Mad Hope

by Heather Birrell

  James wakes up as if he has heard my thoughts; as if now that I have pulled him back, he must pull me back too. Hi, Mum, he says. He smiles. Is it possible for a seven-year-old to be sardonic? Hi James, I say. He looks around. Nice room. Only the best, I tell him, and squeeze his hand. But he means it; he likes this room. He knows it saved him. Still: Can we go home now? Yep, your dad and sisters are on their way. Excellent, he says. He inclines his head towards the TV. Can we watch some shows? I shake my head. I think we have to pay. But when I get up and try the button – the television mounted on its very own space arm – it works. A rerun of Welcome Back, Kotter. Is this the only channel we get? He makes a face that makes my heart twitch with irritation and gratitude. Beggars can’t be choosers, I say. What does that mean? says James. It means, count yourself lucky. What does that mean? says James. It means, watch the show and I love you. I kiss him on the shoulder. Eww, he says. But he’s still too weak to push me away. On the screen, John Travolta’s jeans are too tight and everybody looks too old to be in high school, but James gets into it, and after a few minutes, so do I.

  Impossible to Die in Your Dreams

  Eliza: Soup out of Stones

  When my granddaughter Annie was ten, she started talking like a wrestler from a fable. ‘I regard you as a nail in the eye and a thorn in my muscle,’ she’d say. ‘I will trounce you,’ she’d shout, with her arms raised, fists clenched. That was after the three-month period when she insisted on watching As the World Turns standing on her head with the backs of her knees propped against the recliner. She said it made more sense that way. There’s no contesting the wisdom of children. Now, there she is, all dolled up to the nines and tens, ready to wed. And in such a place! I’m not one for religion, but still, a brewery tugs at the old constraints of credulity. And her sister Samantha, always the ornery one, scowling in the corner. Went and got herself a P-H-D and traipsed around the world. Places herself above weddings and other normal human interactions. Thinks tripping through a rice paddy in Vietnam lends her some smarts inaccessible to the likes of me and Bea.

  ‘Why the beanie?’ says my friend Bea, nudging.

  ‘Not a beanie, Bea, yar-mah-kah. He’s Jewish. But not strict or anything. Eats whatever’s placed in front of him.’

  ‘Shh,’ says Samantha, who has now seated herself behind us. She refused to be a part of the ceremony – said it was antiquated and patriarchal. But now she sits shushing, blinking back tears and choking on love. Guess they never put the term hypocrisy on the syllabus at her fancy schools.

  Annie’s a beautiful girl, wilful and often ill-mannered, but a survivor. It’s odd seeing her in white, in a gown, looking like a Cinderella doll with shiny cheeks and teeth. I had them like that – bones and teeth that thrived and gritted and bolstered. Not anymore. But I still got a couple of gnashers, rising proud like tombstones from the gum. I once heard a sprinter on the TV talk about hitting his stride. I had my legs under me, he said. I’m the same, legs still under me. And I know some things.

  Ah, here they are now, pronouncing the same old promises we go on promising: to be true, to take care, to grow old together.

  And the kiss – under the silk huppah, the clean, striving buildings and the blue, blue sky. Perfect. And impossible to fulfill, though we sweat and ache and die trying.

  ‘Jewish, eh?’ says Bea as the bride and groom stride past, well-fed youth with years ahead. ‘Will she have to wear that scarf?’

  Bea’s sparky and tough, but crosses wires.

  ‘That’s Muslims, Bea,’ says Samantha, sighing. ‘There are some of those here too. Plus some Gentiles turned Jews, a couple of Catholics with questions, some lapsed Buddhists, or Buddhists ascending.’ Samantha scans, then sighs again. ‘Some who just do a lot of yoga.’

  ‘Any lesbians?’ says Bea.

  ‘That’s not a religion.’ Samantha gets up to congratulate and circulate.

  ‘Coulda fooled me,’ says Bea. ‘What with the protests and parades.’

  After the snap-snapping of photos, the well-wishers are herded by Samantha through the shipping doors – passageways from a far-off, enchanted land, too tall for mortals – and into the dining hall, with its soaring ceilings and portentous, yeasty smells. Long medieval tables dressed in white have been set up along the walls. But outside there is the CN Tower, that spire of silver and concrete, people being sucked up through its centre as if caught in God’s gigantic straw. Bea and I sit out on the patio, watching it all. The rabbi who married the couple – a humanistic feministic Jew with a batik scarf draped around her large bosoms – is mingling with the crowd. I can tell that Bea approves of the woman by the way she followed the ceremony, mouthing along as if at a rock concert.

  ‘Do you remember your own wedding, Eliza?’ she asks me, then pauses to reflect and point towards the hustle and bustle of celebration. ‘Do you remember this?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Yes, I do.’

  And she nods the slow, sad nod of the never married.

  A blue jay wings its way across the sky, alights on a scraggly shrub.

  ‘Did I ever tell you about my neighbour’s canaries?’ Bea is alert again, ready.

  Once, twice, thrice, goes the refrain in my brain, but I shake my head no.

  ‘The sweetest songs they sang. So peaceful for such bright yellow things. And none of us knew the reason why. Helen would bring them out in their copper cage to the garden, and I’d listen to them while I weeded. Well, it wasn’t until years later I learned the reason for their dreamy song. It was cannabis seeds she fed them! Carted the seeds from Greece every time she went back. No one ever blinked an eye or sniffed her out. Picked them from her brother’s field. A whole crew of chirpy little drug addicts keeping me company as I plucked dandelions from the soil. Do you believe it? Would you ever have dreamed that one up?’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘No, I could not.’

  We shift from side to side, heave ourselves up and begin the trek inside. There is a beat or two while we breathe and step. We have it down, our rhythm, our particular intermissions.

  ‘But that’s not the whole story when it comes to canaries,’ I say. There are times when it is important to come back at Bea with an interesting fact, a tidbit of information. ‘My grandfather kept his at the back of the garden – was determined to breed them with the pigeons. Figured if the damn flying rats were to be a nuisance, they could be nuisances with some talent.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Bea. ‘Right you are.’ We shuffle our way past a thin, glowering waiter placing cutlery and napkins just so, last night’s libations weighing heavily on his brow. ‘Couldn’t get them to do it though, could he?’ Bea nudges me, something lascivious in her eyes.

  ‘No, he couldn’t. They’d screw their own kind silly, but you couldn’t get them to give the time of day to a stranger.’

  ‘Too true,’ says Bea, sated. ‘Too true.’

  It’s like this with us. We know each other’s stories like we know the shapes of our own noses.

  Samantha comes over and settles us into the reception area, hands us tall glasses full of fizzy, pink drink.

  ‘Cheers.’ She clomps off, too thick-waisted and heavy-footed for her delicate getup. She’s an odd duck, that one. As pretty and petal-like as her sister when she wants to be, but het up with notions of a world out of her reach. Out of everybody’s reach.

  Last week, I had a dream where I flew. But it wasn’t the flying you expect from a dream – the soaring freedom of being airborne, carefree. I could fly only a short distance off the ground, and for me, flying was like swimming. I breaststroked my way around town, just over the heads of my friends and family. Not hovering, but floating as if on water, supported and stymied by the thickness of the air. There was my daughter, teenaged and bold, holding a pantsuit aloft, wanting a button stitched, the hem fixed. And my husband, with a teacup outstretc
hed, his Brylcreemed hair flopping sideways, a sly eyebrow in view. The town, which was my world, had gravel paths instead of roads, a pink stop sign at every corner. Bea was there, in an easy chair by the river. And that bastard Bobby, sitting on a bench by the newsstand. Annie was inside buying penny candy, her pigtails straggling free of their fasteners. I swam over to cuddle her, to hold her in my arms, carry her on my back, so we could swim away from Bobby and his groping fingers, his eyes that stroked and cajoled. But it was hard going. I could not reach her, my kick was weak and tadpole-like. She strode out of the store and he called her over – three times her age and one third of her intelligence! Annie! I shouted. And she turned to look up at me, her inept angel. But I could only ever say her name. Whatever warning was blossoming in me stuck like a lozenge in my throat. She smiled and waved. She sat next to Bobby and counted out her sweets with him, put them in three piles in his outstretched palms. Annie, I said. She smiled up at me again, her cheek bulging with the shape of a jujube. And then I woke up.

  ‘I don’t think it’s about death,’ I say to Bea. Atonement, maybe. Not death.

  ‘No, no, not death,’ says Bea. ‘Impossible to die in your dreams.’

  But this is not what I mean. To die in a dream would be nothing. But to feel it coming down the pipe, to have to do battle with all your willed innocence and slick helplessness. And my daughter, with the same cheery sense of entitlement she wore as a child, a blamelessness she cannot really feel in her core – where is she today while her own daughter twirls and basks?

  Bea grunts softly over her supper, concentrating like an animal. My husband, Frank, would make these same noises, little sighs and half-words dedicated to himself as he ate. There were days I could’ve clocked him for it – a right hook to the jaw – or ended it swiftly, bringing the cast iron down cleanly on the top of his head. Other days, the tiny clicks and deep echoes of his very swallowing filled me with such brutal tenderness it took my breath away. Still, I never begrudge Bea her private sounds and satisfactions. It is one of the luxuries of the elderly – to skirt niceties in the name of infirmity. But now here they are, the couple of the hour, rising to thank us and praise each other.

  ‘Would you look at our Annie,’ I say. Bea is licking her index finger to collect crumbs from the table. She looks. We both look.

  Who is this young woman – mouth open in declamation, hand over her heart – if not a strange beacon to us all? There was a story – her favourite – I used to read to her when she was a child. In the story a village was starving, hoarding what they little had. And into this village came a hobo with less than nothing. But faith in life’s little improvisations – this he had. He helped them make soup out of stones.

  ‘He’s got a good shape, does he not?’ asks Bea of Philip, the groom.

  ‘So he does,’ I say. It’s true. A birthmark like the boot of Italy down the side of his face, but a good shape, and even better sense.

  A pretty girl with chunky arms clears our dishes, the wedding cake is wheeled onto the dance floor. Annie and Philip step forward, sink a knife into the creamy frosting.

  Everything speeds up, tightens, then expands inside of me. I am at the park with Annie. Samantha has skulked off to the pool with one of her pals – covetous with her plans and preparations. Annie is wearing dungarees and a sleek hairstyle. She is eleven, with two new soft knobs for nipples. She runs from tree to tree, actually leaps to catch a white and blue butterfly and succeeds. She comes to me, her hands clasped around the creature. ‘Gran,’ she says. She looks me in the eye. ‘Bobby calls me his butterfly.’ She opens her hands, exposes her palms like a beggar. We watch it together, the darting, fluttering thing, as it spirals up into the sky like ash. Like confetti. Like the suddenly free, short-lived secret that it is.

  Ah, but now she dances. And now she is in the air herself, on her throne, a queen hefted high by friendly drunks. Our Annie, clutching the sides of her chair, terrified, alone, triumphant.

  ‘Earth to Eliza,’ says Bea. ‘Who’s that Samantha’s talking to?’

  ‘Couldn’t say,’ I reply. It is a man carrying himself well, older than Samantha, though not by much. He is taking her hand for the hora, leading her into the fray.

  ‘It’s a good dance for the hebes,’ says Bea, clapping along. ‘For everybody.’

  ‘Yes.’ It is a good dance, bodies linked in circles, grapevining around the dance floor, shoulders shifting this way and that, the elation of arms raised.

  ‘L’chaim,’ I practise softly.

  Samantha: A Room of One’s Own

  ‘You’re not dancing?’ He is tall, this man, his black hair expensively, if modestly, coiffed, and although he does not carry one, Samantha imagines he would suit a cane, a prop of some kind.

  ‘No. Just absorbing it all.’

  ‘From here?’ he says. He takes Samantha by the hand and soon she is in it, being swept back and forth, Annie’s mother-in-law winking at her from the left, her father waving from the sidelines, his look of perpetual surprise deepened by the sight of her, of her joy. Yes, this must be it. She’s drunk and duped into sentiment, into belonging. And her father, so solemn in tone and matte in manner, seems to know something about her she never suspected. How can he, when his most fervent interest, for as long as she can remember, or at least since her mother left, has been the building of ships in bottles? She had always dismissed this hobby as an exercise in maddening patience, requiring only the miracle of single-mindedness, a steady hand and overly long pincers. She thought he had shut out the wider world for a fantasy encased in glass, but now here he is acting as though he knows her, as if he can see not into her brain, which is tangled like a briar patch, but into her future, the twisting tunnel that is her very life.

  ‘Your sister is beautiful,’ says the man, stooping to her ear. ‘Philip told me as much.’

  ‘She is incredible,’ says Samantha, watching Annie spinning in the middle of their circle, arms outstretched. When the sisters were twelve and eight, a vast treacherous galaxy stretched between them. Annie was determined to navigate it. Samantha and her friends believed in witchcraft, blue eyeliner and using tongues when you kiss. Annie was their doll and plaything, a floppy, earnest version of themselves. They used her to play séance, to call up the power they felt surging through their bodies like new sap.

  There was a blindfold, a purple bandana they rolled and knotted, then tied tightly around Annie’s eyes. She was their medium, their conduit. ‘One more spin, then stop,’ said Samantha, then clasped her sister in a hard hug from behind, pushing her fist into the smaller girl’s abdomen to drive out the air. Annie fainted, lay in a heap on the floor while Caroline and Soula conjured love, which meant a boy’s hand moving downwards from the small of your back, his hot breath in your ear, which meant a peppery feeling in your extremities, a drowsy warmth in your lower belly, and lower still. Which meant (if you were lucky or cursed) at night, alone, under the covers, something so raw and wracked and already whole that – although it seemed strange to think it – it could not, honestly, ever be shared with anyone else. Annie woke up suddenly, flailing like a fish at the bottom of a boat, fretful with hope. ‘Did it work?’ she would gasp. ‘Will they love you now?’ And Samantha and her friends would spit out curt thanks, already weary of the conceit.

  But things had been different for Annie. As initiations go, hers should have precipitated a haunting more sustained and damaging than any séance could summon. Why, then, is it Samantha who pitches and yearns, is beset by a desire she can only ever faultily fulfill? When Annie, aged nine, told Samantha what had happened with their cousin Bobby – the clandestine meetings, the candy, the caresses that turned toxic – Samantha had swallowed her sister’s shame and turned it into the wrong kind of anger.

  ‘Bobby is a very close friend of mine,’ Annie had said, when Samantha recoiled, reproved, denied. ‘He said it was j
ust something for us, a love game, you know? Like the say-once game?’

  ‘He is not your friend and this makes you a little, well, this makes you a slut, Annie.’

  Samantha releases her mother-in-law’s hand, excuses herself to the propless man. ‘Just going to the bathroom,’ she half-­whispers.

  ‘Let me get you another drink. What would you like? I’m Max, by the way, a friend of Philip’s from work.’ He follows her over to a nearby table.

  ‘Samantha. Nice to meet you. Vodka and cranberry, please. Twist of lime. Two twists of lime.’

  ‘Gotcha. Two twists.’ He winks at her.

  Smug polished stones cluster next to the sink beside a pile of dried rose petals resting in a shallow pewter dish, and in the mirror: Samantha’s own self, flushed from the wine and the dancing. The hairdo seems prepared to rally, but an anxious musk is mingling expertly with her perfume, clouding out from under her arms, between her legs. She touches her cheek, smooths the shininess from the edge of her nose, taps at her emerging crow’s feet, considers lip gloss. But no, stall first. Inside the stall is safe and square, the lock slots into place as it should. She swings her skirt up and forward, gathers it in front and works her underwear down with one hand. Once seated, she relaxes into the pee, her panties pulled taut between her knees. Everything, her whole life, shrunk now, to this stall, which is every stall, every seat where she’s ever sat to pee. A room of one’s own and all the careful deliberation of the drunken: the narrowed eyes, clasping fingers, the slow tear and the slower, conscientious wipe. The light is pleasantly bright, the walls gleaming and graffiti-free. Samantha is not dizzy, although she is experiencing some of the empty-headed euphoria that accompanies dizziness. Her gaze slides easily up the walls to the ceiling, then back down again.