Storm Glass (14 page)

Returning from that cool place I could see Grandma’s square frame house, sturdy as a fortress, across the road. The
straight lines of its clapboard, the clean gleam of its windows. I can see it now, too. Even after all these years it is a memory so vivid I can walk through its rooms any time I choose and examine its contents the way I did when I was a child. This was an activity of which I never tired and another that was not forbidden. I learned about my deceased grandfather through his untidy desk whose drawers contained
I.O.U
.s and farmer’s almanacs and worthless insurance policies and dried-out rubber bands and Victory Bonds and Liberal Party newsletters, and through the stern bearded gentlemen who adorned his unused Gillette razor blades. My two mysterious dead uncles I came to know by investigating their mutual bedroom which revealed a closet full of World War Two uniforms and dresser drawers rife with the strange things young men keep; matchbooks, theatre stubs, marbles, coins, sticks of old rigid chewing gum, single cuff links, garish bow ties. And by just staying in that house, by sleeping under its quilts and resting my head on its embroidered pillows, I became acquainted with Grandma’s best friend. Because, you see, she
was
that endless series of pastel-clothed girls that my grandmother so awkwardly, and so obstinately, created.

My own first dance is a memory that I’d rather turn away from; turn away from the dark pool of dancing, walk back along the cedar-lined path towards the kitchen, the sunlight, the linoleum. I really
liked
that linoleum. I liked the battered tins filled with oatmeal cookies too, and the old wood stove in whose warming oven I could dry my shoes if I had slipped into the crick while attempting to cross it on a log. I liked all of Grandma’s house right down to the last pearl button, forgotten and wedged between the slats of a bedroom drawer. I liked the
old Christmas cards and the strange striped suspenders that hung, untouched for years, on hooks at the far end of clothes cupboards. I even liked the cluster flies that remained, brittle and dead, on the sills of windows in the vacant bedrooms. I liked all of this but I did not like my first dance.

I was not asked of course, and wouldn’t have known how to dance even if I had been. Yet it was a deep, deep pool, that basement of what was, ironically, a Methodist church, where everything moved but me.

The still pool of my shame growing darker and darker as the evening progressed until I wasn’t sure whether I had become it or was merely reflected upon its surface. The girls I knew floating around the room in pastel dresses, just grazing the surface like dragonflies; their thin, young partners as awkward and as beautiful as water spiders—God, how I wished my father had forbidden the whole thing.

She was very beautiful, this friend my Grandma draughted on swaths of fabric, over and over, in her spare time, distracted only now and then by a threat of hail or a fear of drought. She was very beautiful, said Grandma, owned beautiful pastel dresses and could dance like the wind though Grandma had never seen this because it was forbidden. Poor Grandma was more concerned at that stage of her life with the exact black and white of a dead cow than the way dusty rose or powder blue looks when you move inside it across an oak wood floor. More concerned, I suppose, with getting those cumbersome beasts down that terrifying hill without killing them.

Grandma’s friend had danced and danced in her soft yellow dresses, her dusty rose, her taffeta …

The dark pool that was at the heart of me was not asked to dance for a long, long time. You remember, the one surrounded by cedars, the one where the sun is shut out, the one you leave the bright blaze of the kitchen for. That one was not asked to dance, no, not for a long, long time. The request was finally made, however, and not by anything that hovered or scuttled over the surface either. This had nothing to do with taffeta, or even oak wood floors. The request was made slowly, gracefully, and deeply.

Come down. Come down
.

“She was very beautiful,” said Grandma, “she went to dances and she drowned.”

I was fifteen, had stopped exploring the house, but had not stopped visiting the chain of pools.

“How did she drown, Grandma?”

“She drowned,” said Grandma, picking a bright yellow strand of embroidery thread from her basket and holding it with the needle to the light. “She drowned herself.”

Drowning … dancing.

“There was a man,” said Grandma. “A man she wasn’t married to. He left town.”

“Did she never marry, then?”

“No.” Grandma cut out a miniature yellow skirt with her sharp scissors. “No … she was already married.”

“But you said she wasn’t married to him.”

“That’s right,” said Grandma, placing the skirt on a soft mauve ground, “She was married to somebody else.”

“Was it the dancing?” I asked urgently, the memory of my own first dance still sharp and painful in my mind.

“I suppose that must have been part of it,” sighed Grandma.

It was late afternoon. The kitchen was turning shades of blue and grey. Grandma stopped her handiwork for a moment, two or three completed dancers on her lap, and looked out the window towards the fields. There was a threat of storm on the horizon. I could hear the hum of my uncle’s tractor.

“Grandma,” I asked, “Grandma, why did he leave town?”

“He left town,” she replied, putting away the fabric, the scissors, the thread, “because he was finished with her.”

I immediately thought of the room upstairs that had been inhabited by my two dead uncles while they were still alive. I thought about the foreignness of it, the strangeness—how they kept things that wouldn’t have interested me in the least, those matchbooks and baseball cards. And the male smell of them still there after years of absence: sweat in a glove, stains under the arms of their uniforms. How odd it was, how other. How unlike Grandma’s room with Grandpa gone. A room that smelled of lavender and wild rose sachets. A room … a room …

Yes, I thought, he would keep the oddest things and he would throw away Grandma’s best friend … the dusty rose … the lavender.

Let’s look out the north window towards Grandma’s girlhood. How tidy its fields are, how docile its well-behaved, fenced horses. In front of the barn are six clean, perfect cows and behind it that hill, blocking the view to anywhere else.

When I looked out that window I imagined him as a large and fearsome trout of odd foreign colours attracted by a bright fly, then, perceiving the hook attached, vanishing into a far corner of the pond where he could never be found.

When I looked out the south window I imagined him to be shiftless, uncaring—a shirker of duty, a handsome heartbreaker. More like a fickle, skittish water spider, darting from place to place, never fixed or settled.

It seems I spent a great deal of my girlhood imagining him as one thing or another. But either way I always imagined him gone.

I knew all about Ophelia, of course, all about the Lady of Shalott. All through my girlhood I had sympathized with their long, sad journeys on rivers; journeys taken after they had been discarded. In my mind’s eye they always looked to me like beautiful refuse in the water, bright bits of garbage, everything trailing and coming apart at the seams. Hair, shawls, arms, fingers. I loved the way they never even tried to swim … just let the river carry them along on their last, broken solitary voyage. Yes, I knew all about them. Still, after Grandma told me, it wasn’t them I was looking for while I walked through knee-high ferns, down the cedar-lined path towards the dark transparent water. It wasn’t them. It was Grandma’s best friend.

“For a few months afterwards,” continued Grandma, empty-handed now, rocking in her chair, “several of the women in town would rise and leave the church if ever she came in, but only a few months afterwards because there only
were
a few months afterwards.” The black shoe at the end of her lisle stocking moved quickly up and down. The music that I couldn’t hear had increased in tempo.

“Why did they do that, Grandma?” I was visualizing a dark congregation and Grandma’s best friend, the only pastel flower, waltzing down the aisle.

“They did that,” said Grandma, “because they
knew
and they felt they had to register their disapproval.”

“Did her husband leave with them?”

“No, her husband stayed with her. But he knew, too, there was no doubt of that. He just stayed with her all the time. They were always together.”

“At the dances?”

“There were no more dances, at least for them. There were never any for me. My father forbade it.” Grandma walked across the room to the north window and stared, for just a moment, almost angrily, at her girlhood.

“He absolutely forbade it,” she said.

Grandma had been dead for some time before the dark pool at the heart of me was asked to dance. I had been responsible for selling her house. Farewell to the linoleum and cookie tins, farewell to her lavender and cluster flies, the Gillette razor blades, still there, still wrapped. Farewell to the north window of her girlhood and the south window of her married life, her rocking chair, her warming oven, her cupboards. Farewell to her bright, warm kitchen. But not farewell to her best friend. I took some of her with me; a quilt, an embroidered runner, a cutting of pastel cotton.

I took those items and a memory of a chain of dark pools. I hadn’t asked Grandma where her best friend drowned because I’d seen her down there many times, gazing back at me as I stared into the water—a water spider dancing on her forehead, a trout passing obsessively back and forth behind her eyes. Until I reached for him once and he moved into that distant corner where he could never be found.

I took some other objects, as well, from Grandma’s kitchen and placed them in my own when I finally got one. They looked uncomfortable there, difficult—the wooden plaques, the salt and pepper shakers. Eventually it seemed imperative that I remove them. But by then I wasn’t spending a lot of time in the kitchen. By then that dark part of me had accepted an invitation. I’d started dancing.

Autumn and early evening at Grandma’s house. She was working on the surface of a cotton apron where six pastel ladies danced on a pure white ground. Outside, the north hill of her girlhood glowed as if all light and attention were focused on it and the south fields of her married life lay covered by the long shadows of the surrounding trees. I was reading a Victorian girl’s book that had flowers on its embossed cover and words
like forbid
on its cream-coloured pages.

Grandma rose from her rocking chair and walked across the room to the upright cupboard in the corner. From one of its two drawers she removed an ivory-coloured box and, after lifting the lid, she placed it on my lap so that I could look at the contents as though I had never seen them before.

Brittle, broken, faded, I thought.

“That,” said Grandma, “is my wedding bouquet.”

“I know,” I said.

I knew about her wedding gown too which was upstairs in the storeroom and which I had tried on every year since I was five years old. It lay, folded, in an old brown trunk together with some pillow shams that Grandma had begun to sew before her wedding, which (perhaps because their embroidered design contained no pastel ladies) she had never finished.

“My wedding gown is upstairs in the storeroom,” said Grandma. She paused and examined her hands, first from the front, then from the back. “I was very happy,” she said.

The book I was reading concerned a young girl who had forsaken her true love in order to nurse her aged parents. “Alas, I cannot marry,” she had just said.
Forsake
was another one of those words that hardly anyone had ever spoken aloud in my presence.

I handed the boxed bouquet back to Grandma. She stood in her green kitchen and stared down at its faded colours. Then she returned it to the drawer.

“And one more thing …,” she said.

I looked up from my book.

“I was one of the women … one of the women who walked out of the church.”

Years go by and the furnishings of the past are scattered. Landscapes are altered. A kitchen fades into the night and smooth highways invade leafy places. Hastily made quilts disintegrate in the washing machine and all the dancing ladies come apart at the seams.

A request is finally made, however, and when it is you recognize it immediately. Runaway horses crash through unseen fences, dance floors appear where they have absolutely no right to be, chains of dark pools unfurl across the forehead. Then a dancer beckons from moist hidden places and the world is shut out.

When he leaves me, Grandma, which will be very, very soon now, I know exactly what I’ll do. Goodbye to the north light of girlhood, the south light of married life. Farewell to the relics
in vacant bedrooms: the lavender and talc. I’ll put on that pastel dress you made for me, Grandma, with its loose stitches and ill-fitting sleeves, its crooked hem and sloppy embroidery. I’ll leave behind your kitchen and walk beside the dancing crick, along the cedar-lined path, down to the dark heart of the pool I have become.

She’ll be waiting for me there, Grandma, she always was. Together we’ll recall forbidden dances.