The Opening Sky

by Joan Thomas

  Down at the end, the elevator opens to reveal Sylvie, standing alone among the loops of tinsel. She’s wearing her second-hand Cowichan sweater, her bright hair hanging to her shoulders. Not crying – she looks drained of emotion. Her face is filling out, he thinks in surprise. There’s an almost matronly look about her, all her exuberance dialled down. There she stands in a cage of yellow light, her backpack slung on one shoulder, motionless as in a diorama: a future Sylvie.

  2

  Never Explain, Never Apologize

  TWO CHRISTMAS GIFT BAGS SIT ON LIZ’S OFFICE chair. She lifts them to the desk, not bothering to peek inside, and switches on the monitor to check her calendar. A private appointment at noon – that’s her yoga class – otherwise, the day is wide open.

  Will she tell the staff today? She unwinds her scarf and sits down to think. It would be great to have one less thing to fret about through Christmas. But she’s got to be calm about it, and matter-of-fact. A touch of wry wit. She’s not there yet. Are you taking this as a personal failure? Aiden asked last night. Failure? Liz said. When have I ever pretended to have any influence over Sylvie? But the whole thing is bound to reflect badly on her. It’s just a fact – even people who like her and respect her will have a little laugh at her expense. So who in Liz’s shoes wouldn’t be anxious?

  Two nights ago, when Aiden brought Sylvie home with him from the office, her eyes were swollen from crying. He wouldn’t say what it was – he wanted Sylvie to say it – while meanwhile dread was building in Liz’s chest and she was getting more and more frantic.

  They were standing in the kitchen and Sylvie still had her big sweater on. Finally she burst out, “I’m pregnant!” and Liz felt a brutal twist in her gut at this fresh evidence of Sylvie’s ability to surprise and subvert, and then fury at herself. Of course she was pregnant. One glance at her silhouette, at the new plumpness in her throat, and it was as plain as the nose on your face.

  They ended up not eating the lamb stew Liz had thawed. They sat in the living room for a long time with the lights dimmed, no fire in the fireplace but the Christmas tree glowing and twinkling. Sylvie sat on the sofa beside Aiden, Liz close by on the hassock, and she sobbed and sobbed. It was years since Liz had seen Sylvie cry. It gave her the face she’d had as a baby. Five months? Liz thought. “We need to wait for the ultrasound,” she said several times. The doctor had to be wrong. “You will be astonished, the love you will feel for this baby,” Aiden said at one point. “In no time at all you will not be able to imagine your life without her … or him.” Which was not a direction to take, in Liz’s view. Surely, surely, if the ultrasound came back saying too late, Sylvie should be encouraged to consider adoption?

  In any case, Sylvie took the conversation in a direction no one could have predicted. “You don’t get it.”

  “What don’t we get?”

  “He would never have children, at any time. He’s into vehement.”

  “He’s vehement about it?”

  “No! He’s into VHEMT – the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. He signed the pledge.”

  They stared at her in confusion. Liz was the one who understood first. “Oh, Sylvie,” she said. “One little baby is not going to change things for the whole planet.”

  “It’s not ‘one little baby.’ ” She directed this at Aiden, as though he was the one who’d said it. “This baby will have a carbon footprint equal to fifty kids in Bangladesh. This baby might go on to have kids of its own!” And then she turned that rage on Liz: “Stop looking at me!”

  Oh, Sylvie. Eventually Liz said, “You should have something to eat. We should all eat.” So they went back to the kitchen and she made a pot of tea and they had bowls of cereal, because that was all Sylvie wanted. They stood in the warmth of the under-cabinet lighting and Sylvie leaned against the counter eating Cheerios, telling them how hungry she had been for the past few months.

  “I knew I was gaining weight,” she said. “But I was trying to listen to my body. You know, trying not to listen to all the media shit about being thin. Eat! Eat! my body was screaming. And so I just kept eating.”

  “Your baby will be better off for it,” Liz said.

  “But let us see, honey,” Aiden said, and she opened her sweater and smoothed her T-shirt over her belly. They all stood close, and Liz felt a lift, the honey-sweet thought that maybe this would be a new time for her and Sylvie.

  But five months along! Their family already sounds completely out of control, and the longer she waits, the more she’ll have to explain. Liz sits with her eyes on her calendar and tries to think. We’ve had a bit of a surprise on the family front, she’ll say. She’ll start with Genevieve, her deputy, and work her way down. As soon as she’s had a word with the mail clerk, she’ll wish them all a merry Christmas and send them home. They’re expecting a three o’clock closing; if she lets them go at two-thirty, they’ll rush away with gratitude at the top of their minds.

  She hangs up her coat and sets into the job she’s decided on: tidying her computer files, something mindless to fill the morning. Chris and Maggie Oliphant, she thinks as she clicks and drags. They’re coming over at seven-thirty – Sylvie set it up. Liz will finally meet Noah. Please, God, let him be a nice guy, let them be reasonable people. Sylvie’s promised to be home for dinner and they’ll have a chance for a good talk before the others arrive. Just to make sure they’re on the same page about everything. A good talk, Liz thinks hopelessly as she clicks and drags.

  At eleven-thirty she puts on her coat, says to Megan, “I’ll be back around one,” and heads for the elevator. The yoga studio is a ten-minute walk up Bannatyne. You won’t be able to operate the way you’ve been operating, Liz is saying to Sylvie as she strides along under a pale sky. Your life will change more than you can imagine.

  The class is overcrowded and the teacher is aggravating, but being there quiets her mind somewhat. When she comes out afterwards, snow is falling in sticky clumps. Karen Kemelmen, the accounts clerk, is standing outside their building having a cigarette. “Get your shopping done?” she asks.

  “I had a meeting, actually,” Liz says. She’s carrying a laptop case with her yoga gear in it. You have to get up early in the morning to outfox Liz Glasgow.

  She eats at her desk. Just before two she makes a cup of mint tea and sits composing herself. Then Karen appears in the doorway with Genevieve and Marietta, the new receptionist. They’re making Christmas rounds, passing out chocolate truffles.

  With a flourish, Karen presents a gift bag to Liz. Nestled in red tissue paper is a heavy lump, about the size of a goose egg, made of plasticized clay. Liz sets it upright on her desk. It’s a fertility symbol – that headless, armless goddess you see in women’s studies textbooks, all boobs and belly.

  “My goodness,” Liz says.

  “I know, isn’t it amazing?” Karen says. “I saw it and right away I thought of you.”

  “Karen, I’m guessing you’ve never read SERC’S mission statement,” Genevieve says.

  Megan, the administrative assistant, hears them laughing and drifts in, followed by a couple of staff from the cubicles. They discover the truffles and set into them.

  Liz stands by her desk chatting reflexively. It’s hard to keep her eyes off Karen’s gift. It’s a monstrosity, but also eerily apt. Karen Kemelmen has a crude sort of intuition, Liz has noted it before. “Let’s see what else Santa brought me,” she says, reaching for the gift bags she found on her chair when she came in.

  The first is a big slab of soap, from Cynthia. “Smells good enough to eat,” she says, passing it around. Glances are exchanged. Cynthia’s been selling homemade cosmetics from her desk for several months now, and they all wonder if Liz knows and how long she’ll let it go on. She can read them like a book.

  The other is a lovely bottle of port covered, as it should be, with fine dust. A gift from Genevieve. “Oh!” Liz says, truly touched. “I’ve been longing for port. I was so sorry I didn’t bring any home from Portugal las
t year.”

  “I bought it in Coimbra,” Genevieve says. “I know you loved Coimbra.”

  “You are such a sweetheart,” Liz says. She catches her assistant’s eye. “Megan, do we have any plastic cups?”

  By the time they’ve moved on, Liz’s cheeks are warm and the weight of her worry has lifted a little. And, she sees with dismay and relief, it’s almost three o’clock. She waters her Christmas cactus and her weeping fig, then sits down to the computer and pulls up the template for an all-staff bulletin. The Sexuality Education Resource Centre will close at 15:00 today and reopen 8:30 December 27. Wishing everyone a safe and happy holiday, etc.

  The first thing Liz notices when she walks into the house is the reek of fake-lemon cleaning fluid, drowning out the woodsy smell of the Christmas tree. She opens a few windows and gets the rice started (brown rice – it takes forever). While it simmers, she walks the house, checking ledges for dust, trying to scuff the vacuum tracks out of the rugs. This cleaner is new. Liz has met her only once, but her resentful presence hovers in the hall. Her mission statement, according to Aiden, is If you really gave a shit, would I be cleaning your house?

  The dog sticks close to Liz, assisting in the inspection. They pause in the entrance to the living room, where they’ll sit tonight. It’s a gorgeous space, their living room, entered through what they call “the archway,” which is really a square opening for double pocket doors between the front sitting room and the back. The back sitting room, with its bay windows and fireplace, is the space they use most – their whole life together is in this room. And now this gathering, a meeting that no one in their wildest dreams could ever have foreseen.

  Liz stoops to pick a piece of tinsel from the rug. She stands for a minute looking out into the backyard. All three of their beautiful elms have fluorescent orange dots painted on their trunks. The spots of death – they mean the city will be taking them out. Those trees are 120 years old; you’d lie on the ground under the largest one and its height would make you dizzy. It doesn’t bear thinking about. Why couldn’t the city have marked them on the other side so they didn’t have to look out at those orange dots all winter?

  She turns back to the room and her eyes seek out the jar of bittersweet she gathered herself in the Pembina Valley, and the Day of the Dead figure on the mantel. She’s momentarily consoled by them, by the subtle way they pick up the Christmas aesthetic. Liz has a playful style but she respects the rules of colour and proportion, which is where many people go wrong with an eclectic decor. It might not be right out of House Beautiful, but their home is crammed with personality, unlike, say, Carmela Soprano’s bleak nouveau riche mansion. Where, as a matter of fact, Liz has begun to picture the Oliphants, lounging on recliners in front of their mammoth plasma TV.

  Back in the kitchen, she opens a can of lentils and drains them. She’ll make that rice and lentil dish that Sylvie considers comfort food – rentils, they call it. She grates the Parmesan and snips a pile of oily sun-dried tomatoes with the kitchen shears.

  The front door opens and the dog patters up the hall. It’s not Sylvie, it’s Aiden; she can hear him talking to the dog. She reaches into the freezer for her homemade pesto, breaks a chunk out of the Ziploc bag. They just have to get through tonight. Tomorrow she’ll bring her paperwhites out of the cold storage room and put them on the kitchen window ledge, and they’ll have the miracle of delicate spring flowers blooming at Christmas. Everything will be better tomorrow.

  The pesto melts greenly in the frying pan and Liz stands with spatula in hand, wondering what the hell that crazy hope was based on.

  At 6:45, Liz and Aiden finally sit down to dinner.

  Aiden helps himself to spinach salad, picking through it to avoid the mandarin oranges. “Did you check to see if she texted you?”

  Liz nods, she sighs. “I could kill that girl. We need to talk. We know nothing about these people. And it’s such an emotional thing to have to discuss with total strangers.”

  “I keep picturing them as real Tory types. I don’t know where I got that, given their son’s politics.”

  “I do too! I wonder why.”

  “Well, they live in River Heights. And they own a clothing store. Do you know many pinko entrepreneurs in River Heights?”

  A clothing store. Liz serves herself a tiny portion of rentils, and while she eats, her eyes wander the kitchen, lingering on the fretwork half-doors where a pantry used to be. She’s startled on Maggie Oliphant’s behalf by the sight of a toilet just visible behind those half-doors. One day she was at an auction in the little village of Saint Clements when the Catholic church was being demolished, and she came home with the confessional booth disassembled in her hatchback. At the time they were trying to figure out how to retrofit a bathroom into the main floor. It was perfect in every way.

  “You know,” Liz says, “it’s an awful thing to say, but this makes me glad my mother is gone. I can’t help it. She’d see someone who’d been happily married for twenty-five years, and she’d drop her voice and get that awful smug expression on her face and say, ‘She got into trouble. They had to get married.’ ”

  Aiden picks up the wine bottle and Liz slides over her glass. “And then there was us,” he says.

  “Yeah, then there was us.” Well, they did have that hand-fasting ceremony in the living room – their neighbour Wendy’s idea, some sort of Scandinavian tradition. Liz was wearing an empire-waist frock that showed off her pregnant tummy. Her mother arrived in a pink mother-of-the-bride suit and hat, trying gamely to turn the occasion into something it wasn’t.

  “I keep wondering how the Oliphants are feeling,” Liz says. “But that’s crazy. It used to be the boy who was blamed when this happened. For ruining your daughter. Now it’s the other way around. They’ll be thinking she’s stupid, or she trapped him on purpose.”

  “They’ll be fine once they meet Sylvie,” he says.

  She wants to grab his ears and give them a sharp twist. A force of nature, he always calls Sylvie, as if she can do no wrong. Since the news broke two days ago, not a word has been uttered about the trip to France, the fact that Liz paid a deposit of two hundred euros on the apartment in Sarlat, the fact that just that day she’d bought their airline tickets. For the very week this baby is allegedly due. Liz is no more selfish than the average individual. She grasps the scale of things. She doesn’t need much, just, Liz, I know you had your heart set on that trip. That’s all.

  “Great supper,” he says.

  “Umm.”

  “You went to a lot of trouble.”

  “Well, what else can I do?”

  “What indeed.” He changed before supper, while they waited. He’s wearing his best jeans and a soft white cotton shirt Liz bought for him at a kiosk in a market. You can see how worried he is in the set of his mouth. His hair is a colour no one could name: sandy hair turning grey. It looks poignant to Liz, old age creeping up on boyishness. At this moment it’s hard to hold anything against him.

  “I’m trying to keep calm,” she says. “I forced myself to go to yoga, but it was so bloody crowded. The woman beside me wouldn’t use a proper mat. She was working on a little cotton towel and she kept slipping. She toppled into me twice during the standing poses.”

  “You should have said something.”

  “I did. I said, ‘You know, the studio provides yoga mats.’ And here she’s one of those chemical sensitivity types, she says, ‘I can’t use synthetics because of the off-gassing.’ Oh, whatever, it was just too crowded. On the way out I said to the teacher, ‘You need to put a cap on class size,’ and of course she gets all self-righteous and says, ‘You’ve obviously never done yoga in India.’ ”

  “You’d think everybody would be out shopping.”

  “Christmas drives them to yoga. It’s the shtress of the season.”

  “Oh, Jade was teaching.”

  Poor Aiden, he knows her rants by heart. Feel the shtrength as you shtretch. Liz used to think this annoying speech affect
ation was just yoga teacher Jade (it’s her shtick, as Aiden put it), but now she’s hearing it everywhere from a certain age and class of woman. There’s always something in yoga.

  Well, there’s always something in everything. When she was in high school, in synchronized swimming, her coach would stand on the edge of the pool in a tangerine Speedo and chant, “Synch or swim, synch or swim,” which made no sense whatsoever. And again, she notes, savouring the taste of a sun-dried tomato on her tongue, she is thinking about synchro in the same breath as yoga, when actually it’s different in every way possible – the fact that in yoga you are constantly reminded to breathe while in synchro it’s the reverse, and the fact that yoga is from a realm so foreign to her mother that even from the grave she can have no opinion about it, whereas her mother was in love with Esther Williams and the aqua-musicals. Her mother’s enthusiasms always involved things that eventually mortified Liz, in this case the rubbery bathing caps with lurid lime-green flowers, the grotesque nose plugs, and figures like the kip split: head down in the pool and frantically sculling, Liz and the other girls would slowly, slowly spread their legs in synchronized display, presenting a pornographic row of slashes sheathed in Lycra to the dads and boyfriends drooling from the bleachers.

  Yoga, it seems, is not about displaying anything. It’s about – well, she really couldn’t tell you what it’s about. But today, for a moment, she got it. At the end, in Savasana, when her petty irritations suddenly fell away and she lay quietly feeling her stomach move up and down. The thought of all those people breathing in the dark, that was what calmed her. All their ragged thoughts floating above them. She didn’t sink very deeply into her own self, but she tuned into them: thirty women and a few men lying vulnerable, side by side on the studio’s tiled floor. That in itself was helpful. Who knew the pains and troubles being borne by the brave strangers in that windowless room? How tragic was her situation in comparison to theirs?