That Time I Loved You

by Carrianne Leung

  When she was young, Mr. D had lived down the narrow lane from her family home. Her brothers used to fish with him at the marina. They said he always got the best catch. Too good to bother with poles and lines, Georgie’s father, at nine years old, made a spear from bamboo, sharpening an edge with his pocket knife.

  The first time, the other boys swarmed around the beach and watched him as he concentrated like a soldier and dove into the waves, an orange buoy tied to his ankle. The water would have been freezing, but it didn’t seem to bother him. After an hour, when capped men smoking cigarettes joined the boys, he returned bearing a huge silver fish that he held by the gills, its side bloodied from a hole that the spear had made. A cheer erupted from the small gang of boys and men, and it had felt like a hero’s welcome. The women heard the cheering, and they rushed out with the girls to see what was happening. She was too shy to look at him, so she kept her head down and concentrated on his big toe, which was smeared with drops of blood from the fish. The nail was split in the middle, she remembered. Then some time later, he went away, made a home in this soft country and came back to take her with him. She went, and everybody was happy. Except her mãe. Mãe had stood at the door and said nothing and did not smile. Mrs. D thought about this for a long time, and in a moment of clarity, she wondered if perhaps her mother knew that this man who took her was not just brave, but that somehow, he was also cruel.

  As she continued to walk, she thought about the letter that she received two days ago. It had come in a thin white envelope, and her name had been handwritten on the front. This was a rare thing, handwriting on an envelope. Mrs. D had taken it to her kitchen and carefully used a butter knife to cut the edges so she could take out the neatly folded page. Her brother’s scrawl was difficult to make out. When she read his words, that Mãe had been ill for weeks but had finally died peacefully in her sleep, she felt the familiar wind rush through her. She smelled clean laundry, the kind that could only be created by the alchemy of salty wind and sun.

  She circled Clara Street until Georgie called her in. He yelled, “Mãe,” from the driveway, waving his arm. She looked up and saw her Georgie boy. She was often surprised that he was no longer a baby, even taller than his father. He was so beautiful with his brown curls, like an angel. Even as a baby, he was, she knew, an angel lent to her. The flowers looked up at him too. They smiled and swayed their petals. At fifteen, he had become such a handsome man. She watched Georgie running over to her, and she stumbled as she went to meet him. She wondered, Will he miss his mãe? He held her hand and took her home. As they passed, she could hear the flowers hissing at her, impatient. It was time to go, they insisted.

  She was tired and wanted to lie down, but her son wanted to make sure something was on the table before his father came home. Georgie was kind. Georgie loved her. He got out the pans while she unwrapped some ground beef from the refrigerator. It came from the store already packaged and weighed exactly one pound. Everything here had a place—a perfect place where things fit into one-pound packages.

  Mrs. D heated up some rice and mixed it with the ground beef and some peppers. She left it in a pan and covered it up. She went upstairs to her room to lie down. In her bed of starched linen, she dreamt. Her mãe. Small brown hand over hand to clip the sheets across a clothesline. Large looming clouds and the wind blowing the tall grass. The whites of hydrangea.

  She woke up to the sound of the TV downstairs. She went to Georgie’s room, but he wasn’t there. Down in the living room, she walked past Mr. D in his chair. He was drinking beer and didn’t look up. She didn’t know if he saw her or if she was already a ghost. She knew this could be true as much as flowers could talk. She looked forward to being invisible. She would be a speck of lint on Mr. D’s big split toe while he watched TV. She would be a brown speck on his brown toe against his brown recliner in that brown room.

  She stood for a moment in the corner, looking at the back of his head, noticing the large bald patch in the middle. She remembered when it was full of glossy brown curls like Georgie’s. It was the curls that had made her think that maybe it would be okay to follow him across an ocean despite her mãe’s doubts. It filled her with sadness now, for the hair that was no more. When he used to roll on top of her in the night, she would risk running her fingers through that hair, the only time such behaviour was allowed. It was as soft as she had imagined, like dipping her hand in a basket of down. She felt tears spring to her eyes for the lost hair.

  Before the tears could fall, she let herself out the front door and walked to the garage. She went in and started to close the door behind her. But wait. She wanted one more look at the sky. She opened the door wide enough to glimpse the sky. She looked up higher and saw the moon. Bright, bright orange moon. One flower woke up and scowled at her. “Go back to sleep, sonolenta,” Mrs. D whispered, and winked at it.

  This was not the way she would have wanted to die. She would have preferred to lie down in a shallow river, her bare back pressed against flat pebbles still warm from the sun, her hair like branches of a tree fanning out from her head. She wanted to face the sky and her eyes to be covered with sunlight that glinted on the water.

  She ducked back inside and kept the garage open a crack for the moonlight to crawl through. She retrieved the bottle of bleach from the cabinet at the back of the garage, sat down on her lawn chair, unscrewed the cap and lifted the bleach to her lips. She took a long sip, swallowed, and closed her eyes against the moon.

  Fences

  When Francesca and her new husband, Nick, moved to Scarborough from downtown, she knew she had entered a world very different from their own. People here didn’t have jobs where they sweated and came home trailing dirt. The people here dressed in pressed shirts and slacks, climbed into cars and drove away to air-conditioned or well-heated offices. She worked hard to iron Nick’s clothes so that they blended into this landscape.

  Francesca was shy about meeting these new people, but Nick, as a car salesman, said it was good to socialize with the “mangia-cakes.” They upgraded their cars constantly instead of driving them into the ground like the Italians with their work trucks downtown. Nick saw the opportunity for commissions to be made. Everybody in their old neighbourhood was proud of them for rising from the construction sites that their fathers toiled in to a job that allowed for soft hands and a new place in the suburbs. It was only a one-hour ride on the bus and subway away, but it may as well have been on the other side of the world.

  There was one thing that was reminiscent of the old block where they were from: the children teeming on the streets in packs like bandits. The sounds of laughing, fighting and stampedes of running feet were the same. The adults, though, felt foreign. She made an effort for Nick’s sake, and smiled at the neighbours and made tentative steps by accepting their invitations to barbecues and dinner parties, participating in polite small talk while cradling a lemonade or beer. “You don’t have to be their friends, Franny. They’re neighbours. It’s different,” Nick said.

  Francesca began to notice things about the people on her street. She was particularly interested in the couples. Perhaps because she was a newlywed, Francesca searched for signs of love between married people, noticing the differences from pair to pair. Sometimes it was the way one person laughed at the other’s joke. Or a hum of silence between them told of a communion no one else could be a part of. The immigrant Italian parents in her old neighbourhood had never shown outward signs of affection. She grew up accustomed to their short exchanges consisting of women’s complaints and men’s grunts. But in between, there were moments that she knew were as poignant as a kiss. The way her mother used to scrub her father’s nails with a brush every night even though she knew they would be full of dirt again the next day after work. Or love was in her father always serving her mother first when they sat down for dinner.

  Some couples’ love was easy to spot. For example, their neighbours Marilyn and James, an older couple without children at home, acted in unison, as
if they shared one mind, one desire. People liked to be around them for their easy simplicity, and when they had cocktail parties, all manner of neighbours from Winifred, Maud, Clara and Samuel Streets would show up. Dancing would always break out. Watching James spin a giggling Marilyn around to the pulsing disco beat of the Bee Gees made it seem that their love was deep and wide, a basin into which they’d fallen and happily occupied.

  Other couples’ ropes had frayed. The Bevises, for example, were not in love. Francesca could tell by the way Anthony Bevis stiffened slightly every time his wife, Janine, drew near. These little things may not have been discernible to others, but they were clear to Francesca. She wished she didn’t notice, especially when it seemed something more sinister or sad lay below the surface. But she had the ability to see even when she didn’t want to. She had known for a long time not to trust appearances at first glance, and that, eventually, people leaked secrets like a pesky tap. If you only watched long enough, it inevitably dripped.

  At the mall, whose halls were flanked by ceiling-high mirrors, she would catch a glimpse of her and Nick when they were shopping and study their image as if through borrowed eyes. Slightly slouching was a big-framed man with a round belly, dark curly hair framing a squarish face that held a bulb of a nose, a wide mouth, and saucer eyes. His broad hand easily held her small one, his head tilted toward her. She squinted to determine whether that meant he was attentive, in concert with her will and desire. That she, this woman who came up to his breast pocket, with the shiny brown hair and dimple in her crooked smile, was the other side of his coin. His love.

  Try as she might, Francesca could not look at herself in the mirror and objectively see if the woman reflected there was in love. When she’d catch her own eyes, she’d feel startled, as if she were an animal spotted by a hunter. But she looked, always hoping to see that telltale sign that this thing she sought and craved existed between these two people.

  When they had first gotten engaged, Francesca and Nick stole every moment they could to duck into her basement to fool around. Her mother was always home, but luckily the floors in their old house squeaked, so if she came close to the basement door, they had enough warning to spring apart. They became adept at making love with their clothes partially on, so they could button or zip them up in a second. The sex was not exactly the stuff of romance novels. The old loveseat was scratchy and lumpy, but Francesca would lie on it as best she could, her calves and feet hanging over the armrest. Nick, with only his fly open, would anchor a knee on either side of her hips as if bracing himself to heft a heavy load or weld iron. Before they would start, they would make out furiously. Nick was a great kisser, and Francesca was always too jealous to ask him how he had learned. He would push his tongue into her mouth forcefully, more forceful than any other act that ever came from Nick. He rolled his tongue across her teeth and thrust in to meet her tongue. These kisses, coupled with his hand squeezing her breasts through her clothes, made Francesca delirious. She couldn’t wait until he was inside her and would yank on his zipper to get him to enter her. She always wore a skirt when he was coming over. This made things much easier.

  The first entry was the best. She loved the feel of him filling her, pressing at that need. Then after a few minutes, her passion would wear off, even as she felt Nick’s build. She didn’t know why, but it quickly started to feel like nothing at all and her mind would be brought back to the absurd scene of them on the lumpy, scratchy couch, Nick pumping up and down like he was doing push-ups on top of her. Afterward, they would mop up with the Kleenex that Francesca had the foresight to keep in the basement.

  After marriage, they had the luxury of letting their naked bodies press together in their big, wide bed, unrushed. She loved mornings best. She would look at every inch of Nick’s body in the slats of light coming through their vertical blinds. She ran her fingers through the soft hair that gathered on his chest. She licked the saltiness of his skin and teased him until he would throw her down and make love to her. It was better than the basement sessions, but she could never sustain the initial sensations. After a few minutes, she would go through the motions, arching her back to feign desire, moaning when he did because it seemed the thing that would bring them together.

  When Nick got the job in sales at the VW dealership in Scarborough, Francesca’s mother sold their old house and gave them the money to buy a new one. Her mother was satisfied with their move to the suburbs as her job well done and moved back to Italy to live with her sister until news of a grandchild would herald a return.

  Nick and Francesca vowed they would have a house with wide windows with glass so clear and clean, you wouldn’t even know it was there. The sun would pour in and illuminate the rooms from all sides. Nick and Francesca would not have a constant battle against dust, leaky roofs and loud neighbours like their parents did in their homes downtown. Their future was heading in another direction.

  Their home was like arms held wide open. She could have done cartwheels in their living room. At first, Francesca was fastidious about keeping things up. She used lemon Pledge to polish the dining room table every day, sometimes more when she saw a smudge left by Nick’s elbows or a sprinkling of dust. She would inhale the citrus fumes with satisfaction after seeing her woody reflection on the table’s surface the way the woman in the commercial did. She was also very proud of her vacuum cleaner. It wasn’t the fancy Hoover, but it was an Electrolux and it cleaned just as well. Her mother had never had one, nor did they ever have a carpet. Francesca’s carpet was a plush cream colour, and she savoured the feel of her toes sinking into it like sand. Unlike the tall, creaky Victorian houses full of drafts that she and Nick had grown up in, this house was brand new and welcomed them as its first-ever inhabitants. Francesca felt that as its first, they had a responsibility.

  As soon as they moved in, Nick got his uncles and dad to come over and help erect a fence around their property. Chain-link fences were springing up all over the neighbourhood, so it seemed the thing to do. The five-foot-high interwoven wires, green as if they were meant to blend in with the grass, were ugly to Francesca. They cut into the newly laid lawns, cheapening the scenery of what would have otherwise been open fields between the houses.

  She took Nick aside while his father and uncles worked. “Do we have to?”

  “Trust me, Franny. Fences make for good neighbours.” He kissed the top of her head. “This won’t be like downtown, with everybody all in our business. Here, we can still see the neighbours, talk to them, but at the end of the day, that’s your side and this is mine.” She thought he had a point. Their childhood was filled with neighbours who did not have such boundaries and, like it or not, spilled onto each other’s porches and lives with solicited and unsolicited advice and gossip. Privacy was a luxury that they could now afford.

  They had wanted to have a baby immediately, so their nightly ritual became dinner, a shower for Nick, some TV, and then sex with the night table light on. By the sixth month, their nightly romps began to mimic the basement episodes. They didn’t fully remove their nightclothes, and Nick fell asleep right away and woke up only to his alarm. There wasn’t time for cuddling and talking anymore. She accepted this as something that happened when a marriage progressed. She wrote her mother that she loved Nick but that she didn’t feel this way every day. There were days when he came home, popped open a beer and fell onto the couch to turn on the TV like she wasn’t even there. In these moments, she didn’t love this person. Other days, he made her laugh by pretending to enjoy the dinner she’d burned, to make her feel better, and her chest expanded with gratitude. Her mother wrote back and asked what good was love? Nick was a man who could provide. That was enough.

  After a year in the new house, they settled into an unspoken routine: She cooked his mother’s chicken cacciatore on Tuesdays, and they made love on Friday and Tuesday nights. Monday night was reserved for TV and the big game, and Nick still asked Francesca for her opinion on the plays, the same as when he’d bee
n the fullback on the high school team. That was what initially endeared him to her. He cared what she thought.

  The baby was to complete them, round out their happiness. Children were supposed to come and fill the house, which felt half-empty despite how Francesca arranged and rearranged the furniture.

  Her life was falling into place as she’d imagined it would. But when a baby didn’t happen, she started getting the shakes again. In her parents’ house, when they used to come on, Francesca would lock herself in the upstairs bathroom and eat toilet paper until she calmed down. Perched on the edge of the old porcelain tub, she would stuff torn pieces of paper into her mouth, chewing and swallowing until her heart slowed to normal.

  It was an event that happened shortly after her father’s death that triggered the first shakes. Francesca had come home early from school with a headache and had expected to see her mother in the living room or kitchen. She wasn’t there. Francesca heard soft sounds like a shoe shuffling on the floor coming from upstairs. She climbed the wooden steps, gripping the banister because she was beginning to feel faint from the headache. The sound grew louder and came from her parents’ bedroom. Francesca pushed the door slowly open and saw her father’s best friend, Mr. Rossi, at the edge of the bed, between her mother’s spread legs. His brown work-worn hands held on to her mother’s thighs, fingers sunk into the flesh like fresh snow. Her mother’s black skirt was up around her waist, and her slippers were still on her feet. She watched Mr. Rossi push against her mother and heard sounds from her mother that she didn’t recognize. Like a kitten crying. One of the legs of the bed scraped against the floor, back and forth, back and forth.