Best Canadian Stories 2020

by Paige Cooper

  Sam asks if my sister might come down for Christmas, à propos of nothing, or maybe it’s that I told him she feels like she hates her husband now that he’s become interested in municipal politics and talks about it all the time. I couldn’t resist betraying her sadness and anger, the way a child will never fail to point at another child their own age, eternally surprised to find others moving through the world experiencing it the same way as them. Anyway, I’ve told him a million times, no. No one wants to come to Minneapolis—not from Montreal. And we were just there two months ago for Maman’s funeral, so holiday travel won’t be in the budget. I shrug. We’ll just have a token tourtière again this year and he’ll ask me again to tell Claire how my family stays up all night on Christmas Eve. That we wait til after midnight mass to eat, and that we eat until dawn. When we were dating he asked me what we ate for Christmas, and I told him we ate venison pies, head cheese, blood pudding—and we did, but mostly the old folks ate that. The rest of the food was what midwesterner’s would have: casseroles, sweet gherkins, pickled onions, and ham. Did I feel more lonesome for my family because I’d married an anglo, or because I’d described them to him as exotically as possible? Compared to his family, mine are more colourful, but now I fear I’ve made them seem cartoonish, and worse, more unreal to me in the bargain. Last Christmas when I couldn’t sleep I took some cognac to my smoking spot, the second step of the back porch. I let the snow purple my fingers, and sang the folk song about the girl who wanted to get married, but all the men were at war. C’est la belle Françoise, qui veut se marrier, maluron, lurette. . . . And I cried because my voice was not Maman’s—had none of her warmth, and you have to let yourself be maudlin. You have to give into it sometimes.

  At half past six, Sam stands and says, the way he says every night he has a rehearsal, or a concert: “Ladies, I take my leave.” He bows. Claire bows. They bow at each other as if she’s Chaplin and he’s her straight man, again and again. I love their complicity. I wish I wasn’t her mother, so I could be in on it too. Stupid, childish thoughts.

  Everything is quiet after he’s left. Claire puts her dishes in the sink and asks, “S’il-te-plait Maman, je veux dessiner dehors?”

  “Je voudrais,” I say.

  “Je voudrais dessiner dehors,” she says blankly, but using the conditional as I asked. I watch her, crouched on the sidewalk like a small, malleable frog, while I do the dishes. She is totally absorbed, her arm mirrors the tree limb she’s drawing like one of those movement lines in cartoons. I put the radio on again and the music isn’t quite satisfying. From my collection of audiobooks, mementoes from when I was learning English, I choose The Old Man and the Sea and find that dark night of waiting again. Outside the only point of interest in view is Claire’s rigid body. The houses are there, but all I see is myself in this street; myself and my daughter. As the sun goes down the sky gets darker and the trees get brighter, but I don’t really see it. I feel a direness. It’s plain this fish is killing the old man. He’s long since sliced his hand. Now his good arm has gone numb. He has no sway. He only has a line. Claire’s crouching on the perimeter of her drawing now, not wanting to scuff it. The Macnamaras pull into their driveway but stay in the car. I don’t imagine why. I stay with myself. I swear I see a flying fish on the Macnamara’s lawn, its wings, protruding from its dorsal fin, a bioluminescence of impossible green. I wring out my scouring sponge with my fist. Imagine all the bacteria caught in the drops that strike the stainless steel of the sink. If we could see germs, the very spirit of dirt made flesh, they might be that green.

  *

  At bedtime, Claire has her head in the crook of my elbow while I read to her. When I feel her attention ebbing, I let the book close.

  “Do you love me more than Daddy?” she asks.

  “On t’aime également, sans cesse, sans mesure,” seeing her brow furrow I hold my hands out like Lady Justice and her scales.

  “No.”

  “Mais si!”

  “But you love me more?”

  “Quand t’es follement amoureuse—”

  “What?”

  “When you fall in love, you want to make a baby. When you have a baby, you’ll see, it’s different.”

  “Why?”

  “It feels different.”

  The heat of Claire in my arms fills me with anticipation. I imagine the rush of her thoughts and wait for her to ask why. When she doesn’t, I get my arm out from under her by making a pained expression and jiggling it elaborately. She laughs. I pull the blankets up around her shoulders, and she says, “More.” I pull them up around her chin, and she says, “More.” I pull them up and let them fall, covering her face, and she casts it off to show me her laughing face. Her eyes are grey like mine, naturally. I bring my face to hers, and say, “Bisous,” like I say every night. And she puts her tiny mouth on my mouth and thrusts her tongue past my teeth.

  I stand. Her head is alert, but her limbs are still cast lazily away from her. I feel my molars inching towards my front teeth. Taste the soap Maman slid over my tongue when I was bad. Imagine forcing that horrible bitterness on Claire, the desperate pleading of her eyes as my hand clamps the soap inside.

  “I want to know what it feels like,” she says. She is like a woman, saying I want like that. My rage is a knot in my chest, and I close the door. I’ve never shut her up in her room before. There’s no lock on it. The mute knob offers no closure. I open the door and slam it. I imagine carrying the Shaker chair from my desk up the stairs, and wedging it between the door and the doorknob. Instead, I sit in the hall. Exhale slowly to stop my heart from racing. Is this my fault? Did I make her this way? I did, when she was a baby.

  I remember that I’d been dreaming, and the man with the classic torso was kissing me, more and more—and I woke up with my tongue in my daughter’s ear. There was the rawness of morning in the room and the unfirm look of her skull. I shut my eyes against the fat of her cheek, the delicate cartilage of her ear. I couldn’t look. Claire, Claire, Claire, I said, to break my own heart. I molested my baby at eight weeks, I said to myself, to an interlocutor, the one you explain yourself to, to yourself.

  I couldn’t look at her. I knew that when I opened my eyes, I would see only how much more I was—more than she was. She was just a baby, and I could hurt her. What if I opened my eyes, and I saw the tight bliss of sleep in her baby eyelids and her baby fists, and I stuck out my tongue and licked her face like a dog—like a man acting like a dog. Because I could.

  She cried all the time. And my hands were fearful of her, that I would drop her, that her face would be between my breasts, one hand supporting her head, the other under her butt, that my tired hand, my right, would get sweatier and sweatier and slip from the plastic diaper, that my left hand would cup the absence of her skull as she fell.

  I told Sam about my thoughts. Sam said, “A thought is just a thought. We all have stupid ugly thoughts.” He held me. He always holds me when I’m overwhelmed. Sam has this way of saying trivializing things so feelingly they seem smart. I always feel better after I tell him my secrets.

  Still, he was wrong, is what I’m thinking. I work my big toe into a knot in the pine floor. A thought is not just a thought. It must be followed.

  “Your daughter is a nymphomaniac,” I say to myself, and I hate myself for saying it. Claire is thoughtful, and smart, and has manners. “She’s not a nymphomaniac. She’s an eight-year-old child exploring sex. Frankly, it’s normal. You can’t. You shan’t. . . .” When I hate myself, I’m haughty with myself. This isn’t something to give into. Talking to oneself. Letting my senses disintegrate until I’m sitting in the hallway like a lame animal, and wanting Sam—wanting someone to act with purpose, so that I can act purposefully, also.

  Get up, I think. As soon as I’m standing I reason with myself: “You didn’t molest your daughter.” Then I laugh, audibly, an insane snort that I experience spinally, like fear. I
take the stairs two at a time. Feel dizzy in the foyer. The front door looms with the porch light shining behind it. I hate that yawning glow it has. I walk around the living room, dining room, and kitchen, gathering things in my arms that look out of place. Stop when I’m holding a bowl of stale popcorn, a bottle of coral nail polish in a shade called Malicious, and Claire’s terrycloth robe, which she took off when I said bedtime and streaked up the stairs naked as if it were a prank. She knows her nakedness provokes me and she likes to provoke me. The nail polish goes in the fridge, so it’ll last. Throw the popcorn in the trash on top of the supper, but my hands slip. Reach into the trash. Grab the bowl. Feel something that is slimy enough to be trout with one finger, but the other fingers feel the innocuousness of popcorn, and then the edge of the popcorn bowl. It goes in the sink. Reach up to dry my hands on the dish towel that’s always draped over my shoulder in the kitchen but, no, it’s Claire’s robe, her little robe patterned in pink peonies Maman made from the same pattern she used for mine and my sister’s when we were little, smeared with popcorn butter and fish grease now. I scour the stain. I am always thoughtlessly ruining the things I love. I watch the spot go bleary, on the cusp of focus where despair is normally manifest in tears. I breathe instead. Too disgusted to indulge myself. When I felt like this I could always call Maman, she’d say it was all my fault and that if we’d only had Claire baptized the Lord would intercede. In a way, Maman would’ve been right. I never would have asked her who she loved best. Her affection followed an ordained hierarchy: God, husband, children, and domestic animals. She suffered from it more than we did: the dogs loved us, we loved Papa, and he loved his work. No one loved her best. But her fractious, fearful voice always made the world seem real to me again. Her worry was as unconditional as her love was supposed to be—and wasn’t it akin to love, her worry? It certainly demanded the same kind of attention. Maybe worry is what unrequited love turns into, maybe after a time, it was all she could muster. For the second time, I laugh audibly, almost theatrically, at my thoughts, and because there’s no one to see me, I don’t stop.

  *

  When Sam comes home, I feel his steps on the porch and his key in the door so keenly. Like a dog does. I grab the newspaper and open it to a random page because I can’t stand to be seen lying in wait.

  Sam is smiling at me, and patiently untying his shoes. Picking them up. Putting them away. I always kick mine off so aggressively. He joins me at the dining room table.

  “Claire tried to make out with me.”

  “What?”

  “She said she wanted to know what it feels like.”

  “That’s crazy. I mean, it’s an understandable impulse, but it’s crazy.”

  “I hate that. An understandable impulse. What’s understandable about the way she thrusts herself at us? It’s disgusting.”

  “It’s not disgusting.”

  “I’m disgusted by it.”

  “Those are only feelings.”

  “What is a person besides, like, feelings.”

  “Carbon?” He asks, and I scowl. “Ok. Should we take her to therapy? Is that what you want?”

  “Therapy is for rich people. So they can keep thinking the world revolves around them.”

  “Should we take her to church then, so she can be like the rest of the lemmings.”

  “I hate that you think that’s what I want.”

  “Ok. You hate that too.”

  His mouth is open and that is rare. He looks at me as desperately as when he asked me to be his wife; his questioning simplified by passion, but sadly. I feel the need in me and sit on his knee, and he tucks my head under his head. My face is on his shirt, which my makeup will stain. I let my tears wash the beige pigment off of my skin and into the waffle-knit cotton. His thumb nervously traces a circle on my neck. This current runs through us—this begging of lovers for love. I cry harder. I say to his chest, “Sometimes, I hate her.” I close my eyes to compose myself. I feel the edges of myself, my nose, my knees, my heels dangling off the floor. I need to remember where he ends and I begin to be able to say anything at all. “Tell me all the times she said she hates me.”

  “She doesn’t hate you.”

  “Every little girl tells her father she hates her mother.”

  “She doesn’t hate you.” He says, and shushes me tenderly. I dry my tears and let him put a hand on my shoulder. But what has to escape is not inside our bodies it’s in my mind.

  “I hated how husky she sounded when she was proud of us. I hated her laughter. I hated the way she said my name.”

  “Your mother?”

  “I was worried I was her.”

  “Claire doesn’t hate you.”

  “Don’t keep her secrets from me,” I say. I can feel his posture righting itself, asserting our separateness. “If you keep her secrets, you don’t love me anymore.”

  “That’s insane.”

  Behind him there is the night in the screen door. It’s as dull as a TV turned off. I go to the threshold and it’s a bit better. The back porch is lit white against the night and so are the wicker chairs, and the wicker table, and past them the white posts and the rail. The tiger lilies nod against it. Spattered orange petals flippantly fall away from their ocher stamens. These marshy flowers proliferate across the yard with a flagrant sameness that seems to proclaim that this domestic order is also nature, merely another permutation. This casual landscaping we’ve inherited from the former owners couldn’t be more different from the prim white-painted rocks we’d placed around Maman’s rose bushes, touching them up every spring with stinky oil paint using artist’s brushes.

  “I hate these flowers,” I say. Outside, the smell of the lilies is grievously sweet. I struggle to find a stalk and yank. My feet falter against the slick grass. When the roots come loose, I hold up the lily. It’s as tall as me. Sam is on the porch.

  “What are you doing?” he asks, and when I ignore him he pleads: “It’s dark. You can’t garden in the dark.”

  My fingers slip blindly through the sharp leaves until I find a woody stalk and yank. This time watching the bloom bob above the others as I tear it from the earth. It looks so skinny against the night with its flower now above me. I toss it. I grab for another stalk, yank. Hear the screen door clatter. Sam isn’t watching anymore. After the first few, I work methodically along the perimeter of the porch. Pulling, grunting, piling a waste of orange fakery in the night. I am sweaty. Without the soft fluency of flowers along the edge of it, the porch is stark.

  I go into the kitchen and it beckons me to my family. The dishes in the drying rack and the photos on the fridge all clustered in the way that is ours. I take the cognac from the cabinet and the clink of the bottle in the snifter is nice. The night bites at my conscience still. On the porch step, I sip the gold in a circle of light that makes the dark darker. I can make out the neighbour’s house. She’s so old. We never see her. She has a clothesline she hangs no clothes on. She has a sink next to her back door. No porch. No patio. No chair. I wonder what the sink is for. She’s alone but the house is bigger than ours. It’s two stories, whereas ours is what’s called one and a half. The hinges on the screen door screech. Claire is in the doorway. Her features are mostly mine: round eyes, round cheeks, dainty little nostrils, and a tender underbite. They’re all in disarray. Her nose quivers. Her lips are pressed. Looking at her face is like considering my own in the mirror when I’ve let myself down.

  “Maman.”

  “Oui bébé.”

  “Je m’excuse.”

  “I’m not mad anymore,” I say, staring into the night. The porch slats creak as she comes over to me. She sits a hip’s width away.

  “Why?”

  “It makes me sad to be angry at you.”

  “Why?”

  “At other people, I can enjoy being mad, but not at you and Daddy.”

  “Why?”


  “Because I love you, and I’m responsible for you.”

  “Like how, that one weekend, I was responsible for Lola.”

  “No. That was symbolic. I signed the form. If anything happened to that hamster, it was my fault.”

  “What’s symbolic?”

  “It’s how a picture of something isn’t the same as the real thing. You just had a picture of responsibility.”

  “What am I responsible for?”

  “Nothing,” I say, and Claire’s face falls. “That’s not true, actually, you’re responsible for yourself. Me, you, and Daddy we’re all responsible for you.”

  “But I’m not responsible for you.”

  “No, that’s the best thing about mothers. That’s why you can always be mad at your mother.” I say. Claire looks a little scared, but when I start laughing she laughs too, and she scoots closer to me. That’s what’s wrong with Minneapolis, and all the other places before it, there’s only Sam and Claire, no family, no friends, no co-workers, the only people I know are people I’m responsible for. There’s no one to hate or even dislike for a moment. It’s no wonder I find myself hating her or him, or both of them. But as long as I hold onto my curiosity, I’m not around the bend yet. That’s what Maman always said when we were kids about the old ladies in the neighbourhood, that so long as they were still gossiping they were compos mentis.

  “What are you doing out here?”

  “I was gardening. Do you like it?

  “It’s scary. Like a swamp. I like it,” Claire says, in a whisper that respects the destruction I’ve wrought. It reminds me of how Maman would stay up all night making curtains or reupholstering the furniture. I’d wake up to pee and the living room would be a mess of torn fabrics and stuffing, and she’d be as absorbed as a child at play using Papa’s nail gun. Then a floorboard would creak underfoot, and she’d startle to see me standing there. As if she couldn’t quite place me.

  “What are you looking at?” Claire asks.

  “Oh,” I stammer. “The neighbour’s house. What do you think her sink is for?”