Charlie finishes one bottle, breaks seal on next. Leans towards me. Stewardess should bring out wine soon, he says. Is that Capp you’re reading? He’s pretty funny. Used to read him all the—
No, this is Krapp. Krapp’s Last Tape. Play by Beckett. Apology in my voice? I ruffle pages, show Charlie. Several plays. Quite good.
Charlie nods. Glances at cover through thick lenses. Not Capp? Should read Capp some time. Funny. Can see you read a lot. Must have gone to college. My girl, she went to college. We’re going to visit her now. Charlie’s voice drops. I’m so excited, he says. Haven’t seen my grandchildren since—but just for two weeks. No more. Don’t want to get in the way. They have their lives too. She married a smart fellow.
He taps Mommy. Mommy, what does Sheila’s husband do?
Mommy opens one eye, looks at me, shuts eye. Spray icings, she says.
Chemicals and such, says Charlie. You think you can guess what I do? Though I’m retired now.
Can’t. No.
Advertising. Bet I don’t look the type. His voice lowers. I have my own tailor in Hong Kong. Had this suit made—thirty percent of what it would cost in Montreal. Every stitch by hand. Charlie shows seams of one cuff and inside lapel. Breaks seal on third bottle of whisky.
Plastic Stew takes order for wine. Courtesy airlines, with meal. This will not do. Charlie wants best. Orders two bottles of best. Best is not good, Charlie proclaims, when wine is served.
Charlie stores Mommy’s wine in seat pocket ahead. Plastic Stew’s voice on loudspeakers. Clear aisles, take seats while trays distributed. Charlie giggles. Need nervous pee, he says. Squeezes past, heads for the loo. Mommy comes to life, removes wine from seat pocket, snaps into purse. Owl-eye shuts.
Krapp’s Last Tape becoming depressing. Charlie returns with another bottle of courtesy wine. Lady at back gave it to me, he says. Doesn’t drink. Took it because it’s free. All paid for in the ticket.
Charlie rummages in seat pocket. Looks for other bottle. Now where did that go? Fumbles, gives up. Magical interference. Mommy eye-signals to me, flick flick.
Go ahead and read, Charlie says. Read your Crap. He’s really funny. I’m just an old fool, always bothering you. You read a lot, I can tell.
Plastic Stew brings lunch trays. Mommy leaves earphones in place, begins to sort and chew. I put my book away. Look at Charlie. Prevented from further sensory experience except the visual because of one large crumb from crusty roll on Charlie’s glasses. Half of one lens, the left, obstructed.
Charlie does not know crumb is there. Grins at me but does not use peripheral vision. My impulse to raise elbow, polish lens. Excuse, but there’s a rather large crumb. No, might take offence. Leave it. Look directly ahead. Perhaps crumb will fall when Charlie inclines head for drink. But doesn’t.
Charlie to be spared nothing. I look down and see—icing? cream cheese? something from dessert? Huge smear on Hong Kong vest and left thigh. If I tell him about icing, will also have to mention crumb. The two are linked, make me honour bound. Serviettes are large; I could erase, rub out, remove indignities. I open Krapp, stare at page. Coward, I know. Choose silence.
Charlie spies his suit. Look at me! Pushes away tray Shoves serviette into my hand. Oh look. Clumsy I am. Take it, wipe it off, what will my daughter say? Mommy!
Mommy remains calm. Watches me scrub at Charlie’s thigh.
Need water, Charlie, I say. Don’t think this is going to work.
Steward passes by, collecting trays. Come back with me, he says to Charlie. I’ll fix you up.
Charlie returns, clean, pressed. We lean back, relax. Crumb has fallen off. I couldn’t go to my daughter like that, he says. Mommy, between earphones, taps fingers against armrests. I skip pages, try another play as plane descends.
The hatch spews forth luggage. Moving black tongue. Safe on ground. Legs betray. The wine. Feel shaky, indefinite. Travellers fidget, impatient this side of glass wall, search for familiar faces. I see Hugo waiting at Arrivals. Hide behind tall man. Don’t like to stand exposed through glass partition. Might gesture, make helpless faces at each other, grin until our lips twitch.
Charlie and Mommy have found luggage. Come to stand beside me. Charlie’s belt loosened. Gap of shirt shows between vest and trousers. Shakes my hand warmly.
That your young man out there? He’s been watching you. Looks like a nice person. Well, I wish you happiness in life, like Mommy and me. Eh, Mommy? Sorry you didn’t get a chance to read your Capp. He’s a very funny writer. There’s my little girl, he says. Charlie stumbles towards glass doors, arms outstretched.
Jog beside moving belt, drag suitcase backwards and lift. Must start dreaming again. New story needed by Wednesday. Final exam coming up—clouds waves rocks slides. Hugo looks like stranger from here. Walk towards him. Resembles George Burns. When did he start wearing glasses? Leans towards me in taxi. I asked for a double, he says. He kisses me on the ear.
Separation
It is one of those early November evenings when the air is warm but not hot. When light is fading, but the sky, clear behind, still has a touch of blue. Where clouds, navy-grey, are brushed like bats’ wings against one corner of the sky. And an early moon sits full and white, with one sharply profiled cloud across its yawning centre.
Karla, looking straight ahead, pulls me along, her five-yearold hand firmly in mine, and forces me to merge with the late Friday bustle of this small town. We stand on the crest of the hill and look down on the river and, cool on its bank, the bunker-like shopping mall that contains every place of business in this town. Another week is over. Quick footsteps and slammed car doors signal Friday relief. Cars pull out of the parking lot and others replace them. At the mall’s end, men wearing plaid shirts and woollen hats, and with six-packs of beer tucked under their arms, swing through four identical glass doors. I would like to capture the colours, woven into the moving pattern. Off to the side, students from the high school are sitting around the wall of the circular outdoor fountain that is dry, never a success in this town. Nothing fancy here; life can be, and is, lived by its bare essentials.
There are times when I love the solitude, the town sitting separate and apart from all other places. But there are other, exasperating times, when I would flee at a moment’s notice. I have sifted the old argument with myself over and over again. Why stay? I wanted to be far from the interminable demands of the city. I wanted to paint, more and more. But that was before we knew that Alan would be sent away. The thought of him pierces me now. I do not know if the sensation is one of grief or love or pain. I cannot think of it at all, this separation, because if I do the year ahead will break down into separate days, and there are too many of these to consider. Nine years after my marriage to Alan, I am learning to live alone.
Karla, as if she has been excluded by my thoughts, sings one of her sudden songs. It is a song of love addressed to me, and reminds that I am not, after all, as alone as I would believe:
Your lips are red as lipstick
Your eyes are green as grass
She creates the words and the tune as we walk down the slope. “I’m not so good at singing,” she says, abruptly considering, and stops.
“But that song went inside my heart,” I tell her.
We decide to visit our friend Miss Ellis on the way home. Miss Ellis’ family has lived in the town since the first United Empire Loyalists stepped from their small boats on the riverbank just below the site of the present mall. She is the last of her line and has not a single living relation. She lives on the hill in a large white wooden house, just above the river. The bridge, which can be seen from her front windows, gives the impression of being too modern for this old town. I always think, as I come over the hill and confront it anew, that it should be plucked out of the view, that it would look better painted on a new, green dollar bill.
Karla loves Miss Ellis’ house with its jumble of ancient furniture, its woodpile and its root cellar, its plants twined up and down the stairs and, of
course, its attic. We both love the company of Miss Ellis.
“Everything in this house is parched with age,” she announces, as she opens the door.
“Maybe the dinosaurs lived here,” says Karla, and adds, “but now they’re stinked.”
“Extinct,” I say.
Miss Ellis laughs her wonderful quick laugh, closing her lips a little. She is observant; she pauses, remembering. Although at first glance she seems small and white and frail, when one is with her, one senses strength, largeness. There is something of the artist in her, I am sure. She always describes herself as a picture, someone quickly painted into a moving canvas, someone things happen to. Today she tells the story of the boy who carries in her wood. Somehow, she manages to get to the bottom of people’s lives and stories. But she does not ask about mine, or about Alan’s; nor does she mention the government job which has taken him for a year to a country at war, a country to which Karla and I may not follow.
While she prepares tea, to be shared on her veranda, she listens attentively to Karla, who tells about a dress reversal held by her Kindergarten. Karla then goes into an unexpected and long-winded story about a girl in her class who says mean things about the other girls.
“Ah,” says Miss Ellis, “if you can see through a person, Karla, you can like them. It’s when you can’t, when there are surprises, that you can be caught off guard.”
Karla and I ponder this on the way home. As we turn in at our street, we meet two neighbourhood women, Helen Jordan and Audrey Brooks. Audrey says to me, “Alan is away now, isn’t he, Simone? How is it for you, living alone?”
“What did she mean, Mom?” Karla asks, after I’ve mumbled something incoherent and they have passed. But I cannot answer. Do I misunderstand because at this point I regard any question about Alan and me as intrusive? I do know that I have been wounded, by the encounter.
All day Sunday, I stretch canvases until I think I have enough ready for what I want to do. The work is in my head, growing, murmuring. I feel, at times, that I am being taken over. I let myself move, back and forth, with the images. Karla amuses herself outside in the breeze and the sun as I work. Fall has come late this year and the leaves are past their full final colour. They seem to be having an earthward race; the ground and air are thick with them. My attention roams out and back from window to easel, where I stand looking at blank space. But Karla has caught my eye, her long black hair dangling from her tire swing where she sways upside down. I have all of this space. I feel excited, as if I could paint anything. I wonder suddenly whether I shall enjoy living alone this long time. A large part of me seems to desire, to stretch towards the boundless free state, the state of uncommittedness. Will there be no real impact now that Alan has gone? Almost two months have passed and little seems to have changed—except for the daily contact. Yes, the ordinary human contact with one’s partner—that is missing.
As for Karla, she goes to school, comes home, hums about the house quite happily. I am not really certain what has been altered for her. And Alan? Is he sitting in a room somewhere? Reading? Lying in bed? Walking some foreign street? I have no visual background for him; there is nothing to fit him against. Nothing except descriptions in letters that arrive irregularly: details of long hours, difficult negotiations. What is any of this to me? Anger bursts like a bud, a sudden inner rupture, a surprise. What, indeed, is any of this to me?
I look out again to the yard where Karla is playing. She looks like a flash of leaves herself, in bright yellows and reds. The leaves rain past her as she deftly leaps from rope to branch and back to swing. She painstakingly twists the tire round and round, lies back and allows herself to spin until her body and the movement of the rope merge to an opaque blur. I watch her with a knowledge, a certainty that she will always be a wonder to me, a mystery of spontaneous joy and selfless happiness. Restless, I leave the blank canvas and go outside. I think about my sister Kristina and her family coming for Christmas. Karla and I both look forward to that. Kristina’s family will help fill the growing spaces.
The week Kristina is to arrive, Karla decides to make hats. With glue and paper and paint she creates jesters’ hats, soldiers’ hats, clowns’ hats, hats that look as if they should be worn by Popes.
The tree is decorated; we are ready for visitors. Karla’s holidays have begun and I feel the relief and joy of the break in routine, of having just the two of us in the house.
Karla tires of the hats and decides to play dress-up. I go through my closets and donate to her dress-up box, two old sundresses, one of which—a bright blue—she holds to her chest.
“Children can have breastuz too,” she says, peering into the top of the dress. And then, as if she has been saving this for days, she eyes me shrewdly and says, “How does a man’s sperm get inside a woman?”
I can never anticipate the questions. They seem to spring from a deep well of curiosity and, for Karla, a deeper well of hilarity. Their timing is a mystery to me. We get out her book, one she has gone through many times, and we read How Babies Are Made. But it holds her interest only a few minutes, and off she goes, this time to build with her set of logs.
Miss Ellis arrives, for tea. She brings a bag of knitting and we sit in the living room before the fire, where an ancient and useful rite goes on. I kneel before her, a skein of scarlet strands looped about my hands. My arms sway to Miss Ellis’ rhythm as she winds the wool to a furiously growing round ball. Karla watches this magical performance. Miss Ellis sits back comfortably and begins to knit—a shrug, she says, for her shoulders. A scarlet shrug.
Karla waits and then, testing, remembering the book, says coolly to Miss Ellis, “Did you know that when a man and woman are in bed the sperm eats the egg?”
“Meets the egg, Karla!” I say. “It meets the egg!”
Karla thinks this very funny indeed.
“You seem to know all about it, don’t you, Karla,” says Miss Ellis.
Then she tells us she has received a Christmas card from Alan. “He seems to write happily, Simone.”
Yes, he writes happily to Karla and me, too, but as much as Alan and I have tried to make contact through our letters, he is removed from the fringes of my real life. There are things that I am forgetting. I am living with the new knowledge that my life is somehow changing, almost against my will. In one of my own letters to Alan, sent at the beginning of the week, I found myself scribbling—a postscript: “Do you remember who I am, Alan? Do you remember the things I do?” I have begun to feel anger, anger mixed with sorrow at missing him, and even fear, a new fear that has crept in: that our friendship, our partnership, will somehow be damaged when we meet again.
But these are all of the things that cannot be said, and I stumble over my reply. As Miss Ellis leaves, she pauses at the door. “Isolation can be terrible if you allow it. You’re vulnerable, Simone. Please take care.”
At dinner, Karla is quiet; she makes few demands on me, seems to know something that neither of us can articulate. And for the first time, she leaves Alan out of her bedtime prayer.
Christmas is, in Miss Ellis’ words, “A great success.” She joins Karla and me, Kristina, her husband, Tim, and their two children, who have now arrived. There has been only one light snowfall and, feeling cheated, Karla and her cousins manage to scrape and heap enough of it to make a thin slide. They spend hours shrieking and laughing outside the house. Tim amuses the children and moves easily in and out of the reminiscences which now surround him on all sides. Kristina and I have five days in which to remember, and talk, and remember. And we laugh. We tell stories to Miss Ellis about our childhood, and Karla and her cousins listen, agog. Miss Ellis tells us stories of the town and its past. She seems to know about every settler who came to this area in her great-great-grandfather’s time.
“‘Culture’ was not a word that was used in my day,” she says. “Nor was ‘ethnic.’ People were just people then. Things used to be more simple. Sometimes I look out my window and see young people congregating arou
nd the shopping mall, and I feel as if I don’t know what’s going on any more.”
One late afternoon, Miss Ellis describes a ballet she had seen when she was a child. She’d been taken to Montreal by her parents, and they had visited the theatre. A touring company from Europe was performing. Her eyes are bright with the memory, and she moves her hands and arms as she talks.
“Children were banked along the back of the stage. Then, the smallest girl, a carnation, stepped forward and danced. How that little flower danced! After that, I always played the piece for the dance, always for those tiny feet, that little flower.”
Miss Ellis rises from her chair and goes to the piano bench. Her fingers stretch and falter on the keys of my old Heintzman, but she stiffens her back, perseveres, and the tune is played. Miss Ellis’ head bows forward on her chest. We sit quietly, gathering the dusk.
Kristina and I walk to the big white house with Miss Ellis, who has recovered herself. At the door, her hand on the knob, she tips back on her heels and thanks us.
“There’s something of the belle about her, isn’t there,” says Kristina.
“She’s wonderful,” I reply. “A wonderful friend.” But I think to myself: We’ve left her alone, in that big old house.
That night, I sleep fitfully. In and out of sleep, I reach across the bed for Alan. I wake to the realization that he is gone and it is then that I feel the first and deepest loneliness. There is nothing I can do.
The following day, Alan phones. It is the first phone call from the other side of the world. I am not expecting the call; it is sudden; the connection is poor. Kristina hurries everyone from the room and shuts the door, leaving me in privacy. But my voice echoes back through the receiver each time I try to speak, and I think of tortuous cables moaning and tangled in the deepest parts of the sea. Because of the echoes, our words are delayed. We speak at the same time, cancelling each other out. Every few seconds, there is a beeping noise in the background. What chance do we have of saying anything meaningful?