Are we safe anywhere? Ceese recalls reading two large-print headlines from a prominent poster on the wall of the Breast Clinic, the last time she had a mammogram. The first was: WATCH FOR ASYMMETRY AND SKIN CHANGES. The second was not addressed to her at all, although it was part of the same poster. It read: MEN, KNOW YOUR TESTICLES. Ceese has never seen a man at the Breast Clinic.
Evan phones, in the evening. She looks at the receiver as if it holds the voice of a stranger who knows things about her family. “I’m about to start driving again,” she tells him, and realizes that after she hangs up she will weep. I want my husband, my companion. I want my old life.
She has nothing, really, to cry about. She doesn’t even know if the new plastic eye is capable of allowing tears. She sends a message to Lucy, who replies: Your NOT-crying is like the movie stars who keep smiling through the picture. They put Vaseline on their teeth. And then there’s you: ‘I vow not to cry. I vill not cry. I vant to be alone!’
Ceese’s vision is less blurred; her four-week follow-up appointment is looming. Evan will be home the same day as the appointment, as it turns out. By the time he arrives, she’ll have a new prescription; she’ll have ordered new glasses; her eyes will welcome symbiosis and binocular vision.
She thinks of how, in dim light, a tiny crescent moon appears at the edge of her peripheral vision; how she changes position quickly to make the moon go away—just in case it means that something’s wrong. She has read that her implanted lens is made of the same material airplane windshields are made of; that it will last fifty to sixty years. This is comforting. When she sees the surgeon for her final appointment, he tells her that the eye is healing. It’s just fine.
“Any questions?” he asks.
“Where do you store the replacement lenses?”
Surprised, he tells her that they are in cabinet drawers in another room.
“How big are they?”
“Small, very small. They come in different sizes.”
But she doesn’t want to see. In any case, he doesn’t offer.
She clutches her prescription in her hand and puts on her dark glasses. (You must wear dark glasses, even to hang out the clothes, she has read, but who has a clothesline in the city?) She heads out into the sun.
As she walks towards the Eyewear shop, she is arrested by a blaze of greenery in a small park. Her feet won’t move forward. She raises her sunglasses the tiniest bit. The verdant colour rushes into her eye, her plastic eye. She has forgotten that this is July, that the visual world is rich, so rich. That flowers can slip their images through your tiny pupil and make their assault in scarlet and vermilion, in ruby and crimson.
O, the wonderful sights to see. She walks along, more slowly now, and tries to think of the most beautiful sight she has ever seen. But all she can think of, all she can remember, is a Saturday morning in May when she and Evan were having breakfast at a café in the market, sitting on an outdoor balcony above street level. She looked down at the crowd below and watched the lights change at the crosswalk, half a block away. And then, a giant box of French fries on legs—perhaps seven feet tall—crossed the street and began to walk towards the café.
She’d laughed and laughed as the fries approached, individual fingerlings flopping side to side as they jutted out of the box. There was no sign of a head above or a body below—only legs and the box of fries jaunting along through the market crowd. The sight was so absurd she couldn’t stop laughing, waves of hysteria rolling through her.
Evan, bemused, said, “Get a grip, Ceese,” and sipped his coffee. But she was choking on hers.
Maybe it was the funniest, maybe the most bizarre sight she has ever seen. She didn’t know then and she doesn’t know now. For now, it’s the only scene she can call up. She’ll remind Evan when she picks him up at the airport. See if he remembers.
And then she’ll say, “The ayes have it.” And the best thing about this—she won’t have to look him in the eye—is that Evan (she hopes, she prays) will completely understand.
Man Without Face
There is a man in one of my old childhood comics and, in the story, the man has stopped overnight at a hotel in an English town. One of those towns with narrow red brick houses and unfriendly, ruddy-cheeked citizens; a town where men wear tweeds and black scapulars as they stride over cobbled streets.
In the morning, when the man goes to the sink to wash and shave, he looks in the mirror but he has no face. Where eyes eyebrows nose and mouth had been, there is only an oval of smooth blank skin. Did his face rub off on the towel? Did I then ask myself: how can he see his no-face if he has no eyes? How can he breathe with no nose, no mouth? By some leap of faith into true horror, the man at the sink and I knew and believed that all of this was possible.
Why do I think of this, why, when I think of my own father tripping off my front step and falling flat on his face on the newly cut grass? Always one to cover his tracks, he picked himself up and stepped, even nimbly, into the waiting taxi. Nothing was said. Perhaps, at the hotel the next morning, he didn’t remember. That’s the part I never knew and never asked. How much did he remember?
Just before Father fell on his face, he’d been sitting on my living-room rug trying to organize a singsong. He was wearing a summer shirt and khaki shorts. His cheeks were flushed, and he was slapping his bare legs against the rug as he roared through the lyrics of “In the Summertime,” a song he knew well but that none of us did. Not that we could have sung with him anyway. Not I, nor my husband, nor our children, nor my twin sister, Beryl, who lived in the same city. Not one of us sang with my father.
Burr and I lived with our parents, a mile and a half from Greenly. We had no family car, so to do our shopping we had to take the bus that rattled past our house on the dirt road. There was little traffic, but occasionally some old car bumped by and raised a cloud of dust. Father would say, “There goes Percy to take salt to his cows,” or “Mrs. Leary must have run off on Telly again. Serves him right, the damned fool.”
Behind our house and beyond a fold of hills, there was a rocky place thick with trees. A ten-minute walk past that took us to a waterfall that cut its way down a narrow gorge and opened to slow rolling farmland. The place we lived in was not like that. Thorn and crabapple and chokecherry grew close together and dust blew in off the road. That’s how I remember it.
Burr and I made our way as often as we could to the waterfall. The climb was steep, but midway to the top and, behind the water, there was a kind of half cave, a niche where we could hide away without getting wet, where we could bring our comics to read, where we could watch the water tumble down—and discuss our father. His drinking was the first topic before we got to the second. Why did Mother marry him?
“Why does he drink?”
“How should I know?”
“Do you think he’s always been like this?”
“If he has, why would she have married him?”
“Why did they have us?”
We broke off pieces of limestone from the sides of the cave and tossed them through the waterfall. If Father had known where we were, we’d have been in trouble.
“The old fart,” Burr said, daring, watching to see if I’d react.
“Old fart,” I said back, and threw a chunk of stone.
“Old fart, old fart.” We chanted into the back of the waterfall, louder and louder, until we were shouting above its roar, holding our sides, amazed at the release of our own laughter.
We became serious again.
“What about Mother? Why does she put up with him?”
“She’s trying to keep the peace.”
This was an expression our mother herself used. In tightlipped grimace, she said, “Try to keep the peace,” as she fed us early on a Friday night before he came home from the tavern where he’d already begun his weekend binge after leaving the cheese factory. Dressed in his old suit, shirt and tie, he’d just performed his week’s work, keeping the books in a tiny office that reeked of curd
s.
Mother invented errands, sent us outside. Never, as far as we could see, tried to alter his behaviour. No, that’s not true. There were a few rare times when Burr and I were witness to whole bottles of whisky being poured down the sink, a prelude to Mother fighting him for all she was worth.
Behind the waterfall, we tried to understand what we had done that had landed the two of us into a family as godforsaken as ours. We thought we were born realists, something we’d heard Mother call herself. If we had to take after someone, we said, it wasn’t going to be him. It never occurred to us in any realistic way that there might be any other sort of father. He was the one we had.
“Why do they fight?”
“Maybe they hate each other.”
“They got married, didn’t they?”
“Maybe he didn’t drink then.”
“Maybe he started drinking after they had us.”
One time, we went home and sneaked into a silent house and opened the glass door of the china cabinet. We lifted out the charcoal-covered prayer book and searched for the passage we wanted and laid the book on the dining-room table. A frayed silken cord kept the pages open at the marriage vows. But the book silently found its way back to the shelf behind glass before we were up the next morning, and we did not know who had replaced it. This disappointed us because we wanted the two of them to know that we were part of this, too. That we had to shift and bend with every ripple the two of them made.
The summer we were nine, the daily paper ran an article called: Take this test to see if you’re an alcoholic. Burr and I cut out the article and administered the test—not to Father, but to each other. Behind the waterfall, we learned the questions by heart. Have you begun to invent excuses for having a drink? Do you try to push drinks onto others? No, no, we answered. Do you drink to forget your troubles? And the most ominous of all: Do you drink alone?
After we’d given the test to each other, we answered for Father. Three truthful yes answers meant a drinking problem. But unlike the marriage vows in the prayer book, we did not leave the newspaper test lying around on the dining-room table. We couldn’t go that far. Because Father’s drinking, except between Burr and me, was never discussed.
There was always the next day. The real morning after. When living people rose from their beds and had breakfast and stayed in or went out—to school, to work, to play—and carried on with their lives. Even born realists who lived together and looked one another in the eye and spoke the way they believed other people spoke. But did not mention, no, never mentioned the night before, the day before, the weekend of stumbling, of spilling, of drunken singing, of maudlin tears. Never mentioned Father falling into the empty tub and, arm outstretched, halfway through the bathroom wall; never mentioned the broken glass, the stains on the rug, the holes in the plaster, the lawnchair collapses, the slips on the ice, the broken ribs, ankles, bones. The weeping red-rimmed eyes.
How could we get up in the morning and never mention any of this?
Because these were our real lives.
Because Father got out of bed Monday morning, put on his old suit, stood on the dirt road to be picked up by the factory truck—and went back to work. In some wild and implausible way, he convinced us that he could function. And Burr and I returned to school, pushing down the fear that had knotted in our stomachs like a lurking tiger, since Friday afternoon.
Christmas: Burr and I are ten years old. Father lifts the tree with one hand. He storms through the living room, out the front door—bulbs attached, cords frayed and flying—and plants the tree in the snowbank.
Who brought it back inside? Rescued the surviving bulbs, the frosty angels? Who went down on hand and knee to shake the snow from bruised needles and limbs?
Christmas Eve: Burr and I are eleven. Father sits in his green chair in the living room and begins a slow and steady binge that will last until New Year’s Day. He holds his glass in a salute to anyone who walks through the room, and sings:
Hither, page, and stand by me,
If thou knows’t it telling,
Yonder peasant, who is he?
Where and what his dwelling?
He tries to whip up speed in the lyrics, but his tongue thickens and he’s lodged in his chair and only one arm is able to beat itself against the upholstery.
The last three days, he carries his whisky to his room and stays there. Mother comes downstairs to sleep on the couch. On New Year’s Day, he emerges. Showers, shaves, and comes into the living room, whistling. It’s as if he’s been away on a slightly wearing trip. He reaches under the tree and pulls out our gift, the one he’s refused at Christmas. It’s a photograph of Burr and me, taken at Woolworth’s in Greenly and framed by ourselves. He rolls his eyes towards the ceiling as if to a distant agreeing oracle and says, in a way that only he seems to understand, “By their fruits ye shall know them,” which drives Burr and me back to the cave, despite the icicles and the slippery climb.
“Do you think we’re like him? That we’ll turn out like him?”
“We’ll leave before that can happen,” says Burr.
Where was Mother during this time?
She was keeping the peace.
There were acts of Mother’s that we admired. Her capacity to avoid argument. Her ability to feign sleep; so practised was she at this, she was able to fool Burr and me some of the time. We admired her resolution. Four days a week, she took the bus to Sadie’s Dress Shop on Greenly’s Main Street where, from the day Burr and I began school, she was head seamstress. Mother, in fact, had a narrowly circumscribed life of her own. She had a small income; she had a few friends who, like herself, worked at the shop and with whom she went out occasionally, but whom she never invited home. This, Burr and I understood; our own best friends were more or less kept in hiding over a period of fifteen years.
Long after Burr and I left home, we phoned each other, going over and over the same ground. By then, we were married and had children of our own. But we talked as if there was still something we could do about Father’s drinking: acknowledge it, make it public, somehow. To free Mother, we said. To free ourselves. “The patterns are entrenched,” we said, into the phone. “Thank God we got out. But how can she put up with him? How can she have stayed with him all these years?”
“Too late to leave,” said Burr. “Neither of them can make a move now.”
We sent each other identical newspaper clippings: Nine out of ten wives stay with alcoholic husbands. One husband in ten will stay with an alcoholic wife.
Once, we went into hysterics when Burr, having put her children to bed a few minutes earlier, told me she’d just poured herself a sherry.
“Do you drink alone?” I said, in my behind-the-waterfall voice.
We continued to make the climb in good weather, even after our bodies had grown too large to fit the cave. During our early teens, we sat on the ground at the bottom of the falls and scratched boys’ initials onto flat layers of rock. We knew we were too far from home to be found; in any case, there was no one to come looking. Mother was at the shop until five; Father at the cheese factory until six when the truck dropped him off.
Some days, he brought home a block of cheese, which he stored in the root cellar, the entrance of which was a double trapdoor around one side of the house. Burr and I seldom lifted those wooden slats; a few times, while Father was at work, we did so on a dare, and descended the wooden ladder. Once down in that stifling space, we had to hunch shoulders and bow our heads. Father had run a wire through the floor of the house and hooked up a swinging socket, but this rarely contained a bulb. Burr and I encouraged each other to hold our breath so we wouldn’t have to inhale the underground. I believed the place was alive. Burr called it the rat cellar instead of the root cellar.
While we were there, we inspected Father’s whisky, for this is where he kept his stash. He’d banged shelves into an earth wall. One shelf held aging blocks of cheese. Surprisingly, there was little dampness in that room underground. Another
shelf held his whisky—five or six bottles at a time. Never fewer than three. The store, he called it. Go down and see what I’ve got in the store. And Burr and I, even though we might know the answer, would hold our breath and go down.
Father walks through the back door each evening and reaches for the bottle he’s brought up the night before. He’s taken to announcing in a loud voice, “The bar is officially open,” as if granting himself licence. As if this is a safe joke, an opening line to which there is no reply.
How does he know we won’t speak? That we won’t scream, throw plates, dump whisky down the drain. That we won’t cry or despair or quietly plead, “Please go somewhere and get help. You have a drinking problem.”
How can he count on our silence?
This is the part that is most difficult to understand.
Father has to take only two drinks now, before he starts to weave his way across the room. “I can hold my liquor,” he says, but doesn’t look us in the eye. “Don’t ever think I can’t hold my liquor.”
We hear him from the green chair:
O Mother, O Mother, make my bed
Make it both long and narrow.
Then, silence. We don’t need to see his face to know that he’s begun to weep, as he often does, now.
“Think of his face,” I said to Burr one day when I was sitting in the kitchen of her apartment.
Burr looked over, saw me as I saw her, saw the cold stone that lay at the bottom of our lives.
“Flushed,” she said. “Moist eyes.” She sat down.
“Moist around the lips,” I said. “Soft chin. Wrinkles from the corners of his mouth up across the cheeks.”
Poached Egg on Toast Page 18
