Yes, Mr. Berger was a dictator. But he paid us well. And he made us.
Oh, we went everywhere. I saw Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Texas. Idaho, Kansas, Indiana. All of New England. I liked the big southern cities best, myself. Miami, Houston, New Orleans. Loved those! I loved being warm. I weighed eighty pounds – I was always cold. I loved New York in winter, though. The lights. Always something new to see. I liked it all.
We travelled by train. When we got off we were protected by hired policemen. They walked us to our taxis. We weren’t to go out alone. We had to control our deportment in public – no getting drunk and so on. I had less freedom than I’d had at home! That was a good joke on my mother.
Who came to our shows? Well, everyone with a dollar to spare. We were family entertainment. Sometimes – I’ll tell you this, now – sometimes certain gentlemen came asking for a private show. Just some of the girls, they wanted. Dancers. Mr. Berger always said no. But I think some of the more foolish girls set up private engagements. What did they want, those men? Some said it was paedophilia, but I don’t think so. We were all real women, developed, you now. I think they must have seen us more like dolls. It was just an extension of what our audience wanted from us. They wanted to see a copy of something familiar, but reduced to a manageable size. That was it.
The smaller girls, that’s who they wanted. Jeannie Lyons, now – she got flowers and cards with phone numbers all the time. She was under four feet and normally proportioned, mostly, though I think her legs were a little bit short. She wore really high heels that had to be custom-made. She wore a child’s size nine shoe, if I remember. She was pretty. Big eyes, curls, pouty lips that were the fashion then. Maybe her face was a little flat. Maybe she was a little curvy, a little plump. It’s hard to keep your weight down, when you’re that short. Oh, Jeannie, she was very popular. And she went out, too – Mr. Berger couldn’t stop that. She went out with a friend as chaperone, that was the rule, but the friend was paid to sit in a bar by herself.
The men who liked Jeannie, you know – they were not small men. They were always taller than average. Older. Well-off.
I never did understand that.
Oh, yes. Don was supposed to be my boyfriend. Or my fiancé. That was, or started out as, a ruse. There was a man who started coming to the stage door, asking for me. This was in Pittsburgh. He followed us to the next city and the next. Always at the stage door: It was tedious. Betty told me I should say I already had a boyfriend, so I did. Then, he wanted to meet my boyfriend. So I roped in Don – he was always up for a laugh. Don said, Why don’t you make it fiancé? That’ll scare him off. So then I said we were engaged.
You have to understand, the press wrote about us. We were like the Dionne quints – we had no privacy. People could find out almost anything they wanted about us.
It was in the papers. Little Couple Ties Knot. And that was annoying. But then Don, my so-called fiancé, who had always been the joker, the life of the party, got all serious. I don’t just mean about me – I mean about everything. He went sour. Criticized everything, wouldn’t go out. I guess being a fiancé was making him miserable! He couldn’t see that, though. When I tried to break it off, he grew more morose. He was making plans to leave the company, find a job in Winnipeg – that’s where he was from. And getting more controlling every minute. I wasn’t to do this; I wasn’t to hope for that. He’d always treated me like a chum, but now he wouldn’t listen to me at all. Every time I opened my mouth, he told me I was wrong. Finally, I had to get Mr. Berger to speak to him, tell him it wasn’t on, never had been on.
Oh, he was sore for few days. But he got over it.
What is it about us, hey? What we think we have to become.
Well, I did marry, in my forties. And I married a man who had been married twice before. Both times his wife had died. And he had been in the army. So he knew something about what he wanted, too. Not that we didn’t have arguments. But the arguments were the kind we could both see around. They didn’t swallow us up.
I forgot: There was something I wanted to say about Jarvis. That visit. He sort of sheep-dogged me out of the group, into the kitchen, and he said, Go ahead, Pearl. Turn on the tap. Try the stove. And they were all the perfect height for me: He’d had all of the fittings custom-made, about three-quarters size. Oh, it was amazing. It’s all yours, he said. And I said, Oh, Jarvis. I don’t want to live in a little house. I’ve thought about that many times, later. Why did I say that?
It was months later that Jarvis shot himself, though.
But I’m still here. I’ve still got the house I bought for my mother. Isn’t that silly. Travelled all over this continent and ended back here.
I’ve had to do the kitchen over.
But isn’t it a nice house? Look out the window. You can see a bit of the ocean, there, and the city spread out like the whole world.
It’s too big a house, isn’t it, for one little person like me. But everything is just where it should be. It hasn’t let me down, this house.
ECHOLOCATION
THE DOCTOR’S ASSISTANT SAYS her bladder needs to be full for the ultrasound and keeps urging her to drink little plastic cupsful of water, so by the time Marina gets to the radiology lab, she is bursting. She can’t think beyond it; the discomfort is wholly distracting. It’s as though her mind is buoyed at the surface, while underneath things shift and swirl murkily. Focus, she commands herself, but her mind only bobs in its uppermost layers as she shifts and turns in the metal chair in the corridor. Her mind will not contemplate the implications of what is happening inside her.
Her thoughts drift instead to her daughters, ages three and five, still asleep when she left for her early morning appointment. She pictures them in their bed, facing each other like vertical bookends: in the upper bunk, the older child curled facedown, clutching a tangle of quilt, and in the lower bunk, her younger sister sprawling face-up, arms outspread across her pillows. A perfect pair, Steve always says. Why take chances?
Later this morning, when Steve has gone to work, the three of them will walk down the streets to the fresh-air market to buy food for the party she and Steve are giving tonight. Brown with the ripeness of summer, the girls will walk ahead of her, squabbling amicably, tumbling into sudden exclusive consensus as they choose the purple onions and aubergines, the yellow and red bell peppers. They have assumed her baskets, her migratory routes among the favourite stalls, the counting of leftover change to see if there’s enough for pain au chocolat. Yes, self-sufficient, they appear.
Only she knows the rituals she has given them have bound them to her with invisible cords. Small rituals, small pleasures. An expedition to the market, with her children, in the slow time of a late August morning. How carefully she is building their lives. How she can see the whole, an image like a painting or a movie; how she has worked, one piece at a time.
Marina’s name is called, and she is shown into a small cubicle – dark, full of machines and glowing green, the inside of a submarine. Her sundress pulled up above her belly. The chair reclines, like at the dentist’s. The same sensation of helplessness. Supine, there’s some relief of the pressure on her bladder.
The technician – soft-voiced, serious – busy with her machines. Jelly, its sticky feel; the urge to clean it off, to lick one’s self like a cat. Then the paddle, a moving pressure. The technician does not look at it, but keeps her eyes on a monitor. She types; the screen changes. Nothing else happens, for a while.
In the quiet, in the darkness, her thoughts finally begin to drift and settle downward. She is conscious now of submerged fears and doubts. What if. What if. Steve’s displeasure: visible. An accident. Which she would have welcomed? Would welcome?
Only the messages have not been good. The signs. And how to feel.
How long will this take, this mapping of her internal sea? And all the while, the earth’s rotation changing everything irrevocably.
The paddle moves, uncomfortably, over her full bladder. It’s sendin
g and receiving sound waves that translate shape and movement into lines on the monitor. Movement into sound into image. A metaphor for something, but the metaphor is murky.
The technician touches keys, and the monitor reflects green onto her face. The glow dims and brightens as she types, bringing up successions of screens. In a moment now she will swivel the screen toward Marina and point out the finning motion, the message from inner space. Any time now. Any time now.
But the technician just keeps scrolling through new screens, and in the green glow her lips tighten.
This does not look good. But then, Marina has suspected, has sensed absence, for some days now. There have been ominous signs. There has been a silence at the end of the line.
The technician puts the paddle aside abruptly and slides off her stool. I have to see my boss, she says, pushing through the heavy curtain.
They have not told anyone, yet. Steve will say that this is fortunate, if it turns out to be bad news. It’s a good thing we haven’t told the kids/our parents/our friends. Is it a good thing, though? She understands that the silence is meant to be some sort of protection, but she suspects that she is not the beneficiary of it. She does not feel safe at all.
Now the radiologist yanks the curtain open and walks into the cubicle, trailing the technician. He has glasses, a trimmed beard. He glances at the screen, grunts, and leaves again without meeting Marina’s eyes. Bad news. Bad news. The technician follows him out. Through the curtain Marina can hear them whisper. The words are not distinct but the tone is harsh. What? What? But then she understands. They are arguing.
Yes. That is it. The technician returns, tight-lipped, to deliver what must be a set speech about policy and Marina having to wait until her doctor contacts her with the results.
She does look at Marina now. In her expression, sympathy. It is not the technician’s fault, of course; it is the inflexibility of the system that will sentence her. She will not take their sympathy. She won’t let them snag her with their hooks of sympathy. As long as they can’t reach her, she’s still safe.
It doesn’t look good, does it? she asks, trying to sound casual, detached. And then, to make things easier on the technician, asks, mock-plaintively, if she can pee now.
No, it doesn’t look good, the technician admits. She asks Marina if she has anyone with her and directs her to the washroom, gravely.
Marina has to read the instructions on the parkade meter three times, but at last she figures it out. It’s a new machine, completely automated. It reads her ticket, calculates how long she’s been parked and how much money she owes, accepts her coins and validates the ticket. All without a single human presence.
STEVE’S WIFE IS WEARING a red dress, which makes her easy to spot as she swims through their guests. It’s an off-red, or orangey red, the same shade, now that he thinks of it, as the spikes of flowers standing on the table, the red fishy bits on some of the hors d’oeuvres. It’s a sexual colour, vaguely disturbing. Her red dress fits her sleekly, her brown arms and legs are slim and firm.
The doctor’s phone call this morning had come before Marina had returned from the clinic. For some reason, the clinic couldn’t tell Marina the results of her ultrasound directly. So by the time Marina was climbing the steps, he was already rehearsing what he should say. Not knowing if she knew or not, afraid of her unhappiness. In the end, the words had unreeled involuntarily from his tongue: Should we cancel the party tonight? And she had shaken her head without looking at him. No, she had answered. I don’t see the point of cancelling now; it would be more trouble than going ahead, wouldn’t it? He had been relieved, had put his arms around her, but she had slipped away, running past him up the stairs.
He had found her later, sitting between their two daughters, watching cartoons on TV. The children both had their bare feet in her lap, and she was holding onto them, her wrists crossed, her thumbs and forefingers encircling their ankles, so that the three of them formed a kind of complicated, continuous loop.
Now he watches her, the red dress flickering among the grazing guests. He sees her replenishing drinks, rescuing the stranded (but not getting snagged herself), smiling, nodding, accepting compliments on the food, the décor. She says she does not like to give parties, but she is good at them. She makes them look effortless: this afternoon, dicing the bright vegetables, shredding the salmon and crab, filling the flimsy pastry shells, the phyllo leaves, with a rhythmic delicate touch. She had brought red gladioli from the market that pick up the colour of her dress. He had watched her slipping her new linen shift over her shoulders, tiny gold hoops into her earlobes.
He had stood behind the half-closed ensuite door and watched her. She does not like being watched as she dresses.
He does not like parties. Does not like the day skewed to prepare, the conversations that change direction as if from some invisible signal, the morning-after flotsam of bottles and dishes and paper napkins.
He does not like that at their parties she slips by him without seeing him. Or without seeming to see him. What does he want? she always asks. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know what he has the right to ask for.
Later in the evening, he meets her in the kitchen. She looks tired, preoccupied, but gathers herself into alertness when she notices him.
How are you doing? he asks, setting empty bottles down on the counter. She smiles distantly, a flicker of movement behind her eyes.
Fine.
And then catches her breath, grips the edge of the counter.
Marina?
I’m having these contractions, that’s all.
Something like a chill or a drop of pressure inside him. We should have cancelled the party. You should be at the hospital, he cries out.
Don’t panic, she says, coldly. Nothing’s going to happen for a while.
He watches her, listens to the clatter of the party swelling beyond the kitchen doors, tries to make a rational assessment.
There would be so much explanation if Marina were to leave the party now.
She sounds calm and she must know her own body.
He will relax; he will follow her lead.
And so he exits the kitchen silently in her wake, and for an hour, half-submerges himself in the conversations flowing around him. He watches Marina gliding among the guests in her red dress, pausing, inclining her dark head to smile her closed, self-contained smile.
He should have insisted that they do the D. and C. right away. He doesn’t like things being unplanned, out of control. He shouldn’t have let her be so casual this morning, telling her doctor on the phone that she’d rather wait a few days, let nature take its course. He had questioned her decision, but she hadn’t budged.
Well, he won’t argue any more. She is tougher than she looks.
But when he catches up with her again, as she’s coming out of the bathroom, he sees that she is very pale, her lips a vivid red. She presses her spine against the door frame, closes her eyes.
All right? he asks, feeling stupid.
Of course, she says, looking up at him like a cornered animal.
He feels now that he must send out little invisible lines, little inaudible beeps in her direction, trying to sound her state. If he makes the wrong move, she will curl in on herself and he will have lost her. It’s an uneasy voyage: He must know what it is that is expected of him in order to reach her, but he must not be discovered negotiating this knowledge.
When, just after the last guest has departed, she makes a final limp and clammy exit from the bathroom, he is wary, careful. He fouls up anyway.
It’s all over, she says. I’m going to bed. Do you think you could put anything perishable into the fridge? I’ll clean up in the morning.
He grasps the important line. What do you mean, over? he asks. Are you sure? He means, is she sure that she’s alright, that nothing more needs to be done, but she misinterprets him, retreats. Oh, don’t worry; it’s gone, she says, coldly, flatly. I felt it pass. It’s gone.
And h
e feels a shock, a dull blow, as she has meant him to.
IT ISN’T, OF COURSE, OVER. Two hours later, Marina is lying on a gurney in emergency, gently and inexorably hemorrhaging. An hour or so passes. The resident strolls in and various procedures are discussed. Nobody seems very worried. The specialist has been called, is on her way. All decisions are deferred until her arrival. A nurse comes in every fifteen minutes or so to take Marina’s blood pressure and take away the blood-soaked surgical pads. There’s a warm ocean flowing out from between her legs, but it feels purifying. All stress is leaving her body.
When she can no longer feel her lips and the edges of her thoughts start to disappear, as if someone is moving from room to room shutting off lights, she is amused and intrigued. This is very interesting, she thinks. All the extraneous matter is being shut down, and I will soon discover what is at my core. It occurs to her that she will likely die if somebody doesn’t do something, but she isn’t frightened, only diverted.
Then Steve leans into her line of vision (for the edges of the room have started to go black) and speaks to her. She has to concentrate very hard on what he is saying; her sense of hearing, or rather of making sense of what she is hearing, is also fading. She smiles at him tenderly. He has been taking such good care of her tonight and he must be worried. How good he is to her! How good and gentle. It’s not accurate that everything goes dark. Or that there’s a tunnel, or white light, though perhaps she hasn’t gone far enough to have that experience.
Echolocation Page 5
