by Joan Thomas
“Osborne Village. A chic Santa stocking for a chic young woman.” Liz makes a rueful face.
Aiden drops the disk onto the CD tray and the machine swallows it smartly. Something bulges like a bunion in the narrow toe of the purple cowboy boot – a chocolate orange, no doubt. He fishes an iTunes card out of his shirt pocket and drops it in. Sylvie will hate this stocking and most of what’s in it.
The music starts up, the delicate display of baroque instruments courting each other.
“Is Noah coming over?”
“No. They’re still driving to Calgary for the grandparent thing. They’re leaving today.”
“God. Poor guy.” He drains his latte, tries to snag the last grimy snowdrift of foam with his tongue. “So you knew them fifteen years ago. Why didn’t we catch on?”
“I don’t think I ever knew his name back then. He was just Sparky.”
“Sparky. He wasn’t the kid with the Band-Aid fetish, was he?”
“No, Aiden, he was the kid with the extension cords.”
“The extension cords. I remember that.”
“Yup. He was good at fitting the male and female parts together even then.”
Oh, she is a beauty! “Come here,” he says, reaching out a hand for her, beckoning her over to the couch. “Come and sit with me.” She comes, she curls up against him with her legs on the couch. He slips his hand inside her silky blue kimono and lays it on her warm belly. She shivers, grabs at his hand, and then surrenders, leaning back into him. Their fit is still perfect, though their bodies are not.
Liz had her hair tied back the day he met her. She had (he would learn) just suffered the humiliation of being dumped by a guy she looked down on, but at the time he didn’t know the signs of her moods. They met on a cross-country ski foursome to the Sandilands. Aiden’s friend Roger was dating Liz’s friend Charlotte, whom he eventually married. Aiden didn’t get a good look at Liz until they stopped for breakfast at a gas station on the Trans-Canada. She wasn’t exceptionally pretty, but the character in her angular face drew him. She talked very little over her scrambled eggs and hash browns, but he formed the impression of a smart and irreverent habit of mind. She had that contained way of using her eyes: you’d say something and those eyes would travel over to you in wry appraisal before she turned her head, before her face registered any expression. He liked that. He was working at a group home at the time, and he had no patience with nicey-nice women. He’d pick salty over sweet anytime.
When they got to the trailhead, he discovered that she was one of those rare individuals who knew how to wax their skis properly – she had checked the temperature, she had a full kit with her, and she used a softer wax on the kick zone. He made a point of skiing behind her, admiring her herringbone technique and the tidy ass below her red jacket. It was a cold day and Charlotte was a lousy skier. They couldn’t maintain the pace they needed to keep their feet warm. By the far end of the loop Charlotte was bleating and carrying on, almost in tears. Aiden had caught a glimpse of some buildings along a road on the other side of a bluff, so he veered off the trail and skied over to check them out. It was a little row of cottages. He got lucky – three or four of them hadn’t been boarded up, and one had a window unhooked. By the time the others arrived, he had the front door open and was crouched by the stove, arranging kindling.
“Seriously?” he heard Liz say. He looked over his shoulder. She was standing in the doorway, looking shocked and disapproving.
“Oh, it’s a time-honoured tradition,” he said, aiming (who knows why?) for a Scottish accent.
“Snowmobilers break into a cabin every time they go out,” Roger said. “Just for the hell of it. They shit in the chamber pot. Or on the kitchen floor.”
They found a mickey of rye on a shelf. There was an old Victrola and some seventy-eights; he remembers dancing to ragtime and to Elvis, to “Hound Dog.” Liz seemed to get over her snit. She was a neat dancer, flashing her eyes at him and expertly imitating his moves, which – given that his own style on the dance floor was pretty much self-parody – really broke him up. When they left, they locked everything up tight. Back in the city, in Liz’s apartment, he discovered (well, she discovered) bruises on his torso from his shimmy through the window, which had been four feet off the ground. He was well over thirty at the time, a little old for that sort of courtship display. “You idiot,” she said, not indulging him with the least bit of sympathy.
Below them the dog lies on the rug with his nose on his front paws. They listen to the Telemann and watch the fire, and he can feel her tension ease.
“Noah sure is a quiet guy,” Aiden says.
“Quiet! He hardly said a bloody word.”
“I wonder how the two of them are doing.”
“Well, I watched them after the meeting, when they went outside.” She describes Sylvie shivering by the step, talking in her usual passionate fashion. Noah opened his mouth just once. He was facing Liz (who was looking out the hall window) and his face was lit up by the fairy lights in the spirea bush. But in spite of being a celebrated lip-reader, Liz was unable to make out what he said. All she can report is that they kissed before he turned to leave. “Lovingly,” Liz says. “It was a loving kiss.”
“I’ll be there for you,” Aiden says.
“What?”
“That’s what he said. I’d lay money. That’s their standard line, kids. He was always there for me.”
“Well, I hope he is. That’s what matters, isn’t it, when a girl is knocked up.”
Suddenly Aiden has to stop talking. He has to listen to the minor-key meandering of the harmonium. Just when it seems the whole notion of the piece might be lost, the strings jump in, rein the harmonium back, and order is restored.
“How are things looking for dinner?”
“Good. But I’m hoping she’ll set the table and do the potatoes.”
“Leave her alone. I’ll do it.”
“I have you down for the gravy.”
“I’m not making the gravy.”
The tepee has caught now, and it’s burning merrily. He builds these fires as homage to his real life, on the island, evenings sitting out on the rocky shelf with a firepit at his feet, watching sparks rise against the fringe of black spruce across the narrows. There’s a rock in the narrows that looks like the head and shoulders of a swimmer doing a front crawl – face buried, one arm powerfully lifted and just plunging into the water. The Australian, they call him. When there’s wave action on the lake, it adds a splash to the plunging arm. But usually the Australian’s got an easy crossing. Otter Lake is so calm that a motorboat can tear across it early in the morning and at noon you’ll still see a trace of bubbles on the water. It’s so calm that on clear nights you can see the stars baffled on the surface.
“You know,” Liz says, “I’ve been sitting here thinking about a doll we bought for Sylvie one year, that doll that was supposed to eat and poop and was constantly bunged up with rotting food. And I just remembered something: Mary Magdalene had anatomically correct dolls. She got them from a clinic somewhere.”
Liz pulls away from Aiden, sits up, and swivels to face him. “They were dolls the counsellors used for interviewing abused children. They were so ugly, those dolls.” Suddenly her eyes fill with tears and he can’t make out whether she’s laughing or crying. He reaches for her hand. “Oh, they were ugly! Their faces were flat and the eyes were drawn too high on their foreheads. The boy’s penis was sewn square at the end. The girl had a little cotton pocket between her legs, with crude flannelette lips sewn on the outside. Yuck, we hated those dolls. But nobody was allowed to criticize Mary Magdalene. The kids would play with them – not playing sex, or not that I noticed. Just putting things into the girl’s vagina. Marshmallows. Playskool figures. Or, I don’t know, a battery. Oh, oh, Aiden!” She’s gasping for breath. “There was some sort of scene, with the mother of those androgynous twins. She finally threw a fit about the dolls. I think it might have been what broke up the group.”
By now they’re both helpless with laughter.
“Well, well,” Aiden says when they’ve recovered. “An old friend from GAP. You didn’t exactly fall on each other’s necks.”
“We were never close.” She pulls back from him again. “I know what it’s like to be a single mom. Did you hear her say that?”
“No.”
“She said it, I’m sure she did. I couldn’t believe my ears. Like, she’s already deciding her son will be out of the picture? In fact, she adored being a single mom. She made a cult of it. She was living on welfare – to devote herself to her son. She could have got a job, but she wanted to make some sort of statement about society’s obligation to mothers.”
How tired she looks; she has dark smears under her eyes. “You didn’t say much all night,” he says.
“Yeah, well, it pisses me off that Sylvie didn’t tell us she was going out with Sparky. So we had to be broadsided like that in front of everyone. On top of everything else.”
He lets his mind go slack and a question surfaces. Does Liz enjoy their daughter? And then swiftly the answer: no. And that makes all this so much harder.
He moves Liz over gently, gets up, and goes to the window. It’s like a defaced mural, this scene: their dead elms spray-painted orange. Skeletons against a curdled grey sky, and they’re still full of squirrels. He watches a big one with its tail flicking erratically, as if it’s on an intermittent power source. The neighbour to the north feeds them, doing his conscientious bit to upset the balance of nature. Aiden looks at squirrels in a new light since the day one of them chewed through the attic eaves and dropped onto their bed like a demon commando from another civilization.
Liz stands up and tightens the belt of her kimono. “Sylvie should be getting up now. And you should go pick up your dad. I’m going to get dressed.”
That’s her dad walking across the living room. She can recognize his tread, slower and heavier than Liz’s. She’s sitting cross-legged by the wooden Coke cases, right under his path. Her dad used these cases when he was a bachelor. They’re full of her books now, the books she loved when she was young. She’s halfway through the first case, pulling out each book, shaking it by the spine, fanning the pages. Sleeping Beauty. Charlotte’s Web. The Secret Garden. The dust of her small self clings to them all. Princess Furball. Oh, Princess Furball. She opens it to the picture she loved best as a kid: the princess curled up in a hollow tree in her coat of furs, just like an animal hibernating. And under Princess Furball is Sabriel – Sylvie feels a throb of joy just at the sight of its cover. She leans back against the cement wall and reads the first chapter, whispering the lines she knows by heart, the part where the old man chants a list of all the things that live or grow, “or once lived, or would live again, and the bonds that held them together.”
She puts down Sabriel and goes back to looking. She finally finds it, tucked inside the front cover of Alice in Wonderland. Noah – Sparky – at thirteen, posing in the laced leather vest of a Renaissance falconer, wearing his silver sleeve. She looks closely at his young face, which is not so different from now. She runs her finger along the edge of the picture. When she cut it out with the box cutter, she made a long, curved slash on each side of Sparky, so he seems to be the figure in the central pane of a stained-glass window. The background is blue and brown. Mary Magdalene’s blue gown and Krzysztof Nowak’s brown shirt.
It’s a souvenir. Of a day filled with tests and lessons, most of which she failed. Alone in a house in the Minnesota forest, she cut out that picture and then took the blade to a beautiful book. A few days later, the owner of the book left an angry message on the Glasgow-Phimister answering machine: “Hey, what is this? Your fucking kid defaced my Golden Bough.” Sylvie listened to the message first and then she went to get her dad and played it for him. She was confused in those days about whether she wanted him to know or not. He made a baffled face. “Must be a wrong number,” he said, and she understood then how stupid-on-purpose he was. Who leaves a message for a wrong number?
Sylvie props up Sparky on the trunk where she keeps her things. No one will notice this picture of him at thirteen, or ask. She’s in sole possession of the events of that day, because Liz never gives a sign that it affected her in the least. She lies back on the futon and looks up at the ceiling, resting her eyes on the brown wooden planks with their crisscrossed little braces. How rough the wood is, how bare and real and unimproved – a ceiling that is revealed to be the hardworking floor of the storey above. When she’s down here, her eyes are drawn to it constantly.
Her mom is back in the living room. She can hear their murmuring voices above her but not what they’re saying. She should go upstairs, but she has too much to do down here. Too much thinking to do. She needs to scrutinize the fall, the golden, deceitful fall that seemed to be about certain things but was really about something entirely different. She rolls over, untwists her pyjama shorts, and nestles deeper into the futon. It’s like watching the trailer for a movie called Sylvie Is Happy. But all fall, she thinks, another film was being furtively shot deep inside her, using fibre optics. A film of a curled-up zygote with ET eyes. She jerks at her pillow, angles an elbow over her eyes – and then she hears the back door slam, her dad going outside. She crawls out of bed and reaches for her bathrobe.
When Sylvie finally climbs the stairs, her grandfather is standing in the hall in his parka and an old red cap with an Esso logo on it. He sticks out his hand and says, “Rupert Phimister. Pleased to meet you.”
She kisses him and says, “I’m pleased to meet you too, Grandpa.”
She helps him take off his parka. He’s wearing a red plaid shirt and the measuring-tape suspenders they once bought him as a joke. The sacks under his eyes look as if tears have leaked between the thin layers of his skin. He doesn’t have his glasses on; maybe that’s why he doesn’t know her.
“What happened to his glasses?” Liz asks.
“I guess he forgot them,” Aiden says. “And I didn’t notice. Sorry.”
“Why say sorry to me?” Liz says. “It’s got nothing to do with me.” She’s like a snake with bright yellow don’t-mess-with-me stripes. She hands Sylvie a glass of booze-free eggnog. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
In the living room they distribute the gifts slowly, trying to drag it out. Nobody mentions the baby. Sylvie doesn’t have the heart to tell her grandpa. She’d have to say it over and over, and it still wouldn’t register. They all shout at him as though he’s deaf. Well, he is deaf as well. He never talks to her but she knows he loves her. One day when she had her garden, he rolled up in his big old car and sat with his elbow out the window, watching her hack away at the hard clay with the new hoe she had bought with babysitting money. Then he got out and came over, took the hoe out of her hands, and drove away with it. An hour later he brought it back, all shiny-edged. Nobody had told her that hoes have to be sharpened.
Most of the gifts under the tree are for Sylvie. Sadly, there are no hand-planted cactus gardens for the members of her family. For her father Sylvie bought a pair of goats for a family in India. “That’s in honour of your being an old goat,” she says. For her grandpa she bought a beehive for a family in Ethiopia. He studies the card for ages, though he can’t read it and doesn’t get the concept. For her mother she bought a satchel of school supplies for a girl in Kenya. “A very worthy cause,” Liz says.
From her dad Sylvie gets a new iPod, loaded with his own top-fifty playlist. “This is a pity gift,” Sylvie explains to her grandpa. “Dad feels sorry for me because he thinks his music is so awesome compared to mine.”
“Sylvie’s got that exactly right,” Aiden says. “The harmony bands, the Beatles, the Byrds – there’s a sweetness to them. Even though they were stoned for decades. Even though they were fighting like beasts in the studio. And the lyrics. Those dudes could write. Dylan – what a poet!”
“I never really got Bob Dylan,” Liz says.
“Well, that’s the brilliant thing ab
out him,” Aiden says. “He’s always just on the edge of meaning.”
When they’re finished with the gifts, Liz goes out to work on the dinner and Sylvie manages to slip downstairs. But her dad won’t let her go. He follows her, shaking the bead curtain she’s hung at the entrance to her cave, as a way of knocking.
“Got a minute?” he asks.
“I guess.” She turns her back on him and dumps all the consumerist beauty crap her mother bought her on the old trunk she uses as a dresser. “What do you want?”
“I want to know what lover-boy got you for Christmas.”
“None of your business.”
“Aw, come on.” He leans against the pillar and looks around her cave. He’s wearing the sweater he got from Liz. “I’m not trying to pry. But I’ve been wondering, how are things going with the two of you? How did Noah react when he heard the news?”
“You’re not trying to pry?” she says. “You’re insatiable.” But he looks so pathetic that finally she gives in. She tells him that Noah was just really quiet.
Her dad keeps watching her. “Well, it’s a good thing, isn’t it?” Sylvie says. “If he doesn’t know what to say, he doesn’t say anything. You don’t have to pick through a lot of bullshit. Noah is a cat.” This is her dad’s own theory: some people are cats and some people are dogs. Sylvie herself is a dog. Her tail wags and her tongue hangs out; everything she feels is obvious as soon as you look at her.
He’s still watching her. The other day she could not get the crying stopped once it had started, and she’s determined not to start again. In fact, she and Noah are still not over the taxi ride from the airport, when he wouldn’t talk. He just kept glancing warningly at the back of the driver’s head, as if the guy could hear them through the Plexiglas, as if it mattered.
“This vehement thing,” her dad finally asks. “Is that bothering him?”
“He’s not a freak, Dad,” she says. “He’s just committed to other species surviving on Earth. There are far too many of us, you say – I’m going to stop breeding. But what are you supposed to do? Condoms sit in landfill for a thousand years. So I started that fucking pill. But every time I peed, a bit of it went into the river. And now the fish are growing two heads. And it didn’t work anyway.”