Poached Egg on Toast (32 page)

He thought with pleasure of the bubbles that pushed up through the rubbery red circles as they sizzled in the cast-iron pan. The slices had to be exactly the right thickness.

The rest of the day, Arthur turned the earth in his garden and put in seed and, while he worked, he considered going to town. He had only vague thoughts about what he might do there, and put the trip off to another day. Before he went to bed that night, he lifted the blind and stared out. There was the moon, a slice of lemon, tilted in the sky.

Neither he nor Ada brought up the matter between them. Ada stayed in bed every morning, and Arthur rattled from one room to another, listening for any sound at all. They’d been sleeping on the edges of the bed, careful not to touch. He hated that. He was used to Ada’s warmth seeping into him.

Warmed up
, he wrote,

giblets

potatoes & cabbage mixed

hamburger boiled, with gravy

meatballs macaroni

homemade spaghetti with toast

Irish stew

meat pie with crust

turkey and dressing (seasonal)

chicken pot pie

A good run. He had thirty-six, but he’d hit a block. He went outside and watched the changing light as the wind cleared the clouds. The first green shoots were lined up unevenly in his garden and he made a note in his head to mark on the calendar:
Life pushed through earth
.

He felt something like sorrow as he stood there. It was too late in his life to start cooking on his own, pushing pots and pans around the kitchen. He knew Ada would be lying in bed listening. She’d dug in her heels before and, when she was like this, there was no telling if she’d give in first, or give in at all. She was still cooking his lunch and his supper, but even though she knew he had to have a good solid meal in the morning, she was behaving as if the idea of breakfast had never been thought of at all.

After lunch, Ada said she was going to visit Elizabeth for the afternoon. Arthur waited until she left and he took the bus to town. He paced Main Street and wished he’d never complained. The tension in the house had clamped over the two of them like the steel trap that hung from a long spike in the shed.

Ada was spending more and more of her time with Elizabeth, and Arthur was no longer privy to the bits of gossip and fun she was used to bringing home.

Arthur watched a man speak rudely to his wife outside the A & P. For a moment he thought that he himself would burst into tears in the street. He went to the next block and walked past the florist twice before he entered the shop. With his head down, he ordered twelve roses for Ada and gave his address to the woman at the counter. She handed him a tiny blank card to fill out, and he stared at it in his large palm. He had not considered this, having to include a message. He gave the card back to the woman and cancelled the roses.

He slipped into the diner by the bus depot and sat in a booth and asked for the breakfast menu, though it was afternoon. He ordered only coffee, but began to write on a shred of paper from his wallet.

omelette, plain

cheese and mushroom omelette

Hawaiian omelette with pineapple

He did not fancy what the Hawaiians mixed with their eggs in the morning.

pancakes with syrup

pancakes with blueberry sauce

Without ceremony, the waitress appeared beside the booth and took the menu away from him. She lifted it right out of his hands.

Ada was still away when Arthur returned. He started a new column and wrote out the breakfasts he’d borrowed from the diner. After that, he kept on writing.

corn syrup with toast

bacon (not cooked hard)—He had let Ada know that sometimes she left it too long in the pan.

lasagna (leftovers)

ravioli (leftovers)

cheese chops

He heard Ada coming, and he stashed the list.

Arthur began to dream about plums served on doilied trays, about grapefruit slit with a delicate silver knife. He woke one morning and thought:
Maybe Ada has forgotten the fight
. And then:
Maybe she’s told Elizabeth
.

He imagined the two women laughing over a fight that now seemed to have taken place a long time ago. A fight that was nobody’s business but his own. His and Ada’s, though it was never discussed. Breakfast had simply ceased.

He sat in the chair in the living room while Ada pretended to sleep, and he pressed heavily with a pen into his black diary:
I’m not a useless old fool. I come from a long line of men that were not required to do their own cooking. It’s the way things have always been, though once a year at Christmas my father made his four-meat pâté. Rabbit was the fourth meat because it was in the family tradition. I never saw him cook anything else.

How would he give her the list, even if he did get it done? Somewhere in his mind, he knew he’d attached an unlikely outcome to the hundredth breakfast. Ada would rise early and come to the kitchen in her faded maroon robe and her soft slippers, and she would stir quietly about the room while he sat at the table and waited.

There must have been something else, something besides him complaining about his poached egg on toast. Something deeper, darker, something further back. He couldn’t for the life of him think what it might be.

Black pudding, he wrote.

sausage regular

sausage
Oktoberfest

bananas, flecked with brown

Fifty.

Thursday morning the following week, Arthur put the kettle on and boiled the water and made a large pot of tea, two teabags. He let it steep four minutes, and poured the tea into Ada’s cup and added a drop of milk. He carried it to their room and stood at the end of the bed.

Ada did not stir; her breathing did not alter. He set the cup on her bedside table and, on his way out of the room, he thumped the end of the mattress with his foot.

Before he went outside to work in the garden, he put on his cap and tied a bandanna around his neck. As he passed the mirror, he glanced back quickly, thinking he’d seen a bandit.

All morning, he watered and weeded until his back ached from bending. He scanned the sky, looking for cloud formations, and he listened to the birds raise their young. The baby jays were learning to fly. Every once in a while, a blue ball of fluff drifted past, slow-landing on the earth.

Everything had its life. He’d read in the paper that trees knew when someone was going to chop them down. Their terrible cries could be measured electronically as the axe hit. Arthur believed this. What was being discovered every day was wondrous.

What he did not like was the way things were reported on radio and TV. Instant this and instant that, everything was instant. War inside your own house the same moment it was happening around the other side of the world. He could do without that. The whole business made him weary.

When he went inside, he could not tell if Ada had drunk the tea he’d made. The cup was washed and dried and back on the kitchen shelf. Ada was nowhere to be seen. Though Arthur was tired, he pulled out the list.

ham, fried

side pork

applesauce (cold)

Spanish rice (warmed)

peanut butter on toast

liver and onions

His favourite. He hadn’t eaten liver and onions for a long time. He began to think the list was foolish, but he had fifty-six; he was past any point, now, where he could do a back turn.

toasted cheese sandwich

hot scones with raisins

bread pudding, crisped under grill

cheese biscuits

waffles with syrup

bran muffins

home fries

fruit salad

pigs-in-blankets

He went to his room and hauled down the covers, and in the middle of the day, Arthur went back to bed.

When he woke, he realized he’d eaten neither breakfast nor lunch. It was Ada’s night to go to the movies. Before all this had started, he used to mark the films she went to on the calendar. He never wanted to go himself but, every Thursday when Ada came home, he was used to hearing about the story and the movie stars. He especially liked to hear about the reruns, the old movies done up again, readied for the big screen, like old tarts. Bogart and Bacali. Cagney. Rosalind Russell, now there was someone who could act.

He saw that his supper was in the oven. He’d slept a long time. When he looked out across the field, he realized it was the first time he’d missed standing at the door on a Thursday evening, watching Ada’s back as she crossed the field. She always called on Elizabeth first, before the two of them took the bus to town.

He ate his supper in silence, listening to marauding bands of starlings as they roved from tree to tree across the field. He brought the list to the kitchen.

Salmon patties, he wrote.

dish of prunes

He put down the pencil and picked it up again. He felt his face flush as he wrote and underlined:

Eggs

scrambled

once over

sunnyside

He went outside and stood on the step. The sun was being pulled under the hills and there were streaks of charcoal above the horizon. Since last winter, he’d checked the sky frequently for signs of Jesus in his robe, but he’d never seen such a vision again. He remembered the date of it, December 24. His mother used to tell him when he was a small child that, at the stroke of midnight Christmas Eve, all the animals in the barn spoke to one another. Now, the seasons seemed to glide past; fall would be here and then winter would cover his roof, his garden, his shed.

He returned to the kitchen table.

boiled egg, 3 minutes sharp

eggs Benedict—these, he’d only heard about. Ada had never made them.

Western sandwich

egg-in-the-hole

He went to the gun rack and took down his rifle. As he passed the mirror, he saw that he was still wearing the bandanna. He loaded the rifle in the kitchen.

poached egg on toast

He left the house and walked to the clump of trees in the middle of the field. He sat on the earth, sheltered by trees. He thought he might catch the first star, but three blinked together as if they’d been visible all along and he hadn’t been alert enough to notice. He closed his eyes and thought about the list. It had been easy enough at first, but he was beginning to run down. He did not know why he’d loaded the rifle, why he’d brought it here, to the rise in the field. He sat holding it, pointing the barrel towards the sky. In an hour or so, Ada would be returning. She and Elizabeth would step down from the bus in the dark and Elizabeth would arrive home first and wait while Ada crossed the field. Ada sometimes called back when she reached the step, to let her friend know that she was safe. Not that there was anyone around. They just did that; they were in the habit of calling back and forth through the dark.

He began to feel the coolness of the night as he waited. Birds were settling around him, a soft shudder of wings. Far off, he heard the bus pause to drop its passengers, and it threw out cones of light as it turned to go back to town. Arthur sat upright, his fingers swollen against the rifle.

A few minutes later, the voices of the two women rose and fell through the dark. There was a murmur as they stopped at Elizabeth’s doorstep and then, silence, when Ada set out alone across the field. She had to pass in front of him; the path was below the clump of trees where he sat stiffly, on the ground. It was too late to go back to the house; she would hear him, if he moved.

The argument was of no importance, he saw that, now. He and Ada had drifted to this place together. They’d been living their lives, and anger had erupted and settled in a still, dark pool. He could scarcely imagine why he’d been so stubborn. But she, she was as stubborn a woman as he’d ever known.

She was passing now, below the trees. The curve of her shoulder, her silhouette, was as familiar to him as his own unspoken voice. He cocked the rifle, and was startled to hear the
snick
. He aimed at the sky and pulled the trigger, and the roar nearly knocked him onto his back. The throb and flutter in the trees fell silent.

Ada’s pace did not alter one bit; she did not even look his way. She reached the house and went in, and again he saw the curve of her in the light as she removed her jacket and walked through the living room to close the curtains. He tried to get up, but his knees would not hold him. He had to rub his legs and feet to get them to move.

From where he stood in the field, he might have been underwater. The lighted house seemed to recede as he waded above the path, his thighs thickening with the chill.

If there was a way of surfacing, he’d never learned it. The list was three-quarters done; Ada would probably never see it. She might not even speak to him when he went inside. He felt foolish holding the rifle, firing it into the air. He did not know how other men and women faced their differences, whether it was all a matter of blunder and chance. He knew only that he’d had to let Ada know he was serious about wanting his breakfast. He only wanted her to understand.

These stories, with occasional variations, have been published and/or broadcast, as follows:

“Clayton” in
Canadian Fiction Magazine; Moving Off The Map: from story to fiction; Coming Attractions 3; Pack Ice
and broadcast by
CBC Anthology
. “An August Wind” in
The Fiddlehead; Contexts: Anthology Two; The Ottawa Citizen
and
Man Without Face
. “Megan” in
Queen’s Quarterly
and
Pack Ice
. “Marx & Co.” in
Pack Ice
and
The Penguin Anthology of Stories by Canadian Women
. “Pack Ice” in
Pack Ice
. “P’tit Village,” my first published story, was published in
Queen’s Quarterly
, in
A Land, A People
and in
Man Without Face
. “Truth or Lies” in
Room of One’s Own; Truth or Lies
and in
Common Ground
. “Separation” in
The University of Windsor Review
and
Pack Ice
. “An Evening in the Café” in
The University of Windsor Review; The Journey Prize Anthology; in Truth or Lies;
and an excerpt was broadcast by
CBC State of the Arts
. “Scenes from a Pension” in
Queen’s Quarterly; Coming Attractions 3; Truth or Lies
and broadcast by
CBC Anthology
. “Messages” in
Room of One’s Own
. “Accident” in
Quarry
and
Symbiosis in Prose
. “Touches” in
Grain
and
Man Without Face
. “Foolery” in
Truth or Lies
. “Earthman Pointing” in
Canadian Fiction Magazine
and
Man Without Face
. “Man Without Face” in
Prairie Schooner
and
Man Without Face
. “Sarajevo” in
Man Without Face
. “In the Name of Love” in
Toronto Life. A
two-page excerpt, notes for “The Thickness of One Sheet of Paper” was published in
Rikka
under the title “Black Eyes, Almond Skin.” “What We Are Capable Of” was published in
The Walrus Magazine
. “Poached Egg On Toast” won the 1996 Tilden/CBC/Saturday Night Literary Award and was published in
Saturday Night
and
Emergent Voices: CBC Canadian Literary Awards Stories 1979–1999)
and was broadcast by
CBC Between the Covers
. Blaine Harden’s article on designer coffins in the
Washington Post
supplied background detail used in “Earthman Pointing.”