Small Change (25 page)

small noise draws me to the window. Mike is standing on the sidewalk without coat, hat, or mittens, looking up. It is the end of January.

On Valentine’s Day snow falls as light and deep as goose down. I drop a shovel into the snow, then pull it out clean as a whistle; the sky pod has opened and poured out its soft guts. Inside the kids refuse to have a bath because it interrupts “Maria.” I put the cassette into a portable tape recorder, set the tape recorder on the soap dish, and wash their backsides while the gunshot rings out for the ninety-second time.
“DON’T YOU TOUCH HIM!”

Other presences are in the house: the roof stirs and moves with shifting snow. Under the heat of the sun it grows restless and sounds like someone turning in bed. Ants have begun to appear. There is a dead one on the living-room floor, and I didn’t kill it.

Have the ants come to help? Come to sort through the bedlam of doubts, and in the name of love? They crawl along the bathroom walls past blond hairs hanging off towels and towards two faucets that drip. I think of curiosity taken too far, of love regained by a series of tasks, of help taking unpredictable forms.

A gift arrives. A beautiful coat of many muted colours my brother has worn several times but no longer needs. A fawn-coloured northern parka with a chocolate-brown outer shell and a grey fur collar. I take it out of its brown paper wrapping, and try it on, surprised by its lightness, only to be more
surprised by something else. Every time I put it on, I go in the wrong direction.

I wear it when I walk to work in the evening. I walk up to Main Street, turning right into a hard wind and pressing on, lost in thought, rousing myself only to realize with astonishment that I am going the wrong way. Now I will have to walk fast under an underpass and along a curve of highway to make up for lost time. Cars pass me by – this figure in the handsome coat with a noose of fur around her neck – walking where people never walk. I arrive at work overwarm and surprised at myself the first time it happens, then surprised at the coat the second and third times. The coat has the power my brother had to tease and torment and comfort me.

Strong and continuing bonds are the ones that fascinate. What is this material that holds people together? What can we call it except loyalty of a certain kind?

I think of Maureen’s house, the openness, the paintings on the wall, the pieces of fabric. I think of her stripped to the bone by husband and children, and wanting that, yet not. I see the road through the country – the one we walked – leaves falling away, branches going bare, the winnowing away of all feeling until I was finally unaffected by her.

For a time all my friendships took their shape from the one with Maureen, they were coats on that pair of shoulders. Would I have exploded at Carol had I spoken my mind with Maureen? Brooded so long about Leonard had I dispatched Maureen? Come to appreciate Jill without Maureen?

She continues to thread her way through my life the way a long absence does – something in the closet – an old coat you know thoroughly, a season that returns, a pattern that repeats itself.

It’s March 20th and snow is still falling. Now there’s a full moon and above the housetops, the edge of the sky is lightening – pearl, opal – the colour of certain buttons, opening, as the sky separates from the dark rooftops.

W
e were driving down 96th Street where it crosses through Central Park. A Sunday afternoon, about five, and a young woman was kicking the long grass beside the sidewalk.

Ted said, “She’s lost something.”

We were halfway down the next block and he asked, “What do you suppose it was? Did you see her beating the grass? She hasn’t found it.”

A moment later he said, “A key.”

Her kicks were random, almost careless. It couldn’t have been that important, either something easily replaced or of no great value and the search a matter of form. We drove one more block, turned right, passed a small park jammed with people, found two spaces on our block and took the second.

You don’t often see people involved in the slow graceful act of unhurried looking, threshing the grass with one foot. I tried to find it, she would be able to say. I looked.

We had been visiting Jill and she was overtired long before we left. Her face had a papery quality, but soft, a tissue-paper curtain behind which her sickness continued. By the time we left even that fine paleness had disappeared, and she was haggard. A greyish-yellow fatigue had risen up from the bottom of her soul and tipped her head back against the sofa.

She had been losing things: a string of seed pearls, an earring, a necklace.

“It makes me feel nuts,” she said. “It’s not that I have to have these things, not that I couldn’t live without them. But it makes me feel nuts.”

“They’ll turn up,” I said.

“The pendant might. I might have left it at Maureen’s. But the pearls are gone.”

The pendant was a talisman she had worn for years. She had taken it off before a bath and misplaced it.

Her way of looking was different from the woman’s in the park. She looked everywhere and not with the casual gestures of foot kicking grass, but desperately, incoherently, in places that made no sense.

“I keep looking inside the cups in the cupboard,” she said. “I find myself shaking open books.”

A month later we were in the grassy playground a few blocks from her house. The kids were on the monkey bars,
her husband was with them. She and I stood off to one side. It was mild for December, occasionally the sun lit up her face. She had been sick for so long that her teeth were yellow and huge.

Before lunch and after we had been talking off and on, our conversation interrupted many times. Looking back I could see the thread of it clearly (I had picked at it with my questions, my fingers searching in the dark for something shiny), when there were any number of routes the conversation could have taken. The thread was her son Paul.

He had lost his job, his wife’s eyes were getting worse, their new baby – a second child – cried most of the night. They had come to Jill’s for Thanksgiving weekend, and it had been a lot of work, she said, but good until the end when it was “marred by their fighting.”

She talked while making lunch and the conversation got that far. As far as her saying that Paul’s frustration level was very low and she was very worried about him. It wasn’t until we got to the playground that the rest of the story came out. It takes time for these things to be said and it probably takes a certain setting: not a kitchen, but a playground where you see small children against a great big sky.

Paul had hit his wife several times. After Thanksgiving she called “terribly upset” because he had hit her again.

“Last week I drove over there to talk to him, and she says it’s been much better since then. But he says so little. I can’t imagine being married to someone who can’t say what’s on his mind.”

“What did you say?”

“I told him that whatever he does now will be with him for the rest of his life. The way he behaves now, the way he deals with Ellie and the children, is something that will stay with him for the rest of his life.”

Her face took on a funny expression – puzzled, curious. She stepped close and said gently, “Why are you crying?”

The urge to punish. An image flashed through my mind and I was drawn almost irresistibly to it – an image of slapping my children across the head, over and over again, at some minor irritation. The pleasure of it.

The sight of my father kicking my brother upstairs, not restrained by the child’s fear but impelled by it. By that small body at the end of his foot, which loosened and left puddles of urine across the floor.

The memory of Maureen kneeling beside a diorama – all children, all long patient explanation. It took me eight attempts to get her to finish the one sentence she addressed to me. Eight? Ten.

On what basis does friendship continue after the liking has stopped? Punishment. Friends punish each other.

Paul was twenty-two. He looked older and shorter than he was, already balding, his long torso supported by short legs. Each time I met him, I wasn’t sure it was him. “Paul?” I would say, and he would nod and smile. Out of shyness, he assumed I wouldn’t recognize him. That’s what I reacted to, his assumption that he didn’t register and the way he waited to have his assumption borne out.

I saw him again at the funeral. Nothing we discussed that afternoon in the playground – none of the several losses – anticipated the one that was to come.

Jill’s husband died without warning after we moved to Ottawa. She phoned, and we drove overnight to the funeral.

Less a funeral than a gathering of friends. Jill sat on a chair in the living room, Paul’s wife stood behind her with her hands on her shoulders, Paul stood beside his wife. Across the room, among several dozen guests, were Maureen and her mother seated on a love seat.

It was the moment before colour. April 2nd and there wasn’t any green. Rather the softness of a female bird and that sort of colour: brown, lavender, russet. Fields were wet, streams were high, lakes were melting and yet the air was full of dust.

We had started out after supper and from the highway everything was visible – cows in their barns, women in their kitchens, children in their yards – because doors were open, curtains weren’t drawn, and no foliage hid the view. We drove through dun-coloured landscape, through soft feathery pre-colour, to the grassy end of Long Island. In the morning I saw Maureen on the lawn.

We were in the car. The kids were asleep in the back, Ted was asleep beside me, I was sipping coffee behind the wheel and waiting for signs of life in the house. Out she came in a thin summer dress. She closed the side door without looking in our direction, and walked towards the back of the garden.
Through the windshield I watched her thin thin back, her shorter darker hair, her white hands resting on the brown fence. Then she knelt down on the grass, and even I could see that she was praying.

How easy it was to look at her. All pleasure is relief, William Burroughs said, and it was a relief to see her in the flesh and at a distance. She looked remarkably small. I was an adult returning to a childhood house. I was Gretel closing the oven door.

After a few minutes she stood up and turned around. I got out of the car with an extra sweater. She thanked me, and draped it over her shoulders.

We spoke a little. Danny was looking after the kids, he was going to take them to the zoo. “You remember how devoted he is. We don’t think a funeral is the place for children. Unless, of course,” and the old apologetic look crossed her face.

But it was all right. Everything was all right.

The funeral ended at two. Maureen and her mother helped Jill into bed: ninety-five pounds of bad luck, good grace and tears. Paul’s childhood drawings were on the wall: a bicycle he had drawn when he was five, a praying mantis when he was seven, an interior of a room when he was nine. “He could have been a painter,” she said. “Why do people complicate their lives so unnecessarily?”

Maureen left. She wanted to get back in time for mass. Yes, several times a week. The Catholic church in the old neighbourhood.

Her mother left with her. “Well,” I said after they were gone, “I hope she likes bingo,” and was gratified by the wry smile on Jill’s face.

On the way home we took turns driving. When I wasn’t driving, I was reading a book about people with strange absences in their heads. In one case a young man’s memory was destroyed by a bullet, but his imagination remained virtually intact. Every morning he sat at his desk writing out his life story, searching through his ruined memory for words that eluded him by halves. He forgot what a dandelion was. “When it becomes faded, I remember what it is, but until then I just can’t imagine.”

People elude me by halves. I see only the good, then only the bad. I never see them whole. I have no explanation for this. No explanation for the coolness that stretches out between my periods of warmth, the disaffection between my periods of affection. I touch people when I talk to them. I put my hand on a newcomer’s knee, or hand, or arm, and immediately the new person is drawn into an intimacy that I cannot sustain. People are charmed by my warmth and disconcerted to discover that it doesn’t last.

My friendship is not reliable, but it reliably follows a pattern established in childhood of over-immersion followed by withdrawal, of infatuation (in its many forms) followed by aversion. I find the unlikeable in people. I become critical and harsh, and saddened that I am so ungenerous. Critical of them and of myself for being critical. And so self-disgust
runs through my friendships. A profound disappointment in myself, even as I focus on the flaws of others.

The pattern leads here. To a woman past forty counting up friendships and arriving at small change.

Two days make a difference. On the way home there was a tinge of yellow around poplar and forsythia. Once again the air was one way, and what it surrounded something else. Not dry around wet, but colour around non-colour. Spring and winter tussled just beyond the twigs.