Everything Is So Political (18 page)

“It never is.”

“But I feel I've helped. In a small way,” she hastened to add.

“Look behind you.”

Lindsey turned to see the women of the Royal, Priya and Anjali at the forefront, children spilling out behind, placing an enormous steaming vat onto her table.

“For party,” Sabir said.

Lindsey felt a lump forming in her throat. “
Dhonnobad
,” she managed.

“
Dhonnobad,
thank you,” a voice boomed out behind her. “MrAbijhitNarayan—youcancallmeAbi—nicetomeetyou.” He stuck out his hand.

Lindsey took it, surprised at the softness of his skin.

“Welcometomyhumbleabode,” he said, pumping her hand up and down.

The residents of the Royal scattered at the appearance of their fast-talking, well-fed landlord. The boys began to chase one another around Abi's car, too fast for the sinewy arms of the driver, their reflections streaking across the shiny black paint. But one by one they too disappeared at the insistent calls of their mothers.

The celebration came and went without much ado. Abi cut the ribbon she'd looped around 2F's toilet, the family gathered round, huge smiles stretching their faces. Lindsey hadn't met them, she could only assume they worked in the garment factories during the day. The landlord then helped himself to a heaping plate of Priya's chicken biryani, the grease mixing with the sweat already dotting his moonish face. His driver then ate, which Bishnu seemed to understand as a sign he too could partake, and so three plates of the food were eaten. The rest sat congealing beside Lindsey and J.P. once Abi had stolen away, “pleasedtomeetyoucometoBangladeshagain,” tumbling out of his mouth.

“I don't understand. Why didn't they come to my party? They seemed interested, excited even, but then no one showed up.”

J.P. kept his eyes on the ground. “Tough to say, and you might not know the whole story. Different customs—”

“I know all about different customs, but I still don't get it. I cooked with these women every day, thought I was making progress. Then they didn't even come to my party.”

“You don't know their reasons.”

J.P. was right, she didn't know. She decided to leave the toys and chips and pop for the kids as it wasn't their fault the party was a bust. She rolled up the tablecloth—she liked the pattern so much she planned to use it as a bedspread—and signalled to Bishnu she was ready to go. He put down his Pepsi, burping softly as he picked up her bag.

“I'll see you out,” J.P. said.

They walked through darkness to the front of the building only to be met with rolls of bedding trussed alongside cardboard suitcases set out like dominoes. Lindsey glimpsed Priya as well as Anjali's husband—Jagan, if she remembered right. Grandparents sat on boxes bearing the now almost-illegible stamp of
Eco-Compostable NE20
, wielding canes to keep wayward children in order. Sabir met her eyes until his grandmother drew him back with the corner of her sari.

They'd been packing. Just when she'd finished installing toilets, they were leaving. Maybe this is what Dr. Hassan meant when she'd cautioned development work was difficult, that one toiled when the effort might not appear, in the end, to be appreciated.

“Where will they go?” Lindsey asked after a minute.

“Somewhere cheaper,” J.P. said.

A Year of Coming Home

A. S. Penne

Spring

A woman knows the lay of her land the way she knows her lover's body.

She knows the places in her garden that some plants grow better than others, where she needs to cajole and baby or where she can be hard and demanding. Just so she knows the silky purse of her man's scrotum, the grizzle of unshaven beard on his cheek, and the dark mole on his neck that she checks regularly for cancer. All these a part of her daily life.

She works her garden for sustenance and purpose, but also as a meditation, a relief from real life. Today as she digs and hoes, she replays her beginnings with him; recalls how after he'd bedded her in those first days, his presence had felt all-consuming, stirring up the silt of her life like a King salmon in spawn.

But life is change. Last night he had pulled away from her in frustration, unable to ejaculate. Already he is thickening at the waist and now there is this, another marker of waning hormones. When he rolled over, she had curled in close, spooning him and circling the bulge of his bicep with her hand, thinking to soothe him somehow. Beneath her fingers the rough alligator skin on the back of his arm.

In the garden she buries her hands in the still-cold soil of the vegetable bed, searching for a splayed ball of buttercup roots. When she finds it, she takes hold in a way that reminds her of the cupping of his apricot-balls. A sudden warmth spreads between her legs, the way it used to be whenever he opened the door at day's end, the air beneath her sternum tightening into a knot of anticipation at his approach, his hazel eyes locking on her mouth as though he wanted to hold her down, plant his seed.

She thinks of the years gone by, how things have grown and changed. She has a vague memory of last summer's heat fading into the cool of fall and then the period of moving inside before the lockdown of winter. On the calendar, now, a new season has arrived but still she waits for the land to show her, spring as reluctant as his sperm.

Another week passes, another week of his rolling and tossing at night and then one day a hint of sunlight accompanies the early morning birdsong. In the garden she bends over the beds, digging in compost with an eye toward the harvest, and when the gate opens behind her, she is not ready for what happens.

“I'm going,” he says. And when she turns in surprise, she sees the duffel bag. His whole wardrobe stuffed into that one small bag.

Her voice cracks when she asks: “Where?” Thinking,
Why?

But he does not respond, only looks at her blankly before spinning on his feet. He puts his bag in the cab of the truck, the dogs in the rear, then starts the engine. She stumbles toward him, trowel in hand, wanting to touch him, but as she makes her way forward, the truck backs up and around, drives off.

She watches the cab's rear window as the crown of his head disappears down the driveway. When he's gone she lifts her eyes and sees rain clouds in the distance.

She feels lost in a way she can only describe as homeless.

* * *

She waits two weeks but he does not return. She tends the garden, urging spring towards the morning when it will be warm enough to plant.

In the yard she feels the presence of the giant firs and cedars standing guard behind her. The May rains leave a gauzy mist and the forest becomes a ghostly rampart. But she does not feel protected by their fortress ranks, only cut off by the density of green, as though she were the last person on earth. A Gretel lost from her Hansel.

To resuscitate the feel of his presence, she slips arms into jacket and feet into rubber boots and heads into the trees' dark shadows. But the quiet in the forest emphasizes the missing snuffling of the dogs. He has claimed them as his alone and their loss is one more betrayal, a kidnapping of her children.

In her chest that same knot of air as when they began and he said things like, “I want you….right here.” But this time the knot is a block of cement, her breath held in fear. She keeps her body tight, unable to let go, and for the first hundred yards the branches whip at her face, roots grab at her boots. Dense fog shrouds the shadows and she walks with hands in front of her, a specter sensing the ground of this path trudged so often, always with the dogs, sometimes with him, and now so alone. Now she feels bear-like, awakening from a long hibernation. Hungry and stumbling with sleep.

Damp seeps through the wool of her sweater to the cotton shirt beneath. She closes the snaps on her jacket and hunches her shoulders, trying to stop the shivers that chase her. All around she can smell the wet: in the fingers of mist poking between crusty trunks and in the spongy moss beside the trail where once they had made fast, heated love. And under her feet the mulch of rotting bark, each year returning a little more of the trees to the earth. She moves forward.

But she is not going anywhere—merely trying to be at home alone with herself.

* * *

At first he had wanted them both to leave, find somewhere else to call home, the tissues of connection ravaged by the virus of his restlessness. But until his announcement, she was blind to the severity of the situation.

“Let's buy a forty acre spread in the interior,” he said.

She raised her eyebrows in disbelief. Her protest—“It's too open”—when she saw his seriousness.

“There's forest,” he countered. “Pine and aspen. Spruce.”

Such a small notion of ‘tree.' “Where's the cover in winter?” she scoffed. “You're wide open to the wind, snow, whatever.” Vehemently shaking her head.

And his sneer in response: “No sense of adventure.”

To stop his crazy talk, she suggested a trip to the Cariboo.

But the virus continued. Later it became clear it was her he needed to leave.

* * *

In the woods she breathes deep, listening with each stride to the whisper of boot cuffs against her shins.

What she thinks is,
You are who you are because of this land
.
The land with its rains and fogs and constant damp, the climate blown in across the sea towards steep coastal mountains. She stops, looks up, tries to see behind the trees to the rock face she knows is there, but the stand of forest is as tight as woven cedar withes.

This is her home
.
She knows it in a kind of
I've lived here all my life
manner but still she asks, “Is this where I want to die?”

So often, traveling to exotic lands and feeling in those foreign geographies another place to adopt. Trying the word ‘home' beneath swaying palm trees, ancient green-covered hills, classic limestone architecture. Standing, finally, at the westernmost edge of Portugal on a cliff overlooking the stormy Atlantic, remembering the raw West Coast Trail and mouthing the word in the presence of that other ocean, trying to sense its fit: “Home.”

But on her return from the alien shores, recalling her restless dreams of selling out and moving away, she wondered whether such thoughts signaled a betrayal of heritage.

Which is, perhaps, what has happened to him: a sudden fear of dying in the only place he's ever lived; an urge to travel taking hold and driving him toward the unknown. But why now, when he has never before wanted to be anywhere other than the rainforest? What has sent him in search of the new?

Summer

As the land warms she migrates toward the water. During the full heat of day the forest is her companion, but in the evening she is drawn back to the sea.

Drawn to the shore's ammoniac smells, the barnacled rocks loping down to the tide and the slimy weeds lurking as she reaches tentative toes, considering a swim in the dark water. Sometimes the answer is no, just sit and watch, see what the waves bring.

She likes the sand, the grit between her toes and the sudden surprise when her molars close on a stray grain. Seated at the edge of low tide, she scoops a handful, watches the grains flow through her fingers. She wonders how to catch time, prevent its escape.

As a child there had been camping trips to strange dark islands, landing on a beach somewhere far from home but knowing, intuitive, it was a beach like all the other west coast beaches of her life. Crabs, seaweed, and blue-shelled mussels clinging to wave-battered rocks. Scrambling over the slimed granite—Mother's voice calling out, “
Be careful…”
—finding oysters or clams and being allowed to eat them if the month had an ‘r' in it—“…
don't cut yourself on the barnacles!”

And once her father's boat breaking down in the middle of Georgia Strait, the land in sight but too far away to swim for, and anyway the fathomlessness of the black water with its lurking sea creatures waiting to bite her toes. Having to pee in a bucket in plain view of the world; knowing that, even asked to turn away, others could hear the hot pee plashing against the plastic sides.

Wishing for years she could be like her brother and pee over the gunwales, aiming for a piece of driftwood. But whenever she had craned her neck to locate his penis, there was nothing to see, just the arc of urine shooting out to sea. And all of it—the sea, the sky, the birds—reminding her of a picture in her social studies book, Christopher Columbus on the
Santa Maria
, bound for somewhere.

That was the picture she held in her mind during the last flight back from overseas. But as the jet dropped from the cloud layer high above the Fraser, her chest tightened in a rush of panic. She made herself look beyond the glinting wings at the wave-striped water below and when she saw the Georgia Strait with its tiny seiners and ferries zigzagging for the gentle green-treed land, a sudden rise of tears. And behind her tears the surprise of knowing.

It was—it is—the trees. The giant trees and the water, the ocean flanked by the rainforest, and in the distance a horizon surrounded by water. And more water.

She is woven into this west coast place, carrying it on her back like a shell, its presence an internal poultice.

But without him—without the landmarks he gave her—she feels naked and exposed. Unforested.

Fall

How many times had she gone away before understanding home? It was not until that cliff in northern Portugal, leaning out over the crashing waves below, that she felt the tug of the west coast, the impossibility of adopting another landscape. Now she thinks,
This is what he
needs to do in order to return
.

Still he does not call. She wonders whether he will ever come back…

When finally she'd come back, Vancouver was no longer in her, the blue ridge of mountains hidden behind the city's concrete walls and metropolitan aspirations, the jack-hammers drilling like constant mosquitoes in her ears. Within a month she made another run in search of the land she remembered.

And when she found it, the instant calm.

But first she had shivered, huddling into her body at the sight of dense coastal forest, the lofty height of trees overpowering any sense of self. Still later the vision reinforced the idea that the land was her sentinel.

In a cottage at ocean's edge she found safe harbour and the little house became her haven, a place to remove herself from the confusion about what mattered and who cared. At night the floors and walls came alive with carpenter ants ravaging the wood. But seated by the window she felt the wind across the waves and the protection of the trees, and so she stayed.

Sometimes during storms she'd watch the tugs working their booms in the lee of a nearby island. The orange and black hulls cajoling like oversized hens, lumbering back and forth among the rebellious brood of logs and nudging them into place with rubber-bumpered noses. In the worst of the storms, breakaways from the unruly booms leaped and thrashed at the edge of her deck, cavorting like summer seals. And that first year, when she forgot to lift the short stairway to the beach, the way the gales transformed her wooden steps into kindling.

She learned to identify the tugs by their engines, the eighteen pistons of the
Haida Brave
throbbing in the distance an hour before she sighted it, and another hour as it drifted south for the city lights. Some days she sat at the window with binoculars, watching the tugs as night fell, trying to see the deckhands and their captain and wondering about the kind of men that lived such a life. In the middle of the night, waking up for no reason, she'd peek through the blinds and be comforted by the sight of the tugs' running lights, the thought that someone else was awake with her.

The scene outside like an ongoing movie, always something to watch. The spectacle of the late fall storms and the glory of the summer sunsets her reason for living.

Until his arrival.

Winter

The fields around the house turn brown with the approach of the cold; the long grass, unmowed since he left, bows under the weight of morning frosts. November slides into December; he's been gone seven months.

In the cold months she is most aware of being alone. The season when her father died, his eyes burning at the end of a life, and afterward her mother's similar sag into death. Her brother also gone early, still a boy. A boy who would not recognize his sister if he were to reappear now. She has become old in this world by herself, with only the landscape for family.