Country of Cold (15 page)

The lake bottom sloped out so gradually that some places, even a mile offshore, after swimming for an hour among whitecaps and dark green water, you could still stick your feet down and feel the bottom. What could be more reassuring than that to someone starting to tire? Or less satisfying to someone who wasn’t?

In the centre of the southern basin, maybe 150 miles north of the beach towns, were islands of perfect white silica that was shipped south to be used for glassmaking. Nobody lived there. Elk Island, Bear Island, Black Island. Just the shiny white poplar trees, the sand, the eponymous animals, and clean fresh water on every side. Nobody noticed this. Sometime in the seventies
Playboy
magazine supposedly named these as one of the ten best beach spots in North America to, who knows, make the piece seem more exhaustive maybe, and the people from the city out here recited this fact to each other like a mantra.

“Here, have some more potato salad, it’s my mother’s recipe, it’s the one thing she excelled at, poor thing, and
it had to be potato salad, but there you go, God lives in the details.” Daphne opened one of the Tupperware containers and began scooping out yellow lumpen potato salad onto paper plates.

Her companions sat on adjacent corners of their blanket, knees against their chests, still looking at the water. Daphne and Hannah had renewed their high school friendship three months ago. They had lost track of one another since leaving the Dairy Queen they had worked at, and upon meeting at a bar that winter they had sat and talked as if they were sisters.

Laurel had gone out with Hannah’s brother until ten baleful months ago and had emerged with a new close friend in Hannah, the one acquaintance she couldn’t wail on endlessly to. Dignity being the first casualty of these things. Dignity mattering.

Daphne squinted her eyes and scratched her nose. “I have to start doing something differently too. I’m miserable most of the time these days. I go to work, get my hair cut, go to movies. I feel completely frivolous.”

A few months before her old sort-of-boyfriend (as she titled him in her mind) Rick left the city to make his way in the WWF, Daphne had started working in a series of walk-in clinics. She made half the money she had been making in the north, but she was less exhausted now than she was then, or indeed than she was when she wasn’t working at all. She had been
south for over two years now. She still thought about the people she knew in Wager Bay every day. And she was a little surprised at herself for not having gone back. But she wouldn’t, and now she knew that.

She’d met Greg, her new sort-of-boyfriend, at a newstand on Portage Avenue. He had his daughter with him and he kept looking at Daphne as his daughter merrily read aloud a Pokémon comic book. That was the only glimpse she’d had of his daughter. She had expressed a desire to meet her but Greg had never responded. Okay, Daphne thought, loud and clear. In the meantime, they met on the weekends and had sex. He was a divorced high school chemistry teacher. He brought exams over with him sometimes and sat at her kitchen table marking them as Daphne cooked supper afterwards. He was a vegetarian, and had a delicate stomach—no spices, nothing smoked or pickled. They never really got into things, ever. They found this little ritual of sex and supper the third time they saw each other and had remained in it since. It felt like they had been doing it for years. In a sense, they had. And would continue to, barring surprises.

“I know exactly what you mean,” Laurel said.

“
I
don’t feel frivolous,” Hannah declared.

“Look at us,” Laurel said. “We’re the smartest and most interesting people we know. This self-questioning comes from within, it’s part of our neurosis, our intelligence, maybe. You crave meaning so strongly, it’s what pushes us on past our mediocrity.”

She took a drag on her cigarette; Hannah nodded at the horizon.

“We are too mediocre,” said Daphne. “We just have a particular taste and consider that some sort of accomplishment. None of us do that much. I don’t, anyway.”

The lake exists as two large basins. The southern, accessible one is 15,000 square miles and the northern one 28,000 square miles. For years, the lake was the only transportation link between the northern prairie and the outside world. Goods came down through the Arctic Sea to the tip of Hudson Bay, where they were loaded onto boats that crawled upstream to the tip of the lake, then three hundred miles along the rocky forested shore, and down the Red River to civilization. Some of the boats would turn west from the northern basin to follow the Saskatchewan River into the heart of the prairie, and it was by this means that the Canadian prairie was supplied with shaving soap and shoe polish for most of a hundred years—this was when Hudson Bay was the source of something other than ice and dread.

The lake has the history, and the scale, but it has never become, is never referred to as, a great lake, upper- or lowercase. Great Slave Lake has been deemed so from its nomination, Great Bear Lake, all the Ontario-Superior chain; who hasn’t heard of Titicaca, or Baikal, or Great Salt Lake, Victoria, Malawi, the Aral Sea? All the most important lakes become adjectival phrases with comfortable
grace: mysterious Loch Ness; Lake Victoria—headwaters of the Nile; Baikal, the Siberian Inland Sea. This one is too shallow, too muddy, look at all this
algae
everywhere. The sand is dirty with pine needles, bits of clay. It is what is available.

To the northwest, Hannah noticed a line of grey cloud had been building up on itself for the past hour, like a carpet wrinkling under a door edge, and now was flattening out, and scudding its way across the sky, right at them.

One of Hannah’s favourite devices in conversation was to lean back and say, “What do you mean?” It could be quite disconcerting, especially if you had no idea, or were saying something stupid. It lent discussions with her a necessary precision, a sense of her really listening. The effect could be quite flattering. At parties she used this trick rather a lot and so was considered very intelligent by the other music people she knew. And she was. The thing is, they thought that she was maybe even smarter than
them
.

Hannah said once, with a roll of her eyes, “Musicians always think themselves wonderfully well-spoken and full of intelligent things to say, over and over again.” That she had this much disdain for the members of her chosen profession belied the lack of acknowledgment, the paucity of work she got, and no retort was sharp enough ever to quite puncture the hissed suggestion that
she was simply resentful, and envious. The suggestion was made fairly regularly—she could tell when it was welling up even as she turned from a witticism and walked over to other people she knew. Behind her: nodding.

Hannah lived in any given period on less money than Daphne spent on restaurant meals. She bought her vegetables at the roadstands on the Perimeter Highway and bicycled great bags of them home, swerving onto the shoulder when semi-trailers passed, and leaped at house-sitting situations that involved no rent. It was a little inconceivable that someone could spend as little money as she did and still live in a city. The only thing she owned worth more than a hundred dollars was her French horn. Her clothes had many fashionable patches on them. Her brother constantly offered her money but she declined, reflexively.

When Hannah’s brother and Laurel had begun their on-again-off-again-and-again-and-again breakup, Hannah had been kinder to Laurel than seemed plausible. Laurel took two weeks off from the university library where she worked, pleading pneumonia. She had been on the point of quitting entirely when Hannah compelled her to get dressed one morning and go in, accompanying her all the way and advising her to cough a bit as she went.

The extent of Hannah’s kindness had seemed in itself almost a criticism of her brother’s behaviour, and that was how everyone had interpreted it but him. Hannah continued to eat supper with each of them separately
and never said anything about one to the other. “Shuttle diplomacy” was how Daphne had described it. “You have no idea how exhausting it is,” Hannah had said.

For a few people, the lake is still essential. In the winters an ice road is created for five months, along the eastern shore of the lake. Semi-trailer trucks crawl up this road all winter long to the communities on this side of the lake. It is three hundred miles long, and is formed by phalanxes of snowplows and Caterpillar tractors that set off every December to build and mark the road. The towns it services, mostly Indian reservations, have no other land link, and so they get their fuel and heavy stores only when the ice is hard enough to carry freight. In the summer the only transportation in or out is the float planes, and the women spend their afternoons drawing up their orders for the winter freight shipment. How many hundred-pound sacks of flour and sugar, how many cans of tea and gallons of molasses and buckets of sweet clover honey, and coffee and five-pound bags of cinnamon and nutmeg. When the freeze-up is late or incomplete, families here check off every day on the calendar and pray for cold, waiting for the road to be opened. Every few years, pushing it, a truck goes through the ice.

Hannah and Laurel took ecstasy together when they were out dancing one Friday night in the winter. They were unable to agree later whose idea it had been. They ended
up in a diner in an industrial park, giggling and playing with their condiment bottles. Beside the diner was a lot that the city used as a snow dump. It was late in the season and the snow reached sixty feet in the air, a great glittering bulge into the night sky that caught Laurel’s attention first, and soon they were running toward it, screaming with laughter, their oilcloth placemats tucked around their coats to serve as ersatz Krazy Karpets.

They had to climb over the chain-link fence the city had erected around the hill, festooned with No Tobogganing signs. When they reached the snow pile they were awed at the size of it, thousands and thousands of tons of snow and sand and salt created since Thanksgiving. Here and there a Christmas tree stuck out, little bits of metal foil glittering under the night sky. It was overcast and just a little bit of snow was falling and the low clouds glowed yellow from the sodium lights along the roads of the industrial park.

They were halfway up the hill, snow melting in their shoes, and their faces streaked with tears from laughing so hard, when a police car pulled into the lot. A spotlight probed out into the night, lighting up a narrow cone of snowflakes between the hill and the car. Hannah and Laurel froze, and then scrambled into a little hollow in the mound. The light darted toward them and probed a few inches over and all around them. “He must have seen us moving,” Hannah said.

“Shhh,” Laurel said.

They lay there a long time, many minutes, until their pants were thoroughly wet from the melting snow beneath them. Hannah lifted her head to see if the car was still there. The searchlight stabbed the snow all around them again. Hannah dropped her head like a ground squirrel. They heard a car door slam.

“What’re we gonna do?” Laurel asked.

“Just stay still.”

“We could run for it.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“Do you think he saw us?”

“Yes.”

“Are you as scared as I am?”

“Yes.”

A nasal voice called up to them, “Okay, I want you two down here right now!”

Both women jerked as if they’d been poked. Neither had been in trouble with authority since primary school, if then. They didn’t move.

“All right, you bastards, let’s MOOVE!”

Each woman could feel the other beside her, tetanically rigid and breathing in short tight gasps.

“Hannah?”

“Yes?”

“Your brother is still all I ever think about.”

“I know. It’s okay.”

They heard the heavy steps of boots in the snow start up the mound beneath them. They heard the cop slip and
slide down. They heard a whispered and deep “Fuck.” Heavy steps, kicking into the snow now.

“Hannah?”

“Yes?”

“I think it’s admirable they way you keep on with your music.”

“Thank you, Laurel.”

The cop slipped again. They could hear him breathing heavily below them. Then he turned and walked away. They listened to his steps getting fainter and then they heard the car start and drive away. They poked their heads up and looked below. It was as it had been when they arrived. They looked at each other. “Well, that was interesting,” Hannah said.

Laurel nodded. “They call it the hug drug,” she said.

The evening before they had driven out to the lake, Laurel and Daphne had gone to see a movie together. Walking home, Daphne had asked Laurel if she had ever thought about having children. “A year ago, I almost decided to, but that’s when things with Eliot were getting crazy and it didn’t seem like a good idea. I didn’t tell anyone at the time, just hung out at my apartment afterwards and took Tylenol Threes. I never told Eliot about it. It seemed sort of academic by that point,” Laurel said.

“Oh dear,” Daphne said.

“It’s okay. I don’t think about it as much as I used to. The thing is, it isn’t clear to me whether if that had
happened earlier on things between us mightn’t have turned out differently. Not that I’d ever recommend it as a strategy or anything. But looking back, it seemed like there was a moment there when we needed something to do together. We didn’t, so we just started heading away. Old story.”

“Does Hannah know about this?” Daphne asked.

“No,” Laurel lied, instinctively.

“I won’t say anything, of course.”

“Thank you.”

They walked a little farther. “Why do you ask?”

No answer. They walked on for a few minutes.

“The thing about Greg is that, if pressed, I couldn’t actually say that he has ever done or said anything to stop us from getting more serious. What he hasn’t done was initiate or
propel
anything. I’ve chosen to take this as a decision he has made. But these days I’m wondering if that is accurate.”

“It is so easy to just concede defeat sometimes,” Laurel said.

“Yes. Even if you don’t have to.”