In a Glass House

by Nino Ricci

  I came over once or twice a week, arranging myself around Rita’s and Elena’s schedules, music lessons, Girl Guides, swimming. Their lives seemed endlessly leisured to me yet they talked about their various extracurricular activities with a bored dismissiveness, seeming happier simply to watch TV in the rec room. The rec room remained their enclave, where they seemed to live some secret other life, stripped of the privileges the Amhersts bestowed on them down to their realer, more common selves, merely bored adolescents as I’d been, awaiting some change that could transform them.

  Rita had turned thirteen in the spring, the suggestion of a bra beneath her blouses and dresses giving her an air now at once solemn and slightly comical. There was a fraught, suppressed urgency in her, her movements childishly impulsive, tomboyish, but then reined in at the last instant as if she’d remembered suddenly this new, adult body beginning to take shape around her. Her hair had begun to grow long again, and she had a habit of reaching up with both hands to flick it back but with her elbows in tight at her sides like folded wings, seeming at once to display and to shield herself, like the young girls in Italy who’d cover their mouths with a hand when they spoke to hide their lipstick. We’d grown more awkward with each other, avoided contact, our bodies seeming charged like the like poles of magnets; but then sometimes she’d brush up against me or lean into me suddenly on the rec room couch and some message would seem to pass between us. She and Elena shared their hermetic jokes, sealed themselves off in their arcane adolescence, yet I had the sense that the two of us were always aware of each other, that the room hummed around us with that awareness like static.

  I glimpsed once by chance through the sleeveless opening of one of Rita’s dresses the stiff lace of her bra, the pale mooning curve of the flesh that rimmed it. I avoided looking at her after that, realized that I had long avoided looking at her, had trained my eyes not to rest on her for more than a few fleeting seconds. But now each glance at her seemed more forbidden, etched in my mind like the quick furtive lines of a figure sketch. Images of her would flit past my mind’s eye, be suppressed, then be there again, the round of her shoulders, the hollow her throat dipped down to. I grew more distant with her, more fatherly, more severe, trying to retreat into a gruff, indifferent adultness. But some screen between us had fallen – we seemed to have become too familiar to each other again, to have reverted after the years of formality our separation had imposed on us to the brutal unspoken intimacy of siblings. She’d mimic love scenes from TV, aping their hackneyed dialogue, swooning into me on the couch; but there was a knowingness in her that chilled me, a kind of contempt, some dim awareness of the power she had over me. Every engagement between us seemed a tiny battle of wills, Rita drawing me in and then suddenly, pointedly, ignoring me, one instant all attention and the next casually oblivious.

  She and Elena and I were watching TV the day Nixon resigned: the show we were watching cut out, a newscaster came on, then Nixon.

  “This is boring,” Rita said.

  We watched a few minutes longer, and then Rita got up to change the channel.

  “Leave it,” I said.

  But she’d begun to turn through the channels. Every one of them showed Nixon; but she continued to turn.

  “I said leave it.”

  She turned finally to UHF, found a station there in the midst of a movie, returned to her seat.

  I was seething. I thought for an instant I’d strike her, felt the urge shoot through me like a spasm. Elena cast a furtive glance toward me from her seat, then we simply stayed as we were in charged silence.

  I got up a few minutes later without speaking and left the house. I sat for a moment in the car, my blood pounding, then began to back out of the Amhersts’ driveway, heard a screech of brakes, hit my own: an oncoming car had swerved to a stop. It wheeled around me now, the driver leering.

  “Asshole!”

  I pulled into a parking lot on Talbot. My hands were trembling; I felt tears coming, didn’t want to stop them but felt too exposed there to allow them. In my sudden frailness I thought for an instant that I touched something true about my feelings for Rita, deeper than all the distortions, than my anger, than my need; but I wouldn’t give in to it, couldn’t bring myself to relinquish this clear instance of hurt I could hold against her.

  I returned to the Amhersts’ only twice more that summer. The first time I sat watching TV again in the rec room, stuck in a sullenness which Rita feigned indifference to but seemed to circle around at a distance as if seeking the spot that would break it. It might have taken so little then to make things right between us, some small magnanimous gesture, adult and forgiving, a gesture the brother I wanted to be, light-hearted and winning and mature, would have been capable of. But instead I had only my sullenness to offer, which I could pass off at least as anger, was at least a language of sorts, more bearable than the mere confused awkwardness that seemed its alternative. Then toward the end of my visit there was a moment when she and Elena were joking together that I seemed genuinely forgotten. I saw myself for an instant as Rita might, with her child’s mixed sense of what people were, of what they might want from her, saw how she’d instinctively turn from me finally as from a question that couldn’t be answered.

  My last visit, at the end of the summer, I had supper with the Amhersts. There was an air of finality about the evening, of the relieved beneficence that came before a departure. It was odd to be reassembled again in our old formality, to see Rita and Elena revert to respectful silence, become small again: for the first time at that table I had the sense that they were more strangers to the Amhersts’ world than I was, less comprehending of it, something in their containment making me feel suddenly the full measure of their outsideness, perhaps simply the distance that separated child and adult or something more, the strangeness of being here in this house they didn’t belong to.

  “You’ll want to make sure you come out of school with a profession,” Mr. Amherst was saying to me. “That was my mistake, taking over the business. I’ve done all right, I can’t complain about that, but there’s no soul in it. After a while it’s just counting nickels and dimes.”

  “Don’t be silly, David, you just did what you thought was right. It’s different now, kids have more choices.”

  “Yes, well, all the same.”

  But it was odd to hear him speaking so plainly about himself, to hear that note of disappointment, of self-awareness.

  Before serving coffee Mrs. Amherst sent Rita and Elena upstairs to do homework. Rita said goodbye to me before going up.

  “So I guess you’re going back to school and stuff.”

  “Yeah, on Monday.”

  “I guess I’ll see you at Christmas or something.”

  “I dunno, maybe I’ll come back before that.”

  We brushed cheeks. I caught a whiff of the hot, milky smell of her breath.

  “Well, goodbye then.”

  And there was something different in her now, a shyness, a capitulation, as if we’d passed safely back into the separate spheres of younger sister and older brother.

  Afterwards I lingered. Mrs. Amherst served sherry in the living room, bringing out an ashtray to allow me to smoke. In this air of adultness the Amhersts seemed transformed, less perfect somehow, more human. Mrs. Amherst filled and refilled her glass until she was subtly but definitely drunk, her face taking on a surreal, leathery quality like a mask and her speech edged with a small hysteria, slowly thickening from its learned flat Canadianness into a British burr. I could see her suddenly in another life sitting contented around some kitchen table in England with her family or friends, not the abstraction of Englishness I’d seen her as but merely at home, in her element.

  “Do come again soon,” she said at the door, hugging me, an unheard of thing. “You’re practically part of the family.”

  She seemed truly drunk now, Mr. Amherst standing beside her flushed with embarrassment.

  “Maybe at Thanksgiving,” I said.

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nbsp; Riding home I could still feel the impress of her arms against my sides. I was glad to be leaving, to be spared a few months the awkwardness that would hang between us the next time we met because of that drunken moment of feeling.

  The next day, rummaging through the trunk in our basement for boxes to pack my things in, I came on the corduroy dress I had bought for Rita years before, folded away beneath a stack of old linen. I felt a throb of shame at the sight of it: it seemed such a shabby thing now, though Rita had only worn it a few months before outgrowing it. I remembered having hidden it here, childishly possessive, to keep Aunt Teresa from turning it into rags or throwing it out, wanting somehow to prolong the value of it. I held it up to myself, amazed at the smallness of it, couldn’t imagine now the person Rita had been when she’d first worn it, the brief furtive pleasure she’d taken in it then, not daring either to revel in it or take it for granted. For the first time I felt a relinquishing in me, a turning over of her to her other life, though still with a child’s guilty instinct I carefully refolded the dress, set it back in its place.

  XXI

  In my next three years at Centennial I felt a slow coalescing in me, some essence of what I was seeming gradually to distill itself from the mess of all that I’d been. That seemed what a life was in the end, not, as I’d imagined, a suspension the future intruded upon, precipitously, making you over, but merely this slow accumulation of things, what you woke up to find had been going on like some stranger’s life while you waited.

  I began to feel more at home in my aloneness. It was the thing I’d most fought against, most hated, yet also what made me most clearly myself, what I’d always clung to as the last refuge of what I was, and it seemed enough now merely to learn how to carry it with some dignity. There were people whose spheres I passed into for a time as I had into Verne’s, briefly part of their worlds, though like Verne they somehow remained always outside the true flow of my life – what I seemed to need was only the idea of them, the constellation they formed in my mind like a map of familiar territory. And there were a few women as well, relationships that entered my life like dreams and then faded like them, that quickly took on an oppressive intimacy while I was in them but that afterwards seemed strangely implausible. None of them ever lasted more than a matter of weeks or months, winding down with a deadening predictability from the first imagined closeness and promise to a strained awkwardness and then a parting.

  What seemed to sustain me in the end was my work, the sense of knowledge taking shape in me, assuming patterns as if building toward some final truth about things. I majored in English literature, becoming the expert now in this strangers’ language; though what drew me to literature was that it seemed to leave nothing out, to hold the whole world, and invariably I gravitated toward courses that crossed into other disciplines, psychology, religion, philosophy, more interested in the haze of meaning texts threw off than in their subtleties of structure and style. The world, its slow progress of ideas, took on a history and a logic; within them I looked always for ruptures, the hard sudden reversals when truth was turned on its head, nothing taken for granted but the brute random fact of existence.

  In the time it took me to finish my degree I had almost no contact with my family: I saw them for a week or so each Christmas, sometimes at Easter, perhaps a weekend or two in the summer; there were no regular phone calls, no letters, merely a tacit lapsing into estrangement. Summers I worked painting houses in the northern suburbs of Toronto, taking sublets in the graduate residence on campus and working twelve- and thirteen-hour days, six days a week, catching the bus at seven and then not home again till nine or ten at night. At bottom there was no compelling reason to work myself like that: I had a scholarship still to cover tuition; I had government loans I’d simply banked, wanting to have the money ready there when the loans came due; I had my father’s occasional handouts, his apparent readiness to help out if I should ask him to. But instead I behaved like an immigrant, asking for nothing, filling my life with work until it seemed a vessel I no longer occupied, merely set out every day then reclaimed at night for my brief dead hours of sleep.

  Weekend dances often drew groups of Italians into Centennial from the surrounding suburbs, usually slick-haired boys in platform shoes and tight shirts whom I felt nothing in common with, strutting and tough, seeming to wear their Italianness like a challenge. But there were few Italians who actually attended the university, those of us who did seeming like quiet interlopers within the university’s tidy enclave of privilege. There was an Italian in a satire class I took in second year who began to grow friendly with me at some point, Michael Iacobelli, a few years older than I was, the two of us seeming to come together with the same unspoken bond of forced difference and sameness that had joined me to Vince in high school, gradually gravitating toward one another in the after-class gatherings a group of us held in one of the residence pubs. Michael talked little at these gatherings, visibly set apart, balding and wiry and small like a wizening construction worker; though he remained true whenever he did speak to a peculiar iconoclasm, swerving always from the expected as if to subvert at once any thought people had that they were better than he was.

  “It’s not the oil crisis that’s going to bring the world down, it’s the humour crisis. People don’t laugh any more. Make a joke, for Christ’s sake.”

  But then when the group thinned down to just the two of us, as it usually did, there’d seem a silent, almost bored complicity between us as if a disguise had just fallen away.

  He lived with his parents still, in a subdivision not far from the campus, his street dwindling from the malls and highrises of Jane Street into a small-town decorum, spruce-treed and brick-bungalowed. The first time I visited him there I registered only an indifferent blur of familiarity, the vine bower out back, the pictures of Christ, the baroque excesses of furnishings and flowered ceramic and swirled plaster. People came and went: siblings, shadowy in the background, so that afterwards I couldn’t remember how many I’d met, what their names were; his mother, in apron and hairnet in the kitchen, greeting me with a curt, silent nod and a look of suspicion. Before going down to the rec room we sat a few minutes in the living room with his father, burly and gruff, enshrined in his armchair there like a monolith.

  “We live down St. Clair before, is better. Too many different people here now, drogha, black people, everything.”

  “Come on, Dad,” Michael said, good-humoured. “What did black people ever do to you?”

  But his father didn’t respond, walling himself up against the edge of condescension in Michael’s voice.

  “He gets into his moods,” Michael said afterwards. “He’s like those slugs, you poke them and they roll up into little balls.”

  Michael had been briefly addicted to heroin a few years before. He and two childhood friends, Perry and Gus, still did what they called chipping, no longer addicted but tripping out every month or so when the urge suddenly took them. The three of them would show up sometimes at my residence subtly altered, looking for distractions the way a cat sought movement, for some object outside themselves that could give a shape to the strange floating energy of their high. Gus took on a keen, malevolent irony when he was stoned, treacherous, mind-twisting; at the residence he’d hit on women in the pub with a manic onslaught of banter and innuendo.

  “Say, don’t I know you? I’m sure we met at that sexology conference down in Fresno, you were with Xaviera Hollander.”

  But it surprised me how often women were taken in by him, attracted to his outlandishness or perhaps simply too mystified by him to ward him off.

  The three of them formed an odd group, Michael the still centre around which the other two revolved like polar opposites, Gus an A-student, overbearing and articulate, Perry shambling and easygoing, a high-school dropout, grown eccentric with his unschooled intelligence. Yet they seemed to have evolved over the years into a single organism, even their differences, their marked individuality, their constant di
sputatious assertions of it, seeming the shift and flow of a common energy. For a time I fell under their spell, drawn into their sphere like a satellite by the collective gravity of them, part of them and not, wanting the community they seemed to offer yet feeling something in them that was meant as much to exclude as to attract, to hold the people they drew to them in abeyance like disciples. I mentioned to them once a socialist group I’d joined and felt suddenly like I’d been caught out in some betrayal of them, put on the defensive by their quick dismissal of the group though I myself had never taken it very seriously.

  “So what do you guys do?” Perry said. “Sit around and plan the revolution?”

  Of the group Gus was the most politicized, forever haranguing us over whatever issue had most recently caught his attention. But now he was all condescension and concern.

  “Victor, I thought you were smarter than that. Can’t you see, they’re brainwashing you. They’re as bad as the Moonies.”

  “You’re just talking off the top of your head. You’ve probably never had anything to do with this kind of thing.”

  “I don’t have to, Vic, believe me, I know what they’re like – you meet in some basement room, there’s the little group of them that runs things, there’s the people like you that sit at the back and don’t say anything and then never come back. It’s like a religion for them, Victor, they’re just looking for converts so they’ll feel they’re important. It doesn’t have anything to do with politics.”