His body felt cool in the comfortable dark of the boy’s room, and except for the back of his neck, his skin was dry. He could see the outline of the boy’s scapulae, the side of the multipaneled cranium, the bone that was so fragile in babies that it was the one most frequently broken in newborns, the plates of the cranium sliding over the gray ocean below it.
The boy stirred in the bed, and Peter stilled himself. He heard him take a deep, waking breath, and the boy turned his head on the pillow, so that he was looking toward the foot of the bed. He called out quietly. He was seeing his father in the doorway, in the gloom. He got no answer and raised himself on one elbow and squinted out into the dark. Peter could see his face clearly now, there was no doubt in his mind, he would not be punishing the wrong person. The boy looked confused, and stayed silent, not certain of where he was, or even if he was dreaming.
“Go back to sleep,” Peter said. He made no effort to disguise his voice. The stillness between himself and the boy drew out and neither of them moved. “Go back to sleep.”
The boy let himself back down onto the pillow and pulled his covers about himself. In a matter of a few seconds, his breathing slowed down again, deep dreaming breaths, the boy’s mind sliding to another place. Peter watched him.
Orchards
THIS IS A STORY THAT SOMETIMES ONE OF MY SONS ASKS ME TO tell. It’s about a day in January when I was ten, when my little brother and I found a dead dog in the middle of the road. We’d just come out of Harrison Road and onto York Mills where it starts its long slow dip toward the intersection at Bayview Avenue. Adam—who’s of course an uncle now, imagine—had his skates draped over his neck, the cold iron blades knocking up against each other, while I had mine in my bag. We each carried our own Stan Mikita stick. When the light changed, we crossed and headed down the hill toward the arena. It was very cold and getting dark, and the cars had their lights on. The ones heading in the direction of the traffic lights below were curving around a spot partway down, and when we got there, we saw a big black Newf lying there that had probably walked into traffic and been hit by a car coming over the hill. Other cars had nudged the dog lower, so it came to rest in the middle of the incline. The animal lay on its side, its nose pointing straight across the road, one yellow line disappearing under its back and another coming out under its belly, like it had been struck by a cartoon arrow.
We knew dogs—we’d watched our father whelp pups in the basement of our house, in a little kennel made of plywood he’d knocked together for them. We’d seen them being born. They came out in shiny gray sacs, already struggling, and if the mother (our dog, Sam—we don’t have dogs now, allergies) didn’t free them with her teeth, our father carefully slit the sacs with a penknife; and they’d gush out, wet and keening, their eyes closed. For weeks, the basement smelled of blood and fur, and Adam and I would go down after supper and look at the eight pups blindly snuffling their mother. Sam was a Bernese Mountain dog, and when we were smaller, we rode her around the yard. She once dragged Adam out of the ravine at the back, pulling him by the neck of his T-shirt and growling at him the whole time. Our father called Sam “Mother,” since she was so protective of us and our real mother had died when Adam was a baby. If you were ever in our house at a certain time of day, you’d hear Dad say, “Leonard, go feed your mother,” and someone would have to explain to you that that was what he called the dog.
But when she had the pups, Sam changed. If Adam or I picked one of them up, she’d lift her head and watch us carefully and if the pup made a frightened noise, Sam would draw her lips back over her black and pink gums and she’d even show a long white tooth, although she never snapped or even made a sound.
Adam didn’t know our mother, although he could identify her in pictures. Everyone on the street knew our father was raising us by himself—this was the 1970s, keep in mind—and the thing he cared most about was that we looked okay in our clothes and didn’t go out without hats and gloves in the winter. There was a park near the house that we went to almost every day, and he seemed to know a lot of people there, especially women, and sometimes he’d ask me how I’d feel if he got married again. I always told him that would be fine with me, but I didn’t want anyone who had boy children because Adam was enough, and we could probably use an older sister. He’d joke with me, saying that he’d made a deal with one of the women in the park and that he was going to trade me for a car or for a player “to be named later.” Funny guy, I’d tell him. Other times he’d warn me or Adam to behave or he’d send us down to the farm team. I know what he meant now, but then I thought it really was a farm and I was curious and then disappointed that my behavior was never bad enough to get me sent there.
BUT THE story. We were on York Mills, and Adam held his stick out and walked into the road. It was icy and some of the cars that went around him fishtailed as they passed. I followed him into the stream of traffic and the two of us went and stood by the dead animal. There was no blood, no mark on the dog; it was as if it had wandered out into the street and died there of natural causes. Adam knelt beside the body and stroked its cold fur. The cars made a parenthesis of motion around us. We got ahold of the dog’s front legs and tugged it so it pointed nose-forward down the hill. The big Silverdale 115 bus came over the hill and whined down past us. Then we got behind the dog and used our Stan Mikitas to move it off to the side of the road. It was hard work. The dog kept slipping the wrong way, sliding from our sticks and slowly careering down the hill instead of toward the curb. Adam hit the road with his stick in a rage whenever the big body refused to cooperate. The cars honked and passed closely and some of the drivers called out to us, but we didn’t answer. We could have been killed.
We’d got all our hockey equipment from Mrs. Mendel, who lived two doors up from us. She was lonely all the time and told Adam and me to come over for cookies whenever we wanted. Nell, the girl who lived across the road, told me that one day Mrs. Mendel found her son asleep in the car inside the garage. I didn’t know this meant he was dead, but I think on some level I knew he must have been, and this was why she was lonely. When Adam and I went to visit her, we’d walk across the two backyards that separated us from her house, walking along the bulrushes that lined the edge of the ravine. Next to us were the Goldmans, and then it was the Ponnusamys, whose cooking smelled interesting. Mrs. Mendel lived alone, although her basement was full of hockey equipment that was only there for me and Adam. She was the one who gave us our first skates, and when our father tried to return them she told him he was being proud. We had a special knock that we’d use on the side door, and then she’d let us in and pour us each a glass of milk and give us two cookies. She wouldn’t eat with us, but sit at the table and ask us questions, like what our bedtimes were, and who were our friends at school. Then when we were finished, she’d open the door to the basement and let us go down to play, telling us to let ourselves out the side door when we were ready to go. I’d take Adam’s hand and bring him home in the dark.
This street, which we lived on our whole childhoods, had once been part of an orchard. Our father was good at knowing about the history of places. The orchard had been owned by a man who also raised horses and our dad told us that sometimes when people dug out their basements in the area, they found horse bones. There was only one tree left from the orchard and it never flowered anymore. I had Boy Scout meetings up at Harrison Road Public School, and I had to pass it on Wednesday nights. The tree was lit up under the street lamps, gnarled and silent like the black trees in the forest of Snow White. This is my earliest memory of being frightened of the dark, because when I passed the tree, I thought it could do anything to me it wanted. So I’d talk to it. I’d stop in front of it, in the dark, and greet it and tell it where I’d been and then wish it a good night. I believed for some time that I survived my childhood only because I supplicated this old tree.
WHEN ADAM and I got the dog to the curb we had to stop because we couldn’t lift it over and onto the shoulder. I told Adam
to go back out into the street and wave his stick until someone pulled over. Someone finally stopped, and we were both surprised to see that it was Mrs. Mendel. She rushed around the front of her car and slapped me hard on the cheek and then picked Adam up and held him in her arms. But she didn’t hurry him off the road; she held him against her, the headlights of the cars behind her casting a huge shadow down the hill. I was worried that she was going to do something to him, but I was also frightened to go near her again. Finally, she came over to the curb and sat down, folding her body over Adam, and she was crying. I shook her sleeve and she lifted her face to me and let him go. He came and stood beside me. Then she put us in the back seat of her car and drove us home in complete silence.
I recall Adam slipping his hand across the seat to hold mine and that it had become fully dark by then. Lights were on in all the houses we passed driving back along Harrison Road toward our street. It started to snow and Adam leaned across the seat and whispered to me, this will make it harder for people to see the dog. I can see it so clearly, the snow drifting down onto the road and into the trees, the snow against the sky, dark clusters that glowed star-white when they passed through Mrs. Mendel’s headlights.
Imagine your father trying to shove a dead dog to the side of the road in the middle of winter with nothing but a hockey stick. My sons laugh when they imagine me as a boy, doing this. What they don’t know, and what I don’t tell them, is that this is probably the only day I remember from that year, a single day left standing from an orchard of days.
A Lark
IT WAS THE MOST COMMON OF LOVE SICKNESSES. BERGMAN, AT the brink of forty, had fallen in love with a girl. There was no excuse for his behavior—he was contentedly, if not ecstatically, married, and his work was stable and sometimes even interesting. All of this made his longing for Claudia as incomprehensible (he was a “good” man) as it was or seemed to be unstoppable. He had spent a month in Calgary on assignment, setting up a switching hub in a suburb that had grown by three hundred percent in four years. His was an office job, keeping track of the work, keeping his crews on schedule. There were new papers every morning for him to look through and approve, and they were neatly threaded into a large ring binder. Bright white sheets with rows and columns demonstrated the slow spread of a new network through which the settlers of this greenest new edge of suburbia would now be able to communicate with each other and the rest of the world. He had gone into the field once, but it had been more to show support of his crews than to inspect them. The boom in information technology had seen to it that a company as large as his could hire the most capable engineers, technicians, and fieldworkers, and he knew that exactly the right measures were being taken, and at a pace that was acceptable to everyone. And so, Bergman was deemed good at his job by the men in Toronto who had sent him to Calgary, and by everyone who had become his temporary co-worker there.
Claudia was at the company as a trainee. She was twenty-four, and fresh out of a small west coast managerial college. He had fallen in with her quite naturally, forgetting who and what he was since his true milieu was not around to reflect this back at him. He winningly parodied the marital stumblings and failings that were the commonplaces of midlife, convincingly enough that she didn’t think he would be susceptible to such foolishness. He didn’t look quite as old as thirty-eight and had a pleasing fringe of gray hair behind his temples that was sparse enough to give him some character without rendering him fatherlike. He’d kept his shape as well, even though he had thickened, but it happened in the way (so he liked to think) that it had happened to Mel Gibson, which is to say an agreement had been struck with gravity that was valid as long as his body fat did not go up over fifteen percent.
Bergman was the first “grown” man Claudia had ever met who was not hardwired to the adult circuit board that her own parents came from. He was from somewhere else, towing some scent of his life behind him, but essentially apart from it in this foreign place, some bit of fifth business detached from the background.
He had, naturally, noticed her right away. He noticed women as a matter of course, and had an ongoing monologue in his mind about them, stating without affect some quality that struck him: what fantastic hair, eyes like a doe. When he’d first seen Claudia, she was wearing a pair of riding chaps (the kind intended for fashion, rather than for horses) and he thought, Grace Kelly rides again. As a rule, Claudia dressed more brightly than the other women in the office, and had a clear, liquid laugh that could be heard anywhere on the floor. She was tall in the way of thin, small-breasted girls, willowy, a certain kind of book would have called her, even though she was of average height. There was a sharpness about her that was expressed especially in her arms and legs, and the skin on the backs of her hands seemed tightly wrapped, showing the grain of her sinews. She appeared intensely delicate to Bergman, and this made him want to run a fingertip down her body, lightly.
WHAT HAD started with fast-food meals progressed to drinks (in order to “continue talking”), and from there they could both feel what was happening, and it was like being perched at the top of the first hill on a roller coaster. Bergman had a room at the Radisson, where they’d gone one June night after a couple of extra drinks. She’d allowed him to slide her long, red linen dress off her shoulders and to the floor, where it pooled in ripples around her feet as if she were a pink stone thrown into a deep red pond. She did not wear a bra, there were no lines on her chest or back where one had just been removed, and it struck Bergman that under her dress she was like a sculpture of a woman. She slipped a finger into the band of her panties and drew one leg up and out. Just two pieces of clothing on her. They had sex in the giant hotel bed, and in the middle of her dove cries, her chest flushing red above him, Bergman thought he had gone too far. But then Claudia folded herself down onto him, and the smell of her hair and the sensation of her damp arms convinced him that he was doing what he ought to, if only he viewed what was happening from a certain perspective, and that perspective included the reality of the briefness of life, and the idea that remaining open to new experiences was a positive thing.
He was telling the traditional lies to all involved. To his wife, Renata, the work was going slowly, and there was little in the way of entertainment where he was. Just a neighborhood video store that stocked all the films they’d seen together earlier in the year, and a local bar where he (daringly, he described it) allowed himself the occasional pint of beer and conversation with the barkeep. He’d ventured to participate in a game of darts with some men from his crew whom he’d happened upon, and he’d deepened his bonds. That there was no local bar, and therefore no dart board or crewman to be played with, gave the story dimensions that Bergman thought were closer to engineering than mere lying.
“Will the contract end on time?” Renata asked him.
“I hope so,” said Bergman. “I don’t want to miss the fall in the city.”
“No, dear,” she said, and blew him a kiss down the line.
ON MOST nights after work, Claudia would collect him from a spot a few streets away from the company’s offices and they’d walk to her car and then drive to downtown. She favored Japanese food and steak, and so they’d usually eat in a good restaurant on the company card and then walk hand-in-hand (an open transgression that made him feel invulnerable) down the mall in the middle of the city, the spiky tower looming over them. He’d been to Calgary once as a boy to watch the rodeo and, with the Instamatic camera his father had given him as a birthday present, he’d photographed the fireworks that came afterward. When the photos came back, they were black as pitch. Now, as an adult, he couldn’t even remember what the rodeo or the fireworks had been like.
“I’m not frightened to hold your hand,” he told her. “Although I want you to know I’ve never done this before.”
“Held a girl’s hand?” They were still bantering like this even though they’d already been intimate. He took it as an indication that she was enjoying spending any kind of time with him, a
nd it made him feel expansive, like there was considerable substance to him that had been packed away over the years of his marriage that anyone who took the time could have to herself. It was nice to air himself out.
“You know that’s not what I mean,” he said. “I mean I’m not prone to misbehaving.”
She puckered. “That makes me feel like I’m being bad.”
“Oh no,” he said, “you’re not. Well, a little. Maybe you’ll have to go to bed early as punishment.”
His feeble flirting didn’t get a smile. He’d noticed these little clouds going past and he’d already learned that changing the subject—or simply not following up on it—was as effective as trying to find out what was going on inside her head. He swung her arm a little and she pulled it still and drew the length of herself up against him. “Buy me an ice cream,” she said.
“Still hungry?”
“I have the metabolism of a bird.”
“A hummingbird!”
“Yes, I’m a hummingbird. And you’re a lark.”
He laughed. But later, when he thought about it, he wondered if she had said something significant, if she was saying to him that he was a hobby, or perhaps the reverse: that she was just a little diversion to him. It pained him and he lay awake beside her and replayed the comment in his mind. If I am a lark, then she is just having fun at my expense. But if she thinks I’m larking, then she thinks I could hurt her. He woke her after an hour of this and asked her what she meant. She blinked at him in the dull light of the hotel room.
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