‘You have to remember is all backwards here,’ shouted Mrs Christopher above the buffeting air. ‘You driving on the wrong side of the road again. The left side is suicide. You must forget how you driven car before.’
‘Is not a problem, girl,’ Mother yelled back. ‘I ain’t ever driven car before.’
Soon they found themselves stuck behind a transport trailer loaded with timber, its wheels throwing up sand and grit into their car. Mother decided to overtake it. She pushed the gas to the floor with her bare foot and turned into the oncoming traffic lane, the car swaying and their stomachs turning over. Mrs Christopher had her eyes closed and Mother was smiling wildly, her head thrown back and singing ‘whooooo’ as the car flew past the trailer. They were pressed deep back into the seats of the automobile, sinking into the leather and becoming gloriously animal in their movements.
(The driver of the transport trailer checked his speedometer and tried to calculate the speed of the car now gunning away from him and kicking up from the shoulder a snaking tail of dust. He thought, but couldn’t be sure, that he saw upon the now empty road with its liquid shimmer of heat the back of a woman’s brown hand waving at him. 1963. A mirage of race.)
They had a map, but they didn’t always consult it. They didn’t need one, they laughed. Did they really want to find their way back? They laughed some more and this time the laugh was different, higher and tighter. They passed signs with names like Newcastle and Port Hope, Cobourg and Carrying Place, Tyendinaga and Loyalist, South Frontenac and Long Sault. They hooked a left off the highway and travelled north now, noting signs for Monkland and Apple Hill. The land unfolded before them and was eternal in its beauty. The rock was the oldest in the world and the trees were green and smart and austere.
They passed a young man with sunburned skin and long black hair who was thumbing a ride. He was an Indian, the first Indian they had seen in this country.
‘Let’s stop,’ giggled Mother.
‘Don’t be foolish, girl.’
‘He cute. Look at him there.’
‘You don’t know,’ Mrs Christopher said. ‘You too foolish to know. Man can’t take care of you. Friends, husbands, sons, they all the same. They does leave you.’
They drove for a while until they realized they were hungry. They stopped at a stand at the side of the road and bought some jerky from an old man with leather skin. Wizened old man, selling his wizened wares. When he smiled, he showed exactly three teeth, and he pointed to a place down the road where they could get fresh peaches and something to drink. They travelled further until they came to another stand, and they bought a brand of ginger ale that both Mother and Mrs Christopher, to their shock, had recognized from their different birthplaces. Canada Dry. The white borderlines on the bottle, the provinces of clear green glass. They drank deeply of the nation and then suddenly felt exhausted, the wind blown out of them, the initial euphoria subsiding. The sun was setting over the low bronze hills and soon it was just a break-light on the horizon. The adventure was over, and they needed to head south to pick up the highway again.
But they weren’t sure anymore. They wondered if they had taken a wrong turn and they realized that they should have asked the old man for directions. They kept on driving as the sun finally went under, and they had to pause for at least ten minutes while Mother searched for the headlights switch.
‘Are you sure it this way?’ asked Mrs Christopher.
‘Of course I sure, girl.’
They drove for at least an hour before they finally saw up ahead some lights and then a booth and guard-rail, and two different national flags. It was a customs checkpoint. They had passed the turnoff. Nobody else appeared to be around, and for a while they contemplated turning back, but the road had narrowed and they had no choice but to approach.
‘Step out of the car, please,’ said a voice. There was a flashlight and the glint of a badge. There was another man and another who approached the car, shadows in the glare upon them.
And that’s where the story always ends. Mother never explained to me how they got out of that mess. Two women between countries and belonging to neither. Two women on temporary work permits in a car that wasn’t theirs, without driver’s licenses or proper identification of any sort for that matter, for they had both left it at home for safekeeping. This was the early sixties, remember, and these were black women before blackness itself, before the language of civil rights or anything else that came after. I don’t know what terms they would have used to explain themselves or their belonging. I don’t know how they might have persuaded the officers at the darkened checkpoint to let them carry on as if they weren’t from the very beginning in the wrong.
‘MOTHER? ’
She’s in the living room, sitting entirely still and looking aimlessly through the wall in front of her. Sundowning is what Meera’s books call it. The mental shutdown with the end of day. Meera is reading yet again on the couch. I approach Mother and gently take her hand in mine. Her eyes slowly focus on me. She smiles. She slowly touches my upper lip with its three-day growth.
‘Moustache,’ she says.
‘Do you remember, Mother? The time when you and Mrs Christopher went searching for snow?’
Her face doesn’t change. She moves her hand from my cheek up the side of my face and then slowly traces my eyebrows.
‘Eyestache,’ she whispers.
‘How you both were flying that day, Mother? How you overtook that transport trailer like it was standing still? You used to tell me that part over and over. The wind and the trees and the empty land all about, flying north?’
‘Eyestache,’ she whispers again, closing her eyes and slowly shaking her head no, her smile vanishing.
‘Is it time for bed, Adele?’ asks Meera, setting down her book.
‘I know you don’t believe me,’ I say, turning to Meera, ‘but she was different then. She wasn’t helpless or afraid. She was brave. She adventured.…’
I can’t explain or continue. Mother’s eyes are closed now and she appears to have fallen asleep. Meera picks up her book but then notices my face.
‘She told me the story,’ she says. ‘She told me many things. They were more than brave.’
THE NEXT EVENING, Meera puts Mother to bed and walks into the disaster area of the kitchen. All the cupboard doors are open and all of the counters as well as the kitchen table are spread with ingredients in various degrees of preparation. Green onions and garlic and Scotch bonnet peppers on a cutting board. Herbs and carrot tops springing out of bags on the floor, not all of them righted properly, and a pile of okra on the kitchen table. A mass of dough on the counter near the sink and flour all about the room.
‘But she was upstairs with me…’ she begins.
‘No,’ I explain, brushing the flour from my pants. ‘This is me. I thought I might cook this evening. For … for thanks.’
She bypasses the groceries still on the floor and lifts up a large paper bag from the liquor store. Four whole bottles of Baby Duck.
‘It’s wine,’ I explain. ‘Want some?’
‘Sure,’ she says, laughing at something. ‘Why not?’
She quickly downs two mugfuls and then sets herself up at the table with a third and the bottle, watching me and downing her drinks in quick succession. I’m a bit nervous at first, but I help myself to the wine and begin to loosen up, though perhaps too much. Chopping the peppers, I get careless and chip off a bit of my nail.
‘You OK?’ she asks.
‘It’s nothing. Just a scratch.’
‘What exactly are you cooking?’
‘Saucy wieners.’
‘Sounds exquisite.’
‘It’s actually pretty good. I learned it from a roommate who was born out west. He was a great cook. A real talent for improvising and making do. He said this was an authentic white Canadian recipe, but I never believed him. I’ve tried to cook this before, but I couldn’t ever match his success. There was always something missing, some rich an
d mouthy taste, hard to describe.…’
‘Umami,’ says Meera.
‘What? ’
‘Umami. It’s a flavour recently discovered by Japanese researchers. It means just what you’ve described. That mouthy flavour. Like good mushrooms.’
‘They named a new flavour…?’
‘I think something’s burning,’ she says, indicating behind me.
‘It’s called caramelizing,’ I explain. ‘It’s what chefs do. It means …’
‘Take a closer look at your pot, chef. I don’t think it’s supposed to smoke like that.’
‘Quick! Pass me your wine!’
‘Hey! Waste your own Baby Duck!’
I SCRAPE THE mess out of the pot and start again. Meera seems to recognize my nervousness around her, and she gives me some room. She goes to the record player and puts something on, a British accent, a cymbal crashing, soft feedback whine. She disappears upstairs for a while, leaving me to put the final touches on wieners and rice and salad. When she comes down, she’s wearing a full-length skirt of dark cloth, and lights some candles she has found.
‘You look so … great,’ I say.
‘Well, there it is.’
We set plates and cutlery for ourselves on the old coffee table in the sitting room and we sit together on the couch, closer than we’ve ever sat before, a single candle on her corner of the table. Meera opens another bottle of wine before beginning to eat. The food is unusually bad.
‘It’s alright,’ she says. ‘Different.’
‘Something went wrong. You don’t have to finish it.’
‘It’s not that bad.’
We almost clean our plates. I pour us each another mug of Baby Duck, and I can tell that Meera, too, has become a bit more accustomed to the silence and closeness. We look sideways out the sitting room window to the moon and the lights dancing and the eerie phosphorescence of the lake, and at one point my eyes focus for a moment on the wisps of hair upon her neck. She stares ahead to a clay bowl on a shelf.
‘I like those,’ I say.
‘What? ’
‘Those bowls and plates. I’ve seen them around the house. Did you make them?’
For a moment, I think I’ve blown it. A coolness enters her expression, and she leans back on the couch. She downs some Baby Duck and looks toward the window.
‘Come,’ she says, smiling now. ‘Let me show you something.’
WHEN WE STAND, we realize just how much we’ve drunk. We get the dishes to the sink with a crash and then tug on an odd combination of shoes and coats before stepping outside. The moon is almost full and it lights the tops of trees and the railway track. We circle around to the side of the house where she fetches a shovel and burlap bag. She taps the shovel a couple times to remove dried clay.
‘Hurry,’ she says, walking briskly to the back of the house.
‘Your shoes don’t match.…’
‘Just hurry.’
She leads me toward the steep path leading down to the base of the bluffs. The moon is almost full above us and the great lake is electric with movement. The path is usually difficult to negotiate, but it’s even more challenging in the night and with our drunkenness. We reach for each other for support but end up only unbalancing each other more. Each time, Meera irritably shakes her hand free, only to reach out again when the next pang of vertigo sets in.
‘How’d you know about this path anyway?’ I ask.
‘Stop jabbering. Come on.…’
We reach the bottom of the bluffs and look out upon the moonscape of the beach, white-grey shadows in the sky. Meera pulls me stumbling along the uneven shore to one side of the bluffs. She tests a spot on the clay surface with her hands and goes to work, slicing off clean pieces with the texture of chocolate, the muscles in her arms standing out.
‘Got the sack ready?’ she says.
‘Wait.…’
‘Hold it for me. Here.’
‘Wait, Meera.…’
‘The deposits here are a bit iffy,’ she explains, sloppily filling the bag and dropping clumps of clay over my shoes and pant legs. ‘If you really wanted to do it seriously, you’d have to find a half-decent vein. Dig it up and spread it out to dry. Crush it with a mallet then and make it into a slip with water. Strain it through a twenty-mesh sieve first, then a forty. Then an eighty if you can. Let it settle and pour off the excess water.…’
She wipes her forehead, a streak of grey against her skin. Her arms are streaked too.
‘It’s always pretty short, or crumbly,’ she continues. ‘Never even tried to fire it. You’d have to try adding ball clay. Bentonite maybe. Did you know?’
‘Know what?’
‘The factors. Like bacteria. Live bacteria influences clay almost as much as the fineness of the grains. Clay is alive, you know. A subtle life, specific to each place. There’s Grolleg from England, Florida Lake Kaolin.…’
She breaks off, realizing that the bag is far too heavy for us to carry even a few feet, never mind back up the slope. We’re now both on our knees dumping some of it out, Meera’s skirt muddied at the bottom and hitched up to her thighs, the shadowed brown of her thighs.
‘It’s light enough now,’ I say. ‘You’re emptying the bag.…’
She pushes more clay back in and swings it onto her back, staggering and shaking her head no at my offer of help. I follow her up the path until she lurches to one side and drops the bag. We both turn and watch it slide a few dozen feet down. After emptying a bit more, we try again, this time together moving shoulder to shoulder, bumping slippery against each other. We lurch and sway into invisible branches and shrubs, but we make our way up safely this time. Within the light from the front porch, she starts laughing.
‘You’re covered!’ she says, reaching for my face.
‘But Mother …’ I begin explaining, pulling away. ‘Mrs Christopher too. They’ll kill us. We can’t go into the house like this. We’ll leave tracks all over the floor.…’
‘Don’t be such a suck,’ she says, reaching for my face again and smearing a big wad of mud on my cheek. ‘We’ll tiptoe around. We’ll wash up.’
UPSTAIRS IN THE bathroom, Meera undresses in only two movements, her jacket and earth-heavy skirt thudding to the floor, her sweater and blouse coming off at once like a wet sock to reveal a shock of goosebumps on her arms and chest. I want to touch them, I want to be so gentle with them, but she’s moving impatiently now, loosening my belt and urging me to step out of my pants. She breaks off and steps into the shower, crouching down to the faucet to start the water. The cord of her backbone, the smooth angles of her shoulder blades. I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror fogging over with steam. An unattractive man? A not unattractive man? Are my ears really like teacup handles…?
‘Are you coming?’ she asks, starting the shower.
Inside, with the curtains drawn, we crush against each other, at first only hungry for the fluid warmth between our skins. We’re facing each other but too close, in a way, to genuinely embrace. We stand like this for a while before she touches my fingers still balled up tightly against my stomach.
‘Open,’ she says.
COFFEE-BEAN OF her navel and the knotted riddle of her hair. The slick roughness of her surgical scar beneath my tongue. She watches as I kiss her body and she pulls my face up and bites gently my chin and lips. She is determined but silent throughout and never really kisses back until she’s finished.
WE’RE LYING TOGETHER now on the mattress in the attic. We don’t speak and in the silence the wind tosses the drapes and there is a faint rushing sound of the lake through the old clouded window. On the sloped ceiling of the room, there are shimmering patterns of lights, reflections of the moon off the waves.
‘I like this,’ she says. ‘This period, this full stop.’
‘Sorry…? ’
‘Here. This mole on the back of your wrist. Haven’t you noticed it before…?’
‘My father,’ I begin sleepily. ‘He once bicycled in the c
ity.…’
I AWAKE SUDDENLY and perhaps to a train, although I no longer hear anything. Meera is sleeping with a slight frown on her face, her hand curled under her chin. I touch her eyebrow very gently. She frowns slightly but otherwise remains still. I hear something else, a dull thump from downstairs. I get up carefully from the mattress and make my way down to the kitchen.
The only light is from the open refrigerator door. Mother is sitting with her back against the shelves. She’s holding what’s left of an ice cube in her hands. I sink to the floor beside her and together we watch the cube melt slowly away.
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