My Life Among the Apes (9 page)

THE CREECH SISTERS WERE HARDLY old but they were “mature girls,” as my father called them. Ellen, the elder sister, was past forty and Louise was three or four years younger. Unlike my mother, they both had jobs, Ellen as a veterinarian’s assistant and Louise as a speech therapist, one of the first in the province. Both of them continued to live with their mother, which
my
mother said was the root of their problem. I couldn’t exactly see that they had a problem except for their rather plain faces and that they seemed to smile only as a nervous habit. My father, who knew my mother was one quarter Scots, joked that they had dour Scots blood and
that
was the root of their problem.

Despite my always thinking of them as a pair, the Creech sisters were not quite so alike as all that. Ellen seemed more sombre and uneasy around people; she usually walked on the paths between the cottages with her eyes cast down. She had long black hair that she kept done up unless it was wet. When my father greeted her, remarking on the “sumptuous” weather or asking if she had seen the Canada Geese overhead, honking like “Manhattan taxi-cabs,” she always blushed. Louise, the younger, was not quite so timid. She sometimes chatted with my father and seemed to feel at ease with him. Louise had the better figure and moved in a more feminine manner, although both sisters were busty and wide-hipped. I tried not to appear to watch them when they took Mrs. Creech down to the beach in her wheelchair and then splashed about in the shallows. I sometimes had to tear my eyes away from Louise’s very white thighs. Once my mother put her hand on my shoulder and said if I had nothing better to do she knew of plenty of chores around the cottage.

Some nights, I didn’t fall asleep immediately. Instead, I lay in bed and thought about the Creech sisters and became hard. I was still a couple of months away from discovering how to relieve my own arousal and just lay on my side, towards the wall and away from my brothers, and tried to keep still. It never occurred to me that my older brother might have similar thoughts. He never looked at the Creech Sisters. I suppose if there had been any teenage girls on the island, we would have had crushes on them, but there were only little kids. So the Creech sisters became the object of my rapt attention and reveries. No doubt that was why what they did to my father seemed so exciting and lurid and appalling.

IT RAINED ONLY ONE AFTERNOON during those three weeks. The sky clouded over and the rain came almost instantly, a true downpour. We fled up from the beach, screaming with pleasure, and stood breathlessly on the porch as the lake vanished in the mist. Inside, my mother said that the sun was waiting behind the clouds and the storm wouldn’t last long. So my brothers and I started a game of Monopoly, which I always lost because my older brother managed to trade me out of my best properties. Only my father was missing; he had gone wandering off as usual and my mother was starting to look concerned when the door opened and he came in, soaked to the skin, half-covered in mud, his face flushed from the exertion of running.

“Don’t you come in with those wet clothes,” she commanded, and while he stripped on the mat she brought him a towel and robe. Then he fell into a beat-up easy chair and said to no one in particular, “Well, the damnedest thing just happened to me.”

This was not my father’s usual mode of expression, which was why I turned my head away from the game board to look at him again. He was trying to sound folksy to indicate that whatever had happened ought not be taken too seriously. I cannot remember precisely any of his other words; instead, I can “see” what he described almost as if I had witnessed it myself, no doubt because of the countless times I imagined the scene afterwards.

My father had been taking a walk and, preoccupied with one of his client’s legal problems, hadn’t noticed the clouds overhead. When the rain began he was a hundred or so yards beyond the last cottage, wandering among the small stand of birch trees that were scarred by kids pulling off the bark. He started to run, but he was almost instantly soaked through and, peering through the rain, he saw Louise Creech waving to him from the back window of her cottage. There must have been a lamp on for him to see her.

The Creech sisters often asked my father to do small favours around the cottage, since neither of them, as Louise said, was “very handy.” While he himself had virtually no practical skills, my father’s pride did not allow him to admit it, so he would go off with a screwdriver or wrench from the toolkit the restaurant owner kept under the sink and come home again looking triumphant for not having made the problem worse. Well, he saw Louise Creech wave from the window and he ran through the rain to the front of the cottage and up the slippery porch steps. Louise opened the door. She was wearing a raincoat and he guessed that she had been about to come fetch him. Their mother was napping, she said, and then told him that a leak had started in the roof above the sisters’ bedroom and they didn’t know what to do. “How about praying for the rain to stop?” my father joked, but Louise didn’t smile and he followed her inside. He took off his shoes and socks, whispering that he would be just a moment, and this time Louise giggled. “You don’t have to whisper,” she said. “When our mother naps she’s dead to the world on account of the painkillers.”

She took him down the hall, past Mrs. Creech’s closed door behind which he could hear her snoring as deeply as a man, to the bedroom at the end. The door was ajar and Louise paused in the narrow hall so that my father would enter first. When he did the first thing he saw was the elder sister, Ellen, lying naked on the nearest bed. She was on her back and her eyes were closed, her arms at her side and her large breasts flattened by gravity. Without opening her eyes, Ellen said something. “Bake me” was how it sounded to my father, although after he realized she must have said, “Take me.” Looking down on her, my father was at a loss what to do. I don’t believe he felt any sexual stirring at all, not the way I did when I later imagined the scene. He turned to the younger sister for help only to see that Louise had let the raincoat slip from her shoulders. She wore only a pair of white underpants. She looked right into my father’s eyes and smiled.

I don’t think he got a good look at Louise because she was standing so close to him. I do remember what he told us next: “I got the hell out of there.”

Which he did. It was his lawyer’s instinct not to be caught in a compromising situation. Mumbling a pardon under his breath, he carefully edged past Louise and almost sprinted in his bare feet down the hall. He stuffed his wet socks into his pocket, stuck his feet into his squelching shoes, and was out the door. He slipped on the stairs and though he managed to grab the rail he still landed on his behind, bruising his tailbone. On the sloping path to our cottage he slipped a second time, going down in the mud. He slowed a little for the rest of the way, although I don’t think he felt safe until our door was closed behind him.

ONLY YEARS LATER DID IT occur to me to wonder whether my father ought to have told my mother, or if he needed to, why he didn’t wait until they were alone. Why, in front of his three young sons, would he relate an amusing little story out of two women trying to seduce him? Perhaps he thought that the more witnesses to his story the better. Or that if he made light of it in our presence, our mother would see it the same way. Perhaps he believed us too young to know what he was talking about. Or simply wasn’t thinking. My younger brother certainly didn’t listen and my older brother gave no reaction. As for my mother, she stopped kneading the bread dough on the table, but did not look up. Her face had gone as white as the flour on her hands. When my father finished speaking, she washed up in the kitchen sink, took off her apron, and went into their bedroom, shutting the door behind her. The ball of dough sat on the table for the rest of the day and into the next morning, when I tentatively poked my finger through the hardened skin that had formed over the still-soft centre.

THE RAIN DID NOT RETURN, but it might just as well have. A pall seemed to fall over our cottage. My younger brother noticed the least, although even he seemed subdued in his play. My older brother began spending more time alone, walking along the shore and poking a stick under rocks. While my father pretended to be his cheerful self, I could see he was concerned about my mother. I often caught him looking at her; sometimes he would go up to whisper something in her ear or try to take her around the waist, and she would turn passive, neither responding nor pulling away. He did not take the boat to the mainland again, as if afraid to leave her. Before this I had no awareness that my parents had a private life, an ongoing emotional drama that existed separately from their relations with us.

I could not understand what my mother was upset about. After all, my father had refused the Creech sisters and had even told us about it. When we saw the sisters now, which was unavoidable, he alone greeted them as he had always done. My mother seemed to blame him, as if he was not only responsible but had given in to the temptation. Otherwise, why would she look so wounded?

My own feelings about what had happened were decidedly confused. I found thinking about it far too exciting to be wholly glad that my father had refused. Or maybe I wished that it had happened to my father, except that he wasn’t my father but someone else, such as me ten years in the future. I just couldn’t help wanting to know what exactly might have happened if the person who wasn’t my father, who was me, hadn’t run away. The possibility of one man and two women had never occurred to me. On one hand it seemed almost a waste, considering that I could barely imagine dealing satisfactorily with one. But on the other hand ... well. In some way I was disappointed by my father’s honourable retreat. How could he not have felt his resolve weaken in the presence of Ellen Creech, amazingly naked on the bed, her black hair undone (as I pictured it) and fanning out around her head. Or Louise Creech in her underpants (which I had seen hanging on the washing line), gazing into his eyes? If I was my father I would not have been able to resist. I would have kissed Louise on the mouth and put my hand on her breast. I would have lain down on top of Ellen even in my wet clothes!

At the end of the week our holiday was over and we went home again. Then my parents did something that I could remember them doing only once before: they went on a trip without us. A woman named Mrs. Kratzuk came to stay with us for what seemed like a month, but couldn’t have been more than a few days. She was a vile cook and we survived largely on bread and peanut butter. I can’t remember where they went, only that my father arranged it all and that my mother — as he expected — resisted going but finally gave in.

When they came home, bearing expensive gifts for us, my mother was happy. She seemed to have fallen in love with my father all over again. I didn’t realize it then, but I see now that the real seduction took place not at the cottage but during those few days away. Or perhaps not really a seduction, but a patient and persistent courtship. I wonder if they felt — despite whichever first-class hotel they stayed in — a little like their younger selves, when my father lived in an ill-kept boarding house and my mother in a dormitory and they reached out to each other in need.

The following summer we went to Montreal for our holiday, where we visited art galleries and went to nice restaurants and my father bantered in French with the waiters. I assumed that my mother had forbidden our return to the cottage, but in fact the owner had managed to pay off his bill and took the property back from us.

FORTY YEARS LATER, MY MOTHER is dead and my father mourns for her in his retirement. Both my brothers have taken after my father; they are lawyers, the elder a law professor, as well as loyal husbands and devoted fathers. Why I turned out differently is the haunting question of my life, but it is perhaps the reason that I remember this incident, which my brothers both claim to have forgotten.

A small detail of our last leaving of the island has recently come back to me. One of the boats came to take us back to the mainland and we filled it with suitcases and boxes. The wind had picked up, making the water a little choppy. I held tightly onto the side of the boat as the man stood in the shallows in his rubber boots and pushed us off. Looking back at the island, I saw Ellen and Louise Creech, standing by a spruce tree that had been split by lightning years ago. They were watching us. My mother must have seen them, too, for I heard her say quietly, “Those poor girls.”

I wonder why I forgot that last sight of them for so long. Perhaps I didn’t want to think of them as pitiable, for that would have spoiled the imagining that played over and over in my head. Recalling my mother’s voice now, it is clear to me that she never really doubted my father’s loyalty or believed him responsible. She must have been upset by deeper feelings of inadequacy, the sort that she suffered from all her life and that could be triggered by a seemingly harmless word from my father. I feel no disappointment in my father now, only admiration for the way he knew what was good in his life and what he wanted most. And I think of the Creech sisters, those poor girls. What they were hoping for and what they didn’t find.

The Brooklyn Revenge

I GOT MYSELF A NICE little sublet on Ninth Street between Avenues A and B in the East Village. It was about ten steps from Thompkins Square Park. I remember reading how the park had been turned into a squatters’ village, homeless people or maybe drunks and addicts living in taped-together shacks until Mayor Dinkins bulldozed them out. Anyway, now Thompkins Square Park was all winding paths between the lush green flora, constantly tended by gardeners, although certain benches were occupied most of the day by runaway kids with their knapsacks and guitars and skinny dogs. I liked sitting in the park with a book of poems or my notebook and a take-out coffee, like an old hippy who’d always lived there.

I was sixty-one years old and preferred Birkenstocks, Indian skirts, narrow-strapped tops that showed off my shoulder blades. My friends always said that I looked like a refugee from some hipper time and place. And, different as New York was, I felt immediately at home. Even at night, the sirens and car horns and drunken singing made me feel safer than those dark and empty lawns.

My name is Cleo Dunkelman. I had been a widow going on fourteen months. A mother of three grown children, grandmother of two. A part-time bookkeeper, now retired. I had come to New York for what my oldest daughter, my most exasperating child, insisted on calling “revenge.” I supposed she was right and to myself, if not to her, I began to call it “the Brooklyn Revenge,” since it was going to take place across the river.

But I’m not quite ready to talk about that. First, I want to tell how, in New York, I became something else as well. A poet. Back in the late sixties in college (when, in fact, I wasn’t a hippy but a good girl, going to class from my parents’ house, dating Harry on Saturday nights) I took a few frivolous literature courses and fell unabashedly in love with poetry. A love which continued even after I married and quit my job when I became pregnant, and ran our house and raised the kids and kept the books for a couple of dozen small businesses, working at the dining room table. It was my pleasure and indulgence to buy a new poetry book, at first one of the classics, later one of the modern poets, someone I’d never heard of but who caught me with a title or a line, which was how I fell for a Swedish poet named Lars Gustafsson, a Hungarian named Dezso Tandori, a Canadian named Roo Borson. I didn’t even have anywhere to put those sliver-thin books; they were piled on the floor by my side of the bed, stuffed between the cookbooks in the kitchen. As far as Harry was concerned, reading poetry was my hobby, equivalent to scrapbooking or learning to play the dulcimer. Maybe he felt it justified his hobby, too, which was cheating on me.

In all those years of making dinner and figuring out how to deduct a trip to Miami as a business expense, of running the kids to skating lessons and dance recitals, not one poem did I write. Poetry wasn’t about expressing myself, but falling into someone else’s words. I had no secret frustrated desire. But, in New York, the first time I left my apartment to go for a walk, I went into a stationery shop and bought a Moleskine notebook and a pen. I went into the park, sat on a bench, and immediately wrote a poem. I am not saying it was a good poem, or original, or worth anything. I’m not going to give it to you here to read, because I have no need. But I wrote three poems that day, two the next, and it kept going. I began taking my notebook into Café Orlins, which was two steps below the curb and so felt underground, and which is why I can say that besides everything else, besides being just another woman who was cheated on, I was also a poet.