We take our tents down and move into the cabin. What a difference. I sleep better because it’s always dry, especially once we have the wood stove lit.
We finish splitting and piling our winter’s wood supply against the cabin. On a warm afternoon in early October we walk through the woods to the pine grove. We make love on that spongy mattress, with bits of sun reaching the ground to keep us warm. I lie on my back. The pine branches have made room for one another over the past century, filling the sky but not criss-crossing, not getting in one another’s way. These trees have spent a century and a half learning how to live together. My arm is around Lina and her head is on my chest.
“Could you see living here a long time?”
There is something unattainable about her. It’s going to cause me pain.
“My father wanted me to have his name when I was born, but my mother wouldn’t let him. She’s a proud Wendat. Traditional. She wants me to come home and have a family.”
“Will you?”
“Maybe one day. I’m not through roaming.”
The sun moves behind the trees and I shiver in the shade.
Drowning, October 1994
The last night I saw my father he was dazed in the basement. It was Sunday night and I was headed back to college after coming home for the weekend. He had been drinking since suppertime. My ride was waiting out front as I went down to say goodbye. The car honked. Dad called me back from the hallway.
“How’d your exam go?”
“It’s not till tomorrow.”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry, I forgot.”
On the way back to Lowell I sat in the back seat of my roommate’s Civic, her friend in the passenger seat and some old Bowie playing too loud for me to hear what they were talking about. I didn’t care, stuck in my own thoughts as I was, except that they kept turning around to include me in the conversation and I had to make an effort to hear them above the music. We pulled up to the house and I went straight to bed.
October 25
When the phone rang the next morning, I was lying on my back with my eyes open. I went to the kitchen, past the cat, and took the phone from my roommate, Justine. Who is it? I mouthed at her.
She shrugged and said, “Ask them not to call so early next time.”
The radio was on, broadcasting the day’s news from the city. I took the phone.
It was the police. He was saying something about my father that I couldn’t hear. There was a ringing in my ears that hadn’t been there before he spoke. He said it again.
“There’s been an accident. Your father was found unconscious.”
Then the ringing stopped. I had to pull it out of him by asking if Dad was all right before he told me he was dead. It was as if I had been expecting it for a long time and it was only at that instant that the realization surfaced. He said I needed to identify the body, and I didn’t hear much after that because the word body floated through my head. Body, body, body.
“Do you want an officer to drive you home?”
I told him no and hung up. Justine was brushing her teeth. That is such an ordinary thing to be doing at this moment, this moment that is stretching so long. I didn’t want to have to tell her or anyone. As long as I didn’t say a word everything would be all right. But she could see something was wrong and I had to say the words, as awkward as they felt fluttering out of my mouth.
That’s not how it was meant to work, was it? To tell someone I barely knew that my world had capsized while she stood in front of a mirror getting ready for class. Where were the explosions and the blackouts and high winds knocking down trees? Justine hugged me but I was rigid; I was already calculating how to get the twenty-six miles home. There was a bus that didn’t leave until late that evening, but I had to get home sooner than that. If I had been in better shape I could have run it. A marathon.
Justine offered to drive me. She talked most of the way, lightening the atmosphere and keeping my mind partially diverted. It was a beautiful fall day and I felt crummy for liking it. We pulled into the driveway and I got out, then watched the car back onto the street for the hour-long drive back. I needed to be in the house first, before I went to the morgue, so I would have something familiar to hold on to before I saw him. The place was tidy and smelled like it had been recently cleaned. I had been associating death with disorder. The police officer had implied that Dad had killed himself, which I didn’t believe. I looked for a note on the counter, by the phone, on his desk. Nothing. But then I went upstairs to my room. The cover on my bed was neat and lying by the pillow were his skates, laced up and tied together.
Friends of his I didn’t remember came to the house the night after the funeral. There were cousins I had never spent much time with, Dad’s two siblings, a few of the teachers he had worked with, and a couple of students who had liked him. I assumed my mother would have to turn up, that she would walk through that door as suddenly as she had walked out of it. How could she not? As I stood in the kitchen that afternoon, after leaving Dad in a pine box at the church, I looked beyond each person I was talking to at the door. Her absence that afternoon stung more than the pine box had. My father’s death hadn’t solidified; I had spoken to him too recently to believe he was gone. But my mother? Wind whistling across an empty parking lot.
The darkness was gathering as the last guests left. I stood on the driveway looking at the garage door. I grabbed my hockey stick and a ball from the garage and started shooting it at the door, one-timing it again and again as it bounced back to me. Never again would I clean off the ball marks I was making. I ate some tuna casserole one of the neighbours had brought and went upstairs to bed. It was three nights before Halloween, the end of the year when the Celts say that the veil between this world and others is flimsiest. Things were dying, receding into the earth — that was obvious — and the air was crisp and clean. The living and the dead, what is spirit and what is flesh, more easily communicate when the veil is thin. I felt myself being tucked in. There was a pressure first at the sheets by my feet, then working its way up my back until finally my neck and shoulders were covered against the draft from the open window. I turned to the door, yellow with light from the hallway, but saw nothing.
A card from my mother arrived two days after the funeral, again in an envelope with no return address. She had heard about my father’s death from a friend and said she was sorry that I had to deal with it alone. She said she wasn’t well, that she had had a malignancy removed from her colon the previous summer, and that she would try to see me when she was feeling better.
Two weeks after the funeral I went home to bury my father. I picked up his ashes at the crematorium on the way. The clerk shook my hand and stared into my eyes without blinking. He handed me a heavy metal box over the counter as if I were buying a pizza. There was no way Dad was in that box.
It was late afternoon when I got to the house, and the sunlight was slanting through the kitchen window onto the counter where I had eaten all those breakfasts and carved pumpkins. The house was inhabited by a silence that was corporeal. I held the metal box filled with his ashes and bits of bone and struggled to remember what my dad’s voice sounded like. The harder I concentrated, the farther away it receded. I put side three of his copy of Quadrophenia on the turntable and turned it way up to drown out the quiet.
Later I got the shovel from the garage and headed out to the backyard. At one end of where the rink had been, behind one of the goals, was the apple tree I had given my father when I was nine. A dozen shrivelled apples that I hadn’t picked in October clung to its bare branches. I pushed the shovel into the ground beside the tree. Was this even legal? I folded the watercolour of Sam Peabody I had painted for him as well as a note the tooth fairy had left under my pillow, in his handwriting. You have lost your last baby tooth. Here’s 25¢. You are no longer a child.
I knelt beside the hole. I would have to sell the house; I’d never live there again and I could use the money. I pounded the ground and sw
ore out loud. It wasn’t money I wanted. If you have kids, you owe it to them to stick around, not disappear like a wisp of smoke. I lowered the box and the two pieces of folded paper into the hole. It wasn’t until I received that lame card from my mother that I felt really angry. Did she give him the idea — the permission — to do his own disappearing act? I wanted her to leave me alone. I threw dirt into the hole until it was full, then hammered the mound down with my fists. When I stopped, the indentations of my knuckles were on the surface.
I went back to school, got my degree, and two years later moved to New York. By the time I got there, my wish to be left alone had come true. My mother was dead of cancer.
19
New York City
Benny ran up the stairs again, gut-punched by nausea at the eleventh floor but carrying on. On the landing of the fifteenth she stopped, bent over gasping, and checked her pulse. Thirty beats in ten seconds. Her heart was ready to burst through her ribcage. Rachel was there already, doubled over with her hands on her knees, having finished a few seconds ahead of Benny. When Benny’s heart slowed down, she was able to revel in the blood coursing through her limbs and the breath heaving into and out of her lungs. They walked back down the stairs to start again.
“I love this feeling,” Benny said. “It’s the reason I run.”
“It’s for this that I run.” Rachel grabbed her own butt and laughed.
“There’s nothing wrong with your ass.”
“Nothing that running seventy miles a week won’t cure.”
Benny had met Rachel while running in the park late one afternoon. She caught up with a pack of women jogging together and spoke to the one nearest her.
“What running group is this?”
“Lesbian environmentalists.”
The woman was fast despite being short. She wasn’t straining herself as the others in the group huffed along, red in the face. Benny sped past them and carried on around the loop before heading home. She saw the woman again a few days later, running alone one morning. This time Benny had a difficult time catching up with her.
“Where are your tree-hugging girlfriends?” Benny asked once she had.
“They only run once a day. Wimps.”
“I usually run by myself,” Benny said.
“I noticed. When you passed us the other day I wondered if you’d be into running with me. I prefer company, but only if she keeps up with me.”
With that Rachel picked up her pace, moving ahead of Benny before she could figure out what was happening. When Benny caught up with her again, Rachel smiled as if Benny had passed a test. They ran together, saying little, the rhythmic pounding of their feet on the pavement and their exhalations serving as conversation. As they approached the path leading out to Fifth Avenue, Benny slowed her pace.
“This is where I leave,” she said.
They stopped and faced each other. The skin of Rachel’s cheeks and forehead was pocked from an adolescent bout with acne and her dark hair had the beginnings of dreadlocks, cut like a mop above her shoulders. It looked like she was her own barber. She wore a hoop ring through the right nostril of her pudgy nose. She held out her hand straight in front of her and Benny gripped it. After they told each other their names, Benny searched in vain for something else to say to prevent her hand from being let go. Time stopped. There was no sound, the trees had ceased to sway in the spring breeze, the birds were caught in mid-air. There was a runner frozen mid-stride on the road. Then, just as quickly, her hand was let go and she was returned to time’s irreversible march forward.
“I’m here every morning at quarter of seven,” Rachel said. “Rain, sleet, ice.”
Benny jogged crosstown, dodging cabs. She altered her training schedule to maximize her morning runs. She and Rachel were a boon to each other. Rachel was fast and pushed Benny further in her training than she would have gone by herself. Rachel ran 10K races in the park every second Sunday and was training for the marathon as well. Rachel liked Benny’s company since she didn’t like to run alone. Rachel studied herbalism at the New School, and once a week, after her classes, she ran uptown from the apartment she shared with her ailing grandmother on the Lower East Side to run stairs in Benny’s building.
Once they got to the first floor they started up again. Rachel pulled ahead. There was nothing wrong with her body. She was muscular and healthy.
Benny had won a spot on her college’s cross-country team after her father died. She trained hard and became as fit as she would ever be. Her abdominal pains recurred. Still no period. She started to see herself as separate from her body. She gorged on bagels and cream cheese, strawberry Pop Tarts, and Oreos before going to class. Sitting through class, she loathed herself for giving in. She stuck her finger down her throat if she could find a private bathroom. She tried Correctol, up to thirty in a day, but this got in the way of her training. She would go a day or two without eating, subsisting on nothing but pots of strong coffee. She went from feeling bloated and so full her stomach ached to an emptiness that could only be filled with more food. Or else she’d run and run and run.
It was her college classmate and friend, Alicia, who knocked her out of this cycle. Being the only women in most of their engineering classes, they sat beside each other. Near the end of term, during a physics lecture in which Benny kept dozing off, Alicia passed her a piece of lined paper torn from her binder, on which she had written, Purger or non-purger? Benny folded the note into a tiny ball without looking at Alicia and poked it into the back pocket of her jeans. She was awake now but couldn’t focus on the rest of the lecture. Alicia looked at her when the class ended, waiting for a response.
“What?” Benny said.
“Don’t fuck with me.” Alicia sounded fatigued.
Benny left the class and didn’t go back for the next week. She was lying on her bed when there was an insistent knocking at her door. She continued to count the marks on the ceiling and trace the cracks in its stark white paint. Alicia came in and sat on the edge of the bed. She stayed there a long time before speaking. She had been a purger, she said. Alicia made her an appointment at the university health service and soon Benny was admitted to a psychiatric clinic. Young women were bingeing and purging and starving themselves all around her, hiding from one another. She had group and individual therapy, but no matter how much she talked and was listened to, the void inside did not shrink. She wanted it filled.
She ran, adding more miles to her training. She wasn’t running as a means to punish herself, nor as a means to stay slim. She didn’t need running to do that. Her body, with its narrow hips and muscular limbs, was programmed not to gain weight. She ran because she felt disconnected from her body. Running hard connected her to it. It made her body real. She ran to inhabit a body in which she had never felt at home.
Now, she and Rachel ran the fifteen flights twice more, slowing each time, then agreed to call it quits for the night. They went back to Benny’s apartment.
“Do you want to have a shower?” Benny said.
“You forward little skank.” She punched Benny on the arm. “You wanna soap me up?” Benny blushed. “I’m teasing you. I’m going to run home. I’ll shower there.”
“At least stay for supper.”
“Can’t. Brian’s gonna meet me at my place. Gotta run home, and I don’t want to puke.”
Benny walked Rachel to the elevator.
“Brian?”
“A boy I like to shag from time to time.”
Rachel was smiling as the elevator doors closed.
20
Forest Garden
It’s January and we spend the morning trudging through the snow in the forest, cutting birch and maple, working together on either end of a crosscut saw. The low-lying area froze before the dump of snow we got last night. I slide on it in my boots.
“It’s like glass. We should come back with our skates.”
“I don’t know how to skate,” she says.
I tell her I will teach her.
We carry some of the logs back to the cabin and will get the rest tomorrow. Then we’ll buck the logs and split them into firewood for next year. I make a lunch of rice and beans and garlic on top of the wood stove while she reads poems to me. This winter we have been visiting Art at least twice each week. The only other place we go is Middleton, and then only when the roads are clear. Otherwise we stay at Forest Garden. I am enraptured, finding joy each morning when I wake. I have Lina all to myself.
She borrows a pair of figure skates from Jen and we walk back into the forest. I’m carrying a shovel. I lace her skates as well as mine, then lead her onto the ice. She stands for a few seconds before her feet slip out from under her. I help her up and she falls again, this time on her tailbone.
“Ow!” She sits on the ice, waving off my offer of assistance. “Just go and skate around and let me figure it out.”
I shovel a path curving around the little islands and outcroppings that shape the pond. My blades make a slicing sound on the smooth ice. Crystal Lake often looked as smooth as the ice under my blades, a mirror on which the lights from the houses surrounding it were reflected. As Lina gets up to try again I lean into the curves, turn backwards, revel in lush movement. Soaring on ice, especially on a pond, is the closest to flight I come. Skating allows me birdlike grace. I glance over at her but she isn’t getting it. Soon, she’s sitting on the bank and watching me.
She gives it a try again at the end of the month. The full moon shines off the snow. Lina is hesitant to go out in the cold again.
“You will remember this night forever if we go skating,” I say, “but not if you go to bed.”
The Rest is Silence Page 14