by K. D. Miller
It was just a dream, Eliot told himself in the morning as he hobbled to the kitchen to make a pot of tea. (Coffee, with all its acids, had been forbidden for a month, along with spicy foods.) And how long had it been since he had had any contact with Jill Macklin? Five years? He still had the handwritten letter she sent him when he stopped returning her calls and emails. Once or twice he had tried to pen an answer, but each time the sight of the self-addressed, stamped envelope she had included with a little joke about facilitating had made him crumple the page he had begun and put her letter back in his dresser drawer under his socks.
… whatever I may have said or done that would explain … no desire to possess or control … merely asking for a word from you … closure … enable me to move on …
Pointless, reading and rereading Jill’s letter. But it’s what he does now. Takes three baths a day—getting in and out of the tub is still a small torture—cooks himself bland food and reads a letter he can practically recite from memory.
… abrupt and bewildering change in your behaviour …
One of Eliot’s childhood memories is of asking his father what love was. He would have been maybe eight years old. They didn’t talk much about feelings in his family. You were expected to be polite and pleasant. If for some reason you couldn’t manage that, you were expected to go to your room or take a walk or do something else until you could.
But Eliot had started to notice that all the songs on the radio and most of the stories in the storybooks had love as their subject, as the big thing to win at all costs. So he wanted to know what it was.
His father lowered his newspaper and looked at him for a moment. Then he said, “Love is what your mother and I feel for you, Eliot. And what you feel for us. Isn’t that right?”
Eliot could tell that it was very important to nod and say yes. He was starting to understand that he was different from others. He would make a friend, and everything would be fine for a while. But then the friend would get angry with him. Something would have happened, and Eliot would have failed to say or do the thing anyone else apparently would have said or done.
As he grew, he watched others for clues as to how to pass for anyone else. He cultivated a surface affability, an apparent warmth. Friendships with girls were easiest, he discovered, because girls came equipped with so many feelings. They could fill in the gaps. For a while, at least.
For a few months, Jill Macklin’s elfin face upturned to his, her eyes full of expectation, made him wonder if he might finally have changed, become a bit more like other people. Cautiously, as if conducting an experiment, he told her he loved her. What he actually said was, “I think I might be falling in love with you.” And that was true enough. He did feel a stirring, when he said the words. So perhaps—
He had nothing to compare it to. With his wife Caroline, what he had fallen into was marriage. She had been an old-fashioned girl, warm and vivacious, eager to be a wife and mother. He never actually proposed to her. One day he realized that their conversations had begun to feature the phrase when we’re married. He saw no reason to object.
It actually worked out well for him. Gave him an appearance of normality. Caroline, along with their daughter Mary, filled up the house with their feelings—their likes and dislikes, hopes and disappointments, tantrums and celebrations. It was like a force field, all but pushing him out the door each day to work.
But then Mary left for university. Looking back, he would sometimes try to attribute the changes in Caroline to the dementia that later claimed her. But he knew that was just an excuse. For the first time in their marriage, she was asking him to help her fill up the house. Demanding evidence of his feelings for her. For anything. The more needy she became—for precisely what he could not give her—the more he distanced himself. Closed in on himself.
Now the same thing was happening with Jill. Whatever possessed him to tell her he was a widower? And why did he have to bring Mary into it? My daughter Mary. So casual-sounding. As if they were in touch. Skyped once a week. As if she had never screamed at him that there was something wrong with him, that he wasn’t human. Now Jill was asking about Caroline—when and how she had died. And wanting to meet Mary.
He watched himself withdrawing. Becoming cold and critical. He wanted to stop, wanted to put his kind and caring mask back on, to see that girlish joy come back into Jill’s face. He would wake up in the dark hours appalled at what he was doing to her. Go back to sleep vowing to apologize and tell her the truth the next day. But then, awake in the light, he would feel that cold unwillingness grip him again. After all, what could he tell her? I haven’t seen my daughter in years because she hates me. My wife is in an institution. She sits in a diaper all day, staring out a window. Her expression only changes when she turns and sees that it’s me again. That man she doesn’t know, but manages to despise. So he would convince himself Jill was to blame for being so damned nosy. Then take a perverse pleasure in listening to her voicemails. Reading her emails. Pressing ERASE. Pressing DELETE.
… cannot understand how you could treat someone you professed to love with such …
He puts the letter back in his sock drawer. What would be the point of answering it now? Her address might have changed. But even if she’s in the same place in Hamilton, he’s settled in Toronto for good. Hardly worlds apart, but—
If he could just stop fantasizing about telling her what happened in that specialist’s office. The most ignominious parts that he wishes he could forget but instead goes over and over in his mind. She once knew his body—had seen and caressed every inch of it. She could listen, with shared pain, to what had been done to that body.
Dear Jill. If you’re actually reading this, I can only thank you for even opening a letter from me. It’s more than I deserve. Nor can I expect you to
Stop. What is he thinking? After all this time. Writing to someone who probably wants nothing to do with him. To tell her he had rectal surgery. He’s obviously more shaken up than he thought he was. His judgement’s off. He needs to let some time pass.
And it’s not as if he’ll never talk to Bill about the whole episode. Next month, once his stitches have finished dissolving, he’ll tell him over lunch. Make a joke of it. Yeah, it was a pain in the ass. But the bottom line is, it’s behind me.
In the meantime, he’ll go to the aquarium. Have that to change the subject with.
There are school kids everywhere—running, whooping, shrieking. Barely kept together in their classes by teachers who aren’t long out of school themselves. Eliot hopes he doesn’t look creepy—a solitary older man gazing into display tanks over the bobbing heads of children.
One tank is a tall, round silo practically the area of his condo and full of broad-leafed kelp growing up and up. Two storeys? Three? Every kind of fish is darting in and out the strands, flashing their neon colours. Eliot doesn’t bother with the illustrated legend identifying the species. He’s happy just to watch the fish themselves doing their thing. Do they communicate with each other? Can they see him? Other tanks hold golden carp the size of his coffee table. Electric eels as thick as his thigh.
Look, Daddy! He’s hiding under the rock!
Sweetie, don’t slap on the glass, please. Just look at the fishies.
Everywhere he turns, he sees Mary. As a baby, reaching for a fish eye as wide as her hand. As a child, squealing and pointing. As a teenager, struggling to keep her cool against an uprush of wonder.
As far as Eliot knows, Mary is still teaching kindergarten at that school in Sackville. She had such fond memories of doing her BA at Mount Allison that she went back to Sackville once she was finished her teacher training and took a job there.
The last good time the three of them had as a family was in Sackville, come to think of it. He and Caroline stayed over in the spare bedroom of the bungalow Mary was renting. She showed them all around the place so proudly. The school where she w
ould start her teaching career. The classroom all decorated and ready, weeks before her first students would come and sit down in the tiny chairs. The waterfowl park just steps from her street, where she would walk and gather her thoughts each morning before heading to work. She introduced them to her neighbour, Len Sparks, himself a retired teacher who had become something of a mentor.
At the airport in Moncton, she and Caroline held each other in a long, tearful embrace that Eliot, embarrassed, had to gently disentangle because the plane was boarding. The two had always been so close, more like sisters than mother and daughter. No wonder Caroline seemed lost at home these days. Her loneliness was like a gaping hole in the house. The beseeching looks she threw him when he was trying to read or watch TV made him dread coming home at the end of the day. He worked longer hours. Increased Caroline’s housing allowance and urged her to go shopping for something nice for herself. Maybe join a book club?
Yes, he missed Mary too. In his way. Truth to tell, her absence, the fact of her being grown up and educated and self-supporting was something of a relief. The first time he held her, her head cradled in his palm and her feet not reaching the crook of his elbow, he felt a kind of panic. It was one thing to play the part of a husband. Another to— If anyone was going to reveal him to the world as the hollow man he knew he was, it would be this tiny creature.
He switched careers. He couldn’t go on stock-brokering for a bank. That wasn’t good enough. When Girls First! advertised for an investment officer, he applied and got it. Thirty-five years spent working to help underprivileged girls. All for the sake of appearing good in the eyes of his own girl. Whom he has not seen or heard from since he had to put her mother in the place where she is.
There’s a crowd of what look like grade threes around the octopus tank. This one is lit more dimly than the others, and there is a sign on it—PLEASE—NO FLASH. Eliot gets as close as he thinks prudent. Even so, the kids’ teacher, a young man, gives him a look.
The octopus has wrapped itself around the miniature mountain that almost fills one end of its tank. Eliot can just make out the slits of its closed eyes beneath the bulbous sack that he knows is not a head, for all it looks like a head.
“This is Ella,” a young woman wearing a T-shirt with the aquarium’s insignia on it is saying to the class. “She’s two years old, which makes her middle-aged. Kind of like your grandmothers?” The kids laugh. “Ella likes to curl up around her rock, but—oh, there she goes!” The octopus has detached itself and is spreading its tentacles, sucker-side up. Eliot feels an odd stab in his groin. Revulsion? Except he can’t look away. The creature floats to the base of the rock, where it folds in on itself like the fingers of a hand. Then it uncurls one tentacle after another to pull itself back up.
The children have been coming out with Aw! and Ew! One little girl covers her eyes, shuddering. Mary wouldn’t have done that, Eliot thinks. Mary always looked straight at things, even through tears. A broken toy. A dead robin. Then straight at him if he couldn’t fix whatever it was or bring it back to life.
“Ella’s a real star,” the guide is saying. “She loves to put on a show. Okay. Let’s move along now and say hello to the crustaceans.”
Eliot lingers outside the octopus tank. It is shaped like an hourglass lying on its side. The near globe contains the miniature mountain. Leading from that is a shockingly narrow passage opening onto the far globe, which is empty. Can you really squeeze through that skinny tube? The octopus is once more wrapped around the rock. Well, you don’t have any bones, do you? So I guess— One yellow eye opens and looks right at Eliot. The iris is a sideways black slit curved into a crescent that makes the expression merry and knowing.
Again, Eliot feels that strange stab of—what? It’s surely not sexual. But it is a connection. I want to know you too.
“Didja see the hammerhead shark? How about that giant sea turtle?”
Eliot nods and nods over his moules frites. He hasn’t had a chance to tell Bill about his surgery, and doubts now that he’ll bother. He’s all healed up. And anyway, Bill can’t get enough of his impressions of the aquarium. The jellyfish like floating parachutes. The electric-blue lobster tiptoeing about, balancing claws before, tail behind. And of course the climax of the whole tour—the winding underwater glide through the plexiglass tube. Staring into the midnight eye of a shark. Looking up to see a stingray the size of an area rug undulating past.
He’s not sure he should tell Bill about the octopus. Bill’s great, but he has his limits. He wouldn’t want to hear about how close Eliot came to buying that big, stuffed toy octopus for just under seventy-five bucks in the gift shop. How he planned to say, For my granddaughter to the cashier. Then had the sense to ask himself what he would do with the thing once he got it home. Sleep with it? Wake in the night to see its bulbous silhouette perched on his chest? Jesus. Kind of thing he might once have laughed about with Jill, but not—
“I really got a kick out of that octopus. And I’ve been reading up on them.” Sure. He can tell Bill about the book he did end up buying in the gift shop—Octopus Heart, by Clarissa Pettingill. “Octopuses—and it’s not octopi, by the way—they do have a brain, but it’s sort of distributed between their eight arms. And each arm specializes in something—one’s for grasping, another one’s for getting food to the mouth. And they can smell and taste with their suckers. And kind of see through their skin, not just with their eyes. They’re incredible.” He dips the last of his French fries into his mussel broth.
Octopuses have remarkable facial recognition too, he remembers reading. They seem to appreciate people as individuals, and form opinions about them. Welcome some and squirt brine at others.
Would Ella remember him if he went back? That knowing, humorous look she gave him. Would she—
“Uh, earth to Somers.”
“Sorry, Bill.” He searches through his mussel shells for any morsels he might have overlooked. “I was just thinking about how everybody in the aquarium leaves everybody else alone. I mean, I didn’t see the sharks eating any of the smaller fish.”
“Yeah, well, they’re living the life of Riley in there. No need to hunt and kill if you’re getting fed every day.”
“Good argument for the guaranteed annual income,” Eliot says, grinning. He knows that will get Bill going. Bill describes himself as politically to the right of Genghis Kahn.
The female octopus lays eggs once in her short life. She braids them into strings as they emerge, using her own secretion as glue to attach them to the roof and sides of her den.
Eliot is rereading Octopus Heart. He’s been back to the aquarium twice to see Ella, too, choosing different days and times in hopes that the staff don’t start recognizing him. Ella does, though. He’s convinced of that. The last time, she detached herself from her little mountain and came right up close to the glass just to give him that merry, familiar look of hers—Hello again, Eliot.
He knows it’s crazy. But whenever he lets Ella look at him, his muscles relax in a way they haven’t in—longer than he can remember. He feels as if Ella is seeing through him, into the space inside him. That she knows exactly what it’s like to be Eliot Somers.
What’s it like to be you, he wonders back at her. Is your life as simple as it looks? Do you have family that you miss? What about mating? Is there any pleasure in it for you, or just pressure and release? Are you lonely in that tank all by yourself?
She tends her eggs without ceasing, he reads now, cleaning them of algae, defending them from predators. Typically, she neglects herself during this gestation period, never leaving her eggs to hunt for food, even in captivity refusing to feed. It is not unusual for a mother octopus to succumb to starvation just as her babies are hatching and starting their lives.
Eliot glances around furtively, even though he knows damned well he’s alone at home. Jesus. When was the last time he teared up?
He goes into
the kitchen to refill his coffee. He still can’t get used to doing small things, like hauling himself up out of his recliner with absolutely no pain. All he has left of that episode is a slightly delicious itch when he moves his bowels.
Healing. How does it happen? Well, it needs some kind of intervention first, he supposes, pouring milk into his coffee. If he hadn’t seen that specialist and had that surgery, things would just have gotten worse. Maybe infected. He could have ended up with a colostomy bag. Imagine trying to talk around that with Bill Merton in the Rendezvous.
He sips his coffee, looking at the framed photographs of his ancestors that once again hang on the walls of his kitchen. His new kitchen, as he still thinks of it, though it’s been years since he sold the condo in Hamilton and moved to Toronto.
It was such an easy decision to make, that last move. For one thing, there was nobody to talk him out of it. Mary wasn’t answering his emails. And Caroline—Mary would probably have accused him of deserting her. But he promised himself he would still visit. It was an easy drive, from Toronto to Hamilton. Hell, he’d commuted back and forth to Girls First! for thirty-five years.
That letter from Jill was what finally kick-started the move. The fact that she knew his Hamilton address. Could walk to it.
Jill. First time he’s thought about her today. And he doesn’t automatically think of her every time he sees the photographs in the kitchen any more, either. Is she starting to put him out of her mind too? She was in tears the last time he saw her, and one or two times before that. He still winces when he thinks of her showing him her diary.