Vanishing and Other Stories

by Deborah Willis

  “Everyone thinks he dumped me, don’t they?”

  “You mean Jordan?”

  “People just assume things.” She closed her eyes and swayed in her chair. It must have felt like every star, planet, and moon was whirling around her, like she was the centre of everything’s orbit. “You know, we still do it sometimes. When I feel like it.”

  “What?”

  “Me and Jordan. We still do it.”

  “Oh.”

  “Everyone wonders about that, don’t they? Whether it’s still possible. Everyone’s curious.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Sometimes he lays me out on the bed. Or sometimes we do it like this.” Using her arms, she scooted herself to the edge of the chair and leaned her torso back. “Like this.” Her head rested against the back of her chair and she closed her eyes. She kept them closed for so long that I thought she’d passed out. Then she said, “Do you think I’m still pretty?”

  She sounded drunk. She sounded needy. She sounded the way Nicole had when she wanted to borrow my skirt.

  I looked at her clear skin and closed, heavy-lashed eyes. Maybe it was the light from the stars, but she looked prettier than I’d ever seen her. Maybe her broken body made her face more endearing, more shocking. Death had brushed against her, and she’d been touched by a greater sorrow than most of us had seen so far. Loss lived inside her now, and this made her even more lovely.

  I said, “You’re beautiful.”

  She shivered, maybe from the cold. Then she pressed her palms against the arms of her chair and tried to straighten herself. But she couldn’t do it. I guess she’d lost a lot of strength over the past months, or the alcohol had weakened her arms. She squeezed her eyes shut, shifted her weight, and struggled to make her body do what she wanted it to do.

  “Let me help,” I said.

  “It’s fine.” She was out of breath. “I’m fine.”

  But still, I leaned down and put my arms around her. I lifted her body, which was heavier than expected, and sat her up straight. After, I didn’t let go. I held her the way Jay sometimes embraced me. And she hugged me too, her arms around my neck.

  We held each other for so long that the porch’s motion-sensor light flicked off and it became dark. I could smell her hair and hear her breathing. It was like we were sisters, reunited after a long separation. Or like gravity locked us together: the Earth and its moon. All the rules, those social boundaries, seemed to waver and break, and I would never believe in them again. Welcome, I could hear Armand say, to the world of Black Holes.

  When we finally separated, I straightened her blanket so she wouldn’t feel a draft, and she said, “Thanks.”

  “No problem.”

  We never spoke to each other again. It had started to snow, so we stayed outside for only a few minutes longer. I watched the snow melt into her hair and she looked as betrayed as Christ. As heartbroken as Him too. She was Demeter, aged by her loss. She was Eve, cast out and cold. Or she was just an ordinary girl. An angry, heartbroken girl. In any case, I had told the truth: she was beautiful. And that’s probably why she’d hugged me. She was probably just drunk and grateful for the compliment.

  Or maybe it was more than that. Maybe she wanted me, in a way that Jay never could. Maybe she’d held on to my body because she craved it for herself. Maybe she wanted to switch skins, switch lives, switch fates. I was so ordinary in my jeans and coat that she wanted to inhabit me, to live in the temple of my normalcy.

  I know why I held her. Mostly because I missed Jay and Syl and I didn’t want to be alone. But it was also that I wanted to touch the divinity in Mary Louise; I wanted to see the sublime. I wanted to know what it was like to climb up on that rock and look out over a glittering lake. I wanted to still believe that the stars held a pattern. I wanted to feel the air on my face, just for a second, no matter the consequences. I wanted that moment, before the fall. Then I wanted to dive.

  a n d t h e l i v i n g

  i s e a s y

  SHE CAME INTO OUR LIVES SUDDENLY, like a radio song—the type you can’t stop humming no matter how hard you try. It was the summer after I’d finished high school, during the hottest months this city has ever seen. I had no prospects and no interests other than an impractical one in history, so it was decided I would apprentice in my father’s tailoring shop. Each morning, my father and I walked from our house on Borden to the shop on Spadina. Once at work, I started looking forward to lunch. That’s when we walked to the hot-dog stand and ordered beef smokies piled with relish and fried onions. We ate them on a bench outside the shop as the sun beat onto the tops of our heads.

  Every day, my father would comment, “Not a bad life for us guys, eh?” I would chew and nod in agreement. When we finished our dogs, he’d say, “How about a cone?”

  Then we’d walk to the ice-cream shop on Kensington, one of the first places to cater to the new market of tourists and students. That’s where she worked. She wore an outdated uniform and a tag that said Simone.

  When we met her, my father ordered rum-raisin—his favourite—and said, “This your first day?” He was one of those. The kind of man who instinctively flirts with waitresses and sales clerks. She was at least twenty years younger than him.

  “Yeah.” She bent to scoop the ice cream, and I’m sure we both noticed her greying bra strap.

  “It’s a terrible uniform they make you wear, isn’t it?” My father leaned against the freezer. “What is that? Polycotton?”

  She looked up at him. “I don’t know.”

  “You should talk to them about ordering new ones. I’ve got some fabric that’d be perfect. A soft yellow. It’d look nice with your hair.”

  She handed him his cone.

  “I could even whip up a blouse or something for you. No charge, I mean. Those old bolts of fabric, I’ll never use—”

  “I don’t need a blouse.”

  “Good point. No blouse, then.” My father dropped coins on the counter. “Simone has spoken. Miss Simone, the high priestess of soul.”

  “Can I get rocky road?” I wanted to kick my father in the balls. “One scoop?”

  “You mean Nina Simone?” She leaned against the freezer. “I was named after her.”

  I figured she was lying. I figured she was angling for a tip.

  “No kidding?” My father waved the change away. “You’re a bit like her.”

  “No, I’m not.” And she wasn’t. This Simone was pale, freckled, and skinny.

  “You’ve got the same regal air.”

  She laughed, and it reminded me of the small bell that rang each time the ice-cream parlour’s door was opened. “No,” she said. “I don’t.”

  In all the years that have passed since that afternoon, I haven’t had the courage to ask Simone what crossed her mind as we walked toward the door. Maybe she noticed my father’s dark hair or his confident posture. Or maybe it was his suit: the elegant fabric, starched collar, and the way his trousers hung over his shoes in a perfectly effortless way. I’m sure she didn’t notice me.

  “A dress,” she called out. The bell had just bestowed its charming ring, and we were nearly out the door. “You can make me a dress.”

  A WEEK LATER, she appeared at our house to pick up the dress. It was a simple sleeveless design, with a boat neck and a hem just above the knee. She put it on, then stayed for dinner. She didn’t talk much, but she ate a lot. My father had made one of his famous lasagnas, and she took three helpings. For dessert, she’d brought a bowl of something made of canned fruit and gelatin that her mother had taught her to make. When she said the word mother, we all got quiet and looked at our plates.

  After dinner, my brother, Sam, gave her a tour of the house. He said things like, “This was our rosemary plant, but it died,” and, “Alex and the TV live in the basement.” While he showed her around, Simone found Mom’s records. She slipped one out of its jacket then set it spinning on our dusty record player. “It’s Too Hot for Words” started up, and my fathe
r stepped out of the kitchen, that vein in his temple tensing, because no one since Mom had touched those records.

  “Billie Holiday was my age when she recorded this.” Simone moved her hips to the beat, and that yellow dress fit her perfectly. “It was before all the shit that happened later.”

  My father handed her a gin and tonic, the same as he drank, and offered Cokes to me and Sam. “I’ll take something stronger,” I said, hoping I sounded like Jimmy Stewart in the movies Mom used to watch. But my father ignored me, so I went to my room. I lay in bed but couldn’t sleep because of the music. When they tired of Lady Day, they put on Ella Fitzgerald and played Live from Carnegie Hall all the way through, as loud as it would go.

  THE NEXT MORNING, I found Simone in our kitchen. She was drinking a glass of orange juice and looking through one of my mother’s cookbooks. Sam was already at the table, reading what my dad called the funnies. My father was frying eggs in a buttered pan.

  Simone looked up from a recipe for roast chicken and smiled. “Morning,” she said, and flipped a page.

  “Hello,” I answered, and the hot pan spit at me.

  The next day, I found her on the couch with a cup of coffee. The morning after that, I heard her in the shower. This went on for about a week, until it was clear she had moved in.

  DURING OUR MORNING WALKS TO WORK, my father either whistled or told me his life story. If he whistled, it was a tuneless sound that had all the improvisation of jazz and none of the melody. If he talked, he told me about when he had learned to sew from his father, in the same shop where we now worked.

  “And I hated it,” he said. “I hated the shmattes. I hated the smell. I hated all the men who were just like my father.” He had a quick, elegant stride, and he kept his hands casually in his pockets. “There was no way I was going to spend my life in that dank little shop, hunched over a machine. I decided that, when my father died, I’d sell the place and never walk down Spadina again.”

  I could have asked questions—“Why?” or “What changed?”—but my father told his story the way he might tell a joke, in the practised tone of someone who doesn’t want interruptions. So I trampled people’s lawns and listened to his history. After his initial reluctance to learn, he discovered he was good at tailoring. He was precise and calm and developed a love for the perfect fit, the timeless cut. He altered his young man’s pride and recklessness and turned those qualities into a charming, understated masculinity. Around this time, he met my mother. He seemed to consider her something that had happened to him. He spoke of marriage and fatherhood as things that had taken him by surprise, the way a change in the weather might. “You wake up one morning,” he said, “and you don’t recognize your own life.”

  But despite this boyish astonishment at the way things turned out, I think he became what he always wanted to be: a family man, a flirt, a nine-to-five gent. For most of his life, he fit seamlessly into Spadina’s noise and neighbourly business.

  Now was a different story. The men and women he knew when he’d started—my grandfather’s friends, people who most often did business in Yiddish—had left Spadina. They’d moved uptown, or to the suburbs, and were replaced by people from China, Portugal, and the Caribbean. People who opened restaurants, imported clothes instead of making them, and played music my father hated out their shop windows. Neon signs in Asian script were put up, along with paper lanterns, sculpted monkeys, and carved dragons. There were other newcomers too, Americans who sat in cafés and talked politics.

  Jack Holtzman, my father, was the last stubborn Jew, the only person on Spadina who still wore a suit and polished shoes to work. He never discussed this, but he seemed split between the present world and some idealized past he reinvented and relived each day. Even with Simone, he was divided. He never took her to work with him, or anywhere else someone might see them together. No one would have really cared—by then we’d all heard the rumours of free love—but he wanted to maintain some kind of image, a style his father would have approved of.

  SIMONE GAVE THE HOUSE a feeling of ease, of languidness. She opened all the windows and left her magazines, her clothes, her empty packs of Juicy Fruit lying around. Suddenly our place was nothing like the tidy, airtight home Mom had kept. The house had been her idea—my father would have been happy to live above the shop—and Mom had been obsessive about its upkeep. When she was still well enough, she dusted, vacuumed, scrubbed and waxed the floors nearly every day.

  But that summer, no one vacuumed or wiped water stains from the bathroom tiles. Simone spent most of her time on the kitchen floor with the phone to her ear, telling her sisters about the ice-cream parlour, or whispering things she and my father did. Sam built complex forts in the living room. He used pillows and chairs for walls, and draped my father’s clothes for roofs. My father was so happy, so distracted, that he didn’t get angry when he found his pressed shirts strewn around the living room. He spent his time cooking festive, complicated things: lamb shanks, brisket, squash stuffed with rice and hazelnuts. As though every day were a holiday. The house got even hotter with the oven on, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  After dinner, no one asked me to help with the dishes. Those sat in the sink while Simone and my father drank gin and danced to the blues in the kitchen. I’d go to my room, get into bed with the lights out, and use a flashlight to read a series of books I’d been given as a child. They were hardcovers about ancient civilizations. Pompeii, Babylon, Troy, Petra.

  The text was simple, the maps and pictures faded, but I reread these books all summer. I had nothing else. I hadn’t gone to the library in months, because it would have reminded me too much of Mom. When she was alive, we went every week. I picked out historical mysteries and she took home books about musicians, artists, politicians. In another life, I think she would have made a great biographer. Sam has a lot of my father in him: the wild hair, the vintage sparkle in his eye, and a tendency to view history as a series of styles that can be imitated. Mom saw the world as a tangle of stories, mostly painful ones. I’ve always been my mother’s son.

  EACH MORNING, I’d wake to the smell of the coffee my father had on the stove. “Eggs and toast, boys,” he’d say. There was even something cheerful about the way he flipped pancakes or seasoned hash browns.

  Eventually, Simone wandered in, her blond hair greasy and tangled. She wore my father’s plaid pyjamas, and had to roll the waist of the pants to keep them from sliding off her hips. She’d usually announce her presence by executing a long, sleepy stretch. Then we’d all sit on the porch for the hour before the city was too hot to bear, and watch the neighbourhood wake up. My father served boiled eggs in glass egg cups and we ate them slowly, dipping our toast in the bright yolks. Even Sam sat still while he slurped his juice.

  Then Simone went upstairs to change into the uniform she wore to work. She liked to do her makeup in front of the hall mirror, and we—my father, Sam, and I—would sit on the couch and watch her comb her hair or choose a colour of eyeshadow. She’d talk, her eyes catching ours in the mirror.

  “If I have to work the late shift again, I’m going to shit,” she’d say. Or, “Don’t you think? My own sister? I can’t believe—”

  I doubt any of us listened. We just sat there—male and ignorant and entranced—and watched what she did with eye pencils.

  DURING THE FIRST WEEKS of my internship, my father was proud and patient. “This is my son,” he’d tell customers, and they’d smile at me like I was a newborn. But as July wore on, it became clear that I had no talent as a tailor. I was inaccurate and sloppy. After two weeks of bad measurements and crooked cuts, I was put in charge of filling out order cards and counting change.

  “I’ll deal with scissors,” my father said. “You deal with people.”

  I wasn’t very good at that either. Since Mom, I’d become even quieter. I’d taken to crawling into the very back of my brain and staying there. It probably gave me a strange, blank look. I think it frightened the customers.


  After a month of this kind of failure, working with my father began to scare me. Some mornings I couldn’t get any food down. Once at the shop I was exhausted, and sometimes fell asleep in my chair instead of observing his quick, talented fingers. He blamed it on the heat, and bought another fan for the shop. It buzzed like an insect and hardly moved the store’s soupy air. I watched it all day, counted time by the spooky rotation of its head.

  “Alex, wake up.” My father waved an order card in front of my face. “This is a big one. Five wool suits.”

  “Wool?” I scratched my arms.

  “Yes, sir.” His voice and the movement of his lips made me dizzy. “In this weather. Must be a funeral.”

  Maybe it was the fan’s noise or the heat or the word funeral, or all of it at once, but I fainted. Swooned like a girl and fell to the floor.

  WHAT I REMEMBER MOST about my mother is the way she sat at the kitchen table, listening to a record or to the radio. Also her deep-set eyes and her silence. She could be quiet in a threatening way, and this could last for days. When it got really bad, she wouldn’t read or listen to music or help us with our school work. She’d just sit in the kitchen and hold a smouldering cigarette in her hand. The table would be littered with long curls of ash.

  During these times, my father would joke with her, tease her, kiss her roughly on the cheek, and say things like, “Hiya, sunshine.” Even as a child I couldn’t understand his strategy. It seemed obvious that it was best to leave her alone, wait her out. Eventually, she’d burst from this darkness on her own. At some unexpected, illogical moment she might turn on her record player or announce, “Who’s up for a game of rummy?” But still my father persisted. He cooked her favourite food—chicken soup with kneidlach—and brought her bright, smelly freesias from the florist down the street.