This All Happened

by Michael Winter

  I ask how she’s doing with Oliver.

  Well, she says, I speak of torment. You can’t run a relationship solely on flair and conversation and desire for life.

  I say: It’s warming yourself at a fire. When it dies down youre cold.

  Maisie: It’s like watching a movie of the one you love. What do you mean?

  It’s like when you enter a movie and youre absorbed. But it’s the world of a movie, separate from you. After two hours you’ll leave, entertained, but you return to your own world. And the movie knows nothing of your life.

  We both silently gauge ourselves by this.

  19 Yearning. I want a real love and a woman fully mine and I am fully hers. A deeply entrenched togetherness in some kind of alchemical bond that is inseparable and you change and become a different person because of that woman. You would almost die, yes you probably would die, a shell or a core of you would wither, if that woman left you or you left her. Something else always blooms in the aftermath, but deep chunks would be ripped out and isnt that fear part of a deep love? A thing that we are all desperately craving and searching, smelling, listening for, even when we arent conscious of it. And any other arrangement or agreement is fine for the time but is always susceptible to outside forces that will gnaw on the hawsers and dissolve you like sugar in liquid. I know Lydia has gone through this type of deep love with Earl, a love where she craved him all day long and then came home to him almost lunging and yes she was shocked and hurt by this kind of love and maybe what she has now is a nurtured and careful and indeed beautiful thing and maybe that’s good for her, who am I to say. But I want to caution her against this separation of self from me, if that’s what she is doing or trying to maintain. Give me a rooted thing that is fierce and dedicated and incredibly powerful in head heart and animal.

  20 I’m at Maisie’s and she’s on the phone, so I’m talking to Una. She says, Dad only recently discovered the drive-you-thru. He didnt know how to talk to the man on the intercom.

  She is making a birthday card and puts in nine dollars. Andrea is nine, Una says. It’s a makeup party.

  The invitation reads Don’t Blush! and I ask her if she catches the double meaning.Yes, she says.

  When she writes Happy Birthday on the card I ask her if she knows how to excite and jazz up sentences.

  Put an exclamation mark, she says.

  She says this in a declarative way.

  Some kids end a sentence with a raised, doubting tone. And here Una is adding an exclamation mark, sure of herself.

  She says, A question mark is like half a heart.

  I say, Sometimes questions are asked half-heartedly.

  21 I’ve invited Lydia up for supper. Helmut is back from Boston. Iris and I will team up to cook. We sit in the kitchen and dig up Helmut’s life story. How he was adopted and found his sister only last year. As he’s telling us, a big man with a cast on his arm walks in with a summons.

  Gabriel English?

  Lydia, Iris, and Helmut look at me.

  You guys, I say, know nothing about deception.

  I confess I’m Gabriel English.

  Man with cast: You owe the government twenty thousand dollars, and change.

  I look at the summons. The Cast says, Youre a hard one to track down. Dont you ever vote?

  I vote, but I swear an oath to where I live.

  The Cast is puzzled.

  I lie, I say, about where I live.

  The Cast is very polite, says he has been around a few times but got no answer at the door. He says he can let himself out.

  I can see Lydia looking at the summons with disapproval.

  I’m going to talk to Oliver. I’ll lay ten thousand in cash on the government table. That’s what I borrowed from student loans ten years ago. The rest is 12 percent interest. The rest, I say in a righteous tone, is usury. If they accept it, I’ll take you to lunch.

  Lydia: Last of the big spenders.

  They won’t turn down ten grand.

  Lydia: Not when they see the likes of you.

  22 Oliver says it’s worth a try. I will do this generous monetary transaction on my birthday. It will clear the slate to begin my thirty-fifth year. I could declare bankruptcy, but that taints the future. Also, integrity tells me to pay what I owe but be stubborn on the interest. Also, bankruptcy is not an attractive trait. I can see Lydia wants me to clear this up without it coming to that.

  Mom called. She wants to visit, but she’ll come on the bus. She misses me because I dont come back for Christmas. She calls it a pagan holiday. The only ceremonies she celebrates are marriages and Easter. She doesnt even raise her glass to a toast.

  23 I wrote a passion poem for Lydia. I left it in her mailbox: Send me an ounce of cinnamon, it said, wrapped in paper and string. Send my love’s own grain. An ounce will do, an ounce of cinnamon. For apples, you said. My mouth that eats apples. Tied in paper and string. Eat my mouth in green apples that have been given to him, stapled and pinned. An ounce of cinnamon; send it, given to him who has no cinnamon, save himself. For love’s own grain. Send me this in a cloth so fine and wire so hard it will prove our own forgiveness.

  I am wired into an insane part of me.

  24 Lydia says the poem was appreciated. Her tone implies she didnt, no one could, understand it. I said it was a nonsense poem, just read it for the intent. There’s intent behind it.

  She wants to paint her study. So I drive down and pick her up and we zoom over to Matchless Paints and choose a colour I call avocado green. Lydia says there are a lot of greens in avocado.

  The centre yellow, closest to the pit.

  We get the man to add one fraction of green. It’s the green of unripe banana.

  The man lifts his arms and slips a finger under the tight short sleeves of his shirt, as if his biceps need room.

  A fraction is the minimum amount of paint that can drip from the beaker. It’s enough paint to cover your fingernail. Enough to change considerably the hue of a gallon of avocado. The power of pigment.

  With all the pictures off the walls her study looks relaxed. We’ve stacked Lydia’s paintings and lamps in between the legs of upended chairs in the hall. I expect a caravan to be hauled up outside, a thin horse, ruts in the road from wagon wheels. There is a primitive, European feeling of exodus, of imminent rush and migrant behaviour, hanging around Lydia’s stairwell.

  25 Stories are all about meeting someone, Maisie says. You have the narrator. Then you are introduced to a character. And how does that person shape the protagonist? That’s all a story ever is. Your protagonist meeting someone. That’s how my novel begins, I say. Little Leo Percy (Josh) meeting Rockwell Kent (Max) at the train station.

  I want to write a kid’s book for Una. Have a whale meet a shark and discuss his time on land. How his tail is flat now and he has to return, always, to the surface to breathe. A story about returning home, but how the experience away changes you permanently.

  26 I wake up on the couch cushions on the living-room floor. The rain sounds like plastic bubbling off the walls. Mom is directly above in my bed. I picked her up last night at the bus station. I watched her guide her feet down the steep hammered-metal steps.

  She had her bags on the chair by the phone. She said, Is that okay?

  Yes, I said. We can bring them up to your room later. Oh, there’s a limit, she said.

  What?

  They only go that far for now it’s a joke.

  She asks about commitment, and I explain that Lydia and I are considering the question. She says, You should give yourself a deadline.

  I say, I’ve never been in love before.

  She says, Well, it’s good to have your heart broken.

  27 I introduce Mom to Iris and Helmut, and they look at her with little grins on, as though she explains certain aspects of who I am. Mom tells them I was a quie
t child and I went through a time when I said even less. I would stay in my room. But she wouldnt investigate. I was conscientious and reliable. My brother, Junior, would come home from school and sprawl in the porch. I’ve just got to rest, he’d say. My mother told him people were waiting for their newspapers. When I took over the route, I was an obedient paperboy.

  She mixes brewer’s yeast in orange juice for her breakfast. She says she can run on that all morning.

  She notices I have a hole in my shoe. She says, You take after your grandad. He wore starched shirts and wingtip shoes, very grand. But the shirt cuffs were frayed and the soles of the shoes had holes.

  28 Lydia wants to take us out for lunch. She chooses a table against the wall. There are fresh flowers and Mom admires them.

  We order the specials.

  Mom says money is just after sex for problems in a marriage. Then she clarifies: Money never came between us in an irreconcilable way. We had differences but worked through it. And as for the first thing, the same can be said.

  When the waitress arrives my mother asks: Are you having a wedding, or do you always have flowers?

  Waitress: We always have them.

  Mom: It’s like having fruit when youre not sick.

  Simple pleasures, and Lydia’s happy to have her out. Mom thoroughly enjoys a meal cooked by someone else.

  March

  1 I convinced Mom to fly back to Corner Brook. And she called to say it was terrific, so fast, and Dad sort of enjoyed picking her up at the airport. The only drawback was that she missed having a bowl of soup in Gander.

  No snow Cold, though. Strange but acceptable to have the city so bare. I hate frozen slush. When I was seven I thought Newfoundland was attached to Britain. And with Confederation they floated the island over.

  So often I wake up and the fog, the blizzards, living here is like being on a barge, adrift in the Atlantic. There is no buffer to weather. We’re forced to take the brunt of it. I love it.

  Admission: I love choosing hard times. The not being able to choose is what frightens me. And that’s what scares me most about having kids. It’s true I dont care for surroundings. As long as the roof is solid, the fridge stocked, and you dont see your breath. But wallpaper and matching dinner plates and a brand-new car make my neck tight.

  I have a gut feeling that Newfoundland can float. It’s not inconceivable to haul up anchor and drift into the Gulf Stream. Any thought is possible.

  2 I’ve found only two dots of snow in the crags of southside hills. Old man’s beard, they call it.

  I am incorporating a proposal of marriage into the novel. One of my key tenets: if you know what the next scene is, youve already written it. The novel is full of contemporary events. Lydia says, Be present in the past. But what I’m doing is being present, then infusing this into the past.

  At the Ship the pussy willows, cut three weeks ago for Valentine’s, have begun to bloom in their demi-litre jars. Fresh green shoots, seal fur, in the dark bar. The pussy willows know nothing of winter.

  3 I was about to call Lydia when I pictured her phone and I thought about what she had to say about being present in the past and how impossible it is but instead I’m writing honest moments and people who are themselves and people who make fun of themselves and are silly and childish and unsophisticated and warm and generous and loving and full of toughness too and original and sexy and rough and animalish and playful and have guts and a red red tender heart bursting crying at small wonderful irrational things at moments at hot moments that steam and penetrate our brains and sizzle like a branding iron into the marrow and make us horny and I like trying to put words to these moments give particulars and hand them delicately to people like Lydia and I want them from her too that is my only demand on anyone because that is life that is all life is is moments doesnt she think and I think she does and she does among other things when the moment’s right.

  4 It’s after badminton, on the only day of the year that is a command, march forth. Let’s have a small drinky-poo, Lydia says. Maisie Pye and Max Wareham and Lydia Murphy.

  At the Ship there’s a little whiff of grass.

  Maisie says they are moving to a house on Lemarchant Road.

  Max: When?

  I’ve got the keys now. It’s a little three-bedroom. Yes, I have to move.

  I’m thinking they can’t pay the mortgage. Or maybe they were renting. Maybe Oliver has lost his job. But then we realize it’s only Maisie and Una. No one can speak.

  I say, So what’s going on?

  I’m leaving Oliver. I have to leave.

  Maisie says it with finality. Her hands on the table edge pushing her shoulders back, her eyes closed.

  Me: Do you want to say anything else about it?

  Just that it’s something I have to do.

  Well. It’s good that youve managed to reach a decision. She puts an arm, briefly, to my shoulder.

  Lydia says, I’m so sad.

  Maisie: It has been two hurdles. To decide, and then to actually do it. To find a place. To think about getting beds.

  And how is Oliver?

  He doesnt want me to go. Shouldnt he be the one leaving?

  He says he can’t leave.

  Is he having an affair?

  I found condoms.We dont use condoms.

  Oh, Maisie.

  Then he told me about this paralegal woman.

  Are you capable of calling someone if you do need help?

  Yes, Gabriel. Thanks.

  In bed. Me: It made me afraid to be with you.

  What do you mean?

  If it can’t work out between them.

  Baby, does it make you not want to be with me?

  Oliver’s a legal-aid lawyer and Maisie’s a writer and I thought, That’s a good balance.

  Lydia: And Maisie said it so simply, yet their life is so substantial. I wanted to say to her, Have you given this a lot of thought?

  Me: She has given it a lot of thought. Both families, Oliver, everyone is probably saying to her, I hope youve given this a lot of thought. Do you think I was a little too direct?

  I think she appreciated it. I didnt know what to say. I thought you were good.

  I felt strange.

  You like her.

  Yes. But I wish they were together. I like it better that way. Does it make you nervous?

  I guess I was uncomfortable.

  I think she likes you too.

  But we’ve gone out. And she’s that way with everyone. That’s true.

  But we do seem to understand each other well.

  I think she likes you. Dont you?

  I guess so.

  5 I’m sitting with Helmut, reading, when the room is suddenly painted with revolving blue, hungry light. There is the beep of something big going in reverse. Out on the end of Young Street, a cul de sac, a rogue city tractor piles snow against our fence. The attached houses are cast in fluorescence as the cab light spins. The snow is eight feet high stacked against the fence. I open the screen door. Youre nudging the fence, I say. The driver leaning out his door: If I knock it down, call city hall.

  He reverses. Chains on the fat industrial tires smack against the pavement, sending up sparks. Kids are huddled behind a car, watching. They have made igloos out of the snow. I notice other neighbours are at their screen doors, calling in their children. The driver revs and shifts into first. The nose of the tractor rears. Headlights jerkily bear down on the mound. He races into the snow, stretches the tractor’s hydraulic neck up, and the fence buckles. Six steel posts bend. The pickets lean and splinter, buttons on a fat man’s gut. Three pickets burst and shoot off into the trees. The dark fence cracks and a raw new light is exposed from deep in the wood. The driver lifts the shovel and retreats, halts. Then roars towards the pile again. The steel posts groan, nails pulled from a board. The
palings snap. A mound of heavy, dirty snow tumbles across the path. He retreats, studies the cul de sac. This time he pivots and heads back to the depot.

  6 I look up from writing to watch the dying sun turn the snow on Signal Hill pink. The bottoms of clouds another pink. I can distinguish between pinks. There’s a pigeon cooing, and it sounds like a rope pulled taut.

  I walk down to Lydia’s. Tinker Bumbo, asleep, is a balloon losing air. The flame in Lydia’s fireplace sounds like a finger rubbing grit off a record needle.

  We eat supper and walk down to the Ship. Lydia pulls down her tights to imitate Oliver. She is so quick and apt with imitation. Maisie, disgusted, throws away the chalk after scratching on the break. How funny is that. Can you weigh funniness. How long does an image stay with you. I think now that it was so funny. Yet I didnt laugh when Maisie threw the chalk. It’s a funniness that lingers. Maisie threw the chalk out of not blind disgust but a self-conscious look-at-howshitty-that-shot-was disgust.

  The cue ball hops over the cushion. It hits a beer bottle. I dont mind, for this moment, if Lydia sleeps with Wilf. She wants to go to the Spur, where he probably is. How I love Lydia gossiping with Maisie about men.

  Somehow the world is more intimate and loving and I am generous with what I love. All love is displayed on an embroidered white cloth on long grass beneath a sycamore and generosity is running towards it from a ball field, both teams at once, running, throwing their gloves in the air.

  7 Heartache is something you can have without ever having your heart broken.

  Sometimes. In Lydia’s kitchen. When she’s mixing ingredients for a cake in front of a sunny window. Sometimes, like in photographs of swimmers in the distance, standing on sailboats, the sun cuts through the bodies so the knees and ankles and elbows have light coming through them. Bodies are cut into segments. Sometimes I see that happening to Lydia, so thin. When she’s sideways. At the mixer churning a cold block of butter. And slowly the silver egg beaters mangle.

  In the closet: the sleeves of my coat tucked into Lydia’s coat pockets. The toes of her boots nudging into mine.

  8 Max picks me up in his truck and we head down to Maisie’s. She has put yellow sticky notes on the bits of furniture she’s taking. There are garbage bags with bedding. A cardboard box stuffed with cutlery. She has dresses and shirts still on their hangers draped over a full-length mirror. She says, I just want to take one truckload and no more.