Home Schooling

by Carol Windley

  He picked up his pen as if to make a note of her suggestions. “The animal shelter,” he said. “Yes, of course. I don’t really have any neighbours.”

  “Animals,” Kathleen was saying. “They rely on us and we always let them down, don’t we? We always do. When I was a little girl I had a guinea pig. It was one of those longhaired guinea pigs, all fluffy and soft, like a dandelion puff. One day I came home from school and it was gone. In its place on my dresser there was a goldfish in a bowl. I knew it was my fault. My mother had warned me enough times that if I didn’t clean out its cage she’d take my guinea pig to the animal shelter, but I didn’t believe her. For kids the hardest thing is developing a sense of responsibility, isn’t it? The goldfish died, too. The bowl was too small, I guess.”

  Graham looked at Kathleen, at her translucent skin, her slight overbite, the delicate curve of her neck.

  “It took me a long time to forgive my mother,” she said. “Maybe I didn’t ever forgive her.”

  He got up and wrote the date on the chalkboard, pressing too hard, so that the chalk snapped and flew into the air and landed at Kathleen’s feet. She picked it up. He walked around her and sharpened a pencil in the electric pencil sharpener. The playground was beginning to fill up. Kids were chasing each other around. They were dressed in bright summer clothes, although the wind was cold and there was a feeling that, in spite of the clear sky, rain was on the way. He glanced at Kathleen, who was staring at the chalk she held between her fingers, like a cigarette. He could see the perfect part in her hair, the clean white of her scalp. She went over to the Elvis poster and ran her thumbnail over the yellowing sticky tape he’d used to mend the small tear in the corner. “I can’t believe you still have this,” she said. “I can’t believe it. Do you remember,” she said, “when people used to see him all the time, at a fast-food restaurant or a laundromat?”

  “A laundromat?”

  “Yes. And at motels, airports, and, you know, hitchhiking at the side of some interstate highway in the rain or something, with an old suede hat pulled down low so you could barely make out his face. But, still, people seemed to know who he was. In real life, of course, they would never have seen him, not unless they bought tickets. But when he was dead, he was everywhere. He belonged to everyone.”

  “Yes,” Graham said. “He did.” He looked at Elvis’s pomaded hair gleaming in sunlight filtered through bougainvillea leaves. If he moved slightly, his arm would touch Kathleen’s arm. Her hair smelled of flowers and he recalled the feel of it, silky and cool, and how it used to catch on his shirt buttons or his watch strap and Kathleen would pretend to be annoyed, but she wasn’t, not really.

  She handed him the chalk. “I hope it turns out well for you,” she said, before walking out into the hall. Somewhere in the distance a door slammed. He heard children’s voices, laughter, a teacher calling out that there was no running in the halls, no running allowed, then silence. All morning he couldn’t stop thinking about what Kathleen had said. How true, he thought, how amazing: what had vanished forever would always be in some sense more vivid, more real and accessible, than what in fact existed.

  That night he made himself a simple meal of scrambled eggs and toast and ate slowly, with a reserved, almost finicky grace. He had a sudden vision of his mother eating in the same fashion, taking little fastidious bites, chewing furiously, her hand curled tight around a balled-up napkin as if for ballast. He remembered how unfair he’d thought it, that he had to make do with this life, that the body he occupied was his body, and the woman at the table was his mother, and that was how she ate now, alone, making lightning-fast stabs with her fork, like something mean and sneaky far down on the food chain.

  Graham’s father had been a pharmaceutical company salesman whose visits home had become increasingly rare events, like the questionable return of an unstable comet, nothing but gas and ice particles and an insufficient quantity of vivifying dust. Graham used to carry around in his head a stark yet strangely satisfying image of his father in the one place he never actually saw him: alone in a hotel room in the evenings, sitting on the edge of the bed, methodically sampling the goods. A little Valium, a little Librium, onward and upward through the Phenobarbitals, then inexorably down again, a trombone player inching toward a risky tremolo, a moody indigo riff.

  Why not blame the drugs? Why not be generous and blame the drugs? He’d been there himself. He remembered his mother saying, in a flat, angry voice: I always knew he’d leave, I always knew. They’d kept moving west, he and his mother, until they reached Vancouver Island and there was nowhere else to go. Renata got a job, a series of jobs. She called herself a widow. When she was mad at Graham, when she hated him for just being there with his big feet and his acne and his rock music, she would scream at him that he was just like his father. When in fact he was nothing like his father.

  He thought of his mother’s gold hair, gold to the day she died; her cigarettes, her bangles and sparkly rings. When his first daughter was born, his mother came to stay for a few weeks with him and Annette. She held the baby as if it were a live charge. Then, like the wicked jealous queen in a fairy tale, she turned to Graham and announced: “I had such a strange dream! You and the baby were left on your own. Just you and a motherless child. It was the saddest thing.” As she spoke, she gave Annette a sly, sidelong glance. That was his mother: tactless, cruel, prescient.

  Years later, he and Kathleen had stayed behind after a staff gathering at a pub. He’d started to talk about his mother. He told Kathleen about the awful little jobs his mother had taken, cleaning houses, addressing envelopes, selling lingerie. He talked about the mean places they’d lived, the sleazy apartments, the meals of toast and tea. He heard himself sounding amused and bitter and ironically distant. It was the beginning of the Christmas holidays. Kathleen was wearing a corsage her grade-five class had made for her, construction-paper holly leaves dusted with gold. Some of the glitter had rubbed off on her chin. She told him she had a wonderful family, the best parents in the world. Her father was a dentist. Her mother was a teacher. She had two brothers, two nephews and a niece. “I just don’t have anyone of my own,” she said, savagely pinching a few drops of lemon juice into her Diet Coke. “But maybe that will come.”

  “Of course it will,” he said. He covered her hand with his. He told her what his mother had said to Annette, years before Annette had died. “It was like a curse,” he said. “It was the wicked fairy’s last gasp, a poisoned arrow, the ace of spades.”

  “Well, you don’t have to believe that,” Kathleen said. “You don’t have to believe garbage like that. Your mother didn’t have the power to make someone die. She wouldn’t have wanted you to think that.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “I don’t,” Kathleen said stoutly. He touched her hand. He remembered feeling such gratitude, as if she’d absolved him of a grievous sin. Together they’d gone out to the parking lot and there, as a few wet snowflakes fell from a low sky tinged pink by overhead arc lights, they clung to each other and kissed in a wild, desperate, hurtful fashion, their teeth clashing, gold glitter adhering to Graham’s mouth, a sharp metallic tang. At last they tore themselves apart and said goodnight, goodnight, and kissed again, this time tenderly, lingeringly, and drove away in their separate vehicles.

  And then there was a time of waiting, of waiting for some indication from Kathleen that she wanted to see him, or for some inspired act of reconciliation on his part, but neither occurred, and that year Kathleen transferred to another school. For her, the staircase was always ascending. It always led to another, more spacious realm. She used to tell Graham he needed to decide what it was he wanted out of life, meaning, he thought, that he had to choose between his devotion to his daughters and his love for her. Quite possibly, however, there was a wider implication to her remark: namely that, on close inspection, his life didn’t stand up all that well; it consisted of fractured, isolated fragments that maybe matched and maybe didn’t. Here h
e was as a moody, disadvantaged, fatherless adolescent. Here he was as a young husband building a house in an enchanted forest, except the enchantment was thin and permeable, no protection at all, really. Here he was as a widower with two high-spirited young daughters, and here he was in his current phase, married for the second time (Dad, are you sure you want to marry Sarah, or is it just sex or something, because it’s not too late, you can still change your mind, you know), and now Sarah, his dearest Sarah, was in North Vancouver and her beloved dogs were out there somewhere in the waning light and plainly his sole task was to retrieve them for her.

  In the living room he turned on a lamp, although it was early evening, not yet dark. Beside the lamp, on a small table, stood his mother’s Matryoshka dolls, which Sarah, who tended to be claustrophobic, had arranged in a row so they wouldn’t suffocate, trapped one inside the other. Their painted eyes glittered mockingly at him.

  He remembered sitting with his mother in her room at the nursing home on a hot day in July, watching television news coverage of the return to St. Petersburg of the remains of the last tsar and tsarina of Russia. His mother had wiped her eyes and had said look, look how small the coffins are. He, too, had felt moved, although he kept telling himself if he’d been there he would have been on the side of the Bolsheviks. He’d never believed his mother’s stories of White Russian ancestry, and why should he; his mother had been born in Moose Jaw in 1919. But he was beginning to understand this: for his mother it had been Russia, Imperial Russia, a pale winter sun glinting off the frozen Neva, horse-drawn sleighs gliding across a gold-tinted bridge, while for him it was South America, or it was Costa Rica, a beautiful green jewel of a country — but in both cases, he now saw, these visions came out of a desperate yearning for an unknown landscape, a place where it was possible to begin over and just maybe, with luck, get it right this time and thus avoid being irredeemably damaged by the simple process of living and making choices. But possibly such dreams had a thinning effect — by which he meant they dulled the mind and diverted attention away from what really mattered.

  He got a jacket and a flashlight and took the dogs’ leashes from a hook by the kitchen door. He went outside and walked across the lawn to the edge of the forest. He loved the hour before twilight, long blue shadows across the ground, his own shadow supine at his side. He knew he looked like his mother: the same long, thin nose with a bump, the same slightly prim mouth and narrow downturning eyes. It was almost as if he had inherited nothing from his absent father, and yet in many ways his father had been a powerful influence in his life. He used to dream of his return. In the dream his father wore an open raincoat over a dark suit and carried an attaché case he kept shifting from one hand to the other, saying he had only thirty minutes to spare before his flight departed. Graham had to talk fast, trying to convey to his father how much he regretted not having known him better and how at school he’d got into a little trouble with drinking and so-called soft drugs, and other, less soft drugs, and had indulged in way too much partying, but then he’d married a lovely girl and had two daughters and he’d done all right, all things considered. His father gave him a smooth, unperturbed look. He consulted his watch. Graham wanted to grab him and shake him, but even in a dream he couldn’t do that. His father had died more than a decade ago, in Ottawa, where he’d retired with his second wife, information Graham had gleaned from a newspaper clipping a former employer of his mother had slipped inside a Christmas card.

  Graham walked around the yard, stooping for a closer look at what appeared to be fresh prints in the bark mulch. Were the dogs nearby, taunting him? He stood, thinking of how Sarah had driven from San Diego with two strange dogs in the car breathing down her neck and getting carsick and losing their balance whenever she turned a corner or accelerated. Near Bellingham, she’d detoured to the town of Fairhaven and had gone into a restaurant beneath a bookstore. She’d ordered something to eat and had sat near a window, where she could keep an eye on her car. Then she’d gone upstairs and browsed quickly through the books, on the lookout for new names for the dogs. They had names already, but those names were inextricably linked to their unfortunate prior histories and were, she believed, no longer suitable. Finally she’d settled on Hamlet, from Shakespeare, and Quinn, from a romance novel she’d nearly bought, then decided against, because it had seemed to her the owner of dogs like Hamlet and Quinn wouldn’t read paperback romances. She could feel herself morphing into a new creature, a new being. She’d described it as a truly physical process: it gave her little electrical sparkly feelings on the back of her hands. She went outside and got the dogs out of the car and took them for a walk. A wind was blowing and the sea was all churned up. The dogs tugged at their leashes, tangling her up, and she laughed at the picture they must have made. Sometimes Graham could see this scene so clearly it was as if he’d been there, too.

  In the evening light his house was beautiful, the proportions pleasing to the eye, the front door appealingly recessed, the pitch of the roof precisely right. He’d cleared just enough land to hold it, like a bird in a cage. He remembered the raw wood taking shape, the roof timbers against a clear sky. Every nail he’d hammered in place himself, or he and Annette had, the two of them working side by side. He dreamed of travel, yet there was nowhere else he wanted to be.

  In the forest there was a cold mist rising from the damp ground, a smell like incense. The last time he’d made it this far into the woods, scouting for fallen trees to use as firewood, he’d discovered a crude circle of stones around a pile of ash, tin cans, a couple of plastic water bottles. Someone had constructed a shelter, branches and boughs leaning against the trunk of a Douglas fir, a tarp to keep out the rain. Furious, he’d kicked the rocks and ashes around and shoved the lean-to over. If he’d asked, whoever he was, Graham would have said go ahead and live in the woods, make yourself at home, just don’t leave garbage around or start a forest fire. Sometimes Graham had the odd feeling the squatter in the woods was in fact a younger, hardier version of himself, a self that had somehow sheared off after Annette died and had established a risky ephemeral independence, refusing to participate in a world he didn’t understand or like. And how did you exorcise a ghost like that, even supposing you wanted to? A ghost named Aravin; no one.

  Graham made it as far as the ravine, a strange geological feature, an abruption cutting deep into the earth. He was looking down at huge moss-covered erratics, rocks deposited here centuries ago, at the end of the last ice age, and luxuriant bracken fern, downed trees, mossy and rotten — nursery trees, they were called — host to an astonishing variety of life forms: hemlock and maple seedlings, ferns and lichens and fungus. How beautiful, he thought. What a beautiful, holy place, even to an agnostic like him. He crept closer to the edge. It had rained earlier, a brief downpour, and then the sky had quickly cleared, but the ground was still wet, and his foot must have slipped. Before he knew what had happened, he was falling. His arm struck a tree, or rather the tree struck him, the pain astonishing, as if the arm had been ripped from the socket, and then he almost landed on a rock shaped like an anvil, which just might have given him a platform he could use to climb back up from, but he merely grazed it, and he was still falling and he kept thinking this couldn’t be happening, and at the same time he knew it was.

  He came to rest on a relatively unencumbered stretch of ground, but still the impact must have knocked him out briefly, because there was a gap in his consciousness, and the next thing he knew he was looking up at a scrap of dusky sky as from the bottom of a well. With a little effort, he sat up. He feared his arm was broken, a simple fracture, nothing that would impede him too badly, as long as he did the impossible and ignored the pain. He rested a while, concentrating on breathing and staying calm. He’d lost the flashlight and the leashes. He didn’t blame the dogs for any of this. Let the dogs be in charge of the world, for a change. Let them have their way. He waited, gathering his resources. Then he began making his way up the face of the ravine, gaining
a foothold in rocks, on branches, trying to use his legs and his one good arm-although even his good arm hurt like hell. His ascent acquired a workable rhythm and he marvelled at how quickly he was able to adapt to such strenuous, unaccustomed labour, and to the pain, which had acquired the mass and solidity of another being, a truculent, unshakeable companion.

  There was a time when he actually thought he had it made. All he had to do was hoist himself somehow up and over the embankment and onto solid ground. But when he took hold of a root to use as leverage, he precipitated a shower of dirt and rocks. What looked solid was fragile, tenuous. He rubbed at his eyes, to clear them of grit. Just to survive until morning — nothing else was required. In the morning Sarah would look for him. The dogs would return home, their little game ended, and they’d lead Sarah here and he’d be rescued.

  He thought of extinction, what it meant when the place you’d taken up in the world was empty, when there was nothing there. He was looking at his life and he saw the value of it, its irreplaceable fugitive nature. He thought of Annette, her smile, her dark curls tumbling around her pale face. Kathleen. Sarah. His daughters. His mother, Renate. He thought of Father Dimitri, with his compassionate smile and kind eyes. Forty days, he had said, before the soul severed its connections with the living. He thought of how people came into his life and enthralled him with their laughter, their need-iness and kindness. He thought of the forest drifting above him, like an elevated, sleeping city.

  Each year his students would get in the habit of lightly tapping the Elvis poster, before an exam or a basketball game, for luck. Perhaps he, too, should pray to Elvis, the reading Elvis, his surprisingly delicate-looking hand resting on the open page, the text made blindingly plain to him, the words an avenue of escape, a way up into another world: Some days I would rather read than sing.