Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You (19 page)

Darling
,

Remember the crazy old man next door? He came and ate the things off that pink tree in the garden. I mean the ornamental plum tree, they must be the ornamental plums, they are hard as rocks and nobody ever was meant to eat them I'm sure but I saw him grabbing them and swallowing them down by the handful. I was sitting on the floor in the sun room on the purple cushions, where you and I were—

My darling
,

I had a dream about you last night. It was a beautiful strange dream. You were holding my hair in your hands and saying, this is all too heavy for you, you'll have to cut it off, it will sap your strength. And the way you said it was so lovely, so sympathetic, as if you meant something else not just my hair. How can I tell, love, what you're saying in my dreams if you never write to me? So please write and tell me, tell me what you're saying to me in my dreams—

Love
,

I try and try to keep from writing because I believe I must give you the choice, I don't want to chase after and
torment you but it is so hard when you just drop off the earth like this, I feel so terrible alone. If you could tell me you didn't want to see me or hear from me any more I could accept that, I really think I could, it's just the awfulness of not knowing. I could deal with my feelings if I had to and recover from loving you but I must know whether you love me and want me any more so please, please, tell me yes or no
.

   And the last letter, really no letter at all, a large scribble on the page, without salutation or signature:

   
Please write to me or phone me, I am going crazy. I hate to be like this but it is more than I can stand so I beg you
.

“I didn't write these letters.”

“Aren't you her?”

“No. I don't know who she is. I don't know.”

“Why did you take them?”

“I didn't understand. I didn't know what you were talking about. I've had a grief lately and sometimes I'm not—paying attention.”

“You must have thought I was crazy.”

“No. I didn't know what to think.”

“You see what happened is—my husband died. He died in March. Well, I told you. And these letters keep coming. There's no return address. There's no surname. The postmark is Vancouver but what help is that? I've been expecting her to turn up. She is getting to sound so desperate.”

“Yes.”

“Did you read them all?”

“Yes.”

“Did it take you that long to figure out there'd been a mistake?”

“No. I was curious.”

“You look familiar to me. So many people do, because of the store. I see so many people.”

I tell her my name, my real name, why not? It means nothing to her.

“I see so many people.” She holds the bag of letters over the wastebasket, lets it drop. “I can't keep them around any more.”

“No.”

“I will just have to let her suffer.”

“Eventually she will figure it out.”

“What if she doesn't? It's not my concern.”

“No.”

I no longer want to talk to her, I no longer want to hear her stories. The air around her seems harsh, as if she gave off a shriveling light.

She looks at me. “I don't know why I got the idea it might be you. You don't look much younger than I am. I always understood they were younger.”

Then she says, “You know more about my life than the girls who work for me or my friends or anybody, except I suppose her. I'm sorry. I really would like not to see you any more.”

“I don't live here. I'm going away. In fact I might go away tomorrow.”

“It's just life, you know. It's just the usual thing. It isn't that we didn't have a good life together. We didn't have children, but we did what we wanted. He was a very kind man, easy to be with. And successful. I always felt he could have been more successful, if he had pushed himself. But even so. If I told you his name you might recognize it.”

“You don't need to.”

“No. Oh, no. I wouldn't.”

She makes a little bitter face, a swallowing face, ending with a humorous line of the mouth, that would dispose of you. I turn away almost in time not to see it.

I go out onto the street and it is still light in the long evening. I walk and walk. In this city of my imagination I walk past stone walls up and down steep hills, and see in my mind that girl Patricia. Girl, woman, the sort of woman who would call her daughter Samantha—very slim, dark, fashionably dressed, slightly nervous, slightly artificial. Her long black hair. Her long black hair uncombed and her face blotched. She sits in the dark. She walks around the rooms. She tries smiling at herself in the glass. She tries putting on make-up. She confides in a woman, goes to bed with a man. She takes her daughter to the park but not to the same park. She avoids certain streets, never opens certain magazines. She suffers according to rules we all know, which are meaningless and absolute. When I think of her I see all this sort of love as you must have seen, or see it, as something going on at a distance; a strange, not even pitiable, expenditure; unintelligible ceremony in an unknown faith. Am I right, am I getting close to you, is that true?

But you were the one, I keep forgetting,
you were the one who said it first
.

How are we to understand you?

Never mind. I invented her. I invented you, as far as my purposes go. I invented loving you and I invented your death. I have my tricks and my trap doors, too. I don't understand their workings at the present moment, but I have to be careful, I won't speak against them.

The Found Boat
 

At the end of Bell Street, McKay Street, Mayo Street, there was the Flood. It was the Wawanash River, which every spring overflowed its banks. Some springs, say one in every five, it covered the roads on that side of town and washed over the fields, creating a shallow choppy lake. Light reflected off the water made everything bright and cold, as it is in a lakeside town, and woke or revived in people certain vague hopes of disaster. Mostly during the late afternoon and early evening, there were people straggling out to look at it, and discuss whether it was still rising, and whether this time it might invade the town. In general, those under fifteen and over sixty-five were most certain that it would.

Eva and Carol rode out on their bicycles. They left the road—it was the end of Mayo Street, past any houses—and rode right into a field, over a wire fence entirely flattened by the weight of the winter's snow. They coasted a little way before the long grass stopped them, then left their bicycles lying down and went to the water.

“We have to find a log and ride on it,” Eva said.

“Jesus, we'll freeze our legs off.”

“Jesus, we'll freeze our legs off!” said one of the boys who were there too at the water's edge. He spoke in a sour whine, the way boys imitated girls although it was nothing like the way girls talked. These boys—there were three of them—were all in the same class as Eva and Carol at school and were known to them by name (their names being Frank, Bud and Clayton), but Eva and Carol, who had seen and
recognized them from the road, had not spoken to them or looked at them or, even yet, given any sign of knowing they were there. The boys seemed to be trying to make a raft, from lumber they had salvaged from the water.

Eva and Carol took off their shoes and socks and waded in. The water was so cold it sent pain up their legs, like blue electric sparks shooting through their veins, but they went on, pulling their skirts high, tight behind and bunched so they could hold them in front.

“Look at the fat-assed ducks in wading.”

“Fat-assed fucks.”

Eva and Carol, of course, gave no sign of hearing this. They laid hold of a log and climbed on, taking a couple of boards floating in the water for paddles. There were always things floating around in the Flood—branches, fence-rails, logs, road signs, old lumber; sometimes boilers, washtubs, pots and pans, or even a car seat or stuffed chair, as if somewhere the Flood had got into a dump.

They paddled away from shore, heading out into the cold lake. The water was perfectly clear, they could see the brown grass swimming along the bottom. Suppose it was the sea, thought Eva. She thought of drowned cities and countries. Atlantis. Suppose they were riding in a Viking boat—Viking boats on the Atlantic were more frail and narrow than this log on the Flood—and they had miles of clear sea beneath them, then a spired city, intact as a jewel irretrievable on the ocean floor.

“This is a Viking boat,” she said. “I am the carving on the front.” She stuck her chest out and stretched her neck, trying to make a curve, and she made a face, putting out her tongue. Then she turned and for the first time took notice of the boys.

“Hey, you sucks!” she yelled at them. “You'd be scared to come out here, this water is ten feet deep!”

“Liar,” they answered without interest, and she was.

They steered the log around a row of trees, avoiding floating barbed wire, and got into a little bay created by a
natural hollow of the land. Where the bay was now, there would be a pond full of frogs later in the spring, and by the middle of summer there would be no water visible at all, just a low tangle of reeds and bushes, green, to show that mud was still wet around their roots. Larger bushes, willows, grew around the steep bank of this pond and were still partly out of the water. Eva and Carol let the log ride in. They saw a place where something was caught.

It was a boat, or part of one. An old rowboat with most of one side ripped out, the board that had been the seat just dangling. It was pushed up among the branches, lying on what would have been its side, if it had a side, the prow caught high.

Their idea came to them without consultation, at the same time:

“You guys! Hey, you guys!”

“We found you a boat!”

“Stop building your stupid raft and come and look at the boat!”

What surprised them in the first place was that the boys really did come, scrambling overland, half running, half sliding down the bank, wanting to see.

“Hey, where?”

“Where is it, I don't see no boat.”

What surprised them in the second place was that when the boys did actually see what boat was meant, this old flood-smashed wreck held up in the branches, they did not understand that they had been fooled, that a joke had been played on them. They did not show a moment's disappointment, but seemed as pleased at the discovery as if the boat had been whole and new. They were already barefoot, because they had been wading in the water to get lumber, and they waded in here without a stop, surrounding the boat and appraising it and paying no attention even of an insulting kind to Eva and Carol who bobbed up and down on their log. Eva and Carol had to call to them.

“How do you think you're going to get it off?”

“It won't float anyway.”

“What makes you think it will float?”

“It'll sink. Glub-blub-blub, you'll all be drownded.”

The boys did not answer, because they were too busy walking around the boat, pulling at it in a testing way to see how it could be got off with the least possible damage. Frank, who was the most literate, talkative and inept of the three, began referring to the boat as
she
, an affectation which Eva and Carol acknowledged with fish-mouths of contempt.

“She's caught two places. You got to be careful not to tear a hole in her bottom. She's heavier than you'd think.”

It was Clayton who climbed up and freed the boat, and Bud, a tall fat boy, who got the weight of it on his back to turn it into the water so that they could half float, half carry it to shore. All this took some time. Eva and Carol abandoned their log and waded out of the water. They walked overland to get their shoes and socks and bicycles. They did not need to come back this way but they came. They stood at the top of the hill, leaning on their bicycles. They did not go on home, but they did not sit down and frankly watch, either. They stood more or less facing each other, but glancing down at the water and at the boys struggling with the boat, as if they had just halted for a moment out of curiosity, and staying longer than they intended, to see what came of this unpromising project.