by Joan Thomas
The tears are coming now, and he sees it. “Hormones are natural, you know,” he says. They’re sitting on the futon and he’s holding her hand. “And this is partly hormones. They make you more emotional.”
He reaches over to the old trunk, trying to find a Kleenex. She’s got a pile of handkerchiefs and she digs one out.
“Come upstairs,” he says. “We can play Chinese checkers. Or Risk. You love Risk.”
“We don’t have enough people.”
“Parcheesi, then. Grandpa could handle Parcheesi.”
“Maybe later.” She wipes her eyes and her nose. The handkerchief is useless – she made it from an old pillowcase and it just moves the snot around.
“And talk things over with your mother, eh? This is exactly the sort of situation your mother knows about.”
She tosses the handkerchief in the direction of her dirty clothes pile and wipes her nose on her sleeve. She squeezes his arm to say, I’m fine, thanks. It’s over. “If this was only a computer game,” she says, “I could reboot. I would have saved it when I was on a roll and I could start again from there.”
“Where would you have saved it?”
“I don’t know … After I met Noah at the lake last summer. I wouldn’t want to have missed that.” He smiles, and so much love shines in his eyes that she wants to keep talking. “You know, Dad, it’s really weird, but I think I knew I was pregnant before the doctor told me.”
“What do you mean?”
So she tells him about meeting her friends to plan the Fringe play, and how they talked about a restaurant deep in the ocean and she pictured fish tapping on the glass. And then later, sitting bent over on the toilet, she felt a tap, tap, tap against the wall of her stomach, from the inside.
“You’re probably right,” he says. “No doubt you knew on some unconscious level. It was too big for you to let yourself think about it openly. But something took you to the doctor that day.”
“I know – that’s what I was thinking! And something made me wait to see her, even though my own doctor was away. Even though I had so much work to do.”
“You know, Sylvie,” he says, kissing her tenderly, “you have all sorts of wisdom. Far more than you know. You can count on it in the next few months. You’re going to be all right.”
He goes back upstairs. He meant what he said to reassure her, but actually it makes her feel worse. Because it’s not just her body that has a secret life, her mind does too. The way it sent her scurrying to the clinic, totally oblivious to what she was doing.
Once when she was little and slept upstairs, her mother was reading her a bedtime story and they were distracted by the sight of a silver moon out the window. A crescent moon tipped on its back, a moon like a sly smile. “It’s growing a little bit every day,” her mother said. “Just like you are.” Then she kissed Sylvie goodnight and closed the blind and left. When she was gone, Sylvie got out of bed, dragged her chair over to the window, and knelt on it, looking out into the night, the window blind draped over her back like a turtle shell. That was when she saw it, for the first time ever: the dark, stony, gloating round of the whole moon. There all the time.
“Why don’t you boys play cards?” Liz suggests. She serves them each a glass of red wine and some crackers and tapenade and cheese. Aiden pulls out the cribbage board and sets up, but Rupert just looks suspiciously at his cards. His eyes are strangely bright; he looks like Buster Keaton. “Try him with your reading glasses,” Liz says. Aiden does, but it’s hopeless.
The monster turkey fills the oven as though it has expanded in the heat. Liz slides it out and bastes it. It’s glistening with real fat and juices, not that cheap hydrogenated oil they inject under the skin of supermarket turkeys. She ordered it at the butcher shop in early December, back before Charlotte and her kids had pulled out, when she thought they were having ten people for Christmas dinner. Up till Wednesday, they were still six. Wendy’s son and his wife are in Hawaii, so Wendy was planning to come and bring her Somalian refugee. But she’s got the flu, she’s been sick all week. And after the Blessed Annunciation, as Aiden’s taken to calling it, Liz cancelled the Somalian refugee. “We don’t even know him,” she said to Aiden. “Wendy hardly knows him herself.”
“Mary Magdalene Calhoun,” she whispers, rinsing the baster under the tap. Maggie Calhoun, into the “alternative fabric movement,” running a hemp and bamboo store in a strip mall on Corydon. Liz sets about crimping foil over the wings and drumsticks so they won’t brown too fast. It’s a fiddly job and she feels strangely worked up doing it. It’s the memory of those anatomically correct dolls, which brings with it a thought – a welcome thought – that in some perverse but deep way this situation is Maggie’s fault. Why? Because those dolls speak of a dangerous ideological purity, and ideology so often trumps sensible action.
Maggie’s ideology was not so evident at the meeting. What was striking was her perfection: the perfect, serene bow of her upper lip; her gentle, even voice; her Mona Lisa smile. None of which can be real, given what she must be feeling, and which therefore reveal her as a perfect fraud. This is a woman who had a child with George Stonechild, a white guy from East Kildonan who braided his hair with rawhide and said meegwetch at every opportunity. He fooled no one.
They’ll need a leaf in the table, there are a lot of side dishes. She glances into the dining room to see if the candleholders need fresh candles, and she’s caught off guard by the sight of a window with curtains blowing in a summer breeze. The trompe l’oeil fresco on the north wall, with its painted curtains perfectly matching the real curtains – it actually tricks her eye. It’s brilliant; nobody believes she painted it. The blue for the sky is three shades brighter than most amateurs would have dared. She and Aiden were at each other’s throats that summer, and she was trying to keep herself busy. She can see herself in the dining room with cans of paint on a drop sheet at her feet, a redhead in shorts and a halter top (she was a redhead that long-ago summer).
Oh, that summer. Thanks to Sylvie, the house feels crammed with people from that summer, or an even earlier one. Sparky, a brave little boy with two state-of-the-art shiners, and the self-righteous, bleating GAP mothers. The beauteous Mary Magdalene and her evil ex. Liz sees her old self, a restless, reckless woman she never expected to meet again, stopping in at George Stonechild’s one night when he lived on Dominion with a fallen-down maple in his front yard. Everybody knew that house, for the tree that had been growing sideways for decades and for George’s incessant drumming.
Liz was walking home from an evening drinking wine at Mary Magdalene’s when she heard the drumming and George Stonechild drummed her into his yard. Swiftly he popped a beer for her. Somehow he knew where she’d been, at the house on Greenwood with the purple steps.
“So what were you lovely ladies nattering about?” he said.
“Terminology,” Liz said, taking a long drink. “We were arguing about what to call a certain neighbourhood ex. Whether he’s a prick or just an asshole.”
“And what am I?”
“Sadly, just an asshole. According to Mary Magdalene.” She went so far as to explain: “You’re not smart enough to be a prick.” She could see him trying to find some way to take this as a compliment.
How extremely drunk she must have been to say such a thing to his face – it’s unbelievable. As she pulls down serving dishes from the cupboard, she peers into a yard where the yellow light of a street lamp is falling through the boulevard trees and watches George crowd her up against the fallen-down maple, leaning in for a kiss, sees herself shove him away, sees him laugh. But still she stayed, long into the night, avoiding going back to the house on Augusta Street she was suddenly allergic to, the kitchen smelling of mouldy leftovers and the upstairs hall eerie from the little fish nightlight Sylvie loved. Sylvie muttering in a bed rocky with disassembled toys. Aiden lying on his back snoring, on a sheet that hadn’t been washed in two weeks. She had another beer and another and lounged against the tree, soaki
ng up George’s gaze, taking in his puerile flattery, not enjoying George so much as she was enjoying herself, her fast-talking, careless self.
When Rupert has fallen into a doze with his head against the cushions, Aiden comes out to help. He’s quiet and gentle, which is always his way when he’s troubled. He peels the potatoes and sets the table and then drifts off for a while. When he comes back, he mashes the potatoes. Liz works on the gravy and the side dishes, a butternut squash gratin and braised red cabbage with apple. She glances at the turkey resting on a warming stone. It has browned perfectly, as if varnished for the cover of a culinary magazine.
Aiden calls Sylvie and she wanders up from the cave. Liz asks her to light the candles and she does, and then she leads in her grandpa. They all sit down and look at each other in that little moment of recognition that stands in for grace. Sylvie has her vivid hair up in a knot on the top of her head and her bangs pinned back with a tiny silver bluebird clip. She’s a Renaissance beauty. She called Mary Magdalene right after she found out. This fact still burns in Liz, with such pain that she can’t look at her daughter for longer than a second.
“Isn’t this a feast!” Aiden says. He pours the wine. It’s a Montravel Sec they bought in celebration of their anticipated trip. He glances at the label but doesn’t comment.
“Your father loves Christmas,” Liz says to Sylvie. She picks up the carving knife. “When he was young, it was always winter and never Christmas.”
“Because you belonged to a cult, Dad?” Sylvie asks.
“Something like that.”
Liz carves because she’s better at it. She passes Rupert a plate with all dark meat, as per his preference when he was still able to voice one. She passes her daughter stuffing only – since she was twelve or so, Sylvie has declined to eat her friends. She passes Aiden two slices of thigh, two slices of breast. She follows this with the pear-and-ginger chutney.
“When did chutney enter the Western diet?” Aiden asks.
“Your father always references prehistory when he’s trying to decide whether he likes something,” Liz says. “It’s all ‘What would Cro-Magnon man do?’ ” Sitting in the soft light of the antler chandelier, she feels the full weight of her anxiety again, pressing on her like one of those lead vests you wear for dental X-rays. She flattens her potatoes for gravy; then the gravy comes to her and she passes it on without taking any. If only Charlotte had come.
“So why was your mother so religious?” Sylvie is asking.
“My mother was never religious,” Aiden says. “She just hung out with the Jehovah’s Witnesses because they were always prepared to fight with her.”
“But you never got a Christmas present?”
“In those years? No.” He turns to Rupert, who is stalwartly eating his way through his mashed potatoes. “Although, Dad, I do recall you coming in off the line one Christmas morning and tossing some bags of candy at us kids. You were my hero – do you remember?”
Rupert doesn’t even look up.
Leonard Cohen broods from the speakers over the sideboard – Aiden’s notion of sacred music – and Liz notes the fresh sage in the dressing, musty and subtle. I got it just right, she thinks. But would it have killed me to open a can of cranberry sauce for Aiden? She watches him in his Christmas sweater, methodically portioning turkey and potatoes onto his fork, this lanky, warm-faced man who’s always ready to talk about himself, though his stories never shed much light on what he’s really about. When they first met, she could never mesh his easy confidence and clever talk with his working-class clothes and the startling gaps in his manners. Liz and Charlotte would joke about Aiden’s mysterious past, but all she ever heard about was aimless years and career changes and the girlfriends he’d broken up with for no particular reason – the usual male commitment phobia. She’s going to die waiting for the big reveal.
Sylvie’s eyes are drawn to her dad too. “You know, Dad, you look like a hipster in that sweater.”
“Thank you.”
“It’s not a compliment. Sorry.”
“What I really should have bought your dad,” Liz says, trying to summon up a bit of gaiety, “is a wired sweater. Did you read about them in the Globe? They’re called hug sweaters. They’re lined with copper wire, and when someone who loves you wants to send you a hug, they press a button on a remote and the wires heat up.”
“Oh god,” Sylvie says. “That is just gross. Women are walking three miles every morning for contaminated drinking water, with their babies strapped to their backs, and we’re engineering self-hugging sweaters.”
This from a girl who could not be bothered to buy a single Christmas present for a single person in the house. “You’re a puritan. We didn’t raise you to be moralistic, but that’s what you are. That sweater is just a whimsical way of staying in touch. Using technology to send a warm, human message.”
“Exactly. That’s what else is gross. The child thinks he’s on his own at last. He’s out there, a big kid feeling cool with his friends, playing hockey on the road. He misses a shot. ‘Fuck!’ he yells – and just then his sweater starts heating up. Your mother is thinking about you. Don’t think you can escape!”
Grandpa catches at least one of Sylvie’s words and looks at her with interest. Then he turns back to his crusty roll, which he is endeavouring to eat with his knife and fork. He’s lost the concept of the bread bun and he never really had the concept of conversation; he always seemed dazed by the way they talk at this table.
“You know, Sylvie,” Liz hears herself saying, “you will really enjoy getting to know Noah’s mom. When I was hanging out with Mary Magdalene and her friends, they were true back-to-the-earth types. They didn’t just make soup – they made broth first, from herbs and vegetables they grew themselves. They didn’t make bread from yeast you buy at the store – they kept sourdough starter in their fridges. If there was a hard way to do something, they found it.”
She’s warming up to something and she can’t seem to stop. “I think it was to justify staying home. I was the only one in the whole group with a semblance of paid work. I could never get the hang of how they thought. If someone broke a rule, they’d all talk about it in these shocked, grieving voices: ‘Susan handed out Oreos at the playground.’ Or ‘Elaine feeds her kids Kraft dinner.’ Or ‘Liz lets her daughter watch Sesame Street!’ ”
“What’s wrong with Sesame Street?”
“It destroys the attention span. There wasn’t any handbook for this, no – what would you call it? – scripture. Only leadership … i.e., Mary Magdalene.” The venom in her voice startles even her. She shoves aside her red cabbage and squash and wipes her fingers on her napkin.
“On this festive occasion,” Aiden says, “in this intimate and loving company, I would like to propose a toast.” They raise their glasses. Sylvie has a real Shirley Temple that Liz went to the trouble of making. Aiden looks to his right, to Sylvie. “To new life,” he says. Bravely they drink to it, except for Rupert.
Then Aiden looks down the table at Liz. He raises his glass again. “And to the old one.”
“To the old one?”
“To you, Liz. To my darling Liz. A cook who’s not afraid to lick her fingers.”
The faux candles on the antler chandelier burn steadily and the beeswax candles on the table flicker. Liz looks around the dining room, trying hard to take everything in, the beautiful home she’s made for all of them, as if this is the last time she’ll see it. “Thank God we didn’t plan a party for New Year’s,” she says.
5
Begin as You Mean to Go On
THEY’VE DECIDED THAT WE’RE PARALYZED WHILE we sleep. This is an evolutionary adaptation to stop us from acting out our dreams and our nightmares. Scientists claim to have found the paralyzing switch; they turned it off in a cat that had the bad luck to fall into their hands. Aiden saw it on TV. He saw the cat, an ordinary domestic tabby with an electronic device the size of an old-fashioned alarm clock screwed into her brain. She was sound a
sleep and hunting: crouching, staring, pouncing, doing her predatory thing to a dream mouse that only she could see.
But Aiden already knew this. You’re too hot, he says to himself as he drifts towards sleep. Take off your T-shirt. But his arms lie inert, too heavy to be moved by an act of his puny will.
In the post–Boxing Day morning he’s overheated and tetchy by the time Liz gets up and leaves the house. When he finally pries himself out of bed, Sylvie’s gone as well. To the library, she said last night – she’s in some sort of fix with her plant science paper. He putters around the kitchen, cleaning up the mess she made creating her smoothie, relieved not to see her, not to have to do the chipper optimism thing.
He stands with his coffee in the living room, looking out at the doomed elms in the yard, where the squirrels are chasing each other in a mating frenzy. It’s a bloody Carry On movie. Their babies are going to freeze when winter kicks in, if they can in fact breed off-season. He knows nothing about squirrels. He should study them, chart the population. Figure out if they’re monogamous. How many offspring they have and how long they live. Two years? Ten years? He has no idea. Orange roughy live to be one hundred. He and Liz ate a lot of orange roughy at one time. It was flown in from New Zealand and it was bloody expensive, but it was their favourite company dinner. And now the orange roughy with its turned-down mouth is gone, because they were eating fish as old as they were and no one knew.
He touches the heel of his hand to the triple-pane window and judges the temperature to be about minus two. Yesterday a blanket of snow lay over the yard and Liz went out and swept the patio clear. Now, all around the patio, the snow is retreating, pale and springlike, shrinking away from the dark bricks so fast you can almost see it melt. The albedo effect – that’s what you call it, isn’t it? – that feedback loop where the less ice you have, the less ice you have. When he first read about it, he came away saying to himself, How extremely stupid not to have thought of that.