There were bright, cottagey moments when seeing exploded into understanding. Swimming near the shoreline, holding on to the rock ledge while kicking his legs in the deeper water behind him, Andy felt and saw that the rock beneath his hands was part of the same sloping rock that held up the cottage there in the distance, the same rock they drove past, through, or over to get here. The denuded rock and naked architecture of the small cottage he could see and understand. His parents were the dark, unfathomable water that summer.
Standing alone at the dock one evening, Andy turned from the dozing lake and finally noticed a tiny wooden shelf high in the rock face of one of the giant boulders that sat near the shore. No larger than a shoebox lid, the shelf sat seven or eight feet above the inside edge of the dock. Such was his excitement at the mystery of this tiny shelf hanging above the dock’s own floating shelf that when he ran back to the cottage, he didn’t really process the nervous, doubting conversation he interrupted between Paul and Stan, didn’t quite hear his dad’s “What choice do I have?” or notice that his mom was off on another of her walks. Fixated on the enigma of that tiny wooden shelf, he concentrated only on Paul’s offer of a demonstration, on his obliging stroll back down to the dock, the peeling off of his shirt. How could Andy remember words, mere words, when Paul was climbing the rock to stand on that tiny, tiny shelf, then flying through air and sunshine to clear the dock and dive into the deep lake?
Paul silently absorbed Andy’s fascination with these quick dives. As they arrived to subsequent visits, perhaps just one more with Pat, Paul would take an armful of bags out of their car, offer Andy’s parents a drink, and then shed clothes as he and Andy headed for the water.
“Can I stand beneath you as you dive?”
“Sure. Just keep your arms down.”
The summer before his parents’ divorce, that indelible date stamp in a childhood, Andy had perfected his dive off the dock. That summer also saw Paul leaving the traditional classroom for Correctional Services work, but he still made time to show Andy how to curl his toes over the edge of the dock and then sink his butt toward his ankles to load the spring (a light spring, through the knees). When Stan and Andy made their first trip to the cottage without Pat, Paul took Andy down to hammer in a lower shelf. Andy flew long through sun to water, and Stan could still walk himself to the dock.
25
That September, Betty stayed in her orange room, and in no time Andrew was another idiot with shit in his teeth.
As first she, then they, went on clothing and book raids to her old apartment.
She caught them both one night with a joke: “What does a dyke bring to the second date? . . . A moving van.” (Betty who couldn’t keep her pants up or her skirt down. Betty already on the pill.)
Almost no one recommends living together on the second date. If either of them had told their mothers, the phone would have been ringing off the hook with shrill disapproval and blustery commands. A crew of romantic intervention workers would have been dispatched by helicopter to rappel down and storm the house. Skywriting planes would have written THINK! in the Kingston sky. But they both knew that their mothers were experts in ending relationships, not starting them. When they each worshipped at the altar of stimulation, why not live together? Here, finally, was a surrogate education with a lovely mouth. They read to each other. They traded keyboard shortcuts and essay tips. Late at night they proofread each other’s work and then made the bed. If romance goes from zero to one hundred, why dally at thirty-five?
On their final trip to clear out her old apartment, Andrew had to carry a heavy box around a young couple who had stopped in the middle of the sidewalk so the woman could scrape something from the guy’s front teeth. Arranging his load in the trunk, Andrew clearly thought, No, never, a line I will not cross. Not ten days later when they were out for spinach pizza, Betty announced, “You’ve got shit in your teeth” as cheerfully as reporting a positive change in the weather.
“Oh, thanks.”
Between gallery openings, public readings and the city’s collegiate café culture, they often dined out before or after some public event. Unintentionally and unequivocally, they created the coded acronym SIYT: Shit In Your Teeth. Sadly, the same homonymous adaptability and pervasiveness of the word that made it so easy to use surreptitiously in mixed company (website, insight, sight for sore eyes), quickly had each of them unnecessarily deforming their attractive smiles or hobbling their growing eloquence when out in public. At the opening of a new art installation consisting of remote-control toy birds dropping family photographs into a paper shredder, he heard Betty’s comment about the “site being too passive” and raised a knuckle to his mouth. At a reading of so-called poetry (more undigested journal entries cut by arbitrary line breaks), when Andrew said of the poet, “If he had a single insight it would have died of loneliness,” Betty raised a napkin. Misunderstood, the inciting party offered compensatory shakes of the head or darts of the eye, but too often these were taken to mean that the offending crumb or dab was on the other side of the mouth, the lower teeth, the upper, still there. Site-specific installation. Sites of resistance. Citation. This gallery- or foyer-Tourette’s seemed far worse than consenting to a quick scrape from her fingernail. Thanks.
Her education in visual culture and his in literature threw them into more than a few shared classes. University regulations spoke of major and minor degree requirements, yet there were no official transfer credits for adoration and amazement. Major, minor, lover, the transcripts should read.
Settling into a home date one night (You’ve never had nutritional yeast on popcorn?) with Lars Van Trier’s The Idiots, a film of emotional catch and release taken to extremes, they were a half-naked, half-drunk symposium. The film’s bracing story involved bright young people, lifestyle artists (or those unwilling to trade their souls for a pension and a tolerable marriage, or maybe just the cleverly lazy), who would pretend to be mentally challenged in restaurants, public swimming pools. Anywhere they had an audience, including each other. Spazzing, they call it.
“Of course they’d spaz fuck,” Betty said as the story reached one of its inevitable conclusions.
Half an hour later, when she said, “Use the third person,” lust’s keen radar correctly led him to interpret this as “state your wants and/or commands and/or requests” as he not I, hers not yours. Drop her tit in his mouth. Use another finger. Ride his tail. Get her hair in your fist.
Every love is a dialect of love, a local variation of the universal language. My mind and yours. Your body and mine. Our private language of love. As their months together grew, Andrew realized that the house had acquired its third private language. These walls remained conversant with the ancient dialect of Pat and Stan and the Middle English of Stan and Andrew but preferred the flowering argot of Betty and Andrew. Yet only one of these languages started with a lie.
26
He shaves his legs and look what happens. On the bike, he no longer even thinks of them as his legs. He can still think of his calves, those drumsticks of muscle he must gnaw to make each climb. And he still has knees, those wind-scrubbed turnips fried under a merciless sun. Beyond those details, the legs have become more generalized. They are now two loops of pain, and their orbit doesn’t stop neatly at his hips. On some climbs he has honestly begun to wonder if his legs don’t stretch all the way up into his lungs, if, in fact, his legs and his lungs aren’t connected now, beaten together on the anvil of the frame.
A curved profile-bar extends off his handlebars like the bowsprit on a tall ship and allows him to stretch out his forearms and change the angle of his hips, the pitch of his torso. In this, his flattest posture, when the topography is right and he isn’t staring absently into the trees or the spinning road, there is sometimes, just briefly, a moment when his two hands and the bar they hold seem to block out the next valley. There is a forest beyond his hands, but, for a moment, the valley is invisible, lost, is not what he must push himself through next. Ride
long enough and in some moments denial is as refreshing as water.
Then reality looms. At the nadir of this New Brunswick valley, two bridges leap a wide river. A contemporary bridge, a bridge built with Ottawa dollars, with its computer-modelled arc and expandable grooves, its lack of a cycling lane, leaps the near distance while the stretched house of an old covered bridge hangs another kilometre downriver in a small New Brunswick village. Local roads parallel to each riverbank complete a rectangle between the two bridges, a rectangle only Andrew fills.
A driver would need just a quarter of the time and none of the pain it takes Andrew to get inside the covered bridge. Who doesn’t want to see the inside of that bridge? Drive through a house? The density of air lightens as he bikes away from the highway’s baying trucks.
In less than two minutes, the enclosed wooden bridge in front of him emerges from quaint oddity into comprehensibility then obviousness. This stretched house of untreated wood is a proud reach over water once brimming with logs. The same templates for the trusses of these homes were obviously transferred over to this gabled bridge. (In her advocacy for bringing down walls, Betty’s architect mother, Elaine, once assured Andrew that houses stand upright almost exclusively because of the gabled roof trusses.) Rounding the corner and slipping into the dark, roofed chute, Andrew also knows this is shelter from the valley wind. Step in, brother. There can be respite in movement.
Anticipating a radical shift in light as he moves inside the boxed bridge, Andrew reels in his gaze. At first, bike, panniers and knees shift entirely into grey-scale. Details are lost to shadow. The stubble on his legs, that lengthening Velcro, appears to vanish.
When he had shaved his legs in Halifax, luxuriating in the tub the night before his departure, he knew he wasn’t really making himself more aerodynamic so much as he was preparing a record, opening a ledger. His cleanly shaven face and calves, the smooth top and bottom of a cyclist’s body, would be the blank sheets upon which this trip would write its daily record. That was only the fourth time he had shaved his legs. He’d dipped his razor into the androgyny of cycling once, alone, meeting the always shaved Mark on the Kingston trails the next day with glistening calves and a knick on his knee. And then twice later, with Betty. Betty shaved him before his last few rides with Mark. One trail in the morning and another by night.
Now, eyes acclimatizing to the shadows inside this covered wooden bridge, he just begins to make out the iron filings of his leg stubble when a car horn blasts beside him. At first glance, the driver is simply an older woman. He assumes she’s alerting him to her presence, and he gives her the Stan-nod in greeting, dipping one eyebrow as if stamping the air, then glances back to his ride. Nothing beyond the front tire, save for planked wood and a distant square of light. He’s about to check his speedometer when she honks again. Perhaps she’s trying to alert him to a loose pannier. The horn blasts again just as he glances down and back but before his eyes can make the mirror, so his second view of this middle-aged woman leering explicitly from her sedan is from a full turn, not cropped in his small mirror. This second look entirely rewrites the first. Older woman is actually some version of fifty — brassy hair, a thick grip of flesh around the jaw. The most youthful aspect of her face is a leer made unmistakable by the lean necessary to put it into his view. She trails six inches from his left heel, but his spinning legs and tires maintain their demands on his gaze, pull him from his direct, uncomprehending stare at her to his mirror then back to the road. Again with the horn.
Her smirk has grown. Exaggeration extends smooching lips, slants her eyebrows and adds a coy tilt to the jaw. Her right hand comes off the steering wheel to buff a stretch of air. Horn, leer and gesture translate this mimed arc. Your ass. Your ass.
Here is the wolf whistle crammed into a hard, boxy tunnel. Here is Show me your tits. Until now, he had regarded these male whistles and calls as poor or desperate rhetoric, ludicrous, self-defeating ad campaigns or sneering admissions of failure. No, the rhetoric is clear. This is oppression, not seduction. Honk. Honk. She’s kissing the air now and buffing ass with short, rapid strokes. Because she can.
Her mime is annoying, offensive and tremendously unattractive. He doesn’t for a second think it’s also prophetic.
27
Pat was grateful that Stan didn’t have cancer. Divorce was already cancerous enough, dark knowledge spreading through the house, a drain on all energy, every resource. Stan didn’t have cancer. He wasn’t in pain. And he wasn’t dying. She admired him. She respected him. And yet, and yet.
In ways, you divorce everything. The house, fine. A cost of doing business. She’d even be divorcing the car she was about to use to drive Andy to tell him the news. Gordon, holding her close, had told her that, etymologically, divorce came from a different road. She let herself be hugged and didn’t correct him. Divorce actually came from a verb meaning to turn. Stan had taught her that years ago. Your road didn’t change; you did.
Andy was seven. He’d survive. He might even need this. He’d agreed to spend some time together this Saturday, just the two of them, and he hadn’t posed any awkward questions. Aside from vetoing the arcade, she’d agreed to let him choose where they would go. Driving through the city, she didn’t care where they were going so long as they were going.
“Okay, left here,” Andy told her. “We’re close now. There, on your right.”
Oh God. The Humane Society.
“They have a little trail where you can walk any dog you want.”
“Andy —”
“I know. I know. No dog. That doesn’t mean we can’t walk one. It doesn’t even cost any money.”
Parking the car at the animal shelter, she could see clearly how Stan had to lean his curved chest to raise this very gearshift into park.
The twin smells of urine and disinfectant filled her nostrils as they stepped into the animal shelter’s cacophony of yelping, whining and barking. Andy’s back, no longer tiny, advanced into the room, untouched by her desperate hand. If dogs can smell fear, what do they smell off me?
The phrase your father and I sat in her mouth like an inflamed tooth while she stood in the reception area listening to her articulate, attentive son chat with the patient staff as two adjacent doors opened and closed, flooding the room with smells and whines, smells and whines.
“Should I try to keep the dog at my left as I walk?”
“These guys are a little out of practice with that kind of walking. Keep both hands on the leash and you’ll be fine.”
It was shockingly but fittingly easy to fall in behind Andy as he passed through a heavily scratched brown door into bedlam. Grilled troughs ran through the cement floor beneath their feet. A garden hose hung coiled on a dull cinder-block wall. Walking the aisle between cages was like switching on a food processor of fur. Brown, black and golden shapes stirred in their grey cages. Despite the movement and the bars, Pat saw their dark eyes quite clearly, saw, even as they spun or scratched, the sphere of each eye, saw those little bubbles of oil surrounded by unkempt fur.
“Look at this one,” Andy called, crossing to a gawky, elongated stretch of fluff and haunch. “I’d like to take them all out, but . . .” Ten minutes later, shopping bags stuffed into his pocket, Andy guided his mother and a nearly grown collie-something out into the play area.
“I like that she’s quiet. I don’t think she’s scared, just patient.”
Pat marched on, holding her speech like a revolver in her pocket. The dog trotted left and right uncertainly, never fully straining the leash but always looking to the rest of the enclosed yard.
“Do you want to run? Hmm?” Andy tore ahead then back.
Catching him on a return sprint, Pat cautioned, “Maybe the puppy isn’t used to running.”
“Mom, she’s a puppy.” He slowed purposefully on his next pass. “I could do my next science fair project on dog training.”
“That’s a good idea.”
“So I’d train her —”
&n
bsp; “Andy, think of your father.” Pat finally jumped for the light. “You’re old enough and smart enough to see your dad’s not getting better.”
This time Andy didn’t bolt off. The dog resumed its calculations of leash, human, yard.
“Instead of getting better, though, he could maybe live differently.”
“What do you mean?”
Stretching her eyes, she stayed their tears. “Well, he could live with other people like him.”
“Who else is like him?”
“Or with a nurse.” His eyes were on hers now, also wet, and she went for it. “But not with me. I don’t want to live with your dad any more. Don’t cry, honey. Lots of kids are better off when their parents are divorced. Come here. An — drew, come here.”
She focused solely on his hand trying to squirm out of the leash’s looped handle, so she, too, forgot about the dog. Free of the leash thrown from Andy’s grasp, perhaps stimulated by the run, the puppy bolted.
Glaring back at his mother with his teary, rotten-apple face, Andy slammed the fence gate so hard behind him that the latch did not catch. Yelling after him, Pat watched the gate jerk shut and fling back open. Walking quickly, grateful for the consumption of worry after the corrosion of guilt, she reshuffled the remaining cards in her hand. There or not, I can’t make him any healthier. Or I’m better for you if I’m happy. Or maybe even We only have one life. These crisp, reassuring cards filled her mind’s hand, and she did not immediately notice the puppy’s turn for the open gate.
The Push & the Pull Page 7