Poached Egg on Toast (21 page)

Out there in the semi-dark are her twin sister, Tibbs; Tibbs’s husband, Spoke, who’s been skinny as a blade of grass since they were all nineteen; and Arley, the twins’ younger brother. Arley is fifty-six years old. His wife died last year of sugar diabetes, and Roseanne and Tibbs try to include him in their family gatherings so he won’t be lonesome.

Marian is there, too, Roseanne and Jack’s daughter. Marian is thirty-three, has not yet married, and lives in her own apartment on the other side of the river. She is editor of a woman’s magazine called
Women Anew
, and says she’s always on the lookout for family stories. Roseanne still hasn’t read a word of Marian’s that has been recognizable or that has meant a thing to her own life. She and Tibbs think Marian is too serious; they’d like her to write something funny, something that shows the family sense of humour. Privately, to Roseanne, Tibbs says that the readers of
Women Anew
must think Marian comes from a family that’s dead-from-the-ass-up. Roseanne can’t say much because Marian is her daughter and she doesn’t interfere. But Tibbs, the aunt, can get away with interference both moderate and outrageous. She sat Marian down two weeks ago and said, “Now I want you to promise that you’ll write one thing that’s funny. Just one. A story or an article for that magazine of yours. Something that will make me laugh, hear?”

Marian’s feelings weren’t hurt at all.

As for
Women Anew
, reading it doesn’t make Roseanne feel one bit new; she and Tibbs are the kind of women they are, not really old, certainly not new, just sort of stuck between what Marian’s magazine says is happening and what their own lives really are.

When no one else is around, Roseanne and Tibbs have taken to amusing themselves by thinking up catchy titles for stories and articles. So far, anticipating rejection, they haven’t shared these with Marian. Some of the titles they contrive are from items they read in supermarket tabloids: “Shrunken Human Head Found in Peanut Shell,” or “Newborn Memorizes
War and Peace.”
Others, they just dream up, like “The Case of the Rolling Peas.” One of their long-standing inventions is “Earth-man Pointing,” a title that makes them hoot with laughter because, in a harmless way, it both mocks and describes Roseanne’s husband, Jack. No matter where they are—on holiday, in the backyard for a Bar-B-Q, at a wedding or a funeral, standing in the street—anywhere there’s a group of people, Jack is always pointing. This is something to do with
Life
, Roseanne thinks, or maybe
Destiny
, she isn’t sure. For years, this ritual of his has irritated her, even though she tells herself that at least he points in an upward, skyward direction; it’s not as if he were pointing to a hole in the ground.

As for catchy titles, Roseanne favours “The Sardine Coffin,” having read about designer coffins in Ghana. An old fisherman had told his daughter that, when he died, he wanted to be buried in a sardine. His older brother, a farmer, had been laid out in a carved shallot. Roseanne, if she had the choice, would choose a crane for herself. A whooping crane, elegant and nearly extinct. It would have to be carved thick across the middle, so she could fit inside. The fisherman’s daughter in Ghana had told reporters that the sardine coffin was to let people know that her father was a proud and successful fisherman. Roseanne wonders what Marian might write in
Women Anew
about
her
mother, laid out in a whooping crane. Something humourless, no doubt. And what about Jack? What sort of coffin would he choose? Probably a long thick arm with a pointing finger.

Right now, on the patio, they’re talking about how a giraffe’s blood gets pumped up into its head. “Their necks are over eight feet long,” Arley says. “Must be a hell of a heart to get the blood all the way up there, to its brain.” Then they switch to Tibbs’s husband, Spoke, who, back in high school, had been nicknamed Giraffe. It’s the Thanksgiving story; they’re into memory lane now. Roseanne doesn’t know how they move from one story to another so quickly. One thing she does realize, is that all of them—herself included—talk about their past as if it were cut from fresh crisp paper only yesterday. And they seem locked into a period that stretches from childhood to early marriage, and includes only events that can be made to seem hilarious. Nothing recent, nothing grim allowed. This includes the past twenty-five years.

In the Thanksgiving story, Spoke is standing on a diningroom chair screwing in a new lightbulb, or maybe unscrewing an old, moments before fourteen people sit down to dinner. Spoke loses his grip and the bulb explodes on top of the turkey, just taken out of the oven and set at the end of the table for carving.

Every time the story gets told, the number of people around the table changes and the person screwing the lightbulb changes. Sometimes it’s Roseanne’s husband, Jack, sometimes it’s Arley, sometimes it’s even the twins’ Daddy, before they all left home and got married. Now, they’re saying it’s Spoke, and maybe they’re right, for all that. Spoke, as long and lean at fifty-nine as he was in those early years when he and Tibbs started going out together. (When Tibbs first brought Spoke home, their Daddy took one look at him standing at the back door and said, “Who let the air out of you?”)

What Roseanne remembers is that Thanksgiving dinner was at her house that year; that the turnips, mashed potatoes and gravy had not yet been put out, or she’d have had to dump them in the garbage. Cranberries and pickled beets did get dumped, millions of glass fragments glittering across Roseanne’s sparkling white table. She and Tibbs ran every dish back to the kitchen sink for a rinse, wiped the cutlery, stood on the front step with their backs to the storm door and shook out the tablecloth. Inside, the men peeled the skin right off the turkey, gave it a few swipes with a dish towel, and served it up anyway. Underneath the skin was another of Roseanne’s perfect turkeys. Jack, in a red apron, posed at the end of the table for a photo, pointing to the ceiling with fork and carving knife.

Roseanne is still listening at the window, all the while keeping an eye on Jack. So far—and for this Roseanne is grateful—Tibbs has held her tongue about Jack’s drinking. It’s part of being a twin, knowing when to speak your piece. Privately, Tibbs will no doubt invent some theory that will have to do with Jack’s sixtieth birthday coming up. She’ll say that Jack missed his change of life earlier, and then she’ll tell about Spoke who went through his, right on the stroke of fifty. She and Spoke went through their change together, according to Tibbs, and it wasn’t all buttercups and roses, but they came out the other side. She told Marian she’d be happy to write a family story about
that
.

Jack wants another whisky; Roseanne can tell by the way he’s pacing around the picnic table. He glances towards the window every few minutes, knowing Roseanne is at the sink, but he’s unwilling to come in again after walking through the screen. Roseanne pours herself a glass of wine, curses the Big-Little book, wonders if Tibbs needs a refill, and hears Marian’s voice. “Come on out, Ma, we’re telling stories. Leave the dishes. We’ll do them later.”

“I’ll go in and drag her away from the sink,” Tibbs says. “She’s up to her elbows in you-know-who.”

Roseanne hears laughter and, by the splurt of it, knows right away who they’re talking about now. That sort of outburst is always about Harold Beavis, who followed the twins around when they were in senior high. Harold was a dumpling of a man and, when he walked, what you saw from behind were the cheeks of his bum sliding, one up, one down, as if the two weren’t connected. Roseanne and Tibbs never liked him, because crude words came out of his puffy mouth—smutty queries as he followed them through the halls.

Ten years after they all finished school, Harold Beavis drowned in the river that ran through town, just a block from where he’d always lived. His drowning is the reason Tibbs never drinks from the town water supply, even though the drowning was more than twenty-five years ago. The person Roseanne feels sorry for is Spoke. Ever since Harold drowned, Spoke and Tibbs have been hauling water from a natural spring, thirtythree miles out of town. Once a week they load up the car with plastic jugs and bottles, even in winter when there are treacherous ice slides around the spring. This has become a family joke (“Have you noticed Harold’s been a little sweet since spring runoff?” “Is that Harold, dripping out of the tap?”) Tibbs has been teased for years, but she’s made up her mind; not one drop of fat Harold will get inside her, even on her teeth.

Roseanne, believing this to be irrational, understands. Who could know Tibbs better than her own twin? And has Tibbs ever said a word to Roseanne about pork?

On her fortieth birthday, Roseanne started work as a parttime cashier at the Auction Barns. More money changed hands on paper at the Barns than she would have thought existed in the whole world. She got used to this, and the men liked her because she was quick and could keep up with rapid-fire transactions. At the Barns, which were on the edge of town near First Bridge, she was known to the men as Rosie. It was Rosie this and Rosie that. She stayed in that job for six years and quit on a Friday morning—the day the late Shank Brady’s pigs were auctioned off. One of the men who worked the ring sidled over and said, “You see that big sow over there, Rosie? Whoever eats a piece of bacon out of that hide will be eatin’ a piece of Shank Brady.” Sure enough, though only a few people knew, the pig had killed Brady, eating the guts right out of him when Brady had fallen into the pen.

Since that very Friday, Roseanne hasn’t eaten so much as a slice of ham or bacon, or cooked a roast of pork. She eats beef and a little chicken, but every time she passes the meat counter in the A & ? she thinks of Shank Brady head first in the pigpen, the old sow chomping on his insides.

Tap water and pork. These are the twins’ deprivations.

Roseanne slides back the glass door and lets herself out onto the patio where the others are sitting in a circle, slapping at mosquitoes. Jack sees his chance and shoots past her into the kitchen. Across the darkness, Tibbs raises her eyebrows, and she and Roseanne exchange meaningful looks.

Spoke is saying, “Purple martins aren’t that easy to attract; I’ve been trying for years.”

“The Darth Vaders of the swallow world,” says Marian, blackly. “That’s what they look like to me.”

“Jack knows all about birdhouses,” Tibbs says. “He built two last year. Put them too close together; Roseanne and I kept telling him. One of them blew down in a windstorm. The other is still attached to the tree.”

Roseanne’s version of this story begins earlier, though it’s true that one house did blow down.

Jack built the birdhouses with holes so small, no bird could get in. He set the ladder against the tree, and climbed. He checked the measurements and said the holes were exactly right; if he were to make them larger, sparrows would take over. Swallows did try, but could get only head and breast in before they struggled and heaved and flapped back out.

After two days of watching unsuccessful entries, Roseanne convinced Jack to make one hole larger. Back up the tree he climbed, pointing his file skyward. He rubbed at the wood and came back to the kitchen to stand at the window with Roseanne. Just then, a sparrow flew straight into the hole, plugged it and stuck there. Feet and tail thrashed and flailed as the bird tried to dislodge itself.

Thinking of the bird’s head in the dark, thinking of the descending lid of her crane, Roseanne said, “It’s terrified, Jack. It’s going to have a heart attack.”

Out came the ladder again. Jack climbed, cursing all feathered vertebrates, and enclosed the bird in one of his large hands. He tugged it backwards out of the hole. The bird stilled; only its head emerged from Jack’s curled fingers. Jack stretched his arm and opened his hand, pointing towards the sky. At first, the bird didn’t move; then, it seemed to become an extension of Jack’s fingers, and flew off. Roseanne felt the stirring of an old surge of affection for Jack that day, watching the sparrow in his hand, watching him set it free. A few hours later, the swallows returned and built their nest. But before the eggs had a chance to hatch, the house blew down.

Jack must have slipped out the front door and sneaked around the side of house; Roseanne sees his silhouette near the tree. He’s down at the end of the yard, acting like an alien who’s lurking at the outer edges of a family gathering.

In the shadows, he raises his glass; for a moment, Roseanne expects him to point it skyward as he did the bird. He does not; he downs the contents, probably whisky again, in one gulp. And stays there, by the tree.

She sees now that making fun was the worst offence. She and Tibbs could have made the book and never shown it, and Jack would be none the wiser. It’s all so much silliness, she thinks, all his damned waving and pointing and gesticulating. If he’s that thin-skinned all of a sudden, maybe he
is
going through the change.

She wishes she could remember how she and Tibbs got started in the first place. Maybe they were thinking up titles for Marian’s sour-grapes magazine. She remembers trying to match catchy titles to photos, but she can’t remember whose idea the Big-Little was. All she knows is that in the afternoon she and Tibbs were sprawled out on the living-room rug, cutting and pasting, laughing until their cheeks hurt. It had not been difficult to find photos of Jack among the albums and cigar boxes. Jack, with a point for every occasion: an arm, an index finger outstretched, a stick, a hoe, a carving knife, a shovel, a baseball bat, a piece of driftwood, a fishing rod—pointing at, but at what? At the end of the driveway? At the hedge, the turkey, the flying saucer, the dunes, the migrating geese—the beyond?

What she and Tibbs had done in their great flush of laughter and craziness was to cull the photos and paste them onto construction paper, each photo having its own page. Jack’s point was manoeuvred so that it was always aimed towards the upper right corner. They cut and shaped and produced their own Big-Little book, twenty-two pages long. They stapled the cover and printed the title,
Earthman Pointing
, with felt pens. And then, shrieking and holding their sides, took it to Jack to show him. The book had enough thickness so that when they thumbed the upper right corner, riffling the pages, the effect was that of Jack in rapid motion, Jack with finger in the air, swinging his implements of destiny.