by Kim Aubrey
At school one morning, Jane Pemberly pulled my chair from under me, as I was about to sit down. Pain wormed up my back. Laughter ratcheted through the class.
“You broke my tailbone,” I accused her.
“Sissy,” she muttered.
The nurse said I was fine. I told my mother I fell off a swing during recess. She gave me an aspirin as she ran the bath.
“Turn off the taps when the tub’s full.” She grabbed her purse on her way out to meet my father for dinner in town.
I lay floating in the warm water, listening to it lap over the sides of the tub. I knew I’d filled it too full, only turning off the taps when the water was a couple of inches from the edge. I imagined myself slipping on the wet floor and really breaking my tailbone, like my father had done when he and my mother were first married and deliriously happy, before I was born. What if I fell asleep in the bath and drowned?
My mother lays me flat on the blanket, pushes my stomach to make the water spurt from my lungs, then presses her lips to mine. I feel life come sucking back on the wave of her breath. I will not be a mermaid or a dead captain. I’ll be a living girl, exposed to the whole, damned, painful arc of life yet to come.
By the time my parents arrived home, I’d dried the floor with fresh towels and fallen asleep, my hair damp on the pillow.
In the morning, Jane called.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Yes. No thanks to you.”
“Just checking,” she said before hanging up.
In the years that followed, a strange new camaraderie would sometimes rise amongst the girls in my class, and I’d be pulled along inside of it, as we walked to the bus stop during a storm, jostling and joking with each other, or jumped into someone’s pool at a party after sharing an illicit bottle of strawberry wine. As we grew older, cruelty went underground, and tolerance surfaced. Maybe it helped that the government cracked down on segregation, forcing our school to admit African-Bermudian girls. Three joined our class. No one teased them or refused to invite them to parties, but Dina, Janette, and Joan formed their own group and, except for the occasional inclusion of Jane Pemberly, kept mostly to themselves. I did too, my weekends often spent in the Botanical Gardens, where I read novels, examined the insides of flowers, or watched the anoles blend into a branch or a stone, and where I was always careful to avoid the peacocks.
The day after my fifteenth birthday, Jane Pemberly brought a cupcake to school for me—yellow cake with white icing and a pink candy rose.
“What’s wrong with it?” I asked.
“Nothing.” Jane twisted her freckled face into what appeared to be a smile. “We had cupcakes for my brother’s birthday, and I thought you should have one, since you just had a birthday too.”
I didn’t know whether to trust Jane, but the cupcake looked too good to pass up—sweet vanilla icing, fresh crumbly cake. I ate the whole thing, offering her the rose to be polite. She popped it into her pink mouth. After that, we became friends.
Jane said, “We’ve always been friends. We used to play on the swings in kindergarten.”
“You threw the swings at me, or pulled on my ankles when I was swinging. I don’t call that friendly.”
“Well, you always made me laugh. You were so funny. That time on the rope in gym class. I nearly died.”
So Jane and I were friends, whether we always had been or not. We paraded through town Saturday afternoons, our long hair—hers red, mine black—gleaming from a hundred brush strokes, our skin deeply tanned from sitting slathered in baby oil, our big, early-developed breasts squeezed into tank tops or sweaters. Jane liked a young sous-chef my father had hired for his failing restaurant, so we often stopped by to say hello. My father grunted at us, but the sous-chef always smiled, taking a break from his chopping and stirring to chat. We hungrily kissed boys in the dark of the Rosebank and Island cinemas, while they groped for our breasts with hot, damp hands. Or we took the bus to the beach, where we bodysurfed in the warm, salty water, waiting for big waves.
At first, Jane had to coax me. She found a Styrofoam board for me to float on, assured me that the ocean was calm, showed me how fun it could be to splash in the surf and to let the water carry you. When I finally ventured in, the sun warmed my back. Waves rose and fell beneath the board, lulling the fear from my limbs. My arms, crossed on top of the Styrofoam, felt sturdy and strong, nothing like the short, skinny arms that had flailed in this ocean fourteen years ago.
The rain comes harder. Great drops pelt our heads, soak the uneaten sandwiches. Waves crash up the beach, splash my parents’ feet. Wearing only a wet slip, my mother bundles me in the woollen blanket, shouts at my father to grab the picnic basket, then runs for the car, clutching me in her arms, as the surf swallows her gingham dress, and Arlene’s eye looms closer.
In the summer, Jane and I found jobs together at a jewellery store, where we sold Bermuda charms and bought each other gold hoop earrings with the commissions we earned. After work, sporting our new earrings, we walked to the bus stop.
“You look like a gypsy,” she said, pushing her hair behind her ears.
“You look like a hooker.” I laughed as she tried to shove me into the road. “You’re not strong enough to budge me.”
“Oh yeah?” She grabbed my hand and yanked me off the sidewalk. Together we knocked over a parked moped.
“I’m pretty strong,” she said.
Jane wasn’t as big as I was, but she was chunky with muscle from playing softball and tennis, and she liked to eat. In the fall, we got lunch passes to walk into town where we’d buy burgers, fries, and half a dozen cream puffs from the bakery. Jane still kept a bag of jujubes in her desk, tossing them to me across the room when the teacher’s back was turned.
The two of us graduated from high school in long black dresses. The other white girls wore colours named for flavours of sherbet—pineapple, raspberry, lime. Mary Bright, in long yellow silk—like a lemon popsicle—said we looked slutty, so we adjusted our bras to show more cleavage, and talked up the tattoos we planned to get on our trip to New York at the end of summer. We’d be attending different universities, each about an hour’s drive from Manhattan.
After the ceremony, which took place in the evening at one of the hotels, Jane grabbed Dina and Joan, and the four of us shared a joint beside the pool. Joan wore a bronze-coloured sheath, which glistened in the moonlight. Dina’s dress was a deep purple that seemed to absorb the night.
“I like your dress,” I told Dina.
“I like your rose.”
“Thanks.” I touched the coral rose I’d forgotten was pinned to the narrow strap of my dress.
“How is it that four gorgeous queens like us don’t have dates?” Jane asked.
“Dina and I have dates,” Joan said. “We just didn’t see dragging them to this thing.” She flicked a hand towards the lit and unlit windows of the hotel, as if flinging away something she’d put up with, but no longer needed.
My head felt light and drifty. I started to laugh, and wouldn’t stop until Jane splashed me with pool water.
My parents hadn’t made it to the graduation. My father hardly went anywhere since he’d had to close the restaurant. My mother said he was collecting himself.
“The graduation dinner would be too much. He’d sit there convinced that everyone was whispering about him.”
“Why can’t you come?” I hadn’t told her I was getting a science award.
She blinked her blue eyes twice. “I can’t leave him alone right now.”
The evening of the ceremony, as I’d waited outside the house for Jane, my father had lumbered up the garden steps, carrying a handful of roses.
Squinting in the sunlight, he’d said, “You look nice.”
I’d almost fallen off my platform shoes.
“You have your mother’s smile. I never noticed be
fore.”
“You never look at me.”
Now that he was finally giving me an ounce of admiring attention, I allowed the anger lurking in my cells to spread through me, making me feel powerful, clearing my head. I’d been trying so hard to win my mother’s love with a show of independence and resiliency that I’d managed to ignore how sometimes my father had seemed as hostile as the girls at school, and how other times his indifference had made me feel as lost and worthless as a mermaid on dry land.
Arlene is by no means the worst hurricane to hit the island, but, in spite of the weatherman’s assurances, she does hit us squarely with eighty-five-mile-an-hour winds. At home, my father struggles to put up the storm shutters in the pelting rain, but gives in after covering only the front of the house. Unfortunately, the wind is blowing against the back. In the night, a branch smashes my bedroom window. I wake in my crib, and watch broken glass twinkle in the glow of the nightlight, while the wind shoots my pink gingham curtains straight across the room.
Jane and I left the graduation dance early and rode our mopeds to the beach, where we sat on the sand in our long dresses. The air felt soft and salty, the darkness thick and comforting as a blanket. Invisible out there on the moonless Atlantic, cruise ships, freighters, and sailboats were daring the crossing. I told Jane how the sea had almost reclaimed me. My voice sounded faint and lost against the surf’s rhythmic rush, but Jane’s laughter rang out, filling my ears.
“Hurricane Susan, are you afraid a wave might steal you back to your sea mother?” She tugged my hair, making the tops of my shoulders tingle.
“Stop that.” I shook my head, but the feeling wouldn’t shift.
“I’m afraid,” she whispered. Her hand crept into mine and settled there. This time I didn’t slap it away. Instead I let the warmth rise up my arm and into my lungs, like the crest of a wave.
Earlier, in the garden, my father had handed me one coral-coloured rose. “The rest are for your mother.”
I’d been prepared to stomp on the rose with my chunky heel when he sighed,
“This time, I’ve gone under,” and I saw that the fear and disappointment in his eyes had nothing to do with me.
As my mother dashes to save me, my father notices the nasty chop out past the reefs and the unnatural darkness of the noon sky. He shouts after her, “Be careful! Don’t go in too deep!” Perhaps he even runs down the beach and grabs at her arms to stop her, yelling at her to get out, afraid he’ll lose her—his anchor, his lifeline. The rain begins to fall then and causes him to look up, loosening his hold, as he opens his mouth for the first gentle drops, briefly comforted for any loss he might suffer by the sweet water that begins to fill his mouth.
Unfinished
DAY ONE. “HALF ROOM”
Four glass keys hang in a Plexiglas box in the YES Yoko Ono exhibit, the light striking each curved handle on a slightly different plane. They remind Ann of icicles or transparent candies. She wants to break into the box and hold one in her hand. She imagines a great glass door coaxed open with one of these keys, making available what she has always longed for, but denied herself.
A green apple sits on a white column. Someone has taken a bite, exposing the white flesh, which has turned a little brown, like lightly toasted bread. Ann wants to eat from the apple but worries what the people standing behind her might think.
Pieces of broken bottle glass lie in a case, each labelled with a different date. They represent mornings for sale, lenses for looking at and transforming the sky. The dates are mostly past now, but at the time of their original exhibit some thirty years ago, they were future dates for the purchase of future mornings, like promises or party invitations, crisp and bright with hope. She’d thought those old mornings were gone, but here they are, captured in this showcase. She cannot reconstruct the mornings, which continue to blend into one another—all those glasses of orange juice and bowls of oatmeal, the distracted kiss at the door as her husband escaped early to work, the kids’ last-minute scurry for books and shoes, the purgatorial round of carpools. She has no desire to examine them through these bits of broken glass, keen reminders that both of her children have left home, that Duncan, her youngest, has almost finished his first year of university in a small city one-hundred-and-sixty miles away, where he’s looking for an apartment.
An accordion book stretches across one wall. Its pages dance with dashes of black ink. In the wide broken strokes, she sees people and animals, faces, movement, lines shaky with laughter. From one black splotch, a woman’s face emerges—eyes closed, mouth held open in a yawn or a scream.
In the next room, she finds herself drawn to an exhibit in which everything is cut in half and painted white. She tries to conjure the absent halves. Half a chair. Half a painting. Half a teapot. She summons the phantom half of the empty sawn-off suitcase, the piece that would make it whole and useful, so that someone could pack it full of clothes for a trip. She tries to imagine where that someone would go.
The phone rings behind her. She turns and reads the sign posted beside it, then grabs for the receiver because people are approaching, and because the sign says, “If the phone rings, pick it up and talk to Yoko.”
“Hello,” she says in the crisp, daunting voice she uses to answer the phone in her husband’s dental office two days a week.
“Hello?” says a woman who sounds exactly as she imagines Yoko would sound—a small but powerful voice, ageless, with a still distinct Japanese cadence. “Are you enjoying the show?”
“I love the show,” Ann gushes.
“I love you!” Yoko says.
“Oh,” she gasps, and then, “I want a glass key.”
“Take one.”
“I couldn’t.”
“That’s too bad.” Yoko sounds disappointed, but adds brightly, “Enjoy the rest of the show.”
“Wait,” she says, but Yoko has already hung up. She’d wanted to ask her what it all meant.
Ann stares at some framed scraps of paper, reads the explanation on its small plaque, but the only part that registers is a quote from Yoko, saying, “Nine is a spiritual number, meaning ‘unfinished.’” Then she knows what she has to do—return to the exhibit eight more times. It will be a kind of mission, to unearth what lies hidden here, to await Yoko’s next phone call.
DAY TWO. “CUT PIECE”
In the video, Yoko sits on stage while people walk up from the audience to cut pieces from her black dress. Her shoulders rise and fall dramatically as the participants approach her with sharp scissors, and bear off bits of fabric, stuffing them into pockets or abandoning them on the stage. The dress is disappearing. Some cutters are tentative, taking small swatches, mementos. Others wish to expose her bare skin. One man leaves her clutching her arms to her chest, bra straps snipped, slip pared away, breathing hard. Ann finds her own breath quickening. Her arms cross her chest, one hand gripping each shoulder.
She wonders at Yoko’s devotion to her art, her willingness to sacrifice comfort and peace of mind to men and women with scissors. Ann has sacrificed her time, her comfort, and her happiness, but never for art. She has tolerated the relentless drilling in her husband’s white office as she sat by the phone writing up appointments and bills. She has endured countless committee meetings, bent forward taking minutes, her sharp pen scratching the paper as it ran out of ink. She has nervously pushed shears across the tender napes of her children’s necks, trimming their soft brown hair.
DAY THREE. “PAINTING UNTIL IT BECOMES MARBLE”
This is part of a series of instructional “paintings” or instructions for paintings. They are written in Japanese characters, framed in two rows covering one wall of the first room. Next to each painting sits a stack of cards with translations in French and English. The cards are meant to be collected, read, and the instructions followed so that everyone can make art. This one instructs Ann to frame a painting, then let visitors
cut out their favourite parts, or blacken them with ink. Does Yoko mean that the painting will become like marble, shot with veins of mineral, swirls of light and dark, absence and presence, like the room where everything is cut in half? Does she mean that it becomes more solid as it disappears? That nothing ever really vanishes? Those stolen or erased pieces still offer their ghostly support, their clues to meaning.
Hearing the phone ring in the next room, she runs for it. Too late. A young woman in a neat black suit has picked up the receiver. Ann stands a few feet away, pretends to look at the sawn-in-half chair, trying to listen to the woman’s side of the conversation. A group of teenagers troops by, laughing and pushing each other, scattering into smaller groups and pairs. One slouching boy with his hands deep in his pockets reminds her of Duncan last year, walking out the door with his friends at night, ducking his head as she told him to drive carefully. Now she wishes he dared to be less careful. He’s a gifted tenor who loves music, but he’s followed his father’s advice and is majoring in science in preparation for dental school.
By the time the teenagers have dispersed, the woman in the suit is gone. Ann imagines her tidy outline fading into the exhibit.
DAY FOUR. “WALL OF DOODLES”
She counts seventy-two framed pen-and-ink drawings, each consisting of tiny black dots, which make up an abstract image. The sign says that Yoko drew them as part of her daily routine, often while talking on the telephone. Was she drawing one when she called the gallery a few days ago? Ann wonders if she could amass a similar collection of images if she saved her phone doodles. Is that all it takes to make art? Valuing one’s daily productions?
She used to know how to do it, when she was in school and university, even when she was first married. She’d just finished a BA in art history and was working as admin assistant for a small architectural firm. Her husband was in dental school. They’d furnished their apartment with whatever they could lay their hands on in flea markets and garage sales, but as much as possible they’d followed a black-and-white colour scheme. Now she has decorated her home in soft blues and creams with a little red, in a style the decorators call French Country. She likes its harmony, but misses the promise of that black-and-white apartment. How simple and clear the future seemed then—work and love and art. Her photographs, the collages she built from corrugated cardboard, yogurt cups, Popsicle sticks and matchboxes, all painted white. She hasn’t finished an art project in years, except for the decoration of her house, if you can call that art.
