If Clara

by Martha Baillie

  copyright © Martha Baillie, 2017

  first edition

  Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Baillie, Martha, 1960-, author

  If Clara / Martha Baillie.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-55245-356-8 (softcover).

  I. Title.

  PS8553.A3658I5 2017 C813′.54 C2017-904957-7

  If Clara is available as an ebook: ISBN 978 1 77056 538 8 (EPUB) and ISBN 978 1 77056 539 5 (PDF).

  Purchase of the print version of this book entitles you to a free digital copy. To claim your ebook of this title, please email sales@chbooks.com with proof of purchase. (Coach House Books reserves the right to terminate the free digital download offer at any time.)

  Julia

  As he fell, his hat separated from his head and plummeted. It was brown and made of thick felt. Down the two of them raced, man and hat, through the yellowish-white air. Head below, feet above, he was a stocky man dressed in a shirt made of rough cloth. On his feet he wore brown shoes. Painted into existence in Genoa in the year 1872, he joined a series of tumbling humans commissioned by locals and strangers alike, people who’d experienced a violent accident and wished to thank the saint who’d saved them.

  Despite her intense distrust of me, my sister, Clara, would buy me art books. As she had a great deal of time on her hands and spent much of it wandering from one used bookstore to the next, she often stumbled upon unusual volumes at much reduced prices. She has an astute eye and is drawn to the overlooked. A small book of naive Genovese votive paintings was her last gift to me before vanishing from my life for a period of several years.

  We met in a café on College Street, while mountainous white clouds rose from behind the flat rooftops of the buildings across the street and swelled in the blue sky. My sister came straight toward me. As she pulled back a chair to sit down, she was already extracting from her shoulder bag the slender volume. Three years older than me, reputedly brilliant, she has lovely skin, large grey eyes that are sometimes blue, a high forehead, long face, and a wide mouth. The milky whiteness of her skin has often made me want to cause a disturbance, to flail my arms and shout, or else hide from its unbearable purity and calm. This was especially true when I was fourteen and painfully aware of my own body’s unpredictability and willingness to betray me. Her gaze, all those years ago as now, was enquiring but arrived from far away, as if she were observing me through binoculars.

  I thanked her for the book, opened it with care, turned a few pages, and grinned.

  ‘You always choose perfectly. You know me too well.’

  As I spoke these words, I wondered if I still believed that she knew me well. I took from my pocket a small envelope, which I handed to her with a warning: ‘I know you don’t want this, but I’m giving it to you so that you can tear it up without reading a word, if you like. Mom begged me to deliver it, so I am.’

  She slipped the envelope into the depths of her shoulder bag and asked what I’d been reading lately. I couldn’t decide which of several titles to tell her about, so answered: ‘A bunch of things.’

  ‘Julia,’ she said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m just thinking how solid your name sounds.’

  The note I delivered caused her to shun us for two years. She has since reconnected with my mother and me, though recently she’s once more disallowed all communication. To shun: persistently avoid, ignore, or reject (something or someone) through antipathy or caution. I think the term applies.

  The book of votive paintings that she offered me on the cusp of her first disappearance I keep in a drawer at work, as a sort of talisman. When opened, it reveals waiters falling from windows, farmers from trees, and children from balconies. Each of them, caught in rough brush strokes of thick paint, hangs mid-air, suspended by the upward tug of a saint’s gaze, which is lifted toward heaven.

  Daisy

  I could not see who lay across from me, nor to my right. The air conditioner exhaled, rippling the violet curtains surrounding my bed. We were four in the room. I’d been wheeled in only hours before. Propped up and listening, I felt I’d entered the interior of a giant radio in which stories were travelling directionless, in overlapping waves of confession and demand.

  ‘Who is there? This must be another place. Where are we? Take me out of here.’

  The thin, determined voice continued, unanswered.

  ‘I came with my shoes. I can’t leave without them. This is an impossible situation. What a stupid idea to make something you can’t get out of.’

  I waited, my left leg held straight, wrapped in thick bandages and enclosed in a splint. From another corner of the room came a man’s voice.

  ‘The Swiss banks are the problem. For three years now my mother’s been fighting with them for access to her safety deposit box. She has a key but they won’t let her use it because the box is registered in my father’s name and they claim that when he died, the procurement signed by him, allowing her to open the box, became invalid. Such unbelievable sexism, that’s Switzerland for you. In any case, her battle over the box is what’s keeping her alive. I’m quite sure the day she succeeds, her life will end.’

  He was a visitor, one of three gathered around the bed farthest from my own. Every so often a woman’s voice interjected with a soft clarity I found soothing: ‘Do you mind passing me that glass of water?’ or ‘The cast chafes at my ankle. I must ask what can be done.’

  Perhaps our room was not a radio but a hive. We lay like larvae, safe in our curtained cells, each of us healing as best we could in the violet dusk, well-removed from the outside world, which had smashed us on the ground, breaking our bones without explanation. It was the absence of explanation that united us. So I felt. Though perhaps the others believed in God’s will. And just as I pondered the possibility that for the others in my room an unknowable reasoning illuminated or further darkened their plight, a voice spoke from the bed directly to my right.

  ‘Too much, God. You are asking too much of me. Please, you close my door. I am scared. I cannot sleep. The back door, you close it or someone will kill me. Too much, too much you ask of me.’

  I reached over and pressed the red call button. A voice asked: ‘How can I help you?’

  ‘I need the bedpan please.’

  ‘Okay, someone will be there in a few minutes. Angel to 124-4, Angel.’

  Angel pulled the curtain aside.

  ‘Daisy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Here you go, my dear.’

  Supported by my elbows, using my right leg for leverage, I raised my hips and released a warm fountain of urine.

  Angel, Salmon, Carson, Margaret, James, Yukio, Sharon, Emily, Truman, Rabindranath, Louise, Feodor – they came with needles, pills, face cloths, glasses of water, bedpans, tubes to insert, valves to adjust. They measured pressure, temperature, ratio of oxygen, and regularity of the bowel, creating an order to contain our broken selves. I savoured their ministrations, drops of morphine slipping into my vein, my body relaxing and my sleep deepening.

  Each of them was a famous writer, the touch of their hands as particular as the tone of their prose. On my desk at home, on the screen of my laptop, hung the final page of the first half of my latest novel, in embryonic form. What I read alarmed me, and my pulse accelerated. The sentences on the screen did not belong to my novel. The narrator had become a leg searching for its owner. Having failed to find her or him, the penniless leg looked for w
ork and was hired as a boom on a sailing ship. I could not possibly pass off such nonsense and would have to start all over, racing to meet the publisher’s deadline.

  I woke to the sound of shouting.

  ‘I came here with my shoes. Will someone get me my shoes, right now, I’m leaving.’

  The days replaced each other in a tottering succession, and still my swollen leg could not be operated upon. Such taut skin cut open would not close. The violet curtains at the foot of my bed opened, revealing a woman who’d lost her balance inside a streetcar, breaking her femur, and another who’d tripped on the sidewalk, fracturing several bones in her foot. As for me, I’d been knocked from my bicycle, twisting and shattering my tibia. We were the old, the anticlimactic invalids, everyone over seventy but me, and I’d lived for more than half a century. Perhaps the hospital was hiding us from the young, who’d tumbled from horses, motorcycles, or rooftops, so that we not present too discouraging a vision of old age.

  The woman who’d lost her shoes could not say how she’d come to be among us. That evening she was wheeled away to a different ward. The curtains separating our beds were once more drawn tight, when into the violet dusk a new patient was delivered, a mother accompanied by her daughter.

  ‘Shall I tell her that you’ve fallen?’

  ‘I don’t know. What do you think?’

  ‘She doesn’t want to hear from us. It’s been six months since she demanded that we leave her alone.’

  ‘That long?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have asked you to take her that note.’

  ‘That was the time before. This time it was me who frightened and angered her. I used the term merciless about the government. I shouldn’t have. It was worse when I gave her your note and she refused to see us for two years.’

  ‘I only wanted her to know that I loved her.’

  ‘You had a right to defend yourself.’

  ‘I wanted her to know that I loved her.’

  ‘I knew it would be pointless.’

  ‘You thought so?’

  ‘Yes. Her illness wouldn’t allow her to trust you.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘I’m not sure. There’s a part of her that isn’t unwell. Or there used to be. Maybe it was all a performance, an imitation of well-being. I don’t know.’

  ‘What would I do without you?’

  ‘Is your shoulder hurting?’

  Clara

  If you want to have any kind of relationship with me, never mention the following subjects: politics, movies, or eyes. I don’t take baths, not ever. I disallow all statements about how much money I could get from the government, if I would agree to their terms. It’s not catching, my illness. No need for those latex gloves. You won’t offend me. I know how unwell I am. For years I’ve been trying to convince my sister. She claims to believe that I am unwell but continues to behave toward me as she always has, crashing my boundaries, disregarding my most clearly stated wishes, and congratulating herself on her kindness to me, the self-sacrifices she makes for my sake. There is one question I’d like to ask, a question relating to vehicles. I’d like to ask someone who knows about vehicles. What are these pieces of lead I’ve been finding on the street and collecting? They vary from two to six inches in length, curve a bit, and a clip attaches. Here, I’ll draw you one. See? See how badly I draw? If I had a camera I’d take a photo. Trouble is, I’d take too many photos. I could get a phone and use it just for snapping shots of things, but I don’t want a phone. Not anywhere near me. Don’t touch the phone and it can’t touch you –that’s my motto. I had one – a phone. Texting was too easy. Send, send, send. Someone knows more about you than you ever intended. Non-retractable – that’s life with a phone. While you’re reaching out, other people are reaching in. They fall onto the road. They’re always lying near the sidewalk when I find them, but never on the sidewalk. They must drop from cars or trucks and not be missed. Their function? That, I can’t figure out. I’d arranged more than two dozen in rows on my kitchen counter, when I remembered Marie Curie. True, it was mercury not lead that poisoned her. Still, these could make me ill, these slightly curved small bars of lead. Cleared from the kitchen counter, enclosed in a glass jar, no longer arranged by size, no longer arranged, piled like bones in a mass grave, lead bones in a glass grave, this is the best I can do as I’m not yet ready to throw them out. They’ll keep falling off trucks or cars, but I won’t bend down to pick them up. My new motto: no more collecting bits of poisonous matter no matter how alluring. The kitchen is not a place where I cook or eat. I use the electric kettle, I elect the kettle, I trick the kettle. It stands, the elected, much-tricked kettle on the unused stove. Tea bags can be seen drying around my apartment. So much sunlight, said Julia, smiling with happiness. She’d found me a sunny ground floor of a house and I tried to look happy, I did. But didn’t she know I’d cover over the windows? Her refusal to accept who I am staggers me. If she weren’t so clever, I’d consider her stupid but kind. I’ve got to get out of this basement space, I told her. I named them: centipedes. I didn’t ask for more sunlight. No insects, I told her. They breed in the spring. One more spring in this basement crawling with centipedes, which my landlord claims don’t exist, and I won’t make it, I told Julia. When I killed them I left them squashed on the wall so my landlord could count the corpses for herself. INFESTATION, I yelled at her, my landlord not Julia. I hate it when I yell. INFESTATION, I wrote on a napkin so I wouldn’t yell a second time. We argued over the definition, how many it takes to constitute an INFESTATION. They’d taken the stuffing out of me, as the expression goes. They wanted to get inside my stuffing, the centipedes did. There, I’ve named them, twice, and I’m still here and breathing, none of them crawling in or out of my mouth. So, I contacted my mother. I had no choice. I couldn’t escape from the basement, not on my own. Julia found me a place above ground. You can live above ground now, like the rest of us. Very generous, my family members are. They consider me almost human. No. They are generous. They are. But none of this is my fault, none of it, I did not choose illness, nor is it my fault Julia cannot remember what Alice did to her and that she sides with Alice. We were subjected. Upon us they experimented. I don’t remember what tests were performed. What aroused them was our confinement, their control over our bodies. They measured response time, the sounds that burst from us, and the sounds that dribbled. Oh, exclaimed Julia, such great windows, so much light, what a charming apartment. So long as there aren’t any insects, I told her. There won’t be, she said, as if soothing a child. How do you know? I asked. I asked because I’m that kind of child, the kind that asks and is punished for asking, tortured for seeing what isn’t officially there. The tea bags are fully visible. My goal is to make visible. Anything that if concealed could rot or spawn must be exposed. I cannot accept the festering of damp tea bags. Laid out to dry on various surfaces, the tea bags inventory my days. As they dry, the inventory weighs less and less. My immediate past shrivels inside these square, paper cells. Last week no longer leaks brown liquid, staining every surface it touches. Julia gives the impression of being open because she enters a room with all the disruptive abandon of wind pouring through a window, lifting, knocking over without regard for others. But she is abandoning nothing. The hard kernel of her self-interest, polished, remains nestled. Why anyone trusts a fellow human makes no sense to me. Do you know anyone who has never lied? We trust out of necessity, not because anyone is worthy of trust, each of us locked in our own experiences and convinced that our truth is the truth. When I was two, my older cousins raced each other, screaming with delight, into a pond in a forest. I stood and trotted after them on my pudgy legs. Pulled by their pleasure, I hurtled forward. Someone snatched me from the water. Two muscular arms broke my headlong rush into shared joy. My plunge into the glee of others was intercepted and denied. I remember none of this. It is an afternoon narrated. My mother revives this tale, often. All the same, the scent of pine needles permeates my c
hildhood outside of any narration. The smells belong to me. My mother tells the pond story to demonstrate that I have always been the object of her love, which takes the form of fear. A tremor in her voice, as she describes the pond swallowing me, constitutes proof of love on her part and proof of me as sinking object. It was, however, her narration aside, the freest moment of my life, my fat legs carrying me over the wet edge and into the depths, liberated from their grasp. They’d not had long to define me. The afternoon of the pond preceded my sister. My mother describes the cousins, their long legs and my short legs, all the legs running, to show that I was once capable of joining in, but that the price of doing so, for me, would be death. Then my sister arrived. Alice made a pact with herself. Clara will not suffer what Alice endured, the unjust loss of central place imposed by the arrival of a second child. The attention Alice gave to Julia differed in quality from the attention in which she drowned me. I breathe language. If I breathe at all, it is language I breathe. So many words besides mother pile up inside me that her love sinks out of sight and colour returns to my cheeks, as they say. The loose change of language, words weighty as gold bullion, all of it and all of us. I contribute nothing to the economy. People do not point with their finger or lock me in a cage or an asylum, because such behaviour has fallen out of fashion. The mentally ill are negative space. I am the space surrounding those more solid. In the public library, a book of works by the British artist Rachel Whiteread presents me as I am. I opened the book and there stood a giant concrete mould of the interior of a house whose exterior had been peeled off. Air had become concrete, the penetrable made impenetrable, every absent window, electric socket, and door recorded as indentation. She’d done the same with bookshelves: every book gone, and a plaster cast of the air between shelf and book offered as documentation of the book’s previous presence. The art of Rachel Whiteread consists of this: negative space is given solid form and positive space done away with. Artists are permitted to repeat themselves, especially if what they do is clever. Politicians and young children understand the power of repetition. To be human is to repeat until an accident occurs. All discoveries are accidental. I love you, my mother repeated. I love you. What followed was not accidental. It was calculated to unnerve me to the point of muteness.