Nova Scotia Love Stories

by Lesley Choyce

I pocket my car keys and perch my sunglasses on my head. Don and Leo go out the door. Pausing to find my purse, I watch them saunter companionably towards my Toyota Celica. A man and a hound, walking at the same easy pace, breathing the same soft summer air. I have the strangest feeling that I am watching my forever world in a single, sunlit moment.

  Meeting Marjorie

  Silver Donald Cameron

  And now Silver Donald Cameron tells the tale of meeting and wooing Marjorie Simmins from his point of view.

  On the car radio, two sisters were talking about a third sister. Zoë was a poet, Marjorie a journalist and essayist, and Karin was a memory – a dark sorceress, a looming shadow, bewitching, entertaining, glittering and cruel. A conniving addict and a thief, later diagnosed with drug-induced schizophrenia, Karin had electrified and terrorized her family for a decade until – inevitably – she plunged from the sky and smashed to the ground, dead in a cheap Vancouver hotel room at the age of twenty.

  A hell of a story, and death did not end it. Karin continued to haunt and colour her sisters’ lives – and, unbeknownst to one another, both had written memorial essays about her. Both had shared their work with their mutual friend Andreas Schroeder, then head of creative writing at the University of British Columbia, and also a good friend of mine. Schroeder was stunned and delighted. What are the odds of two brilliant essays about the same remarkable person appearing on one’s desk at the same time? Schroeder sent the two essays on to Saturday Night magazine, which published them together.

  And then the two essays were nominated together for a National Magazine Award, which is why the two sisters were on the CBC, talking to me through the car radio. They came across as incisive, warm, provocative and funny. I thought: I hope they win.

  A couple of hours later, I boarded a plane in Halifax, heading off to promote Sterling Silver (1994), my collection of short stories, essays, rants and reports. In those quaint days, publishers whisked authors around the country, introducing them to book editors, local radio hosts, independent bookstores, national radio and TV shows and in general giving the authors a brief illusion of importance. Ottawa, Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton. And then Vancouver, where I grew up – a city I enjoy but which had long since ceased to be home, though the man who is both my best friend and my brother still lived there with his family. For me, home had become a village on Cape Breton Island, with my vibrant, merry-hearted wife Lulu and our young son Mark.

  So now it’s West Coast newspaper interviews, Vancouver radio and television. And tucked in the middle of all that, an interview with someone from Trek magazine, formerly the UBC Alumni Chronicle, the publication of my alma mater, the University of British Columbia. I’m told the editor has assigned my interview to a fisheries reporter, a woman familiar with fishing and coastlines and the sea, which have always been obsessions both in my life and in my writing. I’m expecting a strapping Viking halibut-hauler with massive shoulders, bulging biceps and a bellowing toothy laugh, the sort of person who eats little guys like me for lunch.

  But no. Marjorie Simmins, the woman who is swinging down West Broadway in the sunlight, is a petite, pretty blonde – short skirt, high heels, a lovely warm smile. We sit down, light cigarettes (it is 1994) and start to talk. Why do you love the Maritimes so much? Your wife sounds very adventurous. You write about a lot of different things and in different forms. How does that work? And the interviewee had questions of his own. How did you get into writing about fisheries? What else do you write about? Horses? I know nothing about horses …

  This is the best kind of interview, where the interviewer gets what she needs, but the two people also swap ideas and experiences, make a real human connection, arriving sometimes at insights that neither would have found alone. The scheduled half-hour stretches to an hour, an hour and a half – and somewhere in the middle of it, Marjorie mentions a piece she wrote about a sister.

  Wait a minute. Did your sister write one too? Were you on the CBC a few days ago? She nods.

  I heard it – and you two were terrific! I say. And your stories sound really powerful. I really hope you win.

  She’s pleased. And when finally she walks away, looking light and summery and fragrant, I think: That’s a truly wonderful woman. I really hope there’s someone in her life who knows her value and cares for her as she deserves.

  Meanwhile, she was envious (I later learned) of the warmth and joy in my voice when I talked about Lulu, after fifteen years of marriage. If there’s one man like that out there, she thought, then there have to be two – and I’m going to find the other.

  When I got home, I said to Lulu, “I will never be unfaithful to you – but if I had been going to be, it might have been last weekend in Vancouver.” It was the only time I ever said anything like that to her. Shaped by her Cape Breton Acadian upbringing, Lulu had not a jealous bone in her body. She laughed delightedly. When Marjorie and her sister did win gold at the National Magazine Awards, I sent a little note of congratulation. And then I went on with my life.

  Flash forward two years. The Professional Writers Association of Canada is going to hold its annual meeting in Halifax. Out in Vancouver, Marjorie Simmins thinks, Hmmm. Nova Scotia. Wonder if Silver Donald Cameron is going to be there? Why don’t I give him a quick call?

  She reaches a very sad and subdued man. For the past year he has been ill – nobody has known with what, maybe hemachromatosis, maybe bowel cancer, but it has proven to be a thyroid disorder. Worse, Lulu has been coping gallantly but unsuccessfully with breast cancer. She and her husband have not conceded that she is in the last weeks of her life, but in their hearts, they both know it. So Don is not thinking much about conferences and meetings.

  Marjorie is shocked, and more saddened than she would have expected. She has been warmed by the flame of Don’s and Lulu’s love, and a few weeks later, when Lulu has died, she will find herself riding her horse in the rain along the Fraser River and “crying for a woman I never knew, and the man who had loved her and lost her.”

  And in the meantime Don and Lulu have lived their last weeks together with great intensity and closeness. But, Lulu says, “after I’m gone, you’ll have to live for both of us. I don’t want you to get lost in your grief. I want you to marry again, and soon.”

  “Lulu – ”

  “No, listen. You’re a wonderful husband. If I can’t have you, some other woman should.”

  And then she is gone, and all the lights in the world have gone out. He lives inside a thick cloak of sadness. His friends, his family and his village carry him with the tenderness a parent shows to an exhausted child. After a few weeks, he thinks, I need to talk with someone whose heart resonates truly with mine in a mysterious and fundamental way that I know and can’t explain. I need to talk to the sort of person who would sit on her horse and cry for a stranger. And there’s only one person like that. He picks up the phone …

  Long afterward, after eighteen years of marriage, Marjorie would write:

  “I imagine him sometimes, on that day his hand hovered over the telephone. So nervous, he said, months later, my heart jumping all over. … Then a deep breath and his fingers are on the keypad.

  “‘Hello?’ I said – and instantly changed my life forever.

  “‘Hello,’ he said – and did the same.”

  That’s the beginning of Marjorie’s 2014 memoir, Coastal Lives. It’s a shimmering love story, and now you know how surprisingly it began. If you want to know the rest of the story, you have to read her book. But I’ll give you a sneak preview. It turns out I was right: she is indeed a truly wonderful woman – and there is indeed someone in her life who knows her value, and cares for her as she deserves.

  Dance The Rocks Ashore

  Lesley Choyce

  And finally, here is a daring attempt of one male author telling a love story from a woman’s point of view – a much older woman who loves her husband deeply.

  I think I love him more now that he’s losing his mind than I did when I first
married him. Pretty funny how things work out that way. He says he doesn’t want to go to a doctor, and I don’t blame him for that. Never know what they’ll do to you. We never went to doctors much the whole time we’ve been married. Just the way we were, the two of us.

  Hard to think ahead about what might come next. Tough enough to focus on the here and now. But I’ll tell you, I can see every little detail of our past life together like it’s right here before my eyes. The first time I laid eyes on Jim. Getting married before the judge, Jim and me before him in that big empty room. Of course we’d already been living together. Then there’s all those pictures of him and me swimming around in my head.

  Or sometimes I see pictures of just him. I can see Jim and the dog rolling around together in the yard. We always had a dog because we couldn’t have kids. Usually the dog would come with us when we took those long morning walks to the wharf, with the sun just barely fending off the shivers with its thin, grey-silver light. I don’t need to get out the photo album to see all that.

  Of course I’m not a hundred per cent sure that it’s him who’s crazy. Could be me. Caught myself staring straight into the TV set the other day and it wasn’t even on. I was entertaining myself, I guess, with my own reruns of the past. Better that way, maybe. No commercials, no interruptions. But I don’t think that makes me crazy. Jim’s the one who wakes up some mornings, and, if I don’t wake up myself, he’ll be all done up in his rubber boots and sea pants, picking up his gear and heading out the door to his boat.

  Only there is no boat. Well, at least, she can’t go anywhere. She sits up on land now. The boat’s too old and too dry to ever go back into the water. Jim said it wasn’t worth keeping her in repair. Like us. Jim and me. Old, tired a lot, one or both of us crazy.

  Jim started to lose a grip on things when the fish gave out. Oh, we’d seen it coming for a long time. Jim came home one day, and he sat down on that piece of lawn furniture he’d built out of alder saplings, and he just looked at his hands.

  “What is it?” I asked him. I knew something was wrong.

  “It’s over,” was all he said, but I knew what he was talking about. I’d been catching bits and pieces of it on the CBC radio.

  “What do you want for your dinner?” I asked him, putting my arm around his shoulders.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  I had to walk away then ’cause I didn’t want to have to look at him. I didn’t want him to have to see me watching him cry. You know what I mean, what I’m trying to say. About men and all. I went inside and closed the door and let out this big sigh of relief. I could never come out and admit to him that I was secretly happy that it was over. He’d be safe now.

  Yes, he did cry. I know that. A man isn’t supposed to cry, but I think he can handle it as long as he thinks no one is watching. Jim always cried when the dogs died. Trouble with dogs is that you outlive them. We outlived three, Jim and me. All died of old age, but they died just the same. We have three good dogs buried on the edge of the forest here. Don’t know exactly why we never replaced Beauty. She was the last one to go.

  I guess Jim never had any real thoughts about what he’d do once he stopped fishing. But it wasn’t like he planned to die at sea. Jim had sense. He came home one day with a survival suit that the government helped to pay for. “A man could stay alive in this thing for days at sea if he had to,” he said. “Got pockets for food and everything.” He put the ridiculous-looking thing on, and then he put his arms around me and hugged me tight. “I’m never gonna drown like them other silly bastards. I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving you alone. If my boat ever goes down, you better bet on me out there bobbing around like a cork, waiting for that Jesus helicopter ride. Just make sure I got plenty of sandwiches, in case. I’d hate to be out there without food. That’s the only thing that scares me. The thought of missing lunch.”

  Jim was always a survivor. Nothing got him down. He had that suit ready to just jump into the sea with my sandwiches in his waterproof pockets. He even had radio emergency gear to signal the Coast Guard by way of a satellite in space. Jim was not a man prepared to go down with his ship. He’d never be that mean to me.

  That suit is still hanging upstairs on a hook. Jim never had to use it. It was always with him on the boat, though, ready to save him and keep me from being lonely. It was the suit that got us both going on that conversation, you know the one. “If I go first I want you to …” Every married couple goes through that.

  “If I go first, I want you to find some sensible, pretty woman and marry her,” I said.

  “Not possible,” Jim said. “The two never go together.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I snapped back, pretending to be insulted.

  “What I meant to say was that a man can find a woman with those two qualities only once in life, and I found her.”

  “You’re a liar,” I teased. I wanted more of the flattery. Jim never was good at flattery, never said a whole lot about how I looked or if he liked my hair or dress. I learned to live without the language of flattery.

  “If I go first,” he continued, “you have to do something you always wanted to do but never did because of me.”

  Funny thing, but right then I actually thought about a whole list of things we never did, things that maybe I would do if he was gone. Drive to Halifax and go to a symphony concert, eat breakfast some day in a fancy restaurant. The whole time we were married, we never once ate breakfast anywhere other than at home, and half the time we were eating it in our kitchen with all the lights on because the sun wasn’t even up yet.

  Jim saw the look in my eyes, dreaming up a list of things. “If I go first, I want you to do whatever you want. Just be sure to bury me out there with the dogs. I’d like that. They were good dogs.”

  All he had to do was mention the dogs and I started to cry, feeling awful guilty for even thinking about Jim dead.

  “If I go first,” I said, “I want you to take good care of yourself.” That was all I could get out. Then he gave me a hug and went out to mow the yard with the lawnmower.

  I need to explain about the place we live in. It’s a house Jim built – well, I helped him build it, too – about thirty years ago. It sits on five acres of land that goes right up to the inlet, with a big yard stretching down to the sand and the water. Jim has about ten pieces of lawn furniture out there made from those alders and young birch trees. Stick furniture it’s called, although the name doesn’t do it justice. People admire the chairs because they look like they’re still wild and alive. Jim would mow the grass with a gasoline mower, and it would stay green right up into December. We’d go out there on one of those rare, warm days in late fall, and he’d say, “It feels just like summer.” The grass was a rich green, the water in the inlet was a piercing blue. Those were good moments. Those were better than any old breakfast in a restaurant.

  So hard to think of all the good things as being behind us. If we had kids like other people, maybe we’d have that way of talking about the future, seeing it in our children and grandchildren. But we don’t have that, and I’m not gonna go worrying myself about what might have been. Like I say, I’ve got Jim to focus my worrying on.

  It was a couple of weeks after the news that the cod were all gone. They might not be back for ten years, a hundred years or ever, that’s the way the government man said it. Jim sat down in the yard on his chair with a pile of newspapers he’d pulled out of the wood shed. And he started to read them. Those papers were probably three years old or older. But he just sat down and started to read one after the other – the news, the classifieds with boats for sale, the sports. I didn’t say a word about it. What was there to say, anyway?

  Later that day when I was in the kitchen making a soup from an old ham bone and some stuff from the garden, Jim was walking around the house from room to room, like he was looking for something. He opened drawers and peered into cabinets, and when he was on his second circuit, I asked him what he was searching for. Jim se
emed startled, and he looked at me with this odd blank stare on his handsome face. He tried to shape some words in the air with his hands, he stuttered, and finally he just said, “I don’t know.”

  I saw the fear in his face, and it scared the living daylights out of me, but I didn’t let on. I laughed and chastised him for being so absent-minded. “You’d lose your head if it wasn’t held on by your neck,” I said for the five-hundredth time in our marriage.

  One night I woke up and touched him on the shoulder. He didn’t notice, I’m sure. His breathing was so slow and steady, just like that of a child. I needed to talk, and I guess it didn’t matter much if he was awake or not. I’d been feeling guilty for some time about the whole fishing business. Like it was my fault or something that the cod had all gone away. Jim, I said to my sleeping husband, when you said it was all through with the fishing and the boat and hauling off in the morning in the dark to risk your life at sea, I had to hold back from smiling. I had to hold back from going bloody wild with happiness now that I’d never have to worry about you at sea again. Pretty selfish, I know, ’cause I wasn’t thinking about how you were feeling but thinking about me. I had you all to myself and wouldn’t have to share you with the Atlantic Ocean ever again. Well, I got that off my chest. Knew I had to say it to him some day because it had been burning a hole inside me. But now I didn’t feel so bad. Jim was safe, and I would have him with me twenty-four hours a day.

  But I guess I was fooling myself somewhat on that. It was like I was going to be punished after all for my selfish, foolish thoughts. The next morning Jim woke up first. When I opened my eyes he was sitting bolt upright in bed, and he was looking around the room in a strange way. I knew already what the look was about. He didn’t know where he was. I took a deep breath and sat up. Jim edged away slightly and turned his piercing blue eyes in my direction. I thought they were going to drill right through me. “Who are you?” he asked, his voice almost shaking.