South of Elfrida

by Holley Rubinsky

  When she came back upstairs, Mr. PurrBunny was busy sniffing the trail of the rat through the apartment, from the cat door through the kitchen and into the spare room. He gave her an accusing look. She sat down at her computer and realized who the culprit was. Mr. PurrBunny. He had brought in the rat. Somehow he’d held that gigantic rat in his jaws all the way up the stairs, across the balcony, and through the cat door. She wondered if she’d known it was Mr. PurrBunny when she accused Derek of having rats in the building; she thinks perhaps she had. What was wrong with her? Why had she been so insensitive? “What a cat,” she said, by way of making him, and herself, feel better, and stroked him, but Mr. PurrBunny didn’t raise his head from his pillow. She cocked an eyebrow. “Are you holding a grudge?”

  No answer.

  When she’d told Sam about the incident, he said, “Didn’t you feel bad for the rat?”

  “You must be kidding. It was a rat.”

  “But that was cruel, the way Derek killed it.”

  “I’m not responsible for what Derek did,” Lee said, suddenly lost, suddenly thinking, Gregory. What Gregory did. She slapped her hands together.

  Sam blinked, startled. “You will never be a Buddhist.”

  “The rat was in my territory. I’m a coyote. Think of me that way.”

  “Coyote is more than Trickster. Coyote means adaptability. Wisdom.”

  “Bullshit,” Lee said.

  Shortly after Gregory died, a colleague, someone almost a friend, invited her to lunch.

  The friend told Lee how amazing she was: “You’re on your feet, walking and talking, doing so well.”

  This particular restaurant, owned by gay men, was in a nearby town and was known for its fresh, local ingredients. On the small table by the window where they sat, a crystal vase held a single iris. Lee studied the iris, the tight folds of mauve and cream, hints of its future glory. She wore Gregory’s wedding ring on her left thumb, holding on to it for him; she didn’t yet believe he was dead for good. She was in the philosophical stage of grief, a confident period of waiting for fate to change its mind. She and Gregory had been married for nine years. After all, Cuthbert and Irma were back together after surviving their ordeals with the bear. Anything was possible.

  The friend said, “My worst nightmare is my husband dying.”

  The friend said, “I wouldn’t be able to function like you are; I would have to be scraped off the floor or the walls.”

  The friend said, “I envy you your freedom.”

  Lee had looked up then.

  Shirley and Sam are over, to drink wine on Lee’s second little balcony, the one that faces the street. Lee tells them the story of the lunch but can’t recall whether it was the floor or the walls that her friend said she would have to be scraped from. “Scraped, anyway,” she says, handing Sam the second bottle to open. His hands are warm, and he has a sweet smile. “She envied me my freedom.”

  “Coyotes don’t whinge or whine,” Sam says.

  “Jesus.” Shirley wears a calculated, disgusted look. “That was so shitty of her.”

  “I didn’t think so at first. Now I do.”

  “Coyotes get on with things.”

  “What is this shit about you and coyotes?” Shirley asks Sam and sits up in her chair.

  “Hey, hey,” he says, and she settles back.

  The friend had talked about her own second marriage, the difficult children, her dependence on the man. If he died, she would too.

  Lee had told her, “No, you wouldn’t.” Then changed the subject.

  She takes Shirley’s empty glass.

  “What a bitch,” says Shirley.

  “This earth is purgatory, that’s my theory,” Sam says and pours another round. They clink glasses, Lee’s new ones from Cost Plus.

  “See, that’s why I love him,” Shirley says. “Thoughts like that never enter my head. I live in the moment, count money, move on.”

  “That’s why I married you. To follow orders.”

  Then their banter: “Oh, yeah?” “Make something of it, why don’t you,” as they drink up and prepare to leave.

  She sits on the balcony, the glasses dried and put away. People are still wandering the streets, though the vendors have closed their booths and stored their wares in locked vans. She hears a radio, some laughter, smells smoke from a bonfire from another camp. In the distance, the quail call each other home; the coyotes lead off with some preliminary yipping. They stop; they will break up, separate, slink around in the moonlight.

  She hears someone on the outside stairs and turns to the screen door. The Bavarian photographer holds his feathered hat in his hand. He says, “Excuse me. Have you seen our dog? The little white one?”

  “Oh.” Lee takes a moment.

  “Buddy’s adventurous. He has no idea he’s so small.”

  “Buddy?”

  “Our dog. The wife’s dog.”

  She hears the yip of a coyote. “Oh, that sweetie,” says Lee. She can’t clearly see the man waiting in the dark, but she knows the expression on his face: despair around the mouth. She looks at her hands. These hands helped to wreck a rat’s life. These hands saved the life of a rooster, but not the life of a man. She glances back in the direction of the door. Hope may be better than no hope. “I saw him a little earlier, heading to the food court.” This may be the kindest thing she’s said in weeks.

  Coyotes yelp in celebration of a kill, so when the real ruckus begins and fills the night with bloody festivity, Lee’s heart lifts too. What is the wisdom in loss? What is she supposed to learn? For now, she wants something chased down; she, too, carries grudges. The stars rise like diamonds from behind the mountains into the vivid sky, deep indigo and mauve. This is the first truly dark place Lee has ever lived; nightly she experiences miracles.

  Borderline

  You burp, it’s rancid, you lie in your crib wet and hungry, a strip of light coming through a partially open door separating you from her. You mutter, the pit of your stomach burns then cramps, your legs fly up and squirts eject, and there you are, in your crib wet, hungry, and now smelly. You mutter some more, you try ba-ba-ba-ba. You stare at the strip of light through which she will pass. She doesn’t come. You wave your arms, wanting the smell of her, the taste of her skin around her jaw and chin that you try to mouth. Your flower-stalk head waits for the weight of her hand to hold it up. Glimpsing her you’re all astir, aflutter, in a quiver of expectation. Slam. Click. Light gone.

  God. When I told this story to my first psychiatrist, back in Toronto, he said there was no way I could remember. Ridiculous. I remember lying stunned and staring into the pitch-black. No hands, no fingers, no legs, no body, no mind. I remember being an invisible baby, flailing useless arms, blinking in darkness, panic rising. “When I stopped my stupid whimpering and crying, I wasn’t sure if I was still alive,” I told him.

  “Ah, but you have to learn to wait your turn. You are one among many. The ego,” he said.

  By then a grown woman with choices, my ego mobilized and stretched itself large. “Me, me, me, me, me, me, me!” I shrieked, startling us both. I stamped to the door, passed through, let it slam shut. A few steps into the waiting room, I heard a sound, a clicking sound, and turned back, tried the handle. He had locked the door from the inside. I could hear his muffled voice on the phone.

  I almost passed out—that was dangerous.

  I’ve learned there’s waiting. Of course there’s waiting. There’s always waiting. Wintering between two American border checkpoints—one, to the south, at the actual border to Mexico, and the other just twenty-five miles north, on the northbound lanes of the I-19 freeway inside the state of Arizona—you learn about waiting. Twice a week I drive to Tucson for appointments with my psychiatrist and I have learned to allow extra time at the checkpoint—you must wait your turn. The Border Patrol calls the permanent roof over the I-19 a “canopy,” but to me, and some others, the eight-hundred-and-seventy-thousand-dollar structure looks like the military instal
lation it is, the Quonset hut roof embedded with spotlights.

  I slow and turn up the car radio to hear the news on NPR, to hear English. The radio in my apartment, its antenna pointing hopefully northward, catches only static or staccato Spanish. The second-hand TV is useless too; occasionally I glimpse Oprah behind the snow. I can’t sign a cable agreement; they want a year commitment. A snowbird, I’m just in Arizona for five months.

  Yes, here comes the flying roof. Border Patrol is siphoning traffic into one lane using orange dunce hat cones. Along with white trucks full of produce on ice, or cars crowded with Mexican families up for the day, or maybe someone like me, working on something that won’t ever be clear, I fall into a resigned line. Everyone wants to avoid the “secondary inspection,” where they pull you over into a special holding area and strip your vehicle. According to the law, they don’t have to have real suspicion; they can “select” you for a conversation, and, in my case, I don’t trust what might come out of my mouth. The goal is not to say anything provocative or to annoy them; I tell myself that deeply, truly I do not want to be noticed.

  The sniffing dog worries the white van five vehicles ahead, the German shepherd at attention on a leash held by a guy twice as big as my small-boned son, a computer nerd locked in a university lab in Toronto. The dog’s nose ciphers a vehicle’s life over the years. What kind of stories would a piece of steel with tires reveal? How would anybody explain: I was young then. Hey, I have no bombs.

  So now to prepare: Turn the volume on the radio down to zero (NPR is considered “left wing”), tidy the front seat, smooth an eyebrow with a pinkie, and open the window. A glance in the mirror informs me that my eyes are red from the mesquite pollen, so in go allergy drops to take the red out. Inching forward, I smile but not too much, turn off the phone, and seem preoccupied with the shopping list beside me, too preoccupied to look them in the eye. Here’s how it is, as I see it: You slide on by. Wade your way through the checkpoint like Mexicans crossing a river. Practise looking guiltless: a gift of the state.

  They wave me on. They hardly look at me.

  Surging through the guilt gate once again, I turn up the volume. The news makes my spirits rise—nutcases act out all over the world. I pass the Tohono O’odham reservation with its mystical white church off in the distance and dive into Tucson traffic.

  Personality disorders—borderline or narcissistic—make you erratic, unreliable in general. My analyst—the Tucson shrink—says, “You have to catch yourself in the act. You have to stop shouting and hear yourself.”

  “But why am I like this?”

  “Work with what you have,” he says.

  The state of my mind is attributed to genetics, familial tendencies. Upbringing. There is that locked-up uncle. But at forty-nine, I’ve realized others aren’t the ones I should be suspicious of, it’s me.

  “You seem sad.”

  The analyst opens with his usual gambit. By the time I arrive, park behind the little square building, climb the stairs—those extra ten pounds—and enter his office with its fake leather couch and the twist of modern glass trying to look vaguely phallic, I do feel sad. “I hate the Border Patrol. They piss me off. I hate having to be nice because I’m afraid.” I’ve stepped into it now.

  “What happens if you’re not nice?”

  “They’ll arrest me. They won’t like me. They don’t anyway. They hardly noticed me.” I pause, then blurt: “I’ll be in an insane asylum or be dead, the kid alone on the playground. Scabby knees. Dirty arms. Damn.” He picks up on “dirty arms.” Feeling childish and defensive now, I say, “I used to show up at Sunday school with dirty arms. When I put my elbows on the table, the undersides of my arms were streaky with dirt. I had to hide them from my Sunday school teacher. She would notice.”

  If he were permitted to smile, he would, I can feel it. But he doesn’t smile. I watch him as closely as a baby watches its mother’s mouth. Sometimes because of the watching, I can’t understand a word.

  He says, “How did you feel?”

  “I would turn bright red.”

  “Embarrassed?”

  “Humiliated. Could never remember to wash my arms. I tried, and there they’d be, dirty.”

  “Whose job do you think it was to see you were clean before Sunday school?”

  “Mine. I was old enough. I just missed my arms.”

  “It was your fault?”

  “I never told my mother.”

  “But she should have noticed.”

  “I wasn’t worth noticing.” Bang. Click.

  Silence. He gives me a moment. Tears are on the way. I won’t give them to him. I won’t give in. But he’s paid not to quit.

  “What makes you think you weren’t worth noticing?”

  It’s all I can do to stay in this room, all I can do to not stand, walk to the door, and shut it behind me—oh so quietly. I’ll be like a waft of air, a mere breeze passing through, a moment he won’t remember.

  He says quietly, “How do you feel now?”

  What I feel is nothing. Dead nothingness, the centre of me as empty as a void, shreds of pride clinging to my skull. But another emotion awakens; I know this one, a form of excess that in my experience can only make matters worse. Righteousness. Righteousness rouses, vaults out from its dark place to fill the gap, to lift me up—I have good reasons to hate this man, to hate myself. I’ll swallow the pills I hoard, I’ll rip up the cheque I’ve written and mail him the pieces. I’ll eat a whole movie-theatre-sized box of Junior Mints. Junior Mints. My laugh sputters out there, sounds like someone choking.

  “Paula, what’s going on, on the inside?”

  I won’t tell him. Won’t say a word. My head roars. Blank space. Then: It’s rude not to say something. “None of your fucking goddamn business.”

  Silence.

  Mental static amid heartbeats.

  He waits, gaze level, practised, attentive. It’s hard to catch him blinking. I take a breath. I am making progress—I am noticing his look. “I hate you.”

  “I know.”

  The kindness in his voice is like a thrust with a weapon, it hurts that much. The pain enters my pelvis first, moves up my spine, and brings tears to my eyes.

  “It’s hard for you when someone’s nice,” he says. “How do you feel?”

  He’s working me, slowly dragging me back. “Borderline personality disorder, remember?” I’ve read the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM description.

  “I don’t believe in labels.”

  “I do.” It was shocking to see my “unique” selfhood described so accurately.

  “Labels are limiting.”

  “Definitions are useful.” Behaviours that I thought my own turn out to be based on a personality disorder. It’s so fucking ironic that my life is hassled with border checkpoints.

  “It’s hard for you to be vulnerable.” He smiles a genuine, likeable smile. Sometimes I attempt to entertain him, to elicit that smile. “When we’ve been ignored by our mother and someone notices us, we overreact.”

  To stand back and see yourself as others see you—a person whose conduct is predictable, based on brain chemistry—makes you feel like a specimen, a lesser human. All those years I thought I was thinking. No. Just acting out.

  Silence.

  Then he skips a few lines. “When someone is kind, do you feel an inner excitement?”

  He has me, and I can’t help it—I scoot forward. “Yes! I start bubbling and want to move in.”

  “Move in?”

  “If someone is nice, I just want to move in, have them all to myself, attach myself like a barnacle.” My body prickles with a sense of urgency; I’ve confessed a deeply tangled truth that gives rise to helplessness and panic. I must disengage immediately. I pick an object to stare at. The twist of coloured glass he thinks is art. There, that choice is unsurprising, conventional. Boring, just like him. What does he know? What does he really know? My eyes slide sideways toward his. The bottom line is, I want him to lo
ve me.

  He says it gently as he stands: “Our time is up.”

  “Thank God.” As always, I try for more attention. We’ve talked about it. I say, “You can’t wait to get rid of me.”

  Driving southbound, at first I’m dazed and practically deaf, my mind cycling through the mixed signals: what I said, what he said. What I shouldn’t have said, the disgrace and unbearable discomfort of wanting so much. As anger rises, I deliberately turn my attention to the checkpoint, to the long, sullen line of vehicles at a standstill, then begin to gloat, an unsettling feeling that’s nevertheless better than the first one. Then fury leaps to the fore, despising me, the fury a predator that operates most successfully in the hell of psychic confusion. The next thing I know, I’m cursing a blue streak and Why the hell, How the hell is the mild part of it. My swearing accelerates to shouting, then I’m screaming, foot pressing the pedal, the car picking up speed. Then I yell, “Stop! Stop shouting, stop shouting!” I want to bulldoze the falling-apart Pontiac in front of me, a mattress strapped to the roof. I shout, “Stop!” again. Someone looks at me from another car and I glimpse myself in the mirror, see in a flash that I’m off track. I have to get off the freeway, pull the car over, bring myself to a halt. The next exit is a long way yet. I grit my teeth, scream through them, swing onto an exit ramp, slow at the bottom. The tendons in my neck hurt from bellowing.

  I pull into a Walmart parking lot and drive over to an empty section. I leave the engine on and the radio up—to hell with NPR, I want loud, violent music—rap!—to muffle the conversation zapping back and forth between me and myself, accusations flying because everyone ignored me, I can’t stand being ignored, I’m angry for being so stupid, so pitiful, so wrong. I shouldn’t have been born, everything about me is stupid, everyone hates me, I hate myself, they didn’t even look at me at the checkpoint, they didn’t think I was worth looking at, the shrink dismisses me, how can you do this, how can you do this to yourself. If I had a gun, I would fire it.