by Claudia Dey
‘Good morning, Eugenia.’
‘Good morning.’
Immaculata sits beside me, upright, pew posture. She watched me through the night, the bitten edges of my sleep, the hum of my breath, my stiff body an ache, having broken through the quiet of our world, taking floorboards, stained carpets and set tables with me, a wig, false teeth and a note duct-taped to a door. A skydiver falling fast. If I asked Immaculata, she would tell me what I dreamed about. But I don’t. I already know. In four days, I have become a person with only one dream.
We get up, look for Mink, knowing that she is gone, the world her pageant. Still, there is effort in our search. We scream her name loudly; our house is a black ocean and she is adrift within it. We look in closets. In the basement. We pull back curtains and covers. We open and close doors, the refrigerator. We check underneath beds – every moment, a jack-in-the-box. She took nothing with her save the fur coat, the pink toque and the car.
‘She didn’t leave a note,’ says Immaculata, deflating.
‘I wonder if she has already forgotten our names.’
‘I wonder if she has already forgotten her name too.’
‘Maybe this is why she won’t answer our screams.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Because she’s forgotten who she is.’
‘Maybe she’s still here somewhere and we’re scaring her silly.’
‘Mink doesn’t get scared.’
‘True.’
‘She wouldn’t forget that.’
All the lights are off. We enter the bathroom, its surfaces still in a sweat from the night before. We flick on the overhead light; it twitches into brightness. We bend into the sink together and scrub our faces, and it is then that the mirror delivers the final evolutionary feat: in the night, we have doubled in age. We are eighteen. Instantly and thoroughly, eighteen. Our mouths are crowded with teeth, my black eyes and bruised neck healed. We lean into our reflections and trace our new faces, the old ones tucked inside them, Russian dolls. Our jaws are strong, our cheeks less full. Faint lines have formed, shading, around our eyes and our lips, our loose grip on childhood now gone. Were we asleep for nine years? We turn on the radio. No. It confirms that this is the fourth day, the fourth day since you disappeared. June 10, 1981. The fourth day of Sheb Departed. The world remains the same. We are the ones changed.
We examine our shapes. With Immaculata’s height came curves. She stands sideways to the mirror and then spins slowly, a figurine on a cake. ‘Whoa.’ She is impressed. I am too. If I had a glass of something, I would spill it. She has breasts that bounce like she is riding in an apple cart, and a down bustle for a bottom. It is as though the magi were here and they were erotic-minded, visiting her, their eastern star, with curves hidden in their bulky coats, bestowing them to those willing eyes in the hay. I am still flat from the side, a pencil drawing, contourless. The shape of a coffin. Sawed straight. Standard Eugenia. My magi, my heat lamp, a thousand miles gone.
We eat cake left over from the funeral. Nuts and cherries. It tastes smoky. Flo.
‘I bet they went in opposite directions,’ Immaculata says gravely, a beginner detective, mouth white with icing sugar.
‘I bet you’re right.’
‘I bet they don’t intend to reunite.’
‘No.’
‘Their only true commonality was lovemaking.’
‘And, in turn, us.’
‘They packed hastily and badly, which reflects a lack of fore-thought, and which tells us that this was not a scheme long in the hatching, but rather the directionless instincts of lunatics suddenly freed from an asylum.’
‘Not that we were an asylum,’ I remind her.
‘No. Not that we were an asylum. They loved us, Eugenia.’
‘If that’s what that was.’
‘That’s what that was.’
My jaw hurts. Immaculata grips it in one of her hands, which is now more like a paw, a paw that could catch salmon and break necks.
‘Though they have forsaken this love.’ She softens. ‘And we are not going to live in the hopes that this love, like them, will come back. If we do, we too will be barefoot and walking the streets without identification. We must agree to belong only to each other, to never speak their names, and in so doing, to do what they have done to us – to root them out from behind our eyes. Promise, Eugenia. Promise.’
‘No.’
‘Yes.’
‘No.’
‘Yes.’
‘No. I’m too old for that.’
We cover the funeral cake we cannot finish and put it back in the fridge, wash our dishes and leave by the front door, Immaculata tripping over her feet and hitting her head on the frame. I tuck the box of matches you gave to me into my pocket and I sling Marta’s rope around my shoulder.
But first we spend a moment looking at Mink’s wig. It is very fine. We stroke it. Its red is a finality. The velvet curtain. An ending. Precisely what you, even after Mink’s toothbrush, will not give over. But this was Mink’s way. As she was haunted by nothing, she does not haunt. Whereas you lurk here, your presence a gauze that has draped itself over everything. Our life, a cottage closed for the winter. Water turned off. White sheets on the furniture, shut eyes.
I read your note one last time. Is there something I missed? The letters are short and shaken. You pressed down so hard, bits of pencil fleck the page silver. You wrote it on a scrap of newsprint. The birth and death notices. From the back of the sports section. I love beginnings! I lift it to my nose. It erupts. Unwashed man skin, old smoke, cat, wet wool, apple.
gone to save the world
sorry mink,
immaculata,
sorry
yours
sheb wooly ledoux
asshole
You did not write my name because you did not want to distract me with it. You wanted me to study the drawing. The drawing is what counts. The drawing is the clue. The flying monk is not St. Joseph of Cupertino as I had thought, but Finbar. I. I. Finbar Me the Three Handsome Funambulist and Colossal Menagerie. Finbar in his black tights and his leather shoes. Finbar who could not fall.
I hear the slam of our mailbox. Look out the window. The postman. He wears postman shorts. His legs are wishbones. His face is the face of a man who has just learned that there are no fairies.
‘Just a minute,’ I say to Immaculata and I sprint to the door panther-fast. She cannot, with her new limbs, keep up. ‘Wait. Wait,’ she pleads, collapsing in a lanky pile near the stairs.
It is a letter. Addressed to me. My first. Ms. Eugenia Ledoux. The handwriting, not yours.
I hear Immaculata come to her feet in her too-small white slippers and lumber along the hallway, using the walls for balance, the mariner battling smoke and fog. I stuff the letter into my suit pocket just as she arrives beside me. In the doorway, she looks trapped, too exotic for this place.
‘What? What did you find? Did Mink leave a note after all?’
Almost telling her everything – the nights by the lake, my feats, the flying monk, Finbar in photographs flashing his white teeth like sticks of dynamite, the air picking him clean – I say, as tall as her new breasts now, ‘No. Nothing.’ In that small utterance, that single word, I see for the first time how much I need, how much I love, a secret. And with it, I look up and I begin to memorize my sister’s aging face.
‘Let’s go.’ The letter thumps in my pocket, a tantrum. Immaculata stalls. ‘Let’s go.’ I say it again, insistent, our house now taking on the sonority of a cave. I lean into my sister. Her hipbone points sharp like an arrow, north. And then, as you and Mink did before us, we leave. Only we leave together. And we, white dress and black suit, look newlywed.
The house next door is burned down. Its black frame stands naked and quivering, a thing shorn. No walls. No doors. There is a hole in the roof. Inside, embers sputter and hiss. If it rained, it would sound like a den of snakes. A spoon. A child’s purple sweater. A television slurred across a table. The
first-aid kit. This is all that is left. The rest is charred ruins. Coal sandcastles, black hoodoos still smoking. They slope and point, broken teeth, the twins’ faces carved into every surface. It is now, in disaster, that God is an artist. There is a small crowd gathered beyond the yellow tape, taking photographs, the cuffs of their pants blackening with ash. They don’t even speak to each other. Mink would have studied the misfortune too.
The twins decided, against good judgment, to make pastry for us in the middle of the night. Now they have to wear tight white nets to keep their skin on. When they heal, their faces will be pulled and uneven, smeared with egg whites left there by a cook, half-asleep, to glaze and congeal. Mr. and Mrs. Next Door have had it. So the twins have been sent to the suburbs to live with their grandmother who cannot tell them apart so she uses only one name for both of them. Eventually, they do too.
Their grandmother has a one-bedroom apartment, thirty-five storeys up, that looks over a highway and then onto a cemetery. By nighttime, she jokes about the cemetery. On her small balcony she has put a television and hung a flag so weather-ruined, the country is unreadable. There, she watches her shows in a housecoat, purse clutched to her chest. She falls asleep, head hanging down. Hair, cobwebs. When the twins wake her to carry her to her bed, their favourite activity, the housecoat slippery, the ankles and wrists too, she pulls them close – soup, baby powder – and whispers, ‘When can I go?’ ‘Never,’ they whisper. ‘You have to stay here with me,’ convincing her that there is only one of them and that she is seeing double.
While Mrs. Next Door walks the debris of their home with the strain of a woman trying not to break anything, we meet the twins’ father in the driveway. His eyebrows and eyelashes are singed hay-yellow. He is wearing blue pyjamas. They are threadbare and need mending. His body hair pokes through them, thick as quills. Mr. Next Door coughs a bit, and then he asks, ‘What will become of the house?’ It is the first time he has ever spoken to us. His voice is mellifluous, pure. It has never been used. If he wanted to read to me for an entire day, in the dark corner of a strange room with nothing else in it but a hobby horse, I would let him. ‘We don’t know,’ says Immaculata. ‘We haven’t decided.’
Mr. Next Door motions for us to follow. We do. To his hatchback, a peeling dwarf beside him. He opens the trunk. Pop. And pulls out a black suitcase. He flicks it open, covertly, like it is a music box with a wind-up spinning girl. It is full of money. Neat stacks of it. So much, it must be fake.
‘Is it real?’ I ask, recalling his photocopier scent, seeing him alone in a dank basement, making money, the photocopier light rolling over his face all day, flashbulbs. ‘It is,’ he says, not lying. He is a man whose failure came for him too young. It hunted him and it shot him down. He blinks, full of dusted-over fantasies. ‘I keep my valuables in the trunk,’ he adds, flicking the suitcase closed and handing it to us. There is nothing else there. No ruby pinkie rings, no yearbooks. No wife and no twins. Immaculata takes the suitcase. Surprised by the heft of it, she steadies herself. The bricks of money too much to tuck into her bobby sock.
‘You’ll find it spotless.’
‘Thank you.’
‘There’s leftover cake in the fridge.’
‘Great.’
‘It’s got nuts in it.’
‘No problem.’
‘And the bathroom light works, just give it some time.’
‘Every house has its quirks.’
‘That’s our only one.’
I hear a dull chatter. I look back at the house. Termites. They are taking to the wood. They waited for us to leave and, now that we are gone, generations of them are building nests and tunnels. Termites have a king and a queen and they have workers. The workers can feed each other, freeing the parents from this task, allowing the colony to grow, to grow so vastly that it can devour an entire house, slowly winning it over, like children desperate to impress.
Immaculata, not turning around, says, mouth suddenly full of shelves and sharp turns, ‘I won’t miss it.’
‘I will.’
{POSTCARD FROM OUTER SPACE}
astronaut looking for the following signs:
pay phone.
gents.
rest stop.
all-day breakfast.
open.
eugenia stunt ledoux.
one mile ahead.
Clotilda and Yufeng’s house is for rent. The sign is speared into the grass, a javelin. So is skinny Selene Valadan’s. Her laundry line pulled down and, with her children, disappeared. So is Tuberculosis Flo’s. The houses are empty, their occupants long vanished and, in their stead, other people, perfect strangers, mill on the lawns. Clumped together in a garden party, a fake fruit bowl, gleaming baubles, they are prospective renters, notepads in hand, necks craned. Under the sky so blue above them, they appear to have been shined. The neighbourhood raccoons should bite their calves and pull them from their reverie.
Zee Mute’s silver car is gone, and he, somewhere, takes a turn too fast, thinks smithereens, his eyes part-closed, yelling out the refrain that he has finally memorized. He is proud. He wishes to be held tight. He wishes to be heard.
There must have been moving trucks through the night, their red lights blinking, sirens without sound, conversationless men, loads stacked on their backs and shoulders, short of breath, the sweat on their foreheads like bubble wrap, tracking dirt in and out of these houses, these houses that sit like picture frames waiting to be filled again.
Elsie is dead. Her magazine collection pulls against garbage bags hoisted by distant relatives, their weak, cold arms, confused scowls on their faces. She has already been taken away and turned to ashes and placed in a personalized urn. But still there is so much tidying. Like you, she was a collector.
And Marta’s house, like the twins’, has been chewed through by fire. There is nothing left of it. Only a square black imprint, cinders like ink gone wrong on a page, a messy stamp, one you would want to do over. The papers flying up are crows. I know that she was in it because as an unemployed existentialist she had no reason to leave. She gave me the rope and then she returned to her dark, where she lit a match and she spun with it between her bookshelves, and they spun with her, her last and most steadfast companions.
My eyes are a vinegar sting and my jaw aches against crying. Why does tragedy have to be so thorough? This time it does happen: my face is stuck through with sadness, and it freezes, just as Mink, with her exquisite hair, warned me it would.
Up the street, across from the church and before the mission, at the corner of King and Dunn, lives my last slab of familiarity, Leopold of the Onions. Mink called him the Malcontent of Mucusville. His house is not for rent. His house is not burned down. Though he wishes it were. He prays for it, night and day, he prays for calamity. Let the lake collect itself into a great tidal wave. Let there be a chemical spill that comes up through the drainpipes. Let me be mistaken for a whale and harpooned. He does drawings of medieval weapons in his notebook, which he keeps tucked, like a filthy magazine, under his mattress. Crossbows and daggers and spiked balls on the ends of sticks that can be whirled above heads like a ceiling fan; he dreams of them making contact.
There are two signs in his window: BEWARE OF DOGS and HELP WANTED. While his front door opens onto our street, the rest of his house sits facing King Street, a busy thoroughfare of traffic and streetcars. The streetcars clang and whine through the night. So do the prostitutes who congregate there. Their offers and grunts, Leopold’s only lullaby. He pulls open the slats of his crooked Venetian blinds and watches them. Their movements, stiff and rehearsed, remind him of a construction site. The hoisting, the lifting, the digging, the pecking. They jerk like heavy machinery. Getting the job done. He plans to give them hard hats and safety goggles. He plans to help them form a union. They know him by name. They pinch his cheeks.
Leopold used to come by our backyard to kick rocks in his white marching boots with the red tassels and unravel his soot-smothered world
with the ferocity of a forgotten veteran. His life: an ambush. We would listen to him, you and I, struck still. We were his only audience. As he spoke, to show him the effect of his words, you would unbutton your shirt and then you would scratch your skin. His story was written there and it was unbearable. You would scratch your skin until it bled. Until you were a man who had been lashed. And you would shout vows to him, to punish those who hurt him, and to make his life right. Leopold would be jealous. His sadness was so much better worn by you. He felt almost undeserving of it.
Other days, when he showed up, you simply shook your head and closed our door firm and tight, leaving him a specimen petrified against the glass. Once, I heard you talking to one of your special men, and you told him something that Leopold had told you, but you told it as your own. You believed that it was. You mistook everyone’s suffering for your own.
As we walk by Leopold’s house today, without our identification, but with our shoes on, he knocks quickly on the window. Tersely, he lifts one finger and he mouths, Wait. We do. He has had his eyes fixed on the street for days, the four days you have been gone, and he has not blinked once. He opens his door and emerges from a hallway black as tomb.
He is wearing gardening gloves and a wide-brimmed hat to protect his skin from the sun. He carries a bag of onions. That hoary voice, a teenaged seafarer, ‘I have a lot of onions.’ He hands them to me with the delicacy of a dowry. He smells of sperm and sunblock. His hair falls straight and pink-blond as newborn mice, his teeth giant white blocks, scrubbed headstones. His eyes are intent, wet, the colour of mashed peas.
‘You’re so sad. I get sadness,’ he says.
‘Thank you.’
‘I am sorry for your loss. It is most difficult for those left behind.’ He would have researched what to say. Read about bereavement etiquette at the library. ‘My deepest sympathies.’
