by Nino Ricci
She returned to College Street. An eastbound streetcar was just coming along and she boarded it. I followed behind in a taxi, the driver not understanding at first but then taking on an air of pleased collusion, as if we were playing a game. At Yonge, Rita emerged from the streetcar amidst a throng of other passengers – I thought she’d turn up the street toward John’s place, but she went into an office tower on the far corner. I followed her inside to check the building’s directory. The automobile association had its offices here, an architectural firm, several lawyers, a medical clinic. The thought formed that she might be pregnant: there would be doctors then, procedures, lies, some monstrous thing taking shape inside her. I didn’t know what would be worse for her, carrying that alone or sharing it with me, admitting the sordidness of it, the horror.
I waited. Everything had to be lived through now, every consequence. Even standing here outside this building in the cold, this crazy shadowing: it seemed part of a story already fixed, where every turning had been laid out in advance to lead exactly here, to this moment. In a minute or ten Rita would emerge and I would confront her or not, we would come to some new understanding or stay imprisoned in inchoate emotion; and at each instant it would be the story deciding, propelling us forward. Perhaps there was only this tyranny, with nothing to choose, no moment to say, We will do things differently.
Across the street, a vendor was selling roasted chestnuts from a trolley, a grizzled man in an apron and cap with a disconcerted look as if he’d been tricked by the sudden cold into appearing here out of season. I had an image of a chestnut vendor I’d seen in Italy once, of his own grizzled face and crooked teeth. It might have been at the harbour in Naples, when my mother and I had caught the boat for Canada. All the years since then that image had lain in my memory like a photograph growing yellow in a drawer. What could it mean to have called it up now, what use could I have for it? Long ago the instant it referred to had vanished utterly from the earth, and yet this record of it had stuck in my mind as if at some moment it might be of worth to me.
She came out. I wasn’t making any effort to conceal myself any more, and if she had turned the slightest bit, she would have seen me. But she made a direct line for the stairs that led down to the subway. A streetcar was just unloading at the corner, and she disappeared in the crush of other bodies descending the stairwell. I paid and hurried down to one of the platforms – two trains were just pulling out, one in either direction. It took a few minutes for the exiting passengers to clear, and to see that I’d lost her.
XV
A few days later I learned from Elena that John and Rita had gone. Elena’s voice on the phone was dry, outraged, controlled.
“I guess she must have talked to you,” she said.
“No.” There was a part of her that wanted me to be on top of all this, to make it seem normal. “Did they say where they were going?”
“You tell me. All I know is they got on a bus to New York to catch some cheapo flight. Frankly the whole thing gives me the creeps.”
“It’s not such a strange thing to do.”
“With a guy who’s forty years older than her?”
“They’re just friends.”
“Yeah. Well. How much do you actually know about him?”
“Why? Was there something specific?”
“It’s not that.” She relented a bit. “He seemed fine, I suppose. You know, very paternal and all that. I’m just a little freaked out is all.”
She was turning to me, in her way, but somehow what seemed most clear in this was the tenuousness of the link between us. It occurred to me that with Rita gone, she and I might go months now without seeing one another.
“I should come by with the rent cheque,” I said.
“Don’t bother. She left enough to cover it. I guess she came into a bit of money.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t be an asshole. I know you gave it to her.”
I didn’t know how to respond to this.
“I guess I did.”
A pause.
“Look, sorry, that was out of line,” she said. “Maybe you should come by here when I’m not being such a harpy. Anyway, there’s probably a few other things we ought to talk about.”
She invited me to come by the following evening. Her friend Suzanne was there when I arrived, at the kitchen table, an empty coffee cup in front of her and an ashtray filled to overflowing.
“So I hear your sister’s flown the coop,” she said.
“It looks that way.”
She gave me a tight, mirthless smile.
“I wouldn’t worry about her. She’s a big girl, from what I could see.”
She got up to leave. At the door, she and Elena stood a few moments in low conversation. I expected them to hug or kiss, but Suzanne merely reached a hand out to squeeze Elena’s shoulder.
“I’ll call you,” she said.
The apartment had already taken on an air of absence. I didn’t remember the walls looking so bare, the furnishings so rickety and provisional. It seemed now that it had never quite been a home after all, just a space to fill, four walls and a roof.
Elena suggested we go out back to the patio. To get to it we had to pass through Rita’s bedroom, which lay in a kind of tidy, sterile expectancy like a guest room, all the comfortable dishevelment of before given way to crisp corners and cleared surfaces. A single poster, from the Rocky Horror Picture Show, was taped to one wall, a bottom edge curling up where the tape had come loose.
“You haven’t heard from her yet?” I said.
“No. Not yet. I’ve been out a lot.”
“You’d think she would call.”
But Elena was more detached now than she’d been on the phone.
“Maybe she figures she’s not being much of a rebel if she has to call home every night.”
The patio was just an arrangement of cheap concrete paving stones heaved up from winter freezes into rolling instability. Elena had set out a few old lawn chairs that she must have picked up at a yard sale, and a small end table whose top was stained with cigarette burns. With the warmer weather that was finally settling in, the garden had begun to show some of the promise that the landlord had spoken of when Rita and Elena had rented the place. A few rows of tulips had sprung up in beds along the side fences, and at the back a forsythia bush was just coming into bloom.
Elena had taken a seat on the steps that led down from the patio door.
“So I got a job today,” she said. “Waitressing, if you can believe it.”
“Are you all right with that?”
“Why?” She laughed. “Don’t tell me you’re going to support me too now.”
She took out her cigarettes and offered me one, which I declined, then lit one for herself.
“I guess the whole money issue is none of my business,” she said. “But you have to admit it’s a little strange. I mean, you must have given her quite a chunk.”
“I’m not sure what you’re saying.”
“It’s a pattern, that’s all.”
“She needed money. I was just helping out.”
“She could have gotten a job. Or a student loan. Whatever. I don’t notice you taking the summer off to see the world.”
“There are other factors.”
“You mean your father’s will.”
I was surprised that Rita had told her about that.
“That’s part of it.”
She seemed to be taunting me, prodding me, as if the money I’d given Rita were some sort of payoff I’d made.
“Well, like I say, it’s none of my business. It’s just always pissed me off a bit the way you used the whole thing with the will as if you were suddenly her sugar daddy or something.”
I was angry now. She was distorting everything, making what had felt genuine seem selfish and twisted.
“I don’t remember you ever objecting when it worked to your benefit.”
“True enough.” There was an undertone of conciliat
ion in her voice that I hadn’t expected. “Maybe I’m the one who has a problem. Except, I dunno, you go for years just being this kind of ghost in her life, and then suddenly you want to make it seem like you’re indispensable. I’ll tell you what it was that set me off – it was the day we went out to the island to look at that place for rent, you telling us you could buy us a house there. It was as if you were saying, you guys don’t have anything but I’ve got the power to give you what you want.”
I thought of that day on the island, of the sun and the snow, the cosy cottage we’d seen with its fireplace and bric-a-brac. Our versions of the day seemed so different now, and yet at bottom the same instinct had joined us then, the same longing.
“It wasn’t like that,” I said.
“Maybe not. Maybe I’m just a bitch.” She took a last puff off her cigarette and dropped it, slowly grinding it out with her heel. “Like buying that couch after to piss you off. Rita could have killed me.”
It was hard not to feel admiration for her consistency. Even her spite had always this moral contour, this larger principle it arose from like some natural counterbalancing of anything that hinted at falseness.
“Anyway,” she said, not looking at me, “I doubt it helped much for her to be dependent on you like that. For one thing, it was probably kind of hard for her to be honest with you.”
“Honest about what?”
“The fact that she was flunking out, for instance. That she dropped half her courses months ago and will be lucky if she passed the half that she kept.”
My heart sank. It was the feeling of having a not-quite-articulated fear confirmed, of knowing the clues had been there before me, and I had ignored them.
“I didn’t know that,” I said.
“Well, I hate to be the one to break it to you.”
“She always seemed to work hard enough.”
“Right. Like all those nights she was supposedly at the library.”
“Where did she go?”
“You tell me. Out. Around.”
“Maybe she was spending time at John’s,” I said.
“I doubt it. I remember asking her once where he lived and she didn’t know.”
It was strange now to be seeing Rita as merely this absence, this darkness, to think of all the questions I’d never asked, how I’d let the little I had known of her stand in for all I had not. I thought of my following her that day into the market, how different she had appeared then, how her aloneness had seemed like a hard, sad kernel of her that everything else merely served to obscure.
“When did all this start?” I said. “The problems in school and so on.”
“I can’t say things were ever great. But they definitely got worse when Dad died. She started getting a little weird then.”
“She told me you said something about him that upset her.”
“What?”
“That you made it sound like he was some sort of pervert.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Something you said to one of your friends. About his adopting you only because you were girls. The way he used to watch you sometimes.”
“She told you I said that?”
“Didn’t you?”
“No. Of course not.”
There was an edge in her voice, but I couldn’t tell if it was anger or defence.
“Why would she lie about something like that?” I said.
“I have no idea.”
“So you’re saying she made the whole thing up.”
“I don’t know. Maybe it was just creative listening. It wouldn’t be the first time.”
“It doesn’t sound like her.”
“If you want the truth, I think she was the one who always wondered about him. I mean, she never really understood why either of them would bother taking someone like her in.”
The possibility that Rita had twisted things, that there was this underside of obscure intention, seemed to call everything else into question. Her coming to me that day after Mr. Amherst’s death, her ending up crying in my arms: all the rest, in a way, had followed from that, hinged on there having been something, some honest moment, that had set in motion what came after.
“You make it sound like she’s disturbed,” I said.
“Wouldn’t you be? Look at the life she’s had. All in all, it wasn’t exactly like growing up with the Waltons.”
“She always made it seem as if she was over all that.”
“Yeah, well, some people just hide things better than others.”
We sat silent. Elena lit another cigarette, tense and quick. It had put her out, being pitted against Rita in this way.
“Look,” she said. “It was probably just a misunderstanding, that’s all. She’s not a nut case or anything, if that’s what you’re thinking. Or malicious. She’s just, I don’t know, different. You must remember those moods she’d get into when she was a kid, when she was just gone somewhere. It’s like she’s always fighting that. It’s like she’s afraid the world won’t hold on to her or something.”
Evening had come on, settling over us a darkness made grainy and soft by light from a streetlamp in the back lane. The lamp rose up almost directly above the forsythia bush at the back of the yard, making it seem, with its yellow blooms, like some rare, radiant thing that had briefly touched down from another realm to grace us with its presence.
“Let me know if you hear from her,” I said.
But already Rita’s absence had a quality of inviolability to it, as if it were not something she could be reached in or called back from. At home, I took out the letters she’d sent me while I was in Africa – they put me in mind now of the rotting bundle of letters I’d discovered by chance in the remnants of my father’s desk after the fire we’d had on the farm had wrecked it, letters my mother had sent him from Italy during the years when he’d been in Canada alone. They were more or less unreadable by the time I found them, reduced to simple artefacts, bits of crumbling paper and faded ink that attested to the existence of certain things without, however, offering up their essence. Rita’s letters I had kept bundled and bottom-drawered much as my father had kept my mother’s. Perhaps the same impulse had guided us in this, the hope of thus holding onto some indefinable thing, whatever had been overlooked or not quite understood but that could continue to be held weighted down by this accumulation of paper and ink rather than being forever lost.
Among Rita’s letters was a photograph she had sent me, early on, a wallet-sized school portrait showing her acned and adolescent and inscribed “Hot Stuff!” on the back. It had obviously been cut from one of those sheets of multiples that school pictures came in so they could be distributed to family and friends, one of its sides angled a bit crookedly so that it caught a sliver of colour from the photo adjacent. I wondered what might have become of the other photos in the sheet, who in the world now had one lost in the folds of a school album or tacked to a diary page or piled with others in a drawer. Or perhaps Rita herself had a sheet somewhere with only this one photograph removed – that was what the sliver of extra colour seemed to imply, that she hadn’t cared enough about the next photo to keep it intact, had thought of only this single connection to make, this single use for her likeness. To my brother in Africa, she might have thought, turning the phrase around in her mind, feeling the weight that the word brother took on, the word family, and then finally slipping the photo into an envelope and mailing it on like a rope sent out, an anchor, to hold her to the earth.
XVI
With Rita’s departure I fell briefly into a kind of a fog, unable for a while to muster the energy to perform anything more than the simplest daily tasks. I would rise and for a few hours feign the semblance of intention before ending up huddled in front of the television again or drifting back into sleep; and eventually the days began to merge one into the other, the separate islands they formed eroding into this general wash of decaying awareness. It was like the body’s slow shutting down for the half-deadness o
f some long, long-awaited animal sleep: one day my heart would slow to nearly stopping, and I wouldn’t rise at all.
At school, deadlines had come and gone, then extension dates as well. I risked the loss of my scholarship, failing grades, an expulsion, but couldn’t muster the sense of urgency required to avert these things. At the prodding of one of my professors, I finally went into the university’s counselling centre one day to get a letter of excuse that would allow incompletes to be registered on my file rather than failures. The centre was the same one where I’d attended sessions several years before with a young graduate student who wore muslin blouses and did body work with me in a mat-lined room. It looked unchanged now except for the strangeness of remembering myself within it, the same narrow, labyrinthine halls, the same reception area hidden away at their core like the prize or trap at the heart of a maze. The receptionist smiled as one had back then, handed me a form to complete with that air of not wanting to let it be seen how she thought herself different from me. It occurred to me as it had then – and it was reassuring, in a way, to feel this thought repeat itself across the years, to feel there was still a link between who I’d been then and who I was now, as if I had not, after all, become a monster – that it was exactly in a place such as this, a place of cure, that you felt most ill.
I was assigned to an older woman who had the trace of an accent, with that attractive, well-groomed look professional women often had that always touched a particular chord of longing in me. Her office was cramped but had none of the usual institutional air of a university office – there were a few plants in the window, a hand-knitted rug on the floor. She asked me questions and gave me small, encouraging smiles. There was a certain shyness in her manner that somehow put me at ease, perhaps simply because it was the normal thing to expect in a stranger rather than the false intimacy I associated with this setting.
I told her about my father’s suicide a year before and my mother’s death when I was small. I had thought these things could somehow stand in for the rest, but it was surprising how small a space they seemed to occupy in the bald relating of them, how much they didn’t account for.
