Stories We Tell Ourselves

by Sarah Françoise

  Can’t talk now. Later? Miss you too. So much.

  Maya fumbled in the dark and dragged Simon to the next street light.

  I feel like I’m in purgatory here. Without you.

  Simon was looking at the field between the small back road up to Joan and Frank’s house and the main road, which they’d have to cross to get to the supermarket. He tugged at the leash. The mud was frozen solid but the damp was releasing the smell of winter grass and soil, and as it mixed with the pitch-black, it became something Simon needed to experience. He pulled harder.

  ‘Wait. Come here.’

  Simon went to Maya, who undid his leash. He panted gratefully at her and ran into the field until she couldn’t see him any more. Her phone vibrated.

  Gotta go.

  ‘Simon. Simon!’ she yelled. ‘Get back here!’

  The road was silent except for the purr of cars in the distance.

  Maya’s chest tightened. She didn’t have the energy to run after a dog. To go looking for a dog in the dark. She didn’t have the energy to go home and tell her parents their precious dog was gone.

  ‘Simon! Get back here you stupid dog!’

  Something behind her made her jump. Simon was there, on the other side of the road, sniffing a road sign. He looked up at her, and Maya thought he looked different – almost human.

  At the main road, cars were whizzing home on their way back from last-minute errands. There was no light, so they had to wait for a gap in the traffic to run to the island, and then wait again to get to the other side. The supermarket was a square steel compound with a neon-blue sign that flickered in every window of Frank’s house. It was flanked by the Buffalo Bill Tex-Mex grill, and a now defunct nightclub. Maya remembered how, when she was growing up, the nightclub, with its velvet red-rope entrance and film-negative neon, had seemed to be the height of sophistication. She tied Simon to the post by the trolleys and walked inside the store.

  The store was warm, and smelled like a French supermarket at Christmas – a mix of red meat and chocolate truffles. A pan-pipe Christmas mix played on loop over the PA system. She picked up a basket and headed over to the toiletries section, to the men’s products. She took the cap off a bottle of aftershave and sniffed it. It smelled of juniper and of Cole. She thought of how Liz’s smell was always the smell of something else. And how something else was always the smell of Cole. It had that good, serious French pharmaceutical packaging, and it looked more expensive than a supermarket gift, so she put it in the basket. Behind the cosmetics aisle was the underwear. She picked out a value pack of socks and another one of boxers. The boxers were tartan. She threw some nets of chocolate money into the basket for the kids, and went to the booze section. Cole didn’t drink much, but she felt bad about giving him only underwear and aftershave. At the end of the aisle was a display with gigantic jars of cherries in brandy. The jar had a gold lid and a label that was meant to look handwritten. She put it in her basket and went to the till.

  On a break. I can’t believe I’m spending Christmas at a goddamn Sheraton.

  Paying for her items, Maya wondered whether the Sheraton had a swimming pool. Outside, she untied Simon and they walked back up the hill.

  Me and this other workshop leader asked the kitchen if they could make us turkey. We’re going to have a mini-celebration on my balcony.

  Maya thought of Liz in a fluffy white hotel bathrobe, eating turkey with her co-worker on the balcony of her bedroom. She knew she had no right to be jealous. She was the one going to sleep next to her husband each night, waking up in a mushy pile of plush toys and the children they’d made together.

  Thank God she’s here. I was feeling really lonely without you.

  Maya flung the phone as far as she could into the field, which was by now as dark and as uninviting as a black hole. After a while she waded into the tall grass, and kept her ears peeled for the second buzz notification. If it came, she didn’t hear it.

  ‘Fetch!’

  Simon looked at her from the road, little clouds of hot breath coming from his nostrils. Maya tried again.

  ‘Fetch! Now.’

  Simon started to walk up the hill, back towards the house.

  ‘Wait!’ cried Maya, jumping over the short ditch and catching up with him. The night at her back felt like too big a wave, just waiting to break.

  *

  Lois followed the draught down the stairs to the basement, where Frank’s house continued to dig itself deeper into a hole. The house was separated from the basement – itself only partially sealed off from the elements – by a simple plywood door with a five-inch gap. You had an agonised-over underfloor heating pattern upstairs and a five-inch-gap that let in the cold downstairs.

  Lois called for Simon, but he didn’t appear. It occurred to her that she had only called out his name once before, during a storm. Simon usually showed up uninvited.

  In the last room of the cellar, Frank had built up an alcove with what looked like summer-camp bunk beds. He’d drilled and screwed three dozen two-by-fours into a junction of slats and shelves, on two levels, to store the children’s expanding archive. The shelves were buckling under the weight of boxes marked ‘Lois’, ‘Maya’ and ‘Wim’. Being the youngest, William only had two boxes from senior school and a couple of boxes containing Lego and leftovers from his Egyptologist phase.

  As a boy, Wim liked to pretend that the basement was the tomb of a pharaoh, and that those who entered would be cursed for all eternity. Believing himself cursed, and therefore immune to any further malediction, he led candlelit expeditions in and out of each room, passing off the family junk as ancient mortuary accessories. Joan once joked that Frank’s expansions were consumed by Wim’s basement excavations, and that only their two obsessions in tandem could guarantee the house’s structural soundness.

  Maya had purged most of her belongings or had them shipped, and her stuff took up only one of the bunks. But Lois had already relegated several lives to her parents’ basement. There were accumulations from two failed relationships (one of which had been firmly on its way to a premature engagement), the legacy of existences in two countries, and a collection of books that was both unselective and unrealistic. Somewhere in there was also her whisky collection.

  The collection hadn’t been started by her, but by Greg, a former neighbour. After suffering a minor stroke in 2008, doctors told him to lay off the booze for good. He pushed a box containing fifteen bottles of whisky across the corridor to Lois’s apartment one afternoon. There was a Bunnahabhain 25 Year Old, a thirty-year-old Isle of Jura, and a dozen or so more bottles. Three unopened, many of them half full, a few with only an inch of the stuff left. When she and her boyfriend had split up, and she’d moved to the US to pursue her Masters, Lois had given away her furniture to friends, but driven the bequeathed whisky back to her parents’ house. It had been maturing in their basement for seven years.

  Simon suddenly appeared in the room, and leaned his clumsy weight against her thigh.

  ‘You don’t know this, Simon, but in my family, I’m always the first to get drunk at Christmas. If I were ever to get pregnant, which I probably won’t ever again, I could never be pregnant over Christmas. That would ruin it for everyone.’

  A few days after the miscarriage, Lois had spent several hours in a local Irish bar, dominating the jukebox. There were four other people in the bar that night. She told them how she’d stood in Union Square for three hours with her prescription for Misoprostol, not wanting to go home to expel what was left inside her. As long as she was on the square, she said, as long as the prescription was unfulfilled, things didn’t feel quite so final. Later in the evening she felt bad for oversharing, and bought everyone a round of top-shelf whisky. And then another. When she stumbled in around 2 a.m., Nick held her hair back as she retched into the toilet.

  The shelves in the basement were four boxes deep, and it took a fair amount of box-Tetris for Lois to get her hands on the booze.

  There was anot
her room in the cellar – a small, dry-walled closet with electrical wires dripping down from the ceiling and two copper pipes protruding from the wall. More conduits that didn’t lead anywhere. This room served as a mixed archive, taking in the overflow from the semblance of organisation that existed in other parts of the basement.

  Lois started rooting through the bags and boxes that were closest. One shoebox was labelled ‘Grandma/recipes’. She tugged at the box and immediately caused the downfall of their communal fuzzy felt collection. Pieces of soft space – stars, astronauts, black holes, galaxies – slow-motioned down to the floor, adhering to the concrete dust. After picking up the felt space bits, Lois peeked in the box. In between recipes for stargazy pie and beef wellington was a stack of letters, all of them addressed to Joan. She put the box in among the bottles.

  Balancing the box on her knee, Lois closed the useless door and walked back up the concrete steps into the kitchen, which was humming with activity and smells and had been taken over by Maya and her mother. She walked over to the living room, where Gitsy was playing Boggle by herself on the coffee table.

  ‘Look! I found it,’ Lois said. ‘My whisky collection!’

  ‘What’s whisky?’ asked Gitsy.

  The dining-room table was set around a stainless-steel tower that would soon accept the oysters that Nick was busy shucking on the balcony. Frank was neglecting the oysters in his office, probably writing to that woman, or about CDF, or falling down an escarpment in a part of the country he had never set foot in. She wasn’t sure which of these was worse.

  ‘Where’s Wim?’

  ‘He went over to Tara’s,’ said Maya.

  ‘Where’s Cole?’

  ‘He’s upstairs with the baby.’

  Lois brought the two boxes to the Christmas tree. She went to the kitchen and filled her Peter Rabbit cereal bowl with ice. She took a tumbler from the dresser and returned to the tree. Behind the tree was a patch of floor where the underfloor heating was volcanic. She sat there and opened the box. The first thing that came out was a Talisker. She uncorked it and dropped a cube of ice into her glass as well a glug of the drink. She took her first sip. As the whisky fell down her throat she thought of the well shaft in Brittany, and how they would throw flaming newspapers down it for a few seconds of revelation.

  Cole walked by with Finn in his arms and sat on the sofa. Lois looked at him through the low-hanging branches of the tree. He was playing round-and-round-the-garden on Finn’s fat little palm. Finn’s throaty laugh sounded like hiccups. At the far end of the room, Gitsy was spelling out her Boggle words.

  ‘L-X-O-O-P-M-Y. How many points is that, Papa?’

  ‘That’s not a word, darling.’

  ‘Yes, but HOW MANY POINTS?’

  ‘It has to be a word that means something.’

  ‘I’m not even playing that way,’ she yelled. ‘You don’t even know how I’m playing.’

  Finn observed with interest his defiant big sister. He and Cole had this look of admiration about them, a look Cole usually directed at Maya. Lois wondered whether Maya’s infidelity could bring out a madness in Cole that no one suspected, least of all Maya. Seeing him on the sofa with the baby filled Lois with a sad envy. Nick was so far from reclining on a sofa with baby – a distance she had stretched out with her bad luck and bad choices.

  She downed the rest of the whisky and took the lid off the shoebox. The label on the box indicated that it had once contained a pair of white perforated Dr Scholls. She took the first letter out. In the top-right corner of the envelope were a couple of Marianne stamps and the postmark for 13 October 1978.

  Joni,

  I can call you Joni? I think, Joni, I should like I kidnap you and bring you back here in the mountains, like I am the abominable snowman. I should like to build for you the perfect house. Buy for you a windsurf. Buy for you fresh flowers every morning. I know I am hirsute and a bad temper and the beast of your beauty. But I should like to convince you that I am not the waste of your time.

  The letter was signed Frank. Lois didn’t know what was more shocking – Joan’s long-lost (and perhaps short-lived) nickname, or the fact that Frank had actually made the effort to write to her in English.

  The next bottle to come out was a Lagavulin. As she poured her second drink, Simon walked to the Christmas tree and stared. She beckoned him into her spot. There wasn’t much room behind the tree, so she made him lie down. ‘Come and rub your growl on my temper,’ she said. Simon slumped down and rested his paws on Lois’s lap. His back fell against the French windows, stopping another draught from a ledge that was awaiting a stone trim.

  Lois put the first letter back in the box and took out another.

  Joni, I am counting the days to a day I know will be grand. I bought a new picnic blanket for us. It is as you say fancy and rolls up into the sausage with leather to close. I miss your Liberty nightdress and your eyes, which are a shade of miracle.

  Frank’s efforts to communicate in English had in time declined, and today his English voice was mostly used to make fun of things it turned out were meaningful to Joan. Joan said her husband’s forays into the English language had gone from unwonted to unwanted, a distinction that was of course lost on Frank. It was strange to discover these letters now, to hear Frank spellbound, labouring to seduce a woman still uncommitted and pre-adaptation.

  ‘Simon! Si-mon!’ came Frank’s voice from near the front door. Frank rattled the leash and called again. Simon didn’t budge. Lois heard the front door close behind Frank. She put her hand on the dog’s neck and ruffled the fur there.

  If I were to purchase a new bicycle for you, would you prefer it to be blue or purple? I await your answer with bated breath.

  This one was in French.

  Lois ran her fingers along Simon’s neck, starting at the throat and going all the way to the point of his tooth that hung over his bottom lip. Her back was pressed up against the window, and the cold glass felt good against the heat from the whisky. She watched as Maya and Joan got agitated in the kitchen, putting the final touches to the evening meal. Nick was smashing a bag of ice against the concrete planter on the balcony. She saw him swing the bag over his head and bring it down with a thud. Gitsy was now sharing Cole’s lap with Finn, and both were concentrated on the Christmas story their dad was reading to them.

  Lois pulled out a third bottle and dropped a second ice cube to work with the one that was half melted. Simon’s head rolled back, and he gazed up at her with his upside-down puppy eyes. She rubbed his tummy. ‘You look like a pilchard in a stargazy pie,’ she said. Simon groaned his approval.

  When he was done crushing ice and shucking oysters, Nick came over to the tree. ‘I know you think it’s cute to hide behind the Christmas tree and drink whisky, but it’s not,’ he said, his black apron spattered with grey slithers of shell. ‘Why don’t you come out and interact with your family.’ He was including himself in ‘family’, she could tell.

  Every now and again, Nick still wondered how much Lois had lied about the affair. If she’d fucked the Historian more than she had admitted to. If they’d ever left the city together to go somewhere. Upstate. Jersey. Somewhere stupidly close but far enough. He went through the soy sauce dishes, hunting for unfamiliar ones. He went looking for last year’s calendar to see when they’d been apart, but last year’s calendar wasn’t in the file box with the other calendars. He wondered if she still thought of him. And if so, how often, and to what degree.

  Lois knew Nick’s forgiveness was not a done deal. It was, and would remain, a work in progress. She had told him she didn’t miss the affair, and mostly it was true. Before long, she forgot the details she’d seen as cornerstones to her secret garden, moments she thought of as haunt-worthy vanished entirely, until all she could remember was a face her lover had once made when she’d used the wrong word for something. It was a face empty of commitment, a face that started and ended with judgement, a face whose preoccupations lay elsewhere.

 
‘I’m turning into my dad,’ thought Lois. She felt what it was like to be on the sideline and prefer the view from there. She imagined the Historian had fielded similar requests for participation from his wife. ‘Are you going to be staring at your phone all night, or are you going to help us paint these Easter eggs?’ his wife might have said. ‘Are we boring you?’ Good God, her father would have loved the Historian. They could have talked about the Occupation till the cows came home. Frank would have broken his people fast for him.

  She watched Nick walk back to the kitchen and start slicing lemons. She knew him so well, she thought, that she could feel the sensation of the kitchen tiles under his feet just by looking at him. Gitsy had migrated from the sofa to the kitchen table. She cradled her cup of warm milk and looked up at her Uncle Nick like he was a god.

  Lois sank back into the warmth of the dog, whisky and the underfloor heating. From her sanctuary she stared at Nick, and found him responsible for her disfigurement. With his forgiveness and expectations he had cauterised the wound that kept her thinking, that kept her invested in the part of the world that wasn’t him, or them. Nick, with all his love and advice and his lemons, was just another warlord.

  8. Christmas Eve

  ‘Sometimes I feel like I’ve spent the last three decades of my life not strangling you,’ Joan told Frank as she adjusted his Christmas tie – tiny candy canes floating in the black void of space.

  ‘Better not to start a conversation with “I’ve spent the last three decades of my life”,’ said Frank. ‘People might think you were overstating. Or single-minded.’