“No, I think someone’s going to die. I’ve always thought I was psychic.” Frances laughed when she said this, not taking herself seriously.
When I was in the sixth grade my friends and I wanted to know who was the most psychic in our class. This was before we knew anything about odds or statistics, so we made cards with symbols on them: squares, triangles, hearts, circles. One person would select a card and concentrate on the symbol while the rest of us would try to read their minds. We kept score of who guessed the most correctly, and in the end I was the most psychic, but that was mostly because I’d been responsible for cutting the cards and had cut them unevenly. After a few rounds I could tell what they were by their shape.
“Quick, what am I thinking?” I asked.
“You’re wondering who’s going to die.”
“Sorry, lady,” I told her. “Try again.”
A few days later I left Frances a voice mail. Hey, last night I had a dream too. I’m wearing a necklace made of teeth, human teeth, and some have roots. I show the necklace to people, you’re one of them, as if they’re a string of pearls.
My boyfriend Nathan had just given me a pair of pearl earrings, these small creamy globes with dull gold backings. They’d belonged to his grandmother. The pearls reminded me of overripe berries, the way they look solid, but how even the gentlest squeeze will crush them, make the juice gush out. Nathan explained that a pearl is calcium carbonate fused together with a compound called conchiolin. Molluscs produce it as a response to irritating objects in their shells. When he wasn’t looking, I bit into an earring, almost surprised by the resistance against my teeth.
My father called at 3:15 in the morning. I remember waking up and looking at the clock. “Janey?” He said my name twice. My little brother, Peter, had been in a car accident. I listened to my father, but also zoned out as I sat on my couch and looked at the outlines of frames hanging on my wall. I’d left a window open, so I hugged my bare legs. And then I put some clothes on, took my car keys and drove to the hospital.
Things I’ve made wishes on: dandelion fluff, white horses in fields, lost eyelashes, time (11:11, for example). As a teenager, I heard stories about the apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Lourdes, France. People would travel from all over the world to visit the site to be healed. I heard that if you prayed a certain prayer series to the Lady of Lourdes over nine days, something good would happen. When I recited the prayers in bed I felt a twinge of guilt for diluting the prayers of those more deserving of grace—the sick, the crippled, the elderly—but I kept at it anyway. On the tenth day, I went to school and got a good grade on a biology exam, and we got let out of last period early and I had a good hair day. It was completely banal, no miracles, but still fantastic.
When my brother had his accident, I was stubborn about my wishes and prayers. I thought—if this is going to happen, it’s going to happen. It wasn’t that I was angry, but that I felt useless. A wish was a puff of air; it was nothing. My mother wasn’t religious, but she prayed and then she stopped because she said that whenever she resorted to prayer, something bad happened anyway. It didn’t mean that God wasn’t listening, it just meant that whenever one becomes that solemn it’s because something serious has happened, something big and often irreversible. We stayed quiet, but that didn’t change anything either.
Peter was coming home from a night out. He was driving our parents’ car and it got a flat tire. He tried to change it himself, but the jack didn’t work properly. He walked out into the street to flag down some help. There were only a few lights and he rushed into traffic too quickly. The driver he was trying to stop didn’t expect him to be there. It happened very fast, the driver said, and it was so dark out.
I don’t remember the last conversation Peter and I had. I think we talked about the summer, what we were up to. He’d just graduated from high school and was living at home before going to school in the fall. But I did get a postcard from him a few days after the accident. I couldn’t believe it when I recognized his almost illegible handwriting in my mailbox, but then I realized that it was because he had addressed the postcard to the wrong apartment. It made its way to my mailbox weeks after he’d actually written it. It was from Vancouver, where he’d gone with some friends after graduating. He wrote, How many vegans does it take to change a light bulb? Don’t bother asking them, vegans can’t change anything, and then he described a hot dog he had eaten. Peter had gone through a political phase in his senior year and started eating vegan. I guess he’d changed his mind on his trip. It was a stupid joke. I didn’t know what else to do with the postcard, so I tacked it up on my fridge.
Four days after the funeral I went camping. I wanted to go somewhere that felt and looked different, somewhere rural and dusty. When I told this to Nathan he said, “Definitely, let’s do it. I’ll find us a place to stay.”
“I mean I want to go right now.”
Nathan paused. “Now now?”
I nodded, and I meant it. He could tell I was serious and by the time we gathered our things and figured out a game plan, it was late in the afternoon. He drove us to Georgian Bay and we arrived after dark. I don’t know how he found us a campsite on such short notice, but he did. He set up the tent in the dark as I sat at the picnic table and shone the flashlight in his direction. I wasn’t very helpful, so he took the flashlight himself, and I kept sitting there, digging my fingernails into the damp wood.
In the morning we rented a small motorboat. It cost thirty dollars for the day, and before we left they gave us a map of the area, a photocopied piece of paper with little squiggly island shapes sprinkled throughout. I squinted at the map and directed the boat and tried to match up the landscape with the hand drawn scrawls. We wanted to swim, but not at the public beaches, so we settled on an empty-looking cottage perched on top of a small island made up of massive, flat slabs of granite. We anchored the boat and jumped into the water.
We had sex on the rocks outside the cottage. It reminded me of what Ted Hughes wrote about the first time he slept with Sylvia Plath: you were slim and lithe and smooth as a fish. It was like that. Nice. It was the bathing suit, I think, the swimming, the fresh air. And then I stretched out, stomach down with my cheek on the rock, which was warm from the heat of the day. I breathed and closed my eyes and thought about how things petrified, how when molluscs were upset they produced pearls, and how if I just lay here maybe things would harden into something good.
I didn’t get up for a long time, and Nathan swam back to the boat to grab our towels. He held them above his head as he treaded back and then covered me with them. Later he forced me to get up, practically dragged me to the boat, and we chugged back to the campsite, me in the front, refusing to wear the life jacket, my t-shirt or shorts. We left before it got dark because I was feeling too far away from the world, even though that’s what I’d wanted in the first place. Nathan took down the tent while I sat in the car, still wearing my bathing suit underneath my clothes.
The camping trip was an example of how after my brother died, I’d come up with plans, with ideas. Ways To Feel Better. They would make so much sense at the time, and then, suddenly, stop. Nathan humoured me, but even he sometimes gave up. I didn’t recognize this pattern until long afterwards, even after it had been suggested to me by others, and so I would simply cling to my ideas, whatever they were, white-knuckled, and no one would be able to shake me of them.
One evening at the end of the summer I went over to Frances’ house. She’d been away, taking some classes abroad, and I hadn’t seen her since the time we’d talked about her dream about the teeth. Her roommates weren’t home and we sat in the backyard. There were black birds flying high above us, shooting around in circles, squeaking. Their high-pitched squeals made me think they were bats, but Frances said, no, they were swallows. Squeak, squeak. Despite the squeak, definitely, swallows. Sailors used to think that swallows would pull them to safety if they were drowning and if that didn’t work, they would carry their souls to he
aven. They would get tattoos of swallows as talismans. The birds were darting around us, small and quick. You would need hundreds of them to swoop down and lift you up.
Frances had something like a talisman too, a tattoo on the inside of her wrist. An initial, her own. It was small, and unless you knew it was there you might think it was just a birthmark or an errant splotch of ink. She didn’t mean the tattoo in a narcissistic way. She meant it as a symbol that in the end, throughout your life, you always have yourself to rely on. I noticed it when she’d hugged me. I took her arm and looked at it closely. She hadn’t mentioned it. She was sheepish. “I was kind of drunk when I got it. In Berlin. I could’ve chosen something much worse.”
The ink was bluey purple and the letter was delicate. Peter had mentioned that he wanted a tattoo once, and had been planning to get one in the fall, was saving money for it.
“Are you okay?” she asked when I didn’t say anything else after a few minutes.
I was having problems clearing my mind. I felt coated in a layer of wax paper. Crinkly, opaque. I felt like those scrambler rides at amusement parks, the ones that spin you into dozens of little circles, and just when you’re getting used to the velocity of the swings, you’re dropped.
“Here, let me show you something.” Frances was taking yoga and she wanted to teach me what she’d learned.
“I’m not good at the breathing stuff,” I said. “Or Sanskrit.”
She made me get up anyway. We took off our shoes. She showed me how to bring the bottom of my right foot to the inner part of my left thigh, so that my right leg was jutting out to the side, like a flamingo. This was the tree pose. After you steady yourself on your leg, your root, you lift up your arms and branch out. And then you keep your balance. The trick to staying up is to focus on a single fixed spot. I stared straight ahead at the top of the tree across the yard, ignoring Frances’s swaying profile beside me and the squeaks of the swallows above. I kept my arms stretched out and I curled my toes. I didn’t stay up for very long.
“It’s harder than it looks, isn’t it?” she asked as I steadied myself and grunted. I just wanted to stand still. It seemed unfair that I couldn’t do this simple move. When my foot touched the ground, I lifted it again, and then again.
For those few seconds I would think only of keeping my balance. When it worked, when I stayed up, I felt good. My rooted leg was strong and with my arms above my head my body looked streamlined, graceful. I got the idea that if I kept standing on one leg and looking up, if I kept focused and if I practiced this pose, maybe, eventually, I could train the rest of my body to stay focused enough to produce something beautiful, something permanent and solid.
BASIL IS WOKEN BY AN EARTHQUAKE. The floor shakes and the one painting he has on the wall rattles, but stays in place. He holds the sides of his bed and wonders what he should do. He closes his eyes and when he opens them again, the shaking has stopped. He gets up and stands with one foot in front of the other, arms out. Steady. And then he quickly pulls on his jeans and a shirt, grabs his coat and runs down the stairs. The ceiling of his bathroom started to leak on the weekend—how sturdy can this place be?
Outside he faces the building. It isn’t swaying. He takes a cigarette from his jacket and smokes half. Each cigarette in the pack is marked off halfway down. He initially estimated halves as he smoked, but caught himself cheating. With the black marks he knows exactly when to stop. Basil decided to quit when he first moved into the apartment. He sat on the newly varnished parquet floors, shook the cigarettes out of the pack and measured and marked. He’s still doing this two months later.
After two half cigarettes (the point is also to remind him of how much money he’s wasting), he goes back to his apartment, this time taking the elevator to the sixth floor. The neighbour he stole Wi-Fi from locked the signal a week earlier (network name: GET OFF MY ASS) and because he doesn’t have a television or a working radio, he feels alone, deprived of breaking news updates. He sits on his bed, takes out his cell phone and calls his wife, Hillary. He leaves her a voice mail.
“Hi Hillary, it’s Basil. Did you feel the earthquake? I hope your new condo’s okay. And that you’re okay too, and Henry, if he’s with you. I’m fine, in case you’re wondering. Anyway, call me if you weren’t crushed alive.”
Basil presses the pound key and then six to delete the message. He leaves another one, but doesn’t say anything about Henry. He deletes it a second time, this time leaving out the part about the earthquake. He’s starting to doubt it happened. The final message is calm, casual and short, “Hi Hill, it’s Basil. Gimme a call when you get this.”
Basil and Hillary met at a New Year’s Eve party almost five years ago. He noticed her because of her skirt. He saw it from across the room: short in the front and long in the back, sort of pleated. There was some denim in there and maybe plaid? It was ridiculous (“whimsical,” a friend of his mused politely) and Basil was intrigued that she could pull it off and still look sophisticated. Sexy. He later discovered that Hillary often wore complicated items of clothing. She bought him a complicated shirt once. It had zippers all over and he was disappointed when he learned that none of them were functional.
Basil’s parents named him after the man who owned the basement apartment they lived in when they were newlyweds. He was an old Greek man, a painter, and he lived upstairs. He would invite Basil’s parents over for drinks on his balcony or in the backyard, and in the winter he poured them cloudy glasses of ouzo to drink in his kitchen. When his mother got pregnant, she mentioned to him in passing that the only craving she had was for lemonade. For a week straight he delivered pitchers of cold lemonade to her in the morning until the craving passed.
The Greek painter killed himself when his mother was six months pregnant. Not at the house, but in the penthouse suite of a hotel downtown. Basil’s parents were shocked when they found out. His children claimed the house and evicted them in the middle of the winter and so they packed up their things quickly and found a new place, this time in a real building where they wouldn’t get the chance to develop a friendship with their landlord.
His parents never read the Greek painter’s suicide note, but in it he left them a painting, one of his last works. It arrived at their new apartment a week before Basil was born. His parents knew they were having a boy and had already picked the name “Michael,” but Basil’s mother decided at the last minute that she wanted to name him after their old landlord instead. His father thought it was bad luck to name their son after a man who committed suicide, but his mother insisted and he gave in, worn out from the move and the stress of the birth of their first child.
When Basil was older he learned about Name Days. Greeks are typically named after saints and each saint has a day designated to them that’s celebrated with even more fanfare than a birthday. Basil was the English translation of “Vasilis” and his Name Day was January first.
At the New Year’s Eve party, when Basil was introduced to Hillary she said, “Tomorrow’s your Name Day!” and kissed him on the cheek. Basil wasn’t used to people knowing that or being kissed by strangers. He looked at her funny, sophisticated skirt and her big smile and his love began to grow. They kissed again at midnight and then an hour later, and then for a sizeable chunk of his Name Day.
Hillary wasn’t Greek, but her last boyfriend was, and she’d always liked the concept of Name Days, even though her own name didn’t have an Orthodox saint cognate. They celebrated Basil’s Name Day for the next few years. The last time was right before they separated and Hillary threw a plate against the wall. The act could’ve been mistaken for a Greek tradition, but they were just fighting.
Basil and Hillary were married within a year of knowing each other, both of them twenty-three years old. Neither had expected to marry so quickly or so young, but Basil proposed spontaneously and Hillary accepted, and before they changed their minds they followed through. They went to City Hall and she wore a grey-silver sheer dress and he wore the only suit he
owned. Basil was secretly relieved that she didn’t wear one of her complicated outfits. Their respective roommates and his parents were the only people who came. They deliberately kept the ceremony small because they thought it would be more meaningful that way.
Hillary’s parents were in Europe, her mother was in Switzerland with a friend, her father on business in Germany. They came to Toronto two weeks after the wedding, stayed in a hotel and brought the newlyweds out to dinner one night and Basil’s parents the next, before catching an early morning flight to Calgary to see Hillary’s sister. For a wedding present, they gave them a cheque for fifteen thousand dollars. Basil was offended by the short visit and embarrassed by the large sum of money, but Hillary merely shrugged. He later found out that she hadn’t told them about the wedding until the week before, precisely because she didn’t want them to be there.
The first few months after the wedding were peaceful. They cooked together and watched movies and in the evenings Hillary would fall asleep in Basil’s arms on the couch. They walked everywhere. The excitement of the first year of their relationship was replaced by moments of extreme, simple tenderness. Sometimes they would happen one after the other, quickly, incredibly, like multiple orgasms. Basil would lie in bed and think, I am happy.
There were little signs that things were going wrong. There are always little signs. The littlest: Hillary would get mad at him for not folding his clothes when he took them off or for leaving half-empty cans of beer around the apartment. She wouldn’t just get lovingly annoyed, she would get angry. He got a sinking feeling about their relationship when they started saying mean things to each other without hesitation. “You’re pushing my buttons,” Hillary would say, shaking her head. And then she would lean over and push his, tentatively, like a tap on the shoulder, the way schoolboys fight, threatening, but never striking. They didn’t hit each other, but they could feel the potential of it in their fists.
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