by Rose Tremain
‘Do you like danger?’ asked Leota.
The Deli scratched his cropped head. ‘I guess,’ he said. ‘I guess.’
When they got to the Falls, The Deli parked neatly and said: ‘Shall I wait in the car, Mrs Packard? Do you want to be alone?’
‘No,’ said Leota, ‘I certainly do not want to be alone. I never would go to the Falls alone.’
They got out of the car and Leota, who felt as frail as a bird, took The Deli’s arm. The day was windy, but the roar of the cataract was still huge above the wind. Walking towards it, Leota told The Deli that Packard used to stand on the far right, where the grassy bank of the Niagara River tapers towards the precipice. She remembered that he used to lean far out over the rail and gaze at the translucent jade of the lip where, for an instant, the water still reflects the light before it foams white and is gone. She led The Deli to this exact spot and the two of them looked down. Leota let go of the boy’s arm and held tightly to the rail. She thought the wind might easily snatch at her and hold her on an eddy above the spray, before letting her fall.
After only a few moments, The Deli said: ‘When you get here, when you see it again, you have to admire those stunters, don’t you, Mrs Packard? Imagine going over the edge in a barrel? Holy shit!’
Leota said: ‘The first person to try it was a woman. Did you know that, Steve? She was called Annie Taylor and she’d been a schoolteacher.’
‘Did she make it? Did she survive?’
‘Yes, she did. I think it was in about 1901. She was a heroine for a while, till people just forgot about her. And that’s the trouble with stunts. People’s memory for them is short.’
‘Well, I admire those stunters. I couldn’t do it. Could you, Mrs Packard?’
Leota stared for a long time at the great spectacle that Packard had been so proud to know and which had comforted him with its grandeur. Eventually, she said: ‘I don’t know, but if I did I wouldn’t want to be locked in a barrel in darkness. I’d want to go over in something transparent – like a giant bubble – so that I could see everything and know what was happening to me every second of the trip.’
That evening when the stars came out, Leota made herself a Martini and took it out into the yard, where she sat down on the tin chair. She’d given up looking for the waterfall star, but she chose a black space in the sky and imagined Packard as a cloud of Lonely Gas within it. The Martini tasted fine. ‘Pack,’ said Leota, ‘you were wrong about Steve Cairns. I do believe you were – and so was I. Steve was just going through a craze for hating the world, as anyone could, but it’s lessening.’
Leota finished the Martini. She didn’t know why Martini glasses had to be so small.
She took off her visor and looked at Packard’s invisible gas cloud with an unprotected eye. ‘He’s learned to drive,’ she continued. ‘That takes application and you wouldn’t bother with driving lessons – that’s what I think, anyway – unless you planned to go someplace and see some sights. And then, Pack, he told me he admired the stunters. He doesn’t see them as boobies. Not at all. He sees them as brave people. So there you are. You thought you had an ally in Steve and I thought I had an enemy and both of us were wrong.’
As she went back into the house and made herself a second Martini, she felt defiant, as if something had at last been resolved. But when she woke up the next morning, she didn’t know why she’d felt this. Nothing was resolved. She’d seen another side to The Deli’s character, that was all. She was relieved of the burden of referring to him as The Deli and of wanting to send him off to the moon. But the fact of Packard’s anger still remained. And now she saw, for the first time, that it may have had a dimension to it that she’d never acknowledged: in coming to despise so much in human endeavour, he must also have come to despise her. He’d seen how inadequate and false was her vision of her Southern childhood, how unenquiring her Georgia mind. He’d nagged and nagged at her to take off her visor. He’d told her a hundred times that she failed to see things as they are, Leota.
She felt bleak. She wanted to say to Pack: I disapprove of killing something as beautiful as a tiger, to grind its bones to some dust or other, of course I do. And a world where women have to sell their blood or their hair or their bodies to buy bread can’t be ajust place. Even I can see this. And I’ve always seen it.
No, says Pack’s voice. Don’t lie. Even now, when you should see the past as it was, you see gnats and fireflies and golden light. You’ve insulated yourself, with the money I made from trash, with your house in a good clean neighbourhood, with the sweet shade of purple you’ve coloured all the seasons . . .
The word ‘trash’, among all the vexing words of Packard’s, was the one that started to haunt Leota most. She looked round her house. It was orderly and warm and comfortable, with quite a few objects of beauty in it. And it was built on a plastics fortune. It was built on products Packard had found worthless.
Leota went into the kitchen. She stared at all the plastic appliances, each with its one and only function of saving her labour and time. And she thought: if I could just see what all the time had been saved for, then I would know what to do with the rest of my life.
She couldn’t see. She sighed her child-like sigh and began putting her dirty washing into the machine. These mundane things had to be done, even though a person felt bewildered and lost. In a Moscow kitchen, a young woman ties a scarf round her head and puts bones into water for a soup. She does it because she has to go on.
But why go on? Why?
Leota didn’t hear Steve knocking at her back door. Or perhaps she heard? Perhaps she said ‘Come in, Steve’? She didn’t remember. All she knew was that Steve was suddenly there in her kitchen. He was leaning against the washing machine, talking about Japanese cars. Then Leota said: ‘Steve, fill the powder dispenser for me, will you, dear?’
‘Sure,’ he said. But he didn’t fill it. He held the round plastic powder dispenser in his hand and showed it to her.
‘Look,’ he said.
‘At what?’ said Leota.
‘At this,’ said Steve. ‘You’ve got the perfect blueprint here – for your Niagara bubble.’
She hardly wanted to let Steve out of her sight after that. She said: ‘I know you have to attend school, dear, and smoke and play music and so forth, but you’ve masterminded the rest of my life and I want you to supervise the plan every step of the way.’
He said: ‘You’re not serious, are you, Mrs Packard?’
‘Call me Leota,’ she said, ‘from now on. And, yes, of course I’m serious.’
They sat at her kitchen table, drinking Martinis and making drawings. She said: ‘We have to remember, Steve, the priority is visibility.’
‘And strength,’ he said. Leota said nothing.
He was good at calculations. He said the only thing he could do at school was Math.
‘What about History?’ asked Leota.
‘Trash,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it?’
They measured Leota and weighed her. Her head had shrunk another notch on her visor and her weight was down to 101 pounds. She was the size, Steve said, of a twelve-year-old person.
It was autumn already – six months since Packard’s death – when Leota and Steve drove in Mrs Cairns’ Toyota to the plastics factory and Leota asked to see the manager, Ron Blatch.
‘Ron comes on breezy,’ said Leota to Steve, while they waited on imitation-leather chairs for Ron to appear, ‘but his home life’s a mess.’
He came in smiling and shook Leota’s hand and said it was always a pleasure to see her. She introduced him to Steve and he was, as she knew he would be, courteous to him. She was glad, nevertheless, that Steve was wearing a polo neck that day and that Ron couldn’t see his tattooed heart so close to the jugular.
She told Ron Blatch that she was funding a stunt, an attempt to shoot the Falls in a plastic bubble, and that she wanted the factory to make the bubble according to a preliminary design.
Steve produced the drawings
that now showed a contraption five feet in diameter and built of transparent air-filled tubing, laid in a circular coil and encased in a clear plastic ball. At its top was a watertight escape hatch that could be opened from both inside and out. Bolted to the ball was a harness made of plastic fibre.
Ron Blatch took out his glasses and put them on. He stared at the drawings. Then he smiled and took his glasses off again and shook his head.
‘Stunting’s illegal now, the whole length of the Niagara,’ he said. ‘It’s banned absolutely.’
‘We know that, Ron,’ said Leota. ‘We know that . . .’
Ron looked at Steve. ‘So who’s planning on breaking the law?’
‘Well . . .’ said Leota.
‘No one,’ said Steve. ‘This is not for personal gain or glory. It’s gonna be for charity and charity stunts can be allowed.’
‘Ah-huh?’ said Ron. ‘Like which charity?’
‘The aim,’ said Leota firmly, ‘is to do something in memory of Packard. He was a good man. He minded about the world and Packard Plastics have made life better for thousands of people.’
‘Sure,’ said Ron.
‘But he was unquiet,’ continued Leota. ‘He was afraid that Canadians had lost their reverence for the natural world, for the things they can’t contain and control . . .’
‘The Falls are contained OK,’ said Ron, smiling. ‘Seventy-five per cent of their power is taken by the hydro-electric companies.’
‘I know that,’ said Leota, ‘but still they’re not quite tamed, are they? And, to Pack, they came to symbolise all the things he was afraid we’d lost.’
‘I know he loved the Falls,’ said Ron, ‘but I can’t break the law for him and you haven’t mentioned which charity you’re doing this for.’
Leota looked at Steve. She hoped his mathematical mind was working on a formula. After a moment’s silence, he said: ‘It’s to help the old, Mr Blatch. The old are a despised group these days. It’s to benefit them.’
Ron rubbed his eyes. He said nothing, but put his glasses on again and stared at the drawings in his hands. Leota thought that he wasn’t really looking at them, but only pretending to look at them while he decided what to say and do.
‘Ron,’ she said, ‘Pack was good to you, wasn’t he? Fair to you all, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes.’
‘So build this for him. Will you? And don’t ask any more questions?’
Ron Blatch looked up. His expression was blank and dumb and Leota felt suddenly sorry for him. He might have liked to go home and talk this over with his wife and get her opinion on whether or not he was about to break the law, but his wife had run off with her fencing teacher and that was that.
‘OK,’ said Ron.
Leota knew that it would take the company some time to manufacture the bubble. Special moulds would have to be made; Steve’s calculations would have to be fed into the firm’s computers. So she also knew that she had time to think carefully about what she was planning.
The nights were getting cold. She laid her light-boned body on the couch and listened to a little light Schubert and tried to weigh her own death against the sweetness and beauty of the music.
She decided there must be some sort of balance between wanting to live on and wanting to leave the world in a bubble. Yet what I see is the bubble. Only that. I don’t see any future at all. The future of Leota Packard is as empty of everything as a Pethcot square. The future is a chair and me on it and my head on my hands.
She dozed and dreamed. The lighter her frame was becoming, the more she floated on sudden little currents of sleep.
One evening, she woke to find Steve in her living room. He was sitting on her Persian rug, rolling a cigarette. When she focused on him, she saw that he looked pale and anxious.
‘Leota,’ he said. ‘Something terrible’s happened.’
‘All right, dear,’ she said. ‘Wait here.’
She went to the kitchen and made two Martinis. She came back into the room and gave one of them to Steve. She sat down opposite him and the two of them sipped the drinks in silence for a moment.
Then Steve said: ‘They’re sending me away.’
‘Away?’ said Leota. ‘Who is and where?’
‘My parents. To some frozen school up near Alaska. My dad says he can’t stand the sight of me another day. I think it’s my knees that freak him out. The tits expand when I sit down. I guess you noticed?’
‘Yes, I did, dear. And your mother?’
‘She doesn’t say anything. She clings on to Dad’s arm. He says every line that’s on her face I’ve put there.’
‘I haven’t noticed many lines. She’s a good-looking woman.’
‘I know. But that’s what Dad says.’
‘When are you leaving, Steve?’
‘Next week.’
‘Well, I’m very, very sorry. A frozen school near Alaska sounds like an awful place. And you’re very thin. I’d better give you some of Pack’s old woollen sweaters to take with you.’
‘Thanks,’ said Steve, ‘but what about the bubble?’
Leota sat very still and looked around her room and then out of the window, where a November rain was falling.
‘I don’t know, dear,’ she said. ‘I don’t know. But you’re the one we must worry about.’
That night, Leota couldn’t sleep. She blamed herself for what was happening. For so long, she’d wanted to send Steve to an icy place outside her world and now he was going there. She’d willed it, out of fear and loathing, and now that all her fear and loathing had gone her will had started to prevail. ‘Leota,’ she whispered aloud, ‘you see everything too late.’
Pointless to cry, she thought. Crying’s for the boobies. So she decided to get up. It was two in the morning and cold in the house. She put on her peignoir and her satin slippers frayed at the heels and went out into the yard. She looked up at the sky and there, in the south, was the waterfall star. She remembered its name: Sirius.
It seemed almost blue, the coldest, bluest star in the galaxy. And it was large, as if it were nearer by hundreds of years than all the stars that surrounded it. Leota felt amazed that she could have searched for it for so long and not found it. It blinked at her – light refracted through time and the thousand imaginary cataracts of Packard’s mind. And then she heard Packard’s laugh exploding up there in its swirl of gas. ‘Stars move,’ he said, ‘and the world moves. You’ve never understood how each and every damn thing in the universe is changing every second of time. So from where you stand, Leota, this is a winter star.’
‘OK, Pack,’ she heard herself say, ‘I see it now.’
She’d always been an impatient person. As a child, when she woke before dawn, she used to yell at the sun to come up. And once she’d decided on a thing, she wanted to make it happen straightaway.
At eight, she called Steve and asked him to come by. He arrived at nine with his roller skates round his neck. Leota made coffee.
‘Steve,’ she said, ‘I’ve seen everything all wrong.’
‘What do you mean, Leota?’
‘Well. I don’t need the bubble after all. You see? It was typical of me to think about a bubble, to think about plastic protection, just like my old visor, but I don’t need it.’
‘What are you going to use, then? A barrel?’
‘No. I’m going to use nothing.’
‘Come on . . .’
‘It’s what I want to do. You won’t be able to put me off, so don’t try. I’m a Georgia girl and stubborn. But I need one last favour from you, dear.’
‘Leota . . .’
‘I want you to drive me there. If I went alone, I could lose my nerve. And I want to do it tonight. It has to be night, because I don’t want to petrify any Japanese or French tourist. And tonight feels good to me. So if your mother would very kindly lend you the Toyota . . .’
Steve got up. He put his roller skates on the floor and lit a cigarette. He walked to the window and smoked silently for a mome
nt, then he turned and said: ‘I want to be absolutely clear what you’re telling me.’
‘I’m telling you that I’m sorry,’ said Leota. ‘Sorry for everything. Sorry for all the things I didn’t properly understand and sorry, in particular, that you’re being sent away to the moon.’
‘It’s not the moon,’ said Steve.
‘Near,’ said Leota.
‘It’s not enough,’ said Steve. ‘It doesn’t explain it.’
‘Well, it’s too bad,’ said Leota. ‘That’s all I can say. That’s it.’
He arrived in a pick-up truck. He said: ‘The days when I can borrow the Toyota are gone.’ He told Leota that the pick-up belonged to the father of a bass guitarist.
Leota had chosen her outfit carefully: clean white underwear and white socks; blue-pants, bought at Queens Quay, Toronto; a white silk blouse and a pale-blue wool jacket with a little silver monogram on the pocket; white shoes she normally only wore in summer. She’d washed and combed her short white hair and fixed two jade earrings to her still soft ear lobes.
‘You look nice,’ said Steve.
‘Thank you, dear,’ said Leota.
When they left, towards midnight Leota didn’t look back at the house that Packard had built for her and where, she had to admit, she’d been foolishly happy. She kept her eyes straight ahead on the moonlit road and all her mind was on the tiny particle of the future that remained. She and Steve didn’t speak until they turned off the main highway leading to the Falls and started down an old track that led nowhere but in amongst some trees and stopped at a barbed-wire fence. A hundred yards beyond the fence was the Niagara River. ‘I know this,’ said Steve, out of the darkness, ‘it’s a place where I’ve been.’
Leota didn’t ask what he’d been here for. Instead, she said: ‘It’s so very kind of you, dear, to help me in this way. I hope you won’t get into any kind of trouble on my account.’