A Circle on the Surface

by Carol Bruneau

But the figurine wasn’t in its usual spot and, after a quick search of the house, proved nowhere to be seen. In a fit of revived taste, Enman had removed it? Then she remembered the noise that awakened her. “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” Mrs. Greene had pontificated. Well, good, and so be it. Right now she had a more pressing concern: a bath. Should she troop down to Isla’s, toiletries in hand? The lake would have to do, but a more secluded section of it. A bigger concern was the future, if the drought dragged on and going daily to the lake to bathe became a necessity. She would need to be here to take calls. Her letter would reach the city in a day or two, would land on the superintendent’s desk by the beginning of next week.

  He would see her credentials and want to discuss them. It wasn’t as if she did not have exemplary service to emphasize. Why fret? Though the superintendent might be on vacation, or hold off phoning until he found a good time to call. The mistake with Gregory had happened eight months ago. Who hadn’t acted impulsively once? In wartime a lot worse happened than adultery.

  Keeping busy was the only antidote for worry. After visiting the lake, she would pick blueberries. There was Mrs. Greene’s pail—the morning before her death, confused, the old woman had asked about going berry-picking, fingers worrying the quilt as if were a bush. How could Una forget? “Mind you don’t hurt my son, he’s a good boy,” were among the last words Marge had spoken. Dipping a piece of cotton batting into water to dampen Mrs. Greene’s lips, Una had practically bitten off her own tongue, not answering back.

  And yet, nearly seven months married, she felt pressed to be more like Enman’s mother at times than his wife. But if there were berries she would try to make a pie; how difficult could it be? A good way to lead a man to bed and beyond, to other things you wanted, was through his stomach—Win’s words.

  Something twinged in her abdomen: the release of an egg? She had read that some women could feel it. The sensation dragged her to the outhouse, which by daylight was laced with cobweb doilies. Dead flies dotted the crumbling sack of lime and its rusty scoop. It made her feel like a wildlife specimen, aiming balled-up newsprint down the hole, something galling about the deposit demonstrating that the body’s basest functions succeeded while higher aspirations failed to.

  How things changed.

  A pie—a pie would thaw any ice between her and Enman, she decided, setting off with the pail and her bathing things. She would be nicer. Perhaps she had been a tad pressuring about his job and a flat and a baby, though, as Dr. Snow said, success in anything demanded perseverance. But Snow said lots of things, about miscarriages, damaged foetuses, and blighted ovuums, which drew from Una a shiver of revulsion at the time.

  “Isn’t it apples that suffer blight?” Enman had said, hearing about these.

  On the barrens the berries were worse than blighted, they were wizened and scarce. A lone bee buzzing made her think, briefly, not of pollination but of spelling bees. Then Mrs. Greene’s earliest remarks drifted back: Perhaps I should’ve been tougher with him—or easier, who knows. If his father had been different. It had almost come across as a warning, chased as it was by an unusually sound piece of advice regarding the wilds around them: Never pass up anything on the beach or in the woods that’s free, Una. There. Straight from the mare’s mouth. Except, these days, nature didn’t seem to be delivering.

  Blinking sweat from her eyes, she trekked to the lake, where there was no one to be seen. Her towel was bright enough to be spotted from the sky like some kind of signal as she spread it over a rock. Peeling off her clothes was freeing—stripping off then laying out the top and shorts that highlighted her slimness. Win Goodrow had recently asked if she was eating enough, saying once the babies started coming she would “fatten up.”

  Despite the blazing heat the lake’s murky depths were not inviting. Stretching out in her birthday suit, she let the sun braise her, her faint muskiness mixing with the peaty scent of the water. The air and the sun were good for any blemishes. She focused on the sun warming her belly, imagined it prodding her insides. Dr. Snow had written a requisition for an x-ray, if she decided to have one, merely a precaution to rule out things like blockages, “because of your age.” Yet plenty of women older than she had babies, her own mother as well as Enman’s. Still, she smiled at the thought of the doctor telling Enman he had “strong swimmers, just not the largest team.” She pictured cells in bathing caps. It was more pleasant than imagining physiology, the bodily tissues involved. If only babies grew the way her mother had told her they did when Una was a child, like Brussels sprouts on a stalk, miniature cabbages sporting either of the parents’ faces.

  Pricked and basted by the sun, she peered into the lake’s bottomless brown. The green thread of an eel laced its murk. Rick Gregory had brought a similar creature into her class, preserved in a jar. A specimen of the type, apparently, that bred in a local lake, its young swimming all the way to the middle of the ocean to loll about in the Sargasso Sea.

  The squiggling eel was no enticement to jump in, but when she did, the water was a tepid breeze against her midriff. Soft and near-lifeless, the water was the colour of the iodine which Barton Twomey sold when his other supplies ran low. It tinted her skin a sepia tone, like the photos she had stored under the eaves. Picturing her parents’ faces, she wondered if they might have been closer, more affectionate with each other, had they married younger.

  But what was age? Look at Charlie Chaplin, in his fifties marrying his Oona, teenaged love of his life. Age meant little when instinct and lust factored into it. Granted, Kit said all Chaplin wanted was a “baby-incubator.” “Men just think with their willies, the brains in their pants. You don’t know how lucky you are with Enman.”

  Sometimes it was hard to tell if Kit was kidding or not.

  Treading water, Una ran the sliver of soap under each arm, then down below. Kit was a piece of work, other teachers had said, behind Kit’s back of course. Kit and her smokes, their clinging smell, the way it rubbed off on you. The way she kissed acquaintances like the French did, an airy graze of each cheek, the way a woman Enman had worked with briefly at the bank did when he had introduced her. With Enman Kit behaved differently, with him she stuck to handshakes. Ever since some fellow had left nail clippings on her coffee table, Kit had no time—or so she claimed—for men.

  Reaching upwards with one arm, stretching it toward the sky, then plugging her nose, Una dunked herself. Something slimy glided underfoot. A boggy taste filled her mouth.

  The man was sitting there on the shore, sitting on another rock, not far from hers, when she surfaced. Suds stung her eyes. The soap squirted from her grasp, sank into yellowy nothingness.

  The lake licked her collarbones. Not ten yards away, he was watching. He was holding something small and shiny, lifting it to his mouth. Through the glug in her ears the sound came belatedly, the way a plane’s roar lags behind its plume.

  It wasn’t just a noise, it was a tune, sort of, a tune being dragged through a mouth organ’s teeth. The tune no more her cup of tea than one of Hubley Hill’s would be.

  “For godsake, put it away,” Kit would have shouted and rolled her eyes.

  Except, there was something rather sweet about it, winsome. The man’s hand fluttering like a wing as he played, his other cupping the thing so tightly to his lips he might have been stifling a cry.

  It was a tune that Enman might have tried to rescue from Hubley by making it fancier somehow, playing along. But the man played less intently, notes wandering in and out, as if he was fishing and the grating melody was a knotted line being cast out.

  Should she have been alarmed? Maybe. He was no more than twenty or twenty-one, no older than Enman’s youngest colleague—if an accountant could consider a labourer a “colleague.”

  A young fellow on a few days’ leave, of course, that’s what he was. Out to enjoy some fresh air and lounging under sun and stars, a break from his barracks.
r />   Had he been there all along, seeing her undress?

  He could have been decent and turned away. But he kept looking. A shivery giggle escaped her. Despite the lake’s flaccid warmth she felt quite chilled.

  She could not stay in here forever.

  If I can’t see you, you can’t see me. How often had the littlest grade primaries played at this, covering their faces? She was laughing now, couldn’t help it. The man would not look away.

  It was a very short swim to her towel. But she was self-conscious as her knees grazed granite and she slithered onto her rock.

  She thought of herself, for no good reason, of being like the little mermaid in Copenhagen that Kit talked about: if the war ever ended, Kit was going there to see it.

  Smiling her best parent-teacher smile, aiming for the kind of smile she might direct at a parent when discussing a pupil’s misbehaviour, Una whipped the towel around herself.

  Nonplussed as could be, the man stayed put, as if lounging poolside at a resort. This close up, she saw how deeply tanned his face and hands were compared to his torso, which was fish-belly white. The ripples of muscle under that pale, hairless skin made her blush. A blessing and a pity he was wearing pants. She didn’t like to stare, of course. Did not want to appear to be sizing him up.

  The man’s leanness, his muscular waist, put Enman’s love handles to shame. The man stared back, all the while blowing another tune—a Lumberjacks’ tune from the Steady Hills’s repertoire, what she had heard blaring from the front room a couple of weeks ago.

  That music all sounded the same to her.

  Wrapped in the towel, she gathered her things. Couldn’t help flashing him a demure smile, like Kit would have.

  A young fellow cooling his heels, that’s all he was. Cooling his heels at the tail end of a toot, Enman would have said.

  Because Enman related everything to drinking.

  The man’s gaze hardly strayed. Cool and remote, his eyes were the same light blue as the sky and the lake’s shimmering surface above its brown murk. His dark blond hair was wavy, longish—so he couldn’t be a serviceman.

  A labourer, then, a casual labourer from up O’Leery way.

  She drove her feet into her espadrilles.

  Oh, heavens, was he someone she had once taught? In the city she occasionally ran into former pupils.

  Through the corner of her eye, she saw his hand move. His jumpy tune zigzagged after her through the bushes, where she stopped to tug on her clothes. Swinging the empty pail—not even enough berries to fill a saucer, let alone a pie—she found the path, was almost to the barrens, when, through the leaves and dappled sunlight, a flare of red appeared. Red and black, hunter’s plaid. A pungent waft of sweat. Before she could veer away a barrel chest and a florid face loomed. Eyes like a bassett hound’s fixed on her. Wasn’t Barton Twomey a nocturnal creature? She almost shouted for help.

  The path left no room to sidestep him.

  His surly expression warped into a grin, a ruddy blur as she tried to squeeze past. She almost made it, when his grimy paw closed around her wrist. She might have cried out. But who was to hear, the boy at the lake?

  Twomey yanked her close, his breath in her face. He gave her arm a jerk.

  “Well, well, Missy-thinks-she-fucken-owns-the-place. I got a bone to pick with you.”

  She shoved the empty pail up by his face, grazing his chin with its brim before his fingers knocked it away. He grinned down at her. Her pulse jumped in her throat, out of fear or disgust. He ranted about Hannah: “Leave her the hell alone! You, filling her head with your old crap!”

  Ignorance, ignorance—it’s not to be feared but fought. A voice inside like Kit’s coached her. She flailed the towel. He snatched and flung it wide, hooking a branch from which it dangled soggily out of reach. Only then he let go of her arm, though he was not yet done.

  “Catch you nosing around my place again, girl, and you’ll pay. Your pussy husband too. Be the last time a Greene fucks with me, you hear? You keep away from us.”

  His language was enough to strip paint.

  But then, just like a passing squall, Twomey swaggered off, an ugly wind bending the alders.

  “You could give Hannah half a chance!” Her shout echoed back.

  Unreachable, the towel had to be left.

  Hannah was waiting on the step when Una got home. The hopeful look on the girl’s face was sufficient to wipe away the worst of Twomey’s threat. The scab by her eye made for a pitiful sight. Her boldness was jarring:

  “I want you to learn me, Missus.”

  Somehow Una hadn’t fully expected Hannah to take her up on her offer, at least not so quickly. Like a lot of urges, a student’s urge to learn could be fickle. But the afternoon was young and Una had nothing more pressing to do. She was no Carmel Rooney, so of course she invited Hannah in. If the girl proved incapable of progressing, Una would soon find out and let her down gently. Hannah would learn to persevere, or she would not.

  “No time like the present, then, is there?”

  It was like having a bird come down the chimney: now what? Una went upstairs to dig out her box of books from under the eaves. The photo of her parents lay tucked inside, its vague scent of furniture polish turned musty.

  Should she mention the run-in with Hannah’s uncle?

  The grade-two reader beamed benignly at Una, dog-eared pages summoning the memory of small groping fingers. The grade-one version was nowhere to be found, so the grade two would have to do, though even Hannah would know that life was more complicated, and far less sunny, than its Tom, Bunny, and Flip stories let on.

  As with teaching, learning required you to care. Unsure of her conviction—after all, teaching was a profession, not unpaid volunteer work—Una laid the book on the table, sharpened more pencils. The smell of the shavings was cheering, bolstering even. It got her thinking of what to say when the superintendent called. Which he might at any moment next week, possibly interrupting a pastime like this one. Which would not be a terrible thing.

  Perhaps he would call on Monday or Tuesday. Certainly, he would call by the end of next week.

  Hannah clutched her pencil, pawed at the first page. Fresh pimples graced her chin. Her lip quivered. The stubbornness in her eyes was almost harder to look at than Twomey’s crazy, misplaced anger.

  “Let’s start at the very beginning, shall we?” Breathing in deeply, summoning what she could of her old patience, Una printed out the alphabet, capital letters and small ones. Upper and lower case, as they no doubt said in high school.

  Tracing each with a fingertip, Hannah made a clucking sound as if approving the familiar ones.

  Resigned to being patient, Una felt a calm fill her. The calm was like an old friend, or a group of friends she hadn’t realized she missed, like girls she had chummed around with at Normal School, then lost touch with and hadn’t seen in years. “How about a rhyming game?” She wrote a list of words.

  With surprising speed, if gracelessly, Hannah was soon printing them out: fat hat cat bat.

  “Very good.” Keeping an eye on the clock, Una printed, The man in the hat hit the fat cat with the bat, then read it out.

  Pressing her thumb under the words, its nail chewed to the quick, Hannah repeated each one, shyly at first, and ended with a shrill laugh. She shook her head in wonder. Her hair made a dull halo.

  It was a touching sight, the lesson unfolding more productively than Una could have imagined. She patted Hannah’s shoulder. Pleased with herself, Hannah clapped her hands. Her cheeks looked as if she had rubbed them with strawberries.

  “Uncle says I’s too stunned to teach nothing to.”

  “Nonsense.” Be practical, helpful: that would be Kit’s approach. “To learn, dear,” she corrected. “And your uncle is wrong, dead wrong.”

  Gripping the pencil with fresh vigor, Hannah copied
out the rhyming line with a finesse that, in spite of her reservations, made Una’s chest tighten. Then the girl crowed out the words, oblivious of the screen door’s whap.

  “Shit.” Out it popped before Una could help it.

  “Fit bit pit—shit!” Dogged as a quarterback—“snit quit SHIT”—Hannah ran with it, her half-cocked grin cracking wide as she printed feverishly.

  “I’ll show them little arseholes,” she yelped, either not seeing or simply ignoring Enman standing in the doorway. “I’ll write them a letter, them bastards that hit me!”

  Enman kept so quiet as to stay invisible.

  “Hannah. Jesus Murphy, so here you are.” He bit his lip.

  The girl’s eyes darted every which way. “Man in hat hit cat wit’ bat.” By now she had gotten up.

  “Isaac let me go early, on account of—” Making a beeline around Hannah, moving like a robot, he took down a glass. “I thought we—”

  “Yes?” Una’s voice was hopeful as he beetled towards the front room. She heard the cabinet door squeak open. So much for his promise.

  Hannah cast an anxious glance that way, eyes dodging hers. “Mister’s mad. Oh, oh. Why, Missus? I never done nothing to him. How come he hates—?”

  “Anything, Hannah.” Una turned to a fresh page, smoothed it, pointed out more vocabulary. “You never did anything.” Butt, cut, hut, mutt, slut, she thought bitterly. Mrs. Finck might have shown the girl more friendliness than Enman had. “For Pete’s sake, here, hold the pencil this way. It’s not you Mr. Greene doesn’t like.” It’s your uncle he’s got it in for, sat on the tip of her tongue like poison. “Did you tell your uncle I was there?” She spoke as casually, she hoped, as if asking Hannah to pass the eraser.

  Hannah’s sunburn deepened. “Me and you are buddies.” Her eyes glistened with a strange pride, enough to lighten the effects of Enman grumbling about something from the parlour. Settling back to her printing, Hannah hummed quietly, a drone soft as a plane’s passing high overhead.

  If only everything, everyone, could be so straightforward.