Small Change (21 page)

Being steady wasn’t enough. It may have been enough when I was a child, but it wasn’t any more. Besides, I wasn’t steady. I looked out the car window at the fields of sweet-smelling hay and felt so accepting that I had no idea how demanding I was, how much I wanted her all to myself and on my terms.

I caught her in the act of brushing her teeth, bent over the kitchen sink with a mouth full of toothpaste. She looked up when I came through the door and laughed her merry, full-bellied laugh, her mouth frothy and white. That was the only genuine, unstrained moment between us.

And now the old urge to contact her again, as though with early affection you can wipe out late disaffection. I reread her letters the way I read the newspaper as a girl – for the sense of another life, a series of connections, a story out there. But this story is not awaiting me, it has gone by, and is still going by.

Newsprint doesn’t have the same smell any more, but rooms, especially in November, have the same darkness. I used to sit on the old chesterfield in the late afternoon, the lamp on, the heat never turned high. There was a brown box radio across the room next to a large window, and beyond the window were fields undergoing the usual urban assault. From my bedroom upstairs I had a view of an abandoned farmhouse on a hill less than a quarter of a mile away. In the other direction, also less than a quarter of a mile away, lived Leah in a smaller, older house with her unstable father and her capable mother who was dying of cancer. Is that what has pulled her into such clear focus? Is that why I am at my desk reading her letters?

There’s nothing the matter with me. A small infection, a course of antibiotics; the small nickel-leaf is already fading.

In one letter she is funny and rueful about her “sorrows,” and after several pages of breast-beating about her obsession
with good grades and her hatred of university, she underlines the sentence.
“You are the only one I can tell
. Anyone else I’m close to is not free. They believe that Christian students ought to strive to be good students, and my parents measure me by my marks, which heal all.”

The last two pages are full of Bible readings. Her favourite passage for reflection is the story of David and Bathsheba, 1 Samuel 11 and 12. It goes with Psalm 51, which David wrote when Nathan the prophet came to him.

I take from the shelf the Gideon Bible I helped myself to many years ago in some hotel. 1 Samuel. Page 268. But Leah has made a mistake. It’s 2 Samuel 11 and 12: David, unable to sleep and walking on the roof of the king’s house, looks down and sees a woman washing herself. “And David sent messengers, and took her; and she came in unto him, and he lay with her.”

I read the psalm. “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.” The story strikes me as an odd one for Leah to be contemplating. The psalm leaves me cold.

In a music store I run my eyes over the cassettes and come to Leontyne Price. I hesitate, unable to choose between Price singing hymns and Price singing Mozart. Thinking of Leah, and out of nostalgia and a certain desire for atonement, I choose the hymns. At home I put on the cassette, but after five minutes I have to turn it off. An hour later I try again, drawn to the hymns and then, as they soar, repelled. All the old bitterness, the juices of rejection, fill my mouth.

In her last letter, sent after I wrote to say my marriage had ended and I was going away for a while, she said that at times she felt agonizingly trapped, but knew that if she ran away she would only have to come back. “God holds my life and I’ll do what He wants.”

When did her mother die? And what did I do? She died while we were still in university and I did nothing. I offered sympathy, but I didn’t know how to talk to Leah about it, and I did nothing concrete. I remember her indirect words of advice. She had had to phone everyone, relatives, old family friends, colleagues, to tell them that her mother’s cancer had come back. She was the only one who could make the calls because her father was already in the depression that would later require outside care, and her brother and sister were too young. Everyone, with one exception, reacted emotionally in a way that tore Leah apart. Only her mother’s sister was matter-of-fact. “Well,” she said, “we thought we had that licked, didn’t we?”

Her mother gone, her father gone in another way, she turned to God. But that isn’t it either. She had already turned to God, she was turning to God when I met her, although I didn’t know it.

I went to visit her one summer in a small tourist town where she shared a cottage with other Christian students who went onto the beaches to save souls. They called it Rahab’s House. Spies, I suppose, for Jesus. Anyone who lived in the house
would be saved, and everyone else destroyed. “Only Rahab the harlot shall live, she and all that are with her in the house, because she hid messengers that we sent.”

And then the slaughter of every man, woman, child, and animal. Then the burning. Rahab stayed in Joshua’s camp while Jericho burned.

That Leah preferred the company of these holy-rollers to me: no matter how stupid the person, if they believed in Christ, their company was preferable to mine.

After she got married I wrote to her, scrawling on the envelope beside her new name,
Arrrgh!
, something I meant to be heartfelt and telling, even funny: a protest I couldn’t restrain myself from making: Here you are abandoning yet another piece of yourself. But it was only fat-headed and offensive. After that she was even less forthcoming.

Snow, at first a few flecks, and now many and larger. A real snowfall, driven sideways. Siberian dancers always portray snow with sideways gestures because snow never falls straight down. Leah would be interested in that, it’s the sort of thing – not just the fact, but the museum where I learned it – that would have enchanted her in the old days.

Outside a woman walks by with an umbrella braced against the wind. And now the sun comes out and it’s light again, having been, before the snowfall, so dark.

The weather takes me back to radio, the same intimacy and promise, the same nostalgia and loss. I don’t work for radio any more and have shaky, mixed memories of when I
did. I remember my mistakes. Yet the foundation is still there, just as it is with Leah: the old brown cabinet in the living room and the comfort it gave me; and dear Leah. I think these words, aware of their elaborate, untrustworthy sound, but the ones that come to mind nevertheless.

Thinking of the weather in friendship, I pull a book off the shelf by a poet of weather who retreated, like Leah, into privacy and religion. The poet writes about invisibility, italicizing the word to indicate the presence of the divine. The book I open was published in 1978 and the poems I like are at the beginning, the ones I can’t stand, the overtly religious ones, are from the middle to the end.

Is it jealousy, I wonder, this feeling of rejection? Leah and the poet have something I don’t have, a relationship, a friendship, which I turn, hard-faced, away from? Or is it just the pain of being left behind? (Leah leaving me for religion, just as my sister left my mother and for the very same Baptists.)

I phoned the poet once. Neither of us knew what to say. I had written to her to praise her poetry, she had written back, and now I was calling. I hung up thinking I had made a mistake. But it wasn’t a mistake. I had something more now: the sound of her voice, her surprisingly smalltown Ontario accent, her discomfited way of speaking, her almost coarse manner, caught out by a caller and uncomfortable on the phone. Now, reading her poems, I picture a solitary woman accompanied by many things, a woman who knows the value of privacy and makes choices in its favour, as did Leah.

After this soft interlude of reading and weather, I see the final line of one of the later poems: “… the only unpretentious,
Jesus Christ, the Lord,” and my rage comes back. Rage at seeing someone swallowed willingly and whole.

There were two resurrections: the one, when after six years of silence I asked around for her address and wrote to her, igniting the brief correspondence that resulted in the visit to her farm, then more silence. And the final time, when I was about to leave the country and wrote to her, and she almost didn’t write back. The final letter I never answered.

Her invitation to the farm came in the form of a card with a picture of a lesser scaup on the front, a small pretty duck in flight. “I’m not entirely sure why the last two years have been so bad – a pervasive sense of failure, of hopelessness … if you come to visit I would take you to see the ducks. They’re beautiful.”

Leah parked the car beside the farmhouse and we walked through fields to the pond where she identified each duck in great detail, later giving me an article she had written about them. I kept the article for years, thinking it might tell me something about her, and deciding, finally, that it told me about the facts into which she had escaped.

Now I realize that the ducks were an escape into beauty, not fact. She turned with gratitude to the lives of animals, sick and tired of her own.

I feel ashamed and moved, only to come up hard against the final words. “Regards, L.” There was a time when she signed her letters,
all my love
.

I find something else, a copy of a speech she gave at the end of school. I read it, then put it down as though my
fingers have been burned. It’s an essay about the importance of friendship as a source of stability in an unstable world. She uses the phrase “relationships with people” more than friendship, and all too typically I give the phrase a bitter twist. By then, I say to myself, she had already begun her relationship with One Person. Jesus.

Ashamed and moved because her despair is deeper than anything I’ve known. Because I underestimate her, am always underestimating people. Because I realize that the ducks were her great consolation and I wasn’t interested in ducks. Because I wanted to be her consolation and didn’t have a clue how to be. Because we had been very close and with some effort could have been still.

We had our unsuccessful visit beside the duck pond, and I don’t think I wrote to Leah again until I was on the verge of leaving the country three years later. She wrote back, making it clear she hadn’t wanted to write at all, her letter so bleak, so grudging, so final, so rigid. “I know my life is in God’s hands.”

She must have identified with Rahab: someone forced to be secretive because she knows something others don’t know and is rewarded not for her knowledge – not, in the end, for knowledge – but for secrecy.

The doorbell rings. I turn away from the letters to open the door, and here is the woman from across the street in tears and a red sweater.

“My mommy died,” the woman says.

I put my arms around her and invite her in, hand her several paper napkins and sit beside her on the sofa. Some years ago Ted got off the phone and said, “My daddy died,” and I put my arms around him.

“I’ve been twelve years here,” the woman says. “I’ve lost my grandfather, my grandmother, and now my mother. I wasn’t there when any of them died.”

There was a time when I would have befriended this woman and for a while we might have been close. Then the friendship would have become a chore – heavy, twisted, chewed up in my mind, chewed over with real and imagined slights, and with simple boredom. In my experience friendships have a natural way of going off, like milk left out of the fridge.

I don’t know the woman well. The first time we met, I saw her desperate need for friendship and avoided her.

One Saturday afternoon in early spring Leah called: she was sewing and suggested I keep her company. I walked to her house (in three months we would be finished with high school) and for a while we talked in the small sewing room off the dining room. But our reticence was too evenly matched: she had too many things she didn’t want to talk about, I knew myself too little and was too shy to say much. I questioned her instead and soon we fell silent. The material was light blue, a dress for the end-of-April dance.

The phone rang. Her boyfriend wanted to come over with his best friend. Leah grimaced and so did I: the best friend had taken me out a few times, but for several weeks he
hadn’t called. Soon they arrived. They sat awkwardly in the living room for a few minutes, fingering the copies of
Time
on the coffee table. Then they left. You’re welcome to stay, said Leah, and I nodded – smiled – said goodbye to them. I sat for a minute in the empty living room. Then I got my coat and left.

I walked home. Halfway home they drove by – the four of them – and I lifted my hand and waved. They were four: the best friend had arrived with his new girlfriend.

Why would Leah cut her life to fit a friend’s more solitary cloth? Not even I expected her to. But I was left behind in favour of other friends more than once, and my reaction (my mild acceptance, my underreaction) anticipated the over-reaction (the brooding memories, the bitterness, the competitiveness in the seeming absence of any).

Of course I am the one remembering, so memory favours me. I’m almost sure she didn’t call me that Saturday afternoon. I called her and she probably said, I’m sewing a dress, but you can come over if you like.