“I’d say. So you never found out what happened?”
“No. He might still be tottering about somewhere. Though he’d be well past a hundred by now. I’ve always wondered what happened to the poor old coot.”
“You’re sure he wasn’t a local?”
“I wondered about that too. But he looked so English, what with his cardigan and all. And I’m pretty sure I saw him walking and talking with two of the children earlier on.”
“What a curious tale.”
“It is, isn’t it? I almost wish you hadn’t reminded me of it.”
What it was that had reminded the woman of an old man forsaken on the brim of a canyon filled with water lilies, Serena will never know. But as she looks up from her book at the white shimmering sky, she wants to embrace the woman named Liz, pat that springy hair and say, “Thank you, my good, sweet angel, my patron saint. Thank you for letting me listen in on your story.”
Smiling at nobody in particular, Serena turns a page in her cookbook, looking to the world like a woman planning a dinner party.
Later that afternoon she feels an overwhelming need to distance herself from Hester who is meticulously printing the same paragraph beginning with “Serena and I” on postcard after postcard, cheeks flushed with the pleasure of her work. Topping the growing stack is one still to be addressed. It’s for Laurel who, as far as they know, is still paddling a canoe somewhere in darkest Africa.
“Where’re you going to address it to? The Okavango Swamp?”
“To her apartment in Vancouver, of course. I’m doing the addresses last. Besides, she might be back by now. And she’ll want to know about our adventure.”
“Yeah, she’ll be green with envy.”
Serena walks out the door without saying good-bye, leaves the hotel to trek into downtown St. Paul, crossing the bridge over the highway, passing the colossus that is the Historical Society before turning left. The afternoon heat sears her skin.
The city centre is a cluster of tall buildings with corporate names like The Pioneer Building, The Empire Building, The Agro-Bank Building. Confident names. There seems to be no street life to speak of. Serena goes inside one of the buildings and ambles through the connecting walkways. They’re refreshingly cool, but gloomy and deserted.
Too spooked to linger she hurries back outside onto the melting sidewalk, makes her way down Kellogg to the river, happy to find it. She continues along it as far as Robert where she flops onto a bench in the shade under a tree. Sits and watches the Mississippi flow by under a bridge that looks brand new. It’s the colour of golden desert sand. She imagines an Egyptian bridge might look like this.
The new bridge spans the river importantly, crowding out the rusted old railroad bridge next to it. Serena sympathizes with the rusty bridge, quiet and forgotten, minding its own business, having done its job without reward.
And then she thinks of Hester — God knows why. If Hester were the rusty old bridge, she would immediately put the new bridge in its place by showing it how to properly span an abyss: “You have to remain inflexible and rigid, never buckle. It’s how we’ve always done it.”
Or she would tell the new bridge that its kind is not needed. It’s what she once told Brian O’Shaughnessy, the boy Serena fell mindlessly in love with in grade twelve. Hester, seven years older, took the hapless boy aside in the street one day and explained — her voice as kind as ever — why it was in everybody’s best interest that he stay away from Serena. One: he was a Catholic. (Feeble excuse Serena now thinks: Frank of the Immaculate Garage is a freaking Catholic.) Two: he was not what the family had in mind. Hester did not elaborate what the family did have in mind for seventeen-year-old Serena, but it’s a well-known fact that Hester does not trust good looks in a man, however young. Manly good looks are a sign of moral decrepitude.
It took moonstruck Serena three weeks before she found out why Brian was avoiding her after those first promising dates of teeth-colliding kisses and padded bra-squeezing. It took far longer to get over him, far longer to let go of her sugarcoated dreams of marriage and children, two girls and two boys, all with same intense blue eyes and dark curly hair as their father.
Serena O’Shaughnessy. Mrs. O’Shaughnessy. She’d had the signature down pat.
Brian eventually married a girl named Catherine, also Catholic and Irish. They have four children, two girls and two boys. All but one are dark and handsome like their father.
Serena ran into him a couple of years after he got married, a moon-faced alien drooling on his arm.
The last wedding party Serena was obliged to attend was Hester’s. Hester surprised the hell out of everybody by getting married at age forty-two to Frank Dubrowski, a man unburdened by good looks, but famous for keeping the most spotless garage for miles. A forty-eight-year-old widower who since his first wife’s death ten years earlier had lived alone in the modest split level with the famous garage that holds his pickup truck and a lawnmower the size of his front lawn. These days it holds Hester’s Honda Civic as well, when Hester isn’t busy trekking Viking-like across the continent in it.
Frank sometimes leaves the garage door up — by mistake, he claims — to flaunt his organizational skills. Inside this sanctum clean tools hang in alphabetized rows according to size, including three garden hoses, two of them unused but of superior quality.
“You could eat off the floor in there,” Hester complimented Frank at the church Christmas party the year before their nuptials. Every person in the room could tell by the look on Frank’s face that he’d suddenly realized that before him stood the insightful woman with whom it might be worthwhile to continue a spic-and-span existence.
They’re truly happy, Hester and Frank.
In bored, petty moments Serena pictures them at their kitchen table, sipping tidy cups of coffee, a coaster under each cup to protect the table, smiling smug smiles as they relish the supreme order of their universe. It’s a picture that forces her, wherever she is, to flee outside to drown herself in fresh air, gulping it, looking towards heaven for reassurance, lest she falls off the precarious tightrope that is her life. She has a poor sense of balance.
The same furtive way she fled Hester’s and Frank’s wedding feast, escaping at the moment she always escapes such gatherings: when the dancing starts and half-pissed relatives begin to flaunt their staggering lack of rhythm. As always, the very sight of them plunged her into dark despair. Emotions that strong must lead their own dance, so she followed them — as always — out of the room, which at a wedding was the dreary banquet room of some local hotel — always, always — down the stairs, out the back — always, always — to the parking lot. Uninteresting territories, these behind-the-hotel parking lots — always, always — oil-stained, bleak and without hope.
But above the pitiless concrete, stars blinked in the night sky — always, always — as though it was tradition when mortals celebrated their paltry achievements, blinked and winked in her understanding piece of heaven — always, always — letting her know they were there. And she wished upon those distant stars — always, always — for what she was never sure, some calming influence, the strength to break free, to rid herself of the confining identity imposed upon her. And it helped. The deep heavy sighs that lodged like stones in her chest became weightless and floated out of her, rose into the universe like bubbles.
Serena knew the family assumed that she had run away because she was jealous of Hester tying the knot with a fine fellow like Frank Dubrowski, remembering how she had fled Cousin Joanne’s wedding in the same manner. Just as she had fled Cousin Torben’s wedding before that, when he married that tall girl from Vancouver, whose dad had been to prison for some white-collar crime.
Just as she knew that that was why they had made a point of consoling her at supper the Sunday following Hester’s wedding, their limited minds figuring she was bothered that not only Hester, but girls whose parents had a criminal past, ended up happily married. They employed their usual version of subtlety
during the consolation process (“You’ll find a man too!”) until Serena got up and stormed outside, over to the back fence where she stood, arms crossed, staring hard into the sky as if waiting for an incoming mothership to beam her up. Stood there knowing full well that in the house they would stay at the table, Mother saying, “Eat while the food is hot!” They would be eating and craning their necks to stare discreetly out the window to see what she was up to.
Just as she knew that Hester would be the first to put down her knife and fork and say, “I’ll go and talk to her. I know how to handle her.”
Just as she knew that Father would mumble, “Oh, leave her alone,” and that as ever nobody would pay him any attention.
Just as she knew that Mother would reply, “You do that,” and then do something like hand Frank the mashed potatoes and say something typical like, “Home grown russet, Frank. From out back. Have some more.” As if her eldest daughter’s second-hand husband might fade into thin air if she did not keep feeding him.
And sure enough, there came Hester looking purposeful. Serena watched her approach, then fled to the driveway, hopped in her car and tore out of there. Hester was still wearing Mother’s flowery apron. It flapped around her hips as she ran to the sidewalk to peer after Serena’s fast disappearing car. She stood there for a while, nonplussed, fingering the top button of her blouse.
Serena always keeps a pack of cigarettes and a ten-dollar bill in the glove compartment; they tend to come in handy. She also leaves the key in the ignition. That Sunday, it was close to midnight before she returned to Mother’s to retrieve her coat and handbag. Hester and Frank were long gone. Mother and Father were asleep (or pretending to be), when Serena slipped quietly into the house, reeking of cigarettes, coffee and the cloying fat of deep-fried donuts.
They stay in St. Paul for another two days. Serena tries hard to be obliging, even when Hester insists they eat the nondescript food in the generic hotel dining room rather than go out to a restaurant where the food might to be worth chewing.
After a mainly silent dinner Hester wants to hurry back upstairs to work on her notes. Most of the copious information she has gathered has nothing to do with their ancestry, but unrelated subjects she finds fascinating and wants to tell Frank about.
“Why would Frank give a shit about what quilting patterns were popular with early Scandinavian settlers?”
“Frank is interested in everything I tell him. He has a very open mind.”
“Frank . . . ” doesn’t have a mind. He’s exchanged it for a garage.
“What dear?”
“Nothing.”
Serena breaks loose each night, desperate to get outside, running down the stairs if the elevators are heading upwards. She does this even though there’s nowhere suitable to walk in the vicinity. She has to. She craves the sky, longs to feel the cooling night wind in her face. She needs to look up and see those reassuring stars, that comforting moon, those unencumbered clouds on their way to distant horizons. She would circle the large deserted parking lot between the hotel and the Sears Bargain Centre, pace it like a caged animal, wear a groove in the asphalt if she had to.
She crosses the street instead, stops on the bridge over the highway and watches the lights of the night traffic below, two uninterrupted red lines streaming one way and two yellow ones hurrying in the opposite direction. Wonders where they are all in such a rush to get to this time of night. Imagines candlelit, garlic based dinners, glasses of wine, people to talk to. Lives well lived.
Up by the cathedral she turns left and heads towards downtown St. Paul, trying to look like she has a destination, that she’s at home here, that she’s afraid of no one. She ends up going farther than intended, inhaling the fresh air after another long hot day. No gun-toting criminals lurk in the shadows. There’s nobody out at all and it’s a bit eerie.
Soon it becomes too eerie. A few blocks past the Xcel Energy Centre, afraid of getting lost in streets that look different at night, she turns to go back to the hotel, walking faster now, chased by her own footsteps. By the time she gets to the bridge, she’s running, out of breath.
Hester is still sitting at the round table by the window, haloed by the glow of the lamp above her head, busy categorizing and transferring the notes about their ancestors from Norway. There are few notes to categorize, so she prints each word with care, giving it its own symmetrical importance, determined to imbue their slender family tree with weight and substance. Relief floods her face when she sees Serena, out of breath and sweaty, walk through the door.
Serena greets her with a comment. “Still at it?”
“Oh, I’ve been busy.” Hester gives Serena the rundown on the family.
Originally from Haugesund on the west coast of Norway, Great-grandpa Johann and his brother, Mother’s Uncle Emmett’s father, Niels, arrived by boat in New York from Bergen in 1892, together with their parents and younger sister, Ulrike. From New York they took the train to Minneapolis, where Johann eventually got a job as a private chauffeur. His only son, Hans, moved to Toronto after he married a Canadian girl. After months of doing odd jobs Niels continued up to Saskatchewan, where a few years later he bought a homestead by the Frenchman River near the Alberta border. Ulrike’s branch was stunted; she never married. Uncle Emmett, an only child, married Hilda, and they had one son, Carl, who was killed in the war, pruning that branch before its time.
“So we no longer have any relatives to speak of?”
“Not on Mother’s side, no. At least not here. But I’m sure we have lots of distant ones in Norway, in this Hoggisand place.”
“Hardly worth the trip, was it?”
“You haven’t enjoyed yourself?”
“I’ve been thrilled to bits, Hester. But now, if you’ll excuse me, I must have a shower.”
“Don’t forget to hang up the towels. That’s what the sign says. Hang them up to indicate that you will use them again to save energy. I think it’s the least we can do to help out.”
“Absolutely,” says Serena. She’s been nice all day and now it’s late and she’s beat. She stands in the shower until the water runs cold, then dries herself and throws the towels on the wet floor. The dry ones too.
Fifteen minutes later, after a cold shower, Hester shakes the towels out and hangs them up. Using a length of toilet paper she cleans the counter top until it’s nice and dry, wiping up the gobs of toothpaste Serena left in the sink.
When Hester is in her flannel nightgown and has hung up their clothes, smoothing them with the flat of her hand, she folds her bedspread and slips between the sheets. She requests Serena turn off the TV.
“You can watch TV at home,” she says. “It’s a rerun anyway. That guy hasn’t been on the show for ages. They killed him off, remember?”
“I like him.”
“No, you don’t. Turn it off.”
“Why?”
“Well . . . so we can talk. We’re on holiday.”
“Fine.” Serena turns off the TV and throws the remote on the floor. “What do you want to talk about?”
“Anything, dear.” Hester’s fount of goodnaturedness is not about to run dry. “Why do you always go walking late in the evening? You do the same at home. I’ve never understood it. It’s always worried Mother, if you must know. It’s not safe, not these days. Especially not here where everybody carries a gun.”
Serena’s too tired to lie. “I need to see the sky.”
“The sky? What on earth for?” Hester’s tone reveals that now she has learned the nature of her sister’s ailment, she’ll do her best to cure it.
“Turn out the light,” says Serena before Hester has time to open her mouth again. “I’m going to sleep.”
When Serena was little she assumed that if you owned a piece of land you also owned the matching piece of sky above it. If you didn’t own any land you were the proprietor of only the area of sky directly above your head.
Uncle Emmett had inherited a lot of land in southern Saskatchewan from
his father Niels. After he married Hilda, he sold it and they moved east to Ontario where the winters were less harsh and the soil more fertile. He bought a farm near Orangeville.
When you stood at the end of the long driveway leading up to the farm, all the land rolling to the horizon was all his, every bit of it, consequently Serena assumed that he also owned the considerable chunk of sky directly above it, perhaps farming its stars.
At Uncle Emmett’s funeral she overheard two of the neighbours, Mr. Harding and Mr. Leskinen, discuss the land. Apparently there was too much of it for Hilda to handle alone, so she had decided to move back out west to a place called Regina, where her only sister lived. Somebody named Gruber had bought the farm. It was no longer in the family.
It was, they agreed, too bad.
Serena was five at the time. “Did the man buy the sky above it too?” she inquired, thinking he must have. Or could heaven be sold as a separate parcel of land?
The two neighbours — they’d had their fair share of funeral whisky in Mr. Leskinen’s pickup truck — looked down at the little girl in her Sunday best. “Did you say something?”
“The sky above this land. Did the man buy that too, or is it still Uncle Emmett’s now that he is up in heaven?”
They snorted and chuckled and shook their heads.
This was a matter of importance and she needed clarification, so she pressed on. “Well? Is it?”
“Sure, kid. Emmett’s right up there behind that cloud.”
“That big cloud over the trees?”
“That’s the one.”
“So you can keep your bit of the sky when you die?”
“You bet, toots. It’s all yours.”
She was relieved to learn this, though it raised another question. “Then what bit of sky do the people get who are taking over Uncle Emmett’s land?”
“That’s up to God to know and us to find out. And seeing as we’re not dead yet, we’ll have to wait and see. That’s how it works.”
“I see.” At the time she thought she did.
Leaving Berlin Page 19