The Juliet Stories (20 page)

She folds her hands in prayer and bends to the girl’s thrown arm, crooked at the elbow, touches her forehead to the open palm and whispers,
I love you
.

Yet when she raises her head, she shivers. It is as if the girl, by the necessary act of breathing in and out, is collapsing through a translucent membrane into the world of flesh and blood. Here, in this room, in her prayer, in her hands, she grasps instead the presence of the son who is gone. He cannot breathe in a world of flesh and blood. He will gasp like a fish out of water; he will die.

She thinks, He is dead.

She thinks, I will not survive this.

It takes all her focus to hold him. If she lets herself hold the living, he will vanish completely. A mother would not let her child vanish. No.

She sits in her bedroom before the mirror. She picks at her hair with a wide-toothed comb meant to enhance rather than frizz her new curls. The curls have been imposed onto the strands by means of a chemical that burned her scalp and watered her eyes.

She leans forward, elbows on the vanity’s glass top. Into one ear she stabs a silver spike, the length of her smallest fingernail, and fastens it at the back of the lobe with a tiny screw. She repeats the process on the other side and inclines her head to examine the results, turning first to the right, then to the left.

The vanity came recently from her Oma, who has moved into a smaller apartment, her father lugging the leavings from the rear of a borrowed pickup truck across the icy porch and into their house. His office received a heavy easy chair with a leg rest that springs open. He is probably sleeping there now. In their cupboards are Oma’s dishes, edged in gold, that her mother refuses to use except for company — and they never have company.

The vanity is old and was made by her Opa, who died so long ago that no one remembers him, not even his only child, her father. Her Oma does not speak of him. It is as if he never existed. But the table is proof that he lived, that he worked with his hands using scraps of wood, that he designed and cut and sanded and painted an object that could be handed down to his granddaughter.

Now she has gone and scissored photographs and placed them under the glass, to make it her own. Her mother screamed, How dare you cut him apart, it’s like cutting him out of our lives, we can never replace those pictures! What point explaining? She deliberately chose from the album a photograph that was blurry; yes, she cut off his head, arranged it in a comical fashion with her own cut-off head, and her mother’s and her father’s and her little brother’s. The heads perch like pears on a tree cut from a magazine. There are other photographs too, on top of other landscape scenes. Her pony, the dog, cats, swimming in a sunset sky. There is an old photograph she knows not to cut, taken on a beach when they were all so small. So long ago: wasn’t it a dream?

Already, the glass pins down distant, lost colours. The girl in the mirror hurtles beyond reach. Staring, she wills herself onward. She says, I will be beautiful, as if beauty were a mask to be chosen, as if its appearance could be commanded; as if it will serve her, and not the other way round.

A knock on the door.

But she doesn’t turn, she doesn’t say Come in. She is fifteen years old. She is wearing acid-washed jeans and a sweatshirt cut and frayed by her own design at the arms and waist and neck. It is six degrees outside and the sky is pouring cold spring rain. It is six degrees and a storm rattles the window of her room, droplets pelting against glass.

The hoops in her ears are made of blue ceramic and curve almost to her exposed collarbones, heavy. Every movement animates them. She is aware, even without looking in the mirror, of their unnatural presence.

The knock again. Her mother: What are you doing?

Nothing.

May I come in?

No.

Please?

She turns, hoops swinging and softly kissing her neck. She does not recognize her own voice; she is not squeezing her face into this shape, muscles twitching, nostrils curling, the hiss of sound, the taste of hatred.
Get out!

He opens the windows but neglects to drag the heavy screens up from the basement. Let it in, he thinks. He opens the windows to the smell of a rural spring, of manure spread upon the fields, and of cut grass, and mud.

He sits in his mother’s easy chair and releases the handle. The leg rest leaps into position, lifting and cradling him, and he is relaxed, and he sleeps, lightly. His dreams are of this moment: they incorporate the rattle of a neighbour’s tractor, the crunch of a child’s bicycle tires in the gravel lane, the meow of a cat.

He wakes as easily as he’s slept, as if a gentle hand is parting curtains of translucent fabric before his eyes, easing him from one space to another, showing him how little difference there is between here and there: You belong in both places. One is as real as the other.

In his dream the son was riding the bicycle.

In his dream the cat was become the son. The cat turned to look at him, but only a glance, disinterested, the way a cat’s ear twitches towards an unexpected sound. The sound that drew the cat’s attention was his own voice, groaning, and that is what woke him.

He sees a cat. He recognizes it: the female tabby, originator of all the cats on this farm, the matron, the elder. The cat has come through the open window; she walks across his keyboard and letters leap nonsensically onto the green screen. For a moment he panics: what if some crucial thought he will never think again has been erased? And then he relaxes. He thinks, If I can’t remember it, it couldn’t have been that important.

He says, instinctively,
tsh-tsh
to chase away the cat, and claps his hands. And she obeys, trotting out the open window and loping down the porch roof, tail stuck straight up into the air. It is only when he sees the cat preparing to leap to a branch that he remembers the crux of the dream, a memory like unearthed lace, full of holes, disintegrating even as he grabs for it.

His son. His son has been in the room.

He is paralyzed in his chair into a position that mimics relaxation, and death. Behind him the door is shut. In the chill breeze his face is wet. He thinks of the names of God, but he does not say them.

He thinks of how he has moved away from the names of God, or how they have moved away from him. He thinks, So. That was temporary too. Now I know.

He finds a nest of kittens. The mother does not hiss and spit at him but rolls to one side, as if to show them off, her nipples in two fat rows along her belly. The kittens are blind and he touches the head of one, black with orange markings, like its mother. He can feel its skull, and through the bones of the skull, thin as eggshell, he feels the beat of its heart, racing. He goes all along the litter and touches each kitten on the head. The mother cat seems pleased, and he thinks, She wants me to.

Last of all, he touches the mother cat on her head, and she pushes into his fingers, purring.

He has not forgotten the kitten that he drowned last summer. They think he has forgotten. His mother said he was too little to understand; but he understood. When he looks at the kittens, he remembers what it felt like to lift the little body and to dip it into the bucket of water. It scratched his wrist when he lifted it out. He wanted to wash it. It had yellow crust around its eyes, and its fur had gotten wet and dusty and had dried into matted points along its spine. He did not know it would die.

He remembers his sister sobbing, and his mother and his father too.

No, he thinks. That was something else. That was another time.

The barn hums with the sound of insects hidden everywhere. He stands and scratches a mosquito bite on his ankle.

There is a square hole in the floor through which he has climbed up into the mow. He kneels at the top of the ladder and makes quiet noises. He throws clumps of straw: bombs exploding. He swings down the ladder, talking under his breath. He is not the commander, he is not the dragon, he is not the bad guy. He is himself, in the middle of a battle.

She takes an interest in the beans growing in the garden. She puts up several dozen quarts using her mother’s recipe; in fact, she does not use a recipe, so familiar is she with the method and means, lodged into her being during teenage summers spent working in a hot kitchen.

The beans are snapped and cleaned and packed vertically into jars with salt and bacon and hot water, and cooked in the massive black canner into a dull green oblivion. When opened and heated and served with butter, they will taste not like summer but like the memory of summer — as if by alchemy, turned to comfort. Anyone could enjoy these beans, even the elderly with no teeth or, if speaking of the toothless, even the very young.

She thinks, Who do we know without teeth? And then, Who do we know, anymore? Who would we invite to our table, to share in this imaginary meal?

A stain of sweat rises on the fabric of her T-shirt, under her breasts. She is wearing a tied kerchief to keep her hair out of the cooking. The windows fog with steam. She sees her reflection in the side of an aluminum bowl filled with beans that need cleaning. She guesses her age in the distortion of metal: Less than four decades, more than three. She feels off balance thinking such a confused thought, even playfully. She mutters: Thirty-six. She yells for her daughter, Come and help, young lady!

I am not a young lady, I am an old girl. A joke they used to share.

She snorts.

The girl stands on the counter, and one by one she hands her cooled jars. The girl lines them up in jewelled rows.

Next, she says, tomatoes. And in between, peaches. And right about now, pickles: dill, and bread-and-butter, and sweet relish. Any vegetable can be finely chopped and tossed into sweet relish: cabbage, cucumber, zucchini, the vegetables that spread and produce out of all proportion to one’s desire to eat them.

While they work, they talk. She talks. She says, Slice them thin, like this. She says, Could you run to the garden for more dill? She says, My grandmother loved pickles. She used to make a dozen different kinds. They didn’t make salsa in those days. They didn’t even know what it was — ethnic food. Oregano was an ethnic food. They used celery as a flavouring, not to eat. They canned something called chili sauce, but I never liked it; I won’t bother. It’s sweet, not spicy. We should look up a recipe for salsa, something spicy. We should go to the library.

She falls asleep perfectly exhausted, with burns on her inner arms and cuts on her hands that sting when they come into contact with anything acidic — vinegar, tomato juice. The deepest cut is on the left palm, between thumb and forefinger.

Later, she thinks, I already knew. I knew exactly what I was doing.

But later it is easy to imagine certitude; is not everything that happens, she thinks, inevitable? Proven by the simple fact of its happening?

They fill the cupboards and the freezer. They fill August and September. The girl looks at her with eyes that neither charge nor accuse nor deny. She tries to mirror in return this gaze, but she cannot. What is it to love? If it is to know, she feels certain that she loves her daughter in a child’s apron, in her bare feet on the counter, with her loose brushed hair and purple eyeshadow; but if it is to give in return, in kind, she cannot. Her love stops here. Her love bashes against a wall behind her own eyes and does not advance any further.

Her love is ruthless. I already knew, she thinks, later. I knew I would leave them.

She writes the advertisement and calls the newspaper office and reads it out. She sends a cheque from her own bank account to pay for two printed lines in the classified section. She remembers when an advertisement like this would have stirred her fantasies. She smiles and dismisses her younger self. Her younger self never practised driving stick shift under the guidance of an older boy who had his licence. Her younger self never grinned sideways and pulled to a stop on a country road and climbed into the back seat and saw the stars through the side window, past the head of a boy who is kissing her neck and leaving his mark.

Pony for sale. White gelding, 14 hands, approximately 10 years old. Trained English and Western. Gentle with children.

On the day when the new owner arrives to load the pony into the trailer, she sits on his bare broad back and pats his shoulder while he nibbles grass in their front yard, near the porch. She has never before ridden him across the yard, up to the porch. His hooves dig into soft dirt, leaving grooves, but her mother does not seem to notice.

It’s time, her mother says. You’re ready.

Of course I am, she thinks, irritated.

He spooks at the truck’s rumble, and she slides off and grabs his faded halter. The new owner operates a riding stable. She wears tall black boots. She is brisk, running her hands down his legs, checking that they are clean. She opens her palm under his whiskered muzzle and surprises him with an offering of grain. Now he will go anywhere with this stranger, who leads him into the empty trailer and ties his head under a bag of hay. His hooves clatter in dismay as they pull away down the lane.

She worries about the broken taillight. She thinks, That wasn’t a real goodbye. It happened so fast. I thought there would be more time. Prone on her bed, face down, she cries, but her tears are scant and she soon pushes herself upright.

I am different now, she thinks, gazing into the mirror. She is curiously satisfied with what she sees. The vanity is cleared of its tubes and powders; only the most essential remain. Her hair has outgrown its false curls and falls long and sleek to her emergent breasts. Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?

Entranced, she believes she has arrived at an answer, and the answer is beauty, surely and truly, scraped down and unadorned.

At a moment like this, in this body, who could think of anything else?

Wake up, wake up, it’s been a year.

He is surprised by how little remains to be completed. He is surprised by how easily the task is done. The footnotes and endnotes require the most effort, but the work is deeply satisfying, like lingering over dessert, accepting a second helping, a glass of sweet liqueur. He thinks, It is easier to end than to begin, but recognizes that proof stands against the theory: his own children stand against it. Think of how easily each was begun, almost as if he’d had nothing to do with it.