Mad Hope

by Heather Birrell

  It scares me still, how bright we keep things, how hard it is to preserve the dark. Even now I believe that darkness is where we are most safe. In the dark they cannot see you. Bea – only seventeen! – came to us in the dark in June of 1944, her wide eyes made whiter, more round, by the gloom. We found her mother in the morning, crushed under a wardrobe that had worked itself free, shaken loose when a bomb hit blocks away. Six days later her father came home with one arm and three bars of chocolate. He hugged Bea lopsidedly, then left her to her own devices. We shared the chocolate, and my fiancé booked us a passage to Canada.

  ‘Annie, she deserves this,’ sighs Bea, her plate heaped high with tarts and confections.

  ‘Yes.’

  I give Bea a little squeeze and she turns to me, surprised, then smiles.

  ‘You’re not getting any of this coconut pie, if that’s what you’re thinking,’ she says.

  Samantha: We Fail?

  ‘You know,’ says Samantha, ‘I had this one student in Vietnam who cycled for an hour and a half each morning to get to school. He wasn’t bright – average, I’d say, or just above – but my God, he tried his nuts off in every single subject. I’ve never met anyone so young and so dedicated. I helped him fill out a university application for a school in the States. Some business school whose name escapes me – associated with one of the Ivy Leaguers. Princeton, I think. I want to go to a world-famous university, he kept telling me. I want to make my father proud. I must come back and get a very good job. Yes, I said, and thought, How terrible for him, to be carrying so much, to wake each morning and step, unthinkingly, into that fierce forward motion. He was one of three, the middle child, living in a house with dirt floors. His favourite book was Who Moved My Cheese?’ Samantha stops talking to take a sip of her drink. She knows she is drunk and holding forth. Max is making a listening-type face, his eyebrows raised generously, but she’s pretty sure he is also sneaking discreet peeks at her cleavage. She doesn’t care; a message is burning inside her, it begs telling.

  ‘This boy’s father told the children, when they were very young, that there would be money for only one of them to go to school.’ Although it is a hackneyed, possibly ethnocentric image, Samantha cannot help picturing the family huddled around the central cooking fire of their ragged home. She places the aspiring boy at the edge of the circle, clothes him in a Nike football jersey, some cut-off jeans and a pair of worn leather thongs. She smooths his brow with one open hand, then steps back, into the shadows. ‘This man set up a scholarship fund for the child who earned the highest marks, then he worked like a dog in the rice fields to make the funds grow.’

  Samantha pauses. She is telling this story for herself more than Max. Why? Because there is a lesson to be learned. If you want something, you must not waver. If you need something, you must try your damnedest, always, to get it. While in Vietnam, she had explained to her students the difference some marks on a page could make.

  Macbeth: If we should fail –

  Lady Macbeth: We fail?

  You had a choice between indecision and imperiousness when it came to the relative success of your plans. Like all of life, it was only a matter of intonation. Samantha leans forward and places her hand lightly on Max’s forearm.

  ‘Did he get in?’ says Max.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Did he get in to the school?’

  ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, then, you did a good thing helping him the way you did. His father must be so proud.’ Max announces this matter-of-factly, almost curtly, so that it resonates with truth.

  ‘Yes,’ she says, beginning to like the way he makes her unsure of the point of things.

  They go out together into the night, into the courtyard and the grassy stretch of park, over a small knoll, to a spot under a maple buttressed by chicken wire near the chain-link fence. The city surrounds them, blocks and blocks of blinking, squared-off ambition. Standing there under the ozone – tattered, as it is, like a child’s security blanket – Samantha tips up her face to kiss Max.

  Eliza: Forget-Me-Nots

  Frank begged off with seasickness on the journey from Carlisle. Bea and I spent most of our time on deck playing games with the wind, watching it work our hair into strange birds of prey, ­boisterous bouffants. The ship felt luxurious and large to us, despite the crowds, and I still get shivers thinking about the red velvet ropes in the stairwells.

  I found them lapping at each other on his narrow bunk, Bea’s eyes squinched shut in love or concentration – who can really tell the difference when it comes right down to it? Frank’s eyes fluttered at the sound of my step. He could always, in all our years, hear me coming. Our gazes met, magnetized, mid-air.

  Up on deck the spray had real spunk, and I hated the fact that the ship was my home.

  Bea’s mother had embroidered her handkerchiefs for her sixteenth birthday – tiny blue forget-me-nots with black staring centres sewn along the scalloped edges. I brought Bea to tears halfway across the Atlantic by snatching one from her sleeve and waving it over the churning grey of the waves. She was on her knees with nausea and frustration before long, and stayed there, sobbing, until I placed the hanky daintily, royally, on her bowed head. In this way we forgave.

  Annie’s dress has been trampled at the back – the dusty spirits of footprints on the dragging train. The flowers that were worked so finely into her hair (rolled and twisted like hamentaschen, she told me, a pastry representing the hat of a Hebrew hero) are gone, and wisps have sprung free around her temples. Her nose is slick with sweat. She signals to the DJ to stop the music with a slicing motion across her fine neck, and the silence is confusing; it slows us all down and sharpens our vision. The guests trip back to their tables, await instructions. Annie has collected her bouquet from the head table: gardenias, marigolds and dahlias, their stems wound round with a wide hot pink ribbon whose ends trail and flap. She lifts the bouquet in the air – up, up and up – towards the bright disco ball. There are sighs and deficient giggles, and Samantha to my left, averting her gaze. Annie turns towards us; she knows how to find and hold her sister steady. They stare at each other. What is it about a room full of people waiting on love to be declared that plugs up the throat? Annie stops in front of Samantha, salutes her with her eyes. Then she turns in my direction, scoots alongside my chair, crouches close – ah! the smell of her hair, the smell of her sweet baby head! – and lays the bouquet in my lap.

  People talk about opposite points of your life like the tail ends of a measuring tape that will meet only when you’ve travelled and tallied that last quarter inch. But Frank once brought me a set of Russian dolls after he’d been out all night. He smelled of pipe smoke and a single woman’s soap when he handed them over – round-faced, brightly swaddled women nestling right down into themselves to a tiny, solid core. Sometimes my wedding – Frank’s smart, purposeful army uniform, the joy and terror doing caged battle in my chest – fits tightly around his deathbed, a too-low ceiling, and how it felt to hold the hand of a husk. Other times, a small moment or image will grow, harden like lacquer and click into place over my entire self. The way Frank allowed his tented book to fall to the floor as we dreamt our way to the ends of our stories and away from each other. My daughter’s face as she pulled on her socks for the first time, the smell of my father’s shirts at the end of the day, Bea’s red golf umbrella snapping open above us, a certain shade of sky.

  Samantha: Muddling

  Out in the night, with Max’s arms around her, her dangerous heels sinking into the moist earth, Samantha realizes something. It is a bracketed understanding that settles outside and slightly to the left of her head, and will eventually drift into her blind spot. She remembers how she and Annie saved the Kleenexes they snotted into at their granddad’s funeral, balled them in their pockets, then deposited them in a cookie tin and wedged
the lid tightly down. She remembers bestowing cast-offs on Annie – three-limbed Barbies and too-short sweaters. Her sister’s face receiving these poor gifts was terrifying in its anxious bliss. ‘For keeps?’ she’d query softly. ‘For keeps?’

  ‘It’s all about muddling, isn’t it?’ Samantha mutters drunkenly, good-naturedly, into Max’s shoulder. Lady Macbeth thought it wise to unsex herself; she gave demons leave to drink from her breasts so she could get on with it, the business of power, but today, Samantha thinks, well, today people go to great lengths to procure offspring, seeking out test tubes and turkey basters, or rescuing tiny foreign tykes left behind by mothers themselves overlooked and overwhelmed. All over the world, blazing bombs in the shapes of planes or pointy fingers zoom down from the sky. The future breakdances madly on cardboard boxes laid over the earth’s mismatched plates and lava – and still we stake a claim on it!

  Max kisses Samantha’s collarbone; his hands find purchase under her bum.

  She keeps thinking she’s found it, the answer, and then it morphs, all sci-fi, into something alien and unclassifiable. For keeps, Samantha chants silently, as she guides Max’s fingers, unbuckles his belt, offers up important corners and foldings of herself.

  ‘Are you sure,’ he says kindly, but only partway means it.

  Eliza: Good Luck to You

  ‘She didn’t have to do that,’ I say, cradling the bouquet in my lap, saltwater squeezing out from under my eyelids.

  ‘But she did,’ says Bea, putting her arm around me.

  'She did,’ says Samantha, teetering strangely on her heels, legs pressed together, ankles crossed as if gathering herself together, holding something in. She shakes her head and kisses the top of mine.

  I reach up to grab on to her smart self. (You know, I once asked Samantha why she couldn’t find herself a fella. Can’t stay up on the shelf too much longer, I advised. She told me she was deeply involved with books. On the shelf, she said, was fine. Well, I said, good luck to you when it comes to reproducing.)

  ‘She did,’ Samantha says again, and takes hold of my hand, squeezing oh-so-tight.

  Bea, who is in her cups, has begun asking questions. ‘A dove brings white babies, right?’

  I do not answer.

  ‘Nothing but bleached-out pigeons, doves.’ Bea is slurring, but happy. I take her hand, but she pulls it away.

  ‘And a crow brings black babies,’ she says.

  A caution is kicking inside me. I look over at Samantha, who is frowning down at Bea. Bea knocks her knife off the table, then bends, gruntingly, to retrieve it. From under the tablecloth comes a new question, more pointed. ‘What, then … ’ This is muffled by the thick linen of the tablecloth’s overhang. She straightens up, places the knife in the centre of the table, far from the edge of the known world. ‘What brings no babies?’

  I shake my head while Bea smiles into her chest. Always, always, there is Bea, hurrying up the joke, harrumphing to herself.

  ‘Two swallows,’ she manages, between gasps. She slaps the table, overcome with the hilarity.

  Samantha, for all her prudery and politics, is laughing along with Bea.

  And I laugh too, knowing, in my heart of hearts, that, timing or no, this is good.

  Notes and Acknowledgements

  Some stories in the collection have been previously published (in slightly different form) in the following books and periodicals: ‘BriannaSusannaAlana’ in The New Quarterly 94 and Journey Prize Stories 18; ‘My Friend Taisie’ in Hobart # 8; ‘Dominoes’ as ‘White Bread Fiction’ in PRISM International 41:4; ‘Dingbat’ in The New Quarterly 85; ‘Bye Bye Flangle Nuts’ in The New Quarterly 99; ‘Wanted Children,’ in Toronto Noir; ‘Impossible to Die in Your Dreams’ on bookninja.com and in The New Quarterly 107.

  Writing and publishing a book is sometimes a bit like raising a child – it takes a village. Many thanks to: The New Quarterly, the Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Writers’ Trust of Canada for monetary and moral support; Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, steadfast friend and supporter of my writing habit; Jennifer Birrell, for impromptu childcare; Simona Opris for help with Romanian ­history and language; Amber Wilson, Kim Jernigan, Carrie Snyder, Julie Birrell and Hilary McMahon for early readings of the manuscript; Alana Wilcox, who handled these stories with true care and integrity; and all the good folk at Coach House, who gave the book a home and called it their own.

  My family bolster and sustain me always; this book wouldn’t exist without their help. As ever, love and thanks to the exceptional Charles Checketts, who keeps me in good grub and good spirits.

  About the Author

  Heather Birrell is the author of the previous story collection I know you are but what am I? (Coach House, 2004). Her work has been honoured with the Journey Prize for short fiction and the Edna Staebler Award for creative non-fiction, and has been shortlisted for both National and Western Magazine Awards. Birrell’s stories have appeared in many North American journals and anthologies, including The New Quarterly and Toronto Noir. She lives with her husband and two daughters in Toronto, where she teaches high school English.

  Typeset in Bell and Agency.

  Printed in February 2012 at the old Coach House on bpNichol Lane in Toronto, Ontario, on Zephyr Antique Laid paper, which was manufactured, acid-free, in Saint-Jérôme, Quebec, from second-growth forests. This book was printed with vegetable-based ink on a 1965 Heidelberg kord offset litho press. Its pages were folded on a Baumfolder, gathered by hand, bound on a Sulby Auto-Minabinda and trimmed on a Polar single-knife cutter.

  Edited and designed by Alana Wilcox

  Cover design by Ingrid Paulson

  Author photo taken by Charles Checketts

  Coach House Books

  80 bpNichol Lane

  Toronto, ON M5S 3J4

  Canada

  416 979 2217

  800 367 6360

  mail@chbooks.com

  www.chbooks.com