The Freedom in American Songs (8 page)

Down on the beach the water looked flatter, and all the people paddling happily—in pairs, she noticed—appeared to her like children on paddleboats in an English park, as if there were no manatees or alligators in the water at all. Manatees, she remembered reading in the magazine in the seat-pocket on the plane, were the closest relative of the elephant: she had no idea how large they grew, but as Chris pushed her offshore with one hefty shove, she imagined many of them must be at least as big as her canoe, and if they chose to put their heads up while underneath her … she had read, too, that the bay was shallow, but even so …

She decided to head for mangroves in the mid distance, in an area where she could see no other canoes. It took her a good half hour—the boats were unwieldy compared to real canoes in which she'd traversed lakes in Newfoundland and Quebec—and once she approached the mangroves she realized she'd left behind the hum and drone of sound—human sound—that had formed subliminal background noise on Sanibel. Each drip from her paddle-ends amplified, as did the cheeps and hoots and rustlings in the tangle of mangrove leaves and roots. She examined the roots, remembering a booklet in the gift shop that had explained their network of gnarls and caverns were little houses—nurseries—for three quarters, was it? … of the fish and bird and alligator life on Sanibel and the mainland. Three quarters! The darkness was asquirm, and here she was, alone … What would happen if she were to land her canoe on the roots and investigate them? With her paddle she prodded and found they moved slightly but did not give way. Had other people got out of their canoes and taken private journeys into what the guidebooks called walking trees?

In Canada she would have been made to wear her life jacket, but here, they'd told her she could use it as a cushion—only children under eleven were obliged to wear them—so she had not put it on and she saw no reason why she might need it while walking in the trees unless … what had Callum Tyree told her? “Just don't go walking in the woods …”

But were mangroves the same as woods? Weren't woods more like the palms and swamp ash trees and subtropic bushes in the island's interior? Mangroves were animate … if you licked them the leaves were salty because they drank estuary water and shed the salt—some leaves turned yellow—here there were lots—and fell in the roots, decomposed and became part of the mucky, nourishing mud-bed that the trees again consumed … sacrificial leaves, she'd heard someone say. She liked the efficiency of this, and the fact that some leaves and not others were sacrificed, though all were borne on the same kind of wood.

Not a good idea
, announced her brother Craig, whom she had not seen in five years, as she stepped out of the canoe and tested the mat of roots with her foot. Her younger daughter agreed with him from afar. The elder one lifted an eyebrow. Her mother had put on her lavender-filled eye mask. The only person in her acquaintance who was the slightest bit encouraging was Callum Tyree, who stuck his hand in his chip bag and, under that Kentucky hat, amiably offered,
You should be all right, long as you tie up that loose sneaker-lace
.

Nobody said anything at the outfitting headquarters about not getting out of the canoe,
said Claire.

No
, said her mother, and in that one word lay a world of remonstrance.

Why are you doing that, pet?
asked her dad, the most understanding of all—he was a man whom she could imagine venturing deep into the mangroves with a scientific curiosity—yes, curiosity propelled her, too, although part of the attraction was that she had an idea animals might be willing to let her stay here with them, as long as she showed quietness and respect. They might—she realized this was hardly sensible, yet—they might somehow enfold her …

She was aware that this was terrain liable to behave in ways unknown to her, yet she walked a few metres, hanging onto overhanging branches and testing, ever so carefully, each footfall. She looked for eyeballs in the dark tangle. Of course there were no eyeballs. She'd done this at home—walked into wilderness hoping for acceptance, for some sort of magic whereby she and the non-human life would extend to each other a kind of miraculous communication
.
Wasn't that what everyone wanted from a trip into wild parts of the world? But wildlife did not come forward. She checked the tangle of roots for code, as if it held a calligraphy waiting to be deciphered.

Stay in one place, quietly and for a long time, she recited, and you'll learn something. She wouldn't mind staying here half a day, waiting motionless … but that was a lie. Twenty minutes was pushing it—she fidgeted and twitched. Here, in the nursery of the ocean, life teemed, protected and hidden. She was looking too hard, downward, upward to where the salty leaf-tangle rose speckled with pieces of sky. She shortened her depth of field and tried to relax as if it didn't matter what she missed, and began to see spiders the size of walnuts scuttling on the mangrove trunks, then—with a spoked, vampiric shawl drawn about its neck—an anhinga, ten feet over her head, motionless, having sat there the whole time.

The anhinga waited for something. All life, Claire realized, was waiting, and the thing that made the difference between human happiness and the kind of sanity-ransacking loneliness she now felt in this armoured wilderness, was that you either did it alone, or you were sensible and you waited with other people, and while you all waited, you bought bottles of wine and some good bread and maybe a couple of hard salamis marbled with fat, and you enjoyed yourselves. You put on some music, for god's sake, and you danced.

There was a particular drama she'd learned about among the pamphlets in her cottage. Anhingas fastened their nests on branches overhanging alligator waters. If a predator approached the nest, the branch bent and the predator slid into waiting jaws. Which meant that yards from where Claire stood in the mangrove roots, there would lurk expectant gators, and she had brought neither strawberry shortcake nor boiled eggs.

Her canoe, she saw through the bushes, now bobbed up and down—had the tide risen? She feared it might break free from the mangroves and … she'd better get a move on. Had it already …

The ground was not ground but a collection of intertwined, upside-down limbs. Her glasses slipped and as she lunged for them she felt her heel and ankle and knee cram into a space … her left leg was down there, really down there in the roots, and her glasses … she knew exactly which opening they'd fallen through, and she reached, yet could not feel her glasses: without them she wasn't blind, exactly, but—and they had cost—those bloody glasses were unbelievably expensive.

She knew she'd be able to get her leg out of the mangrove roots if she remained calm and, by degrees, adjusted the awkward way her body now connected with … you couldn't call it land, or ground … with terra infirma … terra incognito, terra that was pretty terrifying if you thought about it too carefully, and she hadn't been—there was no doubt about it—she knew what they'd say; her mother, her daughters—she hadn't been careful enough. She'd been far from careful, in fact. She bit her bottom lip and tried to mark the place where her glasses had descended—if only she had a bit of red wool and could reach to tie a bow around that root—she knew she'd lose the place once she took her eyes off it. The roots were all the same.

The leg had jammed into a deep fork and her arms did not possess strength equal to the task of … it was absurd. She calmly noticed a stretch of water visible beyond her canoe. If another paddler were to enter that stretch she could shout. If nobody came, if she stayed quiet and felt her body carefully, she'd be able to manoeuvre the leg, unscrew it from the crooked track into which it had forced itself. She noticed the stuck foot, deep down, had begun to feel damp.

Was it her imagination, or had the roots wound themselves more tightly around the leg? Woman Eaten by Mangroves, she read in next week's edition of
The Montreal Gazette
. Head Found Atop Roots. Body Partially Digested by Mud Underlay. Missing Foot Supposed Eaten by Alligators. Passport and Credit Cards Undisturbed in Wallet. She watched the wretched canoe float slightly farther away. Why had she not thought to tie it to the mangroves using her handy dandy all-purpose scarf, instead of leaving that garment like a puff of collapsed magnolias near her life jacket?

Chris would be watching for her, she reasoned. He'd expect her to return at her appointed time. There'd be a half hour's grace period, then maybe an hour of looking for her in real canoes that they surely kept in a bunkhouse somewhere, equipped with lifebuoys and canisters of emergency drinking water. They'd spot her canoe … was that its stupid blue nose bobbing behind a distant oyster bed? They'd circle this island in no time, calling out the name on her credit card, and she'd reply as nonchalantly as a person could, that she was here, she'd fallen and … then they would come and get her. They'd have some sort of slim but powerful saw blade to get these roots off her leg.

The anhinga had not moved. Why didn't the bird do something? Was it sleeping? Poised, its wings were both gathered and fanned, as if awaiting some signal to expand them in an extravagant sweep that would change all things. She waited a long time without panicking, but realized two things had happened which she had not counted on. Her canoe had vanished—who knew how far it had drifted? And the light, which in her earlier confidence she had supposed might outlast her predicament, had begun to fail. Was it possible sundown could come before Chris and his colleagues found her? Would they have to use bullhorns and flares?

She focused on the anhinga, which remained still until she could not differentiate between its outline and the shadows around it. Scraps of sky among the leaves turned red, then an alarming shade of mauve. In her wallet Claire remembered she'd stuffed the taxi receipt Callum Tyree had given her. It had his signature on it, his taxi number and the name and telephone number of the company for which he drove cars. She pictured herself carefully affixing the card to the anhinga's leg and instructing it to find Callum Tyree who would understand where it had come from. Find Callum Tyree and get him over here before night, she whispered at the bird, and as she whispered she remembered from some part of her past having learned—had it been from Mr. Ollerhead or Mr. Wigglesworth?—that alligators are nocturnal. She remembered how on Sanibel there were no streetlights so as not to disturb the life that now surrounded her. She'd thought it charming her first three nights here, and had made sure to cycle down the bike paths to her cottage by sunset every evening. She'd lounged on the bed from eight til midnight eating boysenberry yogurt and switching between local news channels: Charlotte County Couple Burned to Ashes in Smokeless House Fire, and
Stripper Confidential
:
“I'ma gonna tell you right now, Mikhaila, if mah man ever tole me I hadda axe him permission before I goes out an' earns the money I needs tah feed mah chile …”

She'd suspected the mangroves were drawing her deeper into themselves, and had measured the position of her navel against a certain horizontal root. Now that root was a thumb-width higher than her navel. Or was it a different root? How was it possible that neither Chris, nor any colleague of his, had yet appeared? She'd long suspected that most people who worked for somebody else didn't care about the details of their jobs. There was a relaxed, holiday-camp atmosphere at the outfitting shop, not the vigilance one might expect. Workers had a hardened attitude—but who wouldn't, on an island overrun with strangers who came for no other reason than to get away from the northern freeze, rubbing up against this warm body of land with a kind of desperate, heat-seeking friction.

That's what I've done, too, Claire thought. But I lack an instinct that makes other users grab what they want and escape. I'm not a person who gets away with things. I pretend to care, pretend to be curious, to want to get to know the warm body—but it knows. The land knows all I care about is the
heat
—I'm greedy for it …

There was a horrible grating sound and a scream, then a flapping like a tent in the wind and a huge splash—then silence. The anhinga was gone and she was alone. Yet a notion persisted that the anhinga knew her exact location. It had her coordinates. It would get to the mainland when she could not. Maybe it was on its way there now. If only it could communicate her plight to Callum Tyree or to his unnamed friend living in the houseboat without sails among the shrimp fishermen, she might get to step onto that houseboat—mauve and floating in the dusk—paper lanterns strung all around, waiting to be lit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Madame Poirer's Dog

 

 

When Doctor Gisele came
this morning to assess me again, she asked me to name an animal that has four legs. I told her a snake. Honestly. Why does the residence have to treat us as if we're imbeciles, just because we're old? My youngest son, Armand, is the bright spot. We have a laugh if he visits without that wife … Suzanne?—No—Susan. We laugh because, of my four sons, Armand is the only one not enrolled in an eternal quest for the business deal of the century.

The air in here—it's as if we are walking to the cafeteria and the bingo room in a warm vapour of piss … augh,
la puanteur
… Not that the place isn't clean. Madame Sept-Petits-Bars bumps past every morning at five minutes past nine with her Electrolux, the poor woman is always getting its hose tangled, she trips over it and then it bangs into the walls …
quelle vacarme
! This week I'm coping by reading the autobiography of Gabrielle Roy—hardly cheerful, I know. I've been trying to get one of my older sons, André or Gilles, to show me how to operate the flatscreen TV they bought me, but they haven't had time. The thing takes up a quarter of my room, its useless lights flashing all night … I had to throw my dressing gown over it. And now Madame Poirer is coming to live here,
tr
è
s jolie
, as if we've been lifelong confidantes. She's telephoned me every morning this week, wanting to know ridiculous details … Amandine! Are there buses to take us to Bowling LeClerc? Do staff members meddle with one's correspondence? Is the food sufficient in
les enzymes alimentaires
?

No, Madame Poirer, suddenly my close friend, there are no buses because how can the staff take 275 of us out? There'll be no bowling here, and no
crème glacée
at Le Glacier Dillon on Rue Rivard. Last week two twenty-dollar bills disappeared from my room, and no, the food has no enzymes … Come on, Armand. It's noon. That's the thing about Armand, you can't rely on him to be on time. Not for any bad reason—stopping on the roadside … last time it was because he picked me the … fluffy … those branches with the new springtime …
les minous
. And another time he said he was collecting
les aiguilles
from a … a dead
porc-épic
for someone he knows to make a necklace … Suzanne must …
Susan
must love that. But what I love is that Armand reminds me of things I thought I'd forgotten. Do you remember this, Maman? Do you remember that?

Last time it was, “Do you remember Madame Poirer's dog?”

We dipped celery and …
les radis rouge
… in salt. I love the real
sel marin de Bretagne
. They harvest it in by hand. Here they give me a …
c'est horrible
…
une poussière noire
… made of seaweed granules! I throw it down the toilet. Armand escapes his wife in Montreal and he brings
sel de Guérande
and we dip the radishes. Suzanne, Susan, is intelligent but not sensible. She has no idea my youngest son can never thrive in the city. She thinks she has him broken in but my boy loves the country more than she—
pauvre
Suzanne … I tried to teach her, when she married him, how to look out for certain things, but she's one of those women who believe if men are stupid enough not to check their pockets for fifty-dollar bills before they go to the laundromat, then that is the men's own problem. Really, I find her
incompréhensible
.

“I
do
remember that dog,” I told Armand. The celery was cold, the radishes bitter, and the salt had
flavour
. “Even before she got that dog, Madame Poirer was dog crazy. I remember we were at Le Glacier Dillon and a dog barked across the terrace and its owner bought it a cone. When I gave my opinion on people treating dogs like real children you'd think I had personally insulted Madame Poirer. Oh, she disliked me that day!”

Madame Poirer and her husband began poor. Well, we all did. But her husband started driving a school bus. Soon he had a whole fleet of buses, and he made a fair amount of money with that, then he opened a shop. He was not the smartest of men. He was naïve. But he managed his little business all right. He and Marcelle began to think more highly of themselves. Madame Poirer became a snob—she ordered a new living room set from Dupuis Frères on Rue Ste. Catherine, everything upholstered in red moquette bouclé. Then they sold their truck and bought themselves a brown Mercedes. Her children were suddenly more intelligent than anyone else's children—then she acquired that little dog.

“Armand, what was that dog's name?”

We had a dog ourselves, a dog my husband had named Alphonse Daudet, after the French writer.

“Nanette?”

“No. It was … I think it was … Dentelle?”

“That's it. A frilly dog.”

Armand can bring the past to me in a way my other sons do not. When Armand was born, he weighed three pounds. You'd never guess this now. In those days, a three-pound baby did not always survive.

People come and go at a great rate here. Last week Monsieur Paquin died. Again, Armand had me laughing very …
il m'a fait rire bruyamment
… though I felt sad about Monsieur Paquin—I mean I've danced with him. Armand reminded me Monsieur Paquin once had an apple stall.

“Remember,” Armand found us egg sandwiches at the funeral reception even though Madame Sept-Petits-Bars had told me there were only tuna left, “what Monsieur Paquin told me about packing apples?”

When Armand was small, he sold Monsieur Paquin's apples door to door in a cart. Each morning—he was about ten years old—he took the apples from crates and put them in bags. Armand looked so cute wheeling his little go-cart.

“He told you no one will notice if you put one bruised apple in the bag, but if you put two in, they're sure to say something.”

“That's right. He put one soft apple into every single bag he ever sold.”

“You could rely on it.”

After Armand told Susan that story she treated poor Monsieur Paquin like …
elle lui a snobé
when she saw him coming and going in these halls, on her infrequent visits. Over apples he sold almost half a century ago. Do you see what I mean about my son's wife? There are a lot worse things a man can do than put one rotten apple in every bag. She's something of a dreamer, that one. She imagines my son can live with her for the rest of his life in the city. She has
absolument
…
aucune idée
… none at all, that Monsieur Paquin's habit of cheating his customers with the apples is funny.

Armand opened a tin of cashews. “Madame Poirer's dog was named Dentelle, and it was forbidden to leave home.” We both knew our dog, Alphonse Daudet, had the run of the entire town of Abercorn. There was no place in town off limits to Alphonse Daudet. “And—do you remember, Maman, that Madame Poirer put a chastity belt on it?”

A chastity belt! Who knew there was such a thing for dogs? But I suppose if you're going to drive a Mercedes and name a dog Dentelle …

The cashews are something I like to keep on hand. When my older sons visit, it's all business. It's about my bills being paid, and my signature giving power of attorney to the eldest if I happen to wake up thinking a snake has four legs, and arrangements to do with extra services. They think I need the staff to look in on me more often. The staff mean well but they're all from tiny villages: Sainte-Émélie-de-l'Énergie or St. Joachim des Monts. Madame Carré with her homemade hat, and Madame Sept-Petits-Bars, the one with the vacuum cleaner—her real name is Madame Tichoux, little cabbage … she's a little cabbage all right, poor thing. All I needed was the measurement for something I wanted to frame, a special little card with a medal on it from my school days at L'École Normale.

“
C'est cinq pousses
, Madame DeLorimier,” said the little cabbage—five inches—“and …” she frowned at her
ruban
, “
sept petits bars
?” Seven little bars—this was her term for seven sixteenths of an inch. I told this to Armand and he is the one who began calling her Madame Sept-Petits-Bars.

My older sons don't take me to Walmart, or buy small stepladders so I can climb into their passenger seats, or drive me over the Vermont border to see the magnificence of the leaves. Armand and I go to Tim Hortons, where I have chicken noodle soup, then we go to Walmart and I stock up on my cashews, and on M&M's for my grandchildren, and cotton underwear, which keeps disappearing from my room along with the twenty-dollar bills and being replaced by disposable culottes. Armand never washes his van. I've given him money in an envelope and told him to go to a car wash.

Armand said, “But Madame Poirer discovered Alphonse Daudet had jumped through her laundry room window, do you remember, Maman? And he'd torn the chastity belt off Dentelle.”

“Yes, she caught Alphonse Daudet mounting Dentelle underneath the ironing board.”

Armand can never find a parking space close to Walmart's door, so he lets me off and I wait. I lean on my stick. There are times I have to wait ten minutes, the parking lots are so full. While I'm waiting I look at young people go by, and sometimes I wish I had that old photograph of myself, the one of my first day at my stenography position before I became a teacher—in high heels and lipstick at my typewriter—I would show it to … well, who on their way to Walmart would want to look? What clairvoyant stranger? Am I deluded as well as vain?

There was a bakery in Vermont where we all used to get peanut butter pie. The bakery had a worker who looked at me and flashed a …
un coup de foudre
. Every time, until one day—I don't know what happened—maybe I skipped a summer or something died in him, or in me, but one day he was no longer generous with his attention. He was no younger than I was, but he didn't want to waste it on me a second longer. I saw him flirt with a younger woman. Much younger than himself, but is life fair?

Armand brings me something … not the old days or their romance, but … there's an ointment my husband used to put on the …
sur les mamelles
… of our cows. What
is
that ugly word … udders! It came in a yellow tin. Romance departed and its spot gaped raw—I wouldn't tell this to just anyone—and nothing came to heal it. That's old age for you. But the laughter Armand brings me is salve on that spot.

“And Madame Poirer took Dentelle to the vet to have the dog's pregnancy …
terminé
.”

“I never knew that, Maman.”

“And then one of her intelligent sons let Alphonse Daudet through the basement door with Dentelle again.”

I've asked Madame Sept-Petits-Bars to inform her colleagues in the dining hall that liver makes me …
j'en ai mal au coeur de ça
. When liver's on the menu they serve me chicken. I pay ten dollars extra on days Armand dines with me. On those days I don't eat with Madame Lefevre and Madame Pitre—they understand. My other sons never eat here. André is busy at IBM and Gilles says he detests the food. But according to Armand's Susan, what the brothers really mind is that everyone here is
décrépit
. There's a truth to that. It's no big news. All the residents are sick of looking at each other for that very reason. But Susan has no idea Armand tells me the things she says. She's a woman who tries to legislate who tells what to whom. That's what I mean by telling you she's a dreamer. Armand smuggles her cat in here. There's a strict policy against animals, but he stuffs the cat in his hockey bag, brings it up the elevator, and lays it in my lap where he lets it lick
la crème
of a pecan tart from his finger.

“Madame Poirer took her dog back to the vet,” I told Armand. “
Elle l'avait stérilisé
… but this time it died. She was glad to be done with that dog once and for all.”… I wanted to continue, “But Armand, what am I going to do? She's coming here expecting me to act like an old friend … will she expect to sit with me at the table I share with Madame Lefevre and Madame Pitre, where we sit as if we were at a fairly nice hotel, although it is hard to keep up the pretense at times—Madame Poirer is sure to make observations about aspects of the residence we choose to ignore. Having her at our table will …
elle va perturber le statu quo
…”

But I have never whined as an adult, and I'm not going to start now. Do you want to know when I realized, once and for all, that it does no good to lament? It has to do with that little medal for which I wanted Madame Sept-Petits-Bars to measure a frame. It was my school prize when I was sixteen. They give it to one graduating student each year at L'École Normale. I couldn't wait for my parents to come to the assembly. The
directrice
had told me I was the student to be honoured that year. I was so proud. We were all dying to see our parents, because we saw them only at Christmas and at the year-end. One of my sisters, Marguerite, cried for the first three months she was there. But my parents didn't show up. I don't know why. My father would come, I was sure of it—to see me crowned with La Médaille du Lieutenant-Gouverneur du Québec—but he didn't come. I took the buggy and the train home by myself, and no one mentioned my medal. The only reason I want it framed now is that my oldest son said he wouldn't mind having it. So I realized, when I was sixteen, it's no use to feel sorry for yourself.
Il est absolument futile
.