The Worlds Within Her (17 page)

A champagne cork popped to scattered applause. Her mother offered a prim kiss. Charlotte passed her a flute of champagne and a heavy silver knife gaily beribboned. Somewhere, Yasmin knew, there was a cake.

IT WAS VERY
delicate, much more so than these cups you and I use, Mrs. Livingston. So delicate in fact that the sun seemed to suffuse the white porcelain, turning it luminous. There were circles and squares, and symbols of various kinds drawn on it, and a seven-pointed star radiating out from the centre and up the sides. A very pretty cup, but clearly one not made for drinking from. It was ceremonial, you see, in the manner of the chalice you Roman Catholics use for blood-drinking —

Do you think so? Disrespectful? But my dear, you are the ones who have chosen to sanctify the grotesque. And let me say I do not enjoy your tone of condescension: of course I know what symbolism and ritual are all about. But, you see, what I truly object to is that these people, with their rugged grasp of metaphor, have chosen to look down on others for doing in reality what they do symbolically — and I fail to see how the symbolic consecration of the act is in any way superior to its enactment. For we are talking in the end about the same spirit, aren't we, the same idea: Is the priest who imbibes Christ's spirit through drinking his symbolic blood and eating his metaphoric
flesh any different from the Aztec warrior who imbibed the strength of Cortes's men by making a meal of their arms and legs?

You don't. Well. Yes — but is it that you don't see it, or that you won't see it, Mrs. Livingston? Is it your inability or your refusal? My, my we don't like the question, do we. Careful, my dear: clench your jaws any harder and your dentures will shatter.

In any case, be that as it may — it's all beside the track, isn't it? The drinking of the tea, like the drinking of the wine or the symbolic cannibalism, was not the point. The point was the meaning that flowed from them, and I suppose that Victorian tasseomancer's cup held special significance for Celia, since it had come to her from her brother. She brought it back from her only trip to England, where she had gone to see her parents after her brother lost his life in a motorcycle accident.

When she returned to us, I asked after her parents. She said they were bearing up. Then I asked if she had been able to comfort them: what had they done together? Were they religious people? No, she said, they were not religious beyond the conventions, so they had all sat together. For two months. And when my curiosity prompted me to prompt her with a single “And?” she said that was it really, just a lot of sitting together. There was not much to say. I understood then that she was of a family, perhaps of a country, that knew no gnashing of teeth, no tearing of hair: that viewed grief as an internal matter. And this was astonishing to me.

That cup, once her brother's and in some way consecrated by his death, became her tea-leaf-reading cup. And, intrigued by the cup, my husband for the first time allowed his leaves to be read. I remember his amusement when she saw his leaves shape themselves into a torch. It was one of the shapes they were considering
for the symbol of his political party, you see, although Celia and I didn't know it at the time. He insisted that she do the leaves a second time, and again she saw the torch.

I have always felt that Celia confirmed my husband's belief in his destiny, and for that I have always harboured a certain resentment towards her. But then, I suppose we all look to apportion blame to others, don't we, Mrs. Livingston? Everybody has a little role to play when things don't go right. Even innocent Celia, who found comfort and a little specialness by seeing visions in her dead brother's cup.

CYRIL SAYS, “IF
we live long enough, almost everyt'ing'll betray us.”

Penny sucks at her teeth in impatience. “Oh, hush up, Manager, you does get so depressing when you go all philosophical.”

“I just not afraid to say what you always thinking, Miss Rise-an'-Shine. I mean, take a look.” His gaze invites Yasmin, too, to follow the chop of his hand down from the dimly lit porch to the front yard: to an impermeable darkness rent only by the headlight beams of the two vehicles waiting below. “You remember all those quiet nights? The stars, the insects chirping, a cool evening drive into town to have a coconut or a ice cream cone at the botanical gardens. Jus' jump in the car and take off?”

Penny shakes her head. “Nostalgia, Manager, jus' nostalgia.”

“Yes, perhaps. But you know where nostalgia come from? Is when the present don't live up to the promises of the past. When you can't even do today what you used to do yesterday.
When you can't even jus' jump in the car —” again his hand chops towards the great darkness “— and take a little run into town.”

Yasmin, uncomprehending, asks if there is a problem. “I could take a taxi back to the hotel,” she says.

Cyril snickers, and as he does so, Ash, down below, steps into the car lights and calls up.

Penny says, “All-you better get going. Ash starting to get a little impatient.”

Yasmin, uncertain still, hesitates. Cyril takes her by the arm and, escorting her down the stairs, explains that nightfall brings to the island a chaining of gates and a locking of doors and travel in convoy through the brooding anarchy of its darkened streets.

JIM REMEMBERED AT
the last moment that in Montreal he was not allowed to turn right on a red light. Pressing on the brake, he said, “It was a fine life, you know. Growing up here. Very different from the rest of the country. And we knew it, too. We were
the
big city.”

She heard in his voice the regret of arrogance lost — an arrogance that would emerge nostalgic and self-pitying were Jim like those other homegrown refugees who hungered for past glories and the flavour of foods left behind.

But they were no longer in the city. A brief stretch of highway had brought them from the downtown hotel to the suburb where he had grown up. He had given her a brief tour: the park
slightly sinister with gatherings of young males; the cinemas burned out and boarded up; the Métro station beside the expansive grounds of a private girls' school. Now as they drove along the main street, he saw only changes: the tavern, once hermetically male, now a bistro; new restaurants of varying ethnicity; a scattering of specialty shops.

Just past an Ethiopian restaurant, Jim turned right onto a street tunnelled through twilight beneath a canopy of braided branches. Houses — dark-red brick, shadowed balconies — huddled together in close discretion.

Yasmin said, “Do you think they'll be unhappy we're staying in a hotel?”

“And not with them, you mean? Not likely. They like their privacy. Besides, there really isn't room. My old bedroom's still there, but it was hardly big enough for me when I was growing up.”

“You don't have to make excuses for them, Jim.”

“They'll be civilized,” he said, drawing the car to the side of the road and stopping. “They are always … exquisitely polite.”

In Jim's snapshots, his mother appeared larger than the woman who opened the door. Or perhaps, Yasmin thought, she had just been expecting someone larger than life — larger than the woman who, even though expecting them, peered out with timid eyes and a smile brittle with dentures.

Jim said, “Mom,” as if identifying himself.

“Jimmy,” she replied, as if in delayed recognition. Eyelids fluttering, she offered her cheek.

Jim appeared to blow on it. “Mom, this is Yasmin.”

“Why, yes!” his mother exclaimed, turning to Yasmin as if surprised by her presence.

Yasmin remembered to smile when Mrs. Summerhayes's eyes
— pale grey and disconcerted — met hers. “Mrs. Summerhayes,” she said, extending her hand.

Mrs. Summerhayes's finger lightly brushed hers. Then, with an almost comic awkwardness, she led the way into the house.

Yasmin hesitated, stepped forward only when she felt Jim's palm press at her lower back — in encouragement, but with insistence, too.

The foyer was small, crowded with a coat rack and an umbrella stand, a telephone table at which she could picture Mrs. Summerhayes standing during the inconsequential conversations she had had with Jim over the eight months since their marriage. To the left, a carpeted stairway led to the second floor. On the right, through a wide doorway, a living room of composed sobriety: a red-brick fireplace swept clean of ash; armchairs and sofa upholstered in the same soft grey; table lamps shaded blue; a mahogany coffee table sitting on a square of cement-grey carpeting. What brightness came in through the small cut-glass windows was readily absorbed, making it a room — a house, she sensed — without light.

“These are for you,” Yasmin said, holding out a cone of flowers to Mrs. Summerhayes. “Jim said you like tiger lilies.”

“Why, thank you,” she said, flustered. “You really shouldn't have.” She put the bouquet into the crook of her arm. “Jimmy, why don't you show Yasmin the garden? Your father's out there. I'll find a vase for these.” Then she bustled up the stairs.

Jim led Yasmin farther into the house, down a narrow corridor, through the kitchen — loose planks creaking beneath dulled linoleum, a tiny window sheathed in lace, the stove and refrigerator incongruous with newness — and out the back door to a small porch overlooking the garden: a minuscule square of lawn enclosed by a wooden fence and plunged in shadow by the neighbour's leafy maple.

Jim's father was crouched at a flower bed that ran the length of the far fence. The bed was bare, his father absorbed in turning over the loose, dark soil with a gardening trowel.

Jim took Yasmin's hand — his palm moist and nervous — and quietly called to his father.

Mr. Summerhayes looked up without looking back, held up the trowel in greeting. “Jimmy,” he said. “Do architects know anything about soil? All the hydrangeas turned brown and died.”

“Sorry, Dad. The only things I know how to grow in soil are buildings.”

“I've mixed in fertilizer, a bag of bone meal. Nothing seems to help. I'd almost say there's some kind of poison in the soil.”

Jim led Yasmin down the steps to the middle of the lawn. “Dad,” he said, “this is Yasmin.”

Mr. Summerhayes looked around, his squint accentuating the wrinkles that radiated from his eyes down his cheeks. “Hello,” he said. “Do
you
know anything about soil?” His hair was shock white, his eyebrows unblemished black.

“Not a thing, I'm afraid.”

“Oh well.” He laid the trowel on the grass and slowly got to his feet. Dusting his hands, he stepped towards Yasmin. “How do you do,” he said.

“A pleasure to meet you.”

Turning to Jim, he said, “Where's your mother?”

“Upstairs getting a vase for some flowers we —”

“Tiger lilies?”

“Yes.”

“Jimmy, the vases are in the kitchen cupboard. She went upstairs to take her sinus medication. She reacts.”