Season of Fury and Wonder

by Sharon Butala

  “Only my father looked at me as though he knew what had happened, but my sisters were crowding around our mother and my father had to take over, and he pushed them back and sent one to call an ambulance.” She was balanced now, on the edge of the big chair, having, without noticing, shoved down the footrest and, tall now, her back as rigid as a fencepost, she clasped her hands together, wringing them. “But I knew she was dead. I swear I heard her neck break. I can still hear it. I have heard it every night for many, many, many years.”

  The women ranged round the room, the voiceless ones, the unseen ones, were murmuring among themselves, the whispering was rising, deafening her. Her friends did not speak, until Sonya said, “But to call a girl, your own daughter, such names…” Nobody else said a word.

  Finally Rosalyn said, “Barbara. Are we to believe this?” She said it softly, gently, and if Barbara had had a heart she would have cried at the sound.

  “I think it is true,” Jessie-Marie said after another silence had intervened while the angels in the room let their whispering die away. “Are you sure that you didn’t just imagine doing this? That you were so angry that you imagined pushing her downstairs, but in reality, that she merely tripped and fell? Maybe you just didn’t save her – if you could have?”

  At this, Barbara laughed. Her breath was coming back into her chest and she rolled her head as if her neck were stiff and she was trying to release the muscles.

  “That is what my father finally decided to believe. Although I am sure that he knew better. That is what he told the ambulance people who couldn’t revive her and what he told the police and in the end, even the coroner. But I know, and have always known, that he knew better.”

  “Barbara, honestly,” Sonya said, pleading. “Surely this is a bad dream only, a wish you had that when it was fulfilled you blamed yourself for. Surely this is not true.” Then she seemed to cock her head as if listening; she wants to know what the angel-souls think, Barbara thought, and listened herself. But now they were silent.

  “I am here to tell you tonight, that when I was seventeen or so, I killed my mother by pushing her as hard as I could down the stairs, and that no one saved her. Not me, not her guardian angel, not anyone. My mother died at my hands.” Oh, such a collective sigh emanated from around the room and she half-expected the presences to reveal themselves. A very long silence ensued that ended when Barbara raised her hands ceiling-ward.

  “Why do they not take me?” she cried. “Why do they make me suffer so? And on and on and on? Can no one forgive me?” But the spirit-souls had gone.

  Around her she heard voices, those of her friends and the occasional word registered: brandy, medication, priest, prayer.

  SISTERS

  Inspired by Anton Chekhov’s play “Three Sisters”, 1900

  They had grown old, and each of them looked around every day, and said to herself, how on earth did I wind up like this? But before too long, in trying to answer this question, their minds would veer first, instantly, to childhood, to puzzle over this or that small incident, then move on helplessly, in chaos, to some other memory, or else to bafflement as to why things had happened in the way they had, and so none of them ever managed to answer the question. Although, at the same time, to each of them the answer was also perfectly obvious until examined – those old assumptions about each of them and about how their family were, under closer examination, turning out to be mostly wrong – resulting in just as much confusion and uncertainty.

  No, it was some other question they were asking themselves for, as the eldest, Virginia, sometimes said to her sisters on their annual visit, “That is, how is it that each of us is alone? That’s the question,” although the other two didn’t necessarily agree with this assessment. “It is simply how things are for old women in this twenty-first century.” Virginia again, letting out a satisfied grunt as though her statement finished the matter.

  “And the twentieth,” Melody, the youngest surviving sister, said, shifting on the sofa to nurse her newly-rebuilt hip and steadily sipping her glass of white wine.

  “I was about to say, and the nineteenth,” Ava, the middle sister, added, and sighed. “But I think families were still families then and didn’t they take in their spinsters and widows? So, although it was probably just as awful in its way, at least one lived in the bosom of one’s family, and could feel oneself a part of something normal.” Ava was given, on occasion, to talking like a nineteenth century novel, rising verbally sometimes even to the height of a Henry James sentence, spieling it out as she gazed high up into space, although more often she got lost in her own sentences’ complexities and had to let her voice trail away. Sometimes, though, she made it to the end, maintaining the relationship of the clauses and the phrases, and not forgetting the original idea, at the close, tying a bow on the tail of a subdued snake. Her cheeks would flush at such moments, and she did not look at her sisters, both of whom, if she had looked, would be gazing at her with closed faces and inscrutable expressions in their eyes, which she would have known immediately signified dislike. Maybe even hate? Or merely boredom with her and her airs?

  In her youth, Ava had published four small books of poetry, books that had been reasonably well-received, with the critics calling her a ‘promising’ young poet. When they said it for the fourth time, she had stopped writing poetry and had begun to teach English literature to freshman at the university they had all attended. Occasionally, in those early years, Melody and Virginia had asked her why she stopped writing poems, but she always refused to answer. Privately, though, she felt it was because having four sisters constrained her in the matters about which she really wanted to write, and she disavowed completely obscurity, thought that it was not a kind of brilliance, but instead a dodge for people who didn’t know what it was they wanted to say.

  So she had stopped writing and gone back to get a Master’s degree, specializing, very oddly or so everyone said, in Hemingway. What woman specializes in Hemingway? Even her thesis advisor had asked her this question to which Ava could only shrug: I like Hemingway.

  “We are like Chekhov,” Melody, the romantic one, remarked. It was sad, Ava thought, how often Melody fell into childish sincerity, descending far too often into what Ava and Virginia saw, and shuddered at, as sentimentality.

  “Don’t be such an idiot,” the oldest, Virginia, said. She was the one who could not seem to stop herself from, in the middle of a conversation, letting escape a burst of venom, then tightening her lips and snapping her head away, as if someone else had spoken and, while she deplored it, was above reproving the speaker. That she was a pressure cooker full of steaming rage was evident to Melody and Ava, and had always been, although the source of the rage wasn’t clear to them. Virginia had been their parents’ favourite, and had gotten all the attention, and could get away with anything, even throwing the most outrageous tantrums to get what she wanted without getting sent to her room without supper or even slapped for being so disrespectful to a parent.

  They were the ones, thus, who had reason to brim with rage. But, of course, did not. “I hate falsity,” Ava said, rebutting the Chekhov comment, although she was as false as any of them, and knew it, not that the other two would have recognized what she was referring to. She shrugged one shoulder and tried to roll it, saying nothing, but wincing. Once, when she’d been playing football with the other kids on the school playground, two girls pumping up high on a swing collided with her. She recalled the moment the force of the blow turned everything black and then she was on her chest on the ground and her playmates were crowded around her, peering into her face, helping her up. Back in class, she could see their teacher considering sending her home because she couldn’t move her arm and, as her friend told her, her face was chalk white. But the incident had happened a long time ago in a faraway northern village on the prairies, and nearly winter, and she would have had to walk home, and maybe the teacher hadn’t wanted to let her go alone. Or maybe her teacher was just too young and poorl
y educated to recognize an injury when she saw one – if there wasn’t blood and nobody was unconscious. In those days, homesteading barely ended, everyone had to be tough, Ava told herself as she often had; it was a cultural imperative.

  Her parents hadn’t taken her to a doctor either, though, and for a long time as an adult when the shoulder had become a steady problem, growing worse with the years, she had considered being angry at her parents over this. Then she remembered an almost identical scenario, once again when she and her classmates had been playing a game, their own mixture of football and rugby – they were so remote that nobody knew the proper way to play either game – and she had calculated precisely how and where, if she ran as hard as she could, her trajectory would meet that of the girl running with the ball and had hesitated, thinking, I might hurt her, had run anyway, brought the girl down hard, captured the ball and raced away with it, and only then glanced once over her shoulder to see the others running to rescue the classmate she had so efficiently brought down. She supposed, with a mixture of resentment and resignation, even a touch of amusement, that her bad shoulder was her punishment. But then, she was no longer sure which incident had happened first.

  It was no use asking her sisters. Melody had been too young then and Virginia had begun to confuse her memories, and, even though Melody and Ava had sometimes been present when an incident Virginia was recalling had happened, Virginia refused to accept their corrections, insisting that, because of this or that, she could remember as clearly as she remembered her own name, that she was right and they were wrong. Melody would sigh and look away, while Ava would gaze at Virginia as if she were a particularly interesting species of lizard, and Virginia, lost in her reconstructed reverie, smiling an inward smile, pleased as heck with herself, never seemed to notice. It was as if she loved the pleasure of her creation more than she loved any kind of truth. But Ava could see the frozen earth with the sparse covering of yellow grass speckled with hard frost. Remembering that playground, the frigid air and the white sky above it, she shuddered, thinking of what cruelty she had once been capable. She wondered about that. Her desire, even as a child, to understand the world, to see what would happen – she hadn’t had control of it then. Hadn’t understood it. Did she now? But I am not cruel anymore, she told herself.

  “I need a drink,” Melody would say after one of these moments, reaching for the half-empty bottle sweating on the teak coffee table in the southwestern Ontario humidity, and refilling her glass while the other two looked on with careful neutrality. Virginia and Ava would have been happy to drink more, even to become alcoholics in their last years as their grandmother, who died at ninety-six, had been, (“pickled” everyone had said, although not Ava, who deplored clichés), except that Ava had a mild case of diabetes, and Virginia had serious gut problems: bowel dysfunction, and acid reflux barely controlled by her drugs. Anyway, Melody could hardly walk; that was why she drank. “Who could blame her?” Ava would say to her friends when she got back home to the Okanagan. “With Theo not even recognizing her now and so violent that he has to be in a locked ward and drugged to the gills all the time.” Ava was herself long divorced, while Virginia was merely separated, had been for the last forty-or-so years, yet still often spoke of getting back together with Magnus one of these days.

  “Which could happen,” Melody often said, as Magnus continued to live only a few blocks from Virginia and they saw each other almost every day, although considerably less often now that Magnus had suffered a string of strokes and the social workers were angling to get him into a nearby nursing home. How Virginia would visit him was a mystery. Taxis, Ava supposed.

  “We are all terrified,” Melody said. Such a quiet voice, so light and delicate. Outside, the rain dripped ceaselessly down the window, and through the glittering haze the sisters could see the enormous fir that took up the entire front lawn, and loomed like death over Melody and Theo’s house with its row of leaky dormer windows which the repairmen couldn’t seem to fix. “Such a fortune those men make out of helpless old women like us,” Virginia often pointed out, and, for once, neither Melody nor Ava contradicted her or objected to her remark. Now she announced, “We need to get out and go somewhere,” setting down her glass of ginger ale so hard that it was a wonder the crystal didn’t crack.

  “Have a canapé,” Ava said, passing her the plate. Virginia sniffed as if she were insulted, waving them away. Ava took one and ostentatiously, not looking at her sister, popped it whole into her mouth. Salmon paté on cream cheese, how delicious. She longed for a butter tart from the plate next to the canapés, but knew that if she started to eat them, she would never stop and then her blood sugar would rise unacceptably. It wasn’t worth it. She sighed, then coughed to cover it, curling her fingers, and bringing them up against her mouth. Virginia’s gaze rivalled the cold disapproval their mother had been able to summon in a second. It said, such vulgarity. How she could cow them.

  “What time is your plane?” Melody asked. Her sisters said in unison, “The taxi arrives at ten tomorrow morning.”

  Virginia added, “As you know, we are not taking the same plane because we live in different cities.” Melody dipped her chin in embarrassment. Could it be, Ava wondered, that she is getting forgetful like her husband? God forbid, but she had to admit that, nowadays, she was more than a little forgetful herself, and that terrible things happened all the time, so dementia or whatever, for all three of them, was not outside the pale of possibility. And, any day now.

  They had once been five. They had paid an older brother no mind, had never paid him any mind, and he and his third wife, a wealthy widow, had gone many years ago to live in Spain. They didn’t come back to Canada and their children (who were not their brother’s) had scattered across Europe, except for the one who lived in Florida and collected art. The other two sisters had died – Ellen, who had been older than Ava but younger than Virginia, while in her thirties – and Rosemary, the youngest. Both had died of cancer, as had their parents. This was why the remaining three, Virginia, Melody, and Ava, felt the importance of trying to get together at least once a year whether they enjoyed their three or four day meetings or not.

  Dutifully each year, they made their arrangements, conferring with each other over several weeks about dates and whose house they would meet in. Since Melody’s hip surgery two years earlier, Ava and Virginia had flown to her house in southwestern Ontario, land of milk and honey, Virginia, who lived in Winnipeg, never forgot to say, bitterly, as if Ontario had deliberately set out to put her in her place. The previous year they had met in late August, and the heat and humidity had been record-breaking, nearly doing them all in, so that they vowed never again to meet in summer. Now it was mid-October, and would not stop raining. Each of them had begun to wonder why they bothered with these uncomfortable meetings where none of them enjoyed themselves, and the absence by death or desertion – who remembered which? – of husbands, children, siblings, parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles hung like the proverbial lead weight over every minute of every day they spent together.

  “Do we even like each other?” Melody had asked her husband, referring to her sisters, but of course Theo had not replied, striking Melody’s coffee cup to the floor and splashing coffee everywhere, including across the wall, as well as soaking Melody’s pantsuit. Fortunately, it was an old one, a faded brown that she always wore to visit Theo, because you could never predict what he would get it into his head to do. “I’ll never get these stains out,” she had said to the aide, who had come running.

  “Tomato juice?” the aide asked. “Or is that for raccoons? No, I mean skunks.”

  It seemed, they implied to each other without ever saying so out loud, that they kept meeting because each of them was all the others had left; but Virginia told them out of the blue the morning she and Ava had arrived, three days ago, “For our mother’s sake, because she would be devastated if we stopped caring about each other.” Ava, doubting this, had offered instead, “To honour he
r, our mother.” She seemed to have dropped the Henry James effort, was edging toward Raymond Carver.

  “Admittedly, she cared more for some than for others of us,” Virginia spat, staring hard at Ava, and then whipping her head away – Virginia had always liked Rosemary best, not that anyone cared – and tapping the fingers of her right hand angrily against her left arm.

  “Does that mean…” Melody began tentatively, after a beat.

  Ava spoke quickly over Melody’s voice, “Sometimes one, sometimes the other,” gaily, as if it were all a big joke. Or was she taunting them? Who knew any more whom their mother had liked the best, and who cared anyway? Melody snorted. She was on her third glass of wine but, when she took a quick breath and tried to speak, Ava interjected again.

  “Mother did her best. She wasn’t a saint.”

  “And she had her own mother’s influence to contend with,” Virginia pointed out. But they had all said all these things a thousand times before, and while they knew them to be true, and that it was pointless to complain now, of the things that had happened in childhood, when they all had one foot in the grave and would soon join their sisters, they still wanted to speak these things, even when they bored each other to death, made them so impatient they could hardly sit still. That remark would always silence any of them if one of them began a complaint about their mother. Their mother had not liked disloyalty, and had drummed into them that disloyalty to family members was a sin and a crime. This rule had not seemed to apply to their father, but that subject was one about which they maintained an absolute silence. They had their doubts about the value of such loyalty, each of them, but still.