Poached Egg on Toast (19 page)

“Did you now?” you say, and grab her close for a hug.

Zoe pulls back so she can watch your face. “You know that time you and Dad made me,” she says, “when he had to put his penis in you? Well, when he put it inside you, did he burst out laughing?”

You and Alec
clutch
each other in laughter over that. Behind your closed bedroom door. Later, several weeks later, Zoe tells you—again she waits until the two of you are alone—”I’m never going to let any man put his thing in
me.”

She looks really miffed at the idea.

There’s no answer to that, you safely decide.

Every day, you walk farther and farther from the lodge. You’ve met the dogs on the farms, and when you’re in the woods you’re not afraid of bears. A humming sort of heat has descended; a profusion of dragonflies and bees, of poison ivy, thick along the edge of the dirt road. There are strawberry plants and even honeysuckle, which you’ve not seen for a long time.

You are as silent as you hope to be.

You think of Alec. Now that you are away, you can’t keep yourself from tallying up. You know that the two of you can live together for months, asking nothing except that each is there for the other. It’s as if you truly believe that marriage, life, is that simple.

Then, some urgent need for discord rears itself, gnaws up the side of you, takes form in the shape of impatience, irritation, anger.

High tide and low.

Alec always wants to wait things out. As if time is on his side, as if you both have all the time in the world. You—you admit this to yourself—want to delve to the heart; you want to
identify the problem
. But just as quickly as it has dissolved, peace reasserts itself. Fingers reach across a desert sheet. A cold toe brushes against a bare leg. You are learning, and so is Alec. In your separate system of beliefs, you are learning to leave alone what must be left alone, that debris will always be present, waterlogged beneath the surface.

Louisa says she would like to move into your house and live with you. You cannot adopt her, bring her into your circle of safety, though you would if you could. Louisa has a home, whatever it might be. Louisa’s mother watched Louisa’s father when he did gross touches. She was forced to; some part of Louisa doesn’t know this. Now, Louisa’s father is not allowed to be in or near the apartment building where Louisa and her mother live. Louisa tells you that he will be arrested if he puts a toe on the grass in front of the building. You continue to see Louisa twice a week, but that is all you can do.

You enter the dining room. Bert is waiting. He sees that you are carrying a book, a different one this time. He shouts out as you cross the room to get to the annex, “What does she come here for, to READ?” You stick in Bert’s craw like the bone in the wolf’s throat. No one at his table can explain you. “Why don’t you ask her why she comes here,” says Bert’s wife. But he does not. Instead, he complains loudly and bitterly throughout the meal. You ask yourself if the men of his generation were born angry.

Becky has a theory that entire generations of men have been brought up to believe it’s their divine right to be listened to. She’s put in her years, she says, of listening to opinionated men. Once a month, you and Becky go out for dinner after work. One night, in a Vietnamese restaurant, behind a paper screen, she tells you about her first husband, Dirk. Dirk comes home drunk one night—two thirty in the morning—and chases her out of their bed, out the back door, past the blackberry bushes and around the outside of the house, trying to have sex with her. “I know my rights!” he shouts as he chases. He is running with a hard-on, Becky says. “I know my rights!” he calls after her. It’s easy to get away from him, because he’s drunk. Eventually Dirk falls down on the grass and goes to sleep right there. It is not long after that, Becky says, that she leaves him.

Becky is married now to a man named William, a soft-spoken, gentle man. You wonder if William has anger in him; if so, you’ve never seen a sign of it. You wonder if William knows the story of Dirk shouting, “I know my rights!” It’s a story that causes you and Becky to collapse in laughter whenever either of you mentions it, although you both know that the story isn’t really funny.

You have one more night at the lodge. You’ve read a book every day, and you feel as if you’ve walked hundreds of miles. You’ve sat motionless on the dock and watched small dark fish, lurking in the weeds. Every evening, from your room, you listen for the loons.

You phone Alec. You talk to him and Zoe and tell them you’ll be home after lunch the next day. Alec says he’s glad you’re ready to come back. Zoe tells you that a new boy has joined her French class, even though it’s nearly the end of the school year. The girls chase him during morning break and try to tag him. She does not, she says, because she thinks they’re silly.

You hang up the receiver and think about all the parts of your life. You tell yourself that you have to believe they come together to make one life, your life. The one you live every day. You insist that this is possible, that all the parts of your life can add up to one.

Special meal tonight. Most of the guests will be leaving tomorrow, end of the week. There is an air of excitement in the dining room. Bert’s cheeks are flushed; he seems outraged as you enter. You are going to escape, having provided no explanation to HIM.

“Here she is! “ he yells to his wife. “Why she would come to a place like this alone is beyond me.” You stare eye to eye, from the annex window. Is there something you should do? Something you should say?

Bert is rising from his chair. He has finally worked himself up to some action. “I’ll find out about her,” he tells the others at his table. He stumps across the room, stands ten paces back, opens his mouth to shout.

You touch your ears, you touch your lips. Are you deaf? Are you mute? Are you neither of these? You smile as you turn away. Your head is framed by the open window.

In memory, I hold only momentary versions of my early childhood. When I was almost five, my parents suddenly announced to my older sister Jess and me (at least, looking back, it now seems sudden) that our family would be moving to Quebec. They pronounced this Kew-bec and told us we would have to learn to speak another language. Our father’s work was taking us from our own province; there was little choice—none, I realize now.

We were transplanted to a tiny rural village on the Ottawa River, far from friends and family, even remote from the village itself. Our road was a kind of half-road, a ribbon of dust and gravel that contained one other house and led past one field and ended bluntly in another. The river rushed pell-mell into rapids, its roar a constant reminder of its attraction and its danger. During spring runoff, the navy-grey water even crossed the dirt road and lapped at our very step. It was on this step that at five years of age I began to teach myself French and I sat, daily, babbling and blathering to myself in unknown syllables that poured out of me as rapidly as the current that raced past the front of the house. No one could have convinced me that I was not speaking the new language at hand. And when my mother stood at the screen one day, behind me, and asked what I was doing, I wouldn’t tell for fear that she would laugh or tell my father or somehow diminish my efforts. I wholeheartedly believed that my private language had fooled my mother, and she never did say whether it had or not.

Jess and I found many ways to amuse ourselves during those years in rural Quebec. We shared a bedroom, each of us with a single bed, and this made it easy for one of us to pretend to retire early, pad out the bed as if a sleeping body were within, and lie in wait beneath the opposite bed. Though we did not do this often, I remember that the feelings that went with being either on top of one’s own mattress or beneath the other bed, were exactly one and the same. It made no difference whether one was the feared or the fearful. There was always the burst of adrenalin, the pounding of the pulse, the holding of the breath. If I were to frighten Jess, I’d wait until she was well settled but not asleep, and then, from beneath her bed, I’d begin the far-away sounds one can make deep in the throat only when one is lying on one’s back on cold linoleum. A long silence would follow. Then, the noise again. Jess would finally say, as indifferently as she could, “I know it’s you, stupid. You don’t fool me.” But the trick was
not to answer
. By then, both of us would be frightened, and eventually Jess would call out to me for help as if I might, in fact, be in my own bed. And from the floor I would begin to shake and then to laugh.

The ritual was the same when she lay in wait for me. Success was always dependent on the timing. One must hide when hiding was least expected—after a day that had been filled with unrelated events, for instance, so that the other could be taken by surprise.

A long high-ceilinged closet had been built at one end of our bedroom. This was a narrow, open-ended passageway, and served many purposes. At our end, we hung clothes. Then, we met chimney and an even narrower space that we could squeeze past. After that, there were clothing racks, overhead shelving and a series of floor-to-ceiling cupboards set into the far end. The tunnel, certainly twenty feet long, spilled out into the living room and, for children, was a convenient, if dark, shortcut through the middle of the house. The best feature about it was that it was so dark, one could not see into it when passing either end.

This was the space into which we dragged pillows and bedding and lay in wait for Santa Claus, or listened to
Lux Presents Hollywood
, which for years was broadcast later than our bedtime. And, on rare occasions, when our parents hosted parties, we positioned ourselves single file, lengthwise, head to toe in the passage, trying to find out what adults did and talked about when we were supposed to be asleep.

During the summer holidays while our parents were at work, Jess and I would tack long dark curtains inside either end, preparing a
Tunnel of Horrors
through which we led the neighbourhood children. We blindfolded our victims, pulled back the dark curtain, and gave them a shove into the unknown. The victims had to walk the gauntlet with arms outstretched, through and past simulated cobwebs, cold-water dousings, dishes of fabricated brains, blood, wet porridge, all to a background of nasty cries and haunting calls. They emerged at the other end, spilling out into the living room, where a waiting figure jumped out at them as the final curtain was pulled.

On Hallowe’en of my tenth and Jess’s twelfth year, the two of us prepared for an evening of door-to-door rounds in the village. We never tried to represent anything particular in costume; each of us dressed in leggings and jackets, and layered on top of those whatever remnants of old clothes and props we could find. That year, I wore Father’s long johns, the trapdoor leering. Jess wore a full skirt, a blouse many sizes too big and a bandanna round her head. Just as we were leaving, she ran back up the steps, and Mother stuffed a bolster inside the blouse, which already bagged over Jess’s jacket. As we hurried through the field and towards the centre of the village, the enormous bulge led the way as part of Jess’s anterior, and this kept us giggling steadily. We did not know how serious a gesture it was until we reached the third street on our rounds, a house we were curious to investigate because we knew that a man and woman had moved there within the past few weeks, and that this would be our chance to look them over.

The door was unlocked from within, and we were beckoned inside and brought through the darkness of an enclosed back porch into a smoky kitchen. The man who had let us in had only three upper teeth. Two women and another man were at a kitchen table, where a card game was in progress. The table was strewn with ashtrays and quart beer bottles.

The man who was seated spoke loudly.

“Well,” he said, as much to his three companions as to us, “let’s see you do some tricks.”

One of the women, perhaps his wife, left the table, gathering ashtrays to dump. We heard her say, not very convincingly, from the back of the room, “Leave them alone for Jesus sake, they’re only kids.”

“Come on, come on,” he said, “do something, sing, or dance, something.” He scraped his chair towards us and Jess and I backed away in the direction of the door. We had known as soon as we’d entered this room that there was something about his jollity that was not funny, something forced and hard-edged. He drew attention, with his laughter, to the huge bulge in Jess’s blouse, and looked to the other three for backup. But they appeared uneasy and glanced at us and then away, lacking the courage to be solidly on one side or the other. The woman of the house stood near the door, an apple in each hand and, as I looked at her, I knew that she wanted us to leave. At that moment, in the astonishment of realizing that she was as much trapped as we, I heard a noise coming from Jess, beside me:

I was surprised, and then, not. Jess had been the first to recognize that this was the only way we would get out. Our voices joined as we sang together:

The lines came out of our mouths like wisps intertwining with the smoke.

Only one refrain. I could tell from her eyes that Jess would sing no more, though I might have gone on and on for the sake of escape. We turned, and were permitted to move to the door, not wanting the apples the woman had pushed into our hands. Indeed, we heaved them as far as we could up the road when we did get out. But the man who had made us sing followed us through the back porch. And after I had stepped outside, he pinned Jess to the door frame with one hand and thrust his other hand past the bolster, inside the oversize blouse, and rubbed hard against her chest. The two of us stumbled down the steps. It had happened so quickly, the door now being closed and locked behind us, we were unable to voice our outrage, or even to commiserate. We ran to the end of the street, near but not allowing tears, trying to resume normalcy, trying to regain our childish selves. We held our treat bags severely and, to calm ourselves, slowed at the last house where we looked up an outside staircase that led to an upper apartment. We were halfway up and had still not spoken when a man came out onto the landing. He was carrying a black wrinkled bag.