The Company We Keep

by Frances Itani

  Janey, from Spinney’s, had shown up at Brigg’s funeral and she referred to his passing as an unfortunate “off-time” death. Gwen nodded and accepted Janey’s hug, but she’d never heard the term and looked it up later on the web so she could be sure of its meaning.

  Off-time death: Not expected, premature. Before the expected time.

  Brigg was not yet seventy at the time of the stroke.

  Along with Janey, three others from Gwen’s former office attended the funeral to express condolences. Gwen genuinely appreciated their presence, but seeing her former workmates made her realize that she missed the office routines as much as she missed the routines of marriage, despite Brigg.

  There was no one to tell things to.

  For instance, she would like to tell someone this: Two nights ago, after her first visit to Rico, she had a dream about walking along the paths of a city zoo she had been taken to as a child. What was different was that the visit took place now, at her present age. She felt like a child but saw her adult self standing before the glass wall of a large aviary. The expansive enclosure was roofed and filled with trees and shrubs and roosts and loops of thick rope. As she walked past, winged creatures inside stared out at her. One bird laughed uncontrollably.

  What could such a dream mean?

  Brigg would have dismissed her imaginings—or maybe not. He might have been interested. She had no way of knowing; he was dead and couldn’t be asked. Since his off-time death, Gwen no longer had to think about being ridiculed. She no longer had to listen to the detested handbell clanging demands while its echoes bounced off the walls. Brigg insisted on having the bell atop his bedcovers after the stroke. It had to be placed in exact position, beside his left hand, the one he could move. She listened to the barbarous clang-clang-clang all through March and into April, the interminable and desperate days leading to his death.

  And there was something else. He made a noise at the back of his throat, a staccato mechanical sort of sound he did not seem to realize he was responsible for: click-click, click-click.

  She reminded herself that she no longer had to respond to calls in the middle of the night when he shouted from his bed. Click-click, click-click. She tried many times to convince herself that he was gone. She kept looking over her shoulder despite willing herself not to. She did not present her back to a door—any door—though she knew he would not return. She tried to stop listening, stop waiting for the handbell to announce his anger, clatter his demands. She’d moved into one of the spare rooms during his illness, but her sleep had been constantly interrupted. After his death, she stayed on in the spare room, not wanting to return to a space they’d once shared. Why had she allowed the bullying? She had no answer.

  Instead, she put effort into convincing herself that she no longer had to be alert to mood, or prediction of mood, every waking moment. Not until the visits to Rico began. Rico, she decided, was a moody bird. But she was not afraid of Rico.

  If the Grands did return home at the end of seven weeks—or eight—she wouldn’t tell them about her zoo dream. Except for the two phone calls she’d had with Cecilia Grand, and except for being inside their house every day, Gwen had no idea what kind of people the Grands were. Even if she did recount the dream, she would not disclose that Rico, with his parrot-sized brain, was the impudent bird directing his laughter at her.

  “You’re a piece of work, Rico,” she said aloud, and he perked up and cocked his head to the left. In real life, he was anything but laughable. She wondered if he could create the sound of a laugh, and at that very moment, he laughed—like a human! The sound was unmistakably male, a deep, hearty laugh, but with a sort of buzz, as if the sound had been filtered through a partially clogged horn.

  She swept up the seeds with the broom and returned to the kitchen to get water—bottled, never tap! Rico watched intently. When she filled the container at the side of his cage, he edged away. He didn’t like her near; that was easy to see. He didn’t like her putting fresh food out for him, but after it was in place, he settled and began to eat. He was nervous. He didn’t know her well enough. That’s what she told herself. The African grey is a beautiful bird, but it can be skittish. She looked at the curve of his beak. Black, not really black, more like smudged charcoal. She caught a glimpse now and then of a coal-black tongue. Was the tongue perfectly curved to fit within the beak? From the side, the half mask that circled his left eye was a swirling white nebula, indistinct around the edges but with a vigilant black pupil at its centre.

  She sat on a chair in front of his cage and heard her throat make a chirring sound. One of Cecilia’s instructions had explained that Rico liked to hear insect sounds. What sort of insect? How was Gwen to know? An insect sound wasn’t exactly conversation.

  “Ch-ch-ch-ch.”

  Rico hopped over to a different perch.

  “Ch-ch-ch-ch.”

  No response. He chewed away at the kale.

  She decided she would bring Rico something from home. Maybe she would read to him. That might get him talking. Maybe he’d enjoy listening to a soft and steady voice. If she read aloud, maybe he would show some respect.

  ON THE WAY HOME, Gwen drove back to Marvin’s. She needed margarine. She needed a loaf of bread. She needed food. Nothing with seeds; nothing chopped or shaped like pellets. After she’d made the insect sounds, Rico had pecked at his seeds with renewed vigour and scattered them widely, creating another mess that required cleaning up. For her own evening meal, Gwen wanted human food in large pieces. She chose a salmon steak and dropped it into her grocery basket. She would eat a baked potato cooked whole. She contemplated lolling in front of the TV, and hoped there would be no news items about temperamental birds that might pluck their own feathers.

  She meandered through the produce department, selected broccoli and decided she would take a chunk to clip to a bar of the cage the next day. She had the feeling that Rico preferred fruit, but she had to stick to the vegetable–fruit ratio prescribed by Cecilia Grand. Total diet: 50 percent veg/10 percent fruit/40 percent pellets. Halfway through the list of possible foods, Cecilia had underlined: NO PITS, NO APPLE SEEDS. Maybe red palm oil took care of whatever it was that more fruit would supply; Gwen was to add palm oil to Rico’s chop and treats. Or maybe a diet heavy in fruit caused diarrhea. Could parrots have diarrhea? Gwen couldn’t think why not. Maybe there was a special word to describe parrot droppings, a word similar to “mutes.” Isn’t that what hawk feces were called? Falcon feces? She muttered the word “mutes” to herself.

  Marvin was at the cash, having stepped in for an evening employee who was on supper break. Gwen exchanged a few words with him, paid for her food and passed the noticeboard on her way out. She paused when she saw that two more strips had been torn from the notice for the grief discussion group.

  So. Other people were grieving. She hoped she wouldn’t know anyone who turned up at the café. Cass would recognize her, but Cass wouldn’t have posted the notice. The city was large enough that the attendees could be complete strangers to one another.

  Maybe she wouldn’t go at all. She didn’t want to be part of any sort of group confessional. Woe to the people, indeed.

  She cast a glance at other notices and inspected the array of fonts and coloured inks, each attempting to draw attention. What would it be like to brandish her name publicly in outrageous fluorescent capitals? Her full name, stretched across the length of the board.

  G-W-E-N-D-O-L-O-E-N-A.

  A name she used only on official documents, such as passport forms. Brigg had believed her name to be outlandish. At the beginning, he had teased; later, he’d scoffed.

  Gwen knew that her late mother had been fanciful at the time of her birth. She’d become pregnant at thirty-nine, and Gwen was her only child. She’d named her after Gwendoloena, wife of Merlin the Magician, even while writing serious articles declaring that Merlin’s stories were not a true part of the earliest Arthurian legends. Her mother had published a respected paper about the
Arthurian portion of Layamon’s Brut, a Middle English poem known as The Chronicle of Britain. She loved any story of Arthur, and especially loved the language of the Brut.

  If Gwen’s mother hadn’t approved of her daughter’s marriage, she’d never said as much. She’d died long ago and wasn’t around for support while the twins were growing up.

  Gwen stared at the board again. Other people seemed to have lives that were whole, fulfilled—but did they really? She wondered if she had always been on the fringes of that sort of experience. Who on earth did she used to be? How far back would she have to go to find the Gwen who was buried in the past?

  She had several days to think about joining the discussion group.

  The wind was gusting when she left Marvin’s. She stopped to straighten a potted geranium that had tipped over on its side. Crimson petals were blowing about. She crossed the parking lot and slid the groceries onto the back seat before climbing into the front. Fragments of grey clouds swept across the grizzled sky.

  Carry Tiger

  CHIYO

  Chiyo stopped at Marvin’s on the way to her evening tai chi class. She paid for a tin of olives and a plastic container of arugula, and stuffed both into her backpack next to her energy bars. After class, she would make a salad, add tuna and olives, chop in a bit of celery, green onion. Before leaving the store, she scanned the noticeboard at the end of the checkout aisles. She was thinking of her mother’s illness, the diagnosis of leukemia, the treatments, the long, slow death at home. When her mother had stopped leaving the house, Chiyo became responsible for errands, necessary and unnecessary. Sometimes, for Chiyo, coping had been a matter of walking out of the house for no apparent reason. No reason except to get away from her mother.

  “Anything of interest at Marvin’s?” her mother would say the moment Chiyo returned home. The question—posed in a way that demanded an answer—set Chiyo on edge, an edge she willed herself to control.

  Her mother had become thin and weak during the last months of her life, and she was unable to walk more than four steps on her own. Caregivers came and went. Despite her weakness, she’d been resolute about keeping up with happenings in the community and news of the world. The TV in her room was permanently set to the CTV news channel. She also wanted “Marvin’s store news,” even while expressing shock that the citizens of Wilna Creek freely posted personal information in a public place. Chiyo teased about this, knowing that her mother bristled. Mock anger, Chiyo thought now. Maybe I couldn’t tell the difference between real and mock. Real anything. Mock anything. Maybe I still can’t. My mother filled herself with anger, or others did this for her. Old anger from way back, long before I was part of the scene.

  As a young girl, Chiyo’s mother had been forced to move, with her parents and more than twenty thousand other Japanese Canadians, to one of the many inland camps in the mountains of British Columbia, close to the Fraser River. This had happened in early 1942, several months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Her mother had carried her childhood anger about this betrayal of democracy, this injustice, into adulthood. The anger had never been resolved. Too late for resolution now. Or maybe, maybe she was at peace.

  During the final three months of her mother’s illness, Chiyo carried paper in her backpack so that she could copy out some of the notices on Marvin’s board. These gave her mother something to think about, or rail against, or laugh at—whatever mood happened to fit. There were always notices about some guy supplying his own tools, but Chiyo ignored those. On days when she couldn’t be bothered stopping at Marvin’s, she invented notices in hopes of satisfying her mother’s curiosity.

  Rare-looking snake with colourful markings rescued from apartment toilet. So far unidentified. Ophiologists? Care to advise?

  Will babysit your child for $25 per hour, with the proviso that I am permitted to use your sewing machine during work hours.

  Learn twenty-one ways to cook with stale bread.

  Will add an excellent recipe for head cheese.

  (My recipe does not use head of a pig.)

  Found: Wedding dress, hacked to pieces, Booth Street, corner of King.

  The last was a jibe at her mother. But really, Chiyo’s inventions did nothing more than set her own trap. Day in, day out, her mother lay in bed with the door ajar so that she could see into the kitchen. From there, from her sickbed, she was aware of the outside door opening and closing. Her dulled eyes watched, no matter how quietly each person arrived and departed. She monitored Chiyo as she left in the morning and returned in the evening. Before Chiyo could remove her shoes, she heard her mother’s voice, weakened from the effort of straining against illness. The hoarse whisper rasped across the kitchen: “Anything of interest at Marvin’s?” Gradually, to conserve energy, the question was reduced to “Marvin’s?”

  Chiyo was expected to reply. She had no choice, no excuse. Marvin’s bulletin board became the main topic. Pretty much the only topic, if she didn’t count caregivers’ schedules, bathroom routines, medications taken, food that her mother did or did not eat. The truth was, her mother’s world had shrunk to a pitiable state, and Chiyo had been trying to prevent shrinkage of her own.

  Even when her mother was well, she wasn’t an easy person to live with. She pried. Disapproved. Assumed the right to comment on Chiyo’s every act, her every friend. She commented on Chiyo’s appearance.

  “You should eat more. You’re too skinny. So much exercise makes you look like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “The way you look. Skinny, like a giraffe neck.”

  At other times: “Have you been eating too much? Your stomach isn’t flat anymore. That can’t be healthy.”

  “When the stylist cut your hair this time, he finally got it right.”

  What was that supposed to mean? All the other times, he’d got it wrong?

  Never a real compliment.

  Chiyo was often out because she was booked to teach at regular times in a city-run gym in her area. She taught classes for Parks and Recreation three mornings and three evenings a week: stretch and strength, Pilates, yoga, tai chi. Sometimes she held extra classes on Saturday afternoons. Before and after class, she occasionally scheduled clients who engaged her as a personal trainer. For those meetings, she drove to a YMCA/YWCA gym located in the new shopping mall on the far side of the ravine. She knew that while she was out teaching, her mother was probably at home rifling through her private belongings. She didn’t bother to hide the fact that—until she was too weak to do so—she regularly inspected her daughter’s dresser drawers and closet shelves. Postcards from Leonard were scrutinized, but he knew enough not to send private letters when travelling.

  Chiyo had been involved with Leonard for six years. Her mother disapproved from the beginning—in the same way she disapproved of anyone else Chiyo had dated. Her mother wanted her to produce a marriage certificate, grandchildren who would crawl around the kitchen linoleum and who could be shown off to her friends. But her mother’s friends had fallen away in the final year.

  When Leonard used to come to the house, her mother—still well enough—made a point of getting to the door first.

  “It’s him,” she called back over her shoulder, her small stature blocking the doorway by half. She refused to say his name. At the time, she didn’t know that Chiyo had every intention of marrying Leonard. But the relationship hadn’t turned out that way.

  “Your name might mean eternal,” she said to Chiyo one morning, “but you’re running out of time if you’re going to have a child.” She spoke as if her words were etched onto a blade to be twisted as only a mother could. “Child-bearing years do not last an eternity.”

  Chiyo had no reply. She did not fight her mother, but her body flinched from the wound. She didn’t shout: Do you think I’m unaware of my own biology? She was forty years old, and if she was ever to have a child, it would have to be now. But she had not been brought up to shout at her mother. She’d been raised to maintain silence. Respect elder
s. While her mother’s voice yammered on in perpetual staccato, with each beat sharply detached from the next, Chiyo diverted her inner attention to tai chi. Bend bow to shoot tiger, she said to herself, and her body responded as if it had at that moment created the move. Strum lute with both hands. Music calmed her. She thought of the shakuhachi, the haunting echo of rich tones through bamboo. The music of monks.

  Leonard was out of her life. Now she was seeing Spence, who lived in an apartment nearby. Chiyo had stayed on in the house, which was left to her in her mother’s will. She had no siblings; her father had died of chronic lung disease related to the repeated bouts of pneumonia he suffered throughout his childhood in the camps. According to family lore, his health never truly recovered after the years he’d spent in an uninsulated tarpaper shack in the mountains. His lungs, weak in childhood, became weaker in adulthood. He died four years after he married, when Chiyo was a toddler, almost three. She held wisps of father memories: a word uttered softly, a movement, a facial expression, the sensation of safety and abandonment inextricably entwined.

  The bungalow that was now Chiyo’s was cramped and poorly planned: a crowded kitchen, two squared-off bedrooms, a front door that opened directly into a living/dining room, no coat closet at the entrance, a boot mat prominent by the back door. Not much had been done in the way of modernizing, but despite cracked linoleum, chipped paint, an outdated kitchen, Chiyo enjoyed the independence of living on her own. Since her mother’s death in April, she no longer reported to a parental inquisitor who followed her every move. Spence, easygoing Spence, made no demands and was as independent as Chiyo. Sometimes he stayed overnight or for a weekend, but by the beginning of the week, he was back in his own apartment. Monday mornings, after his departure, Chiyo expanded her spirit. Her right arm extended high while she reached for the sky; her left arm pushed low. Stork cools wings. She occupied her own widening space and inhaled deeply.