Oh, My Darling

by Shaena Lambert

  Father turned over, shielding his eyes from the overhead lamp. He gave me a smile, weak but hopeful. “You’re home late.”

  “I went to a friend’s.” I put my school bag by the bar.

  “Which friend?” Mutti didn’t look up from her spread.

  “He lives on Oistins Row.”

  Mutti flicked a card onto the table. I knew the word in her head, Juden, though she didn’t speak it. What did it matter now? Oistins Row was already in the past. In another three weeks we would be gone, boxes packed, visas arranged. There were friends of friends with an apartment in Belize.

  We would continue our wanderings—Belize, Antigua, Puerto Vallarta—until one bright morning Mutti and Father would swerve to avoid a box of chickens that fell from a multicoloured bus, running headlong into the archway of a concrete overpass. This was when I was seventeen, in the second district of Guatemala City. It feels like a long time ago.

  But for now Sanford’s voice rang in my ears, the demands of a wild and petulant angel. Don’t you ever ask why? Doesn’t he explain? I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror.

  I could hear their voices rising—Mutti’s hissing, Father’s cajoling. I opened Mutti’s polka-dotted box of talcum. The puff inside was heavy with powder.

  The rest was natural. Just play. A pleasure which, when it arrives, feels so natural you wonder why you waited, or what you could have been afraid of. I smeared shadow on my lids with the tip of my index finger. I applied lipstick. Then I darkened my eyebrows like Sanford’s. Even that first time I could feel how much the pleasure had to do with mixing and matching, using what was there. Hung over the bathtub rail, among Mutti’s nylons, was a silk scarf she used to wrap the Troccas deck. Could I not use that to wrap my loins? The word loins, its biblical sound, reminding me of Sanford wrenching my leg over with his, one thrust of his hips. I said it again:

  And he covered his loins.

  And he girded his loins.

  They were calling me now, Mutti and Father, wanting to announce the decision to leave Barbados, or perhaps Mutti had decided to forbid me from visiting Oistins Row after all. I will never know. I took a breath and emerged from the bathroom wearing nothing but that scarf and a pair of Mutti’s feathered slippers. I swayed down the hall, clippety-clip, my heart beating like mad, and wafted into the room like the swan prince himself. I stood before them.

  Mutti laid down her cards, mouth falling open. Oh, the sorrow on her lined face, lips creased where the lipstick ran upward, tiny capillaries full of blood. She leapt up, instinct making her want to shield me. Father stood by the sliding glass doors, a newspaper in his hand, his view partly blocked by the bar counter. I could have turned, scurried back up the hall, covered by Mutti’s fluttering. Instead, I swayed past her and faced my father, my chin raised to receive the benediction, as it were, of his taking me in.

  Deep disappointment, that was what I saw: the deepest disappointment of a loving father in an unworthy son. That came as a blow, and almost knocked me back up the hall to the bathroom. Then his eyes grew colder. He looked me up and down, a crooked smile on his face: a smile of shock, I see now.

  “Heinrich, please. Do something!” This was Mutti.

  The molecules of his face swam. “Rudy.” He shook his head. “I don’t know what you are doing—go and wash!”

  “No, Father.”

  “You’re frightening your mother. Go now.”

  “No.”

  The anger welling up through his body must have felt good, righteous even, as it filled him to the brim with conviction. To see such a wrong, a twist in the fabric of nature, must have been shocking indeed; but how good, how electrifying, to realize you could do something about it.

  “Change! This second!”

  “No, Father.”

  “Do something!” Mutti cried, and at her hissed command I saw my father pass out of confusion, over the bridge, to the country of perfect clarity. He came toward me, reaching for his belt.

  So I know the power of a good outfit, believe me.

  And perhaps now you understand why I won’t go to the seaside, to trudge beside Peter, who wears an ugly hat. I have my work cut out for me at the Ex’n’Pop, under the disco balls, against my backdrop of velvet and corrugated tin.

  I step onto the stage on Friday nights, the feathers of my headdress flaming in the spotlight. Careful or you will burn. I take in the feel of the beer-drinking crowd, then I narrow my eyes, willing suspension of disbelief, and look, it works, because now (intake of breath) we are transported to a desert beneath the canopy of a southern sky. I strip and play and flaunt my limbs, but one must imagine it all with more fanfare and more terror, with chords of Beethoven thrumming in one’s ears. A camel kneels on its knobby forelegs, and I straddle it easily, rubbing my loins against its hump. Up it bears me like a prince, and the sky sings with its diamond glitter, and the black slaves and white slaves, concubines and eunuchs, stand back in awe, waiting.

  Child king, they whisper. Little bird. Voglein.

  A Small Haunting

  The haunting started on a Monday. Anna remembered that later—how the morning had begun with all of Monday’s chores and rush: getting Michael and Juliette out of bed, making salami sandwiches, pouring orange juice into portable juice boxes. Juliette’s cheek was criss-crossed with pillow marks as she came into the kitchen clutching her stuffed elephant. Her ridiculously plush lips and bow mouth—I can’t find my underwear!

  Anna moved through her tasks like a life-giving machine: sandwiches; underwear; Thermos of Scotch broth for Kevin (husband), who had joined Weight Watchers with her but didn’t attend the meetings; Cheerios poured into a bowl; milk spilled and wiped; juice spilled and wiped. Michael, coming to breakfast with his Game Boy, tweaked her heart with concern. Then she kissed Kevin at the door. His lips, plush and large like Juliette’s, were lightly freckled.

  It was when she returned to the kitchen and was clearing cereal bowls that Anna saw the photograph in The Vancouver Sun. Looking across the table, she didn’t understand it at first. She came around and picked up the paper. There were dead cows in the picture, twenty or perhaps thirty, and they had been shovelled into a pile and set aflame. In Ireland, the caption said. Mad cow disease. Anna stood for a moment, absorbing the image, the exposed udders, cloven hooves helplessly poking the air, then she called out to Juliette to brush her teeth.

  Anna walked the children to school, dropping Michael at the playground, taking her place with the other mothers at the chain-link fence. Misty rain collected on their raincoats. Like Anna, these women were in their late thirties, heavy in the hips, swollen, she thought, from years of mothering. Some had frizzy hair, others had pulled theirs back in utilitarian ponytails. Anna herself was blond, with calm features, and a florid beauty that struck her at times as a bit heavy-handed. She was a children’s book illustrator and her drawings were thoughtful and painstaking, woodblocks, pen and ink, but she herself was blowsy, as though the artist had gone a little wild. Her cheeks, subject to eczema, were often ruddy. Sometimes, glimpsing herself in the security monitor at the bank or in the mirror of the fish store window, she was reminded of a bosomy peasant woman from The Illustrated Brothers Grimm.

  She made sure Michael had found some friends to talk to, then she walked Juliette to her classroom. It smelled of white glue and the inside of rubber boots. Anna bent to hug her daughter goodbye and then left the school, still breathing in the girl’s sweet scalp. She crossed Sixteenth Avenue, stepping over chestnuts that had fallen to the boulevard. Nothing was wrong yet. At Tenth Avenue she cut through the gardens of Our Lady of Perpetual Help and approached the house.

  Later she considered the sequence. Stepping onto the dewy grass, feeling it soak the leather of her clogs. Shivering. Looking down at the house, which, from this perspective, always gave her pleasure. The church lawn was sloped, not enough for sledding in winter but enough to make
the children break into a run. The house was across the road: a Cape Cod Colonial shaped like a barn, white with green shutters and a red door, and graced by huge maples full of starlings and squirrels, a life that went on almost completely unobserved in the topmost canopy.

  Anna felt it—a pricking of skin along her spine, hairs rising at the back of her neck—before she saw anything. She glanced at the second-floor bathroom window. A child’s face watched her through the glass. Anna stopped, blinked—was that what she had done? She couldn’t remember later—and the child’s face was gone.

  At first Anna thought it was Juliette, though this information, that it was Juliette, made no sense; and besides, this child did not seem like Juliette. Still, Anna dashed across the grass, over the embankment, across the road. She fumbled out her key, inserted it in the lock, sensing as she did this, heart pounding in her ears, the thing on the other side of the door, laughing soundlessly, clutching its sides.

  “Juliette?”

  Anna twisted the key and pushed open the door. A bar of sunlight streamed through the transom window, breaking into pieces on the treads of the stairs. Not a sound but the fridge ticking, the way it did every morning of their lives.

  Nothing. It had been nothing. There had been no face at the bathroom window (though it had struck her deep, that look: a blow to the chest). There had been no laughing child on the other side of the door.

  And yet the haunting continued.

  On Tuesday someone took a bite from every furry kiwi in the bowl on the counter. Who did this? Anna demanded. They all denied it. Maybe it was mice, Kevin suggested, but each bite was the size of a quarter, and not one kiwi was eaten whole; each was just tasted and left, as though to say, Fuck you and your perfect fruit.

  On Wednesday the rain poured down in bucketfuls. The furnace began to bang like a kettledrum, the fridge continued to tick—the house, in its cacophony, resembling a brass band.

  Returning home from the school drop-off, Anna made a pot of tea and took the stairs to the attic. A neatly tacked seagrass runner led to her clean space: the metal drafting table topped in glass, the glossy white floorboards, the collection of Mexican tumblers in which she was forcing narcissus. She had seen a picture in a magazine of a room with floors like this, above a canal in Amsterdam, and she had tried to replicate the sense of calm. She was of Dutch ancestry; the picture had spoken to her.

  Both her parents had left Holland after the war, moving to West Vancouver, where they became part of the expatriate Dutch community. They filled their basement larder with Gouda rounds and smoky coils of peppered salami. Anna remembered being sent downstairs to fetch a cheese round from a wooden box packed with straw, the smell of the room, salty and tantalizing. Her parents, she thought now, staring down at her cross-hatchings in ink, had stocked that pantry to ward off famine.

  She had been commissioned to make a series of illustrations for a book of ABCs. She was on C. She had drawn a Siamese cat gingerly dipping its paw in a saucer of milk. The cat was a black shadow, but you could tell it was Siamese from the length of its body, its long neck and pointed ears. In testing the saucer the cat had pulled it forward, spilling milk (the paper showing through) on the black floor.

  The picture was not coming. A had been fine (an alligator in sunglasses and a straw sunhat), and B simple but effective (bananas on a wood-grained windowsill). But C was giving Anna a clog in her throat. Stepping back from the table she saw that the cat’s haunches were too large for its body. The cat had a fat ass.

  She didn’t want to work on the alphabet, anyway. Her mind was full of memories of her mother, now dead, and her mother’s friends, with their opinionated, accented voices, their almost rude way of speaking. Why think of them now? Because they were in her head, that was all, suddenly present. Her mother’s voice: Anna, bring the cheese—why do you take so long?

  She remembered being at Bachelor Bay with them all, a pebbled beach in Howe Sound. She was about twelve, with fine hair to her waist. When she moved, the insides of her legs did not rub together. She dove in and swam to a log boom, where she lay on her back feeling the wash of the boom as the ferry waves hit, the shagginess of the bark against her skin. Afterward, as she swam back toward the mothers on the beach, the tips of her white, puckered fingers feathered the green water. All but her head was invisible, and she could see the mothers clearly, laughing and talking, flapping sand from towels. They were dressed in silly outfits like clowns, one-piece bathing suits in red and white stripes, lime green and neon orange. Her own mother wore a bathing cap covered in flashing sequins.

  These women with their sulky, recalcitrant bodies, with pubic bushes escaping their coverings, with breasts that sagged, these women, these mothers—they didn’t have a shred of nobility. That was what Anna had thought, swimming toward them, and even now she remembered the electric anger she’d felt, watching them parading farcically on the beach. They looked, one and all, as though they had lost themselves, beaten by their children’s demands, by the new algebra, by men, by the very ease of their lives.

  Fat women. That’s what they were.

  Yet once, at a different picnic, she had heard her mother’s friend Eveline say, in response to the bounty laid out on a blanket (potato salad, chicken salad, eggs and cheese and pickles), To think we ate nettle soup! Nettle soup! They all remembered it. It had turned their mouths green, tasted bitter. One step up from stone soup, Eveline said. More laughter. They dished food onto Tupperware plates and told the children to get out of the water, to stay out for an hour after eating.

  Anna shoved her pen into the inkpot. She could join those mothers on the beach now: she was their size and heft. Under her loose T-shirt she felt the Caesarean scar, a six-inch swath of her stomach frozen from the suturing after Michael’s birth, nerve endings that would never re-knit. Why think about it all? It was the cat’s fat ass that had done it. She took up the vellum sheet and ripped it in two.

  Maybe she should think of another, better word that began with C. Catatonic? Cacophony? That would be something: an alphabet book to terrify children. A might be for Apoplexy. B for Barn-burning. She could imagine the woodcut figure of the fire-starter stealing into the barn, a lit match in his hand. Behind her, a shuffle of feet. Suppressed laughter. Anna hurried across the floor and looked down the stairs. Then she slammed the studio door.

  She woke the next morning, Thursday, with the girl’s voice in her ear. Even with closed eyes Anna felt her—sour breath on her face, dirty teeth, a constrained panic in her heart.

  You should slit your wrists.

  Anna sat up, grabbing at the sheet. Kevin opened an eye.

  “You’re jumpy.”

  “A nightmare.” Anna turned to him. “I saw a child.”

  “Children can be frightening.” His eye closed again.

  She wanted to say she had seen a child the day before too, and the day before that, but she didn’t know how to explain it, and besides, Kevin seemed to have fallen back asleep. She cuddled against him, then they both flipped, and he snuggled against her back, cupping her breast. His underarms smelled, not unpleasantly, of baked beans. Slowly, as though working a complex and ancient fountain, he began to press her breast. He squeezed, pressed, and then improvised with a light jiggle. Anna felt a flicker of irritation.

  “Don’t.” She lifted his hand away.

  On the way to school Michael said, “I’ve made it into the seventh circle of Hell.” He was referring to his video game, Diablo, a battle with the living dead.

  Anna kissed his head, then watched him cross the playground. In Juliette’s classroom a pixieish girl climbed onto the art table.

  “Everybody, listen!” For a small child she had a booming voice. All commotion stopped—the mothers stripping their children of boots and raincoats, the teacher distributing yellow excursion forms. “I know where I came from!” the child cried out, full of potency and glee. “Guess where? G
uess where? Guess where?”

  “We couldn’t possibly.” The teacher gave Anna a half-smile. “Why don’t you tell us, Maeve.”

  “My daddy says I came out of my mother’s big fat hairy vagina!”

  Walking home in the rain, Anna passed a funeral at the Catholic church, six pallbearers carrying a dove-gray casket: the coffin of a woman. When Anna reached her house, she could feel the child on the other side of the door, pressed close, waiting.

  “I’m coming in.” Anna’s heart hammered, sounding like a giant’s footsteps in her ears. On the other side, the creature held a pair of pointed nail scissors. Sallow face, green mouth, hollow below the ribs.

  “Here I come.” Anna took the keys from her purse, jingling them while the child waited, scissors in hand. But no, Anna couldn’t do it. She stood, keys in her palm, then she turned and walked back along the concrete pathway, across the church lawn. But where will you go, she asked herself, if you can’t finish the breakfast cleanup, brew yourself a pot of tea, and head upstairs to make your careful bird’s-feet markings on vellum?

  Anna trudged along Tenth Avenue, cars splashing her. When she reached the railway tracks at Arbutus Street she stood looking down at them, smelling the creosote, then she began to follow them south. She could see into the backyards of people’s houses, a different view than from the road: stacks of wood, clotheslines, garbage cans, a henhouse.

  The rails were slippery from the rain, so she stepped on the ties, finding it hard to match her stride to their spread. This reminded her of a boyfriend she’d had years before who’d lived in an abandoned milk truck on a lake near Pemberton. He used to walk the railway tracks every day, four miles to the gas station to get his food, which he sometimes paid for and sometimes stole. He had become very good at balancing on the rails, jumping from one to the other. Anna had tried to jump from rail to rail too, but wasn’t nearly as good at it, and he had told her, with an ascetic’s dignity, that it would come only if she practised daily.