Reader, I Married Him

by Tracy Chevalier

  There being no computer at home, I use one at the university to write him an email. Having no experience with boys, I don’t know what to say. After much hesitation, I tell him I love him, and I believe he loves me too; upon his return he must convert to Islam. While this might sound frightening, he will be happy in this world, and possibly the next.

  Every day for the rest of the week I check to see if there is an answer. Finally a message pops up in my email box. Words from a lost language. He says there is a misunderstanding, and if he’s played any role in this he is sorry. He has a girlfriend, and marriage is the last thing on his mind, let alone conversion; he says he’s happy to be who he is. He won’t be coming back, for he has received a fellowship elsewhere. He will never forget his time in Turkey, and will always remember me.

  These days I do not go to the canteen. I avoid Yasemin, from whom I cannot bear to hear another “I told you so.”

  Like a shutter in a rainstorm, banging against a window, I venture forth, retreat back, try afresh, retreat again. Nothing changes in my life and yet nothing is the same.

  BEHIND THE MOUNTAIN

  EVIE WYLD

  ONE OF HER DREAMS involves being at the crest of a large wave about to break on a steep sea wall. It is the beach at Deal, flat and grey with a long stretch of pebbles leading up to the promenade. The shoreline is a jumble of barbed wire and the rusting skeletons of beach defences. The concrete is sheer, enormous. The wave, though huge, will break only halfway up the wall, and then she will be dropped by it and churned again into a new wave, beaten against the wall until she is broken into pieces. She thinks of her son, and how he’ll take the news, his housemaster calling him out of class, the necessity of his bravery. Her husband will be fine—relieved, perhaps. The part of blameless widower will suit him.

  She wakes and is still in Canada and the war is over. And there is her husband next to her, flannel pyjamas against the chill that never quite leaves the house, despite the assurances of the bank that everything is top of the range. Her husband always appears to be wearing a suit, even in sleep. On the boat over, he’d sat out on deck in the sun, wearing cufflinks, shoes shining, sweating. She makes herself touch his back so that he turns, and she smiles and says, “Good morning, darling,” to break the spell of sleep, and she watches him reach for a response, roll over and touch her hair, one of his four necessary shows of intimacy for the day.

  “How did you sleep?” he asks. The both of them, she thinks, are trying and only failing on the inside.

  She runs through the day’s errands. Collect the rib roast from the butcher for lunch at the weekend, contact an upholsterer—there is an old mouse hole in the sofa that has split and stretched open so it displays the innards, and if one of their Saturday lunchtime guests moves the magazine stand, it will be exposed. The mouse hole is really the bank’s problem—the house came fully furnished, and her husband has told her, Anything you don’t like, we can change. She will not say, Take me home to my son. She will not say, Reverse time and let me make a different decision about everything. She must decide on a dessert for Saturday. Send out one of the fortnightly care boxes to Sherborne, and try not to think of the twitching canes of the housemasters.

  But first: breakfast. He likes his toast hot, straight from the electric toaster, put in the rack just to make the journey from the kitchen to the table and then straight on to his plate. Of course he has not told her this, and he would never complain of cold toast. But she has seen him pinch a slice between his thumb and forefinger and look crestfallen, as though he has seen his pocket watch fall into a river. This look is instantly masked by the act of pouring tea, and then spreading butter and marmalade on the cold toast, and then the toast is left at the side of the plate, untouched. The first time she noticed, a boiled egg was then eaten without accompaniment; the second time, kippers. Now she has learned that he likes the toast to burn him a little as he plucks it from the rack. And so she waits by the electric toaster until she hears him padding down the stairs in his socks, his shoes waiting for him meekly on newsprint at the bottom of the stairs, and only then will she turn it on. Each time she does it, she wonders briefly if she hates him, then sweeps the thought away like crumbs. He is a good man. She will be a good woman.

  On the drive to the general store she passes the town rubbish tip. The garbage dump. Back in England a man in a donkey jacket with a sun-darkened face and a smell about him comes and takes the rubbish straight from their dustbin. At Christmas she pins a pound note in an envelope to the dustbin, and he sings through, A Happy Christmas, and she waves from the kitchen sink. That way no one is embarrassed by the smell, or the fact that he has seen the things she threw away and knows something of her life. She had found herself cutting an old pair of stockings into rags, just so that if he were to see them, he would not understand that they had clung to her inner thigh, were worn and stained dark brown at the toe by the leather inner of her shoe, and were laddered beyond repair when the Colemans’ terrier tried to get its snout up her skirt. A terrible day. The thought of the dustman seeing was too much.

  But it is not the same in this strange place so far away. People’s rubbish lies exposed and picked through by black bears and jackdaws on the outskirts of town. Seen from the corner of her eye, she sometimes assumes the bears are cows, and then the great dark mounds of them stretch into standing. Her husband thinks of them as nothing more than stray dogs, but she has misgivings.

  At the general store she contemplates a packet of tapioca pearls for a pudding only her husband could like. She imagines the head of the bank and his wife’s polite disappointment and this pleases her.

  The door opens and there is a woman with dark skin and a peculiar, fungal smell. Her head is hidden beneath bandages. She wears thick wool trousers and a coat made of some sort of hide, and she buys a crate of sandwich paste and one of canned ham, and three bottles of cheap whisky. She responds to the grocer’s repeated promptings with grunts and does not look up at him. He asks how she’s getting by, twice, and gets a shrug each time in response. She leaves and the grocer and the few other customers watch her go, see her swallowed up by the cold light of the sun, dust motes hanging in the open door.

  She puts down the tapioca pearls. She tries to put a name to the feeling she has welling inside of her, reaches for it but it is slippery.

  “Old Annie never gets any warmer, eh?” the grocer says to his clerk.

  His clerk looks up. “What happened to her head?”

  The grocer is pleased to impart his information. He has been hoping someone will ask this question. “Dr. Conway has it she was scalped by a bear.”

  “Scalped, you say, eh?”

  “Bear came and caught her in the act of drawing water, head down, and swiped—Dr. Conway has it she’ll be piebald from now on. She’s lucky it didn’t take the top of her skull off.”

  The clerk whistles. “My,” he says. “That’s a brave bear.” They both laugh at the woman who has had the top of her head removed.

  She is now holding a jar of black cherries. She is gripping them strongly, afraid that she might drop and break them and cause a mess. Her fingers feel untrustworthy. The shelf is stacked neatly and densely, the space from where the jar came only exactly as big as the jar she holds in her hand. The act of putting the cherries back on the shelf is too great an adventure. She will have to buy it. The bottle would break if she sent it to her son—imagine him opening the box, the disappointment of finding everything soaked in cherry juice, ruined and sodden, glass shards in the maple fudge. He would write her one of his letters, thanking her for the gift, and would not mention the breakage.

  They will have to have cherries for dessert on Saturday instead of tapioca, though her husband will baulk at the act of putting one’s fingers in one’s mouth and taking out the stone, will spit them bird-like into a teaspoon. Dessert. One of the few North American words she has adopted eagerly. To say the word pudding makes her feel uncomfortable. The feel of it in her mouth. It is r
ounded like a backside.

  The grocer clears his throat. She is now the only customer in the shop and has been holding the cherries too long. She struggles to control the blush that spiders from her chest, arms herself by tidying her hair, patting it twice, checking her posture.

  At the till she is surprised to hear herself ask, “Who was that woman?”

  “Old Annie?” The grocer looks at her cherries, picks up the jar and notes down something in his ledger. “This on account?”

  She nods. “The woman with the . . .” She again pats at her head.

  “Old Annie’s our bit of local colour, I suppose you could say.” The grocer straightens and lets his gut rest smartly on the counter. “Lives up on an outpost in the mountains.”

  “What does she do up there?”

  “What does she do?” The grocer considers this a while, touches his moustache on one side and then the other. “She’s a kinda hermit, I suppose one may say.” She has noticed this in reaction to her accent, how the townspeople reach for a more refined cadence around her. It is irritating. Slow.

  “What happened to her?”

  “A bear did that to her, as I have it,” he says, unblinking. But that is not what she means, and she finds she does not have the words to pry further.

  “Sam the butcher is her son.” He says this as though it explains something. She nods, takes the cherries now wrapped in brown paper, and leaves the shop.

  Back in her car she thinks. A woman like that has a son. And the son is the butcher. The young man who pares the flesh from the white bones of a lamb rack for her, but stops short at the parchment chop frills—she has had to learn to make those herself, or serve the chops with naked bone, which she fears makes her husband uncomfortable. She pulls up outside the butcher’s and sits for a moment gathering herself. How old is Old Annie? It was hard to tell; with the bandage and the gritty-looking skin she could have been anything from mid-twenties to late fifties. Where is her husband, where is Sam’s father? Presumably Old Annie is a widow.

  The butcher, Sam, peers out at her, and she takes the keys from the ignition and steps out of the car.

  “I’ve come for the rib roast I ordered last week,” she says at the counter, smiling. Sam nods—he is not one for smiling either but, unlike his mother, he makes eye contact. He reaches down into the cold box to bring out a package. There is no blood leak, something she appreciates. A trickle of blood spilled down your wrist is more than an inconvenience.

  She buys some chuck steak as well for a stew later in the week, though she doesn’t really want the smell permeating the house. He has written it all down in his ledger, but she still stands and tries to come up with some question that does not leave her feeling intrusive. She can’t think of one. Instead she asks, “Who supplies your poultry?” as if she cared, but just then the door swings open and it is her, Old Annie.

  The butcher nods. “Ma,” he says, and she sidesteps to let the woman get to the counter.

  Old Annie asks, “You got them bones for me, Sammy?”

  The butcher nods. “Out back.” He looks at her, standing in the corner feeling small next to the two of them. “ ’Scuse me, ma’am—I’ll not be a moment.”

  His mother gives a small laugh at his propriety. When he has disappeared out the back, Old Annie says, “I won’t keep him long.”

  “That’s fine,” she says, surprised to be addressed. “I’m done anyway. Do you . . . live around here?”

  Old Annie looks at her; she has her hands on her hips, legs planted far apart, and she is sticking her tongue out to the side of her mouth, tasting her cheek.

  “Up over that mountain.” She gestures with her head, as if the mountain stands just outside the door. “But you seem new, eh?”

  She tries to work out if Old Annie is being friendly or not, and is at a loss. “We moved from England two months ago.”

  Old Annie sniffs deep and hard. “Long way.”

  She nods. It is a very long way.

  The bandage on her head has slipped, and she can see the scar tissue underneath, still livid.

  “A bear,” says Old Annie.

  She looks away. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to pry.”

  “Not prying. You should know there are bears in these parts. What they can do. This is just a swipe—all it means is I’ll be wearing a hat from now on.” For the first time Old Annie smiles, and she sees that her canine teeth are sharp and white, and Old Annie looks suddenly not much older than herself. She nods goodbye, just as the butcher comes back out with a package of bones, not neatly wrapped, seeping red into the newsprint.

  “That’ll keep the dogs happy,” she hears as she leaves, but is unsure whose voice speaks it—both are gravelled and deep.

  She sits in the car and watches Old Annie cross the street and sling the package in the back of a dark green truck. She moves with the confidence of an animal.

  She follows. There are no other cars on the road this morning, and though she catches Old Annie’s eye in the rearview mirror, she still follows. They reach the dump and she stops, watches Old Annie drive on, a bear swivelling its head towards her as she goes. Their eye contact is broken. Soon the green truck is a beetle kicking up dust in the distance, the top of the mountain she lives behind a faded pink.

  On Saturday when the head of the bank and his wife arrive, she is no closer to tracking down an upholsterer. The mouse hole does not seem to bother her any more, and she even moves the magazine rack out of the way because it is easy to trip over. If they notice the hole they don’t mention it. Her husband is caught up with impressing his boss, and politely ignoring the wife. The wife chats loudly in her direction about how wonderful their garden will look in the spring. Mrs. Adam, the wife of the last bank manager, did wonders with perennials. It feels offensive, like a show of power, this prior knowledge of their home.

  Sitting at the dining table, smoothing her napkin over her lap, she thinks of the ringing silence on the other side of the mountain. That is what she imagines, utter silence, even the birds hushed. Would she like that? Will she join the Scotch dancing group?

  “Pardon?”

  The wife is looking at her expectantly, the boss is now too, because she is not answering. Her husband sips his wine.

  “They put on quite a performance at Harvest Festival,” says the boss.

  She nods and, with no frame of reference, says, “I can imagine they do.” She smiles.

  There is a lull, and she says, “I met a woman at the butcher’s who lives alone in the mountains.” She has gestured with her head towards the window, and her husband looks out, expecting the mountain to have moved to their back garden. “She’d been attacked by a bear.”

  “Ah,” says the wife, but it’s the boss who speaks.

  “Old Annie,” he says. “A man-hater. She’d give a dog fleas.” His wife laughs.

  “What happened to her husband?” she asks, and the wife picks up the reins.

  “No one knows—she arrived in town with the little boy, Sam, maybe ten years ago. We all assumed Sam’s father died in the war, but you don’t get more than a couple of grunts out of the woman.”

  “The bear took off the top of her head.”

  “Oh my,” the wife says weakly. There is the sound of cutlery on china. Her husband shifts in his seat; she catches his eye.

  “Not really lunchtime talk,” he says and moves the conversation on to a subject more becoming.

  The rib roast is eaten, and after the cheese she brings out the cherries, which she serves with a small jug of cream. It looks an afterthought, she realises too late; it looks as if she happened to have cherries in the pantry.

  “I love cherries,” says the wife, which may or may not be true.

  She has stopped being worried about it. What is the worst that could happen? “Do you miss your son terribly?” the wife asks, and she finds that she cannot answer. Instead she excuses herself, as if she’s heard the timer on the oven go, as if there is some extravagant pastry cooking i
n the oven that will make sense of the cold cherries and cream. There is not and she stands at the cooling oven. What will Old Annie be eating today? Sandwich paste. A tin can of whisky. She takes a bottle out of the cupboard and pours herself two fingers into a teacup. She drinks it and it makes her cough, but she is glad of it. She wonders if her son has tasted whisky yet.

  As they leave, the wife leans over and touches her elbow. “Tell the bank to address the mouse hole in your sofa. The Adams never got around to it.” There is a note of revulsion. “A better gardener than housekeeper, Mrs. Adam.”

  “It really doesn’t bother me,” she says, and the wife clasps her hands together and smiles in disgust.

  She waits for them to leave, stays in the doorway as her husband walks them down to their car. Her son will be waking, his eyes settling perhaps on the photograph of her and his father kept at his bedside. Old Annie, up there with the bears in the quiet, and Sam cleaving out the back. She feels a thread between them pulled taut for a moment and then snap. Mrs. Adam’s perennials catch the last rays of the weak sun.

  THE CHINA FROM BUENOS AIRES

  PATRICIA PARK

  EVERY DAY IN A classroom in Harlem, Teresa would daydream about food: the smoke-filled steakhouses back home, with short ribs drizzled in parsley sauce, charred provolone, and soft white bread etched with grill marks; the pizzerias with their crimped empanadas and thick onion wedges, instead of the thin, floppy slices here with cheese like chewing gum. New Yorkers, it seemed, could not make a decent pizza para nada.

  During college lectures on biology and history, her mind wandered back to Argentina as her ears failed to grasp the nasal whine of her professors’ unintelligible English. With the other international students she sat through ESL classes where they listened to cassette tapes of slow, crisp, vacuum-sealed speech that they were made to imitate with wide, exaggerated movements of the mouth.

  During breaks the students would cluster by country. Initially the Koreans looked at Teresa’s face and parted their circle; when she opened her mouth and infantile Korean poured out, their circle closed again. A huddle of Hispanic students referred to Teresa as china in the Spanish they thought she could not understand; she told them in her perfect porteño accent, “I’d rather be a ‘chink’ than an indígena.” A fight might have broken out if the students hadn’t been called back to class. From then on they stopped calling her china and started calling her bicha arrogante.