We’ve been in this place over ten years now, and we’ve had an ordinary life, which doesn’t imply a simple one. Simone works as an administrative assistant—my father would still call her a secretary, which would be more truthful. She manages to grow an impressive garden on our porch. We vacuum when we think of it. The girls have grown up, and our existence now revolves around mutual funds and keeping our cluttered house from falling to ruin.
Sometimes, I reimagine history. I see myself as a tailor, a bachelor who lives above the shop and works beside his father. I imagine years of listening to that off-kilter whistling and those same stories. I would have been annoyed with my father every day of my life. But I wouldn’t have been unhappy, just as I’m not unhappy now.
Earlier this year, my father died in his sleep, a direct consequence of those extraordinary meals he loved. Until his death, he never missed a day of work. And he refused to visit our home. Though sometimes, from our upper-floor window, I thought I could see him on his morning walk to the shop—his pace slower, but proud and steady.
BY SEPTEMBER, the temperature had begun to drop. Old people weren’t dying of dehydration anymore, and I could look out at the street without seeing it waver in front of me. That’s when Simone came back.
I was in bed, under my sheet and using a flashlight to read about the tombs of Petra, which were built to imitate the front of a typical house. I didn’t hear Simone until she opened my window.
“Al?” She stuck her head into the room, and her face looked ghostly in the dark. “Are you awake?”
I shone the flashlight on her. “What are you doing here?”
“Get that thing out of my face.”
“Did you and my dad break up?”
“I don’t want to talk about your dad.” She swung her legs through the open window. I kept the flashlight beam on her as she shimmied into my room. Her yellow dress rode up and it showed how her body had changed. She was less bony and girlish. Maybe it was all the ice cream, or my father’s rich cooking.
“I said stop it.” She grabbed the flashlight from me and flicked it off. When the room went dark, neither of us said anything. Then, “Hey, Al.” I felt her weight on the bed. “I have an idea.”
She rolled a joint and we had a smoke, lying side by side. The only light came from the smoulder that we passed back and forth.
“I’m so tired,” she said. “You wouldn’t believe how tired I am.”
“Dad wants me to go to work with him this week,” I said. “He wants me to give it another shot.”
“Doesn’t that make you suicidal?”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
She exhaled a long, sleepy breath. “I’m going to leave Toronto, go somewhere better.”
“Yeah.”
We gave up on conversation for a few minutes, until she said, “I’m going to have a baby.”
I turned to her but could only see the outline of her face.
“He doesn’t want me to keep it. He thinks I’m too young.” She pressed her palms to her eyelids. “He thinks I’m a joke.”
I remembered my father in the kitchen, his hands pressed to the table. The way he’d said, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. And maybe I should have told her this. Maybe I should have explained that, when she’d left, he hadn’t laughed it off. But her chilled skin was touching mine. And since she’d gone, I’d thought about her constantly. I’d missed her, and it felt something like lust and something like mourning. I said, “I don’t think you’re a joke.”
She turned and kissed me the way she had weeks earlier, except this time it was a wetter, sleepier kiss. She tasted like gum and Coke-bottle candies, and I didn’t mind the way her lips felt.
“It’ll be okay,” I said, though I didn’t know what I meant.
She turned on her side and buried her face into my neck, and I could picture her sleeping next to her sisters that way. I knew I’d get up the next morning and I wouldn’t recognize my own life. I wouldn’t sit on the couch, or smoke anything, or punch Sam even once. I would get a job—serving fries or pumping gas. I’d work hard every day of my life. I knew very little about Simone, but I knew we’d stay together.
I told myself that my father didn’t understand her, and that he’d hardly miss her. That to him she was a bright plaything, a bit of sunshine, nothing more. I imagined him asleep in his room. He always slept soundly, on top of the covers and in his underwear. I had to squeeze my eyes shut and push this picture of him from my mind. I told myself—I believed—that eventually he’d forgive me. I was eighteen years old, and I had no idea how difficult my life was about to become.
“We’ll be okay,” I said, but Simone didn’t hear me. She had already fallen into her kind of deep, breathy sleep.
r o m a n c e l a n g u a g e s
YOU WILL HARDLY GROW, but your hair will darken, along with your nipples, and people will stop calling you Jilly. As you drift through classes on French vocabulary and hairstyling, you will wear skirts from department stores and knit hats that slant over your eyes. You will trip at your graduation ceremony, then redeem yourself by attending foreign universities with names no one at home can pronounce. You will live on two continents and speak four languages with the same ease as your mother reads palms or embroiders daisies on dishcloths. You will marry one of your students, and then an Italian you meet on an airplane. These two will be the only men, besides your doctor, to see you naked.
Your mother will visit once in these twenty-three years, when you fly her out to meet your Italian and his two sons. She will sit in your cold dining room and tell her kind of stories. About a woman who birthed a baby with half a heart, and children who lit their own heads on fire. Sleepy and honest from wine, she will even tell of the time she met—spoke with, slept with—a man who ate his own dog. And you will look into her face the way you would stare into a funhouse mirror. Your sense of irony tuned enough to know that she will speak of you—your stone house, tanned skin, elegant husband—in the same way she speaks of her dog man. The same sly, gossipy tone you might use, if you knew your own story, if you could tell it now.
NOW: IT IS AUGUST, it is raining, and you are twelve. Heavy drops slide down your forehead and fall into the neck of your jacket. You stand in a flooded cornfield, and your bony knees stick out of your mother’s rubber boots. You hold your breath because a cricket has leapt into your palm. It folded its stick-and-hinge body into the cup of your hand, so you keep your arm steady, will your heart to still. You want to examine this miracle: the curving antennae, the wings, the strong black legs. If you had a jar, you’d trap it under glass. You know Marie is now looking into her scuffed mirror, clipping on earrings and frosting her lips. If you thought she would care, you’d scream, Mom, come see what I got. Because you want something to show, something to keep. Want it so bad that, before you can tell yourself not to, you shut your fist.
YOU LIVE IN A PLACE that’s not exactly a port town, not a suburb, but a cropping of houses and fields along drenched coastline. In twenty years the farmers and fishermen will sell art to ferry tourists and the auto parts factory will move production overseas. This flat, foggy cut of coast will become part of the nearby city that stretches farther and farther down the highway. As an adult it will be easy for you to romanticize this place: fields of cabbage and pumpkin. Horses that graze under power lines.
It must have been easy for your mother too, who came here when you were still a bad idea in her belly. It was in fashion to leave the city and to stop shaving underarms, so she had no trouble finding the baby-blue trailer she rents from a farmer you call Mr. B. But she didn’t come for retreat. She came to wash hair in the local salon, sell fresh eggs, serve pancakes in the highway truck stop, give women permanents in her kitchen, and tell people their fortunes. She keeps her money in envelopes marked Food, Cigarettes, Jilly, as though you are merely an expense. Every day, she sits at the table and shuffles twenties from one envelope to another.
“You’ve outgrown yo
ur sneakers already, haven’t you?”
You nod, ashamed.
“Your feet are like boats.” Ash drops from her cigarette to the floor. “I don’t know where you get that from.”
So most days you stay outside. You save worms from the highway after rain, or stand on the pebbly beach to imitate a heron’s stance. This place is flat, wet, bare. The only things you like about it are the escape routes: water, road. And how, on sunny days, they melt into each other.
AS A TEENAGER, you will hate your mother the way all your friends hate theirs: she will be unbending, hard, and she will have frizzy henna-died hair. In the grocery store she will buy dried chickpeas and magazines that include articles on weight-loss creams and new Biblical scrolls discovered in Maine. She will run a maid service for working women who don’t have time to dust. Some of your friends’ parents will hire her, and some of your friends’ parents will work for her, so this will be a constant source of embarrassment. She will never be in when you get home from school, so you’ll steal and smoke her cigarettes. Then the two of you will spend hours in front of evening soap operas, you hemming your skirts, she crocheting scrap wool into scarves you will hate to wear.
FROM WHERE YOU STAND in the cornfield, through strips of rain, you see where the circus has begun to sprawl its tarps and tents. You knew it was coming because of the paper arrows taped to highway signs and the posters advertising Four days! Four shows! Still, when you watch it appear from nothing, the warped little town seems unbelievable. The Zavarra: it sounds exotic, but later—when you’ve lived where the Romans held chariot races and fights to the death—you’ll know it’s a nonsense word. And it’s nothing like the European circuses you’ll see, glamour shows of elastic women painted like ice queens. The Zavarra has a clown who stamps your wrist as Marie pulls you past the gate. It has a band, heavy on the brass. No ice queens, but men on stilts or unicycles, and pubescent boys pushing popcorn, candy floss, caramel-covered apples. There are no lions, but two bears—Kyla and Bill—wrap their stubby arms around each other and dance. An elephant raises her trunk for pictures. The ringmaster has a stagy whisper—We need complete silence for this, folks—and the grandstand seats creak. And off to the side are smaller tents. One with a woman who uses her mind to bend spoons, one with a 56-year-old man who has 56 tattoos. And one with a table, two fold-up chairs, and your mother.
You’ll never know what she did to get this gig. But it seems natural that Marie is briefly and fully accepted by people who hold an undying belief that accidents happen in threes and that it’s bad luck to look back during a parade. Later, when you tell this to your first husband, he’ll shake his head and look at you with young, humourless eyes. He’ll think you make this stuff up, so you’ll say: You’ve never met my mother. You’ll borrow her deep, dramatic voice: She was just like them—crazy, a cutthroat capitalist. And you’ll describe the tent she improvised: a blue tarp to keep out the rain, with a maroon velour lining and a sign that read, $5 for a palm reading, or three questions for $3.
But now, you don’t imagine how this will become one of your stories, how it will change in your hands. You sit on an empty tub of Pineapple Whip as people ask Marie their questions. Will there be a wedding? Will he love our baby? She answers in a husky voice and sometimes talks to people’s dead relatives; she can do this too, as well as give hand massages. Tragedy, romance, ghosts—Marie takes these for granted.
“This mark shows you’ve touched God,” she says to an elderly woman who wears a plastic bonnet to keep rain off her hair.
“See this semicircular line? It indicates family battles.” This to a man of forty, a banker who wants to discuss his prospects of promotion. “Look at the way it swoops down. Do you have estranged children? No? You may have children you don’t know about.”
And to a graduate student in braids and a wool skirt: “Your heart line begins right under your middle finger, so my guess is you have a disregard for the responsibilities of love. A very sexual nature.” Marie lowers her voice. “By sexual, I mean dangerous.”
When customers leave the tent, she tucks their money into her back pocket. She is a businesswoman who understands a changing world. Women are working, couples are swinging, parents are splitting, and everyone wants to know what will happen next. You sit outside the tent, your face hidden in your hood, and suck on peanut brittle. Next to the circles of blush on your mother’s cheeks, the varnished nails glued to her fingers, no one notices you anyway.
WHEN YOU LEAVE FOR UNIVERSITY, your mother will give you a stiff hug at the international airport. You will have taken everything you own from the apartment she bought two years before. Your records, your books, your off-the-shoulder sweaters will be tucked into a trunk held shut by two leather straps. Your mother will find a man—wearing a grey trench coat, and about to step on a plane—to lift the trunk onto the conveyor belt.
“Work hard, Jilly,” she’ll say. “And don’t eat the cheese—I heard about a woman who got a stomach full of worms. They’re centuries behind us when it comes to pasteurization.”
Then she’ll pull you to her and press your face to her wine-coloured hair. She’ll pat your shoulder, then your head. You’ll want something from her, some sort of guarantee. But she’ll push you away and ask if you have your passport, your traveller’s cheques.
“ARE YOU THE NICE LADY I should talk to about my future?”
You look up from your peanut brittle and see a man with a mouth that takes up half his face. He is smiling.
“Are you the lady with the magic eye?” He’s not in costume, but you can tell from his accent that he works for the circus because Marie told you these people come from the other side of Canada, where they speak French. This man was obviously not prepared for rain. He wears jeans with reinforced knees and a button-up shirt with the cuffs rolled. He is soaked through. You don’t answer his teasing, just look at him and grip your knees.
“Here, you want something?” He pulls a box of cinnamon hearts from his shirt pocket, and you shake your head. This is how you remember much of the past few years: as a swirl of men. When they acknowledged you, it was to shut you up with a bag of penny candy. You don’t remember faces, only the muscle of denimed thighs that passed you in the trailer’s kitchen as you coloured in a book or spread margarine on toast. You remember the way they messed the curls on top of your head. Cute kid, they’d say, or nothing at all. Your mother has jobs, but these men are her career. She goes months without one, then finds someone—someone older, lonely, well-off enough that he can help a girl out. Buy her wine, pay her rent. You have questions about your father—what was his name? what did he do? was he good at crosswords?—but you think of these men and never ask.
This man, still almost a boy, crouches beside you and taps your knee. “You sure? You don’t want any?”
“Are you in the circus?”
“In a way.” He picks at his mud-spattered boots.
“Can you fly?”
“I can climb things. Ropes, buildings.”
“A cricket flew into my hand this morning. Just like that.” You fail to snap your fingers.
“There are different kinds of crickets, you know. Some live underground, some on trees.”
“What kind is this one?” You pull the crushed body from your pocket.
“Ah.” He touches one of the snapped legs. “A nearly flawless specimen. This is a scaly cricket. If it jumped to you, it must have been in love with you. That’s what crickets do. They fall in love every night and they sing about it.”
“Put that thing away, Jilly.” Your mother’s shadow and her voice loom over you, and you shove the bug into your pocket. “People at the circus don’t want to see dead things.”
“Is that true?” You look up at her legs. “Do crickets fall in love?”
“Who is this?” Marie stands under the tent and looks at the man. A curtain of water separates her from you and him.
“Of course it’s true. It’s scientific,” he says. “The female
s have eardrums on their elbows and that’s how they hear the song.” He stands and faces your mother. “Imagine that. Hearing with your elbow.”
You watch him as he looks at Marie’s blousy shirt and tight, flared pants. His eyes crinkle, his head tilts, and he steps an inch closer to her. All through your adolescence you will watch men do this in her presence.
The boy runs his hand through his hair and keeps talking. “In French we call them grillons. There’s a song. About a couple who make love in a field and the crickets start to sing.”
“Do you need something?” Your mother uses the same tone with him as she does with you, and you feel sudden ownership of him.
“He wants you to tell his future.”
“I was told to visit you. I was told you can see things.” He steps closer to your mother, and stands under the water that falls from the lip of the tarp.
“I’m supposed to be here for the customers. The people who pay to get in.” Marie crosses her arms.
“It’s actually a funny song. Eventually the crickets get so loud that the couple has to cover their ears. They have to hide under a blanket.” He leans toward her and pretends to pull a cinnamon heart from her hair. “Candy?”
“I’m very busy.” She steps back from him into the tent. On the inside wall, she has hung a poster of a gypsy woman. A mockery that doesn’t resemble her at all, except for the hard glint in the eyes.
ON YOUR WEDDING DAY, you will send your mother a Polaroid: you and your student outside the Registro Civil. Him in sandals, a buttoned shirt, a tie. You in the blue skirt and jacket you sewed for the occasion. Out of practice with a needle, you struggled with the material—stitch, rip, restitch—and in the photo the skirt will ride up higher than expected.
Vanishing and Other Stories Page 21
