by Ian Williams
If I should close my eyes, Felicia quoted her mother’s euphemism.
This was a month before she was lying dying in a hospital bed in the background.
* * *
+
Paining, she told him. Her mother said her back was paining her. That was last week. She thought she might have strained herself at work creaming butter and sugar by hand. She only managed to roll half her hair into sponge curlers before lying down. But the pressure was worse when she was lying down. Felicia opened the window then continued putting in the curlers.
Felicia, girl, I wonder if this is the heart attack.
As far as Felicia knew, a heart attack was supposed to maul you between its teeth, then strut away with its cut-off tail and tailored ears, yet here it was licking her mother’s back. Very much unlike Salt.
Salt? Edgar asked.
Salt down the road.
His name was Salt?
Felicia looked back unblinking, unsure what the problem was. Uncle Salt.
Of the earth? Edgar tried to clarify.
The whole village used to hear him gargling salt water every morning by the standpipe before the government bring water inside. They find him dead right there with the water on and he head crack open and blood running down the hill.
* * *
+
Yes, but then she was fine again, Felicia continued. She was leaning with her back against the headboard, saying I old enough to wear a little lipstick now and again. But not to harlot myself with too much blush. When she was my age she used to be stepping.
Edgar looked at her lips.
She ask me if I was feeling cold. The lady does turn down the heat in the night to save money.
* * *
+
I should say a prayer for her for the night, Felicia said.
Me too.
Felicia went to her mother’s bed and prayed.
Edgar went to his, stood over the bed a reasonable time, then said, Does that feel better?
I not praying to feel better, Felicia said.
I was talking to Mutter. Edgar had placed his watch around her wrist. She’s used to having some weight on her.
* * *
+
Felicia’s mother was cold one minute and then she was hot.
I feelin’ a whole picka bush through my body, quoted Felicia. Like dey beatin’ me, man. Dey beatin me with picka bush. And when she touched her mother’s forehead, it was slippery.
If I should close my eyes, her mother said with her eyes closed.
Nothing going to happen, Felicia said and it was like she invaded Poland.
You think I making joke, her mother snapped. I’m at the gate of death and you telling me is nothing.
Yet neither of them suggested calling an ambulance.
In Felicia’s small unrecognized island, where there were only one hospital and two community health centres, ambulances were not free. They were also a leading cause of motor vehicular accidents, she told Edgar. Then she changed the subject abruptly, I don’t care what the nurse say, your mother need some Vicks VapoRub to warm up she chest if you want to get rid of that cough. I go bring some for you tomorrow.
* * *
+
Felicia wanted to know who was in the bed before her mother.
Edgar told her about another woman. They had to recarnanate her.
Resuscitate, Felicia corrected.
What did I say?
Felicia stayed focused. And?
Only one person in the family spoke English.
She stayed the course. What happened to her?
Of course, she— Edgar stuck out his tongue and drew a knife across his neck, a most indelicate gesture for a man his age to make in a hospital. As I was saying, you’re a better neighbour. You shovel my sidewalk too.
* * *
+
Felicia pulled her toque low over her ears. She didn’t want to be looked at. Sometimes, as a woman, you don’t want a man rubbing his eyes all over you in that offhand appraising way they have.
* * *
+
What do you do? she asked.
Paperplane.
Oh, Paperplane. She felt she should know what that was. He didn’t seem like a mechanic. But what is it you do exactly?
I told you.
The plane company. But what do you do?
My title?
Right.
I don’t have one. It’s a family business.
* * *
+
She felt like he was trying to dress her into a category of woman the way she used to dress her doll, twisting its arms over its head and dragging outfits on and off its body.
But do you want to work? he asked.
How you expect me to live? she replied. But if working is all it take then every woman in my country is a feminist.
You don’t have a single housewife in— He waited but she did not fill in the blank.
Well, of course, some women stay home, but they does work, bake a little sweet bread and sell it, sew uniforms, pick banana.
They have children?
Plenty.
Then no, they’re not feminists.
* * *
+
He overshared. She didn’t need to know that he had had a vasectomy. Or that he used to lime with some Bohemians before he cut his hair.
Like hippies, she said. He was going to call her ignorant again.
No, not like hippies. I mean, we didn’t greet people with peace signs.
But once Vater, may he remain dead, cut him off financially and Mutter got cancer the first time, he couldn’t continue driving shirtless across the continent, smoking weed, and crafting Marxist manifestos. He took the moneywhoring job his father created for him, which he couldn’t leave now because he didn’t finish his degree and yes he liked the money and the jets and the Mr. Gross, could you sign here of the secretaries in the building.
Edgar gripped his wrists as he was explaining this, his self-importance tempered by the odd self-embrace.
So I decided if they wanted to kill me then I’d make sure another Gross never walked the face of the earth.
Kill you with work, Felicia said.
Every fibre of my being.
Honest, permanent, high-paying work.
His complaint confirmed Felicia’s suspicions about white people, although she now saw him as less of a white man and more as a very pitiful man, the way she pictured all men as somewhat simple and unrefined and helpless with basic things but good with abstract things like bills over fifty dollars.
Your head not on right, Felicia said.
It doesn’t mean I can’t have sex. It just means I can’t have children.
* * *
+
She said she didn’t want to hear about it anymore. But he kept talking about it.
* * *
+
I don’t see why you would go and mutilate yourself, she said. She tried to recall a passage in Leviticus that prohibited the cutting of one’s body. He needed the sound reproof of scripture. Weren’t there Bibles in these hospital rooms? Nobody go want to marry you.
Rest assured, I’m not as hopeless as you seem to think.
And you already too old to still be a bachelor. Plain talk, bad manners. I don’t know what it is you doing with your life. Then, without warning, Felicia felt herself go from critical mother to six-year-old. I’m going to have two girls and a boy, twin girls. Girls should have sisters.
And boys?
Boys too.
XY
4.
Their conversation that night was also prefigured a few years earlier aboard a flight from Boston to Toronto where a girl Felicia’s age was returning to university after her father’s funeral and divulged every memory to the boy next to her, Oliver, who when he first sat down appeared to be the type to close his eyes and pass gas quietly with a betraying squirm, but in fact shared a bag of chocolate almonds with her as he recounted the story of his older s
ister’s passing (overdose) when he was eight. He never got over it although his parents later had more children. At the gate, they exchanged numbers.
* * *
+
Felicia wouldn’t tell Edgar where she was from. The islands. He named the West-Indian islands he remembered from the ’76 Olympics: Jamaica, Trinidad, Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico.
She said, I not from anywhere you know.
He thought she was flirting with him with the unrecognized island routine—twice she had mentioned it—but no, she had no intention of telling him where she was from.
I not from anywhere.
* * *
+
He told her that Mutter reverted to German as her vocabulary dried up. She used to call me—
Hitler.
Please don’t call me Hitler.
Ghostface.
No.
Hansel.
No. She called me Schatz, Edgar cupped his elbows and rocked slightly. She called everyone that though. All the girls.
Girls?
Caregivers, day nurses, the girls who come, the girls who come when I go to work in the morning.
* * *
+
I bet you don’t know why we brought all those domestics into the country.
Laziness, she said.
No, not— He was thrown off. He glimpsed into the heart of blacks and it was, as he feared, no alley for a white man to be. In the fifties, the government decided it needed to replace all the women who went to work.
And you didn’t stop to think who go replace all the domestic women in their own country, Felicia said. A whole lot of women leaving their families to take care of white people children. No offence.
Edgar retreated. She came on a two-year contract?
Two years? You crazy. She here since ’65.
But her initial contract was for two years, Edgar said.
Felicia gave him a long leery look. He knew too much. He didn’t tell her that he had tried to get a domestic of his own to take care of Mutter a few years ago, in 1975. The domestic scheme was all over the news because the government had tried to deport seven women for sponsoring their children and all he could think was how could I get myself one of those.
Good enough to work, Felicia said. Good enough to stay.
I don’t know, Edgar said. The contract said they were supposed to be single, no children, then all of a sudden they’re sponsoring these mythical children.
(Mutter coughed.)
And the white women them was supposed to be out working, Felicia said. Not home smoking.
* * *
+
No, he didn’t own a pair of blue jeans. Yes, he called them blue jeans. Not now, not ever. No one in his family did. Why did she ask?
* * *
+
He told her that Mutter wanted a funeral like Oma’s, his grossmutter, his mutter’s mutter, who had insisted on a closed casket and a portrait of her face on a table in front. Her whole life, Oma had kept up a correspondence with a married man who was not her husband and she thought that the wife might crash the funeral, squat Portuguese widow, curse-bearing thirteenth godmother, and triumphansee her dead face.
Oma died at home.
Oma died after Edgar’s bath.
Mutter said the children shouldn’t go in. They were too young. Vater said they should, they would, and so his brother took his hand and they walked into the bedroom where Oma, his grossmutter, his mutter’s mutter, was lying with a black handkerchief over her face.
* * *
+
He told Felicia his hair was still wet.
Felicia was still wearing her toque.
As I was saying, that’s how these things happen, he said. While you’re doing something else—death. That’s the Bard.
Felicia disagreed. Edgar wasn’t sure with what.
* * *
+
She asked him if his grandmother was in an adulterous relationship with that man.
Edgar couldn’t see how his oma could be in an adulterous relationship—such archaic phrasing—with a man by letter. You need to have sex, he said.
Felicia disagreed. Edgar wasn’t sure with what.
Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.
He had no Bible text in rebuttal.
Did the woman come to the funeral? Felicia asked.
I don’t know.
Did the man?
He was already dead.
* * *
+
We used to share bathwater in Germany, he said as if his whole life were in that sentence.
* * *
+
He told her that apart from Schatz, the rest of Mutter’s vocabulary consisted of varieties of pain, der Schmerz, das Leid, der Kummer, die Qual.
So starke Schmerzen.
And before she let those go, she dropped down to the article: der, das, die.
It had been the same with his oma.
* * *
+
They didn’t televise the marathon, Edgar said. Just the ending.
I would have watch the marathon, she said. I better with the long races. The race is not for the swift, nor the battle for the strong.
I’d be a sprinter, he said. It was time for another cigarette. And by that point, they were not speaking of the Olympics at all.
* * *
+
Felicia was at the climax of a story. They machete him and set him on fire, yes.
What do you mean machete him?
They hack him up with a machete and set him on fire. The police did bet money on whether he would live or die.
Felicia stopped there as if she had brought the story to its natural conclusion.
And did he?
What do you think?
Edgar honestly didn’t know.
Why you think I telling you this?
He didn’t know that either. All he did was ask whether she was still cold. But he nodded and feigned understanding.
Then she finally took off her toque.
* * *
+
She tried to pry by multiplying exactlies.
What is it exactly that you do exactly?
Where are you from?
We talking about you.
He bit both lips and smiled quidproquoly.
* * *
+
Both Edgar and Felicia demonstrated a limited understanding of critical terms.
He wanted to know why her hair was shorn so aggressively. Are you some kind of feminist? he asked. But he meant lesbian.
I not no feminist.
There’s nothing wrong with it. He was relieved. Do you want to work?
Not right now. She put her toque back on. I go work when I finish school.
Then you’re a feminist.
He could see that she was trying on the word for sophistication, admiring her calf in its hem.
But I want to have children.
You can’t, he said.
* * *
+
What he said was that he couldn’t have children.
What wrong with you? Felicia asked. You have a condition?
No. A decision.
You— She made scissors of her fingers.
I— He clapped and dusted the matter from his hands.
* * *
+
He said he didn’t want to talk about it anymore. But she kept asking about it.
* * *
+
He didn’t have sisters.
Clearly, Felicia said. A sister would never let you do that to yourself.
His brother was like a sister, he told her. He was the one who kept him employed, as a promise to Vater, probably. Edgar had done enough to lose his job, not deliberately, but, in his words, stuff happens when you work with a bunch of idiots. Thank God for his secretary, Polly.
Felicia said, I thought you said machete.
Secretary, he repeat
ed.
I coulda swear.
As they were falling asleep on chairs facing each other, backs turned to their mothers, rocking in a rowboat down the Nile, they scattered details before each other. Was his brother older or younger? Older. Married? Yes. What’s his wife like? A European socialite. Did you go to the wedding? He couldn’t make it. His brother—What’s his name? Heinrich. Henry. Henry only told him on a Tuesday that he was getting married on the weekend. I thought you said she was a socialite. She is. That’s not how socialites do things. You didn’t get a proper invitation? Maybe Mutter got it. Your hair? My hair? Your hair? My sister burn off my good good hair the night before my flight. Gasoline? Lye. You don’t have hairdressers on your island? My sister does get the products cheap. Can I feel it? No. I’ll feel it in the morning. No. It’s growing back. I didn’t think some parts would. You should have seen it—burned my scalp white. I don’t think you is a good Whitey. Good. Did Mutter go to the wedding? I don’t know. Yes, I think so. Does your brother have children? Two. Do you visit? No. Have you ever seen them? In pictures. Why he not here? I mean why are you here alone? Same reason you’re here alone. Do you think nobody care about you and me? I don’t know about you.
XX
5.
In the morning, Felicia awoke to Edgar wiggling her foot, which was up on his chair, with his elbow. He was holding a paper bag and two cups of coffee.
I have to go, he said.
Okay.
He set a bagel on her armrest and a cup of coffee on the floor beside her, then sat down, which was the opposite of going.