“I have to buy some . . .” she said. She went in the rear entrance of the drugstore and walked through and out the front.
He avoided her at school. She told her girlfriends, “We didn’t click.” There was no possibility of telling them what had happened, and not because it was disgusting, although it was, in a puny, pathetic way (less so to her than it would have been to them), but because she had gotten her hopes up. She had wanted more, and he had rightly shamed her.
She wasn’t asked out again until her second year of university. By then she was ready to believe that Ava would have wanted her to live a normal life. The belief didn’t liberate her or console her as much as point her toward what she imagined a normal life entailed.
It was the end of term, a party in a frat house. She arrived late and had to step over bodies and squeeze past lunging drunks to reach the kitchen. An older, slouching guy with longish hair and clever eyes handed her a beer. “Let’s make a break for it,” he said.
They walked to a park and sat at a picnic table. He wasn’t the professor she took him to be from his age and vocabulary. He had master’s degrees in philosophy and political science but the only job he’d been able to find was telemarketer. “I get hung up on an average of twenty times an hour,” he said cheerfully. Then he said, “Let’s not talk about that, let’s talk about your gorgeous arms. Hold them out.”
She did, tentatively.
“All the way out.”
She extended them farther.
“I adore them,” he said.
He challenged her to an arm wrestle. She let him win. “It’s all technique, really,” he said and launched into an explanation of top roll versus hook, hand size versus wrist endurance, and other such considerations. She took this to be slightly inebriated chatter.
It wasn’t. It was who he was, what he did. It was his university degrees in action. When they decided to have sex for the first time, while they were still drinking tequila shots (another first for her), he paced the bedroom of her flat and listed the pros and cons of her losing her virginity to a man in the midst of reformulating his concept of romantic love.
Her ears were chiming. At last she removed all her clothes and got in under the covers. She had worked hard—as hard as he was working now—to talk herself into this. Not the losing her virginity part, but rather the right, the obligation, to experience the pleasure it promised.
“Okay, I’m going to sleep,” she said.
“What the hell,” he said and jumped on her.
He knew his way around her body. But Rose could maintain a state of excitement only if she imagined him at work, being hung up on. She faked her orgasm.
By all measures, except for her inability to come, their sex was torrid—extended foreplay, every possible position. Afterward, he would hold her tight and debate both sides of some topic, it could be anything. He seemed to think from her shifts and sighs that she was listening and contributing. In fact, she was silently debating both sides of the frigidity issue. Was faking your orgasm an act of generosity or of selfishness? Was frigidity a physical or temperamental condition? Did she want to be frigid? Was frigidity a source of power for her or a shrine to her everlasting guilt?
Eight months into the relationship he told her as nicely as such things can be told, but unequivocally, no beating around the bush, that he was seeing a woman on Canada’s Olympic rowing team.
She stayed single for two years. This was during the time of her father’s diagnosis and then his death, and she was working seven days a week. Also, her bad periods had returned, with more blood and pain than ever. Some days it was all she could do to climb the theater stairs. She postponed seeing a doctor in case she, too, had a fatal illness, her fear being not so much that she would die but that her mother would be left alone.
It wasn’t cancer, it was fibroids. The gynecologist said he could remove them, but she would grow more. She asked if she needed a hysterectomy.
“It’s an option,” he said.
She had just buried her father. She couldn’t afford to spend days bleeding and writhing in bed. And to tell the truth, she’d been expecting something like this since the day Ava died. A big reckoning, a penance. Only in the recovery room did it really hit her that she would never be able to bear children. She could have them, adopt them, but she couldn’t bear them. She had told Fiona that any new fibroids were likely to be malignant, and she decided to believe this herself. Although she didn’t really.
Fiona blamed the fibroids on overwork. She said she knew of other young women who had spoiled their female plumbing by working themselves ragged. Right there in the hospital she ruled that they were going to cancel the matinees.
“Really?” Rose said. The matinees had been beloved by her father.
“They’re money losers,” Fiona said, a fact she had refused to acknowledge before now. “What are we?” she said. “A charity?”
So now Rose had Saturday and Sunday afternoons to herself. She began meeting friends at cafés. She attended art openings and saw first-run movies.
One Sunday afternoon she went to a fund-raiser for the National Ballet and found herself seated next to a composer and music teacher recently arrived from Hong Kong. Marlin Lau. While everybody else at their table ignored the two of them, they discovered a mutual interest in Japanese cinema. He liked the later films of Kurosawa, the rest he called “missteps.” Rose had been taught by her father to revere Kurosawa, and the fact that Marlin Lau could write off The Seven Samurai with one withering word gave her a strange thrill. So did the way he looked: slender and elegant, but with a strong concave face, like the man in the moon. On his ring finger he wore a gold band. Was his wife here in Toronto? Rose asked.
He tapped his napkin to his lips. “I am a widower.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
He gave a slight bow. He reminded Rose of Alec Guinness playing the formal Japanese widower in A Majority of One. A cross between Alec Guinness and Kazuyuki, her papier-mâché cellist.
The similarities turned out to be skin-deep (or paper-thin, as she would one day tell the story). Marlin was sensitive only insofar as everything offended him, every sort of fashion, any sort of trend or variation on a theme. Any theme. If he could name it or name its antecedent, it was derivative and therefore worthless. Months had to pass for Rose to appreciate the scope of his disdain let alone recognize it as disdain rather than principled intelligence. He had no friends, and he didn’t think much of hers.
But three mornings a week, in the apartment he sublet on St. Clair West, he did something with his musician’s fingers, and she had an orgasm, a fleeting tremor, a reflex that had nothing to do with love on her part, or even lust. To bring herself to lie down in the first place, she had to think about his dead wife and his stalled career. As far as she could tell, his compositions were performed only by his students. His Symphony no. 1 in G Minor had been in the works for fifteen years.
She would never love him, but she wanted him to love her. The man you were with was supposed to love you. Besides, he had loved his wife and often told her so.
Then one morning she stopped caring whether he loved her or not. She went to sleep caring and woke up asking herself, what am I doing? Apart from the strain of listening to his countless specific and indefinite resentments, there was the fact that he preferred to see her midmorning, during those hours when, normally, she would be having breakfast and doing household chores. But how do you break up with a lonely, recent-immigrant widower?
To celebrate his first year in Toronto she took him to a new four-star luncheon bistro called Les Trois Cloches. They rarely ate out (neither of them could afford it, and his standards were merciless), so when he examined his menu without wincing, she was able to sit back and read her own. Scarcely above a murmur she sang “Les Trois Cloches,” a song she knew from all those afternoons listening to her father play his Édith Piaf records.
“Please stop,” Marlin said.
“Oh.” She looked around.
“Was that too loud?”
“No.”
Was she off-key? She couldn’t bear to ask.
“You sing through your nasal passages.”
Worse than off-key. “God. Sorry.”
“You are untrained.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“When should I have told you?”
“Sunday?” While trying to figure out his German coffeemaker, she had sung “Edelweiss.” “How long have I been torturing you? God.”
“Please keep your voice down.”
“My voice is down.” Or was it? She had lost all confidence in her voice.
He straightened his cutlery. “I have something to say to you. It was my intention to wait until the dessert course.”
“I chew with my mouth open?” she tried joking.
He went still, either at the indelicacy or the realization. Back to business, he rotated his plate an inch. “I feel very strongly that you and I have reached, if you will forgive the jargon, our sell-by date.”
“As a couple?” she asked, hardly daring to hope.
“We lack compatibility.” He flicked a speck of dust from the plate. “We have lacked it from the beginning, if we are honest with each other.”
“From the get-go,” she said a little too eagerly. She lowered her eyes. “I mean, I actually like The Seven Samurai.”
“We have different aspirations.”
“We live in different worlds.”
“I need . . .” He folded his hands on the edge of the table. “I want . . .”
He wanted to finish his symphony, she thought, moved. She reached across and placed a hand over his.
“I very much want . . .”
“I know,” she said.
“To have children,” he said.
She swore off men. Who needed them? Who had the time? Victor was a blind date, and she agreed to go out with him only because she hadn’t dated anyone in five years, and his father had died a few months earlier.
They met for lunch. Like a certain type of intelligent man he imparted facts as a way of holding up his side of the conversation. But his facts were entertaining and always related to whatever they’d been talking about. Neither she nor her mother could bring herself to kill an ant, she said, and he said an ant dragging a moth through a lawn was equivalent, in terms of strength, to a man lifting a light aircraft through a bamboo grove. They both noticed how white their server’s teeth were, and he said that ancient Romans cleaned their teeth with urine. She learned that a shoreline is infinite because it is infinitely jagged, and that Graham Greene wouldn’t have written The Power and the Glory if he hadn’t escaped to Mexico after publishing a review in which he accused Shirley Temple’s most ardent admirers of being licentious clergymen.
By dessert Victor’s wandering eye seemed less an endearing affliction than a consequence of such wide-ranging interests. They were discussing the illegitimate progeny of movie stars, and Rose, knowing she would see him again, confessed to being infertile. “It was a deal breaker with my last boyfriend,” she said.
“The composer?” Victor said, evidently having heard of him through their mutual friend. “Well, it would be a deal maker with me.”
“You don’t like kids?”
“Drooling, incontinent lunatics. Not really.”
She laughed, relieved but a bit disturbed. It wasn’t that she didn’t like children.
“Most of them grow into passable humans,” he said. “Eventually. Unless they’re male.”
He was only trying to separate himself from Marlin Lau, she told herself. “Some males grow out of it,” she said and smiled at him. “I hope.”
He smiled back. “A few of us do.”
FRIDAY, JULY 1, 2005
Rose began to record the episodes so far.
First she drew a diagram of Harriet’s apartment. She outlined the doors, windows, appliances, furniture, bookshelves, sinks, toilet, and bathtub. Where she had noticed them, she added the overhead lights, light switches, plants, and unpacked boxes. She shaded in colors. She drew the calico cat on the bed and the black-and-white cat on the windowsill.
She then created a computer file and chronicled everything that had happened, including word-for-word dialogue, as nearly as she could recapture it. She described Harriet’s physical sensations and her emotions, these latter being the tricky part, whether to go with frustration or disappointment, dread or dismay. She felt a powerful sense of responsibility, far beyond the one she owed her future, potentially skeptical self, to be her miracle’s exemplary witness.
Downstairs, Easy Rider ended, intermission came and went, and The Grapes of Wrath started. During the scene where Ma Joad is crying, “We got a sick old lady!” Rose saved the computer file with the name “Being Harriet Smith” and closed her eyes.
“Wake up,” her mother said.
“Did you knock?” Rose asked, sitting up.
“I always knock.”
“It must have been the heavy meal.”
Fiona let that go, but in the car she said, “When I was pregnant with you, I slept on my feet.”
“I’m not pregnant,” said Rose. “And I’m not having an affair, either.”
“Who said you were having an affair?”
“I can’t be pregnant.”
“Why not?”
It wasn’t that the memories Fiona mislaid were unimportant to her. If only that were the case, if only she were able to hang on to what she cherished most, like a person grabbing the birdcage and photo albums before running out of a burning house. Rose understood how blameless her mother was, but she was tired, and she said, “Mom, think about it.”
They had pulled into their driveway. Rose glanced over.
“No,” Fiona murmured, “that doesn’t work.”
“I forget myself sometimes,” Rose said, sorry now that she had pressed.
“You’ll never be a mother,” Fiona said.
“Not a biological one, no.”
Moths dithered around their porch light. Fiona watched them and chewed her bottom lip. Did she realize she was home?
“So I’ll see you in the morning,” Rose said.
Fiona didn’t budge. She said, “When I stare blankly, I’m not blank. I’m concentrating.”
“Okay,” Rose said.
“I think it must be the same with old people in wheelchairs and hospital beds, the people who get written off, when their minds are years and years away, concentrating on a few minutes that they’re the only ones in the world who remember.”
“Nobody writes you off,” Rose said.
“I don’t mean a birthday or a conversation. I mean an atmosphere. An atmosphere when I was so alive that I noticed everything around me. The atmosphere around me.” She looked at Rose.
“The weather,” Rose suggested. “The light.”
“Everything all blended together. Whatever it is that makes an atmosphere. Lately I’ve been trying to get back the atmosphere from a winter morning, oh, fifty years ago, it must have been. I’d just met your father, and I was head over heels in love. I was on my way to my job at Tip Top Tailors.” Her hand encircled the cuff of her blouse. At Tip Top Tailors she had sewn shirt cuffs. “It was Christmastime. It was snowing. There was snow on the window ledges. The fruit stands had navel oranges in towers, bunches of mistletoe, and holly tied with red ribbon. I was wearing a green velvet beret, tilted to one side, like a French girl.” She demonstrated adjusting such a hat.
“I’ll bet Dad liked it,” Rose said with a full heart.
“He liked my ankles,” Fiona said. She picked up her purse and opened her door. “Off you go,” she said, “wherever it is you go.”
Rose took the Lake Shore to avoid construction. She lowered her window so that Victor wouldn’t smell the cigarette smoke on her clothes, even as she asked herself what business it was of his if she smoked. To her left Lake Ontario was a gray vacancy beyond fogged-in condo towers and strips of parkland. Puddles the size of ponds almost dr
agged the car to a halt.
At Victor’s she let herself into the foyer, but then she just stood there. The living room clock struck the midnight hour. Why wasn’t she with her mother, who would never be a grandmother and who was not incapable of mistaking a can of oven cleaner for a can of air freshener? Why wasn’t she searching for the apartment building she’d seen from Harriet’s window?
Victor appeared as if out of a mist, on the other side of the glass door. “I thought I heard something,” he said. “I’ve opened a really nice Shiraz.”
She followed him to the kitchen.
“Is there a word for the parents of a dead child?” she asked. They were on their second glass of wine. “The parental equivalent of orphan?”
He took a sip of his wine. “I don’t think so. We’ve got widow, widower.”
“It’s too horrible to have a word.”
“We’ve got the adjectives,” he said. “Bereaved, grieving.” Although he knew, of course, that Ava had died, he didn’t make the connection to her parents and their dead child, but talked about how the English language had all these gaps. Where was the word for the feeling of being alone in the woods? The Germans had one: Waldeinsamkeit. Or the word for apprehending your own misery? The Czechs had one. “But then,” he said, “they would.”
Rose looked at the plaid wallpaper his mother must have thought was so modern and North American when she’d picked it out. Where was the word for a man who hated children and had almost put his agoraphobic mother in a nursing home?
They went to the bedroom. That was what they did after the wine and cheese. She undressed and lay beside him and hoped it wouldn’t take too long. But as they kissed, a guilty sense that she had betrayed him with David had her trying harder. And then, when she closed her eyes, he was David. She opened her eyes: Victor. Closed them: David.
She kept them closed.
Little Sister Page 10
