Sea of Tranquility

S
EA OF
T
RANQUILITY

~
a novel
~

Lesley Choyce

Copyright © Lesely Choyce, 2003

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.

Editor: Barry Jowett
Copy-Editor: Andrea Pruss
Design: Jennifer Scott
Printer: Transcontinental
Special thanks to Julia Sway for editorial assistance

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data
Choyce, Lesley, 1951-

Sea of tranquility / Lesley Choyce.

ISBN 1-55002-440-X

I. Title.

PS8555. H668S37 2003         C813'.54         C2003-900344-2         PR9199.3. C497S42 2003

1    2    3    4    5       07    06    05    04    03

We acknowledge the support of the
Canada Council for the Arts
and the
Ontario Arts Council
for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the
Government of Canada
through the
Book Publishing Industry Development Program
and
The Association for the Export of Canadian Books
, and the
Government of Ontario
through the
Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit
program, and the
Ontario Media Development Corporation's Ontario Book Initiative.

Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credit in subsequent editions.

J. Kirk Howard, President

Printed and bound in Canada.
Printed on recycled paper.
www.dundurn.com

S
EA OF
T
RANQUILITY

A woman's voice rising up out of the silence of the island morning. Speaking the names of the men she once loved, still loved. A lone woman's voice on a morning like this, conversing with no one save the wind, the young spruce trees abloom with tiny globes of crystal clear dew and the cloak of mist hanging from the sky. What better audience?

Sylvie Young. On her eightieth birthday. She and the beginning of summer there in the great big backyard on Ragged Island. To be alive on a morning like this. Summer had finally
come to Nova Scotia, damp and cool, but summer all the same. Summer had been on the mainland for a couple of weeks but couldn't find safe passage to the island. Summer holed up in a bed and breakfast in Mutton Hill Harbour, reluctant to make the last leg, but finally, she shook herself and said, what must be done, must be done. Sylvie was waiting for summer to arrive. Never cursed its tardiness. Finally, this.

Sylvie decided this would be the day to walk again to the graveyard. Hadn't been all winter. Take a toothbrush and clean up the headstones of her four dead husbands. At least she could still count them on one hand, she offered to folks when they said how sorry they were that all her men had died. It was a sad thing for Sylvie, but she sometimes pretended it was the same as taking in a bunch of stray cats for pets. Fox would kill them or they'd get run over by one of the Oickle boys in his no-name, pieced-together car. Always something. Not a thing to keep whimpering over for the rest of your life.

The truth was she missed them all and would scrub away the lichen on their gravestones with the toothbrush she'd been using on her own white teeth all winter. Use a little Javex and some Dutch Cleanser — on the headstones. Pull out the dandelions and make room for the grass to grow in sweet and green.

“Eighty. Damn.” It was a sort of sweet, melancholy damnation that the nuthatches and cedar waxwings heard her say. The ravens had heard plenty worse and weren't offended. Besides, Sylvie would spread seed in the backyard in about twenty minutes and they would try to get at it before the glib squirrels or the belligerent blue jays. It was just a number, eighty was. Like any other number.

Sylvie looked around. She knew there was no one in her big, empty backyard, framed in by the tall, stately spruce trees, the good ones with deep roots, rare for these parts, planted and then thinned by her second husband, Kyle Bauer. No one was there,
but she wanted to check anyway. That done, she sat down on the damp carpet of spring beauties, her favourite of all the flowers because it was the first one to arrive each summer, delicate but brazen as born-again bats. She settled there on the cold, wet grass, clutched at a little green puff of moss, and she cried.

She cried not for all those dead men mouldering on the bedrock with gravel shovelled on their caskets. She cried not for the fact that she lived alone or had dozens of reasons to complain about her pains and minor sufferings. She cried not because she was lonely or destitute or feeling rotten as the floor-boards of Kenny Oickle's '59 Edsel.

She cried because she was a woman who needed to cry. Plain and simple. Salt tears, saline as the sea that wrapped its cold, powerful arms around this island. Crying, laughing, saluting the sky, sticking your middle finger up to God. Maybe it was all the same. Life comes at you and you have to make something of it, you have to respond, Sylvie would say. You have to collect all of it and do something with it. Write a goddamn book, pick up a guitar and sing a drunken song. Shout at your neighbours for being who they are. Tell the frigging government to go shove itself up its arse until it's inside out.

Something to do with it. Take life and respond. Cry if you have to. There it is. Eighty. Tears falling on the little spring beau-ties. That's done with it — for now at least. Off to the next thing. Books to be read. Things to think about. A tea kettle will boil. Birds will peck at the seeds dropped from her hand. Maybe it will be a good garden this year. But not before she wages war against the recalcitrant earwigs and the rapacious turnip bugs. Cabbage moths from hell; she'll have to suffocate them with cold stove ash every day until they give up. All part of it, all part of living.

She did not feel sorry for herself, but it was, nonetheless, for her own singular being that she cried. News of starving children in Africa did not make her cry. It made her angry and
embarrassed to be part of the human race. But tears were saved for rare moments like this. Life coming at her like a two-by-four or a low doorway lintel. All at once — not bad, not good, just overpowering, with every blessed thing of this world and the next sweeping through her like a hurricane through a broken window.

Sylvie sniffled, wiped tears from her face with a strong wrinkled hand. A lifetime stared back at her like mighty river deltas. Mississippis and Niles, Mekongs and Ganges. She had named them. Turned her palm over and there was her lifeline, strong and long and wrapping halfway around her wrist, her longevity documented from the time she was a child. Imagine what it takes in the way of courage to think of yourself as old when you are young. Sylvie had read her lifeline and believed what it prescribed. She spent afternoons as a teenager trying to figure out what she could do with all those eighty or more years. Have a couple of husbands. Four had never been considered an option. Men died easily, she knew. They were fragile beings. Men and their trouble: large egos in need of feeding and preening; dangerous work on boats or bridges, in mines and railroads.“I love men,” her own mother had once said, probably quoting someone, for she was always quoting something she had memorized, “not because they are men but because they are, thank God, not women.”

Sylvie had even predicted that she would spend much of her life alone. Solitude had always been like a mythical Greek god to her. Solitude was geography and body and place and a feeling of closeness — with what she was not sure. Sylvie had tried being in love with God. She had dabbled with the idea of a celestial marriage to God or Jesus or the church or any other masculine spiritual thing worth marrying. But it was a failed attempt. God was in her heart where her father and mother had put the idea and it was neither a
he
nor a
she
, and, as much as she tried, she could not externalize any god and propose marriage.

Marriage was now a thing of the past in all forms. Divorce, the great twentieth-century deception, had certainly never been considered an option. She'd known men with pent-up rage even, but they'd never taken it out on her, not even Doley, her third husband. She would have stuck by him though, good or bad. That's what women should do with their men. Doley had carried with him hurt and pain from one of those “traditional,” hard childhoods. No one called it abuse in the old days. They'd just say it was the way some folks brought up their kids. Good parents and bad parents. Doley grew up loving everything that lived, except for himself. He loved Sylvie dearly and was always kind to her. Then he was gone.

Sylvie had stayed right by him and watched as he slowly travelled away from her. She had known then there would not be many more men in her life. She ached for him when he was finally gone. Ached and ached for him, just like the others. And then said goodbye and, with the help of Phonse and Moses, laid him to rest, down on the all-too-familiar granite surface beneath the deepest soil of the graveyard.

Her only crime, it seemed, was her ability to endure. Long lifeline, good blood, heart like a mighty backyard hand pump, set nonstop from here to eternity.