Beth thought it was a message for her father to call the church. Her mother hadn’t called in over four years, so it took a moment of wondering why the phone number didn’t start with two fives like every other phone number in the neighbourhood did, and why her father, who didn’t go to church, should get a message from the church, before Beth remembered that an upside-down V meant not “church” but “witch’s hat.”
In the kitchen Beth’s grandmother was shaking the bean jars to “Here We Come a-Wassailing.” Beth felt the rhythm as a pounding between her ears. “My cranium veins are throbbing,” she thought in revelation, and putting down the message she pressed her palms to her temples and remembered when her mother used to phone for money. Because of those phone calls Beth had always pictured her mother and the man with the toupee living in some poor place, a rundown apartment, or one of the Insulbrick bungalows north of the city. “I’ll bet they’re broke again,” Beth told herself, working up scorn. “I’ll bet they’re down to their last penny.” She picked up the message and crumpled it back into a ball, then opened it up again, folded it in half and slipped it into the pocket of her shorts.
Sticking to her promise, she went over to Helen’s every afternoon. It took her twenty minutes, a little longer than that if she left the road to go through the park, which she often did out of a superstitious feeling that the next time she floated, it would be there. The park made her think of the boy who was run over. On the radio it said that his foot had been amputated and that he was in desperate need of a liver transplant. “Remember him in your prayers,” the announcer said, and Beth and her grandmother did. The boy’s name was Kevin Legg.
“Kevin Legg and he lost his foot!” Beth pointed out to Joyce.
Joyce laughed, although Beth hadn’t meant it as a joke. A few minutes later, in the bedroom, Beth asked Helen, “Why isn’t your mother worried about us getting your hopes up?”
“She’s just glad that I finally have a friend,” Helen answered. “When I’m by myself, I get in the way of her cleaning.”
Beth looked out the window. It hadn’t occurred to her that she and Helen were friends.
Beth’s best friend, Christine, was at a cottage for the summer. Amy, her other friend, she played with in the mornings and when she returned from Helen’s. Amy was half Chinese, small and thin. She was on pills for hyperactivity. “Just think what I’d be like if I wasn’t on them!” she cried, spinning around and slamming into the wall. Amy was the friend that Beth’s grandmother represented with an exclamation mark. Whatever they were playing, Amy got tired of after five minutes, but she usually had another idea. She was fun, although not very nice. When Beth told her about Helen dying, she cried, “That’s a lie!”
“Ask her mother,” Beth said.
“No way I’m going to that fat-head’s place!” Amy cried.
Amy didn’t believe the story about the doctor ripping out Beth’s grandmother’s tonsils, either, not even after Beth’s grandmother opened her mouth and showed her her mutilated tongue.
So Beth knew better than to confide in Amy about floating. She knew better than to confide in anybody, aside from her grandmother and her Aunt Cora, since it wasn’t something she could prove and since she found it hard to believe herself. At the same time she was passionately certain that she had floated, and might again if she kept up her nightly “I love Jesus” chants.
She confided in Helen about floating, though, on the fifteenth day of their chanting, because that day, instead of sitting on the floor and holding Beth’s hands, Helen curled up on her side facing the wall and said, “I wish we were playing checkers,” and Beth thought how trusting Helen had been so far, chanting twice a day without any reason to believe that it worked.
The next day, the sixteenth day, Helen’s head measured twenty-seven inches.
“Are you sure you aren’t pulling the tape tighter?” Helen asked.
“No,” Beth said. “I always pull it this tight.”
Helen pushed the tape off her head and waddled to the bedroom door. “Twenty-seven inches!” she called.
“Let’s go show her,” Beth said, and they hurried to the living room, where Joyce was using a nail to clean between the floorboards.
“Aren’t you guys smart!” Joyce said, sitting back on her heels and wiping specks of dirt from her slim legs and little pink shorts.
“Come on,” Helen said, tugging Beth back to the bedroom.
Breathlessly she went to the desk and wrote the measurement on the chart.
Beth sat on the bed. “I can’t believe it,” she said, falling onto her back. “It’s working. I mean I thought it would, I hoped it would, but I wasn’t absolutely, positively, one hundred per cent sure.”
Helen sat beside her and began to roll her head. Beth pictured the water sloshing from side to side. “Why do you do that?” she asked.
“I get neck cramps,” Helen said. “One thing I won’t miss are these darn neck cramps.”
The next day her head lost another half inch. The day after that it lost an entire inch, so that it was now down to twenty-five and a half inches. Beth and Helen demonstrated the measurements to Joyce, who acted amazed, but Beth could tell that for some reason she really wasn’t.
“We’re not making it up,” Beth told her.
“Well, who said you were?” Joyce asked, pretending to be insulted.
“Don’t you think her head looks smaller?” Beth said, and both she and Joyce considered Helen’s head, which had looked smaller in the bedroom, but now Beth wasn’t so sure. In fact, she was impressed, the way she used to be when she saw Helen only once in a while, by just how big Helen’s head was. And by her lumpy, grown-up woman’s body, which at this moment was collapsing onto a kitchen chair.
“You know, I think maybe it does look smaller,” Joyce said brightly.
“Wait’ll Dr. Dobbs sees me,” Helen said in a tired voice, folding her arms on the table and laying her head down.
Joyce gave Helen’s shoulder a little punch. “You all right, kiddo?”
Helen ignored her. “I’ll show him our chart,” she said to Beth.
“Hey,” Joyce said. “You all right?”
Helen closed her eyes. “I need a nap,” she murmured.
When Beth returned home there was another message from her mother in her father’s wastepaper basket.
This time, before she could help herself, she thought, “She wants to come back, she’s left that man,” and she instantly believed it with righteous certainty. “I told you,” she said out loud, addressing her father. Her eyes burned with righteousness. She threw the message back in the wastepaper basket and went out to the back yard, where her grandmother was tying up the tomato plants. Her grandmother had on her red blouse with the short, puffy sleeves and her blue skirt that was splattered with what had once been red music notes but which were now faded and broken pink sticks. Her braid was wrapped around her head. “She looks like an immigrant,” Beth thought coldly, comparing her to Joyce. For several moments Beth stood there looking at her grandmother and feeling entitled to a few answers.
The instant her grandmother glanced up, however, she didn’t want to know. If, right at that moment, her grandmother had decided to tell her what the messages were about, Beth would have run away. As it was, she ran around to the front of the house and down the street. “I love Jesus, I love Jesus,” she said, holding her arms out. She was so light on her feet! Any day now she was going to float, she could feel it.
Her father came home early that evening. It seemed significant to Beth that he did not change into casual pants and a sports shirt before supper, as he normally did. Other than that, however, nothing out of the ordinary happened. Her father talked about work, her grandmother nodded and signalled and wrote out a few conversational notes, which Beth leaned over to read.
After supper her father got around to changing his clothes, then went outside to cut the grass while Beth and her grandmother did the dishes. Beth, carrying too many dishes to
the sink, dropped and smashed a saucer and a dinner plate. Her grandmother waved her hands—”Don’t worry, it doesn’t matter!”—and to prove it she got the Sears catalogue out of the cupboard and showed Beth the new set of dinnerware she intended to buy anyway.
It wasn’t until Beth was eating breakfast the next morning that it dawned on her that if her mother was coming back, her grandmother would be leaving, and if her grandmother was leaving, she wouldn’t be buying new dinnerware. This thought left Beth feeling as if she had just woken up with no idea yet what day it was or what she’d just been dreaming. Then the radio blared “… Liver …” and she jumped and turned to see her grandmother with one hand on the volume knob, and the other hand held up for silence. “Doctors report that the transplant was a success,” the announcer said, “and that Kevin is in serious but stable condition.”
“Did they find a donor?” Beth cried as the announcer said, “The donor, an eleven-year-old girl, died in St. Andrew’s hospital late last night. Her name is being withheld at her family’s request.”
Her grandmother turned the volume back down.
“Gee, that’s great,” Beth said. “Everybody was praying for him.”
Her grandmother tore a note off her pad. “Ask and it shall be given you,” she wrote.
“I know!” Beth said exultantly. “I know!”
Nobody was home at Helen’s that afternoon. Peering in the window beside the door, Beth saw that the mauve suitcase was gone, and the next thing she knew, she floated from Helen’s door to the end of her driveway. Or at least she thought she floated, because she couldn’t remember how she got from the house to the road, but the strange thing was, she didn’t have the glowing sensation, the feeling of glory. She drifted home, holding herself as if she were a soap bubble.
At her house there was a note on the kitchen counter: a drawing of an apple, which meant that her grandmother was out grocery shopping. The phone rang, but when Beth said hello, the person hung up. She went into her bedroom, opened the drawer of her bedside table and took out the message with her mother’s phone number on it. She returned to the kitchen and dialled. After four rings, an impatient-sounding woman said, “Hello?” Beth said nothing. “Yes, hello?” the woman said. “Who’s calling?”
Beth hung up. She dialled Helen’s number and immediately hung up.
She stood there for a few minutes, biting her knuckles.
She wandered down to her bedroom and looked out the window. Two back yards away, Amy was jumping off her porch. She was climbing onto the porch railing, leaping like a broad jumper, tumbling on the grass, springing to her feet, running up the stairs and doing it again. It made Beth’s head spin.
About a quarter of an hour later her grandmother returned. She dropped the groceries against a cupboard door that slammed shut. She opened and shut the fridge. Turned on the tap. Beth, now lying on the bed, didn’t move. She sat bolt upright when the phone rang, though. Five rings before her grandmother answered it.
Beth got up and went over to the window again. Amy was throwing a ball up into the air. Through the closed window Beth couldn’t hear a thing, but she knew from the way Amy clapped and twirled her hands between catches that she was singing, “Ordinary moving, laughing, talking …”
She knew from hearing the chair scrape that her grandmother was pulling it back to sit down. She knew from hearing the faucet still run that her grandmother was caught up in what the caller was saying. Several times her grandmother tapped her pencil on the mouthpiece to say to the caller, “I’m still listening. I’m taking it all down.”
Ninety-three Million Miles Away
At least part of the reason why Ali married Claude, a cosmetic surgeon with a growing practice, was so that she could quit her boring government job. Claude was all for it. “You only have one life to live,” he said. “You only have one kick at the can.” He gave her a generous allowance and told her to do what she wanted.
She wasn’t sure what that was, aside from trying on clothes in expensive stores. Claude suggested something musical—she loved music—so she took dance classes and piano lessons and discovered that she had a tin ear and no sense of rhythm. She fell into a mild depression during which she peevishly questioned Claude about the ethics of cosmetic surgery.
“It all depends on what light you’re looking at it in,” Claude said. He was not easily riled. What Ali needed to do, he said, was take the wider view.
She agreed. She decided to devote herself to learning, and she began a regimen of reading and studying, five days a week, five to six hours a day. She read novels, plays, biographies, essays, magazine articles, almanacs, the New Testament, The Concise Oxford Dictionary, The Harper Anthology of Poetry.
But after a year of this, although she became known as the person at dinner parties who could supply the name or date that somebody was snapping around for, she wasn’t particularly happy, and she didn’t even feel smart. Far from it, she felt stupid, a machine, an idiot savant whose one talent was memorization. If she had any creative talent, which was the only kind she really admired, she wasn’t going to find it by armouring herself with facts. She grew slightly paranoid that Claude wanted her to settle down and have a baby.
On their second wedding anniversary they bought a condominium apartment with floor-to-ceiling windows, and Ali decided to abandon her reading regimen and to take up painting. Since she didn’t know the first thing about painting or even drawing, she studied pictures from art books. She did know what her first subject was going to be—herself in the nude. A few months ago she’d had a dream about spotting her signature in the corner of a painting, and realizing from the conversation of the men who were admiring it (and blocking her view) that it was an extraordinary rendition of her naked self. She took the dream to be a sign. For two weeks she studied the proportions, skin tones and muscle definitions of the nudes in her books, then she went out and bought art supplies and a self-standing, full-length mirror.
She set up her work area halfway down the living room. Here she had light without being directly in front of the window. When she was all ready to begin, she stood before the mirror and slipped off her white terry-cloth housecoat and her pink flannelette pyjamas, letting them fall to the floor. It aroused her a little to witness her careless shedding of clothes. She tried a pose: hands folded and resting loosely under her stomach, feet buried in the drift of her housecoat.
For some reason, however, she couldn’t get a fix on what she looked like. Her face and body seemed indistinct, secretive in a way, as if they were actually well defined, but not to her, or not from where she was looking.
She decided that she should simply start, and see what happened. She did a pencil drawing of herself sitting in a chair and stretching. It struck her as being very good, not that she could really judge, but the out-of-kilter proportions seemed slyly deliberate, and there was a pleasing simplicity to the reaching arms and the elongated curve of the neck. Because flattery hadn’t been her intention, Ali felt that at last she may have wrenched a vision out of her soul.
The next morning she got out of bed unusually early, not long after Claude had left the apartment, and discovered sunlight streaming obliquely into the living room through a gap between their building and the apartment house next door. As far as she knew, and in spite of the plate-glass windows, this was the only direct light they got. Deciding to make use of it while it lasted, she moved her easel, chair and mirror closer to the window. Then she took off her housecoat and pyjamas.
For a few moments she stood there looking at herself, wondering what it was that had inspired the sketch. Today she was disposed to seeing herself as not bad, overall. As far as certain specifics went, though, as to whether her breasts were small, for instance, or her eyes close together, she remained in the dark.
Did other people find her looks ambiguous? Claude was always calling her beautiful, except that the way he put it—”You’re beautiful to me” or “I think you’re beautiful”—made it sound as if she sho
uld understand that his taste in women was unconventional. Her only boyfriend before Claude, a guy called Roger, told her she was great but never said how exactly. When they had sex, Roger liked to hold the base of his penis and watch it going in and out of her. Once, he said that there were days he got so horny at the office, his pencil turned him on. (She felt it should have been his pencil sharpener.)
Maybe she was one of those people who are more attractive when they’re animated, she thought. She gave it a try. She smiled and tossed her head, she tucked her hair behind her ears. She covered her breasts with her hands. Down her cleavage a drop of sweat slid haltingly, a sensation like the tip of a tongue. She circled her palms until her nipples hardened. She imagined a man’s hands … not Claude’s—a man’s hands not attached to any particular man. She looked out the window.
In the apartment across from her she saw a man.
She leapt to one side, behind the drapes. Her heart pounded violently, as if something had thundered by. She stood there hugging herself. The drapes smelled bitter, cabbagey. Her right hand cupped her left breast, which felt like her heart because her pulse was in it.
After a moment she realized that she had started circling both of her palms on her nipples again. She stopped, astonished, then went on doing it but with the same skeptical thrill she used to get when she knew it wasn’t her moving the Ouija board. And then it was her feet that were moving involuntarily, taking her from behind the drapes into a preternatural brightness.
She went to the easel, picked up a brush and the palette and began to mix a skin colour. She didn’t look at the window or at the mirror. She had the tranced sensation of being at the edge of a cliff. Her first strokes dripped, so she switched to dabbing at the canvas, producing what started to resemble feathers. Paint splashed on her own skin but she ignored it and went on dabbing, layer on layer until she lost the direct sun. Then she wet a rag in the turpentine and wiped her hands and her breasts and stomach.
We So Seldom Look on Love Page 8