Authors: Lucy Ellmann
“Who gave nuclear energy adherents the right to make the world uninhabitable? They should all be indicted for crimes against humanity,” I said. “And that includes Gertrude!”
“They’re all such liars, that’s what gets me,” said Bee. “The nuclear industry attracts the biggest liars in the world. It’s just about money. The BBC too! All they talk about is the Japanese
economy
. They’ve already forgotten the dead. It’s so. . . churlish!” (Ah ha! Bee had been converted to the word “churlish.” That comforted me somewhat.)
“Bee, how could I have been with that creep for five years?”
She laughed. “You weren’t really
with
her. You were. . . kind of out of it for a while there, Harry.”
“Aw, shit.”
“Hey, I saved a woman’s life!” said Bee.
My sister, whom I remembered a shivering wreck in my kitchen, was now a rescuer of women! She’d been walking behind some couple in Canterbury, and heard the man haranguing the woman. So Bee walked faster, trying to get close enough to deflate the guy a bit, or at least embarrass him into silence. Then the couple stopped in a doorway, and Bee had to walk past. But when she got to the corner, she saw that the guy had pulled a knife and was shoving it in the woman’s face. So Bee ran back screaming at him and the man took off. By then the woman’s throat had been slashed, and she crumpled to the ground. Great place, Canterbury. I’d assumed England was pretty safe!
Bee tied something around the woman’s neck and tried to phone for an ambulance but got put through to Liverpool for some reason, hundreds of miles away. Then some other woman who’d seen what happened offered to take them to a hospital in Ashford, only about fifteen miles away (the Canterbury hospital had no real ER). They finally got the injured woman there and she’d been stitched up and was going to be all right.
“But I was scared the whole way that she’d hemorrhage or something,” Bee told me. “I wished you were there! What good’s a doctor in the family, if he’s miles away in an emergency?”
“Bee, can’t you just stay in your studio and make your Coziness Sculptures?”
“Oh, I’m not doing them at the moment. I got sick of all the quibbling about money. I’ve started something new. I’m out on my bike most days, doing research.”
“What are you researching? Daffodils? Thatched roofs? Knife crime?”
“Heartache. I’m collecting inscriptions from tombstones, mostly war graves. There were so many people killed in England in war after war, you’d think there’d be nothing left of this little country. There isn’t
much
, actually. The weird thing is, they always mention the guy’s role in the Army, as if the real tragedy isn’t that he died, but that they lost a
sapper
, whatever that is, or a gunner, or a pilot.”
“I think it’s a guy who digs trenches.”
To get to these graves, Bee cycled. She would cycle to the train station in Canterbury, the one called the
West
Station, although it was further east than the
East
Station (“as if the whole town revolved on its axis at some point,” she said), cycle straight onto the train, sit there for a few short stops, then cycle off at some country station, riding right along the platform, out the gate, and onto the road, never getting off her bike for a moment. It was usually a short spin from the station to the churchyard, which she could see from the train by checking for a steeple. (Bee seemed innocently proud of the simplicity of these little journeys of hers.) And there in some old graveyard she’d note down inscriptions like:
WE ARE PARTED ERIC DEAR
FOR JUST A LITTLE WHILE.
AGED TWENTY.
Or,
A NOBLE BRAVE BOY AND SON.
GREATLY BELOVED.
AGED SEVENTEEN.
“Seventeen!” Bee said to me. “It’s unbearable.”
“Just don’t get yourself killed, Bee, on that bike of yours. I don’t want to have to come over and bury
you
in one of those graveyards: ‘
SADLY MISSED
.
DOPE GOT HERSELF RUN OVER
.
AGED FIFTY-THREE
.’ ”
The memorial that bugged Bee the most though was right around the corner from her house. It wasn’t a war grave but an ugly obelisk commemorating a whole load of Christian martyrs who’d been burned at the stake on that very spot in about 1550. Their Canterbury martyrdom must remind Bee of her
own
, I suggested. But it wasn’t so much the way they died, or why, that irked Bee—it was the way they were commemorated on the monument. Most of the martyrs were named in full, but two were referred to only as “Bradbridge’s widow” and “Wilson’s wife.”
“It’s so. . . patronizing,” Bee said. “You go to all the trouble of getting yourself
burned at the stake
, and they can’t even bother to remember your name?”
“Bit of a wasted effort, you feel?”
“It reminds me of Dad!
Of course
I wore that old coat all the time! Because he made me feel like crap.”
“I don’t really see the connection—”
“Men patronizing women, that’s the connection!. . . Always making me feel like I wasn’t the daughter he wanted. . . But I was the daughter he
made
me,” she said, starting to sound tearful. She was right about him: to me he’d voiced his revulsion, not just for her coat, but for her retreat to Maine to live on a commune with a bunch of hippies and wild dogs, a lifestyle choice designed to drive him bananas. Also, her decision to go to art school, which he refused to pay for—while
I
compliantly took his dough, got the fancy education, and became a doctor not handy in an emergency.
“Bee.”
“You’re not going to defend him, are you?” she said.
“No. I was going to commend
you
, for saving that woman’s life. I think they should make you Queen Bee.”
“I’d rather be a dame.”
“Well, you
are
abroad.”
An old joke, but she fell for it, which was a relief: there’s nothing worse than hearing your sister cry three thousand miles away.
“Bee, I, uh, I told Mimi about the fire.” Bee was surprised, since we never usually mentioned it to anybody. “I still have one question though. Where
was
Dad that night? What was he doing
outside
? I never figured that out—”
“Harry. . . ” she said in an odd tone.
“
What
?”
“Don’t you know?”
“Know what?”
“Dad started the fire.”
“Dad. . . ? Oh, come off it!”
“No. Harry. He tried to kill us that night. Tried to kill us all! The guy was a maniac! Mom protected him, she took the blame. But that’s why she was never the same after the fire. She wasn’t just mourning the house, she was regretting the whole marriage!”
“She should have left him,” I mumbled.
“Mom believed you stick with your husband, Harry, even if he turns out to be a gargoyle drooling rainwater off the Chrysler Building.”
After we hung up, I headed into the sunny dining room where Mimi (awake at last!) was holding a jar of Cheryl’s
please-date-me
marmalade up to the light, marveling at it as if it was Roman glass or something! I couldn’t stand the stuff. It might
look
pretty, but it came at a price: Cheryl kept loading me up with preserves in the expectation of romantic results. I can’t be bought that easily!
“How can you not want this marmalade?” Mimi asked.
“Mmmh?”
“Just look at the sun coming through it,” she said, as she turned the jar this way and that, admiring its amber color and the bits of orange rind floating in the clear jelly, which, to me, looked like tadpoles suffocating in swamp water.
“Jams are seriously undervalued,” Mimi went on. “Just like quilts, and cooking. Because
women
did them.”
“Hmnh.” I looked around vaguely for
the
New York Times
.
“When in fact they’re some of the best things in the world!” she said happily, putting the marmalade down among its fellows, in order to wrestle a coffee capsule into Gertrude’s high-tech coffee machine.
“What?” I really couldn’t remember what she’d been talking about.
“Jam, Harrison.”
“Ham?!”
“Jam! I’m talking homemade jam here,
women’s
work. Part of a whole world of unpaid work women do. . . Probably a remnant of matriarchy and prehistoric, nonmonetary work, when people just chipped in and did what was needed. . . Hey, you’re not listening!”
“Yes I am.”
“You didn’t hear a thing!” she said, and suddenly took up a boxing pose, as if she was going to give me the ol’ one-two. I went over to her and took her hands, her strong hands that I loved.
“It’s just. . . something Bee just told me over the phone.”
“Bee?! Well. . . what?”
I sighed. “That the fire. . . wasn’t accidental. It was my dad.”
“He started it?” She didn’t sound too surprised.
“Yeah.”
She lifted her hand to my cheek, and kissed me on the neck.
“Did you already guess?!” I asked her, astounded.
“Well, it did sound a bit fishy,” she said.
We sat at the table in silence for a while, surrounded by frog spawn.
“I still don’t know
why
though,” I mumbled.
“Because he lost his job maybe? The pension and everything. You think he was worried about money?”
“Aw, he didn’t lose his job. That was a big lie. He was just in a bad mood. No, he stuck with that dumb gum job till the day he left town for good. Bee thinks he was sick of having a sick wife. . . A pubescent daughter too. He hated Bee as she got older. . . Fathers are the worst!” I said, thinking of the pole-dancer’s dad.
It was spring at last, the sky a creamy blue, tweety-birds a-tweeting, lords and ladies leaping. In Central Park anyway, on every bench, against every tree, couples were frantically entwined. It was like
Watteau
in there! One sunny day, and out come the flirtatious looks and the mandolins.
“What a cliché,” Mimi witheringly observed. “Just because it’s spring doesn’t mean you have to mate!”
I was about to concur, the first impulse of the lover, when I remembered that all of my own romances, the more major ones at least, had begun in the spring (including
this
one)—how biological can you get? And yet we soon we succumbed to some canoodling of our own, along with everybody else.
“Let’s try to knock this thing into shape,” she declared abruptly.
“Knock
what
into shape?” I asked eagerly, looking around for a more discreet hidy-hole.
“Your speech, Harrison, your speech.”
“My what?. . . Oh.” We had already covered many types of oral presentation, I fondly recalled, devoting ourselves daily to questions of expressiveness, responsiveness, fairness, intimacy, inclusivity, rhythm and repetition. . . I’d totally forgotten about my
speech
. Who could think about Chevron High in the midst of this?! Why taint love with worry? But now it seemed it was School Time again.
“Ya do remember my book, right?” she asked. “So, what’s your Speech Objective?”
We wandered aimlessly through a sunless sinless clearing, devoid of couplings. I tried to remember what I could of Mimi’s book. I knew it mentioned something about Speech Objectives—but what?
“My Objective,” I said boldly, “is to survive.”
“Hmmm, maybe we’ll work on the Objective later,” Mimi conceded. “Now, how about content? If you could talk about anything you wanted, what would it be?”
“Melancholy?”
“Nah. Not for a graduation speech, Harrison!”
“Why not?”
“You really need to be thinking more in terms of a pep talk, ya jerk. Give ’em something rousing, something a little jazzy! What else you got?”
“Crapholes of the famous?”
She’d seen the book, but no.
“What about your job, you wanna talk about that?”
No, I wasn’t going to talk about my stupid job. Things had recently reached a new low at the office. The police had dropped the charges against the pole-dancer’s father, on the grounds that they’d found no evidence. No evidence, my ass. What was the pole dance she did if not “evidence”? When I objected to their decision, reminding them about the broken arm, which alone was a classic sign of violent abuse, the cops said that, according to the girl’s mother, the kid fell down in the playground. So they believed the cowed mom, not me. But I’d looked into the guy’s soul, and it wasn’t pretty in there.