Season of Fury and Wonder

by Sharon Butala

  The truth was, ever since her husband, Dick, had died two years earlier, she had not been able to stop thinking about Robert Thorley. Like a silly girl, she still thought sometimes of how beautiful his profile was, like an Apollo on an ancient Greek coin, although he wasn’t Greek at all, but a hard-drinking American ex-serviceman, and a blond who was a dozen years older than her. Even though they only went out a few times before he simply disappeared from her life, the cheap little brass elephant he had given her on their first date had stayed, its red and green paint long since chipped off or worn away. (And by the way, she thought indignantly, if distantly so, why do we always turn to that epithet ‘silly’ about girls and never about boys who at that age were every bit as silly? Because of the way we girls were taught to be; being silly was feminine; when I was a girl nobody expected better of us; silliness was cute in a girl.)

  Dick, to whom she had been married nearly sixty years, died thinking the brass elephant had come from her best girlfriend, Gwen, dead at fifty, in a car accident, possibly a suicide, but no one would ever know for sure. Not that Dick had even noticed the little brass animal in years even though, for some reason she couldn’t explain herself – was it for Gwen? – she kept it in a prominent place on her dresser in the bedroom, lifting it to dust, and even now and then grasping it by its tiny upraised trunk to polish it. The fact was – the fact is – that I lost my virginity to Robert Thorley. Not hard to understand, in these days of ready pop psychology, why she had lied to Dick about where the trinket had come from. To tell the truth (hah!), she had never told him about Robert at all, Dick being naïve enough to believe she was a virgin when she said she was. Or had he only pretended to believe her? She had never been sure, and couldn’t bring herself to ask. Better to let sleeping dogs – or elephants – lie, she told herself whenever, thinking of Gwen, rarely of Robert Thorley, she looked seriously at the elephant.

  Was it wrong that she’d never told Dick the truth? Probably, she thought comfortably, but quickly knew that she wasn’t sure about it being wrong. Maybe it wasn’t, given the male ego, and all that. She wondered, as she often did, what Dick had lied about to her. Lots of things, she was willing to bet. Even though he was, as far as she knew, a good man. And who knew him better than she did?

  An art major who had stopped painting years ago, Margaret had wanted to examine Carr’s brushwork, but in this new world in which Dick had abandoned her, she should have known that everything was alarmed. Indignantly, she turned her back to the tiny white church in the monstrous green-shaded forest, and realized that the security guard, a stout woman with a grim expression wearing an official blue uniform, was standing right behind her. Had she been talking to herself? She closed her face, tilted her chin upward.

  “How does one see the brushwork?” she asked, not looking at the guard.

  “Video, ma’am,” the guard said, pointing to the doorway on her left at the end of the gallery.

  “Ahh,” she replied, as if grateful. Then, “Excuse me,” passing the unlovely woman as if she were being the nuisance, and not her, Margaret, once known to all as Maggie, and to Robert – what a thing to think of now – as Maggie Breakheart. She couldn’t help but laugh. If only she had a living friend left with whom she could move through the gallery so if she laughed no one would think of her as a crazy old lady, but they were all gone now, starting with once-pretty, tormented Gwen and the car accident that probably wasn’t an accident – the older Margaret grew the more sure she became that it was no accident – and ending with dear Myra only two weeks ago. Hardly unexpected at her age, but still, Myra had been well enough to buy a plane ticket to Vancouver to come with her to see (before we die, ha ha) this marvelous Emily Carr show. And if all went well, they had thought of going in the New Year, perhaps (always with the crossed fingers that one of them wouldn’t be incapacitated if not dead) to Toronto to the Mary Pratt show. Damn it! And then Myra goes and dies. Eighty-two or not, she was inconsiderate as hell. She searched in her handbag for a tissue and blew her nose. Did she want to look at the video of Carr’s brushwork? She thought not, having always believed that too much examination earned small rewards, and had a stronger tendency to destroy what truly mattered, and anyway, she had only asked the question so the guard would know she was a knowledgeable art lover and not merely a daft old lady.

  It was lunchtime, and she had no one to eat with. Never mind, it was an art gallery with its own café, and one used to single older women, where she wouldn’t be ignored, made to wait unnecessarily, treated as if she were merely an annoyance and not a real customer like everybody else. Getting old is such a bugger, and because Dick was dead and couldn’t criticize her, she muttered the word out loud. “Bugger!”

  “I beg your pardon?” asked the sweet little girl serving her at the cafeteria, her black tie a touch askew against her thin white shirt. For once she had got a solicitous one. Well brought up; maybe even loves her grandmother, and when Margaret failed to reply, not sure what the little thing was referring to, she asked, “Would you like some wine with that?”

  “White,” Margaret said, as if this had been her plan all along. Bad enough to be alone in a hotel room in Vancouver with Myra dead, and having to see the paintings that they had made plans for so long to see together by herself. Their last great adventure, although, of course, there was still Mary Pratt. She’d soon be dead herself; might as well have a glass of wine even though wine did nasty things to her digestion and she would then regret even this tiny amount.

  Ahead of her in the cafeteria line was a couple even more elderly than she, the two of them shorter also; almost indistinguishable one from the other. Each had a tray, each putting identical things on it: small green salad, some meat or fish in cream with mushroom caps rising out of the mix, a scoop of rice, a custard dessert. No wine. Gwen had always drunk too much. Ever since she came back from Europe, how long ago now? Sixty years ago at least. Always giggly or more at parties, and then that stupid marriage to Bright – Jim Bright. Handsome, not bright, in fact, a bit stupid even if more or less successful. Big brick house. And domineering.

  But the men were all domineering in those days, and women mostly just accepted it, except for Gwen, whose answer to Bright’s dictatorial ways had been increasingly just to get drunk, a response that, to tell the truth and even knowing full well this wasn’t a good thing, Margaret had always rather admired. Until he put her into that hospital and told everybody it was to dry her out. Poor Gwen. He was not a nice man, although Margaret thought he loved her. Something, anyway. He felt something for her. If she could now, after so many years of living, say one thing about being alive, it was that it is all a mystery to me. It is all mystery.

  The couple who had been ahead of her, who had taken a long time picking out cutlery and condiments as if world peace hinged on each choice, then filling glasses with water, were now sitting down in the same row where she had planned to sit. The small tables were crowded too closely together; she picked the last table on her right in order to leave a couple of empty tables between her and them, and also to give herself a bit more room. She watched them surreptitiously, leaning back in her chair and pretending to glance around the room, or down at the map of the galleries she had set beside her plate. They were tweedy, rumpled, shapeless, and both wore crumpled, pudding-like, no-colour cloth hats on their heads.

  Probably English, she thought, maybe over from Victoria for the day, also here to see the wonderful work by Emily Carr: a woman who had never married, had almost no success in her life as a painter, by all accounts not much liked by others, and in old age became strange (wasn’t there something about a monkey?) a bag-lady type before there were bag ladies. And yet, the paintings! What the world does to people of talent, while the hucksters prosper. She wanted to say this very loudly but by pressing her lips together, managed not to. Just as well, a clutch of young women in their tight, bright dresses, giant handbags tucked under their upper arms, were setting down their loaded trays and seating themsel
ves noisily around the table immediately across the narrow aisle from her. She put on her elderly-woman blinkers, knowing she could be nothing but ridiculous to them.

  The elderly couple who had attracted her interest, she noticed, did not look at her, didn’t glance around, not even once, nor up from their plates, in fact, not even to look at each other. As she watched them while pretending not to, she knew for a fact that they had not spoken to each other all day, maybe not even for days, and, for the first time since Dick’s death, a tide of relief swept over her at this perception, that his dying had at least spared her this humiliation. This thought was so shocking and unexpected, and so profound that she didn’t doubt it: the couple did not speak to each other any more; they existed in mutual silence thinking their own thoughts and no longer bothering at all to communicate them: Out of hopelessness? Out of a sense that they had emotionally, as a couple, gone everywhere they knew how to go and had no interest any more in trying to go further, or elsewhere? A mutual life, or life as a mutual endeavor had ended; and they had given up, and moved now together strictly as an automaton.

  Her thoughts went back to poor Gwen, and it occurred to her that perhaps Jim Bright was not such an awful man, but only that Gwen saw this too in her future with him, and could not bear it. And here she was, Maggie Breakheart, glad that Dick, whom she had loved, and missed now as if she had lost a part of each of her cells, had died before they had reached this point. Both she and Gwen had glimpsed something else once, when they were young, whatever that thing was, and Gwen couldn’t ever let it go, while Maggie, for some reason she didn’t understand in herself but thought might be a failing, could, and had, and never once acknowledged she had done so, not even to herself.

  For the first time that she could recall, it occurred to her that elephants were famous for their memory.

  Jim Bright had had Gwen committed even though he loved her. He had thought himself as the most fortunate man on earth when she had agreed to marry him, but he was ashamed in front of their friends to acknowledge that the most beautiful girl on earth had, in his care, turned into a drunk, and, worse, one who turned out not to be able to have children. He had her committed because he was so angry with her, because he had come to hate her. Of course Gwen had plowed into that concrete abutment on purpose; it was no accident. Margaret and Gwen, the two prettiest girls in class, and Gwen advising her to drop the gorgeous Robert – He is much too old for you, and besides, you know you can’t trust a man who is that good looking – sage advice, as if Gwen were a hundred and ten instead of maybe nineteen. And yet, even at that, she had been right, if only for Maggie and not for herself.

  And her mother, as they worked together changing the sheets on her brothers’ beds, said to her out of the blue, in a low voice Maggie didn’t recognize, didn’t think she had ever heard before from her, “He will never marry you.” Startled, Maggie had looked down the length of the white to her mother who stood loosely holding each corner of the sheet in her fingers, as if she had forgotten what she was doing, her face turned away, her expression one Maggie wasn’t sure about, but thought might be grief. Maggie had not replied. She knew even then, even at nineteen or so, that what her mother said was true. They began to tuck the sheet in under the mattress, muttering to each other, “That corner’s crooked,” and, “Give me another inch here, would you?” politely. The war barely over, and Robert gone before she had had anywhere near enough of him.

  And then the mourning. Good Lord, what an idiot girl she’d been.

  And here I am in the Vancouver Art Gallery looking at the Emily Carrs and eating lunch alone, I who was once called by a devilishly handsome man, “Maggie Breakheart”. What did I call him? Robert, Bob, Bobbie? No, Rob; I called him Rob. And just like that she was back in his arms, his mouth was on hers. Hurriedly she lifted her wine to her lips and drank a too-large gulp, its chill hitting the roof of her mouth and then icing her throat, freezing out the memory. Not that she desired sex – here she felt like standing up and announcing this to the table of four young women on her other side, all engrossed in their conversation, heads together, out of which floated the words which, it seemed to Maggie she saw, rather than heard: “Jamie,” and “Trev,” and “Ryan.”

  Not sex, that is not what one wants when one is past eighty! She was indignant – it must be the wine – that anyone would think that. One needed to move on and one didn’t actually know how to do that. Oh, dear. Had she ever moved on from Robert Thorley? Moved on to what? She wondered if the old couple down the row of tables from her had figured things out and had moved on. Was that the best reason as to why they never even bothered to speak to one another?

  She examined that visceral second when she had felt the heat of Robert’s mouth on hers: What had she really felt when she found herself so abruptly immersed in it? Impatience.

  Annoyance. Yes, the memory of what it had been like to be in love – no, in heat – with a man. She frowned into her salmon salad. How trivial it seemed now: How one swooned and yearned and magnified every emotion, every sensation, desiring, willing one’s self to be lost in it, to be carried away, believing that this was the meaning of life, that this was at last the fulfilled promise of her otherwise wasted, meaningless existence. The sheer absurdity, the wrongheadedness of this notion stunned her so that she lifted her head, looked down the table at the old couple who were now spooning in their custards – perhaps they were not that old after all – still not looking at each other, nor speaking, and then to the four girls on her right. And Gwen, poor Gwen, lost forever.

  The young women, all ordinary-looking, nothing special about any of them, no Maggie Breakhearts or poor lovely Gwens there, were still laughing together, as if their world was the only one that mattered, indeed, the only one that had ever mattered. How life would sober them. But even as she thought this both sad and wonderful idea, a cloud that was neither vapour, visible and palpable, nor emotion, was moving around her. It was, in fact, more as if it had always been there, but it seemed, nonetheless, to be coming from the four ordinary young women, wafting across the short distance between their table and hers; it was as if, only now, for the first time in her life, she perceived what was always there, and always had been.

  If she had been standing, she would have fallen to her knees so powerful and all-encompassing was it, yet soft and exquisitely delicate, too wonderful, too honest to be merely alluring: It was, her breath held as it dawned on her, the essence of their beauty; it was the ageless, always divine, beauty of the Feminine. No wonder that for this ideal men would rise up, even off their deathbeds!

  How life is illuminated for you, when you are old.

  She felt a distant urge to cry, mixed in with an equally distant joy; her body was flushing with the wonder of it, her heart light as a feather rising in the still air, her now-heavy body that feather. If you wait long enough, if you think hard, but not too hard; if you hold yourself still – but she sounded like one of those sappy television gurus who make their millions fooling, mostly, women.

  But she had seen what she had seen. Those poor girls, thinking their nail polish and seductive glances, half-denied even as they gave them, their too-high heels that crippled them, the low necklines and short skirts, the carefully tended, shining hair, would earn them worlds to rule. Her mind raced to all the raped women, all the brutalized, the murdered women, to all those enslaved women around the world and through the ages – men so terrified of women’s power they sought to stamp it out – terrified of this thing that was surely divine in its origin. What to make of this?

  What had it to do with Gwen and with herself and Robert Thorley, and Jim Bright, and Dick?

  She realized, now, that over the years in some peculiar way she didn’t quite understand, she had begun to think of that small despoiled, yet apparently indestructible brass elephant as having been Gwen’s. But that it was not Gwen’s, but Robert Thorley’s careless yet calculated gift seemed to her to be the lie; in her heart it was a gift from Gwen and always ha
d been, a remembrance of her and the pain of what it truly is to be a silly girl.

  SOOTHSAYER

  Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s poem, “The Raven”, 1845

  The other day, as I was sitting reading in the living room of my condo, I became aware of banging, thumping and scrabbling noises going on somewhere outside. I have mild age-related hearing loss, which makes it hard for me to locate sound, so I listened for a moment in perplexity. I realized, finally, that the noise was coming from the roof immediately above me. Because I live on the third and top floor of my building, and there is no attic between me and the roof, whatever goes on up there interests me. I decided I wasn’t hearing boots – somebody replacing shingles, or checking air conditioners – and I couldn’t imagine how small children could get up there, or the large wild rabbits which populate the underbrush all over the neighbourhood. I put down my book, struggled out of my armchair, went to my balcony door, and opened it a foot or so without stepping outside. It was fall and cold and I wasn’t wearing a jacket or sweater.

  My kitchen extends along my balcony at right angles to the living room and the open door in which I stood. There, on the edge of that extended section of roof, stood the biggest raven I’ve ever seen. It was facing toward the roof, so I could see only one of its legs; it was moving in that jittery fashion of birds, and, hanging loosely from its shiny, grey-black beak was the jointed leg and part of the haunch of an equally large bird. The raven had been looking at me with one eye, but then it bent its head and scratched awkwardly about, it seemed to me, to secure its grip on its burden. I saw then that below the raven on the balcony floor was a pool of dark blood sizeable enough that it was hard to imagine it had come from a mere bird and not from a larger animal. I was so shocked both by the grotesqueness of the spectacle and by the very size of the raven, and thinking that another bird had torn off its leg – that it was holding its own leg in his beak – that my heart began to beat faster, and, wanting only to escape the ghastly scene, I pulled the door shut. Almost at once though, my conscience overcame me and I opened the door a slit, thinking of finding a way to help the raven. But it was far too big for me to hold onto, and even if I managed to trap it, I realized, I wouldn’t know what to do next. The noise still going on over my head, although less frantically now, I pulled the door shut once more, rushed to my laptop and googled ‘animal rescue’.