In the morning we woke up and found Tom and Irene sprawled together on the motel couch, their arms and legs tangled, Irene’s hair spread out against Tom’s hands.
This is my most vivid memory of my father: he was leaning over the veranda, his white shirt brilliant in the sun. Something about seeing him standing there, the neighborhood quiet in the background, made me want to confide in him. My father reached his hand down to rest on my shoulder. I held up the badminton birdie we had buried in mud. “Guess who gave this to me,” I said.
My father raised his eyebrows.
“I got it from Tom.”
“Tom who?” He took his handkerchief out and folded it once, then again.
“Tom from Sports and Leisure,” I said. I explained that Tom came to visit all the time. And he brought us presents. Badminton rackets and bouncy balls. He and Irene sat up here in the afternoons, drinking and doing nothing. But I was sure that she liked him. The way she laughed all afternoon.
“Is that right?” my father said, after a moment. “And what do you think of Tom?”
I shrugged. “He’s nice.”
We stood quietly then, admiring the backyard. My father said he had always disliked the fence. It was made of cinder blocks stacked up one by one but he would much prefer a wooden gate. Then he turned and walked into the house. I stood looking at the yard. My sisters were playing on the tire swing, sitting spider, face-to-face, their arms and legs entwined. They swung back and forth and finally they looked up at me as if they knew what I had said, but they just kept swinging, the yellow rope extending out, my sisters hugging each other. I stood by myself, scared suddenly by what I had done.
When my father came home the next afternoon, and Irene forced us upstairs, I should have said then that I’d made a mistake, but I didn’t. Irene started packing. She took the hot dogs from the freezer and threw them in with our T-shirts and sweaters. Tom had to do everything all over again. My sisters and I just sat and watched, nodding silently or shaking our heads, rejecting the extra sweater, accepting the crayons. Staring dumbly at Tom while he combed our hair and gave us grilled cheese sandwiches. I thought my father would return and everything would reverse itself. When Tom pushed the suitcase closed I started to cry. “I didn’t mean it,” I told Tom, hitting his chest with my fists. “I said I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.” He picked me up and I kicked at him but it did no good. Irene kept bringing things out to the car, one box after another. Tom held on to me, though I was awkward, my arms and legs shooting out. I cried so hard his shirt was soaked. He whispered into my ear so that no one would hear, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, too. I’m sorry,” until I was finally quiet.
In the car, Tom took me with him into the front seat. When the car stopped at the intersections, he would look over at me without speaking. He would rest his hand on my knee, a moment of consolation, until the car began moving once more.
Eventually, it was Tom my sisters went to, instead of Irene. They told him about their boyfriends, the girls in school, the nights they crept out of the house and slept on the beach. They saw his sympathy, I think. When Irene had her breakdowns, they saw how he comforted her and didn’t let go until she was well again.
My father had never been so patient with her, but even so, I yearned for him. I would try to get Irene to talk about him but she would shake her head, say, “Why do you ask me these things?” Once she asked me if I was trying, really trying to make her crazy, and another time, if I still had not forgiven her.
“This is the way things worked out,” she said. “It does no good trying to imagine it differently.”
From the time I was seven, I wrote to my father. His letters, though few and far between, were caring though restrained. After years of writing to him, I found it difficult to get past the first few sentences. Dear Dad, I’d write. I hope you are keeping well. I’d write about North Bend, or respond to the questions he asked about school. Dear Dad, I wrote once. I am very sorry for everything that has happened, but I never sent this letter. It was like writing a confession to someone from a dream. My father, himself, gave only the most general details of his life, and never asked for more from me. I can’t blame him really. He probably still imagined me as a six-year-old child; he did not know me otherwise.
Not long ago, I said to Irene, “Did you ever know that I was the one who told? I was the one who gave everything away.”
“If it wasn’t you, it would have been one of the others.” She shrugged. “It’s over, in any case, and I’m not sorry.”
I should have asked Irene why everyone else could pick up and go on, when that was the thing I found most difficult. Who left who, I often wondered. In the end, who walked away with the least resistance.
Over time, it was easy to love North Bend. That first year, we spent countless afternoons on the boulevard, watching the tourists. They moved in great, wide groups, clutching ice-cream cones and cameras. At the tourist office, they posed beside the World’s Largest Frying Pan — the town’s main attraction. The frying pan is sixty feet high and stands upright, wooden handle pointing to the sky. Tom told us it was given to the town in 1919, as a tribute to the women who stayed behind during the First World War.
Irene laughed and nodded her head. “It’s big,” she said, peering up along the carved wood handle. “A great big pan.”
Come winter, the tourists disappeared and half the shops boarded up for the off-season. One afternoon, Tom ushered my sisters and me up to the frying pan and sat us down on the lip. The chill wind blew our hair all messy and Tom snapped a picture, the three of us hugging each other, laughing into the cold. Then we all started off along the waterfront, Tom closing his eyes and walking blindly across the sand. He let a gust of wind push him forward, his feet stumbling through the foam and water. We laughed, holding our arms out too, tossing about like dizzy birds, the wind tripping us up. Tom pretended to lose his balance, falling sideways on the ground, the freezing tide pouring over him. He sat up, laughing and spitting while we stood over his body, pretending to stomp him.
“No, no,” Irene said. “You’ll catch your death of cold.”
We pretended to kick Tom in the stomach. “Enough!” he roared, leaping up, shaking foam and water from his head. My sisters and I scattered along the beach while he ran after us, Irene’s voice barely audible in the background. “No! Stop it! Jesus Christ, be careful!”
That afternoon, he snapped close-ups of us, the lens of his camera inches from our faces, our hair tangling in front. Days later, he put a picture of Irene and the three of us up on the wall, my sisters and I transformed into bold sea creatures, the clouds and the sky brimming behind us. “What about you?” Helen asked, when we stood admiring the photograph. “Why didn’t you put up one of you?”
“Me?” he said, laughing. “I’m just the photographer, nothing more.”
Irene stared hard at the picture, her expression sad all of a sudden. She looked from Tom to us, as if from a great distance, then she turned and left the room. Tom did what my father had never done — he followed her, down the front steps, into the street. From inside, we could see the two of them standing together, heads touching, a moment of stillness, before they started back to the house.
One night, when Joanne was seventeen, she came home drunk and sick. She and Tom sat on the front steps all night. Her boyfriend, she wept, was sleeping with someone named Elsa, and had been for months. Joanne stomped up and down the stairs in frustration, then collapsed on the bottom step. “I don’t even like him anyway,” she sobbed, “so why does it hurt so much?”
Irene and I sat at the kitchen table, eavesdropping. There was no response from Tom.
Joanne told him she was sick of North Bend, sick of living by the water, the floods in winter. Listening to her, I thought of the groups of old men leaning their fishing lines out the back of their pickups, reeling fish in from the highway, how Joanne and I used to drive by and watch them. She told Tom she didn’t know what to do next, thought alternately of ru
nning away, of drowning herself. There was no way she was going back to school.
“Why don’t you run away, then?”
She started crying again. “Why do you want me to leave?”
Tom’s voice was tired. “It’s not a lack of love. I don’t want you drowning. That’s all.” He gave her five hundred dollars right there. Irene didn’t interfere. She sat at the kitchen table, letting Tom do what he thought was right. In the morning Joanne packed her things and left, caught a bus straight out of Oregon and headed north. My sister Helen moved out not long after. She’d met a bio-technologist from Vancouver and married him. We threw a big party for her at the house, then they drove away to Canada.
These days, our town is visited by many tourists. They come from far and wide. On a Saturday during the busy season, the cars hail from every state, from Alaska to New Jersey, and from all across Canada.
I am in charge of the walking tours, the 9:30, 12:15, and 3:00 groups. We start at the town hall and head east along the boulevard, past Flotsam & Jetsam, the Whale’s Tail, and Circus World, with its natural and unnatural artifacts — fish dishes, glass buoys, bone fossils. Circus World boasts the skeleton of a half-goat, half-human boy, mounted in a glass case. For one dollar, you can buy a snapshot of him and send it, postage paid, anywhere in the country. The tour ends at the big frying pan.
It’s the why of it that nobody understands. I tell my father’s version of the story, the frying pan as war memorial, erected as a tribute to the women who stayed behind. Then I tell my mother’s version, the frying pan for the sake of the frying pan, one monumental gesture. North Bend’s Eiffel Tower, the wooden handle visible for miles.
The Japanese tourists giggle, cupping their hands to their mouths. But the big East Coast men with Hawaiian shirts and baseball caps tell me, “You can never have a thing too big. We’ve got the skyscrapers, you know. Skyscrapers. Unbelievable.” They tilt their heads back then, and focus on the air above.
Tom and Irene own a sporting-goods store in North Bend, selling things like scuba gear, flippers, and surfboards. In the mornings, Tom takes a walk inland, just for the pleasure of turning around again and walking downhill to the ocean. Irene stands on the front steps looking out for him. She has a longing for him. I could be standing right beside her and she wouldn’t even know me.
I am thirty years old and I don’t know if I will ever leave this town. I should, of course, just to see the world. But I would want to come back here. Some changes happen so slowly, you can’t know until it’s done — my parents aging, the beach washing back from the water. Maybe when I am sixty, the town itself will have receded. All of us who stay here will creep backwards too, watching and watching for change, then being surprised when it strikes us, out of the blue. No reason but the fact that it is all different. In our house uphill from the ocean, Irene and Tom and I sit in the kitchen reading books and magazines. From morning until night we can hear the water and the wind and the two mixing together. At night, I can hear their voices through the walls, and the past finally seems right in its place. Not everything, not large, but still present.
Alchemy
In my memory, I followed Paula to the end of the aisle, past the hair products, shampoos, the colored lights, through an empty mall, a parking lot, Granville Street at night with kids and adults panhandling, to a bus all lit up, down a quiet street to her house, where she closed the door behind her, smiling. I stood on the lawn outside. From there I could see everything: the back shed, the porch with the rabbit hutch, her open window with the blue curtains billowing out. Before disappearing she had said, “The rabbits are gone,” and I understood that as a sign. Move on, she was telling me. I’m on my own now. So I left her.
I remembered that last night. I had wanted a sign from Paula. Not everyone believes in signs. But the more you need them, the more you see and the more you believe. I found a white hair today and pulled it out. I call that a sign. After all, sixteen is young.
In school we’ve been learning about time. How human beings have hardly put a dent in it. If the history of the earth were mapped against a single year, we would only show up on December 31, at 4:11 in the afternoon. I would have told Paula that, and we would have mulled it over late at night. We would have laughed and said that, in the history of the earth, she and I, her father and mother and Jonah, were nothing. They would fall away from us without a bruise or a scratch. We could blow them off our bodies. We could say, with confidence, that in the grand scheme of things, in the long run, they meant as little as dust. “Less,” Paula would say. And I would say, “Less.”
Paula’s mom worked downtown at the Hotel Vancouver. She was a housekeeper and smelled of fresh sheets and mild sweat. She always came home first, hung her coat neatly in the closet, unbuttoned the first three buttons of her blouse, and started cooking. Paula’s father was a gruff yet caring man. He fixed cars for a living, came home with grease under his fingernails and the smell of oil on his skin.
I preferred Paula’s home to mine and so I stayed over at her house most nights. At dinner, Paula’s dad once said to me, “Do you know how much it costs to keep an extra body, Miriam? Tell your parents to pay up.”
Her mom made a noise like, “Ssss, shush.” Paula stared at her plate, motionless. Her dad shook his head, apparently hurt, and picked up his knife and fork. “Eh, Jesus. I’m kidding, okay? Can’t I do that in my own home? Any friend of Paula’s is welcome here.” The four of us ate quietly. Paula’s mom brought out drinks, cola for me and Paula, Molson’s for her dad, water for herself. She brought out dessert, a Boston cream pie, leftover from the hotel kitchen that day.
Afterwards, in the bathroom, I stood back while Paula threw up dinner. Her hair, bleached blond, stuck to her face. She rinsed her mouth and said, “I only throw up dinners. You only have an eating disorder if you throw up everything.” Paula told me that there were four kinds of bodies: the X, the A, the Y, and the O. “You’re an X,” she said, “small waist and evenly proportioned chest and butt.” She turned sideways. “What do you think I am?”
“An X.”
“Wrong,” she smirked. “Nice try. I’m more of an A. Heavy on the bottom.” She picked up my wrist and measured it with her fingers. Her thumb and index finger touched. “You’re lucky. Everyone wants to be an X.”
We stayed up late, talking about Jonah and how the halls were empty because the senior boys had gone away to play basketball and about how our math teacher had hair growing on his back. If you stood behind him, you could see it push past his collar, a hairy finger. Paula and I pressed our faces into the pillows and laughed. A breeze came and blew her curtains back into the room, light from a passing car travelling down the wall, across our beds, and gone. She said, “Move in here. Why don’t you just move into the spare bedroom? If you hate your family so much, you might as well, don’t you think?”
“I don’t hate them.”
“Well, whatever. You hardly go home anyway.”
“I’ll ask,” I said, though I knew I wouldn’t. In my home, we barely spoke. My parents had long since given up on their marriage. They were busy working, making ends meet, and hardly noticed whether I was home or not.
“We could be sisters then.” Paula lay back on her pillow. “We’ll share everything.”
Paula wanted to be a veterinarian. That meant that, after dark, we’d slip out of her house and into the backyard, where her mom kept hutch rabbits. Once a week, at supper time, her mom pulled one or two from the cage, broke their necks, skinned their bodies, and drained the blood in the kitchen sink. She made rabbit stew, simmering the meat until it was tender, and you could smell the potatoes and carrots and meat all through the house and down the street.
The first time we snuck outside, Paula unlatched the door and poked her face up to the cage. “Be free,” she whispered. “Be free or be stew.” The rabbits came and stood in the long grass, their noses twitching. We lay down, and they crawled timidly on top of us, onto our heads. “They like our ha
ir,” Paula told me. “They feel safe there.” She tried to coax them across the backyard, crouching on her hands and knees, leading the way to the fence. But they were nervous and would only take a few loping steps before something scared them, a bird overhead, a motorcycle on Knight Street. They scampered back to their hutch.
“What can we do?” Paula asked. “They’re not wild, after all.”
We stayed out on the back lawn listening to the traffic. At one point, a light came on in the kitchen and we froze. Paula’s dad stood at the window, a glass of water in his hand. He took forever to drink it, staring straight at us through the glass, but we trusted the dark and willed ourselves invisible. When the light in the kitchen went off, we breathed easy again, felt the chill in the wind, came back to life.
The nights I slept over, I would wake up with my face in Paula’s hair. It leaped away from her, full of static. The smell would wake me up, apples and dish soap and sweat. I wondered what it would be like to wake up beside someone night after night, hair in your face, legs crossing heavily under the blankets. If the smell and feel would tire you out, like it had my mom and dad. They slept in separate rooms, Mom on the couch and Dad in the bedroom. Sometimes they sat in the same room though neither of them would acknowledge the other. They had perfected it, made it an art to see something but believe it wasn’t there.
Once, when Paula and I were lying in bed, she asked me, “Are you a virgin still?”
“Of course,” I said, thinking of Jonah. I stared at her fingers on the top of the blanket, spread out and still. “Aren’t you?”
She lifted her hands, holding them over our heads like planets, constellations, something we’d never seen up close. “I’m not sure,” she said.
We lay together quietly under the blankets. For a long time lying there, I wondered if I should say something more, but then the moment passed. I could hear her breathing grow heavier. Before she fell asleep, she turned over and held on to me. Her grip was so plaintive that I felt sorry for her and held on, too. I had the sense that some things were impossible for her to say.
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