by Tessa McWatt
“Dad, Uncle David called; he wants you to call him after the operation,” Sasha says, picking up my plate from the table. Charlotte rises with her own plate and joins her sister at the sink. “He sounded like he meant it,” Sasha adds, and looks at me with daughter-pity for her old dad who doesn’t know how to maintain a relationship with his only brother. They both lean on the counter, facing me.
“Suzanne called me yesterday,” Charlotte says, and coils a ringlet from Sasha’s hair gently around her finger so gently that I wonder if she feels like I do, like anything we touch right now will snap. “She said David wanted to come, but I told her that wasn’t necessary.” When she drops the ringlet she runs the back of her fingers along Sasha’s neck the way a lover might, and I feel ignorant of my own flesh and blood.
“Come on, hurry up,” I say, crotchety. Since when does Charlotte have the right to stop putting Aunt and Uncle in front of Suzanne and David?
“Dad, relax,” Charlotte says, and she stops caressing Sasha’s neck and throws her own straight mane over her shoulder in a gesture so like her mother’s that I feel dizzy. “We’ve got two hours.”
“That’s not that much time, with traffic down the 400 …”
“Chill, Dad,” Fred says, and I know he never uses that word in his daily life but is performing for his sisters.
“Since when are you so easygoing about time?” I ask, tasting the grit in my own voice. I imagine the hatchet, its glistening blade sharp as a guillotine, which I would take now to some living thing. Fred rolls his eyes at me and picks up his plate as he rises and takes it to the sink.
“What?” I ask.
Fred doesn’t answer me, but I see how he shakes his head at Charlotte as he clears space for his dishes.
“Charlotte,” I start, but I have no idea what it is I need to say. I grasp at an old idea. “What is the latest on the car? Have you made a decision?” These are the kinds of things I used to attend to for them, the things they count on me for—the car, tax returns, mortgages. For them I have no inner life. Charlotte needs a new car to replace her old Lexus, a gas guzzler, and she should know better, but it’s up to me: “A hybrid is the best bet with the price of oil—” and I stop myself because I haven’t been following the price of oil, but I know it’s outrageous, and the idea of a car, of getting one, of putting my wife in one to take her to this operation, makes me feel so nauseated that I have to hold my head up with my hands.
“Dad,” Charlotte is at my side in a flash. “Dad, are you okay?” I stare at her. “You were swaying.”
“Don’t you go on us now,” says Fred in a cheery, I’ll-have-to-do-everything-then voice.
“Who the fuck said anyone was going?” I say.
There is a putrid smell coming up from between my legs. I am revolting.
“Who said anyone was going anywhere?” I repeat, and Charlotte must smell it too because she backs away from me. There’s a rodent silence now, a skittering away to stillness.
“What?” I ask, looking up at each of them. First Fred, with his air of casual control that says he will never be the fool of a man I have become. I wonder who he is fucking these days to make him feel so smug. For him I gave up mornings alone with my wife, where I was safe, when the crow of day meant that all I had to do was roll over and plant myself inside her. For him I put on a tie. Then Charlotte, second born and yet the first to make me want to keep secrets: petty secrets like leaving half an hour early for work, just to be away from home half an hour longer, or pretending to read the paper so that no one would talk to me.
But when I look at Sasha … the hatred is rightfully aimed at my own breast.
I stand.
“Map the tunes in the hairbrush,” Anna says over my left shoulder, startling me as I dry my hands on a dish-towel. The cloth is filthy; it hasn’t been replaced for weeks. I turn to face her and see that she is indeed holding a hairbrush, and I see, with this new way of knowing, that Anna is perfectly fine, and right to want to examine the wave capacity of important objects as she prepares her head for the assault that is about to take place.
“Mom,” says Fred, walking towards his mother, his voice a pinwheel of fear. I see him as he was: the little boy who made airplanes out of matchbox covers and napkins at restaurants to which he’d been dragged because his father had insisted upon civilized evenings out as a break from the tedium of domesticity. But Fred knew then what I am only beginning to comprehend. He knew that the best moments are silent, and unmeasured but for the task at hand.
Charlotte comes up behind me and runs water in the sink as she starts the dishes, so I don’t hear what Fred says next, but a moment later Anna laughs. She reaches out to her son, who is standing between us and blocking my view. Her hand rises up to touch his face; her fingers push back the hair at his temples and caress the side of his head. I struggle to remember the last time Anna touched my face.
The kitchen smells cheesy; there is filth in the corners.
“Take your time, Mom,” Fred says as he grabs her hand and holds it. “You’re not scheduled until noon. I’ll call them if you want …” and his voice trails off in that pinwheel flutter, and I am surprised that reliable, punctual, rule-abiding Fred would put his reputation at stake for his mother’s comfort.
But surprise feels normal now.
How did I get here?
“Sweetheart.” I walk to Anna, not knowing what else to do. She must be starving, parched. There’s nothing to offer but my presence beside her. “Let’s go upstairs. I’ll get your bag and you can lie down for a few minutes if you need to.”
“Not lie down,” Anna says. She looks at me, flustered, and then looks around as though she’s searching for something I haven’t brought with me. “I need those nozzles, the ones they put on the juniper bush.” She points to my drawing pad on the table, and I realize that she expects us to talk in that new way. My heart sinks; I have nothing to show her. “Magnum feebleness popping—”
“Right,” I say, cutting her off, taking her arm and leading her upstairs. I leave Fred and the girls staring at one another in the kitchen.
“Told you, it embarrasses him,” Charlotte says to her siblings.
The skin on my face prickles.
TEN
I remember a day in Cairo.
Anna was out in the shops, searching for fine cotton and linen. I had made an excuse of the heat, saying she would get more out of the shopping if I wasn’t there to complain. I told her I would finish the book she had bought me, Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, in the quiet cool of our room and then meet her for lunch. But I had been irritated with the book from the moment I had begun it on the airplane, and had only skimmed it during those Luxor afternoons by the pool. I couldn’t face it again, so went down to the hotel front desk, where I chatted with the concierge about a restaurant for lunch. He told me about a café in old Cairo where Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt’s Nobel Prize-winning author, used to write. I remember feeling disloyal to Anna as I stood listening to the man describe the great writer’s Cairo Trilogy and the profound influence the novels had on him, because, after all, books were her territory. I asked him where I could buy a copy, and he directed me to the hotel gift shop. I tucked the copy of Palace Walk under my shirt as I left the shop, as though I had something to hide—not from the authorities who had banned it in many Arab countries, but from Anna. I walked up the four flights of stairs to the rooftop terrace, where I sat alone in the scorching sun, prepared to be entranced by the book.
It was 11:55; I know because I had just checked my watch to see how much time I had before our planned lunch at one. I would enjoy this hour alone. As I began to read—”She woke at midnight. She always woke up then without having to rely on an alarm clock,”—there came in successive waves from all directions in the streets below, a sound whose horn-like crescendo made me think of a battle cry. It was the clamouring voices of men, the marauding bellows of invaders riding on horseback over the desert, surrounding the city, and descending upon Cair
o in a moaning tide of agony and elation to take its citadel and rejoice in its women.
I realized that the sound was in fact the rising call to prayer from all the mosques in the city, the chorus of voices amplified up on the terrace, their elation swelling inside me, drawing me forward. As I looked at the clear blue sky, containing only a single cloud, and as the call got steadily louder, I imagined the mosques filling, the muezzin’s call herding the sleepy market traders and toiling farmers, rescuing its lonesome slum dwellers. At that moment, the lone cloud passed before the sun. I sat up straight in my lounge chair and took the occlusion as an ominous sign, and suddenly felt smug in my skepticism among these believers.
Three minutes later the sound was gone. I put down Palace Walk with a hunger in me that felt like a weapon. I wanted to find something that would take me out of myself, out of my marriage, out of this thing that was sharp and hot and grinding inside me. I walked out into Cairo’s streets.
Now, I make my way through the stale, pale hospital corridor in search of her again, feeling blunt, harmless. I find her room, pause, then enter.
She is bald.
I put my briefcase down on the floor beside the door and go to her. My wife is sitting up in the bed. Her hospital gown is the tint of a faded asparagus fern, and she is now a shaven captive of Ontario’s sandy soil, not the dark banana-leaf princess I first met.
“It’s fine,” I say, stupidly, as I lean down and kiss her cheek. She hasn’t asked me, hasn’t even indicated that the baldness is an issue for her. She pats my hand. There is a small bubble of skin at the nape of her neck that I have never seen before and it reminds me of a wet, shivering animal.
Rosie, the Filipino nurse that Fred arranged for, comes in to take Anna’s blood pressure. She has been carefully monitoring every one of Anna’s vital signs and has given her the final Hunt and Hess assessment. This scale is the neurological indicator of the severity of the condition based on the patient’s symptoms. It allows the doctors to prepare for the operation; to know how they will deal with the aneurysm and the pressure on the brain as a result of swelling. Anna is at Grade 2-, which is a good sign. She has not suffered paralysis, although she seems to have a stiff neck. She is alert, aware of her surroundings, and her speech is not any worse than it has been in the last week.
“Feed the dogs,” she says to me and pats my hand again. I stare at her. We haven’t had a dog since our family retriever, Miko, was run over on Highway 12 almost fifteen years ago.
“I will.” I return to my briefcase, which has fallen over. I set it right and consider getting out the pad, a fresh piece of paper, as I’m not ready yet to show her the one I’ve been working on. A creeping foolishness wakes me up. Who do I think I am kidding? What did I think I would accomplish with this little gesture? My absolution? This is possibly the most cowardly act of all. I should have completed that letter, written down the exact words, and been a man while I awaited the consequences. At the very least I should have strung together those snippets of words in the drawer and tagged on the appropriate conclusion: forgive me.
“Stop it,” a voice says behind me, and it’s Charlotte speaking to Sasha, who is laughing as they come into the room from their small excursion to a Queen Street café for the Blue Mountain coffee that Sasha says is the best in town. I click the clasps of the briefcase back in place and leave it propped up against the wall. I join them by the bed. Fred has returned to his hospital to check in on an elderly patient he was assigned yesterday, and somehow I’m relieved that all I have to deal with in this room are these three women.
“Shit!” Charlotte says as she takes in Anna’s bald head.
“You’re head’s a perfect shape, Mom,” says Sasha.
“Braised harps strung in trees—”
“Mom,” Sasha interrupts her mother gently, “I bought you some nail polish. Charlotte and I are going to do your nails. We have time. I really never have seen such a perfect shape. I wonder if mine would look like that if I shaved it.”
“Do you remember, Mom, we did this when I had my tonsils out,” Charlotte says, taking on her sister’s gentleness as she pulls out the polish and some cotton balls.
For six months after it ended, I ached for her—for her, and for the roaring sound that had rushed through me. But slowly I got the knack of this deadpan muttering.
I wonder if Fred has really had to return to work or if he’s off fucking the woman he’s obviously been seeing. And what if I were to tell everything to Anna now, before she leaves this room for the surgery? Tell her how I never knew that defiance and betrayal would feel so fucking great?
I will the girls to leave. I pretend to be packing up myself by going to my briefcase and opening it.
“Charlotte has been flirting with the male nurse,” Sasha says to Anna in a playful voice.
“I have not!”
“You think because he does something un-macho that he’ll be great in bed—I know you.”
“Sash!”
“That’s what you thought about Robert.”
“Robert was good in bed!”
They laugh. I take paper out of the briefcase, then the drawing I did last night. I hesitate, then snap shut the briefcase with my free hand.
“In the desert there was one street light near our hut at the oasis. The Bedouin who danced with me had three wives.”
I turn and look up at Anna’s face, her head, round and then tapered towards her neck like a light bulb. I know that what she has just said is not confabulation. This really happened. I was there.
“She asked him if he minded night shifts,” Sasha says.
“That’s not flirting,” Charlotte defends.
“Ha!”
“His hips—they tossed themselves at me like a woman’s,” Anna says, and the girls don’t exactly ignore her but neither do they take what she’s saying seriously. Only I know that Anna is right. The man moved like a belly dancer.
Before everything changed.
Cairo had been a layover between the Upper Nile—Mustafa and the Valley of the Kings—and the next leg of our holiday in the desert. We were picked up at our hotel by a driver and another man I thought was to be our translator, but upon attempting to communicate with them it was clear that neither could speak English. The extra passenger, I realized, was the driver’s friend along for the ride. He took advantage of the minivan’s sound system to play tapes of Arabic music at high volume for the entire five-hour trip. As we drove past various formations of desert sand and rock, fantastical mushrooms, giant drums, and hundreds of dunes that resembled the backs of house-sized beetles skittering along the brown sand, I felt drugged, kidnapped, by the men and the chantlike singing blaring from the speakers.
We arrived in one of the towns of the Bahariya Oasis in the western desert of Egypt. I stumbled out of the van, fatigued and disoriented, and we were led to the home of a Bedouin family whose eldest son, Helal, was known, the Cairo concierge had told us, for eventful tours into the White and Western Deserts, and whom we would meet at dinner that evening.
“This is wonderful,” Anna said. She pressed her body close to mine as we headed into the modest clay house. “This is what you wanted, and I’m glad you talked me into it.” There was only the slightest inflection to convey that she wanted my assurance. She was trying hard. I took a deep breath to help me handle the feel of her against my skin. I was unbearably hot, but it was not the heat of the desert; I was fiery with something under my breath, inside my lungs.
At the house, we met several Bedouin men, introduced to us by their roles: cook, camel tamer, builder, gardener. The last, Hamada—a short, boyish man with a serious face and small eyes—was to be our guide. We were invited to sit on the floor, where he served us a lunch of goat’s cheese, cucumber and tuna. Canned tuna in the desert? Though I didn’t say anything to Anna, the fact of this was dismaying to me beyond all reason. I watched Anna expertly wrap the flat wood-oven-baked bread around hunks of white cheese and fish, an expertise I was thinki
ng must have been granted to Middle-Eastern people at birth. Hamada nodded at her, produced his first smile since our introduction, and I was irked. But when she faltered, dropped some of the cheese before it reached her mouth, reacting with an “oops” and a smile, I saw how I was wrong, how I’d spent years exoticizing her and how she was just like me. Still, the air in my lungs seared my insides.
After lunch, Hamada took us in a four-by-four on a tour of the oasis, the surrounding desert, and the sudden, astonishing gardens carved out of the land, where men irrigated crops with water flowing into gutters around vegetable patches and small orchards. At the base of a palm tree Hamada leapt up several times before he succeeded in grabbing hold of a low branch, which he shook with vigour until dark, oblong pods fell to his feet. He bent down and collected the pods in his tunic, then approached Anna, who took one from him. He moved towards me, but I put up my hand to refuse.
“Dates,” Anna said, as she sucked on one, her mouth puckered as though over a nipple. I hesitated, took one, and tasted its burly sweetness. As they walked ahead of me toward the Jeep I heard laughter from Anna, and was curious as to what the so far dispassionate Hamada might have said to provoke it. I noticed that Anna and Hamada were a similar height. Had Anna not been raised in Canada would she have been married off to a more suitable-sized, duskier-skinned man like Hamada? I drew a gasping breath, tossed the rest of the pulpy date on the ground and followed them. I was eager to get to the camp. There, I felt, I’d be able to breathe, to relax into the landscape and disappear into myself without any of the social niceties that this part of the tour required.
At the end of the day, after sitting us on a blanket at the edge of the oasis and feeding us corn that had been roasted over an open fire and a red tea made from sorel leaves, Hamada drove us toward the outer perimeter of the Black Desert to our camp. We were greeted by the expedition’s leader, Helal, who had been born in the desert, was committed to its preservation, and was delighted to share its beauty with the right kind of people. I watched as Anna greeted him; how certain he seemed, merely by the look of her, that she was the right kind of people.