“No woman who knows her worth would want to go back to that,” Kevin said. He put his arm around Rebecca and squeezed tight. “Why go back to beer when you’ve got wine?”
“Well, screw-cap wine,” said Rebecca, but it came out not as funny as she’d intended, and she squeezed Kevin back to show she was joking. Robert flipped the piece of meat sideways, grunting like a weight lifter making the snatch. It hit the grill with a muffled thud, a brutal sound to Rebecca’s ears. The oiled flames jumped up and licked the underside. It felt to Rebecca as if the four of them had deserted a battle their fellows were still fighting and had come to a place of temporary respite, pretending everything was normal. She looked over at Diane, and the other woman suddenly seemed very far away, as if Rebecca were looking at her down the wrong end of a telescope. Her ears filled with a dullness she could hear her heartbeat through, and she detached herself from Kevin and put down her drink.
“Whoops,” Kevin said.
“Too much on an empty stomach,” said Rebecca. She turned her back and leaned against the railing beside Diane. If she breathed slowly, the feeling would pass.
Robert watched her with an analytical squint, a long silver fork in one hand, motionless over the grill, a steel spatula in the other. “Get the poor thing a little bunwich, Di,” he said, pointing toward the door with the spatula, and Diane pushed herself off the railing and went inside. Rebecca felt the wood sway against her back.
Kevin put a solicitous hand on her shoulder. “You want to go in and rest awhile?”
“Maybe I’ll go down to the dock and sit in one of the chaises,” she said.
Robert slapped the tenderloin with the flat of the spatula. “Bad Bessie!” he said. “You’re turning our guests off.” He looked up at Rebecca and smiled apologetically. “She’ll bring you something. Diane, I mean. Go on down.”
THE LAST time Rebecca had been on her parents’ lake, she was twenty-five. There had been a white dock lying on the water and a trail that led up to a wood-stained cottage in the pine. A short canoe ride away, there were two inlets that ended in marshes connected by a beaver dam. She’d been there many times, with her mother or father, or both, and sometimes she came alone and let the boat drift in the calm water. The summer home was the only place on earth that hadn’t changed for her since she’d been a child. From time to time, her parents had talked of selling it and getting another place where there weren’t so many outboards. This worried Rebecca, because she’d got to the age where hanging on to things that you loved made sense. But when the marriage failed, her parents sold it anyway, and neither of them bought anything new after that.
Right before the sale closed that February of her twenty-fifth year, Rebecca had gone up to spend a weekend alone in the cottage. If she ever felt low, she’d always found consolation in the little cabin with its paneled walls and its comforts. She lit a fire the first night and made herself toast for supper and sat near the grate, staring into the constantly warping shapes. Although the flame moved, the source of it was utterly still. The moment extended itself to encompass Rebecca as she was then, with the country home still in the family, and her young life still untouched by irreversible error. The night air was motionless outside the big window, and the lake frozen, and there was no one around for miles. It was a long deep shape of time, and it calmed her.
DIANE CAME down the steps behind her, with a little cheddar sandwich on a white plate, a few grapes on the side. She handed the plate to Rebecca without a word, and then sat down in the chaise beside her. A big canvas umbrella blocked the late-day sun from their eyes.
Rebecca took small bites of the sandwich to be polite, then set it aside and lay back.
“Do you vant to be alone?” Diane said, and Rebecca laughed.
“No. I mean, I’m okay alone, if you want to be with the guys.”
“You’re a polite girl, Rebecca. It won’t do.”
“Stay, then.”
The lake was flat in front of them, the islands across the way reflected in a green Rorschach on the surface. Silent ripples opened and closed on the lake surface, fish coming up to feed. Rebecca imagined tiny, serrated mouths blossoming all over, making holes in the surface, little pits with stomachs at the bottom. This was the kind of picture her mind offered up from time to time, an image that uncovered an ugly reality where someone else might only see something beautiful.
“There used to be a camp over on that side,” said Diane, gesturing to a point on the other shore. “For underprivileged teenagers. They used to come in August for three weeks and canoe and have cookouts and shoot arrows.”
“It’s not open anymore?”
“They had a scandal. The last summer they were open, one of the girls let a friend who wasn’t at the camp come in one night. The other girl drove in and parked in the trees back there. She had a newborn with her, maybe six days old, and she and her friend took out one of the canoes and paddled out to the middle—maybe 500 meters from here—and dropped the baby into the lake.” She looked at Rebecca, who was smiling. “What?” she said.
“And now, every night, you can hear a baby crying somewhere out in the middle of the lake.”
Diane ran her tongue over her teeth. “I thought it was true.”
“It’s not.”
“It could be.”
Robert called down. “Ten minutes!”
Diane waved.
“Are you and Robert okay?” said Rebecca. “Kevin told me things weren’t going too well. I don’t mean to pry.”
Diane stretched her long legs out. They were brown from the sun, with a thin white crust of dry skin in some places, from an earlier tan. “Are we friends, Rebecca?”
“Oh,” she said. “It’s private. I’m sorry.”
“Not if we’re friends. If we’re friends, you don’t have to ask if you’re prying.”
“Okay.”
“I had an affair.” She let that hang for a moment. Rebecca didn’t say anything, but she didn’t look at Diane, either. “He didn’t know until I told him, and I only told him because I wanted to give him a chance to leave if he wanted to. But then the bastard admitted he’d been having one, too. We were both cheating on each other.” She looked over at Rebecca, and the fizzing started again in Rebecca’s head, like a faint breathing behind her eyes—radio voices. “It’s pretty easy to be rotten to the one you love,” Diane said.
THE WAITRESS came and refilled Rebecca’s cup. She was wearing slippers. It was still just her and the waitress in the restaurant, although Rebecca could see an old man sitting on a stool just inside the kitchen. He was smoking a cigarette.
“No, thank you,” said Rebecca, waving away the offer of a creamer.
The old man in the kitchen exhaled a voluptuous chestful of smoke, and it went up in front of his face, obscuring it and imparting its color to his skin.
“Is that your father?” Rebecca asked.
“He is the cook,” said the waitress.
“He could be the cook and your father.”
“My father does not cook here.” She went away with the coffee. Where does he cook, then? Rebecca wanted to say, automatically slipping into the phraseology of the logic puzzles she’d loved as a kid: The waitress’ father does not cook at The Rickshaw. The man who doesn’t smoke was not born in Guangzhou. Her father had shown her how to fill in the grids, canceling alternatives, accruing details that could not be true and leaving one possibility behind. When you sorted out a relationship, you put a checkmark at the intersection. Two of the cooks are brothers, but the older brother is not the waitress’ uncle.
The waitress was in her forties or fifties; Rebecca couldn’t tell. A wave of something came over her—it contained a whiff of despair. She knew the waitress went home alone, and so did the old man who was not her father. Rebecca imagined that this was the closest thing either of them had to a relationship. It was heartbreaking to consider the lots of people who had less hope than yourself, although, thought Rebecca, the recognition of others’ p
ain was not enough to make her own seem manageable. In fact, sometimes it made her own suffering seem ridiculous, a feeling that brought a surfeit of pain.
The woman came back with the bill. Perhaps her personal question had triggered a decision that it was time to close. Rebecca looked up at the neon-lit clock and saw that it was already after midnight.
“I’ll just finish this,” she said.
“Take your time.” The woman stayed close and cleaned the countertop lazily. She turned and wiped around the coffee machine, then took the carafe out from under the drip and poured the remaining coffee into the sink.
“I used to come here all the time, to Gravenhurst,” she said to the woman’s back. “My parents had a place on 169.”
“We live in town,” said the woman.
The we knocked Rebecca’s imaginings askew, but she felt she couldn’t ask the woman anything else about herself. She watched her continue to clean, her hand tracing light circles over the plasticized veneer, without enough pressure, it seemed, to pick anything off it but newspaper smudges. Maybe the we meant there was a mother or an elderly person to whom she was obligated, and the waitress was therefore not alone at all. Rebecca thought perhaps this woman would go back to wherever she lived and would be greeted by the smells of genuine cookery, the sort from the old country that they could not make in this café. The people who came here wanted omelettes or stir-fried bean sprouts with chicken and soy sauce—or coffee and lemon pie. When did people like herself and this woman ever reach across their boundaries to make a link? She could keep coming back here; even if Robert and Diane split up, she could keep coming back to this town where she’d spent the summers of her childhood, come into The Rickshaw and say hello to the waitress, whose name might be Lucy—such things as grew roots between two unlikely persons could be seeded here. She could meet Lucy’s mother. She could take back to Toronto the clippings of alien houseplants and grow them in a window in her own kitchen.
The woman came back and looked down at the bill, and Rebecca said, “Oh yeah,” and fumbled with her wallet. The waitress held up a hand.
“No hurry,” she said.
WHEN REBECCA and Diane went back up the steps to the cottage, Robert was slicing the beef into fragrant red slivers. Dark blood pooled underneath. Diane went and stood behind Robert and put her head on his shoulder so that it looked as if Robert had two heads. Rebecca felt the welling that had been building all evening finally begin to coalesce in the pit of her stomach, the warp of the unnameable taking its terrible shape, and her hands went cold. Kevin slipped an arm around her waist and kissed her neck and that was all the logic her mind needed and the little chambers of her heart fisted up and she was having an attack. She reeled off his arm and stood apart.
“Suck up, you’re behind,” said Robert. “Then we’ll tuck into this.” Suck, tuck, her mind went, wallowing in ominous connections. Robert ran the tip of a finger down the top edges of the meat, riffling it as though it was a deck of cards made out of flesh. Life’s Little Emergencies, went her mind, and then, Jack the Ripper. Kevin was looking at her.
“You’re still not right, are you?”
“I’m fine.” She turned her attention to Robert. She was containing the shallow little breaths that lapped up against her ribcage. “So you guys are okay now? You and Diane?”
“Comme la pluie,” said Robert. “Except she’s nuts.”
Kevin laughed, and Robert leaned in toward Rebecca to tell her whatever it was Kevin already knew was funny. “We went out for a coffee the other night, she and me—”
Sheen me
“—and she farted out loud because there was only one other table there and they were all speaking German and she figured they wouldn’t understand.”
“HAW HAW,” went Diane right into Robert’s ear. She kissed his cheek and stepped toward the door. “I told Rebecca, by the way,” she said. “You’re not the only one with a nasty secret.” She was holding the door open and Robert went in beside her with the blood-scented platter.
“A stalemate is also a way not to lose,” he said over his shoulder to Rebecca. “What do you think of getting married now?”
SHE’D GONE in and sat down, but before she could be served she said she was still not feeling well. Maybe she was coming down with something; she wanted to rest some more. Kevin walked her back to the cabin, and she fell into the bed on her belly, the waves of panic still streaming through her, dark smoke without flame. He rubbed her back. “What’s going on?”
“I think I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed.” Her voice was little more than a whisper.
“You’re hot. Why don’t I get you a Tylenol?”
“You go,” she said. “I’ll be fine in a bit.”
“We’re not like them, you know.”
She pushed herself up on her elbows. “What does that mean, Kevin? Why would you think I was worried about who I was like? Or who we were like?”
He pulled his face back, surprised. “I’m just picking up that they make you feel strange.”
“I make me feel strange. But I’ll deal with it. You go eat Sally Field or Bessie, or whatever Robert’s named that fucking piece of meat.” She flopped back down on the bed, and he put his hand on the small of her back again, and although this contact with him was just what she needed, she gently pushed the hand away. “Go on,” she said.
He looked at her, a little hurt that she wouldn’t reach out to him, but she never reached out to him; theirs was a relationship fueled by a strenuous effort to be happy, and if not happy, then pleasant. In his mind, their relationship worked; this was why he wanted to buy a place with her, this was why (as he’d told Robert) he would shortly ask her to marry him. He leaned down and kissed her softly on the temple, then went back into the cottage. She heard his footsteps receding and the spring-stretch of the door as he went in. Then she lay there, with the sound of roaring in her ears.
Taking tiny breaths, she got up, and dug into her toiletry kit and got out the bottle with the small blue pills in it. She hadn’t needed one of these for more than a year. Having to take one felt like failure, as if all the time she spent between the need to reach for one was just a pause in the natural order, that order being one in which she couldn’t cope, couldn’t helm herself, was broken in a way not evident to anyone but her. She let one of the pills dissolve under her tongue into a wet sugary powder and within moments the sounds diminished and her skin began to lay down again along her arms and legs. She lay there breathing. Then the pill, with its mother’s hands, stroked her to sleep.
SHE’D BROUGHT Kevin to meet her mother, earlier in the summer. They dropped in because they were “in the area,” and they’d caught her baking for a party. So they pitched in, an impromptu comedy with Kevin trying to get edible silver balls to sit dead center on the tops of a gross of sugar cookies, while Rebecca and her mother stuck toothpicks into pound cakes and whispered in the corner.
“Well?” she asked, and her mother replied that she wanted Rebecca to be happy. “That’s the blessing of a pessimist.”
“Is he a lot older than you?”
“No. He’s a good guy, Mom. He’s serious. He’s had the same job for five years. He’s principled.”
“Is he funny? Your father was funny.”
“Is funny,” she said. She was watching Kevin trying to drop the candy decorations into their correct positions. “Look at him now.” Her mother turned and smiled. The tip of his tongue was sticking out of the corner of his mouth. After a moment, he looked up at them and grinned.
“Two for them, one for me,” he said, and put one in his mouth.
“Have you ever been married, Kevin?”
He looked from mother to daughter and back. “I’ve never been married,” he said.
“Well, don’t,” said Rebecca’s mother. “Our generation got it all wrong. We had sex and thought that if we got married the other person would start making sense. We thought marriage made you serious.”
“You don’t think
it does,” he said carefully. His parents were still married, and he’d talked about marriage with Rebecca in a circular fashion, theoretically, as if it were an intellectual hare rather than a possibility.
“Marriage makes you put your trust in an idea.”
“It’s a good idea for some people, though,” he said. Rebecca leaned her hip against the countertop and pushed a fingertip through a dusting of flour there. “In any case, Ms. Jamieson, Rebecca and I are taking things slowly. Aren’t we?”
Rebecca nodded and smiled, but didn’t take her eye off her flour mandala. “Slow enough.”
“But not so slow that you didn’t teach him my maiden name.”
“Well, you’re not Mrs. Silver anymore, Mom.”
Her mother covered her ears in mock horror. “Eee! My slave name!”
Kevin stood up and put the box of candy balls down on the counter. “It was great to meet you,” he said.
WHEN REBECCA woke it was dark out, and the covers had been folded back from the other side of the bed, over her body. She could hear the voices of her friends and her lover in the cottage, murmurs punctuated by laughter. She swiveled out of the bed and sat there, waiting for her senses to come online, then stood up and took the car keys off the dresser. She went out to the car and started the motor, and when, after two or three minutes, no one came out to stop her, she reversed down the long driveway and out onto the road.
The sky was blue-black and the stars hung in vast profusions, a pale river of them arcing through the emptiness. She drove into the town and through the town, and when she got to the highway that led back toward the city, she turned north and drove to the little access road that went to the lake of her childhood. On the birches and pines that appeared in her headlights were the little handpainted signs of the families who had always been there, names of people she knew but had never met. Signs cut into animal shapes—turtles, frogs, bears.
In the ten years since, they’d paved the road that led to the shore where the old place was. Some new cottages had gone up in that time, crowding in along the treed edge of the lake, big satellite dishes drinking in the sky’s signals. But her place was still there, and after she parked and got out, she could see it hadn’t changed much at all. The current owners had kept the woodpile in the same place, and the flagstones that led down the middle of the property to the dock were the same ones she’d helped her father lay when she was a kid. She followed them down to the lake, where the moon lay like a ribbon across the water.
Fidelity Page 14
