The rain slowed, then stopped. Her hair was soaked. Her face was soaked. Her chest was soaked. Her feet squished in her running shoes. But she couldn’t go home. What is happening to me? she thought. It seemed to her that if her mother were alive, Anna would ask her this question, pleading for the answer; though in fact, when her mother was alive, they had, for years, moved in separate spheres. It was only in the wild dusk since her death that Anna ached for her. Now, under the overcast sky, her mother seemed to be everywhere: in the grasses, in the telephone poles, the plastic bag flapping in the barbed-wire fence beside the track. Everywhere and nowhere. Anna moved down the rails, stepping, skipping a tie, stepping, crying. She had been lulled by her mother’s fullness, her hips and loose breasts (she never wore proper underclothes), the gust of long hair, braided unceremoniously, tied with a blue elastic saved from a bunch of green onions.
It was night now, and Anna was at home again. She was sitting on the bed, telling Kevin the story from beginning to end, as he changed out of his suit. He had been at a meeting, then gone for drinks with a client. It was close to nine at night. Anna described the face at the window, the walk in the rain, the sorrow, so deep, which had blossomed out of nowhere, like a sunspot, consuming her vision.
“I miss her so much,” she said, meaning her mother.
Kevin sat heavily on the bed. Anna could smell beer on his breath. Soon he’d get up, say good-night to the children, but for the moment he was calm and listening, taking their marriage seriously. He gripped her neck, giving it a massagelike squeeze. She felt tears rise. What hurt the most, she wanted to say, was that the girl was just so mean, her hate so precise, like slipping a needle in to touch bone.
“It’s because we have so much,” Anna said. “That’s why she hates us.”
“She? This ghost, you mean.”
“Because we forget about the others—”
“What others?”
“You know.” The starving children, she meant. The refugees. The nettle-eaters. She had followed the rails for miles, beyond the houses, across a trestle bridge, past the garbage dump, the backs of warehouses and pulp mills. By the river, she had looked down the embankment at a squalid timbered hut, thinking that nobody could possibly live there, then seen a teenage girl emerge from it, a Musqueam girl, in a yellow-and-green cheerleading outfit.
Kevin rubbed her back.
“Anna,” he said gently.
She knew from the way he stroked, in careful circles, what was to follow: that all this might be a mood, a fractious swing into darkness that, while always unexpected, did seem to come monthly.
“It’s not that,” she said sharply. “Don’t make light of it.”
He looked abashed but sly, as though he knew the cause of it all but had to follow her lead. And in fact her PMS did have a way of sneaking up on her, skinning her, leaving her bleak and terrified by her own life, though—and why was this?—through some deep-seated refusal to adjust, every one of her periods seemed to arrive as a surprise.
Just then, Juliette called out, wanting to be tucked in. Kevin rose in relief. At the door he turned.
“You know, Anna,” he said, “you have these highs and lows, and you always say, once you work through them, that they fuel your work. Have you been drawing?”
She felt a red spot of anger between her eyebrows. “I saw a ghost,” she said. “You’re not listening.”
But after he left the room, she felt her anger receding like a dank tide. She did have highs and lows, it was true. And they did fuel her work. She covered her eyelids with her palms. On the walk, after seeing the Musqueam girl, Anna had tasted something metallic beneath her tongue and felt a heavy creaking in her hips, like a boat pulling against its anchor. She had found a gas station and asked for the key. Under the fluorescent lights, she had pulled down her jeans and there it was—a spot of bright blood on her underwear.
Anna pressed hard with her palms and groaned. She wanted it to be more than that, she wanted clarity, she wanted the girl back right that second, so she could see the lines and angles of her face—the green lips half-open, the sallow cheeks. But it was no use. She could hear Kevin reading The House at Pooh Corner to their daughter: “You’re a Bear of Very Little Brain,” she heard. “A Bear of Very Little Brain.”
Anna got up, straightened the duvet cover and crossed the hallway to Michael’s room.
“Five minutes,” she said.
“I’m about to slay Lazarus.” He didn’t look up from the screen. A figure of doom was reflected in his glasses.
Anna went into the bathroom and stood looking out over the lace curtain, taking up the exact position where the girl had first stood. The churchyard was covered in frost. She imagined herself crossing the grass, looking up, startled.
In the very prime of her motherhood, in the thick underwater heat of it, a skinny ghost was haunting her. And Anna couldn’t explain the reasons, any more than she could explain why there were times when her life felt full and times when it was a bone scraped clean of meat, her marriage appearing, in stark clarity, as a skeleton. And this cycle seemed to be part of a larger one—privation and plenty, waxing and waning—that she could glimpse only now and then, from the corner of her eye.
A shiver flooded her cheeks and her spine. Looking at the lawn, she knew suddenly how to render the letter C. It would need a much larger sheet of paper, maybe even a canvas—something big for the new work she had been pondering: A for Armageddon, B for Bafflement.
C would stand for Cows. Not one or two—but seven, the biblical number. Seven cows, fat as fat, picking their way across a frosted meadow, udders heavy with milk. While lolling up from a creek behind them, emerging out of mud and inky blackness, would come the first of their emaciated sisters.
Now this was something she could use. She felt an urge to race upstairs, begin work while her neck hairs stood on end. But even as her mind rushed, she sensed the girl standing behind her, eyes like holes, gaunt face mirrored in the window. Anna’s back prickled with sick dread, though she knew what she had to do: she was from strong stock after all, women who had seen war. She just needed to spin, reach out, yank that child off balance into a tight lock. The ghost girl would kick and buck and bite, but Anna would hold on.
“It’s all right,” she would whisper, rocking the terrified thing in her arms. “It’s all right.”
Clams
Dear Kenneth,
Perhaps you don’t remember me, and if not I will understand. It was a long time ago. More than half a century. Who could imagine time passing so quickly?
I lived in a beach house near Lund. We used to go out clamming together.
Does that ring a bell now?
You rolled up your pants and I said you had “city feet,” because you made such a fuss about walking over barnacles.
I saw you mentioned in a column in The Vancouver Sun. It said you were retiring after a long and esteemed career at the bar. Not having had much of an esteemed career myself, at first I thought you had been a bartender. Then I saw you’d been on the board of Weyerhaeuser Paper, which is a far cry from slinging drinks!
I read your name and I saw you clear as life, bounding through the heather. That was how I always pictured you, when you weren’t with me. Bounding up that mountain near where you came from in England, a book of poetry in your pocket. Then the memories flooded back, just like it was yesterday. The butter clams we dug up, and how a bucket of them went rotten on my porch and gave off an awful smell. How big the stars were that summer. Who could forget that? Us lying on the beach on my tartan blanket, a million stars overhead, so many of which turned out to have names. Beetlejuice was a name I remember—how about that! I still can’t believe any scientist in his right mind would name a star Beetlejuice.
I suppose I ought to fill you in on my present circumstances. When Frank retired, we moved to Victoria. He died three years ago. He said h
e had a funny feeling in his left arm above the elbow. I said: “Funny ha-ha, or funny peculiar?” I didn’t want to be callous, but those were the last words I spoke to him. He sat in the shade of the house to do the crossword and had a heart attack.
Kenneth Farraday, I do not expect you to get this letter, let alone answer it. But if you do, I’ll let you know this. That summer was the happiest time of my life. I am at the Ogilvie Care Home for Seniors, if you ever find yourself “crossing the seas” to Victoria.
Sincerely, Priscilla King
Kenneth looked up from the letter. Outside his study window the lawn sloped to a border of rhododendrons with gnarled, rain-slick branches. His pride and joy. That was what Deirdre, his wife, called the rhododendrons: “Kenneth’s pride and joy,” suggesting a simpleness in him, he supposed, as well as misplaced priorities. In June they flamed orange and scarlet, but now they were covered in sticky buds. Beyond the hedges and cedars of the British Properties he could see the suspension rigging of the Lions Gate Bridge, and beyond that, the city’s bony cliff faces.
He could hear Deirdre and his eldest daughter, Jennifer, having coffee in the kitchen. Jennifer had come to pick up their grandson after a morning with his grandmother, and the two women were murmuring about his likes and dislikes, his fussiness, his learning disability. Kenneth found his grandson difficult to be around, and blamed Jennifer for having cut his hair in bangs that emphasized his oddness.
“He’s peculiar enough,” Kenneth had muttered to Deirdre before Jennifer arrived, as the boy slurped milk out of his saucer. “Must he also have a peculiar haircut?”
Deirdre had shot him a look from under dark eyebrows, a look of frustration verging on fury. Verging on hatred. In menopause she had gotten used to speaking her mind with a blunt force that had shocked him, and the habit had not left her a decade and a half later.
“He’s your grandson.” She moved her mouth hard. “Show some compassion.”
“It is with great compassion that I have pointed out his unfortunate haircut.”
Kenneth had picked up his tray of tea and taken it to the study with the mail, leaving Deirdre with her chalkboard of tasks, machine messages from the Georgia Strait Alliance, and her simmering pot of osso bucco.
I saw you, clear as life, bounding up that mountain.
He must have told her about Urra Moor, and the image had somehow lodged in her brain, a sliver he carried too, almost painful to draw out now: running up Urra Moor in the morning, birds scattering out of the gorse, a mule deer watching his scramble. How the blood had raced through his hands and arms and shoulders. He had found a stick and waved it, infatuated with the surge of adrenalin through his body.
Funny that she—Priscilla King—had held on to this memory of a place she had never seen, while Deirdre did not even know the name Urra Moor, though he may have told her about it when he was courting her. He remembered Deirdre descending the stairs of the Vancouver Club in a lemon-chiffon dress and gloves. Her father had been an important member. When Kenneth drove her home that night, he had parked at Spanish Banks and pulled up the hem of her dress, stiff as a ballerina’s costume, and touched her knee, then the birthmark high on her left thigh. Perhaps, after that bout of rumpled thrusting, they had lit cigarettes and he had told her about Urra Moor. But he doubted it.
Priscilla King’s handwriting was neatly formed, the s’s like small sails, the g’s and y’s curled neatly beneath each line.
I saw you clear as life.
How odd of her to write to him. The gambit of a lonely widow. Pathetic. And what book of poetry was she referring to? He had taken a couple of classes in English and Philosophy while getting his degree in forestry, before he hunkered down and focused on law. He couldn’t recall carrying a poetry book in his pocket. What a poseur he must have been!
But now he could not stay still. He put on his rubber boots, slid open the glass door and crossed the lawn to the border of rhododendron, where he snapped away twigs, then fetched a box of bone meal from the shed, scattering handfuls among the moss.
Kenneth had met Priscilla King the summer he worked in Lund, which was the farthest town you could drive north to from Vancouver, along the coastal road: past Howe Sound, Gibsons, Jervis Inlet. By day Kenneth had worked in the bush with three other forestry students, Hungarian refugees who had escaped to British Columbia. Together, they measured stream heights, analyzed sediment, bushwhacked trails. He remembered lying in his bunk in the afternoon listening to them play cards. The creosote smell of the cabin, the slap of cards as he traced a knothole with his forefinger, thinking of Priscilla. It must have been a Sunday because he still remembered the anticipation in his stomach waiting for Frank to be gone, back onto his boat. Then Kenneth would wander down the beach, around three coves, to her cabin with its tarpaper roof. Always look for the warning: if she had hung a red towel on the porch rail, a rock weighing it down, then Frank was there.
She was Frank’s wife, a fisherman’s wife, another man’s woman, and this, for Kenneth, was like an aphrodisiac: to taste, to eat of her flesh, to dive into her, to beat himself against her bones, knowing she was another man’s wife, made him flush with desire as he lay on that bunk, surrounded by the smell of socks. When she moaned, he thought: I made her moan more than Frank. When she thrashed, he thought: Can Frank do that? He was stealing her, having his way illicitly. He even remembered whispering Frank’s wife as he kissed her, noticing how she flinched. That, too, was erotic, to hurt her ever so gently. He had been young: affecting any woman had felt exhilarating and dangerous.
Only a year before, he had left North Yorkshire. Mother and Father. Tea at the rectory. He had roamed across Canada feeling like a black sheep, the bad youngest son, though in fact he was the only son, with two doting sisters, Dodie and Kitty. He had a notion about himself, which had to do with pouring himself into the Canadian vastness, submerging himself beneath massive, breathing conifers. After one lice-infested season in a logging camp near Squamish, he had amended his plans, writing to his father for money, enrolling in the University of BC’s new forestry department. That was why he was in Lund with three Hungarians who drank dark beer and called to each other in their bunks at night, leaving Kenneth to speculate on the salty crack in Priscilla’s ass.
Even now (under the rhododendron’s waxy leaves) he remembered the fish scales on her tanned shoulders, tiny, reflective and sharp. The sand in her hair. She had been a kind of beach relic, aged, scaly, sandy. She had shown him places to lick—inner ear, belly button—and every time, because he was young and cocky, it had felt like a conquest. Only once, after they had collected clams, lying on top of her on the tartan blanket, he had been surprised to feel tears at the corners of his eyes. Gratitude? Relief? Pent-up chemical exuberance?
He did not answer Priscilla King’s letter.
Instead he waited for a month, and then he lied to Deirdre, telling her he would be lunching with the Weyerhaeuser advisory committee, then going to the club. She would not be home until late; she had her Georgia Strait Alliance board meeting. Then Kenneth took the ferry to Victoria.
He found a spot by the window, placing his coat and scarf on the seat beside him. They passed the tip of a Gulf island, a red-painted government wharf. Sights like this must have been part of Priscilla’s life, for years and years, as she and Frank returned from fishing on his seiner. And now a voice began to intone, a rocking cadence beneath the engine’s hum:
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
And then, almost like his father’s voice, it was so fever-sharp:
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress—
Where had these voices been? Gone, that was all.
Clamming: you place you
r socks inside your shoes and put them on a rock above the high-tide mark. She looks at your feet, which have never seen a day’s sun, and she says, “Time to toughen those tootsies, Kenneth.”
And you say, “Alliteration, Priscilla.”
She smiles radiantly, exposing an incisor inex-pertly filled with silver.
“You don’t know what alliteration is, do you, Priscilla?”
She walks down the beach, not caring.
You call, “Priscilla prances precisely over provocative pebbles,” and she turns and you know you will lie on top of her tonight, her in all her perplexity and supplicant moaning, her womanly needs.
Come on, Kenneth. I’m going to teach you to catch clams.
I thought they just lay in their shells, and you scooped them up.
After the clamming, he’d gone for a night swim then come up the beach, wrapped in a towel. She was on the blanket, crying. He threw himself down beside her.
“Prissy. You’re a mess.”
“Maybe I’ll kill myself,” she said, conversationally. “I have pills. The doctor gave them to me.”
“Are you crazy?”
“Maybe I am.” She lit a cigarette, blew smoke toward the scrim of stars. “You leave. You go to your university. I stay.”
He kissed the salty tears from her temple, feeling both sorry for her and distanced, in another land, walking among other people, discussing Plato and Locke, discussing Milton.
After that summer, for years, if he saw a seiner crossing the Strait, the words Frank’s wife would flit through his mind, along with the taste of sex in the setting sun—and that was it.
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