by Lisa Moore
So Trevor, she said. What do you do? He clinked his glass against her glass.
BEVERLY
SHE HAD WATCHED Colleen, just last week, from the guest-room window that overlooks a long, gentle hill and the playground beyond. The park was sunlit and pulsing green and after a moment Colleen lay down on the grass and rolled down the hill.
She turned over and over very quickly and then lay on her back with her arm thrown over her eyes.
She looked both joyful and shipwrecked.
Beverly felt a thud of relief: she’s still a child. When she turned away from the emerald-bright window to finish her ironing, the room dimmed and she was satisfied as when a good movie ends.
The vandalism Colleen had inflicted on the bulldozers was a rogue act — Beverly had this thought watching a documentary about a demolition team on television with the sound muted — a rogue act so charged with alien zeal that she imagined Colleen had been brainwashed.
Eco-terrorists had kidnapped her daughter and turned her from her mother and everything she’d ever been taught, such as being polite at all costs, using cloth napkins, wiping the sink if there’s toothpaste crusted on it, achieving excellent marks at school, avoiding sexual intercourse, and oral sex in the back of school buses, which is the rage, recycling, and eating what’s on your plate — all of this had been erased.
On the television screen a quick succession of shots showed a leaden ball hitting a New York tenement in slow motion, and then a hotel in Bombay and then a skyscraper in Paris and the buildings bowed down like supplicants greeting a Japanese emperor.
What pissed off Beverly the most was the brutish lack of imagination.
Self-indulgence she could have forgiven; self-righteousness pissed her off.
It was a calculated and dull-witted act; Colleen had got caught.
Beverly had been drinking blueberry wine by herself at the dining-room table when the pale red and blue washes of light swept across the glass doors of the cherry-wood cabinet. A police cruiser had pulled into her driveway. It was late afternoon and the officer who got out from the driver’s side wore sunglasses and a gun. The other cop was a short woman with plump hips and a heart-shaped face.
Beverly had watched them coming up the driveway and there was an elastic moment when it seemed they might have lost their way. Colleen had been staying at a friend’s for the weekend. Jennifer Galway had asked her to sleep over. Jennifer’s mother played bridge with Beverly.
She saw the police officers and imagined Colleen asleep on the mauve-and-blue shag carpet of Jennifer Galway’s rec room in Mount Pearl. A wooden bowl of chips nearby, crunched cans of soft drink; what else did they eat? And the other girls too, Sherry Ryan and Cathy Lawrence, all asleep in the gloomy renovated basement smelling of old sneakers, cigarette smoke, and dampness. Beverly tried with all her might to imagine Colleen’s dark hair shushing over the nylon sleeping bag when she turned her head in the murky morning light from the base-ment’s grimy, half-sunken window and knew at once that her daughter was not there. She had not slept at Jennifer Galway’s last night. She had not, had not, had not slept at Jennifer Galway’s. Colleen hadn’t mentioned Jennifer Galway in months, except to say that’s where she would be sleeping. Beverly had been delighted.
The male officer drew a small pad of paper from his breast pocket and flipped a few pages and then studied the front of her house. Beverly immediately assumed Colleen was dead, but also believed she could not be dead.
If Colleen was not dead, why were two police officers coming up the walk? Colleen could not be dead because Beverly couldn’t live without her.
She had come to think of life not as a progression of days full of minor dramas, some tragedy, small joys, and carefully won accomplishments, as she figures most people think of life — but rather a stillness that would occasionally be interrupted with blasts of chaos.
The wine was the last of the batch David had bottled just before he died. David was — had been — a short, pudgy man with fine silver hair and a lot of cufflinks. Beverly keeps a brown velvet box with a stiff hinge under her pillow. She gives it a shake, listening to the cufflinks rattle around, before she drifts off to sleep.
He’d had a thing for cufflinks. He’d believed in finishing touches, nice soaps, napkin rings that had some heft to them. He’d smoothed eye gel under his eyes every morning because it felt cool and helped him wake up. He’d clipped his toenails with his foot resting on the toilet seat. The wine was surprisingly right for homemade wine. The trick was real fruit juice. He’d squashed the blueberries himself, with his knuckles. What she missed most were his eccentricities. The weird constellation of qualities she would never find in anyone else. She didn’t want anyone else.
The wine was potent, full of the four lost summers and suspended sediment. She had been saving the bottle for a special occasion. But the day had been unbearably forlorn, the weather windy and sunny, all the trees finally in bud. Daffodils whipped back and forth. David had never cleaned the sink after he shaved. The porcelain peppered with bristles is something she misses, though it had always mildly shocked her when she came upon it before he died. She had never expected it; now she misses it like a stab with a sewing needle right through her heart. How white and cold a sink can look when you live without a man. How sterile. She misses the smell of sex, is what she misses, a shadowy smell, full of lapsing time and cut grass and seaweed.
The alcohol slammed like a door, perhaps because she was dieting. She had decided David’s death would not destroy her entirely. Here was her prescription: behave as if you are unaffected and never stop behaving that way.
There had been a lot of cottage cheese, iceberg lettuce.
In yoga class she lay on her mat, allowing the smell of socks to be a form of comfort, and let tears stream from the corners of her eyes over her temples and into her ears. She was fifty-eight and kept her house very clean and always set a formal table, even when she was eating alone.
A badge or decorative square of metal on the policeman’s cap flared with light. They were standing near her tulips. The man looked up and Beverly could see he was young and she saw her bungalow in his mirror sunglasses. She had bought the bungalow two weeks after David was buried. It had been cowardice that had made her sell their house. She sold their house because she was brave beyond measure. She drove past it almost every evening trying to peer through the curtains. She had once seen the silhouette of a woman with oven mitts carrying a giant pot aloft and there were people around a table and candlelight. It had provided her with stores of comfort. Whoever they were they were young and celebrating. She wanted it to go on until dawn.
The officer touched the row of buttons on his shirt before starting forward.
Beverly wrote her sister, Madeleine, occasional e-mails, though they spoke on the phone once or twice a day. Madeleine had a headset she wore while driving.
I like to get my emotional work done on the move, Madeleine said. Beverly could hear squeals from the tires, as though Madeleine were taking the bends recklessly.
Is it work? Beverly had asked. Madeleine, the eldest by six years, had always been vigilant and uncompromising about Beverly’s well-being. Often there were car horns in the background; Madeleine running red lights or pulling U-turns, absent-mindedly enraging other drivers.
But her e-mails were hard-nosed and terse. No matter what new fear arose, Madeleine’s e-mail advice was the same and consisted of a single phrase: Drive on.
Beverly frequently wrote: I’m losing it. Just that.
The officers started up the concrete walk to the front door. The buzzer rang twice. Beverly had begun to believe in the inevitable. David’s aneurysm had been inevitable. More disaster was inevitable. She would have liked to have written Madeleine at just that moment: I’ve surrendered. Tell them not to shoot.
For four years there had been a physical ache that started in her solar plexus and pulsed through her whole body just as if she had been shot.
People think
sadness is ephemeral and romantic, she wrote to Madeleine. On another occasion: People must think I’m an ice queen, carrying on as I do with ordinary life.
She didn’t know what people thought. She had thought nothing herself about sadness until she was penetrated with it.
Every sensual act since David’s death fell flat. More than once she’d noticed orange peels next to her lawn chair and realized she had already eaten the orange.
She found herself saying things to people she had already said. Two or three times she said the same thing.
People hesitated.
They tried to behave as if it were fresh, what she was saying, but it subdued them. They had a look. A certain numb look that made her feel like her slip was showing.
Beverly had told one of the secretaries at work about leather couches, she’d received a flyer. She had stopped by the coffee machine and the secretary was putting in the creamers. They were almost half-price, because the secretary had said about wanting a new couch, and this was a real opportunity, these couches, they were a find.
She went into her office, closing the door with her foot, and stood there surprised by how dark it had become. She heard the rest of the department faxing and printing and phoning each other from their cubicles — all the burgeoning, insipid vitality of the tourism sector where she had worked for the last twenty years — but behind her office door, alone, she was dazzlingly lost. The room was very dark in the middle of the afternoon. Every object grainy in the shadows, her fountain pen, the snow globe from Banff, her winter boots drying on a rubber mat, bent over each other, each object, indistinct, hardly there at all.
It was later than she thought.
It must be much later.
She usually left the overhead lights off, but in the time it had taken her to get a coffee, it had become dark and quiet. She felt disoriented; she hardly knew what year it was or how old she was.
She might have been twenty, flying down a hill on her bike, the wind making her squint. She remembered a skirt she had when she was twenty and brown knee socks and the wind billowing the skirt; she was going to see a boyfriend. She arrived at his house, Darren Jones, and he’d had a hose. She opened the latch on the garden gate, and a spray of water full of rainbow shimmer and spears of late-afternoon sunlight and a man she hardly knew — he was just a boy, she realizes in the darkened office — and she thought she was in love with him.
That wasn’t love, she said out loud.
She snapped on the overhead light and everything became hurtfully present and stark. She had been fifty-five then and already a widow. She went back out to tell her secretary about some leather couches that were on sale.
The wine tasted like what it was: homemade wine, too sweet, too strong. She had expected a visitation. The wine slammed into her.
The wind took the aluminum door from her and it crashed against the wrought-iron rail and it rang like a gong. The male officer asked if she was the mother of Colleen Clark. Beverly slumped against the door frame and her eyes rolled back in her head. The male officer caught her elbow before she hit the floor.
I have relinquished my hold, she imagined writing to Madeleine, once the officers had put her head between her knees at the dining-room table. The female officer unrolled the yoga mat that had been pushed against the wall and had Beverly lie on it. Then she took Beverly’s legs and lifted them into the air, resting the woman’s cold bare feet against her chest.
I think I’m very discouraged, Beverly said.
You may just have to cheer up, said the officer.
She came to after only a minute but she felt chilly and had broken a sweat. She heard vandalism and bulldozers. Apparently Colleen had not been hurt. There had been a car accident, she’d got a good crack across the nose, but that was it. Her nose wasn’t even broken. She deserved a broken nose at least, Beverly thought. Thank God her beautiful little nose was okay.
The male officer was in the kitchen checking the cupboards for a glass. He came back out with a beer stein full of ice cubes and orange juice.
Electrolytes, the officer said, and Beverly closed her eyes and saw fireworks on her eyelids. She imagined killing her daughter. She imagined putting her hands around her throat and squeezing tight. She imagined the cartilage of Colleen’s windpipe snapping under her thumbs. How dare Colleen frighten her like that?
Colleen had been saying eco-terrorism, but Beverly had not been listening. Colleen had been saying change the world, the plight of animals, the environment, radioactive waste, the World Trade Organization. She had said Seattle, she had said Quebec City. She had been going on, but Beverly had not listened.
Are you listening? Colleen kept asking.
Beverly had said about new shoes.
We should get you a nice pair of shoes, Beverly had said.
Of course she’s a minor so the complainant has no way to recoup costs of the damage, the male officer said. The sun came out at that instant and hit the prisms in front of Beverly’s window and a rainbow fell on the officer’s cheek and another on the front of his blue shirt. The glass of orange juice flared with sunlight as if it were a fire in his hand.
I have a daughter, the female cop said. They’re nothing but trouble.
Colleen was wilful and lovely. She had become beautiful overnight, large blue eyes and full lips, long, shiny hair. Her trembling, towering empathy, her insistence that the world play fair. She would not allow injustice; she would not stand for it. Beverly had seen the colour rush to her cheeks and tears brighten her eyes over nothing, over some insult visited randomly on one classmate or another — a girl disfigured by acne who had been teased, someone left out, someone who was poor, the kids who had no lunch. And then came the animals. She could never stand the immense unfairness to animals, the chicken factories, cows led to slaughter, even fish. As a four-year-old she had worked herself into an inconsolable rage when Beverly flushed a dead goldfish. She could not bear the indignity of the funeral, her little fists white at her sides, the stamp of her small foot on the bathroom tiles.
How did you catch her? Beverly asked. The worst was how thoroughly she had been betrayed, how befuddled and old she felt. She felt dangerously foolish.
We had a call from a gentleman who picked her up hitchhiking, the male officer said. The officer had been distracted by the crystals. He gave one of the spears of glass a little flick with his finger.
She dropped her knapsack at the scene of the crime, he said. We found the address in there. A rainbow jittered over the wall like a new butterfly.
She’ll have to come down to court, he said. Your daughter will have to admit she’s sorry for what she’s done and then she can avail of the youth diversion program.
You’re thinking of diverting her, Beverly said. She thought of rivers in the developing world that were diverted for hydro-electric power, how plains were flooded and birds had to abandon their nests and whole villages were made to move with their belongings on their backs. She had seen this on the documentary channel.
We have a very good program, the kids do community work, said the female cop.
COLLEEN
BEVERLY HAD MADE crustless sandwiches for the funeral home three days in a row when David died. Colleen remembers her leaning over the bathroom sink applying mascara, her eyeball very near the mirror, her mouth stretched open between each stroke. She had pulled the matted hair from her brush and wiggled her fingers so the hair fell into the toilet. These were the ordinary gestures of getting ready. There would be no hysterics; for whatever reason, Beverly had decided she would appear completely intact.
I’m still intact, she’d said.
David was dead but she would apply mascara.
At the funeral home she gripped the hands of visitors and held them. Colleen watched her squeeze each hand for emphasis when she was recounting some memory. Madeleine stood beside Beverly throughout, directing friends toward the casket, bringing cups of tea, sometimes holding her arm above the elbow as if to keep her on her fee
t.
Late, on the last afternoon of the wake, Colleen had followed her mother into the bathroom of the funeral home and saw her leaning on the sink, her arms straight, her knuckles white, her head hanging down. The water was running in the sink and she might have just thrown up. Finally, she tossed her hair back and they stood like that, mother and daughter, looking at each other in the mirror.
They were absolutely still and they didn’t look away from each other, nor did they touch each other or speak. Colleen became aware of the ticking of her mother’s watch over the running water, and the thrum of a heater and the murmuring of guests in the rooms over their heads.
There were five separate rooms in the funeral home for separate wakes and each room had a slotted board near the door with the dead person’s name in movable white letters that slid into the slots. What sounded like voices might have been steam in the pipes running under the floor.
The lights pulsed slightly, a surge of electricity that caused them to buzz, and still Colleen and her mother stood there not moving until her mother closed her eyes and drew a deep breath through her nose and exhaled with a shudder.
She rubbed one of her eyes hard with a knuckle and there was the wet sound of the knuckle and eyelid and eyeball, a watery, interior, extremely private noise. Colleen’s mother yawned deeply and Colleen yawned too. She saw herself yawning in the mirror and she could not stop yawning. They might have fallen asleep on their feet; they might have been generating the same dream.
David’s body in his charcoal suit with his wedding ring and white rose, his hands, and the creamy ruffled lining in the casket and all the old women and men who had come to visit might have been something from a deep, deep sleep. The way part of a particularly exhausting dream floats back throughout the following day, overtaking the dreamer, portentous and absorbing.
Then her mother shattered the gathering quiet.
I think a trip to Florida after the funeral, Beverly had said. She closed her purse, which was beside her on the sink, with a hard little snap. She turned off the water.
