First Things First, page 14
“By then I was working in the Lairdmore mine, I was forty-five. Effie and me, we got married the next year. She wore a grey suit and an orchid. Never did figure out why she thought my being down inside the mountain was any safer than being up on top of it!” Anne was relieved to discover that it had all worked out in the end. There was some kind of basic reassurance to be derived from other people’s happy endings. She felt like applauding but put on her toque and mittens instead. They were at the first bridge, where Herb would leave her. In the narrow road, he turned the truck around in little jerks until it was aimed back down the mountain towards Lairdmore. He got out and helped Anne lift her gear over the tailgate.
“Enjoy yourself,” he called as he drove away. “Bridgetown’ll always be the best place around these parts. You’ll see.”
Anne propped her ski poles up against an evergreen and positioned her feet on her skis, snapping the bindings shut with the tip of one pole. She could still hear Herb’s truck grinding back out to the main road.
The bridge was made of logs, several of them rotted away now, forming dark crevasses in the snow. It was the first of three that had given Bridgetown its name. The creek below it flowed slick and garbled over the rocks, moving too quickly to freeze. Anne skied across carefully, her eyes tearing in the wind. She imagined the first explorers, the ones she’d been reading about, coming this same way . . . coming to this unnamed river in flood which must be crossed somehow if the pass was to be found and the country pushed through to the other side. They were all still here somehow.
You could only hear river sound rushing, a monstrous new pulse in your ears. The water came up to your neck, roped around your ankles. Food and clothing, three guns, swept away. Horses screaming. You might never be dry again.
Anne pulled her camera out of her pack and composed a shot of the bridge. She fitted her skis back into the fresh track and continued on. The track carried her forward, turning each corner in a smooth arc, leading her on like a map. If her skis slipped out of the track, they would sink deep into the new powder on either side.
You had nothing to go on, no trail, no map, no guarantee. Even the Indians didn’t come this far, knew these mountains had nothing to offer but magic and myths. They were afraid. They had no names for the Shining Mountains. The rock was all one, no distance measured, no time either. No way to get through in miles or hours. The rock existing in a single dimension: space. You were pygmies.
The track went steadily uphill and Anne was beginning to sweat inside her parka. She loosened her scarf and unzipped her jacket a few inches to let in the cool air. She started to hum and then stopped, the little insect sound nervous and impossible in this place.
The trail took a sharp turn to the left. Slowing down abruptly, Anne lost the rhythm of her stride and struggled to stay in the track. Around the corner, the trees were thicker and more tangled, dead ones propped up against live ones, creaking under the weight of the snow, rotting away from the inside. The branches, which did not appear until several feet up each trunk, were growing blindly into each other. Anne photographed just the trunks, dismembered torsos, bodies without arms or legs, so many, so thin. But there was nothing horrible about them here. It was only carried away in the camera, spread out in the darkroom, hung in a frame on the wall, that they would become alarming or ridiculous.
You must have thought this an unfortunate land. Candelabra pine trees can only be beautiful once they no longer need to be journeyed through. They were the same trees, smaller then than now, but no less impossible. This place would not even be pleasant for another fifty years.
In some spots the trees were so thick that neither the sun nor the snow could get through to the ground. Here the grass sprouted like meagre hair through the frozen dirt.
Your crazy battered horses could never find enough grass to fill up their well-bred bellies. Ranging farther and farther, their hooves skidded on the wet rock. One dappled mare fell over the edge without crying out, still chewing.
The trail opened out of the trees, following the rim of an undercut cliff. Trying to plant her left pole, Anne jabbed first empty air and then a large chunk of snow and dirt that came loose and bounced down the cliff.
Her left knee, the closest to the dropoff, began to vibrate uncontrollably. Her thigh muscles clenched up tight and would not push forward. Her image of falling was large but not vivid, not extending much beyond the thought that Peter would disapprove if she died away up here when he didn’t even know where she was.
The hardships were always borne. You never seemed to doubt that they could be, and you never seemed to be afraid of dying if they couldn’t. Sewing-machine legs on the ledge sent pebbles like bullets over the edge. Your courage was genuine: you had no choice.
Anne pushed harder, leaning more on her poles, hauling herself up with the whole length of her arms. The trail rose more steeply, up over the second bridge and around a pile of boulders that had slid onto the old road. She’d imagined herself strong and severe on this mountain, taking the miles with ease and determined grace, but now her lungs were like bricks in her chest. She paused to wipe the sweat from the back of her neck and then leaned on her poles to rest, breathing deeply.
You thought of the old women back home serving high tea and teaching the little girls to embroider. Rock of Ages in cross-stitch. They had already stopped thinking about you. There was no way to reach you, too much rock in the way.
The trail dipped down to the third bridge. Anne brought her arms in close to her sides and pushed forward. She did not think about falling or stopping—either choice was more or less impossible.
A young woman—what was her name?—came with you, would not let her new husband go off alone this time. He was embarrassed and proud, you expected nothing but the worst . . . fainting, falling, complaints, she was bound to turn back after ten miles. But she tricked you all by being strong, silent, pregnant. The boy was born in a cave like an animal with no fur. Happy and howling, the two of them. You could do nothing but wait there three days while she healed (you were outraged by this indecent pain which you were supposed to be protected from) and nursed him and sang. It was hard to look at her because you knew she was braver than any of you.
Anne stopped on the last bridge, changed the lens on her camera, and focused far back into the trees.
This is a photograph of you, woman . . . see there, behind the big tree. No one will believe your stories. There is no way of knowing that you were ever here. The land closed up behind you like a mouth.
The trail took her into a large clearing. On the south side of the meadow, snow-covered terraces mounted the slope. Bridgetown had clung naturally to the mountain like a goat.
Still wearing her skis, Anne climbed awkwardly up to the third terrace and focused a long shot back down the slope.
This was a photograph of no one.
Still climbing, Anne watched the ground carefully, expecting artifacts, some archaeological sign just under the snow . . . a horseshoe maybe, or a broken dish with flowers painted in the bowl . . . discarded bits of lives like fingernails. But there was nothing. A promising lump in the snow turned out to be a dead squirrel.
On one of the upper streets she discovered one side of a concrete foundation still standing. It had been a large building, a church or maybe the school.
Even Herb Murchie’s memories weren’t real here. Effie wasn’t here either, she was dead beneath the valley floor, her name and two dates like bookends carved in the granite. In the summer there might be red peonies on her grave.
There had been children born here. They were all in nursing homes now or dead, and the place on their birth certificates did not exist. They would always be children in Bridgetown, adults only in some other place. Anne tried to imagine families passing through high-ceilinged rooms on their way to dinner, school, the mine, cousin Gertie’s piano school. She tried to imagine couples making love and could not put them into a big feather bed, but only onto the meadow, brushing away branches and pine cones before they laid down. Hard women, loved. Woman served up on the rock, bruises in a string down her backbone.
She climbed back down to the meadow and ate her lunch sitting on a bare rock in the sun.
It was almost dark by the time she got home.
She and Peter are eating supper at the blonde maple table which Peter built when they first moved in. The white dishes are like coins on the blue tablecloth. Two of Anne’s photographs hang on the wall behind them but they aren’t looking at them.
The first photograph is just above Peter’s left shoulder. In it, an old man and an old woman are out in the backyard shelling peas. The white enamel bowl is wedged between their straight-backed wooden chairs.
Her dark dress is spotted with tiny colorless flowers like scars. His home-knit sweater is sagging brown and blue. Their faces lean together, rapt with green peas dropping into the bowl like beads from a broken bracelet.
They are stationed in front of a rock face which there is no reason for them to pay attention to.
The rock after rain is like some shiny metal.
The man and the woman cannot climb anymore . . . too old, too easily broken and bleeding . . . wingspan too short. They are pretending there is nothing behind them but sky. The woman’s hand reaches down to ease the bandage around her tree-stump leg.
They look like crows but are not.
The second photograph is just above Peter’s right shoulder. In it is an empty house which was torn down by the time Peter first saw the photograph. He couldn’t remember where it had been.
White clapboard lists to the left, shedding overcooked shingles like flakes of sunburned skin.
There could have been a dinner table still there inside, set with white and silver for roast beef and carrots and lemon meringue. Anne doesn’t expect Peter to be able to see inside because he still believes in the inherent solidity of walls.
There is no glass in the window frames which are peeling off in strips like cellophane tape. A blue curtain is flapping out through one of the holes. You can see right through the house. It has no intestines. You can see right through to the mountain behind.
There is rock in the frames. Rock like frost would have been on the pane, or faces steaming on the glass.
“What did you get up to today?” Peter asks, mopping up the gravy on his plate with a chunk of bread.
“Nothing much,” Anne says, sucking on a chicken wing.
It would take too long to explain. She will tell him eventually. And he will believe, mistakenly, that the day had been too unimportant to mention at the time. She will tell him one day, inadvertently.
FIRST THINGS FIRST
(1980)
Next time, if I get the chance, I’ll ask more questions first. I imagine some kind of questionnaire. A snappy little quiz to hand out at the bedroom door. It seems there are always some subjects you just never get around to until the whole situation is pretty far advanced. And then it always turns out that those were the important things. The ones you should have known about right from the start.
First things first.
QUESTION ONE:
Are you allergic to cats?
I come from a long line of cats. I was only five when I made the major discovery that, at any given time, there are any number of stray cats just roaming around out there free for the taking. My mother, I realize now, withstood this barrage of skinny furry (and probably wormy) creatures remarkably well, and we always had at least one cat around the house. Occasionally she tried to talk me out of it by explaining how maybe some other family owned the cat and they would be missing it terribly and crying. But I was young and had no sympathy for people who lost things.
When I figured she was getting fed up with me and might give me trouble, I would run home from school carrying a cat under one arm like a football, toss it in the back door, and keep on running. I went down the street to the park where I would swing furiously for half an hour while the cat, I hoped, was making itself at home. If, when I did venture back to the house, there was a dish of milk by the fridge and my mother was talking to the cat while she started supper, I knew we were all set. My father was always the one who got sent out for more kitty litter.
But all my cats were short-lived. The world, it seemed, was rife with things that killed cats. Dogs, fish-hooks, rotten meat, distemper, and speeding cars that didn’t stop. Finally, my mother decided that neither of us could take much more of this. So my father rigged up a leash on the clothesline for the next cat which turned out to be a big orange tom I called Punky.
One night that summer I slept over at my friend Ellen’s house. It was too hot to sleep so we spent the whole night with a flashlight under the covers reading True Story and touching ourselves. Ellen stole the magazines from the drugstore where my mother worked. When I got home in the morning my mother was sitting on the back step crying and my father was watering the garden, something he usually never did. My mother said the cat was dead, had hung himself in the maple tree while trying to catch a bird. Instinctively I knew this was some cruel and unusual punishment for the feeling that came from reading True Story.
Right now I have only one cat because I live in a miniature basement suite. Her name is Jessie. Sometimes I call her Liz Taylor. She’s black, fat, and very sure of herself. In the sunlight her fur shines blue. Some people say I’m neurotic (or at least very odd) about my cat but I don’t care. There have been so many times when she was all I had. So now my cat collection consists mostly of cats on calendars, cats on posters, and cats hand-painted on little ceramic boxes. I also have Polaroid pictures of Jessie taped all over the fridge door. Love me, love my cat.
Last April I met this guy James at the horseshoe tournament. Half the town was there with all their kids and all their dogs, no cats of course. Cats never get to go anywhere.
James started talking to me during the ladies’ final. He said he’d been wanting to meet me for weeks.
And then he said, “Joyce, do you ever think you’re more clever than your friends?”
I thought that was very perceptive of him because maybe, just maybe, sometimes I do. So I started paying more attention to his good brown skin, his curly black hair, and the long muscles in his thigh. He told me he was reading War and Peace for the third time.
James kept bringing me more cold beer from the ice-filled bathtub in the garage. Another woman, Lana, kept bringing him beer and hovering, but he just kept touching my arm and asking me who my favourite writer was. It was all wonderfully tense. I must admit that sometimes I like that sort of thing. But only if I’m winning.
Later it turned out that Lana was his lover right before me. But you can’t always know these things at the time.
When it got dark, those few of us who were still hanging around went into the house and arranged ourselves on and around a sagging old couch. I remember it was the colour of dried blood. Lana sat on one arm and it fell off. We all laughed warmly to let her know such minor disgraces didn’t matter to us. James played the mandolin and sang. There were also some guitars and pretty soon we were all singing. I thought about how James and I could be together and talk about music and books all the time. Sometimes we would play backgammon and have liqueurs in our coffee. I would show him some of the stories I’d written and then he would sing to me. A Bob Dylan song.
When I finally got tired of waiting for something more to happen and got up to leave, James said, “Joyce, I want to start seeing more of you.” I was ready for anything.
He started phoning and coming over to my apartment, sometimes for supper. I quickly discovered that he favoured romaine lettuce, baked salmon and seedless green grapes. I suspected that he’d never once succumbed to the glory of greasy french fries. When he was fasting, which was at least once a week, he drank gallons of ice water and nothing else. I admired his willpower but had no particular use for it myself. He lent me his favourite book, a scathing exposé of the eating habits of North Americans.
He was working extra shifts at the sawmill and never had much free time. He started coming over late at night without warning. I had no idea when to expect him. Sometimes when he arrived I was already in bed, reading or asleep with the cat on my chest. Other times I sat at the kitchen table until two in the morning, all dressed and casually keeping the coffee warm. Somewhere I’d already learned or been told that phoning a new man too often or asking for more information was unpleasant. And I already knew that expecting too much from James was risky; he couldn’t take the pressure. I was always perfecting my technique of biding my time.
When James did appear at the door, he’d start grabbing at me as soon as he could get his work boots off. He smelled like freshly cut wood. (Afterwards, I wondered if maybe it was really some racy new aftershave designed to make women drool for the I’m-a-labourer look.)
He never actually pushed me into the bedroom but he was always spinning me around and pointing me in the right direction. Pin the tail on the donkey.
I just assumed that we’d get around to all those other things, the music and the books and the all-night discussions, soon enough.
But there was a problem with the cat. Every time we had sex, first I had to lie in bed waiting and trying to look voluptuous while James gobbled four or five antihistamines and gagged. Jessie always sleeps on the bed no matter who else happens to be in it. Then, the whole time, while I wiggled around underneath James looking for the right spot, he snuffled and choked and cursed the cat. Afterwards, he had to get dressed right away and go home before his eyes swelled shut. He told me I’d have to get rid of the cat. Jessie, of course, adored him.
One night when he was trying to get my nightgown off, something occurred to me. I said, “What makes you think you can come over here and climb into bed with me anytime you feel like it?” He’d run out of antihistamines that night anyway. And I wouldn’t give my cat away for anybody.
