“Shit,” said Georgia. She rested her right hand on her right knee, still holding the syringe, then stared at Connie, waiting to be told what to do next.
“Connie? Babe?” I said. “What am I doing out here all day, Con? Why am I trying? You have to want it.”
Elvis was still playing, back in another part of the house, but it wasn’t “Love Me Tender.” It was “Milk Cow Blues,” which meant nothing to us.
“Oh Jesus, Kirk. Look at me.”
She fixed me with this awful, pleading, watery stare, and in it I saw that all the things I’d dreamed had made me into a person who was worth something were, in fact, meaningless.
“What do you want me to say,” she said. “You never could have gone through with it. I know that, and so do you.”
I got all blubbery then.
She said, “Am I wrong?”
“No,” I said between sobs, “you’re not wrong.”
“Babe,” she said tenderly, “you never even took me to Graceland.”
Footwork
MOST DAYS, CLAUDIA’S GRIEF was indistinguishable from joint pain: hard and stubborn and debilitating. It denied her the ability to plant firmly, and was softened only a shade by food, sleep, or wine. She wondered if grief was even the right word for what she was experiencing.
Bo wasn’t dead, he’d just left. On January third. Left her and left their little cabin in the woods, where she thought, in better days, they would ride out eternity, or at least their little share of it. But he’d found it—and her—lacking, so he got into his car and was gone. Gone to the big city, or to another town, or to wherever men go when they decide they don’t have what they want.
There are new stakes, she said to herself then. Her life felt like it had suddenly become very open and stark, and everything she did would in some way be a preparation for death, whenever it might come. So she did very little. She was paralyzed. She lost weight and her hair began to thin. She found it in the sink and the shower, and on her pillow.
Claudia spent the rest of the winter in bed, more or less, and when spring came, she barely registered it. Only the new sweetness of the light made an impression on her, its strength, its proximity. But she didn’t do the regular spring things. She planted nothing. She maintained nothing. Every day her little cottage fell a little closer to its ruin, and she did nothing to slow its collapse. There were little seedlings—maple and tamarack and oak—peeking up over the lip of the eavestroughs. There were mice in the cabin’s walls, and rot in its window frames, and the stovepipe needed cleaning before the next winter came. But she couldn’t muster the resolve. She just couldn’t.
She worked days in a coffee shop called the Fresh Start, on the crumbling brick edge of the shabby town twenty kilometers away. Train cars full of oats and molasses rumbled slowly by, twice a week, on their way to the big sweet-smelling factory by the river, where they made granola bars that were then shipped out by truck. You could smell it all over town, the aroma floating up the river toward where a big, thick forest used to stand. On Mondays and Tuesdays, the factory made chocolate chip bars. On Wednesdays, strawberry. Blueberry on Thursdays. Claudia didn’t know what the factory did on Fridays, and she assumed nothing happened on weekends. She couldn’t know for sure, though, because she spent her weekends at the cabin.
Before Bo left, their weekend routine involved sleeping late, keeping busy in the afternoons with upkeep and projects, and then either roasting a chicken for dinner or slow-cooking a thick soup to eat with bread she made in a machine that whirred and churned and hopped across the counter. As the light slipped away they would play cards on the porch or drink wine and watch television, and then make love with the windows open. She didn’t know why Bo had wanted to leave that. Unless there was just something particular about her that he no longer cared for.
Life was taking on a restrictive shape now, narrowing toward an end which she could feel with awful certainty.
***
Across the street from the coffee shop was an old brick building. Viewed from above, it was shaped like an H, its two long, narrow wings joined in the middle by a brick wall, cut at the centre by an archway just wide enough to fit a sedan through. It had been built early in the previous century to house weaving machines, was later fitted to accommodate the manufacture of transistors, then had a third life as storage for the larger electronic-components plant across the street, and was finally sold off when the owner of the big plant moved most of its operations to Mexico.
The new owners eventually chopped the H-shaped building up into discrete units and leased them out. Now there was a welding shop, a rock-climbing gym, a fair-trade coffee roastery, warehouse space, and a fencing and archery club.
***
One October morning, Claudia pulled into the Fresh Start’s pocked lot and spied the fencing club’s sign in her mirror.
Maybe I ought to try something I’ve never had an interest in trying, she thought.
And just like that, something fell into place.
For months, because there was so little left in her life that she cherished, she felt untethered. Only now, for the first time, did she see that as a form of freedom.
She was going to be forty in a year. She didn’t particularly feel like making a big deal out of the aging milestone. Lordy, lordy. Nor did she want to stake her self-improvement to what amounted to a pretty arbitrary date. But neither did she feel much like wallowing any longer. Love, money, red wine, loneliness, insomnia. She had been pulling the memory of Bo—the shame of having him walk out on her—like it was a tractor tire fixed to her waist with a length of zinc-plated chain, and the weight of it all, on her neck and shoulders, was tiring.
She was tired of waking up tired.
Claudia had a reservoir of strength. She’d been avoiding it, but it was there. Strength and anger. After the divorce, when she was five, she’d been raised by her mother, Gloria, her father having essentially disappeared. When Gloria taught Claudia to play cards, she told her that the queen was above the king. Anything which required doing, said Gloria, was best done yourself. Gloria met life with tenacity and not a little bit of animosity.
Surely to God, Claudia had access to that resolve? Atop all the other things she’d inherited, including, likely, a susceptibility to breast cancer? It seemed only fair.
Claudia had dated a fencer in her last year of high school, a floppy-haired boy named Will who was bound for Queen’s University, and for tournaments at Ivy League schools, and for an MBA and unqualified happiness. He was a lousy kisser, though, which justified her decision to dump him just before finals. But before dumping him, she’d watched him fence two or three times, and because of that she felt she understood the rudiments of the sport.
Claudia rolled her little hatchback into the Fresh Start’s parking lot, fifteen minutes early for her shift. She stepped out of the car, standing taller than she’d done all that summer. The vertebrae between her shoulders popped and stretched out. She could feel the tissue between them grow spongier. Then she walked across the street, carried on pistoning legs, to the big metal door of the South End Fencing and Archery Club, and was happy to find it unlocked.
***
That night, Claudia baked a uniquely aromatic loaf of bread and cinnamon buns, for nobody but herself. As she baked, she waggled a hot cinnamon toothpick in her mouth, of the sort she always chewed while baking so she wouldn’t be tempted to eat too much of the food she was preparing. She was introduced to them as a young girl, during one of her mother’s semi-annual attempts to quit smoking. Claudia had used them ever since, and not just as an appetite suppressor. They were also an anxiety aid, and likely the reason she’d never started smoking in the first place.
Unfortunately, the hot cinnamon taste now reminded her of Bo. Specifically, it reminded her of one afternoon at the end of a long drive through Vermont. They’d found themselves in a small valley among low mountains, where a shallow river—almost a creek, the water clear and cold—wound around a ball
field and a church and a creamery. They stopped the car and went down into the creek bed, pulled off their shoes, rolled their jeans up to their knees, and waded into the water. She remembered they had to step lightly on the bottom, lined as it was with rocks of grey and pink and white, granite and shards of pottery and glass, fragments of bricks stamped or chiselled with the names of manufacturers long gone. It was as if the cold clear water had swept the physical material of history to that spot, under their feet, and preserved it for that very afternoon. They had stood in that water beneath the high blue melancholy sky, the air humming about them with dragonflies and heat, the water so cold that it sent a pain up through their legs and trunks into their teeth and foreheads, and they kissed, and she tasted cinnamon on his lips, and he tasted it on hers, because during the drive they’d chewed through a whole package of the toothpicks, chewed them so long their lips stung.
They were, back then, more in love than anyone had a right to be. Those days came back to Claudia now, as she chewed every toothpick until it was frayed and splintered and she had to replace it with another from the little box. But the memory didn’t bite the way most of them had in the months since he’d gone. Instead, in the warm, moist, bread-scented kitchen, she was buoyant. Her first fencing class was coming up, and it had been so long since she had done something new that her scalp felt as tight as a drum.
Claudia had three glasses of wine, slept poorly, and rose excitedly in the morning. Eight hours at the coffee shop, then she’d eat a dinner of odds and scraps from the kitchen, and just before six-thirty she would change into sweats and cross the street and walk into a new thing. She took the feeling in her stomach—of motion and unease—as a good omen.
***
At the entrance to the fencing club, the man who’d registered her and taken her cheque the day before—Arthur, she thought his name was—was standing with his back to the door, hands clasped behind him. His brown hair was thin and close-cropped, and he wore black: black polyester track pants, a black pullover, black Nikes. When the door clanged shut behind Claudia, he turned around.
“Hello again,” he said, smiling. “Glad you could come.”
“Well, this is what I signed up for, right?”
“You’re nervous. Don’t be nervous. We’ll get started in a few minutes. Have a seat there and change shoes.”
There was a mania about the shoes, she’d noticed. NO OUTDOOR SHOES signs were placed immediately inside the door, and then at regular intervals along the wall, and there was one taped to a placard on a stanchion planted between grey plastic boot trays.
She sat on the long bench beneath coat hooks and faced the large room’s focus and purpose: a dark, rich wooden floor, raised slightly, just a step, above the painted concrete beneath her feet. There were eight lanes—pistes—painted across it, from her left to her right. Between the pistes were padded columns that reached up to the ceiling, maybe fifteen or sixteen feet high, iron trusses beneath planks of wood painted white sometime in the last century and not once since. Archery targets lined the far wall. Nearer to her, on the left, was a whiteboard. Opposite that, bracketed by two large rolling doors which opened, she figured, to the parking lot, were racks of equipment: foils below, clasped at their bell guards, tips pointed downward; above, two neat rows of masks, like blank faces.
There were seven other people in the room besides Arthur, all of them pulling up, strapping on, and tying various pieces of apparel and equipment. It was clear they knew one another, as they milled and lounged and snarked at each other beneath the archery targets. Claudia removed the dowdy but supportive white Reeboks she wore at the coffee shop, pulled her cleanest running shoes from her gym bag, and slipped them on.
In the waiting area to Claudia’s right were four doors, all now open. Three led to small change rooms; the last, nearest the gym floor, opened to an office, into which Arthur disappeared for a moment. When he came back out, he was wearing a thick black jacket, like a smock, over his pullover, and a black mask cocked back on his head so that his face was visible.
“Okay, everybody, let’s meet over at the board,” he said.
The congregants made their way to the whiteboard and arranged themselves in a semicircle. Claudia finished tying her shoes and went over to join them, stepping up onto the beautiful floor and feeling its firmness and flex beneath her feet.
They were anywhere from fifteen to forty, the fencers. Two or three wore simple sweats, like her, but most wore the white breeches with suspenders and long socks she always associated with fencing. There was only one other woman, who looked to be about thirty. The rest were boys and men, which she thought she should have anticipated, but hadn’t.
“Okay, folks, this is Claudia. She’s starting with us tonight.”
Claudia nodded, smiled shyly, said, “Hello,” and was met with apparent indifference. She wondered if there was a general tendency for new people to burn out quickly.
“We’ll focus on strength tonight,” said Arthur, “but we’ll also get some fencing in toward the end. Domenic, you’ll lead the warm-up. Evelyn, why don’t you stick with Claudia to help her through what she might not know.”
“Sure,” said the other woman.
“Okay,” said Arthur, “let’s move.”
The group broke quickly, like startled animals, and began running around the floor’s perimeter in a counter-clockwise circle.
As they jogged, Evelyn came abreast of Claudia and said, “Hi.”
“Hi.”
“We’ll do a few laps like this and then start the stretching.”
“Okay.”
“Just watch me.”
After four laps around the gym, which had Claudia feeling the limited capacity of her lungs and rib cage, Domenic called for them to begin: “On toes!”
The runners immediately rose up onto the balls of their feet, with their arms stretched above their heads. Claudia watched them a moment, unsure that she was seeing what she was seeing. Evelyn nodded to her and said, “Like this,” and together they tiptoed around the gym stretched as long as they could get, reaching for the ceiling.
Then Domenic said, “Sweeps!”
Sweeps turned out to be long strides where the torso would be held straight and upright as a church pew, the front leg bent at the knee at, or close to, ninety degrees and the trailing leg almost touching the floor. With each step the fencers would brush an arm down, low enough to sweep the floor with their fingertips, before bending the elbow and bringing both hands up to shoulder height to meet at the chest, in a small gesture that looked like prayer. On the next awkward step forward, they’d repeat the sweeping motion with the other hand.
Claudia watched Evelyn closely for two or three repetitions, and then she did her best to mimic the motion, feeling the muscles of her hips strain and flex and then open up. She completed a circuit of the gym, losing her balance two or three times along the way. But she liked the feeling, liked the strangeness of it. How, at the bottom of the exercise, she felt like she was supplicating. She liked, above all, the arcane nature of it, how she was like an adherent to something secret, with its own language, costume, and rites. She was glad she had chosen this, whether accidentally or by providence, as a means of rejoining her body—her life. Had things gone only slightly differently, she might at this very moment be in a spin class instead.
***
After the warm-up, the others began running wind sprints, from end line to warning line to end line to on-guard line to end line to centre line, and so on. Arthur called her aside to begin her introductory lesson. First, he handed her a binder.
“This is your textbook,” he said, putting it in her hands. “Don’t be intimidated. It’s history and rules, as well as techniques. It has questions to help you study. There’s everything you need to know to achieve your first armband in there.”
“Okay.”
“But that’s later. Don’t worry about it now.” He smiled, the brown bristles of his goatee encircling his mouth. “I’m frea
king you out, aren’t I?”
“No,” she said. “Yes.”
“Really, don’t worry about it. Just take in what you can tonight and come back next week and we’ll start to work.”
“Okay,” she said, “yeah.”
“Now,” he said, “if I were to say Smirnov to you, what would you think?”
“Vodka?”
“Right, that’s what most people say.”
“But no?”
“Smirnov was a Soviet fencer, early eighties. He died. Opponent’s foil went right through his mask, into his eye, right in his brain.” Arthur used the index and middle fingers of his right hand to mimic the blade’s course through Smirnov’s mask and into his eye.
“Jesus.”
“But he’s the reason we have all this,” he said, patting his jacket with one hand and pulling on his mask with the other, his voice warm and muffled. “Caused a whole rethink of the protective equipment. We’re safe because of Smirnov. That’s how I think of it. Everything was reconsidered.”
“Oh, well, that’s good.”
“Right? So okay, the mask,” he said. “The screen over your face has to be able to hold more than fifty pounds. Let’s get you one.” He led her to the rack on the wall and took down a headpiece of heavy cotton and plastic and black metal screening, and said, “Pull it on.”
She tightened her ponytail and slipped the mask over her head. She was surprised at how well she could see through the screen. It appeared nearly opaque from the other side.
“How’s that?”
“Feels good,” she said.
“Yeah. Pretty soon that’s how you’ll see the world. When you’re not wearing one, you’ll wish you were.”
Lands and Forests Page 9
