The Spectacular

by Zoe Whittall

  For a moment, I thought Melissa would follow. Her face was inscrutable, and I couldn’t tell if she was twelve or six or sixteen. Regression and maturity at battle in this girl. Then suddenly she put two fingers in her mouth and let loose an extremely loud whistle. Baileeeeeeee! she yelled. Sure enough, the sheepdog came bounding over the hill and toward Melissa. They collapsed like two long-lost lovers. She pulled treats out of her overalls pocket and led him toward the tree. Bailey will stay with me, she said. I wasn’t sure if this was the saddest birthday I’d ever seen, or the sweetest.

  7.

  We ate supper with Bryce and Carola in the kitchen. The other commune residents roamed in and out, helping themselves to the stew and pot of rice on the old cast-iron stove, or heaped their plates with salad made from leafy romaine and dotted with sunflower seeds and apple slices. All of the chairs around the oval kitchen table were mismatched, and Carola sat at the end, high up on a stool, with her legs crossed, eating stew from a bowl. This is Missy’s favourite, I don’t know why she doesn’t want any, Carola said. Maybe you should bring her some, I suggested. I had the strong suspicion that Melissa would welcome her mother’s company in her tree. Well, I suppose if she doesn’t come back soon, I will walk a plate out to her and try to see what’s what, she said, but I don’t appreciate the manipulation. Gail piped in, It’s not manipulative if you’re trying to get your needs met. Carola scoffed, Children can be manipulative. They’re human. Bryce sat at the other end of the table, drinking golden cans of beer and thanking Carola so profusely every few minutes for cooking that she finally stood up and slammed her bowl down on the table. Enough, Bryce! It was clear we’d arrived in the middle of a war, and it had something to do with Susannah who was out in the yard doing some sort of spinning dance by herself in the clover. Both Carola and Bryce kept glancing out the window at her. When we finished eating, Carola cleared everyone’s plates and brought out a homemade birthday cake. It was very pretty, with white icing and Melissa’s name spelled in rainbow jelly beans. Carola said, I’m really tired. You can bring this out to her. She headed up the stairs, with Bryce trailing her. Gail and I made our way across the fields, carrying the cake. We took turns holding it, each nervous to drop it. Melissa saw us coming and lit our final march with a flashlight. The three of us sat under the tree, digging into the cake with our forks. Why didn’t my mom come and get me? said Melissa. She made the cake, didn’t she? Is she mad? I told Melissa that her mother was not mad, but just tired. She’d had a long day, taking care of everyone. I tried to be gentle, to weigh my words. A pretty cake for a pretty girl. Your mother loves you very much. My body was so uncomfortable under the tree, sitting on the hard ground. I worried I wouldn’t be able to stand up if I didn’t do it soon, when at last Carola and Bryce ducked their heads under the tree boughs. Missy’s face lit up. We piled everything into the wagon, and Bryce carried a sleepy Missy on his back over the hill like a child, even though her longer limbs and her arm of bright red jelly bracelets were a whisper of what was to come.

  8.

  The next day I drove Melissa into town and let her pick out a birthday present: a Sony Walkman. I don’t think I’d ever seen Melissa so happy. I also let her pick some new clothes from the small selection inside the one department store, which seemed to specialize in power tools and cases of discount beer but had a small aisle of cheap clothing. Mom is going to be so mad, she said, giggling with delight, as she admired her red stirrup pants in the store’s mirror. I had not planned to buy her an extravagant present, but she smiled so wide as she sorted through a bin of plastic shoes with silver stars on the toe, looking for her size, that I had to do it. In fact, I’d brought a gift for her, Bryce’s old violin, still in excellent condition. When I gave her the violin she’d looked confused, and then remembered her manners and said, Thank you very much, Granny. We had lunch at the diner, plates of burgers and fries, washing it all down with soda. All forbidden food back at Sunflower, but I didn’t care. This was my day with my granddaughter. I tried to ask her if she was happy, if she liked the farm, if her parents fought all the time, but she didn’t want to talk about any of it. What do you want to do when you grow up? I finally asked. I don’t know, but I’d like to be rich. Gail snorted. Melissa asked her why that was funny. It’s less funny than it is ironic. You’ll understand when you’re older.

  9.

  The following spring, Bryce and Melissa showed up on my doorstep, a truck packed with their belongings, the old white farm cat, Snowflake, in Melissa’s lap and Bailey squished between them. Carola was not with them. Someone had been injured on the farm and the family of the young person was suing them. They’d lost everything. And Carola had already gone. I didn’t know how to talk with Melissa about what had happened, so I taught her how to play the violin. She was so good at it, so intuitive, a natural. I had been teaching music lessons to children for so many years and I’d never seen anyone take to an instrument the way my own granddaughter did. In a way, music saved her. Of course, she didn’t stick with the violin. Once she tried cello in the high school orchestra, there was no turning back. Her life’s course was set, but, as with everything, Melissa had her own set of plans.

  Beaurepaire Village, 1997

  1.

  I am lucky to have lived as long as I have. Most people I have known and loved have already passed. After Gail died, I kept her ashes in an Ovaltine tin from the 1970s. The funeral home suggested a brass urn, but Gail wouldn’t have cared. She’d worn corduroys with ink stains on both pockets for the last two decades of her life. I intend to bring the tin back to Turkey and lay her ashes in the family cemetery. I can’t put it off anymore, not with what Dr. Lebel said so nonchalantly this morning. Four to six months. Try treatment, which will be hard on a woman of your advanced age, or do the things you’ve always wanted to do. What are the things I’ve always wanted to do? I always do the same things, I suppose. I go to church. I teach violin. I have lunch with friends. I call Bryce on Tuesdays. Life has had the same shape for as far back as I can remember, up until I met Cy six months ago. What I wanted was to be able to rewind time and meet a young Cy and marry him. Life’s cruel like that.

  2.

  Cy usually stops by in the mornings at half past eleven. We were introduced by Marlene, my preferred teller at the bank. I was next in line and an older gentleman was just finishing his transaction with her, when Marlene said, in her busybody way, Ruth, this is Mr. Acropolis. She winked. He looked at me, quite startled it seemed, and the skin above his white-and-grey beard reddened. Marlene suggested we drink coffee together at the café across the street, and he mumbled, yes, that would be nice. I was so surprised by this interruption to my daily routine, I didn’t quite know what to say. I followed him out the door, cautious but charmed. I liked that Cy didn’t immediately start talking, the way most men do. And I knew it could have felt embarrassing to be set up by your bank teller. But I was lonely, so why not? I used to be so shy. Not anymore. Who has the time at this age? You can get so accustomed to being by yourself that loneliness is not even noticeable, and the idea of conversation and company feels too effortful. You begin to wear solitude like a comfortable coat. But it’s an illusion, getting so used to being alone that it feels pleasant. Cy helped me remember that other people weren’t always bothersome.

  3.

  Looking back on marriage from the other end of life, it seems altogether a strange and desperate custom. I was married to Frank, someone who, in the grand scope of things, was ultimately insignificant to me emotionally, with the exception of our shared child. When Frank died, I felt a twinge for our former life, but it passed in less than an hour. Relatives called to soothe me and I had to pretend I had a depth of feeling I didn’t have. I have the kind of feelings for Cy that are meant for marriage. That is a cruel irony. The way he smells, a cologne that makes me think of the spring, of new life. Oh, we would have had such a life together! I love how strong he is, even at his age. I can feel it, the way he holds me. And his gentle
ness, the way he is sincere in wanting to hear about my life, my whole life, when most of it is behind us. This feels important. To know the before, and to experience what feels like an endless erotic presence whenever he is near. God is giving me one last gift. And it is precious. Dutiful, doting Cy. If I could have designed a man to come to life, it would be him.

  4.

  Cy spent his young adulthood along the same stretch of the Aegean Sea that I did as a child and, for some reason, landed in the same area outside of Montreal in the 1950s when we both had young families. He managed to get on a boat to Athens with his father while Smyrna was burning and Turkish soldiers slaughtered most of the people he knew. He’s never asked the details of how my family escaped; it would have been a difference that kept us apart, knowing that my family’s money bought us escape on a boat, while everyone he loved died. But now my passport and privileges don’t matter. We are simply Canadians now, and he has far more financial security than I do. Cy and I share memories of the same cypress trees, the same green-blue sea, the intensities of the climate and the people. We laugh together at the contrast in Canada: the grey swaths of seasons, and the mild-mannered people. Now, the semi-rural village of Beaurepaire we immigrated to in the ’50s has become a thriving suburb, and we’ve grown old as the houses bloomed around us.

  5.

  Since Melissa and Bryce left, and since my sister died, I have been pretty much on my own. Bryce calls for distant conversations about nothing much, and my granddaughter comes to visit every few months for dinner, always makes a stop when she is home from touring with her band. I never ask directly, but I get the sense the two of them don’t talk to each other all that often. Melissa can be difficult. A shy girl who grew into one of those brash women who says things just to provoke a response. She’s not the same girl who used to sit at the window and give the sparrows names and character traits as she watched them bop around the feeder. I have to do something for Melissa before it’s time for me to go. It’s not her fault her mother left and she didn’t have any role models. Who is she supposed to become, if she spends all her time with men in a van traipsing all over the country? When Melissa told me over the phone that she was quitting school to be in a rock group I took it quite personally. It was the same feeling I’d had when Bryce decided to quit pursuing business and instead become a full-time idealist. Only I’m more forgiving of Bryce. He was such a sensitive child, and I appreciated his sense of wonder at the universe. It’s ill advised to be that way as a woman. The world will eat you up.

  6.

  It is odd, I suppose, that I discovered sex so late in life. Before, it was like a hobby other people had that I didn’t quite understand. But the chemistry between Cy and me was a revelation. Romance, touch, connection. I’d never known it. My wife, she didn’t like it like you do, Cy said, after our third post-church encounter. He was stretching carefully on the side of the bed, arms pressing against the wall, wearing white cotton boxer shorts with a red waistband. Years ago, a comment like this would have made me horrified with shame, but now I didn’t care. He clearly meant it as a compliment. When you get to be my age, you have to give up all the hang-ups. We have bodies for a reason and we don’t have them for very long. Cy laughed, rubbing the spot on his neck that always aches. Besides, my husband took a mistress soon after we were married. He even moved her here from Turkey and bought her a house down the road. For years he kept up a double life. So I’m making up for lost time. Cy often leaves some time in the evening, so he can be home for his daughter’s weekly phone call from Kansas. He walks up the street and turns right, through the garden he still keeps immaculate, and into his little brick bungalow. He tells me that it feels too empty now that he has the pleasure of my company. Before, his life was just his life. Now his solitude feels magnified. He once tried to explain this, suggested we move in together. But I just said, Oh, Cy! You’re such a romantic. We’re just having a little fling. He didn’t come to church the week after I said that. I had to show up at his house with a tray of homemade baklava. After that, I understood that he was tender-hearted, and acted accordingly. I told Melissa that if you want to have a boyfriend, you have to learn how to lie, but kindly. Everyone just needs to hear what they’re obviously yearning for. What’s the harm? It doesn’t cost you anything.

  7.

  When the gravity of my diagnosis hit me, I spent a day having what felt like an anxiety attack, immobilized with an infuriating fear. And then as quickly as it came, it receded. I decided a few things in a very short period of time. I will not get treatment. I will call Melissa and her mother and reunite them, no matter what Bryce wants—which is to punish his ex-wife till the end of time. They both have to figure out their lives, and they are going to need each other. And I’ve known where Carola was for years. Bryce told me, when Carola had contacted him, but he made me swear I would never tell Melissa. It seemed quite important to him, though I was never sure if we were protecting her or playing out his own personal revenge. I will go back to Turkey with Gail’s ashes. I will set my old body free in the ocean that had once tried to take my young body—my final victory.

  Beaurepaire Village, Two Weeks Later

  1.

  My granddaughter and her mother sit across from each other at my dining room table. I brought them here as a final gift. I laid the table with the beautiful white linens I only use for the most special occasions. I put out the real silverware. I have high hopes. Missy sips from a can of ginger ale. She tears off the metal pull tab, stuffs her pinkie finger into the hole, then drums it on the table. She glares at Carola. Her mother looks out the window at the bird feeder, remarking on the size of the hummingbirds, Nearly insects they are. I’ve been humming with anticipation all week, like when you have a lightning bolt solution for a problem. Now that we are all here, I don’t know what I want from them precisely, but I’d like for them to stop being ridiculous. Dying lends perspective to absurdity. I want to say, Do you know these days are finite? But instead, I take another sip of my wine. I was so hopeful when Carola first arrived. Missy has been marinating in her room for a week and I was at my wits’ end. Maybe her mother could shake her out of it, even though they haven’t seen each other for years. A mother’s still a mother. But now I feel like a director who has forgotten the script. Maybe I forgot all the effort required to admit your mistakes, to be open to forgiveness. Those things seem easy when you’re dying.

  2.

  When the roast is ready, I go to remove it from the oven, but Missy follows me to the kitchen and shoulders me aside, insisting on doing the lifting. The smell of the meat hits her and she turns her head. My granddaughter is pale, paler than when she had mononucleosis in high school, like the girl who was kept underground by a madman in a recent TV movie-of-the-week. Only instead of a bonnet Missy wears a toque, pants that appear big enough to house her cello, as big as her T-shirt is small, which seems made for a doll, with the words FREE KITTEN scrawled in marker across the bosom. I tell her to go sit back down, offer her the bottle of Aspirin I keep in the cupboard with the tea and biscuits. Missy has appeared hungover since she returned, but I have yet to see her drink. Carola helps me bring the food to the table. I take stock of the bounty before us. I have spent the previous several days planning and executing. But what have I done with my life? It comes in waves, that question. I spoon out roasted potatoes onto our plates, a sprig of crisped rosemary on each. Sliced carrots, scoops of gravy on slabs of beef. Ruth, you didn’t have to go to all this trouble, Carola says. But she seems grateful, either for the food or simply to have something to say. Everything tastes incredible, knowing I only have so many more moments left to taste. Missy twirls a carrot on her fork.

  So you left us for a cult, is that it?

  It’s not a cult. It’s a retreat.

  Oh, that makes it much better. If it was a cult you could blame someone else.

  It’s okay if you want to blame me.

  Oh, is it okay?

  The conversation escalates, but
we don’t stop eating. The clang of silverware, the airing of grievances. I can’t remember the last time I made a roast. I get lost in the flesh of it all. I put my fork down. I ask everyone to think about what they are grateful for. Cy does this at every meal. It seems sentimental, but it’s been making me feel more grateful anyway. For example, I say, I am grateful to have you both here. I reach for their hands. They are both warm.

  3.

  I can see their twinned cheekbones, matching eyelashes, the same filial yearning in their face. Unmistakably mother and daughter, but essentially strangers.

  I’ve been listening to your band, Carola says. The song about me was hard to listen to.

  It’s not about you. The line between art and life might be thin but it is there, Mother.

  I don’t want to be here any longer. I get up and walk to the window and look out at the garden. I think about making a plan for the beds next season, choose which flowers, which vegetables, but decide not to. Let everything die. Return to the earth. The perennials will come up if they choose to. I feel invisible, like I’m already physically disappearing. The dinner conversation continues without me. Missy tells her mother how she used to go to the police station, asking them to look for her.