“In the park at Wollman.”
He had tacked up a quotation from Frankenstein on the corkboard beside his desk:
What glory would attend the discovery, if I could banish disease from the human frame, and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death!
Beside that, a Canadian Cancer Society sticker: Cancer can be beaten. The “can” was crossed out and covered with “WILL,” also written with a black Sharpie. What he referred to as hopeful naïveté had brought him to the bench. He had told her that he had a mission to contribute to the fight to cure cancer because of his mother, who died when he was twenty-one. He had been embarrassed during his grad school interviews at the University of Toronto when he brought this up. He was told by the principal investigator interviewing him that such generalizations were innocent and emotional and had no place in the lab.
“Does it bother you to use animals in your research?” she asked.
He said it did a bit and that he never got used to killing them. Those mice that didn’t succumb to the cancers they were encouraged to grow were eventually dispatched with a whack on the neck with a metal ruler. The ones that got cancer suffered, but it was work that needed to be done. With Leroy’s mind and focus he was able to discover aspects of mouse genetics that nobody had known before. He told Benny that he relished these discoveries. They might be minor, some were cul-de-sacs, but they were his discoveries and his cul-de-sacs. His work involved observing the effects of DNA-damaging agents on DNA repair in normal and mutant mice. He bombarded them with X-rays, vinyl chloride, aflatoxin, UV light. These led to mutations, chromosomal breaks, and deletions of whole sequences of DNA. Most of the mice developed cancer, and he had to kill those. Some mice survived, and one, an agouti he named Chico, survived no matter what he threw at it. From Chico, he cloned a DNA repair gene, which he called AMF1. That gene, and the functional analysis of the protein that AMF1 produced, would be sufficient for his thesis. He looked forward to finishing his grad work, and not only because he disliked the city. It would mean he could go home and continue his research to find practical applications. Molecular biology gave him hope. His colleagues were developing the weapons to slay genetic demons. If they could prevent mutations from happening in the first place, or repair them after they occurred, cancer would be beaten. It was cellular eugenics, and a fight he took personally.
“But it’s practical work. I don’t want to just add to a pile of information.”
“As we’re doing?” she suggested, raising one of her eyebrows.
“No, from what I hear, Leach is going to solve the world’s environmental woes.”
She laughed. They had both sat in on departmental seminars in which Leach had waxed poetic about his microbes. He bragged that they would be able to clean up everything from oil spills to nuclear waste, from dioxin in rivers to CFCs in the air. The more soiled our nest, the sexier bioremediation became as a research topic. Yet, Benny and Leroy knew results were coming slower than her professor’s promises.
Leroy bought a pair of Bauers and he and Benny went to Wollman Rink in Central Park that night and almost every Friday night that winter.
The next afternoon Benny stood in Leroy’s doorway, shivering, water dripping from her hair onto her shoulders and down her back. Her hands were cold and pink.
“Come in.”
Warm air blew in from the vent, a constant bronchial exhalation loud enough to cover the splattering rain and the hiss of traffic where she had been running. The crazy wind drove heavy rain first in one direction, then another.
“Annika said she’d be there when I got back, so I didn’t take my keys. I’ve got to get warm.” She peeled off the sweatshirt, her damp long-sleeved cotton shirt, and a T-shirt, leaving her white running bra covering pale skin, pruned as if she had been in a bath too long. Drops landed on the vinyl floor, where they made small puddles.
Leroy told her to take a bath. Once in the bathroom, she looked at herself in the mirror. Her heart had slowed since she arrived at his door, out of breath from running the stairs, but it continued to beat against her sternum. What did Leroy see when he looked at her? Her finger traced her clavicle to her throat. She was thin and knew that, though she was attractive enough, she was no Annika. She had seen Leroy staring at her roommate as though he had been hypnotized. The water in the tub was too hot for her chilled feet. She turned the cold faucet on and lowered herself into the tub. Once she was in, she turned off the cold and felt the heat on her legs. Benny closed her eyes and submerged her head. Her heartbeat under water had the rhythm of wings flapping. She moved her head from side to side, her long dark hair flowing between and around her fingers. The tendrils of hair, graceful and slow, moved like the tentacles of a squid.
She lost her virginity the spring of her freshman year of high school. It was painful to think too closely of that time. It reminded her that something was missing. Leroy had once told her that gin had become his drink of choice after his mother died because it reminded him of her. As Benny sat up, a wave sloshed over the edge of the tub. He said he liked its earthy tang and the way it made the sharp edges of some memories blur. Perhaps gin would blur the memories of inadequacy that were coming to her now.
He was two grades ahead of her. He was nice enough, and she thought for a while that she loved him. On one of the first warm nights of May they lay on the football field behind their school. Her arm was falling asleep under his head. As they kissed, his hand slid along her belly and moved under her sweatshirt. She didn’t wear a bra. Her breasts had always been tender, but his calloused hand made her gasp. He pulled back. She told him it was all right and led his hand back to where it had been and kissed him. He told her that he loved her as he groped her, then pulled off her pants. When he entered her, it was sharp and abrupt. He seemed to mistake her moaning for pleasure. He came quickly, then flopped onto his back beside her and stared up into the murky sky. She stroked his face as she lay on her side, wondering at the distance between them, at the warmth between her legs where she had felt such pain. It wasn’t long before he was hard again and wanted her. She asked him to go slower. It hurt, but not as much, and she wondered if sex was always like that. She shivered and pressed herself against him. The next day he passed her in the hall without even looking at her.
For a week after that night Benny was in bed with abdominal pains. She had had pains like this before but never this sharp. Was this her period, finally? She hoped so. She had friends who menstruated at eleven; she was seventeen. Benny faked cramps at school and kept a bottle of Midol in her locker for show. She occasionally gave one to a classmate in need.
She found the Merck Manual that had always been on her parents’ bedroom shelf and looked for an explanation for her pain. Benny had been perusing it since she was in the seventh grade to diagnose every symptom she suffered. She had asked them at the dinner table once about the book. Her mother and father stopped eating and looked at each other, seeming to want the other to speak. After her dad started to say something, then bit his lip and stopped, she let it go. Now she found a section on chronic abdominal pain and wondered what was causing hers. Endometriosis? Not likely because she still wasn’t menstruating. Hepatitis? She wasn’t tired or losing weight. Ovarian cyst? Perhaps. She’d have to go see someone about it soon if it kept up. She put her hands on her breasts, wishing they were even slightly larger. Maybe they’d grow when she started to bleed.
She saw a doctor, who told her it was probably anxiety and wrote her a prescription, and her pains stopped for a while.
—
Benny submerged her head again, as if she could wash off the memory, then pulled the plug. When she came out of the bathroom Leroy offered her a pair of black track pants, a dry shirt, and his cableknit sweater. They sat in his room as her hair dried. She wrapped her legs in a blanket on his bed and curled them under her.
“That sweater looks good on you.”
She was glowing from her run and the heat of the bath. He told her that the
sweater had been a gift from his mother when his parents came back from a trip to Scotland. Its wool, now yellowed the colour of an old man’s teeth and with a coffee stain shaped like the map of some imaginary country, had been white when he received it.
“It’s from the Isle of Skye. Mom bought it from an old Macleod who spoke mostly Gaelic. She told her that each family had a unique pattern that acted as a signature to identify the fisherman who wore it. If he was drowned, and battered on the rocks, he would be recognized by his sweater.”
That sounded to her like the kind of thing that sold sweaters to tourists. He wore it raking leaves, playing Frisbee and football, and tobogganing. He had worn it until there were holes in the elbows, and he patched those holes with green, orange, and brown yarn he’d woven into a tight knit. Though he might not recognize the pattern if the sweater was lost, the patches he added had made it unique and recognizable as his.
A few days later Benny returned the track pants and T-shirt but kept the sweater. He never asked for it back.
15
Forest Garden
On the hottest day of the summer Lina and I decide to make raspberry jam. Across the road is a clear-cut that slopes toward the valley. Out of the thin, gravely soil and mounds of too-small logs left behind grows a tangle of raspberries, alders, and skinny birch. The wild raspberry canes push through the piled logs, now soft with rot, and knot them in place. We pick berries into baskets hanging from our necks with sisal we cut off the straw bales in our garden.
Once we have eight quarts we walk back and pour the mushy berries into a pot and add sugar. The sugar feels like sand against the wooden spoon as I stir it on the stove outside. Sugar-filled steam rises from the pot and lands on us as we stir the bubbling jam. We both have our shirts off and I try — I really do — to keep my eyes averted from the drops of sweat beading between Lina’s breasts.
“It’s kind of hard for me to focus on making jam,” I say.
“Focus on what you need to,” she says as she bumps my hip and smiles. “I’ll look after the jam.”
Why can’t I simply tell her how I feel?
“I love what we’re doing here,” she says.
It’s dark by the time we pull the final batch of jars out of the canner. We spread the last, half-filled jar on flaxseed bread from the bakery in Middleton, with Jersey butter we bought from the Reaghs.
A big moon beckons us to stay outside. Lina suggests going for a swim, so we put our shirts on and go down the hill to the pond. We stop talking as we pass the cemetery. On the shore she slithers out of her shorts and T-shirt as if shedding skin. I pull off my shirt but leave my shorts on. She looks at me and smiles.
“Coming?”
My heart is rowdy as I stand as naked as I dare in front of her. She turns and wades in. She stops when her bum, taut muscles curving up to her sacrum, is half submerged. Then she dives, arching like a porpoise, her calves and pointed toes disappearing with hardly a wave. When she emerges she calls in a whisper.
“Take off your gotch and get in here!”
I walk in with my shorts on. We swim in the moonlight as silently as we can, keeping our hands underwater so they won’t splash. I get her to float on her back while I grind the soles of my feet in the coarse sand and cradle her, my hands under her neck and knees, her breasts and belly on the surface. With my eyes I trace the tattoo snake spiralling around her belly as it shines in the moonlight. It lies coiled like a blue vein under her skin. The quicksilver washes over the flesh of her stomach, over her nipples, and brushes her long hair looking like fronds of kelp swaying.
Onshore I wrap her in a towel as she shivers.
“Don’t you like skinny-dipping?” she whispers.
“No.” My shorts are clammy.
We go back up the hill. I have to tell her sometime. When we get close to our place I count to three and dive in.
“There’s something — . It scares me shitless.”
She stops walking and puts her hand on my forearm. Her eyes are glistening in the moonlight.
“I’m afraid once I say it, everything will change. I love this summer.”
She doesn’t say, “Trust me,” she doesn’t say, “Tell me.” There’s a glitter in her eyes that makes me believe it’s going to be O.K., that she’ll go on liking me even if she might never love me.
“I, I was —” But I start to cry before I can finish.
She takes a half-step and puts her arms around me. I let her hold me.
“Lina, I’m in love with you.”
Her jaw drops and she swears. We continue past our place to our neighbour’s field of mown hay and sit under the moon. Finally, she turns to me.
“This has happened to me before. I make a good friend. Then he falls in love with me and the friendship is ruined.”
I want to argue, but the illusion of our simple life has been broken. My hope that she can love me has proven as fragile as a soap bubble.
Things fall apart, 1993
The last spring I lived at home, the final semester of my last year of high school, my father let his flower beds go. The tulips at the end of the driveway bloomed in April like an echo from the time when he was happy. For a week when I walked home from school I passed the fading tulips, watching their petals droop and fall to the ground, hoping he’d do something with them. I cut lilacs, purple and white, from the path to my old school and put them in a vase on top of the bureau in my room. I’d have to tend his flower gardens by myself.
I dug up the bulbs and stored them in a box in the garage, as we always had, then replanted the triangular bed with petunias. The lilacs took on a funky smell by the third day, a pungent note of decay, and I threw them out before the water grew stagnant.
I tended his peonies, roses, and dahlias all summer. I didn’t ask for help and Dad didn’t seem to notice. The purple-flowering clematis climbed the light pole of its own volition. The ants crawled on the pregnant peony buds, preparing them to open once again, and the roses bloomed provocatively whether or not he chose to smell them.
I was without a job that summer, choosing instead to stay home to be near Dad before I went to college. Perhaps I should have moved out, but it felt as if someone had clipped my wings and I could not fly in a straight line.
He was disinterested in me and in what I was doing. I stayed out of the house as much as I could. When I was home we circled each other like tired prizefighters in the twelfth round, morose and taciturn. Or I went to my room to read or smoke a joint and listen to Dad’s old records. Dylan, The Band, The Allman Brothers, Clapton, Bowie, The Who.
Since our last camping trip to Maine, he rarely asked me to go for walks with him, complaining of being tired all the time. When he did have the energy to go, he either overcompensated by being garrulous or he made no effort to talk and there were long silences I wanted to fill but couldn’t.
In the evenings, when my bedroom was stuffy with the day’s leftover heat, I sat on the back porch. Sometimes my friend Steve joined me and we listened to a ball game and talked. But I was usually content to be by myself, and on those nights I’d smoke some pot and brood. I liked sitting in the dark after washing the dirt and sweat off my skin from my day in the garden. The sun stayed stored inside me, radiating its heat outward as my skin cooled in the dark.
One night in early August I couldn’t sleep. I got a can of ginger ale from the fridge on my way out to the patio. I sparked up a joint and had been there less than ten minutes when the breezeway door opened behind me. I threw the joint on the flagstones and ground it out under my flip-flop. I stood too fast, tipping my chair backward with a slap on the stones. I bent to pick it up, then bumped the table with my hip.
“Smooth,” he said, then laughed.
It was the first time he’d sought me out in weeks. He held a bottle and placed it, along with two highball glasses he held with two fingers and his thumb, on the round table. Gin. How could he drink that straight?
“It’s too damn hot to be inside. I can�
��t sleep.”
He unscrewed the bottle and began to pour. He asked if I wanted some. I shook my head.
“Not your drug of choice?” He winked.
His breath was heavy as if he’d just come back from a jog. Something about the still night and him joking about catching me smoking dope made me feel closer to him than I had in a while. It made me take a chance.
“Do you think Mom left because of me?”
He looked at his glass and then at me.
“I got the feeling sometimes that she didn’t think I was all right,” I said.
“There’s nothing wrong with you, Bean.”
He hadn’t called me that for such a long time that my eyes filled with tears he couldn’t see.
“Something is wrong, though,” he said.
“With me?”
He shook his head. He poured himself a bit more and drained the glass.
“Tomorrow I’ll show you what to do with those raspberry canes. I’ve let them go and they need pruning.”
He picked up the glasses, wrapped his fist around the neck of the bottle, and disappeared into the house.
The next day I waited in the garden, but he never showed up.
Steve and I were wrestling on the lawn the day after my birthday. Dad came home as I pinned Steve. Dad got out of the car and stood staring at us as though he were trying to remember where he’d met us before. It was weird. I jumped off Steve and waved at him.
“Hey, Pop!”
He stared a moment longer, then yelled at me. “Stop your childish nonsense.”
He looked miserable as he turned and went inside. I felt like he had kicked me in the gut. I sprinted down the driveway and along the road. I kept running until I was exhausted.
My father was quiet at supper, solicitous, and he avoided my eyes. With my head cradled in one hand I pushed food around my plate with the fork. I could feel his eyes on the top of my head but I couldn’t look up. I went to my room and wept.
The noxious cloud that crossed between us that afternoon lingered like a bad smell. His anger came and went without obvious provocation. It was inexplicable to me. I had passed through some door of my childhood and was being pushed into a dark space as the door locked behind me. He moved into the spare room in the basement with its pull-out couch in front of the TV.
The Rest is Silence Page 11