Once I saw your mother eat raw hamburger with a raw egg. The fork prying the fibres of cold pink meat, a peach fuzz of congealed fat, burst yolk. Popping it in her mouth.
Your father wore a custard-coloured suit. A few shades lighter than custard. When I was nine I went with my father to shop for a suit. He wanted grey but I was to choose the shade. There were thousands of suits on the wall in two rows, one beneath the other, each suit a slightly lighter shade of grey than the one next to it.
At art school there was a drawing exercise to get as many shades out of an HB pencil as you could. Only one of the grey suits was exquisite. Dad tried on the one I chose. He stood facing the mirror, then in three-quarter profile, smoothed his hands down the front. Touched the bottom edge of the jacket. He asked me if I was sure. After a moment he asked me again. Then he bought the suit with a large wad of money. It was the most money I had ever seen spent in one place. His only suit. He was buried in it. And there was your father, in something lighter than custard.
If you’ve never experienced grief you don’t recognize it. When I met you I was full of grief. During an art history class we saw a slide of a sculpture,
The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa
. A woman arched as in orgasm, pierced with thousands of arrows. I closed my eyes and imagined my whole body covered with tiny needles, an ocean current making them sway gently, a sweet numbing pain.
I took an interest in astral projection. I tried. It was hot and I lay on the army cot in the dormitory with my fists clenched. I tried to float off the bed. I believed in God until my father died.
And I believed my body was the temple of God. This didn’t mean I couldn’t have sex until I was married, but that as soon as I was penetrated I’d be spiritually sewn to that man forever. Fated to him. If we had sex I’d be fated to you.
I slept. Sleep was like oxygen. I couldn’t quite get enough to fill my lungs. At six in the evening I’d make excuses to go to my room. Ten minutes later I’d be asleep with my clothes on.
I’d wake up late for school. I had hallucinations while I slept. I’d sit up and pinch myself as hard as I could. In the morning there’d be small bruises, but even while pinching I’d see the iron bars of the radiator melt at the bottom like knee socks that had fallen around the ankles, or the sky, filled with stars, force itself through the open window, float over the cot until I was looking up into the cloudy universe, terrified.
I was volunteering at the women’s penitentiary, teaching art to one student who had attacked her sister with a hammer, causing brain damage. She was so blind her nose touched the paper while she drew and it would sometimes be daubed with paint. She always painted the same picture, Christ with his arms spread, in a white robe, on the far side of a navy river. Her bleary eyes and the blue paint on her nose made me think she was trying to dive into the river, reach Christ.
She did the same painting over and over until her migraine made her stop. I chattered all the while she painted. What do you say to someone who believes that when the guards turn off the light in her cell she is visited by a bulldog with the face of a man and the tongue of a snake?
I told her about the night sky visiting me. She lined the paintings edge to edge to edge until I began to think it was a message for me. Was it my father on the other side of the river trying to cross? Arms open to me. Or was it me? Was it me unable to cross to myself?
One day I left a pencil behind and she gouged it into her arm, ripping open the vein.
You didn’t talk much. On weekends, or at night, I’d make you hitch-hike to an empty part of the highway with me. The highway cut through the darkness. Sometimes all we could see was the yellow line. Every so often the pavement would vibrate through the rubber soles of our sneakers and the headlights from transport trucks came up from behind us. The lights swiped like giant paws over the trees and boulders until they overtook us and we fell back into darkness.
I just talked and shouted and did cartwheels and the cancan with my parka open. I did chorus kicks all the way down the empty highway. I shrieked the lyrics from old musicals;
I got plenty of nothin’ and nothin’s plenty for me
. The hills climbed up on either side of us. Rain fell off the massive sky like the faces of buildings in an earthquake.
It’s possible to imagine you have completely forgotten me.
You were honest. That was a point with you. I’ve been with men who believe they’re honest, but the truth loses its shape around them. I prefer them. You never said you loved me, even when I begged you.
Please say you love me just once. Please, please, please, please, I’ll devote my whole life to you, I’ll do anything. I was holding onto the hem of your jeans. We were in the echoey stairwell. I was flat on my belly, on the stairs, being dragged with each step you took, breathless with laughter. You drawing one leg up, then the other, pulling yourself up by the railing. In danger of losing your pants. Please say it, just say it for Christ’s sake.
I’m trying to imagine what it must have felt like to be the
object of that much devotion. You were stern, that was your policy. In the face of obsession, be stern.
I was in a high school play the night my father died. I stood on a ladder. I was Voice Number Three. I talked about spring coming, and wore a feather boa dyed orange. I changed a Styrofoam painting of autumn leaves on a plywood tree for a Styrofoam painting of green ones. Mom was waiting in the wings. She said I’d have to come right away, Dad was sick.
That night the nurse told us he would die. A heart attack. It seemed to me an easy thing to fix. There must be some kind of syringe to suck the blood back into the heart so it can pump again, some surgery. I explained this to the nurse. I had an image of the heart as one of those hard plastic models stuck on a steel spike in the science lab. But a heart, in fact, must be like tissue paper, must come apart when it’s not pumping, must dissolve. He had wires attached to little white circles attached to his chest. He looked very tidy, not soaked in blood at all.
The next day I wanted to go to school as though nothing had happened. My mother didn’t stop me. In school there was a surprise party for a teacher who was having a baby. Everybody chipped in on the present. She held it up, tissue paper over the sides of the box. She made a joke and everybody laughed uproariously, the excitement of a free period. Miss, Miss, Miss, and over the noise of my own laughter she mouthed the words, How’s your father? and I mouthed back, Dead.
Her shock hit me in the stomach. The bell rang and everyone
jumped up to leave. In the corridor I leaned against the wall, unable to hold myself up.
We had sex outdoors a lot for lack of any other location, living as we were in student dorms, no boys on the girls’ floor, and vice versa. Once in the mud and yellow leaves, criss-crossing black branches above us, a crude basket that would catch us if we fell into the sky. The smell of mud. You had a moustache. Not a very full one, mousy, the separate hairs bending like drawn bows against my lips. A wallet with a Velcro hasp, a condom in the billfold. Once we had sex beside a river in the middle of a snowstorm, the water churning brown, headlights sweeping over us, wind blasting, my breasts and stomach exposed to the falling snow. You ripped the Velcro with your lips, the body of the wallet tucked between your chin and shoulder.
Later, after we’d gotten an apartment of our own, and you decided it wasn’t working, you refused to sleep with me. Once I tried to force you, burst into the spare room while you were in bed, straddling you, kissing you, trying to get at your belt. We struggled and you pushed me off, dragged me to the window and ripped my shirt open. Pressed me against the window, half naked. Two empty parking lots and the fire station. Nobody saw. Once while I was asleep you came into our room and kissed me, kissed my cheeks, kissed my neck, and when I was drawn awake, when I put my arms around your neck, you left the room. You couldn’t explain it, the leaving, except to say if we didn’t break up we would stay together forever.
This is the sad thing about loving. It’s a skill, like working up a clay pot on a wheel. As though the form is slipping to life by itself, the hands slicked with juicy mud are doing all they can to contain it. Just the tiniest squeezing of muscles in the hands keeps the pot perfect. It’s such a shock to throw a pot for the first time and see how unsimple it is, to have it skew, deform and collapse in seconds, against what you expect.
I was terrified of dying suddenly, like my father. My skin was a mess. I burst into hysterical laughter for no reason, laughed until I was in tears. I’m only remembering what I did, because I can’t remember how I felt.
When I was thirteen I developed an ovarian cyst. It was removed and turned out to be benign. After the doctor’s appointment when the cyst was diagnosed, my mother and I stopped at my father’s office. My father said, How’s it going? and my mother said, Our little girl isn’t having a very good day.
At that moment, having to tell my father I was going to be operated on made me feel infinitely sad for myself, and for him. I felt I was letting him down. I opened my mouth to say something but I couldn’t. My father pressed my face into his chest so hard I could feel the button of his shirt digging into my forehead. My mother told him, and when I looked up at him he was smiling as if an operation wasn’t such a bad thing. But his face had broken out in soft red blotches.
After the operation, when I was recovering, my father cooked me a fresh trout. He had taken the green canoe out on the lake before sunrise, the water so still the leaping trout startled him. He made twists of lemon and bought some parsley
sprigs to decorate it. But on the way through the screen door he dropped the plate. Broken splinters of china covered the fish. My mother told me about it later. She said he cried. For a long time I associated his crying with his death, rather than my illness. I remembered not myself in the hospital, but him and the nurse telling me he would die by morning. As he was coming through the screen door, he must have realized he would be leaving me, how hurt I would be, how irreparable it was, and the shock of it made him drop the plate.
I dreamt last night that Mom and I were sitting naked on my bedroom floor. She had a tin filled with beeswax or shoe polish. She said if I smeared the stuff in my vagina it would make me pregnant. This way I could avoid the risk of having the father die after the child was born. There’d never be a father to die. My child wouldn’t have anything to lose. I had agreed to get pregnant this way, but at the last minute I was backing out. I knew I wanted my child to have a father, no matter how much pain it would cause to lose him.
The first time you kissed me, the whole town was buried in snow. Some drifts went to the tops of the telephone poles. It was like walking on the moon. Everything curved, everything buried, deceptive, muted. We were coming back from a movie and you leaned me against the orange bricks of the dorm. A drift came to our waists and snow blew off the lip of it, swirled around us, hissing on the back of your nylon parka.
You sucked my tongue. Our hands were linked loosely, two or three fingers twined. It was as though you were pulling my whole self, all the pain from my father’s death, all the loneliness
of being separated from my mother, all my loud babbling, siphoning it up through my body into my tongue, and taking it into your mouth, until my tongue felt swollen. Until I wasn’t even thinking of who you were any more. Just the sucking that seemed to be drawing out the sadness. Heat, like the needles being drawn from my father’s foot with melted wax. I was trembling. When you stopped kissing me I had nothing to say. My lips cracked when I smiled. I ran my tongue over them and they stung.
Do you remember Joyce, my roommate in the dorm? She slept on the other side of a half-wall that divided the room. She told me when I first met her that she was asthmatic, and showed me where she kept her respirator. I woke one night to the sound of choked spasmodic breathing. I thought she was dying. I filled up with that quicksand of sleep and fear, so heavy I couldn’t move, not even my mouth, to scream for help, but in that same second I had flung off the sheets and jumped out of bed, my skin already clammy, and I called her name.
Two things went through my head simultaneously. Death was coming again, and it had missed me. It had skipped over my bed because I was waiting for it; even in my sleep I had outwitted it. Not only that but I would save Joyce from it too. The second thing came in the voice of a nun who taught me math in grade eleven and failed me. A nun with pasty skin, someone I hated. But she had showed up at my father’s funeral and gripped my shoulders so tightly it hurt, and that pain seemed to keep me from passing out. Her voice came into my head at that exact moment and said, Don’t take another step, she’s having sex.
Then a male voice said, Your roommate.
Joyce said, She’s asleep, she talks in her sleep, she’s always yelling stuff.
It took me a full two minutes to get back in the bed without a creak. Then I lay there listening. Frightened they would figure out I was awake, my heart pounding so hard I felt short of breath, and at the same time conscious that I had to make my breath sound deep, the way it is when you’re asleep. The more I tried to breathe evenly, the more erratic my breathing, until I had the bed sheet stuffed in my mouth. It was the first time I had ever heard what sex sounds like, the bed creaking, the moans. It stopped suddenly and Joyce asked him to pass her a Kleenex off the desk. I fell asleep deeply, for the first time since my father died, without dreams, as if I had been given an injection.
Wisdom Teeth
T
hey call it a state of emergency. White dervishes scour Stephenville, the blue arm of the plough impotently slashes through the snow. In St. John’s where my mother is, the wires are frozen with sleet and the electricity is out. She’s in the plaid chair, I know, one emergency candle and a flashing drink of rye.
She’s thinking of Barbados. She’s thinking of a warm night when she wears a chiffon dress that floats around her, first in the breeze, and then like a flower opening in the swimming pool, swaying its petals. She’s wearing a spaghetti strainer on her head and singing into a wooden spoon, “Until the twelfth of never and that’s a long time.” My father holds a cigarette between his index finger and thumb. He’s wearing a floppy hat with peace signs and dancing the flamenco, singing, “Ya ta ta” under his breath.