The Opening Sky

by Joan Thomas

  “That wasn’t my impression,” Liz says. She gropes for some way to bat the embarrassment back to Maggie, but Maggie’s already talking.

  “If Sylvie has made up her mind, she’s entirely within her rights, of course. But it would have got things off on a better footing if Noah had been involved in that conversation. Listen, Liz, I don’t mean to cut you off, but I’ve got to run. I’m late for something.”

  Liz sticks the phone into its base and sits down. Scorching blossoms open in her chest, their heat licking up into her face. She bends over the table and rests her forehead on the linen placemat. Cold seeps through the wall beside her, but she’s got her own crackling fire to keep her warm.

  Late February, and light starts to creep across the kitchen floor at breakfast. The longer days are nice. The cold is normal. It will cheer Sylvie up, Aiden thinks. She can imagine the polar bears waking up happy with frost on their snouts. But the only recent word from Sylvie is a text to Aiden: TELL LIZ TO FK OUT OF MY LIFE. Apparently Noah is not entirely on board with the notion of keeping the baby. Apparently he only learned about this plan through his mother, who heard it from Liz.

  Making coffee, buttering toast, they snipe about their next move. “You need to let them sort it out,” is Aiden’s position.

  “I gather that’s your standard professional line. ‘Sort it out yourself.’ How do your clients feel about paying a hundred bucks an hour for that?”

  “Listen, there are two anxious kids and two distraught mothers already involved. I’m not jumping in.”

  She pries the lid off the yogurt, peers into it. “Somebody’s been eating this yogurt directly from the tub.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Look at it. Look how runny it is. It’s been predigested – by your saliva.”

  She’s wearing some sort of straight-cut grey dress that is meant to look sophisticated. She’s shrill these days or she’s silent. Liz is a samurai with silence, he thinks while she moves around the kitchen, hastily assembling her lunch. The year he pissed her off by withdrawing from the Ph.D. program, he was subjected to a deep freeze that lasted for weeks. No doubt it was high-handed, buying the Otter Lake property the way he did, but he always comes back to that: you suffer the silent treatment long enough, you start to feel that you’ve been cut loose. And then, when his summer counselling course was finished and he wanted some time alone at the lake, she actually gave him an ultimatum: don’t go, or else. He has never responded well to ultimatums.

  It was their worst time, he thinks as she races up the stairs. Maybe it gouged a permanent trench in their conjugal goodwill; when things are rough now, he has a sense that they’re sliding into it. How seriously was she thinking of leaving him that summer? It was brinkmanship, on both sides. But brinksmanship can strike at the moorings of even a good relationship. It’s staggering, actually, the risks you’re prepared to take when you’re provoked. For what? To gain the upper hand?

  She’s out in the hall now getting her things together. He goes to the doorway and leans, watching. She’s got on a cloche hat, pulled low. A deep orangy colour, it suits her. We’re past that, he thinks, watching her knot her scarf. Past the stage where we believe there’s another life out there, that we could just throw this whole thing away and take up something else.

  “You look like a Vogue cover.”

  “Oh god, Aiden, you don’t know what Vogue is.”

  He goes over and kisses her. “I’m sorry Sylvie was so mean to you.”

  “Yeah? Well, me too.” Her face under the hat is wry and plucky. A waif’s face.

  It’s too cold for Aiden to run outside, though there are maniacs who do it. The river has finally frozen but it’s too cold to skate, too cold even to think of skiing in to the cabin. They’ve invested in triple-pane windows but cold leaks in around the doors (or the heat leaks out). Aiden never hears the furnace muttering on because it never turns off. Mornings he battles the north wind on his walk to Portage Avenue. Freezing your face walking to the bus – it’s expiation for every sin.

  When he comes home one night, men in orange parkas with fluorescent hazard X’s are swarming the backyard. They’re wielding chainsaws. They’ve already lopped the limbs off all three elms. The massive columns of the trunks are still standing. Through the failing light Aiden spies the spruce, their only remaining tree. One side of it is sheared off. “Yeah, sorry,” says the foreman in a yellow safety helmet. “Dropped a big limb on it. Coulda sworn we had the angle right. You can contact the city, make a claim for damages.”

  By the end of the next afternoon, two of the columns have been felled and they’re just launching into the big cut on the third. Most men would stay and watch this operation. Aiden goes upstairs and lies obliquely across the bed, face down. A few minutes later the house shakes, a crash of three on the Richter scale.

  He’s still lying there when Liz comes in at suppertime. She stands by the wicker chair, taking off her skirt and jacket. “What’s with the drama?” she says. “You knew this was going to happen.”

  He turns his face to the side. “I miss the winters when I was young.”

  “Oh, I know, everything was so nice then.” She’s at the wardrobe; he hears the rustle of clothes being arranged on hangers. “May I remind you, it’s Dutch elm disease that got your trees. It’s got nothing to do with the end of the world. You’re a catastrophe slut, Aiden.”

  They go to bed early. In the middle of the night, a bunch of people visit Aiden. It starts with Meryl Streep as the hard-faced preacher’s wife whose baby was eaten by a dingo. Aiden is in her house in Australia, they have a very friendly relationship. Then his client Christine Tolefson appears, although (he comes to realize) it’s not Christine he’s talking to but her avatar. His daughter is also there, sadly pregnant, swollen in every aspect. Her hands, where a ring is cutting into her flesh. She spreads her fingers to show Aiden. She is grieving, enfeebled by a terrible knowledge. I’ll find something to cut it off, he says. But he wanders the bare concrete streets, stymied and distracted at every turn. The night gets darker and more threatening. He’s waiting for it all to come down on them.

  It’s a wearisome, looping dream, and he’s lucid through parts of it but can’t seem to pull himself out. Eventually he manages to open his eyes. Liz is a long ridge lying motionless on her side of the bed. He turns his head cautiously and looks at the digital clock on the alligator suitcases. 3:59 … 4:00. He swings out his legs and sits up. His jeans and padded shirt are on the chair. He grabs them and heads down the stairs, stopping on the second-floor landing to pull them on.

  Downstairs he and the dog greet each other. He pauses by the liquor cabinet and then walks into the living room and sits down, not bothering with the lights.

  What a shitty day. In the morning he got a call from a ward clerk at the Health Sciences Centre to say that the police had brought Rupert in. He was wandering in a Safeway parking lot in his bedroom slippers. Aiden went at noon and found him hooked up to an IV, looking, with his frostbitten ears bandaged, more than ever like a nasty elf. Automotive booster cables lay tangled on the bedside stand – Rupert was apparently carrying them when the police spotted him at four a.m. Aiden knows he starts the car once in a while and backs it out of the garage. In the summer he gives it a wax job or just sits in the driver’s seat, listening to right-wing rants on CJOB.

  “Going to jump-start the Caprice?” Aiden asked, taking a chair by the bed. Rupert looked at him dismissively and turned his head away. Aiden glanced over at the other bed, where an octogenarian lay wrapped in a sheet as though it were the white shroud of his years, and then he leaned towards his dad and gave it another try. “You’ve got to watch it,” he said genially. “Jump-starting your car in this cold. The battery could explode.”

  Rupert rotated his head on the pillow and stared at Aiden with open contempt. He reached up his thumb and forefinger to pinch his nostrils, and with that absent-minded gesture Aiden was hit by a tsunami of rage. You little
piece of shit, he hears his dad say, as he did say more than once, though he never needed to. Day after day his coldness said it, his sneer said it, and there the cocksucker lay, a stubby beer bottle full of piss and old prejudice, still sucking back oxygen. It was a fucking travesty. Aiden felt it with a sort of horror – that there could be people like Rupert in the world, sheltered forever by ignorance of who they are.

  “Okay, Dad,” he said, getting up and reaching for the booster cables. “This bullshit is over. You like silence, you’ve got it.” He coiled up the cables and went out the door with a pitiless swing of his shoulders.

  Aiden leans his head back and trains his eyes on the window. In the greenish light of the night sky, the backyard is a clear-cut logging site. He’s just old, Rupert, old and daft. It’s not really that he hates me, Aiden thinks with some surprise. Not anymore. It’s that I hate him. And what would I do without that hatred, where would the two of us be? Without that energy, without my compulsion to drag myself up to the old man’s house and demonstrate, through gentle deeds of charity, the victorious knowledge that I am so much better than the nasty old fart?

  He reaches up and pulls the chain on the floor lamp. His reflection leaps onto the window, a stuttering image: the pale face with startled eyes creased (and creased and creased in the layers of triple-pane glass), a plaid-shirted aging man in blue jeans clutching at his little shards of self-knowledge, while in the dark behind him, the bent world and his darling daughter hurtle past, at the mercy of an entirely different wind.

  Charlotte comes to town, Liz’s dear friend Charlotte, running out of Arrivals with her hair flying and her carry-on bouncing over the curb. In the kitchen, in the soft under-cabinet lighting, her beautiful face is long and lined, longer and more lined and more beautiful than the last time Liz saw her. She’s got a new hair colour and a sweater of natural silk and linen – she’s all gold and tarnished silver. Liz opens a Sauv Blanc and puts out olives and a great chèvre and bread. She sears prawns and does a flambé with pastis – it’s the most delectable treat she can think of.

  When the show is over, Charlotte peels a prawn and then breaks off a chunk of bread with her knobby fingers and plasters it thick with the chèvre. She eats it with great appreciation, and Liz is happy because she drove all the way to St. Boniface to get that baguette, for its authenticity and its perfection.

  “I thought you’d have a bedroom decorated with duckies by now,” Charlotte says.

  “Oh, the nursery – don’t even go there.” Liz takes a sip of her wine. Her anxiety has hardened around her chest; she feels it chafe like a plaster cast.

  “But Sylvie’s decided to keep her baby?”

  “Who gives up babies these days?”

  “And how is she seeing the future?”

  “I suspect she’s blocking it out entirely.” Liz crumbles off a bit of cheese with her fingers and eats it. “If you can block out a watermelon under your T-shirt. No doubt she’s still just fretting about the oil sands and watching Jon Stewart. She has this goal that for the rest of her life she will buy nothing new. It’s some Internet coven she’s joined.”

  “Wow.”

  “Well, it’s easy enough, isn’t it, when you have all the comforts of your parents’ home to fall back on.”

  “Liz, you have raised an idealist. I drink to you.” Charlotte empties her glass. “Sylvie is not saving for a boob job or defacing her lovely body with tattoos. She’s not starving herself to get into a made-for-TV movie about bulimic fashion models.” This last is a reference to her own daughter, Lucy. “Your Sylvie is devoted to changing the world. And this year she’s had a really bad break.”

  “You think?” Liz says, feeling the heat rise. The dog is under the table, trying to lie on her feet. She shoves him off savagely and refills Charlotte’s glass. “You know what I think? I think it’s grandiose for one teenage girl to believe she can do anything about the fate of the entire planet. And it’s kind of sad to watch Sylvie obsess about it. Yes, she’s in a fix at the moment, but in the broader scheme of things, she has every advantage. And she insists on being unhappy on behalf of Africa.”

  “What does Aiden say?”

  “He thinks she’s ahead of us. He says our entire civilization is in denial, whereas Sylvie’s already at the anger stage. Or acceptance. I forget which.”

  “That’s interesting, sweetie.” Charlotte sops up butter and pastis from the pan. “Because, as a guru of the grieving process, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross has been totally debunked. Aiden should know that. Apparently the stages are bullshit.” She leans forward to protect her sweater and pops the dripping bread into her mouth.

  Liz sits in silence. She watches Charlotte attack another prawn, sucking sweet juice out of the tail. She drops the little husk of shell onto her plate and gropes for a napkin, which Liz hands to her. Their eyes meet. They go back a long way. They were once in love with the same guy, a Turkish exchange student named Doruk Aksoy, and here they are, still best friends. Well, neither of them landed him.

  The door opens and Aiden comes up the hall, bringing the cold with him. He kisses Charlotte and she reaches up and hugs him, lingeringly. He’s looking over her head at the spread on the table. Liz gives him a bugger off stare. “Love to join you,” he says smoothly, extracting himself from Charlotte, “but I’ve got some calls to make.”

  “He’s looking a little strained,” Charlotte says when he’s gone.

  “No doubt.”

  “Maybe he needs to go up to the lake for a few days. You should go with him. Chill out for a while.”

  “Yeah, rig ht.”

  “You don’t like the cabin?”

  “Not in winter. Anyway, he never wants me there. He wants to do the monastic thing. That cabin is his, not ours.”

  “Well, I’m not a big fan of peeing in a freezing outhouse myself. It’s okay for men. They can stand.” Charlotte extends her glass. “So, how’s work going?”

  “Work,” Liz says as she pours. “Is it going to be all Liz all night?”

  “Yup, it’s Liz’s turn all weekend. But speaking of peeing, I need a loo break first.”

  She jumps up and runs into the confessional. Liz takes a swallow of wine and sits back in her chair. What a surprising shape Charlotte’s life has taken. When they met in university, she was so gauche and naive; she looked like Alice in Wonderland with her wavy hair and Mary Jane shoes and her baffled expression. And she stayed that way for a long time. Once when Aiden’s friends threw a party, Liz and Aiden invited Charlotte because her boyfriend was out of town. It was at an infamous party house with no furniture and a disassembled motorcycle on the porch, and Char showed up with a chocolate cake. Word raced through the party that someone had baked a hash cake, and sweet Charlotte, straight as an arrow, had no idea why they fell on it so eagerly.

  When she got married, she had the poofy white gown followed by a brocade going-away outfit with hat and corsage. But then she shook off her marriage and moved out west. She got a job as director of a great little jazz festival – all about drinking Scotch with saxophonists in fedoras – and she bought an apartment just up from the beach in White Rock and raised her girls alone. And now she smokes. How strange that Liz and Aiden are the ones who ended up looking conservative.

  The toilet flushes and water runs in the tiny sink. “So tell me,” Charlotte says, sliding back into her chair. “How are things at the circus?”

  “I don’t want to talk about work,” Liz says. “Except to say I can’t get no respect and I’m sick of it.”

  “I can’t believe that’s true. How could they not respect you? You are the most competent person I know.”

  This is the way they talk to each other. When Lucy was going through a shoplifting stage, all Liz ever said was “You’re an amazing mom. You are! Amazing.” But Charlotte is looking at her with genuine concern, so she rallies herself to tell the story of spiteful Karen Kemelmen, how she tried to put a hex on Sylvie’s baby. If, God forbid, there should be something
wrong with the baby. You know what I mean?

  Charlotte sets down her glass. “What a witch! She’d never dare say something like that to a male boss. It’s outright sexism.”

  “No,” Liz says. “It’s not sexism. It’s just … This thing with Sylvie has completely undermined me at work.”

  “Oh, honey. Well, maybe. I guess they have to have their little joke. It’s the revenge of the underclass. They’ll get over it.” She pulls out an empty chair and swings her stockinged feet up onto it.

  “It’s women, isn’t it,” Liz says. “They see an opening and they’re ruthless.” And then she is into it, well in. “Remember that accident I had with Mary Magdalene’s son? When he was hit by a swing? Well, after that, Mary Magdalene escalated things to shitting on my whole way of parenting. It was just before they moved away. We’re out on the street, and she looks at me in that I’m-too-pure-for-this-world way she has and she says, ‘You know, Liz, if you blow it raising your kids, it doesn’t much matter what else you’re good at.’ She actually said that. I’ve never forgotten it. And now Sylvie has proved her right.”

  “Liz!” Charlotte cries, sitting up straight. “It’s her son! Her son is the dad! So how can she possibly judge you? And anyway, that thing she said? It’s not original. She was quoting Jacqueline Kennedy.”

  “Really?” Somehow this makes Liz feel better. She opens another bottle of wine and, savouring the reckless joy of confession, tells Charlotte about the night she drifted into George Stonechild’s yard and ended up drinking with him most of the night. She tells how Mary Magdalene walked over to their house the next day to lecture her.

  “When was this? Sylvie was born?”

  “Yeah, she was born. She was five or six. It was the same summer as the swing incident. Anyway, the doorbell rings and Mary Magdalene is standing on the veranda. She’s obviously been talking to George, and she says, ‘Before you get in any deeper, Liz, I feel I should warn you. He’s a fake, you know. He doesn’t have an ounce of aboriginal blood.’ I couldn’t believe my ears. She is such a fruitcake. Please, I said.”