February (17 page)

Helen had struggled to define herself and what she wanted in a man. It seemed important to know what was true about herself. How to put into words the tumult of pleasure her life had been; how to say she had lost something big and was left with a hole in the middle of her chest and the wind whistling through. How to tell the pride she took in her work. That she had friends. How to explain that her friends were celebrating anniversaries, the twenty-fifth, the fortieth, and they were smug in their marriages, smug in their happiness, rude about it, and it was a smugness that seemed designed to exclude. They didn’t even know they were smug, and Helen had forgiven all of that. She wanted to mention that she didn’t begrudge her friends that happiness. She wanted to mention that she was the kind of woman who had kept her heart open and it had been a struggle.

There were other questions. How old, how young. What interests. What she could offer; what she could share. She wanted to say: I am so bloody lonely it doesn’t matter who you are or what you are, I am capable of loving you. She wanted to say: I will make love in such a way that you will be thankful for the rest of your days. She wanted to say: I am capable of giving that kind of pleasure. I am capable of experiencing it.

What she wanted was to talk. She wanted to have sex but she didn’t write that, she wrote that she wanted to talk. She wanted to cook for someone, or (this is the most humiliating part) to hold hands. Or (this is the most humiliating part of all) she wanted to discuss books. She wrote that she liked candlelight. She wrote that she expected kindness and a sense of humour.

There was no humour evident in what she had written. No humour at all. It was morosely serious. And completely dishonest.

If she had been honest she would have asked: Could you be my dead husband for an afternoon. Could you put on his clothes, I still have them. Will you wear the cologne he wore. Will you smoke Export As, just for an afternoon. Will you drink India beer and burn the steaks on the barbecue, will you be funny and tell jokes and leave groceries for the family down the road who have no groceries. Could you be Cal? Could you smile like Cal, a soft, lopsided smile, and raise a family like Cal, and be brave and courteous and charming with my women friends, and beloved by all who know you, and could you be as smart and awake as Cal, and can you make me come over and over and over again?

Helen and Cal had never held hands. It was one of the many things she regretted. They both saw the importance of keeping some distance. They were the kind of lovers who could have fallen into each other, been swallowed completely, and they had to guard against it. They did not hold hands; they did not eat off each other’s plates. But Helen had served him. She had made Cal coffee and put his wool mitts on the heater at night. And had thought about him when he was on the rig.

The trouble is, you get used to it, Helen thought. You get used to being alone. You use the end of a fork to dig the packed-tight coffee grounds from the espresso maker your children gave you for Christmas. There is the smell of cold coffee, of Ethiopia or Somalia, at five in the morning, hitting the plastic bag in the garbage bucket. And how hard-edged and real the garbage looks, how it smells (potato peels, a lump of wet dog food, the coffee). There was a snowstorm raging, the wind was loud, and the house was cold. It was the high ceilings in these old downtown houses. These houses were never warm. This was the trouble, how comfortable she had become with solitude.

. . . . .

The Night the Rig Went Down, February 1982

HERE’S THE FUNNY
thing. Helen had left the burner on. There was a giant pot on the back burner because she was going to make soup, and she had dropped in the chicken carcass and a few onions, and the funny thing was, she went off to sleep on the couch with her book.

She’d already put the kids to bed and she was reading
The Grapes of Wrath
and she woke up because of a kink in her neck. The house was cold and all the lights still on. The cold brightness.

Helen went into the kitchen and turned on the taps so the pipes wouldn’t freeze. She felt stupid, thinking about it. She had not dreamt, but the book had been in her hands and she had fought to keep her eyes open. Stupidity was a knotted muscle in the centre of her forehead.

She ran a thin thread of water. If the pipes froze she’d have to be down in the basement with the hair dryer. The pot was boiling furiously but she didn’t notice the pot, and all she could think later was that she must still have been asleep.

She switched off all the lights as she went. The girls had the heat on blast in their rooms, and there were clothes and Dinkys and dolls all over their floors. Lulu was snoring and Helen stood and listened to her for a moment and then Lulu flopped onto her side and was abruptly quiet.

The bedsheets were cold, and she got in the bed with her sweatshirt on and her track pants. She began to read her book again but she noticed that her eyes were closed. They had closed by themselves and she tried to open them but she couldn’t. She couldn’t see the words but she was generating the story herself so she would not have to open her eyes. In the novel someone told her to turn off the light and get some rest, so she did.

But then she was awake. And she heard Cal in the bathroom. She heard the water running and she heard the tap turn off with its particular
squeak
, and she could hear him brushing his teeth and she heard him spit. She heard the drawer open under the sink and he was rummaging through all the cosmetics and she heard, eventually, a length of dental floss being drawn from its plastic case, and the
ping
of the dental floss as he worked it through his teeth. Then the water ran again and was turned off. She heard Cal close the drawer. She wanted to cuddle into him; she wanted his heat. She was strangely chilled. It was from falling asleep on the couch. She was shivering in the bed.

The lid to the wastebasket in the bathroom banged off the wall and fell back down.

Come and look out the window, Cal told her.

Helen got out of bed and put her glasses on and went to the window. It was four in the morning. She knows because she looked at the clock on the vanity table. The ugly brown clock-radio with dust in all the grooves over the speaker and the big red digital numerals, and none of the radio stations worked. The alarm didn’t work either. Or they always set it wrong. They would set it for six in the morning and they would hear its tiny
scritch-scritch
noise, what was left of the alarm, at six in the evening. For days after setting it, if they were on the way to the bathroom or putting the laundry away, and especially if the children were outdoors or if she and Cal were making love, the alarm would startle them.

Helen was surprised that it was so late, she remembers quite vividly, thinking how surprising it was, because she felt as if she had not slept at all. And now the day would begin. The window was covered in ferns of frost, elaborate curling tendrils, etched and opaque or transparent. And the wind was banging against the house. She saw the lid of a tin garbage can fly down the street and catch in the branches of a tree.

But then a plow came down over the hill and it was bleating and the revolving light on the top of the cab struck the frosted window and Helen could see thousands of crackles and crystals and grey shimmer burning as white as a flashbulb, violet-white, just for an instant, burning so fiercely it hurt somewhere behind her eyes.

It hurt somewhere deep in her skull. It felt as though the light had pierced her, gone through, and the mad design of the frost, infinitely curling in on itself, had been printed on her retina.

It felt like a puncture. A rapture. It was the pregnancy, she realized much later. It was the pregnancy that had made her so profoundly sleepy, as if drugged, and she was faint or the hormones had created some kind of mild hallucinogenic effect or the light hitting the frost at that second had refracted, each minute crystal a hall of mirrors, so that the intensity was hugely magnified.

The pot on the stove. She blinked and a spot floated down behind her eyelid in the shape of the light from the plow, and it was white in the centre with a violet aureole. She did not exactly remember the pot on the stove; rather, she was jolted and suddenly knew. The pot had been left on the stove. Or perhaps she had smelled the smoke, and in an instant of panic some synaptic misfire had made her experience the stink as a blinding light.

The water had boiled down and the bones of the carcass were black and the inside of the pot was black and the kitchen was full of smoke. The smoke hugged the ceiling and filled half the room like cotton batting, and it was a dense grey, and she held her breath. She flung open the back door and the snowdrift was up to the door handle and she grabbed the oven mitts and took up the pot, threw it into the snowbank on the back deck. It sank out of sight.

It was four in the morning. She opened all the kitchen windows and she left the back door open and the wind howled through. The snow whirled down from the uppermost reaches of the universe, it spun and swarmed the naked bulb of the back-porch light, and it sparkled near the bulb; each snowflake shot through with pinks or blues or greens. The sound the pot made when it hit the snow was a reptilian
hiss
.

It was weeks later, or months, that she remembered Cal had not been in the bathroom; she had only dreamt him. But she had known, unequivocally, that there was reason to be afraid. She had known he was dead.

A NEW DAY

A Lesson, November 2008

HELEN IS AT
her morning yoga class and everyone is absolutely still on their separate mats, inward-searching. The first orange rays of the sun are coming through the big frosted windows, stretching in long rippled rectangles over the tiled floor. Flinching concentration. They are a class of shiny, flinching women, except for the gay high school boy, who wears a spandex headband and has dyed blue hair.

Lulu said yoga, so Helen has been doing yoga. The smell of feet and floor polish and the scrudge-squeak, now and then, of a naked foot on the royal blue gym mats that unfold with a slap and send up the smell of dust and sweat.

Sweep your arms out and turn the palms towards the sky, the instructor says, so you can receive the breath. You’re going to offer your hearts, she tells them. Helen feels the thump of her heart and tries to look like she is offering it. She glances around. There are expressions on some of the women’s faces; they seem to be sincerely offering their hearts.

And reach, reach for the sky, they are told. The instructor breathes in audibly, and then the class breathes in. The instructor exhales. They all exhale.

Consider all you have learned, the instructor says. And let’s practise gratitude while we stretch. They practice gratitude silently.

Bring your left foot in, the instructor says, when she figures they’ve been grateful enough for the moment. And come back to the centre. A muscle in Helen’s ass has clenched. It happens every time.

Turn your heart, the instructor says, towards the sky. Helen holds the pose. They are required to think philosophically about their lives while they stretch. Stretching is not enough for the yoga instructor. They are supposed to summon the wisdom they have achieved thus far. And hold. Yoga has a spiritual side, Lulu had explained to Helen. And Helen thinks: a slippery, yeasty-smelling religion having to do with church basements and community halls, ache and release.

Easy pose, with a twist, the instructor says. Look over your left shoulder. They all turn at once to the left and glance back.

This is what Helen has learned: it is possible to be so tired you cannot reach for the sky, you cannot breathe. You can’t even talk. You can’t pick up the phone. You can’t do a dish or dance or cook or do up your own zipper. The children make such a racket. They slam around. They play music on bust or they lie on the couch watching soap operas. They fight and smash things and lose their virginity or they lose their way. They need money and they need to borrow the car. One shoe is always missing. You go through the bookbags, you go through the closet; always one shoe. Gone.

Easy pose, with a twist, look in the other direction, the instructor says. Helen lets the pain invade her other thigh and it is a sonorous voice. There is a voice in her thigh full of recrimination, rising in volume. An April afternoon, she thinks, that was so cold the dog’s water bowl had a film of ice and the kids found a sheet of bubble wrap in the churchyard and tied it to their arms—Lulu and Cathy—and they flapped like damaged birds all afternoon. They made potions with mustard pickles and dish soap and dried grass in Mason jars. Their noses ran and the sky looked like it would snow and then it did snow.

Cat-cow pose, the instructor says. As you’re opening your chest and your heart, ask yourself, Am I grateful?

They get on their hands and knees and stretch their chins to the ceiling. They stick their bums high in the air and then they arch their backs. The bums in the row in front of Helen are all very different. Shiny and squeezed into Lycra, the bums in the front row look scrawny and forged, or as dimpled and shapeless as beanbags. She is grateful for these women and their earnest, hard-working bums. Helen is grateful that she has more or less kept in shape.

She is grateful that her children made it through. Her daughters got drunk; they got stoned. There was always a priest who had something to say. There was a teacher. And later there were people who said
coke,
who said
promiscuity.
But that was all grossly exaggerated. Next I’m supposed to achieve balance, Helen thinks.

And balance table, the instructor says. The foundation of yoga is balance.

And I am grateful, Helen thinks, for the blockbusters at the mall in the summers. All the loud soundtracks, things blowing up and busting apart and all the pieces flying upwards, end over end, into the sky. She had liked the slow tumble of wood and metal, the flame and smoke that covered the big screen. She had liked the roaring music and buckets of popcorn and how it was still bright out when she left the theatre. Helen took the children to the movies on the bus, and they ran up and down the aisle of the bus and swung on the chrome poles. She took any neighbourhood kids who wanted to come so long as they had their own money. It was an hour and a half together in the dark and she and the children felt united, lined up in the seats when the lights dimmed. She was grateful for all the brief escapes.