by Joan Barfoot
It’s all really complicated, page after page and book after book of variations and consequences. Not easy, learning all that, but she had, as far as she knew then, all the time in the world, and if it turned out she didn’t have quite that much, still there were several years with little else to do except listen to sad voices or angry ones, and hear a good deal about impulse control, and try to tune everything out with nicer words like infusion.
Out here, though, it becomes obvious that even so much study, and all those drawings and instructions, are vastly different from being in the midst of the actual greenery, which is more mixed up and untidier than it is on a page. How did people ever figure out what was safe and what wasn’t? Never mind what should be boiled and what must be dried? It had to be trial and error. Error would be terrible, but maybe back in those days individual lives weren’t so important and nobody especially cared.
Beth has been thinking recently about asking for some space of her own, maybe a corner of the kitchen or of Nora’s glassy studio, to grow some of her own herbs. Just a little garden of pots, nothing grand or wild. She was thinking this should be her next step just because real experts don’t do what she does, which is mail-order for ingredients and when they arrive, store them in jars in the fridge and in a row at the back of the kitchen counter. Now any kind of herb garden anyplace is most likely out of the question. A missed opportunity? A matter for regret? Hard to say. Everything’s going to be different.
It already is different. Look where she is, walking in the air and light of the countryside, all by herself!
Sophie wouldn’t have been nice anyway about Beth using the kitchen to grow stuff, or about her bringing in armloads of things like burdock for cooking or drying. Sophie is sarcastic enough already about the teas Beth makes with the ingredients from her tidy jars. To tell the truth, Nora’s not always kind either, but Nora’s an artist and gets to have big unpredictable moods. Because whether they’re good moods or bad ones, she makes something with them, they don’t go to waste; kind of like Beth studying teas: making something out of large events, and fortunately, like Nora, something good. Beth perceives troubles and ailments and honestly does the best she can to alleviate them, if not always cure.
Sophie, on the other hand, has no excuse. She’s just a servant, like a hotel maid, and so what if she’s seen things other people have not? She’ll go on about the homeless and landless and stateless and hungry and brutalized and what they’re owed by everyone else as if all that isn’t just luck, like getting a good judge or a bad judge at a pageant. Good luck, bad luck. Karma, even, who’s to say the homeless and landless and stateless and hungry and brutalized didn’t earn their disasters in previous lives? You never know, is what Beth thinks. Sophie seems to believe she’s entitled to look down her nose at a lot of people, but especially Beth just because Beth is beautiful, even though Sophie herself most likely isn’t a truly good person either. With Philip, for instance. That wasn’t good, if it’s true.
Beth could shut Sophie up in a sentence if she wanted to. That’s a nice, secret kind of power to have, the kind that comes from silence, and not correcting wrong impressions. Sophie doesn’t know much about Beth. Neither does anyone else. Could Beth tell even Nora? No, the most wonderful person in the world would have to be inside every minute, each smell, word and sound, to know. Beth can’t even properly explain to herself, but she doesn’t have to. Doesn’t care to. “What’s done is done,” her mother used to say if Beth failed to come first, second or even third, “We’ll do better next time.” What’s done is done is a good motto in some situations.
The mothers always drank tea, plus coffee and wine, depending. The girls mainly drank bottled water, although sometimes unsweetened juices. Mothers could eat what they wanted, but not the girls.
Later, when the time came when plates were full and Beth could eat as much as she felt like, the food was unappealing, and she wasn’t hungry. She hasn’t been hungry for years, really. So her sense-memories aren’t tastes, they’re smells and sounds, sweetish and sticky: hairsprays and colognes and perfumes and powders and skin creams, voices rising high with tension, soft and sugary with praise and encouragement. “You were great,” girls, Beth included, told each other. And, “I love you in that dress,” and, “Oh, I wish I could wear that colour,” and so on. Friendships, maybe they were friendships, could be passionately real in their way, if sometimes brief, and girls did a lot of fun things together, like playing Hearts and Crazy Eights and euchre while they waited for this and that, and telling each other’s fortunes with Tarot decks and by examining palms. But everyone knew what the point was, which was winning not just tiaras or sashes or even big cheques, but a long, slim, creamy leg up on the future.
Such hopes, such dreams, such possibilities! Others might aim, or say they aimed, to be physicists, teachers, doctors or diplomats. “You,” said Beth’s mother, “you have your special beauty. More special than anyone’s.”
A person can look and look into mirrors and see their own individual features, but it’s still hard to detect a whole magic effect.
Beth remembers light, too: its sudden and radical shifts. There was the sharp glare of dressing rooms, for fixing or camouflaging last-minute flaws, a loosened strap, hinted zit; then the blackened spaces behind curtains, all anxious whispers and jitterings in the dark; and finally the blinding radiance of the stage, the stroll, the turn, the jut, the easy, brilliant smile. Also, out on the road, the darkness of highways between cities at night, broken by endless white lines and an occasional river of headlights; departures at dawn, sudden sun rearing up into the eyes. Driving into the light, leaving light behind.
Between these extremities, accidental days and weeks of grey: regular life, Beth supposed, for those not like herself. There were weeks when she woke and went to sleep in her own bed in her own little pink-painted room, heading off to school in the mornings. How did the other girls in the pageants and contests find the time and information to come up with desires like physicist, doctor, diplomat? But maybe those were as false as Beth’s aim to carry music to the world’s children. She dropped in and out of school to the tune of more essential demands, inaudible to anyone but herself and her mother. “Beth has a larger destiny,” her mother told irritable or maybe worried teachers. “She does her lessons while we’re away, doesn’t she? Can she read? Can she write? Can she do arithmetic?” Yes, she could. “Then what’s the problem?”
If Beth wasn’t always in class long enough to study a novel or a play right to the end, she could still finish reading it if she wanted to, or if she needed to turn out some kind of paper for her long-distance homework. If the idea of algebra’s unknown X was intriguing, there’d be time when she was old, maybe thirty, to look into its qualities, if she still cared. For the moment, her mother said, “Take advantage of what you have while you have it. I wish I’d realized that.”
Beth wouldn’t want to be bitter later on, angry about lost opportunities.
Now she hears, while you have it. That must have passed her by at the time.
At the time Beth’s particular kind of rarefied, upper-atmosphere beauty had high purposes, nothing as commonplace as attracting the attentions of boys, who anyway, when she was at school, steered clear of her and certainly did not call her for dates; as if she scared them. Well, girls, too. It’s not that they were friendly or unfriendly, more that they drew apart when she appeared. She walked as if she wore books on her head, or tiaras. She didn’t care. She was beyond them. She went places, she won things, she had opportunities and gifts they could not dream of, just as her mother said.
How far has she walked? Gravel pokes into these thin sandal soles. There’s so much bright green and bright blue out here. Funny how those colours work together outside, but otherwise not. Like, you wouldn’t paint a room in bright green and bright blue, and a dress in exactly these shades would look tacky. “No class,” as her mother said sometimes, looking over Beth’s competition.
There was he
r mother: adjusting hems and hair, breathing hope and ambition, back at the wheel, driving them on.
Later smells and sounds were harsh and metallic. That was in the time of disinfectants and unpampered bodies, and voices that yelled, wept and whimpered; others that comforted, commanded and advised impulse control. The point is—the point is, this air out here is starting to smell gentle to Beth, this light begins to feel kind. The sounds aren’t so strange, just occasional traffic and birds and invisible rustlings through grass.
Or it could be she’s excited. Happily on edge. On the brink of something joyful. Maybe this is how her mother felt, driving home full of prospects and plans, talking about decisions that would need to be made soon.
Everybody’s got a story—how obvious, how banal. Beth, too, although she keeps hers to herself, and tucked far back in her mind. It’s also true that the elisions and collisions of individual stories create and break love and care, they lead to murder, rape, slaughter and war, as Sophie enjoys pointing out, and also to acts of generosity, kindness. Experiences and trajectories ricochet off each other, they take slow curves and sharp turns, they wreak confusion here, salvation there and—this is the hardest thing—there’s no way to predict which detail or tiny decision may grow huge in its consequence.
There is, for instance, a way of seeing what happened with Beth and her mother as an outcome of failed air conditioning in their van on a summer day even hotter and more humid than this one. A mechanic who, for reasons of lassitude or incompetence or pressure in the plot of his own unknown story, fails to spot signs of an exhausted bit of equipment under the hood; which creates an excessive scratchiness of voice and mood in the overheated front seat during a long drive home from a pageant; which leads to—well, leads to catastrophe, really.
Or: in a longer-term view Beth’s father’s choice of careers repairing highway rigs like those now and then hurtling past her results in insufficient funds for plane fares except for Beth’s and her mother’s farthest-flung journeys, so that they must mainly travel by road with their mountains of luggage and garment bags.
Or: if at that one particular pageant Beth had lost instead of won, if she’d even come in second rather than first, that might have put a dent in her mother’s hot, exhausting enthusiasms. An extra word or absent gesture, who knows what makes a difference? If, if—a multitude of slightly altered circumstances and moments, and that day would have gone entirely differently, and this day would not have arisen, Beth would not be picking her way over gravel along a rural roadside, examining the airy August light and promising weeds. She would be, at this moment, in some other place, maybe even some other country. She would never have caught Nora’s eye, would not have wound up living with Nora and Philip and Sophie, shifting her limbs and expressions to Nora’s commands.
This is just life, of course, the extraordinary luck of the draw, torrential water under the bridge.
The pageant at which Beth comes up once again the winner is a national one. The prizes are concrete and promising, and include a cheque for ten thousand dollars, and a full-length mink coat. This is big time. Beth bends and sweats under the weight of the coat, but her mother strokes it as if it’s a lush, favoured pet. She tries it on, too. “So lovely,” she says. “Such luxury.”
“You keep it,” says Beth. “It looks nice on you,” although too tight all the way from her mother’s shoulders on down.
This pageant has taken place five hundred and fifty kilometres from their home, via a complicated interplay of highways and roads. Heading home without air conditioning in the van, Beth is light-headed, her mother perspires, heat rises in shimmering rhythms off asphalt. “Oh dear,” is her mother’s view. “But it’s only a few hours.”
Beth is seventeen, a weary young winner, as well as spoiled, possibly, in unusual ways. Her mother is—what?—in her early fifties. Her waistline is failing her, she has chunky hips, only the buried bones of their resemblance remain. She has deep lines around her eyes, some of them probably from squinting for so many hours at so many highways. Brackets have formed at the sides of her mouth, and railway-track lines along her top lip. There’s something tissuey about her cheeks, her throat is a river of small, choppy whitecaps. Flesh on her upper arms swings at each turn of the wheel. Beth is propped against the passenger door watching her, hearing her voice. She thinks her mother is old. She thinks her mother’s very red lipstick and highlighted cheeks are overdone and also the wrong colours for the altered textures and shades of her skin. Beth can’t imagine ever being that old, so far gone.
She wishes that instead of home, she was going someplace like a beach. With friends. She doesn’t have the kind of friends that drive to beaches for happy days playing in water and sand. Well, she doesn’t have any kind of friends, really. There’s a commercial, Beth’s probably seen it three dozen times in hotel rooms here and there, for some kind of beer or cooler or soft drink or juice. The product doesn’t matter, the young men and young women playing volleyball in the sand do. They chase each other through dunes and water, they gather around a beach campfire at nightfall with their drinks, they look so pleased with themselves and each other, they’ve had a totally excellent day. They look like people who live like this just about every day.
Her mother says, “That coat is just stunning, don’t you think? And the money’s a good nest egg. I’m thinking, though, that we can’t wait any longer, we need to get down to business right now.” She means today, she says, or tomorrow. She speaks again of Beth’s gifts, and of her accomplishments. She says, as she has said so often, “You are lucky. I wish I’d had your opportunities when I was your age.” Instead, she married Beth’s father when she was a year older than Beth, and commenced mourning her multitude of lost choices.
“Here’s how I see it,” she says. How she sees it is that they must decide, finally and absolutely, between pursuing ever-higher-level pageantry, aiming at scholarships, cars, clothes and jewellery, leading to any beauty-related career from advertising to acting; or diverging immediately towards high-end modelling, with its international glamour and travel, magazine covers, famous acquaintances. “I know your body isn’t quite right for that, but it could be. The thing is, you’re already nearly too old. Some girls are only fourteen, fifteen. So we really do have to decide right away.”
None of this hopeful future, except perhaps its immediacy, comes new from her mother. That’s why it must be the heat that helps turn Beth’s stomach over. She watches her mother’s face glowing with hope as well as humidity, her streaked hair piled carelessly up off her neck, damp wisps stuck to her forehead. Her hands on the steering wheel are scattered with tiny red heat-dots. She keeps picking at her white cotton blouse, pulling it away from the moist skin of her breasts. She hikes her light denim driving skirt higher. The skin above her knees looks crackled, like an old painting. The flesh of her thighs is dimpled and plump.
What is this old woman doing, living Beth’s life in her hoarse, on-and-on voice?
Not that Beth has any better ideas.
Even Beth’s mother is not indomitable, however, even she gets worn out, worn down. By the time they’re pulling into the driveway of home, she is complaining of a violent headache. When she goes upstairs to grab a quick shower and to change her clothes and locate the Aspirin, Beth stays downstairs. “I’ll make tea,” she says, and it takes a while, but she does.
This is long before Beth makes a study of teas. She is not subtle or delicate in her preparation, but she is certainly blinded by insistent, irresistible, unexplainable, indefensible purpose. Impulse.
At the first sip, her mother’s mouth curls radically. “Oh, Beth, this is terrible stuff, it’s undrinkable, what on earth is it?”
“I know it doesn’t taste good, but if you drink it down in one swallow, it’ll fix you right up, I promise.” And just like that, just because Beth says to, or because she doesn’t think not to, Beth’s mother does.
It’s like watching a movie; about aliens, maybe. It involves some
dissolution of edges and borders, as if her mother collapsing, heaving, to the floor is transformed from human form with all its crumplings and wrinklings and streaked hair and dotted flesh and bright lipstick into some other, unknown and unfamiliar, more wavery creature. All jellyfish and strange colours.
Beth looks away. She tilts her head back, turning her attention upwards.
Are there sounds? There must be. For sure there are smells.
“Oh, dear God,” says Beth’s father when he gets home from work. Beth hears that.
It doesn’t seem to occur to him or to anyone, not even to the men who come in the ambulance, that anything about this is deliberate. Beth herself, they must suppose, is in shock, immobilized as she is in the kitchen, staring hard and determinedly up at the ceiling. They may be right about the shock. They take her arms and lead her outside and drive her to the hospital, too. She makes no resistance. Anyway, she’s too slight to resist burly men. At the hospital, her mother goes one way, Beth another. In a very few hours various people arrive in Beth’s hospital room wearing strange expressions. They talk and talk, to each other and to her.
Her father comes, too, several times. He is agitated. “Why?” he cries, but Beth cannot say. Also he asks, “What did she do?” as if he might, if it were explained properly, be able to rest blame on Beth’s mother.
Beth doesn’t have words. She is surprised, too. She’d thought, insofar as she thought at all, that it would be faster. Easier. And then—well, she hadn’t supposed consequences, more just poof, a vanishing.
More particularly a silencing.
Who knew the contents of mouse-killer, even vigorously mixed with extra-strong tea, would be so stomach-wrenching, bowel-churning, lip-frothing?
Also, who knew they would be so immediately discernible inside the dead human body, which surely to God she never meant to be dead? Her awful, disastrous mistake. Somebody should have instructed her better about resisting swift unconsidered compulsions, and about consequences and flat, hard results, not just about skin-toning and blush, straight hems and dipping necklines, tiaras and sashes, mink coats and pretty speeches about the importance of music. But it seems nobody ever mentioned cause and effect, action and reaction.