by Joan Thomas
Liz puts down her fork and surveys the kitchen again. Her beautiful kitchen with the warm cork floor in a checkerboard pattern of charcoal and cream, the craftsman cupboards, the high ceiling with its schoolhouse lights (real, not reproduction). If she were in the Oliphants’ shoes, if she had walked into this home for this sort of meeting, what she saw would run contrary to all her expectations. She’d know at a glance that it would not be simple to work out the whole story. She’d figure there had to be something a bit off, but it wouldn’t be easy to spot. Nothing like … her eyes catch the mark on the granite countertop, a stain in the perfect shape of Newfoundland, where vinegar was spilled and lay undetected overnight. Nothing as obvious as that.
They finish their dinner. Aiden goes to set up the fire and Liz feeds the dog. If the past is anything to go by, Sylvie will show up ten minutes late for the meeting and she won’t say a word about missing supper. Never explain, never apologize. Isn’t that what we all aspire to?
Liz loads the dishwasher and gets a plate microwave-ready for Sylvie, just in case. Just as she’s putting it in the fridge, the side door opens and Sylvie slips in. She goes straight down to the basement without so much as a hello. Liz’s emotions coalesce into a familiar helpless rage and she backs out of the fridge and tips the contents of Sylvie’s plate into the compost pail.
Straight down to the basement. Like a rude finger raised in Liz’s direction. She’s got a gorgeous second-floor bedroom with huge windows, but by choice she’ll hide in a cave favoured by a certain loathsome brown beetle you never see anywhere else in the house. Sleep on a musty futon where the damp of Red River clay sweats coldly through the floor and the walls. Shower in a thundering tin stall where the previous owner kept his cat litter. Screw you, she’s prepared to say to her mother, even now. Screw you and your so-called life.
Liz stands for a minute with the plate in her hand. She opens the freezer door and cold, stale-food air wafts out. She hears the basement shower start up and she turns her eyes to the tumble of plastic and tinfoil packages that make up her frozen stash. Stollen, she’ll serve the stollen she made for Christmas. She gets out the log and unwraps it. Breathe, she says to herself, leaning on the big butcher knife, feeling it sink in evenly. Not everything is about you. The basement suits Sylvie; down there she can believe she’s being subjected to Third World deprivations. Consider the Oliphants. No doubt true Chamber of Commerce types, and they’ve raised a kid who wants to wipe humans off the planet. Though apparently this doesn’t involve keeping it in his pants.
Liz wraps up the remaining stollen and stows it back in the freezer. She reaches into the fridge for the jar of homemade tapenade, calculating. There’s still Christmas and New Year’s.
Aiden is in the doorway. “Did I hear Sylvie come in?” he asks.
Liz tips her head towards the basement door. “Is this too much?” she asks, gesturing at the tapenade. “I don’t want to go overboard.”
“Looks okay to me,” he says. “But I’m not quite ready. I can’t seem to find the shotgun.”
“Oh, babe,” she says, and reaches for him. He lays his head on her shoulder and she says, “This is a kick in the gut, eh?” and he says, “It’s a kick in the balls, babe,” and they hug until she feels his warmth seeping into her. She’s afraid she’ll start crying and she lets him go.
When she’s alone again, she runs her fingers through her hair, looking at herself in the window of the microwave. Her reflection lifts its chin in the black glass. She knows how to run a meeting – it’s one of the things she’s best at. Aiden doesn’t do groups. It will be her; she’ll be the one who takes the lead.
They’ll offer wine first, but she’ll set up the coffeemaker just in case. She’s at the sink filling the carafe when headlights turn off the street and a grey minivan rolls up the driveway. There’s a fitting hesitation in the way the van drives up and stops, and in the slowness of the simultaneous opening of the front doors, and the gravity with which two people get out, in the manner of a gangster film or a funeral. Just two. The woman was driving. She’s wearing a red coat, Linda Lundström or a knock-off. She has a tangle of grey hair, but otherwise she’s a dead ringer for a legendary figure from Liz’s past, Mary Magdalene Calhoun. And then they’re moving towards the house and the mop of hair lifts, and Mary Magdalene herself looks up towards the window. She sees Liz peering out at her and produces a mournful smile.
Sylvie is just climbing the stairs from the basement, her fingers working her towel-dried hair up into an elastic. “Sylvie,” Liz says, “didn’t you say Chris and Maggie Oliphant? Isn’t that what you said?”
The front doorbell rings. “No,” Sylvie says, standing in the kitchen, her eyes averted. “I have no idea where you got that,” and Liz sees in her flushed face and the set of her shoulders that she’s known perfectly well all along.
3
Glad Tidings
SEVEN PEOPLE IN THE GLASGOW-PHIMISTER LIVING room for a meeting of the Montagues and the Capulets. The dog lies smugly on the rug, as though he’s just succeeded in rounding them all up. On the hearth a little fire dances. The Christmas tree is a seven-foot balsam from New Brunswick – not the most graceful tree in the supermarket parking lot, a balsam, but it is fragrant, and beautifully decorated, because Liz has a knack for that sort of thing. From her perch a red-cheeked, yellow-haired angel surveys the living room, the prickly bifurcated tip of the Christmas tree up the back of her papier-mâché skirt.
Sylvie’s in the swivel chair below, one leg tucked under her and one bare foot on the rug so she can give herself a shove whenever her terror threatens to reach up pudgy hands and choke her. She darts a glance at her mother, who’s sitting with her legs and arms crossed, and then she turns her eyes back to the man who’s talking. Someone she’s never met before – George Oliphant, Noah’s real father, one of those sad old hippies. He’s staring at her; they all are. Five parents in this room focused on her like hungry ghouls, gawking at her stomach and her boobs, suddenly swollen and voluptuous. Humiliation sears her throat like heartburn. For being Bristol Palin. Worse – for not knowing, for being the sort of girl who gives birth in a toilet at Walmart and says, I had no idea.
Aiden, on a corner of the couch, notes them all staring at Sylvie. But really, he thinks, who can blame them? His daughter, who always has a bloom about her, is incandescent tonight. Her jeans have a frank three-cornered tear on the thigh. She’s wearing her SORRY FOR WHAT’S ABOUT TO HAPPEN T-shirt, and the tender swelling of her tummy is plain as day. For a second this pregnancy seems a natural climax to all her adolescent transformations, which have taken him by surprise day after day. Then she gives her chair a little swivel and he sees how scared she is, and his own sadness laps at his rib cage. For all she’s losing, poor kid, for the cruel lesson she’s facing in the narrowing of things. He enjoyed twenty years of adult idylls before he had to deal with parenthood.
Five loving parents assembled now, but to be frank, the only ray of hope Aiden can see is Noah’s mother. When she stepped through the front door with Noah, sober-faced, behind her, he could have wept with relief at the sight. Not one of those toned, tanned, brittle, cruise-going Tory types – no, thank Christ, she was a comely, comfortable woman dressed in a loose tunic thing in rich colours, a woman with a warm smile and a confident voice and the calm light of self-knowledge in her eyes. And then Liz came down the hall and they were greeting each other – she was someone Liz knew!
MAGGIE: I was thinking about calling you. In the fall, when Noah first told me he was seeing Sylvie. And then he was gone, back to school, and it slipped away from me. Well, now we do connect. Whoever would have dreamt it!
LIZ: Mary Magdalene and I know each other through GAP.
AIDEN: GAP?
MAGGIE: The Group for Alternative Parenting.
AIDEN: Oh, yeah. Whatever that meant.
Maggie laughed politely and possibly reprovingly. Then they rose in Aiden’s mind, the GAP women who used to hang around this house
, a clowder of back-to-the-earth types wearing striped leotards under woollen skirts, their kids exuding an unfamiliar body odour from the chickpeas and tofu they were forced to subsist on.
“It’s just Maggie,” she said. “It’s been Maggie for a while. And this is Noah, of course. My big son, all grown up. Noah, go find Sylvie, honey. It’s fine, go on. Listen, I am so sorry Krzysztof can’t be here. He’s doing a seminar at the Banff Centre and we’re going to meet up in Calgary for Christmas.”
Taking Aiden’s arm familiarly, she bent down to unzip her boots and slip into the shoes she’d brought in a drawstring bag, all the while outlining the complications already plaguing their Christmas – the flying and driving in various directions across the country, and Krzysztof’s mother, who’d just moved in with them, and her own mother in Calgary, showing signs of dementia. And then suddenly she caught sight of the dog and bent over again, to pat him. “What a big head!” she laughed. “And look at his little hind legs! He’s like something out of a New Yorker cartoon.”
“He was sired by a warthog,” Aiden said. “That’s what we figure.”
“What’s his name?”
“Max.”
All the while, Liz stood there clutching Maggie’s red coat. “Maggie’s partner is Krzysztof Nowak,” she explained when she managed to catch Aiden’s eye.
“Oh gosh,” Aiden said. “Well. I didn’t put that together at all.” Krzysztof Nowak. A minor national celebrity whose Prairie Gothic films Aiden is vaguely familiar with, though he registers the guy largely for the overweening display of consonants in his name.
MAGGIE: But you never met Krzysztof, did you, Liz? Wasn’t he after your time?
LIZ: No, we met. He was at that party on the river. On Palmerston.
MAGGIE: Oh yeah, at Esme Gwynn’s. I remember.
AIDEN: Sorry, I’m not quite with the program here. You didn’t realize you knew Noah’s mom? All this time, since Noah and Sylvie started dating?
LIZ (heat gathering visibly around her eyes): Mary Magdalene’s little boy was always called Sparky. I’d totally forgotten his name was Noah. You met him in the summer, but I didn’t, remember? And I was thinking Maggie Oliphant. I could swear that’s what Sylvie said. (finally turning to Maggie) Why is Noah’s name Oliphant? Isn’t George Stonechild his father?
“George Stonechild,” Maggie said, as though she were telling a long, sad story just by saying his name. “George is his dad, all right. George’s real name was always Oliphant. He dropped the Stonechild thing a long time ago. Anyway, Krzysztof is the one who more or less raised Noah. And he and I have a little girl, Natalie. She’s just turned six. So she’s a Calhoun-Nowak. We’ve got four different surnames in the house – it makes the letter carrier crazy.”
She offered Aiden a tender, regretful smile and poked the tips of her fingers into her hair, elevating the silver cloud a half-inch. This is all good, he thought. (One of us, he couldn’t help but think.) Although Liz and the woman were stiff as hell with each other. And when they stepped into the living room, he saw to his surprise that Noah and Sylvie were sitting on separate chairs, not holding hands on the love seat as you might have expected. Noah had the hood of his fleece up monkishly.
“Noah,” Maggie said softly, and he looked at her and slid it back. Then the doorbell rang again and Noah said, “That will be my dad,” and Aiden saw Maggie’s equanimity slip. “He called me. He’s leaving for the States tomorrow, so I told him.”
“He’s got the right to know,” Sylvie added primly.
Aiden went back to the door. “Weren’t sure we could fit it in,” a tall man cried, springing into the hall with every assumption of intimacy. “Flying down to Texas first thing in the morning. George Oliphant.”
And this guy with his hand stuck out, greying hair hanging to his shoulders in some misguided homage to his youth, was also not entirely a stranger. Not that Aiden knew him by name, but it was a small city they lived in. Aiden would have seen him in lineups at the Folk Festival or buying bread at the Forks, could even vaguely picture him at younger stages. And here he stood in their own front hall, wiping his boots assiduously on the Afghan prayer rug, he and his tiny wife handing Aiden their jackets as he cried to the assembly at large, “Great to have a thaw this time of year.”
“Yeah, the polar bears are loving it!” Sylvie swivelled her chair impatiently.
“Leaving for Texas in the morning,” George repeated from the archway, rubbing his hands. “Going to stay through January. It’s always been a dream of mine to be part of the studio audience of Austin City Limits. It’s on my bucket list. Or what the hell is it they say now? You only live once. YOLO!” He was almost yodelling. “It’s on my YOLO list, Austin City Limits. Not as easy as it sounds – you can’t just go online and order tickets. Those Texas buggers want to keep the tourists out. They post the location a week before, and you got to know the city blind to find it. But I got a buddy in Austin. We’re going to get in – my buddy is confident.”
“They keep changing the concert venue?” Aiden asked stupidly.
“No, no, dude, the ticket wicket.”
George shook Liz’s hand and ogled Sylvie with avuncular appreciation. “Congratulations, kiddo! Noah is one lucky guy!” Then he turned to his son. “So, big guy! What’s all this?” and Noah got up with the courtesy Aiden had noticed when they met in the summer (though he kept his head down as if he was afraid a high-five might be coming his way) and offered his chair to his stepmother. Then he sat cross-legged at Sylvie’s feet and the dog wandered over and curled up beside him. George Oliphant arranged himself expansively in the leather armchair and turned his winsome face from one to the other with eagerness and satisfaction.
Turned his face a second time to Liz, who was just sitting down again. She looked away quickly. George Stonechild! With a wife like a miniature aged teenager, a wife named Patti, and his long, tapered braids gone, his dark hair shoulder-length now and showing some grey, but otherwise as good-looking and as absurd as ever. Her mind cast up a memory of carrying a sleeping Sylvie across a field, George Stonechild’s arm around her waist in ostentatious chivalry. But there was not a flicker of recognition in George’s eyes.
And Mary Magdalene Calhoun. Liz’s hands had been actually shaking when she took Noah’s mother’s coat. Maggie, Maggie Calhoun. She still has that gentle, precise way of speaking that asks you to drop what you’re doing, surrender to her tender gaze, and soak in every word. She’s still undeniably beautiful, though sporting a rough-woven anthropological ensemble that says everything about how stuck she is in the past. Resolutely, Liz drew courage from her own sleek outfit with its artful combination of neutrals, and from her lovely front hall with its one-of-a-kind prayer rug and the antique boot chest, from her knowledge that this house, which had been good when Mary Magdalene used to hold court from the Mission chair, was even better now, that it testified to Liz’s gradual transformation into a mature woman worthy of respect.
And sure enough, “What a great house” was the first thing Maggie said as she walked into the living room. Instantly Liz’s confidence sagged, because she remembered that after Mary Magdalene moved away from Wolseley, she lived in an absolutely unique property in Point Douglas – one of the original farmhouses, tucked into the middle of the city in a pod of green, at least 150 years old and with all the cachet of a funky, fabulous house in a marginal neighbourhood.
“You’re still in that amazing house in Point Douglas?”
“Did you visit me there?”
“No, but everybody in the city knows that house.”
“I guess they do. It’s true, it is kind of special. Well, we sold it. It was impossible to heat. We’re in River Heights now.”
And this young man was Sparky, a tall version of his younger self. He was five or six or seven when Mary Magdalene used to come to this house, a serious little boy, and Mary Magdalene was a single mom, moving on to the matriculation level of full-time motherhood: home schooling. Her boy was called
Sparky because he had a fixation with electrical circuits. At his birthday party he was the happy recipient of a heap of extension cords in different colours and lengths and he worked intently all afternoon while the children played around him, arranging a circuit to some precise template in his mind. When he was done, Mary Magdalene supervised the insertion of a plug into a wall outlet. A lamp came on and they all clapped.
Would Liz have known him if he’d come to the house without his mother? Yes. He’s got the even-featured face he had as a kid, and the same dark, straight eyebrows, and that way of really listening, but from a distance. And there he sits, all six feet of him, with Sylvie in a half-lotus in the chair above him. Sylvie, who never said a word – that’s what truly knocks the breath out of Liz. Her wine’s on the end table, she’s longing for it, but she doesn’t trust herself; she just sits with arms tightly crossed in her cashmere sweater, digging her fingers viciously into the slippery tenderloin of her forearm, pressing right down to the bone.
The Christmas tree lights twinkle on the windows and the fire crackles into perfection. The angel leans in to hear George Stonechild/Oliphant talk. No one has the will to wrest the meeting back from him.
“Sure would love to jump in the car and drive down. That’s on my bucket list too. Anybody here ever do the Will Rogers Highway?”
“Never heard of it.”
“Sure you have – it’s the old Route 66. You pick it up at Chicago. You can stay in the room where Elvis used to crash on his way to Vegas. The Trade Winds Inn, Clinton, Oklahoma. They haven’t changed a thing. Still got the same toilet seat. Can you believe it? You can sit on the can where the King took his dump.”
“You’d never get that room, sweetie.”
“Aw, I’d talk them into it. They love Canadians down there.”
Shut up, shut up, Sylvie breathes. She untucks one leg, willing Noah to lean back against her.