by Matt Rader
“I don’t think I can stomach the smell of wine,” Josie said, guiding Catherine into a chair and stepping on the foot pump to raise Catherine’s head to a comfortable height. Catherine felt Josie shudder at the thought.
“Is that okay?” she apologized.
She meant the wine.
She was looking at Catherine in the mirror where they could see each other so clearly and also themselves, and then their further reflections in the mirror behind them and so on to the limits of their vision or light, Catherine didn’t know which. Josie had her hands on Catherine’s shoulders.
Josie had big round eyes and long eyelashes and bangs. The skin around her eyes was dark and her nose was red and sore-looking underneath her makeup. She reminded Catherine of a particular movie star. Not because she was beautiful but because she was not quite, as if the presence of some essential woman, essential image of a woman, interfered with the face Catherine was seeing reflected before her.
“Of course,” Catherine said.
She didn’t need wine.
She wanted to be friendly. Kind. Josie was sweet and struggling.
She liked Josie. She was like Josie.
Or Josie was like her. A little younger. A little more alive.
That’s how Catherine felt. She was surprised by the feeling. Surprised that it came to her as clearly as it did and without bitterness. She felt sorry for Josie. And for herself.
And also proud. Intimate.
Josie was some part of herself she’d left behind but that she still loved. That was Catherine’s thought or the tenor of her thought, something not quite direct or formal, but implied in her thinking. A kind of pressure that tilted her mind. She was picturing the hair again.
Then she said, “Maybe you’re pregnant.”
It was a half-joke. The kind of thing that was meant to be funny in its awkwardness. She’d never been pregnant nor had she ever wanted to be.
She’d meant to wink or smile conspiratorially.
But she didn’t.
In Russia, at the end of the First World War, in the period between the fall of the Czar and the October Revolution, a woman named Maria Bochkareva formed the First Russian Women’s Battalion of Death. That’s what it was called and there were others in Petrograd and Moscow. The battalions were meant to shame the demoralized Russian army who no longer knew for whom or what they were fighting. During the Kerensky Offensive, she led more than two hundred Russian women over the top of trenches in the Belarusian earth and drove back the Germans for a time.
Catherine knew all this because Bochkareva had been called “Yashka” and when Catherine had come across the nickname while researching Catherine the Great for her now sick and mouldering novel, she’d experienced the particular kind of delight and horror that had characterized all the most important moments of her writing life: the rhyme of her own limited expression—her inability to say Jessica as a child—with this woman in history, how that limitation had superseded the name her parents had given her sister, the doubling of her own name and the famous empress’s—
She tried to tell her sister.
“They called her Yashka,” she said. It seemed so unlikely that anyone else should have this name that had been between Catherine and her sister as an error, a skewing of something essential that others had access to but that could not be described accurately in Catherine’s mouth. Somehow that error had overtaken the essential and become not just the signifier of the signifier but her sister’s name. Together they’d invented Yashka and her sister embodied that collaboration. Now here it was again, somehow prefigured in history.
They were sitting in Yashka’s office at the clinic, the map Catherine remembered hanging like a flag on the drab wall to her left, next to Yashka’s graduate degrees from the University of British Columbia and from Johns Hopkins. Yashka had always been so focused, as if she were clearing a path for Catherine, for her children. On the desk were portraits of Yashka’s two sons. The oldest was fourteen now and he looked like no one Catherine had ever known.
Yashka was writing a note and when she looked up her left eye peered over Catherine’s shoulder and for half a moment Catherine felt compelled to glance behind her. But she resisted. She’d been fighting that impulse all her life.
“What happened after they drove back the Germans?” Yashka asked.
It was nearing noon and the sunlight in the window cast few shadows.
Catherine wanted to tell her sister about the other women’s battalion that had defended the Winter Palace and was then imprisoned in the Smolny Institute following the revolution, a place that had once been the first school for girls in Russia as decreed by Catherine the Great and then later the Bolshevik headquarters before the capital was moved to Moscow. Even Vladimir Putin had worked there at something or other in the 1990s. Now it is a museum to Lenin and the statue of Stalin has been removed from the gardens.
History was like this for Catherine: full of doublings, repetitions, echoes, rhymes, recurring shapes in time that lit up when viewed through the agency of her perception. Often her life seemed to be lit with recognition, as if history were looking her in the eyes, as if she were seen by Time. That was how she felt at that moment in the office.
That was how she felt in the salon.
Only half a second had passed, but it was enough to think all this.
She was looking at Josie in the mirror. Josie with scissors in her hand.
Yashka’s oldest son was too old now to hold her hand while they walked. Yashka had told Catherine this recently and Catherine had not known what it meant.
“There were no reinforcements,” she told her sister. “The men wouldn’t leave the trenches. They lost everything.” Bochkareva went to America. She dictated her memoirs. She met Woodrow Wilson.
Josie held her gaze. She was ready to cut. To take something away from Catherine. To give something back. To help shape her into whom she might be at a later stage of history.
When Bochkereva returned to Russia in 1919, the Soviets shot her as a traitor.
No one in the salon said anything.
Then Josie burst out laughing.
And Hannah was laughing.
And the girl sweeping the hair.
And Yashka.
Catherine.
HOMECOMING
SATURDAY NIGHT AND DAWN and I go down to the Pier for a couple rounds, two empty car seats in the back of the Toyota. It’s a week before Christmas and by 8 p.m., at this latitude, it’s been dark for three and a half hours. And cold. Wet cold.
We’re coming down the hill towards the marina. There’s not another car on the road. The lamp standards are lynched with red Christmas lights. I must have driven this stretch a hundred times, two hundred, going down to meet the boats when I was a kid. Dawn too, going down to meet her dad. Hefting the salmon fresh and cold right off the ice. Now, there are no fish. No fishermen. No dads. And Dawn and I haven’t been around much in the past ten years ourselves. Haven’t lived here at all. I can feel Dawn in the passenger seat fishing in her purse.
“Colm,” she says.
“Dawn,” I say.
“You got cash?” she asks.
We’re just about to pull in to a parking spot. I’m driving slow.
We left our girls, Amelia, four, and Lillian, two, passed out on a foamy in the office at my mother’s house, where we’re all living for the time being, my mother watching a British drama way too loud in the next room. I’m just a day and a half back from Vancouver and Dawn and I haven’t been alone in a month. She’s been here in Comox, on northern Vancouver Island, waiting for me to finish up in the city, settling in with the kids, with my mother. Now I’m here.
“Yeah,” I say. “I got cash.” I crank the wheel and ease us in between two white lines painted on the blacktop.
“Enough?” she says and I know it’s more warning than question. Be ready mister, she’s saying. I’m gonna get my money’s worth tonight.
I’m not sure if she’s angry
or antsy or a little bit of both. She’s been up there in the new subdivision on the eastern ridge of the valley with two little kids and her mother-in-law for a month. She could be pissed off. She could be raring to go. It’s just too early to tell.
“Yeah,” I say, “I got enough,” though it’s only half- true and she knows it. I have a couple hundred in twenties in my wallet but it doesn’t really belong to me. It’s all floated. In one way or another. From the bank. From the credit card company. From the car dealership. From 0% this. And no-payment-until-next-year that. We can drink with the cash. We will drink with the cash. But it’ll never be enough.
“Good,” she says, and—voila!—she’s got a tube of lipstick in her hand and she’s putting it on courtesy the map light that comes alive when she opens the cosmetics mirror on back of the sun visor. The lipstick is dark red, maybe a shade purple. It looks terrible.
“There’s a light for everything,” I say.
Dawn doesn’t shrug. Doesn’t roll her eyes. She snaps the mirror shut and winks out the light
“Okay?” she says, turning to me.
I nod. “Okay.”
A YOUNG GUY, MAYBE twenty, in a white apron, tattoos from his knuckles all up his bare arms, and an older, round- bodied woman in Chuck Taylors and a black sweater, black slacks, at the edge of the parking lot. The dish pig and a waitress, I’m guessing. They’re in the shadows, a healthy ten feet from the pub doors, smoking. No coats. They must be frozen. Both of them. You can’t smoke inside anymore. Not even near the door. Sign on the side of the building says seven metres. That’s how far away you have to be to smoke, legally. But no one’s that cruel.
They give Dawn and I the once-over as we walk past and I’m feeling that small-town thing—like maybe I recognize the kid because I knew him once, or knew his brother, or maybe he just looks like all the other young men I’ve known who grew up here like me, like my brothers, like all my childhood friends. Then the other side, too: like maybe the waitress and the dish pig know us, know who we used to be, or just know our type, the ones who leave for a time, who go to the city, and somehow find themselves back again.
The pub has two saloon-style doors both outlined in glowing white holiday lights. I push one side open with my arm and after I usher Dawn into the soft, beery warmth, I hold the door just a second longer to glance back at the smokers who haven’t said a word since we walked up. They’re still watching me, waiting for me to go so they can finish their conversation. I don’t know if I know them. If they know me. I wish they’d come inside and get warm. Or let me stay out here with them and smoke their cigarettes. I wish we could make this moment last. Then I let the door close behind me and follow Dawn into the bar.
The joint’s more than half-empty and festooned with fake holly boughs and mistletoe. There’s Late Fifties and his wife at the back, near the bar, both sitting alone on the same side of the table. Maybe he owns a business selling blinds. Maybe she does the books. And the forty-somethings, half a dozen of them, jeans, dockers, golf shirts, maybe a work party, maybe old friends, sitting at the high tables to the right when we walk in, a couple pitchers of Canadian on the go.
Up front, near the entrance, two guys playing guitar, something a little bluesy, a little soulful. The one guy I’ve never seen before. Round head, tawny skin. Hawaiian maybe. Samoan. The other guy, the white guy, late twenties, I recognize immediately. His face comes back to me like a sudden wave, fully and out of nowhere. But his name doesn’t come as easy. He recognizes me too and nods as Dawn and I walk past and I nod back and smile. For now, that’s all I have to do.
“It’s gonna be one of those nights,” I say, half to myself, half to Dawn. I don’t even know what I mean.
“Where do you want to sit?” she asks.
I’m looking around but it’s like I can’t see anything. Anywhere seems as good as anywhere else and everywhere seems worse. We’re hovering there in the middle of the joint, right between the bar and the performers. We catch a few glances from the bartender and from some of the patrons who are watching the musicians. There’s a Canucks game in the first period on all the television sets. Home game. I spy a waitress buzzing around the bar and all I want to do is sit down before she comes and talks to us.
“Over there,” I say, pointing across the room. “Let’s sit by the window. We can look at the boats.”
But we can’t see the boats when we sit down. Not really. It’s too dark outside and too bright in here with the Christmas lights lining the windowsill, bleeding into the glass. When I look out the window all I see is a shadowy me, a shadowy Dawn sitting next to me, her back to the bar, our table, the waitress coming up behind us with menus.
“Can I get you something to drink?” The waitress asks, handing us the menus. They’re laminated and I know what they say just from touching them. “Or do you need a few more minutes?” she asks, stepping back from the table, giving us some space.
She’s got long dark hair, the waitress, and a dark dress. Late thirties I’m guessing. Taller than the woman outside. Different shape. Her skin has lost its smoothness and clarity around the eyes. A liver spot on her left hand. Older than me, I think, but not much. A good figure. A grown-up figure. Hips and an ass. Perfume I can smell even through the french fries and beer. She’s all rote friendliness. Not fake, but practised. It’s laced up in her smile, how she puts a bit too much weight on one leg. Like she’s just waiting. Waiting. Waiting.
“A whisky and water,” Dawn says already scanning the drink menu. “To start.”
The waitress turns to me. “For yourself?”
“Canadian,” I say.
She’s about to leave when I shoot out my hand. “Do you have Maker’s Mark?” I ask.
“I’ll check,” she says, but that means no. If they had it, she’d have known. I watch her in the window as she goes, watch her ass move up and down in that dress.
Dawn turns her chair around so her back is to the window and she’s wide open to the pub, like she’s ready for some action. It’s not like her and we both watch the room for what will happen next. And then, after a minute or so, she spots the waitress returning with our drinks and turns her chair back to the table, the experiment with boldness over. For now.
The waitress slaps down two coasters, puts the whisky on one, the beer on the other. Dawn smiles. The waitress smiles. I smile. The drinks sweat.
“Would you fuck her?” Dawn asks once our server is out of earshot. She’s got her whisky in her hand and she takes a sip.
“The waitress?”
“Yeah,” she laughs, “who else?”
I turn around in my chair and scan the place and turn back to Dawn. I’ve seen enough to know the answer to that question. And the first one.
“You know that guy who’s playing guitar?” I ask nodding towards the performers. “We went to high school with him, didn’t we?”
“Is she too old for you? You don’t like her because she’s old?”
“No.” What else is there for me to say? “How old do you think she is?”
“Forty,” Dawn says. “Forty-two.”
“Middle-aged.”
“What, you don’t want to fuck middle-aged women?”
I smile and try to catch her eyes. I smile like it might just charm her into submission.
“Thirty-two is middle-aged,” Dawn says. “It’s right in the middle years.”
She has her brow arched like I’m supposed to acknowledge her correctness but I don’t. I just look away at the hockey game. One-nothing home team.
“You’re middle-fucking-aged, Colm. Get used to it.”
I try to smile. “I’m serious,” I say with a laugh. Maybe I can laugh it off. “Do you know buddy’s name? The guy playing guitar?”
Dawn sips her whisky and takes a long moment to look the guy over. Then she turns to me and takes a long moment to look me over. I’m beyond worrying about whether the comparison is flattering. I open my mouth to say something, anything, before Dawn can say something
herself. “Remember that winter my dad lived on the boat?” I ask. It’s a dumb thing to say. But we’re at the marina and it comes to mind. It’s dumb because neither of us like my father. But he’s my father. If we pressed our faces against the window we could see the finger where his boat berthed that winter. I lean in and squint. Dawn looks out the window now too. We’re trying to see past the reflections. Past the glare.
“That was the winter your mum threw him out.”
“It was,” I nod. “Current Address, he used to call it. The boat, that is.”
“More like The Last Straw.”
“The Last Stand.”
“Homecoming,” she says.
I’m still looking out the window. “Remember how my mum came down and sewed him curtains. Like three days before Christmas?”
For a few seconds Dawn keeps on looking out the window. Then I feel her look away.
“Yeah,” she says, “I remember.”
I’m not ready to face her yet. To look Dawn in the eyes. So I lean closer to the glass. I can almost smell the cold on the other side. “Why’d she do that?”
“Because he couldn’t, Colm. Simple as that.”
“He couldn’t sew? Or he couldn’t keep the daylight out?”
“Couldn’t stop everyone else from seeing in.”
The Hawaiian and the guy from high school start in on a Curtis Mayfield tune. A couple of the forty-somethings, a man and woman, get up to two-step. They’re a bit tipsy and hang onto each other the way drunk people do when they dance or when they walk down the street. She has her arms over his shoulders and he’s got his around her waist. They’re pressed close together. They both have bellies and their jeans sag. They look like they have short legs. They look like they couldn’t be happier.