Country of Cold (10 page)

“Hi, Cora,” he said. “How’s it going?”

“Just fine, thanks, Mr. Lavallee,” she declared, noticing how sincere she sounded. “And how are you doing?”

“Oh, about the same, I suppose.” He shrugged. “Like you said, it’s gonna take time I suppose.” There was a pause. He looked at Cora expectantly. She smiled stupidly. She blinked. She had no idea what he was talking about. Pierre shrugged again and hung his toque on a hook and walked into the bar. Cora stood with her hand still on her coat. Ringworm? Migraines? Depression? Impotence. Ever since his hog barn had … no that was Mr. Aizenman. Back pain? Jesus.

In the bar she surprised herself and ordered a rye and ginger. Incontinence? The rest of her rink wasn’t there yet. She took a deep swallow and sat down to put on her curling shoes. (One with a rubber grip, the other
with a slick plastic slider; the day she’d bought them she’d worn them home to break them in and zoomed over the sidewalk ice paddling away like a skateboarder late for school.) Cora had been in Pigeon River for about two weeks when it had become apparent to her that she had to do something to reduce the amount of empty time spent alone in the house. In the summer she had played softball with a huge ball and this rule that you couldn’t strike out, you swung until you hit it. Which had made for some pretty long at bats but they had indulged her. And now she was learning to curl.
“CURLING!”
a friend from Montreal had squealed into the phone. “You mean, like, with kilts?”

“Yeah, yeah,” she had replied. “Listen, it doesn’t look like the Bolshoi is going to make it out here this winter and it gets claustrophobic here in the summer, never mind what January is going to be like.” And so she had signed up for the clinic rink. (Teams are called rinks. Innings are ends. Four players to a rink, eight ends to a game. Never mind about keen and wick. No, you need a special curling broom, you can get them down at McCleod’s Hardware.) The skip was Mrs. Dubinsky, the clinic nurse, the lead was her husband, Walt, who taught grade seven and lived for good jokes, and the second was Ed Harrison, the pharmacist, who, at thirty-three, still lived with his parents, who owned the drugstore but had promised to give it to him as a wedding present. Or so Mrs. Dubinsky had said. Ed seemed to say nothing at all.

It had been a month since the four of them had gone down together for the practice night. “Just go throw a few,” Mrs. Dubinsky had said, “to get the weight of them, while we figure out who’s gonna skip. We’ll be right down. Walt, get over here.” And so Cora had gone down to the ice while the others were debating and manoeuvring, not that it really mattered to them. “Just go throw a few, to get the weight,” she’d been told. And so she did.

The first thing she got was that those things were way heavier than they looked. She held the curling stone against her abdomen and tried to figure out how anyone could actually throw the thing. She heaved it forward. The next thing she got was lumbar disc prolapse. The third thing she got was a growing realization that she had caught the attention of just about the entire curling club, partly from the two-foot gouge in the ice where the rock had landed and partly from the silent stares of everyone in the building, whose awed faces she could just make out from her prone position on the ice when she turned her eyes all the way to the side. If it weren’t for the searing pain in her back, she might have been more embarrassed.

Later, as they were wheeling her out, she asked, “Well, why don’t they just
say
‘push’?”

It looked like the gouge had been repaired, she noted out of the corner of her eye, not wanting to acknowledge it. Carl something, the rink attendant, waved to her and
pointed to the spot, smiling, indicating with his hand that it had all been smoothed over. Cora smiled back at him over her Styrofoam cup and flapped her fingers at him. She turned around. He pointed that out every time she curled, just in case the episode still bothered her.

Her shoes now on, with a ludicrous pink furry bedroom slipper—courtesy of Mrs. Dubinsky—slipped over the left to protect the shiny smooth sliding surface, Cora walked to her locker and got her broom. She walked back to the lounge and had just picked up an issue of
Icesports Today
when Mrs. Dubinsky and Walt came in, followed by Ed Harrison.

“Cora!” Mrs. Dubinsky effused. “You’re here early!” Cora put down the magazine thankfully.

“Well, we’re all here,” Walt observed. “Why don’t we go”—eyebrows raised almost to his receded hairline—
“throw”
—mouth open now, eyes darting from side to side—“a few stones?”

“Now Walt, leave the poor girl alone.” Mrs. Dubinsky slid an over-the-horn-rimmed-glasses look at him and they all hoisted their brooms and headed down to the ice to push some rocks around.

In a letter to the boyfriend who had refused to accompany her to Pigeon River, Cora had likened the town to one of those tanks they had read of in psychiatry experiments. “It’s a fifteen-hundred-person sensory deprivation chamber, Mark. Please send me some old copies of the
Mirror
. Can I come visit soon?” But his
reply had been vague and slow in coming and so she knew that things had changed and soon she stopped writing. “Error after error after error,” she’d said aloud one morning at three, her head flat on her kitchen table, her eyes shut and streaked, a half-empty bottle of piña colada mix in front of her. “Mood Indigo” played for the thousandth time that night and Sarah Vaughan’s feeling had gone right down her knees and she’d just sat and cried, “Go long, blues.”

On the ice Cora listened as her teammates spoke earnestly of strategy, raising their eyes to her for her concurrence. She nodded thoughtfully. “Sure,” she said. Cora understood curling as shuffleboard but on ice and with way heavier pucks. She liked it when a rock of the other team was in the bull’s-eye, she meant house, because then all she had to do was hit their rock and everyone on her team, she meant rink, was satisfied, not to say surprised. Figuring out how hard to throw it to get it to stop on its own in the bull’s-eye, she meant house, was an entirely different matter, however. And of course there is a very good reason that the game is called curling. At least in shuffleboard, when you throw the puck straight, it goes straight.

But this was easily the most social sport she had ever seen, she’d have to give it that. You could scoot around on the ice with a drink in your hand and no one thought anything of it. A cocktail party you could call a sport—great idea.

Afterwards they sat in the lounge savouring their first win of the year. Even Ed seemed happy. Walt was downright ebullient. It was all that Mrs. Dubinsky could do to stop him from getting up on the table and doing the cha-cha.

Driving home she noticed how the sky had clouded over the stars and how the wind had picked up. The ground drift formed a carpet of blowing snow maybe a couple of feet deep that swept over the highway continuously. Cora had to gauge where the road was by her position relative to the telephone poles on either side. She slowed down and leaned forward into the dash. She gripped the wheel tightly and felt for the edge of the pavement with her tires. She turned off the radio and breathed slowly.

When she pulled into the driveway she felt the snow squeak the way it does when it is fresh and especially cold. She drove slowly, listening to the chirping under her tires, and gently came to a stop in her garage. She shut off the engine and the lights. It was utterly black. She plugged in the car by feel and groped her way to the door. Once outside she sprinted to the front door of her house. Inside, she stood for a minute, shivering and shaking and waiting to warm up. She walked into the living room with her coat still on, the lights still off. Outside, along the highway, she saw a car pass by: first a diffuse lightening in the trees, then a rapidly narrowing cone of headlights, and
then the car itself but only for an instant of metallic colour and red taillights and then it was gone.

The wind picked up further and little swirls of snow swept along inches off the ground outside. The sky seemed still lower, and in the direction of town, Cora could see it glowing yellow from the lights. A semitrailer passed by outside, running lights blazing, charging into the night. Cora blinked as the room shone with its headlights. When it was black again she switched on the light. In the window she saw herself and the room reflected in the glass, and underneath all this she saw steadily moving beads of light that crept horizontally across the window. All that was missing was the rhythmic beeping.

She found the copper Canada-goose teakettle under the counter and set it on the stove, burnished wings outstretched as if to take off, or land, in her neat little kitchen.

The previous occupant of the house, David Andrews, had lived here for forty-eight years, the last thirty of them alone. He’d been seventy-six when he had died, a month before Cora had finished her family practice residency, forty grand in debt, exhausted, constantly frustrated with Mark. Andrews’s kids had taken a few pictures and the silverware, and thrown the rest of the furnishings in with the house and the practice. They’d even left his shotguns neatly racked in the basement.
For Cora it had been like simply switching gears. One minute she was a harried resident in Montreal putting up with her unreliable boyfriend mostly because it’s his name on the lease and the next, the clutch goes in and clunk, she’s alone under the prairie sky of Manitoba, nothing taller than a grain elevator for four hundred miles in any direction, desperate for a cappuccino, stepping into the beloved Dr. Andrews’s life. She was still finding notes he’d left for himself: “Don’t forget the eggs,” “Write Bonny,” or, more mysteriously, “Mail the sparrows to liverwurst.”

When Cora had been growing up in Dunsmuir, Manitoba, two hundred miles east of here, she had constructed her entire identity around the distinction between her and everyone else around her. She was born and raised in a place not very much different from this place, but by seventeen, she couldn’t have been less familiar with curling, or down clothing, or the concept of self-sufficiency as an ideal if she had spent her entire life in the greater Montreal area. She dressed like a silage bale, wrapped in black vinyl, and for her date at the high school graduation dance she took the one gay boy in the school. Or the one who didn’t keep it a secret, anyway. Her secret was also out by that time: she was not like anyone else there.

Her abrupt return to Manitoba following her residency surprised her as much as anyone. It was partly her boyfriend, but there were a hundred escape routes open
to her from that particular problem. She tried to explain it to her friend Daphne, also from Dunsmuir, who was in the same residency program in Montreal: “It’s like I’m not finished that course, or something. I’m still a few credits short, is how I feel.”

“Listen, it was a shitty place. You have unresolved issues, let it go.”

“I just think that if I did let it go, it’s like, I’d never finish that degree, and all my life, I’d be wondering what was really in the course calendar.”

“I can’t say that I understand.”

“Well, the money is good, they’re paying for the move, and I think I just want to be an adult for a while.”

“You have an unfulfilled yearning for parental approval.”

“If you say so.”

The copper Canada-goose teakettle began shaking with impatience. Spurts of steam started spraying out of its little nostrils and a high-pitched shriek began to sound from somewhere within it. She picked it up and directed its head at her cup of cocoa. The lower bill flopped open and out spurted a stream of boiling water. Cora stirred. Mrs. Andrews and the children had gone back east one Christmas in the early sixties and hadn’t been on the train back. On her cup, “David” was spelled in Teutonic letters. She sipped her cocoa. Underneath that it said, “World’s Greatest Golfer.” A Christmas-party gift,
maybe. This house must have seemed terribly quiet and empty for a long time. She looked at her about-to-take-flight kettle and shook her head. The cocoa was good.

She picked up a copy of the
New England Journal of Medicine
that sat on the kitchen table. A couple of formal studies of a new chemotherapeutic regime for ovarian cancer, a case report about a new type of fungus found to infect
AIDS
patients, and a review article on the management of post-myocardial-infarction heart failure. According to Dubinsky, Dr. Andrews had kept in touch with the kids, spoke of them often, and had brought them out for a few days each summer. Their various graduations had been high points for him. She stood and walked back into the living room, flipping through the heart failure article. He never explicitly spoke of his wife again, but Mrs. Dubinsky maintained that he never stopped missing her. The sequence that followed was familiar enough: never took another vacation, was always available for house calls, reassurance of new parents. And Mrs. Dubinsky never said anything that accounted for the boxes and boxes of empty Seagram’s Five Star bottles in the basement. Cora shifted around on the overstuffed purple-and-yellow couch; it was the sort of furniture that would not allow you to be comfortable, no matter how much you squirmed.

The house was an archaeological dig—relics of different eras lying side by side but nevertheless distinct and datable to the practised eye. The couch, for instance,
Cora assumed to be of Mrs. Andrews’s era—she must have been starved for colour. The purple-and-yellow couch, the Gauguin prints in the hallway—anything that was old enough to have been bought when she was around dripped colour like a box of sun-melted and faded Crayolas. And among these things, but entirely apart from them, were the subdued cowboy prints in the den, the dark wooden bookcases beside the fireplace—like ashes not quite covering spilled paint.

ACE
inhibitors, diuretics, beta blockers, low-salt diets: there seemed nothing much new in the field of heart failure management.

Cora put down the journal and stretched. She was restless and having trouble concentrating. She was lonely. She decided not to call Mark. She walked to the fireplace and leaned her head against the mantel and shut her eyes.