Authors: Eliza Robertson
On Gin’s first trip to the slimes, she found a fox. She could tell by its ears, how they arced from the tailings, and its chin, fine boned, jaw shellacked open. Three points suspended in misshapen geometry, a tranquility so malformed she sprinted home for a net—sprinted in case it was still sinking, through rows of white birch and winter-dead roses, toward the frozen slush that led to their cabin. She used her nephew’s butterfly catcher because none of them fished, a sturdy wide one her brother brought from Papua New Guinea. She returned with it, a milk jug of water, and rubber gloves in case the oil was corrosive. When she dipped the hoop into the pond, the mesh trailed behind like a wise man’s beard in a bowl of grey soup. Though hardly larger than a terrier, the shape sagged in the net and tripped Gin forward when she yanked it toward her. Dregs slid from its spine in webs, the pelt so slick she couldn’t discern single hairs—only a glossy mat up the flank, textured like the implied fur of ceramic cats.
She and Clare had arrived at her brother’s last month. The exile recommended by her doctor after a week of sleep, deficient lactation, and not wanting to nurse even with formula. Pink pills, blues tests.
I do not feel sad. I feel sad. I feel sad all the time and cannot snap out of it.
The usual surveys. “Inventories,” they call them. As though smiles were merchandise. The complete stock shelved on her lips—one for the custodian, one for the nurse. Sorry, Doc, fresh out. They moved her from Maternity to Psychiatrics on day three. The nurse had clucked into the room to find Clare shrieking in her lap, Gin watching, arms limp at her sides, her eyes exploring her daughter as they might a photograph in a coffee-table book. Coarser nurses in Psychiatrics. Paintings of sand dollars. Clare slept downstairs with the gelatinous mauve elephants. More tests. Scales.
I have laughed: as much as I always could. Not quite so much now. Definitely not so much now
. Do Re Mi. Never a Rorschach—too clichéd, perhaps, but too bad, because that’s one she might have enjoyed. She liked to divine images from shadows—from points on a dead fox’s head. Ear to nose to ear, the lines she wiped first. A
V
fingered into the bitumen, Cassiopeia folded in half.
She hailed from Vancouver, a glass city where the sun shone 360 degrees: sky to sea to the condos on Coal Harbour. She hadn’t liked it much, but this Syncrude hinterland was by all accounts a hole. Even with the thaw, the collapse of icicles into the underbrush. The fragrance of peat moss and bird breath and other springtime anomalies. She ventured outside the night her baby stopped wailing and her sister-in-law’s voice sugared through the cedar planks. First she sat upright and listened, poised in the centre of her bed. Goodnight, stars. Goodnight, air. Goodnight, noises everywhere. Then she slid into her brother’s sheepskin slippers and slipped the hell out—flannel sheet limp around her shoulders and enough sub-horizon sun reflected from the snow that she didn’t need a flashlight.
Her limbs were bed stiff, baggy with three weeks’ inactivity, but her paralysis wasn’t physical. There was less snow beneath the roses and the birds had left a few frostbitten hips, strange spidered fruit latched to the branches in lattices of ice. The pond drew her because it was the only thing not frozen. An alien crater behind the birch, the bitumen floating in coagulated mats as skim might on a tub of tepid gravy. Now she crouched on the gravel, milk jug almost emptied, fox corpse as clean as she could get it. The forest blocked the sun, but her shadow on the slush suggested it had risen. She laid the fox on the shrinking patch of snow that capped a white stump and palmed its fur so that all the hairs pointed the right way. Its paws were bent in paddle, its lips lifted over the gums. Up the bank, two white-throated sparrows skittered from shrub to shrub, their songs tinny in the echo of upriver dump trucks and draglines. She leaned the butterfly net against the stump, collected her milk jug, and followed the birch trees home.
The silence felt like night when she slipped through the door. Lights still off, blinds pulled. She tracked wet onto the front mat and removed her slippers, the slush melting into fast puddles, her feet swollen and stinging onto the hemp weave. She saw a turtle-ish hulk breathing in the green glow of the wall night light. Her nephew hunched in the hall beneath a tangle of bedsheets, as though he tried to shove them behind his back when she opened the door. They stared at each other, both pegged to their corners, Jake all linen and eyelashes and trying to stand straighter, to hide the bedding with his sixty-pound frame. Gin lowered her eyes and leaned the door closed with her shoulder. Her own blanket coiled wet and tarry between her feet. She stepped off the mat and he moved too. When they passed each other, she glanced to find his eyes on the hardwood, until he stepped through the kitchen to the room with the washer and she sank behind her own four walls.
Her brother knocked on her door an hour later, all suited up in company coveralls, scalp a few inches shy of the door frame.
“Hey,” he said.
She tugged the blanket to her chin and stared at a knot in the wall.
“Gamelle’s taking Clare and Jake to the pool in town if you want to go. Jake has swimming.”
“Thank you, no,” she said, and shut her eyes.
She heard the cedar creak beneath him as he shifted his weight. “Right,” he said. “Well, there’s coffee in the kitchen.”
She waited for his boots to plunk down the hall and out the door until she rooted in her suitcase for wool socks. Then she rolled them over her chapped damp toes and climbed out of bed.
Jake stooped at the table with a bowl of Cheerios milk and an anime comic. When Gin sat opposite him, he scanned up the tablecloth and adjusted the goggles he wore strapped to his forehead.
“Jake, can you check the formula?” Gamelle shouted from down the hall.
He lifted his bowl with both hands and tipped it into his mouth.
“Jake?”
“Minute,” he called, milk dribbling down his chin.
The silhouette of a bottle orbited the microwave and a pot of oats boiled on the stove. Gin could see the porridge from her seat, a single gummy mass that bloated up the sides of the pot. She shifted her eyes to the microwave as it blacked and started dinging.
“Jake, the formula,” called Gamelle as she tore into the kitchen, red hair flailing from the elastic, stained towel flung over her shoulder, and Gin’s baby hitched to her hip. “Oh,” she said when she saw her at the table.
Gin averted her eyes back to the porridge pot when Clare squirmed in Gamelle’s arm, pinched faced and blotchy, screaming. The microwave dinged. Jake slurped milk from his bowl. The oats loomed in a perfect dome above the rim. Clare shrieking. Jake wiping the milk off his mouth with his sleeve. The porridge hissing in a slow wave onto the stove.
“Fuck,” said Gamelle as she glanced over her shoulder. She wiped the sweat off her cheek with her free arm and snatched the formula from the microwave. “Jake, clean up the porridge.”
“But, Mom—”
“Or no swimming.” Her housecoat flared at her heels as she stormed back into the hall.
That night she found ducks. Two of them, tail up in tailings like an ironic postcard. A third tarred to its side, single patch of iridescent jade sheening from its neck under the beam of her flashlight. She had left in the early blue hour, with boots this time, a toothbrush, and another jug of water. They were easy to miss, there yesterday for all she knew. She netted two in one go and weaved the hoop back through the sludge for the third, the mud funnelling from the bottom when she lifted the net into the air, casting slow circles toward the shore. She dumped the ducks on the bank where her fox draped the stump, fur whited by frost, an icicle slanting off the tip of its tail.
Snow seeped through her nightgown when she sat, eventually numbing her rear so she couldn’t feel any gravel. She scooped a duck with her glove and started at the bill—rubbed the slick with soft toothbrush strokes, inching between its eyes. Both wings were stretched from the body, like at any moment the bird might vault from her hand, tail feathers beating her chin in a tar-heavy tumble into the sky. She poured water from the jug and wiped its head with her thumb until she hit green, focusing on the bills and necks and feet because the feathers were too matted and too easily tugged out. Then she laid her ducks by size in a row—the idiom toppled by their ghoulishness: bodies half tarred, an odd wing snapped ninety degrees, ankles stretched like Chinese window poultry. But they were lined in order and she could see their faces.
The next evening she sat in the bay of the den window with the
Birds of Alberta
. Her brother was streaming hockey in his room with the baby, and Gamelle had driven to Fort McMurray to pick up the PAC ladies and donuts. Gin knew her ducks were mallards, but she liked to read the trivia—how their iridescence is called a “speculum,” and how female ducks quack loudest. Even more, she liked the shape of Latin on her tongue.
Anas platyrhynchos
, like broken glass, sherry shards pressed to the roof of her mouth. The categorization of every beast through accordioning syllables.
Anas clypeata
. The Northern Shoveller. Close to a mallard, but with bills shaped like spoons and males that say
wook wook wook.
“Want to see my favourite?”
Jake hovered at her elbow in insect pyjamas. Praying mantises or grasshoppers scattered up his chest.
“It’s on page 167.”
She didn’t know how to respond so she thumbed to the page.
“The Sandhill Crane,” he said, and climbed onto the arm of the couch.
“Grus canadensis.”
She gathered her dusty blond hair into a twist down the side of her nightgown collar. “Why do you like it?”
“They fly through here around this time. And when they stand in the yard, they look like statues.” He lifted his arms and tested his balance, nudging his toe up the couch’s brown leather.
“He’s handsome,” she said, and peered out the windowpane. Women’s voices and cocktail laughter trickled in from the porch.
“Just Mom’s friends,” said Jake when she snapped the book shut. “Her turn for pickup.” He leaped off the couch and landed with a thudded squat, then marched into the front hall as though Gin might want proof.
She glanced at the wall that divided the hall from the den and listened for the door to fling open to a pack of flapping tongues. Waited for the women to stomp into the hall, to find her in the window—their sour-sweet smiles as they say,
So you’re Ginny.
She pressed her shoulder blades against the wood of the alcove and drew her feet up the sill, flattened her chest to the front of her thighs.
“Jake, what are you doing up,” said Gamelle. She herded him from the front hall to the kitchen, where Gin couldn’t see. “Go brush your teeth.”
Coated figures filtered in the same direction. One woman paused at the den, leaned into the door frame for balance as she removed her boots. Gin shallowed her breath and waited to be noticed—the woman wavering on a nyloned foot and tugging at her plastic spiked heel.
“It’s only eight o’clock,” Gin heard Jake say from the kitchen. “Plus I can’t find my toothbrush.”
The woman in the doorway straightened, wet boot in each hand. She stared into the den, hair framing her cheeks in tidy blond parentheses, her eyes poring up and down the wall adjacent to Gin’s window.
“Is that Spanish Olive in your living room?” she said as she turned from the doorway and followed the ladies into the kitchen. “We considered it for the sunroom, but in the end we went with the Tourmaline.”
Gin exhaled, her breath warming the tops of her knees. She listened to the clatter of the coffee pot, and then her baby as she started screaming from the room at the end of the hall.
“Oh, she’ll probably need changing,” said Gamelle from the kitchen. “Sit. Help yourself to Timbits.”
She heard the bedroom door open and close. The crying subsided.
“Poor thing,” said a woman in the kitchen.
“Both of them,” said another woman.
“I heard they sent her from Vancouver.”
“Guess Dad’s not in the picture.”
“Probably buggered off.”
“Could you pass a Dutchie?”
Gin folded her chest back to her thighs. Her breasts ached. She ignored the damp as it cooled through her dressing gown cotton—a thin grey seep not quite like milk.
That night she counted in nursery games. Duck, duck, duck, goose. A Canada goose, to go by the cheek patches, though the mud obfuscated the feather schemes. Its wings were spread, but webbed by the bitumen, its neck stretched 180 degrees. So far all the birds were migratory, and she wondered if it had something to do with pond temperatures. This dark hole punctuating white fields, white lakes, white trees like a blinking motel sign on the highway to Fort McKay. A warm mouth to rest your wings in after a continental flap. She imagined the sludge to have a mummification quality, her pond dwellers preserved like the corded wood people inside Nordic bogs. Duck, duck, duck, goose, fox. Fowl of the air, beast of the fields, her slimebank taxonomy.
At home she lay on her bed and whispered verses of
Goodnight Moon
to her sunken belly like back in month three. She had been a model mother then. Single, but fresh eyed and rosy, dreaming girls’ names and bedspreads and invigorated by the life inside her.