Living on the Borderlines

by Melissa Michal

  “I’ve got this, Aaron.”

  “They know you keep a good house.” He gave her a look that meant concern. Where his eyebrow moved down, rather than up.

  “We got too old for this,” said Aaron.

  “Never,” she retorted with a slow smile.

  A few times a year this event proved to pass time in a different way, with weeks of preparation, the actual party, and then the clean-up. Her body hummed in one place and didn’t itch to ferry out to other places. They used to take small trips to Prince Rupert or Vancouver. And a few times to Sitka in the States. Not so much anymore.

  “This salmon is truly delicious,” said Donna. She shook her head and gave Anna a hug.

  Donna made probably the best salmon on the island. Anna blushed.

  Little ones crawled across the furniture. And Aaron’s niece, Nari, her niece, too, she guessed, brought her daughter, Lily, over and put her in Anna’s arms.

  “Here,” she said. “Enjoy baby time.”

  Donna raised her eyebrow. That physical admonition did get old fast. Anna could read her thoughts. Could she handle kids emotionally if she couldn’t have her own? She had been “handling it” at every family gathering for years with no breakdown or tears. But they still worried. Not everyone in the family, really only the older siblings. Youth seemed used to bouncing back these days and didn’t see her that way. And it wasn’t that she didn’t want to adopt. But by the time she had decided for sure, she felt old, too old for someone new to teach everything to and chase around. The need to mother left her. Just like that. One day when she was forty-two or forty-three, she felt it lift out of her soul and float on the breeze out their screen door. Sadness left. Anger left. Need left.

  She minded more not holding the children rather than dealing with the family gossip, so she put up with their assumptions. Not many people around Haida Gwaii were shy about handing their children over to her, though. It showed trust, really, a mother’s trust. The little girl smelled sweet and a bit like sour milk. The mixture made Anna want to drink in her hair, her clothes, and her chubby neck.

  With her free hand, Anna plucked a piece of salmon from the large ceramic dish. She had baked it this time, laying the fish out as foundation and pouring the marinade over it, also sweet and sour.

  She did not like fish or seafood when she first came to the island. A bit of a problem if she was to eat, especially with Aaron’s family. Fishing for their food meant survival and eating through winter.

  The flake of salmon fell into her mouth, an old habit now. A slight aftertaste remained of salt and things of the Pacific Ocean and bays. The almost two-year-old reached out for the fish.

  A flick of Anna’s fingers grabbed another chunk for Lily, who stared at it. Then her tiny hands stuffed it in her mouth, teeth and lips and squeals of joy.

  “Did Nana give you salmon? It’s her favorite,” said Nari. She took Lily into her arms. “Thanks for holding her.”

  Nana. A name she became a few years ago when grays traveled through her hair. She could never be a real nana, but liked the name just the same. And she guessed she could have been one by now, in another life.

  Aaron watched his wife move through the family crowds, her motions dedicated to showing them a comfortable time. He saw Anna cling to these get-togethers. They roared with people and the vibrations of generations. And the bodies closed in on their small home. The lack of space didn’t seem to matter if it was his family.

  Her back would pull straight, like a cord was attached to it on either end. The bun of red light pinned, kept layers of hair in order. This order didn’t mean detachment or an overcontrolled environment. She rolled with each thing as it came: running out of certain foods and replacing with others, spills, kid fights, animal fights, relatives that must be kept separate.

  He wouldn’t trade her or change her. So many had wondered why a white woman. He wondered why it mattered. But knew.

  “She caught you, didn’t she?” his sister Donna had said. She meant well and liked Anna. Things about people, things she didn’t like, didn’t ever truly dissipate, though. Not with her. His brothers slapped him on the back the first introduction and never thought twice about it again. Somehow, he figured it would be the opposite. His brothers followed tradition so strictly.

  “Flighty,” his sister had said then.

  “Feisty,” he wished he had said back.

  A man whose face he only somewhat recognized pulled him away from staring at his wife, asking, “Aaron, what’s the next project?”

  “Mmmm, a totem pole.”

  “I’d love to see it.”

  “Park’s admission will do it.”

  The man nodded. A little light left his eyes, as if an idea diminished somewhere.

  Seeing meant talking—somehow revealing himself or his work and always the “why.” Lately, he only wanted to get to work, in and out. He politely talked himself away and into the kitchen. Maybe that was a mean response. Sometimes he couldn’t let go of the anger.

  “It’s amazing what Anna can do with salads,” Donna said. She began filling emptied bowls with new food items. “She’s doing well with this.” Her free hand waved around the room. Blue-corn chips hit with a clatter. Tuna salad slid into another bowl.

  He nodded. Anna did well with each party. Rain or sun.

  Once his sister had said, “It just … didn’t seem like she came back a whole person after her mother died.”

  It showed in Donna’s eyes now and again, some kind of concern mixed with judgment. Anna did lose energy. The weight deflated her questions, her movements, her words. She shifted into a quiet realm where she took more in with her eyes rather than her mouth. Some of it came slowly back. He saw it at these parties, and in her weaving.

  “Here, take Lily, Mom,” said Nari. She shadowed the doorway, handing her daughter to Donna. Her voice was not as high as his sister’s. And she seemed to have a consistent smile since Lily arrived.

  Donna walked away, cooing in the little girl’s ear. She pointed outside, showing her the birds and trees, naming them.

  “She talked to you like that,” he said.

  “Hey, Uncle.” His niece hugged him and kissed him on the cheek. “I’ve been thinking, you should give Lily carving lessons.”

  “She’s a bit young.”

  “And female.” Nari laughed. “She likes hanging out here. And she just stares at anything you make. Never looks away.”

  “Maybe we could. Maybe.”

  Anna came into the kitchen, picked up a few bowls, and headed back out with a slight nod and twinkle. His heart skipped. It still did that when she flirted.

  They could see Anna through the doorway. She flipped a piece of hair behind her ear and put a hand on his great aunt’s arm to steady her.

  “She’s good at these things,” said Nari. “This many people drive me batty. Andrew knows I try. But I run around like a crazy woman waiting for the next disaster. You’d think I would be used to it with everything our family does.” She turned to him. “I know Mom’s not nice sometimes.”

  Aaron played with a pencil in his hand.

  “I didn’t know Auntie before … but she was always kind.” His niece took the pencil from him, which he had begun to doodle with. “I detested myself in high school … I liked pushing people away.” She fiddled with the pencil, tapping it against the counter. “She kept talking to me anyway. Saying I was good and special. It sunk in after a while.” Nari paused and looked out the window at her mother and daughter.

  When Anna hadn’t come back after her mother’s stroke, rumors traveled quietly through the village. They expected him to go after her, help, then return with her. When that didn’t occur, they made their own assumptions. She stayed back in her world, they said, because that was comfortable—somehow right. She surprised them when she came back. But not Aaron. However, he couldn’t ever figure out why he didn’t go to her, even against her wishes. He wasn’t there for her when she needed him most.

 
; He and Anna didn’t talk about her previous life after they married. Her family existed in country clubs and on yachts. Not in their lives. And Anna was okay with that. Now he wondered if he still was all right with her silence.

  “I’d say she was meant to come back.” Nari gestured around the room and pointed at him. She squeezed his shoulder and handed the pencil back to him. “Well, we’ve got to go.”

  He doodled more on a napkin after she left—a tiny sketch of a small sea monster.

  Other guests began to disappear with the afternoon light. The house grew quiet again, calm.

  He took his wife by the hands once the last person had left and led her into the living room. She didn’t protest. With his hand cupped in hers, they stared at the fire.

  “I always like this,” Aaron said. “How it gets quiet.”

  “Don’t you miss the whir of people?”

  “No.”

  He kissed her.

  The fire lit them in orange and yellow.

  Anna sat on a stool bent toward her weaving. The strings lay between both sets of fingers. The pain in her lower back and shoulders felt dull. She had been arching her back this way so long she forgot the pain as she wrapped the strings of yarn rolled with cedar bark just so.

  Her eyes occasionally grazed the design board Aaron had painted. But she knew it, went over it with him months ago. She talked him out of drawing Mouse Woman this time. You could not see one of the animals without recognizing body sections of the other. One became part of the other.

  “Why not move this here and here?” She used Aaron’s pencil like a pointer. Years sitting together meant things rolled off her tongue easier. “And thicken this line here, by the monster’s head.”

  She could see a sketch, let it float through her mind, and point out changes for curves. It was something like how she saw the design as she weaved it. One existed in her fingers and the other in her mind. She drew her own sketches in college and then painted some of them.

  The women don’t design. She respected that now, but still didn’t quite understand it. It was solely always done that way.

  “These are good suggestions,” said Aaron.

  He used to cringe at them, as if her words sounded unnatural or garish. She touched his hand. “Thank you.” She held back this urge to say more, sketch over things, erase. She knew his process took him deep into himself and his ancestors. Sometimes she felt the itch in her own fingertips—different from weaving, but the same—a kind of flow in the blood.

  He erased some of the lines and shifted the design a little in Anna’s way, still keeping his own traditional way, too.

  With each addition and change, she memorized the workings of the design and pictured them becoming strings moving through her fingers. It became habit after so many years.

  “I think I’m done taking on students.” Anna even surprised herself when she said it. The reaction she expected from Aaron didn’t come.

  “Are you sure?” he said.

  She nodded.

  She wanted to get her blankets done. It wasn’t that she lacked the duty to weave. She learned it, then felt it fly in her fingers, almost like a need. The design becoming part of the thread through her. But she wasn’t like Aaron. She didn’t have the urge to pass it down. It may have been given to her by her teachers, but she lacked the history and it seemed a family connection. It simply wasn’t the same for her.

  When she died, what would be left were her hair combs, a diary in her large cursive with penciled sketches, a tidy house, and clothes lingering in lilac perfume.

  “Okay.” He leaned over and placed his hand on her back between her shoulder blades. His fingers pulled at the knot in her muscles. The touch felt light, but gave relief. A familiar movement that held quiet patterns between the two.

  Her desire to stop teaching came from tiring of explaining. What weaving and teaching meant to her seemed like it was different for others. Maybe it was more ingrained in how they grew up. But the questions persisted in polite ways, of course. This generation asked a lot. Aaron had more patience with them. Teaching scarcely built the same excitement with her any longer.

  As she wove, the black-and-red lines became clearer. To the naked eye simply looking at the loom early in the process, the purpose could remain a mystery. One twist at a time built a gradual picture. This blanket neared completion.

  Aaron knelt on his wallboard—carvings almost complete. His knees ached. He kept this from his face and body movements. The light shone heavy on the place he carved. Sweat dripped from his forehead and underarms. The adz he held was his father’s. Their finger marks filled the round handle with tiny indentations.

  Because it was the middle of the island’s summer, it also meant heavy tourist season, and a large crowd of people who knew nothing about Haida art or totem poles. They flanked every bit of space in the workshop.

  Their breaths were obvious, their coughs, camera snaps, foot twitching, even the children rolling their eyes. Thankfully, the tour guide spoke for him.

  He knew he could not gain studio space like this elsewhere. And he liked the idea of people learning something new and outside of their own comfort. Or at least he used to. Still, the tourists annoyed him with their incessant questions: What does that bear mean? What’s a crest? What’s that totem pole’s story? Why did you choose that?

  As if totem poles had answers. But it is the outsider way … to question. Maybe someday, he thought, they would learn enough from them not to have their questions.

  He looked forward to those days, once or twice a year, when people actually understood—had studied the art before visiting. And he thought, too, about his wife. He worked the adz into the wood. Chips fell to the floor in small ripples. Her questions in the beginning had amused him, before too many tourist questions tired him. She still asked. But now she also voiced her thoughts. And not all at once—over time. Anna dug deep into the carving and into what he stood for. She made him think about it.

  “Why this curve here?” she asked.

  Or, “You know, the way these lines move together, they swell into the wood, like the ocean.”

  And the previous week, “Your work is darker lately, with deeper edges and colors that bleed into the wood.”

  He never questioned his carving or his pure connection to the wood. He was just good at it. It simply came to him, lines curving along his brain.

  He pulled out of this when there was a question the tour guide passed on. “Well, maybe our artist should answer that.”

  He questioned when the tour guide used that label. Artist. Historian. Carver, maybe. Art was never the original purpose of it all—not art like Europeans saw it, something to collect.

  “What’s that thing in your hand?” asked a kid who popped a bubble with his gum.

  Aaron lifted his eyebrow and then said, “An adz.” He demonstrated how he plucked and plucked at the wood, grooving it by chipping the wood away. Red cedar fell to the ground when he brushed it. More ripples. At least a child this age had time to learn—a reason to not know.

  And more questions. Questions and interruptions. He would work late that night.

  Anna ran her fingers over the grooves. She preferred the feel of the wood before the paint spread across the design. The smooth, soft touch reminded her of an antique bench her father once bought at a house sale. It had been worn by many bodies arching into the back of the oak.

  Aaron’s time and hands smoothed this wood. Anna’s eyes traced the pattern back and forth over the crescents and U shapes. They leaped off the wood. Her favorite part of viewing his carvings was figuring out the forms and why he chose them for that wood or that commission. Sometimes her own designs became inspired from this—rolling in her head. But she never sketched them in front of him. A few made it into her journal.

  Anna guessed at the designs when he finished. Most times, right.

  Art. That was how she saw the whole process. He didn’t. But no one else could create what he did. No one else cou
ld turn the wood out in that same way. These were not the patterns of his ancestors. They differed. They became Aaron, or whatever it seemed at the time he needed to channel in the grains. Some leaned deeper into the wood. Some sat high. Some patterns were simpler and more spacious. Happiness. Anger. Grief. Passion. It all came through the cedar planks.

  Anna placed her hand on his shoulder and traced lines back and forth, rotating muscles as she went.

  “Maybe it’s time,” she said.

  “No.” He closed one eye and stared at the side of the pole. Then he chipped in one spot with an upswept detail, a tiny tool for the details. His fingers stiffened, so he wiggled them, then twisted his thumbs in his suspenders.

  “It’s almost there, I think.”

  He had been saying that for two months about this piece. And he had slowed as the months moved forward. Commissioners gave them more time this year.

  She dipped a brush into the black paint, tapped it on the side and swept it over his penciled design. This back arch was wider, and her arms stretched with the gesture. Now and again she might also tool away pieces of excess wood.

  For some reason, he either avoided this particular pole or didn’t have the energy. She couldn’t tell this time. He strayed to different projects, like the now-finished wallboard, and then maybe moved back. What she did know was that he didn’t talk about the arrangements made with the commissioners. He rarely angered or let it fall into his voice. But one phone call she overheard in snippets revealed maybe enough. No words, just tone.

  The lines in this pole grooved more simply than his normal marks.

  “What’s this one for?” Anna asked.

  “A totem pole park.” He continued to chip away at the tiny edges, one eye careful on the tool, one eye cautiously navigating the design.

  She waited a few minutes. The outdoor paint dried, and she moved the brush over it a second time, darkening the black lines again and again.

  “So, it’s a replication?”

  “Sort of.”

  The designs changed sometimes from an original pole that had deteriorated, from one to another, usually navigated by the commissioner’s desires and aesthetics, as well as the original pole’s design.