Читать книгу Film Society - Gilaine E. Mitchell - Страница 14

In August we watch ’night, Mother with Sissy Spacek and Anne Bancroft. Delaney brings it. She tells us she couldn’t think of what else to get. Besides, she says, she needs to keep her head in the stories of mothers and daughters, for the sake of her documentary, which she has set aside for a few hours.

“I need the break,” she says. And I almost believe her until I catch sight of the note on the videocassette cover and see “porch scene” and “couch scene” scribbled at the top in her neat and tidy writing. She has already made a list of scenes she wants us to replay.

I expect complaints to come from every corner of the room when she announces the movie she has brought with her — most of us were depressed for a week the first time we saw it. But no one says a word. We are all in some kind of end-of-summer funk. The nights are getting cooler and darkness falls earlier. I still haven’t heard from Ben and have weakened and started calling, but he’s never there. I am thankful and disappointed all at the same time.

“How’s the documentary coming along?” Storm asks.

“I agonize over it,” Delaney answers. “Did you know Sally agreed to be in it?”

“Reluctantly,” Sally adds.

“What’s it called again?” Alex asks.

“When Women Lose Their Mothers,” Del says.

“It’s the first in a series,” Sally jokes. “The next one will be, When Women Lose Their Fathers, and I’ll be in that one, too.”

A few of us smile awkwardly. Delaney heads for the bathroom. Sally rolls a joint.

In my kitchen, Alex makes an arrangement with miniature sunflowers. She reminds me that it has been a year since she first started seeing Vincent. “It goes by quickly,” she says, “when you only get together a few times a month.” There isn’t any particular tenderness in her voice, or excitement, or a hint of anything remarkable about her love affair. In one breath, she mentions Vincent. In the next, she talks about Anthony. Except for the names, I cannot hear any difference between the two.

Have I heard from Ben, she asks me. Did he leave town or something? Have I sewn the patch from his shirt on my jacket yet? She eyes me up and down looking for it, picking up on the coincidental patterns on my back — likening them to fields I’ve sewn with perennial regret. From a distance, she tells me, the fields are as clear as day, when I’m standing at the other end of the living room, or down the hall near the dining room. Anyone can see them, she says, if they forget they’re looking at a piece of clothing, at the random assembly of fabric and thread — if they can ignore all suggestion of whim or misguided direction.

Alex walks out of the kitchen, leaving me to wipe up the water drops and the clipped stems off the counter and to clear the dust she has just stirred in my head. She leaves me alone to deal with Grace, who comes rushing in to tell me in private that her novel has been rejected by another publisher and she’s about to give up and can I say something, anything, to make her feel better, to keep her going. Can I?

I walk back out to the living room with a beer in my hand — thankful that Storm is the quiet type and Jenny is at The Cottage and not here to watch the movie and hear all the talk about mothers and daughters, which puts her on edge and the rest of us on guard. Then I remember that for Jenny, a trip to The Cottage is like being stuck in the same movie, over and over again, and could just as easily star Sissy Spacek and Anne Bancroft, only it needs a cottage and a lake. And if you could take Sissy Spacek and Anne Bancroft and put them On Golden Pond, and take a little of the Elizabeth Taylor Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf character and make her part of the Anne Bancroft mother character, you’d pretty much have the movie of Jenny’s life. Only it wouldn’t end in less than two hours. It wouldn’t end at all.

I settle into my chair with Del’s note and my aging remote and I’m ready to rewind the porch scene and the couch scene and all the others she has written down with as little disruption as possible.

She was still looking for a few more visual ideas for her own work. That’s what she told me earlier in the week, when she asked me to describe, quickly, without thinking, five images that came to mind when I thought of my mother. She wrote them down while the two of us were driving the back roads, looking for the perfect shot of perfect clouds in a perfect sky: An empty porch. An open sewing box. Wavy fields. Burning candles. And cheese curd.

“Cheese curd?” she repeated.

“Cheese curd,” I shrugged.

She made me drive while she sat in the back of my car and spent most of the ride leaning out the window with a video camera in her hands. She needed the perspective of someone looking out the window of a moving car, looking up at clouds. They had to be the right clouds, she said. They had to line up in a certain way and cross a certain type of sky.

“That’s kind of a tall order,” I suggested, “considering the formation of the clouds and the sky is completely out of our control.”

“It’ll happen,” she said, “just keep driving. Don’t you have any faith, Sadie?”

“I do,” I said, and I did, but I lost it after two hours of zipping up one road and down another. Each one looked like the last, like all the roads that criss-cross the township, the landscape is surprisingly consistent. By car they appear as one long, liquid blur. The same watered-down images whir by, seen but not noticed. Only a house painted in an unlikely colour, or a particularly beautiful farm, or the shifting stones of a century-old cemetery provide visual breaks. Landmarks. And the odd hill, which is steep and distinct, instantly recognizable, and felt in the pit of your stomach as the road drops away beneath you.

“It’s the most important part of the documentary,” she pleaded when I suggested we go home, that the clouds weren’t listening. “Please,” she said. So I stayed out there and eventually passed a road, fleeting and familiar, while Del sighed and clung to the camera and rode with her head leaning out the window, restless and agitated, and increasingly desperate.

I could hear it in the way she breathed. As if it were a chore just to be there.

You can’t ride so close to the rails, to the nitty-gritty task of compilation — the putting-together of life stories, summation and conclusions, capsulated and abbreviated, told then walk back into your own life as Del was trying to do and live it as it comes at you, moment by slow-moving moment. Not without thinking of where it might lead, or won’t lead. Not without the taste of the earth, as it once moved from underneath your feet, appearing suddenly on the tip of your tongue, a mineral taste, distinctive and lasting, it takes days to go away. You can still feel it between your teeth. Your body shivers whenever you think about it, about where you once were.

The same can be said of a certain kind of love.

You can’t go there not there — and come back unchanged.

I returned to my husband — that night at the Legion, that night when I didn’t go off with Johnny Marks, I returned and I stayed. Partly because I felt I should, partly because Johnny never came to take me away. It was months before I finally stopped looking for him, half-expecting, half-hoping he’d come speeding up our driveway to get me.

I returned to Hal and to my garden and to cooking asparagus country pie. I filled two rooms upstairs, one with a son and then one with a daughter. Hal left before they ever started school — left me agitated and restless, with the taste of missed opportunity swimming around in my well-behaved mouth. I let him go without much fuss — told him I only wished he’d done it a few years earlier when I still had a chance with Johnny.

“That’s just it,” he said as she stood in our kitchen. “Now, I get to be someone’s Johnny.”

It ended without drama or raised voices. He just left one morning while the kids were out with my mother — with as much as he could carry at one time in his long, anxious arms. I watched him go. Peering out from behind the curtain on the front door, I watched him drive away, then I went for a walk.

I didn’t go very far. I walked along Sarles Road, not far from the road I lived on — a road no one lives on. A short stretch of side road with nothing but fields of hay, clover and straw, and fence lines held in place by high piles of fieldstone, some large and flat, perfect for garden paths. I’d taken my share over the years.

I kept thinking I should cry — not for the loss of a great love, for that would have been a lie. For what then? The loss a family? For my children’s father? Hal had promised to see them every other weekend and one night through the week.

No — if I had wept, which I didn’t, but if I had, it would surely have been for myself. For failing to trust what I knew years before, for failing to trust that Hal would have survived without me, for failing to see it wasn’t love for him that made me return, or pity, or duty, or anything like it. Pity and duty would have kept me from loving Johnny Marks.

It was on Sarles Road that I met the plaid patch, which sits on my left shoulder, next to my collar. My first patch. My first choice, the first time I realized I had any, that the world wouldn’t end when I made it.

His name was Zeke.

Yes, he had a last name, but I’ve thrown last names away in favour of the fabrics by which I’ve known them. Zeke Plaid and Glen Silk and Bobby “Ball Cap” Polyester. Shortcuts to the memorable moments in the life of Sadie McCann. Belittling details I admit trivialize and hide my fonder memories of these men with last names and snipped shirts and lives that go on without me, Sadie what-was-her-name?

Still, the shortcuts work and save me time. I think of Zeke Plaid and I instantly feel the overworked muscles underneath the flannel squares and the thick lines that only partially covered his heaving, hairless chest when he stopped shoveling gravel and asked me if I lived nearby.

“Around the bend, third house on the left.”

“The old Chalmers’ house.”

“You know it?”

“I’ve worked on these roads for fifteen years.”

“A lifetime for someone your age,” I said. He barely looked older than thirty and wasn’t sure if I was teasing him — I being the older — one the older woman who had to throw age up into the air, to see if it made any difference, if it made him run.

He didn’t bat an eye.

“In this job, you eventually meet up with everyone — or you hear about them.” It was his turn and he took it. Or you hear about them. Putting me in my place.

Zeke was an employee with the township. His dark blue pickup was parked nearby with the township emblem painted on the side of both doors. He was repairing Sarles Road that spring. It was only a matter of weeks between Hal’s leaving and my meeting Zeke. Hal left the first week in April. Zeke was working on Sarles Road in the middle of May. The heavy rains had washed part of it away, had thinned it out in places that threatened to split it in two.

I was on one of my walks, which I took whenever Hal had the kids, or my mother or my aunts came by to give me a break. It had become routine — counted on — this time to myself when I quickened my pace and lengthened my stride and walked from one end of the road to the other and back again, slowing down on the last few hundred feet, dragging out the minutes it would take to get home — back to the busy life that awaited me. Motherhood. A return to college. Stripping furniture at night and on weekends for a store in town to help pay the bills.

I walked down Sarles Road whenever I could, rain or shine. I practically ran out of the house to greet its knolls and potholes known to me as well as the scars and moles on a lover could ever be. Its trees and bushes and roadside boulders, and the one-wall remains of an old tree-house were as much a part of my walks as street signs and skyscrapers and store windows would be to any urban dweller — minus all human contact.

I never ran into anyone on Sarles Road. Not until the day I met up with Zeke.

He was bent over, a shovel in his hand, stopped in midmotion, looking up at me from underneath his Rawdon Township hat. Raindrops were landing on his chin and around his mouth, resting on the clean-shaven strip of flesh between his nose and his upper lip, until they rolled down the creases that formed when he smiled and waited for me to say something. The creases, I figured, came from working outside, from sitting behind the windowed sun, driving the back roads of the township since he was practically a boy, before he became the man I met.

He stood up and leaned on his shovel. He was taller than I would have guessed.

The rain’s getting pretty heavy. I can give you a lift.”

“I’ll be fine,” I said.

“It’s no trouble for me. I get paid no matter when I’m doing out here.”

I liked the fact he wasn’t giving up but I wondered if it had anything to do with me, personally. Maybe he was this nice to everyone he met up with.

“I’ll be fine,” I repeated. “I do this all the time. And I have my umbrella.” I wasn’t even halfway through my sacred walk. I wasn’t about to abandon it on the chance there might be more to his politeness than a genetic predisposition to gentlemanly behaviour something he might have inherited from his father, and his father before him.

I continued on down the road, feeling his eyes on my backside. I walked with a great deal of concentration. I suddenly felt tipsy and clumsy, as if I’d had too many drinks and might lose my balance and trip over my own feet. Or walk, absent-mindedly, off to one side of the road — on an angle that would reveal my self-conscious, school-girlish concern over what he thought of my ass.

With all the grace of an insecure, ganglylegged teenager, I eventually walked out of his sight. I went to the end of the road, until my feet were soaked and my jeans were drenched, soaking wet and heavy, yet I felt light and serene in my puddly path — in the prolonged gaze Zeke had given me. In the chance he’d still be there when I turned around and headed back. In the very fact I could ask myself, What do I want to happen next?

It had already been decided, on his first offer for a lift.

No — before that.

Before I ever set eyes on him. When I walked out my front door that morning, or some other morning. When I stepped outside and began putting distance between what had been and what was to come, and what I chose not to live without.

It was only a question of would he still be there, or not? And how fast could I make it happen? I didn’t want to make it complicated. I barely wanted to talk. I only wanted to walk up to him and start.

It wasn’t like Johnny Marks who came upon my life with some kind of fateful impact written all over his face. I wasn’t going to fall hard, and be forever changed by my experience. My head was still present, still walking with me, still demanding equal time with my libido, maybe more.

It wasn’t like Hal, either, where everything was tied up in married love, measured in quantity and endurance not quality, or interest — just how often, as long as it was often enough, normal enough for married couples.

It had more to do with a guy who laid me down in the grass by the roadside — another road, another time — a guy who told me I was getting too excited, that I didn’t have to move so much. Who said my urge to pee was part of it, part of losing my virginity, that he’d forgotten what a drag it was having a chick for the first time. Did I know I would bleed later? Did I know it gets better each time? But it didn’t. Not with him. Not while I continued to lay under his body, motionless, holding back urges I finally knew had nothing to do with peeing.

I realized how fast I was walking and slowed my pace, left it up to the gods who had orchestrated the whole thing in the first place the rain, the road, the man with the shovel with the moist mouth. Planted in my path. Temptation waiting in the knoll before the turn where the rest of my life was waiting less than half a mile away.

That night I’d be cooking spaghetti with tomato sauce, fighting with my kids to eat more, they never seemed to eat enough. I’d be playing the god of rain myself, holding the shower head above them in the bath while they pretended to be sailors at sea during a sudden storm. I’d be reading one more story, just one more story, about moons and bunnies and cats that wore funny hats. And then I’d be in the spare room, off the living room, sanding a washstand, sanding until two in the morning, at least until two in the morning, to get it done.

I quickened my pace. I decided — yes — only the gods could make it rain. But only I could move my legs fast enough to get there. To get to him before he left. Before he drove off. Before all his work, his freshly laid sand and gravel, washed away in a rain that threatened to never stop.