The Dead Husband Project

by The Dead Husband Project- Stories (retail) (epub)

  “Your mother is very kind,” he said in a rattling voice, setting off a fit of deep mucusy coughs.

  Your mother. Is very kind.

  “Thank you,” I said. With his good hand, he reached into his coat for a handkerchief just as his coughing began to subside.

  Your mother is very kind.

  She slid back into the car and brushed the snow out of her hair with a quick and deliberate hand.

  “Where do you live?” she asked.

  I looked at her fogging-up glasses in the rear-view mirror.

  Your mother is very kind.

  —

  There was a stack of pictures of the two of us in a wintery park. Maybe not quite a stack, maybe there were only a few. One of them in particular stands out in my memory. I’m a baby, four or five months old, bundled in a furry one-piece and lying in her arms. The barren tree branches behind us are lined with white, and beside us is the flat expanse of a frozen pond. She holds me close to her, but something makes her seem uncertain. I remember, as a child, examining my own expression in that photograph to see if even then I could sense her particular distance, but my tiny blurred face was screwed up in the wince made by all babies who are about to cry.

  She looks down at me cradled in the nook of her left arm, her right hand bent over my face to protect it from the falling snow. It could almost conjure images of the Virgin and Child.

  Almost.

  Especially with the luminous white orbs captured in the foreground, it does seem nearly ethereal. But it’s the colourlessness, I know, that I loved the most. The pictures could have been in black and white, but they weren’t; it was just the winter, the snow that stripped colour away. And for many years I dreamt of doing just that.

  —

  I was twelve when her pursuit began. One Sunday afternoon that April the door to her study swung open and out she ran right into the kitchen table. A pencil in one hand and papers in the other, she bumped into a door frame, then the banister and then the old rocking chair on her way to where I lay reading in the living room. She sat down on the arm of the couch, out of breath, her lips firing with rapid calculations.

  “Mom—what’s the matter?” I dropped the book to my lap.

  She stared at the wall in front of her, lost in her private language.

  “Please, Mom.”

  “Margaret. I—” Struck by a thought, she scribbled something down.

  “Mom!”

  She smacked her hand on the papers, squeezed her eyes shut and said, “Margaret, I think I’ve found another colour,” before gathering her notes and walking stiffly back to her study.

  —

  Dr. Claire Gardner, Associate Professor.

  B.Sc. (Toronto), Ph.D. (Yale).

  Research fields: mathematical physics, matrix theory, nonlinear dynamical systems

  That was printed beneath her picture in the university’s Applied Math Department handbook, the photographer’s flash a burst of light in her glasses. I always liked the sound of “matrix theory.” I could sense the mystery in the coupling of those words, but I hadn’t inherited the aptitude to understand the first thing about the world that carried my mother off for hours and hours every day.

  When I was younger I believed she even drifted there in her dreams. Late at night I would creep between the stacks of books in her bedroom to where she lay curled on her bed beside a twisted rope of sheets. I would often have to wrest a notebook from her arms and turn off the lamp on her nightstand or feel around for a pencil beneath her. My eyes would adjust to the moonlight and I’d watch her face to see if I could read what she was dreaming. Her flickering eyelids told me nothing. Sometimes, if her hands weren’t tucked between her knees, I’d lift her arm and put it around me and that was how we slept until she turned over to face the other way. When I got cold I’d slip out of her bed and out of her room, and tiptoe back down the hall in darkness.

  The morning of that April Sunday, I saw her looking out the living room window as I came downstairs for breakfast. It was dark outside, swells of blowing rain blurring the glass.

  “Do you have a good book, Margaret?” she asked when she heard the stairs creak.

  A bowl on the kitchen table, a box of Corn Flakes. “Yeah, I think so.”

  “I have work to do today.” She followed me into the kitchen and went to the fridge for milk without reacting to the rip and bang of thunder that tore across the sky.

  She always had work to do on Sundays. Most Saturdays too. She’d hole up in her study and tinker with the theory she’d been playing with for years. “Recreation,” she called it, as if it was a crossword puzzle, only it didn’t fit into a neat square and the solutions didn’t arrive with the thud of next week’s paper at the front door. Tucked tight between her heavy wooden chair and the expansive desk that had once been my grandparents’ dining room table, she sat hunched over for hours, humming, breaking pencil tips with the pressure of her thinking, drinking the cups of black tea and glasses of milk that I alternately took to her at the top of each hour. If there were crumpled-up sheets of paper beneath her I would gather them to toss in the wicker bin, but mostly I sat in the nest of blankets and pillows I’d arranged in the corner of the room, reading or writing stories in my hardbound journal until her humming lulled me to sleep.

  I didn’t dare bother her with banalities like milk or tea that April day; I knew she wanted to be left alone. And after she’d made her startling pronouncement and went back into her study I barely moved, afraid of disrupting what was unfolding behind her door. Didn’t even switch on the lights when the evening began to settle in shadows around me. I wove in and out of sleep, roused periodically by the receding thunder, and finally by her voice, muffled by walls: “Margaret, please order a pizza.”

  We ate on the living room floor that night amid piles of notes, cups of ginger ale, and tomato sauce-stained paper towels, as she explained how her system of symbols would forever change electromagnetic spectrum theory and prove the existence of another colour. Warped continuums, previously unexplained amplitudes and frequencies, photons, quantum electrodynamics. She said she’d entered a dimension no one had previously considered.

  “With my mind, I mean,” she said, picking the mushrooms off her slice of pizza. As though I’d think there was a portal hidden by the rug beneath her desk.

  I nodded every so often just to keep her going. I had no idea what she was talking about, but there was something in her movements, in her eyes flashing over her notes, in the way she sprung up to get more pop from the fridge, that I never wanted to end. And yet, as I sat chewing on pizza, I sensed a change, a vastness around us. I knew that a tie had been severed and we’d been set adrift, my mother’s eyes trained on the horizon, mine on a patch of icy shore slipping further from sight.

  —

  Pages and pages filled with notes, supporting proofs, explanations in the margins. More than a decade of work. No one yet could see it.

  “It has to be beautiful, Margaret,” she said when I found her in her study after school on Monday, still in her pyjamas.

  I closed her door and ate leftover pizza for dinner, standing up with my back against the fridge.

  She returned to work the next day. And the day after that. And when the summer came she got dressed in the morning and drank her tea before dropping me off at French camp on her way to the university. In the fall, she waved from the screen door when the school bus picked me up at the corner. Unbroken rhythms and routines. The changes were visible only to me in those early days and months. The lengthening of her silences, her gaze a little more faraway than usual. The way she could drift off mid-chew at dinner, a mound of chicken or bread in the pocket of her cheek, and only by banging my glass against the table could I bring her back and set her jaws in motion again. Not that we ate dinner together much by then. Most of the time she’d come home from work, take off her shoes and head straight for her study, and that was where she would stay until long after I’d brushed my teeth and gone to bed.r />
  —

  Two weeks before Christmas I put on my coat and boots, tramped down the hall and announced that I was going to the plaza to buy a tree.

  “The tallest one I can find!” I yelled through her door.

  I took a step back in the vain hope it might swing open, and then pressed my ear against it, listening for a shuffle of papers or the scrape of her chair against the floor.

  Silence.

  “I’m getting your wallet!” I called, clomping across the kitchen. “I’m taking fifty dollars!”

  Nothing.

  I went back to her door and opened it for the first time in months. The lights were off, the blinds drawn.

  “Mom?”

  A soft voice on the other side of the room. “It’s finished.”

  “Why is it so dark in here?”

  “Finished.”

  I flicked on the switch. She pressed her eyes shut. There were papers everywhere, on the floor, the table. Pencil shavings curled like dead snails. Books open on the ground as if they’d toppled from the shelves. The mouldy smell of old mugs of tea. My mother in her usual place with her arms by her sides, her head bent over a short stack of notebooks as if she hadn’t the strength to lift it.

  “I’m buying a Christmas tree,” I said.

  Three blocks from the store, when I knew for certain she hadn’t followed me, I turned to go back home. I watched the snow sparkle under the street lights as I kicked it up in puffs. White blinking with tiny shards of colour. Pink, blue, green.

  They would think she was a fool.

  —

  I’d seen her once before with the other professors and graduate students. A department Christmas party years earlier for the children of faculty. I’d played there with a quiet boy named Winston who’d brought a fire truck and a G.I. Joe that was missing a leg. Santa was a thin pink-faced man in a red plastic costume who bellowed “MERRY CHRISTMAS!” as he leapt into the room and promptly removed his scratchy white beard. Winston was the first kid to get a present and he was told to open it in front of everyone. An abacus. The grown-ups all laughed very hard. Santa then passed him another present, which was a model of the Millennium Falcon; Star Wars toys for the boys and Strawberry Shortcake dolls for the girls. One girl named Rupinder returned to Santa with a Chewbacca figure, a mistake Santa appeared to feel very bad about.

  For the most part, the parents all stayed on one side of the room drinking wine out of paper cups and holding plates of half-eaten potato salad and rolled-up slices of ham. I watched two graduate students approach my mom, who was filling her cup with Coke at the end of the buffet table. She looked at the ground or above their heads as she answered their questions. At one point she scratched the back of her neck and I noticed how inelegant her black digital watch looked resting nearly halfway up her forearm. The other women there, mostly wives with silky hair and sparkly earrings, wore pretty party clothes. Outfits. A blond woman in a tight green turtleneck with a gold chain belt on her hips laughed sweetly at the stories told by the professors around her. I looked at my mother. She was always wearing the same thing: a red plaid shirt, black jeans, brown hiking boots. She checked her watch and said something to the students before retreating to the washroom. The students looked at each other and smirked.

  When she came out, she tried to walk unseen past a group of her colleagues, but a man stopped her by the arm and introduced her to some of the wives. She talked to them with her head down, her hands in her pockets. One of the men had a pipe in his teeth; he gently elbowed his wife, who was suppressing a smile. The women examined her with up-and-down eyes while she spoke and closed into a tight circle when she walked away. The man with the pipe let out a hard laugh.

  Before she could pour herself more Coke, I told her I was tired and wanted to go home.

  —

  “They don’t believe me.”

  She was standing at the door. Chunks of snow that should have been kicked off her boots on the porch were melting into a puddle in the hallway. She looked past me toward the kitchen.

  “Gerry said not to submit it. Nonsense, he said it was.”

  A tide of calm swept over me, reorientation. Relief. The shoreline back in sight.

  But then she said, “It’s political, I think,” and went to her study without taking off her coat or boots.

  Castaways once more.

  I looked at the slushy grey boot prints she’d left in her wake and wondered what would happen if I let them soak into the floorboards. The old wood had already begun to darken where water bled into the cracks.

  In an hour I’d mopped the hallway, the kitchen, the living room and the upstairs. I’d wiped the dust from the banister and the hardened toothpaste from the sink. When I finished in her bedroom I let the mop handle fall from my hands and bang hard against the floor, knowing that she was in her study directly below.

  “Don’t worry, Mom!” I called. “I’m okay.”

  I picked up a book from her dresser and smashed the mirror above.

  The fragments were still there three days later, crushed to bits where she’d walked over them in her slippers. I swept them into a dustpan and mopped once more to ensure that no pieces were left behind.

  —

  A month after I turned eighteen, I left for university. I’d read almost the entirety of my first- and second-year English Lit reading lists by the time I’d arrived, since much of the two years prior I’d spent with my face in a book. Coffee shops, parks. Smoky bars that didn’t check ID. My room at night. My mind arcing to the worlds of Woolf, Plath, Brontë, only to retreat to the creaking darkness of our home. My mother had been encouraged to take a sabbatical year, though she never went back to the university when it was over. They’d hoped she’d give up on her theory and spend those months realigning herself. Instead she sank further into it, and further away from me.

  I’ve since heard in hushed confessions from her former colleagues that they never listened when she talked to them about ozk—the name she’d christened her colour, and the term she used as shorthand to describe the math behind it. When she did speak, it was the only thing on her tongue.

  “It all just sounded so preposterous,” they’d say, and, “Well, you know your mother,” with a wink of camaraderie, as though their experience with her was akin to mine.

  Now that she can no longer talk, I’ve often been asked to do so on her behalf. To tell the story of being the daughter of a woman who made such a radical discovery, who gave this gift to the world. To speak about the merit of perseverance in the face of adversity, the value of women in the fields of math and science. “The Mother of Mathematics,” the headline had read; strength, serenity and resolve captured in the accompanying photo of her as a graduate student, her chin resting on her hands. God knows where they’d found it.

  Her work speaks for itself, I write in my letters back. They say they are impressed by my dignity.

  I still wonder if she drifts there in her final human darkness, to her intricate world that begins far beyond the perimeter of my own; or perhaps that is where she now exists entirely. We adjust her bed to a sitting position and she opens her mouth as I feed her spoons of soup or oatmeal. I try to read her eyes but nothing is there.

  I direct most inquiries and speaking requests to Jack Springer, the man who brought her work to light. Now a professor himself, he was a graduate student when he unearthed the notebooks my mother had left behind at the university.

  “Did she happen to write more?” he’d asked nervously over the phone all those years ago. I told him there were boxes and boxes of notes in her old study. “Would you mind if I came to take a look?”

  He’s one of the few people I allow to see her as she is now, and the only person to have had intimate access to the workings of her mind. Closer to her, in many ways, than I could ever be. He spoke to her for a long time on his last visit. Leaning forward in the chair with his hands folded and his elbows on his knees, he told her in quiet tones about his trip to Germany and
the lab that had harnessed ozk. Wearing special lenses, he’d seen it flash across a screen.

  “What does it look like?” I asked later as I walked him to his car.

  He smiled. “What does any colour look like? You could have been there if you’d wanted to, Margaret. You know that.”

  I didn’t press. I’d see it soon enough.

  “Oh,” he said, stopping and reaching into his jacket. “I’ve been meaning to give you this.” He handed me a photograph of my much-younger mother standing in a winter park with a baby in her arms. “I found it before my trip. It was tucked in a file with some old notes. I thought I’d given it to you years ago.”

  I stared at the picture, the way her hand shielded my face from the falling snow.

  “I haven’t seen this in ages. I wonder why it was in there.”

  Jack looked at me strangely. “Turn it over.”

  On the back, in her hand, the word OZK was written beside the year I was born. And beneath it: the sound Margaret made when snow first touched her face.

  BARBADOS

  Each morning, I watch from our open window as the woman and the man drag their loungers out along the soft pale sand to reserve the same spots under the same palm trees by the same violent, indifferent waves, wordlessly draping the white weathered vinyl with blue beach towels and tossing down straw hats and paperback novels and bottles of sunscreen before retreating back up the stone steps toward the villas and, presumably, back to bed. I turn from the shutters, your body still a sleeping lump on your side of the ginormous bed, close to the edge.

  —

  Hours later, the bronzed sixty-something platinum-haired wife comes out in her white bikini to reclaim her chair. Her eyes fixed on the ruler line that keeps the sea from the sky, all above and below it blue and foamy white. She doesn’t acknowledge us. But why should she when we are just renting? We’re only here for the week, and when we drive our rental car back to the airport our faces will dissolve from her memory, as will our naive self-conscious appreciation of the rollicking sea and the gentle shifts in the breeze and the warm sand under our feet. Tiring to witness, week after week, we (our kind) must be to her. She rubs oil into her thin brown biceps as if she can’t see us tripping past with our cumbersome umbrella and our bag of toys and our SPF-55 and our three fraying towels and this baby in a sun-protective suit, hooded, on my hip. You dig a hole deep enough in which to jam the umbrella pole and I make a point of thinking that I won’t remember her face either. It’s dissolving already, as soon as I look away. You get the pole in, packing the sand around it to make it sturdy, and I put the baby down on a towel in its shadow.