Home Schooling

by Carol Windley

  Every day Lydia and her grandmother were alone in Lydia’s parents’ house on the east coast of Vancouver Island, where the air was fragrant, moist, palpable, somehow, and the mountains of the Coast Range were respectably distant, like a scene in an old travel brochure. In the afternoons Lydia read to the grandmother from a murder mystery, an unsuitable diversion, Lydia would have thought, considering her grandmother’s history. And yet she could see how necessary death was to the story; how it moved things forward, how it had to happen the way it did, in ordinary rooms, in landscapes blurred with gentle mists. Without violent death, it seemed, there would be no genuine passion, only ill-tempered, unfulfilled individuals, full of anomie, grating on each other’s nerves.

  She thought of her Victorian Poets professor, Julian Schelling. There’d been a rumour he’d been married or living with a woman who’d killed herself with sleeping pills and a plastic bag over her head. There were rumours that Dr. Schelling was convinced it had been a case of murder, not suicide, and that someone was out to get him, as well. His paranoia, if that was what it was, had escalated to the point where, when a student gave him a box of chocolates, he’d put it on the floor outside his office and called the police, demanding they send in the bomb squad. Lydia only partly believed this. In her mind she saw Julian clearly. He had a way of tossing his hair and keeping his eyes focussed on the ground, as if crossing an engorged river on a rope. How she’d loved the defiant way he’d read from “The Grande Chartreuse”: Take me, cowled forms, and fence me round / Till I possess my soul again. She knew she could be the steadfast presence he needed, the ameliorating influence. Take me, cowled form and fence me round! she’d wanted to misquote teasingly.

  The worst thing — or second worst thing — she’d done was to phone his extension repeatedly, hanging up if he answered in person. On two occasions she’d lingered near his office until he’d emerged and walked past her in his quick, tense way. The moment was full of potential and then it was gone. Then, when she was turning in an assignment, she’d found in his mailbox a list of faculty addresses and home phone numbers. She’d copied Julian’s address on a scrap of paper. No one witnessed this. The next day she took a bus out to Jericho Beach and quickly located Dr. Schelling’s house, which was old and painted blue, with lots of small, shining windows casting unimpeachable, darting glances up at the sky. She walked around the block and discovered a narrow lane behind his house, with garages, walled gardens, hedges on either side. A small black-and-white cat jumped down from a fence and came and rubbed around her ankles, purring and butting her with its head. A car turned into the lane. She moved aside, but the driver, who she could see was Julian, had to stop for the cat. Here kitty, Lydia coaxed. She pretended the cat belonged to her. Bad cat, she admonished, clapping her hands. Shoo, she said. Shoo. The cat stalked off, its tail held high.

  Julian pulled into his driveway. She heard him shutting his car door and running up a flight of stairs and then a house door banged shut. She walked quickly up and down the lane, to calm herself. It was a mild October day, but the lane seemed to have become colder, more arboreal. The trees cast their shade extravagantly on the ground, where it pooled in inky glacial streambeds she could slip into and drown, like Ophelia. She thought of the professor’s erstwhile wife or lover. Had she died in this house? Lydia would bet she had. She could feel the death, the cold injudicious engine of its arrival and then the follow-through, the trajectory, which, once set in motion, could not be averted. She could sense the whole event, as if it were just taking place.

  She sat on the grass, her back against the fence. She was hungry. She remembered being a child, too engrossed in a game of pretence to make it home in time for dinner and reluctant to get there, anyway, because often at her house there were parishioners or visiting clergy as guests. They had to join hands around the table and say grace all in one voice. Lydia’s grandmother refrained from prayer. She inspected her fingernails or picked lint from her clothes, going assiduously after the last speck, then delicately spearing a broccoli floret with her fork, taking her time, taking her time, like someone abstracted by the work of getting over a debilitating, irreproachable malaise.

  Lydia heard a door open. She got up and took a look around the fence and saw Julian coming down the stairs of his house carrying a small child in one arm and in the other the kind of bag used for diapers and bottles. She couldn’t tell if the child was a boy or a girl. It was dressed in pants and a little hooded jacket. She drew back. Of all the secrets she might have uncovered concerning Julian, the dire and the beautiful, astonishing secrets, this was the one she’d least expected. She felt betrayed, as if she’d been displaced in Julian’s affections, even though she knew he had no feelings for her yet. She wanted to shout: A child! A child! Why didn’t you tell me!

  By the time she got back to the campus, the cafeteria had closed and she had to go to bed hungry. In the morning she woke up hungry and the imposed fast seemed like a deserved penance. She knew she had to stop following Julian. She knew she was being irrational and obsessive. But, if anything, her infatuation deepened. She dreamt of herself and Julian and the child as a small family. She thought of the stories she would read to the child, evenings when the child slept and she and Julian talked quietly and listened to music on a fantastic audio system. The black and white cat would live with them. It would sleep in Lydia’s arms.

  The oak tree outside her dorm room window misted over and disintegrated. She clutched at her desk to keep from being sucked into the empty space where the tree had stood. She was a vast empty space. She tried to work on an essay, but language was not serving her well; it fled on horseback, galloping off like a band of high-spirited mercenaries who had all the power, all the power and glory, forever.

  She met Declan in the line-up at the cafeteria. They sat at the same table and talked about how gross the food was and how not worth it their courses were. Declan was a pale boy with a mass of curly brown hair and a beard that glinted like copper filaments. He touched things and gave off blue sparks. He was nineteen. He wanted to be a filmmaker, but as far as she could see his chief activities consisted of lying around in his room and drinking beer. They both drank a lot of beer. Declan showed her one of his projects: a portfolio of black and white photographs of people standing around on a beach, singly or in groups, dressed in dark flowing garments that contrasted in an interesting way with the grainy drift and subsidence of sand. In his photographs, he said, human forms were analogous to celestial bodies in a void, the space between humming with weird energy.

  Declan said she made him think of Maria, the real one, the good Maria, in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, which was a real trip. That woebegone little bunny face, he said. He pinched her chin. I love that face, he said.

  Can you feel that? he said. Can you feel that energy? He brought his hand closer to hers, until their fingers were suggestively entwined. Tell me if you can feel this, he said, pressing her hand firmly to his crotch. How’s that for energy? he said, getting a little carried away, snorting with laughter, until, overcome with his own high spirits, he had to release her hand. Lydia said she didn’t think they were that kind of friends and Declan hooted and rolled around on the floor. Not that kind of friends! he repeated. Jesus, no. Not us!

  She smiled tolerantly. Declan was good at acting older than his age most of the time, but when the mask slipped he was his true, young self: younger than young, a boy whose skin broke out and who frittered his student loans away on leather pants and cannabis and called home every day to talk to his mom. She knew these things about him. But she was willing to put up with him, because he was her absolute equal in wasting time, in falling short, in underachieving, in screwing up. The appealing thing was, he had no idea this was so. In his mind he was already a sought-after filmmaker, nothing left to do but kick aside the fetters of youth and inexperience and penury.

  Lydia ended up sleeping with Declan, more out of loneliness and horniness than anything. The truth was, she considered him les
s a boyfriend than a sort of human antechamber — or did she mean decompression chamber? — between her yearning for dear, mysterious Dr. Schelling and a more tenable, less febrile way of being.

  Declan said she wasn’t like anyone else he knew. Is that a compliment or an insult? she’d wanted to know. He’d just laughed his bored, ugly little laugh. In May he was going to Ireland with his parents. He said he might never come back. He might get a job there, making documentaries or something.

  I could come with you, she said. I could fly over and meet you there. Yeah, maybe, he said. She was sitting on the floor beside him. Classes had been cancelled due to a snowstorm. Declan was going through his portfolio of photographs, complaining that this one needed cropping, that one was overexposed. They were crap, basically.

  No, they’re good, Lydia said. She pointed at a photograph in which a lone figure stood tensely, indecisively, on the sand. Who’s that, she said, and he said how should he know? But you took it, you must know, she said. It’s one of the professors, isn’t it?

  What are you talking about? Declan said. Leave it alone, you’re getting fingerprints on it.

  She knew the figure in the photograph was Julian. Robed like a monk. His face concealed, but not from her. Not from her.

  Could you move, Declan said. Could you just please quit crushing me?

  He kept sending her down to the vending machine in the lobby for munchies and pop. She ran back up the stairs, trying to rid herself of a nearly intolerable excess of energy. It was the snow, the unnatural silence, the disagreeable, yet poignant, smell of wet boots and micro-waved popcorn and the cavernous pulse of rap music coming from behind closed doors.

  In the hall she stopped to look out a window. The wintry scene made her think of the time she and her parents and her grandmother had travelled to the small town in the West Kootenays where the grandmother had lived as a girl and where her family was buried. Lydia’s father said the trip would be healing — therapeutic — for all of them. Yes, it’s true, we are the direct descendants of a homicidal maniac, and, yes, there are noticeably few of us, a scant few survivors, most of our family having been massacred in a fit of pique, but still, we’re good people, are we not; resilient and well-intentioned, and above all very, very likeable.

  Lydia, who’d been fifteen, had sat in the back, with the grandmother. She’d felt sorry for her, because she was used to being the wife of an architect and going to Maui on vacation and suddenly there she was, a widow, trapped in a cold car hurtling through a frozen landscape.

  The road through the mountains was a sheet of ice and a wind was picking up, flinging pellets of snow against the windshield. Lydia’s father said it might be wiser to turn back, though that might be just as risky. We don’t have to do this, he said. I’m afraid this may not be the best thing for you, mother, he said.

  What’s the problem, don’t you believe in redemption anymore, Phillip? she said. She leaned forward and prodded Lydia’s father, telling him to turn up the heat, she wasn’t as well insulated as some.

  By the time they reached their destination the clouds had thinned; the sun cast a pale glow on the mountains, while the town itself was in deep shadow. There was a Shell station, a coffee shop, a Sears Catalogue outlet, a Rod and Gun Club in a brick building that had once been the bank where Lydia’s grandmother said she’d worked. The house where she’d lived was further out, in the foothills. She said she couldn’t remember how you got there.

  Let me think, she said. Let me get my bearings.

  The next day they drove out to a little graveyard beside the highway. Lydia’s grandmother was wrapped in a fur coat. At that time, she’d worn her hair crisply waved, tinted pale blond. Her mouth was painted a savage plum colour. On her hands she wore all her rings, all the diamond and sapphire rings the besotted architect had given her on anniversaries and birthdays and for no reason at all, except that he adored her.

  Lydia’s mother went and sat by herself on a headstone with a thermos of coffee. Lydia’s father began a little prayer. It meandered around, touching on this and that, the weather, the road conditions, then segued to the exigencies of real life in a troubled world. Words like mercy, grace, forgiveness, scrabbled at the icy air, fleeting and insubstantial, but sharp of beak, like small, startled birds.

  Around the graves marched Lydia’s grandmother, setting her feet purposefully in the snow, leaving a trail that never deviated, and to Lydia it seemed she was hauling a rope after her, she was a sailor winding a rope around the graves like an anchor, and Lydia had wanted to say: let go, let go. But she knew the grandmother wouldn’t let go, and neither would anyone in her family.

  Wandering in two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born. One was the world of faith, in the poem, and it was — dead? Only poetry was real, Matthew Arnold had proclaimed. Poetry was the mind, the true mind, without any garbage getting in the way. Religion was illusion, but it had its own poetry; that at least was true, according to Matthew Arnold, and Lydia believed him. Julian reading poetry in class — that was real to her, that was all possible worlds, the dead, the powerless, the one here and now with its hours and days, its light and dark, its sand and frost.

  She trudged back to Declan’s room and handed him the Pepsi and taco chips. To get his attention, more than anything, she told him what had happened in her family. The story came out briefer than she’d thought, and crueller. Now, thanks to her, Declan would have it in his head always. He’d tell his mother and his mother would say, Couldn’t you find someone normal to be friends with?

  Well, little Lydia, Declan said at last, tugging at his beard. Are you making that up? He said it reminded him of Keyser Soze in The Usual Suspects, when he kills the wife and kid before anyone else can get to them, a kind of pre-emptive strike.

  Yeah, very astute, Lydia said. It hurts to be in love. She put on her coat. You don’t have to go, Declan said. He stood up and smoothed her hair away from her face and said she felt feverish. She said she was fine. In fact, she felt very alone and a little disembodied. She went outside, but, instead of going back to her room, she stamped around in the snow. Alone, she felt happier. She scooped up snow and tasted it, freezing her mouth. Everywhere the night sky shone with light reflected off the snow.

  She saw, or thought she saw, someone running toward her. At first she thought it was Declan. Whoever it was, he was wearing a bulky, hooded jacket, kicking up plumes of snow as he ran clumsily, powerfully, with intent. As he got closer he put out an arm and pushed her, hard. She lost her balance and fell backwards. Her assailant, or whatever, kept running. All she could think was: why her? Why did it always have to be her? It took her a long time to feel angry, to feel anything at all, besides empty and sad and pissed off, mostly with herself. She got up and looked around, afraid someone had seen. She brushed weakly at the snow clotted to her coat. She limped a little, as if she’d been injured, but she was really okay, except she’d lost her gloves. She went back to her room and picked up the clothes she’d left lying around on her floor, stuffing everything into plastic garbage bags. Half-completed assignments, practically unused notebooks, her journal, she put in another bag and both bags went down the garbage chute in the hall. Everything she did felt rational and necessary and full of grace. She had no ego. She had no substance. She’d dropped biology after the first week, because it was just too hard, too hard to open the mind to the harsh reality of life, but she remembered hearing that the human genome contained not eighty thousand or a hundred thousand genes, as expected, but a measly twenty thousand. Everyone pretty much the same, a thin soup made of the most humdrum ingredients: potatoes, a carrot, maybe, at best a rutabaga or some egg noodles. A soup always on the simmer, self-interested, inflated, anxiously waiting to be pronounced uniquely nourishing and flavourful. So it seemed, to her.

  She remembered how hard she’d tried as a child to please her mother, to make her laugh at her feeble jokes (Knock, knock. Who’s there? Lydia. Lydia who? Lid of your garbage can, that’s who
!), but her mother had already heard all the jokes at school. She’d laugh politely and get on with what she was doing — knitting, sweeping the floor, reading a magazine. When the grandmother came to live with them, there’d been a brief competition for Lydia’s affection, a little minor tugging and pulling, which had made Lydia feel pliant and expendable, like a misshaped dough doll. In those days the grandmother still drove and on Saturdays she and Lydia would go to a restaurant, where the grandmother flirted with the waiters and let Lydia taste her wine. At home, the grandmother had badgered Lydia’s mother into serving dinner by candlelight, on gold-rimmed china, at the old elm dining table imported from the grandmother’s house in West Vancouver. Lydia’s grandmother would cosy up to Lydia, inching her chair closer, so that she could say in a perfectly audible whisper: This is an interesting variation on beef bourguignon, I must say. Why didn’t I ever think of leaving the gristle on the stewing beef?

  In the evenings, Lydia remembered, her mother would lock herself in her bedroom, saying she had a headache, and, for a time, she’d ostentatiously swallowed a small white pill every morning at breakfast, for her nerves.

  Julian had told the class how close he’d once come to visiting the Grand Chartreuse. Not the monastery itself, which was unavailable to visitors, but the famous Musée de la Grande Chartreuse, where all nine hundred years of the monastery’s history were documented: the struggles against oppression, the devastating destruction by fire on something like eight separate occasions, the subsequent reconstructions. He’d been staying at a hotel in St.-Laurent-du-Pont, the very village mentioned by Matthew Arnold in the poem. But Julian’s travelling companion came down with one of those minor tourist’s maladies, nothing serious, although she’d taken it seriously enough. She’d demanded a doctor. She’d wanted the sun to be less oppressive and the people in the next room to be quieter. An argument ensued, over their itinerary and the cost of everything. One thing led to another, Julian said. They’d ended up cutting short their vacation. He didn’t see the museum or the Grande Chartreuse. He’d missed what might well have been his only chance to fulfill a dream, to see what he’d yearned with all his heart to see. He stopped. He looked shocked, as if he’d said far more than he’d intended, and it was true, he’d never spoken so openly in class before. Of course his travelling companion must have been the woman who had died, the mother of his child. And, as if he knew Lydia knew, he turned and stared bitterly at her. He dismissed the class. He strode quickly out into the hall, where she caught up to him.