You always thought of her as the exotic one. But why? It was more than the New York accent, which made you think of chipped teeth and long, black hair. It was more than the way she looked, the skin stretched to excess and the mop of sandy curls. She rode her bicycle, with its wicker basket on the front, everywhere she went, and despite her weight looked as nimble as a child, almost as if her weight helped her achieve balance, that Southern lady’s sense of unhurried pace. These things you admired. They made her watchable. But the exoticism came from somewhere else. It seemed to you that she’d had so many lives before the one you knew her in.
On your first morning in New York, as you ate breakfast, she told you about the honeymoon with her first husband, about the aerial view.
“Men can do such things to you,” she said. “You have to be so careful, careful not to let yourself go too much. Sex especially, honey, watch out. You’re so young; your emotions will get involved. It’s a matter of firsts. That’s all.”
She told you about how, as a child, she would lie behind the living room couch all day. The sun shone down just so through the front window, and she lay there. Her sisters would fight over dolls and sweaters while demanding sandwiches and forming accusations, and her mother would come up with activities to keep the fighting to a minimum, arts and crafts activities like painting their own stained glass. Ella stayed away. She was that contented behind the couch. Only when communication was absolutely necessary did she send out word. She delivered notes through the dog. I vote hamburgers for dinner. Would someone be so kind as to send a glass of water? It is not true that I got my math test back last week and failed.
“I called him my own personal Purolator courier,” she said. “He would take the notes in his mouth and drop them at my mother’s feet.”
Her second husband had been a photographer for National Geographic. He had been to Africa and had flown his own small plane over Kenya. You thought that she probably had no use, ultimately, for your father and you greatly respected her for this.
You asked what it was like, living in the house where she had planned a future with her first husband.
“The first week after he left, my furnace went out and I couldn’t get a man in to fix it for a week. It was so cold that frost flowers were forming on the windows, and none of my blankets did the trick. I discovered when I was cleaning that my husband had forgotten just one belonging, his red sleeping bag in the back of the closet. So for all that week I had no heat, I wrapped it around my shoulders day and night. And I moaned and wondered if I’d made a mistake and I cozied up under that sleeping bag as if it were the man himself. After the furnace man came, I cranked up the heat and sweated it all out. I put the sleeping bag back where I found it and haven’t looked at it since.”
She filled the copper kettle with water and set it loudly on the hissing burner, as if that was the only end her story needed. “I’d rather be trampled by a horse than ground up slowly by nostalgia.”
In the sunny kitchen, she was naked under a lace nightgown and you could see everything. You hadn’t seen your own mother naked since you were four or five, but it took you no time to adjust to Ella’s failure to cover up. There was your father’s mistress in the kitchen cooking, and there was her entire body. Your father had once said about her, after an argument, “She’s in fine form.” And this hadn’t made you think of debates at all, of feisty opinions and an unwillingness to back down. It seemed to refer to her body. Such fine form. She walked around, smiling at you from time to time as if she had no idea her nightgown could be seen right through. The rolls of fat, like bread dough. You wanted to squish your hands in and feel the warmth. Your father had already gone off to his conference and he was gone all day. She made you an omelette, with Brie, portobello mushrooms, tomatoes, and spinach.
“We need to fatten you up,” she said.
You felt she was taking responsibility for you, tending to you.
Normally, you picked at your food, and your father talked about how all the women in his family had no fat on them, they were as thin as could be. He said this with a bit of mocking, as if you were all silly for being thin, but it was clear that he was proud too, proud to be affiliated with this clan of rigorous, thin women. But you stuffed the omelette in your mouth quickly and asked for more. You wanted her to see that you were not like most people: you approved of fat, curbs of skin folding, one onto the next.
Ella’s face was round and lineless. Your mother was bony and gaunt. You did not want to be associated with her murky demands. She held her past tightly, refused to distribute childhood stories as entertainment. Although you made these comparisons, sitting in Ella’s kitchen as she talked in her lace nightgown, they did not mean you saw Ella as a more desirable mother. That was not how you saw her.
A man knocked on the front door, and she reached into a closet in the kitchen and pulled out a bathrobe, wrapped it tightly around her before answering. So she must have been aware then, she must have been aware of all that could be seen.
You were just a child. How can it grip you even now, after all the men, the men and the years?
Later that first day, she took you to a local outdoor swimming pool. She wore a wide-brimmed straw hat and didn’t swim, but sat on a lawn chair waving to you when you looked her way. She was wearing another lace top, but this time she had a shirt on underneath. The pool was full of people, so you couldn’t swim properly, but you tried your best to look as if you were cavorting around, having a good time. The sun was hot, beating down on the water so that it felt like a bath. There were no trees around, just a parking lot on one side of the pool, an apartment building on the other. You snuck looks at Ella and hoped she wouldn’t notice. You took water into your mouth and streamed it out through the gap in your teeth.
You wanted to call out, “Come swim with me,” but you hadn’t the courage. She looked so serene in her straw hat.
When you were ready to get out, she wrapped a fluffy pink towel around your shoulders, then followed you into the change room, which was a large concrete area with no private, curtained areas. You tried to change from your bathing suit into your clothes without showing your body and without looking as if you were hiding it from her. By accident, you dropped the towel when you went to put on your bra. It was your first bra, and you were not an expert at getting it on and off. So surprised were you to find yourself standing before her, watching calmly, that you simply stood there topless, exposing breasts you were barely familiar with yourself.
Ella said nothing at first. It occurred to you that all you would ever want from love was someone to call you baby, to say it at the lowest pitch of longing and regret.
Finally, looking at your stomach, she said, “You have a scar.”
The year before, you had had your appendix out. The scar seemed new, still pinkish-purple. She leaned in and traced an index finger over the thin raised dash, still tender in the way that scars with a history never quite stop feeling tender. You hadn’t let your stomach be seen since the nurse held your hand in the recovery room as you cried with anaesthetic nausea and unanticipated soreness, the awareness that something had been removed that could never be replaced.
But you stood there with Ella as her finger skimmed over your scar. You closed your eyes and held your wet bathing suit against your leg so that the water trickled down your thigh.
THE FINGERS HAVE a memory far longer than the mind’s.
After dinner, your father wanted you to give a recital of your grade eight Royal Conservatory pieces. In her living room, Ella had an old Steinway grand piano, barely in tune, with heavy ivory keys. Your father always organized concerts of this kind, after elaborate family dinners on Christmas and Easter, mobilizing aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents into the living room for an impromptu piano recital. For days before, he would hound you into extra practice, then on event day would find himself at the dinner table folding his cranberry sauce–stained napkin, the thought occurring to him just then that they might all e
njoy a musical interlude. You would play your pieces from List A through to List D, then the two studies, waiting after each for your family to clap obediently like a symphony audience, waiting, after the second study’s final note, overdramatized with a pedal sustained too long, for the lone “Bravo” to issue from your father, standing in the doorway.
The same you did for Ella. Only she didn’t clap and even your father seemed embarrassed by his “Bravo” in an audience of two, as you kept your foot on the pedal and the sound of the final, off tune A flat of Study No. 3 hummed in the air.
“I’ll teach you a real piece,” she said. “Something worth knowing.”
She nudged you off the piano bench and pulled from inside it the yellowing pages of Debussy’s La fille aux cheveux de lin and set them before you.
“But it’s grade nine,” you objected.
“It’s slow. You can learn it.”
The following morning, after your father left, she went through it with you, telling you where to pedal and where to create the legato with just your fingers. She corrected you at the end, when you played the reprisal of the primary melody too loudly.
“Softly,” she said. “As if contemplating.”
You played it every hour on the hour twice, and when you performed it for your father on the last day of the visit, you let the music fall from the stand because your fingers held the tune.
ON THE SECOND VISIT, you got the flu. You lay in bed sweating and shivering, and Ella took your temperature and murmured in concern. She blotted your forehead with a soft flannel blanket. Your temperature went up to 102, and Ella called your father at the conference hotel and got him out of one of his seminars. Over the phone, he suggested a cool bath. She came into the guest room and put a hand on your cheek. You opened your eyes but could barely see her because the window was at her back. There was just her silhouette, the sheer white curtains rippling around her.
“You need a cool bath,” she said.
You stood and allowed yourself to be led to the bathroom. So weak you felt, so glad to be weak. She held your hand as if she was initiating you into something.
The bathtub was a large, claw-footed tub and the water in it looked clear except for specks of rust, barely visible. Dust floated in the stream of sun through the window. She undressed you then. You leaned against her as she pulled your nightgown over your head, as you stepped out of your underwear. You rested against her arm as she helped lower you into the tub.
You were sweating, and she turned on a fan and set it in the doorway.
“You’ll have hot and cold on your skin now,” she says. “You’ll like it. I know your skin.”
Ella kneeled and leaned against the white porcelain, wet her hands. She held you forward gently, your chest against her forearm, while she spooned cool water up over your back. Then she reached for the soap and held it gently while it glided over your back, as if it were soaping you itself. Lifting your foot, she rubbed her thumb along its bottom, and she worked the soap between her hands and made hills of lather along your arm. She hummed.
“I could wash your parts all day,” she said.
She did everything for you. Soaping you with conjugal diligence, she held a wet washcloth against your forehead and made sure each part got as clean as the others. She cupped your foot as if measuring its exact weight. Then she rinsed you, making waves in the tub and letting the water lap against your breasts before she scooped it into a small wooden bowl and poured it over your head, shielding your eyes with her hand.
“There you go, baby,” Ella said. “Clean as clean.”
That evening you spent on the couch covered in an old afghan, afraid to be alone in your room because every time you closed your eyes, you could see, through the dark inside of your eyelids, enormous black birds with long, trailing wings gliding over your head. Ella made you chicken noodle soup from scratch, and you hoped that your father wouldn’t arrive and make a fuss that you were spreading germs in the communal areas of the house. On the coffee table was an old photograph of a balding man with a younger, black-haired woman looking formal and legitimate in a wedding photograph beneath an overgrown oak tree.
“Who are they?” you asked Ella when she brought you a bowl of soup.
“My parents.”
“They have a grumpy look about them,” you said. “Like someone’s forcing them to apologize.”
“I suppose they do, don’t they?” she said, looking at the picture curiously, as if she had just spotted in a crowd the person she was searching for.
Her mother was Canadian and had grown up in Windsor, she told you, and her father was an American living in Detroit, and they met when he was visiting relatives in Windsor for the summer. For their first date, they arranged to go see a matinee of Guys and Dolls across the river in Detroit. She had suggested meeting him at the drugstore on the corner of his street. She was liberated before women were liberated, Ella said. Also, she knew that making an impressive entrance meant more than just sweeping down the stairs while your date stood at the front door under the eyes of your father. She was a woman who knew her entrance. She did not go to the trouble of hot rollers and her bangs taped to her forehead all night for the sake of one mere boy. She dressed for her larger public. An entrance meant a bevy of turned heads; it meant all eyes, male and female, compelled to take her in; it meant the odd reverential whisper passed between strangers. And so she swung open the door of the drugstore and stepped inside, and agreeably, it was as busy as she had hoped it would be. She stood expectantly at the door, wearing a trench coat buttoned to her neck, the collar up around her throat, and the belt pulled as tightly as the need to breathe would allow. She registered Ella’s father registering the turned heads, the hushed comments, and was satisfied.
He announced that he had to drop a book at his aunt’s on the way out of town and off they went. Up in the old aunt’s apartment, the heat was stifling, and the aunt repeatedly invited Ella’s mother to remove her coat, and Ella’s mother repeatedly refused. The aunt had set out cookies and tea, so they were obliged to stay for a time and be entertained. For half an hour, the aunt encouraged Ella’s mother to take off her coat and for half an hour she declined, until sweat was forming on her upper lip and beginning to drip down from her carefully set hairstyle. Finally they left, and in the car, Ella’s mother took off her coat, right there on their first date, revealing that she had on only her bra and underpants. Then she rolled down the window and fanned her forehead, checked her hair for signs of humidity in the rearview mirror.
“You see, back then, all the latest fashions were in the department stores in Detroit. You couldn’t get them in Windsor. My mother thought she didn’t have anything grand enough to wear to the theatre in Detroit,” Ella said. “So she planned to go into the department store before lunch, buy a fancy new dress, and wear that.”
Your father had come home from the conference halfway through her story, and stood in the doorway still holding his briefcase.
“It was a nicer time then, don’t you think?” she asked. “You could take your coat off and let a boy see your bra and underwear and it wouldn’t proceed to God knows what else. He wouldn’t assume. That was probably the happiest time they ever had.”
Your father set down his briefcase. “I thought we were against nostalgia.”
“It’s not nostalgia. It’s just remembering,” she said.
They went into the kitchen and left you staring at the Steinway grand.
Is it nostalgia or just remembering when you still play, twenty years later, La fille aux cheveux de lin without missing a note?
YOU NEVER DID FEEL that love enriched your life. Mostly all it did was remove the finer points of happiness.
Walking alone on a tree-lined, windy lane in the country. Floating on waves in Miller Lake, looking up at the cliff face. Lying in bed at night, preparing to sleep, preparing to stay awake.
There are experiences diminished by companionship.
It was your father who said t
his first, but it was a long time before you realized how true it was. He was going to the botanical gardens, and Ella wanted to go along. She hadn’t been in years. He said she had to stay with you, you were too young to be left alone in a strange place.
“She’ll be fine,” Ella said. “She’s not a child.”
She looked at you gently, but regretfully, as if you alone were keeping her from something she very much wanted. They stepped into the next room, but you could still hear them.
“I prefer to see it alone.” His voice made it clear that he had long since decided. You wondered if he had already moved on to the next one. Even then you understood that there is always someone ready to step into your place.
“We could experience it together,” she offered.
“There are experiences diminished by companionship.”
She came back into the room, looked at you, and delivered her expression, but sadly this time, without its usual bite.
“‘Balls,’ said the queen. ‘If I had two, I’d be king.’” She rolled her eyes jokingly, but couldn’t hide the sadness in them, in the downturn of her lips.
And even though she must have resented you, even just a bit, she was good to you when he left. She made iced tea and filled the glasses too full, so that when she dropped in ice cubes the liquid overflowed. She laughed as she mopped up the counters. You didn’t blame her for wanting to go with him. Already, you understood how it must be to feel you’d give almost anything for half an hour alone with someone.
She took you to a park near her house. A small group of older Asian men and women was practising tai chi on the grass. At the far end was an area of thick trees, and she led you towards it.
“This part used to be all trees. Then they cut them down. Here, it used to feel like a forest in the middle of the city. They were so thick, you could stand in the middle and it would be dark. The sun didn’t come through. There are trees in there great for climbing. I’ll wait out here on the bench. Go have fun.”
The Virgin Spy Page 12