Peninsula Sinking

  You are looking out over the lights glittering off the still, black harbour, looking past the hooked suicide fence and thinking, as you’ve often thought, what it would be like to jump off the bridge, to enter the wet blackness below. Though the news doesn’t usually report it, many people have jumped from this bridge over the years. And though the water doesn’t seem that far away, most of them have died. You do not think this in a suicidal way—that is, you do not actually consider jumping. It is a harmless curiosity. What actually happens to the body when it hits the water? You have heard that unlucky people sometimes survive the one hundred-plus metre fall. That in order to ensure death you have to land horizontal, like a bellyflop. But you like the idea of diving, launching a flawless swan dive and soaring gracefully, gracefully, before splitting the water like a well-placed axe sinking into a log. You like the idea of shredding through the night air towards the gold-speckled blackness below, of parting the ocean and searing straight down towards the harbour floor. Of simply vanishing, there, in the bottom. Of entering something deeper than you.

  From the peak of the bridge, Miranda utters the old cliché: “The best part about Dartmouth is the view of Halifax.”

  “True enough,” you say, thinking that there really is some truth to the saying. Thinking that you love Dartmouth too and wondering if the wisdom of the line is that the best part about any place is the shadow of someplace else.

  “Ever think about moving back here?” you ask your sister as the car clears the peak and begins to descend.

  “Of course. I’d love to come home one day. Things would have to be right though.”

  “You mean jobs?”

  “Yeah, no jobs here. No good ones anyway. But not just that. You know moving to Ottawa was the best thing I ever did.”

  “Sure: husband, mortgage, baby. None of that here.”

  She pauses, thoughtful. Takes a breath. “When I was living here after my degree, time seemed to stop. Years of idling. Couldn’t get it together to go back to school. Applying for ‘real’ jobs every day and making minimum plus pennies at the coffee shop. Couldn’t meet anyone exciting because I knew everyone already. I stayed because I love the place and I’d still rather be here than Ottawa. But I’d rather be me in Ottawa than me here. It’s weird. If you love a place, you’ve got to leave it. I don’t know.”

  You say no, you get it. And you have never been sure what that “it” means but you are sure you get something.

  Date night arrives. You and Ferdinand actually go for a walk across the Commons and down to the public gardens and you are wondering what’s up with his enormous man purse until he pulls a blanket out and lays it on the ground. You sit down and he produces a bottle of pinot noir and some baguette and Comté and a sausage joke comes but you stifle it and just sit there cultivating cuteness. How does one sit on a blanket in a park? You try triangle, then up-dog, settle for cross-legged. The Comté has a perfect sweat going but you’re trying to peck at it because you don’t want him to know the walk drained your fragile resources and your calves are still burning from yesterday’s treadmill refinement process. The wine gets him talking and surprise surprise he knows the name of every bird and tree in the park and he does a little yoga and grows his own tomatoes and if you wanted to go with him sometime he’d love to show you the treehouse he built in the woods near Fall River when he was twelve years old.

  A bit more wine and you start leaking verbal and yes you are telling him about your ancestor who was hanged as a witch. Well, not really technically your ancestor, being that you are adopted and the only visible minority in your family and all you know about your birth mother is that she came to Dartmouth from Turks and Caicos and she no longer lives anywhere close. But you don’t tell the Ferdster about all that. Not yet. You can put that suitcase in the baggage check for at least a week or two. You tell about Mary Easty.

  Your mother has told you the story eight thousand times and you have never tired of hearing it. How Mary Easty gave one of the most articulate denials of witchery heard at the Salem trials but Judge Hathorne imprisoned her anyway. Your mother says Hathorne must have had a thing for little girls, a grown man buying into all that fairy dust. She says how Mary was briefly and mysteriously released from jail for a few days, how she wrote a petition asking for fair trial, how she refused to confess, how she missed the first round but hanged, finally, on September 22nd, 1692. Your mother says Mary Easty died because she spoke the language of the law, not the language of witchcraft and delusional little girls. It was an honourable death but every time your mother tells the story you imagine the pillory and the scowling deep-voiced judges and you know that if you were there you would confess. You would make up wild accusations and dive onto the floor in phony paroxysms and do whatever it took to make Abigail Williams your new best friend. You know this because you know you are weak and selfish at the core but also because you love, sometimes, to let your imagination roam wild and dangerous. Because you know that there was some large and real part of Abigail that really believed she was being tortured by witches. That that night in the woods making brew with Tituba she had really seen a man with the feet of an ungulate, really seen Sarah Good pealing through the night sky, that she had been moved by those things and wanted to live in that dreamworld of devils and witchery far more than the world of pious books and obedient silence and the hard oak pews of the town church.

  Ferdinand is listening eagerly and eventually he says yeah witches are pretty cool and asks if you ever saw The Witches of Eastwick. You say yes and agree to watch it sometime, thinking about legs rubbing under blankets. After the wine is finished the two of you watch the sun begin to set. You inch closer and lick your lips but there’s no lean-in. The butcher’s tongue does not make an appearance and when you think of it that way you’re a little relieved. You’re thinking maybe he’s not interested but then you remember about the wine and baguette and Comté and really who acts that smooth when initiating a platonic hetero friendship? Some uniformed gnomes come around and start locking things and Ferdinand rolls up his blanket and shoves it in his man-sack and says you should come back to his place because there’s something he wants to show you. He seems nervous, saying it, and you want to ease the awkward so you make a crack about tenderloin. He laughs and says no not that and you head out together towards South Park Street. When he hails a cab and says “Gottingen and Charles” you feel relieved that he lives in your neighbourhood and there will be no more pilgrimage this evening.

  The damp grassy smell of the Commons pours in through the taxi window and Ferdinand puts his hand on your leg and you let him keep it there even though you’re thinking he really should kiss before making proprietary semi-committal gestures. The cab passes the chic coffee shops and the microbrews and he asks if you remember when Gottingen was the ghetto and you say no you spent most of your childhood in Dartmouth. He laughs and says I guess that’s better than Fall River.

  “The best part of Dartmouth is the view of Halifax.” You say the line wistfully, hoping to give it new meaning as you watch a string of taillights arc over the McKay.

  “Is the best part of Halifax the view of Toronto?”

  “Nova Scotians can’t see past Moncton.”

  He laughs, asks what you mean. You say the usual. You say about unemployment and alcoholism and the fisheries and welfare. You say everyone you know who has something resembling a “career” had to leave the province to get it. You tell him about your ex and his friends, all flying to Alberta to work the oil patch, how it’s fine when you’re twenty-one but what happens when you’re thirty and want to start a family and you can never stay home more than three weeks at a stretch, if you’ve been lucky enough to make it to thirty without a meth habit. You say how you’re twenty-six and started undergrad late and have no idea what comes next because most of your friends with degrees are serving tables or working retail or learning trades and have never left the province. You say how the
re’s some sick compulsion about this peninsula. You say the water level’s rising and we’re all going to drown here clinging to fiddles and slabs of distressed barnwood. You admit that you don’t want to leave either, which makes you sad because the way you see it the people around you are split into two groups: those who leave and flourish and those who stay and squander.

  “I don’t see it like that,” he says. “I’m here, I’m happy. I got a degree and now I’m doing my own thing, butchering. I own the business. Nothing fancy but I’m comfortable, happy.”

  “Happy butchering!” You announce it like a wedding toast, then laugh way too loud. You think you may have ruined date night, but you also feel that you have never heard anyone say something so honest and brave. So you hope you have not ruined date night.

  Ferdinand’s loft is littered with milk crates full of vinyls and stacks of second hand books and walls covered in sepia photos you truly hope he didn’t develop himself. Yes, there is a ukulele and a banjo. He takes your wrist and leads you into the bedroom and you’re expecting to see a sex swing or at least a set of handcuffs but instead he pulls you into the closet and you’re looking at a diminutive calico princess with three blobs of furry adorability nursing on her sagging teats. You sit down and just watch the animals for a long time before you’re bold enough to pet them. The mother doesn’t seem to mind so when the kittens are done nursing you rub a little black one until it lolls over and lets you stroke its belly. Then Ferdinand hands you a white fluffy one with an orange tail and says, “This one’s yours if you want. I call her ‘Ariel.’”

  “Ariel,” you repeat. You take her between two hands and she looks at you and her eyes are green all the way through. No white at all. You have seen so many cats in your life and never been so astonished by this radiant lack of white. Ariel play-bites your thumb and you stroke her unfairly soft mane, then move to the neck, your whole life diluting in the ocean of her purr.

  Ferdinand goes into the living room shouting “Robert Johnson” and puts on a scratchy old blues vinyl. You set Ariel down and crawl softly into the bed, peeling your clothes off quietly and preparing to surprise him, thinking what better time than now to take a risk?

  When you were nine you became fixated on Sable Island. Your mother bought books and you learned about the heavy fog and the jackknife currents that had caused hundreds of ships to wreck on this improbable crescent of sand. You learned about the Delight, the Manhasset, and the Merrimac. You learned about the grey seals that breed each summer on the island’s beaches but mostly you were transfixed by the horses, the more than 500 wild horses that may have descended from confiscated Acadian stock but no one quite knows where they came from or how they got there. You liked to think that a few of them had survived one of the shipwrecks and afterwards they’d bred and thrived for centuries. You did not like to think about the horses the Cape Breton coal mines took to work underground. What you liked was imagining the horses running in the open air, galloping full speed over the island’s forty-kilometre stretch. The island so long and narrow and free of predators and it seemed to be built for a horse to roam and sprint, to fly over the soft wet sand. Your mother once saw you staring transfixed at a picture of a feral horse thundering over the beach and she asked if you wanted a horse of your own, if you might like to try riding. You had to think about it but finally you decided that what you liked was the idea of a horse running riderless through the open. You told your mother that you did not want to own a horse—you wanted to be one.

  Ariel and Ferdinand, Ferdinand and Ariel. These two have entered your life and that life has become pink and effervescent. Life has become champagne or at least sparkling white. Yes the sex has been better than good and there have been choice cuts of premium, hormone-free, grass-fed. Yes Ferd barbeques a ravishing lamb burger and yes you feel that some combination of regular intimacy and living with an adorable calico kitten has considerably alleviated your anxieties about how you have to let U of A know by the end of the week. No you have not answered Dr. Chen from Carleton’s email saying you could have another month to decide and they would like to give you more money but you have been going for regular outdoor jogs with minimal owl phobia and boozing less and you’ve kind of quit Tinder. You are thinking sure. Sure you could settle in Halifax and start an organic dairy business and buy a modest home and live with your butcher and have beautiful mixed babies with his hazel eyes and his strong chin and his knowledge of wine. Yes Miranda returned to Ottawa and gave birth to a baby boy and chose to name him Jed. You find it strange how Jed is the only thing Miranda can talk about on the phone now—bragging about how at three weeks he can hold his head up with his own strength, bragging about the way he air-punches with his fat little arms, bragging about the strength of his tiny, brief pees, how once the stream made it all the way to her chin. And even though you think it is a little perverse how your sister is now unable to talk about anything but her son you want nothing more than to go to Ottawa and meet your first nephew.

  You are in Ferdinand’s bed when he says “deal-breaker.” You are in bed discussing whether or not it is weird to have sex with his cat in the room and both of you think not in theory but maybe yes a little bit offputting and then he pops the door open because his cat—the mother he kept after giving away the remaining kittens—is scritching that she wants to get in. You are thinking how can you possibly love it so much, the way Ariel scritches your walls and door and furniture? You are wondering about the part of you that oozes rhapsodic and starts to mumble pettish pleasantries even when you are half-asleep and she claws the mirror until you get up to feed her and find her bowl still half-full. Your mind is purring softly through this Ariel montage when he says he has to tell you something and he hopes it isn’t a deal-breaker. You’re thinking marriage thinking AIDS thinking secret travelling salesman with alternate family thinking moving to Alaska or Australia and then you are trying to control your worst-case-scenario syndrome.

  “Deal-breaker?” you laugh, summoning nonchalance. “I’m sure it’s nothing.”

  “Well,” he says, “maybe it’s early for this but I’ve noticed the way you talk about your nephew and I just thought I should let you know that I don’t want children.”

  A vast estrangement.

  The world an explosion and you newly deaf. Everywhere soundless carnage.

  “Oh, no, of course, whatever. No big deal.”

  If it’s no big deal why are you resisting eye contact and letting him kiss you but feeling like his lips belong to a stranger or your long-lost biological brother. He asks are you sure and you say yes of course you’re sure but just out of curiosity are you, Ferdinand, like a hundred percent about this? He says yes a hundred percent and you say just curious but why exactly and he tells you ecological reasons. He doesn’t think he can justify bringing a child into this overpopulated world of depleting resources when there are so many children suffering and nothing could be more confusing because this is actually the kindest most logical answer you could imagine. You ask would he consider fostering or adopting and he says maybe and you once again find this strangely painful because you admire him so much but you know there is something inside you that can’t be reasoned with and needs to see a version of yourself—your genome and your unpredictable hair and your tiny ears and all of your failures and problems—reflected imperfectly in the face of a tiny child. You tell him that’s absolutely cool and actually you really respect his choice and then you force yourself to have sex with him again and this time it horrifies you that his cat is watching. You play normal for the rest of the night but on the walk home all you can think is really? Are you really going to break things off with this handsome perfect butcher because he doesn’t want your snotty-nosed, genetically mediocre children?

  When you get home and open your apartment door and the cat isn’t there to greet you all you can do is slap the wall and count your breaths to suppress the panic. One. A bit older now, Ariel has been t
rying to get out the back door every time you open it. Two. You’ve been seriously considering it but haven’t had the courage to let her into the yard yet. Three. So you are double-checking all the windows and thinking of who has a key to your place and obviously your mother wouldn’t just come over and let the cat out to eff with you when you finally see her on the floor between the radiator and the couch. Your first reaction is enormous relief, swirling from your brain stem and sweetly kneading your clenched gut.

  Then no. You are a single thought and that thought is a colossal no.

  You are kneeling on the floor and touching her and petting her and checking gently for the pulse that you already know is not there. You have never felt a sadness so total. You are kneeling in some version of child’s pose with both hands on your beloved, unbreathing cat, your body heaving and your lungs skittering and the snot seeming to crawl across your face and you have no idea who you are thinking to but all you can think is let me make a bargain. Let me give this cat all of my breath and all of my blood. Let me divide my remaining years in two. You would give everything now, you would sacrifice your very lifespan, to have this creature spasm and stand up and mewl and return everything to normal.