Swallow

by Theanna Bischoff

  “How do you even know what she looks like? And why do you even care, Carly? Ryan loves you.”

  “Because!” I could picture her pouting on the other end. “Because she keeps phoning. She left her name on our answering machine and I looked her up in Ryan’s yearbook. Listen, Jessa Marie Ryce. Grade: Ten. Activities: Dancing, Pageants — ”

  I interrupted her. “She sounds pretty dumb.”

  “You didn’t let me finish,” she said. “Activities: Dancing, Pageants, Debate Team, History Club. She’s gorgeous and smart. I’m a cow who may not even pass English. School to me is all jibber-jabber.” I’d once tried to explain to her the possibility that she had a learning disability. “That’s just a nice way of saying I’m stupid,” she’d countered.

  “Don’t compare yourself to Jessa! Anyway, that’s not the point. You shouldn’t snoop through Ryan’s stuff. He hasn’t called her back, so obviously he’s not pining over her. If you’re worried about it, talk to him.”

  “The thing is, she’s only in his Grade Ten yearbook, not Grade Eleven or Twelve. Do you think they broke up because she moved away?”

  “Listen!” I said, “They were fifteen! Nobody stays together at fifteen. He’s with you now. You have to let this go!”

  She did not let it go. A week later, she was at home alone making dinner. The pasta sauce had bubbled over and spilled chunky tomato onion onto the burner, sending the smoke alarm into a frenzy. She’d clambered up on a chair and taken the battery out to get it to shut up. The apartment clouded over. She’d opened the balcony door to let the smoke out. The phone rang.

  When she told me this story, her teary blubbering made it so that I couldn’t understand the words. I had to make her repeat it a few times.

  “And, and so I answered, and she was like, I’m looking for Ryan Angeli, and I was like, who is this? And she wouldn’t tell me, but of course I knew who it was, so I was like, I want you to stop phoning my boyfriend. And she was all, I don’t want your boyfriend, I just want to tell him he has a daughter.”

  &Valentine’s Day fell on the Wednesday after I’d told Ryan to stop answering my sister’s calls. Carly had a class on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings. When I phoned her on my drive in to work, she answered, breathless and jovial.

  “Hey, sis! I’m actually just heading into class, can I call you after? I have good news.”

  I slowed for a red light.

  “Ryan phoned,” I said. It came out as a statement, a fact. I squeezed the wheel, my cell phone pinned between my ear and my shoulder. The car slid forward, just slightly, with the loss of traction.

  “Nah. But he will. I mean, it’s Valentine’s Day. I know we’re kinda broken up, technically, but he wouldn’t — he hasn’t called me back for a while, but I mean, it’s Valentine’s Day, and, well, anyway, whatever. I can’t really talk. How about I call you at lunch?”

  I agreed, the thought occurring to me that I’d left my lunch — leftover Hawaiian pizza from the previous night’s dinner — sitting on the counter, slowly warming in a Ziploc bag. I wondered whether Kipling would gnaw her way through it. The light wouldn’t change. I sat, gripping the wheel, my stomach warming sour.

  &Papi died the day before Patrick and I were to celebrate our first anniversary. I found out when his niece Frances called. Papi kept his phone numbers on sticky notes on the wall by the phone, but he refused to rely on the single side of adhesive to get them to stay, taping down all sides with scotch tape in neat little squares. He had several numbers for me, as I’d changed apartments or cell phones, each crossed out and rewritten in his shaky hand against the grooves of the tiled backsplash.

  He died in his sleep. A nurse, who had been coming to check on him and help administer his insulin shots, found him. I hadn’t even known that he’d hired a nurse, or that he’d been diagnosed diabetic. I pictured him in his faded blue striped pyjamas, of which he owned four pairs. I pinched my jaw shut on the subway over, breathed through my nose to keep from crying. My eyes stung, holding the tears back. Frances told me that she’d given the landlord at Papi’s building — my old building — permission to let me into Papi’s apartment, in case I wanted any keepsakes. Her voice on the phone unnerved me, the voice I’d never heard before, behind all the birthday cards written in calligraphy with chocolate loonies hiding in the envelopes, the shiny ribbons and crunchy wrapping paper.

  I called Carly and asked her to take the subway to Papi’s apartment after school, but went in first myself, bringing a small empty backpack, not even sure what I wanted to take. I lay on the couch with his rough orange blanket that felt like cuddling carpet.

  I tried to picture him, dreaming about his beautiful twenty-five-year-old wife, her picture at his bedside, and then the two of them, reunited, no space in-between. Over time, the cats had reduced in number to a lone, scrawny kitten. Papi’s apartment seemed bare without the cats, the way a room feels with the furniture gone, a bare square of floor where a bookshelf should be, a TV stand, a beloved recliner.

  “Don’t worry, the kitten had plenty of food,” Frances told me, and I wondered if Papi had known, if he’d had a feeling. Keeping others safe, as usual. “She’s at the neighbours, but they can only keep her for a couple of days. I think someone from the shelter will come take her back.” I’d never met the kitten before; he’d acquired her over Christmas, during my final exams. I’d talked to him, but hadn’t visited for several months. My stomach turned inside out.

  I called Patrick.

  “How does dinner in Little Italy sound?” he asked, before saying hello, recognizing my name on the display.

  “My grandfather died,” I said, flatly. His sentence and mine hung there, for a moment, awkwardly juxtaposed.

  “I thought all your grandparents died a long time ago.”

  “Well, yeah. Not my real grandfather. My Papi. My adopted grandfather.”

  He paused. “The guy who used to babysit you and Carly?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I didn’t know you were still close.”

  I pulled the blanket up to my face and didn’t answer.

  “Darce? You still there?”

  “Will you come with me? To the funeral?”

  “To his. . .”

  “It’s going to be in Sudbury where his wife is buried.”

  He paused, again, “Oh, Darce, I dunno, I think. . .to take the whole day and go up to Sudbury. . .and I’ve barely met your mom and stepdad. And you haven’t even really been that close with him, lately, right? You’ll be okay without me. We can meet up afterwards.”

  “You didn’t even ask when it was,” I said.

  “When is it?”

  “You don’t care.” My voice, not unlike Frances’, sounded unfamiliar. Patrick and I had not yet had a significant fight. I hung up. I got up off the couch and studied the Matryoshka dolls on the counter. My phone rang. I ignored the ringing, slowly unscrewing the dolls into halves, one by one, until the noise stopped. In the dolls’ bellies were the mismatched babies from the day I’d been home sick and switched them. In all those years, no one had ever checked.

  I put the tiny wooden infants back in their correct places and put the dolls back together, meticulously lining up all the patterns. Each, I tucked in the bottom of my backpack, their wooden bodies knocking up against one another, and zipped them away, into the dark.

  Then I went next door and knocked.

  &Ryan often teased Carly, telling her she was the only nineteen-year-old he knew who didn’t drink. Despite her weakness for anything sugary, Carly refused to drink, saying, “My body is a temple.” A temple? So then why did she think fries and a milkshake during a break from work sufficed as dinner three nights in a row? When I started running, she teased, “Why run, unless a bear is chasing you?” I wondered whether the smell of alcohol reminded her of Dick’s vodka B.O. Whatever the reason, I didn’t argue. I didn’t want alcohol on top of everything Carly already brought to the table.

  She argued the temple thing a
bout medication, too. When sick — and she often claimed to feel sick — she did not like to take meds, unless they came backed by a legitimate prescription. While I was known to pop DayQuil every four to six hours during a cold to make it through the school day, Carly preferred to call in sick, to miss class, to wheedle Ryan into buying her wonton soup and red-white-and-blue popsicles, the kind we’d suckled on when we were little, to make it through the humid Toronto summer months.

  All three of us got sick often — Carly, my mother, and me. Illness seemed to run in the family. I remember my mother, sick and pregnant with Carly. I remember trying to scramble into bed with her, curling around her massive belly.

  “Stay away from me,” she warned. “You’re going to get sick. Go play with your dad.”

  She pulled the blankets around herself, despite the late summer humidity. She smelled of sweat, and had forgotten that my father had gone out. I spent the morning playing ponies. During her pregnancy, my mother often pointed out that soon I would have a playmate. I stashed my ponies on the highest shelf in my closet, where no baby could reach.

  Mom gestured me out of the room. Irritated, I wandered into the bathroom. One of her lipsticks lay open on the counter, the lid popped off. I twisted the bottom and smeared the tube across my lips, dark red. I smacked my lips together. It tasted kind of gross. I wiped it off across the back of my hand.

  My parents’ toothbrushes sat side by side in a glass, their bristles rubbing up against each other, kissing. I pulled them apart, made them face the other way.

  The next morning, when I woke up hot and nauseated and about to start a week of day camp, my mother felt my forehead with the back of her hand. Still sick, she couldn’t feel my fever.

  “I’m okay,” I said, “Cross my heart.”

  Later, after a game of freeze tag at the park, supervised by two teenagers in matching bright red CAMP SPADINA! T-shirts, I slipped behind a tree and threw up. My mouth tasted like breakfast, backwards. No one noticed.

  &And so, Ryan’s history spilled out, like spaghetti sauce bubbling over the pan, sticky and scorched, smoke rising from the burner.

  Jessa Ryce, as it turned out, moved away because she’d been pregnant. Her parents had packed up and packed her up, and moved to Kingston, 244 kilometres from Toronto.

  She’d delivered their daughter, Autumn, without ever telling Ryan. Autumn Ryce. It sounded like a Thanksgiving recipe. I didn’t voice this opinion, though. I could barely think it over the sound of Carly’s sobs. The very energy of the conversation drained me, even over the phone. Ryan had to work a late shift; when Carly finally conceded to going to sleep, I went to my own bed and lay there, my eyes open, my body humming. I got up and laced my running shoes, slid my mittens inside the sleeves of my hooded sweatshirt. I wanted to feel the cold. Novocaine for my nerves.

  &Conor obsessed over the Calgary Flames and still ranted about how they’d been robbed in the 2004 Stanley Cup playoffs when, in the final game against Tampa Bay, their final goal during double overtime didn’t count. Patrick and I had lived in Calgary for eight months, and though I had no interest in hockey, I watched the game with some classmates on a big-screen TV, squeezed into a booth at Bob the Fish. Despite being a new Calgarian, I found myself actually watching, cheering when the Flames slapped the puck into the net. Like everyone else in the tavern, I believed the Flames would bring home the coveted trophy. Patrick stayed at home studying, accusing me of being a “follower.” I took a cab home after the anticlimactic night, and Patrick pulled away when I tried to kiss him, saying I smelled like booze, and to go brush my teeth.

  Happy for a day of warm weather in March, Conor, Andrew and I elected to eat lunch outside. Conor leaned against the trunk of a large tree, his mouth full of ham sandwich. “I just think the Flames were robbed. I mean — ”

  “Look, Man.” Andrew noisily slurped reheated chili from a Ziploc container. “The Flames are like my last girlfriend. Every season, they put on a little show, do well in the first couple of games, pretend like they’re going to do something, and then, as soon as you get close, bam! They freeze up. It’s hopeless; they’re never going to put out. Speaking of. . .I got tickets to this singles event tonight down at the Hyatt. You want to come? Come on, dude, singles event. . .desperate women. . .”

  &I do not know quite when my father left us; I could not narrow it down to a day, an argument, a specific memory. I knew with certainty only when the framed picture in our parents’ bedroom, two identical girls with heavy bangs and corduroy dresses, went missing from its place on the wall. I was seven, and Carly was just about a year old.

  Mom said we girls needed a pyjama party — which became a seemingly endless string of days and nights in itchy pyjamas in Mom and Dad’s lumpy bed, the sheets sweaty and sticky and smelly like Carly’s hot diapers. And through it all, Mom slept. I stared at the blank spot on the wall, at the patch of paint cleaner than the rest, the way I’d often stared at the two girls. Identical bodies, but asymmetrical expressions. The girl on the left appeared somber, almost bored; her mirror image sister had the faintest smile.

  Our father had been a twin, too, but the other twin arrived stillborn. Their names were written in the family Bible my father left behind. Dell Edward Nolan. Date of Birth: April 12, 1955. Max Jonathan Nolan. Date of Birth: April 12, 1955. Date of death, April 12, 1955. Stillborn. The picture of the two little girls, he took. The family Bible, he left.

  The corduroy twins didn’t look at all like the postured family photos of Carly and me in matching outfits, grinning at the camera, my hair twisted into neat French braids, Carly’s yellow-blonde tufts tied off with ribbons. Mom took the few blurry shots herself.

  The photo of the twins seemed impulsive, the snap and flash too soon, before both girls had a chance to pose, to say cheese.

  My father told me stories about the photograph. “Do you know what the lady who took this picture said? She said, ‘A photograph is a secret about a secret.’” I couldn’t remember his face, but I remembered those words.

  Missing secrets — how I knew my father didn’t live with us anymore.

  The itch of the pyjamas, the empty square.

  & In undergrad, while others studied at the library, I carried my heavy knapsack and laptop south on St. George Street, past the construction site for the new graduate student residence, to the U of T gym. Sometimes, before important exams, I had to turn my phone off so that I wouldn’t get distracted by Carly’s incessant calls. I told her the gym didn’t get good reception. High in the bleachers of the pool, I read my textbooks and made dutiful notes to the soundtrack of splashing and whistles, the hoots and cheers, the raucous gossip of college athletes, their wet hair pulled into sloppy ponytails and tucked beneath swim caps. It lulled me: the noise, the chlorine.

  &I met Patrick in an art history class, the only class that fulfilled my fine arts requirement and fit my timetable. Aubrey and I rushed in late, having gone first to pick up cinnamon buns. My period had come that morning while I slept, a day early and heavier than normal, soaking through my pyjama bottoms. I’d tossed my sheets into a bathtub of cold water and tied my hair into a loose ponytail, gagging down two aspirin. I’d donned two pairs of underwear, a trick of Carly’s, whose menstrual cycle came at different times each month, always irregular. My fingers, sticky with icing, left sugary smears on my jeans when I tried to brush them off.

  Aubrey and I slunk into the lecture theatre. Two seats sat available in the back row, on opposite sides of a boy, who smiled at us but did not make the effort to move, perhaps because the lecture had already started. We reluctantly took the seats, reaching across him to pass the cinnamon buns and napkins. Not the kind of day to be sitting next to someone so attractive. He had dark hair, a little on the long side, and wiry glasses. Despite the cold weather, which had produced a sort of rainsnow, he wore only a grey T-shirt, with words in a contorted font that I couldn’t read without making it obvious that I wanted to look at him.

  The professor dro
ned on, reviewing the assignment he’d just handed out. The boy in between us slid his towards me, diagonally on his desk, so that I could look on. Select a piece of artwork that has special meaning to you and research its origins and significance.

  When class ended, Patrick introduced himself, offered to accompany us to the photocopier and make copies of the handout.

  I rooted in my wallet for dimes.

  “I think I’m going to do Katsushika Hokusai,” Aubrey commented. Patrick asked, “Who?”

  “My parents have a really giant painting of his hanging in our living room.”

  I remembered the painting — a giant wave poised, about to crash, its white foam edges spiky, like claws. The Satos also kept a hardcover book of Hokusai’s art among the other books on their shelves. At age ten, Aubrey had pulled me into her bedroom and flipped the pages open. “Look!” Among the paintings of waves and mountains was the depiction of a two-headed octopus performing oral sex on a naked Japanese woman. One of the octopus’ tentacles snaked around her left nipple.

  I looked away, burning. “Aubrey! That’s bad. We’re not supposed to look at stuff like that!”

  “I dunno,” Aubrey said. “She looks like she likes it.”

  The light slid across the photocopier.

  “At least your parents kept art in the house,” Patrick commented. “My parents were about as artistic as a paint-by-numbers. Unless you count Anne Geddes. Maybe I’ll research the famous piece, Baby Losing Its Dignity.”

  Aubrey laughed, “You should.”

  “Nah,” Patrick said, “I’ll probably do Monet.”

  “Really?” Aubrey scrunched up her face. “Don’t do Monet. That’s so traditional.”

  Patrick shrugged, “I’m a traditional guy. I take a multivitamin, I’ve read Crime and Punishment, I get my hair cut once a month, I like dogs more than cats, I drink red wine, and I can’t cook particularly well, though I do make a mean mashed potato.”

  That evening, I typed “Twins + Famous + Photograph” into my search engine, and there they were, looking at me, doubly exposed.