Home Schooling

by Carol Windley

  The unhappy excursion in the boat had been all Simon’s idea, not mine, but I did feel responsible for the way things had turned out. While we waited for the tide to float us free, we sat on the bow of the boat and drank beer and passed a bag of stale potato chips back and forth. On one of the adjacent islands a party was going on, five or ten kids out on the lawn in front of a house, a Rolling Stones song blasting out across the water. I loved the Stones, but it was true the music seemed to get caught in the recalcitrant ocean currents and the burning heat of the sun, becoming oppressive, inescapable. Simon stood, hands on his hips, at the boat’s rail and yelled across the water at the kids to shut up, shut the fuck up. Naturally they responded by shouting obscenities in return, parodying Simon’s anger, jumping around like apes, beating their chests. I had to smile. I saw the scene through their eyes: the middle-aged man, his naked sparrow’s chest, his gut slack over the waistband of khaki shorts. Me in my pink two-piece bathing suit, my ponytail. The adamantine sky. The sinking ship. I was starting to enjoy myself. In my head, I began to compose a poem. I felt myself grow distant from the scene. I viewed Simon objectively, coldly. Then again I allowed myself to look at him with pure affection and warmth. I imagined that he would, in front of our motley teenaged audience, begin to make love to me. I slipped my bathing suit straps off my shoulders and stretched out in front of the cabin window, now somewhat aslant, to sunbathe. I intended to look voluptuous and irresistible, but instead I fell asleep. When I woke thirty minutes or so later, we were underway.

  Dr. Bergius repeated his advice, telling me I should rub cold cream on my sunburn; I should have a cool bath and let the water soak into my skin. “Let me bring you a glass of water and an Aspirin,” he said, and I said, “No, I’m fine, really.” I wished he would go back to his office. He had this sad, far-off look on his face. “Perhaps one day I will have a chance to talk with your mother at greater length,” he said. “I must see what I can do.”

  His interest was unwarranted enough to seem like trespass. He went down the hall, then turned abruptly and walked back to his office and shut the door. I depressed a few typewriter keys softly, without leaving a mark on the page. I liked being a copywriter, even if I wasn’t very good at it yet. The stuff I wrote wasn’t beautiful, or poetic, or even especially true. I knew it was mostly junk. Even so, if I did manage to write something that seemed okay, even more than okay, brilliant, perfect, I sat there reading to myself over and over the lines of faded type on the cheap yellow paper.

  In the back porch of our house Bethany hung bunches of everlasting flowers to dry. In the winter she took the dried flower heads and separated the petals, spreading them out on the kitchen table. Then, using a pair of tweezers, she painstakingly glued each individual petal to a sheet of paper. The petals formed textured designs that represented birds or deer or flowers. Once, she did an evening landscape, a sky of gold and mauve and crimson above a field of russet-browns. She liked it enough to hang it on the kitchen wall. That summer I took it down and ran my fingers slowly over the rough, prickly surface. I felt within myself a corresponding irritability. Felt skies, I thought.

  Since that day in Dr. Bergius’s office, I had learned that Rilke’s mother had wanted a daughter, not a son. Her disappointment made her spiteful, and she forced Rilke to pretend he was a girl; she took hours to comb his hair into fat, silky ringlets. She pinched his pale cheeks to give them some colour. I thought of Dr. Bergius listening in some long-ago twilight as his mother read to him — a simple, motherly act he’d spent his whole life trying to repay. Then I began to think about Bethany’s mother, my grandmother, whose coldness and remove were incomprehensible to me. Bethany had run away from home when she was eighteen, because her parents wouldn’t give their permission for her to get married. And then, when things hadn’t worked out with the man she’d loved and she got pregnant with me, she’d tried to go home, but her mother refused to see her. Clearly, there were shades, gradations, in the spectrum of parental love that were dangerous, extreme, yet somehow, in the end, tolerable. Bethany said she didn’t blame her mother, not any longer: people were what they were, she said. And I suppose I didn’t blame my father. Not entirely. I wished I knew, though, what had caused his sudden flight or banishment, because that would tell me something, wouldn’t it? Tell me something about myself. Bethany promised one day she’d tell me everything. One day.

  But that day never arrived. Bethany was always too busy cultivating and nurturing all those fragile, needy plants. In her garden shed she kept poisons to eradicate disease, fertilizers to encourage growth. She had little sharp scissors and knives to cut out dead or stunted shoots. She was a horticulturist; she was a woodswoman. Her hands were sinewy and tanned and muscular, and looked as if they rightfully belonged to someone else. That summer, the summer of 1974, the summer the American president resigned from office and received a full pardon — an event that came to serve as a kind of neutral marker in my mind — I found her in a far corner of the garden. She was wandering among the great massed shapes of shadow and light in a kind of trance, her eyes shining, her dress stained with grass and dirt. I said her name and she didn’t hear me. I went right up to her and put my hands on her shoulders. The air between us became as clear and untroubled as glass. We were our twinned selves, like to like. We were in a dream. It was a good dream, mostly, all the menace and danger kept manageably distant, like a thunderstorm far out at sea.

  If I sat on the edge of the raft-shaped deck in front of Simon’s house and extended my legs far enough, I could just skim the surface with my toes. This evening the water was dark, turbid, as if the passage of a deep-sea creature had recently stirred up the mud at the bottom. When Simon had nothing better to do, he fished for bullheads from the deck. When he caught one, he removed the hook from its mouth and tossed it back into the water. He stretched out on his stomach and scooped jellyfish out of the water with his hands and let them melt into a silvery puddle on the hot, rough wood planks. “That’s cruelty to animals,” I told him. Simon laughed. He stood and looked down at me. “You can’t be cruel to a jellyfish, Rachel,” he said. “Being melted alive is what they were born for. Jellyfish karma.”

  I believed a jellyfish could experience pain and fear. Everything could, every single thing. I got up and went into Simon’s kitchen, where he was stepping over Mitzy to get to the fridge. Mitzy was fourteen years old, which was pretty old for a dog of her size and breed, Simon said. Plus she had a heart condition and cataracts, which caused her to keep bumping into walls. “Look at this. I’m out of bloody dog food,” Simon said. He took a slice of cheese out of the fridge, unwrapped it, and threw it on the floor. Mitzy heaved herself up and staggered forward. “Here, here, dummy,” Simon said, pointing at the cheese. I knelt on the floor and rubbed the space between Mitzy’s ears. The dog stared at me with her milky, sorrowful eyes. I broke the cheese into little pieces and fed them to her. Simon filled Mitzy’s water bowl with fresh water and put it on the floor beside the fridge. He poured two glasses of whiskey and handed one to me. Then we went into the living room, where we sat on the couch, which was covered in a blue and green afghan that Mitzy had slept on so much her coarse golden hair was woven right into the wool. Simon put his arm around my shoulder. He took my glass and put it on the floor next to his. Then he kissed me. His mouth tasted of metal, the same metallic smell my hands got from my old typewriter at the radio station. He placed his hands on my shoulders and increased the pressure until I was flat on my back. I didn’t try to resist. I was curious, mainly, about what would happen next. I was listening to Maria Muldaur on the radio singing Simon’s favourite song, “Midnight at the Oasis,” about moonlight and shadows and sending camels off to bed and I’ll be a belly dancer and you can be a sheik, and at the same time I was thinking of the foreign films Simon and I went to see in Victoria. Here it was, at last, I thought: the seduction scene. It was and at the same time it wasn’t. Not a garment was removed. Not a word was spoken. Simon moved heavily against
me. I stared over his shoulder at the wall, at a pale unsteady circle of light that made me think of sprites and demons, although I knew it was nothing more than the last of the day’s light reflecting off the sea. Simon cradled my head in his hands. He lay still. It was finished, whatever it was. Whatever it was supposed to be. He sat up and wiped his face with a corner of the afghan. “There,” he said. “Virginity intact.”

  I sat up. I pulled the end of my ponytail forward and twisted it around my fingers. What happened? I wanted to ask, but didn’t dare, in case he got mad, or thought I was unbelievably dumb. Even though Simon was sitting next to me I felt intensely lonely. Had he meant my virginity, or his? He didn’t know that I was a virgin, he didn’t know that at all.

  “How’s your drink?” he asked. He picked up my glass and tried to give it to me.

  “I don’t want it,” I said.

  “Go on, finish it up like a good girl,” he said.

  “I can’t,” I said. I covered my mouth with my hands.

  He pulled my hands away and put the glass to my mouth. “Open up,” he kept saying. I pressed my hands to my throat and swallowed. I felt sick, panicky, as if I was on the verge of an attack of some kind. Outside, the light was fading away. The little circle of spinning light on the wall was gone. The air felt cooler on my hot skin. My throat burned. I hated the taste of whisky; I despised it.

  In August, Dr. Bergius telephoned my mother and invited us to his house for dinner Saturday evening. She accepted for both of us. “Why didn’t you tell him you were busy?” I said, exasperated. I had to phone Simon and tell him I couldn’t go out with him on his boat. He’d planned what he called a “leisurely cruise,” to make up for the earlier fiasco. “Oh, it wasn’t that bad,” I said, on the phone. Thinking about it, I began to believe this was true. I remembered the rock music from the party travelling with subdued energy across the water. I remembered the boat rocking as if it were a cradle, the blue sky overhead, gulls mewling.

  “Oh, come on, it was a disaster,” Simon said. “You don’t owe your boss your weekends, for Christ’s sake.” He slammed the phone down. The next morning, he phoned to apologize. He said he’d put the boat trip off until Sunday. “That’s if you don’t have any important dinner engagements,” he said. There was peevishness to his voice that I couldn’t help associating with age, with illogical crankiness and permanent bad humour. But I was more concerned that his bad mood was a natural response to my failings, my inadequacies. If I were older, I told myself, my mother wouldn’t still be making decisions for me. And then, as if to prove that I was indeed childish, I took my anger out on Bethany. I told her she’d be sorry — Dr. Bergius was a weirdo, a crank, a madman who quoted poetry all the time. She told me she’d be happy to have dinner with a madman if it meant I’d be with her and not with Simon. Bethany was fanatical; she’d even offered me money if I’d stop seeing Simon. I told her it wasn’t enough. It’s all I can afford, she’d said, laughing, but close to tears. If you could just try to get home before midnight, she had said. That’s all I ask. I don’t want you driving home from Venice Bay late at night on that road. And then she said, “Does Simon drive when he’s been drinking?”

  “No, “I retorted. “Of course not.”

  I followed her around the garden while she cut an armful of roses to take to Dr. Bergius. I wanted to grab the roses away from her and throw them on the ground. She was wearing a long blue skirt and an eyelet-lace blouse. She had on lipstick the same pale pink as the roses. She looked very pretty. When she scratched her hand on a rose thorn and pressed her hand to her mouth, I wished I could take the pain from her and bear it myself. When I was a little girl, I used to tell Bethany I was going to be rich some day and buy her a beautiful house and a new car. The other dream I had when I was a child was that my father would turn up. He would come home and fall in love with Bethany all over again. He would pick me up and toss me in the air. He was strong and dextrous and cheerful. He’d fix the hinges on the back door and overhaul the furnace when it broke down in the middle of a winter snowstorm.

  Dr. Bergius lived at the end of a private drive bordered by tall poplars. Sunlight came fitfully through the leaves, so that Bethany and I seemed to be driving through a more fluid medium than air. The house, when it came into view, was white with a red tile roof. Beyond, there was a pond on which white birds, swans or geese, were floating. It seemed full of hope and possibilities, as if it had once occupied a central place in a story that concluded: And they lived happily ever after. It was exactly the kind of splendid property Bethany deserved to have, I thought.

  Bethany got out of the car and presented the roses to Dr. Bergius, who had come marching out from behind his house to greet us. He was wearing a long chef’s apron over a blue shirt and grey slacks. His silver hair was glistening with some kind of oil. “Why,” he said, “look at this. No one ever brings me flowers.”

  “It’s a modern rose,” Bethany said. “There are old-fashioned roses and modern ones. The modern ones are bigger and they last longer.”

  “Ah,” said Dr. Bergius. “I didn’t know. I’m afraid I have no luck with roses. The leaves turn black. The blossoms turn brown.”

  “Gardening can break your heart as well as your back,” Bethany said. Dr. Bergius laughed uproariously. He shepherded us around to the back of the house, where a picnic table had been set for dinner with green and gold china. Then he disappeared into the house and returned with the roses in a vase, which he set on the table. “Very festive,” he said. “A perfect match for my lovely guests.”

  Bethany shook her head and smiled. “That’s very kind,” she said.

  We ate dinner, which was cold slices of turkey and roast beef with corn on the cob and fresh asparagus and various kinds of salad, and Dr. Bergius questioned Bethany minutely. He wanted to know how she liked her job. Where did she and I live? What was our house like; did we find it comfortable, did we find the noise from the highway intrusive? I could see he wanted to establish himself right away as a good, caring person, like Freud at his most genial. Then he started to describe houses he’d lived in when he was young: the staircases, the windows, the lovely little courtyards.

  “This is a wonderful meal,” Bethany said, wiping melted butter off her hands and laughing at the mess she’d made with the corn on the cob, and Dr. Bergius smiled and said, “Perhaps Rachel has told you that my late wife, Eva, was a teacher of cookery. I was her keenest pupil. In any case, this is such a pleasure. Not to dine alone. It means a great deal to me.”

  “Well,” said Bethany, “it’s a treat for me and Rachel, too, isn’t it, Rachel?”

  When we’d finished eating, Dr. Bergius went inside to put on the coffee. Bethany and I sat in the dusk, watching the geese. They were domestic geese, Dr. Bergius had said. They did not belong to him, but to a neighbour. I had my back to the house. I began to feel as if someone was watching Bethany and me. I imagined a face at the kitchen window, a cold, superior stare. I imagined someone — perhaps Eva — helping Dr. Bergius set out coffee cups, a small jug of cream. This scene came to me with the clarity and exactitude I remembered from Simon’s beloved foreign films. I imagined Eva removing a small silver spoon from a drawer lined with velvet and examining it for signs of tarnish or wear.

  Dr. Bergius came to the door and said he didn’t know what he was thinking of, leaving us out in the damp air. I didn’t think the air was damp; on the contrary, it was a beautiful, mild evening. Nevertheless, we went inside and Dr. Bergius led us through the kitchen, which was perfectly empty, no one else there at all — the coffee maker burbling to itself on the counter, African violets on the windowsill — and into the living room. Here, the furniture seemed to have been shoved to the middle of the room in order to make space for an array of professional-looking recording equipment, including a reel-to-reel tape machine with sound-level meters, much like the one at the radio station. It was the strangest room I had ever seen. Bethany and I sat on the edge of the sofa and Dr. Bergius stood in fr
ont of us, his cheeks stained with colour. He began to lecture us in a high-spirited, animated way. He strolled around the room a little. He told us he and his wife Eva had been privileged to hear Stockhausen’s Gruppen performed in Cologne, Germany, in 1957, shortly before he came to Canada. Imagine three orchestras, Dr. Bergius said — three orchestras contending, as if engaged in battle, then achieving a brief, momentary accord — what we think of as accord, he amended — why, it had changed his life. At the time, Eva’s health had been declining; soon after, she was admitted to a sanatorium. His poor mother, also, had been unwell. She’d lost her home during the war, all her treasures, her books. It was a difficult time, he said. As he had listened to the Gruppen, he began to understand that everything could be destroyed, and then someone, some brave soul, would begin over, one tentative note at a time, and, with patience and perseverance, there would once again be music and poetry and books. Yes, it could happen. It happened all the time.

  Bethany and I sat there stiffly on a fusty old sofa. Through the thin draperies the evening sun cast a mordant glow. We listened — or tried to listen — as Dr. Bergius told us that language came from the mind and the heart, but music came from the soul. Music, like nature, had no language other than colour and design, modalities and tones. In this way it was the language purely of the spirit, the language of wind and light and movement. Finally he sat down — or rather collapsed — on a hassock and put his hands on his knees and drew a breath.

  “Rachel writes poetry,” Bethany said.

  “I do not,” I said quickly.

  “Ah. And what kind of poetry does Rachel write?” Dr. Bergius said.

  “Well, it’s very good, I think,” Bethany said. “I don’t get to see it very often.”