What We Hold In Our Hands

by Kim Aubrey

  “Is Jeff still AWOL?”

  “What do you mean AWOL? He’s not in the army.”

  “You know what I mean, Patti.”

  “Well, he’s not here much, and he missed my ultrasound last week. And our first childbirth class.”

  “Give him time. He’ll come round.”

  “The baby’s due in six weeks.”

  “Why don’t you stay with me? It’s so hot in that apartment.”

  “I have to go, Mom.”

  Patti and Jeff rent the second and third floors of a house. Their kitchen window looks out onto the roof of the main floor apartment’s covered deck and the small backyard that no one ever uses. Patti wonders if her baby will play there next spring, crawling through the dandelions. She opens the window for a breeze. A fly buzzes in. The broken screen has yet to be replaced after Jeff’s attempt to squeeze inside when he locked himself out a few weeks ago. He’d climbed onto the roof of the deck and scrambled up the thick, old ivy, instead of ringing the doorbell and waking Patti. She’d heard rustling and scraping, and had crept into the kitchen with her cell phone, prepared either to see a raccoon or to dial 911. When she recognized the sleeve of Jeff’s secondhand leather jacket coming through a rip in the screen, she’d considered making the call anyway. A midnight arrest might have shaken Jeff up, made him ache to be back home in their bed. And watching two cops shove him into a white car might have helped to soothe Patti’s anger.

  The air had been cool that night. Now the longed-for Toronto summer is trying too hard. The cloying July heat wears Patti out, while her restless son sets her belly twitching. She holds a hand there, trying to find a rhythm to the kicks, watches the fly settle on the windowsill and crawl along the rim of the small, two-handled silver cup her mother had found in a cupboard and brought over for the baby. The cup is engraved with an ornate version of Patti’s initials.

  She has been reading about the objects stolen from the National Museum in Iraq. Stolen or destroyed. Tablets engraved in ancient languages were smashed. Some recently discovered and not yet documented. Clues to the beginnings of civilization lost. She feels the same grief and dismay that sank through her chest when she’d heard about the Taliban toppling giant Buddhas. She tries to write about the lost artifacts for her dissertation on Objects and Desire, but so far all she has are questions. Why do we admire some forms of iconoclasm, but find others unthinkable? And how does an object inspire such devotion in some and such fear, hatred, or indifference in others?

  Jeff can’t look at the silver baby cup without saying, “I bet you never drank from that.”

  “It’s symbolic,” Patti says.

  But their unborn child is not symbolic. The latest ultrasound revealed his knobby shoulders and the floating finger of his penis. Jeff hasn’t seen the image. He doesn’t want to believe in the baby except as an example of Patti’s stubbornness. The condom had leaked, and her refusal to take birth-control pills or any other drugs unless absolutely necessary had always annoyed Jeff, who popped ibuprofen and muscle relaxants like candy to release his sore and twisted upper back.

  When Patti learned she was pregnant, her body had felt more solid and real. So had the world. That’s why she hadn’t been able to listen to news about the U.S. preparing for war, about weapons lurking in a desert land, whose leader was being portrayed as both devil and clown. She’d sought refuge in her thesis, analysing the weapons and the inevitable war as object and desire in an attempt to neutralise them, but her ideas had seemed increasingly abstract and had caused the base of her skull to ache. The day Jeff told her that Canada had refused to join the invasion, she’d rested her head on the kitchen table and sobbed with relief. Finally able to turn on the news, she’d listened with gratitude to the sound clip of Chrétien’s familiar raspy voice, admiring the note of anxious determination it struck.

  For now all she can do is gather ammunition, like this piece about the stolen artifacts, data she can arrange and test once she is her old self again.

  Her mother says that Patti will never be the same again, that motherhood changes you, but Patti tells herself that she is not her mother. She feels devoted to the idea of the baby, but the weight she has to carry and the pain under her ribs where he’s been punching her are not endearing. Doesn’t love require an object outside of yourself?

  As Patti naps in the early afternoon, images of the lost artifacts float and twist through her mind—a worn and chipped Buddha, a stone mask of a woman’s determined face, a yellowed carving of a lion attacking a man—while the baby floats and turns inside her uterus, waking her with another blow to the ribs.

  Somewhere in the city, Jeff floats too, trying to find out what he wants or what he’s capable of. He’s teaching an outdoor art class in a park a mile or so north of their apartment. What Patti knows is that the class is one of a series of weeklong summer workshops that begin at nine and end at one. She knows this from the brochure she found on Jeff’s desk. She also knows that Jeff doesn’t come home until well after one o’clock.

  Since he tells her nothing about his day, she imagines him in the freshly mown park with his watercolours, giving his students a demonstration on how to approach the landscape, then sending them off with their paints and folding chairs to various corners of the park and into the adjacent ravine, while he stays behind to fiddle with the painting he’s begun, but will never complete. Later he goes looking for his students. Some will need more help than others. He’ll find himself spending more and more time with two women who sit together in the ravine, their beach chairs facing the woods. Patti calls them Rhonda and Janine. They bring spiked punch in a big thermos and enough sandwiches to share with Jeff and anyone else who has forgotten or neglected to bring lunch. Both mothers with young children in the same summer camp, they always have to leave a few minutes early to make it home in time for the camp bus.

  Patti has stopped asking Jeff where he goes, relying instead on the scenes in her head. Every night when he crawls into their bed, hugging the edge, she listens to his shallow breath deepen and feels a troubled rush of power, certain that if she were to touch him, even gently, he’d fall.

  Awake from her nap, Patti drags herself off the bed, brushes her teeth and her long hair, thinning at the right temple. Only a few years ago, Jeff painted a series of portraits of Patti brushing her hair. He used to draw and paint her all the time—quick sketches, longer studies, and detailed oils for which she spent hours posing. Some of those portraits are sold, but most stand around the apartment, propped against walls, leaning against each other. Later, she’ll take a look at them, but now she is desperate for a turkey sandwich from the diner on Yonge Street. The fierceness of her appetite shocks her. She used to go all day without eating, caught up in her work, feeling only the mildest of pangs.

  The fly has settled on the lone peach in the fruit bowl. Patti brushes it off, washes the fruit, cuts out the bruises, and devours the peach over the sink, juice dripping down her wrist. Unappeased by this offering, her belly pulls her out the door, as she imagines her son will one day, taking her where he wants to go, showing her things she wouldn’t notice on her own. Like the acid green moss that grows in the cracks between the sidewalk and the railway ties outlining the front lawn. Like the silence from the house next door, which usually resounds with piano music. Like the small roll of paper stuck in the piano teacher’s wrought-iron fence. Patti put it there herself not long ago, wrote the words it conceals—“Life is a long caress that finally kills us.”

  It may have been something she’d heard in a dream. She often used to jot down notes for her thesis, but this one did not relate to her work. She’d found the paper in the pocket of her denim jumper one morning when she was walking to the subway. On impulse, she’d rolled it up tight and slid it inside one of the iron curlicues.

  Passing the fence now, Patti touches the note. The contact sends a shiver through the narrow bones of her wrist and hand.<
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  Lily watches Patti from her bedroom window. When she and Max first bought the house, Lily had loved that fancy iron fence, even though it had seemed meant for a much grander place, loved how it made their front yard, one block from busy Yonge, into a secluded garden. She still likes to sit on her front porch, almost hidden from the street by shrubs and vines that hush the noise of the city, but she has talked to Max about taking down the fence. It’s rusty in places, the gate creaks, and it seems a kind of folly now, like music played on a sinking ship.

  Lily has read Patti’s note, rolled it back up like a cigar, and replaced it inside the iron circle. Was it meant for her? For Max? Maybe the curly-haired screenwriter wrote it. He walks past the house several times a day, pushing his daughters in their rumbling double stroller, sometimes getting to the coffee shop by himself in the evening, laptop in hand. Lily imagines him writing a love story for Patti, wedging brief installments between the iron posts.

  Patti is pink-cheeked and graceful, carrying her unborn child as if it were weightless. Watching her, Lily feels the weight of her forty-eight years. Her own children, Beth and Emma, are living at opposite ends of the country, in Vancouver and Halifax, where they attend university and where both have found summer jobs. This morning, she had an e-mail from Emma:

  Hi Mom. It’s busy here at the hotel and they’ve begged me to work right up until September so I won’t have time for a trip home after all. I’ll try to make it for Thanksgiving. Don’t worry about Beth. We talked last night. Emma XO

  Lily wills herself not to think about Emma’s e-mail, or Beth’s silence, or the unanswered phone messages she has left them both. The worries and power struggles of motherhood sometimes feel like all she has left, habits she clings to, even though she knows they can only drive her daughters further away. Already their childhoods haunt the house, creating an audible hush, whole chords and phrases, essential notes vanished from the soundtrack of Lily’s life. She tries not to wish them back. Instead she thinks of a man she met four years ago, remembers each particular of his body, a litany of comparisons she made between him and her husband—how his chest hairs were rusty while Max’s were black, how two blond hairs grew out of a mole on his left shoulder where Max had a smooth hairless mole, how Becket was exactly her height, but Max had to bend his head to kiss her, how his mouth tasted salty, and Max’s sweet. She remembers each meeting, most of them ending in Becket’s tightly made bed, the air fragrant with their mingled sweat and the leafy vanilla scent of his cigars. Remembers waking from a brief post-coital doze, wiggling her toes under the unyielding sheet where they met Becket’s hairy ankle. She leaned into him, kissed the slope of his shoulder, but he didn’t wake.

  She wriggled out of bed, leaving the sheets intact, folded and tucked under the heavy mattress. Becket shared a housekeeper with one of the other condo owners. Mrs. Santos came for two or three hours every morning while he was at work, cleaned the apartment, made the bed, washed and ironed his clothes, and cooked his dinner, which she left in a glass dish in the fridge.

  “What’s she like?” Lily had asked earlier when he’d claimed that he wasn’t a neat freak, that Mrs. Santos was responsible for the spotlessness of his rooms.

  “I never see her.” He’d nuzzled Lily’s neck. “I just leave a check on the counter.”

  “You must have met when you hired her, when you gave her a key.”

  Lily had always longed for a Mrs. Santos, but had never been able to let go of the control she gained from those daily rites. They’d seemed to bind her closer to Max and the girls. Like Mrs. Santos, she prepared dinner early and unseen, before her daughters came home from school, and her students began to arrive for their piano lessons, long before Max returned from the suburban industrial block where he designed houses and shop displays, and oversaw the building of cupboards and counters in the huge dusty workshop behind his office.

  “I left the key with my neighbour,” Becket had said. “But she was here once when I came home to change for golf. She dropped the vacuum nozzle on my toe and muttered something in Portuguese.”

  “So?”

  “So…she’s short and matronly, and an excellent housekeeper, not a gorgeous pony like you.”

  “I’m not jealous, only curious. You shouldn’t take her for granted.”

  “Are you kidding? Every night I kiss the clean counter and the casserole in the fridge.”

  “Good.” Lily had kissed his nose, twining her right leg around his left one.

  It was Friday afternoon, and Mrs. Santos was long gone. Naked and thirsty, Lily tiptoed to the kitchen and gulped ice water from the tap in the fridge door.

  She hadn’t known she was lonely until the September evening when the phone rang while she was folding Emma’s and Beth’s T-shirts and jeans. They’d been more than old enough to do their own laundry, but between homework, hockey, ballet, and basketball, they simply hadn’t had time. Lily usually slammed the phone on solicitations, but when a clear, fine baritone had said, “Lilian Vance, I have the answers to all of your questions,” she’d found herself swallowing the words, surprised at how smoothly they went down.

  “Yes,” she’d said. “I want to come to your seminar on mutual funds.”

  Her grandmother had left her and her sister Judith a little money. Lily had sequestered hers in a savings account at a different bank from the one she and Max used. Waiting to decide what to do with it, she’d fantasized about a baby grand, about trips to Barcelona and Venice, but nothing had felt pressing enough to dislodge the money. It was a life raft stowed, waiting for the right need to arise.

  “You need to put your money to work for you,” Becket told Lily and the dozen other people at the seminar. They were all older than she, most in their sixties. Becket was her age, her colouring, her height, but solid not lanky. When he gripped her hand, their eyes seemed to slide into each other, and she had to look away.

  “Our technology fund is growing like wildfire,” he said. “It showed a thirty-percent increase last year, and this year has almost doubled so far. This is an opportunity you don’t want to miss.”

  “It’s too risky for us,” said an owl-eyed woman whose husband sat nodding his head.

  “If you can’t tolerate much risk, we have a nice dividend fund, mostly blue-chip companies. Your money won’t grow as quickly, but you can’t go wrong with it. The longer you hold it, the better it gets.”

  Lily wanted to hold him tight against her chest, firmly in her hand. I can’t go wrong, she thought, transferring her money to Becket’s investment company, one half into the dividend fund, the other into the swelling technology fund. When he shook her hand, she kept her eyes fixed on his until he asked her to lunch—Chinese food and beer. She joked about the cheapness of the meal.

  “You’re not a big client,” he said. “Just an attractive one.”

  “How attractive?” Lily drank her Tsing Tao straight from the bottle, lips lingering on the glass edge.

  He gripped her hand for the third time then, but didn’t let go.

  She never doubted the rightness of her and Becket back then. It was 1999. The tech fund was soaring, the dividend fund chugging along. Millennial anxiety made it seem okay, necessary even, to grab whatever you could get. Their third lunch spilled over into his condo two blocks from the refurbished diner where they’d eaten. His fingers were tough but smooth on her skin, as if he had no prints to leave.

  When Max pulled her close the next morning, his sandpaper hands startled her. She was confounded by the excitement she felt at the contrast, as if Becket’s smooth fingers were the bass line needed to make Max’s tenor sing.

  A fan hums behind Patti, shifting the heavy air of the diner. Even at two in the afternoon, all the booths are full, leaving a small table at the back where she waits for her lunch. When Jeff glides through the door, she opens her mouth to call to him, but the clatter and buzz of the diner and the dista
nce between the two of them discourage her from really trying to make herself heard. Instead she watches him take a seat at the counter and stare at the familiar menu as if he’s never seen it before. The waitress’s approach seems to startle him, but he still manages to give her the self-conscious half smile that used to make Patti want to kiss the corners of his mouth.

  He looks towards and away from the teenaged girls drinking coffee beside him. Patti can feel him notice their silky hair, the soft skin of their bare shoulders, their exposed lower backs where their T-shirts ride up from low-slung capris. Can feel it like the point of a very sharp knife dragged across her belly, making her breath shallow and the soles of her feet go numb.

  She blushes at the thought that someone she knows might see her sitting here alone at the back of the diner while Jeff sits with the two girls at the counter. How strange that person would find it. The person she thinks of is her thesis advisor, Evelyn, a second-wave feminist for whom Patti strives to maintain a persona of independence, ambition, and control. How would Evelyn interpret her behaviour, her choice not to reveal her presence, to spy on Jeff like a neurotic housewife?

  The waitress brings her an open-faced turkey sandwich glistening with brown gravy. She forgets about Jeff as she eats and is genuinely surprised to see him walking towards her on his way to the washroom.

  “Didn’t you see me come in?” he asks.

  She refuses to lie, having promised herself that she will never be like her mother, inventing stories for her father about what things cost, how she’d spent her day, how the kids were doing at school, always smoothing out the wrinkles.

  “So why sit here by yourself?”

  “I didn’t think you wanted me.”

  “Of course I’d want you,” he says.

  She licks the gravy from her fork.

  He jiggles one heel against the floor. “Just a minute. I have to pee.”