Vital Signs

by Tessa McWatt

  I was all too familiar with the scene she’d described, that subtle dance of abandonment that couples go through, when one leads and distances, while the other begs like a dog for scraps of attention, and then the positions reverse. I picked up one of the peas, now cold and even more shrivelled, and gently squeezed it without bursting the skin.

  “Marry me,” I said, looking up at her.

  Her eyebrows did that twitch again, but then she smiled.

  “You’re something else,” she said.

  I had to ask her again, several times, before she agreed. When she told me that story about the couple in the subway, I took it to mean that we weren’t like them—that things were right and balanced between us and that we didn’t do the abandonment dance. But now I wonder if I got it all wrong, if maybe what she meant was that I should be more like that guy, and the story had more to do with my not talking to her enough, or not using my words with enough authority—as far as I’m concerned. Maybe I wasn’t giving her the pleasure she could have had from a more talkative man. Perhaps it was only me who was comfortable with silence.

  “I’ve found a job,” she said casually one evening when she’d come to my apartment with a bottle of wine and some blueberries, her favourite. Instead of excitement, I detected a note of resignation. That this is what people do: they graduate, they get a job, and they come home with blueberries.

  “Hey, great! Where?” I stood up from my desk.

  “George Brown,” she said, then turned on the tap and ran water over the fruit. George Brown College had been her first choice out of all the colleges she had applied to, and the first one to respond to her unsolicited letters asking about possible positions for teaching English.

  “Two courses, five groups, so that’s twenty hours a week,” she said, and I wondered if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

  “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” I asked.

  She put the blueberries in a bowl and swept her long hair behind her ear and over her shoulder. She walked towards the table; I met her there and we both pulled out chairs. I kept my eyes on her.

  “Those who can’t … teach …” she said and took a handful of berries.

  I shifted in my chair. “But you can.”

  “Can what?”

  “Whatever you want.”

  Her smile was clenched as she shook her head.

  “Do you want children?” she asked after a short silence.

  “I don’t know,” I said, feeling ambushed. Why was she asking me that now?

  Much later, I would prod her about her decision to teach. There were things she knew deeply—things to do with literature, politics, food, the directions to my brother David’s cottage on Georgian Bay. There was her own Turkish history, her status as an immigrant, as one of untold millions who, like her family, had contorted their identities to become North Americans. Yet she chose to limit herself to paragraph construction, apostrophes and the proper use of commas.

  Soon after she started teaching, I overheard her talking to Susan in the kitchen of our first apartment: “My mother never admitted she wanted more, but she never seemed satisfied. If she’d been allowed to, she’d probably have run a state, let alone a business, as well as bring us up, but you can’t have it all. I won’t be like her. I won’t.”

  Her voice had been so determined that I had stepped back and returned to the living room.

  Anna’s father had been a teacher, greatly respected by the expats with whom he drank coffee at the local Turkish café on Dundas Street. Her mother had wanted to be a dancer—a dervish like her own mother, perhaps because it was forbidden—but in Toronto she had helped her husband to run a shop while raising Anna and her brother. Anna told me that her mother had often stared into space, a look that told Anna she was imagining the life she could—but didn’t—have, thanks to the burden of a husband and children, and the Canadianness they were all meant to be learning.

  Her parents died within two years of one another, both from cancer. These parents—the brainy Fatih and the dainty Lale—had been intertwined with our lives, excellent grandparents and babysitters to our children, keen gardeners, and players of bridge and other tabletop games. While Anna showed her parents a quiet respect, she seemed to view their lives as unremarkable, and very rarely spoke of the accomplishment of their reluctant integration into a new culture, or the simple happiness that existed between them. Her brother Joseph—Joe—had moved to Miami in his twenties and had last made an appearance at their mother’s funeral, a decade ago. Before the service, brother and sister had argued on the same steps of the funeral chapel in suburban Etobicoke where, many years before, Fatih and Lale had stood with a sense of dutiful relief, having just signed the monthly instalment plan that would ensure that their own funeral services and interment were no burden on their children.

  “You think you’re special?” Anna had managed to choke out through tears. “You’re not special. You’re just like the rest of us, and when you figure that out, let me know.” She turned away from her brother and composed herself by smoothing down the cropped black suit jacket that gathered at the waist to accentuate her slim figure. Carefully picking her way up the remaining stairs in her delicate-heeled shoes, she walked with dignity into the chapel. Her hair was now cut to just below her chin, but the life-long habit of swinging it over her shoulders and pinning it behind her ear was still a tic, like the itching of a phantom limb. When I asked her, later, what had happened between her and Joe, she shook her head and brushed the air with her long thin fingers to dismiss the question, but then she began to cry. She buried her head in my shoulder, sobbing, saying, only, “my mom.”

  When our children were growing up, Anna didn’t dramatize her family for them the way I did, telling my grandfather’s stories, recounting traditions and farmers’ superstitions. It wasn’t as though she was embarrassed about who she was or where she came from; it was more that her family was then, and our family was now. This was her accomplishment—a single-mindedness of purpose that has by association shaped my life. I resented her for it for many years. And yet, all along, it has also been that humility that I am fatally attracted to.

  By the time she finally agreed to marry me—”Okay,” she said, a tear sliding from the outer corner of her eye towards her ear, her breath hot, chest heaving, her sex still spasming, holding me inside her—I felt disarmed. From that day on, I believed that one day Anna would out me, and I would be seen for the fraud I was, and she, she would … what? Rule the world, no doubt. I’d let her, I’d decided, and would be content that if I had to lose her I would lose her to her own, bashful power. I still can make no sense of why that hasn’t happened.

  “Did you know that, Dad?” Fred says, touching my shoulder. I look up and realize he has been standing there without my noticing. “You didn’t hear me. Never mind. I’ll call you with the details later.” What details? I have been far away, staring out at the horizon, not hearing a word he has said. He returns inside.

  The day is overcast and the air sticky; finally some of the summer heat is arriving. I raise my hand to my neck and squash at least three blackflies with my fingers, wiping them off my skin. There’s a hum that is much bigger than insects, but I can’t trace it. Sasha comes onto the porch, and I look down at her as she stands beside me, gazing out towards the asparagus ferns as though she’s spotted something. I notice she’s holding a digital camera the size of a business card. I look over to where she is gazing, but don’t see anything particularly scenic, then my eyes return to the camera. Suddenly I am struck by its size, and I try to decipher how it can hold my image, or hers, or that of the landscape before us. How are such things possible? For the first time in years, I am in awe.

  “What’s that sound?” I ask, now more bothered by the humming noise from out in the field.

  “They’re fertilizing,” Sasha says, as she slips the camera into the back pocket of her jeans. She looks up at me. “Look, Dad, I think Mom wants to talk to all of us. We just h
ave to let her take the time she needs.” She holds the top of my arm as if about to squeeze my bicep, the way she did when she was a child, but she and I both know how my flexing now would fail that habit of love. I look at her face and think of pickles. Sasha suffered with terrible acne as a teen and a few scars remain. Her eyes are pale green like blanched cucumbers. She is not beautiful, not the way Charlotte is, but she is so much more attractive. Her face is concerned and yet confident. Nothing daunts her.

  “I catch her sometimes,” I start, thinking it’s only to Sasha that I might be able to say these things, “watching her reflection in a glass window or public mirror, and she’ll do a kind of ‘Boo!’ and pull a face, as though the real her had caught her physical self off guard, as though she knows it’s all a joke.”

  “Everyone does that, Dad, don’t you?”

  There’s a misshapen silence between us. I rerun Anna’s “and you do the same for me one day” from the night we met. My guilt sickens me.

  “Charlotte’s leaving, and I think Fred is too. Dad … Charlotte said something a minute ago,” Sasha begins, but then breaks off. Her eyes are glassy. “Is there something she’s angry with you about? ‘He won’t stay alone long,’ she said.” Sasha sneaks a look behind her toward the kitchen, to make sure she’s clearly out of earshot. I hear the muffled sound of Anna and my distant daughter laughing.

  It’s Charlotte I’ve disappointed the most.

  “Sometimes, when she feels most strongly, she has to lash out,” I say to Sasha, and I realize that I have invented this version of Charlotte and that in fact I know nothing about her at all.

  “Let’s go in,” I say, wiping more blackflies off my neck.

  When I return to the table and sit down, Anna and Fred emerge from the kitchen and sit with me. Sasha pulls out a chair and we wait, silently, for Charlotte to join us, but when that wait feels too long, Fred asks Anna if she has made up her mind.

  “It’s important to act quickly,” he adds. “There’s no time to waste, and even so, if you tell them now, there’ll be a waiting period. Scheduling, tests, preparation, pre-op stuff …”

  “I know,” Anna says clearly and forcefully. “And if the buckets are filled …” She hesitates, and I hold my breath, “the farmers in the park become sugar for the king. You mustn’t hobble them up in the rickets and make wretches of them. It’s the law, and when riches sway and the moon makes its choice, well then, feet will rock, lemons will fall—”

  “Mom, it’s your decision, and your time,” Sasha says abruptly, a horrified look on her face, corking the flood of her mother’s nonsense.

  “Sasha, please, cut the airy-fairy crap,” Fred cuts in.

  Charlotte enters then and stands behind Fred. The two of them seem to breathe in as one, positioning themselves as their mother’s sentinels.

  “Remember, Mom, this thing will get worse, not better,” Charlotte says, and shifts the weight on her feet.

  “And the technology these days …” Fred adds.

  “We have a stake in it, too—”

  “Charlotte, you selfish bitch!”

  “Sash, please,” Fred says. “If you recall—”

  “I CAN REMEMBER THE FIRST WAS TREES!” Anna’s raised voice cuts Fred off. “If the storm was France’s creamy hotel, it would not smell like this. Don’t you see the smell, the way it makes everything cold?” She stops herself, then looks at her fingers collected together obediently on the table. “I remember,” she says, her voice now barely audible, but still insistent.

  Charlotte glares in my direction, as if Anna’s two keenly whispered words support her accusations against me. Charlotte is the one who most resembles her mother.

  “Dad,” Fred mumbles, and begins to walk towards the kitchen.

  I push my chair back and follow my son.

  “I spoke to Dr. Mead,” he says, in a hush like a cop-show coroner. “Jargon aphasia is what it’s called. It’s semantic jargon, but not yet neologistic or even phonemic.” He nods like one of those toy puppies in the rear window of cars whose necks are suspended on springs.

  I have no reply.

  As the blonde Tuesday turned into three months of Tuesdays, I watched my stomach flatten, my arms tighten; I felt my senses return to their peak.

  “It means it’s not just confabulations, but something associated with aphasia—the temporal gyrus or the posterior parietal operculum … it means that it’s possible there’s more pressure than Gottlieb can fix.”

  It’s not that I don’t want to speak. I do. But I can think of absolutely nothing to say.

  Charlotte comes into the kitchen and pats Fred on the shoulder as a signal that they should leave. Another thing that my daughter blames me for is the drive back to the city. If I hadn’t insisted we needed a simpler, back-to-nature life, just at the time when Charlotte was needing a more complicated, teenage one, she’d be travelling a few blocks instead of an hour down Highway 400. She’s right to blame me. I was the only one who needed this return to the expanses of corn that dominated my childhood. As I look out the kitchen window, I see that the stalks have grown even since yesterday.

  When they have all gone, Anna and I sit in the living room in front of the evening TV—our choices being the home video shows filled with doggy mishaps and baby surprises, or the perpetually dismal news magazine shows.

  “Leave this,” Anna says when I choose America’s Funniest Home Videos, and I revel in her clarity. “It’s hard,” she says after a few minutes.

  “Yes,” I say, alert to her every jitter, her flapping baby finger, her twitching foot. Maybe with these few, controlled utterances she is telling me that this is the way she needs to talk to me now: simple constructions, a few syllables at a time. So I take her up on it and decide to do the same:

  “Can I get you something?”

  “No.”

  “How do you feel?” God, I’m as bad as the doctors.

  “Frightened.”

  I inhale.

  “Would you rather be somewhere else?” And then I realize it’s not a clear enough question. What I want to ask is if we should risk leaving, if I should take her to the mountains, which she loves, or do something that will get our minds off all of this, but of course there is no getting her mind off all of this. Her mind is all of this. “I mean, is there anything you’d like to do, to help this all be easier?”

  “The baby will need changing and then there’s all the clouds, and the dam on the highway that will only get worse,” she says and I see that I’ve asked the wrong thing again. I hold my breath.

  “What about the baby?” she asks me.

  “What baby?”

  “The one in the corn.”

  I don’t ask her what she means. It’s my job to know. I am her husband.

  I wait.

  But then my doubt and guilt grab me by the collar and I think I might choke. I wonder if Anna is finally confronting me, and I think that I now must face losing her.

  “What baby in the corn?”

  “Yesterday’s,” she says softly, in a tone that seems forgiving. I feel the urge to lay my head on her lap. I must be very tired. None of us has slept much this last week.

  “Are you tired, Anna?”

  “No, no,” she says and smiles. She stands up and holds out her hand, beckoning me to join her. I take her hand, stand, and she leads me out of the house into the backyard that looks out on the field we’ve given over to the horses owned by the farmer next door. The night is warm and the punishment of the recent rainy days seems to have let up.

  “Smell it,” she says as she drops my hand, steps forward and looks up to the stars. I am beginning to see a beauty at work in Anna’s brain. I toss my head back and smell and see and even lick the air, which tastes candied. Anna turns and steps back toward me. She puts her head on my shoulder. I wrap my arms around her and we breathe in tandem. I dare not ruin this by telling her all that needs to be said.

  When Charlotte was eight and wanted to ride horses, you prete
nded it didn’t frighten you; you pretended for her sake that you didn’t know that a beast as powerful as a horse did not need to take commands from a tiny, if agile child who wanted the world at her feet. You told her that the horse needed her to tell it where it should take its wild energy. Charlotte blamed me when she finally did fall, years later, because I hadn’t allowed her to ride the horse of her choice, the biggest one, the one with the blackest mane.

  Later, when I am beside Anna in bed, her calf touching my shin as we spoon, I feel her breath quickening. Its rhythm reignites the urge I felt in Gottlieb’s office. I touch her back, but worry that the force of this impulse to love-making will frighten her. I stroke her very gently. I feel our lust take its shape between our bodies, a memory becoming physical again. But then I think I hear something in her breathing. A rattle. I stop my stroking and raise myself up on my arm to look at her. Her eyes are closed, she is waiting, hoping, wishing, but I can’t continue. I am afraid if I penetrate her that her head will explode.

  THREE

  “Is there anything else you want to know?” Gottlieb asks Anna, who is now out of the MRI tube. He has explained to us what surgery will entail for a brain aneurysm like hers. There’s a chance that the confabulation will disappear within a few weeks, but there’s also a chance that it won’t. And even if it does, the aneurysm won’t go away by itself. Clipping the balloon so that it doesn’t get full to bursting is the wisest option, in Gottlieb’s humble and oh-so-calm opinion. He lauded the appearance of the speech disorder as something that alerted us to the aneurysm that we can now monitor. Why is it that Gottlieb is so easy with these words—the who-knows-what of my wife’s body?

  Anna shakes her head: no, there’s nothing else she wants to know.

  “There’s one last thing I would like to know,” Gottlieb says.

  Anna looks at him and waits.

  “Why wouldn’t you choose it?”

  She stares blankly ahead.

  “What could possibly make you want to live with the risk?”