Clear Skies, No Wind, 100% Visibility

by Theodora Armstrong

  “Oui.” It was a dish his father used to make for them at home, something simple he could whip up with very few ingredients at his disposal.

  “It’s me, Charlie,” he said loudly into her ear.

  “I know. I know,” she said, laughing and patting his hand, her once-perfect English thickened with the French accent from her childhood.

  “That’s right, Maman,” he said, “it’s Charlie.”

  “I know.” She laughed again. She was meticulously scraping the sides of the container to make sure she got every last scrap.

  “Aisha is having a baby.” The way he said it made it sound as though he wasn’t part of the equation. His mother didn’t even know who Aisha was. “Maman, can you hear me?” He leaned in close, letting his lips graze her ear. “A baby.” She looked down at her comforter with an absent smile, her eyes losing their focus in the garden print, a world of gardenias and roses and beautiful coloured birds.

  CHARLIE THROWS OPEN THE back door and finds Rose holding a newspaper over her head while smoking furiously, fat raindrops falling from the sky. “It’s fucking raining,” she says, stating the obvious. A raindrop hits Charlie on the forehead and trickles down the bridge of his nose. He ducks under the newspaper. “Would you believe there is a hundred-year-old lady in there sitting at a dirty table looking around for something? I imagine she’s looking for food. I know that’s hard to believe, this being a restaurant and all.” The tip of his nose is no more than an inch away from the tip of hers, his eyes bulging, warning her that if his head does explode, he will make sure it explodes all over her. “Why do I often find myself out here, reminding you of your job?”

  Rose smiles sweetly and takes a last drag on her cigarette. She turns her head politely so the smoke doesn’t hit his face. “All this nervous tension, Charlie.” She pulls her bleached hair into a tight ponytail that reveals the acne along her hairline. “You’ll give yourself an incurable disease.” She carefully butts her cigarette and then gives his shoulder an irritating rub before sauntering inside. She pains him. Oh God, she pains him.

  “There are other restaurants in this neighbourhood,” Charlie shouts at the back of her head as he follows her down the hall. Her tattoos wrap around her bony arms like octopus tentacles. She is so skinny Charlie can’t imagine how all of her organs fit into her torso. He wants to pick her up and plunk her headfirst into one of the garbage cans. “Topher’s here,” he yells. “I’m sure he’d be happy to give you a job.” His voice carries out across the mostly empty dining room. The elderly woman looks up, startled. Topher and Martin are drinking martinis at the bar. Charlie storms into the office and slams the door behind him. “I’d like that insolent little girl fired.”

  “Who?” Susan says, glancing up briefly before going back to her work on the computer. There’s an ugly bruise around her left eye, the lid swollen and red.

  “What happened to your face?” He knows the answer to the question; she’s been fighting with her wife for weeks.

  “Oh,” Susan waves his words away while scanning her computer screen. She types the way she eats — efficient as a robot. If he lingers in the office long enough, Charlie knows he’ll get the full story. There’s a curiosity nagging at him, but he’s not sure he cares enough to go through what has the potential to be an hour-long introspection. The staff have been getting regular updates on the abuse Susan suffers at the hands of her wife. She’ll come to work visibly upset, tight-lipped, begging everyone to leave her alone, but by the end of the night the entire story will have trickled out and suddenly you’re standing in a puddle of her gloom. Charlie saw Susan’s wife at the coffee shop last week, her arm in a sling. He’s guessing the punches are thrown from both sides. He’s expecting a divorce announcement any day now. “Sorry,” she says, turning in her swivel chair to face him, “who do you want fired?”

  “Rose. Rose, once again. I wanted her fired last week and last month and last year.” The phone rings and Susan answers, “Marinacove, Susan speaking.” After a string of pleasantries she hands the phone to Charlie. “It’s Aisha.” Charlie grabs the phone, his foot already tapping impatiently. He doesn’t like calls at work. “What’s up?”

  “Oh, not much.” Aisha’s voice floats through the line, high and soft, like a balloon disappearing in a blue sky. “Just called to say hi.”

  “Aisha.” Charlie’s voice is a pin poised to deflate. “I’m in the middle of dinner prep.”

  “Well, I was just feeling, oh, I don’t know . . .” She lists off a string of aches and pains, to which Charlie makes all the appropriate hums and grunts. “You’re pregnant,” he says finally, “you’re not supposed to feel well.”

  “She okay?” Susan says, after he’s hung up the phone.

  “She’s fickle right now. She’s all over the place. She’s driving me nuts.” Charlie leans back in his chair and rubs his temples. “I’m fucking tired.”

  “She’s the one making the baby,” Susan says, angling her chair back and examining him. “You don’t even understand tired.” The fluorescent lights give her bruise a purplish sheen. The ugly eye, the office clutter, the bad lighting — it all makes Charlie suddenly feel a dark sadness, a wrench in his gut that makes him want to crawl back into bed and forget his life. He’s not in the mood for one of Susan’s lectures. What does Susan know? She’s never had a baby. He thinks about his beverage sitting above the pass-bar in the kitchen. He hasn’t figured out how to drink in front of her yet. She’s always sniffing around.

  “There’s no firing today. I called everyone else off because of the storm.” The window behind Susan’s head is being pelted with rain and beyond the window the ocean lashes the beach and pier. Charlie can barely see the lights of the Lions Gate Bridge through the weather. “Unless you want to put on an apron tonight?”

  “Do you think people want to look at this while they eat?” Charlie says, motioning from his sweaty brow down to his rotting shoes.

  “No,” she says, giving him a stony once-over. He waits for her to laugh, but her gaze remains level. “Did you think I was serious?”

  “Tomorrow then, immediately,” he says, stretching his neck from side to side, releasing a series of loud cracks. He indulges in an impressive yawn, loud and wide-mouthed, and thumbs one of his cookbooks, rubbing at sticky spots along the way. The staff are always in here, loitering, stealing pencils, gumming up things with their dirty fingers. He pinches his arm, using the pain to keep his eyes open. “Rose refuses to call me Chef, you know,” he adds, to strengthen his case. Sleep is trying to take over his body — it talks to him, tells him things like it’s okay to curl up in a corner under the desk, tells him no one will notice if he sleeps in his car for a half hour before the dinner service. He keeps asserting to himself that no, it is not okay, but his resolve is waning. Sleep may have a point.

  “It looks bad, doesn’t it?” Susan says, fussing with her hair as though that will somehow take the swelling away from her eye. He’s been staring at it without realizing. He may have been sleeping with his eyes open.

  “I’d give you a steak to put on it, but our food costs — ”

  “That’s why I don’t have a kid,” she says, examining her eye in the reflection off the computer screen. “She’d fuck it up. Do you worry about that, about fucking up this little person?”

  “I don’t think about it much,” Charlie says, skimming a recipe for Bayonne ham with petits pois, allowing another exaggerated yawn.

  “Don’t,” Susan says, gripping Charlie’s chair and swivelling it so they face each other, “fuck up your kid.” Charlie’s head swings around on his limp neck. “Christ, Susan.” He treads at the floor to try and release his chair from her grip, but she hangs on. The eye is worse up close, bloodshot and weepy. It shocks him out of his lethargy for a brief moment, the pain inching up his sternum once again, throbbing like a bad memory. He taps his index finger at the recipe, as though he’s
found the answer to both of their problems. It’s right there in the Dijon mustard sauce. “I think I’ll do ham for a Christmas feature this year.”

  Rose pops her head into the office. “I have one bloody table. All she wants is coffee and the entire cream shipment is spoiled. She’s banging her mug on the table.”

  Susan releases Charlie’s chair and gets up to leave.

  “I want to talk before dinner service begins,” he says. She’s going to make him wait for their sit-down. It’s probably part of her negotiating strategy. The longer she makes him wait, the happier he’ll be with anything, but he knows that game and he has a number in mind and nothing is going to convince him otherwise.

  “Let me deal with this first,” she says, as she trots out the door.

  Charlie lays his head down on the desk and lets his eyes blur. The wind howls outside. He pretends the wail is one of his mother’s French lullabies singing him into a deep sleep. Did she ever sing him lullabies? He can’t remember. His father would sing him French drinking songs but always got the words mixed up. The fatigue is worse today. Lately Charlie has been having trouble sleeping at night. He dreams of his teeth chipping, crumbling, falling out. Last night, as he got into bed at four in the morning, Aisha pulled his hand to her belly. He imagined a tiny, sharp-toothed raptor delicately clawing at the lining of her womb, plotting its escape. “Stay still. Pay attention,” she said, as though the fetus was about to deliver an astounding recital from her belly. She gripped his hand and moved it around, trying to anticipate the spot where a kick or punch might land, but he didn’t feel a thing. He told himself it was the baby’s cautious respect of his authority. “Do you want something to eat?” he said, getting out of bed.

  “You have to be patient, Charlie,” she said, poking at her belly to try and wake the beast.

  “There’s smoked duck with egg noodles in the fridge.” She had wanted duck for an entire week: confit, à l’orange, red-wine braised, seared with cherries and port sauce. “No duck,” she said. She stretched and gazed up at the ceiling, telepathizing with the barnacle. It was as though she was talking across worlds to the dead, the intensity she summoned to choose her next meal. “Pasta.” She untied and retied the bun on top of her head. “Something creamy. No tomatoes.”

  “Pasta. Creamy,” he muttered, as he made his way into the kitchen.

  They sat in bed to eat with linen napkins on their laps. He cradled the bowl, twirling the fork in the noodles and placing a generous bite in her sweet, pink mouth. Nothing rivalled the approval of a pregnant woman — if he got it right she bathed him in praise. “Oh, oh, oh.” She closed her eyes and sank back on the pillow. She was not difficult to please. She grabbed the bowl from him, balancing it on her belly. “You don’t want any,” she said, offering him a spoonful.

  “No.” He sat back, feeling, for once in a long time, satisfied. He watched her eat in silence, each spin of her fork, each dart of her tongue along her lips.

  “Charlie,” Aisha said, putting down her fork. “We’re having a baby.” She had never admitted this fact before — we, his responsibility. “I’m scared.”

  He got out of bed and left her lying there alone with her noodles.

  “Where are you going now?” she said, sitting up and pushing the bowl aside.

  “You need parmesan,” he said, rushing to the kitchen.

  “But I’m almost done,” she called after him.

  He got distracted once he left the room. The dishwasher needed to be loaded. There was a recipe he wanted to check. He played some online poker. When he got back to the bedroom with the parmesan, Aisha was asleep, the bowl of pasta cold on the bedside table.

  Crumbling teeth are a symbol: someone told him that once, a few years ago now, at an underground dinner party in the West End. The soirée was hosted by a Michelin-star-lauded chef, something overpriced and overrated, and very private and very chic. There was a secret word for the buzz code — chateauneuf or kumquat or bluefin. Basically it was a hundred and twenty dollars to sit on tasselled cushions around an egomaniacal asshole’s coffee table and sample “epicurean delights” as described by said asshole. Charlie wore his most ironic T-shirt.

  The conversation that night was appropriately diaphanous. Between the foie gras toasts and the beef tartare, talk turned to worst fears. A woman with impossibly long hair had him wedged into a corner between a sofa and an armchair; the hair tumbled in dark waves nearly to her waist and he could smell her sweat under the citrus of her shampoo. Usually he hated the intimacy of small spaces and discussions like this one, but after five grapefruit soju cocktails he was working on a decent buzz with a freshly cracked beer in hand he’d found hiding at the back of the fridge.

  The group wouldn’t accept his first answer: he had no fears. “Everyone has a fear, Charlie,” the host said, stepping out from his kitchen lair. “Charlie,” he said slyly, pointing a wine glass at him, accidentally emptying the last droplets of red onto the white-tiled floor, “come on now, Charlie. What about fear of failure? What about fear of an empty restaurant, Charlie?” Charlie had just started working at Marinacove. He wanted the host to stop taking digs, so he told them about his teeth. The long-haired woman was the only one concerned for him. She was still asking for specifics and inspecting his mouth long after everyone else had moved on to the man who was terrified of Canada geese. “It means something,” she said, flipping her hair importantly from one shoulder to the other. Tiny beads of sweat sprouted on her upper lip. Her mane was like a black cloak around her shoulders. “But what?” he howled, “What does it mean?” The alcohol and the woman’s beautiful hair were causing him to overreact. Later, she played the piano with everyone gathered around like a Christmas cliché, but Charlie felt he was the only other one there — just him, bowed beside Aisha at the keys.

  He’s never bothered to look up the meaning of the recurring nightmare, but he is still filled with dread and a sense of suffocation whenever he wakes up searching for his teeth in the sheets. Last night when he came to bed, he fell asleep immediately and had the worst nightmare yet. He kept drifting back to sleep only to be startled awake again and again. In this dream, all his teeth were gone and Rose was sitting across from him, spooning a salmon-coloured purée into his mouth, her tattoos slithering around her skinny arms. He woke in a cold sweat, still able to taste the fishiness, feel the texture in his mouth, the motion of his gums and tongue masticating the thick substance, trying to ease it down his throat. He was beginning to think he may have other fears, ones that were lying dormant and were stirring now, stretching their spindly arms and yawning.

  Long after Aisha had fallen asleep Charlie lay wide awake, his hand on her belly while she snored peacefully beside him. The long-armed maple tapped at their window — a warning of the storm to come. A sharp wind off the ocean cut past the apartment buildings and rattled the branches, sending orange showers of leaves to the ground and ushering them down the street like a bunch of boisterous schoolchildren on a field trip. Charlie lay there listening to the scratching along the pavement, his mind a hot element fuelled by the day at the restaurant and by Aisha, her fear, the barnacle. He tried to let his mind cool, thinking of his body in the icemaker at work, chunks of ice clunking him in the forehead. Sleep will come. Clunk. Sleep will come. Clunk. He no longer wanted to close his eyes because of the pink purée nightmare. When the sun rose his eyes would shut. He had his father to thank for that.

  In the dark, he stared at Aisha, his hand still resting on her belly. Who was this woman? How did she get there beside him? How was it that some of his DNA was now furiously multiplying inside her body? How could he explain to Aisha that it was all up to her, that no one had taught him how to be a father? He had been taught how to be a ghost, a spectre in the back kitchen. He felt a strong kick and jumped, his hand shooting into the air.

  The maple tree outside the window tapped out answers in undecipherable Morse code. As he w
aited for the first whispers of sun, he imagined buying a chainsaw and climbing up into that goddamn maple tree to get rid of that tap, tap, tapping for good.

  CHARLIE LIFTS HIS HEAD off the desk and looks out the window. Sinister grey waves are rising from the surface of the water, taking their time, anticipating their own destruction once they reach their destination. Pain splinters through Charlie’s head. He fell into a deep, dream-saddled sleep — how long was he out for? When he staggers out of the office Topher is gone. Martin is polishing glasses and chatting with Susan. Rich, Tara, and James are cleaning the forgotten corners of the kitchen. The elderly woman is still there, with Rose sitting across from her. Their table is clean and fresh cups of steaming coffee sit in front of them. They’re both staring at the rolling ocean. Charlie can’t even look at them. He busies himself on the line, knocking back the rest of his drink and prepping the sweet garlic purée for tonight’s roast chicken. When Rose walks by he rattles his empty cup at her and before long there is a fresh drink in front of him. He takes a swallow: strong — Rose is trying to push him over the edge. At this point in the evening the restaurant is usually bustling, but tonight a dreary hush floats over the near-empty dining room.

  “Tara,” he says, “you can go home.” Her apron is off before he’s even finished the sentence. Out of the corner of his eye he watches Rich and James for any mistakes while they’re cooking. “Vinegar rag that plate, James. I can see your greasy fingertips all over the rim.”

  Customers begin to trickle in looking wet and wind-haggard, shaking out their coats and umbrellas. Aged parents with their sullen teenagers, eager-eyed tourists hungry from their day of sightseeing, girlfriends with arms linked in preparation to hunker down for a couple good hours of gossip; everyone wants to sit at the windows for a better view of the storm. Charlie glares at Susan’s back while she jabbers with Martin, trying to burn two perfect circles through her shiny suit jacket. An older couple walks into the restaurant and Charlie can tell by the way they survey the room — disinterest and mild disgust — that they have money. Rose takes them to a quiet corner table, performing the little bows she reserves for the wealthy.