February (27 page)

A woman in a fluorescent lemon-coloured vest came along with a long pole with a claw that she manipulated with a squeeze-lever in the handle. The words
Cleaning Operative
were written on the back of the woman’s vest, and she reached the claw under the seat of the sleeping Indian man and snagged a crumpled napkin and drew it out without touching the man’s pant leg, and she dropped the napkin in the garbage trolley she was pulling behind her. Helen had the idea that the cleaning operative had reached into the man’s dreams and taken out a plot turn. She had surgically removed the key, the turning point upon which everything hinged, from the man’s dream. Or it was her own dream. The napkin had been like a plug and all the world on this side would swirl down the drain in a great spiral into a parallel universe, and Helen either had that idea or she dreamt it. She felt herself dropping off.

The soiled napkin had held everything in place, exactly so, and without it, all that came before and all that followed would be misaligned, and forget it, she would never get home, and she jerked awake, and when she did the Indian man was gone and in his seat, directly across from Helen, with a cup of coffee, was Louise.

I hitchhiked, Louise said.

. . . . .

Helen’s Paint, November 2008

BARRY SAID RED
was an unforgiving colour. He hoped she wasn’t thinking red.

The number of coats, he said. He’d had a lady in Cowan Heights wanted to cover up a red living room and it had taken ten coats.

Barry had agreed to stay on and do the painting after all.

Not a word of a lie, Barry said. He looked at the spackled walls and he had a stainless steel ruler he tapped against his leg while he spoke.

Lately there’s a lot of dark brown around, he said. There were pauses when he and Helen spoke. They took the time to imagine brown walls. They could do this because they weren’t in a hurry, because everything, every utterance, could be turned on its head and mean more than one thing.

Chocolate, they call it, he said.

I’m thinking light, Helen said. Barry nodded.

Eggshell, she said.

He had worked on the mainland, Barry said. He’d had a guy ask him to build a mansion in the country by a lake, and he had laid down black marble floors. This was back when he was a kid.

That house, he said. He shook his head as if he could not believe his own capabilities. Marble floors, he repeated. He could get loquacious during the breaks. He liked to view his work and then he would tell bits of his story. They were all stories about construction. They were about taking a ripsaw to something, or a hammer or a crowbar.

He was thinking of Toronto in the seventies when he said money. What opportunity. He had worked sometimes two or three months at a stretch without taking a day off. The money.

Like picking it off the trees, he said. He had a way of squinting into the distance when he spoke. His eyes were a grey Helen had not seen before and she had to admit she found him to be good-looking. She did not tell Louise. She did not tell her daughters. Barry’s eyes were grey and they did not change in outdoor light. They weren’t sometimes blue or sometimes hazel.

Today she made him a sandwich and put carrot sticks and olives on the plate. She wanted to make the plate attractive. He has someone who calls on his cell and asks for things, interrupts his work, and when he hangs up he is utterly lost in the exchange. He sings quietly to himself.

Barry Kielly loves whoever it is on the phone. It is a calming, peaceful love and Helen is shocked by how territorial and disappointed she feels in the face of it. She has, on occasion, sat down in the middle of the staircase and listened. Or she has stopped sewing and listened. Today she stops with the squeaky Windex and listens. Unaware she is listening; straining to hear.

She made him a sandwich because she was making one for herself, but she found herself peeling carrots too. Garnish. She was making a garnish for the plates, and when you live alone you are a stranger to the idea of garnish. You are a stranger to any flourishes at all. Because you do not exist: there is the
TV
and your sister Louise and the wedding dresses and the grandchildren; there is the worry of John. There is Christmas. But Helen does not put a garnish on a plate.

Both Helen and Barry are taken up with their work and the precision it demands. And Helen listens to Barry. She draws patterns and cuts the brown tissue paper and pins it to the fabric and uses the expensive shears and hangs the pieces over the backs of the furniture. There are stacks of
Vogue
and
Bride
and
Cosmo
. She draws with graphite or she draws with a charcoal pencil. She has a tomato pincushion and a wicker sewing basket with compartments within compartments and needles and satin lining, and it looks like it comes from another age.

People like the idea of a hand-sewn wedding dress because it is a kind of talisman.

Lately some of her brides are lesbians and they are married on boats in the harbour or on windswept cliffs, and they do not go in for flounces and bows, but they want to be beautiful just the same and not in an ironic way.

My son was after buying us the plane tickets, Barry had said. Come on, Dad, we’ll go up to Toronto for a game. His mother was a contrary woman. I don’t pretend to understand women. We got up there and one afternoon I said to him, I said, Let’s look for the house. I must have drove for four or five hours and do you think I could find that house? Thousands of houses, and all of them exactly alike. We never did find it.

Now it is dusk, and Helen is standing in front of the mirror in the bathroom holding a sodden ball of paper towel. She was a young woman, she thinks. When Cal died.

And at first you think you will not be alone forever. You think the future is infinite. Childhood seems to have been infinite. Downstairs, the saw revs and Helen hears a stick of wood fall to the floor. And so will the future be infinite, and it cannot be spent alone.

But, she has learned, it is possible: not to meet someone. The past yields, it gives way, it goes on forever. The future is unyielding. It is possible that the past has cracked off, the past has clattered to the floor, and what remains is the future and there is not very much of that. The future is the short end of the stick.

. . . . .

A Blessing, November 2008

JANE WALKS IN
the dusk through dropping temperatures, and it has started to snow. Christmas garlands swooping across Spadina Avenue. Everything lit up. She has already passed two Salvation Army Santas with hand bells and plastic globes full of crumpled bills.

A while ago she passed a choir of at least thirty men and women singing in Latin on the steps of the stone church at Bloor and Avenue Road. They were dressed in red and white gowns, and clouds of breath hung in the air. The conductor pinched her fingers together and pulled them apart as if pulling an invisible thread taut, and the music snagged. A sudden breathless silence. The conductor nodded, once, twice, and flung her hands up and the voices boomed again at twice the volume.

Jane kept walking because her feet were cold, but she had an eye out for a taxi. She will see John in the morning and she is full of dread. Why did she call him? She is afraid of what he will say. She is thrilled.

A man wrapped in a voluminous patchwork quilt stops Jane and waves a sheaf of papers. It’s a novel I wrote in a course I done to help me achieve employment, the man says. He gives the papers a little shake.

This is a book about redemption, the man says. The glorious light that come into the world with the baby Jesus.

Jane opens her purse and takes out a fistful of change. The man turns his head and coughs hard. His chest is full of phlegm. Jane can hear it. The man has dreadlocks, rust and grey and whitish and hanging over his shoulders, and a veil of snow covers his head.

I just need a break, the man says. He is gaunt, and the thinness makes him look regal, and one lens in his black-framed glasses shows a white, burning star from the streetlight.

The shops are all closing and Jane sees the traffic is thinning out. The man has been crouched in the doorway of a deli and there is a line of very yellow chickens hanging upside down inside the window, and on a bed of AstroTurf there are silver trays full of crushed ice, showing dark steaks marbled with skeins of fat, and a stainless steel bowl of pig hearts.

The Christ Child, the man says quietly, looking past Jane’s shoulder down the street. Came into a world of darkness and eternal damnation and he brought the light.

Jane smoothes out the pages of the man’s novel on her thigh. She sees that the handwriting is regimented and full of hard points that dig into the lined paper. The novel is about Rastafarianism.

The man has reached under the quilt and is fiddling with something below. Jane can hear his breathing go ragged, but she doesn’t care what he’s fiddling with. Maybe it is the cold or her hormones, or it’s because she will soon be a mother, or it is the choir bellowing out in the dark in a dead language—she doesn’t know what it is, but she feels compassion for this man. She will deal with John when he shows up. Jane will tell him: this is how it is.

Last week, the man wheezes. Last week I accepted the spirit of the Holy Ghost into my heart. He draws out from under the quilt an inhaler and puts it in his mouth and presses the button and draws a deep breath. His eyes bulge.

Jane skims a few pages of the man’s novel, tilting the paper under the street light. She brushes away a few snowflakes.

Do not eat anything with a face, the man’s novel says. There is mention of good and evil and a pure light that will break the hearts of men, grind them to dust, and the dust will blow away. She reads a line that says:
Unto your children and your children’s children, and unto them will be born a child, and that child will be the light of the world
. Jane’s baby somersaults, a kick in the belly, a kick in the spine.

I am only asking for enough to get these few pages photocopied, the man says. So I can get a start in the world of publishing. I just need a start. Just last week I was born again.

Jane opens her purse and gives the man a twenty. He scrunches it up in his fist and draws the fist back under the quilt. Jane thinks he must have put the money in his pocket, because now he puts his hand back out for the pages of his novel.

Bless you, he says.

. . . . .

John’s Cornish Hen, November 2008

JOHN IS EATING
snails in a restaurant and they are doused in garlic butter and parsley and he has a little prong to dig them out of the shells but the prong keeps bending like boiled spaghetti and his high school math teacher is at the other end of the table. Then he notices one of the snails has crawled out of its shell and left a slimy trail on the white rim of the plate, and it is moving, very slowly, clinging to the edge of the rim.

He puts the snail in his pocket and forgets about it, but then he’s in a taxi going through the streets of New York and there is something big and wet jammed in his pocket, and it has soaked the leg of his pants and he has to work hard to get it out of the tight pocket, and it’s a Cornish hen. It is plucked and cold, as if it has come from the freezer.

John knows intuitively that the hen can think. He feels a gushing love for it. A geyser of love and the need to protect it. He knows it hasn’t acquired language yet but it is something he can love with his whole heart, and though it is deformed in some way and therefore it is wrong, very wrong, to hope for it, he does hope. He hopes that maybe it will someday speak and love him back.

It occurs to him now that he might be dreaming, and he remembers to put his lucid dreaming techniques into practice. If he tries to read in a dream all print will appear as gibberish. Then he will know unequivocally that he is asleep. There is a physical ache of sadness radiating through his chest, a love so deep and piercing and lonely it is paralyzing him.

He can feel himself beginning to drool. He sees the taxi driver’s identification paper on the dash, and he tries to read it but it’s in Arabic, and since he cannot read Arabic he has no idea if the writing is gibberish or not. No idea if he is dreaming.

Then he is running through a building, an abandoned school. He finds the hen trembling in the corner of an empty classroom. It has been attacked by a cat. It has several puncture wounds and is bleeding. He runs his hand over the hen’s cold, blue-white, bumpy skin. Here and there he can feel little prickles where the very ends of feathers were left in the animal when it was plucked. He tries to cuddle it in his arms and he is weeping. He sticks his finger in one of the wounds the cat has made. He sticks his finger deep into the puncture and it is warm and wet inside, and when he pulls his finger out his fingernail is rimmed in blood, under the nail and along the cuticle.

He jerks awake: the plane to Toronto, through the night sky. He is scared and exhilarated. He wants to get there. He wants to arrive.

. . . . .

The Phone, February 1982

THE PHONE RANG
and woke Helen. Telling her to turn on the radio.

Do you have the radio on?

That’s the way the families were informed: It’s on the radio. Turn on the radio.

Nobody from the oil company called.

What must have happened was this: the men had not been dead an hour and the company had public relations on it. They had lawyers. Helen can imagine the meeting in the boardroom. Or maybe it all happened on the phone. She can imagine the kind of language employed.

Or there was horror. Of course there was horror and it had numbed them. When did words like
situation
enter the vocabulary? Because Helen believes they thought of it that way. She believes they all wanted to
manage the situation.

And the fury of the storm outside the boardroom window. The veils of snow erasing everything outside and then everything bleeding back through. The wind roared and the Basilica was gone in a blast of snow and came back. The edge of the building showed through the white in a lull of the wind and then the rest of the building came through. Gower Street was gone and came back with a new howling gust. The wind was an eraser working backwards, erasing all the white, leaving the buildings grainy and soft-edged and smudged.