Читать книгу Film Society - Gilaine E. Mitchell - Страница 10

The night Ben and I got stuck while making love was a night like all the others I’d seen at Oak Lake.

That’s how I’d begin.

With something familiar.

With the same dark sky that greeted me every time Ben called and I drove out in the middle of the night to see him — on the wheels of one long-ago moment — under a sky full of stars, sprinkling specks of light on a lake rumoured to be bottomless. That’s what made me clamp down on him with a force I never thought possible. The bottomlessness of the lake.

The temporary loss of footing.

Even after it happened and Ben lay sleeping beside me, I was sure there was a point to this bizarre occurrence. I just wasn’t sure what it was yet, since it only developed in the last several hours of my life, placed in the lap of my artistic sensibilities, a metaphor I couldn’t imagine would do me any good.

If I were a writer, I might reach for a pen and record the details while they’re still fresh — the black water; the green and white fireflies glowing around the shoreline; Ben’s unbelievable release of control. How he nearly drowned me in his eagerness to take me with him.

If I could paint, I’d splash the canvas with underwater lovers and a horizon of black binoculars. Big, eyeless binoculars with glassy stares that threatened to make intimacy a spectacle. Something ugly. Something laughable. Something punishable.

I thought I saw someone watching us from a cottage down the lake. A stick figure against the dim porch lights. Maybe that’s what kept me from going with Ben to a place, he kept panting, was the best he’s ever been.

If I could write it all down, I’d have an accurate, detailed account of what happened. But I’m not a writer or a painter. I’m a storyteller of the verbal kind, with a wandering mind. I can’t stay on course and land in the middle of the end of the story. I have to go off here and there and make stops along the way. I have to take a walk on an island I think no one else has ever discovered and describe what I see before I make my way back to the point of the whole blurry mess.

I’ve had my share of impatient lovers, and an ex-husband who was forever asking, “is there a point to this story, Sadie?” So I’ve learned to pace myself and periodically inject, “and there is a point to this story,” into my ever-changing, always-evolving, becoming-something-else monologues.

And just how will I tell people what happened?

Will I start at the beginning, which some would say was earlier in the evening when I met Ben at Oak Lake, in the dark, so no one could see me. I drove my car down John Meyers Road and parked it on the side, just before it forks to the left for Sid Oaks Lane, then walked the rest of the way in — the same way I’d been doing it for over a year. Of course, that’s not really the beginning. They’ll want to know why I met Ben in the dark, why I didn’t want anyone to see me at this winterized ramshackle cottage he calls home.

Why does a forty-nine-year-old woman sneak around in the dark to meet her younger lover? A respectable woman who runs an adult literacy centre, has two teenage children, a mortgage in a small town, and a shitty car that empties her pocket every other week with its needs-this-needs-that attitude, and a nagging feeling she should have bought some registered retirement savings plans twenty years ago.

That’s the beginning of another story.

Or the beginning of this one.

I have so many. I collect them, and at this very moment I’m wearing most of them on my back. Literally.

“It’s a case of vaginismus,” Mary-Beth said on the phone, “an involuntary contraction of those muscles. It’ll go away if you just relax.”

I was standing in the small kitchen of Ben’s cottage, where the phone is. Ben by this time was an involuntary appendage and shuffled along the floor with me, the two of us wrapped in a blanket that smelled of cigarettes we had grabbed from the couch after we manoeuvred our way up from the lake. I was cold and had put my jacket on. Ben was wearing his black Levi’s shirt, faded and marked with the remains of too much clumpy laundry soap, which he doesn’t see or doesn’t bother wiping off.

“Usually fear or pain makes you clamp down like that,” Mary-Beth continued. “If you can relax those muscles, you’ll release him.”

“Why can’t he release himself? Won’t he lose it soon?” I was panicking. Ben kept sighing and shaking his head and didn’t know what to do with his arms, which were tired of holding me and bored with hanging idly by his sides. MaryBeth was calm, and I could picture her sitting up in bed under her crisp sheets in some freshly laundered summer nightgown, which she had hung on the line to dry that morning.

“You’ve probably cut off the blood supply,” she said quietly. “That’ll keep him erect.”

“Jesus Christ, Mary-Beth, what if we’re stuck like this forever!” I could already hear the cries of humiliation from the mouths of my children, the gossip and whispered enjoyment that would spread throughout town.

She’s the one who got stuck.

“You just have to relax,” Mary-Beth kept saying. “Do some deep breathing. Lie down and talk calmly. I could come out with some Valium. Where exactly are you?”

I didn’t tell her. I said I’d call back if I needed to. The last thing I wanted was Mary-Beth showing up, knowing Ben’s name before I even introduce them, asking him about this bad back, telling him he should quit smoking to get rid of that cough he’s had for a while now.

I only called her out of desperation.

I’m not friends with her.

We meet every now and then on the street, or we go for a drink. It’s always Mary-Beth’s idea. How can I say no? She gives me yearly Pap smears and listens to my complaints about my sore neck and recommends Kegel exercises to keep my bladder and all those other things up where they should be.

She knows how much I weigh.

Besides, I tell myself, she hasn’t been in town that long, and doesn’t appear to have many friends. Any friends. She only moved to Stirling from Ottawa two years ago, after Dr. Reynolds retired, and lives alone in the apartment above her office, a pale blue home on the edge of the Mill Pond with white shutters and a parking lot with five spaces reserved for patients.

“How about a drink?” Mary-Beth will say when we run into each other. We’ll go to Jim’s, the sports bar on the corner, where a ball game or hockey game will flicker above us and the smell of pizza and stale beer fill the air — where Mary-Beth pretends to be like me and I find myself acting like Mary-Beth, leaving things out, rearranging, talking in a language not entirely my own.

After a drink or two, we’ll go our separate ways. I always have a reason to get on with the evening. Groceries. Making dinner for my kids. Or film night with my friends.

I’ll watch Mary-Beth walk back down Mill Street in her comfortable shoes and navy suit and cropped, chin-length hair, and I’ll get an urge to rush home and burn anything in my closet that isn’t multi-coloured or beaded or bright, or scented with Patchouli Oil, which never bores me and fills my pores with nights I’ll never forget.

I’ll go home and put on my Storyteller’s Jacket while I scramble eggs for dinner and wait for Ben to call, which could be anytime between 5 p.m. and midnight. I’ll stand over the stove in my jacket made of silk ties and plaid shirts and a snip or two off a pair of faded blue jeans — the fabrics of love — crazy-quilted with cross stitches and blanket stitches and twolane stitches that remind me of love on the road in the back of a Volkswagen camper.

Purple velvet and red silk and paisley greens and gold. Years ago, I took a navy jacket and began covering it with pieces of my lovers’ clothes. I wear it now, as I lay otherwise naked under a blanket in Ben’s cottage, with a piece of his black Levi’s shirt in my jacket pocket. I snipped it earlier, a small piece from the bottom right side, near the seam, so he wouldn’t notice it missing for a while.

Ben shut his eyes a few moments ago.

He didn’t want to talk.

Sleep will take care of this, Sadie. Sleep, he said.

Quit talking.

Quit thinking.

Just go to sleep.

I was in between men when Ben showed up. A knock at the door. There he was. Canvassing for money for a family whose home at Oak Lake burned to the ground earlier that spring, just after the warm air began melting the ice on the water. I was making dinner, the television was blaring from another room, my children were whining about their grumbling stomachs and why can’t I stop being so cheap and buy some extra channels so there’s something worth watching.

I went to the door with a black-handled flipper waving in the air, yelling for the kids to turn it down, watch the burgers, and set the table — which I wouldn’t have done if I knew who was standing on the other side, listening to another frantic, bitchy, burned-out woman. At least, that’s the way I imagined he saw things, or how I see myself when I let the reel roll back in my mind. A frantic woman I hardly recognize who takes me by surprise, knocks me out of breath with her hurried, scattered state.

I could have just given him some money. I had close to thirty bucks in my wallet. I could have let it go at that, but I didn’t. I didn’t see a wedding ring.

No, he didn’t know what caused the fire. Yes, he knew the family. They live across the lake. Or they used to. He’s just trying to help. Everyone needs help from time to time.

I could arrange a big yard sale at the literacy centre to raise money, I said. I’ve done this kind of thing before. I’ll call him with a date and the details. What about a yard sale and barbecue?

An exchange of phone numbers and the door closed and I watched him walk down the street to the next house with his good looks and good intentions and all of my thoughts in the palm of his hand.

It often happens this way for me.

I’ll go for long periods of time without seeing anyone then all of a sudden someone shows up like a gift on God’s wind and consumes my every waking moment. The sleeping ones, too. A complete takeover of my daydreams and night dreams, and the precious few moments when I’m actually alert and aware that another world exists outside the new one that’s just been created and tossed into the universe, waiting for its history to begin. How will this turn out?

Even in my brief moments of awareness, he’s there — when I’m teaching someone how to read a newspaper, or defending my right to wear the clothes I do to my embarrassed and hopelessly conservative seventeen-year-old daughter. I can hear the sound of the telephone ringing before his next call. What he might say. What I might bring up. How we’ll get from here to there. It always happens this way for me and I kick myself for still obsessing about boys at 49.

I make myself wash the car and shop for hot dogs and talk to people on the street. I tell myself I’m doing all these things and functioning and at worst appearing only slightly distracted. See. I’m not paralyzed by my obsessive thoughts. See. I’m in control of them, letting them in fully one moment, when I lie down for a nap after work before making dinner, shrinking them to a smaller screen against the bigger picture in other moments — multi-tasking with whatever demands my attention at the time.

I toast buns, fry Spanish onions, and try to talk everyone into buying a date square for another $1.50. It’s for a good cause. He shows up and carries larger items to people’s trucks and car trunks and tells me I’ve really done a wonderful job and aren’t we lucky it didn’t rain. He was sure it was going to rain the way the wind picked up last night and covered the stars with a sheet of cloud and pushed the waves up over the dock. Have you spent much time up at the lake, he asks.

Several summers, I tell him, with my kids, at the little beach where the canteen is. I keep forgetting there really is a lake up there. It’s strange, I say, the way it sits at the top of the Oak Hills, a tiny lake smaller than most of the farms that surround it, just five minutes from town, in a bedroom community of expensive suburban homes with fenced-in pools and central air, and long and winding heated driveways that melt the winter snow. Even some of the old cottages on the lake are being replaced by three-storey Cape Cod-style homes with cathedral ceilings and state-of-the-art kitchens.

It’s hard to think of it as a lake, I tell him.

Lakes are supposed to take you hours to drive to, with miles of wilderness around them and nothing but endless water ahead of you when you stand at the shoreline — not something you pass on a regular basis along the highway, and hardly ever notice, and never think of when you long to be lying on a hot dock with a gin and tonic and a good book and no worries beside you.

I hadn’t thought about Oak Lake in years.

We packed up the barbecues and let the other volunteers divvy up the unwanted yard sale items and took some of the leftover food up to his cottage. It was late in the afternoon, on a Saturday, the only time I would see the cottage in the daylight. Darkness would usher me in for the next year.

You see, he has this girlfriend. Everyone likes her. All the neighbours, his friends, everyone. She’s a nice girl. She wants to move in with him. He doesn’t want to hurt her. He doesn’t want to live with her, either, so he puts her off. The cottage needs fixing up. His ex-wife is suing him for more child support.

He loves his kids.

He does what he can.

He’s in between things.

He just wants to fish all summer and make decisions with a rod in his hand and a smoke in his mouth.

He’s being honest, he says, at least with me. Can I handle it? He doesn’t have the energy to deal with anything else.

We made love against my better judgement, which I’ve learned to set aside with frequency and consistency over the years, and toasted his thirty-ninth birthday, which was the day before, and picked a place for me to park my car the next time I came up to the lake — after dark, so the neighbours don’t notice, so no one will say anything to a certain someone, so his life doesn’t get more complicated than it already is. We picked the fork in the road, not far from the cottage, and sort of chuckled over the irony of our choice. The heavy scent of calcium chloride that kept the dust down followed us out to the highway, then disappeared into the midnight air as Ben drove me back into town.

I keep thinking about standing at my kitchen sink in my Storyteller’s Jacket, scrambling eggs for dinner, waiting for the phone to ring, for Ben to call. How the anticipation ran up my sleeve, skipping tike a stone over a quilted history of similar moments, putting its arm around my shoulders and rubbing my back with nostalgic affection, time passing.

I scrambled back and forth myself, between the counter and the stove, adding salt and cayenne pepper, and throwing utensils into a sink full of eggshells and dirty bowls while Van Morrison sang about old loves. I grabbed a salad out of the fridge and vowed to take down all the posters advertising concerts i couldn’t afford to go to, which hung like dangling carrots under borrowed inspiration. The scribbled lines and curves of my own handwriting formed the words of some other, wiser souls on sheets of recycled paper from the literacy centre. I retained nothing and carried on, forgetting what it was I felt I needed to remember.

The phone rang and I talked quickly, breathlessly, to a friend about the downside of love on the sly, trying to fit all the details into one long, uninterrupted sentence before my daughter or my son walked into the kitchen looking for dinner or something to drink, throwing a look of disapproval my way.

Ben can’t go to concerts with me, or to dinner parties, or meet my friends, or my ex, who drops by every other week to pick up the kids and keeps asking me when I’m going to get a real life as he bitches about his new wife and their rambunctious three-year-old son and drinks my beer.

Hal tells me I’ve picked another loser who hasn’t got a job and doesn’t take me out. He closes the door and leaves behind empty bottles in a beer puddle on my pine table and the lingering image of the purple and black striped shirt he wore to my sister’s wedding at Wasaga Beach twenty-five years ago, where he sat by the water’s edge flirting with a cute blonde, lighting her cigarettes and fetching her drinks. I watched him as I followed my sister and her new husband around, passing out wedding cake wrapped in doilies and silver ribbon to guests who would forget to take it home or would discover it at the bottom of their purses two weeks later, rock hard and turning colour.

You can’t know for sure how you feel about a man until you end up stuck to him — with him — with him in you. You think you like him, maybe even love him. You create scenarios as days pass and he doesn’t call. His mother died and he went away. His girlfriend keeps showing up and he wants to call you but can’t get a moment’s peace from her. He got a job and left town.

You tell yourself he didn’t mean much. He was just another lover, someone to pass the time with. You were going to break it off anyway.

The phone rings. It wasn’t so long ago that you saw each other, was it? No, you’re not mad. Of course, you understand.

Then you hop in your car at eleven at night and your daughter calls you a whore and your understanding son says he’ll look after things, and you drive out into the darkness, rationalizing your right to your own life, praying, bargaining for him, or her, or it to keep your kids safe until you get home.

You go.

Just to get there.

Just to get there one more time.

Some of your friends say you’re too available. You deserve more. Make him choose. You or her. Secrecy or out in the open, public declarations of affection that make everything alright.

How can you drive out there in the dark in the middle of the night? It’s not safe. He shouldn’t make you do that.

You’re a disappointment to women everywhere. Weak and boy-crazy. A horny middle-aged disappointment who can’t tell what it feels like when you get in your car and put on Patsy Clines “Walking After Midnight” and smell the lavender as you back out of your driveway, and breathe Patchouli Oil, and the fresh smoke of the cigarette you’ve just lit, and the ripe smell of the hay that’s been cut in the fields you pass as you climb the hills and reach the bonfires and the black water of the lake, and remember a thousand times in your life when you couldn’t smell anything but disappointment with yourself.

How can I not go, I say

Sometime over the last year, i started telling Ben about Mary-Beth, and Mary-Beth about Ben, and this is what really bothered me about Mary-Beth coming up to the cottage to fix our problem. They know too much about each other.

Ben knows all about the man Mary-Beth dated who had the latest, greatest fishing boat with all the gadgets and gismos to help him spot a fish five hundred feet away; how the kids on the dock where he parked the super fish-finder caught more fish with sticks and string than he ever did, how Mary-Beth said he was never any good at finding the right spot on anything, which surprised me that Mary-Beth would even bring that up.

“The only things he ever found out there were mosquitoes and a good place to pee,” Mary-Beth had said, and I repeated it for Ben hoping he would shed some light on what answers he might be finding out there on the lake with his rod and his smokes. He was on his second summer of soul searching and as far as I could see he hadn’t caught a single decision.

Once, after we had made love and Ben fell asleep, I went outside on the porch, which threatened to give way at any moment and send me down a grassy slope into the cold night waters. I stood there and watched the blackness roll in towards me and wondered what Ben thought about when he was out there alone, fishing in the weathered aluminum boat that came with the cottage. It bobbed up and down and back and forth against the dock — yes, no, yes, no — as indecisively as the man who climbed into it and went fishing for answers.

The precarious life of a fisherman.

I never told Ben about Mary-Beth’s theories on why he can’t make a decision, or what she thinks about the way his girlfriend has begun following him around and showing up without notice, which is really beginning to irritate him. I’ve never said a word about my “aftermath cycles,” which Mary-Beth named and asks about whenever she sees me on the street and I’m looking anxious.

Days one through five after I’ve seen Ben, I’m fine and can live with or without him. Days six through ten, I teeter between calm confidence that I’ll see him again soon and a state of questioning despair when I’m sure he’s chosen the other one, or someone entirely new, and won’t even call to tell me. By day eleven, I’m ready to break it off and get rid of the headache that’s been sitting above my eyebrows for the past four days.

“What day are we on?” Mary-Beth always asks, then we’ll go for a coffee or a drink, or just stand on the street, the two of us backed up against the hardware store, analyzing the meaning of the ring-less phone.

“Everyone thinks I should dump him.”

“Why,” Mary-Beth says, “you like him. Love doesn’t just have to happen in the daylight or between 6 p.m. and midnight, for all the world to see. To hell with convention. What’s it got to do with love?”

“You’re right,” I say, “why get messed up with that.”

“He’s been honest with you, from the start,” she says with a serious tone to her voice.

“You’re right, he has.”

“So, he’s not as honest with the other one. What does that tell you about their relationship?”

“You’re right again,” I say. “I’m really glad I ran into you.”

And I am glad until Mary-Beth tries to turn the helpful advice into a commitment for dinner at her place the next night. I didn’t mind our impromptu meetings on the street, every now and then, but Mary-Beth wanted some kind of payoff — friendship — for listening to the aches and pains of my heart that she solicited in the first place.

I decline her invitation, saying I have to watch my son play basketball or something like that. I can’t remember now. I regret ever telling her anything about Ben. Mary-Beth assumes she’s now part of our relationship and can bring it up in conversations on the street corner, the way most people talk about the weather.

“Are you awake?”

Nothing.

“Ben?”

Nothing.

I can feel him slipping away, a weakening of the walls that hold him in place.

Not yet.

Not yet.

He sleeps. His body rises and falls, and he breathes as though he might stop and be gone forever. In the dim light, with only a thin line of pale yellow coming in from the kitchen, he could be anyone, or everyone — if I let what I already know about him drift out the window onto the night’s breeze, and I clear the slate for nothing but the shape of his silhouetted shoulder as he lies on his side facing me with closed eyes, like the others who’ve clothed me with their passing love.

He breathes.

He stops.

He breathes.

And I remember standing in line at a post office, years ago, with a brown package in my hands, waiting my turn.

And the striped T-shirts Johnny Marks used to wear.

And the way he used to sit on the front porch of his sister’s house with his back against the pillar, with one leg over the edge, resting on the ground.

I still think of him every time I cut asparagus and go to yard sales and cover tomato plants with tin cans to protect them from frost.

I stand at my kitchen sink today, waiting for the phone to ring, and I’m there again — back in the gardens of vivid recollection, listening to music on a transistor radio, the smell of anticipated love sitting in the damp morning soil, which I turn over and run my fingers through and carry around for hours under my nails until I wash my hands.

I’m in the barn, stripping wash stands and flat-to-the-walls and dry sinks. I feel the heartburn from breathing the chemical stripper as I peel back the layers of paint, removing my gloves, using my bare hands to get every bit. Waves of prickly heat run over my body thinking about him, the possibilities, the unknown, as I get down to the original finish and realize I’ve hardly noticed the time.

Then Hal’s voice mumbles something about it all being a waste of time, this stripping. People — the ones with real money — want everything “as found.” If it’s still got bird shit on it, it’s worth more, he’d say. The rougher, the better. And a little bird shit is as good as gold.

Most of the people who used to drop by our barn on a Saturday or Sunday still wanted what we called “honey money pine” finish by Min-Wax, so I continued to strip and peel away the layers — and wonder about the furniture that was once a backdrop for family photos, or a reminder of a bad fight where fists were slammed and legs kicked, or the place where love rolled around under the sheets and children were conceived.

In winter, we would work upstairs, in the empty bedrooms where we planned to put our kids some day. When we had kids. I’d help lug cupboards and weigh scales and bedroom sets up the narrow staircase as Hal cursed the sharp turn at the top and yelled for me to move back a little, to the right, to the left, to the extra space that wasn’t there. Then we’d work for months inside one of the bedrooms, opening the frozen windows when we could, to breathe. To let the cold, grey air into our lungs.

In the workaday haze that was my life, I didn’t see Johnny Marks coming.

I saw Hal and our barely-make-a-living antique business, and the vegetable gardens behind our house, and the empty rooms we planned to fill upstairs.

I didn’t see Johnny Marks coming, even though he’d been part of my life ever since I was old enough to yearn for the kind of love that didn’t demand silence and the occasional quick look the other way — didn’t ask for tradeoffs and tradeins of tidbits, and parts, and whole chunks of your being, and the oddest appreciation for what you got in return, no matter how much less it was worth to you.

Pawn shop love.

Johnny came to housesit at his sister᾿s while she went travelling for a year in Europe with her husband and her two daughters. He moved into their farmhouse, on the seventh concession, two roads over from our place. He looked after their beef cattle, and repainted the house, and carved the faces of old men and old women on the cedar fences in the fields behind the house, and along the road — a series of bumps and grooves you wouldn’t see unless you knew they were there, secretly sitting in the man-made boundaries of dead wood.

He showed up one day, when Hal was someplace else. He brought a chair. It used to belong to his grandmother, he said. He remembered sitting on it when he was a kid, watching his grandmother make his favourite fudge. Maple walnut.

He found the chair in his sister’s barn, with peeling white paint, and red paint under that, and flecks of pale green paint under that. He wanted it restored. How much would it cost? He’d pay any price. He couldn’t stand seeing it painted in three different colours and covered in dust and chicken shit anymore.

“Some people would pay a fortune for a chair like that,” I told him, “especially with the chicken shit on it.”

“Some people have chicken shit for brains,” he said.

“My husband always prices the jobs,” I told him, wondering in my own mind how that came about in the first place when Hal always asked me how long I thought it would take to complete the task, and what the cost of the materials would add up to.

“Well, whatever it is, I’ll pay it.”

Johnny stood in a three dimensional picture, framed by the thick beams that outlined the huge doorway to the top of the barn, with a horizon of summer-green behind him.

“What difference does it make what it costs,” he said, his face shadowed by the strong afternoon light behind him. “If you’re going to do something, are you going to change your mind because it costs a hundred bucks instead of fifty?”

“To some people, the price you pay makes all the difference,” I said. I was conscious of the way the light pushed past him and spilled over my face, a spotlight on every micro-expression he might catch if he was paying any attention at all. I tried not to give anything away.

“Then their minds weren’t really made up, were they,” he said, a question and an answer at the same time, and I wasn’t sure if we were still talking about his grandmother’s chair, which stood only a few feet away with his past, and maple walnut fudge, and my future lying in the crevices of the spindles I’d be stripping tomorrow.

He hung around for a while, wandering through the maze of refinished furniture and works-in-progress, asking me about this piece and that, and did I make a living doing this? He carried his cigarettes under the sleeve of his striped T-shirt and ran his fingers through his hair, which was thick and messy and made him look like he just woke up.

“You should soak your hands in aloe,” he said, a thought that came out of nowhere.

“Do they look that awful?” I held them up for inspection. I was used to the dryness and hardly noticed how much the chemicals were changing the texture and colour of my own skin.

“My sister has half a dozen plants lining the kitchen window serving no useful purpose in life. I’ll bring you a couple when I come back for the chair.”

He shook my hand before he left, the softness of his skin bathing my own chapped hand in tenderness that wasn’t part of a quick business handshake, and I couldn’t remember the last time Hal had held my hands. Or I held my own. They were for work. A separate entity. I had forgotten they were there, at the end of my arms, with all the pleasures of touch at their mercy.

I told Johnny to come back next Tuesday. I would have the chair finished by then. I walked with him through the barnyard, over to the driveway where his car was parked. The ground was dry. It hadn’t rained in weeks. I was listening to the sound of our feet moving in unison over the cracked dirt path, and the chatter of the barn swallows that lined the telephone wire stretching in from the road. Something from inside of me leapt into the air as the swallows picked up and flew away above our heads in a single, sudden move of force and unanimous decision

After Johnny left, I remembered Hal was going to Toronto the following Tuesday to deliver a few pieces to one of our regular customers. He wouldn’t be home when Johnny came back for the chair.

I never planned to have an affair with Johnny. There wasn’t time for that — for planning. Sorting, sifting, thinking things through. He appeared that day in the doorway of the barn with his grandmother’s triple-painted chair. He came back the following Tuesday to pick it up, stripped and waxed and restored to its original finish. By Friday morning, we were walking through the fields behind his sister’s house, looking at the faces he carved in the fences — the old men and old women who knew what we would know one day. That’s what he said.

By Friday afternoon, I gave myself up to him and let him have me right there in a field, and all the way back to the house, and in the kitchen, on the floor, near the chair. It was meant to be, he said. He knew it was going to happen, since the first moment he saw me. He said I knew it, too. And I guess I did. I didn’t plan it, but I knew it, and I couldn’t pretend I didn’t.

In the fields that day, I only knew not having him was more unbearable to me than any act of disloyalty I was committing. Grabbing my chance was everything. Planting myself on the ground, letting him, and his perception, and certainty, push me into the soil where I had a chance to grow all over again, and do it differently.

I went home hoping Hal wouldn’t smell our lovemaking and cooked him asparagus country pie for dinner. I complained about the heat and headed for the bath, and my heart skipped a few beats when some blades of grass floated to the top. I sat soaking, lingering, putting off washing Johnny away. I could still feel him between my legs when I got out of the tub and dried myself off and dabbed Patchouli behind my ears.

That summer, I retreated to the front porch of my mother’s house — the third house on the left past the Harold Cheese Factory — where the McCann women regularly gathered for cheese curd and tea and Aunt Viv’s homemade cherry wine. Of course, their last names changed when they got married, but they always thought of themselves as the McCann women. There was something reassuring about it.

Hal thought I was there more often that I was. When I wasn’t with Johnny I did go, to sit with the women who had always been in my life, to see if I’d spot something of myself in their eyes, to see if they noticed any change in me.

My father would retreat to the drive shed whenever the McCann women arrived. He’d go off and fix some old boat motor he’d found at the dump, for the fibreglass boat he brought home years before, which still sits to this day, dry-docked in the tall barnyard grass, with a bird’s nest under the hull.

My mother never learned how to swim and didn’t like the water and refused to go out in it with him. It sits — a symbolic reminder of the one thing she wouldn’t do for him — in the same place where those rusty relics he called farm implements used to sit. Just throw a little Massey-Ferguson red on them, Charlotte, and they’ll be as good as new, he’d say. And she would. She’d stand out there in the hot summer sun, swatting horse flies, painting bright red the spokes and the prongs on the hay cutters and the rakes and whatever other ugly contraptions he’d drag home, boasting about his keen eye to spot a piece of rusted machinery that could still be useful.

I was the only McCann woman of my generation who was still in the area. My younger sisters and female cousins were scattered throughout the province and rarely made it home anymore. My brothers were here and there and made the odd appearance with a girlfriend or new wife who was interested in sniffing out the past.

I was the one who sat on the porch with them — with my mother, and Gran, with Aunt Viv and Aunt Ruth — and I was accepted as their equal, expected to understand their private jokes and recall the lost lyrics of songs they danced to when they were young. Don’t you remember that one, Sadie? Surprise. Surprise. They were always surprised to remember I was half their age, less than a third of Gran’s life. I never said a word to any of them about my affair with Johnny, but it hung like a question mark in my own mind at the tail end of every subject we covered.

I told Ben part of that story already. I remember because he asked me if my father would be willing to sell the boat for fifty bucks and I couldn’t imagine him selling it at all, and I really couldn’t imagine Ben driving up there, to the place where I grew up, talking to my father, and hauling that boat away, leaving his footprints on sacred earth. My earth, which he barely knows about and stomps on frequently when he doesn’t call or makes me wait four weeks to see him again.

It all slips away. My tight grip on where I came from. He walks all over it and clouds my vision with the dust he kicks up in his silence.

I never told him this.

He’d only interrupt me, or stop my words with his beautiful mouth, or say I’ve got it all wrong and rationalize my rationalizations until I forgot what it was I was trying to get my head around to begin with.

I only told him about the boat. He asked me if fifty bucks would pay for it. I told him I couldn’t bear going up there, seeing it tied to the dock, sitting in the lake, bobbing up and down in stormy waves, being caressed by gentler waters under a sliver of the moon. Being where it should have been all along.

That’s as far as we got.

His phone rang and Ben ran inside to answer it, leaving me on the dock to wonder why he couldn’t just let it ring until it stopped. When he came back, he had a dismissive look on his face, as if it might persuade me it was only his friend, Bill, drunk and distressed over the sudden flight of his wife — the one with the beady eyes and the beak-like mouth, the one he said never stopped complaining about how bored she was living in the country, how she missed the sound of six-lane traffic and screaming sirens and pollution warnings on the radio.

I might have believed it if it didn’t take him another half hour to move closer to me, to separate the words he’d heard over the phone from what I was saying, to return to the position we were in before he leapt to answer the call. My legs over his legs. His arm around my shoulder. His feet hanging over the dock. His free hand catching fireflies and drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. Running his fingers through his hair.

He was asking me about the pale blue silk patch on my right arm. I was telling him it came from a scarf that belonged to a man named Glen, a sculptor who spent half the year in Italy working with the finest marble, how it reminds me of my Aunt Viv, who once planned a trip there. I was telling him all of this when his free hand began unbuttoning my blouse and he suggested we take a swim. Was Glen a good lover, he wanted to know. Did he do anything special? Yes, I said, as a matter of fact, he did do something very special. He rubbed my feet like he was sculpting clay. He’d rub them for hours with his strong hands, and he listened to my stories. He liked my stories.

Ben said he liked my stories, too, and would like to hear more about Aunt Viv and her trip. I said she never went away. She only planned to. He said I could tell him all about it. Later.

I didn’t think about it at the time, when he was stripping me and kissing me and telling me how much he wanted to fuck me, but I thought about it before.

About telling him why Aunt Viv never went to Italy. The way Aunt Ruth used to paint her house, over and over again. The kitchen, the bathroom, the stairway, the kitchen, the bathroom, the stairway.

About the shirts my mother mended and made do with, and the flea markets she used to wander through, looking for a small item that would give her a lift. A candle too pretty to burn. Some old rhinestone buttons. Something luxurious and frivolous for under five dollars.

The way Gran used to complain about everything. The money Ruth wasted on paint. The food at the nursing home. The mystery person who kept stealing everyone’s hand lotion. How Gran sat, rigid and frayed, like the broken threads of woven osier in the seat of the rocker. That was her chair, near the purple clematis, the shadiest spot on the porch.

They were there in the beginning, that first summer when Johnny Marks showed up with his grandmother’s chair. They were still there the following summer, after I mailed that brown package and left the post office without any blood in my veins.

They remain as bookends.

They sit on a shelf I pass regularly and sometimes stop in front of, letting my fingers touch the volumes that stand between them, holding the details I’ve managed to keep in good shape. Crisp and clean, without dog-eared or ripped pages, like new every time I see them. Separate from everything else.

Under the roof my father patched a dozen times — behind tiger lilies and irises and three generations of peony bushes — on a wooden floor with peeling grey porch paint and splotches of cherry wine stains, I learned how to build the shelf that love sits on. I learned how to make it sturdy and unadorned so it looks like it belongs. Plain and simple, another piece of furniture holding some untitled books, which become obscured by the pockets of air that puff out of Ben’s mouth and make their way into a bag of endearing things about him, which I carry with me when he’s not around. Of all the things to cling to. Apnea. And the streaks of laundry soap on his shirts.

I’ll think about them when I’m trying to knock him down a peg or two. He snores. He walks around looking like yesterday’s laundry. He doesn’t work. He can’t even catch a good fish.

He stumbles through

He stumbles.

And makes me wish I could, too.

Stumble and fall, and not bother getting up right away to brush myself off, but lie instead, on the ground I land on, and stay a while. Fallen and still. With half a chance to remember what it is I couldn’t do as I stood in the kitchen of my mother’s house, waiting for a kettle to boil, while Gran demanded to know what happened to her mother’s ring.

“I hope one of you didn’t go and pawn it or something,” she said.

I could hear her, and the rest of them, through the screened door in the kitchen, where I stood, eavesdropping, until an image not unlike my own caught my eye.

There was a picture of my mother lying on the table, a photograph leaning against a candle. Taken long ago, on the porch. A picture of her wearing a straw hat, leaning on a pillar, staring out over the peony bushes. Behind it, there was a picture of my mother painting a rusted rake in the barnyard. Behind that, another picture of my mother squatting, her back to the hushed lens, painting the same rake, and Aunt Viv standing beside her with a paint brush in one hand and a bandanna on her head, her mouth moving, caught in midsentence as she spoke to the camera. Protesting, no doubt, against being in such an unflattering setting, sweating, in clothes she’d only wear to paint in a barnyard.

“That ring’s worth a fortune,” Gran went on. “It’s a whole carat. The detail on that carriage, they don’t make them like that anymore. Of course, my father had taste. Taste and money, which is more than I can say for your father.”

“Dad tried, mother,” I could hear Aunt Ruth say.

“He forged cheques!” Gran snapped back.

“The worst time,” Aunt Viv joined in, “was when the police came to get him just as my date showed up, that Robert what’s-his-name. You know the one, Charlotte. He drove the red convertible.”

“Robert Davidson,” my mother answered without hesitation, plucking the detail from her mind as she plucked thread with a favourite needle, up and down, through the thinning fabric of one of my father’s shirts. “He lived in town, on Emily Street,” she continued. “His father was a butcher.

“My God, dear, your memory never ceases to amaze me,” Aunt Viv said with her own mix of drama and sarcasm. “Thank you for carrying around the details of my life I can’t be bothered remembering.”

“You can’t be bothered remembering, Missy, and I’ll never forget.” Gran began rocking back and forth, faster, enough to make the chair inch closer to Aunt Ruth. “I’ll never forget that time your father went all the way to Florida to keep from going to jail again. He came back three hours before Charlotte’s wedding, with no money and no suit to wear. Remember that dear? He had to borrow that awful powder blue suit from Norman.”

“It wasn’t awful, mother,” Aunt Ruth said. “My husband paid a fortune for that suit.”

“It was the ugliest suit that ever came out of a store!” Gran yelled, her anger at everything and nothing squeezing into the first opportunity she’d had all day.

“It was an expensive linen suit, mother.” Aunt Ruth’s voice was controlled, with exasperation only a few more words away.

“Ugly as hell, and wrinkled too,” Gran pecked again.

“It wasn’t wrinkled, mother!” Aunt Ruth yelled. I could see her shaking her head, sighing, turning to face the flowers that had gone limp in the beds below her. She was a tired as they were of the unrelenting heat and the burning words from the yellow goddess who sat across from her. Gran wore the same yellow smock dress most of that summer.

Just as Aunt Ruth yelled, my mother dropped her sewing box, and straight pins and spools of thread scattered all over the porch floor, and Gran switched to the old sewing machine she gave my mother, and why didn’t she ever use it, and how many times is she going to mend the same shirts, and isn’t that husband of hers ever going to make a decent living so she can go to the store and buy some new clothes.

The rest of the McCann women stayed low to the floor, picking up the mess of pins one at a time, while Gran ranted on to no one in particular about the heat, and the weak tea, and the intolerably long distance between the porch and my mother’s only bathroom at the top of the stairs.

I slipped into the pantry off the side of the kitchen when I heard Gran coming. I stood behind the door and pretended to be looking for more sugar. In case. I heard her climb the stairs with a steady pace at the start, then slow, staggering steps. I could hear the aging anger go out of her when she got close to the top — it wheezed its way out, and was replaced by confusion and indecision about which direction to head off in.

I read the labels on soup cans while I heard her feet shuffle one way, then the other. A door closed and she moaned slightly as she sat down on the toilet. I stayed in the pantry until she flushed and went back to the porch — and the pump in the cellar below me kicked in, drawing water from the well in the field behind the house, with a motor that was growing louder and slower, deadening the sound of her return and the question of what happened to her mother’s ring.

The pale blue silk patch over here never found out. He went back to Italy and fell in love with a model with nicer feet than mine.

The plaid flannel on my elbows didn’t even want to know I had a grandmother, or a mother, or children of my own, and frequently called at the last minute on a school night to get together, and planned weekends with beer and pot and sex at my house because he was married and we couldn’t go to his house.

Earlier, Ben asked me about this funny green material on my hip. It wasn’t like any shirt he’d ever worn, he said. It feels like polyester, but thicker, he said. I was going to tell him, but then I had to put my mouth on his and take my jacket off, and everything else, and slide into the lake with him because he made me think of Bobby and his nice strong body, and why I clipped a few pieces from one of his ball caps.

I was going to tell Ben how every time I went into Bobby’s closet or dresser drawers looking for a patch of cloth, he walked back into room and made love to me again, and again, and I couldn’t think of clothes at all when I thought of Bobby, only his tireless, muscular body. But as I lay under him one night, drained by love’s rough touches and his inexhaustible probing and acrobatic curiosities, I couldn’t help but notice the swollen fabric on his collection of ball caps, which hung on hooks in perfectly straight rows on the back of his closet door, and when Bobby got up to shower before another round of spinning and hanging and tangled limbs, I snipped away at his Scout’s hat with the Swiss army knife he kept on his night table.

It sounds like a fable, not a real life, and I don’t sound at all like the same person when I tell that story and the one about my grandmother’s ring. I can hear the difference in my own voice.

I hear it.

The way my voice loses its smile and becomes guarded, and unsure, as I stand under the covered bridge on Mill Street and watch the flow of Rawdon Creek and tell Mary-Beth once again how Ben romanced me in the wee hours of the morning, faking surprise at myself for letting it all happen. The midnight rambler, we call him. His name is rarely spoken anymore, not even by me and my handy little bad girl voice. Shame, shame on me, trailing the verbal journal entries I make every time I see Mary-Beth.

Except that one time when she cornered me outside the Sears Catalogue Store and invited me up to her apartment for a drink and I couldn’t think fast enough about what else I had to do.

When she did most of the talking and I walked around her living room scraping fragments, excavating amongst her brown Lazy-boy leather furniture, and the dying fig tree in the corner, and the pictures on her bookcase, which sat near a heap of seemingly uninteresting rocks and pebbles, until I looked closely and turned them over and found the embedded vertebrae of something tiny and unknown.

Mary-Beth dropped names like gastropods and cephalopods and trilobites, and did I know they were pre-Cambrian, five hundred million years old? She collects them from the beach at Presqu’ile. She drives out on weekends and scours the shoreline, looking for historic backbone.

She’s never had any of her own, she said.

“I’m not likely to leave any marks on this earth.” That’s what her clinical doctor’s voice said.

“Nothing that’ll last beyond tomorrow.”

When she said it, she was standing in front of the bookcase and she spoke with resignation, which I hate and find presumptuous, since none of us know what will happen tomorrow to change our view. She could meet someone, she could do something. I don’t know what. Something.

I looked at those pictures on her bookcase and figured I did a good job of picking out her mother and her father and her brother, the one in the white frame with his blond, well-groomed wife and their two impeccable children. It was the man in the gold frame I couldn’t place — the one who was standing beside a small plane, leaning on its wing with a cigarette in one hand. I wanted to know who he was but I didn’t want to know the story. There had to be a story behind that picture, and why she chose brown leather, and why she doesn’t move that dying fig into more light, and how she ended up here, without anyone in her life but a bunch a patients who only need her twice a year when they get a runny nose or find a lump.

We sat on her couch and drank scotch and soda and she asked me what I was going to do about the midnight rambler. Was I getting past the conventional crap that says I have to have him all to myself, like the rest of the normal world? That he has to call me three days before he wants to see me, not eleven at night, and promise me exclusivity on his penis and his heart.

Had I gotten past all that, she wanted to know. Could I close my ears to the rest of it, to what I’m supposed to do?

Sure, sure I have, I said, as I chugged my drink and couldn’t figure out why I said I’d have soda, which I’ve never liked and which sits in my stomach, burning, bubbling, until it works its way back up and settles in my chest — carbonated rain against my bones Like that man in the picture, the one in the small gold frame on the bookcase, fizzing and spitting at me from behind a piece of glass. Staring at me. Shaking his head in between drags on his cigarette, and throwing looks of disappointment my way.

I left Mary-Beth’s apartment and walked home, after that.

Then I drove out to Johnny Marks’s sister’s farm.

I stopped a short distance before the house, pulled over, and parked in front of the faces he carved in the fence along the road. They were still there, a lighter shade of grey.

Of course.

Think of all the suns that have risen since then, casting fading rays of hope on the bumps and grooves he left behind. The boundaries we didn’t cross still stand and get splashed by passing cars after a heavy rain has filled the potholes on the road, their wooden eyes never blinking in response.

Dead wood.

That doesn’t flinch.

Or ever move.

Like I did, from the kitchen to the pantry, when Gran went upstairs to the bathroom and came back down and returned to the rocker on the porch and demanded to know what had happened to her mother’s ring.

She had a right to know.

She had given it to my mother, her eldest daughter, years before, and never spoke of it again, until this time. She wanted to see it.

Suddenly.

Suddenly, it was the most important thing in the world, the only thing her failing mind could focus on. The ring. The ring. That fucking, fucking ring.

I didn’t tell Johnny Marks about the ring.

I told him Hal begged me not to leave.

With his eyes.

His silent, silent eyes.

I told Johnny I owed Hal another chance.

That I had an obligation.

I’d made a promise.

To be there.

I wrote it all down and mailed it in a brown package along with that shirt I embroidered for him. That jean shirt with the pearl buttons. I sewed tall blades of grass and grey split-rail fences and simple outlines of old faces. Half-faces, with one eye, part of a nose, half a mouth, carefully placing them on the front and back of the shirt just below the collar. I added a red barn and a chair and some birds on a wire just before they leapt into the future.

I folded it properly, the way my mother taught me, and tucked the note I scribbled one morning when Hal was out into the pocket, with a little hanging out over the top so Johnny wouldn’t miss it.

And I wondered if it would send him flying up the driveway to get me.

To save me from myself. Or convince him I wasn’t capable of leaving, of trusting what we had.

I kept waiting for Johnny to tell me to leave, even though he said he’d never say it, wouldn’t tell me what to do, wouldn’t tell me — that I should hear it in the way we made love that year, but all I heard was silence when I got out of bed at his sister’s house to go to the bathroom.

I couldn’t hear my feet on the floor when I got up, after we spent the afternoon loving and talking and sleeping for minutes here and there until it woke us up for more, before I had to go.

I couldn’t hear my feet, or feel them on the carpet at the end of the bed. On the plank boards in the hallway, painted deep red, bleeding love at my feet.

I took that jean shirt out on the porch after I made another pot of tea and sat beside my mother to finish what I’d started.

“That looks like a man’s shirt,” Gran said.

“It is,” I answered.

“You mean to tell me, Hal’s going to walk around with whatever it is you’ve got on there?”

“It’s a lovely shirt,” Aunt Viv said.

“It’s a silly shirt,” Gran snapped back. “What man would wear a bunch of birds, and, and — what is that? Is that a fence? My God, what man is going to wear a fence embroidered on his chest?”

“Mother,” Aunt Ruth piped in, “just because you can’t imagine something doesn’t mean it’s bad.”

“I never heard of such a silly thing. Birds and fences on a man’s shirt. A tablecloth or a pillow, yes. But a man’s shirt?”

A car went by, breaking the conversation with the sound of shifting gravel. I looked up and saw the haze left behind by speed and dust, then continued sewing the beaks on birds, swatting flies that tickled me with their nothing legs as they ran across my arms.

1 felt a sense of urgency With finishing the shirt. With getting home. With getting to the next moment. It sat in my gut, pounding, as though my heart had sunk to my navel and was banging from the inside like a growing child, restless, uncertain, torn between the dark safety of the womb and the enticing warmth of light on the other side.

His sister was coming home, Johnny said, and it was time for him to go soon, back to Toronto, maybe, or north to Sault St. Marie. He might go there, he said, and spend some time at a cabin in the woods, outside of town, he wasn’t sure. He stared at me from the pillar on his sister’s porch, which he leaned against, with one leg stretched in front of him, the other dangling over the side, his eyes on me, on what I wasn’t saying.

I never told him how Aunt Viv took his shirt out of my hands and showed me how to make tulip stitches, which she placed with precision along the split-rail fences, with green stems and red petals. How Gran grew impatient over the failure of my mother to produce the ring. How Aunt Ruth kept trying to change the subject, pulling out paint swatches from her purse, asking us what we thought of lavender for the hallway.

Any one of them could have pawned it, Gran said. Every one of her daughters had a motive, she pointed out, then went down the list. Aunt Viv wanted to go to Italy. Aunt Ruth had put too many paint and wallpaper and new linen purchases on her credit cards. My mother had to replace the roof on the house, which had started leaking and was losing shingles every time the wind picked up.

Aunt Viv opened a bottle of cherry wine. My mother got some glasses. Aunt Ruth poured and took a glass out to my father who was still puttering in the drive shed. I stayed quiet in my corner, tying off the threads with three or four knots, obsessed about the pictures of our story staying in their proper place on Johnny’s chest plate and shoulders.

I guess I knew then I was going nowhere. I was stuck. With myself.

With Hal, worried and upset we weren’t making enough money. Needing me to put my arms around him and tell him everything would be alright, looking at me with eyes that knew I’d been someplace else for the last several months, and not with him, not really. He knew I was slipping, he had to know, and he reached out to me and told me we didn’t have enough money to pay the mortgage and the insurance and couldn’t I, wouldn’t I even consider—

I took it in. So he’d quit looking at me, quit involving me.

In the kitchen that warm summer day, while I waited for the kettle to boil, and Gran came down the stairs from the bathroom, I wanted to tell her — in those few seconds it took for her to cross the kitchen — I wanted to tell her my mother gave the ring to me and I’m the one who pawned it, traded it for a couple of mortgage payments and some car insurance, and that I was leaving, going off with my lover, and isn’t it the right thing to do, Gran? Wouldn’t you have done the same, if you could have? Don’t you wish you did? Don’t you wish?

And I almost did.

I stood outside the Legion in Stirling on a Saturday night, the week before Johnny left, while everyone else was inside celebrating Aunt Ruth’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. I stood there while it rained, waiting for my feet to take me to my car.

I was coming.

I even opened the door and sat inside and turned the key and the wiper blades kept saying yes, yes, yes, yes. Then I saw Hal, standing outside under the white light. He didn’t move. He just stood there in the rain. Waiting. Pleading, with his silent, silent eyes.

I told Ben about the Legion scene once before, when we were talking about defining moments, when he was in a talkative mood, pensive and worried about what he was going to do next, concerned that he couldn’t hear that voice that always tells him what to do. It seemed it had have left him for good.

We were sitting on the dock and I told him I knew I shouldn’t have stayed with Hal, that night in the parking lot of the Legion, I knew it. I told him I should have gone off with Johnny.

When I asked Ben if he was listening, he said yes, but he continued looking out over the lake with other things on his mind, so I stopped, and didn’t bother telling him how I never saw Johnny again, that I mailed the note and the shirt the next day, that I stood in the post office feeling faint, afraid I was going to vomit on the marble floor, or crawl into the corner and wince.

I didn’t tell him what happened in the bathroom at the Legion that night, that I ran into Aunt Viv and Aunt Ruth just before I thought I was leaving for good — that Aunt Ruth was crying because her husband told her his anniversary gift was paying off the debts she’d piled up on the credit cards, which Ben wouldn’t understand anyway, because he didn’t know anything about Aunt Ruth’s obsession with redecorating or how Uncle Norman had spent their entire marriage telling her, her home is her life and it should be enough to make her happy.

How could I ever explain the frazzled excitement she experienced when she pulled out swatches of paint and wallpaper and laid them across the red metal table on my mother’s porch? Or tell him about Aunt Viv’s sarcasm, which vented anger at her husband’s unwillingness to die. He was dying for years. No one should live that long like that, with oxygen tanks and soiled beds, and a leash around her neck, keeping her from going anywhere.

I didn’t tell Ben I saw Aunt Viv and Aunt Ruth embracing, wiping each other’s tears, fighting to get past the rush of truth, which had caught them both unaware in the freshly painted bathroom of the Legion. I said Uncle Norman was a son-of-a-bitch and they scolded me for talking that way. He was a good provider, they said. He just didn’t understand women. I apologized and watched as they washed their faces, and Aunt Viv pulled out her lipstick and green eye shadow and rose-red blush, and they made themselves up all over again before they walked back out to dance to Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin.

I stayed in the bathroom for a while and smoked a cigarette and couldn’t help but notice all the spots the painters had missed with the beige paint. Flecks of old white paint were still showing in the corners and in the indentations between the cinder blocks on the wall. It was a sloppy job, I decided, and they should never have been paid.

Of course I left the bathroom certain I wouldn’t have to look at its poorly painted walls ever again, never imagining I’d be back in less than hour, reapplying mascara that had run down my face on the dance floor and onto Hal’s white shirt. Never imagining that I’d end up here, all these years later, divorced and lying next to Ben, losing him as he slips away and leaves me empty and barren, down there, where I’ve filled myself with dozens of lovers and still find myself — never mind. I’ve collected a few good stories along the way. We only covered the pale blue silk patch on my left breast, the plaid flannel on my elbows, and the swollen green polyester near my hip, on the right side.

I’ll probably never tell Ben I was thinking about Johnny earlier tonight, when we were making love in the lake, when he cried out this is the best, this is the best, and he gave himself up to me, completely, and I had him, all of him, everything in him, in my hands and between my legs and we went further and further out, deeper into the blackness until I couldn’t feel my feet touching the bottom.

I was thinking about johnny, then. About the article I read last year in a Toronto paper, how he’s been commissioned to carve hundreds of faces in logs for the city parks. There was a picture of him, inset, in the top corner of a larger picture of three logs he’d already carved, with the faces of old men I could have sworn I’d seen before staring out at me.

He looked the same. Older, but the same. And I wondered what ever happened to that shirt — if his wife, an artist from northern Ontario, the article said — if she found the shirt one day while she was cleaning out closets, if she threw it into a pile for the Salvation Army, if someone else in the world was walking around with our story on his back. Some unknowing soul clothed in split-rail fences and tulip stitches and birds on a wire just before they leapt into their future.

The night Ben and I got stuck while making love was a night like all the others I’d seen at Oak Lake.

That’s how I’ll begin.

With something familiar.

With the same dark sky that greeted me every time Ben called in the middle of the night and I drove out to see him — on the wheels of one long-ago moment — under a sky full of stars, sprinkling tiny specks of light on a lake rumoured to be bottomless.

And then I’ll tell the story.

How I drove home the next morning with a piece of his black Levi’s shirt in my pocket, thinking about my Aunt Ruth and my Aunt Viv, who still hasn’t booked her trip to Italy even though her husband died three years ago, afraid to leave the house alone. About my mother, who asked me the other day if I thought the way she fixed her hair made her look older than she is. I suggested she go to a hairdresser for a new style, but she shrugged and said my father always trimmed it and she managed fine.

We were all sitting with Gran, in the dining room at the nursing home, on her ninety-sixth birthday. There was a cake with candles and the staff was about to sing for her. Gran was in between my mother and myself, looking at a bird on a feeder outside the window, not knowing or caring what all the fuss was about.

Not remembering I told her that day on the porch that I was the one who had her mother’s ring, while my mother looked the other way to hide what she knew was the truth.

Not remembering the ring at all.

I rubbed Gran’s back and thought of Mary-Beth’s rocks, the embedded vertebrae of the tiny and unknown, and how Gran’s skin had become thin and barely covered the bumps and grooves of her own disintegrating spine.

And how I left Ben’s cottage just as the sun was coming up, left him sleeping, shrivelled and retracted from inescapable decision. Safe. How the heavy scent of calcium chloride followed me on the cottage road and out to the highway, then disappeared in the early morning air as I drove back into town.