by Alix Ohlin
“God, I look like her,” was all she said, and it was true; they had the same eyes, the same face, its sharp angles softening with age.
The baby was fascinated by the images flickering on the screen, one of the few things that quieted her, so we held long marathons with old black-and-white movies I loved: comedies by Preston Sturges and Howard Hawks, musicals with Fred and Ginger. I showed her Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake on the road in Sullivan’s Travels, Cary Grant looking for the intercostal clavicle in Bringing Up Baby. I wanted her brain to be filled with happy things. Mostly I fell asleep with her on my chest, waking to the strains of “Shall We Dance” as yet another leaky diaper dampened my shirt.
When the movies weren’t playing she was a cranky baby and not beautiful; her face was red and bumpy, with scaly patches of dry skin, and a blister on her top lip kept popping and re-forming. Her hair was a nondescript pale color and her legs and arms were skinny and elongated. She looked nothing like the picturesque chubby babies that had once dominated my dreams. She looked like a baby monkey doing her best in a difficult situation. The doctor said she was fine; she was gaining weight and producing dirty diapers, and what else did I want from her? He rushed out of the room before I had time to unfold the creased paper on which I had jotted my millions of questions.
I named her Scottie, after Jimmy Stewart’s character in Vertigo, which Robin told me was deranged. “This is her life model? A mentally ill cop with women issues?”
“I love Jimmy Stewart.”
“You could have named her George Bailey. Or Liberty Valance.”
“I never realized you knew so much about movies.”
“Everybody knows those movies.”
“I think Scottie is cute,” I said.
“You should name her Midge, after Barbara Bel Geddes. She’s the only decent person in that movie.”
“A midge is a kind of insect, it’s an ugly name.”
“Well, she’s not exactly a beauty,” she said.
I nestled the baby against my chest and said, “It can’t matter to you, Robin.”
“You’re right,” she said.
Later, I told her that I wished I could’ve asked our mother for advice about Scottie, and she laughed. “Marianne would have fixed herself a cocktail and ignored you,” she said. “You forget everything bad now that she’s gone.”
It was true. I forgot everything bad, now that she was gone.
2.
Two years later I was back in Brooklyn. I’d rented another apartment in the same neighborhood and still saw Elena regularly. She was always offering to babysit but this mostly involved her smoking on my couch while telling Scottie that kids in her day behaved a lot better, so I didn’t take her up on it much. I had a job on a show about dating after divorce, starring a grizzled heiress who’d survived three marriages and was looking for true love the fourth time around. She wore long fake eyelashes and her facial expressions were muted from all the Botox she’d had. But she was great at dismissing her suitors with a single, cruel line of judgment. Of one she said, “He’s like if you took a slug and poured salt on him, then put him in a suit.”
My daughter had grown into a sturdy, excitable girl with curly blond hair; she looked nothing like me or Robin and everything like the father none of us knew. I taught her that I’d asked for her and Robin helped me bring her into the world, which she took to mean that I had ordered her online, as I did diapers; she demanded to see the cardboard box in which she assumed she’d arrived. She was no longer interested in movies, wouldn’t sit still for anything on-screen, and when I tried to show her the films I wanted her to love, she ran out of the room, clutching her toys for dear life. I had years’ worth of tidbits to share with her but when she asked me questions they were always about subjects—why people got old, why yellow was yellow and blue was blue—on which I had no answers prepared.
Robin came to visit for Scottie’s third birthday. Still waitressing at the restaurant, she complained relentlessly about the customers and their dumb requests and low tips, though I believed she must have enjoyed it, because Robin never lasted long at anything she didn’t enjoy. She was happiest talking about the wolves: she was introducing new pups to the pack and could go on for hours about their eating and grooming habits, and how the older animals were teaching them to belong. She treated my daughter with an absent-minded brutality that roused intense devotion. If Robin told Scottie to be quiet she would sit silently in a corner, obedient to my sister as she never was to me. At night she clamored for Robin to tell her stories and begged Robin to sleep in her bed. When I went in to check on them, I found her curled against Robin, clutching the tail end of my sister’s braid in her little hand. Robin, holding her other hand, was breathing into the curled shell of her ear. The brutality was a pretense.
Sometimes I wondered if there were vestiges of physical connection between them, some trace element of Scottie’s origins inside Robin’s body, her citizenship there. But Robin, when I tried to talk to her about this, told me I was being ridiculous. Anyway it was me Scottie ran to when hungry or hurt, me whose eyes she sought for reassurance when Robin told her some outrageous tale. I was the first person she looked for when she woke. Robin was the beloved guest, all the more adored because she was known to leave.
For Scottie’s birthday Robin gave her a box full of sticks she’d collected from around her house in the Laurentians. “What do I do with these?” Scottie asked, and Robin said, “Build, poke, I don’t know.” Scottie gazed at them in confusion, city girl that she was, but because they came from Robin she weighed them in her hands like treasures. The day after her birthday they went together to the park and dug in the dirt with the sticks and then flung them at each other, as the other mothers watched disapprovingly, imagining eye injuries and head wounds. It was a grey day and muddy and their shoes squelched as they ran. I took out my camera and filmed the whorls in the mud, the sticks traveling in the air. The sound of their voices rose and fell off-screen, music to remember them by.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to my colleagues at Lafayette College, where I started this book, particularly Lee Upton, my dear friend and model for how a writer and teacher should be. Thank you to the English Department at McGill University, where I finished a draft during my time as Mordecai Richler Writer-in-Residence. Thank you to the Creative Writing Program at the University of British Columbia for your trust in me.
Many people generously read drafts and offered perceptive, helpful comments: thanks to Natalie Bakopoulos, Ariela Freedman, Peter Ohlin, Karen Olsson, Liz Van Hoose, and especially Amy Williams, who saw what I was trying to do from the start. This book, like my others, owes so much to the steadfast support of Gary Fisketjon and Sarah MacLachlan.
Thank you to Bianca Falbo for helping me learn about wolves; Chris Reynolds and Tracy Pratt-Stuchbery for sharing their experiences as pianists; Nandini Sikand for talking me through developments in documentary film; and Eileen Finkelstein for teaching me about editing for reality TV. Any errors or artistic liberties that remain are, of course, my own.
Certain aspects of Robin’s home in the Laurentians owe a debt of inspiration to Hélène Grimaud’s memoir Wild Harmonies: A Life of Music and Wolves and Neko Case’s album Middle Cyclone, but the details of her life, her character, and all scenes are entirely my invention. Olga’s work on nostalgia is informed by Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia, though her character, life story, and quotes are fiction.
My father showed me old movies and talked to me about John Grierson and documentary film and taught me that to be a writer and artist was something of value. My whole family has supported every aspect of my writing life since I was a child. Stephen and Peter have continued to make space for my work, even when it takes me away from them, and I am grateful for them daily.
To my devoted mother, my sister, and all the women who have been like mothers
and sisters to me: thank you.
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