by Russel Smith
We are roast chicken dinners with chicken seasoning that we bang out of a tin can with the flat of our hands. The chicken from a frozen package of three, purchased at Costco, frost-burnt and plump. We cook with haste. Long as it isn’t raw. We buy the jumbo Party Mix and shovel handfuls into our faces while we cook and do the dishes.
We tell each other stories, outrages from my husband’s office, flecks of pretzel flying as he says about this one or that one. Or I talk about the customers at the store; the new Excel spreadsheets I’m using for inventory, glitches in software.
I type, I say. Then there’s a delay.
These are fillable forms?
A delay and then the letters and numbers flick across the screen, meanwhile I’m not doing anything. These are fillable.
You’re not touching the keyboard?
And the letters pour across the screen, seconds later, like, thirty seconds maybe.
My husband doesn’t like the gloves I use for washing the pots and pans. Yellow rubber gloves.
You leave them all over the place, he says. Put them away at least.
They’re gloves, I say. Grease, what do you call, globules in the water.
You leave them on the counter.
Clots of dog food, pork fat, a soggy toast crust. I don’t want my hands touching that.
The feel of those gloves inside, he says. Wet, icky.
And then, I say. Like, a half sentence of text ticks out all by itself across the screen.
Turn the machine off and turn it back on, my husband says.
I do.
Do you turn it off?
I do, I tell him.
Marriage is: you buy a cabin (a “cottage,” they’d call it on the mainland, with a veranda and garden, a lilac and an apple tree, blossoms all over the ground) in outport Newfoundland, maybe an hour or two from town. Canoes, barbeques, an ATV. Before long, you invest in a small business, buy a convenience store down the road from the cabin. A commercial property with a gas bar, soft-serve machine, beer; sell firewood to the crowd who come in from town for ice fishing on the ponds.
When the store came on the market we saw it as extra income to supplement my husband’s retirement, maybe six or seven years away. We thought: opportunity. We thought I could commute for part of the week, manage the store from town the rest of the time. An hour and a half drive.
We thought when my husband retired we’d live around the bay most of the year. Solar panels, maybe even thermal heating, a greenhouse for tomatoes, basil. He’d apply for a moose licence; get one of our neighbours to take him out. We thought off the grid, maybe. Or partially off the grid. Turn our house in the city into an Airbnb.
We are: a box comes in the mail. Something rattles around inside it; I have to slit the packing tape with an X-Acto knife. Here, let me get you a knife. I got it. No, use the knife. Okay, give me the knife.
Even then, I have trouble ripping open the heavy cardboard. Present for you, my husband says. Guess what it is. No idea.
What’s the occasion? No occasion. You can’t guess? I’ve no idea.
A dildo, bright purple with ridges, a smiley face at the tip. Hilarious.
Set in a bed of Styrofoam S’s. I twist the wheel on one end and the vibration is industrial. The S’s squeak against each other, writhing in a pelt of static electricity. Twist the dial back the other way, a gentle hum.
Give it a whirl, he says.
We are the neighbour’s snow blower at dawn. Trips to the dump. We are the new surveillance system I have installed at the store. A camera pointing in every aisle. The simultaneous feed on a flat screen at the cabin and the video footage, three months after the system was installed, of the first break-in. A young woman with long dark hair and a round rabbit-fur hat, pixelated and flaring white like a halo. A young man loading cartons of cigarettes into an army surplus bag, cleaning off the shelves with a sweep of his arm. I’d phoned the cops by running out onto the road with the phone until I found reception. Only two bars, halfway to the river out back, but they answered. They blocked off the highway on both ends, the only two ways out of Low Point if you’re driving.
Marriage is: You should get that windshield wiper fixed. I will. Don’t go on the highway with it like that. I won’t. Stop at Canadian Tire. I will. Did you stop at Canadian Tire? No. You drove like that? Yes, I did.
The wiper with the rubber blade torn away from the metal arm so that the strip of rubber wiggles over the glass like a maddened eel. The metal arm scratching an arc in the glass.
Sucking his cock; the vibrator on roar.
How was it? Oh my god. Was it good? Oh my god.
A marriage is: remortgaging the convenience store in Low Point after the divorce and the condo fiasco. I work more shifts at the store and live in our cabin, to which you say: Okay, until we figure out something else.
You got the cabin in the divorce. We split everything down the middle, the accretion of a life, the worst being the doodads; the worst being the Aerolatte from Bed Bath & Beyond for milk foaming; the worst being the Dirt Devil, and all the handheld devices for cleaning to which I’d inexplicably formed an attachment.
The glass decanter your mother gave us, and the popcorn maker; the worst being the Christmas decorations, dragged from the basement in the heat of summer, the needlepoint Santa my sister did which naturally went to me, the pewter reindeer.
The very worst was the tin salamander from Mexico City with plastic jewels on its back and you could put a tea light behind it. The salamander you bought after we’d stood over the graves with the Plexiglas covers embedded in the stone of the courtyard outside the Metropolitan Cathedral. Unable to see what was below because of the condensation on the Plexiglas, the murky depths of the graves, and the febrile moss of decay.
And the wild fucking in the hotel room behind the cathedral and the bar when the Mexicans stood, one at a time, stood up from tables squashed with relatives, maybe fifteen at a table, all ages, and sang out folk songs, and the enchiladas and old grandmothers.
You took the salamander. We fought over the salamander and I threw a plate at your head but I missed, smashed it against the cupboards. You got the salamander.
I had lost my entire share in the condo fiasco; that was not us, it was me. But after thirty-two years of marriage what could you do? You would not have me say I was put out on the sidewalk. For a time, until I got on my feet, I could stay at the cabin in Low Point. You refinanced the convenience store. Of course this was not us. This was my lawyer and your lawyer.
I was a dancer until I was twenty-seven. Once I performed in a dance that began at dawn in the graveyard of the Anglican Cathedral. We dancers lay face up on the graves. Many of the headstones in that graveyard lie flat on the ground, and the words and dates are smoothed away, gouged by centuries of rain and sleet.
We were wearing long gowns and petticoats, the col- ours too brilliant for period dresses. A troupe of fifteen young women. We rose from the graves as the sun came up, yawning, stretching our arms in the air. We each had a big silver tray with heaps of cut fruit that we offered the audience. Fog crawled around the graveyard. The trains of our dresses left streaks of bright emerald in the dew-greyed grass. I was wearing a ruffled dress with a stiff lace bodice; the smell of baby powder and the comforting scent of some other actress’s stale underarm sweat; lying in a faint depression in the earth because the coffin below me had rotted through and collapsed.
Dancers live by their bodies; they know the muscle and gut, ache and attrition. It’s a short stint, dominated by youth and strength, and sexual appetite. Ungovernable hunger. When we accept the idea of decay we are no longer dancers. We hold the simple tenet: everything moves.
The divorce had come through, and then, at the Low Point beach, the vision. I hadn’t been to town in more than two weeks. I had to be at the store when gas was delivered for the tanks, to see the Atla
ntic Lottery rep, the Central Dairies delivery, the man from Labatt’s restocking the fridge. I was discovering discrepancies in the accounts: small sums, sometimes significant sums, but I could see no pattern, make no sense of what was missing. Almost everyone in the community ran a tab, and everything they bought was written down by hand in Hilroy exercise books. I was transferring the accounts to spreadsheets but there were glitches in the software. Some customers complained they had been charged for things they hadn’t bought. They said things like this had never happened under the former owner. One woman said it was as simple as the nose on your face. If it wasn’t written down you never bought it.
The man at the beach was in a too-tight plaid jacket and jeans with the crotch hanging low enough on his thighs that it seemed to pinch his gait. He walked with a cordoned strut. He was standing with his phone out, trying to take a picture of the water.
The ocean was teeming with cod. They were so dense near the shore I could see their backs breaking the surface, piled on top of each other, their violent writhing. They formed a solid sludge. Some had been left on the beach when the waves withdrew. The sun was setting, turning the water a streaky orange, and close to the beach it was a bloody violet. All the windows in the houses along the shore glowed deep yellow. It was only a matter of minutes before the sun disappeared into the horizon. Fish were dying all over the sand, flinging themselves up, sometimes as much as a foot in the air, and wriggling.
I smelled the alcohol off the man, and the stink of rot or sewage so strong it made my eyes water until the wind changed and the smell was gone. His face was slack except for a ridge of cheekbone, high and sharp under his deep-set eyes, the corners of which radiated white lines in his tanned face as if he had been squinting into a permanent glare. His forehead swooped back, a receding hairline. The pate spattered with brown patches. He had a beard, tufts of thin hair, almost colourless. He was bone with hard knots of stringy muscle and very short. I’d never seen him before.
People said with the downturn in the economy, strangers were coming from St. John’s to cause trouble, break into homes, vandalize, steal what they could get. This was new in a community that slept with their doors unlocked.
What’s happening? I asked.
Fish, he said. I saw that there were cars lined up on both sides of the harbour with their headlights on. People standing at the edge of the cliff. I had never seen anything like it. It was unnatural. The water churning.
I was trying to post a picture, he said. But you got no reception here.
Sometimes you get one or two bars, I said. Up near the church.
You don’t belong here, he said. What are you? From town? He ran his eyes over me and slid his phone into the back pocket of his jeans. He started to walk beside me toward the road, where his truck was idling. He took a flask out of the inside breast pocket of the jacket. The bottle was in a paper bag, soft with thousands of fine wrinkles from reuse. He tilted the mouth of the bottle toward me. A truck up on the hill pulled out of the line of trucks and headed down the dirt road. Its headlights, for a brief instant, made the man a silhouette. Light punched through his crooked elbow and between his legs and over his shoulders and when the truck had gone past there was a shimmering floater hanging over the man’s mouth. I blinked hard but I couldn’t get rid of the blinding spot of light. Then my stomach flip-flopped like the fish on the beach and I felt very afraid of him. It was a paranoia that I recognized, even in the grip of it, as being entirely unreasonable. But the fear was a quickening, solid and instinctive; I could neither make sense of it nor stand another minute in the man’s presence. He was befouled. But it was only later that I understood he hadn’t existed. That he was a visitation, a violation.
A few weeks after the first vision there was the fire at the Bay de Verde fish plant. Down the shore a few miles from my cabin—the cabin my husband was letting me stay in free of charge until I could get back on my feet, until his good will ran out—a whole community went up in flames.
The smell of fresh paint in the condo; fifty-six people defrauded of their life savings. A chalky vanilla scent. They are scenting interior paint these days. But I’d stepped inside the one-room condo in St. John’s with Marion Sullivan that day and I’d felt nothing out of the ordinary. I am not a good judge of character. Even in hindsight it is hard to believe that Marion is not the well-meaning, never-stops-talking but canny person I thought she was.
She intuited the divorce when we were getting a coffee at Tim Hortons, though I hadn’t said. But at Tim Hortons, the pressure I’d felt. Preparing to sign the papers for the condo at the bank. My husband would have known about Marion Sullivan. He can smell a false, bright confidence as surely as I could smell that vanilla paint.
I had my son, Kevin, with me the morning I signed for the condo. He’d been skateboarding outside the bank with friends but the security guard came out to make them leave. All Kevin’s buddies dispersed with the slump-shouldered lag of kids who don’t respect authority but would find anything other than sluggish compliance unstylish.
Kevin stepped on the tail end of his board so it seemed to leap into his hand, and then he followed me into my meeting at the bank without a word.
The day before, I’d let myself in the front door of our downtown house after one last, confirming visit to the condo with Marion Sullivan and I’d looked down the long hall to the kitchen where Kevin had been standing at the counter making a sandwich. He was lit up by the setting sun from the patio doors at the back of the kitchen. He winked out of view; I heard the kiss of the rubber seal on the fridge door as he pulled it open, tinkling the jars and bottles, and he winked back into view.
Kevin had sprouted during the divorce. He’d shed a stunting dormancy, arms and legs telescoping out, shoulders broad and muscled. The growth was accompanied with unexpected elegance, loping grace.
In that instant, while he was backlit with blinding sun- light, I thought Kevin was his father. I thought my husband had come back, or more accurately, had never left.
What’s happening out there, I asked the man at the Low Point beach. A lockjaw wince stole over his face before he spoke.
Fish, thousands of fish, he said. He was one of those men who deliberately pause too long before answering. That kind of subtly coercive silence that counts on you to be polite and wait it out.
I saw that there were lots of people around. It looked like the whole town had stopped to take in the leaping bodies of the fish. Cautious stories on the news, lately, of a return in the cod stocks. But cod don’t usually do what I was seeing. They don’t behave that way under normal circumstances.
Percy Strong picked me up from the beach that night and drove me up the hill to the store. Percy owns the only other house on my lane, his lights visible through a stand of whispering aspen and a few birch. Percy’s daughter, Jocelyn, lives behind my cabin, an acre of hay between us, and a row of high white rose bushes. Jocelyn has put in one of those motion-sensitive halogen lights and it pierces the cabin’s kitchen in the middle of the night. A car or a coyote will set it off. The bright things in the kitchen flash, the chrome kettle, the stainless-steel fridge. When I flick on the light to get a glass of water, after a bad dream, the picture window in the kitchen goes black and reflects everything in the room. Even the panda bears on my flannel pyjamas are visible. Perfectly delineated bears, little white chests, each chomping on a branch of leaves. Sometimes, I’ve wandered out to the kitchen for water just in my T-shirt and underwear, and there I am, lit up, but pale.
On the day I thought Kevin was my husband: we had a stained-glass fish, a sculpin (mouth hanging open, protuberant saucer eyes) made by a local craftsperson, suspended in the window transom above the front door. The reflection of the fish was visible on the wall, red and amber, floating without moving, as though the fish were working against a current too strong for it. Kevin has his father’s posture, his voice.
The illusion afforde
d a reprieve so tender and dreamlike it weakened my knees. I stumbled over the boots in the front hall and had to hold the bannister.
Part of the reason I was buying the condo was that Kevin had decided to live with his father and his father’s girlfriend; they were renting an apartment on Waterford Bridge Road. Kevin was moving out of his bedroom on the second floor, full of dirty dishes smeared with hardened ketchup, the wall-sized flat screen for video games, the blasts of pseudo-automatic rifles, the way he talked (too loud because he couldn’t hear himself with the headset) to people all over the world, somehow sounding in command, offering strategy, logistics, in a voice both calm and full of intelligence, cajoling, instructive, often playing through the night; the hole in the wall where he had smacked a basketball hard against the Gyproc, the posters of rap artists smoking joints, the electric guitar and amp, the pile of laundry.
The house was too big for me if I was going to be living alone. Selling it for a condo was also a fuck-you to my husband. I expected him to intervene. I expected him to decide to come home once there was no home to which he could return. I wanted him to think I’d moved on.
At the bank, Kevin had sprawled in the chair beside mine, his legs flung wide. He shot questions at the manager. He finagled me a lower interest rate by threatening to go to another bank. But the threat was so pleasingly articulated, amid banter about the relative advantages of investing in lithium or cannabis, the young manager complied without argument.
Once we were back outside, Kevin dropped the skateboard and put one foot on it to keep it from rolling away.
What will you do with your life? I said. He told me that a friend’s dad, driving them from a field party at four in the morning, kept saying that Kevin should do communications.
I want a job where I convince people to buy things, he said.
What sort of things? I said.
You gave up too easily, he said. Then he blushed, but his eyes met mine. A floater, opalescent and the size of a loonie, dropped onto his mouth. When I looked away it hung on the brick pillar of the bank. Kevin asked what was wrong and I said I had something funny going on with my eyes. He said I should get it checked out, that I was probably dehydrated.