by Rachel Wyatt
At home she took out her sketch pad and drew a frame for a human diorama. No trees, but an array of tables with white cloths. She left out the other diners and focused on one table for five. There she was, wearing a new black sweater with her silver necklace. Sam next to her already looking thin. Donna leaning towards him across the table as though she were trying to hold him back. Graeme and Holly. All of them aware that this anniversary was the last. She froze them all in that good family moment before Holly threw her wine across the table, splashing her mother’s jacket, and shouted, “This is false. This isn’t right.”
She drew the shady outline of another person standing behind Sam’s chair, and no, it wasn’t the waiter or a hooded, faceless person with a scythe. It was a woman called Glynis. The children had known all about her and kept quiet. Sitting there, dabbing at her jacket, she felt betrayed by all four of them, her “nearest and dearest”. Then she’d walked away from the table and away from them knowing, as no doubt they also knew, that she would return and nurse Sam to the end. As she had done, trying not to be tight-lipped, not to cry, not to blame. Failing some days. When he died, she’d collapsed into the embrace of grief.
Dinosaurs had small brains, but maybe when a mate died or a child suffered, their hearts ached and they roared in pain.
The phone rang. “I have voted,” she said, and pressed the OFF key.
She and Paul always exchanged a little kiss when they met. Over coffee and cookies or muffins, they talked of so many things that the time passed quickly. If they got involved in too much discussion of the current state of the world, the never-ending wars, greed and destruction, the government’s harsh policies, a depressed silence overcame them and they had to rally themselves with a glass of wine. After that they talked of hockey or their grandchildren. And they shared laughter.
Early on, Ella had given Paul the Sequence to read as a token of trust and he hadn’t let her down. His response had been gentle and he’d made two good suggestions about Rosemary’s one-way trip to Holland. Jody, the so-called editor at The Grove, had only been useful in reverse, like the negative of an old-fashioned photograph. The opposite of whatever she suggested worked best. She hadn’t pressed her published books on the others. They were prose writers, after all.
“You don’t need to go on a course, Mum,” Donna had said when she told her about it. “You’ll be with real amateurs.” But they were serious people, intent on their work. Iain had set off down that long road to find a future. Marina, the nurse, returned to the comfortable past. Aritha! Who could tell what had driven her to leap on Iain that night? Or, come to that, why had Ilsa laughed as the Coke dripped down Aritha’s face? Clever and attractive, Jody had sat there, a spectator, as if this was a normal end to a writing week.
So what had that few hundred dollars and six days of veggie meals and editorial care done for her, for Ella herself? “What did you get out of it?” was Graeme’s question, and it was hard to explain. Just the sense that life goes on? That people will never give up trying to interpret the world? “I met some interesting people” didn’t justify the expense of his Mother’s Day gift, so she added that it had refreshed her mind and given her many new ideas and had been a real holiday and she would certainly do it again.
But she’d got a better idea from the dinosaurs and perhaps too from the man who denied the visible truth. There was, really, only now. Only this day, this hour. This particular hour, she was sitting beside Harriet Cherton, reading to her. Harriet, lying very still, might live for a week or a day. The nurse brought in tea and went out again. Ella wondered what kind of words she would ask for on the last part of her journey. It would be poetry. Some patients asked for books they’d loved as a child. For others it was the repeated comfort of an old friend.
“‘The evening ended with dancing. On its being proposed, Anne offered her services as usual…’”
“Do you think she was stupid,” Harriet asked slowly, perhaps her final question, “to let herself be persuaded and lose eight or nine years of happiness?”
~ • ~
When Paul came on Wednesday at five, he brought Ella a guide to Seattle and returned the copy of Apparatus she’d lent him. She looked the man over and certainly he was, for his age, quite trim, quite mobile. His face was lined but not aged-looking and his eyes were clear and kind. His hands were mottled like her own, but they were soft hands, not at all skeletal. “Come and sit beside me,” she said to him, opening the guide. “So shall we go on the Clipper? Or we could take the ferry to Vancouver and drive.”
~ • ~
It was never totally dark in hotel rooms. Streaks of light shone round the edges of the drapes and from under the door. Ella looked at Paul asleep now in the other bed. It would be better next time when he wasn’t so shy. She sat up and took a sheet of paper from the phone pad, and the pen, and finished the poem she’d begun to write last week. Syllabic prints on tiles Become pebbles. Cyrillic shapes bearing Positive messages Undermine wallpaper With hints of passing time.
Woman at the Bar
Young woman at the bar, red dress covering breasts but bare to waist at back. Men perched on stools either side leaning in towards her. Hungrily? Not quite. Table near exit, older woman in yellow knitted vest, odd garment, wispy reddish hair destroyed by too many chemicals, sits alone with glass of red. Music loud enough to drive out thought. Hockey playoffs on three large screens. Loud groans as puck bounces off the post. Two women side by side at same table, eyes glued to laptops, not speaking to each other. One of them takes out cell and talks on it while still tapping keys. Mid-life Vancouver. This is me, now, here.
Jody picked up her glass of Pinot Blanc, swirled the liquid round and poured some into her mouth. It was vacation time. There’d be another glass. Maybe two. One evening away from editing the latest manuscript from Higson, from news, from calls, from making up her mind. And she would try to drown out the sound of Aritha screaming, “I’ll kill you!”
The week at The Grove had been another delaying tactic. Busy days. Nice surroundings. Healthy meals. Decent, searching people. “Beyond my competence,” she’d said to Anja before she went, but Anja had replied, “It’s all words. And you’ve seen plays. You’ve read poems. Go do it.” Four paying customers and one freebie. No one else applied. Hard financial times. Odd mixed bag. No surprise if they’d all asked for their money back last Sunday when they left. Instead, despite their minimum talent and her sparse encouragement, they’d all gone away satisfied if not exactly happy. Lives appeared to have been changed. Any day now though, light bulbs might flash on and they’d realize they’d been had. Aritha, fifty-something, crazy, falling over her own cleverness, might publish a few more stories. Keep your day job! Not likely to get rich soon.
Well now. Woman enters, very chic, long blond hair, long black jacket, asks if she can share table. Bar crowded, orders bottle of wine. One glass. Gets out iPad. Won’t want to talk. Good. No telling, but she might have a manuscript in that costly briefcase. Nearly everybody has one hidden somewhere. Why did she not at least ask if I’m expecting someone?
“Are you expecting someone?”
“I was but I just had a call. He’ll be late.”
Lies. Was chic blond going to drink that whole bottle alone?
Jody sat back and tried to let her mind settle. This contained panorama was not the right place for concentrated thought. Better to have gone to Chez Laura. Always quiet there. So few customers, she and Bill thought it must be a laundry. Dirty dollars in, clean dollars out. So what had she come in here to think about anyway? Her long-term future, that was all. Three roads were open to her right now, but any one of them could be closed due to repairs by next week. The pattern of her life so far was always to choose the counterproductive sidetrack and follow the sign that pointed to Nice View This Way instead of continuing straight on to the main attraction. The job at The Grove, last minute because flu had felled the regular mentor, was another cul-de-sac. That cheque was hard-earned though. Poetry and
drama! Iain on his way to Mexico now – or not. She’d rejected his invitation to share the journey maybe too sharply, but without emphasizing their age difference. His loneliness was apparent in the sad little note he’d left her. But she had, he wrote, given him a great idea for his play.
The woman in the red dress slipped off the bar stool, put a scarf round her naked shoulders, picked up her large leather bag and left the two men to stare after her as she walked out.
Roland’s goodbye hug had been strangely emotional. The old man was almost in tears and had thanked her as if she’d given him a million bucks. His story, if he lived long enough to write it, was a neat piece of history: the hope of the emigrant widower with kids that success would be ensured in the new land. The return of the failure. And how many men in the century before last had gone on that hard sea trip and returned sans cash, sans every damn thing?
The waiter asked if she wanted another. She nodded and smiled. It was an upmarket bar and the man, no doubt an actor in his other life, expressed pleasure that she had come in on that particular evening and had chosen to drink their costly but ordinary wine.
“Nuts?” she asked.
“Certainly, madam,” he replied as he swept up the fragments of her napkin.
The next glass would help her decide. Option two: travelling along the Trans-Canada to Saskatchewan with Marina Harchuk and her handsome, slim, blue-eyed brother, Jim. Telling tales of childhood and love, taking turns driving, they would keep going day and night. So why not take off eastward through the mountains and then the flat, flat-day-after-day-flat, land? The Prairies had always been a kind of joke in her family, but now she longed to see them, to understand what drew people back to them. “Come with us! We’re going home for a month. Marina would be glad of editorial help.” Jody could have her own cabin, take her laptop, keep on with her work. It was nearly as crazy a leap as Roland’s relative going off in a sailing ship to Halifax with no notion of what he would find, or whether there would be pirates or dragons.
Red dress woman now replaced by a woman in a navy suit talking into her cell. Barman knows her. Pours ingredients into shaker and begins to shake it.
“I love him!”
“Sorry?”
“I didn’t realize I’d spoken aloud.”
The waiter placed the new glass of wine beside her and two napkins.
“Would you like to order from the menu, madam?”
“Not just now, thank you.”
The off-white, ankle-length gown with a nipped-in waist in the closet at home forbade starch and sugar, even from this distance. I love him too much. I’m prepared to fall into a morass of loving and giving up part of my life and if I think like that is it really love? Oh, for crap’s sake, I sound like a letter to Dear Daphne.
Did anyone in the world care which way this particular cat jumped? Or was it dog? Whatever animal, yes, they did. Dad talked every other day about leading his daughter up the path to happiness. Mom would freak out, far, far out, if Jody told Diamond Bill, as she called him, that she loved him too much and that she needed some stress and misery in her life to make it meaningful, and bliss was only for the good and pure of heart.
Woman in navy suit at bar now stripped of jacket, nose into cocktail glass. Man on her left looking at her with interest.
Stop editing life, she said to herself. And never try to edit poetry again. Ella’s look when Jody told her that whichever was not a poetic word had dripped disdain and near despair. However, Jody had regained her editor’s hat when she reread and admired the lines Whichever day you choose, whatever hour you dare to share with me, beware, for time is a caprice, a goat, that can’t be held – in check. She felt that it wasn’t poetry, she was almost sure it was nonsense, and yet the words, now inscribed on her brain, had given her a shiver of recognition.
Solitary and confined, The Grove group had, as they relaxed, asked her questions about her own life, and she’d told them she worked for a publisher, guiding words into their proper places on the page, helping writers develop their themes not as a teacher but as a questioning reader. She mentioned no names but let them wonder which famous writers she had guided into print. All pleasant until the pressure-cooker syndrome had taken over last Saturday night.
Older woman in yellow tatted vest, greenish shirt underneath, long brown skirt, moving not to the lobby, not to the washrooms, but this way, coming this way. Smiling with purpose, carrying her empty wine glass. Sitting down here!
“You look at me as if I’m a ghost. And sitting in this bar, I am a ghost to all these people with their briefcases, their laptops, their importance, drinking, talking, making appointments for tomorrow. They can’t see me. I have no appointments for tomorrow. I’m here because my daughter is attending a conference and I’m the babysitter. I love my grandchildren because I have to, but they’re very hard to manage. I’ve left them watching TV and helping themselves to candy and soft drinks from the little bar. I put all the alcohol in the safe.”
Jody could only say, “Have we met?”
“It was ten years ago. You were giving a talk on the editor’s role in literature.”
“You must be thinking of someone else.”
The woman reached across for the chic blond’s bottle of red and filled her own glass.
“In the public library. Three of us in the audience, but you were good. You acted as if we were a crowd.”
Jody remembered. She shrank. This woman had a manuscript. The novel she’d been writing for forty years was probably above in her hotel room, all one thousand and one pages of it. Nowhere was safe.
“So I’ve watched you looking around. What are you hiding from, Judith?”
A clarifying angel! I’m trying to run away but am being held back by some kind of moral sense, or is it cowardice? Might as well ask questions as if this intruder were an oracle.
“What do you think about the Prairies?”
“I’m Lorna, by the way. And I used to live out there, but I like big cities, so I settled in Calgary after my husband died.”
I could screw my way to Mexico and then get ditched for a younger, prettier woman or maybe man.
Options: Tell this woman to go away. Move to another table. Talk and listen.
“Are you sure your grandchildren are all right?”
“As right as they’re ever going to be. I’d like to see them taught better manners. Tied to their iPads, Pods, whatever, they hardly look up to say hello. They live in another world. A place full of aliens and enemies. Will they ever get used to being among humans?” She reached for the bottle of red again.
“Leave that alone, Mother,” the blond snapped. “And please go back to Rosie and Fergus. You’re supposed to be looking after them.”
“You get on with your work there. That’s what you’re here for.” She turned back to Jody and spoke in a whisper. “Only one thing to say: I never got her to understand this and she’s supposed to be a lawyer. It’s always a matter of who it affects. The decisions you make. Think of your life first, but avoid cruelty. How far can you see down the road? On the Prairies you can see for days. Life is different here. You can’t see far and some days hardly at all.” Then she turned to her daughter and said, “I hope you won’t be too long, Ingrid. I’m tired.”
She walked away. Clearly, her sparse hair was due to chemotherapy and her yellow vest was in fact a smart garment made of thin strips of leather. Jody watched her go. She wanted to move before the woman across the table spoke.
It was too late.
“My mother’s had a near-death experience. She thinks it’s her duty now to offer help and guidance to strangers and family as if she’d had an injection of wisdom or foresight. Let me tell you, she hasn’t. She told my husband he’d be better off without me. Can you believe it?”
“Did he – believe it?”
“I have to finish this before I go.” Ingrid turned back to her papers and poured the rest of the wine into her glass.
The waiter walked by Jody wit
hout asking if she’d like another. She felt reproached.
So what were all these people doing here? De-stressing? Some were still working. Some were clearly in no hurry to go home. Had the burly man wearing a jacket with Hammer of the Antichrist printed on the back come in to preach? Did they all simply seek solace in wine, comfort in cocktails? Were they hiding from their lives? Very few of them appeared to have come into the bar to enjoy themselves.
Ella was right. Caprice was a goat. At The Grove she’d seen her and Roland coping with the third stage of life. Marina would surprise herself. Her book would sell because it was human and humane and different from other tales of prairie life. Iain’s energy had reminded Jody that in a few years she would be forty and there was no time to waste. The course had only lasted six days, yet the rhythm, the meaning of her own life had been affected by the words and even the pauses in the daily dialogue with her students. She’d been invaded by their thoughts and hopes and lives and had, on that last evening, felt fear in the face of Aritha’s meltdown.
“Goodnight!” Ingrid gathered her papers and prepared to go back to her family.
Jody smiled at her and nodded, and then she said, “Just the bill,” to the waiter. She looked at him. What did he care if she drank herself stupid? He was young, twenty-five or so, and could have been doing a hundred things other than waiting on these careless people. But in a place like this, the tips were golden.
She sat back, proud of her self-denial, and wondered how far Iain had got on the road to Mexico. Depending on the stops he’d made en route, he could be in San Francisco or beyond. She could never catch him by road, but there were planes. She took out her cellphone and wrote a text: Have an idea for a play. Coming to CA. Where are you? Youth would be captured (his), recaptured (hers). Sunshine, adobe houses, ancient history. Her finger was on the Send tab when Lorna’s words came into her head. “Who will this affect?”