Authors: Joan Thomas
“In those years? No.” He turns to Rupert, who is stalwartly eating his way through his mashed potatoes. “Although, Dad, I do recall you coming in off the line one Christmas morning and tossing some bags of candy at us kids. You were my hero – do you remember?”
Rupert doesn’t even look up.
Leonard Cohen broods from the speakers over the sideboard – Aiden’s notion of sacred music – and Liz notes the fresh sage in the dressing, musty and subtle. I got it just right, she thinks. But would it have killed me to open a can of cranberry sauce for Aiden? She watches him in his Christmas sweater, methodically portioning turkey and potatoes onto his fork, this lanky, warm-faced man who’s always ready to talk about himself, though his stories never shed much light on what he’s really about. When they first met, she could never mesh his easy confidence and clever talk with his working-class clothes and the startling gaps in his manners. Liz and Charlotte would joke about Aiden’s mysterious past, but all she ever heard about was aimless years and career changes and the girlfriends he’d broken up with for no particular reason – the usual male commitment phobia. She’s going to die waiting for the big reveal.
Sylvie’s eyes are drawn to her dad too. “You know, Dad, you look like a hipster in that sweater.”
“Thank you.”
“It’s not a compliment. Sorry.”
“What I really should have bought your dad,” Liz says, trying to summon up a bit of gaiety, “is a wired sweater. Did you read about them in the
Globe
? They’re called hug sweaters. They’re lined with copper wire, and when someone who loves you wants to send you a hug, they press a button on a remote and the wires heat up.”
“Oh god,” Sylvie says. “That is just gross. Women are walking three miles every morning for contaminated drinking water, with their babies strapped to their backs, and we’re engineering self-hugging sweaters.”
This from a girl who could not be bothered to buy a single Christmas present for a single person in the house. “You’re a puritan. We didn’t raise you to be moralistic, but that’s what you are. That sweater is just a whimsical way of staying in touch. Using technology to send a warm, human message.”
“Exactly. That’s what else is gross. The child thinks he’s on his own at last. He’s out there, a big kid feeling cool with his friends, playing hockey on the road. He misses a shot. ‘Fuck!’ he yells – and just then his sweater starts heating up.
Your mother is thinking about you. Don’t think you can escape!
”
Grandpa catches at least one of Sylvie’s words and looks at her with interest. Then he turns back to his crusty roll, which he is endeavouring to eat with his knife and fork. He’s lost the concept of the bread bun and he never really had the concept of conversation; he always seemed dazed by the way they talk at this table.
“You know, Sylvie,” Liz hears herself saying, “you will really enjoy getting to know Noah’s mom. When I was hanging out with Mary Magdalene and her friends, they were true back-to-the-earth types. They didn’t just make soup – they made broth first, from herbs and vegetables they grew themselves. They didn’t make
bread from yeast you buy at the store – they kept sourdough starter in their fridges. If there was a hard way to do something, they found it.”
She’s warming up to something and she can’t seem to stop. “I think it was to justify staying home. I was the only one in the whole group with a semblance of paid work. I could never get the hang of how they thought. If someone broke a rule, they’d all talk about it in these shocked, grieving voices: ‘Susan handed out
Oreos
at the playground.’ Or ‘Elaine feeds her kids
Kraft dinner
.’ Or ‘Liz lets her daughter watch
Sesame Street
!’ ”
“What’s wrong with
Sesame Street
?”
“It destroys the attention span. There wasn’t any handbook for this, no – what would you call it? – scripture. Only leadership … i.e., Mary Magdalene.” The venom in her voice startles even her. She shoves aside her red cabbage and squash and wipes her fingers on her napkin.
“On this festive occasion,” Aiden says, “in this intimate and loving company, I would like to propose a toast.” They raise their glasses. Sylvie has a real Shirley Temple that Liz went to the trouble of making. Aiden looks to his right, to Sylvie. “To new life,” he says. Bravely they drink to it, except for Rupert.
Then Aiden looks down the table at Liz. He raises his glass again. “And to the old one.”
“To the old one?”
“To you, Liz. To my darling Liz. A cook who’s not afraid to lick her fingers.”
The faux candles on the antler chandelier burn steadily and the beeswax candles on the table flicker. Liz looks around the dining room, trying hard to take everything in, the beautiful home she’s made for all of them, as if this is the last time she’ll see it. “Thank God we didn’t plan a party for New Year’s,” she says.
T
HEY’VE DECIDED THAT WE’RE PARALYZED WHILE we sleep. This is an evolutionary adaptation to stop us from acting out our dreams and our nightmares. Scientists claim to have found the paralyzing switch; they turned it off in a cat that had the bad luck to fall into their hands. Aiden saw it on
TV
. He saw the cat, an ordinary domestic tabby with an electronic device the size of an old-fashioned alarm clock screwed into her brain. She was sound asleep and hunting: crouching, staring, pouncing, doing her predatory thing to a dream mouse that only she could see.
But Aiden already knew this. You’re too hot, he says to himself as he drifts towards sleep. Take off your T-shirt. But his arms lie inert, too heavy to be moved by an act of his puny will.
In the post–Boxing Day morning he’s overheated and tetchy by the time Liz gets up and leaves the house. When he finally pries himself out of bed, Sylvie’s gone as well. To the library, she said last night – she’s in some sort of fix with her plant science paper. He putters around the kitchen, cleaning up the mess she made creating her smoothie, relieved not to see her, not to have to do the chipper optimism thing.
He stands with his coffee in the living room, looking out at the doomed elms in the yard, where the squirrels are chasing each other in a mating frenzy. It’s a bloody Carry On movie. Their babies are going to freeze when winter kicks in, if they can in fact breed off-season. He knows nothing about squirrels. He should study them, chart the population. Figure out if they’re monogamous. How many offspring they have and how long they live. Two years? Ten years? He has no idea. Orange roughy live to be one hundred. He and Liz ate a lot of orange roughy at one time. It was flown in from New Zealand and it was bloody expensive, but it was their favourite company dinner. And now the orange roughy with its turned-down mouth is gone, because they were eating fish as old as they were and no one knew.
He touches the heel of his hand to the triple-pane window and judges the temperature to be about minus two. Yesterday a blanket of snow lay over the yard and Liz went out and swept the patio clear. Now, all around the patio, the snow is retreating, pale and springlike, shrinking away from the dark bricks so fast you can almost see it melt. The albedo effect – that’s what you call it, isn’t it? – that feedback loop where the less ice you have, the less ice you have. When he first read about it, he came away saying to himself, How extremely stupid not to have thought of that.
Don’t start thinking about arctic ice. What about the ice on Otter Lake? No hope of a ski-in to the cabin this week. He should have scheduled some clients between Christmas and New Year’s; two or three really wanted an hour. But when he was setting his schedule in November, he was counting on being up at Otter Lake.
Aiden was a kid when Rupert built the cabin in north-western Ontario, on land made available to
CN
employees. They went in every summer weekend on a train called the Campers’ Special,
two or three passenger cars full of railway families, hitched to an eastbound freight train. Rupert had scored a prime lot, a tiny, rocky island in a tiny lake, a five-minute boat ride from the train stop. Aiden’s parents were matter-of-fact about the property, almost gruff: they’d both grown up in the country. But an
island
– this amazed and thrilled Aiden. He still remembers the first time he saw it, a ten-year-old in too-small runners who had thought the city’s north end was the whole world. And then there was this island, with its continuous rocky margin, its resident turtle and visiting eagle. The private, intricate beauty of its lichens and mosses. He was the only one in the family the island really spoke to – that’s what he believed from the beginning – except that at certain times it seemed to take them all in. In the evenings especially, as the sun slid behind the spruce trees on the mainland and their parents sat out on the rocks, the embers of their cigarettes glowing red, and he and Carl and Ken dove off the end of the new dock, over and over, their shoulders felted with sunburn and their arms goosefleshed with the cold. Sloughing off the city, sloughing off their enmity, they’d be slotted into the night, merged into one black shape shouting over the shining water. He never lost it, what he felt about the island that first summer.
One day eight or ten years ago, Aiden was over at his dad’s, rebuilding his back fence, and Rupert let drop that he’d been talking to a realtor at Minaki about selling the cottage. Back in the eighties
CN
had stopped the Campers’ Special, and without the train, you had to be a diehard outdoorsman to get in. Aiden set down the picket he was fitting and straightened up. “I thought you might sign it over to your kids, Dad,” he said, aiming for a lightness of tone.
“Aw, they’re not interested,” Rupert muttered around the home-rolled cigarette dangling from his lower lip. Aiden’s mind cried out for witnesses: he wanted somebody from the Cosmic Tribunal on
Parental Malfeasance to note how unconsciously Rupert’s mind leapt to the two sons he considered his real progeny, totally blind to the existence of the chump who’d just spent two days in this yard breaking his back with a posthole digger. But on the facts, Rupert was right; they weren’t interested. Aiden’s older brother, Carl, had moved to Fort McMurray and hadn’t been in touch in two or three years. And Ken, the last time they’d seen him, had a mob of creditors waving tire irons on his tail.
That was the summer Aiden entered the master’s program in counselling. His pension from the group home was just about to vest, so he started the paperwork to pull it out and he bought the property. For the price his dad was asking, as a point of pride. Obviously he and Liz could have spent that money ten different ways, but he made what at the time he called a unilateral decision. Well, maybe every marriage has its black holes – differences so fundamental you just have to back away from them – and they did, they did back away. She was beyond angry for about a month and then she dropped it. The issue’s still alive somewhere, no doubt, but she’s packed it away in some storage facility for undetonated resentments. It’s still there for Aiden, for sure: the island’s always on the rim of his consciousness, gleaming with his knowledge of how much he was prepared to pay for it.
Anyway, there’s no hope of a winter road out of Minaki for weeks now. Aiden lowers himself into the Mission chair and contemplates the mess in the fireplace, three charred logs that failed to burn last night because he failed to stoke the fire. Liz was pissed off with him that entire summer, and it wasn’t just the Otter Lake thing. He’d gone back to university with her full and generous support after fifteen years of working in group homes, and he was almost at the end of the long road to a Ph.D. in English. But he was hating it, finding it hard to breathe the rarefied air of the semioticians, and
fed up with departmental politics. If he’s honest, he stopped believing in his dissertation about a year into it. You can make decisions based on an outdated understanding of yourself and the world, and that’s how you get trapped. Then one day at the library he ran into the director of the counselling program and she encouraged him to apply for a master’s of individual and family therapy (the deadline was just a few days away), and that’s what he did.
This eleventh-hour career change surprised everybody, and it broadsided Liz. But she was finally on solid professional footing herself, and he couldn’t see any practical reason why not. God knows, he never had much hope of a tenure-track position in English. So he followed his instincts and applied for the
MIFT
program and he got in, and discovered to his surprise that psychotherapy picked up what you might call the bright thread of his interior life in much the same way as reading did. Literature was always more a private delight for him than an academic vocation, a furtive pleasure after the belligerent redneckism he grew up with. He still remembers the moment he understood that poetry is not bullshit, that it is maybe the antithesis of bullshit. He was in first-year English, standing in the stacks reading an assigned poem (Yeats? Or maybe earlier George Herbert?), when a light rose up off the page and cast something essential he’d been feeling into high relief, something he had never tried to articulate. When he started the
MIFT
program, he sensed right away that therapy drew from the same well. It was rigorous in ways he hadn’t expected. The human psyche, like the poem, tends to tell things slant (is how he came to think of it). Readers of both have to keep their wits about them.
One of the program’s premises was that therapists in training needed to do personal work on their own issues. Aiden arrived at his first group therapy session uneasy and suspicious, but by the end of the day he was completely disarmed. It was a gift in your
middle years, he saw, this chance to probe your experiences with astute listeners. He was moved by his group’s struggles to disclose themselves honestly, by the risks they took, and by how forthright they were in their responses to each other. He felt as though he were reading a brave and original text and the even braver gloss on it (it was a fact that, in his previous studies, a piece of intelligent criticism often lit him up more than the literary text itself). He was the only man in his group, but his colleagues let it be known there’d be no hiding behind some ideal of male reticence. Like a woman learning heavy-duty mechanics in a class of men, he’d be held to an even higher standard: he had to make up for the privilege that no doubt had gotten him into the program in the first place.