by Lee Kvern
What now? She doesn’t know. Her fierce heart rises at the back of her throat. She knows not where to begin, but only to begin.
“Did you know he went to see Sylvie every month his last decade?” Lesa asks, looking for the first time in three years at her mother.
Her mother’s lowered head, the grey strands dominant now over the normally red-hennaed hair. In the silence the forced air from the heat vents, the sudden catch of her mother’s breath. She hadn’t known either. Her mother raises her head. The black mascara from her eyes a moist charcoal river down her cheeks.
“Your hair,” she says, breaking the awful silence.
Lesa reaches up, touches the blunt crop of her black-dyed hair. She’d forgotten.
“For Sylvie,” Lesa says.
“I told Nate I thought you’d gone there,” her mother says. The shiftless ambiguity of Lesa’s day, not so much the risk in her mother’s mind, only Lesa’s. The realization that her mother knows her better than she does.
“Nate?” Lesa asks.
She’s sorry to have missed him.
“He’s gone out with friends,” her mother says. “He’ll be back.”
Her mother lowers her head. Lesa can smell the burning filter of her cigarette.
“Sylvie?” her mother whispers.
“She’s fine,” says Lesa. “You’ll see.”
Tears well up again in her mother’s lovely violet eyes. Her mother no longer hiding behind darkened sunglasses. Remorse so deep that her mother can’t even think of Sylvie without going back to that Wednesday in July? Lesa can only guess, but it doesn’t matter, what matters is the release. Lesa remains on the sofa, waits/wades in the depth of her mother’s rivers.
Watching her mother across the room, Lesa gleans only now, only after Lesa’s own dreadful Wednesday—that it wasn’t any lack of love for Sylvie on her mother’s part, but too much love: scared love, safe love, the sweet/despondent love only a mother can have.
Lesa crosses the carpet, takes her mother’s duty-bound hands in hers, tries to wipe the river away from her mother’s face, but once flowing, it doesn’t stop.
“Did you love him, Mom?” Lesa scarcely whispers, afraid to say her father’s name outright, afraid of what her mother might say. That long-remaindered embrace with the constable that lived next door to them in the row housing when Lesa was five, her mother essentially alone with three children, including high-wire Sylvie, baby Clare on the way, her father seldom home. Was their marriage sheer need, outright necessity, without choice—loveless? Did her mother stay despite herself for the sake her of children? Lesa doesn’t want to know, but needs to know for the sake of the things she will carry forward from her mother’s past—the sake of her own future.
“Yes,” her mother says, as if she can read Lesa’s interior mind.
“I didn’t always like him, but I always loved your father. At the core your father was a good man.”
The ash from her mother’s expired cigarette drops to the hardwood floor. Neither of them bothers with it.
“Things have a way of evening out over time,” her mother says softly.
Lesa wraps her mother in her arms like the child she doesn’t have. The children she will one day hold in this limitless/faultless way that her mother has for all of them. Her children’s father? Lesa hasn’t thought about it until now. Neither blue, nor burnt toast, she decides, but more, much more.
When her mother quiets, Lesa releases her, goes into the large kitchen to retrieve a box of tissue. The stove light is on. She pulls open the warm oven, smells fried chicken, gravy. Not something Nate would have preferred, but Lesa’s favourite. She lifts the glass lid on the casserole dish, pulls out a piece, picks the seasoned meat off the bone, and pops it into her mouth. Realizes how wholly empty she is after this day, feels her knees give into fatigue. She steadies herself against the Frigidaire in the dim light of the stove, the warmth of her mother’s chicken in her belly. She eats slowly, purposefully, until the strength comes back into her. She shuts the oven door. On her way back into the living room she takes her Bic lighter out of her jean pocket and lights the candles on the dining room table.
Her mother is silent, spent, mascara stains down both cheeks.
“Come,” Lesa says, taking her mother by the shoulders.
Her mother rises from the green torture chair. Lesa leads her past the dining room, into the small bathroom off the large kitchen, sits her down on the closed toilet seat, and opens the medicine cabinet. Fishing through her father’s leftover medication that her mother can’t bring herself to throw out, Lesa finds her mother’s meagre bag of makeup. A single tube of red lipstick leftover from Lesa’s childhood, she’s sure, can recall the few times her mother wore it. A plastic case of red blush the colour of clown’s cheeks, no eye shadow ever, a slim tube of clumpy black mascara. Lesa leaves the bathroom, comes back with two Johns and her own makeup bag.
“Let’s start over,” she says to her mother, who accepts the cigarette, lets Lesa light it after her own. Her mother inhales deeply, so does Lesa.
Lesa takes out her cleanser, gently wipes the mascara from her mother’s face with a cotton ball. Up close Lesa sees the minute fissures of red blood vessels, a lifetime of them broken across her mother’s freckled skin that Lesa never noticed before. Had they always been there? Lesa wipes harder, hoping they’ll be magically erased, but she knows better. She looks into her mother’s glassy eyes, digs out her purple eyeliner.
“Shut your eyes,” she says.
Her mother does so, obediently. Lesa notes the creased lines running crossways on her mother’s forehead, her unplucked eyebrows, her mother never one to take time for herself. Lesa cups her mother’s soft aging face in her hands, the same way her mother used to in the bathtub, gently catching the small of Lesa’s child head in her steady palm, likely also Sylvie’s, Nate’s, and Clare’s, while she rinsed the shampoo out with the large plastic measuring cup. As if her mother could measure the love she felt for all of them each time she bathed them, washed their hair, clothed them, tucked them into bed each night.
Lesa looks at her mother’s closed eyes, expects her mother might open them, some memory of this long-forgotten ritual, this practised remembrance between a mother and her children, but her mother doesn’t open her eyes. Seems she’s given in fully, let Lesa take the reins. In this moment, Lesa realizes her mother has had no one to take care of her, that she’s raised her children, buried both her parents, nursed a dying husband, and now she’s alone. Lesa has to steady her shaky hand to make the purple eyeliner skim over the surface of her mother’s pale lids. Lesa traces her mother’s uncomplaining, wordless mouth with raspberry lip pencil, follows the curved contour of her mother’s still-full lips. Where her mother has had no keeper, Lesa is/will be.
Lesa flicks her cigarette into the chipped enamel sink that her mother has touched up temporarily with Wite-Out, examines her own face in the silver-flecked mirror. In the everyday light of her mother’s bathroom, she sees the sliver of her mother, her father, Sylvie too, beneath her brown freckles, the water green of her eyes. Lesa pulls out her face powder, brushes it lightly, softly across the deficit of her mother’s face, along her high cheekbones, over her strong jaw, and finally covers over the tiny red fissures beneath the surface of her mother’s skin, if only to make them both feel better for the time being.
Acknowledgments »
My thanks to the Michener Centre in Red Deer for their kind help given toward my research. In particular, Margaret Rumsey, who shared numerous working life stories of Michener, both present and past. Dr. Robert Lampard, for taking the time to answer my many, many questions. And thanks also to the security staff, who immediately questioned my driving, walking, skulking about the grounds, usually within minutes of my arrival. When I told them who I was and what I was doing, they graciously unlocked the no-longer-in-use buildings and allowed me to walk through, thus sparking both childhood memories along with the current-day surroundings of a wonderfu
lly evolving Michener.
Special thanks to my sister, Jody Kvern, and the lovely ladies of West Terrace Three. Thanks, also, to the fine, long-standing women who care for the Terrace ladies.
My mother for not being the mother in the story, her many years of daughters, service, love, guidance through less than perfect times. Her continued years, love, guidance in our adult years. My father, whose bright presence I miss daily.
My thanks, yet again, to the gentle, funny, trusting, highly concise editing of Lee Shedden, and his wife, Fiona Foran, for her intuitive reading and thoughtful insights.
My thanks to Brindle & Glass Publishers, to Ruth Linka for her coastal support of prairie writers.
The Alberta Arts Foundation for their financial support in making Sylvie possible.
My constant sisters: Kelly Gray, Bobbie Charron, Dani Kvern.
My tall, great, growing-in-all-ways guys: my artist husband, Paul Rasporich, whose unvarying husband/artistic support allows me to write all the livelong day, my boys, Kai and Seth, who are ever-patient, always sympathetic. Writer/mothers are not the easiest to live with, and yet they do.
About the Author »
LEE KVERN is an award-winning author of short stories and fiction. Her novel, Afterall, was nominated for the 2006 Alberta Book Awards. Her short stories are well celebrated: White was the winner of the 2007 CBC Literary Awards, and I May Have Known You was nominated for the 2010 Alberta Literary Awards. Her work has been published in Event, Descant, enRoute and Joyland, New York. Lee lives in Okotoks, Alberta. Visit Lee’s website at: www.leekvern.com
Copyright © 2010 Lee Kvern
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, audio recording, or otherwise—without the written permission of the publisher or a photocopying licence from Access Copyright, Toronto, Canada.
Originally published by Brindle & Glass Publishing Co. Ltd. in 2010 in softcover
ISBN 978-1-897142-48-6
This electronic edition was released in 2011
ePub ISBN 978-1-926972-22-0
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Kvern, Lee, 1957–
The matter of Sylvie : a novel / by Lee Kvern.
Print format: ISBN 978-1-897142-48-6
Electronic monograph in PDF format: ISBN 978-1-897142-89-9
Electronic monograph in HTML format: ISBN 978-1-926972-22-0
I. Title.
PS8621.V47M37 2010 C813'.6 C2010-903670-0
Edited by Lee Shedden
Cover image by Angel Strehlen
Author photo by Paul Rasporich
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Brindle & Glass is pleased to acknowledge the financial support for its publishing program from the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF), Canada Council for the Arts, and the province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.
www.brindleandglass.com