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Prism international 31:3 / Spring 1993
Prism international
90 Pages
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in. LMJ international SPRING 1993 Contemporary writing from Canada and around the world $4.50 (plus G.S.T) 1992 Fiction Contest Winners "Yl JY/U international international Editor Murray Logan Executive Editor Patricia McLean Gabin Fiction Editor Zsuzsi Gartner Poetry Editor Shannon Stewart Advisory Editor Keith Maillard Associate Editor Anna M. Nobile Business Manager Vigeland B. Rubin Fiction Contest Manager Kris Rothstein Editorial Board Meredith Bain Woodward Jennifer Davis Anne H. Ferncase Mark Hill Tony Kazoleas San Khanna Angela Lavery Rosalind MacPhee Catherine Mamo Maureen Medved Barbara Nickel Anthea Penne Eden Robinson PRISM international, a magazine of contemporary writing, is published four times per year by the Department of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C. V6T IZl. Microfilm editions are available from University Microfilms Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan, and reprints from the Kraus Reprint Corporation, New York, N.Y. Contents Copyright © 1993 PRISM international for the authors. Cover art by John Belisle One-year individual subscriptions $16.00, two-year subscriptions $24.00, library and institution subscriptions $22.00, two-year subscriptions $36.00, sample copy $5.00. Canadians add 7% G.S.T. All manuscripts should be sent to the Editors at the above address. Manuscripts must be accompanied by a self-addressed envelope with Canadian stamps or International Reply Coupons. Manuscripts with insufficient postage will be held for six months and then discarded. The Advisory Editor is responsible for the magazine's overall mandate including continuity, quality, and budgetary obligations. Payment to contributors is $20.00 per page plus a one-year subscription. PRISM international purchases First North American Serial Rights only. Our gratitude to the Canada Council, Dean Patricia Marchak, and the Dean of Arts' Office at the University of British Columbia. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Government of British Columbia, through the Ministry of Tourism and Ministry Responsible for Culture. Publications Mail Registration No. 5496. May 1993 Contents Vol. 31, No. 3 Spring, 1993 J.A. Hamilton Elise Levine Lisa Moore Paul Rawlins Dorothy Speak Sara Berkeley Suzanne Buffam Richard Harrison Susan L. Holbrook Mark Miller Bruno Oijer trans, by Ulla Natterqvist-Sawa Alpay K. Ulku Alan R. Wilson Fiction Accusation 42 Boris 66 Ingrid Catching Snowflakes on her Tongue 57 August—Staying Cool 7 Washtucna 79 Relatives in Florida 22 Poetry Paddington 74 Driving Down Musgrave 36 Roadmap 38 An African Hockey Story (continued) On the American Express Ad 19 The Sweater 20 Stanley Cup 21 The Children and I Up 53 A Man Wounded by an Elephant 54 Princes Wharf, Hobart, with my two-year old 41 You Feel the Swift Breeze 64 What Speaks for Us 65 Heat Lightning, Progress, Cat, George OrweU 55 Glacier 56 Equipment FaUure 75 Elemental 76 Cover Art 18 John Belisle Contributors 89 1992 Short Fiction Contest Winners $2000 Prize: Paul Rawlins, Provo, Utah, U.S. A. "August—Staying Cool" $200 Prize: J. A. Hamilton, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada "Accusation" $200 Prize: Elise Levine, Toronto, Ontario, Canada "Boris" $200 Prize: Lisa Moore, St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada "Ingrid Catching Snowflakes on her Tongue" $200 Prize: Paul Rawlins, Provo, Utah, U.S.A. "Washtucna" $200 Prize: Dorothy Speak, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada "Relatives in Florida" 1992 FinaUsts SE. Ingle, U.S.A. "The Caretaker" Lisa Daus NeviUe, U.S.A. "AU Men Are Immortal" Roma Quapp, Canada "Anna, Frieda und Ilsa 1933" Mark Wisniewski, U.S.A. "Between Ties" The 1992 PRISM Short Fiction Contest had 594 entries from across North America and around the world. PRISM international would like to congratulate the winners and to thank everyone who entered. We would like to extend a special thank you to John Metcalf, this year's final judge, and to Kris Rothstein, our Fiction Contest Manager. August—Staying Cool Paul Rawlins This summer in record heat, five days running over a hundred degrees, I'm staying cool—no smack, no ice, no Robitussin remedy—jacked up on rock and roU pumped out at nine on monster floor-to-ceiling speakers from my brother's apartment. He explains how they produce a waU of sound that turns the front end of the living room into a stage when you sit at the point he's triangulated out with string and a nail across the ceUing. He says you sit here, and lay your head back; and I swear, he's right, that sometimes when the blues get deep enough the room sets you on edge and sinks you into deep and sweet surrender I haven't felt for two months now since I came off heroin the second time cold turkey. Evelyn Ray saw me through that, with my brother, Mike. The first time, when I had to go out of state for methadone treatments. The second time like everybody else, in the back room, strapped to the bed with leather belts, screaming like I'm down the bottom of a deep weU. Mike telling aU the neighbors it was O. K., and the cops. Evelyn wiping down my naked body with a wet towel, cleaning up the mess I made of the sheets. Kissing me and petting my hair when I was calm or played out. Mike standing over me then, big and black, like I was his fuU blood brother, saying to me, "You beat it back. You win this." There's a word for what Evelyn did, leaving me now. "I faU to see her side in this," I teU Mike. "She just leave?" he says, "or did you two fight?" If I point to the day itself, one day out of a hundred, she just left, gone out early, probably after groceries. Or, for precision's sake, she never came by at aU. Mike's worried about me now with the heat. That's why he carted in the stereo and the big projection TV and half a million CDs and videocas- settes. He's thinking about the Santa Anas that blow in Southern California, the hot winds that stoke everything up to the boiling point. Mike says when the Santa Anas come, everything starts to give. People jump off bridges and kill each other. They go crazy with crime, crazy in the heat, when the wind blows, no way out in the barrio. No way, Mike says. "You got to stay cool," he tells me. "You got to ride this out. You're a big man." He's told me he won't see me again on dope. He'll kill me first and then move away. Mike should be a woman. I've got a shrine assembled on the TV. Mike doesn't like it, but he lets it go. I've got a used up needle, with a burnt-out spoon and an old piece of surgical tubing. "That ain't no way," Mike's said. "It's my way," I tell him. "I'm bigger." I've surrounded the paraphernalia with pictures of friends who have died, infected early on, before the word got out about swapping needles. One of them might have been gay, too, but they were big users. I've got Polaroids and quick prints, in all stages of life and decline. One buddy was saving up for Europe where there's some new treatments, but he caught strep first, and that did him. Evelyn found me after in my bathtub, where I'd dug his initials into the enamel with my car keys. The things I've thought of doing, sending her in the mail. I talk them out with Mike. I tell him I've watched The Godfather all afternoon. Mike puffs up his cheeks and blows out air like he's practising trumpet. His girlfriend, Denise, is with him tonight, heading out to the kitchen to carve up bread and meat for ham sandwiches. I made it out to the store today, and I tell her there's lettuce and some little tomatoes and stuff for a salad. "Salad," she says. "Yeah," I say. "My mother used to make a salad for dinner." "You want to eat salad," Denise says. She says it slow, like it's half question, half temptation. "Yeah" I say. She's sitting on the corner of the couch with her legs crossed at the knee. "How come your mother made you eat salad?" Denise is all lines; the long lines of her feet and legs slip into the triangle of her mini-skirt. Her arms are lines off her square shoulders. She keeps her back straight, and she is the proudest, sexiest, blackest woman I have ever known. "Too hot to be cooking no salad," she says. She's got me staring now. She's got her hair beaded and hanging like a veil. It's shiny, glossy black like polished shoes. "What's this, Mike?" I'm saying. "Crazy lady," Mike says. "Crazy with the heat." "What's crazy?" Denise says. "Whole damn world," I say. "Braves this year," Mike says, like he keeps track of baseball. He's got the TV guide to see what's on. "Got no time to discuss it," Denise says. "Got to go make the big man's salad." "What?" I say. "How she is," Mike says. He's puUed his cowboy boots off, and I pick them up and set them outside the front door. "People out there steal," he says. "People out there do things you never heard of," I say. Mike's looking at the half circle of pictures. There's one of Evelyn today, propped up against an aerosol can of hair spray. In it she's trying not to smile. She has dimples and green eyes. Mike reaches over to pick it up, studies it like he's looking for clues. "You Uke that granola girl look," he says. He flips the picture back into the middle of the shrine. "You got to be cool," he says. "Life coming at you in waves, you got to just bend back and..." "What?" I say. "Float," Mike says. "You don't know floating," I say. "You don't begin knowing what I know," Mike says. "You get any caUs on anything?" "Just someone wliile I was in the bathroom," I say. "Always happens." "That was me," Mike says. The fan's turned up high, humming like an airplane. "Appreciate it," I say. "It's what gets me through the day." "Only saying me and Denise are seeing some movie tonight," Mike says, "someplace with some A.C. You want to go?" "No, "I say. "You want work?" he says. "Someday." "You going to burn that girl's picture?" he says. "Thought I might." "Boy," Mike says. "Boy." Mike crosses his arms above his head, and I can see the muscles under his shirt, the sUck stains under his arms. He removed my enemies when I was young, the ones he chose to, the ones who thought they were reaUy bad. "Wait till your nigger brother ain't around," they said. "Yeah, wait," Mike said when I'd teU him. He had a junior weight set with the bar bent from too much poundage. "Wait till when." It's been just like that. "So she walked out on you," he says now. "So what?" Evelyn sang on the weekends, country torch and twang, danced with gentleman cowboys who called her Little Sister. It was a funny thing for a Mormon girl to do in Utah, working bars and clubs. But she hadn't been raised Mormon, hadn't grown up in Utah, had time enough to decide on her own set of virtues in Savannah. Still, she wouldn't go to bed with me. "You're lightweight," she said when I was complaining for sex or trying to wheedle something out of her. "Little League." She'd eat out of my fridge, use the laundry in the basement. "I'm not going to marry you," she said a hundred times. "I never asked," I said. "Just so you know." "Just so you know I never asked," I said. I had to kick through the country tapes she left littered all over the floor, George Strait, Randy Travis. "Where's Johnny Cash?" I said. "My dad used to listen to him." "Somewhere in Missouri," Evy said. "Why don't you pick this up?" I said. "Why don't you get rich?" She stayed at my place while I went for the methadone treatments. She sent me get well cards with elephants that had thermometers sticking out of their trunks and crazy cats with zigzag stripes looking like they'd just crawled out of some psychedelic trash can. One with a big set of lips that said "Put this where it hurts." "I'll water the plants," she said. She was sitting on my bed, folding things for me to put in a suitcase. "There aren't any." "I'd better get some," she said. She knew how scared I was this wasn't going to work. She knew where the money was coming from, from my mother through her second marriage to a contractor up in Ogden, which had come after my dad announced another half brother to Mike and me. She was funneling it through Mike, and I was too sick and too played out and limp to fight any more, only wanting off, out from under. I was in sweats and shakes later that night, and Evelyn stayed. "Sit down here," she said. She put me on the floor between her knees and rubbed my shoulders and neck. "Why don't you go to work," I said. "Hush," she said. "I'm not your baby," I said. I'd been throwing up all day, and the heat was up high in the apartment. Evelyn had made some clear soup out of chicken wings and angel hair noodles. I had my shirt unbuttoned, no pants on. 10 "Yes, you are," she said. "You're my baby." She scooped the hair back off my forehead with her hand to cool my face. Then she curled over me, held my head against her chest, and she rocked me. "Mama's boy," she said, "little angel," and sang cowboy songs quiet in my ear. "God," I said, and it sounded like a prayer. "Do you pray?" Evelyn said. "You of all people on the earth." "I saw the devil in my closet," I said. "We played Crazy-Eights. Mike was there." "Shh," Evelyn said. I had my ear against her breast. I could hear her heart pound. "I'll say it," I said, "whatever it is." "What?" Evelyn said. "Whatever, anything. I'm sorry," I said. "I'm very sorry about it." "Shh," Evelyn said. If I burn her picture, I've got another one. I bought one of those disposable cardboard cameras for a weekend trip up to Hoback Junction and took the whole roll of her by the pine tree, Evelyn with the squirrel, Evelyn pointing at the mountain, Evy sleeping in the truck. I've got one of her in a bathing suit that's nothing special. I called her fat once. "Where?" she said. She shucked her dress right there on the kitchen floor, and what was I going to say? Mike comes by with a deli sack of fried chicken and a six-pack of Sharps beer substitute that tastes as good as mouthwash to me. No booze either. I'm dry. Denise is on night shift at Smiths Food and Drug, where she's assistant manager with a ring of keys and a uniform with a little red vest. "Sit," I say. The Republicans are on TV. They claim the Democratic challenger's experience in foreign affairs amounts to breakfast at an International House of Pancakes. Mike doesn't vote. "I'm waiting for a man," he says, "rides a big white horse." He's got his high tops on, and his shorts with rips up the sides for his thigh muscles, ready for a little roundball. This is exercise for the week. Mike spots me ten points and beats me to twenty-one. There's enough heat left in the asphalt to turn the soles of our shoes tacky. I tear my shirt down the middle yanking it off halfway through a game. At midnight it will be almost ninety degrees. I hop a fence to stand in a sprinkler in between games, to keep from tearing off my skin. Last week I cut off my hair the minute we walked back into the 11 house. I did it with a kitchen knife, stopped Mike dead trying to think in time. We let two kids in on a second game. I get the tall one with a grinning black widow on his t-shirt. I feed him behind my back, looking his buddy off the other way, and he gUdes around Mike and puts up a one-handed stuff over his shoulder. "Bet me," I yeU at Mike. "I bet you lose," he says. "Bet this," I say, and I launch a rainbow from somewhere in half court land and look it all the way home into the bottom of the net. Mike takes his partner to half court for a conference, and they beat us on an in-bounds play that sends Mike up the middle to turn around and screen for the kid who is a pure shooter. We can't beat them at muscle baU either, and when my outside shot stops falling, we're done for unless the spider can get a step on Mike, then it's lift off and flying to the hole with the sun in his hands. We hold on till sixteen. "You're too big, man," the spider says to Mike. "You ought to be playing some footbaU." "You just got to get good enough," Mike says. "Huh," the spider says, "good enough." "Get gooder," Mike says. "Huh," the spider says. Mike and I sit on the grass waiting for the sun to finish going down. "She's out of town, man," Mike says. "She's aU gone." "I'll get around to looking someday," I say. "What's it matter?" he says. "Doesn't," I say. "Doesn't have to matter." "Me and Denise are looking for someplace, I guess," he says. "She's got ideas." "It isn't ideas you want," I say. "What do you know," Mike says. We sit breathing hard, and the air tastes like it comes out of a vacuum cleaner and doesn't do us any good. "Hot," I say. My back itches. Mike's chest is covered in short hair that looks like some tight Uttle plant growing on rock. I'm on my back, and then I'm on my knees. "Just sit still," he says. Where did I meet Evelyn Ray? It's a topic for this afternoon. I couldn't sleep last night. Nobody could. Sirens. I got up and put my pants on, and I was thinking I would Mow fire engines. But I just opened the frontdoor and sat on the couch and let the fan run. 12 Evelyn Ray left Savannah, Georgia, when she was nineteen and came out to Utah because she joined the Mormon church. She wrote that down on the top of a yeUow piece of paper, and said it was the beginning of her history. "What were you before?" I said. "A waitress," she said. "Where do I come in," I said. "Here." She ripped out a piece of paper and told me to write about myself, the first thing I could remember. "Today," I said. "I'm busy," she said. She had herself curled around the paper so I couldn't read it, scratching with a number two pentil she smeared because she wrote left-handed and never learned to write sideways. I thought Mike was the earUest thing. But then I remembered a rocking horse, the old kind with a square metal frame and big springs that always got stretched out and busted from riding too hard. I remembered naming it Poker and BuUet, SUver, a hundred different things. I remembered it had a saddle and wooden handles coming out of the head behind the ears and a belt I hung around its neck for reins. That and Mike were what my father gave me. I let her read it, and Evelyn thought it was important. "Why?" I said. "Because it means something to you. Because it's part of what you are." "I set it on fire," I told her. "I burned it and my Dad beat me so I couldn't go to school for a week." "You're a spoUer," she said. "You're afraid to enjoy anything." "I didn't spoU the world," I said. "You spoU it every day it's bad," she said. "I'm not buying," I said. "Why weren't you happy when you were Uttle?" "There was nothing to be happy about," I said. "I go to school, it's 'Hey, where's your nigger brother?' Home you always make too much noise, or you talk back, or you didn't take out the trash just like you got told, so someone got to beat some sense into your dumb head. At the industrial school they beat you up just because. That's the best reason of all, 'Because I feel like it.' "That's why," I said. "Too many black eyes ruined my attitude." "You teU a sad story," Evelyn said. She didn't grow up in peaches and cream Georgia. When she was in the mood, she would teU me stories in a bland, ordinary voice about a Southern, white trash girlhood. "But I can make up my own mind," she said. 13 I might have known a drummer in a band she was in. I'll say this: I still can't find anything in my kitchen. I've been tearing through the cupboards this afternoon. I've turned the drawers upside down onto the floor, and I'm wading in trash and busted plastic dinner forks up to my ankles. I know what I am looking for. I've made so sure, double, triple certain I can't find it. I settle for the refrigerator with the door open, sucking on ice. The fan's broken and the apartment must be a hundred and fifteen degrees. I've dumped the fridge, and I'm sitting in it, on the vegetable crisper. My pants are damp and my shirt's gone. Mike will let me get away with anything. He'll come in and see the place, and he'll clean the kitchen while I sit watching sitcoms on the tube dealing with what are real-life situations somewhere in America. A friend called this morning. I said, No. No. No. Goodbye. Evelyn bought a green pickup for three hundred dollars. It used to belong to the water conservancy district. "What's it run on?" I said. It had a sprinkler painted on the side. She drove it to gigs, factory outlets, drove it to buy groceries. She couldn't cook, ate everything out of a can or a bottle. I tried to show her one thing, pancakes, from a mix that came in a blue bag with gold letters. "This is basic chemistry," I told her, "equal parts flour and water." "I can do that part," she said. But she couldn't, never quite right. "And you turn the griddle down low," I said. "And you wait. Then you pour on the batter and wait for the bubbles on the top." I showed her how to peek under the edge to check to see it was browned just right underneath. She cooked them sticky and raw as bread dough. "Make them for me," she said. "You got to fend for yourself," I said. "I can't," she said. "When are you going to learn to fish?" I said. "When are you going to quit feeding off my catch?" "Make me pancakes," Evelyn said. "Just three little ones. And make some for you. You ought to eat more." I was skinny, using again, fooling the world. In May, when Evy's father died, the family called her, but nobody had the money to send, nobody cared if she came. TU get it," I told her. "When you die," she said one night, sitting by the window opened up 14 to let the smell of the rain come in, "your spirit, what's really you, leaves your body, and that's all." I had my face against her neck and shoulder. I thought I was giving her some comfort. Her hair hung down to her waist, and she hadn't put it up in days. She'd sat around my place in a sack dress and her bedroom slippers. I must have been tired. I remember thinking, I should be listening to this. "When you die," she said, "you go home to God. What are you going to say to God?" "Old man," I said, and I didn't know just where to go from there. "For that moment, when you come back, no matter what you've done," she said, "he loves you." "You believe that?" I said. "Mmhmm." "It sounds good," I said. I pushed the screen out, so Evy could get at the water, and watched it crash in the street. "It's going to rain all night," I said. I don't remember if it did. I couldn't look in her eyes those days. The second time I came just that close to flying somewhere for a blood transfusion. Mike was ready to cut and bleed me till I had to have one, and my mother was phoning clinics. I'd stayed off six weeks. "No more," Mike said. He washed my stuff down the sink. Evelyn was standing in the front room, crying with her fist in her mouth. "No more," I said. "Never, no more," so high I didn't know who I was. TU kill you," Mike said. "Don't say that," Evelyn said. She was screaming. "Don't say that, ever." "You afraid?" Mike said to me. "No," I said. I had my hands behind me, on the kitchen table. I was limp and grinning at Mike standing at the sink. "Stop it," Evelyn was saying. "You better get afraid," Mike said. "You better get scared." I heard Evy crying harder, and then I swore I heard the rib crack when Mike hit me. "You're going to learn something," he said. They kept me in the dark five days. Mike phoned in sick or left me with Evelyn and came in the evenings to lean against the wall at the foot of my bed like some dark angel. I called Evy bad names. I made her make promises. She said anything. Mike's getting married. Denise has got a ring with diamonds and gold swirling around like a galaxy. I tell them to wait for Christmas. If they do it now, the flowers will wilt 15 and the cake wiU melt. Everything wiU be sad, dripping like tears. "It will be a sticky, uncomfortable occasion," I teU them. I say, "How about HaUowe'en? Or Turkey Day." "Do you want to be invited?" Denise says. She's in her manager's outfit, and the way she wears it, it looks like a costume for a strip act. It looks tailored, nipped and tucked in aU the right places. Vanity. "I'm the best man," I say. Mike's brought by mineral water that's clear and flavoured with lime juice. I make them a toast. "To you," I say. "You can't come if you don't behave," Denise says. I put my feet up on the TV. I burp, but then I cover my mouth and say, Excuse me. Til ask your Mama if she wants to come," Mike says. "Dad says anything about it, how come he's not invited, I'll teU him I thought he went to heU a long time ago." "I saw him," I say. "Like I see you." I hold up Evelyn's picture in two hands. "We could have had a hoedown," I say. Denise is folding out a compact at the bathroom sink, touching up her eye liner. I have never seen her sweat. "How do they keep it cool in the store," I say, "with no doors?" "You're so wise," Denise says. "You're like an old man." Denise is too cryptic for me. She speaks in riddles. Mike's welcome to have her. "Do it in a church," I say. "Oh, yeah," Mike says. "You'U be my sister," I teU Denise. "Won't that be grand," she says. She slips the make-up into her purse and leaves the bathroom Ught on. "Won't that be something to write home and tell all the folks." I'll get a job in the faU, after the coUege kids are back in school, after the sun starts going down at night. I'm writing a Ust of things to do, and the pencil is sUck and burns a red rash on my finger. I use an old note pad of Evy's that says "In Case You Forgot..." at the top. After "get a job," I put down "bank account." Mike caUs about 11:30. "I'm just up," he says. "Me, too." "Me and Denise going to get someplace where you don't hear traffic." "I like it," I say. I can hear it now. I'm stretched on the couch in just my jeans, looking out the front door into the street. "Getting married, man," Mike says. "Getting married," I say. "Getting old." I can hear the swamp cooler at Mike's place. I can hear a radio. 16 "You weren't ever going to marry that girl," Mike says. "No, "I say. "Then forget about it." "Best thing," I say. Mike breathes in the phone, a sound like static. Denise is working graveyard. Mike will be sitting in his living room in his shorts till one or two, all the lights off, waiting to call her on break. I stretch the phone cord into the bathroom and turn on the shower with my foot for Mike to hear in the background. Then I pull the bathroom door shut. "Who's there?" Mike says. "Nobody in particular." "Good boy," Mike says. "I won't ruin your wedding," I say. "No chance," Mike says. "You're best man." I leave the phone on my stomach when Mike hangs up. Across the street there is a neon sign over a bakery that says "Star." The gang kids hang there on the weekends in front of the big window, flashing handsign, talking trash. I haven't really changed much. I turn to Evelyn's picture of the TV that's casting a blue light in the room and moving pictures without sound up on the wall. I tell it, "I haven't really changed much." Then I lay back and wait for glass across the street to shatter, some crack in the weather. 17 Richard Harrison four poems An African Hockey Story (continued) For the photo shoot in the only rink in the Cote d'lvoire, I carry a hockey stick from the Canadian Embassy into the streets of Abidjan, and the stares of the passersby say no one knows what it is just as the farmers north of Achea who had never seen the sea stared at Ulysses with his oar; the old king waited for those stares, the oar become a butter churn, a plough, the viUage speaker's staff when the business of the day gives way to night it is time for the story to be told. 18 On the American Express Ad Photo of Cardmembers Gordie Howe and Wayne Gretzky Talking After The Game The old man holds his hands in the middle air before him, raised and loose, explaining something only he and the kid who took his place in the record book and maybe one or two others reaUy understand as a question. Hockey looks simple and fast the way Sumo looks simple and fast, and there are 78 named moves in Sumo though a match is over in 9 seconds or less, the time it takes for a man to score a goal and the two who get assists to set him up; advice is briefly spoken and takes years to hear; Gordie said to Wayne, "work on your backhand." Later Gretzky's father wiU lie dying in a Hamilton hospital and Wayne wiU take a check from behind into the boards—by reflex, he wiU take off his helmet, his heavy gloves, undressing himself on the ice in his pain, his own armour too heavy for his shocked skin; unprotected, brought low, he wUl look the way he doesn't think he looks here in this photo, receiving Gordie's wisdom, the weight of the game flooding his limbs beyond bearing. 19 The Sweater Could I tell you he was beautiful, returned from winter camp in a sweater reaUy from the team whose crest it bore, him standing among us with our hands outstretched; I touched the cloth; I dream the things I do as if we were part of that kind of team; shaU I teU you of his snule, his reckless arms that day; in a hockey town he was a son in his father's own colours, how the son once caUed his favourite teacher "coach" and the father, meeting that teacher, took his thin, long hand in his huge fingers, squeezing it not hard, enfolding it in inescapable size and said "my son loved you"; shaU I speak of love then, too? a black suit burning gold at the edge; in the middle of class this young man held up his arm in a sleeve of Stanley Cups—he came that close. 20 Stanley Cup At the centre of the circle of the Champions of the World, Mario Lemieux hoists the Cup, kisses its sUver thigh and the names of men where his wUl soon be cut with a finish as pure as a mirror; around him, the tumult. And Scotty Bowman, the winningest coach in the NHL named his first son Stanley when his Canadiens won it in '73 with a stonewaU blueline and a dizzying transition game. Every player on every team who ever won the Cup gets to take it home; it has partied on front lawns, swimming pools, and in the trunks of cars and even the man who left it in a bus terminal still, he thinks of it as holy, and that word—"holy"—appears most in the conversation of veterans who know how the touch fades and the shoulder takes longer between days of easy movement, how Bobby Hull passed over the chance to drink champagne from its Up when the Hawks won it '61 because he thought there'd be so many in his life and holy things repay the closed door. Some take the Cup apart at home, clean the rings, make minor repairs in their basements and then inscribe on the inside of the column the unofficial log of their intimate knowledge. This way I have loved you. 21 Relatives in Florida Dorothy Speak At dinner, my brother Floyd says grace. "And, Dear Lord," he finishes up, "let us pray for our beloved father, who is in exUe in the United States, and hope that he'U return to us someday." "You don't know where he is," I say. "For aU you know he's dead." Father ran away ten years ago. I was twenty at the time, Floyd twenty-five. It wasn't untU a few weeks after he disappeared that we re- aUzed he'd taken Floyd's credit card with him. We were able to trace his progress through the States by reading the credit card bill: a gasoline purchase in Watertown, New York. Dinner in Syracuse. Motel rooms in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia. "He's Mowing the Interstate 81," I said, looking at a map. "He's taking his time. Probably headed for Florida." "I hope he's not ill," Mother fretted, referring to a pharmacy purchase that showed up on the bill. She is a simple, unquestioning woman who does not always grasp the magnitude of things. "Now," said Blanche happUy, "we'U be able to teU people we have relatives in Florida." Floyd, a smaU, flatulent man, a physical weakling with round wire- rimmed glasses and a red goatee, said he wasn't angry with Father for running up his credit card bill. "He didn't mean any harm," he said. "You are a simpleton," I told him. "If you were in touch with God," he said with gentle pity, "you'd know how to forgive." Floyd got reUgion in his early twenties. He was working at the dairy then. He became so crazed with God that he went around the dairy exclaiming, "Praise the Lord, Brother! HaUeluiah, Sister!" He sang hymns on the job. He tried to get a prayer group going at lunch break. One day he put reUgious pamphlets in the empty milk bottles riding down the conveyor belt. That was when they fired him. Now he has worked his way up to lay preacher in the Church of the Risen Christ. He assists the minister, opens the church up on Sundays, counts the coUection money, that sort of thing. He teaches Sunday school 22 and gives the scripture readings at services. Once in awhUe they let him give a sermon. For this, they pay him a smaU salary. When I say that about Father being dead, they raise their eyes and look at me. It is an October evening and their faces are reflected in the black kitchen windows: Floyd with his stiff, Christian smile disclosing a mouthful of tiny, rotting teeth, Blanche batting her fleshy eyeUds at me in disapproval, Mother swaUowing a smaU, anxious, let's-not-fight gulp of air. At seventy, she has shrunken up to the size of a child, like a Uttle figure in a picture book. On either side of her, Blanche and Floyd grip her bony hands, forming what Floyd caUs a Chain of Prayer. Mother, her arms held high by them, wears an expression of surprise and reluctant salvation, like a suicide victim pulled from a river. She joined Floyd's church a year ago. "You brought us up as atheists," I told her at the time. "How can you go against everything you ever taught us?" "It's easier this way," she said. "Now Floyd leaves me alone. Maybe you should consider it." "I'd sooner take poison." Floyd and Blanche have a tiny apartment over near the bus depot but nearly every evening when I come home from work, I see Floyd's burgundy coupe parked in front of our place, a Uttle frame house with a vestibule the size of a telephone booth stuck on the front. They say the apartment makes them restless, there's nothing to do there. I can't blame them for being bored with each other. Floyd reads the Bible aU day and Blanche wants to look at television, but their set is broken. At our house, she sinks into an armchair, watches the game shows aU afternoon, eats plates of Mother's lemon tarts. She is a big, soft woman with tufts of hair sprouting from the corners of her mouth like black grass. "They need a chUd to distract them," Mother says. "They're chUdren themselves," I teU her. "And Brethren," Floyd says at dinner, closing his eyes again, "let us bow our heads once more, for we are not finished with the Lord's work at this table. We wiU pray for our sister, Jean, that she may open her heart to the love of God—" "I'm not going to sit here and Usten to this rot," I declare, pushing my chair back. "You can pray until you're blue in the face and it won't change me." "Pass the potatoes," says Blanche. I pick up my plate and head for my room. It isn't the first time I've finished my dinner there. As I climb the stairs, I hear behind me Floyd's voice droning on in prayer, low and toneless, like the buzzing of a house- 23 fly. The sound of cutlery clattering on dinner plates rises to me through the floor. Later, I hear them cleaning up the dishes. Around nine o'clock, I hear the front door close. I go to the head of the stairs. "Are the idiots gone?" I caU down. "Do you mean Floyd and Blanche?" Mother repUes. "Who else would I mean?" Once, I thought they'd left and they hadn't. "Are the idiots gone?" I caUed down. "No," Blanche answered without thinking, "we're still here." On the weekends, Mother and I have a quiet life. Mother rises late and moves slowly from room to room in her mules and thick flannelette nightgown. She goes to the kitchen window and stands there for some time, motionless, looking out at the birdfeeder, at the chickadees, cardinals, bluejays, the hardy, faithful birds who wiU abide the Canadian winter with us. She is entertained by their bright wings, their swiftness, their greed. Her fingers, pressed to the cold windowsiU as though frozen there, are white as bones. A circle of vapour forms on the glass where her face comes close to it. Later, she sits in her swivel rocker and says her prayers. Around noon she takes a bath in an inch of water. FiU the tub up, I teU her through the bathroom door. SpoU yourself. Enjoy your bath. I don't want to waste water, she says. Her skin has gotten very thin and sUky and loose. Like an old suit that doesn't fit her anymore, it ripples and sags. There are big brown spots the size of pennies on the backs of her hands. She can pinch the skin there and puU it away a distance of an inch. The hair has faUen out of her arms and legs. She is smooth and much like a newborn baby, with this loose, wrinkled, hairless skin. In the afternoon, she puts on her clothes, thin sweaters that do not keep her warm. Thick ones are too heavy, she says. She cannot support them. They exhaust her. We turn up the thermostat on the Uvingroom waU. She sits again in her chair and reads large-print books from the Ubrary, her legs extended straight out in front of her, supported by a footstool, her heels pressed together, the toes of her shoes pointing up at the ceiling. She reaches to turn on the radio. On Saturday afternoon we wait for the rain to stop. Then we venture out onto the wet street, pulling our grocery buggy behind us. We turn onto a smaU sidewalk that cuts through our block to a larger street, where there is more traffic. We walk two blocks on cracked sidewalks, down a gradual slope to the store. There is a greyness to the day. Everything is grey: the low, wooUy clouds, the shining road, the misty air. The store, however, is bright and warm. We take a cart and pass up 24 and down the aisles. The staff knows us. They say heUo to Mother, heUo to me. Clerks who were young men when I was a chUd now have grey hair, hearing aids, are big and round about the midriff. I cannot beUeve that they are still here, packing groceries into paper bags, stamping price stickers on cereal boxes, sweeping sawdust into Uttle pUes in the corners of the store. Perhaps they cannot beUeve that I am here shopping in the same grocery store I came to as a chUd. The store hasn't changed in fifty years. First come the cereals and jams, then the tea and coffee, peanut butter, household cleaners and so on. Moving anything would upset the customers, elderly men and women who shuffle here from their nearby homes and apartments, leaning on canes, their glasses thick as bottles. This is a smaU store. There are newer ones now, big ones built further out, on the edge of town, chain stores large as factories, but they are for young people with families and cars, people who want fancy cheeses and deUcatessen salads, who are not afraid of heavy grocery cart traffic, who do not distrust or become confused by technology. At the meat counter, Mother picks up a pork roast and stares at it for a full minute, forgetting what it is she wants and where we are. Blood leaks through the ceUophane wrapping onto her gloves. I move up behind her, take it from her hand and return it to the meat cooler. She looks at me. "Your father liked pork," she says, with a look of nostalgia and mild confusion. Into the cart we put peanut brittle, cookies with a dot of strawberry jam in the middle, a bag of jeUy beans, an Oh Henry chocolate bar. These are the things Mother wants. At home, she eats very Uttle. She can't finish dinner, but she always says, What is there for dessert? I have to have something sweet with my tea. Her day builds up into this Uttle hiU with something sweet on the top. Outside of sugar, she is not interested in food. She says she can't taste anything, she is never hungry. It is as though her body were dormant, as though aU her bodily functions have come to a halt. She does not perspire anymore, she does not menstruate, she doesn't get up in the night to reUeve herself. In the fresh produce section, she stops, her feet planted firmly beneath her. "It was here," she says, pointing to the floor, "that he died. That is where he feU down." She is talking about a boy named WaUy, with whom I went to grade school and who once had a crush on me. "I know, Mother," I say. "Dropped dead of an aneurism whUe he was hosing down the lettuce." "Yes, Mother." "Twenty-five years old. A bright boy. Wife and child. Terrible." I try to move her along but she won't budge. She is suddenly strong 25 enough, excited enough to resist me. It is as though her feet are rooted in the cement floor. We are standing beside a freestanding bin full of root vegetables. People have to steer their carts around us. One of the clerks passes in his white coat and smUes at us, curious and amused. I turn and feign interest in the turnips, running my palm over their thick, waxy surfaces. "He should have married you," Mother teUs me angrily. In recent years, her face has gotten yeUow as a Chinaman's. Her teeth are brown with tea stains. "Mother," I say a Uttle impatiently, "he didn't look at me after grade four." "WeU, he should have." "Let's get some ice cream," I say. It is late on a wet, dark October afternoon and I am counting suppUes at a large window in the back room of the dentist's office where I work as an assistant. The office is downtown, just off Main Street, in an old brick Victorian rowhouse with white gables and white spindle porch raUs. It is a cozy office, with crooked waUs and modern, muted Ughting and many smaU, unpractical examination rooms and soft music and grey sUencing broadloom on the floors. It is 5:15 and Dr. Peter Beveridge steps into the room and comes up behind me. "Everyone's gone home," he teUs me. I myself have heard the last of the staff preparing to leave, the singing of coat hangers on the cloakroom rod, the hum of the evening traffic flowing in through the front door as it is opened again and again. Goodnight, goodnight. Dr. Peter Beveridge places his hands on my hips. "I want you to leave Mrs. Beveridge," I say without turning around. We are reflected together in the windowpane. He is a foot taUer than I and briUiant as Ught in his white smock. He has been to Mexico and his face is bronzed and healthy. I look at his reflection and shake with desire and loathing. For three years I have worshipped him like a god: his height, his square, clean jaw, his moist, brown eyes, his slender hips, his tight backside, his smooth, perfect hair, his almost-muitary neatness. "Oh, Jean," he says gently but firmly. He is fifteen years older than I and sometimes talks to me as though he were my father. "You feel depressed today," he teUs me. "It's just the rain." We are looking out the window at the bank parking lot next door, where a diagonal rain is falling and the wind has flattened huge orange leaves against a wire fence. "It's not the rain," I say angrily. Cars come and go in the parking lot. People run in and out of the bank, their coUars turned up against the weather. Through the enormous plate glass windows of the bank I can 26 see the customers lined up between crimson ropes, moving forward to the taU counters in the bright yeUow Ught shining down from the lofty ceU- ing, talking to the teUers, carrying on their ordinary, innocent transactions, ready to run out again to their cars and go home, cook dinner, spend the evening with their husbands and wives and chUdren. That is aU I want, I think. A normal life. If I let him, Dr. Beveridge will lead me out to reception, where there are warm Ughts and a long couch and a large aquarium in which jewel- coloured fish, gUding slowly through water, have a tranquillizing effect on patients, especiaUy those coming to us for extractions, fillings, crowns. He wiU lay me down on the couch and make love to me with the fishes swimming by. Soon I wiU find that I am not thinking about him or feeling what is happening. I am not connected to him or to myself at aU. I am watching the fish, enjoying their shapes and colours, the blacks, oranges, yellows, purples, fluorescent blues. It is easier to think about them than about what is going on. They regard me with rubbery, immobUe eyes. They sway and turn and press their flat Ups against the glass. They blow bubbles at me. I feel sorry for them in their watery prison. I am numbed by their slow, perpetual motion. Dr. Beveridge says that he is sick. He is sick of dentistry. He wants to spend the balance of his life duck hunting. He is sick of toothrot and haU- tosis and cash flow and mortgages. He is sick of his beautiful wife. She is too good, too perfect. She makes life seem intolerable. Sometimes she comes into the office wearing her simple, expensive clothes: wool slacks, a blazer, a thick, cream-coloured turtleneck sweater, loafers. I cannot stop looking at her clear, oUve skin, her deep dimples, her large dark eyes, her cap of straight, shiny, hair. She is like a beautiful doe—serene, graceful, harmless. One evening in September, Dr. Beveridge caUs me at home. He never caUs me there and I can teU that his wife must be standing at his elbow because he speaks in a formal way. Would I consider babysitting for them that evening? It is asking a lot, he acknowledges, it is very short notice, he is afraid I might have some social thing of my own to go to (here, he is being—something, cute? ironic? unkind?). Their scheduled babysitter has canceUed on them and there is a function they must attend. I would be doing them a great favour. I eat an early dinner with Mother and then walk over through the darkness to their house. I am excited about seeing Dr. Beveridge on a weekend night, excited about getting a look at the inside of his house for the first time, and about being near him when his wife is there. I feel nervous and hypocritical and aroused and ashamed. I am too dressed-up for baby- 27 sitting, having put on a silk blouse, short skirt, black nylons, black suede high heels. One of his sons (age ten) answers the door and then his wife comes forward with her beautiful white smUe and her kind, trusting face. "Oh, Jean," she says, taking my hand warmly. "This is so good of you." She is plainly dressed, in low pumps, a simple black wool crepe dress, smaU pearl earrings, but I have never seen anyone look more gorgeous with such Uttle effort. Her beauty is so pure and true and natural and sustaining, like clear spring water or plain white bread. The house, a long, low bungalow, is just as I've expected it to be— unpretentious but elegant. Low, pearly light, champagne broadloom, white leather couches, long expanses of sheer-draped window. Serenity. SUence like a cocoon, aU sound absorbed by the deep carpet and the raw- silk waUpaper. Mrs. Beveridge leads me into the Uvingroom, where there are many people standing in little groups, drinking cocktaUs and eating fancy bits of food before they all go out together to this important dinner. "Everybody!" she says, calling their attention to me. "This is Jean, Peter's assistant. She's saved our Uves tonight. She's staying with the boys." They aU turn to me then, in their silk dresses and dark suits and ruffled shirts and bow ties. They look at my inappropriate clothes and smile coldly at me as if to say, WeU, if she's the babysitter, what's she doing in here with us? Then Dr. Beveridge says, "Come on, I'll show you the boys' rooms. This way." I precede him down a long, carpeted haUway. We never reach the boys' rooms because he pushes me into the master bedroom and swiftly, sUently pulls the door closed behind us. He caUs me a beautiful bitch, though I am not beautiful at aU, I am homely. Maybe the bitch part is true, though. He tears at my blouse. I watch a button fly across the room. He bites my neck, my shoulders, my breasts and whUe he is doing this, I am looking around, cataloguing the contents of the bedroom, observing Mrs. Beveridge's hairbrush and face cream on the dresser, her jeans lying across a sweet upholstered chair that looks like it is meant for a doU's house, the closet doors standing open and her clothes hanging there beside his, the soft track Ughting, the thick pocket novel lying open on the low, wide waterbed. Then he straightens his tie in the mirror and goes back to his friends, leaving the door sUghtly ajar. Their ugly laughter drifts in to me as I crawl across the carpet looking for my button and flapping my blouse to dry his slobber off it so I can go out and find the boys' rooms for myself. When I am putting him to bed, Eric, the son who answered the door says, "Do you work for my father?" He is a serious, fair boy with a round, gourd-like head. 28 "Yes," I answer. "I'm his dental assistant." "What do you do?" "I keep the examination room organized. I hand him whatever instruments he needs to work with. I mix up the substances he uses in the patients' mouths." "That sounds boring." "It's not boring," I say, cool but defensive. "It's interesting. You have to be very organized. You have to be quite intelUgent to be a dental assistant." "You don't look intelUgent," he says. It is late one evening when I leave the office. The rush hour traffic has subsided, people are in their houses, eating dinner. I walk home through the dark, quiet, leaf-strewn streets, looking at aU the bright windows in people's homes and the shadows of figures moving behind drawn curtains. Presently, I come to Mother's grocery store, which is closed for the evening but fuUy Ut inside, with strong yeUow Ught. I am passing the store when I notice a soUtary figure in a long white smock working in the produce section, stacking heads of lettuce in a deep bin. I pause and approach the window because I think I recognize—yes, I recognize WaUy, his taU, tense figure, his swift movements, his jet-black hair, his square, earnest jaw, the pecuUar frypan flatness of the back of his head. The year he came to our school, he chased me every recess in the yard and pinned me against the red brick waU of the school, breathing hard in my face. I could have escaped him. I could have run faster to begin with, or, once he'd caught me, I could easUy have sUpped out from under his arms, but I chose to stay there, pressed against the rough bricks, with his breath on me. I wanted to look up at his clean, sharp face and his dark, troubled eyes. The next year, his father, who drove the town fire- truck, miscalculated a corner and ploughed into a bank waU, killing himself. Then WaUy forgot aU about me. I linger now outside the grocery store and wait. Finally, WaUy turns and sees me standing under a streetlamp with the empty Ught behind me and the wind bending the taU, thick pines enclosing the Uluminated grocery store parking lot across the street. His eyes are large and blank and drained of aU hope and passion. They say to me, I know who you are and I know who I am and it doesn't matter. Nothing matters because I am going to die young and possibly I have known aU my life that I am going to die young and maybe it is a good thing because I wanted to be a news broadcaster but here I am in a seedy grocery store tending vegetables. He turns and wheels the empty troUey to the back of the store, where he disappears through great swinging aluminum doors. 29 Dr. Beveridge says to me, "Jean, you're driving me crazy," because I have told him, "Keep your hands off of me. If you touch me I'll scream at the top of my lungs. I mean it." "Jean, don't do this to me," he says. "Leave her and you can have me again," I say. "I am the hunter and you are a Uttle purple-winged duck," he used to teU me, and he'd pursue me aU day long. Little pinches and strokes as I squeezed past him in the examination room. Nicks and bites between patients. Mouth against my neck. Finger down my coUar. Hot breath in my hair. Fingers up the sleeve of my uniform at the x-ray station. A hand down my front in the supply room. In the empty staff room, a hand shooting, swift as an arrow, up under my skirt and inside my panties. And I was supposed to keep working, I was not to flinch or jump or shiver or indicate in any way my excitement. I was to go on mixing up the platinum in a Uttle dish, sUding the tiny x-rays into their sleeves, arranging the gleaming instruments in the notches around the circular tray, fastening the paper bibs around the patients' necks, as though nothing had happened. That was part of the game. There was this buUdup, this mounting of desire, aU day long, until the office emptied out and we were alone. "I want to be something more important to you than a game," I teU Dr. Beveridge. "I'm tired of being your toy." "You're not my toy, Jean," he says sadly, shaking his head. He tries to carry on. Leaning over his patients, his fingers in their mouths, he pauses and looks across their foreheads, searching my face. I sit on a high stool, with my feet resting on a rung. I lay an instrument firmly in his extended hand and in the instant before I can let go, we connect, there is an electric charge, a current rurining between us, through the innocent metal probe, with its sharp, deUcately curved tip. I feel the power of his grip, the maturity and inteUigence of it, the maleness that set my heart pounding the first time I assisted him. I try not to look at his immaculate hands and square, manicured naUs, I try not to watch his beautiful fingers, which are long and white and graceful as a pianist's. I catch him staring at my knees. A fine perspiration forms on his upper Up. His hands begin to shake. "Jean, you're going to ruin me," he says after the patient has left the room. One night after work, he catches my arm in the haUway. "Jean, you're acting like I don't exist," he hisses. "You don't," I say, pulling on my coat. I have been making a point of leaving with everyone else, so that he cannot corner me. I run out into the night with the others, clattering down the wooden porch steps, and hear my own voice, shrill, sad and gay, calling, too loud, to them, See you tomorrow! 30 One evening Dr. Beveridge says to me, "AU right, Jean, you've won." He hands me a key. "I've rented a smaU apartment for us. We'U Uve there on a month-to-month basis until things settle down and we can find something more comfortable. I'm going home to teU Angela. You teU your family too. I'U meet you at the apartment at eight o'clock tonight." Then he takes me out to reception and makes love to me again, in the blue quivering Ught of the aquarium. I am in rapture. I look up at the shining fish moving in their transparent, deadly regions. Suddenly I enter, I am transported into the aquarium's landscape of sunken ships and treasure chests and scuba divers. My body floats, is sucked into one of the black, watery caves. I close my eyes and the searing colours of the fish flash up against my eyeUds. I feel the fish moving over me, wave after wave of them, their scaly, wafer-thin bodies brushing the length of mine like feathers. It is late when I arrive home. "Jean," Mother says, relieved to see me. "It's nearly seven. We wondered. " She and Floyd and Blanche are nearly finished dinner, which cannot be delayed on my account because Blanche gets hungry. I see that Mother has set aside something for me on a plate on the stove, with a Ud on it. "Too bad you came home," Blanche says, disappointed. "I was thinking of eating your dinner." "Go ahead and eat it," I tell her indifferently. "I won't be sitting down." "Jean," says Mother, detecting something in my face, "Is there anything wrong?" The three of them, their cutlery poised in the air, have stopped to observe me. "She looks smug about something," says Blanche cautiously. "You may as weU know," I teU them, "that Dr. Beveridge and I have been carrying on an affair. He's leaving his wife tonight. We're meeting later this evening." "I knew it!" exclaims Blanche, though her soft, pudding-like face is quivering with surprise. "Floyd, stop her. How will this look? She'U bring disgrace on us aU." Floyd's mouth is pinched with piety. "Jean, this is a terrible thing," he says. "She's gone mad," Blanche says. "Where wiU you go?" asks Mother. What she means is, will you be warm? will you eat enough? will you have a comfortable bed? When you get old, aU you can give is an old woman's advice. AU you can remember are the things your mother told you, which are the things her mother told her, which are the same things her mother told her before that. These are the absolutes. Dress for the weather. Don't stay up late. Wear shoes that fit. Nothing else can be known for sure. As for affairs of the heart, 31 those foolish, futile, transitory pursuits, why even try to look for prescriptions, formulae? "You can't just walk out like that," says Blanche. "It's not right." "Father walked out," I remind her, "and nobody seems to blame him fork." "That's different," Blanche answers. "He's a man. Men get restless. There are things they have to work out of their systems." "Oh, rot!" I say. "I've spent aU my adult life doing the right thing, Uving here with Mother, supporting her when it was Father's job." At this, Mother blinks rapidly and presses her Ups together. "Now I'm going to do something for myself," I say and I go upstairs, still wearing my coat. Floyd comes up after me, Mowed soon by Blanche, who lurks on the landing, thinking I didn't hear her heaving herself up the steps. I feel her bulk on the other side of the door, like that of a large witless animal. Her breath whistles through her throat. Her smaU black eyes peer through the crack in the door. "It's never too late to repent," Floyd teUs me. Ignoring him, I tear my clothes out of the closet. Hangers fly across the room. I pull things out of drawers and fling them into two suitcases. "It won't last, Jean," Floyd says to me. "These things never do. He'll leave you eventuaUy and aU you'U be left with is your sin and your shame." I let myself into the apartment with the key Dr. Beveridge gave me. I put my suitcases down and walk from room to room, turning on Ughts, observing the furniture, which is plain and threadbare and somewhat ugly. I sit down at the Uvingroom window, which overlooks the road, and wait. I glance at my watch. I get up and raise the heat on the thermostat. I walk around the rooms again, test the taps in the bathroom, browse through the kitchen cupboards, turn on the television. I sit down and wait some more. Again I look at my watch I have been here nearly two hours. It is now past nine o'clock. FinaUy the phone rings and I grab for it. "Jean," Dr. Beveridge's voice comes over the Une. "It's me." "I know that," I say. "Where are you?" "I can't do it," he says. "What do you mean?" "I swear to God, I came home with every intention of carrying through. But, Jean, I came in and dinner was ready. They'd held it up for me. Angela had cooked a roast and the boys were fuU of news about their hockey club. Everyone was so beautiful and excited. Everyone was so happy. I couldn't spoU it." "TeU them tomorrow night, then," I say, noticing that I've begun to shake. "I've waited three years. I can wait a Uttle longer." 32 "You don't understand, Jean," he says, his voice growing firmer. "BasicaUy, we are a happy fanuly. I'm not coming over there. I'm calling it off." "Maybe you don't understand, either," I teU him. "I've made the break with my family. I'm waiting here for you." "They'U get over it," he says. "Nobody else has to know. TeU them not to teU anybody else." "You have humihated me," I say. "Jean," he says. "You can't come back to the office. I'm letting you go. I'll have your outstanding wages and your severance pay maUed to you tomorrow. I'll write you a letter of reference, if you want. I'm not worried about you. You're a good assistant. You won't have any trouble finding another job. And Jean, don't make trouble. It'U only backfire on you somehow. Let things go. Forget about it aU. Accept it and move on. Don't let yourself get bitter." I crawl into bed in my clothes and sleep aU the next day and the next. When I finaUy get up, snow is falling. It is December, after aU. I put on my housecoat and a pair of thick wool socks and sit at the Uvingroom window for two more days. Big, soft, independant flakes come down. I watch them in all their calmness, in aU their individuaUty and separateness, and this seems to give me strength. At first, they melt, these beautiful snow- flakes, when they touch the ground and this brings me a sense of peace. I feel myself melting, dying with them as they fade into the warm gardens, the still green grass. GraduaUy, though, they build up, coating lawns, roofs, driveways. The apartment is on a wide, busy residential street. From my window, I watch pedestrians tramping over the white sidewalks, cars creeping through the flying snow, crowded buses with wipers, long as a man's arm, beating back and forth. I have the sensation of watching the world from a great, wise height. I go out and get groceries. I eat scrambled eggs, jeUo, raisin pie. I have a lot of time to think. I go out for walks and find myself picking my way down a smaU slope to the Lion's Pool, which is closed, of course, for the winter. I stand outside the high wire fence. Snow is falling in the pool where Floyd and I once swam and dove into the blue water, shrieking. AU the chUdren shouting. I hear their happy cries echoing against the low yellow brick waU. I smeU the dankness of the change rooms and remember splashing through the shaUow chlorine bath on my way out to the pool. Snow is falling too, on the bleachers, where there were always a few parents scattered, waiting patiently for their chUdren. I see Mother among them, her face bent to her book, in the days long ago when she could read fine print. Now, at seventy-five, she has only peripheral 33 vision. There is a big black hole in the centre of everything she looks at. I have begun to think that this condition has affected her inteUectual perceptions. She doesn't see the centre of things. She doesn't see the issues. She sees only the things surrounding them. I think about how I used to come in the front door after work and find Mother sitting at the kitchen table with her hands Ughtly folded on her lap, waiting patiently for me to come home, her face full of calmness and hope. Just from her pose, I knew that she thought about me aU day long. She never left the house. She moved from room to room, dressing slowly, looking out the windows, picking up her novel, in which she progressed slowly, sometimes reading the same page over and over again, forgetting she'd already read it, glancing now and then at the clock, thinking: Jean wUl be having lunch now. Jean wiU be cleaning up. Jean wiU be home in an hour. The thought of her tranquiUity, her vigUance, used to sustain me. One day I call home. "Winter is here again, Mother," I say. "HeUo, Jean," she says. "Yes, I know." "I have to find another job, Mother." "That's fine, Jean," she says. "You'U find one." "I never meant that," I teU her, "about supporting you. You know I like living with you." "I know you didn't," she says, and begins to cry. "I'm just so happy to hear your voice," she says. "You knew about Dr. Beveridge and me, didn't you?" I say. "No, I didn't know. How would I know?" she says cautiously. "You knew, Mother. You knew and you never said anything. Say you knew. I can't come home unless you admit it." "Yes, I knew," she says. "It upset me but I could see it was helping you. You aren't a happy person, Jean." For a moment neither of us speaks. We Usten patiently to the sUence, are comfortable with it. I can feel her physical presence at the other end of the Une. "Mother?" I finaUy say. "Yes?" "Why aren't you angry with Father?" "He must have had his reasons for leaving, Jean," she says, "and some day he'U come home and explain them to me." I won't go so far as to say I missed Floyd and Blanche in the few weeks I lived in the apartment. But when I move home I find them easier to accept. I seem to have a new appreciation for them and even catch myself 34 listening for the sound of their footsteps coming in through the front door at dinnertime or on the weekends, though I would never admit it to Mother. At Christmas, Floyd says, "Jean, come with us to church, just this once," and I do. Then it becomes a habit. What else is there to do with Sunday mornings? I learn to pray and I learn to forgive. I forgive Father for not taking us to Florida with him and I forgive Dr. Beveridge for Uving on with his wife and his two gourd-headed boys in the beautiful bungalow on the nice curved street. On Sunday mornings, we return from church in Floyd's car, Mother and I sitting in the back, Blanche in the front, flowing jeUy across the bench seat. "I prayed for Father this morning," Blanche teUs us over her shoulder. "I prayed for Jean," says Floyd. "I prayed that Floyd wiU be sent to the African missions, where he'U be eaten by cannibals," I say. "Oh, Jean," says mother, shocked and amused, "you don't mean that!" "Of course I do." In the evenings, Mother and I watch television. "Can you see from where you're sitting?" I ask her. "Yes, I can see," she says. "I can see everything." She is afraid of being perceived as infirm. She is afraid of being shoved away in a seniors' home. "Are you sure?" I say. "Do you think you should move closer? Why don't you sit in this chair?" "No, no," she says, "don't worry about me. I'm fine." And I know it is aU darkness. 35 Suzanne Buffam tivo poems Driving Down Musgrave lawns trimmed neat with shrubs the size of cabbages, pruned like heads in the dim path of the moon, we drive past shuttered houses, the skeletons of tricycles scattered like thoughts like my father's ramblings: "driving down this street always reminds me of people being disconnected from life support systems," he says, "i think there must have been something about that on the radio when i was passing this street a long time ago. i seem to remember being in my father's car, the cracking leather smeU of the seats. that wonderful old car." now it's me who can't pass without being invaded by these thoughts, flashes that return unbidden as a smeU unwelcome as the saltmusk of his clothes the brandnew vinyl of his car. what haunts me—this haunting i have inherited: 36 behind the shuttered windows, an old woman knows this warmth —like a hand in dishwater lapping slowly at her elbows, her knees- is overtaking her. she cannot reach the light, Ues alone in her yielding bones joints crooked hands. always, as i pass this street, i feel her lying in the dark, being slowly disconnected, by my father's voice. "if you got to die," he once said, "do it quiet." 37 Roadmap driving, She remembers the day She was born. She remembers the weather first, darker than She had expected, more fuU of rain. She had envisioned cannon baUs of Ught, everywhere, not only in the doctor's fist, at once, She suspected: this is not my element. there is a tiny star-shaped birthmark on Her face, above Her right eyebrow, this is a part of Her symbology, Her roadmap. the star points in 3 directions: under, over, through. She drives through Hope with the windows down, arid landscape dotted with indian paintbrush, the colour of tongues, flags by the side of the road. sometimes She even forgets the sound of Her own name, when there are no other voices, She can hear only the air as it pushes through the windows, the sound of trees streaming together along the highway, sky, opening before Her. Her fingers loosen around the wheel. She cannot stop telling people the prices of tilings: —those earrings? they only cost me $4. or —can you beUeve i only paid $30 for these pants? —the best thing of aU is the price, She says to the pharmacist, i'm only paying $300 to Uve there. mostly, it is to show people what a bargain-hunter She is. She has stopped removing the price-tags from things: books, mugs, a vase. bargain-hunter: one who stalks merchandise—She Mows a trail/aisle, corners a market, shoebox fuU of receipts, a collector, a 38 gatherer. She is proud of Her survival, catches a glimpse of Herself in the rearview mirror: the look in Her eyes is hunger. to catch a glimpse/ a cold/ a train (of thought; these thoughts run through Her head more like cars, separate & a/part; to catch a thought, She thinks, to drive a thought) signs by the side of the road choke up on Her: Vancouver 340 Vancouver 180 Vancouver 63 the growing anxiety of approaching destinations. suspended this way, She is overcome by fears, the fear of being alone sticks in Her chest: alone at Her kitchen table, thinking of Her landlord, 2 floors down, talking to a picture of his long dead wife, but also She is afraid of crowds: at the market, pushing past fruit stands, past butchers, past coffee bars, She is afraid of meeting people's eyes, their eyes pass over Her like fingers; She can feel them touching Her from across rooms, across beaches (the man on the saUboat watching Her through binoculars). This Body Is Not For Sale: (at the craft fair admission table, the man taking Her money, $2 bill, & stamping across her wrist in blue ink the word: SOLD). She has given up the dream of Her birth & has begun dreaming in numbers(#'s): distances/ prices/ the costs of things 39 driving over mountains, through canyons, She turns over fears, like smooth stones by the highway. She could drive on like this forever, washing Her clothes at coin laundromats along the way until Her money runs out. to run out: of things to remember (checklist forgotten miles behind) of 500 postcards to send of your life with no excuse (to make no excuse for this running) She only feels comfortable with places She's never seen before, something about these places relaxes Her, soothes the anxiety that rises from time to time in Her throat. Single YeUow Line: Pass w/ Caution. She hears the sound of church beUs, down the hill, underneath Her, remembers the woman at the toU booth giving Her a cold stare. She has given up making excuses. the exits refuse to admit Her; they are a green blur in Her right eye as She drives past them. She tries to ignore them, swaUows down the fear in Her throat: the fear that She might be nearing the one marked in red on her map, the strange & simultaneous fear that She has missed it. trees pavement water flag fireweed window cloth mouth eyes passage open(slash)open(slash)open (dash) Merge. how can we mark our Uves with this paintbrush, She thinks, through the desert of this landscape? passing exits, the highway a dried snakeskin, headless, taU trailing into history. this road pushes you back, aU of you demanding explanations. 40 Mark Miller Princes Wharf, Hobart, with my two-year old I take Jack to see the fleet at the wharf- fishermen unloading tuna from the deep huUs of boats, the oUy, metalUc-grey skin gUstening in the early Ught, the glass-eyes staring as if still aUve— Jack watches, mesmerised by the foreignness of it aU: two Taiwanese on deck, three on the wharf, their faces barely visible behind their wet-black japaras, and the steaming yeUow-fin hauled on taut ropes, two at a tune, and crammed as if part of some ancient ritual into a Hiace van— We watch at least fifty rise steaming and suspended in air untU one of the fishermen gestures for my boy to come nearer and I snap their picture, getting the focus wrong on Jack, being drawn to the bUster of blood on the fish's jaw as it tilted forward on the man's shoulder fixing me in its glare. 41 Accusation /. A. Hamilton The boyfriend was on his way for a visit. I woke up and the first thing Teresa said to me was, Mark is coming for coffee. On Tuesday the first thing my wife Teresa said to me when I got up was, "Mark is coming for coffee." I was sleep-singed, I thought Teresa meant a friend from the city. I told her I thought I'd seen Mark driving through town the day before. "So he's on-island," I said. "Good." "Mark Dunn," Teresa corrected. "Not Mark WiUiamson. Mark Dunn. Is that aU right? AU right with you?" I poured the last of a pot of coffee. There was a lot in the air, an excitable quaUty. "Mark from work?" Teresa said, "He wants to meet you and the kids." "Oh," I said. "O.K. then." "I'm going to go get him. He's not at home. His wife has the car. I'm going to pick him up. I'U drive there and get him. If it's O.K. by you, I'U go get him now." "It's aU right with me," I said. "He's at a friend's house near Mosquito Lake. I'U go pick him up." Teresa smiled. "We'U have coffee together. That's the idea. He wants to meet you. And the kids, when they get home from school. He wants to stay that long." "I'U make a pot of coffee," I said. Teresa kissed my cheek. "I'm going now," she said. "I'm not stopping you," I told her. "No," she said, "that's true, you're not. So I'U go now. I'U see you in ten minutes. WiU you be awake in ten minutes, Rob? WiU you be awake and ready for company? It's reaUy near here, where he is." "Go," I said and ran the water to refill the coffee pot. Teresa said, "Only, Mark drinks tea. Herb tea. He doesn't drink coffee. Mark doesn't drink coffee, Rob. There's hibiscus tea in the cupboard." I looked at my wife and she walked out. From the door she caUed, "Rob? I'm taking your car, Rob. Is it 0. K. with you if I take your car? My muffler is getting worse and worse." 42 WMe Teresa was gone I started a letter to a writer back east. What this guy wanted was to know whether he could visit during an upcoming reading tour to the coast, in November. He'd heard about this island and about a kind of tree that grows indigenously, the arbutus, and he wondered if I could suggest a hotel or resort and whether we could have lunch. In fact, whether I'd show him this tree. He wanted to see its orange bark curl first hand, that's what he wanted. He as a friend of my former wife's. He became a friend of Mamie's after we spUt up. They were involved. I'd had his letter for two weeks; I didn't know how to respond. TeU me, do you hear anything of Marnie? He'd already said Mamie was Uving in Stratford; what more did I want? I started writing and said he could come and stay with us. How I said it was, We'U bum the home fires for you. I supposed there was resentment in that sentence, hostility, so I tore it up and looked at the clock. Teresa wasn't back. She'd been gone half an hour and she wasn't back yet. I wrote, Sorry but we're snowed under here. Maybe we'U catch you next trip. Congrats on your new book and aU good wishes, Rob. I included a pamphlet on bed and breakfast houses from the Chamber of Commerce. Then I got up and stood at the window. You could see autumn. It was only early September but faU was out there in the way the bushes and trees were leaching of colour. There was a subtle change even though it was sunny and hotter than most of the summer had been. I looked at the front garden. Teresa and I had just laid strips of PVC across it, which we planned to cover with bark mulch There were a few shrubs, a forsythia bush and morning glory vines climbing out of the ditch. I looked at the house across the street, its yeUow vinyl siding and green vinyl roof. Away past that was ocean, the Strait of Georgia. I could see saUboats. In another life, one with Marnie for instance, I might be out there in a boat, skippering. Mark was the assistant chef at the restaurant where Teresa was head chef. Mark, I knew, was twenty-two. Three things I knew about him: he was twenty-two, in his alternate life a painter and musician, and he was married to a woman named Kate. I didn't want him in my house. When Teresa got back she was alone. I was still at the window so I re- aUzed this: there was no Mark in the passenger seat of my car. I opened the door for Teresa. It was over an hour since she'd left. "He couldn't come," Teresa said and brushed past me. "He couldn't come?" "That's what I said. Mark couldn't come. Don't you hear me?" "Why not?" 43 "He had to go home and seU his house. He had someone coming over to look at his house, Rob. If that's aU right with you" "I can get some work done," I said. "Yes, yes you can, Rob. Go for it." "If Mark isn't coming." "He's not if it makes you happy." "Why should it make me happy?" This was the sort of fractious, facetious question that happens in marriages, in first and second marriages. "Rob," Teresa said. "I don't know why it would make you happy. Just forget about it, that's aU. Just go on and forget I ever said Mark was coming over. It was nothing. He wanted to meet you. He wanted to meet the chUdren, O.K.?" "When did meeting me get so important to Mark?" "I don't know why anyone would want to meet you, Rob," Teresa said. "Let alone Mark Dunn." "Very funny," I said. Teresa said, "I'm not making a joke." I said, "You're not funny so it's lucky that wasn't a joke." Teresa said, "Good." When I was married to Marnie we Uved in Vancouver. I was in school and Marnie was a poet. We were young. We rented an apartment on the top floor of a house by Vancouver General Hospital. On the bottom floor there were two apartments. One was rented by a gay man named Darryl who worked for Air Canada as a ticket clerk. The other apartment, which was bigger, was rented to a woman I liked. There was another woman I liked, upstairs in an attic room. Her name was Sylvia. Everyone in this house kept in touch because of the Greek landlord, because he'd let himself in our apartments when we were out and do things like turn down our freezer settings, leaving things to thaw, or shutting off Ughts. No one could stop him. Sylvia had the idea to caU the city and invited us aU up to her place to discuss it. Marnie was back east visiting her mother, but the rest of us decided to form a tenants' committee and after the others left I touched Sylvia's face and kissed her. Later, of course, some years later when I was still married to Marnie, there was Theresa. I met Teresa through Sylvia: they were second cousins. I was just settling down to read a manuscript I'd been avoiding when Teresa came up behind me and put her hands on my shoulders. She has big hands, like a man's, scarred from cooking accidents. She rubbed my neck. I took one of her hands and kissed it. She said, "You think I'm screwing Mark." 44 "I'm thinking about what it takes to pubUsh a book," I told her. "That's what's on my mind. This book. This guy has written a pretty awful book, Teresa. I have to read it and write a cover blurb." "You can't accuse me," Teresa said letting her hands drop. "It's not fair. I'm faithful to you, if you only knew it. I'm tired of you accusing me." "I never accused you. I don't think you're fooling around," I said. "You do think so. Mark is my friend, O.K.? Mark is just my good friend. I could have friends in a normal relationship, Rob. In a regular marriage I'd have friends and you'd have friends and then we'd have friends, mutuaUy. But you don't want me to have any friends, Rob." "That's ridiculous," I said. "Teresa, for god's sake, I'm trying to work." "Mark is a good chef, Rob," she said. "I don't think you reaUze that. He's a good cook and he's good company. His wife is infertile. His wife wore black to their wedding. What would you say to that?" I didn't reply. "We keep each other company in the kitchen, Rob, O.K.? Maybe if you had a Uttle company once in awhUe you wouldn't be such a stick in the mud, you'd have a life." "I'm a writer, Teresa," I said. "I'm supposed to be a stick in the mud. I'm not supposed to have a life." "You had two affairs when you were married to Marnie," she went on. "That proves it." "Proves what?" I asked. "Proves if anyone's having an affair, it's you." "No one's having an affair." "I could have an affair if I wanted to," Teresa said. "I don't doubt it, "I said. "It's not for lack of opportunity," she said. "It wouldn't be." "But I'm married to you. That was a vow I took, to be faithful." "I took it too, Teresa," I said wearily. I had found a poem Mark the painter/musician had written, a rambling, incoherent sob about the torture of animals. I had also read Teresa's sporadicaUy kept journal, an entry where she questioned what she was doing getting involved with a twenty-two year old, someone young enough to be her son. Teresa was forty-one. "There are inconsistencies," I told her. "What's that supposed to mean?" "I mean, maybe you are having an affair." "You see?" she said. "You are accusing me." "You stay late at work. You go in early." "We need the money, Rob. You know we need the money. You're the 45 most suspicious man I've ever met. I can't win with you. If I earn enough money to get us by, it means I'm having an affair. Where do you get that?" "I don't want to discuss this," I said. "How does that Mow logicaUy?" she asked. "I'm glad you're earning lots of money," I said. "I'm grateful." "Terry needs new shoes, Rob. Linda needs a new winter coat. We have biUs to pay off." AU true. I said, "Let's just drop it." Teresa said, "You're the one who's hanging on to this. You ought to be embarrassed, accusing me. My job gets this family through, Rob." "Drop it, Teresa," I warned. "Fine," she said. "But I don't want to feel like your eyes are boring accusations into my back every time I leave this house." "They won't be," I said. I made my attempts over the next weeks. I was a cuckolded husband; I did my best. On Teresa's birthday I answered the phone to Mark and passed it along without comment. The next day I dutifuUy Med to remark on a red silk scarf that appeared in our bedroom. I attended a Virgo party the restaurant held and met Mark, and Mark's large-nosed wife, nodding and chatting with both as if nothing was wrong. I knew things now: I knew Mark had very blonde hair that wasn't receding and that his wife had a horsey, grating laugh. I knew Mark was shorter than I was and his wife had masses of unkempt black hair. His wife was an offensive woman, and I thought, cornered by her, that no wonder he wanted mine. "I hear you're a faUed writer," she said to me and laughed. I said back, "I hear you're infertile." I enjoyed the flashes of surprise and pain that appeared in her eyes. I knew things: I had met Mark Dunn. I had watched Mark Dunn dance with my wife. I had danced with my wife myself and had let my hand sUp down from her back, had very pubUcaUy kissed her. I was not young, I knew, but I had access to Teresa in a way Mark didn't. I had history. I had things to offer. We had chUdren together. I thought Teresa should get pregnant again. We had been close during the months of her pregnancies. She said having a baby domesticated her: she said it was the only time in her life she felt truly domestic. "Like a cow," she explained and smiled lazUy, bovinely. We had always meant to have more. "When we get rich," we said, counting, back then, on my writing. "When I've recuperated," Teresa said after months up nights with our youngest. Then we bought a house. My mother got iU. Teresa went to cooking school then took a gruelling job as a prep chef. I started a novel. But now I 46 needed a way to reattach Teresa to me; I thought having our kids grow so far up was dangerous. I suggested a baby, a new baby, that anchor. Teresa, resting on my shoulder, said, "Mmm." "Would you want to?" I asked, nervous. "I can't have any more kids," she said. "I can't cope with the two we have." I said, "You're a wonderful mother." "I'm a frustrated mother," she said and lifted her head to smile at me. "I do sometimes want another, though. If it isn't already too late." "Let's," I said. "Let's talk about it more," she said. "We'd have to reaUy think about it." Right then I had doubts about Teresa's affair. I could not beUeve in Mark when I held my wife in my arms. We were happy. I felt it. Weren't we happy enough, my wife and I? Once, when we were married three years and Teresa was pregnant with Terry, she asked me if I'd slept with Marnie after we'd gotten together. I'd told her Marnie was my wife. She'd asked what that meant. UntU Marnie and I separated, I said, we were lovers. "You slept with both of us?" Teresa asked, hurt and surprised. "She would have known something was going on, otherwise," I said. "But lovers, you said. Rob, you used the term lovers. As if you'd enjoyed it." "I enjoyed sleeping with you," I said. "I got aU my pleasure with you." "Poor Marnie," Teresa said. "I wonder why she didn't suspect us earner. " "She did suspect." "I didn't realize that," Teresa said and rubbed her beUy, looking off into the distance. "She didn't know it was you but she did suspect someone." "WeU," Teresa said. "I guess we were hard to hide," I added and grinned. Several times over the next whUe Teresa came home from work wearing different clothing than she'd left in. In her purse she carried a toothbrush, toothpaste, and shampoo. I did not know how to talk about suspicion; I did not know how to say my throat was tightened in fear. These were the honest words: Teresa, don't leave me. Some mornings a sort of wisdom had been granted me in sleep, a patience, a broad forgiveness. Then I wanted to say I would stand beside my wife while she did what she did. I wanted to say I knew it from the other side, with Marnie, from the 47 adulterer's perspective, and I understood it wasn't about me, not done to hurt me or erode our marriage. I wanted to say I would not watch her going to work early or coming in late as if I were a spy, not rummage through her desk drawers again or check her purse, not add up infractions against her. I wanted to be a man I partly was, a large man, a man of largesse. I love you, I thought, but the thought itself, its troubling ramifications, was a pressure behind my ribs. I'm sorry, I thought, but responded to that sentiment with a hot flash of anger. Within minutes, whether Teresa was still asleep or already gone or in the shower, I began to take photographs, cUcking over in my mind, that included Mark bending to kiss Teresa, Mark's arm around her back or breast, Teresa folding herself tight against his body. I could not place myself anymore in Mark's place, or, at the breakfast table, see myself reflected in my chUdren's eyes. I made peanut butter sandwiches and packed apples and my wife in her lover's arms had erect nipples. A gold leaf occasional box I had given Teresa—my wife loved intricate boxes—disappeared from our dresser in the bedroom. She brought home a cassette tape of Mark singing and asked me to Usten to it. She brought home some slides of his paintings, which we examined over the kitchen table, holding them into the Ught. Teresa wrinkled her nose and shook her head as we peered at each one, until on the last she laughed and said he wasn't very good. But there was something in his work I liked a lot—a perversity. He painted women in anguish, mostly, in deep tones of black and red, and it attracted me. I said, "CaU him up. Let's go down there and have a look at these." Teresa opened her eyes at me. "I mean it. Give him a caU and find out if we can see these." "Now?" Teresa said, reluctant. "Absolutely," I said. I reached for the phone. Teresa stared at me. "This is great," I said, nodding, holding one of the sUdes aloft. Teresa dialed. I watched her out of the comer of my eye, how she knew the number without looking it up, how she cleared her throat as it rang. "Mark?" she said. "It's Teresa. Fine, thanks. I've just been showing your sUdes to Rob and we'd like to come down and see the paintings." She listened. "No," she said. "I know. No, it's not." She put her hand over the mouthpiece. "To buy?" I nodded. "This is great stuff," I said. "Great stuff." "With an eye towards buying one," she told Mark. "Rob likes number nine. The sUde you've got marked number nine." 48 When she hung up she looked at me. "Are you sure, Rob?" "Did he say we could?" Teresa nodded. "Let's go," I said. I was full of nervous energy. I gathered up the sUdes. In the car, I said, "So? Where does he Uve?" "In Meridian," she said, naming the southernmost vUlage on the island. "Where in Meridian?" I prodded. "On Frank-" "Franklin Street?" "No, I don't know." "I don't want to drive aU that way if we're lost on the other end," I said. Teresa didn't answer. I thought she was holding her breath. "Go look it up in the phone book," I said. I knew she knew the address; I knew she knew it exactly. "Unless you know it." "I don't know it," she said sullenly. She got out and went back inside, stomping up the stairs. "It is Franklin Street," she said when she got back in. "I thought it might have been." In Meridian I drove along Franklin Street, a curving, rural road that sUd past Franklin Lake. I had rarely been along here except during the summer to take the kids swimming; it was too far out for anyone to have business along it. There were occasional houses and fruit orchards, with de- crepid vans or buses sitting in their drives. There was a beautiful garden and I mentioned it, surprised to find so many blooms in October, such ribald color. My wife would know what was blooming; she was an avid gardener. Teresa said, "That garden is my favourite. I can't get enough of that garden." I waited a minute. "I thought you hadn't been here before." "I haven't." She paused and said tightly, "I drove Mark home one night after work." "You noticed a garden at midnight?" "Don't start with me," she said, then, "quick. A left here." I was not surprised she knew the driveway's location and that despite a lack of address marker, knew to direct me to the right branch of it. We lurched up it, through ruts and potholes. The house was an old farmhouse of weathered clapboard and wood sash windows. Teresa sighed and said, "Let's get this over with." I looked at my wife, at her consternation, and felt unexpected sympathy. I regretted forcing her to come here. I said, "Honey, we could go back home. If you want to go home I don't mind." "I don't want to go home, Rob. I'm just as interested as you are in these paintings." 49 We got out. I followed Teresa up the back steps, avoiding rotten spots where the wood was split. We needed a good rain; things were dusty. It felt like a drought. Mark ushered us in. He was small, he was healthy, he was handsome in a washy, characterless sort of way, but I couldn't see anything in how he greeted my wife. It seemed innocent enough. Inside was just an apartment, a combination living and dining room and two smaU bedrooms off to the right. There was a good size kitchen. I said, "I thought you had the whole house here. This is just a little bit of it, isn't it?" He said, "The Twiggs own it. You know the Twigg family? Old islanders? Kate and I just rent this converted part." He asked if we wanted tea. He said, "Kate's at work. She'U be sorry she missed you." Mark had an easel set up and books of photographs laid out on a cumbersome oak table. Teresa and I went right over there wrule Mark went in the kitchen. He kept calUng things out, like how he had a show in Toronto two summers earUer and which of the paintings he'd sold. He said he wasn't painting much, since moving here. Since moving here, he was concentrating on the music. I told him I thought it was a shame to give up the art. Mark said, "We're moving to Vancouver, Kate and me. I think I'U start to paint again when I'm back in the city." He carried in tea on a black- enameUed tray. This was clearly news to Teresa. Her face paled and her shoulders stiffened. She was husldly, "You're moving?" It had the effect of an echo, the way her voice came out. I was elated. I felt waves of reUef surge in me. I busied myself with his albums, turning plastic pages. I still liked the painting I'd liked at home, which the book explained was eighteen by thirty-two inches, acryUc on canvas. It was of a globe, or the upper half of a globe, with a diminutive purple figure bending over on top of it. There was a lot of hemisphere; most of the picture was of places without any oxygen. "I was going to give you notice today," Mark explained. He kept glancing at me. "Notice," Teresa said numbly, duUy. "I can't get along without you." "I'U take this one," I said, showing number nine to Mark. "I can't run the kitchen without you, Mark," Teresa said in a rackety sort of tone. "Oh my God." "Things are slowing down," Mark said. "I don't know if there's a dozen tourists on the entire island anymore. I'U still be here for weeks, Teresa. I'll give you three weeks notice. We're not going until HaUowe'en." Teresa got up and walked out. Mark and I sat there and watched her 50 go. He picked up the teapot and said, "I don't know if I should pour this." "I want this painting," I said and pushed the sUde over to him. "She's reaUy upset." I took out my chequebook. "How much?" "It's packed away," Mark said, but he was distracted. "Four hundred, I guess." "That's fine," I said. I had a deficit balance; I'd have to borrow from my wife to cover the cheque. We heard a car door slam. Mark went and stood at the door. I put my cheque on the table. I let him walk outside, out of my view. I poured myself some tea. It wasn't hibiscus. ChamomUe, maybe. Something yeUowish. When we left, Teresa's face was smeary with tears. The kids weren't home from school for another couple of hours, so I drove across the street to Franklin Lake. I took Teresa's hand and helped her from the car. We walked down to where logs were strung out along the beach. I was smUing. I was grinning to beat the band. I started whistling from sheer happiness. "Goddamn you," Teresa said. "I'm suffering a loss." I stopped whistling and looked at her. "Loss, Teresa? What loss?" "Can't you console me? Can't you understand?" "What loss? What are we discussing here? It's not short-staffing at the restaurant. Don't expect me to think that." "Goddamn you," she said. "Honey," I said. "You bastard," she said, and then added slowly, dangerously, "I don't like you." I smUed. How could that matter now? "I don't. That's what this is aU about. I don't even like you, Rob. Oh God. You don't get it. Do you? You reaUy don't get it." "You don't like me so you're having an affair with Mark? What, you thought you had to prove it? O.K., you don't like me." I knew what Teresa was saying ought to be hurting me, but I was feeling too good. I was feeling righteous. "You want consolation because your lover is leaving?" "I Uve with a writer. I Uve with you. Don't you think I deserve consolation?" I considered that for a minute and assented. "I have thought that." We were quiet, the air fruity between us. Teresa said, "What I want, Rob, is not to be us, the couple we are. I just want something to happen. Something has to change here. I'm over forty years old, Rob, and every day is a day we planned and it goes along 51 like we planned. The kids go off to school. You write. I cook chicken with asparagus mousse. Doesn't that ever bother you?" "I like it," I said. "Teresa, that's exactly what I like." Teresa waved her arm, dismissing me. "I'm not even sleeping with him. That's what this feels like, Rob, like I'm having the best sex of my life. Or I ought to be. Now you made us come down here. You made us visit him. O.K., I went along." "Teresa, you brought his sUdes home. You wanted to push things. I don't care. You might as weU be sleeping with him. Are you sleeping with him? I know you were at his house before. I saw their bed." "I'm not sleeping with him. I should be." "Why?" "He wants me. O.K., that's what you want to hear. He wants me. I'm flattered. He's attracted to me and I enjoy it. There's my guilt. That's a lot of guUt, isn't it, Rob? A boy finds me sexy and I like it. I deserve the electric chair. I'm forty-one years old, married ten years, and I'm having a flirtation. So shoot me with a gun." "There's more," I said. "I'm not leaving you. I love you," she said. "You love me?" "I do. O.K.? I do. But Christ, Rob. Sometimes I can't stand your guts." She stood up and jeridly started taking her clothes off. I thought Mark could see her from his work table; I thought Mark could be watching every move we made. Teresa took her shoes off. She took her sweatshirt off and then her bra and jeans, untU she was wearing only panties. She had some acne dotted on her lower back. She walked out onto the dock. The water was very green, a real green that looked cold. It had been cooling down a month since summer. I caUed my wife's name. She kept walking forward. At the end of the dock I saw her go up on her toes. She had a pretty figure. She hardly parted the water when she went in, arms and head first. I watched her come up. I walked out on the dock. Franklin Lake is smaU. On a map Franklin Lake is hardly a speck; I hoped that would hold in the warmth and keep Teresa from hypothermia. She swam out on her back. Her breasts were above the water. She swam out slowly, like she wasn't in any sort of hurry. 52 Susan L. Holbrook two excerpts from "Wading through this green today, naming: Poems for Catherine Parr Traill" The Children and I up The chUdren and I up 6 lb sal soda earUer each day work the land, scrub 6 lb grease, strained the house bright bright keep the balance from tipping from impurities stir boil set cut should be as white 4 lb good quick lime as now as now he is larger, darker 4 gallons of snow wakes later each day to our bright cleaning to the roar of flies. 53 A Man Wounded by an Elephant A man wounded by an elephant holds no romance for me a shark-bitten man lame buU-fighter but a true Canadian injury ignites, I'm afraid, this fooUsh heart. There is an EngUshman in the next county was scalped by a bear while working his field. Men were out a week with shotguns but could not find the bear. Perhaps she wore the trophy on her head as a disguise. The man is quiet and does not take off his hat to me. this is where a dried leaf of spearmint was fixed before it fell to dust and this is where I tried to draw from another one, not quite as sweet as the first, but have scant skill at drawing, so it's blank the scent may linger here still 54 Alpay K. Ulku two poems Heat Lightning, Progress, Cat, George Orwell It is a cat walking on rice paper. It is a priest placing communion wafers on the penitents' clean red tongues. Something is trying to wake up from a nightmare, tapping the screen with its white wing; both wings. It is the Morse code of an old fashioned telegraph, the kind that kiUed the WUd West. It is the eye of the pyramid. Erza Pound said: What is money? A blind man's cane to Mow the cat's paws. The gathering storm is possible, because the sky is cooling off. If a storm can't be stopped, could the cooling? It's not a whistle but a window. Someone flings a window open. Takes a breath. 55 Glacier I can imagine how it must have been, the glacier so cold it wasn't snow that feU but Ught, the infrared cooling to ultraviolet, breaking down as it touched your coat and sUd off the visible spectrum. so this is what it's like vanishing word-by-word as you said it, then the bearings; things, direction, leaving behind what? I could have done so much. 56 Ingrid Catching Snowflakes on her Tongue Lisa Moore Ingrid moves around the kitchen. The shadows of the leaves flow over her like a home movie; the shadows on the linoleum lap at the toes of her boots. The cutlery rattles. She's laying down forks and knives. I'm putting down plates. My husband and Ingrid used to Uve together. They were together for three years. They were both single parents when they met, barely twenty. But I knew her before he did. I've just remembered this. I knew her, from a distance, in the summer of grade five, before anything had happened to either of them. She was the girl in the yeUow bathing suit. Competitive water-skiing. I'd seen her take the ramp. I didn't know her name, but I knew who she was. Her yeUow suit would shoot off the ramp, an erratic jerk, as she caught her balance. She could make everybody's stomach lift with her. The spank as she hit the water. A curt wave to everyone on the beach, cut short by a grab for the wooden handle. The guys in the boat went so fast they stippled the surface, making it like an unpaved road. She as rigid and concentrated as a man with a jackhammer. I was afraid of water-skiing so my parents bought me Jesus boots. A giant Styrofoam boat for each foot. Bungling to a standing position, my legs supping away from each other, I'd catch her out of the corner of my eye. On the other side of the lake she was so smaU she seemed to be standing still, loitering. Now she smokes, is languid. Her chuckle is like Coke pouring from a plastic bottle. But she still has an athlete's body, angular, broad- shouldered, lean. Once, when she was in the bath she flexed the muscles in her leg for me, the water slurping as she lifted her leg straight into the air, she moved her fingers down the back of her thigh. "These muscles are my favorite, see the definition'" 57 I could see three ripples, drops criss-crossing through the wiry gold hair on her calves. She had glued seasheUs around the edge of the old-fashioned tub. A mask, snorkel, and flippers hung from the pipes. Three melon-scented candles made the steam as yeUow as smoke. Several squares of coloured glass lined the window ledge. The coloured glass is from the apartment on Patrick Street where Ingrid Uved when my husband was in love with her. It was no smaU love, I know that much. Sometimes when she's visiting, my throat constricts with jealousy. It's not that I think they're still in love. I'm jealous of when they were. I like sitting on the staircase Ustening to our house. The graveUy voice of the coffee maker in the kitchen, something metal turning over in the dryer, the ebbing of canned laughter from behind a bedroom door on the third floor. My husband's daughter, Mary, rubbing against the tub, flaccid splashes. The house is a skeleton and our moods surge along the wiring, spilling through the pipes, circulating like currents of heat. Living under the same roof with someone shapes you both the way Uquid takes the shape of its container. Ingrid's old apartment on Patrick Street was demoUshed recently. I was there when the construction workers started. The face was pried away; it feU onto the street with a ringing slap. The other waUs were left standing for a wlule. Rain streamed down the waUpaper; seals with beachbaUs in Gabe's room, raised velvet in Ingrid's. It was like a theatre set. I stood on the sidewalk, Ustening to the rain drum on a doorless fridge. I thought of the noises that would have been there—vegetables sUding into hot cooking oU, magnetic letters sUpping down the fridge door when it slams, her sewing machine, Mike's typewriter, the scratchy needle on the record player, the sound of their sex. My husband had a new daughter. He was taking Mary for three days a week. You could see your breath on cold days in the apartment. The wiring was dangerous. Ingrid and Mike put plastic over aU the windows, holding a hairdryer over it to shrink it tight. A trace of kerosene in the air from the heater they dragged from room to room. Mute had to hide his toothbrush and shaving cream. She was on welfare. When the social workers do home visits they look for signs of a man Uving on the premises. Mike's told me that sometimes the babies cried aU night, Mary starting fresh when Gabe was exhausted. His only escape was to take a bath. Or he would go to the comer store, lean on the freezer with a sUce of bologna in wax paper, and watch the snow faU. 58 He'd put Gabe and Mary in his eiderdown army jacket and zip it up. They'd sleep like that, Gabe's blonde curls tangled with Mary's straight black hair. Once both the chUdren were playing on the kitchen floor while Mike was chopping a turnip. He lifted the knife dramaticaUy over his shoulder and the blade flew out and stuck in the cupboard between the chUdren's heads. Another time Gabriel stepped on the pedal of the sewing machine and Mary's finger was punctured twice. The chUdren would often bite each other untU they broke the skin. Ingrid breast-fed Gabriel even after he was able to ask for booby. Sometimes she breast-fed Mary. When Ingrid drops by and Mike is in the kitchen, sometimes they'U talk about these memories and shake their heads with quiet astonishment. When they talk about that time they become almost shy of each other. I go up to the bathroom to make sure Mary has rinsed aU the shampoo out. Her hair is pressed against the water like Ucorice ropes in a glass jar. Her body submerged to the neck in the shaUow bath, her eyes closed. She looks like Snow White in the glass casket. For the first time I see her breasts are growing, smaU buds. Without opening her eyes she crosses her arms over her chest and says, "What do you think you're staring at?" I bend a strip of the Venetian blind, clear a spy hole in the condensation with my finger. Mike is coming down the street with an armload of groceries. Ingrid concealed her pregnancy. She was working in a second-hand bookstore. One day she didn't show up for work, the next day she came in with a baby boy. No one had guessed. No one knew who the father was, there weren't even any rumours. She doesn't talk about her famUy much. They Uve a block away from her, but they haven't spoken to her since Gabriel was bom. Ingrid's careful with the smaU amount of money she Uves on. She buys things rarely, but when she does it's something that will last. QuaUty. An EngUsh duffle coat of navy felt with bone buttons for Gabe. A cutlery set with heavy mother of pearl handles she found in a second-hand shop. Sometimes two months or more wiU go by when she can't pay the rent. She's been evicted. Had her heat cut off. On winter nights we've gone for long walks and she's pointed out places she has Uved in. I imagine her standing on the doorstep of her parents' house, knowing she was pregnant. No money. I imagine it like the moment in the air when you leave the water-ski ramp, your stomach flipping up, being completely still and flying at the same time. I don't know where she could have gotten the courage. The first tune you feel a baby move inside you, it's like a candle flame. Not the heat of the flame but its chaotic flickering 59 in a draft. It's about the size of a flame and as frantic. If you could hold a flame in your fist. You feel it over the pelvic bone and immediately doubt that you've felt it. She must have decided not to tell anyone, not even the father. That movement inside her, that's the only thing I can imagine giving her the courage to leave her parents' house. November, with the street lights coming on, the branches bowed down with ice. For some reason she wrote to Marcel, Gabriel's father, when Gabe was five. He flew back immediately. His ticket was open-ended; he stayed for a year. It ended when he took a swing at her. He's a smaU guy and he was drunk. She hit hun back and he feU onto his bum, his legs straight in front of him, his toes pointing toward the ceiling, his palms flat on the floor—like a kid at the beach, she said, sitting at the edge of the sea. She had knocked his glasses off and he blinked, sUghtly sobered. Mary was eight when Mike and I had a daughter of our own. Mary stood over me, watching Jenny breast-feed. She tucked my hair behind my ear. "What does it taste like?" I hadn't tasted it myself. I hate milk. Mike said he had tasted it before. Ingrid's. Mary said in baby talk, "I want some." The book said that if an older sibling shows curiosity, offer her some. After a few squirts of milk she'U be bored with it. Mary sucked my nipple. I felt the sharp tug aU through my breast and stomach, the touch of her teeth, rather than gums, harder than my baby's suck. One squirt was enough. "Moo," she giggled, and was gone out of the room. With Mary, I feel that I'm pouring my love into a vacuum. Sometimes when Mike and I have sex my mind races. The kind of kinetic energy that the leaves have in that reflected murky square on the waU. The leaves are as sharp as characters of the alphabet, but they move over each other, disintegrate before they can speU anything. Sounds, smeUs, images, every sensation sUpping over the next, chaotic, tickUsh. I can feel the metaUic yelp of the maUbox Ud at the tips of my teeth and I have to run my tongue over them. The smeU of ink, like the smeU of blood. A fingernaU broken to the quick, rubbed against a cotton bedsheet. Then the smeU of paint thinner. Sometimes the images piggyback. Paint thinner on the back deck in a plastic tub. A week ago I lifted the Ud, then noticed Ingrid walking back from CarneU's store. I could just see her through the aUey between the opposite houses. She was weighed down with grocery bags, Gabriel scuffing behind her. She had to stop for a rest. I could imagine the plastic handles cutting into her fingers. She was under a streetlight and she stuck her tongue out. Then I noticed it had started to snow, an early No- 60 vember snow. She was catching snowflakes on her tongue. In the middle of sex I mix her up with vapours from the paint thinner, how they evaporate in the air, like homemade vodka, or barbecue starter, naU polish remover. I was afraid there might be a time in the future when she wouldn't be as important to me as she is now. When I might not know her. Just as I'm about to come, I feel her on the edges of my teeth too, and I almost say out loud in Mike's ear, "Ingrid's coming for supper." Mike sometimes wakes and says he's just had an erotic dream. They can be about anyone, but they're often about Ingrid. "What happens?" "What do you mean," he says, "We were screwing, it was reaUy nice." I ask Mike where his dreams happen. Do they have sex on damp concrete floors in the basements of strange bmldings, or in a dory that's heading through the narrows, are there knives or vegetables or candles in the dreams? He says no, there's just his body and Ingrid's and intense physical pleasure. Ingrid was visiting the first tune I cUpped Jenny's fingernaUs. A nurse at the hospital had told me to bite them off, but I was using the cUppers. Ingrid was washing the dishes. I sUced the top of Jenny's finger off. The Uttle knob of flesh on the tip of the naUcUpper. I held Jenny out in my stiff arms. For a long time she didn't draw a breath, her face got redder and redder, her mouth stretched open. Then, as if to make her get on with it, I screamed myself. Ingrid turned from the sink and took Jenny from me. The blood drenched Jenny's sleeper, smeared over Ingrid's cheeks. It soaked a thick facecloth, then a dishtowel. I Mowed Ingrid to the bathroom, blood dripping on each step. Both my fists clenched over my mouth. Ingrid filled the tub and put Jenny in. The water turned pink, then red. The finger spurted for fifteen minutes. The strength of my scream and a tingle in my arms from holding them so tight to my chest made me fiU up with calm, like a glass of cold water. When Mike got home I kissed him in front of Ingrid, something I never do. He smeUed of yeast, poppy seeds, his mouth tasted of coffee, honey, and cigarettes. He saw the stiffened sleeper on top of the garbage. Ingrid had turned to look out the window. This is what I know about Marcel, Gabriel's father. Ingrid said it was a one night stand. When I was seventeen, Marcel was thirty. A photographer. He Uved in a house out in the Battery, by himself. The Uvingroom made up most of 61 the house, one giant plate of glass looking over the harbour, into the city. At night the city was just orange and white Ughts. They Ucked the land like a fire that breathes in a wood chunk, with no flame. Sometimes they spread a flicker over the whole city like a shiver on a horse's flank. Marcel's fridge was fuU of photographic paper and chemicals. Bottles of Uquor, wine. A bottle shaped like a Spanish dancer. No food. He ate out, always. The front door didn't close properly, he had to lean a car tire against it to keep it from blowing open. If we were lying on his bed we would know if someone came in by the wobbling tire, the circles getting tighter and tighter. When he left the house it was padlocked shut. It never occurred to me to wonder where he got his money. He was sUent about where he came from, except to say Toronto. He liked to dress in white. AU white including his socks, shoes, even his underwear, always. He wore black sunglasses. Marcel's pictures were fuU of geometric shadows. Everything was balanced, contrived, almost mannered. There's a photograph of himself in a room, empty of furniture except for a piano. He's wearing a white tuxedo, sitting with his back to the camera. A naked girl, sixteen, Ues across the piano top looking into the camera—two cognac glasses. He made a point of staying out of photographs himself. This picture of his back was the only exception. I heard Marcel talking about the girl. Ingrid. I remembered the name because I didn't know any Ingrids. He had the phone pinched between his ear and shoulder, he was swishing a shiny piece of paper in chemicals with a set of tongs. Even in black and white you could teU her pubic hair was gold. They must have been talking about it because I could hear his friend say through the receiver, "I like to get them young, then shave their pubic hair." Marcel said, "I like to get them before they have pubic hair." He hung up and pinned the photograph to a clothesline strung across the darkroom. There were ten other prints of the same picture. He was a fanatic about lint or dust, graininess. I said, "I don't see how you could sleep with someone who was sixteen." He said "You're seventeen." I didn't say anything to that. We hadn't had sex yet, not exactly. He hadn't photographed me naked either. My mother showed up, and dragged me away. I was stinking of Uco- rice. He made the Pernod viscous, milky, by adding water. He had teased me into taking it in my mouth but I wouldn't swaUow it. He dipped his tongue in my shot glass and Ucked it down the ridges of my windpipe. I 62 could feel it cool, evaporating. I swaUowed. The first time I had ever drunk alcohol. In an hour, I drank most of the bottle. Marcel led me to the couch. He bit my tongue so hard he cut it on both sides. My mother hit her hom at that exact moment. It might not have been the exact moment. It took a while for my mother's horn to bum through the Pernod. The lights were off in his house. I don't know how she knew I was there. I stood up and tried to button my shirt, banged my shin on the comer of the coffee table, a shard of pain. I had a hard time moving the tire out of the way. It's as though photographing Ingrid was what made her pregnant. Nobody gets pregnant from a one night stand. In my mother's car, my body was shivering from drinking so much. I was poisoned. It was like the one time I tried to water-ski. I forgot to let go of the rope when I feU. Currents of water plowing my gritted teeth. Dragged untU I thought I would drown. Her hom was a simple sound. Like a voice finaUy coming through the throbbing of an outboard motor, underwater. A wobbled voice, almost in another language untU the simplicity hits and you think you knew what it meant aU along. Just let go the rope, stupid. Or: that's my mother outside, get off me, that's my mother. It struck me he might have gotten the bottles mixed up, poured developing chemicals into me. AU those Ingrids spilling off the black piano top like milky Ucorice in my mouth. 63 Bruno K. Oijer two poems translated from the Swedish by Ulla Ndtterqvist-Sawa You Feel the Swift Breeze You feel the swift breeze of sea air through a smoky casino you pick a man who is to bite your mascara and penetrate you later when he has left you open the curtains the very moment it strikes you that you have picked a quiet good hotel and how crueUy the dayUght has Uquidated the stars almost one by one 64 What Speaks for Us What speaks for us is that we are subjected to a crude sexual intercourse with everything's imperfection with everything's yearning for fulfillment nights and days of dog barks run back through history, medieval spring nights rush over the apple trees where young girls dressed in white linen inseminate themselves roll themselves pregnant in the grass 65 Boris Elise Levine Boris walks at night through our house. His face is green, some- tunes emerald-green like a Uzard's, but only when he's very hungry. I say, Don't go into the basement, and when my brother says, Why?, I say, Just don't. My brother cries a Uttle and my mother gets mad: Big baby. Then she says, You're scaring your brother. Miss Smarty- pants. When Boris walks up the stairs he keeps his eyes shut tight, not because he's asleep—because he's dead. The haUway's dark. My brother and I sit tight, and the Ught from the TV scrapes our faces blue. The mad doctor laughs, and I try not to spUl from the tray on my lap as I pass my brother his drink. When the doctor laughs again my brother and I press our heads to the back of the couch There's a boy who plays at the edge of the woods. AU by himself. A crowd gathers in town. They shout, wave torches. I'm letting my brother eat Cheerios and he sucks each mouthful to a soft whine, and his pyjamas crisp nice against my shoulder. The air crackles and pops, blue and white explosions. The boy looks up. Stumbles, faints. When something drags him deep into the woods the doctor laughs and laughs and I hold the tray tight as men and women scream, mouths cracked into o's of surprise. I stop chewing, mouth full of crumble. Listen, I teU my brother, and I nod toward the haUway. It's Boris. Can't you hear him? The TV spits fire, spits Ughtning and I can see my brother's face—how he just looks. I lean closer. March march march, I say, and I teU him how my ears pound against my head. I told my brother something. Last Saturday afternoon in the parking lot at the grocery store. My mother parked the car. Got out, then leaned back inside. She looked me hard in the eye. 66 When a strange man knocks on the door don't let him in. Don't let your brother out. She left and I roUed the car windows up tight. I locked the doors shut. I counted wait-wait, tick-tock like a clock. Then I said, sharp as scissors, Don't move. He kicked the seat in front of him, testing. We'd played this before: the steering wheel a throat, the dashboard aUve with tortures. I cUcked and growled. I said, BeUeve me. Air stUl as cliffs, like waiting for something to start or to stop—sUp over the waiting, faU aU the way forward. Then there's only my brother, sitting still in the car like he's frozen. Outside the car window, people push grocery carts, pineapples stiff through the tops of bags. People unlock their trunks, their doors, they get in their cars and go home. But I'm still saying, It'U get you—I don't stop. And after a wtule I do. Then my brother and I wait quietly in the car for my mother, but it seems like forever. And in the summer forever's very hot. In the winter it's very cold. I think Boris's heart is like that, misery thickened to heavy machinery and it turns and turns and inside its cold parts (somewhere in there) I can hear my own voice. The TV gurgles now, it hisses. Boris walks. After the first movie. After the crackers and toast. After the first half of the second movie, when my brother Ms asleep, and I wake him. Bed, I say. I take him down the haUway to his room. I put the covers over hun and he's so sleepy, tomorrow he won't remember how he got there. From the hallway I can see the TV flash and fade, and I don't look down the stairs. When I go back into the room and turn off the TV it smokes to grey then dies to black. I Ue in my bed. AU night long, Boris. His arms stretch in front of him and his hands open and shut, open and shut, very slowly, and they're white with wormy grey veins, and his hands are very strong, and cold. When I pee the bed it's hot and the hot- ness makes my legs warm. But then the pee grows cold, and smeUs bad, and I know my mother will yeU in the morning. You could never stop him. This is something I know, and I don't know if my brother knows it, but I do, and that's aU that matters. 67 So I never even try. What my brother and I know for sure is this: there are bad people. We're not so sure about good people. Bela. My brother and I hold hands above the vampire. Close our eyes. Bel-ah. Chase each other over the bed, under the bed. Tear around the waste- paper basket untU I bang into it—blue, green, yeUow construction paper spews out, and we trample it and yeU at each other, we yell at the top of our lungs—I vant to suck your blood—until our mother shouts up the stairs. You kids'U be the death of me. Bela's cape looks like my father's best tweed jacket. My brother picked the cape up before the paint dried, fingerprints on the black outside and on the red inside. 0. K. Bela's an English vampire who roams the moors by night. Very poUte when he greets his guests at Buckingham. Good eve-eh-ning. Step right this way, over here we have the famous Creature, the Creature from the Black Lagoon. The hardest to put together. First we lost his spiny taU. A star of claws went next. We take him out of the box and lay him on the floor and smaU bits of plastic surround him like a magic circle. Kick some away, by accident, and they're like a trail of crumbs, and we can Mow them to the Creature's wandering tail. My brother says, When. Supper's ready. You kids get down here now. Boris. Nothing's missing. His skin shines dull as a dead man's. Pants tattered, black like the black knobs on each side of his head. Only I can place him back in his box to rest, wrapped in green tissue paper and bits of sUver tinsel left over from last Christmas. Handle with care! Disease! Injury! My brother's still wondering about the Creature. It's fun knowing more than someone else. She'U have to go upstairs and clean up after us. She knows it. Fish sticks. Coke and canned peaches. She says she's the Shit-Lady, and aU we ever do is shit on her. That's aU people'U ever do to you. You and your so-caUed friends. (Listen to the mouth on her, my father says.) After supper my brother and I go outside. We spUt a Vachon cake. In the morning dragonflies ride double in the ditch and the grass flattens 68 damp under your feet. But at seven o'clock the trees darken to fists and the birds cry loud and long and you can look for them as long as you like and never see one at aU. We turn the comer from HUlcrest Crescent onto Princess Street. It's almost summer-warm. The faU leaves rot sweet into my nose. That's where Wendy feU off her bike when the chain grabbed her foot and she tried to turn the handlebars but the gravel jerked her tires. Off she went—ten feet at least straight through the air and into the ditch, and her skirt flew around her head. (When I told my father, he wanted to know, Could you see her bare arse? Yes, you could, I said. You could see her bare arse.) And yesterday I went looking, and I found a yeUow streamer from Wendy's handlebars, wrapped tight around a rock in the ditch, but I never gave it back. Underwear, the bare tops of Wendy's legs. Arse. I didn't used to know how to ride a bike. My cousin Ruth showed me. We were at her house by the lake. Uncle Roy feU asleep on the floor, after my father took my mother and Ruth's mother shopping. Uncle Roy drinks. Like candy to a baby, my mother says. My father says, Imagine, a grown man. My mother says, what do you expect. Mumma spoiled him. Ruth and I went outside. We had purple Ucorice strings, to tie together or braid, and foamy powder kegs that fizz up your nose when you suck the Ucorice wick. She took me behind her house (Shack, my father caUs it) and I found a frog. Ruth said, No, it's a toad. The lake shone blue. My nose hurt. Ruth said, Come over here. Hurry. But there were nails everywhere (junk, junk heap) so I had to go slow. Big boards, rusted metal growing up like grass. She stood beside the tool shed, holding two comers of a big dirty sheet, as high as my waist, higher, lumpy, orange-brown. Dirty water and dead bugs caught in its folds. Abra-cadabra. A hush like wings flapping. And then from the house a door slammed, and my cousin Ruth had that big orange sheet only half-way up. Breeze catching at the edges—and I froze, too. My father calling to me. He must have left our mothers in town, they drive him crazy, two old broads. We could hear him, kicking the garbage can by the steps. Calling me. Saying, Little bitch, when I didn't answer. I looked at Ruth. Pull it off, I thought. PuU it. And when my father caUed again I thought, Don't. 69 A door slammed a second time, and the house was quiet. She puUed off the cover. Her new bike shone blue, like it'd been skimmed off the top of the lake. We didn't say anything for a moment. Nice bike. She said, Ride it! So I did, straight down the path behind the house and into the woods, and the lake flashed like coins through slots of trees, sUver, sUver-blue, sUver and the blue of the bike high above the lake. I rode that bike fast—and what Ruthie told everybody later was wrong, I rode it reaUy far, then I stopped. And lying between rocks and roots on the path, I could see the blood on my knee was even brighter than Ruthie's bike. My brother and I check the ditch on Princess Street again. Nothing there, so we climb back out. I can see Wendy and her older sister Marie, but they're far off, at least half-way up the street and close to WiUowdale Avenue where the cars aU go. Wendy and Marie are talking to Kathy Martin, who's taUer than Marie, taUer than even the boys in the Grade Five class at school. Their shorts dust to grey in the twilight. I want to catch up, but the stones from the side of Princess Street catch in the backs of my flip-flops, and each time I stop to shake the stones out my brother says, Rather we go home. Four-year-old in blue seersucker pyjamas and a straw tourist-hat from Mexico, fringed with red pom-poms. Rather he do this, Rather that. Know-it-aU, my mother says to me sometimes. My brother's face a tight hard rock that won't budge. His big words make me angry because now it's him, not me, who thinks he knows. His cake's gone, but I still have the wrapper to Uck clean. We have to go up the street. I wave my tongue across the plastic in slow hard circles like I'm waving a wand, and the caramel tastes so good. He's looking at the wrapper. Too afraid to turn back without me. The streetUghts are still off. I want to see them come on, aU at once. But aU I see are the twirly bats as they fall through the near-dark around us. When I get to 224 Princess Street I stop. He's ten steps behind me so I turn around and wait. Dark-green curtains in the window, fuU of shadow. Wrought-iron railing up the dark-brown steps. Cracked. Steep. Even the untrimmed shrubs that line the long drive. He catches up. Look. 70 But he can't, he's so scared he runs and it's funny, how his arms and legs jerk in different directions at once like they might snap right off. I pass the house. Curtains move. (I'm sure.) Run. In Kathy Martin's kitchen the spoons go somewhere else. I hold one in my hand and reach up and puU open the white drawer, but only half-way. Kathy Martin laughs and says, It always sticks. Reaches down and puUs it open for me. Wendy and her older sister Marie wipe the pots and pans. Nobody turns the kitchen Ught on so the streetUght from Willowdale Avenue shines in the window. Kathy Martin opens the fridge door. That Ught shines too. I think I hear a bus go by. Not sure, so I don't say. When I look inside the drawer I look hard at the tray but I can only see forks where my mother would put the spoons. I can see plastic corn cobs at the bottom of the tray, and I don't even know what they're for. My brother sits in a chair in the comer. I can't see him too weU. He has his hat on, and he's quiet. Looking around, swinging his legs. Nobody teUs him to stop. I look harder at the tray, she could take the spoon-drying away from me. I look down at my hand—pretty spoon, so smooth, and warming, now, against my palm. Red handle, metal joints with bits of food caked in them. What the washing missed. Crusted with pinky cream, and the smooth round inside stiU streaked from when somebody sucked their last spoonful, too fuU to eat another mouthful. FuU to the brim. My brother's laughing. Kathy gives him a popsicle. But to Wendy and Marie and me she only gives taU glasses of water. Then Kathy Martin says, Spoons over there, and points to the left of the knives. I drop my spoon in, dry two more. When Kathy Martin's father comes into the kitchen he turns the Ught on. He looks like my father asleep, face twisted swoUen like a baUoon the day after it's pumped up. Air shrinking inside. At first Kathy Martin's father just looks at us. He's been sleeping. His chest is hairy and his underwear bags loose around his legs. He bangs his fist down on the counter and the still-dirty dishes bounce up and clink. Rubs his hands over his face. Walks over to the table and puUs out a chair, slowly tUts it back. He makes a noise and I think he's saying some- 71 thing, but Kathy Martin and Marie hold onto their glasses and don't say a word, so I can't reaUy teU. Oh. My brother's popsicle melts cherry-red down his arm. Sticky. He doesn't notice. I'm not going to clean it up, I don't care. Wendy starts to hiccough, she always does when she's scared—she can't stop. I think, Shut up. Please. Then Kathy Martin's father says, Jesus, very slowly. Jee-sus. And he lets the chair faU. Fuckers, he says. Get the fuck home. Boris, Ups seepy-fat bUsters. Listen, I teU my brother. Listen. He does. My brother and I yelling, hot with hot laughs, dizzy. And once, my mother came into my room late at night. This is something I never teU. Wake up. We're leaving. She dressed me, but she forgot one sock, and I liked how my bare foot felt inside my boot—strange. Like someone else's foot. My heel rubbing against the felt liner. We walked to the park on Spring Garden Avenue. She talked fast. Words I couldn't put together, and by themselves they didn't make sense. Brown-gloved hand on my arm. She brushed my hair out of my eyes. The Ughts from the houses on the street above the park looked warm. She was laughing. Saying things like, Oh, and the time, then laughing before she finished talking and holding my hand and jerking it when she got excited. Then she laughed and rode the sUde, even though it was wet with snow. I watched to make sure she didn't sUp backward and bump her head, the way she sometimes did for my brother and me. After the sUde she wanted to ride the teeter-totter, so I sat on tiie opposite end from her and she laughed as she jerked me into the air. At first I laughed, too. And then I didn't—riding high-up and the houses on the street above us silent and frozen. And I held on tight because I thought I might faU, squeezed hard against the giant arc of rusted metal creaking like a breath held up or down on the in or out, aU that still cold air turning inside me. My eyes watered hard against the sharp night—I knew there was no one to catch me. UntU up that high aU I could see were the black spaces between the up and down swing of blue and red metal, the houses just blurs of Ught. 72 A blurry star moving at the top of the hill. My mother stopped. We walked up the hUl and got into the car. My father drove us home. She was quiet. He said, Don't teU your friends about your crazy mother. I'm eight. I'm ten. I'm twelve. Sometimes I don't think about much, being older, and the old games so stupid. I go out with my friends. My brother stays in his room and adds this to that with his chemistry set. Test tubes foam, surge with secret formulas. Break. Guess he doesn't know much, like how to put the parts together. Snap, snap crackle pop. And sometimes. Boris only a dream at night, foggy, a man in my room. Sitting in a chair. Go back to sleep, he says. He moves his hands over my legs, is it cold. Can I run. Maybe it's hot. My father always says, Go back to sleep. And there was that time once, at the end of Princess Street, before you turn onto HUlcrest Crescent and walk the three doors to our house, when I stopped running and turned around. I can see him up the road, moving through the dark between the streetUghts towards me. He's lost his Mexican hat, and as he gets closer I can see his mouth snap open and shut, open and shut. Very fast. I can't hear a thing. Or I hear something, like something's spinning or chug-chugging only it's not my brother and it's not me, or is it. And coming up to me like that on Princess Street his face looked funny. AU surprised and jangly, like he was aU beaten up inside. He was crying, and I hit him and hit him, we were so afraid, and I was so mad. And that's what it was like, being young and having a Uttle brother- just no good people, maybe. And a Creamsicle, or maybe a chocolate float. You eat it fast. You try not to make a mess. 73 Sara Berkeley Paddington The taxis line up in the sooty air, I wait for a later train. Above us aU a net is cast in the gloom It hangs above the clocks you can hardly see For grime. They have given up the struggle, They wander in time as the platforms thicken And grow lean, I wish I were not this fault disheveUed me With the stoppable heart, always an eye out For the leap of Ught, The shaft of yeUow I turn from, Healed for a speU. The sun is red, The ordinary Uves Are mnning out on narrow raUs, The engine growls at the rear, I stop my ears, I turn from the snub end of the beast, Ashamed that the sound Can so dismantle my peace of mind. I look to the three arches for black grace, A sense of Ught coming apart And coming together, up in the birdnote rafters The organ-music heights; I think I have to climb down, get on a train, And sit tight. 74 Alan R. Wilson two poems Equipment Failure First the telephone went dead. Then the wind lost its murmuring tongue as it circled the eaves. Then the fair-weather cloud dropping rain like a ruptured bladder. And the sun not burning my eyes though I stare at it. And the angry figure in wing-shaped splints, bashing his trumpet, blow by blow, to dust. 75 Elemental Hydrogen How its passion for attachment to neighbours links us to its world. There: bonds with oxygen, bonds with nitrogen. Here: water for faces, ammonia for floors. But we suspect other possibUities. Men whip around though nobody's there. Women in skirts recoU. Helium Inert. Unreactive. Colourless. Its own indifference the air that floats it away. Lithium This lightest of metals— on wing, almost, at the blacksmith's ear. 76 use me, it whispers, your horses will fly. Carbon Sleight-of-hand. Deft shuffle of atoms, each more unlikely, more complex than the last. But for its best trick, Usten... (breathing). Oxygen The wrong word spoken or spark shot from a narrowed eye preceding (barely) conflagration. Arsenic An interest in what dances not just in the wind. How it sUps through back doors into their parties to eavesdrop, to study their motion in pairs, to slide a tart tongue into wine that alters them so. And then when the winds inside them fly out and every guest stops twitching on the floor— Why? it cries through a sizzle of tears, Why are their bodies so still? 77 Uranium Heavy with electrons which makes it unstable, like a mother under stress, who hits an obstacle and bursts into tears. Unnilpentium Coached toward existence in labs, it reaches for shape, wavers, and is gone. 78 Washtucna Paul Rawlins Down TheU Road outside of Washtucna, Washington, the cobalt blue of the south horizon at sunset marks the far-off line the saU- ing men of Christopher Columbus feared. A mile off West 26, first to the north then to the south, you'U see white houses, and they'll each have a bam and a couple of sUos, a windmill, and a pine windbreak. And around it aU, in front to the highway and behind back to the edge of the world, is grain and grain and grain. It's two hundred plus miles to Seattle, and that sunset takes up a curved third of the sky in oranges at the middle, through the dirty roses, and into grey-violets and blue. The whole outdoors curves with the Une of the sky like an amphitheater, and for contour you'll see a tractor and harrow in silhouette on a liill, ramshackle lonely off West 26. Mauren Cowley, the girl I was seeing last summer, wondered who put up phone lines along every mile of highway and down every crossroad. It breaks my heart to think about it. And I wiU not, not for anything in this world right up to the very edge, stay here and be a farmer. Dad thinks I'U come around and study agricultural science here at WSU. "A college degree is worth something these days," he says. "Everything is agri-business now. CoUege wUl gear you up for the market end of things." He sees a future in organic farming. "The people want it," he says. "They want food clean and safe, environmentally responsible. They want it au naturel." If they want it cut with a sickle and bound in shocks stacked like Uttle sheds, he'U oblige if it adds up to a nickel more a bushel net. My dad is a farmer who works the land. He loves it like a tool, not for how it smeUs after rain or how it feels to crumble a clod of it between his fingers—not if that clod had too much clay or sand; not if there are too many stones or too much alkali. No one abuses the land like farmers, who pour their crankcase oU down a ditch bank or use old tin rubbish for landfill and leave rusting machinery to sit. It's the growers who erect and string and repair endless lines of fence chopping up the countryside in what amounts to a bigger task than the telephone lines aU down Highway 26. 79 "What do you know about it?" my dad said to me once. "As much as I ever wiU," I told him straight. Last summer, on Tuesday nights and Friday nights, I drove West 26 to see Mauren Cowley, the short-order girl at Mackenzie's Drive-in. I'd take her home so she could shower off the grease smell and change. Sometimes I'd hang out with her Uttle brother while I waited and shoot frogs with his twenty-two. He didn't care whether I or anybody else took our Mauren or not. He bummed rides in my convertible and swore that he could drive, wrule Mauren dried her hair. Then Mauren and I would drive the forty-three rrules down 26 into OtheUo to be someplace different. We'd drive past wheat and into hay and the sprinkling pipes along Irby Road, stretched out like high kickers arm in arm, swirling water out in feathers and crawling on their wheels. By the time we were over the tracks and past the old elevators by Lucy Road, the water in the fields was flashing like high beams out of the end of the rows, and I'd play the music so loud Mauren and I couldn't talk, whUe we blasted down the highway till the flashing yeUow "STOP HERE" at the weigh station and then the flashing red at the crossroad for Othello and Yakima or Moses Lake. Then I would turn the music down and ask Mauren what she wanted to do. Mauren Cowley would shrug; then we would go eat and then most times see a movie. I liked Mauren Cowley without ever meaning to and without ever loving her. Mauren Cowley was dumb and she had a horsey face. She looked wall-eyed when she had her hair puUed back, the way she wore it slopping together shakes and Dagwood sandwiches at Mackenzie's. Which is where I met her because you wouldn't meet her anyplace else. She looked good from a distance, through the glass of the kitchen window from the gas pumps. She looked like some mousey-haired girl in a pink T-shirt and rolled up jeans who you didn't know. Inside, I was disappointed by her horsey face, but by the time I got home, I wasn't remembering her as being so bad. When I went back the next week, she looked more tan, which seemed to help, and so did some of the hair that had sUpped out of the ponytaU. I said heUo when I paid for the gas, and I looked at the name on her blue badge. I asked her could I get a cheeseburger. "Unhuh," Mauren said. Mauren got started on my quarter-pound double cheese at the griU, and a short woman in cat's-eye glasses and an apron came out of the Ladies. She asked had I been helped. 80 "Mauren's fixing me up," I said. Mauren stopped, and if you can know someone's smiling whUe their back's still turned, I'U say she did. Cat's-eyes rang me up after Mauren finished, and I asked what time they closed. Cat's-eyes squinted and checked my receipt in her head. "Eleven o'clock," she said. "Twelve on Fridays." Mauren Cowley came out about 11:20. Cat's-eyes came out behind her and locked the door. A fat man in a pickup was waiting for one of them. Cat's-eyes looked straight at me and she said, "You need a ride home, Mauren?" "No," Mauren said. "I'm her cousin," I said from across the parking lot. "Like heU," Cat's-eyes said. She got in the truck with the fat man, and they sat with the motor mnning and the headUghts off. I walked over and asked Mauren if she needed a ride, and she told me no. "Do you work every night?" I said. "No." "What nights don't you work?" "It changes." "What nights usually? What nights next week?" "Tuesday," she said. "And Friday or Saturday." "Do you want to go somewhere Tuesday?" I said. Mauren shrugged, and I edged up beside her. "Who's that?" I said. Cat's-eyes was watching, so I pointed at her. "Clara," Mauren said. "She looks like the wrath of God." "I work with Becca sometimes," Mauren said. The fat man switched on his headUghts and pinned us to the waU like escaping prisoners. I turned my back to them and stood in front of Mauren. "What time are you off Tuesday?" I said. "Five o'clock," she said. "In the afternoon." All summer long we blasted down 26 with the music loud enough to make our ears bleed and the wind blowing out whatever Mauren had done with her hair, until she stopped doing anything at aU more than washing out the smell of the griU and tying it back into the ponytaU. We ate at drive-ins. Mauren liked it when we went to an old-type A&W where you ordered over a speaker in the Ughted menu, and the girls brought your food out on a tray they hung from the window of your car. She liked to make the orders difficult. She'd order without pickles and want root beer and ice in separate cups. 81 "What do you do that for?" I said. "You like pickles." Mauren shrugged. "Sometimes," she said. She'd watch the girls in their short, candy-striped skirts and chew at the comer of her mouth. Then mostly we'd see a movie, where Mauren would do everything she was supposed to do. She would laugh when things were funny, and when things got close she would squeeze my arm or my hand, and if the movie got scary she would scream and sometimes pick her feet up off the floor, as if under her chair was a space like under her bed, with hands waiting to reach out and grab her and puU her away. We would kiss a little in the movie, and then more somewhere along the way home. Sometimes back behind the old elevators by Lucy Road, or down some other crossroad and out in a field, with the top always down and the stars always up. And once on the train tracks, waiting to feel the tremors and the rumble. The rain was the most lonely thing out on our place. I would lie on my stomach and watch out the front door. The house was dark as twiUght inside, and the rain outside was cold and fell in big drops and straight lines. It fell on the fields aU the way to the edge of the world. I would call Mauren at work. I would try to make my voice sound like I thought her father's would, and I would ask to speak with her please. Becca would call for her, or Cat's-eyes would bark, "Mauren." "What are you doing?" Mauren would say after she said heUo. "Nothing," I would teU her. "I'm not doing anything." "Why aren't you working?" she would say. "It's raining. Why aren't you?" "Troy," she'd say quiet into the phone, "I'm going to get in trouble." "So?" I'd say. "Troy, I gotta go." "Go," I'd say. "Good-bye." I would call her back aU afternoon, and Mauren would be scrambling to answer the phone. She would make up things to say out loud for Becca or Cat's-eyes to hear. She would say, "No, she isn't working this shift. I don't know, but I can check the schedule." And I would teU her, yes, check the schedule. I would teU her sometimes, "Check and see when Mauren Cowley is working," and she'd read back to me her own schedule for the next week: "Monday, Tuesday, Friday days; Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday close." She would quote prices to me. "That would be $2.99. Plus tax. It's on a special." Always plus tax. Or it would be the gas price. "A doUar twenty-three. But there's three cents a gaUon discount for cash, and that would be a doUar twenty." 82 And a hundred times she only said, "I'm sorry, you must have the wrong number. This is 7879." Becca would beat Mauren to the phone and teU me, "Mauren's run off with a trucker." Cat's-eyes would gripe at Mauren about how she wasn't getting paid to talk on the phone and this was a business number, hand her the phone every time, then scream at her when she hung up, Mauren told me. If I picked up Mauren after I had caUed her aU afternoon, Becca would teU me I was siUy. Mauren always said, "I'm going to lose my job." "You don't like your job," I'd say. "It's the only job there is." We had rain almost two straight weeks in June. And I lay in the dark, calling Mauren at work to get her to the edge of trouble. Mackenzie's was the only job there was. Mauren asked questions like a baby doll, like nobody told her anything, not ever in her life. She said, "What is it about unleaded gasoline?" "It's lighter," I would teU her. She asked me where I was going to college in the faU. "Let's go see," I said. Mauren put on my sunglasses, and we drove a hundred rruies an hour to just outside of Pullman. We crept once around campus for a look and then turned around and rocketed back to Washtucna. "What are you going to take at coUege?" Mauren asked me. "Women," I said. It's what I always said. "What else?" Mauren said. "I don't know. Maybe business, maybe science, some sort of engineering. " "I'd like to go to travel school," Mauren said. "My dad says go learn to cut hair, but I'd like to go to travel school and learn aU about traveUing." Her dad did say that; he said he wished he knew how to cut hair. He would set up a shop in his spare room and barber for three dollars a head on weekends and make a mint. "On who?" I'd ask Mauren. "Have you been in an airplane?" Mauren said. I said, "Yes." I Ued. "Where did you go?" "Texas," I said. "To see my uncle." And once, wfule we were parked out in a field, with the sky down low, being a tease about rain, my Ups were bruised from kissing and cut one place from a jagged crown Mauren had on one front tooth. 83 "I get the worst of this," I said. Mauren had her legs stretched out over my lap and was trying roll the window up and down with her foot. She said, "Sometimes can you wish for things and then still get them?" "No," I said, "not that I've ever seen." She reached her hand over the car door without thinking about it and tugged up a stalk of grain. "No," she said. "It doesn't ever seem like it." She was weaving the stalk into her hair, winding it around the ponytail tUl the head of grain stood up like a single feather in an Indian bonnet. "Pocahontas," I said, "white squaw. That's stealing." "There's a lot," she said, looking around the field. "Didn't you wish for this car? Isn't this the kind of car you wish for?" "No," I said. "I bought it." I taught Mauren how to downshift and power into a turn, showed her peeling out and burning rubber, made her pump gas and check the oU. When we caught air coming off bumps down the dirt roads, she said, "Isn't it bad for the car?" "When it's gone, it's gone," I told her. I taught Mauren how to swear, something she could use. I worked all day that summer for wages from my dad. I rode in a high- cabbed tractor with my shut off and the radio turned up, and chopped grain for nules. I could drive an hour in one direction and cut a twenty- foot swath that added up to nothing. If I stared at the horizon, the edge, I'd be standing stUl, like I was on a giant paddle wheel, and the grain moved past in a river along my side and underneath me. I used to climb up on the cab and yell. I bounced up and down in the seat till I broke the springs, and I jerked the steering wheel at the same time, trying to yank it free. I spit out the window at the grain and took leaks on it and practiced aU the words I'd teach Mauren and make her yell out the car on Highway 26 into the wind. Mauren and I went to OtheUo to see fireworks on the Fourth of July. She was late getting off work. I waited for her outside of Mackenzie's, lighting off firecrackers in a ditch down the road with a bunch of Uttle kids. "We've been swamped," Mauren said. Her hair stuck to her face and she flapped her T-shirt because it was sticking, too. "Clara wasn't going to let me go." Clara was watching us through the glass, and I held up a dud firecracker like I was going to flip it at the gas pumps for her to see, untU she started around the counter. "Let's go, "I said. Mauren's family was loading into a pickup when I pulled onto the lawn. 84 "I'U hurry," Mauren said. "What time do they start?" "When it gets dark," I told her. After her famUy left, I walked into Mauren's house. I heard the shower going, and a radio. The radio was in Mauren's room, the one she shared with two Uttle sisters. There were bunks, and under an open window with yeUow curtains a twin bed that would be Mauren's. The bed was white with a metal gate headboard like in old hospitals. The room was picked up neat except for Mauren's jeans and T-shirt on the floor. When the shower stopped behind me, I waited for her, standing in the doorway. I had never seen Mauren even in shorts yet. She took her time, and she came out in jeans and a sleeveless sweater, toweUing her hair. She stopped when she saw me. "Did everybody leave?" she said. "Yes," I said. She waited for me to move before she walked into the bedroom. I stood back in the doorway and Mauren put on her canvas deck shoes. "Do you like fireworks?" she said. I shrugged. Mauren pulled her hair back into the ponytail and daubed on Up gloss. "Do you want to eat here? There's salads and things. My mom left a note," Mauren said. "You don't want to," I said. "We could," Mauren said. Then she shrugged away the offer and dropped Up gloss and gum into her purse. We watched fireworks from the car, picking through cartons of Chinese food Mauren had wanted to try, but she didn't like it, only the Uttle strips of meat and the pea pods. The fireworks, the gold ones that hung and dripped, made me think of wiUow trees, I told Mauren. She was leaning on my shoulder, sucking on snow peas and pointing. "What makes the colours?" she said. "It's minerals. Sulphur is the blue; phosphorus is white; cadmium makes red." I made it up. "I don't know what makes the green." "Sugar," she said. "Sugar burns green." I didn't know if it did or not. "My mom's going to Seattle," Mauren said after another burst, the ones that pop into screaming tadpoles in the sky. "What for?" "Dancing," Mauren said. "She goes every year. She meets her old girlfriends and they go out dancing and see movies and flirt with men." We watched a huge blast, a baU of red, white, and blue that exploded out and down and down so that we ducked. "What does your old man think of it?" I said. 85 "He sends her," Mauren said. "He doesn't like to dance." I figured then Mauren's father was about as dumb as his daughter. "Do you ever go?" I said. "No," she said. I told Mauren my dad didn't even take the hoUday off. Her father was a mailman of some sort, but not the kind that deUvered house to house. "He picks it up in Pullman," Mauren said. "He takes maU to aU the Uttle towns." She said did I know their cat had died of old age. She liked Washtucna. A white comet went straight up from the ground and didn't explode—it just tipped over and went out. We sat till midnight Ustening to the radio play in the dark, watching the cars pass. We drove home at the speed limit, with our eyes open for cops. Mauren started wearing rings on her thumbs, then two or three on a finger, stacked above and below the knuckle. She kept them in her purse and strung them on or swapped them around, and that would keep her attention for ten or twenty minutes wlvile we drove. "They look like puU tops," I said. They looked like sUver, but they stuck to magnets. They would suck up in the car vac like loose change. I'd find them down my shirt when I undressed at nights. When I gave them back to Mauren, she dumped them in her purse. Mauren is the first girl I slept with, which is a funny way to say it, since there wasn't any sleeping. It was down by the grain elevators, just off the tracks, waiting for the train again. I thought it would be like the music, when it's so good you want to take it inside of you and the only thing you can do is turn it louder and then louder, until your stomach starts to shake, and you're waiting to come apart. I thought it would be like that. She is the only woman I've ever slept with, then she cried on the way home. Sometimes, after I'd drop Mauren in Washtucna, or on nights when I couldn't see her, Sunday nights, I drove the road myself. I would putter down to Washtucna like taking a lap up to the starting Une, and then I would drive the distance back to OtheUo as fast as I could, and sometimes without Ughts, which was like holding my breath, waiting for something to happen. And I wanted to be standing alongside the road to hear myself tear by, like a rush, like a buUet. And to hear the screaming fade, and to reach out and touch the red flash without breaking my hand, only burning the tips of my fingers. 86 Sometimes I imagined dying in a crash. Mauren would come to my funeral and drop those Uttle sUver rings in my casket. Mauren told me in August, "I don't want you to come see me anymore. " "What, are you pregnant?" I said. Cat's-eyes probably read my Ups. Mauren only looked at me funny. "What's the matter?" I said. She looked down at her shoes that were fuzzy from the soap she used to mop the drive-in floor. "I've got a boyfriend," she said. "What boyfriend?" I said. Her dad came in the pickup and waved to me. Then he looked at Mauren, looked puzzled, and she climbed in. I shrugged, and he waved again and drove Mauren Cowley home. On Sunday at home, I washed the car and listened to Dad yammer off the front steps. The same old thing. "Pull up the Lincoln and do that, too." After the soap and wax, halfway into the buffing, he'd say, "Do it right." In the afternoon I drove out to the motorcross at Washtucna. Mauren's brother was there, and trying to score rides. He was sitting on a Kawasaki decked out in muddy chrome and lime-green plastic. "How old is your sister, reaUy?" I said. "Fifteen," he said. "Hey, what happened man' I seen her new boy." "Nothing," I said. "Nada." "Hey, check this," he said. He laid out on the bike with his face stuck over the handle bars and twisted the throttle and squeezed the clutch. There is no Ue in this world like the Ue about love. The Ues of science explain it best. Valence sheU electron pair repulsion theory and gravity and the polar ends of magnetic fields. The logics of repulsion and attraction and the fascination between two bodies—that I underlined in a notebook because I thought I knew what it meant. I'm learning aU the things I didn't know about the world now, taking physics and chemistry. I'm puU- ing mediocre grades, having a hard time with the math. Dad says no more meal ticket next year. He pats the hood of my car and says there's tuition and books, right there. There are two things you do here in coUege, and they are the same everywhere, I guess, and they are to drink and to get laid. I can't drink. I get sick. My body has no tolerance, not even for beers. I've known this since I was fifteen, and at first I tried to get around it. I drank and I got sick, but I told myself it was like lifting weights and bmlding up your wind with distance running, but I stiU got sick every time, and I quit. 87 And I've cut out the other for a wtiile, too. Not that it isn't easy to come by, not that it isn't dropping down from the trees and crawling in through the window. Not that I don't know my roommate's lacrose stick outside the curtains means I'm on my own to find anywhere to go but home for the next hour. But I've figured something out, something about the Ue of it aU. Sometimes when I think of Washtucna, and the fields, and the roads with the telephone lines swinging down them off West 26, I swear, I'll just keep going east. Down to Cheyenne and Chicago, Cleveland, aU the "C" towns, not for "Cowley," but just because one comes after the other in a line. And I think that someday maybe I'U be in love, and that could make the difference. 88 Contributors John Belisle is a Vancouver designer and illustrator. He lives in Vancouver and is in the Graphic Design Program at the Emily Carr School of Art. Sara Berkeley was born in Dublin in 1967. She has published two collections of poetry, Penn and Home-Movie Nights, and one collection of short stories, The Swimmer in the Deep Blue Dream, all available from Thistledown Press. Suzanne Buffam was born in Montreal 20 years ago. She now lives on the west coast and is working on an undergraduate degree in Creative Writing at the University of Victoria. Her work has previously appeared in The Liar and The Capilano Review. J.A. Hamilton's most recent book is July Nights. Her new collection, Steam-Cleaning Love, is due out in the Fall. Richard Harrison's most recent book is Recovering the Naked Man. He lives in Toronto and is working on a new book, Hero of the Play. Susan L. Holbrook is a graduate student at the University of Calgary. This spring her work also appears in West Coast Line and Journal of Canadian Poetry. Elise Levine has work published or forthcoming in PRISM international 31:2, The Malahat Review, and The Fiddlehead. She is completing a collection of short fiction. Mark Miller lives in Shoalhaven Heads, Australia, with his wife Jenny and sons Jack and Roy. His first prize-winning volume of poetry, Conversing With Stones, was published in 1989. His second volume, Fixing Shadows, is with his publishers. Lisa Moore's work has appeared in Canadian Fiction Magazine, Tickleace, The New Quarterly, Event (upcoming), and PRISM international 31:2. She has also had radio plays produced on CBC. Ulla Natterqvist-Sawa is a translator of Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian. Her translations have appeared in PRISM international, The Literary Review, and in Swedish literary journals. She has work forthcoming in Beacons, an anthology issued by the American Translators Association. Bruno Oijer is a Swedish "Rock-poet" who has published five books of poetry. The poems printed in this issue are from his collection While the Poison Acts, for which he was given an award by the Swedish Authors Association. 89 Paul Rawlins was bom and raised in Utah, and took his BA and MA degrees in English at Brigham Young University. He lives in the Provo and Salt Lake City area and works as a freelance editor and writer. Previous work has appeared in Paris Transcontinental and Short Story. Dorothy Speak's first collection of short stories, The Counsel of the Moon, was published in 1990 by Random House Canada. She lives in Ottawa. Alpay K. Ulku's recent work has been published in The Black Warrior Review, The Malahat Review, and Poor Tom, and was broadcast on National Public Radio's "Iowa Radio Project." This is his second appearance in PRISM. Alpay lives in Iowa City. Alan R. Wilson has published in, among others, Canadian Literature, Chicago Review, The Dalhousie Review, The Fiddlehead, and The Malahat Review. In 1991 he received second prize in the poetry category of the CBC Literary Competition. The poems in this issue are from his recently completed book, Animate Objects. 90 PRISM! international $2000 1st Prize and 5 Prizes of $200 plus publication payment Judge: to be announced Deadline: December 1, 1993 For entry form and rules, please send a SASE (outside Canada enclose SAE with IRC) to: Fiction Contest Prism international Department of Creative Writing University of British Columbia Vancouver, B.C. V6T IZl Canada 2^\ Five million Canadians cannot read or write well enough to function in today's society.* Every Canadian has a fundamental right to literacy. You can help. Read to your children. Write to your member of parliament. Become a literacy volunteer. Make a donation. For more information, contact: Canadian Give the Gift of Literacy Foundation 35 Spadina Road Toronto, Ont. M5R 2S9 Tel: (416) 975-9366 Fax: (416) 975-1839 The book and periodical industry of Canada supports the Canadian Give the Gift of Literacy Foundation. * Southam Literacy Sur^y 1987. Announcing the First Annual Prairie Fire Short Fiction Contest! First Prize: $300. • Second Prize: $200. • Third Prize: $100. All winners will receive publication in Prairie Fire 14,4 (Winter, 1993) plus payment for publication. (Honourable Mentions may be published —and paid—as well.) Final judges: Sandra Birdsell is the author of Agassiz Stories, The Missing Child and The Chrome Suite. Carol Shields is the author of Swann.A Mystery, Various Miracles, The Republic of Love and numerous other volumes. Rules: Submissions previously published or accepted for publication elsewhere cannot be considered. Entrant anonymity is preserved throughout the judging. Please do not identify yourself on the submission, but include your name, address, telephone number, and entry title on a separate page. If you wish to be informed of the results, please enclose a self-addressed envelope with sufficient Canadian postage. (Contributors outside Canada, please send International Reply Coupons.) Manuscripts will not be returned. Maximum length for submissions is 5000 words. Entries must be typed, double-spaced on 8 1/2" x 11" paper, clipped not stapled. Entry Fee per story is $16 (includes gst). This entitles you to a three issue subscription to Prairie Fire for yourself or for a friend. (Those already subscribing will receive a three issue extension unless they designate otherwise.) Deadline: Submissions for the 1993 Short Fiction Contest must be postmarked no later than June 30, 1993. Personally delivered entries will not be accepted after 4 p.m. of that date. Address your entry to: Short Fiction Contest, Prairie Fire, 423-100 Arthur Street, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3B 1H3. Tel. (204) 943-9066; FAX (204) 942-1555. (Please make cheque or money order payable to Prairie Fire.) c CU o> v_ u en DC ro o -C to T3 C ra c o U Poetry • Novel/Novella » Short Fiction, Stage Plays * Screen & TV Creative Writing B.F.A. The University of British Columbia offers a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing. Students choose ^three genres to work in from a wide rtfiEBfe^ESsKi range of courses, in- C^^^^^^^^P eluding: Poetry, Novel/ Short Fic- Plays, Screen Radio Plays, Children, Non- Translation. All instruction Novella, tion, Stage & TV Plays, Writing for Fiction and is in small workshop format or tutorial. Faculty: Sue Ann Alderson Hart Hanson George McWhirter Keith Maillard Jerry Newman Linda Svendsen Bryan Wade For further information, please write to: Department of Creative Writing University of British Columbia Buchanan E462 - 1866 Main Mall Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1W5 Sujium • sAey ojpey • sAe|d ai >8 U88.cs • sAey ageis 'uoipjj 70 CD a. o' CD < 3 ro ST O o 3 CD 3 Q. 3" O Poetry Sara Berkeley Suzanne Buffam Richard Harrison Susan L. Holbrook Mark Miller Alpay K. Ulku Alan R. Wilson Fiction J. A. Hamilton Elise Levine Lisa Moore Paul Rawlins Dorothy Speak In Translation Bruno Oijer ISSN 0032.8790
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