Walt

by Russell Wangersky

  Hard not to envy someone who can live like that, who can hold on simply by pure force of will and self-possession. Because will isn’t easy, especially when you look around and find out it’s fled.

  Every now and then, I wish that the years could spin backwards, and that I could suddenly find a way to fit in somewhere in that coil of past time, step back onto that carefully ordered track that Mary and I stepped off of somewhere. And that Mary stepped off far further than I ever did.

  I wouldn’t want to forget everything — I think I’d want all the knowledge I have now even if I wanted to turn around and do things differently. Otherwise I’d just live that same exact pattern all over again — make the same choices, step the same steps. Dance the same dance.

  But I wish sometimes that I could be one of those people with blind, unquestioning belief. Someone who could keep living a life, however dreadful, because it was the right thing to do, and the right thing is what people are supposed to do. Always.

  Because that kind of belief would be such a gift. A real comfort.

  I’ve never been good at belief, and I think I’ve gotten worse and worse with every passing year.

  Think of it this way: Einstein might have been real pleased about figuring out relativity, about tracing it right there in front of his face with a pencil or chalk or whatever, but when he went outside, do you suppose it ever made him feel like he was in the least little bit closer to the stars?

  I imagine it actually made him feel like he was farther away from them — and maybe sometimes he felt bad about that, too.

  Nothing quite like seeing the world the way you want it to be, right there yet always out of reach.

  When things didn’t work out just the way she had planned, it was like Mary began to fly apart. Maybe that’s not the right description. Pull away, for sure. Parts of her certainly flew apart. Flew out from her — left her orbit altogether. She had belief — some kind of belief. And then she lost it and came undone.

  Not obviously at first — it wasn’t like she woke up one morning and was different. She wasn’t speaking Hungarian or licking the sheets, not adopting fleets of feral street cats. No, it was like small pieces started to break off of her, at first like moons that had all at once lost confidence in her gravity, moons spinning out and away from the security of their usual, regular orbital field.

  Then it began to be bits of Planet Mary herself.

  There was nothing wrong with her rotation — she still spun, all right. I think it was just that, suddenly, there was too much spin for all of the bits along the edges to bear.

  I don’t mean she woke up all crazy and strung out and screaming, that she forgot the meanings of words or began winding sticks in her hair like birds were nesting there and the eggs might hatch out any day, little beaks and bright eyes poking out from their hiding spots near her scalp and singing their little plaintive “we’re hungry” notes into the room every time they laid eyes on you.

  That would almost have been simpler.

  I don’t mean any offence to anyone this is happening to, but it’s like living with someone whose stomach is always out of sorts. Someone who constantly has a non-defined, non-specific problem dogging both them and, in the process, everyone they live with.

  When there’s suddenly a real diagnosis — even if it’s a stark and final one — you know how you’re supposed to set your face about it. You know how you’re supposed to look to the world, what you’re supposed to do. There are things to be dealt with, even if those things are truly horrible. There are things to be done and there are things you can safely not give even the slightest fuck about. But until then, you don’t know whether to be honestly worried or justifiably annoyed.

  With Mary, everything was in that horrible land of the not-quite-specific. All that happened was that things that had been crucially important even just a few days before suddenly didn’t matter. They faded all at once — and that didn’t make any sense to me.

  I mean, if you want to retire to British Columbia and grow hybrid roses and banks of forced asparagus or whatever, or if you want to buy an Airstream and head to the deserts of the southwestern United States, spending every other week in a Walmart parking lot so that you’re never more than a hundred yards from someone else’s clean toilets, you’re not supposed to suddenly stop, wake up one morning, and decide it would be just fine to spend every single day wrapped in fog in a two-storey saltbox house out in Flatrock instead.

  You either want things or you don’t — and the things you want badly shouldn’t just wash right out of you, or wash right off of you, with one single tick of the clock.

  But that’s exactly what seemed to happen with Mary.

  I couldn’t decide if I was exactly, precisely to blame, or if it was just another way that her list was supposed to work — like there were entries on it that were categorized as “either/or,” and since the “either” hadn’t happened, there was nothing left to do except settle for the unattractive “or.”

  When I started thinking that way, I also thought the “or” might be every bit as predetermined as everything else.

  I came home from the store one afternoon to find that she had painted the entire front room. Tied her hair inside a plastic shopping bag, put on her painting pants — the pants that had smears of paint from every room in every house she’d ever lived in — and worked like a dervish.

  She had wanted a certain number of rooms when we bought the house, and, of course, we’d found a house with every single one she needed. She didn’t say anything concrete, but I knew she had ideas for them all. Mary liked painting. Often, she didn’t so much paint the rooms for the things she wanted them to be as she painted them in a way that wouldn’t exclude what she thought they could become.

  The front room upstairs, I know she thought it would be a nursery, despite the noise. So it had always been pale colours — not obvious nursery colours, but a beige that could be repainted in one simple coat to something she thought was suitable. After a while, it became a mild café au lait — nothing definitely “baby” about it, but also nothing that would immediately rule out baby, either.

  I came home from the store that day and it was dark blue — the kind of dark blue that would take three or four coats to ever come close to being a light colour again, and it wasn’t like anyone was going to put a crib in a room painted the colour of ten o’clock in the evening on a late summer night. “Hey baby, here’s a nightmare for you: it’s getting dark now, it’s actually dark all the time, so maybe no one’s ever coming back. Sleep tight.”

  Beautiful, it was. Carefully, precisely done? Absolutely.

  Welcoming? Not one single bit.

  It was the kind of solution that’s more like a dare than anything else — a dare that says, “Let’s go.”

  That’s sort of what I thought Mary’s dark blue paint in the upstairs front room was supposed to be, too — a sign that she was spoiling for a fight.

  Just waiting for someone to say it out loud — “What the fuck were you thinking about?” — and start the whole thing up.

  The room’s still that colour now, and the funny thing is that I like it — or at least I’ve gotten so used to it that it just seems right.

  Dignified, more than a little standoffish — and maybe just exactly the way a study is supposed to be. I go in there often enough — I just don’t often stay.

  After the painting of the room, the next thing was the basement — or the things she would take out of the basement and simply leave on the curb for the garbage men.

  I’m sure that the garbage men thought they had struck the jackpot.

  You wonder sometimes if there’s a ton of stuff that just doesn’t make it all the way to the dump — and if, somewhere at home in garbage-man-ville, there are spouses who roll their eyes as yet another pile of curb-side treasures shows up at the front door.

  Are thei
r garages packed to the roof? Do they rent weekend flea market tables and set stuff out for sale?

  It must be tough to just take perfectly good things and toss them in the back of the truck, then press the button and watch the hydraulic ram crush them, turning absolutely everything into garbage.

  I didn’t even realize what was gone for several weeks, not until I went down to the basement and saw the empty room off the laundry. A big rocking chair went, along with a bunch of boxes from her mother. I’m not even sure what was in some of them, just that the room had been full before and now it wasn’t.

  Turned out later that the Christmas decorations had been in some of those boxes, too, so Christmas came and we started all over again from scratch with brand new stuff. Other stuff went as well: Raggedy Ann dolls that Mary had kept for so long their faces had changed and shrunk in the sunlight, developing a look that was more mental than freckle-faced happy.

  All she was willing to say about it was that “there isn’t a point anymore,” and she said it, every time, with her hands thrown out in front of her, her palms down and her fingers somehow arcing upwards. I can still see it — a combination of dismissiveness and the motion you’d make shaking water off your fingertips.

  It looks kind of fatalistic, seeing it written down like this, like she was shaking the dust off of a set of biblical sandals or something, and maybe she was. But those were her exact words, and she offered up the same exact motion every time. And I have to say that it didn’t seem fatalistic at all, then. It just seemed resigned.

  When she did it, I could also see that there was plenty more in there behind her face just waiting to come out. Sometimes, the sides of someone’s face work like they’re chewing a kind of particularly wordy gum, like they’ve decided they’re going to force themselves not to say even one single word, but their jaw can’t help going through the motions. I remember thinking once that, if she were there, Helen Keller could just place her hands on both sides of Mary’s face and know absolutely for a fact every single thing that was going through Mary’s head.

  I think that it was all an opening gambit — the painting, the cleaning out. I think it was her way of trying to get me to hook into and haul out those words hidden behind her face.

  If only I had been willing to pull that line.

  I was pretty sure I knew what she was going to be talking about.

  You don’t have to be Einstein to realize what it means when the room you’ve always tacitly agreed would be the nursery has been painted over. What you have to be is completely, absolutely, magnificently stunned.

  Because there’s a time when it’s just better to play dumb. And be smart. And manage, against near-impossible odds, to pull it all off convincingly.

  Einstein probably would have just started thinking about stars.

  Chapter 28

  Kitty litter

  Coffee cream

  1 Fresh Milk

  1 bag oranges

  Sometimes, it’s more than what’s on the list. I mean, it’s still the list, but there’s something else that makes it valuable. One I found in the parking lot in the rain, almost a perfect square, a torn piece of white bond paper stuck down with the water so that it looked like a big postage stamp glued to an oversized envelope of asphalt.

  People were pushing their carts right past it, right over it, like it didn’t even exist.

  Not surprising that the note didn’t gather any interest. It was washed-out blue ink on the front, open handwriting with each lower-case f boasting a semi-circle to the left on the top, the capital F like a backwards number seven with a line drawn back through it.

  I had watched it flutter down to the pavement from inside the store, staring out through the big thermal-glass windows as a woman got into her car. It fell as she turned and settled herself into the driver’s seat, and I watched it fall all the way. It was a little bright green car, and I knew her. She was a regular, in her mid-twenties maybe, and she lived on Gower Street, I was pretty sure with a couple of other young women. They sometimes shopped together, and I’d noticed that, when they did, the groceries were rung in all at once.

  The things people use to write their notes: this one was obviously torn from a piece of regular typing paper, and it dried out unevenly on my counter, with the grocery list side face down on a sheet of paper towel, because the real message was on the back with a different pen, this one in black ink.

  The same handwriting, except it was the top right corner of another, much larger, note, with the words left behind in something that was almost like a poem.

  Like this:

  have

  to loan me

  on Friday

  back pay

  and an

  Written fast, the spaces between the letters much larger, just the end of each line left there and spelling out a clear message, but the same handwriting, the f’s and e’s and a’s all exactly the same.

  You get short lists, and sometimes you wonder if the people are just disorganized and in a rush, whether they can’t plan their way out of a simple corner, or whether the amount of money they have to spend on groceries has just made them cut their purchases back to the absolute necessities. And if that’s the case, it’s amazing how often cat food or dog food or kitty litter always makes its way onto the page — “Sure, I’ll starve, but there’d better be Kibbles ’n Bits for Tigger.”

  This corner of paper, it was maybe one-sixth of the whole sheet, but the message was there in the words I had. All there, if you know how to read it. Everyone knows there’s a huge part of the population that lives paycheque to paycheque. Most people, if they were to miss just one payday, wouldn’t even be able to buy food. Nothing saved up — no rainy day fund. If they needed money all at once, they’d have to resort to all sorts of things you’d never expect.

  It was pretty obvious: a message left out for one of the roommates, asking for a little help, just a little loan until her pay came in. And it gets you thinking — at least, it got me thinking.

  It got me thinking about money and the way it can just pile up when you make your way from store to home with nothing more on your mind than a six-pack of beer for the fridge and another steak, not bothering to spend it on anything else. At the same time, it got me thinking about just what it is some people will do because they’re desperate for cash.

  It’s about intersecting lines, really. Intersecting lines and the gamma rays pulsing straight through things and creating their unplanned little consequences. And it’s about trying to figure out the clearest way to nudge things slightly sideways so everything collides and everything seems accidental.

  Leave your car up on Gower Street without the right parking permit and maybe the parking enforcement guys are going to look close enough at the tag hanging from your mirror to see if you’re in the right zone and then slip a ticket under the wiper. And maybe they’re not.

  They’re certainly not going to do it while you’re sitting in that car, waiting. When the parking guys see the shape of you bulked up in the front seat in the dark, they shy away in a hurry, like they’re used to always being the target of the brute force of confrontation, and perhaps they are.

  But you can see them taking stock of you in there, can see their brains working along the lines of “I’ll come back later and check that white Toyota again.” And you can be sure that they will. Maybe you’ll get a ticket in the end — not much you can do about that.

  I was sitting on the uphill side of the street, looking west, watching, a straight-line view across to the front door of her house — it was one with a public laneway right next to it, those slim little laneways that are asphalt-paved straight up to the next cross street but without any streetlights, right-of-ways that every single drunk in the city seems to know about, so that, on their way home and bladders filled to bursting, they can lean their foreheads up against your outside wall to keep their bal
ance and piss on your siding.

  I was watching the cats in the laneway — there were two of them right out at the end of the alley, like they were supposed to be the start of some kind of homemade Disney movie or something, one of them all smooth fur and a bright red collar, the other a ragged, skinny, high-assed tom.

  The tom was thin the way tomcats always are — slinky-thin right through the ribs and sides, and then with their butts stuck up higher than the rest of their bodies, like every bit of strength was packed into their hindquarters, all hard purpose and blunt design. The well-kept one was bigger, heavier, and more tentative — someone’s house pet out for a night on the rough — and it was easy to see what was going to happen when they finally got close enough to fight.

  Because it’s not like they’re going to make friends and have a hundred kittens and catch evil robbers and make their own movie.

  No, there’s going to be ragged torn ears and a claw-raked face, deep bites that do what cat bites always do: get infected and weep thick pus and lead to big vet bills. You don’t have to be a genius to see that coming.

  I think people forget how much we’re like animals, because most of us are too busy trying to force a square peg in a round hole and make it seem that, really, the animals are more like us.

  I was watching television, maybe a couple of months ago now, and I saw this piece about the bushmen, about how they catch animals, and not by hiding or sneaking up on them either. They catch them because people don’t have fur. That’s the simplest way to describe it. We’re supposed to make the most of what we’ve got, right? Well, people have the ability to sweat.

  The bushmen just chase the animal until the ibex or the antelope or whatever it is overheats and can’t run any more. Three, four hours of running, until finally the thing just stands there panting, too hot to keep running away, and the bushmen are all long and ropy there under their sweaty skin.