Real Life

by Sharon Butala

  Alone in Elaine’s apartment, she picks up Wiesel’s Night again. This time she opens it to the first page and begins reading. At first she forces herself, then, although she wants to stop, she gets caught up in the harrowing narrative and can’t. She reads, her gut in knots, her palms wet with sweat, her breathing shallow and fast, as if she is perhaps asleep and dreaming some intense, frightening dream. She feels as though she’s caught in the throes of some terminal disease whose symptoms are amazement, horror, disgust, and an unfathomably deep shock that the world could, after all, contain such depths of savagery, such depths of suffering. When, hours later, she finishes the book, she sits on the side of her cot for a long time staring into space.

  After a while she wanders to the balcony doors to gaze out over the concrete-grey of the city, tinged purple in the bleak light of the powerful street lamps. She thinks about Elie Wiesel, about a certain expression that appears on his face when she’s seen him being interviewed on television. She doesn’t think she’s seen it on anyone else’s face, and every time she’s seen it on his, she’s wondered what it means.

  She thinks she understands it now. Since the camps he has become a witness, determined never to look away from the terrible pictures he carries in his mind, or from the stories he’s been told, the photographs he’s seen.

  For once, the streets outside the apartment are quiet, no drunken young people shouting, nobody roaring his motor or squealing his tires on the road leading onto the bridge that crosses the wide river, no fire trucks or ambulances or police cars screaming past where she stands alone in her nightgown in the shadows. She stares up at the moon hanging hard and white over the city, and thinks of all the millennia it has been shining down on this planet. For a moment, the belief she’s been taught, that every single human death matters, wavers and almost disappears.

  The world does not make sense, she thinks. One horror ends and somewhere another is beginning. She must not look away either, she tells herself, but doubts she has the courage to carry out such a resolve.

  After Elaine’s return from her week-long stay in the hospital, her needs grow in quantity and intensity. Since they can’t afford to hire a professional nurse to stay with her—only the rich could do that—the visits from home care attendants and nurses increase. Elaine’s case manager drops in, drinks coffee with them, chats in a friendly way. She’s here to assess the situation: both Lucia and Elaine know that soon, if she doesn’t die first, Elaine will have to go to a facility equipped to care for someone as ill as she is, maybe even to a palliative care unit in a hospital. When Lucia hasn’t the strength to lift her out of bed one more time, to leap up from sleep one more time to rush into her room and pull her up in bed, even then, she can’t imagine how they will get Elaine to consent to go.

  Lucia has lost quite a lot of weight, she has chronic diarrhea now and a number of random aches and pains which she tries to ignore, but which, nonetheless, alarm her. She wants to go home, she wants to lie down and sleep for a month, she wants George to come and hold her. One day someone phones to tell her that the friend she ran into at the cancer clinic so long ago, and to whom she made that stupid, unfunny joke, has died.

  Now Elaine is staying alive on oxygen and morphine and an unwillingness to die. Lucia has begun to wish the end would come, the quicker the better, and she finds herself irritated with Elaine’s refusal to face what is happening to her. Early on, when Elaine had misunderstood a doctor’s message to her, taking it as hopeful when it was really a statement of hopelessness, and Lucia had tried gently to correct her misunderstanding, Elaine had screamed, “I’m sick and tired of you telling me

  I’m going to die!” Now Lucia can’t bring herself to try to talk to Elaine about her impending death, and she hates herself for her desire, which she can no longer deny, that Elaine should give up this fight she can’t win.

  She’s read all the books in the stacks behind the kitchen door now, or all that she can bear to read; there is only a work by Primo Levi left that she’s determined to try. Primo Levi comes highly recommended from a rabbi-professor friend of George’s, and so she places his book on the top of the pile to begin reading once Elaine has had her evening morphine and for a few hours will be unconscious. Although it seems to her she’s done what she set out to do, however unclear that intention was and, in some ways, remains, her new knowledge has not brought her peace, or any new understanding, or even any satisfaction. She doesn’t know what it is she wants, but whatever it is, it hasn’t yet come. Maybe it never will, maybe she isn’t wise enough or smart enough. Maybe she’s too weak. Or maybe she has to be the victim, instead of just a helper, to know what it is.

  Evenings now, after the last visit from the palliative care nurse, and the last home care helper has long since departed, Lucia spends a lot of time on the phone. Relatives call from across the country, there’s her evening talk with George, sometimes the family doctor calls, or a friend or two. It’s quite late before she’s able to make up her cot, undress for bed, and climb in with her book. Since she learned how as a six-year-old, to read before sleep has been her habit, and now, despite her exhaustion, she clings to it as the only remnant of normalcy left in her life.

  Levi’s book is a careful, scholarly dissection of the degrees, causes, and purposes of specific daily cruelties in the concentration camps of the Second World War. It examines in detail, coldly, human evil as it manifests itself in the simplest and smallest of everyday acts. This book is the worst of them all, and she’s read only a few pages before she begins to wonder if she can go on.

  Elaine has begun to cough. Lucia throws back her blanket and sheet and hurries into the bedroom. Surprisingly, given that she is now constantly heavily drugged with morphine, Elaine is awake. Her blue eyes, grown large and beautiful in these last weeks, shine in the semi-dark, and through her spasms of coughing she tries to speak to Lucia.

  “Yes, okay,” Lucia murmurs, although she hasn’t been able to understand her sister’s broken mumbling. She tries, using her usual techniques, to partly pull, partly lift Elaine back up to a sitting position, but for some reason it is one of those nights when she can’t manage it. Maybe it’s because Elaine can’t help her any more by pushing against the mattress with her hands.

  Frantically, she climbs onto the bed beside Elaine and puts one arm against her back to hold her up. Elaine’s cough has settled into a steady, gasping roll that is terrifying to hear. Lucia reaches with her other arm for the pillows and the foam wedge to pull them down to where she’s holding Elaine up in her sitting position, but she can’t get a grip on them, and when she does, the wedge refuses to move, seems to be caught on something she can’t see or reach. Elaine is trying to speak again. Lucia freezes.

  “I’m … so … scared …” Panic grips Lucia, her helplessness, her desire to save her sister any suffering she can, her hopeless, endless failure to do so, and the demands of the moment that she can’t even consider rush through her mind. She tries, but from here she can’t reach the phone without letting go of Elaine and she doesn’t dare do that.

  Upright now, Elaine’s coughing has subsided enough that Lucia can feel her short gasping breaths returning to shudder through her chest and ribs and spine.

  “I’m … so … tired … I … need … sleep …” Elaine whispers: a word, a breath, a word, a breath. Lucia gives up the struggle to pull the wedge and pillows to her. Holding Elaine upright with her left arm, on all fours she moves around behind her, transfers Elaine’s weight to her left shoulder, while she tugs at and straightens her own nightgown that has twisted around her legs. Then she crouches behind Elaine, her face hovering level with the back of her sister’s stubbly head. Slowly she lowers herself until she’s seated behind her.

  She spreads her legs so that they enclose Elaine, and the pillows and wedge fit her own back, neatly propping her upright. She puts both arms around Elaine, pulls up the sheet and blankets, pats them into place, folding them down under Elaine’s chin. Then she clasps her ha
nds on Elaine’s lap, and accepts her sister’s full weight, surprisingly heavy for all her thinness, her frailty, against her chest and abdomen and thighs.

  Elaine falls back into unconsciousness almost immediately, her head lolling against Lucia’s throat, chin, and shoulder. The concentrator drones on beside the bed and the city’s light glows in around the curtains so that Lucia can make out the shadows that are furniture. Slowly her sister’s twisted, knobby spine relaxes and settles into the warm cushion of Lucia’s breasts and belly.

  Lucia’s mind wanders to the book by Primo Levi she’s been trying to read, she remembers reading that Levi committed suicide. She grasps Elaine more firmly, presses her lips lightly against her sister’s clammy cheek. She thinks of their parents, dead now, and of her and Elaine’s long childhood together in the bright, quivering aspen forests of the north, of the moving sky there, the intense green of the grass.

  Elaine coughs, a light, shallow cough, moves her head slightly, her short, stiff hair brushing Lucia’s mouth, before she relaxes again against Lucia’s warm body.

  They stay that way a long time, Elaine deeply unconscious, her polio-and-pain-stiffened shoulders, neck, and back slowly loosening so that they feel almost normal to Lucia, while Lucia drifts in and out of sleep, until the heat of their two bodies has so melded that, awake now as the first pale rays of dawn seep around the drawn curtains, Lucia can no longer tell where her sister leaves off and she begins.

  Winterkill

  “Pammy! Get a move on.” There was no answer, but feet began thumping down the stairs. Without turning around Bonny called, “Where’s Jason?” The radio was playing softly beside the sink and she reached with a soapy hand to shut it off.

  “An aboriginal man claims that he’d been driven by the police to the outskirts of the city Thursday night, and left to walk back—” She pulled her hand back, soap bubbles sliding from her wrist onto the counter.

  “I dunno,” Pam answered in a singsong voice, always happiest before figure-skating practice. “Com-ing, I guess.”

  “He says that the policemen also took his jacket. It was forty below that night. He says that he pounded on the door of the power plant until the night watchman—”

  She could tell by the muffled thuds and exclamations that Jason was at the back door now, too. Pam had stopped humming and the two of them were into the did-not-did-too-did-not quarrelling they seemed to do in their sleep, but which had been especially bad this winter with Ross gone from the farm all week.

  “Cut that out!” Bonny shouted, moving her head closer to the radio. “Police say they are looking into the freezing deaths of two aboriginal men whose bodies were found on the outskirts of the city near the Queen Elizabeth power plant. Aboriginal leaders—”

  She could see through the window above her sink that already the shadows were growing longer, turning the shining hills a mile away across the snow-covered stubble field a deep blue. Such a cold January, a record breaker. She remembered the sink, pulled the plug, and let the water drain. The radio was still playing, but she couldn’t make sense of what the announcer was saying, and after a pause, during which she held her hand an inch from the knob, listening and frowning, she snapped it off.

  She dried her hands rapidly on the tea towel, went to the back door, and pulled on her boots and parka to run outside and start the truck so it would warm up before she drove them into town. Jason had his snowpants and boots on, and was searching for something in his hockey bag. Pammy was rubbing intently with a moistened finger at a spot on the boot of one skate. Too bad Ross would miss Jason’s game, but there was no help for it. Without his job they couldn’t pay their bills; without her part-time work at the nursing home, they couldn’t even buy groceries.

  Her boots squeaked on the packed snow as she hurried across the yard to the shed that in winter housed the truck. She held one mittened hand over her mouth as she ran; the air was too cold to breathe it in directly. She couldn’t get the block-heater plug to separate from its connection, had to pull off a mitt for a better grip, and her fingers stung where they touched the freezing metal. There was no place at the rink in town to plug vehicles in and she worried that she’d have to let the truck run during Pam’s practice and Jason’s game. But with the price of gas—I’ll just have to go out and start it every half-hour or so, she decided. What a nuisance—but it was the only way to keep the motor warm so the truck would start when it was time to go home. Now, even plugged in and in the shed, the motor turned over reluctantly and, huddled and shivering behind the wheel, she had to keep playing the gas pedal until it was running smoothly.

  Thank God, Ross would be home in the morning. His being away all week was part of what made the winter so long; at least he didn’t leave me with animals to look after, and before she could squelch it, maybe next year we should all move to Swift Current for the winter; then, no, better to wish our bills were paid so none of us have to go to Swift Current. This reminded her of the mail waiting in the drawer for Ross to deal with. There was an envelope from the bank, probably another statement; she never opened the ones from the bank, and dreaded the moment when Ross did.

  The older boys were just finishing cleaning the ice as the three of them made their way into the rink. Jason immediately dumped his hockey equipment on the bleachers and hurried back to the lobby with a few boys from his team to play a noisy game of tag until the girls’ practice was over and their game would start. As he ran away, Bonny called to him, “Stay out of trouble,” as much for the benefit of any adults around as because she thought Jason, who, thank heaven, wasn’t a problem kid, might get into something he wasn’t supposed to. She finished lacing Pam’s skates and went to join the other mothers where they sat snuggled together on the wooden benches. Pam skated out to join the other girls who crowded around their teacher and her assistant at centre ice. It was much colder than usual in the rink, and instead of their usual practice outfits of very short skirts and tights, most of the girls were wearing heavy sweatpants or ski-pants and light jackets.

  “Ross back yet?” Colleen asked.

  “Tomorrow morning. He’s working too late tonight to come back.” Rita and Irene arrived, every breath making small white clouds, and the line of seated women slid down to make room for them.

  “Brrrr, it’s cold,” Irene said, taking off her glasses and using her thumbnail to scrape off the frost that had formed on them. The others mumbled agreement. On the ice the girls had divided into four groups, each group skating off to a corner. The club’s star, Tammy Jo, was practising spins at the blue line on the women’s left. Pam’s group had gone to Bonny’s right on the far side of the ice. There they had joined hands and were skating in a circle, halting, and skating back the other way, trying, but mostly failing, to keep synchronized. With the carnival only a couple of weeks away, they’d have to keep at it until they had it right. Pam’s group’s skating was still jerky, lacked the grace of the older girls, except for Pam who was a little sprite on skates and, as usual, led them as they snaked out of the circle, reversed in synch, and stopped in a wavy line that was supposed to be straight, the little one on the end stumbling and almost falling.

  Bonny was about to ask Colleen about the home-and-school meeting when she noticed that Denise McKenzie, carrying her baby bundled in blankets and her toddler at her side, had entered the rink near where Pam and the other girls were practising, and stood watching them. Bonny said, nodding her head in Denise’s direction and laughing, “She’s getting that little one started early.”

  Colleen said loudly, “It’s too cold for her to be out with that baby! She’s not a month old!” Irene, using the same disapproving tone, said, “I saw her at the bake sale on Tuesday and she put that baby on the bake sale table and changed her diaper! Can you imagine?”

  “In the grocery store?” Bonny asked. “Where else would she put her? On the floor?”

  “Such a bad mother,” Annette said sternly, puffs of white spurting with each word. Bonny had been about to p
oint out how Denise took her children with her everywhere and the baby never fussed and the toddler didn’t run around like a little maniac as most of the other kids did. How Denise spoke quietly to them, her voice full of warmth, not screaming like the other mothers so often did. But now the rest of the women were joining in, and the conversation went on around her, all of it negative, while Denise stood on the other side of the rink watching the girls falling down and getting up again, oblivious to the fact that she was the object of such nastiness. Bonny gave up trying to defend her, or even listening, and transferred her attention to Pam.

  It was after eight when she turned the key in the ignition and after a few seconds of growling the engine putted, then rumbled into life. She’d insisted that Ross take the newer truck to work, he’d offered to leave her the better one, but she knew men and their vehicles. They felt shamed if they had to drive an old clunker, it was worse if everybody knew you had money trouble, and she didn’t want Ross going through that. But nobody remarked on it if the women drove the clunkers—most of the staff at work did.

  They rode in silence, the two children tired and beginning to drowse. The coach hadn’t played Jason much, but as long as Ross wasn’t there to see it, Jason didn’t care. Now, as if he knew she’d been thinking about him, he stirred, and asked in his high voice, “Mom, what happens when you freeze to death?” Startled, she turned to him. Had he heard that report on the radio? Had the kids been talking about it?