South of Elfrida

by Holley Rubinsky

  A wave gathers itself, crashes to shore. She asks her question again. “Do you think he was the real Brian?”

  “No.” The fisherman in Henry returns; the transformation is clear to Roz. His expression changes from worry to serene and lights his face. He points down. “What I think is that dang sea lion’s going to take all the fish. You see him out there? He have a big ugly face. Kind of cute, but ugly.”

  The presence of the fish-eating sea lion would certainly explain the fishes’ anxiety. She herself has a little anxiety; the floating beast looks like a huge dog with tiny ears. She holds to the railing.

  “See? He happy.”

  Roz opens her eyes. The sea lion’s chocolate-brown pelt isn’t like the mangy fur of the dirt-coloured dogs. His eyes are like shiny globes. His whiskers are nice. He seems friendly.

  “You just hold tight. It be all right in the end.”

  Henry offers her a fishing pole. He has never offered her one of his poles before, and she takes it. They watch the sea lion together. A nice moon is heading toward the ocean, soon to shimmer it. The sea lion barks, a bark totally unlike the sharp yap of a shrapnel-camp dog. Maybe because he likes their company, the sea lion exhibits his clown-like tricks—he barks and disappears below the surface, reappears, splashing, and barks again. Roz and Henry lay their poles on the railing side by side. The sea lion flaps his flippers, then seems contented by his performance and settles back, bobbing in the swells.

  At Close Range

  Maureen steps out of her condo on the way to the pool and sees a bullet on her Astroturf doormat. A .38 Special. She knows guns, and she knows bullets—she’s wintered in Tucson long enough—but finding that damn thing, in the light of day, is unnerving. All the time now, even in her area around the Catalina Mountains, black helicopters clatter in the sky while white Border Patrol vehicles snoop around on the ground. On TV news, SWAT teams hunch outside boxy stucco houses where oversized Fisher-Price plastic toys and cars beyond fixing are strewn around the properties. There is a slick, commercial look to 24/7 media coverage of a society coming undone.

  She continues to the pool through the parking lot, carrying her towels and makeup in a straw bag with coloured stripes from Chico’s, a women’s chain store in a mall across from where Congresswoman Giffords was shot. Leaving the pool area is a young mother in a floral bathing suit cover-up, losing her grip on a fussing, squirming toddler about two or two and a half. The mother sets the blond child down on a patch of lawn, sits on her heels so that she’s eye to eye with her, and slides her tanned hands up and down the child’s bare back. Maureen pauses to watch. The toddler pulls away and pouts: “Me hungry.” The mother murmurs, “Yes, you are feeling so sad, and you are the cutest best baby and you will get Goldfish as soon as we get home, all right? Won’t that be so nice?” She glances at Maureen. “Can you believe it? I forgot the cheese crackers.”

  Maureen unlocks the iron gate and closes it behind her. Joanne is already in the whirlpool, the timer ticking. Maureen does the bookkeeping for Joanne, who hates numbers, in return for half rent. After she puts her things down on a table in the shade, Maureen holds the railing and sidesteps into the swirling green. The two women watch foam roll over their knees. The sky is as blue as Joanne’s eyeshadow.

  “I would have whacked that kid upside the head,” Joanne says. “You should have heard the racket in here a few minutes ago.”

  “Spoiled.” Maureen slips on her visor against the glare.

  “Mr. Arnie Jay Jones, the man himself, is gone to the rodeo with those new folks. Party types.” Joanne’s husband, Arnie, officially the manager of the Sabrina Springs condominium complex, is useless—only good for high-fivin’ around the pool, opening beer, and yakking for the entertainment of the snowbirds, mostly retirees from Wisconsin and Michigan. The rodeo means a day of drinking.

  “Some sort of trouble is on the way.” Maureen tells Joanne about finding the bullet. She flicks a eucalyptus leaf off her arm, looks at the tree hanging over the pool. A bird scratches in the leaves under it.

  Joanne lifts her dark glasses to give Maureen a bug-eyed look. “Is that negativity talking?” Joanne has been listening to self-improvement tapes. The doves along the fence railing scatter, their wings chiming. Joanne sets her sunglasses beside the plastic tumbler on the deck. “Don’t start again about Lou,” Maureen says. “Lou was just a guy.”

  “You didn’t tell Jennifer, did you?” Joanne reaches for the tumbler and fiddles with the straw as she sips. “This is club soda and white grape juice, just so you know.” Joanne is cutting down.

  Maureen’s daughter has married into a big Estonian family, proud of their cultural identity, and lives in Mississauga, Ontario. She has a little girl and a new baby, a boy. Maureen has seen her four-year-old granddaughter only once. During that visit, Jennifer had muttered, “Never again,” as Maureen accepted a third glass of wine from Kurt, Jennifer’s father-in-law. Maureen pretended not to hear. But it has been “never again” in terms of a relationship between them.

  “Why didn’t you tell her?”

  “She doesn’t want to know,” Maureen says. “You know that. We’re not simpatico.”

  Joanne glides off the ledge, sinks into the water up to her neck. “You are some tough.”

  “Yeah, and you won’t dunk and ruin that gunk on your face.” Maureen plucks a towel and drapes it over her shoulders so she doesn’t burn. Something karmic must be at work in the chronic dislocation with her daughter, her only child. The lie to Jennifer about her father wasn’t the world’s best idea, she supposes, but she couldn’t admit (to anyone) that the father of her baby was a Filipino bus boy at the InterContinental Hotel on Bloor Street in Toronto, where Maureen used to go for a drink after work. Jennifer was conceived in an upstairs staff room. When Maureen told him she was pregnant, he didn’t come back to the job; she didn’t even know his last name. She checked for him so often that the bar staff scuttled away whenever she popped in. Lying to her daughter as a way out of shame seemed sensible at the time, but the status of Jennifer’s invented father—a Brit who died a hero in a fire at an English stadium, and went straight to heaven and became an angel—gave Jennifer lifelong ammunition against Maureen, a mere mortal, imperfect, faltering.

  Lou is another story. Him dying in her bed was so damn humiliating—the paramedics working on a corpse with a collapsed, sticky penis. As soon as the ambulance took him away, she phoned the Sally Ann to come get the bed. She made the man work too hard at sex; she should have known better, at his age. They looked like what they were: two people over the hill, trying to whoop it up. Lou may have sold cars, but he was worth loving. They’d been dating, going to movies, checking out lounges featuring light jazz. They both appreciated cold vodka martinis. She liked him. She bought Joanne a case of Henkell Trocken minis and asked her to spread it around the complex that Lou had died in his sleep. No one had better make fun of him.

  She kicks a foot, watches the water swirl around her ankle. “It’s not like Lou and I were serious.”

  “Yeah, so? He was a good guy.” Joanne hefts herself on to the ledge, her cool fleshy shoulder touching Maureen’s. She puts her dark glasses back on. “It’s been two months since Lou went. You have to get over it. You’re getting bitter as one of those blood oranges they’ve got at Fry’s.” Maureen sees Joanne shift gears as she says, “What’re you supposed to do with those suckers, anyway?”

  After they toss around the merits of the oranges—there was a recipe for blood-orange margaritas in the paper—Maureen leaves the pool, showers, oils every inch of her body, folds herself into a Samoan wrap, and slips on the new sandals with the daisies that look bright against her pretty feet and her toenails, polished a pretty fuchsia.

  The phone is ringing when she steps into the apartment. It’s Jennifer, words falling from her mouth tinny and mangled, probably calling through the Internet. “The baby doesn’t look like anybody in the family.”

  Maureen touches her fingers to her fo
rehead. Years beyond expecting a greeting like Hello, how are you from Jennifer, she’s taken aback by her point-blank words. His eyes? The shape of his eyes? Giving herself time, Maureen lifts the cover off the budgie’s cage, and coughs into the phone. “Excuse me. What do you mean?” At lunch, the budgie—it belongs to a friend visiting grandchildren—was squawking, and as soon as he sees her, he starts again. She wags a finger in his face and he hops to the side.

  “The baby’s eyes aren’t normal. Can’t you hear me? Are you at it already, this early in the day? What time is it where you are?”

  Maureen kicks off her sandals. On the counter is a bottle of tequila; she leaves it in plain sight. In Jennifer’s eyes, in the uncompromising severity of her gaze from early childhood on, there was vague distrust, an unwillingness to align herself to her mother, a stranger she didn’t quite approve of. The smoking and her choice of friends were “too much,” Jennifer had written in a long, earnest letter, the eighteen-year-old truth letter, mailed after she left home, taking with her Maureen’s best wool coat, Maureen’s money in the form of a plane ticket to London, and eighteen years of Maureen’s time. Maureen says, “It’s two in the afternoon here, around two. I’m fine. Did you get the baby gift?”

  “I’m not talking about your gift, thank you. I’m telling you his eyes aren’t normal,” Jennifer says again.

  Anxiety moves in, grabs hold of Maureen’s neck and belly; her body begins to rev up as her mind goes blank. “God. Mongoloid?”

  Jennifer falls silent. Maureen expects the slam of the receiver, may deserve it for her callous, unthinking comment.

  “Not that.” Jennifer sounds tired. “Heredity, the doctor says.”

  “Are you all right?”

  In the ensuing silence, Maureen coughs again, her mind veering off in all directions. Should not have screwed around. Should not have created a pale-eyed father. Should not have found a photo of a decent-looking, ordinary white man, framed it and put it on Jennifer’s dresser.

  The budgie pipes up again; his voice is a jarring screech.

  When Jennifer was born, Maureen hadn’t recognized a single feature in the little face, although the infant’s skin lightened up after a month and the eyes settled on deep hazel. After weeks of sleepless nights dealing with the surprise baby, she couldn’t even remember what Jennifer’s father had looked like.

  Jennifer is saying, “Maureen? Are you listening? Is this why I don’t look like my father? Not really? Is that why I couldn’t find my family in England? Is there something you haven’t told me?”

  Jennifer will hate her even more for the lie; she’s the odd one out in her chosen family, has no idea who she is, genetically. Jennifer has no heritage—Jennifer just has Maureen. “Yes,” Maureen says.

  “Well, what is it?”

  Maureen hears Jennifer’s impatient, angry breathing, sees the image of the serene young mother on the lawn with her adored child, sees the hugging, the holding, the caressing in the woman’s soft words. Maureen can’t bear feeling like such a failure and a fraud, and can’t begin to frame an apology. She pushes the End Call button. The budgie has tossed seed and pine shavings onto the kitchen floor. She throws a new cuttlebone into the cage, covers the cage up again, moves into the living room, and sits on the divan. The ninth-hole flag whips in the wind. Two couples, neat and tidy, wearing similar outfits, laugh and reach for their hats.

  Dressed in pressed white jeans and white boots with metal toes, Maureen stands in line at Marksmen firing range to buy bullets, along with a string of guys who would take it personally if you cut them off on the freeway. The bullets she buys are for personal defence, the type that explode in the body when fired at close range. She’s there for the noise, the dead-calm thrill of shooting at shapes of human beings inked in black on yellow paper, seeing the holes rip through them. She loads her new .22 calibre Colt Diamondback bought at a gun show. The gun doesn’t have much recoil; it’s the perfect size for her hand. The man at the firing range tells her she’s good enough for a concealed weapons permit. She knows; she has one, against the law.

  She reels in the target sheets, lightly folds them, carries them out to her car. Traffic is heavy, as it always is in winter, people slowing down who don’t know the streets. She drives back toward the Catalinas, air conditioning on, the radio tuned to light jazz.

  The target sheets feel fragile as she unfolds them. It looks like she has six inky dead men piled on her bed, instead of the one sweet man she actually had, Lou. She carries in a chair from the kitchen and finds a roll of Scotch tape. Picking up the first target, she steps barefoot onto the chair. Carefully, one sheet at a time, she tapes them to the bedroom walls.

  With a pitcher of margaritas and a salted glass, she sits on her balcony overlooking the golf course. The wind has died; the mountains are hazy from kicked-up dirt. She can’t stop the steady crying, but the umbrella hides the condition of her face. Sometimes drinking isn’t the comfort it ought to be. Sometimes it’s the same as willfully choosing to back into a closet and shut the door. There is no escape in these trapped moments of despair, and so she’s given in to alcohol and remembers when it made her fuzzy, talkative, and confident. This was before she became disgusted with herself for being flirty and assured, before she was just simply not young enough to be so humming and witty. Her head throbs; she’s forgotten to take her blood pressure pill.

  Tipping the last dribbles from the pitcher, watching the viscous drops slide into her glass, Maureen thinks she probably will have to buy a plane ticket, fly to Ontario. Stay two days in a hotel. Invite Jennifer to lunch, order water, coffee, or tea. If Lou were alive on this day, he would tell that girl a thing or two about respect. He would boost Maureen’s spirits, toast her for raising a child on her own, and such a feisty one at that. He would declare in his loud, cheerful voice, “Sleazy-kabeazie, what does anybody care?” But of course someone will care. Jennifer is the responsible girl with the slut for a mother. You can’t give birth to a stranger’s child and expect to get one who likes you, much less one you know how to raise and cherish.

  Maureen stumbles over a footstool in the dark, walks hands-on-furniture to the bedroom. Turns on the lamp, takes the gun from the night table, slides it under the bed. Some things are so screwed up you can never get out of them and never get over them. She raises her head, dizzy, and looks. Graphic figures hanging on the walls come into focus, hearts shredded, shot to bits.

  Acknowledgments

  For early edits and supportive advice, I thank Luanne Armstrong, Sharmaine Gray, Caroline Adderson, Almeda Glenn-Miller, and Caroline Woodward. For advice near the end, thanks go to my friend Anna Warwick Sears and to Debra Barrett, with her keen eye for art. For their kind consideration over the years, I thank Canadian literary magazine editors, especially Rick Maddocks (Event) and Kim Jernigan (The New Quarterly). Earlier versions of two stories were published in Event and The Antigonish Review.

  For her willingness to jump into the pile and make some sense of it, my gratitude goes to Nancy Gibson, of Edmonton and Kaslo. For taking it from there, I thank Ruth Linka of Brindle & Glass, and Morty Mint of Mint Literary Agency, Nelson, BC.

  Thank you, Lynn Sears, for the use of the Ajo house, and friends, neighbours, and participants in writing workshops, who listened to bits and pieces and offered helpful feedback.

  And the “without whom” goes to Rhonda Batchelor, the editor who took these stories further.

  HOLLEY RUBINSKY is a Canadian fiction writer living in Kaslo, a village in the mountains of British Columbia. She is the author of At First I Hope for Rescue (Knopf Canada; Picador in the US), Rapid Transits and Other Stories (Polestar), and Beyond This Point (McClelland & Stewart). Winner of the $10,000 Journey Prize and a Gold Medal for fiction at the National Magazine Awards, her second book, At First I Hope for Rescue, was nominated for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Holley was the host of The Writers’ Show, produced by CJLY, Nelson. Her stories have appeared in a number of anthologies, including The Pe
nguin Anthology of Stories by Canadian Women. Please visit holleyrubinsky.com.

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