“We had the logs brought over by boat, one by one, from the boat launch on the next lake. There’s a secret way in, just for us,” Janine said. “Of course, we had to make the windows larger. The first old log houses used heavy oiled paper for glass. Did you know that, Marylee?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Well, no one could read then and it was off to bed with the sun so it didn’t matter,” Janine told her. “Look at those beautiful windows!” Janine said. “They’re from the last TB sanitorium in the Ottawa Valley. Storm windows too. They used to leave patients out on these glassed-in porches, even in winter. Imagine!”
I knew it made me sound like a naïve child, so I was careful to keep anything querulous out of my tone, “Where are the closest neighbours?”
“Not on this lake! No motorboat-loving, hotdog-chomping, beer-slugging, radio-blasting cretins within five miles. We bought the whole lake. The last of the original homesteaders was in a nursing home. Private sale. We got it for a song.”
“Come on Shae, join in on the hiking song,” his father said, suddenly hearty.
“Dad, if you want to sing it, go ahead. We’re here and I’m not five years old,” Shae said.
She did hear his Dad singing outside while he was chopping wood for the wood stove, an old song she heard long ago, not knowing the words. She almost laughed at the corny accent, so unfamiliar. His father didn’t have a lot to say, but he was usually very precise and scientific, just as she would have expected from an engineer who studied aircraft design in the wind tunnel at the National Research Council.
When I was young I used to wait
On the boss and hand him his plate
And pass down the bottle when he got dry
And brush away the blue tail fly
Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care
Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care
Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care
My master’s gone away.
Shae’s mother lit the oil lanterns, then the wood stove, and until it finally got warm, the snow we tracked in and swept from our shoulders glittered on the dark wood floor like silver filigree in the honey-coloured light. Our breath froze and fell as tiny crystals onto the round oak table.
Shae nudged the small of my back with his elbow and I followed his eyes to the massive wood stove that was starting to tick as the metal warmed up. Master Climax was written on it in happy script, a long-ago innocent brand name.
“Your wish is my command,” he whispered to me, but instead of giggling, I stepped away from him.
His mother noticed and came over to me, smoothed my hair with her hands and kissed my forehead. She had never done this before. The impression left by her warm lips tingled cold for a long time. I had the feeling that she left a lipstick mark on me but couldn’t check. There were no mirrors anywhere.
Once the downstairs was starting to get warm, she led us up the stairs and left us alone in the room with the one double bed, across the hall from their own. She had pointed out the wrought-iron vent in the floor.
“This is the warmest room,” she said. “And the most private.”
“What’s wrong?” Shae asked me once she’d gone back downstairs.
I was standing just inside the room, calming myself by tracing with my eyes the Mexican zigzag motif of the bedspread, woven in reds and yellows intersected by thin lines of lightning blue. It must have been made by his mother on her big loom in the basement. I wondered why the loom’s hulking shape, the shadowy corners of the unfinished cellar were such an aphrodisiac but this lovely bedroom, tacit approval of his parents, and accoutrements of a rustic B&B were so intimidating.
He saw me looking at the bed and said, “Yeah, it’s little weird. For me too.”
“They’re right there across from us. I couldn’t.”
He came up behind me and nestled his face in my hair. “They won’t come in. They never come downstairs at home. You know that.”
He wrapped his arms around me from behind, his palm cupping my left breast. But I could hear his mother downstairs, cast iron frying pan against cast iron stove. It sounded like a giant bell. I felt myself stiffening.
“You have to admit, it’s a bit of a waste. I hoped we could sneak away and here we are, given a room for the night.”
“I just can’t. Not here. Not now.”
“Okay, okay, but I’ve never really gotten it. You do everything else, we both get off all the time, but not that. What’s so great about being a virgin?”
“I don’t think of myself as a virgin. That’s just a technicality.”
“Technicality. You sound like a lawyer.”
I felt a familiar resistance to him that I couldn’t explain. Something about not being subsumed. Something about not being too available and losing track of my own desires and aspirations. I never assumed we would stay together, and we didn’t, but it wasn’t until summer that we broke up. In another city where he was working in a restaurant kitchen, we had a fight that started in a stranger’s apartment on Peel Street and went on, his will pitted against mine, the whole evening until he delivered me to the metro stop so I could catch a Greyhound back to Ottawa. He sent me down the wrong stairway first and stood across the tracks from me on the opposite platform, gesticulating, pointing at his feet. I was so offended, I pretended I didn’t know him, and soon enough, I didn’t.
“No means no,” I said, suddenly stubborn, the seeds of our summer fight being sowed in a gorgeous rustic bedroom on the wintry lake. Even a year later, that would have been the most irresistibly erotic situation. The oil lamp his mother lit created a number of golden halos: oblong on ivory lace curtains, circular with a dark heart on the rough squared beams of the ceiling above us.
“Now you really do sound like a lawyer,” he said.
“And what do you sound like? A wheedling jerk. Soon you’ll be telling me it really really hurts.”
His mother called up the stairs, something about wine and dinner being ready in a little while. It could have gone either way, and he chose the easier path.
“Okay. We’ll just hang a blanket between us like a courting couple back on the homestead. We’ll bundle, if that’s what you want.”
We spent the night under the blankets, fully clothed. I don’t even think we kissed. He was mostly turned on his side, away from me. The night was windless and quiet, not a bird or tick of snow against the window, no electric hum. I wondered if his parents were lying awake in their room or if they’d already fallen asleep. A while later, I heard his mother’s voice low and broken, as though she was crying. What hidden sorrow was she expressing, but then both their voices got louder, rhythmic, in unison.
SHE’S SHOWING ME another album, not noticing how distracted I’ve been. Shae as a baby wearing a white matching sweater set, Shae in a basin, splashing water on the kitchen table.
“When he was born, the doctor said, ‘He’s going to make some woman very happy.’ I’m so glad you’re here to talk to. Most other people wouldn’t understand, but you could handle it. You were such a little slip of a girl at seventeen, I wondered if his endowment would scare you off.”
I may be 37 years old, but she’s shocked me. I feel as though I’m back at the cottage, warding off sexual pressure.
“Maybe I didn’t handle it.”
She laughs. “So now you tell me! All my hopes for you were for naught.” She wags her index finger at me as though I really have been a bad little girl.
The truth was I was relieved when my long-term lovers after him were a better fit. In every way, the men who followed suited me better. Although there was never another mother like his. I realized, rapt as I was by her cheekbones and upturned lips, that I’d been pining for her ever since my teens.
“I waited a long time for grandchildren. How I longed for them … Maybe if I’d had those other children. You know they say that abortion can raise your risk of cancer, and I had two. One before Shae and another one after. Then I had my tubes tied, but I regr
et it. I regretted it a year later once I truly knew I wasn’t going to conceive again.”
“Why did you?”
“What? End the pregnancies? Sometimes I wonder. I was sick, so sick I couldn’t stand it and found myself almost praying, ‘Please let this be over, let me have a miscarriage.’ Then I thought why can’t I? I’d actually marched for reproductive rights. So I did.”
“But you had Shae.”
“I felt just a little sick with Shae. They say that one gender or the other will make the mother sicker. Maybe they were girls. I hate to think that now. I would have loved to have daughters. Then I wanted grandchildren so badly. I didn’t really care how they came. I just wanted them.”
I’m quiet, wondering if I’m hearing what she means for me to hear.
“I was so heartbroken when you stopped coming here. Shae never told me why, but I want you to know, I wouldn’t have minded, not one bit, if you and Shae had gotten pregnant.”
“That would have been a disaster for me,” I say and smile, reminding her that she can’t be serious.
“We delay things too long in this culture. You were a mature girl, a smart girl. Sometimes having too much choice about these things just takes what we want away from us.”
I don’t look at her and she flutters a little beside me, presses my arm gently with her dry palm.
“But that’s all idle speculation, isn’t it? You have a rich life, an important life.”
She takes out another photo album, leaving the old one open on the coffee table.
“And here’s my sweetie, Erica, Shae’s daughter. I went over to Lagos for the birth.”
I’m looking at a photo of Janine holding the tightly bundled newborn, and although I can’t really see her face clearly, I tell her that the baby is beautiful.
“But when she was born I told myself I better not get too attached. I could see the marriage wasn’t working out. His wife is … tight, too tight for him.”
I could mistake her intention, so discombobulated I am by the direction this whole conversation has taken. Is she too tight for him sexually, is this what Janine is saying? What exactly does she mean? She reads my mind again and laughs, saying again, “I mean wound tight like a spring. Tense.”
She tells me she only saw her grandchild that once, three years ago when she was there for the birth. Being there, actually helping in the room, was a miracle. Shae came home to arrange for her to get some help when she first started chemotherapy but Karen and the baby stayed in Africa. She hasn’t been well enough or free enough from treatment to fly halfway around the world.
She flips to the earlier pages of the album, settling on a two-page spread that is so intimate I at first look away.
Karen, Shae’s wife, is lying on her side in obvious pain, one hand grasping the railing of the hospital bed. Then she’s propped up on her back with her eyes closed. Her hospital gown is lifted and Shae’s hands are on her belly. I purposely don’t look at the patch of hair between her legs. The photo on the next page gives me no choice: it’s a close up of her pubis, the baby’s darker hair just visible beyond the purplish bulge, the extended lips. I hope Janine was using a zoom and not perched on the bed leaning in for the shot. Then a photo of Karen pushing, being held up by Shae. Her delicate face from earlier photographs is unrecognizable. She’s snarling, mouth open, all the power of her neck, arms, legs focused on this one task. Then blood in the bed, the spiraling tough purple cord as the baby is held above her, but still tethered to her mother’s body. The stitching, the exhaustion, the baby put to her mother’s breast. I see a smear of blood near Karen’s armpit, her nipple pulled like taffy. In the next photo, Shae holds his wife’s breast to the baby’s mouth.
Janine notices me shifting away from the album. It’s too intimate, studying this woman at her most vulnerable.
“I’m sorry, Marylee. I’ve been insensitive. That’s what you most want yourself, a baby. I shouldn’t have shown you these photos.”
We talk more about my parents, whom she is glad to hear are well. She tells me about some of the teachers at the high school who’ve died. I pour another cup of tea from the pottery teapot so that I don’t seem to be in too much of a hurry, but I manage to finish off the cup in a couple of minutes because the tea has cooled. I rise to leave. As she’s lifting my coat off the hanger in the front hall, she says, “You should come back in a couple of weeks. Shae will be here for meetings at the end of January. You two could catch up.”
“That would be nice,” I tell her. She hugs me, hard, and I feel the ribs in her back, strangely close to her spine. I hold her an extra minute to transfer my warmth to her because I know I’ll never see her again.
Lucky
A FEW MONTHS BEFORE MY FATHER DIED, he won over $95,000 at the casino across the river, not all at once, but over a couple of weeks, in the middle of the night when I thought he was sleeping. It was like the blast of light before a star burns out—that last run of spectacular luck.
“Why didn’t you call me when the furnace died?” I asked him.
The cold had awakened him and he dressed, fetched his fanny pack of poker chips and money from his hiding place in the basement and called a taxi to take him to a place he knew was warm and welcoming 24 hours a day. I could imagine him at three in the morning standing in his black leather jacket, plaid scarf, and matching leather newsboy cap at the dining room window watching for the sweep of headlights across the dry snow, the heft of the black car lifting little whirlpools of tiny sequins as the taxi pulled up the driveway. Then, leaning against an icy middle-of-the-night blackness, my father would have had to steady himself with his hand on the warm hood, heard the ticking of the warm motor, then smelled the air-freshened chemical scent of pine.
“It was Valentine’s Day. I didn’t want to take you away from your sweetie. And maybe you’d had a little too much to drink.”
“You could have taken the taxi to my place. I wouldn’t leave you out in the cold,” I said but he didn’t answer because this hasn’t always been true. When he was drinking and out of control I did leave him out in the cold, for years in fact. Left out on my doorstep, banging on the glass to be acknowledged, out of my life for as long as I could stand the guilt. This current period of diligent closeness was so unexpected, maybe he didn’t trust it. Being the good daughter was certainly a strange experience for me. Being back in his life when he was 84 years old meant that I’d be there for the long haul, whatever that would mean. I knew that, but maybe he didn’t. I must have seemed as ephemeral and unreliable as he had been when I was growing up.
“Good thing I didn’t,” he said. “I wouldn’t have anything to show for lying in bed like an old man. You’ve got to get out there and strike when the iron’s hot. That’s what I told the guy who drove me home.”
“You shouldn’t have told him you’d won. How much money did you have?”
“About $40,000.”
“You told a taxi driver that you had that kind of cash on you?” I was so alarmed I was almost yelling at him, but my father just laughed.
“The guy said, ‘In my dreams. I’m that lucky in my dreams.’”
“He could have mugged you! Thrown you into a ditch. He could have helped you into the house and pushed you down the stairs.”
“Not Fariq. He said to call him any time. Gave me his personal number.”
He must have used that personal number a few more times because by the end of February he claimed to be close to $100,000.
“It’s your mother,” he said when I drove him to the bank, insisting that he deposit all but a few hundred of the money he won at the casino. But he kept thousands of dollars in his back pocket. Maybe more—even in old age he had the habits of an addict. Would his luck go this way or that? Either way, he would hedge his bets. Make sure he could keep going. Even though he was letting me take him to the bank, he had his plans. I could tell by the way he was looking at his fingernails and not at me, his wrists turned towards his body as though he was already h
olding a hand of cards, protective and secretive, as if sheltering something that could fly up out of his grasp.
“I found her little purse. The one she wore over her shoulder, all packed and ready to go, with lucky chips, lipstick and 200 dollars in coins. You know how she liked the slots. No skill in that, the odds are all for the house, but she enjoyed it. Now she’s my lucky charm.”
My mother had died the fall before, leaving him alone in the big suburban house with too much garden to tend. This was the last thing I would have expected. He had always been the one suddenly in intensive care after another suicide attempt, four in all. But he was lucky a student noticed the light on in his office one Sunday night. Lucky the neighbor heard his car running in the garage another time. Lucky he didn’t have brain damage. Lucky liver, lucky kidneys. Lucky the police didn’t stop him when he lightly bounced off the abutment, that he never had a car accident, killed a child, lost his job.
Thinking of these dark possible outcomes that he’d somehow dodged, I felt the same wave of shame I felt years ago when I dropped by a party at the university celebrating his 20 years as a professor. From the doorway of the darkened room, I saw him in his old Air Force uniform doing a crazy dance punctuated by deep bends from the waist that showed off his blazingly white underwear because the too-tight pants had split. Whoo! The crowd went wild every time he took that dip, usually off-time to the loud rock music. As far as I could tell, the room was filled with students and not his colleagues. My mother hadn’t gone to the party—she never did—and he had wanted at least part of his family there.
Blood Secrets Page 18
