drawings down.
Jane and Bruce worked at their relationship meticulously. They tried to be consistent. But still at night, sitting alone in the living room, while Bruce took his turn putting Cara to bed, Jane could feel the container of grief threatening to spill over. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. Certainly not Bruce’s, with his open-hearted kindness, his ingenuity at fixing toasters and shower rods. And she and Bruce were both proud of what they had created, proud of their dispute-resolution mechanisms, their absolute equality.
I love you, he said as he left each morning, backpack on his back.
I love you too.
She suspected that he heard, as she did, the minute leap of faith required by this litany—as though they hoped, through repetition, to fan something wilder into flame.
But back in 1968 the evenings are all Sturm und Drang, and Jane lies in bed picturing the elephants. They follow Hannibal over the Alps, then down the body of Italy toward Gaius Flaminius, who is about to be severely outflanked. As Jane falls asleep, the two men, one dark, one light, take hold of each other and wrestle beside the lake. Hannibal’s gold earring glints. Gaius is as skinny as a slice of moon. On they struggle, slick with oil, while behind them, with utter disregard, elephants chomp at the sweet lake-grass.
When Jane cries out, her mother is there, lying down beside her. To distract Jane, her mother sings songs, or recites the names of fishing flies she used to be able to tie, tricks her father taught her growing up on a remote lake in the Shuswaps, in the interior of the province, during the war. Silhouetted damsels. Deer-haired nymphs. Goldenheads. Silver doctors. These names cause a ruckus and shine in Jane’s head. She lies beside her mother, picturing the hunting and fishing lodge with its cookhouse, and eight wooden cabins with green shutters that can be raised and lowered on hinges. Wood stoves for heat. Four outhouses.
It wasn’t a camp people brought their children to. There were just men up from the city on hunting trips, or expert fishermen or, now and then, a couple, like the honeymoon couple who came thinking the place would be romantic. The lady, bored and fretful, tried to suntan at the end of the dock, which turned out to be impossible because of the bugs. The day before she left she painted all of Gretchen’s toenails red.
It is her mother’s loneliness that Jane feels, each time she hears the stories. Jane closes her eyes, and she can see her as a little girl running after her father through the long grass, and this image radiates a great throb of loneliness from its centre.
She sees her grandfather Hans pulling on his work boots, and then walking past the cabins to stand on the dock. Gretchen runs after him and slips without a word into the bow of the rowboat. She feels the thunk of the oar blade against the dock as they push away, shooting across the reeds. They row past Butterfly Cove and Mermaid Rock, toward the dark side of the lake. Hans casts and trout come to his hook, but Gretchen, aged five, doesn’t care about the fish anymore.
“How many days?”
First it is one hundred sixteen. Then eighty-three. Then—miraculously—sixteen. Sixteen days until the end of banishment. Sixteen days until the first day of school.
Gretchen sees her father looking toward the end of the lake where the outlier cabin sits in its private cove. One of its shutters is off-kilter. He rows into the bay, ties up to a sapling, and they go to investigate. If a wolverine has been inside, it could have done serious damage. Wolverines are ferocious and carry long grudges. Gretchen can feel her father’s worry. He pulls open the door, and mattress ticking floats everywhere. The bed has been knifed open, canisters overturned, bacon grease and cornmeal spread on the floor to form a messy swastika. And the worst part—someone has taken a shit on an enamel plate and left it on the card table.
As for the first day of school at Sicamous Elementary—it was inevitable—how could it not be? This little girl from the woods was bound for sorrow, just like a character in one of the folk songs Gretchen sang. No friends were going to gather around her in pastel dresses, bows in their hair: not likely. She was an enemy alien with scabbed knees and a German name, whose jacket smelled of woodsmoke, whose parents couldn’t afford saddle shoes. What happened next was as inevitable as coughing, as lying down, as dying—and Jane wishes, whenever she hears the story, that she could go back in time, step from behind a corner of the schoolhouse, walk past the tittering girls and take her mother’s hand. I’ll play with you, is what she would say, if she had that kind of power.
But now it is 1968, and the women of West Vancouver are swollen with different longings. They tie-dye their husbands’ handkerchiefs while they are at work; they use the good silver to hot-knife hash; or, like Jane’s mother, they spread moonlike silk on the table in the woodshed, and prepare to make something beautiful, while in a nearby cedar a woodpecker goes at the bark with hydraulic force.
On this day in April all the tulips open at once, showing their stamens like dog penises. Jane walks home from school at lunchtime. She doesn’t like to eat in the playground because some of the boys have named her Gorki Pickle. Now why have they done this? Is it her plump stomach? Red hair? White legs? Boys seem to sense the changes in her body: breast buds, softening nipples, the arrival of foxy hair around her pubis. She smells of sabotage.
To make matters worse, Miss Shapiro, her favourite teacher, has told the class she plans to leave school mid-term, right after Easter break, in order to travel to Mexico. She uses the term find herself—she wants to find herself in Mexico—inspiring Jane with the cloudy understanding that one’s self can actually go missing. And suppose (this was what her father said later, when he heard)—suppose Miss Shapiro were to go to Acapulco, but her self was in Puerto Vallarta.
Jane opens the back gate, salami sandwich in one hand. The yard smells of wood bugs and mulch, a leafy scent of decay. The shed door is open and her mother is singing. She has a good voice, mellow and low, and Jane, stepping along the gravel path, feels the song like a caress. The boys’ teasing and name-calling dissipates in the cedar-filled air.
Inside the shed, Jane’s mother stands over a table covered by a length of white silk held along each edge with carpenter’s clamps. It is taut as the skin of a drum and has a bluish cast to it. She has a tjanting in her hand—a penlike instrument with a fluted spout, out of which she can pour a line of wax. The fabric reflects light onto her cheeks and forehead.
“You’re home. Everything okay?”
Jane nods
. She cannot say to her mother, They call me Gorki Pickle. She cannot say, I am crushed by something large on my chest. Jane reaches out a finger to touch the fabric.
“Are your hands clean? It’s watered silk.”
Watered silk.
“It’s slippery,” Jane says.
“I was just about to make my first mark.”
It is almost too exciting, this immortal moment, with its honey scent of beeswax and paraffin, the enamel pot bubbling on the hot plate, ready for the poisons—acid blue, mordant yellow, raw sienna. Her mother cups her hand beneath the tjanting and stares down at the pure swath of fabric. She cocks her head, narrows her eyes, and something artful in this birdlike gesture makes Jane wince. Gretchen shifts her weight, preparing to touch wax to cloth, and she seems all at once like a puppet, falsely radiant with the effort of making this one moment matter. What does she hope for? Jane feels an itch of irritation gather under her clothes. Only much later, as a grown-up, does she understand what her mother must have needed. She wanted a ripe line of wax to flow from the tjanting, such as might come from the pen of a Zen calligrapher: thick, thin, even, uneven, pure, followed by another, and then another; moments of grace: God visiting her softly, without fuss, right there in the backyard woodshed.
That was all.
Back at school, Miss Shapiro has gone to the principal, telling him that she intends to leave at Easter break.
“You can’t,” he says.
“I have to.”
“Then go now. Right now.” The gauntlet thrown.
When Jane enters the art room after lunch, Miss Shapiro is kneeling in front of the supply cupboard, a clutch of her favourite girls around her. She is telling them that authority does not always understand the dictates of the heart. At the same time, she is separating construction paper into two piles, as some of it is hers.
One of the girls says, “Gorki Pickle, go away.”
But Miss Shapiro says, “Don’t be ridiculous. Jane, you come and help me.”
Oh, My Darling Page 3