by Tessa McWatt
Christine stayed awake each night after I left, she told me. Over and over again, she blamed me for the insomnia she said was aging her. And for her childlessness. After the hunger, the fumbling, the mad excavation to the centre of her, I would pull out and come somewhere on her body, in my hand or on the sheets. And each night after I left, she’d stay awake alone, aging with an empty womb.
I was playing a perilous game with myself. With her.
“I love my family,” I would say, toying with them, too.
“Then what are you doing here wasting my time?” she finally asked one night.
“Well, I love you too,” I said, believing in the cliché of the man I had become.
“Go home,” she said, and thus it began: the slow attrition of pride and lust. She threatened never to see me again, telling me that at thirty-eight she was now too old to be playing this game. When I called the next day, wracked that she might now hate me, she had softened, and our routine of dinner, sex and songs began again, and at first seemed as spontaneous and erotic as in the beginning. But over the next few months I turned into an observer of myself, wondering how I had come to this, how I could have these conversations, or listen to this pathetic singing. I watched when we fucked, too, wanting someone else to see me, wanting to perform this for an audience, feeling my leg muscles swell, my arms bulge with effort that I wanted documented. I’d do my little show for myself, and then I’d pull out at the very last second.
Charlotte is helping Anna make more piles. They are in our bedroom, and I have come to stand in the doorway to watch. Charlotte has delicately trimmed Anna’s hair to an ear-length bob, which will facilitate the clipping and shaving that will take place before they carve open her skull. This small act of vanity in the face of the operation’s brutality is something I believe is only possible among women: my daughter is anointing her mother’s body in preparation for its mutilation.
“Look at this!” Charlotte yelps, coming across a plaid skirt in Anna’s closet. She hauls the skirt out and holds it up to her waist, drawing attention to its extravagant length and bulk. “Good grief, Mom, how could you?”
Anna smiles and puts down the other clothes she has been sorting. She crosses the room to Charlotte. “Ah, I love this skirt; it’s so old,” she says, fondling the woollen pleats, and both Charlotte and I are drawn in by her perfect syntax.
“You do?” Charlotte says through laughter.
“I do.”
“But Mom, it’s hideous. It has to go. I’ll buy you a new one, after. Shorter, funkier. You’d look great in Vivienne Westwood.”
“No, this one,” Anna says, without taking her eyes or hands off the plaid, “this one he made in the poppies.” Charlotte and I don’t even bother to look at one another.
“The tail in the squares makes the bones dance … it was that time when all the bones danced.” She pulls the skirt tightly against herself and I wonder if this statement is indeed true and not a confabulation.
I have noticed that, but for brief snatches of clarity, Anna’s language has changed in the last few days. It feels not so much like a sluicing of random words, but rather a controlled, matter-of-fact absurdity. I imagine that it’s not just memories she has confabulated; she is constructing the future now. The moment when all the bones will dance.
“They waste stuff,” she says in three controlled words, waving her hand at Charlotte, who smiles in sheepish acknowledgement. “They have loads,” Anna continues. Another three. “You’ve spoiled them,” she says as she turns to me.
“I’ve spoiled them?” I say. “I am the only one who ever gave them a curfew, made them do homework.” I smile at Anna and watch the smile rise on her own face. “It was always, ‘Wait until Dad gets home.’ You gave them money every time they held out their hands!”
“That’s true, Mom,” Charlotte contributes.
“Don’t mind me,” I say, laughing, enjoying the three of us this way. “I just went to work, faithfully, every day, to give you all these little extravagances,” and I hear my voice catch with regret and hope to God that neither of them has noticed, “and about that, anyway …” I am shocking myself, hearing these words come out of my mouth, “about all that … work … it’s something I’ve been meaning to say, to tell you …” and I can sense Charlotte’s eyes on me, her brow furrowed in confusion, like mine, “around that time, you know the work was very trying … and it’s …” What am I doing? “It’s strange, but I think I must have felt …”
I look up at Charlotte, whose lips are pursed so fully in disapproval that they look clownish. We hold each other’s gaze for so long I feel my eyes start to get watery.
“Dad, Mom and I aren’t finished all this sorting,” Charlotte says and gives me a look that says “Over my dead body will you speak now.” Yes, Charlotte has known all along, I think. What is this facility with truth that women have?
“Michael Williamson,” Anna says as she comes up beside me. “Don’t worry, the tear mountains make yellow stripes of us, frozen like the ones in Kyrgyzstan that time the dog bit you.”
And I laugh.
Instead of weeping, I laugh so hard that tears come anyway. I take a breath. “I think you’re right; we spoiled them,” I say. “But at least they’ve had to find a way to hang on to the lifestyles they grew accustomed to. They’re rich! They can look after us.” Charlotte looks at the two of us and then walks out of the room. Anna smiles and takes my hand and leads me to the edge of the bed, where we sit.
“If anything—” she starts, but I squeeze her hand so tightly that she stops.
“I think you’re supposed to eat a lot of liver when you come out. And carrots. I’m stocking up. Thought I’d make soup too.”
From my research and from talking to Gottlieb and others I know every stage and intricate detail of the operation Anna will undergo, from the amount of anaesthetic she will need to the instruments they will use to cut into her. I know far more than I am comfortable with, so instead I focus on liver and carrots.
“Fixing market waves in black leather …”
“Lentils, and corn on the cob.”
“My driver’s licence,” she says, returning to her three-fingered accompaniment. She is reminding me that we have to surrender her licence at the hospital. “You’ll have to do all the vacuuming—” and I know she means “driving.” Or does she? I have grown to enjoy the uncertainty. I am fond of this aneurysm now. Her hands, I notice, are more wrinkled than I remember, and this arouses me.
“I want to show you something,” I say, and I get up from the bed and go the drawer of my bureau, where I have hidden little snippets of writing, all the small things I want to tell her, which I promise myself that I will gather and put together into one letter. I catch sight of the words on the top sheet. “I always appreciated when you threw yourself into our life, giving the children things you never had …”
These are clumsy, vague imitations of what needs to be said.
When the squalls and frost and minus 20 of January days threw you into your Mediterranean body, you plucked light from a vault and decided to take up cross-country skiing with eight-year-old Fred, who slipped and slid to keep up with you, as you said, “faster, faster, come, we’ll stay warm.”
I wonder if this is the right way. Perhaps there’s a way to be more precise. I retrieve the illustration I began working on last week and finished yesterday. I take it out and close the drawer.
“Here,” I say, giving it to her as I sit back down. “Like the old days,” I add, and watch as she takes the sheet and examines it.
The light in her face tells me she has understood. I am grateful.
“Slip part of the window under a fountain and off comes the frame,” she mutters.
I nod. She’s right. Whatever she means, she’s right. I can feel her. Everything is perfectly clear. Something new for us when the frame comes off. The past takes too much language. This is how we must proceed.
EIGHT
The lawn mower ha
s stalled. Should I go to the rescue? I watch through the window of my office as Sasha dismounts the John Deere tractor mower, opens the hood and peers at the engine, adjusting wires and checking valves. Her movements are winged and certain. When I look at her I cannot for the life of me understand why she has been without a boyfriend for so many years, or why she isn’t married. Charlotte, I know, can be hard: beautiful, but anodized. Sasha, her face asymmetrical, her eyes small yet penetrating, her heart tender, should be a young man’s boon. I think again that it could be something I’ve done or not done that keeps her single—something that has caused this cultivated loneliness which sends her into her own body, so aware yet unknowable. She starts the motor and hops back on the small tractor.
I turn back to my work. I must manage this small feat before the operation. I have something to tell Anna, but I don’t yet know how, or even exactly know what it is. If I can get this right, if I stay at this desk and work through the day, and, if necessary, all night, I will glimpse it.
What more than a sex and a pulse—a slow, deep pulse—make a woman? Yes, this is the difficulty. How to represent Anna. Not the me of Anna or the children of Anna. But Anna’s essence. Who is she?
“There are magpies in the corn again.” She is standing in the doorway.
“Crows,” I say, as I turn toward her. I cover the sketch with my hand, stretching out my fingers to slide some opened bills over my handiwork.
“Crows,” she repeats. “They shred all the wind in the fountain.”
I want to talk to Anna, like this, forever.
“Three greens gobbled in the field, cluttered white clouds two in the sky; the shadows are fences,” she says.
Yes, this is true.
I crumple up the sketch, shove it aside, and reach for a clean sheet of paper.
I take my marker and do a quick sketch as she watches over my shoulder.
She takes the sheet of paper and examines it. She smiles. “Mmm,” she says, and here we are, for the first time in months, perhaps years, in the same moment, the same way. I see what has been wrong with my previous drawings: my concentration on meaning through a linear process. What Anna and I have in common now is more like a grunt. I need to think more like a cave painter.
I hold her hand as I get up and walk with her outside. The July corn is like a teenager, gawky and nearly as tall as it ever should be, but with the dangerous possibility that it will keep growing. The ears are bulging like oblong testes, and silking has begun: that spurt of thin tassels at the crown of the husk, like the crystallized dregs from a boy’s dream. We stand looking out onto the field and I think of the old couple in the painting American Gothic—the man grasping his pitchfork, that look of disaffection on their faces from the toil of everything between and around them, everything that makes their lives so fucking hard. I have my marker in my back pocket, and I am standing next to a woman who is stripped of the language that once defined her. We are all that is left of our past and the future.
“I don’t want you to have the operation.”
But I don’t turn to her as I say this. I stare at the corn spewing in its ecstasy, and I wonder if she and I should run through it.
“What?” She turns and faces me.
“There is, there’s a chance these symptoms will disappear on their own,” I say. It’s all lies, all diversion, all desperate keening.
“Michael,” she says, and touches the outside of my arm with her hand. “Michael—”
“Martinique!” I blurt out to stop her. “We could go to Martinique. I know it’s summer, but we could stay till winter, we—”
“Don’t!” she shouts, and I listen for an echo but there is none; the corn has absorbed it. “Owls. The wife ate the owls by mistake, but the trees made holes in her.”
“Anna, please, we could take a trip, really. Florida, to see your brother—” and I know this is a dead end, as there’s no pretending that seeing Joe would be relaxing for her. She hasn’t even told him about the operation. She has no reason to visit the States, and so before she floods on about oranges and grapefruit and Mickey Mouse, I quickly take her arm and draw her into a dance. I find myself singing Tom Jones, “But for me they shine within your eyes … As the trees reach for the sky above … So my arms reach out to you for love … With your hand, resting in mine …” I sway with her until she starts to snigger.
And then she stops and pushes me away. “Michael.” Her tone is harsh.
“What?” I am a hurt, silly little boy. For some reason I think of Mustafa in Luxor, and an Egyptian ideogram comes to mind: a man on one bended knee, a hand to his mouth as though he’s eating, a curve that looks like a fragment of Horus’s eye before him, and below that, near his knees, an oblong shape like a cushion on a pedestal. It is the ideogram for love, wish, want, desire. But this sign cannot possibly represent all of those disparate emotions. What is supposed to be obvious is not obvious at all. I want suddenly to get back to my desk to work out a new idea.
“Fixing up the second barn is something I’ve been planning to do. Put windows in the barn loft, make it a place for the grandchildren,” she says, and I think she’s speaking remarkably clearly, and that I am right: she doesn’t need the operation. “Gold eyes in the glimmers,” she continues. It’s a delicate mistake. She is better, I tell myself.
“We will do all that, yes, and maybe China … we could go to China, you know; we could even sky dive, scuba dive, dive and dive and dive …” and I am delirious.
She punches me in the arm.
When I rub it she takes another swing and hits my ribs, then lands another over my kidneys.
“What?” I ask in pain. Her two fists come at me now. Girl punches at my chest, and then on my forearms when I raise them in self-defence. She hates me now, I’m convinced, and it’s finally now, this moment, when I’ve been so stupid, that she will tell me she knows, that she knew all along, and could in fact recite what Christine said to me on that last night, nearly three years into our relationship, when she saw me for the despicable coward I really was. Anna is about to tell me what Christine said then; she is about to say, “you deserve nothing that you have.”
I let Anna hit me until she exhausts herself and flops into my arms.
She doesn’t cry. I don’t cry. I smell her hair.
When I came home from Fallucci’s that first time and smelled of cigarettes, not mine—their rusty perfume on my shirt—you told me that there were ways of talking to one another that would not sting. I didn’t want to understand what you meant, and believed you had found me out. Worse, I wanted you to know. Wanted to punish you with the knowledge of how I’d lifted her leg, placed it on my shoulder to angle in, just so. Wanted you to know how lost I had become.
Anna wipes her nose into my shirt. “You want me to die,” she says gently, clearly, raising her face now, which is tear-stained and snotty.
Dear God. I hold onto her and feel the slippery wetness on my shirt.
“Anna, please, I’m frightened.” And I take her face in my hands and see that there’s no fear there. Her eyes say that she wants me to do better than that.
“Let’s go to the market,” I say, thinking I’d like to cook something special for her tonight. As we walk towards the car, I feel how death has made my every action suspect. Either I have a duty to tell her everything or no right at all to taint her memory with my version of reality. I have no idea which of these choices is the right one.
Later, Anna’s shallow breathing tells me that she is only pretending to sleep in order to be left alone. And I am at work again. The corn feels close, like hair curling at my neck. A hot breeze blows through the rows tonight and the moon is growing back its broken face. The horses in the field are running, and their canter beats a rhythm in my head. When I close my eyes, filaments of light behind the lids dance like the aurora borealis. I’m desperate to get it right, but it isn’t yet.
The question of duty brings me to this point: where what I am meets what I say I am. And here b
e dragons, as the map-makers used to write. I can tell Anna what she doesn’t know, or tell her more of what she does. Does she know I was a man who split his life in two for fear of ending up with nothing? Does she understand how such cowardliness can last so long?
NINE
“Dad, there’s toast—take some toast,” Charlotte says as I nibble on the scrambled eggs she has prepared.
“Good eggs,” Fred says, his lips making that wet-smacking sound that convinces me he cannot be my son. I push away my plate. My children are vulgar, devouring food in front of their mother when they know she has been on “nil by mouth” since midnight. Sasha has at least taken hers outside to eat on the porch.
I touch my pocket and feel the crumpled sheet there. It’s shit, this drawing. It will not do. The head is all wrong, the feet out of proportion. If these selfish children would just get out of our way, I could find the time to get it right. And maybe even convince Anna that the whole trip to Toronto isn’t necessary. If I’m to lose her, I want it to be here, on my turf, in our own house, with enough time for both of us to speak, or not to speak, or—
“I’ve just heard from Rosie, she’ll be on shift by the time we get there,” Fred says.
Fred, I must admit, has been stellar about dealing with the hospital. He’s made special arrangements for a particular attendant at St. Michael’s, a nurse named Rosie, who will give Anna that extra bit of care.
Sasha comes back inside with her plate as Charlotte scrapes some charring off a piece of toast. I hear Anna upstairs in the washroom, preparing to come down.
“Finish up and clear the table,” I say generally to these overgrown bodies. I feel Charlotte’s eyes on me. I look up at Sasha, who has traced the agitated motion inside me to the trembling in my cheek.
Dear Anna, when we returned from Egypt the shadows on the rim of my eyelids made shapes like the leaves of all the varieties of lettuce on earth. The leaves were veined with all the lies of my life. I watched them, and followed.