by Mary Swan
She had a brief thought, the day she came across it, of writing to all those people she hadn’t thought of for years. Like a message from the future; she would buy postcards, and she pictured them dropping through mail slots all over the world. No picking and choosing, that would be the rule; she would send a card to every one. Even the soldier who gave them a ride from Malaga, a wild guitar tune sweeping them along the coast road. Even that crazy Scot they met, when they were stranded in Lyon, and the girl who had cried in the youth hostel in Geneva. But as she turned the pages, counting how many cards she would need, the flare of the idea fizzled out. So many of the entries were completely mysterious, even the addresses giving no clue, and she thought of all the places she’d written her own green name. Thought of how many people would pick up her postcard, turn it over and shrug. How many would say, as she was saying, I wonder who that was.
John gave her a new book, the one she still uses, their first Christmas in this house. She remembers the tall tree with its coloured lights, can imagine it in the corner of the room where she now sits. Thick snow falling past the bare windows and the rolled rug spread out, soft and new and covered with scrunches of red and green paper from Lizzie’s frantic tearing. There was a gritty feeling behind her eyes, “Jingle Bells” playing on the tape deck, and she remembers thinking how silly it was, the time and care spent on wrapping, tucking the corners in just so. She remembers too the stab of anger when she opened John’s flat box, the way she assumed it was not a gift but a demand, his way of making her draw a line through her life and set aside all that happened before they met.
It was unfair, of course, and even at the time she knew it was unlikely he was sending her a hidden message. John was the most straightforward person she’d ever met, genuinely baffled by any kind of subterfuge, by people who said one thing but meant another; in those days, if she was sure of anything, it was that. Probably he had been looking for a number and noticed how little space was left in her old book, noticed the tears and ripples, the coffee stain that had seeped through the alphabet. Probably he thought she’d be pleased that he had noticed, that he’d chosen a new one with a sturdy leather cover. When they first met they walked down city streets with their fingers enlaced, and while Lizzie was being born she squeezed his hand so tightly that she left small bruises, left crescent-shaped gouges on his palm. And it happened so slowly that maybe neither of them noticed how much that grip had loosened.
That’s not anything she wants to be thinking about, though, and she wipes her face and says, “Too much time alone,” in her briskest voice. It’s what Lizzie is always telling her and she knows it’s true, but she wonders why solitary thoughts always lead you to a dark and lonely place. Wonders if there’s anyone who spends their time remembering jokes they’ve heard or slapstick movies, chuckling in an empty room.
Before she gave away the television Clare used it, along with a few glasses of wine, to help her sleep. Once she forgot to press the mute button before she drifted off and woke to a woman’s scream, but usually it was just to the comfort of the flickering light. And the moaning and creaking of the house, sounds that have become more sudden and mysterious as it slowly empties and make her think of that crazy play Lizzie was in once. The tiny theatre dark except for one tall candle at the edge of the low stage, and nothing but sound to tell you what was going on. Ticking clocks and a tinny bell, a motorboat, or maybe it was a chainsaw. Bird calls, a crying baby, smacks that might have been a fist fight, and every so often a different voice intoning: The white lilacs. Flame. Sorrow.
It was a very long play; beside her John slumped into sleep, while she fought with her bobbing head. Jerked upright at a sudden snort that might have been her own, or might even have been part of the play. Could that be it? she wondered in the dark. Were they all supposed to be characters? “Oh honey,” was all she could think to say afterwards, hugging Lizzie who had been revealed at the end in a black cape, two clownish red circles on her cheeks.
Sometimes now Clare did a parallel thing when she opened her eyes in the dark and tried to work out what was unfolding on the silent television screen. It wasn’t so difficult, the same few stories playing themselves out in different times, with different actors. “Don’t go into the basement,” she said to the woman whose hand was closing on the doorknob. “Don’t believe a word he says,” when a slick-haired man appeared with a sheaf of black and white roses. Once there was a news bulletin flashing, a shot of a huge airplane tilting into a ravine, flames from the cockpit and the tiny windows, jets of water and revolving lights. But as she watched she realized that this time it was a different story. This time, through some combination of luck and skill, everyone had made it out alive. Cut and bruised and rumpled, but euphoric, filling up her screen in vibrant colour.
If it had gone the usual way, she thought, there would have been small, blurred photographs in the newspaper, flat words on a page, and she realized that she was seeing the dead, watching them move their mouths, touch their cheeks, brush the hair from their eyes. That tanned teenaged girl, the tall man with his tie askew, the mother holding her baby. So many, more than a hundred of them, who would be able to go on, who would live out the rest of their lives; no need for her to imagine anything at all.
In the kitchen now Clare’s hand slips as she pours from the kettle, and boiling water splashes. As she heads for the sink she stubs her toe on a box of books and hops and curses, reminded of needles in the doctor’s office, the way her mother would pinch Clare’s other arm just as the shot went in. She had been a nurse, Clare’s mother, and though she gave it up when she married, it always showed in the brisk way she tucked the sheet corners tight, or shook out the thermometer when Clare asked to stay home from school. She liked to say that she had no time for sentiment, and she would have snorted at Clare’s sorting and packing, the time she spent on each decision. When she had moved from her own house to the apartment she tossed all kinds of things into garbage bins with a gleeful flick of her wrist.
What’s done is done; Clare’s mother never saw the point of what she called rubbishing around in the past, and though over the years she told Lizzie more than Clare had ever heard about her life she still rarely mentioned the rock-strewn farm she came from, the brothers and sisters she never cared to see again. In movies and novels everyone knows that a gruff exterior always hides a soft core, but even now, when she wants to be kinder, Clare suspects that life is different. Thinks there may really be times when what the hard shell surrounds is a stony heart.
She’s thought all along that this business of moving house is something like arranging a funeral. The red notes on the calendar, all these practicalities to focus on and the small, constant decisions to be made. She’s been following those red steps like a sleepwalker, blank-eyed yet resolute, and sometimes she imagines them leading her on, off the page. At her retirement party there were the usual speeches, and jokes about students, and comments about how her door was always open, except when it was closed. They gave her a wheeled suitcase topped with a shiny gold bow, so someone had been listening when she said she might go to Scotland, to Ireland, might prowl through misty graveyards, looking for her roots. A better answer than “I really don’t know,” and an acceptable one these days, when everyone seems to be looking for connections.
People have given her books and she’s read them, knows what every expert says about making drastic changes too soon. It’s written down like a rule, but turn the page and you’ll read that everyone has to make their own way through grief. And anyway, rules are made to be broken, as Lizzie still likes to say. John used to call that her mantra, and it was the title of her first project in film school; Clare remembers her explaining it, at the now-sold kitchen table. Something technical to do with persistence of vision, the way the eye sees what it expects to and fills in gaps. She remembers how excited Lizzie was that day, her hands dancing and stabbing at the air. She remembers thinking of all the moments that had brought them to that one, and she remembers t
hinking of a game they used to play. Not really a game, but a thing they used to do when Lizzie was small, and they walked the gravelled path through the park. Holding hands in their short line with Lizzie in front trying to pull them along, and they didn’t resist but they didn’t make it too easy. “That’s the physics instinct,” John said, as Lizzie bent her little body forward and tugged harder. Their feet suddenly shifting and beginning to move, the three of them stumbling on together.
Lately Lizzie has been doing research, starting with the names on the back of that old photograph, with others Clare remembers and her best guesses at dates. It was another of their old arguments—she could never believe how little Clare knew. “It just wasn’t something we talked about,” Clare had said. “All that family history—it just wasn’t important.” She knew it sounded feeble, but it was true. The last time Lizzie was home she’d smoothed out a roll of photocopies, records of births and marriages and burials, written out by a long-dead hand. “Keep them for a while,” Lizzie said, “you’ll get interested,” and Clare thought it unlikely, but was grateful. It surprises her, always, this kind of evidence that Lizzie has been thinking about her, worrying about her maybe. That their roles have been—not reversed, but somehow balanced out. Leave, but don’t leave me; there’s a thought she can’t quite catch hold of, but it’s something to do with the pieces Lizzie has put together, throughout her life, with the idea that all along Clare has been leaving clues for her daughter to find. That Lizzie will have fit them together in a picture that may be very different from Clare’s own idea of herself, but just as real.
On that same visit they made a lemon cake from an old family recipe and watched a long movie about a woman in a coma; they were both disappointed but Lizzie thought it was interesting, the way the whole thing was done without flashbacks. And then she told Clare about an idea she was working out, though she wasn’t sure yet what she’d do with it. She said it had come to her in the library while she was looking things up, all around her people Clare’s age or older who were doing the same thing. She’d been struck by how excited they got, and how they talked about their ancestors as if they were people they really knew. Oh look, here’s Thomas, they said, and his wife Bessie Anne. And this Thomas must be their son, who was the minister—now didn’t he go to Ohio?
Lizzie said she could see it as a one-woman show, just her on a bare stage with a heap of brightly coloured cloth, maybe dresses or maybe just wraps of some kind. And it would be about a long line of women through time, she wasn’t sure how far back, and with each one she’d wrap herself in another layer until she’d be so swaddled she could barely move. “And at the very end,” Lizzie said, “I’m not sure what, maybe music, some kind of music playing very fast and I’ll start whipping those layers off, one by one, and they’ll end up in a pile on the stage again, but it will be a different pile, do you see?”
Before she could stop herself Clare said, “You’ll be naked?” and Lizzie gave her a look, but let it pass.
Since she did that first commercial Lizzie keeps her hair cut short, and the sticking-out ears that used to cause her such anguish have become a kind of trademark. For all the histrionics, for all her tales of woe, she is living a life that suits her, the life she wants; she has an uncanny ability to make people laugh, to draw them to her. Things happen, men come and go, but she bounces back; she’s not a brooder, and Clare realizes that she’ll be fine, that she is fine. In spite of me, she thinks, and she remembers, as she sometimes does, walking with Lizzie on a windy day. Her shaky toddler legs, one hand folded in Clare’s and the other clutching the ratty grey cloth that she wouldn’t be parted from. There was a sudden vicious gust, a bit of grit in Clare’s eye, and she must have forgotten for a moment, she must have let go. Lizzie set loose and falling, hitting the hard pavement and rolling away from her.
It’s a moment she’s never told anyone about, but of course everyone has those. Moments of guilt, but also things that are too trivial to mention. The memory of dappled light through a breeze-blown curtain or a sentence a teacher once said, a brown horse dipping its head. But if they’re so meaningless, why haven’t they vanished completely? Why does her mind snag on them, again and again? Maybe they’re not trivial at all, she thinks. Maybe those moments are clues, a string of essentials that make a story that weighs you down, like a backpack stuffed with everything you own, like an anchor heading for the bottom. Somehow they become that heavy, all these tiny things that float within easy reach.
The people who have bought Clare’s house will be moving from another province and the woman, Beth, called occasionally to check a measurement, or to ask a question about local renovators. She sounded nice enough, said she hoped Clare didn’t mind, didn’t feel as if Beth was nudging her out, or taking over before time. She sounded nice, but of course it’s hard to be sure, over the telephone. For all Clare knows she could be a vampire; there seem to be a lot of them around these days. That’s the kind of thing she would have said to John, who would have put on a professorial voice and asked for her evidence, and she would have told him how Beth always apologizes for calling so early, how she claims to still be muddled about the time zones. She would have told him it’s more likely because it’s almost sunrise, where Beth is, that she hangs up the phone just in time to close the heavy lid of her coffin.
Those calls were a nuisance, but Clare knows it’s better than if Beth lived nearby, if she dropped in from time to time with her own measuring tape. It’s better than if Clare had actually seen her; then she would have to picture her in the house, all its spaces filled up with unfamiliar furniture, a jumble of strange shoes by the door. She would have to picture Beth flipping pancakes at the new stove she’s told Clare about, carrying plates to the square table that, yes, will just fit where she wants it to go, while her husband and her rosy-cheeked sons beam up at her. You can’t judge a book by its cover; Clare thinks about Beth and she thinks about the TV girl and how strong those skinny arms really were, how easily she lifted the set with its trailing cords and settled it into the wagon. And she wonders why she assumed a life of misery; it could be that they have great jokes and games, the mother and the shuffling boy. It could be that she twirls and dances in a sunny room while he beats out the time with his spoon and grater, until they can barely breathe for laughing.
The towels are all packed, so when Clare turns off the tap she pats her wrist dry on the bottom of her green sweatshirt, doing it gently, as if the red splotch from the boiling water hurts much more than it actually does. The CD has finished, rain falls past the tall windows, and the spoon is loud against the side of her cup. She packed the calendar too soon and has been having moments of panic, wondering if it really is Tuesday, or Wednesday, or whatever day. Moments when it seems that she could have easily lost track, that whole days, even weeks could have passed in the packed-up house without her noticing.
They’ve always happened, she realizes, these moments when she seems to wake up and wonder where she’s been, sometimes for years. I’m a ghost haunting my own life, she thinks, and then she says, “What on earth does that mean?” It sounds like something her mother might have said, after her mind began to fray. When all kinds of things came spiralling out, but not in a way that made any sense. Cryptic phrases, names and fates that for all Clare knew could have belonged to characters in a book she had once read. “Promise me you’ll shoot me first,” Clare said, every time she came back from the seniors’ home, and John poured her a glass of wine and promised he would.
She knows it wasn’t a bad place, not really. Bright murals and posters on the walls and all the staff patient and upbeat. The food was decent, even Clare’s mother said that, and though she avoided the crafts and card games there was often something going on in the big day room, with its view of endless rooftops and the green hills of Moss Park in the distance. Clare remembers that room, and the way sunlight fell through the long window. The old people in their chairs, all waiting for yet another singalong, for the paunchy magici
an with his dusty top hat, and his patter. He had a few good tricks, that magician, but she remembers thinking how cruel it was, when he waved his wand and they had to watch more things vanish.
One day the entertainment was a storyteller, a soft-spoken woman in a hippyish long dress; she had trouble with the microphone stand and a red flush flamed out across her cheeks. She sang a song she said she’d learned at her grandmother’s knee, though Clare had her doubts about that, and told a long story that had something to do with a black stone and a feather. Then another song she said they’d all remember from when they were young, and some of them did.
When the voices trailed off, the woman clapped her hands and said she’d create a story on the spot, just for them; she asked everyone to tell her one happy memory. Clare’s mother raised a shaking hand, obeying some long-ago rule, and said something about skating on a river, the smell of a boy’s leather jacket, but it didn’t sound right, and Clare thought she must be making it up. Or if not that exactly, then maybe it was someone else’s memory, slipped from its moorings and drifting until it had found a space where it could nudge and nestle its way in. A strange thought, but a thing that seemed quite possible, in that stuffy, brightly lit room.
Other people said other things, and the storyteller assembled her new story; there was a tiny baby and a warm leather jacket, there was a cake and a party and a beautiful sunset. She turned on a little silver tape recorder before she started, and Clare realized that was how it worked, that another group of old people in a similar room had offered up a black stone, and a grandmother’s song about the rain. And though she knows it wasn’t the same day, that’s how she remembers it, the final stroke that left her mother glaring and silent. At the mercy of strangers who rolled her and diapered her, rubbed scentless creams and powders into the pale folds of her skin. Yet another thing Clare doesn’t want to be thinking about now and she wishes, suddenly, that Lizzie had come anyway. Had thrown open the door and dropped her bag with a thud that filled up the empty hallway.