The door to the bathroom opens. A gulp of ‘Dancing Queen’ before it swings shut. Ivory toenails, strappy black patent leather sandals click over to the sink, then into the stall two over from Samantha. ‘Bon voyage!’ she calls softly, when she hears a neighbourly flush. Bon voyage! For this is what it has become – the whole affair – watching Annie move slowly away from her, as if on the deck of a cruise liner from the forties. She’s fluttering a white handkerchief, pretending, trying on a life that, as children, they could never have conceived.
Marriage: it was a place where dolls lived, stiff-limbed and polite, dry humping on piled-up napkins, a mini Kleenex package for their pillow. And Annie now is stepping into it, as if through a gate in a tall brick wall no one can see past or over. How can this be true? Samantha does not want this to be true. Because the only forts in which she still has faith are those built in the deep days and nights they spent as sisters. If asked Do you love your sister? how else could she reply? Yes. Yes. Yes. But love is watery thin – impotent! – compared to what she feels. ‘Bon voyage,’ she says again, to the impassive tile. Bon voyage. To the purse rack, with a queen-like wave. The pomp and circumstance, cummerbunds, tulle and pageantry. The solicitous man, gazing over her shoulder into the gaping crevasse of his future. It is not what Samantha wants. Then what is it that eludes her? She braces herself against the wall to work the panties back up into position. A baby, she has been thinking lately. Or not thinking, but feeling in the ache that ripples through the crooks of her arms, the ghost town of her lap. A baby. She washes her hands, dabs them dry with a paper towel, then shakes them gaily under the blower for good measure.
Back at the table, Max is holding a lime slice in each hand, grinning.
‘Two twists.’ He passes them to her. She squirts the juice into the redness, pokes at the ice cubes with her straw. ‘Thanks.’
‘So, what do you do, Samantha? I mean, when you’re not cutting a rug.’ Max laughs as if he’s not sure how.
She likes that: cutting a rug, the nervousness. ‘I’ve been travelling quite a bit, working wherever I can, trying to get a bit of a handle on the way the world works.’ She recoils. How the world works?
‘Really. Where have you been?’ He focuses on a point just above her collarbone.
It is possible she is losing him here, and although she is still not certain he is worthy, she wants him to pay attention, to validate whatever Samantha-style missives she can toss his way. She craves the spotlight but knows she’d feel overly warm in the cheeks, fraudulent, if she managed to get there. Has she always been this way? Crippled by self-conscious righteousness? Oblivious to others in all but the most superficial way? It is likely, she muses, that she will produce a maladjusted, misanthropic child – no matter how much Mozart or Mandarin the baby is privy to in utero.
Max clears his throat.
He likes her. So it is settled then. ‘Well, I was working on a farm in Mexico for a while and I’ve just been teaching in Vietnam – English, to teenagers mostly. Sort of the equivalent of our high school, but more structured and rigid. Which wasn’t really a bad thing. I mean, I had some wonderful students, hungry for what I could give them, hungry for what we have. Hard to get them to loosen up though; they’ve got the weight of the world on their shoulders. So much expectation ... ’
‘Right. That must have been challenging for you.’ He is feigning or not feigning admiration. Either way.
‘More challenging for them.’ She can feel herself being humble and hates it. ‘What about you? Are you in marketing with Philip?’ Samantha knows next to nothing about marketing and considers this a fault. Enough people seem to do it, all day, for days on end; there must be something molten and mesmeric at its core.
‘Well, yeah, more the communication side of things, really. Some graphics and copywriting. Not very interesting. I’m in a band, though, and I do some, well, performance pieces, I guess.’
‘Oh.’ It doesn’t suit him, this revelation. Samantha struggles to match it up with the mannered walk, the missing cane. ‘What kind ... ?’
‘Well, I try to express how the banal, the menial ... ’ He is dragging his fingers through some spilled red wine on the table, drawing diminutive snouts and asteroids that glow softly up at them. Samantha considers the weave of his linen suit and the slight lean of his nose and finds they please her immensely.
‘You know, how the universal, the transcendental, can be encapsulated in the small, seemingly inconsequential occurrences that surround us.’ Max lifts his eyes to meet hers, his nostrils aquiver with the power of art explained. It is possible she was wrong about marketing, its central mystery. She smiles like a tired sorceress.
‘I mean, I write and sing about whatever happens to me, I guess.’ He smiles back at her.
Okay, this is better. ‘There’s something to be said for paying attention to the everyday, I suppose.’ Samantha nods at him, and keeps nodding, as if weighing things up. But what is now dawning on her, like a lazy sunrise, is the fact that she is no longer living the domestic, or even cannily observing it, but instead attempting, clumsily, to ambush it at every turn. She has become unmoored; she is drifting downstream from her very own life. She is saddened by this, then remembers. A baby – there was an anchor, an absolute, a tangible. Without meaning to, she has begun to tap her foot in time to the music, is swaying ever so slightly, a happy reed on the shore newly discovered by the wind.
Max nods distractedly in the direction of the dance floor. ‘Would you ... ?’
‘Yes,’ she says, ‘why not?’
To talk while dancing seems awkward and prematurely intimate, but the silent alternative more so. The music canters up and around them, creates not so much a mood as an expectation. Samantha struggles to keep the physical distance between their bodies consistent. She knows any type of rapprochement will require careful diagnosis on both their parts.
Max leans towards her, but with a certain sanitized purpose. ‘I’ve done a fair bit of travelling, but really, in the end, it comes down to a kind of day-to-day vigilance, a certain faith in the richness of the domestic sphere. I’m not sure there’s much new I can learn through the exotic,’ he murmurs past her ear.
‘Huh, the domestic. The exotic. What do you mean?’ She can’t help it; her voice has grown edges. She thinks this Max is trying to put something over on her, and succeeding.
‘I mean, well, to put it inelegantly, to use a cliché, I mean Be Here Now, I suppose.’ He sighs showily at his own conversational ineptitude, then applies some pressure to the small of her back, leading her into the centre of the cluster of dancers. Why, thinks Samantha, do people always apologize for using clichés, then seem pleased to have used them in the first place? Annie had once told Samantha, by way of comfort and admonishment, that she expected too much of people. ‘Yes,’ she had shouted in reply, ‘yes, I do!’
The song segues into something more rhythmic and cross. Samantha wants to jump up and down, to pump her fist and yell, but she doesn’t know how with such an audience. She makes her way back over to the tables and chairs, Max following close behind.
Eliza: There Are Limits
‘Can’t say I like this much.’ Bea nods towards the dance floor.
The music is hard and bare. A man speaks in nursery rhyme about getting naked over the steady pulse of bass. ‘That’s rap, Bea. It’s the rage.’
‘Ridiculous.’
And what can I say? I’ve tried to pull myself by the seat of the pants into the times of today, to keep up with what is televised, but there are limits. ‘Yes,’ I reply. ‘Ridiculous.’
Samantha: Mudstick
Somehow – how? – Samantha finds herself dancing again with Philip’s mother, a tiny, wiry woman, with dark wiry hair and a quick, wiry mind. ‘Welcome,’ she says simply to Samantha, who thanks her, twice, wishing this woman were he
r own mother as they waltz carefully through the crowd.
Why is it, really, that Sandra, Samantha and Annie’s own flesh-and-blood mother, has not mustered the courage to attend her own daughter’s wedding? In her place is a package the size of a small fridge, around which all the other gifts have been clustered like acolytes. The gift is not a small fridge, although it could well have been for all the care Sandra has put into it. Not that Samantha thinks much of the whole gift-giving enterprise to begin with. There is a rule – made up by a posse of matrons and manners mavens (and marketers, no doubt!) – that insists the amount you spend on the wedding gift must equal or exceed the amount the hosts spend to feed you while you make merry. When had the world become so assuredly crass? But perhaps it had not changed much since the days of the obliging milk cow offered with the mild-demeanoured daughter with decent child-bearing hips. Sandra had called Samantha to tell her she had checked the registry and found a corresponding kitchen mixer on sale in Detroit for one third of the price, a scratch on the finish remedied by a daub of similarly hued nail polish.
But if Annie is upset at their mother’s absence, she does not show it. She runs like a sleek, white clown – fresh out of finishing school – towards her sister, who is now standing with Max in the far doorway, as if pausing regally before making an entrance. Only it is too late for such things now.
Annie releases Philip’s hand to embrace Samantha. ‘Married. Do you believe it?’ she asks, her breath skimming the underside of her sister’s chin.
‘Well,’ says Samantha. She nods, ducks her head to hide her tears. ‘Our Annie,’ she mumbles into her sister’s perfect hair.
She had a teen magazine she treasured, has it still, squirrelled under grade-school reports and old tax returns at the back of a closet. To test your breath before a date, it instructed, blow softly into a soda bottle, then sniff. At the age of eleven, she taught Annie and together they misted up the green glass. ‘Mine smells ... ’ Annie always said, so certain and free, even back then. ‘My breath smells like yours.’
Max and Samantha return to what has become – within so short a time, in so few exchanges, but life is lived like this, isn’t it? – their table, to find the ice in their drinks has melted into tiny translucent disks. The serving staff is still loitering around the periphery, wiping down surfaces, scowling with a handsome lack of conviction. Samantha drains her glass in two long pulls. Max places his hand on her knee like a comrade. She watches her sister and Philip on the dance floor, studies their embrace as if from far away, and farther still.
She can feel the weight of Max’s hand on her knee, can sense what was once friendly becoming something more, something her body insists she must requite. She shifts her legs to the side, makes to cross them, and Max lifts his hand up and away. Up, up and away, she thinks as a bridal bouquet sails unbidden into her mind’s eye. At the next table a baby cries out in hunger or in pain or in anger or in loneliness. The baby’s parents stick their heads into the baby’s bassinet; they are quicksilver sleuths and the most essential of superintendents. They do not emerge from the baby’s lair for a long time. Samantha understands that it is impossible to just sit back and observe a baby. You cannot pass a baby by. A baby has needs, it draws you into its orbit surely and quickly. She looks at Max. He toasts her extravagantly. A person could do worse than a marketer-slash-performance-artist for a father. Samantha lifts her own glass, sips, then excuses herself again. ‘Bladder,’ she says, ‘like walnut.’ She holds up her hand in an A-OK sign by means of demonstration.
Max looks elated, then puzzled. ‘Okay,’ he says.
Samantha walks past her Gran and Bea, huddled together like frail football players with a plan; she steps over her six-year-old cousin Graham tying napkins together in the shape of a lasso; she notices Sebastian Newton in a pile against a wall, his hand gripping the top of a barely upright beer bottle as if it were a ski pole. Was it she or Annie who had kissed him, French-style, after a party at Suzy Ludcombe’s? Neither of them can remember, and it strikes her (although not forcefully) that this is perhaps odd. The bathroom looks different this time around. Someone has stacked the stones next to the sink in the shape of a lopsided inukshuk. So we don’t get lost! Samantha thinks, thrilled and troubled. She turns towards the mirror, although there is no need, really. She is beautiful from the booze, smart too, thoughts linking up with loud connective clicks. She bends over to check stall vacancy. Ah, shoes she knows. They are her sister’s round-toed ivory pumps, size six wide. She reaches under and grabs an ankle. ‘Annie?’
‘Let go, you stuck-in-mud monster.’
Samantha lets go.
Annie steps out of the stall and bumps her hip against Samantha’s. ‘Hey,’ she says. ‘Kidding.’ She rinses her hands, glances over at the towel dispenser, then wipes them on her dress.
‘That’s your dress, Annie.’
‘Yes it is. Yes. It. Is.’ She grabs Samantha’s hand. ‘C’mon, Mudstick. Let’s play Concentration.’ She lifts her palms. Samantha does the same and Annie begins. It is a game less dependent on strategy than memory and association; it is an accounting of sorts. ‘Let’s play Concentration.’ She taps Samantha’s hands. ‘No repeats, no hesitation.’ She taps them again and Samantha taps back. ‘You go first, I’ll go second.’ Another tap. ‘Topic is ... Names!’
‘Names of what?’ Samantha drops her hands and takes a step back.
‘Well,’ says Annie. ‘People we know!’ She lifts her hands to tap Samantha’s hands again. ‘Sebastian!’
Samantha smiles and taps her sister back. ‘Dad.’
‘Not a name,’ says Annie.
‘Yes it is.’
‘Okay, I’ll allow.’ Tap. ‘Remington Steele.’
‘You don’t know him, Annie.’
‘No,’ says Annie sadly. ‘Your turn.’
‘Maggie.’
‘Who’s that?’
‘Mum’s second cousin – she visited from England when we lived in the high-rise on Southam Road. Red hair and those tight dresses with sashes?’
‘Oh yeah. Okay. Hands up.’ Tap. ‘Dominican Republic.’
‘That’s a country, not a person.’
‘Yes, but it should be a person. I think we’d be pals.’ Tap. ‘Bobby.’
‘Don’t say his name, Annie.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s not your turn.’
‘Then you go.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Why not, Mudstick?’
‘Because I would have killed him.’ Samantha leans up against the counter and reaches down to unstrap her shoe, which is rubbing annoyingly against her heel, but finds she cannot undo the buckle. Her hands are trembling. ‘I could kill him.’
Annie squeezes Samantha’s chin and gives a gentle wrench. ‘I know that, Mudstick. That’s why I never had to.’ She smiles. ‘Hands up,’ she says. Tap. ‘Philip.’
‘Yes,’ says Samantha. ‘He’s a good one.’
Eliza: In the Dark
When Annie was twelve I gave her my autograph book. It was only partway full, the inscription on the first page still fierce, intact, a message from my own mother. On the first line, in careful cursive: Above all to thine. And on the second: Own self be true! I remember what I felt when she gave it to me, a thrill like eating ice cream too fast and a guilt that settled cloudily in my chest. I thought I knew what the message meant: that I must be true and never lie. And I knew the reason she had written this – it had something to do with a missing saucer and one of my unlikely falsehoods involving the cat. Still, I treasured that book, and even felt a twinge of regret when I handed it over to Annie. ‘Own self,’ she said, patting her chest. Then, ‘Be true!’ as if signing to a caveman.
Samantha is still talking to the tall man, her eyebrows meeting in the middle of her forehead like so
mething from a political cartoon. Smile, I will her. Look into his eyes. There is softness in her, I’ve seen it. Post-Bobby, for an entire year, Annie refused to dress in anything but purple. When her mother lost patience, what little she had, it was Samantha who emerged in a lavender pantsuit and mauve eyeshadow to intercede. Softness and loyalty the girl has – it’s a certain spontaneity that’s missing. Always skidding around inside her own damn head. Still, I will give her this: there is no one Samantha despises more pointedly than her cousin Bobby Mason. But our Annie forgave. Annie invited him to the wedding. It was me and Samantha who burned the sealed envelope – queenly stamp and all – over the gas flame of my stove, relished the flames licking and flickering, then feigned puzzlement when the bastard never replied.
I have arrived at many conclusions in my life whilst wrapped in the charm and force of the moment, only to cast my certainty away when the next challenge foils me. Still, here is what I know: there is a brand of betrayal that cannot ever be forgiven, but it is unique to each and every person. There is a night I will always remember. Frank had left us for a while – found something sweet and comfortable with a secretary or some such. Annie and Samantha’s mother – my daughter, Sandra – was young when he left, three years old. She got up the night he came home and stood at the top of the stairs in her nightie, staring at him through veils of sleep. He held out his arms, then reached into his pocket for the trinket he had bought in the hopes of being welcomed, reborn. She blinked and remained suspended in her place. Then she raced into her daddy’s arms and I understood in a flash how – with a child’s certainty, the most certain of certainties – I had been blamed, and how much, how absolutely I had lost.
I look around me at the leftovers of celebration. Napkins wadded like sad ghosts on the tables. Sleek, silver cameras abandoned next to bread baskets, delicate fringed swaths of cloth used to keep out the cold tossed casually over the backs of chairs. Glasses – half-full and half-empty – everywhere. The couple of the hour on the dance floor, swinging each other round, holding tight to hands as their friends watch and cheer. The city night through the window, the tower – that desperate beacon – standing straight up to the stars none of us can see, here in the company of streetlights and skyscrapers.
Mad Hope Page 20
