The Letter Opener

by Kyo Maclear

  The refrigerator cool of the place was a sharp contrast to the humidity outside. At the front table sat two middle-aged men in construction clothes, both staring at the mute television. Beside them sat a younger man reading a newspaper, taking short slugs of Coke from a bottle. Andrei made his way to the counter and ordered a sandwich and a latte from a man with thick grey hair. As the man steamed some milk, he turned his head toward Andrei.

  “My son goes nuts over the track-and-field competitions. He’s a runner. It’s all he cares about.” He poured the espresso and steamed milk into a glass and set it down in front of Andrei.

  Andrei dropped two sugar cubes into the coffee and stirred, then leaned his elbows on the bar. In the corner, a man was punching the pay phone to try to get his quarter back.

  “Hey, strongman. Ease up,” the man at the counter shouted.

  “Yeah, yeah, Manuel. All right.”

  A storm was hatching and the sky darkened. Cyclists and mothers with plastic-covered strollers hurried by the window. There was a crack of thunder. Manuel turned on the overhead lights, which pulsed a discontinuous and irregular tempo. Outside, the rain became lavish. Inside, the gymnasts twirled soundlessly across the screen.

  At the end of each routine, Andrei watched the girls huddle with their coaches as the scores appeared on the board. He read their bodies. Ecstatic hugs and high-fives, or arms flopped at their sides in disappointment. Tears of triumph or defeat. Girls whose entire equilibrium depended on one thing: winning. He held his breath for them. He thought of asking Manuel to turn up the volume but realized that it didn’t matter. Their movements were synchronized to the sound of the cappuccino machine. Hums and groans. Sudden blasts of air. The loud thith of milk being frothed.

  “Your country?” Manuel asked, pointing at the Romanian leotards.

  Andrei nodded, spinning slowly on the vinyl stool. Manuel turned off the cappuccino machine, a gesture of respect. He reached up to the television set and jacked up the volume.

  Manuel walked around to the other side of the bar, a can of ginger ale in hand. He sat down beside Andrei. Together they watched one of the most dramatic duels in modern Olympic history: Szabó going head to head with a pixieish Mary Lou Retton for the all-around title.

  Andrei wasn’t a heavy smoker, but that afternoon he lit up one cigarette after another. Manuel let out a small gasp when Szabó missed a relatively simple turn on the high bar and tumbled to the floor. Looking genuinely tense, he went around to the fridge and brought back two bottles of beer. He popped the caps, slid one bottle over to Andrei.

  The final vault portion of the competition lasted a nail-biting thirty seconds. All the men in the Milky Rose had risen from their seats and were now sitting along the edge of the Formica bar, eyes fixed to the screen. Retton was still trailing by five one-hundredths of a point. She needed another 10 in the vault to win. The stadium fell quiet. Retton stepped to the mat, eyes centred on the pommel horse, and began her run. She smacked the horse with both hands, twirling over it and sticking her landing—feet hitting the floor and staying there. She knew right away, and stretched her arms in victory.

  Andrei grimaced in disappointment, slapping the counter with his hand, surprised that it mattered, surprised at the primal connection to Romania he felt at that moment.

  Sarah was also watching the Olympics on an old black-and-white television screen, along with Eli and Ileana. Unlike her son, she was feeling no particular loyalty to her country. What she was focused on were the team uniforms. It was not the colours she studied, because her monitor didn’t permit her to see any. What she was studying were the insignias—all the crests, the letters and patterns, the shoulder stripes, the stars and the hoops.

  A young woman was doing a floor routine. Her featherweight body tumbled past, performing aerial flips, her arms tucked, then extended like bird wings. She flowed with whirling, gleaming energy. It was only when the girl stopped, back arched, arms in the air, that Sarah deciphered the writing on her chest: white letters knocked out of a dark bodysuit spelling Canada.

  Sarah felt an uneasiness. The word had jarred something in her, something unrelated to Andrei. Her brain tried to recall when she had heard it before, in some other context. Then she remembered. The gates of memory opened. Her mind was suddenly filled with images. And they all related to a place called Canada.

  She didn’t share these memories with Eli or Ileana. Instead, she excused herself and went to her bedroom, where she composed a letter to Andrei, a letter she carried for several weeks, until one day she passed it to a map-toting scholar she encountered outside the town’s abandoned church. Following a brief mime of an exchange, the man assured her he would post the letter once he returned to Cambridge, England.

  The letter arrived two weeks later. After that, Andrei could never see the word Canada without thinking about it.

  Twenty

  One morning close to Christmas, a particularly depressing note arrived at my desk from a mother in Kamloops, British Columbia, who was “frantically anxious” to trace a family heirloom, a “modest” jade pendant necklace she had sent as a reconciliation gift to her estranged daughter in Boston. The handwriting was barely decipherable in parts. One could see from the shaky lines and clots of ink that she was old and possibly suffering from mild Parkinson’s. She divulged in the letter that her husband had recently died and her daughter, who had run away from home at an early age, was now her only living kin.

  Her daughter would “surely have sent a letter or note” to her “ailing mother” if the gift had been securely delivered. Perhaps the present had “burst open” along the way, in which case would we kindly search for the lost necklace, which had originally come all the way from Singapore?

  Feeling low in spirits, I reached my hand deep in the box labelled Jewellery and confirmed what I already suspected. No necklace. I refolded the letter and placed it in a folder of correspondence to be answered later. I wondered how many mothers, at that very moment, were writing letters of appeal to their disaffected children.

  Warren didn’t come to work the next day. He was already on his way to Sudbury to visit his family. The rest of us finished up at noon to allow everyone time to join their relatives. I spent the morning sorting through holiday greeting portraits.

  I picked out the glamour shots. There were a half dozen of these portrait studio creations. I lined them up side by side on my desk. The women all bore a certain similarity. Salon-swept hair, unnaturally tilted heads. The soft-focus lens had melted away any worry lines and blemishes. In one shot, a woman gazed wistfully off into the distance, holding a rose to her cheek. A few had fantasy backdrops—palm trees in an orange haze, a star-speckled night sky. These images were both baffling and fascinating to me. The women they showed were not evidently wealthy. (The rich did not require cardboard-framed testaments to their glamour. The rich exercised a sort of blithe informality by wearing Lacoste shirts and chinos in their Christmas portraits.) Who knew what these women really spent their lives doing? From the notes attached, I saw that several of the portraits were directed overseas, to the Philippines, Colombia, Portugal.

  Making use of my rudimentary Spanish, I discerned that two of the notes contained elements typical of letters from recent immigrants and migrant workers. A chronicle of status symbols of a “better” life (newly acquired televisions, appliances, suitors, friends), these letters aggrandized so as to settle any worries and doubts back home. Seen in this light, the glamour photos felt valiant, like pictorial embellishments, wishful more than boastful, gracious more than vain.

  Paolo was working until 6 p.m., so when the mail office closed at noon, I decided to head over to Sakura for a visit. I picked up a coffee on the way, to perk up, and found myself in a mall full of desperate and impatient shoppers. Sweating in my coat, I watched men hovering furtively in the lingerie store, picking through complicated lace undergarments; women plucking stocking stuffers from bins and elbowing their way to the front of the checkout counter.
Even the utilitarian shops—the shoesmith and the vitamin supplements stand—seemed to beg for a last-minute seasonal purchase. I bought a pack of cinnamon gum and a small notepad at the drugstore and continued on my way.

  When I arrived at Sakura, the residents were clustered around the television eating pieces of cake with toothpicks. A sugared satisfaction could be seen on their faces. But my mother’s face was not among them. I assumed that she was in her room, and took a moment to sit with Gloria, who was off to the side in a wheelchair, holding an untouched plate of cake on her lap. Her grey hair was newly cropped. I was shocked by her gauntness, by how much she seemed to have dwindled in only a few weeks, but I was careful not to let it show on my face. I kissed her on the cheek and promised myself that next time I would bring her some thread or wool, something to embroider or knit, something to occupy her fingers. A substitute for the quilt, now that it was completed. She needed busy hands to work away the worries in her head.

  Just as I was about to leave, I remembered the notepad in my bag and pulled it out. I removed the plate of cake from her lap and set it on the table.

  “Here, Gloria.” I handed her the notepad along with a pen. “I thought you might like this.”

  As I walked toward the elevator, I stumbled into Roy Ishii. He was wearing a green sweatshirt and short red scarf, which he had attempted to toss over one shoulder.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” He stopped at the window, rested a hand against the glass, pointed at the slow-falling snow.

  “Yes.”

  “The barometer is rising. There’s a warm front coming in from the Gulf of Mexico.”

  “Sounds promising.”

  “Are you going to see your mum?”

  I nodded and he dug into his pocket. “Here. Give her this from me.”

  He handed me a roll of butterscotch candy and ambled away, his mouth pursed into a whistle—a pretty slip of a melody lingering in my ears. Through the window, I could see that the snowflakes were melting before they amassed, disappearing on the branches, sliding off the cars in the lot. I watched Roy as he made his way down the hall, then rounded the corner to the common area. How perfectly the basic criteria of weather paralleled the highs and lows of daily existence. There could be overnight changes, spectacular shifts in clouds and air currents, sudden movements from murk to brilliance.

  Sakura, however, bore no real notion of seasons or time. The same controlled temperature existed all year around. It could be July or February, it always felt the same.

  The rooms were small, but each was bravely decorated with keepsakes and personal photographs—modest or elaborate attempts to individualize that helped stave off the air of institutional uniformity and provided a buttress for those with memory impairments. The paintings that lined the corridors were bold and bright: realistic portrayals of nature and animals—a dog springing through a meadow of flowers, an apple orchard—spaced at regular intervals to encourage movement. Easy to look at, nothing abstract or geometric or patterned all over; nothing to swallow up the mind. The wide, well-lit hallways, designed as a circular walking path, led to carefully spaced sitting areas. Those with wandering tendencies could shuffle from one site of comfort to another. They would never experience the frustration of a dead end; their self-esteem was boosted by the fact that every pathway had an achievable destination.

  A framed photo of my mother as a young woman hung on her door. It was a memory aid recommended by the in-house therapist. We had selected it together, she and I, from a slew of images, knowing in the back of our minds that we had chosen a picture that separated us, or rather, eliminated me. It captured her life before I was born.

  Every time I stepped up to that photograph I was reminded of our differences. At my age, my mother had lustrous black hair and pert little breasts that created tiny tents in the front of her sleeveless mock turtleneck. She wore white hip-hugging slacks and, looped on her arm, right below the crease of her elbow, she carried a small half-moon purse. Her hair was cut in an immaculate bob, perfectly rounded ends creating a Cleopatra silhouette. A razor tidied up the neckline. She wore sleek leather pumps that gave her blisters and eventually bunions. She was beautiful.

  What happened to that purse? How many had she owned in her lifetime?

  I thought of all those old purses, filled to the top with personal matter (lipsticks, tissue packs, metal compacts), satin linings stained with ink and powder so embedded it could not be shaken out. With each new purse, she took what pleased her from the old one and left the rest: a fresh start, a chance to reorganize life until the jumble began again.

  I tapped on the open door and entered slowly. My mother was sitting in a chair in her housecoat, opening and closing the snap of her latest purse, an item for which she showed almost unlimited love. This one was soft black leather and had lots of compartments, some with zippers. Watching her, I felt as if an entire day could pass in the emptying, sorting and filling of the purse. Some days it was as flat as an envelope, other days its contours bulged until the seams strained to the point of popping. Today, the purse was flat.

  One thing had remained consistent since my childhood: she was the only one allowed to rummage inside. Everything else was up for grabs, but her purse—that was hers; something never to be surrendered to curious, acquisitive kin. It was a pathetic container for something as uncontainable as a life, but for my mother, a purse was a palace.

  Her hair was tied back in a loose ponytail, and from its limpness I could see that it hadn’t been washed for several days. She looked up as I approached. Her face softened in recognition. I breathed a small sigh of relief. I was still on the side of the remembered.

  Snap. She closed the purse.

  “Naiko,” she said. “Kochira oide. Come closer. I have something important to ask you.” She wriggled her feet into a pair of sage green slippers. I walked toward her and sat down on the bed.

  What she said next was disconcerting.

  “Cremated?” I repeated. Part whisper, part choke.

  “Yes. I think that’s what I’d prefer.”

  “Okay. But do we need to have this conversation right now? It’s a bit early, no? I mean, you’re not dying or anything.”

  “Of course, there’s time. But I’ve been thinking.”

  “Yes?”

  “Will you keep me?”

  “What do you mean ‘keep you’?”

  “The urn. My ashes. I don’t think I want to be tossed all over the place. And, frankly, I’m not sure that Kana would want the responsibility.”

  Flustered, I tried to compose an appropriate reply, but my mother had trailed off and was now talking about something else. A banquet dinner. A seasonal talent show. Holiday activities skilfully organized to prevent the residents from feeling alone. As I watched my mother twirl the strap of her purse, I fell into my own solitude. A few seconds passed.

  I tried to conceal my dejection by offering to cut her hair. She refused at first. I told her that we could dye it, and that she could save the bits of hair we cut. In the end she agreed.

  “The ends are dry anyway,” she said.

  A few of the women on my mother’s floor had perms. Mary Kawamata’s hair was so overprocessed you could see the light shine through it. It looked like candy floss, sitting lightly on her head as if it was not joined to her scalp. Mary spent her days drawing rotting fruit and vegetables. Nature morte, she called it. Most mornings, her eyebrows were plucked and powdered away and replaced with carefully pencilled arches. My mother avoided the Asian “afro.” Her one chemical concession was hair dye: every few weeks, I helped her comb her white roots with black Clairol.

  “Let’s run a bath,” I said after I had finished cutting her hair in the bathroom. My voice bounced off the tiles.

  As the bath filled, a lavender mist invaded the room. The mirror clouded. My mother’s hair was piled up in a towel. Hair bits stuck to her moist neck.

  I waited for her in her room while she made her way through jars of face and bo
dy cream. Today, her room was a store of bright and beautiful things: colourful spools of thread lined on a shelf, bottle caps in a Mason jar, necklaces on a small wooden rack. Things in their proper place.

  My mother was still in the bathroom when Setsuko arrived with the afternoon mail. Setsuko was a visiting student from Japan who hid her feet in heavy walking shoes. She wore sparkly blue eyeshadow, pink lipstick and an alpine ski hat. The residents depended on her. Between twelve o’clock and four o’clock there were other people and activities they depended on, but at four-thirty, they relied on the girl with the hat.

  “Ayumi-san? Ayumi-san?” Setsuko peeked into the room, steadying a basket of letters in her arms. “Ara. Naiko-san. Konichiwa. I have something for your mother.” She clip-clopped into the room.

  My mother bolted out of the bathroom and snatched a postcard from Setsuko’s hands. I smiled apologetically. My mother had lost her sense of courtesy—she no longer insisted that someone else take the most comfortable seat or the largest portion.

  She studied the postcard with a knobby, arthritic finger, then held it to her chest like some hard-won prize.

  “It’s from my daughter,” she announced to Setsuko. Then added for clarity, “The other one.” Setsuko nodded politely, backing toward the door. “Asoko,” my mother said, and pointed at a photograph on her dresser. There she is, as if Kana were actually present in the frame, living behind a bevelled cardboard mat. (Trust Kana to send a promotional photograph of herself.)

  When my mother had finished poring over the card, she handed it to me to read. Postmarked from Prague, it had haste and artificial cheer written all over it. This pathetic little token, with its loopy, overlarge script, filled me with spite. I wanted to rip it up and stomp on the pieces. At that moment, I hated Kana—for cheating, for always taking the shortcut. And yet my mother responded like a cat being fed, almost purring, virtually swishing her tail with delight.

  My mother’s hair was drying in waves. She looked wild and alert. Some glimmer in her at that moment moved me to tell her about Andrei’s disappearance.