by Méira Cook
But Macilroy was hungry as a hunter now, as if his wife’s passing had conjured the starving man inside the dutiful husband. He clamped the meat down with his fork and tore at his flank steak, sawing at the gristle as if the knife was a set of teeth and he a panting dog. In four or five bites the steak was gone and he began to spoon mash and corn niblets into his mouth, all the while talking about his daughters: the Elk River daughter who had married young and was living to regret it, and the Vancouver Island daughter who was old enough now to smarten up and commit to something she’d likely regret in the future. Life, eh?
He held out his plate to Rose and said he wouldn’t mind a refill of whatever she had going on the stove there, particularly that delicious fried steak.
Delicious? thought Rose. Well, here was a man transformed!
There was no extra steak though, there never was. Rose had only fried up four —one for each of the kids, and another one each for herself and Macilroy. Aunt June tended not to eat with the family on flank steak nights. Whether this was a matter of taste or of tact, Rose couldn’t say. Steak was expensive and even such a cheap cut as flank stretched the family’s budget.
Rose took Macilroy’s gleaming plate from him — had there ever been a plate of such reflective emptiness? — and carried it, together with her own dinner plate, to the kitchen. She’d barely touched her steak, so enthralled had she been by Macilroy’s radiant transformation from husband to widower. Inspecting her steak now Rose saw that only one small corner bore knife marks. Swiftly, she transferred her own steak to Macilroy’s plate, concealing the bite-sized absence with a thick coating of gravy. There was plenty of mash and corn niblets, there always was.
“So his daughters never came in the end?”
“Never. How d’you like that?” Rose was sitting with her sister, filling her in on the day’s events. Her stomach growled. In her flurry she had forgotten the cause of her hunger but this did not lessen its effect. She suddenly remembered staring into the gleaming emptiness of the boarder’s dinner plate before she’d heaped his second helping upon it. For a moment she’d had the impression that the plate, far from being empty, was actually reflecting her own invisibility. But that was impossible, of course, a passing fancy. It was just a dinner plate, why make such a fuss?
“So the children —” Aunt June ventured in a small voice.
“— did not come.”
“No, not those.” Aunt June didn’t care about Macilroy and his unknown daughters. “The other two, the neighbourhood kids.”
The B-words, she meant. Brittany Thomas and Billy Sinclair.
“They have a man in custody, I guess,” Rose told her. “Looks like it might be Brittany’s father.”
“Ooo-h, Lord. Lord!” Aunt June moaned, but whether at the idea of the murdered children or at the pain in her tooth to which she had finally admitted, her sister couldn’t tell. Rose had brought up a length of cotton wool soaked in oil of cloves and brandy, and her sister had pressed it against her gums. Although her eyelids fluttered in pain at the motion, the homemade concoction that their late mother swore by was gradually having its numbing effect, the colour returning to Aunt June’s cheeks, the drawstring around her mouth loosening.
“Oh June,” Rose said, stirring. “Did I tell you what he called me today? That terrible boy?” She knew she couldn’t say the word out loud although she longed to. Cunt! she wanted to tell her sister. That little bastard called me a cunt. Imagine.
Instead, Rose began to laugh helplessly and after a while Aunt June, as always, joined in. After that the sisters sat for a time in amiable silence. Even though Aunt June had only laughed to keep her sister company, Rose could see that she had cheered up. Yet Rose was beginning to feel that familiar tug of loneliness that often followed a bout of laughter.
“Wind’s picked up,” she said to distract herself and also because it had.
Indeed the wind had picked up considerably in the last couple of hours and now, peering out the window over the trees and streets of the neighbourhood, Rose could see that the smoke from the chimney stack of the great hospital incinerator was blowing sideways. Usually the incinerator smoke rose straight as the column of the Lord that had guided the children of Israel in the desert, but now it was blowing sideways.
The children of Israel would never leave the desert.
Instead they would wander there with all the other lost children. The murdered neighbourhood kids, and the teenagers who hung out at dusk in the park, no mother’s voice ever calling them inside, and Macilroy’s daughters who had not come in time. Even the girl who came to sit with Aunt June had a tragic sister somewhere in her past.
Outside, under a streetlight, a little group of refugee kids turned in circles, waiting for their first sight of the promised snow. Watching them, Rose thought of all the world’s lost children: her own that had grown up and out of the orbit of her gravitational love, and Aunt June, who had once been a child although there was no one left to witness the child she had been.
All lost, all lost, the wind sighed as all the children — past, present, and to come — wandered in the imaginary desert of their eternal lostness.
Suddenly, the wind seemed to thicken and fill with snow. The first of the year. The streetlight cast down cones of illumination through which snow fell slantways, but the wind caught the snow before it reached the ground and blew it around. A young woman was walking home, small and lonesome. Rose thought she looked like Aunt June’s girl but she could have been anyone’s. Someone’s darling, perhaps. The cross in the sky above Sisters of Mercy appeared then disappeared, shrouded by clouds or snow static or some gusting failure of belief that had lain dormant for years but, just this minute, flared up again.
For a moment the city, all that she could see from Aunt June’s window — the hospital with its ugly geometrical blocks and breezeways, the skywalk that floated above them in a harsh daze of fluorescence, the Friends of Mercy donation thermometer creeping up past the halfway mark of generosity, and further away the old railway bridge and the blackness beyond that was only the river in the midst of its coldhearted freezing — the city hung in the balance. Then the wind caught it up again, turning it sideways, and for a long time the horizontal city streamed past the window like the long white exhalation from a sleepwalker’s breath.
Thaw
Thirteen
A House, a City, a Country Far from Home
It began a couple of months ago, with a bump in the night. Mine, against the headboard where I’d been trying to grind out the same old bad dream like a lit cigarette. I’d fallen asleep reading Max Brod’s biography of Kafka and woken with the book tented over my face. Did you know that Brod refused to follow his pal’s instructions to burn his life’s work? Instead, he saved Kafka’s manuscripts and published them. But of course you knew that. You are a Max B, too. There is nothing you won’t salvage.
God, men are so predictable. It’s like buying a lottery ticket. You never know what numbers are going to come up but you know for damn sure they aren’t going to do you any good. You were wrong about so many things, Max, but the only thing I won’t forgive is your optimism. It made you vulnerable, it made you reckless. Presumably even God can’t resist a sitting duck, a stopped clock, a greying middle-aged fool who can’t keep his eyes on the road. And yes, I’m angry. Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it, my darling. Anger is what has kept me upright and burning brightly through all my dark nights, and anger is what has roused me in the morning with the clean iron cut of an axe breaking the frozen sea within. More Kafka. Should have thrown him in the fire when you had the chance. Anyway, back to my insomnia.
I wonder if Sams is home? I thought. I ran to his bedroom to investigate but of course he wasn’t. It was only past eleven and much too early for our son, our vampire, to come home. Sams has gone rogue again, retreating into that dark little pinhole in his soul, the one nobody sees but me.
/> Oh Sams, Sams. My good, my best mistake. Do you remember how Imee used to call him her falling boy? I’d come home from work and there he’d be huddled in her lap and sobbing his heart out because he’d fallen and bumped his head or scraped his knee.
“Sorry Mrs. Maggie,” she’d say, “I couldn’t catch him in time.”
I knew what she meant. I used to throw the boys up into the air when they were little until one day — with this one, this particular boy of my heart — his eyes flashed open, and I watched fear like a shower of small hard stars falling through his body. I caught him in time but he fell anyway.
So, Sams. Out all night. Asleep all day. His room reeks of sour sheets and crusty T-shirts and stale, windowless air. But when I sneaked in earlier this evening there was a different smell. That acetone stink. Don’t you remember Dr. Raj explaining about bodies and kidneys? “If he doesn’t eat his body will shut down, hence the odour of ketones, Mrs. Binder, Professor Binder, of which we have to be especially chary.”
I knew I’d never fall asleep again, not tonight, not ever, so I thought, Soup, why not? He hadn’t eaten in days, you see.
White soup. It’s not easy but it’s doable, according to the Lutheran Ladies’ Recipe Swap Cookbook. The Lutheran Ladies are nothing if not a can-do bunch of gals. Onions and leeks and potatoes. I chopped and sautéed and stirred. Something curdled so I began again. More chopping. By then it was three in the morning and Sams still hadn’t come home but someone else was trundling down the stairs. Bump, bump, bump. Lazar with that Christopher Robin expression on his face. You know the one: intrepid but slightly anxious, brave in the face of danger.
“Butter beans,” he said.
I vaguely remembered a conversation we’d had about beans and why he thought I should add them to soup. Protein, was the answer. And yes, I’d toddled off like Mrs. Danvers, a demented but faithful family retainer, to source those damn beans, a can of which I eventually discovered cowering between asparagus tips and hearts of palm in Aisle 3: “Canned Goods and Instant Foods.” I don’t need to tell you how welcome I felt in Just-Add-Water Land except to say that Aisle 3 might be my spiritual home. But tonight I could not find those damn beans no matter where I searched, or speculate where they’d gotten to, or enter into a discussion with Lazar about why they were always in the last place you looked. Because sane folks tend to stop looking once they’ve found whatever they’re looking for, I snapped at the poor kid.
Ah, Max, to tell the truth I didn’t give a hill of beans. But Lazar has lost so much in the last year that my maternal bosom — rather pinched and miserly by this juncture — swelled. Who knows, perhaps there is such a thing as magic beans. So while the two of us knocked about the kitchen, banging open drawers and tossing through cupboards, I drew up this little existential contract, binding as all such contracts are, even between a mother and her son, even in a late night kitchen, even about beans: If we found the beans then Sams would come home and eat the soup. The soup would nourish him and, sated, he’d sleep in his own bed, and the smell of starvation would waft away from the room, never to return.
“Give it a rest, kiddo,” I can hear you saying. “You always want too damn much.”
I know, I know. Naggy Maggie, Maggie the hag, the drag, the lone zigger in the world of zag. Eyes too big for her stomach; stomach too small for her appetite.
“Go to bed,” I told Lazar finally, and I suppose he did because suddenly it was morning again and Christopher Robin was coming down the stairs, dragging his gaping backpack behind him as if it was his faithful bear. Bump, bump, bump. I couldn’t face him so I stepped back into the kitchen and laid my head on the table. Just for a moment. When I jerked back into consciousness about a year had passed, and my mouth tasted like bad dental work, and I had a Halloween pumpkin for a head. I’d been woken by the sound of gagging, and when I was able to focus again I saw that our youngest son was in a death match with the soup.
Naturally I told him he didn’t have to eat it and naturally it only spurred the kid on because he grabbed a spoon and forced down a sizeable chunk. Then, of course, he got all bulgy and red eyed, the way he would as a wee lad when you made him eat his broccoli. After I’d wiped him down as best I could, both of us dry heaving and gasping, gravity settled in me like sawdust. All I wanted to do was curl up into a ball and go to sleep wedged behind the stove. But the house was giving me that early morning squeeze, that elbow in the ribs, that get going, get out, be gone soul-poke that has yanked me out of bed every morning since your —.
Since.
So I pulled myself up and I shook myself out. I waved to the boy as if it was just another morning, which it was.
“Have yourself some fast times at Ridgemont High, Spicoli,” I said and saluted.
And damned if he didn’t salute right back. “Semper Fi, Mom.”
Let the record show that I strode off, waving not drowning, shining not burning. Let the record show that he waved back. And I’d like to believe that kids are stronger than what happens to them, that green fractures heal fastest, that for a time boys, like crabapple trees, thrive best on neglect.
But here’s the thing, Max. I felt bad about that soup. Because of falling asleep with a book on my face and waking up with a bump in the night. Because of the bad dream and the eyeball-scrunching, lead shoe-shuffling lack of sleep. Because of Sams gone AWOL, and the smell of death in his room, and the panic that drove me into slicing onions and leeks in the middle of the night. Because of misplacing the butter beans, and trying to find them, and not. Because that soup was the worst soup in the history of the world and, by gum, there was a lot of it. Because your mother, who always used to complain about terrible food and small portions, would have enjoyed the joke. Because I haven’t seen your mother in weeks; she makes me too sad.
But the thing I felt worst about was what I said to the kid before I left.
“It’s awful,” I said. “Just throw it down the drain.”
And I knew that when he came home Lazar would shrug off his backpack, roll up his sleeves, and begin dividing that pale gloop into individual freezer portions, pausing every so often to wipe down the counters.
He is the Max Brod to my Kafka. I can do nothing so shoddy that he doesn’t believe it can be salvaged.
Begin again.
“One can’t help feeling that you’re quite, uh, quite given over to anger these days, Mrs. Binder.” Dr. Raj put his fingertips together and tilted his head. “One senses a certain, uh, resistance.”
I call him the Rajah because he is a demi-wit with a grandiose manner and a clinically low threshold for irony.
“No,” I said. “No resistance.” I looked at his steepling fingers and his head cocked, the better to pluck my confidences from the air. I swear it was all I could do not to smack him so hard that his tight little therapist’s head would whip backward and forward forever on his skinny little shrink’s neck.
“No resistance,” I repeated, uncrossing my legs and my arms to indicate a free and easy lack of resistance. My movements made my stockings hiss suggestively and — with a little help from me — my ample bosoms heave. The Rajah shifted and blushed and tried to ease his involuntary erection. If I say so myself, I clean up pretty good: my hair was up (mostly), my neckline was down, my dander was up, my guard was down. Resolve up, eyelids down, shirt hiked, mouth turned down at the corners. Up, down, up, down. I was a walking mood disorder.
You know me, Max. I’m not one to weep in public. Never have, never will. The occasional sniffle when in the safe confines of the family, the odd whimper behind closed doors. I’ve been known to sob quite heartbreakingly when alone (well, it breaks my heart, anyway). But mostly was not now and I’m afraid to report that the sadness began somewhere in the pit of my stomach. By the time it had worked its way past my diaphragm and up my throat and out of my eyes and down my cheeks, it was too late to say, “Now then, Maggie,” or “Hold tha
t thought, girl.”
So much for forty years of never have and never will. Thanks a bunch, darling.
The Rajah looked disconcerted, as those in the caring profession frequently are when confronted with people who require care. What had happened to the Ice Queen? I could sympathize since I too was anxious to get to the bottom of the mystery. Why the sudden tears? Why the runny nose, the streaming eyes? Why all the goddamn liquid?
It turns out that tears are a good thing, Maggie. (You don’t mind if I call you Maggie, do you?) It turns out that tears are what dissolve anger. They are a sign of authentic sadness. He spoke slowly as if to a child, and not a smart one.
“That’s swell,” I said. “Tears and sadness, huh? Wow, what a reunion show that would make. ‘Tears and Sadness: Together at Last!’ Anger left the band for good but who needs him? He was a real bummer and an all-round creep.”
I’m ashamed to say that I went on for some time in this vein. Really working the metaphor, if you know what I mean. Ah, Maggie, I can hear you sigh. He was only trying to help —. I know, I know. He was only trying to help and I responded with my trademark brand of rinky-dink humour and reflex cuntery. So it goes, so it goes.
Let’s leave the Rajah and his unresolved woody shifting about on his swivel recliner in his third-floor office in one of those newly chic, restored factory warehouses on the river where, in fact, I did leave him, still pouring over our oldest son’s brick of a file. His office smells of Nutty Club candy and Union Shoe leather and the sweat of indentured labourers, and he is undoubtedly a dullish prick and a bore très colossal, but Sams is used to him, and he thinks Sams is a troubled soul with an inviolable inner light and no, we don’t use the word bonkers here, Mrs. Binder.
Well, at least I’d got him to stop calling me Maggie. Small victories, tiny triumphs.
But I continued to think of sadness and anger as I banged my way out of his office and into the street, as I gazed at the river, still frozen despite the New Year’s thaw, as I hurried downtown, cars and buses sloshing by, spraying me with gutter swill, as I found myself trapped behind pensioners yertling toward infinity and discount days at the Bay. A giant chocolate chip cookie tried to accost me and a panhandler in a duffle coat planted himself in my path and did a soft shoe shuffle on the sidewalk. I thought of cleaning his clock but didn’t. So: on a scale of one to ten — one being calm as milk and ten being me — not that angry, my darling. But then I remembered why I was here and that old shard of glass gave a twist and lodged deeper in my heart.