Cat's Eye

Chapter 64

In the corner of a parking lot, among the sumptuous boutiques, they’ve reconstructed a forties diner. 4-D’s Diner, it’s called. Not a renovation, brand-new.

They couldn’t tear this stuff down fast enough, once.

Inside it’s pretty authentic, except that it looks too clean; and it’s less forties than early fifties. They have a soda fountain countertop, with stools along it topped in acid lime-green, and vinyl-padded booths in a shade of shiny purple that looks like the skin of an early shark-finned convertible. A jukebox, chrome coat trees, grainy black-and-white photos on the walls, of real forties diners. The waitresses have white uniforms with black tab trim, although the shade of their red lipstick isn’t quite right and they should have run it around the edges of their mouths. The waiters have those soda jerk caps set at an angle, and the right haircuts, a close shave up the back of the neck. They re doing a roaring business. Kids in their twenties, mostly.

Really it’s like Sunnysides, done over as a museum. They could have Cordelia and me in here, in our bat wing sleeves and cinch belts, stuffed and mounted or made of wax, drinking our milkshakes, looking as bored as we could.

The last time I saw Cordelia, she was going through the door of the rest home. That was the last time I talked to her. Although it wasn’t the last time she talked to me.

There are no avocado and sprout sandwiches, the coffee is not espresso, the pie is coconut cream and no worse than it was then. This is what I have, coffee and pie, sitting in one of the purple booths, watching young people exclaim over what they think is the quaintness of the past. The past isn’t quaint while you’re in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you can see it as decor, not as the shape your life’s been squeezed into.

They have Elvis Presley zucchini molds now: you clamp them around your zucchini while it’s young, and as it grows it’s deformed into the shape of Elvis Presley’s head. Is this why he sang? To become a zucchini? Vegetarianism and reincarnation are in the air, but that’s taking it too far. I’d rather come back as a sow bug, myself; or a stir-fried shrimp. Though I suppose the whole idea’s more lenient than Hell.

“You’ve done it well,” I say to the waitress. “Of course the prices are wrong. It was ten cents for a coffee, then.”

“Really,” she says, not as a question. She gives me a dutiful smile: Boring old frump. She is half my age, living, already, a life I can’t imagine. Whatever her guilts are, her hates and terrors, they are not the same. What do they do about AIDS, these girls? They can’t just roll around in the hay, the way we did. Is there a courtship ritual that involves, perhaps, an exchange of doctors’ telephone numbers? For us it was pregnancy that was the scary item, the sexual booby trap, the thing that could finish you off. Not any more.

I pay the bill, overtip, gather up my packages, an Italian scarf for each of my daughters, a fountain pen for Ben. Fountain-pens are coming back. Somewhere in Limbo, all the old devices and appliances and costumes are lined up, waiting their turn for re-entry.

I walk up the street, along to the corner. The next street is Josef’s. I count houses: this one must be his. The front’s been ripped out and glassed over, the lawn is paving stone. There’s an antique child’s rocking horse in the window, a threadbare quilt, a wooden-headed doll with a battered face. Onetime throw-outs, recycled as money. Nothing so indiscreet as a price tag, which means outrageous. I wonder what became of Josef, eventually. If he’s still alive he must be sixty-five, or more. If he was a dirty old man then, how dirty is he now?

He did make a film. I think it was him; in any case, the director’s name was the same. I saw it by accident, at a film festival. This was a lot later, when I was already living in Vancouver. It was about two women with nebulous personalities and cloudy hair. They wandered through fields with the wind blowing their thin dresses against their thighs, and gazed inscrutably. One of them took apart a radio and dropped the pieces into a stream, ate a butterfly, and cut the throat of a cat, because she was deranged. These things wouldn’t have been as appealing if she had been ugly, instead of blond and ethereal. The other one made little slashes on the skin of her thigh, using an old-fashioned straight razor that had belonged to her grandfather. Toward the end she jumped off a railway overpass, into a river, her dress fluttering like a window curtain. Except for the colors of their hair, it was hard to tell the two of them apart.

The man in this film was in love with both of them and couldn’t make up his mind. Hence their craziness. This is what convinced me that it must have been Josef: it wouldn’t have occurred to him that they might have had reasons of their own for being crazy, apart from men.

None of the blood in this film was real blood. Women were not real to Josef, any more than he was real to me. This was why I could treat his sufferings with such scorn and unconcern: he wasn’t real. The reason I’ve never dreamed about him was that he belonged already to the world of dreams: discontinuous, irrational, obsessive.

I was unfair to him, of course, but where would I have been without unfairness? In thrall, in harness. Young women need unfairness, it’s one of their few defenses. They need their callousness, they need their ignorance. They walk in the dark, along the edges of high cliffs, humming to themselves, thinking themselves invulnerable.

I can’t blame Josef for his film. He was entitled to his own versions, his own conjurings; as I am. I may have served his ends, but he served mine as well.

There is Life Drawing, for instance, hanging right now on the gallery wall, Josef preserved in aspic and good enough to eat. He is on the left side of the picture, stark-naked but turned with a twist half away from the viewer, so what you get is the ass end, then the torso in profile. On the right side is Jon, in the same position. Their bodies are somewhat idealized: less hairy than they really were, the muscle groups in higher definition, the skin luminous. I thought about putting Jockey shorts on them, in deference to Toronto, but decided against it. Both of them have wonderful bums.

Each of them is painting a picture, each picture is on an easel. Josef’s is of a voluptuous but not overweight woman, sitting on a stool with a sheet draped between her legs, her breasts exposed; her face is Pre-Raphaelite, brooding, consciously mysterious. Jon’s painting is a series of intestinal swirls, in hot pink, raspberry ripple red and Burgundy Cherry purple.

The model is seated on a chair between them, face front, bare feet flat on the floor. She’s clothed in a white bedsheet, wrapped around her below the breasts. Her hands are folded-neatly in her lap. Her head is a sphere of bluish glass.

I sit with Jon at a table in the roof bar of the Park Plaza Hotel, drinking white wine spritzers. My suggestion: I wanted to see it again. Outside, the skyline has changed: the Park Plaza is no longer the tallest building around, but a squat leftover, dwarfed by the svelte glassy towers that rise around it. Due south is the CN Tower, lifting up like a huge inverted icicle. This is the sort of architecture you used to see only in science fiction comic books, and seeing it pasted flat against the monotone lake-sky I feel I’ve stepped not forward in time but sideways, into a universe of two dimensions. But inside the bar not a lot has changed. The place still looks like a high-class Regency bordello. Even the waiters, with their good-grooming hair and air of harried discretion, look the same, and probably are. The management used to keep ties in the coat check, for gentlemen who’d forgotten them. Forgotten was the word, because surely no gentleman would deliberately choose to go tieless. It was a big thing when this place was cracked by women in pant suits. A chic black model did it: they couldn’t refuse to let her in, she could have hit them with racism. Even this memory dates me, and the little thrill of triumph that goes with it: what woman, now, would think of a pant suit as liberation?

I didn’t used to come here with Jon. He would have sneered, then, at the upholstered period chairs, the looped drapes, the men and women cut from a glossy whisky ad. It was Josef I came with, Josef whose hand I touched, across the surface of the table. Not Jon’s, as now.

It’s only the ends of the fingers, only lightly. This time we don’t say much: there’s none of the verbal prodding there was at lunch. There’s a shared vocabulary, of monosyllable and silence; we know why we’re here. Going down in the elevator, I look into the smoked-mirror wall and see my face in the dark glass obscured by time, as a stone overgrown. I could be any age.

We take a taxi back to the warehouse, our hands resting side by side on the seat. We go up the stairs to the studio, slowly, so we won’t get out of breath: neither one of us wants to be caught out by the other in a middle-aged wheeze. Jon’s hand is on my waist. It’s familiar there; it’s like knowing where the light switch is, in a house you once lived in but haven’t been back to for years. When we reach the door, before we go in, he pats me on the shoulder, a gesture of encouragement, and of wistful resignation.

“Don’t turn on the light,” I say.

Jon puts his arms around me, his face in the angle of my neck. It’s a gesture less of desire than of fatigue. The studio is the purplish gray of autumn twilight. The plaster casts of arms and legs glimmer whitely, like broken statues in a ruin. There’s a scatter of my clothes in the corner, empty cups dotted here and there, on the work counter, by the window, marking my daily trails, claiming space. This room seems like mine now, as if I’ve been living here all along, no matter where else I’ve been or what else I’ve been doing. It’s Jon who has been away, and has returned at last.

We undress each other, as we used to do at first; but more shyly. I don’t want to be awkward. I’m glad it’s dusk; I’m nervous about the backs of my thighs, the wrinkling above my knees, the soft fold across my stomach, not fatness exactly but a pleat. The hair on his chest is gray, a shock. I avoid looking at the small beer belly that’s grown on him, though I’m aware of it, of the changes in his body, as he must be of mine.

When we kiss, it’s with a gravity we lacked before. Before we were avid, and selfish. We make love for the comfort of it. I recognize him, I could recognize him in total darkness. Every man has his own rhythm, which remains the same. In this there is the relief of greeting. I don’t feel I’m being disloyal to Ben, only loyal to something else; which predates him, which has nothing to do with him. An old score.

Also I know it’s something I’ll never do again. It’s the last look, before turning away, at some once-visited, once-extravagant place you know you won’t go back to. An evening view, of Niagara Falls.

We lie together under the duvet, arms around each other. It’s hard to remember what we used to fight about. The former anger is gone, and with it that edgy, jealous lust we used to have for each other. What’s left is fondness, and regret. A diminuendo.

“Come to the opening?” I say. “I’d like you to.”

“No,” he says. “I don’t want to.”

“Why not?”

“I’d feel bad,” he says. “I wouldn’t want to see you that way.”

“What way?” I say.

“With all those people, slobbering over you.”

What he means is that he doesn’t want to be merely an onlooker, that there’s no room for him in all that, and he’s right. He doesn’t want to be just my ex-husband. He would be dispossessed, of me and of himself. I realize I don’t want it either, I don’t really want him to be there. I need him to be, but I don’t want it.

I turn, lean on my elbow, kiss him again, on the cheek this time. The hair down low, behind his ears, is already turning white. I think, we did that just in time. It was almost too late.

Chapter 65

With Jon it’s like falling downstairs. Up until now there have been preliminary stumblings, recoveries, a clutching for handholds. But now all balance is lost and we plunge down headlong, both of us, noisily and without grace, gathering momentum and abrasions as we go.

I enter sleep angry and dread waking up, and when I do wake I lie beside the sleeping body of Jon, in our bed, listening to the rhythm of his breathing and resenting him for the oblivion he still controls. For weeks he has been more silent than usual, and home less. Home less, that is, when I am home. When I’m away at work he is there all right, even when Sarah’s in preschool. I’ve begun to find signs, tiny clues left in my way like breadcrumbs dropped on a trail: a cigarette with a pink mouthmark on it, two used glasses in the sink, a hairpin that is not mine, beneath a pillow that is. I clean up and say nothing, hoarding these things for times of greater need.

“Someone named Monica called you,” I tell him.

It’s morning, and there’s a whole day to get through. A day of evasion, suppressed anger, false calm. We are well beyond throwing things, by now.

He’s reading the paper. “Oh?” he says. “What did she want?”

“She said to tell you Monica called,” I say.

He comes back late at night and I’m in bed, feigning sleep, my head churning. I think of subterfuges: examining his shirts for perfume, tailing him along the street, hiding in the closet and jumping out, red-hot with discovery. I think of other things I could do. I could leave, go somewhere unspecified, with Sarah. Or I could demand that we talk things through. Or I could pretend nothing is happening, continue on with our lives as usual. This would have been the advice offered in women’s magazines, of a decade ago: wait it out.

I see these things as scenarios, to be played through and discarded, perhaps simultaneously. None of them precludes the others.

In real life, the days go on as usual, darkening to winter and heavy with the unspoken.

“You had a thing with Uncle Joe, didn’t you?” Jon says casually. It’s a Saturday, and we’re making a stab at normality by taking Sarah to Grange Park, to play in the snow.

“Who?” I say.

“You know. Josef what’s-his-name. The old stick man.”

“Oh, him,” I say. Sarah is over by the swings with some other kids. We’re sitting on a bench, having cleared the snow. I think I should be making a snowman, or doing some other thing good mothers are supposed to do. But I’m too tired.

“But you did, didn’t you?” Jon says. “At the same time as me.”

“Where did you get that idea?” I say. I know when I’m being accused. I run over my own ammunition: the hairpins, the lipstick, the phone calls, the glasses in the sink.

“I’m not a moron, you know. I figured it out.”

He has jealousies of his own then, wounds of his own to lick. Things I have inflicted. I should lie, deny everything. But I don’t want to. Josef, at the moment, gives me a little pride.

“That was years ago,” I say. “Thousands of years ago. It wasn’t important.”

“Like shit,” he says. I once thought he would ridicule me, if he found out about Josef. The surprise is that he takes him seriously.

That night we make love, if that is any longer the term for it. It’s not shaped like love, not colored like it, but harsh, war-colored, metallic. Things are being proved. Or repudiated. In the morning he says, “Who else has there been?” Out of nowhere. “How do I know you weren’t hopping into the sack with every old fart around?”

I sigh. “Jon,” I say. “Grow up.”

“How about Mr. Beanie Weenie?” he keeps on.

“Oh, come on,” I say. “You were hardly the angel. Your place was crawling with all those skinny girls. You didn’t want strings, remember?”

Sarah is still in her crib asleep. We are safe, we can get down to it, this telling of bad truths which are not entirely true. Once you start, it’s difficult to stop. There is even a certain relish in it.

“At least I was open about it,” he says. “I didn’t sneak around. I didn’t pretend to be so goddamn pure and faithful, the way you did.”

“Maybe I loved you,” I say. I notice the past tense. So does he.

“You wouldn’t know love if you fell over it,” he says.

“Not like Monica?” I say. “You’re not being very open right now. I’ve found those hairpins, in my own bed. You could at least have the decency to do it somewhere else.”

“How about you?” he says. “You’re always going out, you get around.”

“Me?” I say. “I don’t have the time. I don’t have time to think, I don’t have time to paint, I barely have time to shit. I’m too busy paying the goddamn rent.”

I’ve said the worst thing, I’ve gone too far. “That’s it,” says Jon. “It’s always you, what you contribute, what you put up with. It’s never me.” He hunts for his jacket, heads for the door.

“Going to see Monica?” I say, with as much venom as I can dredge up. I hate it, this schoolyard bickering. I want embraces, tears, forgiveness. I want them to arrive by themselves, with no effort on my part, like rainbows.

“Trisha,” he says. “Monica is just a friend.”

It’s winter. The heat goes off, comes on again, goes off, at random. Sarah has a cold. She coughs at night and I get up for her, feeding her spoonfuls of cough syrup, bringing her drinks of water. In the daytime we are both exhausted.

I am sick a lot myself this winter. I get her colds. I lie in bed on weekend mornings, looking up at the ceiling, my head clogged and cottony. I want glasses of ginger ale, squeezed orange juice, the sound of distant radios. But these things are gone forever, nothing arrives on a tray. If I want ginger ale I’ll have to go to the store or the kitchen, buy it or pour it myself. In the main room Sarah watches cartoons. I don’t paint at all any more. I can’t think about painting. Although I’ve received a junior grant from a government arts program, I can’t organize myself enough to lift a brush. I push myself through time, to work, to the bank to get money, to the supermarket to buy food. Sometimes I watch daytime soaps on television, where there are more crises and better clothes than in real life. I tend to Sarah. I don’t do anything else. I no longer go to the meetings of women, because they make me feel worse. Jody phones and says we should get together, but I put her off. She would jolly me along, make bracing and positive suggestions I know I can’t live up to. Then I would only feel more like a failure. I don’t want to see anyone. I lie in the bedroom with the curtains drawn and nothingness washing over me like a sluggish wave. Whatever is happening to me is my own fault. I have done something wrong, something so huge I can’t even see it, something that’s drowning me. I am inadequate and stupid, without worth. I might as well be dead.

One night Jon does not come back. This is not usual, it isn’t our silent agreement: even when he stays out late he is always in by midnight. We haven’t had a fight this day; we’ve hardly spoken. He hasn’t phoned to say where he is. His intention is clear: he has left me behind, in the cold. I crouch in the bedroom, in the dark, wrapped in Jon’s old sleeping bag, listening to the wheezing sound of Sarah breathing and the whisper of sleet against the window. Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It’s like the tide going out, revealing what ever’s been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future. The ruin you’ve made.

My body is inert, without will. I think I should keep moving, to circulate my blood, as you are supposed to do in a snowstorm so you won’t freeze to death. I force myself to stand up. I will go to the kitchen and make tea.

Outside the house a car slides by, through the mushy snow, a muffled rushing. The main room is dark, except for the light coming in from the lampposts on the street, through the window. The things on Jon’s work table glint in this half-light: the flat blade of a chisel, the head of a hammer. I can feel the pull of the earth on me, the dragging of its dark curve of gravity, the spaces between the atoms you could fall so easily through.

This is when I hear the voice, not inside my head at all but in the room, clearly: Do it. Come on. Do it. This voice doesn’t offer a choice; it has the force of an order. It’s the difference between jumping and being pushed.

The Exacto knife is what I use, to make a slash. It doesn’t even hurt, because right after that there’s a whispering sound and space closes in and I’m on the floor. This is how Jon finds me. Blood is black in the darkness, it does not reflect, so he doesn’t see until he turns on the light. I tell the people at Emergency that it was an accident. I am a painter, I say. I was cutting canvas and my hand slipped. It’s my left wrist, so this is plausible. I’m frightened, I want to hide the truth: I have no intention of being stuffed into 999 Queen Street, now or ever.

“In the middle of the night?” the doctor says.

“I often work at night,” I say.

Jon backs me up. He’s just as scared as I am. He tied my wrist up in a tea towel and drove me to the hospital. I leaked through the towel, onto the front seat.

“Sarah,” I said, remembering her.

“She’s downstairs,” Jon said. Downstairs is the landlady, a middle-aged Italian widow.

“What did you tell her?” I asked.

“I said it was your appendix,” Jon said. I laughed a little. “What the hell got into you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “You’ll have to get this car cleaned.” I felt white, drained of blood, cared for, purified. Peaceful.

“Are you sure you don’t want to talk to someone?” the doctor in Emergency says.

“I’m fine now,” I say. The last thing I want to do is talking. I know what he means by someone: a shrink. Someone who will tell me I’m nuts. I know what kind of people hear voices: people who drink too much, who fry their brains with drugs, who slip off the rails. I feel entirely steady, I’m not even anxious any more. I’ve already decided what I will do, afterward, tomorrow. I’ll wear my arm in a sling and say I broke my wrist. So I don’t have to tell him, or Jon, or anyone else, about the voice. I know it wasn’t really there. Also I know I heard it.

It wasn’t a frightening voice, in itself. Not menacing but excited, as if proposing an escapade, a prank, a treat. Something treasured, and secret. The voice of a nine-year-old child.

Chapter 66

The snow has melted, leaving a dirty filigree, the wind is blowing around the grit left over from winter, the crocuses are pushing up through the mud of the desolate smashed-down lawns. If I stay here I will die. It’s the city I need to leave as much as Jon, I think. It’s the city that’s killing me. It will kill me suddenly. I’ll be walking along the street, thinking of nothing in particular, and all at once I will turn sideways and dive off the curb, to be smashed by a speeding car. I will topple in front of a subway train without warning, I’ll plunge from a bridge without intention. All I will hear will be that small voice, inviting and conspiratorial, gleeful, urging me over. I know I’m capable of such a thing. (Worse: although I’m afraid of this idea and ashamed of it, and although in the daytime I find it melodramatic and ludicrous and refuse to believe in it, I also cherish it. It’s like the secret bottle stashed away by alcoholics: I may have no desire to use it, right now, but I feel more secure knowing it’s there. It’s a fallback, it’s a vice, it’s an exit. It’s a weapon.)

At night I sit beside Sarah’s crib, watching the flutter of her eyelids as she dreams, listening to her breathe. She will be left alone. Or not alone, because she will have Jon. Motherless. This is unthinkable. I turn on the lights in the living room. I know I must start packing, but I don’t know what to take. Clothes, toys for Sarah, her furry rabbit. It seems too difficult, so I go to bed. Jon is already in there, turned toward the wall. We have gone through a pretence of truce and reformation, straight into deadlock. I don’t wake him up.

In the morning, after he leaves, I bundle Sarah into the stroller and take some of my grant money out of the bank. I don’t know where to go. All I can think of is away. I buy us tickets to Vancouver, which has the advantage of being warm, or so I suppose. I stuff our things into duffel bags, which I’ve bought at Army Surplus.

I want Jon to come back and stop me, because now that I’m in motion I can’t believe I’m actually doing this. But he doesn’t come.

I leave a note, I make a sandwich: peanut butter. I cut it in two and give half to Sarah, and a glass of milk. I call a taxi. We sit at the kitchen table with our coats on, eating our sandwiches and drinking our milk, and waiting.

This is when Jon comes back. I keep eating.

“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” he says.

“Vancouver,” I say.

He sits down at the table, stares at me. He looks as if he hasn’t slept for weeks, although he’s been sleeping a lot, oversleeping. “I can’t stop you,” he says. It’s a statement of fact, not a maneuver: he will let us go without a fight. He too is exhausted.

“I think that’s the taxi,” I say. “I’ll write.”

I’m good at leaving. The trick is to close yourself off. Don’t hear, don’t see. Don’t look back. We don’t have a sleeper, because I need to save the money. I sit up all night, Sarah sprawled and snuffling in my lap. She’s done some crying, but she’s too young to realize what I’ve done, what we’re doing. The other passengers extend themselves into the aisles; baggage expands, smoke drifts in the stale air, food wrappings clog the washrooms. There’s a card game going on up at the front of the car, with beer.

The train runs northwest, through hundreds of miles of scraggy forests and granite outcrops, hundreds of small blue anonymous lakes edged with swamp and bulrushes and dead spruce, old snow in the shadows. I peer out through the glass of the train window, which is streaked with ram and dust, and there is the landscape of my early childhood, smudged and scentless and untouchable and moving backward. At long intervals the train crosses a road, gravel or thin and paved, with a white line down the middle. This looks like emptiness and silence, but to me it is not empty, not silent. Instead it’s filled with echoes. Home, I think. But it’s nowhere I can go back to.

It’s worse than I thought it would be, and also better.

Some days I think I’m crazy to have done this; other times that it’s the sanest move I’ve made in years. It’s cheaper in Vancouver. After a short spell in a Holiday Inn, I find a house I can rent, on the rise behind Kitsilano Beach, one of those toytown houses that are bigger inside than they look. It has a view of the bay, and the mountains across it, and, in the summer, endless light. I find a coop preschool for Sarah. For a time I live on grant money. I freelance a little, then get a part-time job refinishing furniture for an antique dealer. I like this, because it’s mindless and the furniture can’t talk. I am thirsty for silence. I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over. I think maybe I should go to see a shrink, because that is the accepted thing, now, for people who are not in balance, and I am not. Finally I do go. The shrink is a man, a nice man. He wants me to talk about everything that happened to me before I was six, nothing after. Once you are six, he implies, you are cast in bronze. What comes after is not important.

I have a good memory. I tell him about the war.

I tell him about the Exacto knife and the wrist, but not about the voice. I don’t want him to think I’m a loony. I want him to think well of me.

I tell him about nothing.

He asks if I have orgasms. I say that isn’t the problem.

He thinks I am hiding things.

After a while I stop going.

Gradually I grow back, into my hands. I take to getting up early in the morning, before Sarah is awake, to paint. I find I have a minor, ambiguous reputation, from the show in Toronto, and I am invited to parties. At first there is a resentful edge, because I am from what is known as back east, which is supposed to confer unfair advantages; but after a time I’ve been here long enough so I can pass, and after that I can do the resentful act myself, to easterners, and get away with it. I’m also invited to take part in several group showings, mostly by women: they’ve heard about the ink throwing, read the snotty reviews, all of which render me legitimate, although from the east. Women artists of many kinds, women of many kinds are in ferment here, they are boiling with the pressured energy of explosive forces confined in a small space, and with the fervor of all religious movements in their early, purist stages. It is not enough to give lip service and to believe in equal pay: there has to be a conversion, from the heart. Or so they imply.

Confession is popular, not of your flaws but of your sufferings, at the hands of men. Pain is important, but only certain kinds of it: the pain of women, but not the pain of men. Telling about your pain is called sharing. I don’t want to share in this way; also I am insufficient in scars. I have lived a privileged life, I’ve never been beaten up, raped, gone hungry. There is the issue of money, of course, but Jon was as poor as me.

There is Jon. But I don’t feel overmatched by him. Whatever he did to me, I did back, and maybe worse. He’s twisting now, because he misses Sarah. He calls long distance, his voice on the phone fading in and out like a wartime broadcast, plaintive with defeat, with an archaic sadness that seems, more and more, to be that of men in general.

No mercy for him, the women would say. I am not merciful, but I am sorry. A number of these women are lesbians, newly declared or changing over. This is at the same time courageous and demanded. According to some, it’s the only equal relationship possible, for women. You are not genuine otherwise.

I am ashamed of my own reluctance, my lack of desire; but the truth is that I would be terrified to get into bed with a woman. Women collect grievances, hold grudges and change shape. They pass hard, legitimate judgments, unlike the purblind guesses of men, fogged with romanticism and ignorance and bias and wish. Women know too much, they can neither be deceived nor trusted. I can understand why men are afraid of them, as they are frequently accused of being.

At parties they start to ask leading questions that have the ring of inquisition; they are interested in my positions, my dogmas. I am guilty about having so few of these: I know I am unorthodox, hopelessly heterosexual, a mother, quisling and secret wimp. My heart is a dubious object at best, blotchy and treacherous. I still shave my legs.

I avoid gatherings of these women, walking as I do in fear of being sanctified, or else burned at the stake. I think they are talking about me, behind my back. They make me more nervous than ever, because they have a certain way they want me to be, and I am not that way. They want to improve me. At times I feel defiant: what right have they to tell me what to think? I am not Woman, and I’m damned if I’ll be shoved into it. Bitch, I think silently. Don’t boss me around.

But also I envy their conviction, their optimism, their carelessness, their fearlessness about men, their camaraderie. I am like someone watching from the sidelines, waving a cowardly handkerchief, as the troops go boyishly off to war, singing brave songs.

I have several women friends, not very close ones. Single mothers, as I am. I meet them at preschool. We trade kids for nights out and grumble harmlessly together. We avoid each other’s deeper wounds. We’re like Babs and Marjorie from my old Life Drawing class, with the same sense of rueful comedy. It’s an older pattern, for women; but by now we are older.

Jon comes to visit, a tentative move toward reconciliation, which I think I want as well. It doesn’t work, and we divorce, finally, by long distance.

My parents come as well. They miss Sarah, I think, more than they miss me. I have made excuses not to go east for Christmas. Against the backdrop of the mountains, they seem out of place, a little shrunken. They are more themselves in their letters. They are saddened by me and what they probably think of as my broken home, and don’t know what to say about it. “Well, dear,” says my mother, talking about Jon.

“I always thought he was very intense.” A bad word that spells trouble. I take them to Stanley Park, where there are big trees. I show them the ocean, sloshing around in seaweed. I show them a giant slug.

My brother Stephen sends postcards. He sends a stuffed dinosaur for Sarah. He sends a water pistol. He sends a counting book, about an ant and a bee. He sends the solar system, in the form of a plastic mobile, and stars you can stick on the ceiling that light up at night. After a time I find that, in the tiny world of art (tiny, because who knows about it really? It’s not on television), swirls, squares, and giant hamburgers are out and other things are in, and I am suddenly at the front of a smallish wave. There’s a flurry, as such things go. More of my pictures sell, for higher prices. I’m represented by two regular galleries now, one east, one west. I go to New York, briefly, leaving Sarah with one of my single mother friends, for a group show organized by the Canadian government which is attended by many people who work with the Trade Commission. I wear black. I walk on the streets, feeling sane in comparison with the other people there, who all seem to be talking to themselves. I come back.

I have men, at long intervals and in some desperation. These affairs are rushed and unsatisfactory: I don’t have time for the finer points. Even these brief interludes are almost too strenuous for me. None of these men rejects me. I don’t give them the chance. I know what is dangerous for me, and keep away from the edges of things. From anything too bright, too sharp. From lack of sleep. When I start feeling shaky I lie down, expecting nothing, and it arrives, washing over me in a wave of black vacancy. I know I can wait it out.

After more time I meet Ben, who picks me up in the most ordinary way, in the supermarket. Actually he asks if he can carry my shopping bags, which look heavy and are, and I let him, feeling silly and archaic and looking first to make sure no women I know are watching.

Years before, I would have considered him too obvious, too dull, practically simple-minded. And for years after that, a chauvinist of the more amiable sort. He is all these things; but he is also like an apple, after a prolonged and gluttonous binge.

He comes over and fixes my back porch with his own saw and hammer, as in the women’s magazines of long ago, and has a beer afterward, on the lawn, as in ads. He tells me jokes I haven’t heard since high school. My gratitude for these mundane enjoyments amazes me. But I don’t require him, he’s no transfusion. Instead he pleases me. It’s a happiness, to be so simply pleased. He takes me to Mexico, as in drugstore romances. He’s just bought his small travel business, more as a hobby than anything: he made his money earlier, in real estate. But he likes to take photographs and sit in the sun. To do what he likes and make money at the same time is what he’s wanted all his life. He is shy in bed, easily surprised, quickly delighted.

We combine households, in a third, larger house. After a while we get married. There is nothing dramatic about it. To him it seems appropriate, to me eccentric: it’s a defiance of convention, but of a convention he’s never heard of. He doesn’t know how outlandish I think I’m being. He’s ten years older than I am. He has a divorce of his own, and a grown son. My daughter Sarah becomes the daughter he wanted, and soon we have Anne. I think of her as a second chance. She is less pensive than Sarah, more stubborn. Sarah knows, already, that you can’t always have everything you want.

Ben considers me good, and I don’t disturb this faith: he doesn’t need my more unsavory truths. He considers me also a little fragile, because artistic: I need to be cared for, like a potted plant. A little pruning, a little watering, a little weeding and straightening up, to bring out the best in me. He makes up a set of books, for the business end of my painting: what has sold, and for how much. He tells me what I can deduct on my income tax return. He fills out the return. He arranges the spices in alphabetical order, on a special shelf in the kitchen. He builds the shelf.

I could live without this. I have before. But I like it, all the same. My paintings themselves he regards with wonder, and also apprehension, like a small child looking at a candle. What he focuses on is how well I do hands. He knows these are hard. He once wanted to take up something like that himself, he says, but never got around to it because of having to earn a living. This is a lot like the kinds of things people have said to me at gallery openings, but in him I forgive it. He goes away at judicious intervals, on business, giving me a chance to miss him. I sit in front of the fireplace, with his arm around me solid as the back of a chair. I walk along the breakwater in the soothing Vancouver drizzle, the halftones of the seashore, the stroking of the small waves. In front of me is the Pacific, which sends up sunset after sunset, for nothing; at my back are the improbable mountains, and beyond them an enormous barricade of land.

Toronto lies behind it, at a great distance, burning in thought like Gomorrah. At which I dare not look. Thirteen - Picoseconds

Chapter 67

I wake late. I eat an orange, some toast, an egg, mushing it up in a teacup. The hole poked in the bottom of the eggshell was not to keep the witches from going to sea, as Cordelia said. It’s to break the vacuum between shell and egg cup, so the shell can be extracted. Why did it take me forty years to figure that out?

I put on my other jogging suit, the cerise one, and do some desultory stretching exercises on Jon’s floor. It’s Jon’s floor again, not mine. I feel I’ve returned it to him, along with whatever fragments of his own life, or of our life together, I’ve been keeping back till now. I remember all those mediaeval paintings, the hand raised, open to show there is no weapon: Go in peace. Dismissal, and blessing. My way of doing this was not exactly the way of the saints, but seems to have worked just as well. The peace was for the bestower of it, also.

I go down to get the morning paper. I leaf through it, without reading much. I know I’m killing time. I’ve almost forgotten what I’m supposed to be doing here, and I’m impatient to be gone, back to the west coast, back to the time zone where I live my life now. But I can’t do that yet. I’m suspended, as in airports or dentists’ waiting rooms, expecting yet another interlude that will be textureless and without desire, like a painkiller or the interiors of planes. This is how I think of the coming evening, the opening of the show: something to get through without disaster.

I should go to the gallery, check to see that everything’s in order. I should perform at least that minimal courtesy. But instead I take the subway, get off near the main gate of the cemetery, wander south and east, scuffing through the fallen leaves, scanning the gutters; looking down at the sidewalk, for silver paper, nickels, windfalls. I still believe such things exist, and that I could find them. With a slight push, a slip over some ill-defined edge, I could turn into a bag lady. It’s the same instinct: rummaging in junk heaps, pawing through discards. Looking for something that’s been thrown away as useless, but could still be dredged up and reclaimed. The collection of shreds, of space in her case, time in mine.

This is my old route home from school. I used to walk along this sidewalk, behind or in front of the others. Between these lampposts my shadow on the winter snow would stretch ahead of me, double, shrink again and disappear, the lamps casting their haloes around them like the moon in fog. Here is the lawn where Cordelia fell down backward, making a snow angel. Here is where she ran. The houses are the same houses, though no longer trimmed in peeling white winter-grayed paint, no longer down-at-heels, postwar. The sandblasters have been here, the skylight people; inside, the benjamina trees and tropical climbers have taken over, ousting the mangy African violets once nurtured on kitchen windowsills. I can see through these houses, to what they used to be; I can see the colors that used to cover the walls, dusty rose, muddy green, mushroom, and the chintz curtains no longer there. What time do they really belong in, their own or mine?

I walk along the street, slightly uphill, against a scattered traffic of small children going home for lunch. Although the girls wear jeans, denoting freedom, they aren’t as noisy as they used to be; there are no chants, no catcalls. They trudge along doggedly, or so it seems to me. Maybe that’s because I’m not at their level any more: I’m higher, so the sound comes up to me filtered. Or maybe it’s me, the presence among them of someone they think is an adult, and has power.

A few of them stare, many don’t. What’s to see? A middle-aged woman, hands in her coat pockets, the legs of her jogging suit bunching above her boot tops, no more bizarre than most and easily forgotten. Some of the porches have pumpkins on them, carved with faces, happy or sad or threatening, waiting for tonight. All Souls’ Eve, when the spirits of the dead will come back to the living, dressed as ballerinas and Coke bottles and spacemen and Mickey Mice, and the living will give them candy to keep them from turning vicious. I can still taste that festival: the tart air, caramel in the mouth, the hope at the door, the belief in something for nothing all children take for granted. They won’t get homemade popcorn balls any more though, or apples: rumors of razor blades abound, and the possibility of poison. Even by the time of my own children, we worried about the apples. There’s too much loose malice blowing around. In Mexico they do this festival the right way, with no disguises. Bright candy skulls, family picnics on the graves, a plate set for each individual guest, a candle for the soul. Everyone goes away happy, including the dead. We’ve rejected that easy flow between dimensions: we want the dead unmentionable, we refuse to name them, we refuse to feed them. Our dead as a result are thinner, grayer, harder to hear, and hungrier.

Chapter 68

My brother Stephen died five years ago. I shouldn’t say died: was killed. I try not to think of it as murder, although it was, but as some kind of accident, like an exploding train. Or else a natural catastrophe, like a landslide. What they call for insurance purposes an act of God.

He died of an eye for an eye, or someone’s idea of it. He died of too much justice. He was sitting on a plane. He had a window seat. This much is known.

In the nylon webbing pocket in front of him was an inflight magazine with an article in it about camels, which he’d read, and another about upgrading your business wardrobe, which he hadn’t. There was also a set of earphones and a vomit bag.

Under the seat in front, beyond his bare feet—he’s taken off his shoes and socks—is his briefcase, with a paper in it written by himself, on the subject of the probable composition of the universe. The universe, he once thought, may well be made up of infinitesimal pieces of string, in thirty-two different colors. The pieces of string are so small that “colors” is only a manner of speaking. But he is having doubts: there are other theoretical possibilities, two of which he has outlined in his paper. The universe is hard to pin down; it changes when you look at it, as if it resists being known.

He was supposed to deliver his paper the day before yesterday, in Frankfurt. He would have heard other papers. He would have learned.

Stuffed under the seat along with the briefcase is his suit jacket, one of the three he now owns. His shirtsleeves are rolled up, which doesn’t solve much: the air-conditioning is on the fritz and the air on the plane is overheated. Also it smells bad: at least one washroom toilet is out of order, and people fart more on planes, as my brother has had occasion to observe before, having taken a lot of plane trips. This is now compounded by panic, which is bad for the digestion. Two seats over, a fat bald-headed man is snoring with his mouth open, releasing an invisible cloud of halitosis. The shades on the windows are pulled down. My brother knows that if he were to raise his he would see a runway, shimmering with heat, and beyond that a dun landscape alien as the moon, with a blinding sea in the background; and some oblong brown buildings with flat roofs, from which reprieve will come, or not. He saw all this before the shades came down. He doesn’t know what country the buildings are in. He hasn’t had anything to eat since this morning. Sandwiches arrived from outside, strange granular bread, the butter on it liquid, some sort of beige meat paste that hinted of ptomaine. Also a piece of pale sweaty cheese in plastic wrap. He ate this cheese and the sandwich, and now his hands smell of old picnics, the roadside lunches of wartime.

The last drink of water was doled out four hours ago. He has a roll of peppermint LifeSavers: he always takes them on trips, in case of bumpy rides. He gave one to the middle-aged woman in oversized glasses and a plaid pant suit who was sitting beside him. He is somewhat relieved she’s gone: her voiceless, colorless weeping, snuffly and monotonous, was beginning to get to him. The women and the children have all been allowed off, but he is not a woman or a child. Everyone left on the plane is a man. They have been spaced, two by two, with an empty seat between each pair. Their passports have been collected. Those who have done the collecting are standing at intervals in the aisles of the plane, six of them, three with small machine guns, three with visible grenades. They are all wearing airplane pillowcases over their heads, with holes cut for the eyes and for the mouths, which show in the dim light as white glints, pink glistenings. Below these pillowcases, which are red, their clothes are ordinary: a leisure outfit, a pair of gray flannel slacks with a white shirt tucked in, the bottom of a conservative navy-blue suit.

Naturally they came on board in the guise of passengers; though how they got the weapons past Security is anyone’s guess. They must have had help, someone at the airport, so that they could jump up, the way they did, somewhere over the English Channel, and start shouting orders and waving around the firearms. Either that or the things were already on the plane, in pre-arranged hiding places, Because nothing metal gets through the X-rays these days.

There are two or possibly three other men up in the cockpit, negotiating with the control tower over the radio. They haven’t yet told the passengers who they are or what they want; all they’ve said, in heavily accented but understandable English, is that everyone on the plane will live together or else die together. The rest has been monosyllables and pointing: You, here. It’s hard to tell how many of them there are altogether, because of the identical pillowcases. They’re like those characters in old comic books, the ones with two identities. These men have been caught halfway through their transformation: ordinary bodies but with powerful, supernatural heads, deformed in the direction of heroism, or villainy. I don’t know whether or not this is what my brother thought. But it’s what I think for him, now. Unlike the open-mouthed man beside him, my brother can’t sleep. So he occupies himself with theoretical stratagems: what would he do if he were in their place, the place of the men with pillowcase heads? It’s their tension, their hair-trigger excitement and blocked adrenaline that fills the plane, despite the lax bodies of the passengers, their fatigue and resignation.

If he were them, he would of course be ready to die. Without that as a given, such an operation would be pointless and unthinkable. But die for what? There’s probably a religious motif, though in the foreground something more immediate: money, the release of others jailed in some sinkhole for doing more or less the same thing these men are doing. Blowing something up, or threatening to. Or shooting someone. In a way this is all familiar. It’s as if he’s lived through it before, a long time ago; and despite the unpleasantness, the irritation of it, the combination of boredom and fear, he has a certain fellow feeling. He hopes these men can keep their heads and carry it off, whatever it is. He hopes there will be no sniveling and pants wetting among the passengers, that no one will go berserk and start screaming, and trigger a jittery massacre. A cool hand and a steady eye is what he wishes for them. A man has entered from the front of the plane and is talking with two of the others. It seems to be an argument: there are gestures of the hands, a raised word. The other standing men tense, their square red heads scanning the passengers like odd radars. My brother knows he should avoid eye contact, keep his head down. He looks at the nylon webbing pocket in front of him, furtively peels off a LifeSaver. The new man starts to walk down the aisle of the plane, his oblong, three-holed head turning from side to side. A second man walks behind him. Eerily, the taped music comes on over the intercom, saccharine, soporific. The man pauses; his oversized head moves ponderously left, like the head of some shortsighted, dull-witted monster. He extends an arm, gestures with the hand: Up. It’s my brother he points to.

Here I stop inventing. I’ve spoken with the witnesses, the survivors, so I know that my brother stands up, eases himself past the man in the aisle seat, saying, “Excuse me.” The expression on his face is one of bemused curiosity: these people are unfathomable, but then so are most. Perhaps they have mistaken him for someone else. Or they may want him to help negotiate, because they’re walking toward the front of the plane, where another pillowhead stands waiting.

It’s this one who swings open the door for him, like a polite hotel doorman, letting in the full glare of day. After the semidarkness it’s ferociously bright, and my brother stands blinking as the image clears to sand and sea, a happy vacation postcard. Then he is falling, faster than the speed of light. This is how my brother enters the past.

I was on planes and in airports for fifteen hours, getting there. I saw the buildings after that, the sea, the stretch of runway; the plane itself was gone. All they got in the end was safe conduct. I didn’t want to identify the body, or see it at all. If you don’t see the body, it’s easier to believe nobody’s dead. But I did want to know whether they shot him before throwing him out, or after. I wanted it to be after, so he could have had that brief moment of escape, of sunlight, of pretended flight. I did not stay up at night, on that trip. I did not want to look at the stars. The body has its own defenses, its way of blocking things out. The government people said I was wonderful, by which they meant not a nuisance. I didn’t collapse or make a spectacle of myself; I spoke with reporters, signed the forms, made the decisions. There was a great deal I didn’t see or think about until much later.

What I thought about then was the space twin, the one who went on an interplanetary journey and returned in a week to find his brother ten years older.

Now I will get older, I thought. And he will not.

Chapter 69

My parents never understood Stephen’s death, because it had no reason; or no reason that had anything to do with him. Nor did they get over it. Before it, they were active, alert, vigorous; after it they faded.

“It doesn’t matter how old they are,” my mother said. “They’re always your children.” She tells me this as something I will need to know, later on.

My father became shorter and thinner, visibly shriveled; he sat for long periods, without doing anything. Unlike himself. This is what my mother told me, over the telephone, long distance. Sons should not die before their fathers. It’s not natural, it’s the wrong order. Because who will carry on?

My parents themselves died in the usual way, of the things elderly people die of, that I myself will die of sooner than I think: my father instantly, my mother a year later, of a slower and more painful disease. “It’s a good thing your father went the way he did,” she said. “He would have hated this.” She didn’t say anything about hating it herself.

The girls came for a week, early on, at the end of summer, when my mother was still in her house in the Soo and we could all pretend this was just another visit. I stayed on after them, digging weeds out of the garden, helping with the dishes because my mother had never got a dishwasher, doing the laundry downstairs in the automatic washer but hanging it out on the line because she thought driers used up too much electricity. Greasing the muffin tins. Impersonating a child.

My mother is tired, but restless. She won’t take naps in the afternoon, insists on walking to the corner store. “I can manage,” she says. She doesn’t want me to cook for her. “You’ll never find anything in this kitchen,” she says, meaning she thinks she’ll never find anything herself if I start messing around in there. I smuggle frozen TV dinners into the refrigerator and con her into eating them by saying they’ll go to waste if she doesn’t. Waste is still a bugaboo for her. I take her to a movie, checking it first for violence, sex and death, and to a Chinese restaurant. In the north, in the old days, the Chinese restaurants were the only ones that could be depended on. The others went in for white bread and gravy mix sandwiches, lukewarm baked beans, pies made from cardboard and glue.

She is on painkillers, then stronger painkillers. She lies down more. “I’m glad I don’t have to have an operation, in a hospital,” she says. “The only time I was ever in a hospital was with you kids. With Stephen they gave me ether. I went out like a light, and when I woke up, there he was.”

A lot of what she says is about Stephen. “Remember those smells he used to make, with that chemistry set of his? That was the day I was having a bridge party! We had to open the doors, and it was the middle of winter.” Or else: “Remember all those comic books he had stowed away under his bed? There were too many to save. I chucked them out, after he went away. I didn’t think there was any use for them. But people collect them, I read about it; now they’d be worth a fortune. We always thought they were just trash.” She tells this like a joke on herself.

When she talks about Stephen, he is never more than twelve years old. After that he got beyond her. I come to realize that she was, or is, in awe of him, slightly afraid of him. She didn’t intend to give birth to such a person.

“Those girls gave you a bad time,” she says one day. I’ve made both or us a cup of tea—she’s permitted this—and we sit at the kitchen table, drinking it. She’s still surprised to catch me drinking tea, and has asked several times whether I wouldn’t prefer milk.

“What girls?” I say. My fingers are a wreck; I shred them quietly, out of sight beneath the tabletop, as I do in times of stress; an old bad habit I cannot seem to break.

“Those girls. Cordelia and Grace, and the other one. Carol Campbell.” She looks at me, a little slyly, as if testing.

“Carol?” I say. I remember a stubby girl, turning a skipping rope.

“Of course, Cordelia was your best friend, in high school,” she says. “I never thought she was behind it. It was that Grace, not Cordelia. Grace put her up to it, I always thought. What became of her?”

“I have no idea,” I say. I don’t want to talk about Cordelia. I still feel guilty, about walking away from her and not helping.

“I didn’t know what to do,” she says. “They came to me that day and said you’d been kept in at school, for being rude to the teacher. It was that Carol who said it. I didn’t think they were telling the truth.” She avoids the word lie, if possible.

“What day?” I say carefully. I don’t know what day she means. She’s begun to get things mixed up, because of the drugs.

“That day you almost froze. If I’d believed them I wouldn’t have gone to look for you. I went down the road, along by the cemetery, but you weren’t there.” She regards me anxiously, as if wondering what I will say.

“Oh yes,” I say, pretending I know what she’s talking about. I don’t want to confuse her. But I am growing confused myself. My memory is tremulous, like water breathed on. For an instant I see Cordelia and Grace, and Carol, walking toward me through the astonishing whiteness of the snow, their faces in shadow.

“I was so worried,” she says. What she wants from me is forgiveness, but for what?

On some days she is stronger, and gives the illusion of improvement. Today she wants me to help her sort through the things in the cellar. “So you won’t have to go through a lot of that old junk, later on,” she says delicately. She won’t say death; she wants to spare my feelings. I don’t like cellars. This one is unfinished: gray cement, rafters above. I make sure the upstairs door is left open. “You should have a railing put on these stairs,” I say. They are narrow, undependable.

“I can manage,” says my mother. From the days when managing was enough. We sort through the old magazines, the stash of different-sized cardboard boxes, the shelves of clean jars. She threw out a lot less than she could have, when they moved; or else she’s accumulated more. I carry things up the stairs and stow them in the garage. In there they seem disposed of. There’s a whole shelf of my father’s shoes and boots, lined-up pairs: city shoes with perforated toecaps, overshoes, rubber boots, wading boots for fishing, heavy-soled boots for walking in the woods, with a bacon grease patina and leather laces. Some of them must be fifty years old, or more. My mother will not throw them out, I know; but neither does she mention them. I can sense what she expects of me, in the way of control. I did my mourning at the funeral. She doesn’t need to deal with a tearful child, not now. I remember the old Zoology Building where we used to go on Saturdays, the creaking, overheated corridors, the bottles of eyeballs, the comforting smells of formaldehyde and mice. I remember sitting at the dinner table, with Cordelia, his warnings washing over our heads, the ruined water, the poisoned trees, species after species snuffed out like stepped-on ants. We did not think such things were prophecies. We thought they were boring then, a form of adult gossip that did not concern us. Now it’s all come true, except worse. I live in his nightmare, no less real for being invisible. You can still breathe the air, but for how long?

Against his bleak forecasting is set my mother’s cheerfulness, in retrospect profoundly willed. We start on the steamer trunk. It’s the one I remember from our Toronto house; I still think of it as mysterious, the repository of treasure. My mother too views this as an adventure: she says she hasn’t looked into that trunk for years, she has no idea what’s in there. She is no less alive because dying. I open the trunk, and the smell of mothballs blossoms upward. Out come the baby clothes folded in tissue paper, the pieces of flowery silver, yellowy-black. “Keep these for the girls,” she says. “You have this one.” The wedding dress, the wedding pictures, the sepia-colored relatives. A packet of feathers. Some bridge tallies with tassels on them, two pairs of white kid gloves. “Your father was a wonderful dancer,” she says. “Before we were married.” I have never known this. We go down through the layers, unearthing discoveries: my high school pictures, my lipsticked mouth unsmiling, somebody’s hair in an envelope, a single knitted baby sock. Old mittens, old neckties. An apron. Some things are to be kept, others thrown out or given away. Some things I will take back with me. We have several piles.

My mother is excited, and I catch some of this excitement from her: it’s like a Christmas stocking. Although not pure joy.

Stephen’s packets of airplane trading cards, held together with rotting elastic bands. His scrapbooks, his drawings of explosions, his old report cards. These she sets aside.

My own drawings and scrapbooks. There are the pictures of little girls I now remember, with their puffed sleeves and pink skirts and hairbows. Then, in the scrapbooks, some unfamiliar pictures cut from magazines: women’s bodies, in clothes of the forties, with other women’s heads glued onto them. This is a Watchbird watching YOU.

“You loved those magazines,” says my mother. “You used to pore over them for hours, when you were sick in bed.”

Underneath the scrapbooks is my old photo album, the black pages held together with the tie like a shoelace. Now I can remember putting it into the trunk, before I went to high school.

“We gave you that,” says my mother. “For Christmas, to go with your camera.” Inside is my brother, poised with a snowball, and Grace Smeath crowned with flowers. A couple of large boulders, with names printed underneath them in white pencil. Myself, in a jacket with the sleeves too short, standing against a motel cabin door. The number 9.

“I wonder what happened to that camera?” says my mother. “I must’ve given it away. You lost interest in it, after a while.”

I’m aware of a barrier between us. It’s been there for a long time. Something I have resented. I want to put my arms around her. But I am held back.

“What’s that?” she says.

“My old purse,” I say. “I used to take it to church.” I did. I can see the church now, the onion on the spire, the pews, the stained-glass windows. THE•KINGDOM•OF•GOD•IS•WITHIN•YOU.

“Well, what do you know. I don’t know why I saved that,” says my mother, with a little laugh. “Put it on the throw-out pile.” It’s squashed flat; the red plastic is split at the sides, where the sewing is. I pick it up, push at it to make it go back into shape. Something rattles. I open it up and take out my blue cat’s eye.

“A marble!” says my mother, with a child’s delight. “Remember all those marbles Stephen used to collect?”

“Yes,” I say. But this one was mine.

I look into it, and see my life entire.

Chapter 70

Down this street is where the store was. We bought red licorice whips, bubble gum, orange Popsicles, black jawbreakers that faded to a seed. Things you could buy for a penny, with the King’s head on it. Georgius VI Dei Gratia.

I’ve never got used to the Queen being grown up. Whenever I see her cut-off head on the money, I think of her as fourteen years old, in her Girl Guide uniform, her back as straight as ours were supposed to be, looking down at me from the yellowing newspaper clippings on Miss Lumley’s Grade Four blackboard; standing in front of the clumsy diamond of a radio microphone, frowning with earnestness and well-concealed fear, rallying the forces as the bombs fell on London, as we sang “There’ll Always Be an England” to the waving of Miss Lumley’s life-threatening wooden pointer, in a time warp eight years later.

The Queen has had grandchildren since, discarded thousands of hats, grown a bosom and (heresy to think it) the beginning of a double chin. None of this fools me. She’s in there somewhere, that other one. I walk the next blocks, turn the corner, expecting to see the familiar dingy oblong of the school, in weathered red brick the color of dried liver. The cindered schoolyard, the tall thin windows with orange paper pumpkins and black cats stuck onto them for Hallowe’en, the graven lettering over the doors, BOYS and GIRLS, like the inscriptions on mausoleums of the late nineteenth century. But the school has disappeared. In its place a new school has risen instantly, like a mirage: light-colored, block-shaped, glossy and modern.

I feel hit, in the pit of the stomach. The old school has been erased, wiped from space. It’s as if it was never there at all. I lean against a telephone pole, bewildered, as if something has been cut out of my brain. Suddenly I’m bone tired. I would like to go to sleep.

After a while I approach the new school, go toward it through the gate, walk slowly around it. BOYS

and GIRLS have been abolished, that much is clear; though there’s still a chain-link fence. The schoolyard is dotted with swings, with climbing bars and slides, in bright primary colors; a few children have come back early from lunch and are clambering about.

It’s all so clean-cut, so open. Surely behind those glassy, candid doors there are no more long wooden pointers, no black rubber strap, no hard wooden desks in rows; no King and Queen in their stiff regalia, no inkwells; no sniggering about underpants; no bitter, whiskery old women. No cruel secrets. Everything like that is gone.

I come around the back corner, and there is the eroded hill, with its few sparse trees. That much is still the same, then.

No one’s up there.

I climb up the wooden steps, stand where I used to stand. Where I am still standing, never having been away. The voices of the children from the playground below could be any children’s voices, from any time, the light under the trees thickens, turns malevolent. Ill will surrounds me. It’s hard to breathe. I feel as if I’m pushing against something, a pressure on me, like opening the door against a snowstorm. Get me out of this, Cordelia. I’m locked in.

I don’t want to be nine years old forever.

The air is soft, autumnal, the sun shines. I am standing still. And yet I walk head down, into the unmoving wind.