“Touch,” Lawrence invited. The lichen: a delicate leather. (Also few metaphors.) I smelled it, looked through his magnifying glass while he explained, but this isn’t one of those stories puffed out with data about parrots or antique clocks or saffron, so no more. What happened, the doings that took me every- and nowhere—in this story that’s all I intend.
Lawrence concluded, “Lichens rule the world.”
Then he had to go, for his mother was expecting him. It was the father who’d died. Wishful thinking.
Translation awaited me, so I went home to the top floor of my parents’ house, one enormous attic room. Why live there? Private entrance 800 sq ft, FP, HW floors, alcoves, dormers, claw-footed tub. . . Mostly, to annoy my mother. Outside, the wind sang in the trees (personification). As a child I’d dreamed of floating out and over those maples, far away. (Not emotion. Fact.) I had a hot plate and used it, but fiction garnished with recipes doesn’t appeal to me.
My parents’ TV and bathroom and furniture were all bigger than mine, their magazines glossier, so from time to time I regressed to the lower floors. My father and I would converse.
“YY?” he’d say.
“XXX.”
“No, YY! And also YYYYY!” he’d retort.
I’d shout back, “XXX, and XXIV for that matter!”
“What?” He was growing deaf. Shorter, too, with age.
My mother did the ending. “Oh let up, you two! Such a to-do.”
Our family dialogues could have featured as idiom samples for ESL students. Let up. Really. How you do. Worked up. To-do.
For a translator, idiom offers the most brilliant challenges. (Except poetry. I have not got that far.) Back then I translated botanical articles, conference proceedings, minutes, reports. (Even in such meagre soil, metaphor sprouts). Idiom drew me, still does, a private tongue parenthetical within a given language. Parasitical? No. Idiom enlivens, does not destroy the host.
Like lichens, I told Lawrence, languages rule the world. Nor are they separate, especially those spoken by millions—Mandarin, English, Spanish. Oh, at the centre, where the standard flies, they’re distinct, but at the margins the rules get bitten to bits (repetition, alliteration), and people speak amazing hodgepodges. There’s far more margin than centre. Look at any page. See how metaphor slides in? All this and much more I said to Lawrence, but as backdrop that’ll do. No elaborate analogies between Chinook and the symbiosis of algae or fungi and love. In too many stories, such comparisons drag the doings off course.
At the Whatsits’ house, Lawrence’s territory was the basement suite. High, south-facing, sun-washed. Small animals jarred in alcohol stood in ranks on his shelves. Skins, skulls. A globe for twirling. A cupboard door that must stay closed till spring because a spider’s egg-mass clung to the hinge. I wouldn’t have cared.
When Lawrence and I came upstairs after a morning on his bed, his mother was ready for us with waffles, peaches, crème fraîche.
“I remember you, Ellen,” smiling. Some high school event, awards for science students.
After eating, Lawrence took us back downstairs, only in part to make love again. “She pushes in too close,” he frowned. “Keep your guard up.” Too close? Such a thing, in a mother!
Familiar, peculiar, other, darling, such was Lawrence. Botanical Latin was only one shared idiom. Others: our bodies, devotion to work, facing a fourth decade in houses where we’d always lived. Bonded like lichen to stones we were, another simile, my guard down.
Lichens. Lawrence photographed them. For drug companies he analyzed their properties. For universities he identified them. He lectured.
“I’m portable,” he said. “So are you.” He set his globe twirling. “Languages and lichens are everywhere.”
To detach, dislodge, float like bursting clouds of spores (another) was our hypothesis. To live nowhere seemed a fine plan. Our preparations for marriage were simple. We saw a travel agent, got new laptops, and at his mother’s urging rented a post office box.
My father told me, “I like him, dear, but that’s no way to live.”
“Why such a fuss? We’ll have the house to ourselves.”
“What did you say?”
My mother had spoken with perfect clarity.
For nine months Lawrence and I travelled. On airstreams of desire and thermals of spontaneity we floated about Europe, Asia. The green algal cells in the symbiosis, were they him? Or me? Who made the colourless fungal strands? See how metaphor bloats up to excess?
His mother wrote when the eggs hatched. She’d carried hundreds of spiderlings out to the sunshine. Although I wouldn’t have bothered, to me her act showed reliability.
Lawrence frowned. “She’s overdoing it.”
I translated. Globally I faxed and emailed, loving how Lawrence and I and our work diffused ourselves electronically. Dispersal. Possibly even then I loved that as much as him.
For my birthday, the mother-in-law sent a pretty book with blank pages. “Thought you might jot down your doings.”
Such a thing, never owned, never done. (Don’t worry, no quotes.) To note, scribble—exotic, for a rigorous translator of proceedings.
My own mother had recently shrunk, but now her letter blew her up again. “Your father and I think of renting out the attic. Waste of space.”
“He’d never do that!” Lawrence hugged me. “Your Dad loves you, Ellen. Don’t worry, my sweetheart.”
Hug hug.
For my father, Lawrence photographed the two of us. He shot lichens—crustose, foliose, fruticose—enough. Events only. He wrote, lectured. In Turkey and Malaysia he made good contacts. In bliss we lived. No one, not even she, can take that time away.
When I began to vomit each morning, Lawrence stayed happy. (It is possible, given later doings, that he grew even happier.)
My whole body hurt. Respiration, digestion, excretion, translation, circulation all malfunctioned. Only reproduction hummed along. After an Athenian doctor opined that a difficult pregnancy was best endured “at home,” back we went, at Lawrence’s insistence, to our sole country Canada, and our lovely airport living ceased.
Mrs. Whatsit crouched in her familiar house.
After the vomiting came faints and vicious headaches, and in their train eclampsia. She never failed to soothe and feed. We stayed upstairs with her so she could help quickly, though Lawrence longed for a space of our own.
From my own mother came no word about Fussing or Worked up. She met my tear-bleared gaze. “Terrible, isn’t it? Now you know.”
Lawrence published. He consulted. Everywhere lay slides of lichens—cloud-grey, celadon, duck’s egg. My translations slept unattended like Snow White. I did not care. No prince would come.
Mrs. Whatsit read aloud from baby books. Chuckling, she told of her son’s infancy.
“Can’t you see Ellen’s tired?” Lawrence’s anger meant protection, but I closed my ears to him, admitted only that soft female voice.
After many hours of labour they got it out of me. An army had trampled through my body (this one extended metaphor I permit, pleading extenuating circumstances) and then stomped off across obliterated borders. The occupation over, defeat at first felt unimportant. That no one was inside sufficed, that no one any longer lived off the country of me. I can still close off the metaphor, am not so far gone as poetry. The scale in the delivery room told seven pounds. I’d have believed seventy.
We moved downstairs, into the sunny basement suite.
The baby wouldn’t take the bottle. Mrs. Whatsit became agitated.
“Why fuss?” asked my mother. “She’ll give in. It’s the rule.”
A pattern of feeds and sleeps developed, Lawrence’s mother claimed. Simultaneously, metaphors I’d played with on pages set aside in the journal leaped up. They morphed into narratives. The paper absorbed ink as mosses do rain (third sim
ile).
Now what were we going to do?
Lawrence and I, from fifteen to approximately thirty, had been acquainted. When we really met (there’s a translator’s test!), we fell in love. We married. We were happy, easy in every tongue. He now looked much older than when we ate cherries on the grass.
Me too. My father said, “You were so pretty, dear, such a pity.”
Back to translating. Compared to the brutal tasks impressed by pregnancy, the glide/slide from language to language was easy. My work done and invoiced, I bought a separate notebook and left behind first person. Yes, I abandoned her, pushing off into the singing trees of third, dozens of thirds. Metaphors, similes were the least of the hijinks I got up to.
I had to come down when Lawrence and I rented our own apartment. After I’d finished my daily stint of translation and wanted to write, I’d leave her in the building’s laundry room (why would anyone take a baby?) to enjoy the dryer’s vibration, or put her out on the balcony to feel the spinning rain. The trees were way down, much too far to float, but Lawrence’s mother fussed. She got worked up. She came over ever more often to help. (Such a test, that common verb!) To escape her, Lawrence spent hours back in his old room with the dead drunk moles. She was here, he was there, I was nowhere I knew.
Next we tried my old attic.
Renovation easily created a baby-area and one for Lawrence’s work, but that space had all been mine. Since my teens, my parents had hardly entered. To cram in with a man, a baby, Mrs. Whatsit more often than not, and to sense underfoot, literally, my own parents—intolerable. (Also my mother’s word for Mrs. Whatsit.)
My father often clumped upstairs. He liked Lawrence. He bought a TV series on fungi narrated by a potato-in-the-mouth Brit and cuddled the baby while watching my old screen, still there, still small. Dad turned the volume up and up.
Defeated, Lawrence agreed to move back to his mother’s house.
Her bedroom was next to the baby’s. “So convenient!” she said, delighted. “So easy to get up with her at night!” I agreed. While I translated, Mrs. Whatsit brought coffee, baked snacks, took phone calls, ran errands. All these Lawrence had long ago cut her off from doing for him.
My narratives were now my real work. I hid the notebooks. My mother-in-law didn’t need to see the massy life swelling from her gift. Things were bad enough already. In the guest room, Lawrence couldn’t get it up. He tried to lure me to the golden basement, apparently not understanding the words I spoke about this. A long time went by before he grasped that no sex was possible unless conception was 100% impossible.
After the extraction I’d asked for a tubal, but the docs hedged and huffed. So it was up to him. So he requested a vasectomy, and got zero medical huffing. We made love once. Made. Hard work. Then I got all worked up. Until my period, no narratives came.
“Ellen, once a month is not enough.”
What standard of language was this? This rule was never before ours, not mine now. Near the Whatsit house was a park. Sitting near windy trees, I wrote narrative. At night I translated. Thus, very busy.
Quite a good time, that.
Lawrence and I and she went for dinner to my parents’ house.
My father: “You’re too thin dear. Slouching makes you look thinner.”
My mother: “Don’t fuss. Can’t you see she’s having trouble?” She fetched his jar of maraschinos. “Here, Ellen, eat.”
“What?” my father asked. “What is Ellen having?”
The baby cried.
Because Lawrence’s mother was not there to soothe her, he took her up to my attic and walked about. His steps, her cries resounded above. I watched TV with my parents. Stuck in those big fat armchairs, they looked littler all the time.
Lawrence insisted I go back to the doctors. “You have to stop crying.”
After my tubal, things changed yet were not better. Not really. Try that, translators!
A form letter came. Our post-office box was up for renewal. Mail had scarcely ever reached us thus, but we remembered the happy rental. We cried. Side by side, Lawrence and I turned and folded and smoothed that shoddy official paper till it became soft as muslin. For days that form lay on the dresser in the guest room. One of us would pick it up, read, smile, cry.
He announced, “This is despair.”
His saying so was pivotal to the plot. A hundred times I’d felt myself alone in framing that definition.
On our first travels we’d floated on whim, spores adrift, blending clouds of love as we learned each other’s tongues and conjugated our own idiom. This time Greece took us three months to work through, Turkey the same, Thailand almost six. Researcher, photographer, translator, writer, we packed our laptops everywhere each day, yet my handwriting filled one notebook after another. I scrambled to move the pen fast enough.
These travels were bliss encore.
In airports and libraries I met magazines. Narratives went into my laptop and out again, as submissions. Rejection wasn’t defeat. In nature, most attempts at distribution fail. Only if many occur do some succeed.
The first anniversary of this happy life found us in Malaysia with a bevy of lichenologists. At the hotel, after collecting the colloquium’s agenda and our mail, we panted up to our room for air-conditioned love, but found that Mrs. Whatsit had sent photos.
“She looks like you,” in unison.
Shiny coloured rectangles slid over the king-size. She held a toy plane Lawrence had sent her from Istanbul. On Mrs. Whatsit’s lap she cuddled smiling, on my father’s too.
“A lot like you,” we repeated. I told the truth.
When he thought I wouldn’t notice, Lawrence examined the photos again, again. I heard his fingers handling them, not notes or reports. He tried to bring the images into bed. I wouldn’t agree. He persisted. I sensed a new rule arriving. When he reached for me I was sure, and quickly moved to my own margin. By now I understood my mother’s twin bed. She had no notebooks, though, poor woman. Then and there in front of Lawrence I got out my stories and began to write in my own idiom.
He did not ask. He, we did not speak our language very much any more (another conundrum for the translators).
Her third birthday approached. Lawrence wanted to go to Canada.
“What would a child that age know about celebration?”
He had no scientific comeback, but one day after a siege of meetings he and I were having drinks with other participants. A fellow translator asked me with gentle concern if I were tired.
Lawrence snapped, “No, Ellen always slouches like that. And she gets all worked up.”
The inquirer stammered. Others lowered their eyes while my husband publicly raged, glared, sulked.
At last I said I’d go. Not then. At Christmas. With conditions. Our arrival must be unannounced, so no airport reunion. No gambols, no funny gifts of the kind that Mrs. Whatsit, given opportunity, would invent. And we’d stay at a downtown hotel, to prevent a child from slipping into our room at dawn expecting special treatment.
I had to force myself to get on the plane. Even my parents’ rather austere seasonal practices reared up like penitentiary walls. (That’s the last, unless I’ve lost count. Four’s plenty.)
At dusk the taxi moved through softly falling white to the old neighbourhood and so to the Whatsits’ house, its basement dark. Snow flowed around us.
Peering through the bright living-room window, we saw our daughter, arms akimbo, face red, tongue stuck out. Her body shook with shouting, “No no no, I hate you!” Tears sprang off her face.
Lawrence gasped, laughed. His eyes too were wet.
My mother-in-law, her back to us, spoke inaudibly. Her hair was greyer. She was fifty-five now, I calculated.
“When the worst teen years hit, she’ll just be getting her pension.”
Lawrence’s fist almost reached me, but we flinched.
That idiom, alien still. We watched as the woman and child calmed down, smiled, kissed.
He and I kissed too, a long deep final word. Then the father ran up to his front door.
I walked, wondering where under the everywhere whiteness lay that delicate lichen, frilled, leathery.
Through the living-room window of my parents’ house glinted an enormous Christmas tree. For her. They never used to do that. A light shone in the attic, another by my private door. My key slid in. On the stairs I sat to note the essentials. In the airport lounge I’d go further, for likely there’d be hours before the flight above the tumbling snow, hours to live in my idiom. Ours no more. Never hers.
Some women take to it, some don’t.
Writing poetry was now imaginable.
I tiptoed up.
My parents’ huge TV and chairs and beds were in the attic, as were they, two tiny dried-apple dolls in robes and slippers by the fire. They nibbled mince-tarts. On the dormer windows, glittering lichen bonded with the sky. The trees, sheathed in ice, stood silent.
My mother sighed. “So nice with just the two of us.”
“What did you say?”
Dirty Work
With deepest sympathy?
In Your Hour of Loss?
Certainly not.
I searched through the rack of cards with no text.Flowers and rivers cooled both the September heat and my anger at the day’s news reports from Afghanistan about Bush at his dirty work again, cosying up to the Taliban’s leaders. Stars, clouds, ocean beaches.
Then—a wide field where two old trees stood close, their colours muted, the sage and olive conveying respect, I thought. Admiration.
Rowena deserves neither. Light and lethal as plastic wrap she is, so I bought that card. Very sorry to hear the news. Catherine. She’ll get it. With snail mail you can’t see recipients react, though, unless your daily lives are linked. Perhaps she never noticed that ours briefly were.
Red Girl Rat Boy Page 10