He whooped, and she thought, in spite of everything, he likes me.
Rizla started telling them about this great recording contract his sister had just got.
"What's her music like?" Síle asked.
He shrugged. "New Age Aboriginal, I think she calls it. She performs as Falling Feather because she says Ann Vandeloo sounds like a brand of apple pie. So there'll be a big party at her place all next week; you two should ride down on the bike," he said, pointedly leaving out Gwen. "Unless it's raining again."
Apparently the summer was proving weirdly cool and wet, though it seemed scalding to Síle. Rizla started warning her about tornadoes. "On the highway, never try to outrun one or your ass is dead meat. Jump out of your car and dig your way into any kind of hollow."
"Don't let him scare you off," Gwen told her. "Immigrants from all over the world are banging on the door to come settle in southwestern Ontario. Not that it's too hard to get a visa if you've got the skills," she added hastily.
"I'm sure," murmured Síle, amused at the lack of subtlety. Jude caught her eye and gave her an embarrassed little grin.
"Why would I be trying to scare her off?" sneered Rizla. "We could do with a looker like Síle, there's so many dog-uglies around here."
Gwen met his stare.
"I reckon Síle should move right in, right away," he said, his finger indicating the bedroom upstairs, "jizz the old house up a bit."
"Work at Dudovick's?" suggested Síle.
"Why not, I bet you'd make a mean turkey plucker."
"Or maybe I could cash in my mutual funds, buy that garage-café place where you work, and be your boss."
That threw him, but only for a split second, she could tell; soon he was down on his knees demonstrating how readily he'd lick her boots. Gwen was looking revolted.
Later they played Pictionary. Gwen's drawings were hilariously bad, while Rizla's big hands proved expert with a pencil; when Síle got muddled about the differences between a whale and a seal, Rizla made her a handy diagram of each as well as a dolphin, a shark, and an otter for good measure.
"How come you're such an expert?" asked Gwen, dubious.
"I did work my way round the world when I was twenty-five," he reminded her.
"What, swimming with sharks?" Síle asked.
"Washing dishes and hitching rides with truckers," Jude told her. "He only knows wildlife from late-night TV."
"Mohawk wisdom has many mysterious sources."
"Oh," Síle remembered, "and Jude says you can do the sound of those birds on the dollar coins."
"Loons, sure." He cupped his hands and made a sad, wavering call. "But Jude shoulda shown you herself; I taught her how when she was a kid."
"That's not all you taught her," said Gwen under her breath.
He gave her a cold look. "Something to say, spit it out."
Jude made a feeble attempt at a loon call. "See, I've lost the knack."
"If you ask me," Gwen told Rizla, "you were lucky her mom didn't call the cops on you."
His eyes bulged.
"Hey, hey—" Jude began.
"I mean what kind of so-called adult hangs round a teenage girl, plying her with rotgut, playing stupid driving games that nearly rip her head off?"
Síle smiled into her hand.
"It was a cut ear, that's all," said Jude. "And we all begged him to buy us liquor."
Rizla exploded, his finger pointing at Gwen. "You make me sound like some kind of slimeball serial killer."
"I'm just saying, any daughter of mine—"
"She wasn't a freaking vestal virgin, you know. I didn't get anything some pimpled tenth-grader hadn't got already."
Jude winced visibly.
Rizla roared on. "Listen, Goody Two-Shoes, just because you spent your whole adolescence doing extra softball practice because nobody ever had a hard-on for you—"
Síle was pleased to see that this observation didn't crush Gwen. "And then you married her," Gwen accused him, "in some lame attempt to keep her from escaping your sweaty clutches by going off to college—"
"I didn't plan to go anyway," Jude put in, but nobody was listening.
"—and it's just typical of you that you still haven't come up with a penny toward the cost of the divorce. And don't try your old trick of blaming racism or Tory fiscal policy for the fact that you live in a rotting trailer, you bum."
Rizla produced a teddy-bear smile. "Thing is, though, I'll always be her number one bud. You're just the backup."
Gwen spoke through her teeth, leaning across the table. "You are a fungus on her life."
"Might I have a moment?" Síle spoke with serene authority, as if to a plane full of fretful passengers. "Now it's Jude's misfortune that her two old friends can't stand each other, but given the limited options in an underpopulated area, she's unlikely to replace either of you—unless you go on behaving like three-year-olds at dinner parties. So might I suggest we call it a draw, and call it a night?"
Later, Síle had to remove her makeup with moisturizer and toilet paper. It was quite fun, all this improvising, though she couldn't imagine getting through the whole week without shopping.
Jude fished out a new toothbrush from the back of the cupboard.
Síle looked at it quizzically. "I hope I remember how to do this without the help of electricity."
"You know, come the apocalypse, you're going to be helpless."
"Come the apocalypse, I have a lot more expertise on handling panicking crowds and first-degree burns than you do."
Once Síle was settled in bed beside her, Jude said, "Okay now? Any more core needs I can supply?"
"Very possibly," said Síle, wrapping one leg around Jude's hip.
"What time is it for you?"
Síle made a quick calculation: three in the morning. "Here and now."
Jude had to work the next day, so that she could take a three-day weekend after that. Síle smelled her linen dress and made a face.
"I guess this afternoon we could check out the stores in Stratford—"
"No, this is a learning exercise. I've gone twenty-four hours without baggage already; let's see how long I can last. People pay hundreds of euro for courses on simple living, you know."
Jude snorted.
Síle managed to find some low-slung black jeans that were loose on Jude but bum-hugging on her; with the cuffs folded up several times they made a reasonable approximation of capri pants. She added a belt with a snake's head, and an old red bandana to keep her hair out of her eyes. "Wow," said Jude, stroking her white vest as it clung to the curve of Síle's shoulder, "everything looks different on you."
They had breakfast on the tree-shaded back deck, where various bird feeders hung. Jude pointed out a mourning dove, a red-wing blackbird, a yellow chaffinch, and a grackle with a jade head. The air was heavy, sticky already, as Síle walked Jude to the museum and kissed her good-bye. There was a sulphurous tang in the air that Jude said was skunk.
Síle spent the first part of the morning looking around the old house. It had clean lines, and Jude kept it uncluttered and serene. There were red and blue quilts hung on most of the walls; she thought Rachel Turner had probably made them. Síle felt like a detective, leafing through old filing cabinets and photo albums. Inside a wardrobe she found J.L.T. 1989 cut in a ten-year-old's careful print. Nineteen eighty-nine: That was the year Síle and Ger (who found they got on much better as exes) had gone snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef. Sometimes the gap between her past and Jude's gaped so steeply, it made her dizzy.
She wandered the length of Main Street. At the Garage she had a homemade lemonade; the only other customers were a fat teenage boy and girl Silently holding hands, and two women lamenting the closure of two more rural mail routes and discussing the peculiarities of their cows, tractors (also referred to as she), and husbands. Síle listened to the rolling vowels; she thought she was beginning to distinguish the local accent, though Jude had only a trace of it, probably because of her Eng
lish mother. The menu included a Little Eric (1 fish w. cheese) and a Foot Long. Looking out through the little lace curtain, Síle thought she spotted Rizla's legs sticking out from under a Jeep. For all his famous travels, he didn't seem to have any further ambitions to leave town. He seemed oddly content, considering how little his life amounted to: fixing cars, free lunch on the premises. Shut up, Site, she scolded herself, how do you know what his life amounts to? He had a best friend to whom he just so happened to be legally married. She knew her jealousy was absurd, but that didn't make it go away.
At the Olde Tyme Gift Shoppe, Síle did her bit for the local economy by buying herself a Shaker-style jewelry box and some tea towels made of old flour sacks. On the street she noticed a lot of baseball caps, denim, shorts. Also bad hair, racks of white teeth, heavy mustaches that made the men look like gay clones. The cars were mostly Buicks, Chryslers, Dodges, and GMC trucks—some old, some new and expensive-looking. She passed a shiny yellow SUV and wondered whether it was the one that had killed Jude's red setter. She counted three motorized scooters; back in Dublin, old ladies simply had canes, but then at home the paths were never knee deep in snow. Two girls in long dresses shot by her on Roller Blades; she thought they were probably Mennonites. The small cemetery had some familiar names—Malones, Meaghers, O'Learys, and Feeneys—but also a Looby, some Soontienses, Krauskopts, Schoonderwoerds, and (this one made her grin) Heuver-Poppes.
In Replay Used Books and Video Rentals a man with a tragic face charged her a dollar for a book of love-letter poems called Flesh and Paper. At the door, she turned back to say, "Excuse me, this was a furniture shop once, wasn't it?"
He nodded. "Ben had a yellow velvet chaise sitting in that window for five years, I swear. The stuff was too fussy; he hadn't the business sense of a frog, though you don't need to tell Jude I said so."
Síle's face heated up; of course the man knew who she was, she kept forgetting that she wore an invisible sign: THAT TURNER GIRL'S LATEST.
There was a mysterious booming coming from inside the turkey factory. Síle paused to read the Soviet-style slogan: REACHING SAFELY BEYOND OUR GOALS, IN THE PAST SIX YEARS WE HAVE LOST NO TIME TO ACCIDENTS.
Lots of houses had those wooden chairs outside, with flat arms to hold drinks. There were Daffy Duck weathervanes, gnomes, elaborate slides and swing sets, a huge trampoline just like her nephews had in Dublin. Basketball hoops, tinkling chimes, plastic wagons and bikes left out with no concern for thieves, maple-leaf flags, and banners featuring teddy bears. Some Catholic had propped an Infant of Prague in a dormer window. She passed a porch strung with white washing, and recognized a dial-up modem's distinctive whine coming from the room behind.
"Well hey Jim, how're you keeping?" she overheard on the street.
"Pretty good, Loretta, and yourself?"
"Good, good. All righty, see you later."
Dublin had never been like this, Síle thought, though it had possessed a certain easygoing sleepiness back in the eighties, before the tidal wave of money had crashed in.
The retired G.P.s next door to Jude were selling white peaches off their porch; Síle bought a basket and introduced herself. "What a pretty accent!" they told her, as several others had that morning; she feared she was playing it up. The male Doctor Peterson assured her that when he was growing up it was all bush around here; he used to take his shotgun and bring a couple of bunny rabbits home for supper. "In those days you could shoot a cannon down Main Street, but now, the traffic!"
Síle agreed, straight-faced. It wasn't that she looked down on the residents of Ireland, Ontario; she just couldn't take the place quite seriously.
They wanted to know how poor Jude was doing since losing her mother. "These serotonin reuptake inhibitors do wonders for bereavement," the female Doctor Peterson assured her. Síle was startled by this shift into the contemporary.
On the porch of the old red general store, kids were sucking those frozen tubes Síle remembered from her own childhood, except these seemed three times longer. Inside, there was a post office counter and dry-cleaning drop-off. The counter had herb pots, a rack of beef jerky, and a dish of pennies labeled LEAVE ONE, TAKE ONE, WHEN YOU NEED ONE. The notice board offered a GARTH BROOKS TRIBUTE, A DRUMBO/INNERKIP FISHING DERBY WITH PRIZE FOR LONGEST TROUT, and DEWORMED SIBERIAN HUSKY PUPPIES, $250 AS IS. Paul specialized in live trapping and would solve all your problems with skunks, possums, raccoons, pigeons, bats, and mink. There was an opening for a PERSON (she liked the attempt at gender neutrality) in a mineral plant in the Goderich area, DRIVE FORK-LIFT, OWN BAGGING EQUIP.
At half past twelve she made up some peculiar sandwiches from whatever she could find in Jude's fridge (Brie and mango chutney, prosciutto and cucumber) and brought them down the street to the museum. Jude was excerpting some letters for a forthcoming feature on economic depressions called "Hungry Times." "Did you know," she said, "that the recipient owns the piece of paper itself—like, the body—but the sender owns the words, like the soul of the letter? So it's a present you've half given and half kept."
"How romantic!" Síle perched on the desk and leaned over to try to make out the spidery brown handwriting. "A permanent thread between the two of them."
"But a huge hassle if you're trying to track down two sets of descendants to get permission. I'm now wondering whether I should just summarize Mrs. Alfred Vogel's thoughts about her dead children rather than quoting her not-particularly-eloquent words ... So how're you liking things?" Jude asked, taking another sandwich.
Síle wasn't fooled by the casual tone. "Charming," she assured her. Honesty made her add, "If a tad Stepford." Jude grinned. "Oh goody, a pop culture reference I don't have to explain."
"I read The Stepford Wives when I was twelve, and I swore I'd never get married."
"So what happened?"
"I guess I forgot."
"Hamlet in the secondhand bookshop was rude about your father's business sense," Síle remarked, "though I doubt the guy's making enough to pay for light bulbs, himself."
Jude laughed. "That's Joe Costelloe. Alma's the cook at the Old Stationhouse Guesthouse. She and Joe split up years ago; now they live on different floors of their house but have to share the kitchen and bathroom. Each of them's waiting for the other to crack and leave town."
"Jaysus," Síle groaned, "are they under a spell?"
Jude shrugged. "Bad enough to lose your marriage without having to lose your home too."
Privately, Síle thought it would be the best thing for both the Costelloes. "Oh, and I've been glued to the Mitchell Advocate and Huron Expositor. All those blurred photos of grinning prize winners or sales staff called Wayne or Agnes or—inevitably—Dave! Warnings about animal rightists sneaking into poultry farms. And I love the way they juxtapose international news with local—like, "Asia Faces Currency Crises" alongside lost terriers and in memoriams—and the way the stock listings include grain and hogs!"
"You've probably never read an Irish local paper, have you?"
"Hmm," said Síle, "but it couldn't possibly be quite as wholesome. There's a charity bicycle race on in Seaforth next week in which the slowest rider wins!"
"You've really been doing your research," said Jude, with a slight edge to her tone.
Síle decided she'd been laying on the satire a bit thick.
"In the general store, who served you, was it a young guy? That's Neil McBride, the Evangelical who won't hold the door for me and my haircut. I can tell he pictures me sizzling in hellfire. Was his mother around?"
"An oldish woman? Blue rinse?" Síle recalled.
"Julia McBride."
"No way! The one your father—she's still here?"
"Where else would she be? Dad moved to Buffalo, and there were terrible fights between her and Hank—she was seen with a shiner, once—but she never left him."
"So your poor mother had to buy her morning paper from the Whore of Babylon?"
"She had it delivered," said Jude, "but yeah, she and Julia even ser
ved on the Quilt Show Committee together for a couple of years. They were civil."
"Do you think your mom's jealousy just faded away?"
"Not a bit," said Jude, shaking her head. "But in a place this small, running into each other twice a day, they had to come to some kind of terms."
"Why do you stay, really?" Síle asked, despite her best intentions.
Jude shrugged. "This is where I was born and raised."
"But that's utterly arbitrary—"
"Sure, but so's the fact that I speak English, have blue eyes, and fancy you."
Síle smiled, trying to keep the tone light. "It's just that ... we don't have to stay where we're put anymore. We've been cut loose, set adrift; we can live where we want."
"I don't want to be adrift," said Jude. "What's that line of poetry? Something about seeing the world in a grain of sand."
"Yeah? When I look at a grain of sand, I see a grain of sand," Síle told her. Then she burst out, "A population of six hundred people, that's barely enough for a party!"
Jude's eyes were hard.
It's been six months since the woman died, Síle thought, it's time. "I think you stayed here to look after your mother, didn't you?" she asked as gently as she could. "Especially after your father dumped her."
"Mom was a very capable person."
"I'm sure. But then to move back in with her, after you split up with Rizla—" She was tempted to add that she thought Jude had stayed in town to keep an eye on him, too.
"Out there is the garden where I grew my first tomatoes," said Jude, jerking her head. "My first kiss was with Teresa Guderson in a storm overflow pipe off Main Street. I came off my motorbike at the corner of Huron and MacKenzie, and if I look closely I can still see a little bloodstain on the wall."
"We've all got a past," said Síle. "But to cling to the spot where it happened is a bit pathetic." As soon as the words were out, she wished them unsaid.
A cold stare; a shrug. "Amnesia's a form of brain damage, you know. Is that what you'd recommend? Fresh start, clean slate?"
Silence.
"I didn't mean that. Sorry. I just ... Stasis gives me the creeps," Síle admitted. "I can't stand to feel walled in. I need a little breeze of possibility." After a minute, she added, "I'm talking about us now."