The Worlds Within Her (20 page)

But an effort had been made. Yasmin saw that. The sliced cherry tomatoes lining the serving dish; the paper frills slipped onto the ends of the sprawled bones; the sprigs of parsley that sat like a stand of baby bonsai in the central stuffing. “It looks lovely,” she said.

“It is a bit of a mess,” Mrs. Summerhayes said, not apologetically, as Yasmin thought at first, but with mock bemusement.

Jim, sitting beside Yasmin, missed the humour. “Oh, it'll be fine, Mom,” he said in a tone dismissive with impatience.

Mr. Summerhayes, summoning gallantry, said, “I'm sure it'll be delicious as always. Now come on, my dear, sit yourself down and let's get on with it.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Summerhayes said, abruptly taking her seat across from Yasmin. “Let's get on with it.”

The lamb turned out to be tough, juices expelled, the flavours of the garlic and rosemary flowing off with them.

But the chewing around the table was determined. Mr. Summerhayes's the most vigorous. As he helped himself to a clutch of lettuce and quartered artichoke hearts — wielding the salad spoons with one hand, as if they were chopsticks — he explained that he had learnt long ago to approach meat with caution. At a dinner function one Christmas — what with all the chat and laughter and whatever — a piece of steak had wedged in his throat.

“Do you know what that's like?” he said, his dark eyebrows rising at Yasmin. “I'll tell you what it's like. It's as if someone has suddenly slammed a door shut in your windpipe. You feel the air leaving your lungs — with nothing, absolutely nothing, to replace it. Airtight. You can't even gasp. Everything starts
going dark. Your eyes water. And you know, with absolute, undeniable certainty, that you're about to die.”

He paused, filled his mouth with lettuce, speared a chunk of artichoke heart.

Mrs. Summerhayes, eyeing her plate, said, “My dear, must you —”

Jim concentrated on his food, slicing dutifully into the lamb.

“I vaguely remember half standing, unable to explain, of course, but as luck would have it my neighbour at the table, a French-Canadian fellow, recognized what was happening. He wasted no time in delivering a powerful uppercut to my solar plexus. The blow sent me flying several feet, but the meat was dislodged — and I've never forgotten what that first breath felt like. It was like sucking in life itself.

“Some people thought a fight had broken out and came running from around the room, making directly for the poor fellow. I'm afraid he absorbed a fist or two before I could explain that I was probably the only anglophone in the province who will be eternally grateful to a French-Canadian for belting him one.”

Mrs. Summerhayes, her food barely touched, suddenly rose as abruptly as she had seated herself moments before. Her chair slid silently backwards, and in silence she bustled out of the dining room.

Mr. Summerhayes's eyes froze in her wake. He crossed his cutlery on his plate, dabbed at his lips with the napkin and, mumbling pardons, followed her out, his pace leisurely but measured.

“You have to understand,” Jim said after a moment, with a sidelong glance at Yasmin. “It's the most exciting thing that's ever happened to him. He loves that story. But Mom — it's a whole other matter. If that guy hadn't punched him, Mom
would've been left with a two-year-old, no job, no insurance, and a new house mortgaged to the sun. So she hates that story. But he tells it anyway. She thinks it's his way of telling her, and me, to be grateful.”

He paused, and she followed his gaze out the window above the buffet: through the points of light in the lace, to the slats of fencing that appeared somehow even closer now than they had outside.

“And one other thing. That guy who punched him? The company eliminated his job a couple of years later. Dad had the task of firing him. Couldn't have been easy. I'm sure he lost at least a couple minutes' sleep over it.”

Yasmin took a sip of her wine, a nondescript Chilean red purchased at the corner store. “Aren't you being harsh?”

“No harsher than he's ever been. I don't hate him or anything.”

“Her?”

“Her either.” He shrugged, sipped at his wine, grimaced. After a moment, he said, “They're like this wine. Drinkable, but with an uncertain bouquet. A personality that's ill-defined, hard to grasp. Not unpleasant by any means, but still, not a wine you could ever grow fond of.”

An unsettling simile. Yasmin took another sip. The wine slid warm over her tongue, lapped pleasantly at her cheeks; but as she swallowed, an underlying coarseness tightened the skin, imposing a sensation of rapid aridity.

His parents returned, a new quietness to them. They took their places and the meal proceeded in the silence of an assumed tranquility.

Afterwards, as they lay in bed at the hotel watching the news on television, Jim said, “I have been trying hard, you see, all my life. Trying hard not to be like my parents. But what I don't
know, what I'll never know, is whether I'm just kidding myself. You see how they are. What they're like. Were they always like that, or did the years make them so? I can't picture them young, you know. And photos don't help. I still don't really know what my dad did for a living. He spent his life working for
CN
, in the payroll department. When I was young, before I knew what the payroll department was, I had this fantasy that he was a train engineer, that he stoked fires and drove a powerful locomotive. Then I found out what payroll meant. I know it's not fair, but he never recovered from my disappointment.”

He turned in the bed, pulling the blanket higher on his shoulders against the cold of the air conditioning.

“You know, Yas, I can take as many cooking courses as I like, I can learn everything there is to know about wines, I can daydream about light as much as I want — but I can't shake this feeling that there's something I'm not getting, something insidious, that'll win out in the end.”

Yasmin, seeking to lighten the moment, said, “You could have told me this
before
we got married.”

“But you mightn't have married me,” he said. “And then how would you have saved me?”

“Have I? Saved you?”

“We'll see.” He reached over to brush a curl of hair from her forehead. “You might yet.”

Moments before they fell asleep, Yasmin said, “I know why your father's hydrangeas won't grow.”

“Why?” Jim mumbled.

“Not enough sunlight.”

LIGHT FROM THE
table lamp pools around the telephone, the bulb reflecting in the plastic like a distant sun.

“Hi, it's me.”

“Yas. Everything okay? You sound …”

“Everything's fine. But you got your wish.”

“What wish?”

“I'm at my relatives'. I'll be staying here for a couple of nights, until I come home.”

“How come?”

“It's a long story. Problems at the hotel. I'll tell you all about it when I get back. Everything okay with you? Anything new?”

“No, just the usual. You?”

“Well …”

“Oh-oh.”

“No, no, it's just a little weird, that's all.”

“How weird?”

“You tell me.”

And she tells him about Penny and the box that now sits across the room from her on the dresser, beside the smaller box that holds the urn that holds her mother's ashes. Tells him how, after offering her the use of the empty dresser — which she will not accept, for it implies an intimacy she finds unsettling — Penny had left her alone; how, after a few minutes, she had returned with the box, of plain cardboard, unlabelled and taped shut. Tells him how Penny had slid the box onto the dresser and said, Here it is, is what you really come for, not so? And, on seeing Yasmin's puzzlement, had said, Is some of his things, is all we have left. Odds and ends. Vern's. Your father's.

Telling the story leaves Yasmin breathless.

After a moment, Jim asks whether she's opened it yet.

Not yet, she replies. In a curious way, she's savouring the moment. “It's the first time in years we've all been together in the same room.”

“Don't be macabre,” Jim says, and Yasmin pictures the face he is making: a grimace decades old and thousands of miles distant.

“Does it sound macabre?” She knows she does not intend to be macabre. What she does not know is what she does intend. The word “completeness” occurs to her. It is for now just a word, though, weightless but resonant. Because of this, she says, “Sleep well, Jim.”

And as if he were lying groggy beside her on the bed, Jim replies, “You too, Yas.”

NO, MY DEAR
Mrs. Livingston, I fear your leaves refuse to offer any recognizable shape — recognizable, at least, to my eye. After all, shape and form, even more than beauty, for they come first, are in the eye of the beholder. What to me is shapeless may to another be wondrous.

To discern the fine contours of each other, to define each other's shapes and grasp each other's realities, remains the supreme challenge to all human ability. And today at least, my dear, your leaves are of no help to me. They are good — but only for brewing. This is no reason for despair, or skepticism, however. Just the opposite. As my husband once wrote in a note
that became famous, dawn follows midnight. So, on we go. Agreed?

My dear Mrs. Livingston, what's that look on your face? If you're tired, we can call it a —

What is that noise? Is it you? Why are you gurgling —

Mrs Livingston?

Mrs. Livingston!

Can you hear me?

SHE BURROWS INTO
the bedsheets seeking the darkness.

Burrows, ageless, away from the light seeping grey through the ill-fitted shutters.

Burrows deeper into the mattress, seeking out the warmth that is her own infused into the fibres.

Deeper into the scents that are unfamiliar and comforting. Detergent. Steam. The absorbed warmth of the sun that suggests the bright outdoors, and wind, and the brush of fresh-cut grass.

Slides into scents that seduce her whole into worlds of image quickened by sensation.

Night. The air cool and taut, becoming whole again after the searing day.

Above, a veiled quarter moon and stars — clustered, strewn — pulsing like pieces of shattered silver with a chill, radioactive beauty.

His touch — fingertips, lips — sure and gentle, urgent: an exploration that aroused her nerves.

And her touch — palms skittish, fingers afire — incorporeal with eloquence: reaching into him, grasping at an essence that could not be held, like seizing at joy itself.

Sounds — his, hers — liquefied and muted, severing her from herself, moulding her into him, him into her: shaping a multiplicity of one, with no beginning, no end, conjoined by a swirling fierceness.

Electricity as subtle as starlight wove webs between their skins, binding them to the blanket, to the rumbling earth beneath: an electricity feeding on itself, cannibalizing, nourishing, enlarging appetite even as it is satiated.