Shy

by Naomi K. Lewis

  Two: There is a short row of new shirts in my closet—some have been there for months. I’m still deciding if I can wear them. Any of them. Red—it might be a good colour. It might be a good colour on me. But is it too different? If I actually wear it, will the change be too abrupt? Will I jump out, will someone at work say, “Hey, is that a new shirt?” There are, in there, shirts that I will never wear—yet, paradoxically, love far too much to ever give away in the regular closet-cleansings. There are some that I love simply because I wish I was able to wear them.

  The dryer has a faraway, incomplete sound, like neighbours arguing small arguments on their deck, the sort of sound that’s supposed to speak of hearth and house pride the same way the smell of bread does. In this big empty house, it only sounds lonely.

  “If I ever leave, the cats stay,” she says. “I’m not putting them through all that again. I’m just not.”

  And I imagine costly therapy for abandoned step-cats, imagine the solitary click of their untrimmed claws on the hardwood, each meow a sound either bitter or lost, a serious white-coated doctor following their every meander with a notepad and urgently scratching pen.

  I know I can’t force things to stay the way I want, and that big changes appear suddenly from little things, like the jump of a serious earthquake from a pattern of tiny tectonic shifts. I know I can form words in my head, words that I can’t ever force out of my mouth—and that, even if I do, they will be incomplete.

  Three: Shy is strange. A spectrum of difficulties that, more than thirty years in, you just learn to moderate. It’s far, far worse for some people than it is with me. There are people who can’t speak to a stranger, who can’t squeeze even a word out. I can talk, no problem at all, but only until it’s about something I want. I can talk about you—I love to talk about you. I have a harder time getting beyond the shiny, easy public surface of me. The edges of your own particular shyness are clearly delineated. I know that. There are no smudged chalk borders, no lines that move easily or get pushed back, even with practice. Live inside shyness and you’ll realize it’s regimented as the precise and regular turning of gears in a clock. You can see things coming right toward you, tick-tock, each deliberate step at a time—you know the things you can do, and, after enough time, you learn the things you can’t.

  I could give any one of a countless number of reasons why I feel this way—why I fear this way. I’ve tried them all on, like clothes put on and then taken off again, without ever getting past the sliding mirrors in our bedroom.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  Driving alone on a Sunday afternoon road far from anything, caught out on the Avalon barrens in heavy fog, there’s a chapter-ending finality about every single kilometre.

  I’m driving toward a town I’ve never seen, that hunkers down on the very foot of the Avalon Peninsula, a town pushed so far out into the ocean that it spends much of its time living under the grey weight of fogbanks. That is its constant, spring, summer, and fall, while winter brings the respite—if you can call it that—of regular, constant light snow.

  The fog unfolds page by page—revealing a pond here, and a long, falling sideways heather-clad hill next—and I feel that absolutely anything is possible with the next turn, that any kind of monster could live right exactly there, that it could step out at any minute with a reach broad enough to put claws into both sides of the vehicle at once.

  My hands hold the steering wheel too tight, and I can feel my muscles fighting the hard nubbled plastic. The car hugs the curves, and sometimes it’s as if the car is on autopilot, my head going one way while my hands and the road interact all by themselves.

  Things keep snapping into view in front of the windshield, like flash cards that haven’t yet gotten around to revealing the order that underwrites their central pattern and explanation. Once, a white headstone, rough pockmarked old limestone, “CAREEN” all in yelling capitals across the front, so that it’s hard to know for a moment whether it’s a name or a shouted instruction. Another time, a small, lonely juniper tree, its branches crooked and bent and black with the condensing fog, and an angrier-looking tree I don’t think I have ever seen.

  Somewhere up ahead of me is Point Lance, a town whose name sounds like the tip of a needle seeking a boil, and I’ve driven by the side road that heads down to that town a hundred times, and never taken the time to actually make the turn.

  But I turn down the road all at once anyway, despite the stories I’ve heard of a rough crowd down there, of former fox farms with wire fencing and sentry towers like miniature prison camps. Fox farms that smelled alternately of fox piss and risky investment, and, finally, the whiff of broken dreams.

  The pavement is cracked and wrinkled all along the edges of the road, with the cracks all leading inwards, cracked like nature’s just too damned tired of being kept at bay and has decided to slowly edge its way toward the yellow centre line—and I think that when the cracks reach that defining line, all man-made things will be necessarily finished here.

  Behind me, the past is closing as fast as new things appear, history erasing itself with grey gauze: one moment, it’s a shopping bag caught flapping in the endless wind, caught on the tip of one hedged branch and whipping against itself, and the next, the bag is gone as easily as if it had never been, and the present is an instant of a small stream threading its way into an overlarge corrugated culvert.

  When I get to Point Lance, it is not what I’d expected.

  Not because I didn’t expect small and hardscrabble and tough, not because I didn’t expect wood smoke and flat empty windows as unyielding as mirrors and an empty twisting road with not one single living person in sight, but because I didn’t expect the beach.

  A beach like that—I think I would have heard about that, at least from someone careless enough to let it slip, the “Oh, you want to see a hidden gem” kind of thing.

  The sand is long and red and ruled flat by the tide, so that the only thing left is the tracks from a large dog, running away, running fast so the claws dig in far deeper than the pads, and there’s no way at all of telling just when it was last here. No telling whether it’s still here, just out of sight up ahead in the fog, waiting. And the wind is blowing hard, driving the fog against my skin, and I can feel it in my hair. I hate my feeling my hair move.

  Four: Forty-nine years old, and I still can’t stand it when someone points out I’ve just gotten a haircut. My mother used to cut my hair in grade school, always the same way. Straight across the front, that cut everyone in my class called a “bowl cut,” as if I’d had a mixing bowl over my head while Mom worked the scissors across my forehead in a straight line. Then the clippers up the back and right over the mess of cowlick that would never lie down. She had no conception why the abrupt change—from longer hair to no hair—would bother me. Yet I know she was crushed the very first time I told her I wanted someone else to cut it. The hairdresser who cuts my hair now has been cutting it for twenty-five years. If she’s not available when I call, I get my hair cut on another day when she is.

  Coming down the road, I have passed several houses with big chain-link enclosures housing very big dogs, the kind of dogs that tear at the fences with their front paws even though they know it’s fruitless to try and break through—maybe just so they can see their actions’ effect on me as I drive past. I have seen no trees or fire hydrants or other strangers, nothing else in this town to serve as canine distraction.

  The first thing I think is that if there is still a dog loose out there, it’s going to be a big dog, and it will be delighted, in its private, revenge-filled way, to meet with me. It’s foolish, I guess, to believe angry dogs are always in a rush to settle someone else’s scores on your flesh.

  At least I know where the dog isn’t, where it can’t be.

  I know it isn’t at the end of the beach behind me, where the rocks come down from the cliff and jangle out into the water in jagged tumble. There, the sand is still unmarked, face unlined and in r
epose.

  In the other direction, with the distant beach lost under the fog, it’s not so easy to tell. My instincts warn me that there could be something out there. And you’ve always got to pay attention to the things your instincts are busy warning you about, even when you don’t want to believe them.

  The tide line is littered with the occasional shred of wrack and seaweed, and, strangely, a potato, and then another, right at the edge of the water, as if they’d been washed in, waiting for someone to save them. Amazing how a mind can wander, how just for one shimmering moment I picture a huge passenger-steamer, taking on water fast, all of its potatoes abandoning ship into the cold North Atlantic, a colossal and tragic tuber epic, tears running from oh so many potato eyes.

  I kick a few potatoes along the sand, looking over my shoulder guiltily once or twice to be sure no one is looking.

  Five: For five excruciating years, I worked in television as a news reporter. Seems an impossible job for someone who’s shy. Perhaps—but when you’re desperate, you invent solutions. Coping mechanisms. Stopgaps that can make impossible things work, because there are mortgages and credit cards and bills that have to be paid. I learned to watch my stories only on the monitors in the editing suites at the television station, never on an actual television at home. Pretended they were a private production, seen only by my cameraman, my editor, and me. Startled when anyone came up to me and talked about a news story I’d done: I was so completely deluded, I’d wonder where and how they possibly could have seen it.

  The beach at Point Lance stretches out red and even ahead, and stretches out sideways as well to the edge of the fog—the beach disappears before the waves even have a chance to break, although I can hear them out there, thundering in loud, then falling away all at once like their lips and teeth have been forced to bite into cotton wool at the very last moment.

  I walk for a few more minutes until the wet heft of the wind settles in under my jacket, in around my neck where the skin is too soft, and then I head back for the car, where the gear shift and the pedals are all in the right place, and my hands feel right on the wheel again.

  But what does this have to do with her?

  Well, I guess the fact is it’s all about her, from soup to sand.

  Because I drive away from Point Lance with the idea that I just want to show her this place, that I want to give it to her—wordlessly, because that’s sometimes all I am capable of—as simply as if I had done it up in wrapping paper and handed it to her, with the hapless idea that she will be as grateful to receive it as I will be happy to give.

  Driving out of the small town, little more than a gaggle of houses edged in tight along both sides of the road—the passenger seat beside me empty—I come to a big new-looking bridge over a slow-moving, peat-brown river, and off to the right, a small old gravel quarry where they’ve dug up the stone for the road.

  From the quarry, a small trail heads out east under the low cloud toward the shore, and there’s just enough visibility to see a beach there as well, easily a couple of kilometres out of town, and I find myself wondering if the red sand as fine as flour runs out as far as that.

  Because if it does, I think, we could park the car and head down there with a blanket, and we could both lie naked on the beach, far enough from everything that we could listen for the high whining bumblebee-thrum of the all-terrain vehicles coming and get back into our clothes, shaking the loose sand out of our sleeves and cuffs long before they had a chance to get there. You’d see them coming for miles, heads and handlebars hovering above the marbled oily ripple of the heat-shimmer, until they get close enough for their wheels to coalesce into tires, hubs and finally the long run of tracks, heading back and away.

  I can imagine the flat smooth sand and her entire body there, stretched out long and smooth under the sun like hills and heather.

  Because I know every single inch of her like Braille, and she’s never minded Braille-reading before. I can imagine it, right down to the way the fine, dusty sand will catch and stick in those small starred patterns where the first skim of perspiration makes its careful way out through skin. Right down to the way that goose-bumps rise up and breath catches from the touch of fingers electric.

  Six: For years, directing my lover with my hands, because I was too shy to put anything I wanted into words. Then, if something goes wrong, you can always claim that you were misunderstood. Not at all like words. I’ve always been too afraid to hear the clear danger of her spoken words in response.

  I want to believe that, if we went there on that singular day, the sun would shine in a way I’ve heard it almost never does in Point Lance. The way it almost never does because the land sticks permanently out into the cold water and snags the ocean air like a fishing hook caught deep into the weave of some particularly stubborn and unyielding cloth. It is the way it is, like I am the way I am. Pouring words out here, but struck dumb when it is urgently important that I speak.

  Seven: I even write shy. I write for people who don’t know me. But for those who do, I hide other things in the words and sentences they might recognize. And for those who know me really well, there’s often even more. It’s not a parlour trick, not a game—it’s not even really deliberate, at least not as a deliberate structure. I’m not trying to be deep—I’m trying to communicate. A column, an editorial, a short story: there are keys in all of them that are meant to unlock the particular, and I have particular people in mind when I place them. Semaphore, message in a bottle, Morse code—they say an experienced operator recognizes the touch of a familiar hand on the Morse key.

  The soup is cooking with fat angry plops now, past tempered boiling, steam lurching up through the reddish liquid like fumaroles that snap open and closed on the edge of an impending stovetop eruption.

  Perhaps my curse will always be not paying nearly enough attention at that crucial moment when everything matters. Perhaps my curse is that I know I won’t be able to call for help when it does.

  Not only has the soup boiled, it has burned as well, annealing itself into a hard skin on the bottom of the pot, and few kinds of sandwich would be able to save that. It has made a pattern exactly the same shape as the burner right there on the inside bottom of the pot, a pattern that screams out about the callous absence of careful stirring. A pattern that says “how could you?” with a hanging and unfinished ending, as though said by a stranger passing our street-front window and then disappearing, unseen, into the night.

  Outside, the wind has gotten hard and blunt, rattling the screen door like it wants to come inside and can’t understand the latch mechanism, and she’ll be hard and blunt too—even her lips will be cold, I think, and a tremble shoots down somewhere through the long tendons in the backs of my thighs. By the time she gets here, walking fast, her head will be whirling with a thousand shards of ideas like broken glass in a hurricane. I’ll have to wait to see which way she wants to turn, whether she’ll head upstairs with her lips seamed shut or whether she’ll want to fall together on the floor. Or maybe, as I always fear possible, she won’t be home at all, swept away on the white-breaking crest of something or someone too amazing to resist.

  Bittersweet and frightening, exhilarating every time: I wonder if I’m always going to get to dream this way, whether I get to have a whole life looking at changing mental sketches of tomorrow, or if one day, it will just run out of me like air out of a flattening tire. If it will become too much effort or too little reward, too much fear and too little wonder.

  Eight: I am full, stuffed full with things I feel justified thinking, but that I can’t find a way to say. The words tumble and crash over each other, hundreds of them—but I remain mute, even when an argument rages all around me.

  Right now, I can draw a thousand ways that any single thing might happen, a million different ways in which next week or next month could unfold. My hands are always full.

  The only thing that’s hard to conceive is that we could end up alone and clinging together, each depend
ing by necessity on the other, our individual worlds toppled into one by the absence of anything else. Because there is too much else.

  The thing is, in just a year or two she’s found her way into this town like a splinter into soft flesh, found her way in far better than I’ve been able to in two decades. And she doesn’t need me, not socially. She sits in her own brilliantly lit circle, overhung and surrounded by her own chandelier of main and subsidiary cut crystals.

  Nine: I stay close to walls. “Mixers” are excruciating. Many of my clothes are deliberately dark or plain. I don’t want to look like I care about how I look, and I don’t want to look like I don’t care. I just don’t want anyone to look. I want to leave anywhere without fanfare or goodbyes, slipping outside and away even when doing exactly that is plainly rude. I can talk to anyone, as soon as I see them well enough to think of them as someone. I watch all the time, especially the people who move so easily out there in the world. How amazing, how free it would be to have none of that baggage. I’ve met the un-shy, and I know they have no idea of the simple gift they’ve been given.

  She has friends now whose names I’ve never even heard before, a circle of friends that gets larger and larger like a brush fire getting bigger with every single step outwards—it’s gotten to the point where it’s creating its own wind, that the whole thing is close on to unstoppable, that the fireground officers should be calling the waterbombers in with more than a little edge of panic in their voices. She tells me the things her friends say and do, even though the names seem as distant from me as if she were chanting constellations in order of diminishing familiarity: “Cassiopeia, Andromeda, Taurus, Octans, Pavo, Grus.”

  She charms them.

  She can catch them with something as simple as her eyes. I know it well, the way those eyes can be so big and alert and attentive. Or else she snags them with something like the lasso of the U-Haul story, setting the rope gently around them and drawing them back in with the steady pull, so even that they can’t even feel the tug.