First Things First, page 6
“I kept the cage,” she told him. “I hope you don’t mind—but it was so pretty that I hated to give it up.”
Kevin soon stopped sitting behind her in every class they shared. She hoped he’d found somebody else to give canaries to.
Elizabeth now put the cage on the bookshelf beside the chesterfield. She looked up at the painting which hung beside the shelf. An original watercolour, she had chosen it from a university exhibition. Her father paid for it, easily ignoring the price.
She’d chosen it because when she first saw it, it brought one word to the surface: “light-hearted.” It was a landscape with mint-green trees, turquoise waves, and sailboats popping up from a yellow horizon, She seldom looked at it now but when she did, it made her wish for purple, black or navy blue. She came to hate the artist even though she usually couldn’t remember his name—he’d been unfair to the spectrum, having so neglected its darker side. The picture had no balance and it was too light-hearted after all, with nothing to stop it from floating away like a lost canary feather or a yellow balloon.
“Now I know what to do with it,” she said, jumping up and hurrying into the kitchen. She rummaged through the cupboard over the stove where she kept a child’s set of paints. Her mother had bought them for her once but she’d never allowed Elizabeth to play with water in the house. And so the watercolours were never used.
She carried a cup of water into the living room. It spilled over the edge, leaving a pattern of dots on the floor.
She climbed up onto the chesterfield. Her feet sank deep into the stuffing and the upholstery stretched as she searched for a solid place to stand.
Posing with the brush in her hand, she measured the painting with her thumb and one eye. She placed a small black dot exactly in the centre of the scene. She looked down at the face of the bat in the cage and she started to paint.
Several minutes passed and then she backed away, straightening her shoulders, easing the muscles in the back of her neck.
“There, that’s much better, isn’t it?” She jumped down from the chesterfield and ran to the opposite wall to admire her work. Yes, there was balance now. The face of a bat hung in the middle of the horizon, lapping the points of the sailboats with its chin, severe against the pastel yellow sunrise.
“Yes, much better.” Satisfied, she went back to the kitchen and deposited the paints and the glass in the sink with a pile of assorted dishes.
Returning to the living room, she sat down in the chair beside the bookshelf and said, “Do you want me to read to you for a while?”
She moved the cage closer to her chair. She peered at the books on the shelf, dismissing those with bright paper wrappers and turning instead to a thick volume bound in black leather. She pulled it from the shelf. It was a Bible. She knew that there would be no yellow canaries, no young man named Kevin, no girdled girls in sealskin coats in those onionskin pages.
She spread the Bible flat against her palms. Gilded and curling like bright wire, the letters on its cover shone through her fingers.
She curled one thin leg beneath her as she read and the other hung down to touch the floor with just her toes. The bat hung upside down from the wire bar in the middle of the cage. Its broken wing flopped down to brush the bottom of the cage with just the ends of its long-fingered joints.
WAITING
(1976)
One: Dory
After a time even the sound of the television stopped. Dory couldn’t tell how long she had lain awake listening to it. The voices of women had come to her for hours perhaps, woman voices with no words, soft and sudden, as if they were talking in their sleep. Soon Dory stopped listening for them and listened instead for those other voices, deeper voices.
Man voices. Making little waves that roll right through my belly, not my ears. Like water waves. Just like when my dad sat me down in the sand at the beach. Just like that time and the waves came up over my belly.
Just before the silence came, Dory heard familiar music coming through the bedroom wall and through the woollen blankets tucked up tight around her ears. Dory held her breath, straining and hoping to hear. She caught and remembered the song just in patches. It made her think of plywood and big blackboards and chalk. All of these things became tangled up in the song.
What song? Throats singing fast, yes, too fast, and slowed down then by some other throat. Grown-up throat wearing a wool suit and nylons and green high-heels. That throat with no first name. Only “Miss” and last name “Burns.” Miss Burns singing this same song and she leads the room by its throat through the notes with her pointer. Fingers made of chalk and chalk on her cheeks too. Cheeks that move up and down and sing this song . Calls it “anthem.”
The song was the signal for another day to begin. And once it had been sung, she could sit down at her plywood desk and wait to be told to open her books for the day. And Miss Burns, standing up at the blackboard, would always call her “Doria” and she would sit up even straighter then, trying to make the full name fit. But none of this could happen until the song had been sung. Until it had been sung by everyone all the way through to the end, time and the day could not begin to pass. But now Dory could not sing: the song had lost its words somewhere and Miss Burns wasn’t there to rescue her. Without Miss Burns’ throat to push the music into line, there could be no song.
The silence came with a click. Dory could picture that girl out there in the living room turning off the song before it could end. And now time could not pass. That girl out there turned off the music, not wanting the evening ever to end. That girl who came over only when Dory’s parents were going out for the evening.
“Estelle” they call her. Or “the babysitter.” She means they’ve got to go. Her face at the front door makes them leave. Why leave? House too small maybe. Not room enough for all of us here and so then they leave.
You’re just being silly.
I know.
The screen door had closed tight and fast on their backs when they left early that night. Dory’s mother was still saying goodbye when it slapped shut.
Now another sound came into Dory’s room. Another sound somehow familiar, everything from out there seemed to sound familiar from inside her room. This sound was soft and shuffling. Like wool and slippers.
Yes, that girl has feet with slippers on. Wool with pink puffballs stuck to the tops of her toes. Good for walking on floors in the winter.
Dory rolled over in her bed and the covers rolled with her. The sheets twisted up around her legs, close and tight like drying skin. She looked up through the darkness to the ceiling and discovered a new game to play with the porcelain light globe. Looking straight at the spot where she knew it hung she could see nothing. But if she turned her head and let her eyes sidle slowly up to the spot . . . there it was. At least it was there until, in her slow sidling, she was finally looking straight at the spot again. And then the white globe was gone. The game kept Dory amused for some time. But then came the sound of the back door opening and closing.
The door is locked. No one home. No one? That girl is gone now. And only I am home.
In her bedroom with the door shut, Dory could not know that the back door had been shut and then locked from the inside. She could not know that Estelle was stretched out on the sofa, already falling asleep. Dory’s parents would not be home until the next day. They had gone to spend the night at a neighbour’s camp. Dory was left at home because there would be snowmobiling (“Too dangerous,” her father had said) and then liquor and lots of ribald jokes (“Hardly the thing for little girls,” her mother had said).
Dory lay awake now waiting for their homecoming sound, for the sound of their car outside in the street. When it came, the sound would spread itself out flat in the street like new snow.
Headlights grazed the bedroom ceiling, laser beams of light. And then the same darkness drew back deeper into the room. Dory undid her legs from the bedsheets, unravelled her flannelette nightgown from where it had spun itself around her shoulders.
The house was quiet. To Dory, the silence simply proved that she was alone. Her feet felt for the floor.
Floor is wet? No, just cold. So cold it sticks to my skin. Like when my tongue got stuck to the car door handle. Cars went by and I cried there stuck. And my dad laughed while he undid me.
And then?
Blood and my mother made me drink warm milk. Silly girl, she said. And I felt silly too. I cried and she smiled. So silly.
Dory crouched down in front of the bedroom window. Her fingers gripped the wooden sill with little peanut knuckles. The sound of the car outside continued. She could see it now. But it wasn’t their car. This one was too small, kneeling down, there beside the snowbanks and the garbage can. Theirs was bigger and blacker.
The door of the car opened and a girl climbed out, nursing her purse close against the cold. She walked away from the car without looking back, as if it were no longer there, as if she no longer thought at all of the one she was leaving behind.
Leaving? Must leave. Not room enough for everybody in that little car. She doesn’t care. People leaving never care, do they? No, and the ones who’re left, they don’t care either. Neither do I. Everybody smiles through goodbye. Smiles? Yes, because they’ll come back. They? That girl, Mom, Dad, family, me. We all smile.
Cold now, like the tile, Dory’s feet slid across the floor as she groped her way back to the bed. She heard the car drive away.
After a time, Dory stopped listening for them. And listened instead to her breath and to another breath which seemed to come from the back side of the door. It was, she decided, the breath of the house.
And who will sing my house to sleep? Not me. No one. It will just sit and wait. Maybe it can’t ever sleep. Never? No, and I won’t again either.
Dory was not afraid. She had not been alone often enough to know that there might be a reason to be afraid. Her parents did not come home.
Why not? I don’t know. Forgot maybe? Well, I won’t forget. Won’t go to sleep either. Keep my eyes open. Open? Yes, but just let me close them for a minute. Hurt from looking at nothing for so long. Nothing? Well . . . at the dark then. And that’s nothing.
Just let me close them for one more minute. One more little minute. Just one more . . .
Dory could not have known when she fell asleep.
Afterwards, she wouldn’t even know for sure whether she had or not.
Two: Caroline
Caroline resisted the impulse to turn on the television set. She sat in an armchair lodged in one corner of the room. The throw cover had slid down the high back and lay in a bunch at the small of her back. Annoyed, she leaned forward. A spring bounced up hard beneath her.
Rearranging herself to avoid both the throw and the spring, Caroline stroked the uncovered arm of the chair.
Stroking: such a comfortable motion. Stroking everything back to passivity. Passive like passion. From the same word. And we’re in love so passively, letting its moments enfold us, and we are passionate together. But passive apart. When apart? Now. Alone for a time and in love. How long in love? Forget now when it all began. Like Christmas Eve that way. On Christmas Eve there is no past. Only future. And waiting for the morning. Waiting now for Matthew to come home. Will come. Before the morning. Long before.
A freight train shunted cars on the track which ran parallel to the house. Somewhere in the kitchen a dish rattled and the metal kettle shuddered on the stove.
My ears and the room fill up . . . with? Sound in simple waves. Like the ones that get caught up in a seashell. Remember that day on the beach and I found a conch when the tide went away. Listening to the sea inside it: I felt just like this. Will tell Matthew when he gets home. But no. Remember what he said about the conch: not the sea, silly girl; logical explanation for this common phenomenon. And everyone knows that science has taken the sea out of seashells. Silly girl.
A novel lay open on the table close to her chair. Caroline picked it up. She read one more page, skimming. The floor was vibrating slightly under her toes.
Vibrating. Like waves in the wind. No, not waves again. Just a simple freight train. Or maybe just the rhythm of these written, rewritten words. Catches at my veins. Beating them back into shape. Hammer on tin. I wish I’d been the one who wrote these or some other words. Lots of words all laid out in lines. Laid out on pages spread out flat on Matthew’s lap. He could take my words with him then. When he couldn’t take me. There would be no forgetting then. And he does forget me, yes, when I’m not there. A door closes on my face and he is walking away and forgetting. Fast. Like now.
Caroline put the book down in her lap and stretched her arm out long before her. The deep pull of her muscles made her yawn.
The hours spun away on the clock-face. Caroline’s confidence dipped away at random intervals. And anxiety filled up the space.
What if . . . an accident? Out there somewhere away from me, forgetting me and the car steers itself off the road. Into the ditch in silence. Why silence? Shouldn’t there be metal ripping and white bones bruising, burning black? No. I’m not there. No sound with no ears to hear. No sound? Well, maybe just sad singing. From the sky or maybe from this mouth, my mouth, here.
She hummed a tune out into the room. But her lips were dry and sometimes the song sucked in the silence instead of displacing it. She hummed her way through every nursery rhyme she knew, tying the notes up in ribbon with her cigarette tongue. The ashtray balanced on the arm of the chair was bulging with butts. Caroline frowned at it.
Like squirrels. With wrinkled brown tails and acorn cheeks fat with waiting for winter that day. Walking that day together through the bushes and trees way out there. Past the city limits somewhere. And Matthew wondered when the squirrels gathered up those nuts and when the trees sprouted all those leaves. We never saw them do it. Only talked. Talking our way around so many trees—some were dead—and he told me things. All those forest things he’d read about in school.
Caroline stood up and crossed the room to the window. Her hair hung down her back in two thick braids. No one thought this unusual for a woman her age anymore. All her friends kept their hair short and curly but they’d grown accustomed to her braids. She pushed open the drapes which had become warped and slightly discoloured with this constant habit of hers. Even when the drapes were closed now, an uneven oval of the outside showed through.
She watched the street and tried to pretend she wasn’t alone.
And when I turn my back to the window again he will be there. In the chair, reading the book, the one with the blue binding. The one I’ve been reading. My book for now. Can share the same words anyway. And smoking too. He will be smoking like I was. And I’ll see the smoke poking holes in his hair and I’ll laugh when it gets in the way of words. The smoke seduces me and the words do too.
Caroline turned from the window. Of course the chair was still empty. And the only smoke in the room was not curling up through the air but lying in layers instead, stale and thin and dry.
He’ll come home when he’s done what he’s got to do. Has to see some people first. Faces, just faces, no names. His friends, not mine. Work faces, the ones he spends the day with. Saves the nights for me. When we are together, they’re left alone. But before that can happen, some things must be done.
Matthew buys them drinks and then he drinks some too. With them. Cheers. Being friendly. What does that mean to him? Buying drinks and food. Rare sirloin steak and mushrooms and salad. No sour cream on my baked potato, just butter, thanks. Smells good. Tastes better. He buys more food when somebody new joins the group. He is somewhere out there in a room full of little round tables and three-legged chairs and music and drinks full of ice cubes and hot food and faces and fresh smoke and walls without windows and legs arms hands teeth.
Caroline looked out the window again, watching the world through well-polished glass. The red brick bungalow directly across the street was brightly lit and six cars were parked against the curb in front. Their roofs were littered with yellow wet leaves that dripped steadily down from the birches on the boulevard. She pictured a cluster of shiny-skinned people laughing into the bright little rooms.
This time the spring did not jump when Caroline fit herself back into the armchair. She leaned her head up against its high back.
It’s early yet. It’s early yet.
She chanted the lie to herself in a monotone, believing that this combination of words would work magic, would work her a spell that would make it all true.
She thought that when Matthew did arrive, she would cry, just at first, just when he came in the door.
But not now. My tears are no use when there’s no one here to catch them. Catch them? Yes, with his fingers imported fresh from the world. Fingers factory-sealed in new leather gloves, vacuum-packed.
Just in case she fell asleep before he arrived, Caroline left the back door unlocked. He might have forgotten his key.
And yes he will come. And open the door and carry his love for me inside with him. A carefully obedient love. Kept on a leash, three paces back, with a choke chain. It will heel on command. And it even plays dead.
She leaned back further and deeper into the chair. The buttons on the back felt round and large, protruding like somebody’s eyes.
Matthew did not come home. Caroline let herself fall asleep and she missed the sun just starting to rise.
Three: Hannah
It was a Friday sometime in March. Or it might have been Thursday and it might have been in April. Hannah reached for the little cardboard calendar—Courtesy of Your Friendly Neighborhood Bank: We Care About Our Customers—on the chest beside the bed.
Surprise. Wrong again. All wrong. It’s a Monday in May. Which means? Nothing in particular. Or it might mean warm rain and children slopping through puddles in plastic yellow rainboots. Making waves in the oil-skinned water. Waves and they shine. Means there should be sun. But no, it’s night now. Means darkness moist like breath.
Kevin soon stopped sitting behind her in every class they shared. She hoped he’d found somebody else to give canaries to.
Elizabeth now put the cage on the bookshelf beside the chesterfield. She looked up at the painting which hung beside the shelf. An original watercolour, she had chosen it from a university exhibition. Her father paid for it, easily ignoring the price.
She’d chosen it because when she first saw it, it brought one word to the surface: “light-hearted.” It was a landscape with mint-green trees, turquoise waves, and sailboats popping up from a yellow horizon, She seldom looked at it now but when she did, it made her wish for purple, black or navy blue. She came to hate the artist even though she usually couldn’t remember his name—he’d been unfair to the spectrum, having so neglected its darker side. The picture had no balance and it was too light-hearted after all, with nothing to stop it from floating away like a lost canary feather or a yellow balloon.
“Now I know what to do with it,” she said, jumping up and hurrying into the kitchen. She rummaged through the cupboard over the stove where she kept a child’s set of paints. Her mother had bought them for her once but she’d never allowed Elizabeth to play with water in the house. And so the watercolours were never used.
She carried a cup of water into the living room. It spilled over the edge, leaving a pattern of dots on the floor.
She climbed up onto the chesterfield. Her feet sank deep into the stuffing and the upholstery stretched as she searched for a solid place to stand.
Posing with the brush in her hand, she measured the painting with her thumb and one eye. She placed a small black dot exactly in the centre of the scene. She looked down at the face of the bat in the cage and she started to paint.
Several minutes passed and then she backed away, straightening her shoulders, easing the muscles in the back of her neck.
“There, that’s much better, isn’t it?” She jumped down from the chesterfield and ran to the opposite wall to admire her work. Yes, there was balance now. The face of a bat hung in the middle of the horizon, lapping the points of the sailboats with its chin, severe against the pastel yellow sunrise.
“Yes, much better.” Satisfied, she went back to the kitchen and deposited the paints and the glass in the sink with a pile of assorted dishes.
Returning to the living room, she sat down in the chair beside the bookshelf and said, “Do you want me to read to you for a while?”
She moved the cage closer to her chair. She peered at the books on the shelf, dismissing those with bright paper wrappers and turning instead to a thick volume bound in black leather. She pulled it from the shelf. It was a Bible. She knew that there would be no yellow canaries, no young man named Kevin, no girdled girls in sealskin coats in those onionskin pages.
She spread the Bible flat against her palms. Gilded and curling like bright wire, the letters on its cover shone through her fingers.
She curled one thin leg beneath her as she read and the other hung down to touch the floor with just her toes. The bat hung upside down from the wire bar in the middle of the cage. Its broken wing flopped down to brush the bottom of the cage with just the ends of its long-fingered joints.
WAITING
(1976)
One: Dory
After a time even the sound of the television stopped. Dory couldn’t tell how long she had lain awake listening to it. The voices of women had come to her for hours perhaps, woman voices with no words, soft and sudden, as if they were talking in their sleep. Soon Dory stopped listening for them and listened instead for those other voices, deeper voices.
Man voices. Making little waves that roll right through my belly, not my ears. Like water waves. Just like when my dad sat me down in the sand at the beach. Just like that time and the waves came up over my belly.
Just before the silence came, Dory heard familiar music coming through the bedroom wall and through the woollen blankets tucked up tight around her ears. Dory held her breath, straining and hoping to hear. She caught and remembered the song just in patches. It made her think of plywood and big blackboards and chalk. All of these things became tangled up in the song.
What song? Throats singing fast, yes, too fast, and slowed down then by some other throat. Grown-up throat wearing a wool suit and nylons and green high-heels. That throat with no first name. Only “Miss” and last name “Burns.” Miss Burns singing this same song and she leads the room by its throat through the notes with her pointer. Fingers made of chalk and chalk on her cheeks too. Cheeks that move up and down and sing this song . Calls it “anthem.”
The song was the signal for another day to begin. And once it had been sung, she could sit down at her plywood desk and wait to be told to open her books for the day. And Miss Burns, standing up at the blackboard, would always call her “Doria” and she would sit up even straighter then, trying to make the full name fit. But none of this could happen until the song had been sung. Until it had been sung by everyone all the way through to the end, time and the day could not begin to pass. But now Dory could not sing: the song had lost its words somewhere and Miss Burns wasn’t there to rescue her. Without Miss Burns’ throat to push the music into line, there could be no song.
The silence came with a click. Dory could picture that girl out there in the living room turning off the song before it could end. And now time could not pass. That girl out there turned off the music, not wanting the evening ever to end. That girl who came over only when Dory’s parents were going out for the evening.
“Estelle” they call her. Or “the babysitter.” She means they’ve got to go. Her face at the front door makes them leave. Why leave? House too small maybe. Not room enough for all of us here and so then they leave.
You’re just being silly.
I know.
The screen door had closed tight and fast on their backs when they left early that night. Dory’s mother was still saying goodbye when it slapped shut.
Now another sound came into Dory’s room. Another sound somehow familiar, everything from out there seemed to sound familiar from inside her room. This sound was soft and shuffling. Like wool and slippers.
Yes, that girl has feet with slippers on. Wool with pink puffballs stuck to the tops of her toes. Good for walking on floors in the winter.
Dory rolled over in her bed and the covers rolled with her. The sheets twisted up around her legs, close and tight like drying skin. She looked up through the darkness to the ceiling and discovered a new game to play with the porcelain light globe. Looking straight at the spot where she knew it hung she could see nothing. But if she turned her head and let her eyes sidle slowly up to the spot . . . there it was. At least it was there until, in her slow sidling, she was finally looking straight at the spot again. And then the white globe was gone. The game kept Dory amused for some time. But then came the sound of the back door opening and closing.
The door is locked. No one home. No one? That girl is gone now. And only I am home.
In her bedroom with the door shut, Dory could not know that the back door had been shut and then locked from the inside. She could not know that Estelle was stretched out on the sofa, already falling asleep. Dory’s parents would not be home until the next day. They had gone to spend the night at a neighbour’s camp. Dory was left at home because there would be snowmobiling (“Too dangerous,” her father had said) and then liquor and lots of ribald jokes (“Hardly the thing for little girls,” her mother had said).
Dory lay awake now waiting for their homecoming sound, for the sound of their car outside in the street. When it came, the sound would spread itself out flat in the street like new snow.
Headlights grazed the bedroom ceiling, laser beams of light. And then the same darkness drew back deeper into the room. Dory undid her legs from the bedsheets, unravelled her flannelette nightgown from where it had spun itself around her shoulders.
The house was quiet. To Dory, the silence simply proved that she was alone. Her feet felt for the floor.
Floor is wet? No, just cold. So cold it sticks to my skin. Like when my tongue got stuck to the car door handle. Cars went by and I cried there stuck. And my dad laughed while he undid me.
And then?
Blood and my mother made me drink warm milk. Silly girl, she said. And I felt silly too. I cried and she smiled. So silly.
Dory crouched down in front of the bedroom window. Her fingers gripped the wooden sill with little peanut knuckles. The sound of the car outside continued. She could see it now. But it wasn’t their car. This one was too small, kneeling down, there beside the snowbanks and the garbage can. Theirs was bigger and blacker.
The door of the car opened and a girl climbed out, nursing her purse close against the cold. She walked away from the car without looking back, as if it were no longer there, as if she no longer thought at all of the one she was leaving behind.
Leaving? Must leave. Not room enough for everybody in that little car. She doesn’t care. People leaving never care, do they? No, and the ones who’re left, they don’t care either. Neither do I. Everybody smiles through goodbye. Smiles? Yes, because they’ll come back. They? That girl, Mom, Dad, family, me. We all smile.
Cold now, like the tile, Dory’s feet slid across the floor as she groped her way back to the bed. She heard the car drive away.
After a time, Dory stopped listening for them. And listened instead to her breath and to another breath which seemed to come from the back side of the door. It was, she decided, the breath of the house.
And who will sing my house to sleep? Not me. No one. It will just sit and wait. Maybe it can’t ever sleep. Never? No, and I won’t again either.
Dory was not afraid. She had not been alone often enough to know that there might be a reason to be afraid. Her parents did not come home.
Why not? I don’t know. Forgot maybe? Well, I won’t forget. Won’t go to sleep either. Keep my eyes open. Open? Yes, but just let me close them for a minute. Hurt from looking at nothing for so long. Nothing? Well . . . at the dark then. And that’s nothing.
Just let me close them for one more minute. One more little minute. Just one more . . .
Dory could not have known when she fell asleep.
Afterwards, she wouldn’t even know for sure whether she had or not.
Two: Caroline
Caroline resisted the impulse to turn on the television set. She sat in an armchair lodged in one corner of the room. The throw cover had slid down the high back and lay in a bunch at the small of her back. Annoyed, she leaned forward. A spring bounced up hard beneath her.
Rearranging herself to avoid both the throw and the spring, Caroline stroked the uncovered arm of the chair.
Stroking: such a comfortable motion. Stroking everything back to passivity. Passive like passion. From the same word. And we’re in love so passively, letting its moments enfold us, and we are passionate together. But passive apart. When apart? Now. Alone for a time and in love. How long in love? Forget now when it all began. Like Christmas Eve that way. On Christmas Eve there is no past. Only future. And waiting for the morning. Waiting now for Matthew to come home. Will come. Before the morning. Long before.
A freight train shunted cars on the track which ran parallel to the house. Somewhere in the kitchen a dish rattled and the metal kettle shuddered on the stove.
My ears and the room fill up . . . with? Sound in simple waves. Like the ones that get caught up in a seashell. Remember that day on the beach and I found a conch when the tide went away. Listening to the sea inside it: I felt just like this. Will tell Matthew when he gets home. But no. Remember what he said about the conch: not the sea, silly girl; logical explanation for this common phenomenon. And everyone knows that science has taken the sea out of seashells. Silly girl.
A novel lay open on the table close to her chair. Caroline picked it up. She read one more page, skimming. The floor was vibrating slightly under her toes.
Vibrating. Like waves in the wind. No, not waves again. Just a simple freight train. Or maybe just the rhythm of these written, rewritten words. Catches at my veins. Beating them back into shape. Hammer on tin. I wish I’d been the one who wrote these or some other words. Lots of words all laid out in lines. Laid out on pages spread out flat on Matthew’s lap. He could take my words with him then. When he couldn’t take me. There would be no forgetting then. And he does forget me, yes, when I’m not there. A door closes on my face and he is walking away and forgetting. Fast. Like now.
Caroline put the book down in her lap and stretched her arm out long before her. The deep pull of her muscles made her yawn.
The hours spun away on the clock-face. Caroline’s confidence dipped away at random intervals. And anxiety filled up the space.
What if . . . an accident? Out there somewhere away from me, forgetting me and the car steers itself off the road. Into the ditch in silence. Why silence? Shouldn’t there be metal ripping and white bones bruising, burning black? No. I’m not there. No sound with no ears to hear. No sound? Well, maybe just sad singing. From the sky or maybe from this mouth, my mouth, here.
She hummed a tune out into the room. But her lips were dry and sometimes the song sucked in the silence instead of displacing it. She hummed her way through every nursery rhyme she knew, tying the notes up in ribbon with her cigarette tongue. The ashtray balanced on the arm of the chair was bulging with butts. Caroline frowned at it.
Like squirrels. With wrinkled brown tails and acorn cheeks fat with waiting for winter that day. Walking that day together through the bushes and trees way out there. Past the city limits somewhere. And Matthew wondered when the squirrels gathered up those nuts and when the trees sprouted all those leaves. We never saw them do it. Only talked. Talking our way around so many trees—some were dead—and he told me things. All those forest things he’d read about in school.
Caroline stood up and crossed the room to the window. Her hair hung down her back in two thick braids. No one thought this unusual for a woman her age anymore. All her friends kept their hair short and curly but they’d grown accustomed to her braids. She pushed open the drapes which had become warped and slightly discoloured with this constant habit of hers. Even when the drapes were closed now, an uneven oval of the outside showed through.
She watched the street and tried to pretend she wasn’t alone.
And when I turn my back to the window again he will be there. In the chair, reading the book, the one with the blue binding. The one I’ve been reading. My book for now. Can share the same words anyway. And smoking too. He will be smoking like I was. And I’ll see the smoke poking holes in his hair and I’ll laugh when it gets in the way of words. The smoke seduces me and the words do too.
Caroline turned from the window. Of course the chair was still empty. And the only smoke in the room was not curling up through the air but lying in layers instead, stale and thin and dry.
He’ll come home when he’s done what he’s got to do. Has to see some people first. Faces, just faces, no names. His friends, not mine. Work faces, the ones he spends the day with. Saves the nights for me. When we are together, they’re left alone. But before that can happen, some things must be done.
Matthew buys them drinks and then he drinks some too. With them. Cheers. Being friendly. What does that mean to him? Buying drinks and food. Rare sirloin steak and mushrooms and salad. No sour cream on my baked potato, just butter, thanks. Smells good. Tastes better. He buys more food when somebody new joins the group. He is somewhere out there in a room full of little round tables and three-legged chairs and music and drinks full of ice cubes and hot food and faces and fresh smoke and walls without windows and legs arms hands teeth.
Caroline looked out the window again, watching the world through well-polished glass. The red brick bungalow directly across the street was brightly lit and six cars were parked against the curb in front. Their roofs were littered with yellow wet leaves that dripped steadily down from the birches on the boulevard. She pictured a cluster of shiny-skinned people laughing into the bright little rooms.
This time the spring did not jump when Caroline fit herself back into the armchair. She leaned her head up against its high back.
It’s early yet. It’s early yet.
She chanted the lie to herself in a monotone, believing that this combination of words would work magic, would work her a spell that would make it all true.
She thought that when Matthew did arrive, she would cry, just at first, just when he came in the door.
But not now. My tears are no use when there’s no one here to catch them. Catch them? Yes, with his fingers imported fresh from the world. Fingers factory-sealed in new leather gloves, vacuum-packed.
Just in case she fell asleep before he arrived, Caroline left the back door unlocked. He might have forgotten his key.
And yes he will come. And open the door and carry his love for me inside with him. A carefully obedient love. Kept on a leash, three paces back, with a choke chain. It will heel on command. And it even plays dead.
She leaned back further and deeper into the chair. The buttons on the back felt round and large, protruding like somebody’s eyes.
Matthew did not come home. Caroline let herself fall asleep and she missed the sun just starting to rise.
Three: Hannah
It was a Friday sometime in March. Or it might have been Thursday and it might have been in April. Hannah reached for the little cardboard calendar—Courtesy of Your Friendly Neighborhood Bank: We Care About Our Customers—on the chest beside the bed.
Surprise. Wrong again. All wrong. It’s a Monday in May. Which means? Nothing in particular. Or it might mean warm rain and children slopping through puddles in plastic yellow rainboots. Making waves in the oil-skinned water. Waves and they shine. Means there should be sun. But no, it’s night now. Means darkness moist like breath.
