She stands in the hall for a moment, listening to Ashley mutter to himself in the bathroom as he plunges the toilet; then she goes to the living room and takes a pile of books from the bookcase, returns to the bathroom door and sits.
“I’m going to read to you,” she says to the closed door. “To help the time pass.”
“I can do without.”
“Don’t worry,” she says, as if he’s dismissing her for her own sake. “I’m fine.”
She chooses randomly, starting with Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Pet Dog.” She reads slowly, lingering over each word, pausing at the end of each paragraph, and when she is finished, she reaches for Coleridge and reads on. Ashley is still banging away inside, and she can’t tell whether he’s listening, whether he can even hear her over the clang of metal on porcelain. She reads “Christa-bel,” moving now at a less leisurely pace because she is afraid he will tell her she has to stop. She grabs Theodore Roethke’s Collected Poems when she comes to the final word of “Christabel,” and flips through the pages, starting near the end and moving back and forth through the collection.
When she comes to the end of “My Papa’s Waltz,” Ashley says, “I plagiarized that poem when I was in grade ten.”
Daphne puts down the book and stares at the closed door. Her mouth is sticky and dry from the reading, and she has trouble swallowing.
“I’d forgotten all about that. I won my school’s poetry competition. I plagiarized and no one knew, at least not at first. Not one teacher in my whole school recognized it. They thought I was a prodigy.”
“How did they find out?” Daphne asks, sitting cross-legged in the dim hallway, the books resting in the sliver of light along the bottom of the bathroom door.
“It wasn’t until much later,” he says. “I got to read the poem out in front of the whole school before they found out. I even loved it. I didn’t feel guilty at all. The night before I got to read to the school, I practised in front of my bedroom mirror. I tried raising my voice and lowering it. I was trying to find the perfect pitch. Sad and kind of troubled. Like things had happened to me. Real things. Stuff they couldn’t understand. And it worked too. I even cried a bit during the last verse. It was almost eerie after that too. People acted as though they were scared to talk to me, even teachers, as if I was too good for them. I really enjoyed myself. I can’t explain, but I felt deserving of the whole thing. I think I convinced myself I really had written the poem.”
Daphne hears the toilet lid drop to the seat.
“They even sent me to Ottawa,” he continues, “as the school’s representative at the provincial competition. I’d never been to Ottawa. Even though I was only going for a week, my dad bought me new luggage, one of those little suitcases with the wheels. I took four or five hours to pack the night before. I wasn’t usually that careful about things. I wasn’t much of a planner as a kid, but I enjoyed packing for that trip. I wanted to be sure I had enough clean socks. I remember being concerned about that, running out of clean socks. I really liked that suitcase. It was almost the best part of the whole thing.”
The shadows change under the door, and Daphne can tell that he is moving around the bathroom, lingering behind the door, where she hears him rearranging the towels on the racks, then retreating to the middle of the room. He returns to the toilet, where he sits with a thud, and claps his hands on his knees.
Daphne asks what happened in Ottawa.
“Nothing much,” he says, unconcerned, back to himself. “They found out on the first day, and they sent me home. That was it. No lectures or punishment. They just sent me home. The principal of my school made me apologize in the gym in front of the school. I told them I plagiarized the poem. And I pronounced Roethke as Roask. My English teacher corrected me afterwards.”
Daphne pictures him at fifteen, skinny and entitled, with legs so spindly it seemed they could never hold him up, standing in front of a tall microphone before his entire school. She pictures him at home after school, crying and crying in his bedroom.
“How terrible,” she says.
“Well, it wasn’t that bad,” he answers. “Everyone forgot about it a week later.”
“That was it?”
“Things went back to normal. That’s what happens.” His shadow retreats again, and she hears him open the shower curtain and rest his toolbox on the rim of the bathtub. Then he starts to plunge the toilet, with power that makes the water rock against the sides of the bowl.
She wishes she could be this way, that she could have this same ability to forget about things, that resilient knack for freeing herself from the burden of too much memory. She wonders if this is a fundamental difference between men and women, boys and girls: their conception of embarrassment, the ability to get over things. When she was in grade eleven, a teacher made her spit her gum into his hand, then write line after line on the board, “I will not chew gum like a cow in Mr. Erickson’s history class,” and she had been humiliated by the thought of this incident well into university.
As she opens her book, she feels shocked, less by Ashley’s story than by his seamless forgetting, by the prospect of sleep untroubled by thoughts of how things might have gone differently. And as she starts to read Yeats to the closed bathroom door, she thinks that this might be something to strive for. The perfect pitch of forgetting. She listens to the plunging of the toilet, to Ashley’s grunts as he goes faster and faster, and she listens to the sound of her own reading voice, to the sound of Yeats, to “Leda and the Swan.”
ONE COCKNEY SUNDAY, a night two weeks before the wedding, Daphne meticulously cleans the apartment while Ashley goes grocery shopping. She feels she can’t get married unless her apartment, her car, and her classroom are freshly scrubbed and vacuumed. While she is cleaning Ashley’s study, Carol calls and leaves lengthy marital advice on the answering machine, lecturing Daphne about her neighbour, who has a son with Down’s syndrome.
“I’m just saying,” she warns for the third time. “You’re almost thirty. The risk just increases with age. Marie was only thirty-two. You should just see her. The whole time we’re talking, he’s insisting I give him a kiss on the lips. ‘No,’ I say, ‘on the cheek.’ ‘Sur la bouche! ’ he yells. ‘Sur la bouche!’ You kids just shouldn’t waste time.”
When Carol begins to describe the boy’s heart surgeries, Daphne deletes the message and dusts the empty spaces in the back of the filing cabinet, and re-alphabetizes Ashley’s books. Then she spots the wicker garbage can, empty except for a few dirty Kleenexes and a crumpled piece of paper. She removes the paper and opens it up, expecting another bill from a phone sex company. It’s a letter in Ashley’s handwriting dated three days before, addressed to her:
Daphne. I have thought about things a good deal. Over the past several months, I’ve become extremely concerned by the discrepancy between the future I envision for myself and the future I seem to be pursuing. I don’t know what to do. It seems too late for all this. But should one swallow one’s doubts and behave with rectitude or should one follow one’s instinct, however scorpion-like it might be? What I mean is this: I have been plagued by the question of whether it is better to hurt you now, or whether it is better to damage you by subjecting you to my performance as a sub-standard husband.
Do not misunderstand me. You are mainly a wonderful person. It would be inaccurate, however, for me to state that I do not have grave doubts. My mind has been pondering the following questions. Are Daphne and I a good fit? Does she slip into my life as a foot into a shoe? Is she destined to be the mother of my children? Is it wrong to want more?
These, I think, are reasonable questions. Occasionally, I look at my life six months from now, and I can’t see you there. I certainly have a sizable amount of affection for you. But where do we go from here? How much love is enough?
The letter is signed, simply, A. Daphne stands in the middle of the dim study, Windex in one hand, the letter in another. For a minute, she wonders if it is indeed Ashley who has writt
en the letter, it sounds so cool and matter-of-fact, and Ashley usually has so much trouble getting down serious thoughts. But the arches and spaces are all in order; she can even see where he has paused, an awkward writing habit, before each s, a large printed letter in the midst of tight cursive. Even the opening—just, Daphne—seems an announcement that the letter is not for her. Around the apartment, he leaves her notes about dinner plans and grocery lists, and he addresses them differently each time, in a way she thinks of as typically Ashley—earnest even in his attempts at eccentricity. Dearest D. To Daphne, bearer of freshly squeezed orange juice. Hello goddess of Rice Krispies, ally in intuition. She feels her forehead, damp under the bandana she’s wearing for cleaning. It is as if the air has thinned, like the air of higher altitudes. She can’t quite get a proper breath. She sees her wedding dress, hanging unsteadily in the doorway, and notices a small spot of blue along the hem, a spray of Windex on the white silk. Hola, Daphners, partner in crime. Although she knows she has just discovered something distressing, terrible even, still she cannot gather sadness for the letter and its intent. All she can think is that this letter, with its formality and its petered-out woefulness, cannot be for her. To Daphne, about whom I have grave doubts.
How can it be she who went so far wrong in interpretation?
She doesn’t want to be home when Ashley arrives with groceries, to unpack Cheerios and raspberry yogurt and bananas with him, wondering whether, in the plan of his world, they are getting married in two weeks. To be around such domestic things and pretend to be concerned about them. Did you remember my milk? Is this peanut butter all natural?
So she leaves in the car. She simply drives. Because she steers without forethought, without the barest notion of how to get from one destination to another, she drives around the city streets, moving from her apartment, through the weekend rush of College Street, the martini-drenched dress-up, into the deeper downtown streets with their crowds of taxis. Past Nathan Phillips Square and the Eaton Centre, she drives slowly, signalling her left and right turns well ahead of time, easing into them with geriatric care. In fact, she has no idea where she is going as she makes her way north.
To Daphne, whom I do not love.
She drives and drives. And her mind fills with a single thought: all she would like is to drive home and find the apartment dark and quiet, to see Ashley lying in bed already asleep, his mouth slightly open like a child’s, and to slip into bed without waking him and lie quite still there, so she can hear the wispiness of each breath in the air, the way sleep seems to lift him a little from the bed, as if he bears no burden of adulthood. She would give anything to hear it now, that level of noise just above silence, the airborne rhythm that barely identifies itself as sound. Is she allowed to wish for this? She thinks not. She is beginning to know that there are no wishes to be had any more because she never even knew how to wish properly, or even improperly. More fitting than marriage is that she should be left with the captive life of retrospect, the wheel in her hands.
Looking at the dashboard clock, she realizes how late it is, ten o’clock, and she has no idea where she is. Without pulling over, one hand gripped on the wheel, she reaches over to the glove compartment to retrieve her Perly’s road guide.
There is no noise, at first, when it happens. She is wrapped, still, in this altered calm, her conviction that there are no decisions, no confrontations to be made. A moth flies along the length of the windshield and lands on the dashboard just above the steering wheel. She monitors its movement, glancing back and forth between the road and the moth. As she turns a corner onto a softly lit side street that has already descended into a midnight sleepiness, she looks down for the moth, and it is gone. Then she feels a brush at her cheek, a feathery kiss, followed by the moth’s panicky flutter across her ear and into her hair and back again to her cheek. Letting go of the wheel, she slaps at her cheek with both hands and slams on what she thinks is the brakes. There is a moment of delay before she feels the bumps. A moment before her mind registers what she hears. Then it all comes at once.
A series of high-pitched, clipped yelps. The front wheels over a small bump, a moment, the back wheels over a small bump. She slams on the brakes and sits, waiting for something more, yelling or instant sirens, something dramatic like a flood of gunshots. But the street is quiet. She opens the car door. The yelps are trailing off into low groans, faint whimpers broken by pinpricks of sound, then another single yelp. Daphne can’t fit the yelps and the groans and the bumps together to form an understanding of what’s happened. The noises, the bumps in the car, seem isolated, as if they are outtakes of different events that can’t connect. She wanders, feeling vacant and baffled, to the back of the car, and her eyes follow the road. “Oh,” she says, “Oh, God,” and her voice has a brittle, collapsed quality she finds unfamiliar, a formlessness that is barely verbal, as she falls to her knees, realizing what she has done.
There is a dog, a little terrier, lying behind her car, one of his hind legs stretched back behind his body. As she pulls the leg back into place, the dog yelps again, weakly. Its breaths are shallow pants, and it groans in a far-off, unreachable way. Its eyes are glazed over, aimed at a distant spot in the night sky.
It seems impossible to her that there are not ambulances streaming down the street to help her out of this.
Leaning over the dog, she runs a hand across its blond fur, so soft, like the wisps of a baby’s hair. It doesn’t respond to her touch, doesn’t move its head or twitch its skin. She looks up and down the quiet street, at the houses, all of them dark, even the houses with two cars in the driveway. Carefully, she slides both hands under the dog’s side, feels its ribs, some still intact, some cracked at their centres. Then she crouches and slides her hands farther in until she has the dog cradled in the crook of her elbows. As she lifts and stands, the dog moans faintly. It is limp in her arms, still staring at the spot in the sky.
The dog seems too heavy, so much weight in so little an animal. She feels as if she is standing at the bottom of a cold river, as if the water above is pressing her into the sticky bottom, and someone has just told her she has to travel from one shore to the other. Her movements are thick, muddied, each step requiring strength she doesn’t have. She wades her way across the sidewalk.
She walks up the path to a house and rings the doorbell twice. She waits a minute, then rings the doorbell again four times.
“Hello?” she calls, trying to sound like a sane person. “Please answer.”
She cradles the dog, waiting for someone to answer the door, for surely someone must answer. Someone must answer at a time when her arms have never seemed so inadequate. The neighbouring house is also dark, but she cuts across the lawn and up to the door. She rings the doorbell, but doesn’t hear its noise reverberating back to her from within. Then she thinks she hears noise from inside, a television or a radio, and she rings the doorbell again, and presses her ear to the door’s cold wood. Then, with all her strength, she kicks the door. She stands on the top step for another minute, then steps back, looks at the black windows, and rings the doorbell again, willing someone to come to the door, picturing a correct resolution with all her ability to desire. When still no one comes, she hardens her body and kicks the door again and again.
“You have to help me,” she shouts at the white door.
The dog gasps and lets out a long low moan. She bangs on the door with her foot. Her shoes leave black smudges on the shiny paint.
The dog groans again and shudders. It turns its head from the sky and rests its cold muzzle on the inside of her arm. It lets out a long breath and licks, with the tip of its cool tongue, the centre spot on her wrist where her arm meets her hand. She kicks the door again and again. She is certain now that she hears the organized laughter of a television show.
“Come!” she shouts. “You’re in there!”
How could there be no one, when she has come to do the right thing? She turns and looks up and down the street at all the
houses, at the rows of black windows, the emissaries of all the people living in the backs of their homes.
CRUSADE
Your new boyfriend is not welcome in your house. Your mother declares that his curly red hair is an assault on her senses and that she doesn’t understand how any girl in her right mind could be attracted to him, not with that shiny Christian face. You argue without conviction. Tell her that she’s a reverse bigot. That it’s not a crime to go to church three times a week. That she worships at the altar of sexual charisma like a teenager. You slam the door twice leaving the room. Your father emerges from the basement.
“Who’s slamming doors?” he shouts.
Your mother holds up her hands. “It isn’t me.”
“I’m not fixing any more doors,” he calls out to you.
On an impulse, you invite your boyfriend to dinner even though you and your mother have been fighting steadily. His Holiness, she calls him. Certain revelations about the degree of his Christianity do, in fact, trouble you, but ever since you’ve been confronted with your mother’s aversion, you have become his most strident defender. During dinner, he holds forth. Your mother is perched on the edge of her chair, her tight smile stitched to perfection. Every time he refers to his group, Campus Crusade for Christ, she lays down her fork. She seems to oscillate between shocked remove and direct terror, on her face the wondering assessment of a woman watching news coverage of a tornado or a hurricane, natural phenomena far from home but nonetheless alarming. Your father nods approvingly every time His Holiness refers to God as “my Saviour.” The faces of your two younger sisters are contorted with the effort of choking back laughter. Every time they kick each other under the table, a bubble rumbles noisily to the top of the water cooler. Your older sister is in her last year of university and is just discovering her affection for impugning the values of men she views as misogynists.
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