Excessive Joy Injures the Heart (6 page)

Which she now saw as a surreal city, the Yellowhead Highway vs. the Yellow Brick Road, Saskatchewan the Canadian version of Kansas, and then here it was again, that great and weirdly comical concrete monolith, the Sturdy Stone Building, a splay-legged stone giant towering over the flat little metropolis and, just beyond it, an automated primeval chirping at the
intersections of the streets close to City Hall. But what is all this chirping
for
, she wondered, then it occurred to her that it must be for blind people, they would need to have some kind of instructions on how to hurry across the street, Western drivers were such cowboys, but when she turned back toward the park (not feeling quite safe on this street after all) she saw the way the bellhops carrying suitcases into the hotel across the street from the Bessborough were dressed like Hitler Jugend, and it was at this point that she considered crossing over to the Bessborough for coffee in the little café up on the mezzanine — what was it called, Tree Tops? — so she could sit at one of the window tables and look out over the floodlit lawn at the back. But she wanted to be out in the city even more, it was a Thursday night and people were still out on the street, she wanted to be walking among them. Which had to be wrong, on the day her father had died. Even if she was continuing to feel absolute relief for him. She also couldn’t stop hearing the lines from “Chelsea Hotel” that kept repeating themselves in her head. But wasn’t that a song about suicide? Well, so it was then, what of it?

A cowboy wearing a white Stetson was coming toward her as she was walking in the direction of the Midtown Plaza. She decided that he must be from somewhere even farther west because except for the Hutterite cowboys dressed all in black and wearing black Stetsons, Saskatoon wasn’t really all that much of a cowboy town. “Hey!” he called out to her. “Hey. You look lost.”

“I’m not lost,” she told him. “How can I be lost? This is almost my hometown.”

“Almost! So what
happened
? Didn’t we make the
grade
?” Dancing backwards, or at least dancing as much backwards as
his drunkenness would allow. Really, it was an attempt at dancing backwards that was more like stumbling sideways to the music of a joke only he could hear.

But then she saw that he wasn’t really all that drunk after all; his eyes were undrunk as he asked her if she would care to join him for a drink at the Senator Hotel.

She said, “I can’t, I’m too tired, I have to get up early tomorrow morning for an appointment.” She noticed that she was unable to say that her father had died, it was news that she couldn’t bring herself to give to a stranger. And yet she wanted to. Wanted to say, This is the real world, this is real life, this is what happened: my father died.

“An appointment,” he said in a marvelling voice.

“Yes.”

“How dull.”

“Not really.”

“Not really,” he mimicked her.

“And so I have to go now.”

“So go then. Am I stopping you?”

No one was in the lobby when she stepped into the glass elevator, and her relief at being alone was so extreme that she almost mistook it for happiness as she looked out at the lights on the far side of the dark water.

Once she got back to her room she made herself a cup of Think-O
₂
tea and then stood at the big windows drinking it while she looked out at the night. It still amazed her that at nine o’clock this morning she’d had no idea at all that by sundown she’d be so many hundreds — or wasn’t it even thousands? — of miles from home. She looked out at the Sturdy Stone Building in the eerie hot blue of the prairie night and
remembered her father reading her the story about the houses of the three little pigs: the house made out of straw, the house made out of bricks, the house made of something else, she thought it was sticks. But there could also have been a fourth building, a sturdy stone building, or at least this was how she’d thought of it when she was a child, but at some point someone must have explained to her that the sturdy stone building was only called the sturdy stone building because it was named after two Saskatoon politicians, a Mr. Sturdy and a Mr. Stone. Wasn’t her father the one who’d taken the time to tell her this? She remembered him reading aloud to her at bedtime. The story about the Snow Queen, and
The Wind in the Willows
, his voice in such a familiar and soothing monotone (from exhaustion, she now understood, although at the time it had just seemed to be the voice he used when he read aloud to his children).

At ten the next morning, an uncle of her mother’s came to pick her up for the drive north. She sat beside him in a car that smelled offensively new, her chilled feet in the ballet slippers she’d brought along on the plane to use as actual slippers. She was so longing for him to drive faster that she kept tensing her feet to urge him over the speed limit. She knew that her father was dead, but she wanted to get to him in time to say goodbye to him before he died. This didn’t make any sense, even to her, but her feet believed it.

She was also afraid that her mother would be angry with her because she hadn’t brought the right clothes for the funeral, she only had her black skirt and her pink silk shirt, her grey jacket. Not that her father would have given a damn, he would have just wanted beautiful music and people wearing whatever they happened to be wearing when they heard he was dead, he
wouldn’t want people dressed for grief and getting all miffed behind spooky black veils, he’d hate all that, he really would, and she began to see herself as the ambassador for her father, as the one who must stand up for his rights, what he would want, against the self-serving demands of the living, and she looked out at the prairie and saw herself at his funeral, heard voices behind her here and there: the only daughter, his favourite, she was always such a beautiful girl, she’ll miss him. She felt deeply ashamed of herself, using her sorrow as a platform on which she was the star, but it did seem to help her.

But now they were already driving through Turtleford, then beyond it, driving west to St. Walburg, stomach-dropping country, home, almost home, then there was the house, set far back from the highway and still painted a sodden Italian mustard, a Tuscan villa on the Saskatchewan plain, and as they were slowly proceeding up the long drive she remembered being drunk at a party one night last summer and telling people that when she was a child her mother brought so many cushions and fabrics home from Ikea that she thought Ikea must be a country in Africa. But now they were already here and walking across gravel to find the house crowded with brothers and wives and girlfriends and nephews and neighbours, her mother somehow fiercely vague — could someone be that? — in tan slacks and a black sweatshirt, glancing over at her to say, “Oh
there
you are, why don’t you come with me to the funeral parlour and we’ll pick out a casket for Daddy …”

“But didn’t Daddy always say he wanted to be cremated?”

It was as if she had just said something in extremely bad taste, for her mother’s look was now the look of the other
mother. Not the mother who wrote on mauve notepaper “Much much love and kiss-kiss,” but the mother who stared at her children coldly, her fixed gaze inspecting, unkind. “Please don’t start making complications, it’s too difficult —”

And so before she had time to say hello to any of her brothers or her little nephews she was already off again, climbing up into the cab of the truck with her mother, then they were bumping out to the highway, fields coming at them backwards, fields spinning around them — I’m going to be sick, she thought, I’m going to throw up if I don’t get some air — and she tried to roll down the window although it felt sealed, the air airless, but at last she was able to squeakily roll it part of the way down, the hot wind coming into the truck as they were rattling toward North Battleford.

I’ve forgotten all of it, she thought, but it wasn’t true, it was all here, she remembered everything, then she was asking her mother about the brother in Tanzania and the two brothers in London and her mother was telling her that they wouldn’t be able to get home for the funeral, but now she was also noticing something she really
had
forgotten: that her mother’s way of announcing her virtues was to apologize for them. “I apologize for all the commotion back at the house,” her mother was saying — her mother! who never apologized! — “but I
did
want to invite everyone to sleep over who needs to sleep over. I’m just not a selfish person. I wish that I could be, it would make things so much easier. But I’m not, it can’t be helped, I’ve always been generous. So be it.”

The funeral parlour, a kind of dwarfed white colonial mansion, had a tall black door with a brass knocker on it. But there was also a bell. Claire’s mother, pressing it,
whispered to her, “You wait in the reception room while I deal with the undertaker.”

Claire stood in a formal room whose wallpaper had tiny white ferns on it. She still hadn’t cried, there was only a high nervy ticking up on the right side of her forehead, not quite a headache, she rubbed at it with her fingers while she tried to identify a clop-clopping from farther down the street. It kept getting louder until a polished brown horse went trotting smartly by, pulling a black carriage, a man in a black coat and top hat up in the driver’s seat, a cargo of women in sunglasses and cardigans in the back. Were they tourists? In North Battleford? But where was her father? Was he shelved away in cold storage in some room at the back? God, she would have to find herself something to read. She went over to a small magazine stand and picked up a copy of
National Geographic
, then sat down and flipped through it. But she wasn’t able to take any of it in.

Then home again: her nephews running to her to show her their new yellow kites, each kite with a big blue fish on it, wanting her to watch as they made them fly, and she did watch for ten minutes or so, then walked around to the front of the house to look for her brothers. She found them talking in a conspiratorial little group down on the front lawn, all of them barefoot in the hot spring afternoon and all of them smoking. They were country boys and they were all still smokers. She accepted a cigarette when Felix, her youngest brother (looking impenetrable in black jeans and dark glasses) offered it to her, in memory of their father.

The screen door slammed a few moments later, and their mother, who’d now changed into black nylons and a black dress, came out and stood on the verandah to watch for the hearse. And here it already was, winking in the bright sunlight as it turned onto their laneway, then making its way up their drive. It came to a dignified stop to the left of the verandah and four undertakers (four farm boys) in navy-blue suits got out of it. They carefully eased the coffin out of its back end, then carried it up the verandah stairs and into the house. Claire and her brothers watched as it was carried up the steps, and they were still watching when the four undertakers came back out again. They all watched as the four of them got into their deluxe black panel truck and drove sedately away.

“The fab four,” said Max, and they all smiled with a certain impressed sadness at that. But Max was the most formally dressed of all Claire’s brothers, in a white shirt and black dress pants, his hair combed back into a ponytail of fair quills and held in a circlet of berry-red beads and black twine.

But now Helmut, their oldest brother, was narrowing his eyes at Claire. “So you’re a college girl now.”

“After a fashion.”

“How long has
this
been going on?”

“For three years,” she told him. “As a matter of fact.”

“Then what?”

“Then I’ll have to do a graduate degree, then my doctorate, so I can teach.” But she was thinking, with a kind of despair, of the long years ahead of her.

“Claire as a professor.”

“The thought amuses you?”

“Just a bit.”

“It frightens me.”

“Why do it then?”

“Because the one thing I’ve learned from all these years of being your sister is that terror is thrilling.”

Her other brothers laughed, and Helmut even laughed too, but then he couldn’t control himself, he had to reach over to shove her dark glasses back up on her nose. She was surprised, but only batted him away. “My brother, El Mosquito.” He had always been her most bossy brother. He was called Uncle Hell by his two little nephews, and whenever he sent Claire a Christmas card he always wrote inside it in green ink, “A very happy Christmas from all of us here.” And then, in parentheses, “Uncle Hell and family.” But at this point Max, her most gallant brother, offered her another cigarette, then pulled a lighter out of his pocket and held the flame out to her. “Here, Claire. Let me light that for you.”

Helmut said, “This is the brand Dad smoked.”

Felix looked over at him. “The brand that killed him.”

“Overwork killed him,” said Helmut.

“That too,” said Max.

The phone ringing in the middle of the night was what Claire remembered most, her father’s footsteps running down the stairs in the dark, her own quick run over to her bedroom window just in time to see him, his overshoes still unbuckled, wading through the blown snow out to his truck with his canvas veterinarian’s bag and then using his right arm as a giant windshield wiper to wipe the left-hand side of the windshield clear of snow.