Poached Egg on Toast (30 page)

The next day, a Saturday morning, Michael phones her at home. Em answers and for a few minutes they discuss their work. Then his voice says, “Did you receive my message?”

“Which one?” She hears a woman talking to someone in the background. She hardly dares to breathe.

“This one,” he says.

“Yes. Did you receive mine?”

“Yes,” says Michael softly, and they hang up.

How can we do this? she thinks. How can we? She is sorry she has ever seen Frieda. She can’t pretend there is not another person, a real flesh-and-blood person, involved.

Em looks at Sarah seated on the floor and is startled to see how small her daughter becomes when she pulls this far inside. Four years ago, Sarah strutted through the same room, showing off her new dress the day of her high school formal. She was wearing black velvet—long sleeves, low back, black stockings, new shoes. A part of her, as if this were a rite of passage, was awed and overwhelmed. A corsage had been dropped off in the afternoon, a ritual Em had mistakenly assumed to be a custom of the past. For hours Sarah drifted from room to room, detached in a way that had nothing to do with anyone but herself. Her behaviour was reminiscent of her child-self when she’d drifted in and out of rooms on her birthday, whispering, “Cake, cake, cake.” Extreme pleasure spilled out of her then, as it did the afternoon of the dance. Em did not doubt that her daughter’s more serious life was ahead of her, but when Sarah kissed her and thanked her for helping with preparations, Em was close to tears, so newly grown-up did Sarah appear to be.

Surprisingly, on that occasion, Sarah’s expectations had been met. But Em remembers something else. When Sarah left the house and turned to say goodbye, a flash of uncertainty crossed her face. So quickly, Em might have missed it. Poised but vulnerable—Sarah, at the edge of the world.

“Mom,” says Sarah, “how can someone love a person and then hurt them this badly? Did it ever happen to you? When you were younger, I mean. When a friendship fell apart? When nothing you did, no matter how you tried, could save it?”

“It happens to everyone,” Em says. And then she adds, “But I don’t think we try to wound intentionally.” She speaks with the greatest of care.

Always an early riser, Em wakes even earlier now that Sarah is home. She needs space, time alone. Her body agrees by taking up an amazingly accurate rhythm with the sun. Every morning her eyes open at the exact moment of sunrise. Each morning the time is slightly different, but she wakes with the change even if it’s only three minutes or four. She slips into her robe, goes to the window, and watches the bulge of sun as it lifts itself out of the sea.

When she and Michael spent time together, they stood at this same upstairs window, watching the sun rise through the undersides of clouds as it spilled silver across the waves. Sometimes there was only greyness, or a thin line of navy separating earth from sky. Although the colours of the east were often like those of the west, she was aware of the subtle difference: in the east, there was a greater sense of light, of
becoming
.

One evening, Michael drove to the house unannounced. The two of them sat outside on the veranda and a great horned owl flew past with such grace they did not speak for several minutes. The owl had been as startled as they were. It hovered momentarily between house and shore and then abruptly changed direction, turning back with its wondrous undulating wings. Em didn’t ask how Michael was able to get away. They both knew what they were doing. There was nothing to say.

Everything is said in the letters. Michael goes to a tiny island in the South China Sea for fifteen days to receive applications from the camps.

The work is hopeful and hopeless at the same time
, he writes.
Conditions worse than expected, worse than we’ve been told. Every day, thousands of faces at the high, barbed fence. When I enter the enclosure, I’m surrounded. People beg to be sponsored but this time we have only enough funds for two singles and an extended family of five or six. When I come back to my room in the evening, I try not to weep. I think of you, your spirit, your voice. In this place, where humanity is crowded and shoved together, I imagine you alone on the shore, singing, walking into the wind. Or looking up at an indigo sky, convinced that every star is alive. The Big Dipper tipped upside down over your roof.

Country big, the class writes. The peeple big. They hav big hans. We laff and laff when we trying clothes they giv. I think Diep is cry from laffing hard. When autum comes we go with teacher to by boots. In winter our children play in snow like children here.

Do you remember when we drove to pick up the lemon pie at the bakery on the highway? he writes. How you sang the Emperor Concerto all the way back? You’re the only person I know who can sing the Emperor Concerto.

The concerto had stayed in her head for days. The music forced her to acknowledge the wonder, the happiness, the sure knowledge that this had to end.

Sarah finds summer work at Stan’s, a seafood restaurant next to the wharf, two miles down the highway. Sometimes Em drops her off on her way to town; other days, Sarah walks. On Em’s day off, Sarah takes the car. She works afternoons and evenings, alternating shifts with two local women.

Something about Sarah is changing, but Em is not sure what. A hard edge is creeping in. Sarah has phoned Garry, she tells her mother, but the call was not satisfactory. They discussed books and a sweater he’d left in her apartment; she’d given permission for him to contact the landlord so he’d be allowed in. “It’s all right,” Sarah tells her. “Don’t worry. He sees things one way; I see them another.” To herself she mutters, “But there has to be an explanation I can understand.”

Sarah is still stomping over the dunes, taking long walks by herself. She has made no effort to contact friends, though several former schoolmates have returned to the island for the summer. Em feels as if she can read Sarah’s behaviour like a program that has been opened, bent back, frayed at the edges. First, you blame yourself. Occasionally, you get angry. Mostly, you’re sad. There
is
no explanation that you can understand.

Who tugs whom to the centre of this dark circle? She closes her eyes. After a late meeting at work, they stand together on the first floor, sinking, sinking. “I didn’t know this was possible,” he says. The streetlight outside illuminates the stairwell, but casts them in shadow. “Even if I wanted to stop,” Michael says, “I don’t see how I could.”

“The one place you can’t get away from is inside your head,” Sarah tells her, as if Em has never thought of this before. Sarah has been home four weeks now and though she’s beginning to look rested, she hasn’t let go. “Do you know what people say to me?
Time heals
. As if I have a chronic disease. It’s the biggest cliché in the language and it isn’t true. Still, it makes me furious that I feel like this. How could I have given up so much control?”

It happens
, Em wants to say.
It slips away little by little, when it has nothing to do with control. When it is called connection, joy. It’s only when you try to recover, pull back, that you become aware of how much you’ve given away.

“Sometimes,” she says to Sarah, “it’s a miracle to believe that even the smallest insight is possible.”
And there’s the practical matter
, she adds, but not aloud,
of what to do with so much pain
.

Now that she works afternoons, Em takes her long walks in the morning. She watches the boats rocking side to side, offshore, while the lobster fishermen lower their traps. One early morning, there are two Cape Island boats, then a third. These turn, and turn again, while a stick figure leans over the side of each. The little boats circle like game players, as if the movement of one affects the movement of all. They change direction and begin to circle again. When the wind rises, the gulls make brave attempts to drift, land, settle on the waves. Sometimes the boats rock right off the horizon. Em climbs back over the dunes and sees how high the marram grass has grown in only a few weeks. She runs a finger up the smooth surface of a single blade, knowing that her skin will be cut if she slides it down in the opposite direction. The grasses grow in clumps, different shades of green, deep and dark at the base. Hidden underground is a vast network, spreading beneath the sand.

They shared laughter. Silliness. They couldn’t have stopped playing if they’d tried. She sang for him when they were walking on shore, and when they were in the car. She sang every day.
Is it possible that I sang the Emperor Concerto?
she thinks.

It is.

I did.

They see each other at work, except when Michael is travelling. When he is away, he writes to her. Frieda is not mentioned, though her unwritten name is always there.

It might be a long time
, Michael’s letters say.
We’ll choose a place. We’ll work it out
. Neither Michael nor Em has any idea how
it
will be worked out, or where that place might be.

Bed, pillow, room
, write the students.
We hav the television, black and wite. We learn new words. Children are sick because cold at nite. When they grow big like children here they hav educasion. Good job. By house. We not own house. In our country, small house. Gone past. Old life.

Em visits the family headed by Auntie Trinh. Seven people—she thinks they’re related but she isn’t sure—live in two rooms, one small, one large. A crib has been pushed near the door and two adult mattresses are spread end-to-end on the floor. Ignored by the adults, the babies crawl up and down the mattresses. One baby bangs a glass mug against the floor as he makes his way to Em on hands and knees. He bumps the mug in front of him and, miraculously, it does not shatter. There is an open purse on the floor and the second baby roots through this, but no one tries to stop her. The rooms are beside the elevator; the building is old. Em thinks that the walk through the odours of the corridor would be enough to cause hope to drop out the bottom.

But this is not the case at all. Auntie Trinh makes a pot of straw-coloured tea. The young women laugh and joke in Vietnamese. A man stands and smokes in the doorway between the kitchen and the main room. He does not join the laughter. It is only when Em is ready to leave that he speaks directly to her. His English is better than that of her students, she discovers. He is visiting from Ohio, a cousin they have searched for and found. He has been in America for three years. “We are trying to find the whole family,” he says. “We want to be together.”

Em wonders if the family will decide to stay here, on the east coast, after more and more family members make themselves known. This has happened before: the island becomes a way-station for a couple of years. Even if the sponsored families were to remain, the islanders would refer to them as
off-island
. Welcoming in their way, but an islander is an islander who waded out of the sea more than a century ago. Michael, unthinking, said one day, “She’s offisland, isn’t she?”—referring to a colleague who had lived on a farm outside town for twenty-seven years. Em’s daughter, Sarah, on the other hand, will always be an islander, having been born
on-island
. Even though she lives
away
, whenever she returns, she is coming
home
.

“Come on, Mom,” she says. “We’re going to the wharf. We’ll buy fresh fish and get some roadside chips.”

It’s Saturday and they both have the day off. Em follows Sarah to the car. First stop is McCrae’s Wharf. They push back the wooden door and slop across the wet cement floor where four men are cleaning cod. The men recognize Sarah because they take their breaks at Stan’s, where she works next door. Em looks around and sees full bins of cod three feet high around the room. The fish have been cleaned, layered, salted.

“This morning’s catch,” says one of the men. He’s locked into perfect and harmonious rhythm with three partners at a slab of metal—the gutting table. Each of the men, at the same split second, slashes a fish with his blade, removes the head, chops the tail, slits the body, tears out the guts and throws. If one of the men breaks the pattern, the guts collide in mid-air. The double-X of slop drops into two gutters.

Sarah stands and watches while one of the young men, about her age, interrupts the rhythm every four or five throws so he can aggravate his co-worker at the far end of the table—someone bearded and very fat.

“Cut it out,” the fat man warns.

The young man grins, pretends he hasn’t heard, slips back into rhythm. Each of the four wears high rubber boots and a heavy apron splattered with blood. One wall in the room is made of a sliding screen, ceiling to floor, leading outside to the wharf. The screen seems to be thick black mesh, but a closer look reveals that the mesh is a cloak of flies—tens of thousands of swarming flies, all on the outside, waiting their chance to get in.

The owner, a tall and bony man whom Em knows as Angus, wheezes in from the cannery side of the building. He seems to have shrunk into the physical frame of his former self. He is cleaner than his four employees—just.

“The boys went out, got two nice haddie in their nets today,” he says, seeing Em. “We got plenty mackerel, too. Gen’rally, we keep the haddie for the restaurant.” He nods towards Sarah. “If you want the haddie, it’s all right with me.” He calls over to the gutting table, “Ned, come fillet these for the ladies.”

The young man at the end, without looking up, flips the guts of the fish he holds in his hand. The guts travel sideways the length of the table, past the two men in the centre, through the startled open hands of the fat man, and out again. The fat man curses, stops, and strikes for revenge. For one confused blurring moment, guts fly in all directions. The three at the table settle down again to slash, chop, slit, tear and throw. Ned grins, and hoses down his hands before he fillets the
haddie
.

“Ned’s not full time,” Angus says between wheezes. “Sort of apprentice, you might say. Home from school for the summer. He first showed up when the boats come in with the catch, twice a day. I tried runnin’ him out the back, he come in at the side. I run him out the side, he come in at the back. So I let him stay. I even pay him for staying.”