Crossings (22 page)

I don't know what happened at five. Perhaps something truly did. It's not fashionable now to write psychological novels. I lied.

They were laying. I was lying. I was hearing. He said I was lying and laying and listening to them laying. To this day I have trouble with the forms of the verb. Lie lies lied, lay lays laid. He pulled my hands from my ears and he said, ‘You're laying there listening to us lying.' Lays layed laying. Lain laid laying. ‘You're lying there listening to us laying.' It is the transitive which gives me trouble.

When I finally had my baby, I decided to write an anti-Aristotelian novel. I would write each day exactly as it occurred. I would not lie.

The last paragraph goes like this:

It is obvious that this ‘journal' will have no literary merit … simply because I haven't weighed words, balanced truth, selected facts, designed and controlled. I've always found diaries ‘written for posterity' rather pompous, but of course … if they're written to be read at all, they must be written for posterity. Maybe now I can get back to work—without feeling I'm betraying something. I wanted to be honest, but honesty comes out of contrivance … the truth of the thing is felt because the artist has designed his creation so that the spirit of honesty, if not the data, is there. To be recognized. It's work, it's hard hard work … and it comes out of the tradition of deliberate, methodical workmanship, threaded through with that sense of something else … that desire to honestly portray … which is inspiration or what you will. The beautiful lie.

Sister Mary Joseph said to me: ‘You were always seeking God. That was all. You sought him in the flesh of men. That was what went wrong. Why He has denied faith, I do not know. I do not yet understand. But perhaps there is a reason. But it is you who should have been the nun and I the …'

She didn't finish, and we laughed at that. ‘The sinner?'

‘We are all sinners. Don't glamourize yourself. It is self-indulgent to consider yourself a greater sinner than me. And it smacks of pride.'

Sister Mary Joseph cannot suffer fools gladly. She is out of the silent order now, but she is still the bride of Christ. Her mother says it is all because ‘something' happened to her when she was ten. And I could tell it that way. I could tell what happened to Sister Mary Joseph at ten and it would all be quite clear. Except that, of course, that is not the way it was. God came to her like a killer. There she was, her, high school degree at fifteen, her BSc at seventeen, her MSc at nineteen. Brilliant, irascible, dedicated to reason. And God came and did not ask her name.

People say to me, ‘Why is she a nun? Is she afraid of sex?' and I feel such rage for their ignorance. I, who never believed in God, believe in that, what happened to Sister Mary Joseph. I know her name is not Jane anymore.

‘You dramatize everything, Vicky,' Momma said.

 

MIK HAD GONE to work at a logging camp and Mom, on an urgent summons from Jocelyn, had come to see what could be done with the eldest daughter who seemed to have gone mad after the divorce. Who was ‘living common-law' with a man who tore telephones out by their roots.

‘If I thought that, I couldn't bear to go on,' Momma said.

I had asked her, in a quiet moment, to tell me again how he had died. My father. ‘I had this idea,' I said, ‘that it was, you know, on purpose. Then, when Jason went in after him, it was Daddy who caught him and held him and brought him down. Under the water. In his arms. Miss Haggerty says I should get it clear. What really happened. Once and for all.'

It was a lie. The Nut Lady had never suggested any such thing.

‘It was an accident,' my mother said.

‘But do you remember how you said, the night before? He asked you would you make a baby with him? How he was going away for a long time?'

‘He had a premonition,' Momma said. ‘I'll always believe it was that. He had a feeling something was going to happen. He said, “I have to go away,” and I said “Why?” and he said because he had to. I asked him how long he would be and he said it might be a long time. It was a premonition.'

‘But you remember,' and this is the hardest part, I can feel the clutch at my throat, and I bring it out past the spasms lurking like inquisitors, ‘you said someone told you, Jason and Daddy, someone said they were homosexuals.'

‘I
never
said that!'

‘Yes, you did, Momma.'

‘When?'

‘Right after.'

‘I never.'

‘I have to know, Momma.'

‘You always dramatize, Vicky. I remember now. It was Joe Price. He said it wasn't
natural
for Daddy and Jason to be together so much. That's what I told you. Joe Price said their relationship wasn't natural. For men.'

‘But …'

‘I
never
said they were homosexuals. How could you think such a thing?' And her lip is quivering. ‘And I never paid it a bit of attention. Never. I don't even know why I told you.' And, ‘If I believed that, life wouldn't be worth living.' And now her face crumples and tears stand out in her eyes. ‘I couldn't go on.' And she cries.

She always cried. After a beating or when she had gone away because she couldn't bear the wheezing. After, she would come and kneel beside my bed and ask me to forgive her. And cry. I would put my hand on her head and say, ‘It's all right, Momma, it's all right.'

‘She says it was just an accident.'

‘Do you believe her?' says the Nut Lady.

‘I do and I don't.' I am enormously weary. ‘What I feel now is, it doesn't matter, whichever way it was.'

‘It doesn't matter.'

‘No. It doesn't matter.'

‘What does matter?'

I don't answer and then it comes, in a long howl. ‘He died.' And now it is I who am crying. ‘I loved him and he died.' It is the first time I have cried. In front of anyone.

I cried once before. When I went to feed his chickens. Six months later. Coming over from my grandma's to feed his chickens. Knowing somehow she wasn't doing it. There are three of them in the coop, dead, and the maggots are crawling out of their feathers. Two half-dead birds are huddled well away from the stench. They will die tomorrow.

I buried the dead ones and fed the live ones. And then I cried. But that was the only time. ‘You never even cried,' said Momma. ‘Not once.'

‘I loved him,' I said and I hunched forward and let it all out, all the old years, like rotten yellow crusts.

‘You hold it in,' Momma said. ‘You even hold your pee in.' I was, inside myself, a mass of dried pee like crusted sulphur, hard and dry and impossible to wash away because I did hold it in, the tears and the ahah. Only a thousand tiny elves working day and night with picks could chip the pee away. Then, with buckets of water, they could wash it down the gulley of my body. But I did not believe in elves anymore. I did not see the inside of my body corrupting and soft with decay, but only as hard and dry and yellow.

Inside my head it was different. If you cut my head in two you would find rows and rows of exactly placed electric light bulbs, like the ones on the marquee of the

Isn't that odd. I've forgotten the name of that movie house. The. The. It will come. I won't think about it. If I don't think about it, it will come.

My mother is still crying. ‘Where did I go wrong?'

And, ‘You know why I let you go to Grandpop's, don't you? Because you were so sick and the doctor said the cellar was so damp and if you didn't get out of that house you'd die.'

‘Why didn't you move to another house?' I want to ask, but don't.

‘But when I did come back, that time,' I say, ‘you told me to go away.'

‘But that was After,' Momma says. ‘I wasn't myself then.'

‘It was you who rejected
me,
' Mom says, her voice rising, all the old anger. ‘You wouldn't even suck. Right from the first you were different. Not like the others. Right from the first you pushed me away.'

I sucked Mik. His nipples, his penis, his toes. I loved him all over. His great thick body like a whale. In the deep salt sea he rose and spouted and I rode him like a dolphin. Deep under the air there were fairy castles, Gaudi cathedrals, elaborate, ornate, made of shells and limned rock, and one day I would go there, in the dim green light I would breathe. I was out of my element, that was the trouble. They took seventeen days to find him. And nineteen to find Jason. And yet they had gone down together. In each other's arms.

It was called the Plaza.

‘What you have are hypnagogic experiences,' said the Nut Lady.

‘“Hypnagogic,”' I say, trying the consonants over again as if in their atomic depths I will find the irreducible fact.

 

AND MIK CAME back from the logging camp.

We had written every day for those three weeks. I had sent him a toy boat with a man at the wheel.

‘What's the toy in aid of?' he wrote.

‘It's the man in the boat,' I wrote back. ‘So you'll have it with you.'

He had taught me many expressions. Muff diving and hunting for oysters and the man in the boat. ‘I like to see him sit up and take notice,' he would say, tickling it.

Now he was coming back for the weekend. Or was it over, the job? I don't remember. Tonight he was coming back on the ferry. My flesh yearned across the water to his. I dragged a bed down to the cellar, so my mother would not hear us that night. I set it up beside the pile of briquettes. It was cold down there, and smelled of mildew.

He came down the CPR dock and my guts gave a great thud.

There he was, a thick heavy man in an Indian sweater, humped over from the weight of the duffel bag, grinning crookedly at me. He had a buddy with him.

‘This is the missis,' he said.

The buddy said, ‘Hello, Mrs O'Brien.'

It was only what we had to do. It didn't mean anything. It was what we had to do to stop the furies.

Later, when I was having the baby, I dreamt of them, black hags with long knives rushing at me, slitting open my stomach, dragging out puppies and kittens and monsters of deformity. And I hadn't read Aeschylus yet.

We are in a café, Mik and I, in the back booth, grinning at each other like madmen.

‘My mother's here. I've made us a bed in the cellar.'

‘That buddy, he's got a cabin, up the coast. He says we can have it if we want.'

My thighs are wet with wanting him. I can feel my nipples straining out to him through my sweater.

‘Jesus, I want you.'

He never said he loved me. Except for the first time. And perhaps that's a lie.

A short thick girl with curly hair comes toward us. I recognize her with a kind of terror. Marcie. From the lab.

‘How are you, Vicky?'

‘All right. You?'

‘Okay. I'm in teachers' training now.'

‘That's nice.'

‘I see Ben sometimes.'

‘Oh yes. How is he?'

‘Well …' She darts a look at Mik. ‘He's all right.'

For some reason I don't want her to know I see Ben.

‘I looked over and I didn't think it was you. You've lost a lot of weight.'

‘Yeah. I went on a diet.'

‘You're looking well.' She keeps sneaking looks at Mik, her eyes resting briefly and then pulling away as if the sight burnt them.

And I see him through her eyes: a big red-faced thug.

‘This is Mik O'Brien. Marcie Davis.'

‘Hi.'

‘How do you do.'

‘I do okay, how do you do?'

‘What?' And she laughs nervously. ‘Well. It was nice seeing you again. Are you still writing?'

‘Trying to.'

‘See you sometime. I …' She hesitates, glances at Mik. ‘I'm sorry, for, you know, what happened.'

‘Yeah. Okay.'

‘I was going through a sort of bad time myself then.'