Mad Hope (23 page)

Annie's dress has been trampled at the back – the dusty spirits of footprints on the dragging train. The flowers that were worked so finely into her hair (rolled and twisted like hamentaschen, she told me, a pastry representing the hat of a Hebrew hero) are gone, and wisps have sprung free around her temples. Her nose is slick with sweat. She signals to the
DJ
to stop the music with a slicing motion across her fine neck, and the silence is confusing; it slows us all down and sharpens our vision. The guests trip back to their tables, await instructions. Annie has collected her bouquet from the head table: gardenias, marigolds and dahlias, their stems wound round with a wide hot pink ribbon whose ends trail and flap. She lifts the bouquet in the air – up, up and up – towards the bright disco ball. There are sighs and deficient giggles, and Samantha to my left, averting her gaze. Annie turns towards us; she knows how to find and hold her sister steady. They stare at each other. What is it about a room full of people waiting on love to be declared that plugs up the throat? Annie stops in front of Samantha, salutes her with her eyes. Then she turns in my direction, scoots alongside my chair, crouches close – ah! the smell of her hair, the smell of her sweet baby head! – and lays the bouquet in my lap.

People talk about opposite points of your life like the tail ends of a measuring tape that will meet only when you've travelled and tallied that last quarter inch. But Frank once brought me a set of Russian dolls after he'd been out all night. He smelled of pipe smoke and a single woman's soap when he handed them over – round-faced, brightly swaddled women nestling right down into themselves to a tiny, solid core. Sometimes my wedding – Frank's smart, purposeful army uniform, the joy and terror doing caged battle in my chest – fits tightly around his deathbed, a too-low ceiling, and how it felt to hold the hand of a husk. Other times, a small moment or image will grow, harden like lacquer and click into place over my entire self. The way Frank allowed his tented book to fall to the floor as we dreamt our way to the ends of our stories and away from each other. My daughter's face as she pulled on her socks for the first time, the smell of my father's shirts at the end of the day, Bea's red golf umbrella snapping open above us, a certain shade of sky.

Samantha: Muddling

Out in the night, with Max's arms around her, her dangerous heels sinking into the moist earth, Samantha realizes something. It is a bracketed understanding that settles outside and slightly to the left of her head, and will eventually drift into her blind spot. She remembers how she and Annie saved the Kleenexes they snotted into at their granddad's funeral, balled them in their pockets, then deposited them in a cookie tin and wedged the lid tightly down. She remembers bestowing cast-offs on Annie – three-limbed Barbies and too-short sweaters. Her sister's face receiving these poor gifts was terrifying in its anxious bliss. ‘For keeps?' she'd query softly. ‘
For keeps?
'

‘It's all about muddling, isn't it?' Samantha mutters drunkenly, good-naturedly, into Max's shoulder. Lady Macbeth thought it wise to unsex herself; she gave demons leave to drink from her breasts so she could get on with it, the business of power, but today, Samantha thinks, well, today people go to great lengths to procure offspring, seeking out test tubes and turkey basters, or rescuing tiny foreign tykes left behind by mothers themselves overlooked and overwhelmed. All over the world, blazing bombs in the shapes of planes or pointy fingers zoom down from the sky. The future breakdances madly on cardboard boxes laid over the earth's mismatched plates and lava – and still we stake a claim on it!

Max kisses Samantha's collarbone; his hands find purchase under her bum.

She keeps thinking she's found it, the answer, and then it morphs, all sci-fi, into something alien and unclassifiable.
For keeps
, Samantha chants silently, as she guides Max's fingers, unbuckles his belt, offers up important corners and foldings of herself.

‘Are you sure,' he says kindly, but only partway means it.

Eliza: Good Luck to You

‘She didn't have to do that,' I say, cradling the bouquet in my lap, saltwater squeezing out from under my eyelids.

‘But she did,' says Bea, putting her arm around me.

'She did,' says Samantha, teetering strangely on her heels, legs pressed together, ankles crossed as if gathering herself together, holding something in. She shakes her head and kisses the top of mine.

I reach up to grab on to her smart self. (You know, I once asked Samantha why she couldn't find herself a fella. Can't stay up on the shelf too much longer, I advised. She told me she was deeply involved with books. On the shelf, she said, was fine. Well, I said, good luck to you when it comes to reproducing.)

‘She did,' Samantha says again, and takes hold of my hand, squeezing oh-so-tight.

Bea, who is in her cups, has begun asking questions. ‘A dove brings white babies, right?'

I do not answer.

‘Nothing but bleached-out pigeons, doves.' Bea is slurring, but happy. I take her hand, but she pulls it away.

‘And a crow brings black babies,' she says.

A caution is kicking inside me. I look over at Samantha, who is frowning down at Bea. Bea knocks her knife off the table, then bends, gruntingly, to retrieve it. From under the tablecloth comes a new question, more pointed. ‘What, then … ' This is muffled by the thick linen of the tablecloth's overhang. She straightens up, places the knife in the centre of the table, far from the edge of the known world. ‘What brings
no
babies?'

I shake my head while Bea smiles into her chest. Always, always, there is Bea, hurrying up the joke, harrumphing to herself.

‘Two swallows,' she manages, between gasps. She slaps the table, overcome with the hilarity.

Samantha, for all her prudery and politics, is laughing along with Bea.

And I laugh too, knowing, in my heart of hearts, that, timing or no, this is good.

Notes and Acknowledgements

Some stories in the collection have been previously published (in slightly different form) in the following books and periodicals: ‘BriannaSusannaAlana' in
The New Quarterly
94 and
Journey Prize Stories
18; ‘My Friend Taisie' in
Hobart # 8
; ‘Dominoes' as ‘White Bread Fiction' in
PRISM International
41:4; ‘Dingbat' in
The New Quarterly
85; ‘Bye Bye Flangle Nuts' in
The New Quarterly
99; ‘Wanted Children,' in
Toronto Noir
; ‘Impossible to Die in Your Dreams' on bookninja.com and in
The New Quarterly
107.

Writing and publishing a book is sometimes a bit like raising a child – it takes a village. Many thanks to:
The New Quarterly
, the Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Writers' Trust of Canada for monetary and moral support; Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, steadfast friend and supporter of my writing habit; Jennifer Birrell, for impromptu childcare; Simona Opris for help with Romanian ­history and language; Amber Wilson, Kim Jernigan, Carrie Snyder, Julie Birrell and Hilary McMahon for early readings of the manuscript; Alana Wilcox, who handled these stories with true care and integrity; and all the good folk at Coach House, who gave the book a home and called it their own.

My family bolster and sustain me always; this book wouldn't exist without their help.  As ever, love and thanks to the exceptional Charles Checketts, who keeps me in good grub and good spirits.

About the Author

Heather Birrell
is the author of the previous story collection
I know you are but what am I?
(Coach House, 2004). Her work has been honoured with the Journey Prize for short fiction and the Edna Staebler Award for creative non-fiction, and has been shortlisted for both National and Western Magazine Awards. Birrell's stories have appeared in many North American journals and anthologies, including
The New Quarterly
and
Toronto Noir
. She lives with her husband and two daughters in Toronto, where she teaches high school English.

Typeset in Bell and Agency.

Printed in February 2012 at the old Coach House on bpNichol Lane in Toronto, Ontario, on Zephyr Antique Laid paper, which was manufactured, acid-free, in Saint-Jérôme, Quebec, from second-growth forests. This book was printed with vegetable-based ink on a 1965 Heidelberg kord offset litho press. Its pages were folded on a Baumfolder, gathered by hand, bound on a Sulby Auto-Minabinda and trimmed on a Polar single-knife cutter.

Edited and designed by Alana Wilcox

Cover design by Ingrid Paulson

Author photo taken by Charles Checketts

Coach House Books

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bpNichol Lane

Toronto,
ON M5S 3J4

Canada

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