The Sentimentalists

by Johanna Skibsrud

  The government house, which he had looked forward to every year – where it had seemed, in each ensuing summer, possible once again for him to become a new, and different sort of human being – had become for my father his last and only option. “I’m gonna die in Casablanca,” he sometimes rumbled in his Bogart voice. “It’s a good spot for it.”

  When he said things like that, though – when he quoted Bogart – we knew he was in an optimistic mood.

  Casablanca

  The negatives that haunt our ideals … must be themselves

  negated in the absolutely Real. This alone makes the universe

  solid. This is the resting deep. We live upon the stormy surface;

  but with this our anchor holds, for it grapples rocky bottom.

  WILLIAM JAMES

  1

  But then, in that next spring, after my father’s first winter in the government house, I found that it was my own life that came, quite abruptly, to an end. It happened simply. While standing at the intersection of Dominion and Queen, on my way to work one day. In that briefest moment of repose, when the lights, lingering momentarily between red and green, had paused traffic in four directions. So that, even when I could hear again the cars lurch from their standing positions forward, even when I could feel again the thrombotic pressure of their blinking lights, now stalled, now pulsing with longing, to turn left, to turn right, I myself stood still, caught at that particular intersection from which I could go no further. The birds on the top strand of the telephone wires whose notes, which had remained always, in previous days, a background melody that I had not heard, seemed suddenly to hit precisely the chords which resonated in my own stopped heart. And though a great pressure continued to propel the earth forward, tilting it along its axis in a precise and singular direction as it went, careening through space, in another, I myself remained static and unmoving.

  Finally, though, blown free at last, I floated up over the intersection and looked down at the great expanse of suburban streets below. From that perspective I was able to see all the way from King in the north to Woodburn – that great artery which led out to the highway. All the way from Halifax Street in the east, to Division in the west. And then farther, and yet farther – almost to the city limit, where the streets gave way, in brief consent, to stubborn grasslands; to the few surviving farms there, studded by the roadsides with gigantic billboards, which seemed to announce, in eloquent sentences, the beginnings and the ends of the earth.

  I was by that time suspended at such a distance to myself that I was no longer aware of the traffic, the birds, or the patterns of objects which had arranged themselves into various systems below, and hovering at that furthest distance, my only thought was that I would like, very much, to go home. But home was by then so arbitrary, so vague a location, with no precise dimensions in space or in time that it was by an unexplainable coincidence that I was then returned with a sudden jolt (the impact of which was comparably slight) to my own body. And that there, after adjusting my bearings, so that instead of heading east down Queen toward my place of work, to which I was never to return, I retraced my steps north, instead. That I followed the stream of light that broke, in sporadic and ever-changing patterns, along the centre of Dominion, all the way back to Brooklyn, from where, gathering what few belongings I still recognized to be my own, I made my way to Casablanca.

  Perhaps all of this will seem slightly less surprising if I divulge at this point that the event I have just described occurred exactly ten days after stumbling upon the man who for six years I had been intending to marry as he made love to another woman. A woman who happened to look very much like me. On top of a stack of clean laundry, which, earlier that day, I myself had piled on the bed.

  Although in the days that followed I would say next to nothing of the event, and would come to believe, as had been insisted, that what had occurred had been in fact the smallest of infidelities, and so particular in nature (having occurred in what was already now the past) that I might come to overlook it entirely, I could not seem to drive the image of that woman, who had resembled me so closely, from my mind. Nor forget the expression on her face, of surprise – and perhaps, vaguely, of recognition – as she put on my clothes, which she picked from the floor (her own having been lost, irreversibly, in a tangle of laundry and bed sheets) and walked out my door.

  After altering my route, and tracing my steps back to Brooklyn that afternoon, and packing what little I could into two duffle bags which I had often used before for weekend travel, I left the man who, for six years, I had been intending to marry, as well as all of the accumulated objects of his existence, except for myself. Left them because, quite simply, they were his. And I, in my thirtieth year, who had accumulated what appeared to be next to nothing, took a taxi to the airport and flew to Canada, to live – on grounds that I could not reasonably articulate – with Henry and my father.

  Overall, I would have to say that it had come as a disappointment to live within the particularities of a life; to find that the simple arithmetic of things – which I thought I had learned by rote, but was now unsure from whom, or what it was that had been learned at all – was not so simple. That it was not, in fact, combination alone that increased the territory of living in the world. And that love did not, of its own accord, increase with time. That it could find itself just as easily divided by things. And that there was nothing to do when it left you but bite your tongue and wait for its return. As though it was a small bird, which sometimes thought to wing itself across the city – but would, almost always, thinking better of it, arrive again in a rush, to the sill. Oh, I would have waited like a dog for seven lifetimes for that bird to appear, if I knew that it would continue to come! If I knew that it would continue to look in again with fondness at the small room, which it had thought to leave behind; at a life of knowing; of closeness, and foibles. Of regrets, misdeeds, and small, personal ecstasies.

  The objects, just as they were – so delicately arranged for it there, all lined up on the shelf – would seem so precious to the little bird, then, that it would wish its heart was not so small, or nailed so closely to its chest.

  But so often had I approached that window myself, with no concerted attempt at flight, that by the time of the incident at Dominion and Queen, I had become convinced that it was in fact an impassable divide. So that when, all of a sudden, and without my expecting it – though I had in fact been for many years teasing at a small crack in the glass with my mind – the window shattered, I almost did not recognize it. That the window had become a window again – paneless, glassless – an empty space from which I was required to depart. And all the world, in its variations, its illimitable pathways and directions, seemed then not terrifying as I had imagined that it might, but only very dull in comparison to the bright and tangible details of the room I was obliged to leave behind. After all, however ultimately far off from the rooms that I once had dreamed of inhabiting, the colours and textures of that room were at least visible, handleable, real, and therefore seemed more pleasing and worthwhile to me than an empty succession of shades of grey.

  It is only from a distance that abstractions are, after all, desirable, or even possible. And none was desirable enough to me then to warrant an actual course of action, replete with telephone calls made to real human beings, and the inevitable initial chill of a new and as yet unlived-in life. So that, staring dully from the vantage point of the airport waiting room as I made my way to Casablanca, there seemed nothing that might satisfy me; no route that the sudden introduction of a window might illumine; no life that would not also contain the great sorrow which hung from me, then, as though it was a separate object. The one thing of any weight that I had, it seemed, so far acquired.

  “I just need a break,” I told Helen when I called her from Henry’s house two days later. I had put off calling until then because I didn’t want to explain anything to anyone. Because there was in fact very little to say. I put it in its simplest terms
: the other woman I had found, the flight from New York. But Helen was hardly ruffled by the news. “Good for you,” she said. “But don’t drive yourself crazy up there. Why don’t you come home?”

  Because I didn’t know the answer to her question, I didn’t say anything, and shortly afterwards I hung up the phone.

  Then, after putting the phone back in place on the government house wall, I gazed around Henry’s kitchen, where for once I was alone. Looking for something, I guess. Some object that might prove to me that the events of the past week and a half had been real. Some object that I could not have recreated or imagined for myself otherwise if, as seemed more likely then, I was only dreaming. If I had not actually returned to Casablanca, with only the contents of two duffle bags, neither of which – when I rifled through them in the mornings – seemed to contain anything at all.

  But there it all was. The usual items of Henry’s kitchen, as well as some things I’d forgotten, or never seen. A hanging plant by the porch door, which had recently been installed. The joke barometer which read, permanently, “wet and windy,” which I hadn’t noticed for years. The remains of a specific, unimaginable lunch on the stove.

  I hardly spoke at all to Henry and my father in those first days at the government house, and miraculously, when, for the first time I might have wanted him to, my father did not ask me for my story. Instead, I walked alone, back and forth along the lake road, hoping to uncover my old feeling for that place, which was something that I had also, perhaps, only forgotten. But whatever it was that the government house had at one time been to me seemed buried at such remove that it might have been someone else’s memory that I hoped in those moments to recall.

  At night, I lay up in Owen’s old bedroom where I had slept so many nights as a child and felt nothing at all, except for the static hum of electricity from the floors below. A sad and irreversible change had occurred, it seemed, and the great and open space which I had always felt within me, that I had thought, in fact, had been me, had disappeared, so finally that I could not hope, I thought, to resurrect it, or feel again that lightness at the exact centre of my heart as I had on so many occasions before. When, in that very room, I had harboured in me an expectation of a world so vast, and of such an incomparable beauty, that I could feel it loosening the muscles of my throat; a disturbance of which I could hardly endure.

  On those occasions, what I had feared most was only that the space I felt in me so palpably then might remain all my life in the unbearably empty state in which it had arrived. So to find that, on the contrary, it could disappear completely – and without a trace – without ever having been filled; that it could be compressed so soundly within a body that inside would remain only the mechanical procedures of the lungs and the heart, was a great surprise. But what was more of a surprise was to realize how many years had passed without my noticing its absence, and I wondered how many more years would have gone by; if the window had not smashed, that is. If my life had not reeled to halt on the corner of Dominion and Queen.

  I had thought in those years, I suppose, having learned the lesson from my mother well, that it was foolish to ask for too much out of life, afterwards only to live in the wake of that expectation, an irreducible disappointment. But what pain, I thought now, could be greater than to realize that even the practical reality for which you had assumed to settle upon, did not hold – that even that was illusory? Would it not be better, then, to set your sights on some more fantastic and rare dream from which even in failing you might take some comfort in having once aspired?

  In the mornings I would remain as though asleep for as long as I could. I did not want to wake to find myself there, again, in Owen’s room. And in those first moments, my eyes shut tight, I tried to imagine that I had not really arrived there at all. That it had in fact been only a trick of the universe that had, temporarily, sucked me back from my great, disembodied adventure over the suburbs of New York, into that particular body, that particular room.

  Hoping that this was the case, I would stay in bed sometimes for an hour or more before I rose, listening to my father and Henry beneath me: banging the breakfast dishes and shouting to each other across the hall in immense, pithecoid, monotones.

  What, I wondered, were they hoping to communicate down there?

  When I could wait no longer, I would rise and join them, lumbering heavily down the stairs. My father would greet me as I arrived. “How’s my little wanderer?” he’d say, and I would grimace a reply as I wandered to the sink to rinse a mug and drink three cups of coffee by the window, while he sketched out the day’s crossword puzzle, and Henry grunted through his perusal of the obituaries and the local news.

  Unlike Helen, or my mother, who called several times a day to do so, my father and Henry did not ask me any questions, and my father was often jovial in the old familiar way, which I had missed over the course of his first winter at the lake when, even in the briefest of telephone calls, great silences had occurred. These my father blamed on the government house, whose emptiness in the winter, he said, gave him the creeps, and resulted, conversely, in a claustrophobia more severe than any that had resulted from the narrowest of his forsaken palace halls.

  2

  But then, hardly a week into my stay, as I lay in my bunk in Owen’s room, I was interrupted from my own silences by my father’s scream, which rose to meet me as though in a single spiral. It was a wail so loud, so long, and so inhuman, that I thought, at first, it was not my father’s yell at all. That it had come instead from within me; the echo perhaps of a great loneliness which I was only then beginning to understand.

  Or perhaps it was only the ghosts of the house, I thought, who, after so many years of fluttering in corners, of rearranging the dishes and books on the shelves, had thought to call out – weary of our disbelief – and make themselves known.

  But, when the noise continued, now loud, now low, now muffled by curses, I realized that it was my father who yelled, and I flew down the two flights of stairs to the entrance of his room.

  By then the noise had stopped, and for some reason I hesitated at my father’s door.

  “Dad?” I said. Cautiously. “Dad?” I entered, but did not find him there.

  I met Henry in the kitchen, where he had wheeled himself, bleary eyed. “What’s going on?” he said. Then a third yell was heard, a fainter and most human yell, which ended with a moan as I flung open the bathroom door, and located my father.

  He was crumpled in a ball, slid somehow between the bath and the toilet bowl, his legs curled into his chest as he clung to one arm and swore through his teeth. “It’s my fucking arm,” he told me. I turned on the light and both of us flinched in the glare. My father’s limbs were long and bare, and looked like the imaginary limbs of a large bird, as if drawn from the inside. I was afraid to touch him in case he broke into several pieces, as once, reaching to a high shelf in my grandmother’s house I had caused a glass animal to shatter. And in fact when I did bend toward him he yelled out at my touch. “Honey, Jesus!” he said, and I had to reposition myself so that I could reach his far side without jarring the hurt arm, which he held onto so tightly that the fingers of the hand that held it had gone white.

  Henry was in the doorway. “Holy Mother of God, Napoleon,” he said to my father, for the first time, in my memory, using his real name. We sat there for nearly half an hour on the bathroom floor, Henry in the doorway, before my father allowed me to help him dress and move to the kitchen, where we sat for another hour and a quarter, wondering what on earth we should do.

  “We’ll wait until the morning,” my father said. “See what it looks like then.” But already my father’s shoulder was the bruised colour of an eggplant. “If I could fucking breathe,” my father said, “it would be better.” It was true, his breath was coming now in short bursts: harsher, and faster than normal.

  Finally, I managed to help him out, in the pitch darkness, to Henry’s car. We walked slowly, Henry shouting encouragement sometimes
from the lit-up porch. But every time my father stepped onto his right foot, a pain shot through his side and into his lungs, taking root in his damaged shoulder, and what he took to be his heart, so that with each step he gave a short yell, almost a “Hup! Hup! Hup!” keeping time as we walked. And when at last he was tucked into the passenger’s seat and I leaned in to fasten his seat belt as carefully as I could on his opposite side, he yelled out: “Jesus, Honey, are you TRYING TO KILL ME?”

  I shut the door and got in across from him, and we drove the two hours to the border, crossing over at four-thirty in the morning, my father finally asleep, his face on the glass.

  The shoulder, we were told, had been broken cleanly across the blade, at the exact point of impact when, having become disoriented in the night, my father had fallen against the bath thinking he had already traversed the small distance to his bed. By ten o’clock in the morning, however, we were already on our way back to the government house, my father’s shoulder taped and in a sling. He stared out the window almost the whole way and seemed to not have much to say, nor care if I did, though I tried – my first concerted effort since I’d arrived – to make my voice light and unworried sounding as I made small remarks about the things, for example, that we passed on the road.