Belinda's Rings (14 page)

All right, Mum said. Not the topic I would expect from two fifteen-year-old girls. She smiled.

Yeah, well, I said. I was just curious. But Rose didn't explain it very well.

Wiley was busy cutting up his meat, not even looking at me.

Wiley, I said.

He looked up.

You know about this kinda stuff, right? I said.

Wiley jumped out of his seat, rushed into the kitchen saying, One sec, just getting the pepper! I rolled my eyes at Mum and she shook her head back,
just let it go
. Wiley sat back down, sprinkled pepper all over his plate like he was playing a maraca.

I've discovered I love pepper, he said, watching his plate fill up with black flecks.

Hello? I said.

He set the pepper down, picked up his fork. Sorry, what? he said.

Purgatory! I said.

Oh right, Wiley said, tapping his baked potato with the back of his fork. Isn't that the place where you get tortured?

Not exactly, Mum said. It's more of a . . . state of
being
than a place.

So like something you make up in your head? I asked.

You might say that, Mum said.

It's those goddamn priests, Wiley said with his mouth full. The ones who diddle with the choirboys. They want to convince themselves they're still gonna get into heaven.

I laughed, and Wiley seemed to like that 'cause he smiled.

What are you talking about? Jess said.

Mum cut in. Well, she said, the way I understand it, it's taking into account that things aren't always so black and white.

Rose said it's a place between heaven and earth, I said.

Yes! Wiley said, slamming his hand on the table. That's what I learned. Sunday school — I took six years of it. He wagged his finger at Mum.

Yes, okay, Mum said, some people see it as a place. But that's a bit — simplistic.

Wiley put down his fork. He propped his elbows on the table, folded his hands and pressed them to his lips.

Mum glanced at him, then continued.

Catholics, she said, believe that some people — the ones who were good but did their share of bad things — have to be purified before they can go to heaven. She cut into her potato carefully and mashed up the inside, watching Wiley out of the corner of her eye. He was chewing slowly, staring at her like she had a target on her forehead.

Sounds creepy to me, Jess said.

So what, I said, their ghosts just kind of float around in their dead bodies waiting to get into heaven?

I guess so, Mum shrugged. I don't really know. I guess they believe you don't need to go to a special place to prove you're a good person.

Wiley snickered at that. What a scam, he said. His knee started jiggling under the table. I guarantee you, he said, the guys who came up with that crap are the jerks who disobeyed all the rules behind everyone's backs. They've gotta convince themselves they're still
good people
. He made air quotes when he said good people.

Well, what's wrong with that? Mum said, laying her knife across her plate even though she still hadn't taken a bite of her food. She looked Wiley right in the eye and his knee stopped jiggling. His smile quickly faded away.

For a few seconds everyone was silent. Jess was holding her fork in midair, balancing three peas on the prongs. Neither of us knew who was going to say something next so we just stared at our food.

People make mistakes, Mum said, but they can change. Does that mean they're not good people? Mum's face was blank, her hands folded. Jess lowered her fork back to her plate.

Then Wiley started breathing really loud through his nose. His breathing got louder and louder and faster and faster until he was practically wheezing and his face started to go pink as the ham on his plate. He looked at me, then at Mum. And then he gave her this look I'd never seen before. A sneer. It was like something straight out of a Grimm's fairytale. It was the same face that evil witches make when they're stirring poisonous concoctions and plotting their evil schemes. I'd never seen someone try to make that face seriously, so I almost started laughing out loud at the table.

There are no good people, Wiley said.

Mum's cheeks turned bright red. She got up from the table and took her plate with her towards the kitchen.

Cunt, Wiley said. He didn't whisper it or yell it. He said it like it was just a regular everyday thing to say like
tennis
or
orange juice
.

When Mum's head whipped around I expected her to look really angry. But instead she looked like a scared puppy. She looked at me and Jess and not even Wiley, didn't say anything. No
Excuuuuse me?
or
Watch your mouth!
or even
What the fuck
is wrong with you, you fucking bastard?
Just that ridiculous puppy face that made me want to curl up in a little ball under the table. It only lasted a split second, but that was all we saw before she left the room.

And then Wiley stood up, and I could feel all my muscles hardening and my shoulders shooting up to my ears. He picked up his plate and tossed it clear across the room. Potato and peas and shards of stoneware and ham pieces went spewing everywhere.

See? he said to us, spreading his hands. No good people. He didn't follow Mum to their bedroom, left the house by the front door.

Of course Jess was crying by this point and I really didn't blame her. We'd never heard our parents swear at each other like that, call each other names, break things. That was something people did in movies — the criminals and the psychopaths. I think I probably would've cried too if I wasn't so shocked that I could hardly wrap my head around how chunks of potato got on the ceiling. The Wiley I knew made jokes whenever people talked about anything serious, and used insults like dingleberry and numbskull. That Wiley, the one who marched right out the front door and left it swinging open on its hinges, was totally different. It was as if someone else had climbed into his skin and taken control of his body. But the scariest part about it was that the whole thing made me believe that what Wiley said might be true.

I guess in the end I never really figured out what purgatory was. But I got to thinking. What if this
is
purgatory, what we're all living, right now as we speak? That might explain why nobody's happy and everyone always wants to be someplace else, and why we always want to be better than everyone else. It would explain why people want to believe in perfect and wonderful things without having any proof. It's like somewhere deep down, they know this can't be all there is.

A lot of people don't realize that the first deep-sea oceanographers were considered total kooks. Even the smartest and most famous scientists told them that nothing could live down there, it was just a bunch of ooze and dead matter. There's this great line from “In the Abyss” by H.G. Wells that goes,
You thought I should find nothing but ooze. You laughed at my
explorations, and I've discovered a new world!
The neat thing about that story is that it was written in 1896, almost forty years before the first deep-sea submersibles were even invented. In the story, Elstead the explorer journeys to the bottom of the sea in a homemade bathysphere and he finds an underwater city inhabited by these weird reptilian fish that have two legs and faces like humans. My favourite part of the story is when the fish people start worshipping Elstead as some kind of God because they've never seen anything like him, and after all, he did float down out of the dark sky in a shiny metal ball.

I like the idea that in the ocean world, the earth is actually the sky and the sky is the unknown universe beyond. It makes me wonder how many layers there really are to this cake.

VIII

DR. L ONGFELLOW COULDN'T BE
older than forty-five. In a magazine interview he had mentioned that he received his doctorate in Biophysics in his mid-twenties (he was something of a prodigy), and a biographical note on one of his articles cited his graduation year from Brown University as 1978. Belinda couldn't be sure if he was married; his research partner, Monika Treadstone, had been mentioned in almost every one of his papers. And at the end of his last letter, Dr. Longfellow had written,
Monika and I look forward to meeting
you
. It struck Belinda as a kind of affirmation, or perhaps a warning; a gesture akin to a man by himself in a bar laying his left hand next to his wine glass, his wedding band glinting in the dim light like a pylon. Monika may have been one of those women who chose to keep her maiden name. She was a scientist, after all, and Belinda had noticed that many highly-educated women claimed to be feminists. Belinda imagined Monika as tall and thin and wearing a one-piece beige safari suit, belted tight at her trim waist. Her long raven-coloured hair would curtain seamlessly over her shoulders, even after a day of traipsing through the fields and digging for soil samples. She was probably much smarter and even more dedicated than her husband, always in the lab doing new experiments.

Belinda herself had gone about marriage in the wrong way. She was no longer reluctant to admit that. Both of her marriages had been adventurous rather than practical, defiant more than genuine. Her swift marriage to Wiley, ten years her junior, had been as scandalous as her marriage to Dazhong. He's
Chineeese?
her mother had said, indignantly smearing the word. Belinda had felt sublimely happy to hear her mother say exactly what she expected, and she spread her hand to show her the ring with its small, round diamond, the facets winking white light.

You don't know what you've got yourself into, her mother had said, peering dubiously at the jewel. You don't know what kinds of values he has. The Chinese have different values. Her words had sounded cold and snobbish. A poor excuse for her resolute disapproval. What did she know about love, anyway?

Belinda's marriage to Wiley had been slightly different. Her mother hadn't even known about it for almost a year, when Belinda informed her through a letter. She'd only written it to quell the ‘I told you so' thoughts she knew her mother was having over Dazhong. The letter made it clear that this time, she'd chosen the right man — an energetic, fun-loving man. But Wiley had changed after Sebastian was born, and Belinda couldn't be blamed for failing to recognize the early signs. He'd acted as if getting married and having children was going to change the world.

We're perfect together, he'd say. Can you imagine what our kids will turn out like? With our combined genes? They'll be geniuses! Beautiful geniuses!

Belinda mistook it for passion.

The heart of Belinda's problem in marriage was her persuasive imagination. She had the ability to imagine feelings into being; if she wanted romance, she could convince herself that Burger King on a Saturday night was unconventional and sweetly modest. In a way, it was empowering. But eventually reality would catch up with her, stripping all her self-imposed happiness down to threads of stubborn tolerance. It seemed to her that the solution was to resist attaching herself, to darn the holes left by her amputated partners and allow her own body to fill her skin.

Belinda finally disembarked in Salisbury just before noon. When she arrived, coated in nervous sweat, at The Viceregal Arms Hotel — a blocky building, curiously striped black and white like a prison uniform — the desk told her that her party had gone for the day. A note in Dr. Longfellow's handwriting read,
Be back after dark
. The terseness of the note tied a small knot in Belinda's stomach. She ordered a pot of English tea to her room that arrived as a bag of Tetley floating in lukewarm water. Then she fell asleep while watching the news on TV, and when the telephone woke her several hours later she considered, for a brief moment, not answering. She could pretend she wasn't there, that she'd gone out on her own to explore.

Hello? Belinda said into the phone. She sounded groggy and prayed that Dr. Longfellow wouldn't pick up on it.

Hello, Mrs. Spector, the man on the other end said. Mr. Longfellow's asked me to inform you that he's in the lounge.

Oh — all right, thank you, Belinda replied. She set down the receiver and sat still. How strange it seemed to her. Even impolite. Why hadn't Dr. Longfellow called her himself? Or come up to her room?

She had ironed her cream silk blouse and black skirt upon settling into her room, so she quickly slipped them on, retouched her makeup and hair, and tucked her wallet and lipstick into a tiny leather purse. She added the notepad and pen from the nightstand, in case Dr. Longfellow intended to give her an orientation or a run-down of tomorrow's schedule. Maybe they had fallen behind in their sample collection without her there to help. Dr. Longfellow had explained through his letters that much of their work would involve long days digging in the fields, taking pictures, and charting maps of the formations. She was anxious to showcase her thirst for knowledge, prove her dedication. She was a fast learner. As she made her way downstairs to the lounge, she walked lightly so her hair wouldn't fall flat.

Dr. Longfellow was the only person sitting in the lounge. Belinda didn't notice him at first, partly because he was sitting in a dark booth in the far corner, but also because he looked nothing like Belinda expected. He stood abruptly when Belinda approached. His red hair coiled in frizzy ringlets to his shoulders and his suit jacket appeared too long for his torso, giving him the appearance of a child wearing his father's clothes. Belinda shook his hand and he didn't return her smile; his pale blue eyes fell away from hers and then flitted about the room as if tossed by a sudden gust of wind. He was slightly shorter than Belinda, and rather severely hunched.

Good evening, he said, brushing his sleeves. The train was late?

Yes, Belinda said, unfortunately it was. I'm terribly sorry. It's wonderful to meet you, finally.

Yes, trains are always late from London, he said, and flashed a thin smile. He sat down in the booth and Belinda took a seat across from him. A cigarillo reclined in the ashtray between them, curling grey smoke.