Poached Egg on Toast (20 page)

“Someone is very ill here,” he said. “Someone is dying. You shouldn’t disturb the family.” He spoke as if he had not noticed that we were in costume or that it was Hallowe’en.

We turned and went home, and never told our parents and never spoke of the evening again. Jess said only one thing on the way home. “If you make up your mind that it won’t bother you, it never will.” And though this sounded fine in theory, I knew that for weeks and even months, Jess had the same sick feeling inside her as I had, almost as if we ourselves had somehow been to blame.

My memory takes me now to more recent times, a period during which I moved, with my family, to Germany and then to England, where we worked and studied for several years. During my stay in Germany, Jess and her daughter visited for one month. It was their first trip to Europe and we took short trips and long, and talked and caught up, and talked some more. I found a sudden and unexpected power, too. Throughout our formal childhood education, I had always trailed two years behind Jess, and it had seemed to me that I was always having to learn what she had already got to and assimilated before me. This must have irked me in childhood more than I’d realized, because I now took my sister about Germany introducing her (with laughter on all sides) as my mute sister.

“This is my mute sister,” I would say. Of course by this time, I was fluent in my new language. Jess, as a visitor, was still struggling to interpret
jawohl
and
Ausgang
.

“Now stop,” Jess said. “Stop introducing me as the mute.”

But there was nothing to be done. I had become my sister’s voice. She could not ask for a basket of rolls without my help.

We had decided to travel through some of the southern parts of the country and, with Jess’s daughter and my own, toured a town in a mountainous area some two hundred kilometres from our village. There was a Natural History Museum in the town, and the children asked to go in to spend an hour or so looking at exhibits. We decided to stay in the area overnight, visit the museum and perhaps hike into the surrounding trails late in the afternoon.

We saw wonderful exhibits: shells and fossils, polished rocks, precious stones—even an elaborate collection of live leafcutting ants. But in the middle of the third floor, we were suddenly faced with the choice of continuing along the corridor, or stopping at a floor-length curtain of heavy dark material that had been hung across an otherwise unremarkable door frame. Crudely attached to the outside of the curtain was a cardboard sign, which provided information in three languages. The English message read:

The parents must have to decid if the children would be better not to see behind this curtain. The child must be wit the adult.

Of course, this meant no choice at all, and the four of us pulled back the curtain at once.

We entered a small room, perhaps four feet across and six by length. Like the long closet of our childhood home, it had a curtained entrance (or exit) on the far side. And during those few moments, while we were trying to apprehend the exhibits on the surrounding shelves, startled heads and hands of other visitors continued to thrust their way in and around the curtains from both sides. When the curtains were still, it was difficult not to have the sensation of being wrapped in the inner folds of a deep cloak, a cloak in which we stood at the centre looking up, and jars of preserved human fetuses, transfixed by their own awe and terror, stared back down.

All were a bluish colour. Each was detained by an arrested state of development, imprisoned within transparent bonds of fluid, the better to bear the interrogation of posterity. In a male fetus, the navel had developed to one side; there was only a hint of genitalia beneath an internal fold. A completely developed fetus had a cleft lip and palate, its mouth open in its watery jar; another, a rubbery-looking head that looked as if it had, at some terrible moment, collapsed in upon itself. There was a body with two heads and one torso, a third arm grown out of its middle, a single penis. And on and on, shelf after shelf, jar upon jar.

If we began to feel smothered in that room, the experience prepared us, at least in part, for the next, several days later. We had been driving for an hour on a near-empty road, dominated on all sides by thick forest. It was an unpopulated landscape of rolling hills, narrow brooks and ancient trees. As it was a hot day, we pulled off the main road when we saw a weathered F
anta
sign, and drove into a fenced yard that contained a house and roadside stand, even a small private park, unusual in that country. Several signs were nailed to fenceposts and I translated these for Jess, telling her that there was a museum on the grounds. We needed to stretch and walk, and we purchased cold drinks from a man who came out of the house. We decided to pay the entrance fee when he told us that his exhibits had something to do with local wildlife. I was not sure of the man’s dialect and instructions, but in curiosity we followed him to the museum building, converted from an old barn. The man unlocked the door; we stooped to enter and descended two shallow steps.

The room was dim, but an occasional fluorescent bulb had been hung low along rough work tables arranged end to end. And the exhibits? Each was stuffed and mounted on a log, a branch, a piece of bark; each was prepared with the taxidermist’s devotion to perfection. A crow’s sleek black head was smoothly attached to the body of a rabbit; an adult hedgehog had a duck’s bill, its tail portion a curl of feathers. We saw a rabbit with the small horns of the
reh
deer; a stuffed pike, the pelvic and pectoral fins of which had been replaced by feet that might have belonged to a turtle; a creature that began as fox but ended as a hawk.

In the short time we were in that place, the man, the owner, the taxidermist himself, followed us about, watching our faces, commenting in a low voice which I could not comprehend. The mutterings, I thought, of someone who was used to being alone. What was certain was that he expected praise, even admiration, for work well done, for the seams that did not show.

And what thoughts would such a man have as he removed the gills of his fish and attached feathers in their place, as he stalked his quarry in woods that yielded its natural life to his alterations? Perhaps he worried over proportion, or attitude, or blending of colour. We were sorry we had entered, and we left as quickly as we could, the children as offended as Jess and I. It was as if our own childhood
Tunnel of Horrors
had somehow got out of hand. I suppose that if I had dropped in for a visit from another world, so perfect was the man’s work, I might have been fooled into believing that these unnatural combinations represented the inhabitants of this place. And were there subtle differences that I, during my short time in that room, had not discerned? Could he have fooled us by exchanging the otter’s paw for that of the fox? the hawk’s eye for the crow’s?

Half a year later, after I returned to Canada, Jess was diagnosed and died within a two-month period. One day she began to drag her foot; by the end of the same week she had had brain surgery and her speech centre was partially destroyed. Between the time of her surgery (which marked the beginnings of aphasia) and her death, it seemed that she was able to speak for only a few moments. But I see now that my memory fools me, that this must have been a gradual deterioration, that events were so desperate and compressed it would have been impossible to measure and consider them.

She was able to make some sounds in her throat, gesture with an arm and hand, and communicate with facial grimaces that made much use of her mouth and eyebrows. She was able to make clear, most of the time, what she needed and wanted. On the other hand, frustration and anger were not at all difficult to read.

What I did not know was that in the last weeks of Jess’s life, her physician had sent a consult to a speech therapist, asking her to assess the degree of aphasia in order to attempt to retrain Jess’s speech. I was in the hospital room when the young woman arrived. She was cheerful, slick, I thought, and clinical. I did not much like clinical people then, and I resented the intrusion. Perhaps this was a reaction to her obvious good health, her enthusiasm and her youth, her confidence. She introduced herself and said how delighted she was to have Jess
and
her sister present, because there was something she would like Jess to do and it would be easier if the two of us were to do it together. Jess and I exchanged our “Oh, no” looks, and glanced back to the therapist, but our communication had not been intercepted.

The young woman first ascertained that Jess could create sounds. “What I would like you to do,” she announced, “and it might seem foolish to you now, is to
sing
together. We’ve found that in patients with this type of problem, before single words and sentences are uttered, sometimes lines of songs will come rushing out, whole and complete, exactly as they were learned years before.” She looked to the two of us. “Can you think of a song you’d like to try?”

But we could not. Not only that, we
would
not. Jess’s lips closed, though she raised an eyebrow, and we laughed when we looked at each other. But each of us knew that the other would not.

The therapist egged us on. “There must be something. A childhood song? Anything will do.”

And I found that, once again, I had become my sister’s voice and, this time, I knew that she was glad to be out of the running. Her expression was saying, “Does she think we are fools?”

I mumbled that we’d been taken by surprise, that all I could think of were songs in another language—one or two stanzas of French songs we’d learned when we were children, living in Quebec.

“Great!” said the therapist, and waited.

But we would not.

And perhaps this time it was because we knew that singing would not help. That a French refrain would not buy us an escape.

The young woman became gloomy and said that, while we were thinking of songs, she would begin to do her testing.

She had brought with her a flat board containing a series of interchangeable cardboard backgrounds, each marked off in squares, each square containing a picture, or a number, or word. She told Jess what to do (we had rolled Jess to a sitting position in bed) and said that she must point to the correct square when a word or number or name of an object was called out.

Jess nodded that she understood. She even looked eager—whether to get out of having to sing, or because it excited her to do the test, or whether it was just to get the woman out of her room, I was never to know.

And what happened was that Jess got almost all of the tasks wrong. At first, I thought she was fooling; and then—I could not have stopped myself—I began to laugh. Surely this was my sister’s sense of humour. But Jess drew her lips together and, with two fingers, she continued to point and gesture and point to the squares on the board.

And I began to experience the pounding of the pulse, the holding of the breath, the oneness of the feared and the fearful. Had I been a child again, I might have said, “I know you can do it, stupid. You can’t fool me!” It was as if the therapist and I had knowledge that Jess
must
and
would
have, and I became very much afraid as I watched her arm move faster and faster to the board, pointing and pointing and pointing, but always to the wrong squares.

And what was impossible to let in was the realization that things were not what they seemed, that we had become grotesque partners near the end of one life, that we had both been fooled, I by the outer signs, Jess by the inner ones. I had to allow what my eyes were perceiving: Jess did not know that she did not know.

She became impatient with both me and the therapist. Her face betrayed self-righteousness and, then, a haughty sort of pride. And I felt as violated by that knowledge as I had been years before, while I stood helplessly by and watched the man on the step molest Jess as we tried to leave his darkened porch on Hallowe’en. We were unable to voice our outrage, or even to commiserate. The decision not to let it bother us was not ours, and we were still learning that when one pulls back the dark curtain, the fool, the madwoman, the jester might come rushing out.

Perhaps Jess saw something in my face during those moments; perhaps she died being fooled, died knowing that I had tried to protect her from her own knowledge. I do not know. I know only that it mattered very much; that never again would I be eager to examine what was behind the locked door.

Roseanne is fidgeting at the sink because she has just watched Jack walk through the patio screen, face first. The screen went with him, his right arm scrabbling to thrust it away, while his left arm propelled his body forward. Jack has had too much to drink; Roseanne has been counting. To be exact, eight beers, and now a start on the whisky. Jack wipes his chin with the back of his hand, and hums each time he walks through the kitchen—to let Roseanne think he’s sober and in control. But Roseanne has been married to Jack thirty-six years, and is on to all of his tricks.

Sometimes Roseanne attempts to look back over her years with Jack and sees them not as years wasted, but as time put in. Like everyone else she knows, her time so far has been filled without her lifting a finger to help it. Years gone. Years spent. And she knows why Jack is drinking tonight—it’s the Big-Little book, she’s pretty certain. She and Tibbs went too far. They got together this afternoon before the others arrived for the Bar-B-Q, they started acting foolish, and they just went too far.

The others, out on the patio, have finished eating. They’re pretending they haven’t noticed that Jack has just scrunched the armful of screen into a grey ball and dropped it off the side of the deck. The mosquitoes are sure to start invading. Roseanne crosses the room and slides the glass door so that it shuts tight, no crack. She goes back to take up position at the sink, and listens through the screen of the kitchen window to hear what’s being said. Most of it, she’s heard before. Still, she listens because she likes to hear how they twist and tangle the old stories to suit themselves.