February (20 page)

Watch this, watch, Cal said. Don’t move, he said softly.

The dog stayed still and then there was a sound that was high-pitched and came from the dog’s throat, and the dog lifted one paw and put it down and lifted the other and put it down.

Don’t, said Cal. And the dog went still again. Helen could not stand any of this. And then the meat dropped, and the dog’s jaw snapped and ripped the meat out of the air and there would be two more wet snaps of the jaw and the meat was gone. This whole show delighted Cal so much he’d push his chair from the table and slap his thighs and the dog would jump up and put his head over Cal’s neck and they’d both growl at each other, and Helen would say, Not at the table.

Cal peeled off his wet clothes and he got in bed beside her and his legs were freezing, and his feet. Then he threw the blankets back off with a ripping sound and he was gone again, and Helen heard the back door and the truck and Cal driving off.

He came back at dawn and Helen dressed and went outside to look for the dog herself. She walked for an hour. Her clothes were soaked as soon as she went out. Her jeans stuck to her thighs and calves.

The river was swollen and churning brown, and there were broken trees, and the splintered wood looked very yellow in the dark. The river was rushing faster than she had ever seen, and it had pressed itself out over the banks and it was smooth and thick over the boulder the kids usually jumped off, and it was dangerous. She stopped to smell a wild rose, the petals covered with big drops of rain, and it smelled like cinnamon and a dusky sweetness that was particular to wild roses.

The dog must be dead, she thought. It was crazy how much Cal loved the dog. People said it was a Nova Scotia duck toller, but it was a mutt. Reddish brown with a curling tail, and after several summers they saw a lot of dogs with that tail in their neighbourhood. It was a small pretty dog, but it tore the arm off her when Helen tried to walk with it on a leash. Busting with energy. When it wanted to get out in the backyard the dog barked at the door and leapt up and down, yapping.

When Helen came back to the house the lawn was covered in water and only the very tips of each blade of grass stippled the glassy surface, and the rain had almost stopped. It was still falling, but it fell silently, and there was sun and the clouds and the blue sky reflected in the glassy surface over the lawn. The smell of the wood-stove smoke was very strong. Everything smelled fresh. The kids were up and Cal was cooking scrambled eggs and he didn’t turn around when she came in.

I know he must be dead, Cal said. But I can’t imagine it.

We’ll all get in the car, Helen said.

If he wasn’t dead he would be back by now. Cal put the eggs on small plastic saucers with Big Bird on each. He had a plate with the toast in the oven and he took it out, forgetting it was hot, and dropped the plate on top of the stove and flicked his hand hard, holding it at the wrist.

Fucking plate, he said.

He served the eggs and gave everybody toast, and he poured the children juice, and there was coffee and he poured two cups.

Everybody in the truck, Helen said.

Let them eat, Cal said.

Everybody in the truck, she said. The children all got in and Helen climbed up and pulled the door closed and rolled down the window. All of the land was steaming now.

Seat belts, she said. The sun had come out hotter now, and ragged bits of steam drifted over the highway, and there was a low-lying bank of fog drifting across the bay. They all called to the dog along the highway. Cal drove slowly, and then Cathy screamed.

There he is, Cathy screamed.

At first the dog didn’t move and it looked like he was dead for sure, but then he lifted his head and Cal pulled over. They ran down the steep bank, and the dog was hurt. He was lying in a puddle of water, and the cold, and his fur was soaked, and he looked like he might die even though they’d found him. His fur had been scraped off his hind leg to the bone, which was yellow-white, and he was shivering violently and hardly able to move, and Cal picked him up and spoke to him.

Cal said, It’s okay, we’re not going to let you die.

Cal drove them all to the vet, and they drove back home at the end of the day. It had taken a long time to get to the vet in Carbonear and so they left the dog overnight. His back leg was broken but there were no internal injuries and it was going to cost them two hundred dollars.

When they got back to the house it was dark, and Cal turned on the light. He had Lulu asleep in his arms. He and Helen got the children settled. Then the two of them went back downstairs, and the scrambled eggs were still sitting on the yellow Big Bird plates and there was the untouched orange juice in three small glasses. They both stood looking at the table. The overhead light bulb was bare.

The eggs and the Big Bird plates and the juice and the smell that comes after a rain—Helen remembers how all of these things made her think for a moment that she was walking in on a scene in a museum, a tableau from a lost life: Outport Newfoundland, circa 1980.

. . . . .

John’s Girlfriend, 2005

JOHN HAD HAD
two of the sort of relationships he would call serious. The question of children had come up with both of the women. They had each fallen in love with him not quite believing he couldn’t be convinced or tricked into fatherhood.

Both times the end had come down to a cauterizing discussion. The end with Sophie took place in her basement apartment; they had just painted the kitchen pale green and the paint was scented. Forever after, the smell of mint reminded him of the late hour, the stark walls, and how Sophie had slid down one of them, leaving a streak in the wet paint. She sat on the floor, her shoulders hunched, elbows together between her knees, her wrists loose so that her hands were hanging limp near her face.

She was shaking with hard sobs but there was very little noise. John tried to pat her, or smooth her hair, but she slapped his hand away. She looked up, her face slicked with tears and snot, pink with ferocity.

You will be alone, she said. A lonely eccentric old man with no one to change your colostomy bag, you won’t even have a cat, or you’ll have thirty cats shitting on the kitchen floor. You’ll stink of loneliness.

He left the apartment without another word. It had got dark outside Sophie’s apartment while they’d been painting. The heavens had opened up. The rain was lashing the sidewalks and bouncing back up under the street lights. It ran in little streams near the curb, piling against a pop can and hurtling on, dragging brown leaves. It glassed over the street in overlapping sheets that flared with the reflection of passing headlights. John’s socks were soaked inside his shoes. What he didn’t feel was regret or sadness. He felt exhilarated.

He had loved Sophie; or he had enjoyed her cooking and the dope she grew in her bedroom closet. A big closet with grow lights. The dense green stink and tickling leaves when you stepped inside. The bushes were almost as tall as she was and half a joint could knock you silly. She had a way of rubbing the leaves and then bringing her fingers to her nose to smell them that he found erotic. There were things she claimed she could tell by smelling the leaves. She spoke as if the plants had an inner life and he didn’t question her because he was afraid of what she might say. Sophie knew an esoteric vocabulary of wattage and seed and water and she tended those plants with a feeling that verged on respect.

She sold her weed for reasonable prices; that was important to her. She liked the social aspect of meeting with her customers. She liked the secret lazy hours she’d spend with unemployed people or university professors or retired lawyers. They talked about politics and ways to change the world.

John had admired the way she set a table: chunky and tarnished candelabra, a hand-woven Mexican tablecloth with a stripe of outrageous pink down the middle. She went in for novelty drinks and the sort of gamey meat that was full of tiny bones and that she covered in pastry. Or she went vegetarian for weeks. Sometimes the entire surface of her kitchen table had been covered with drying chanterelles. She frequented poky health-food stores and bought grains and spices John had never heard of, and she spoke about putting together a barbershop quartet. If she had a gift, it was for harmonizing. She was smarter than John and had a way of narrowing her eyes while she waited for him to catch up.

But a baby; the cry for a baby was like a haunting. John had thought they needed a priest or some holy man of another stripe to exorcise it. He felt that he’d been let in on a glimpse of what Sophie would become: hunched and puffy-lidded, ghoulish against the faintly green-tinted fresh paint. This had nothing to do with the nakedness of Sophie’s back in her black sequined dress or the sound of her flute in the late afternoon—the things he loved. She was looking for an enslavement that would chain them both. She wanted to put aside all of her elegance for something squalling and blood related. The sight of blood made John faint.

The walk across the lane from her apartment that night drenched him to the skin. He waited for the car to warm up. It smelled of the wet tweed coat he was wearing. It was as if Sophie had been washed away.

And she didn’t phone, though he’d expected her to and had made plans to change his number.

He saw her two months later on the street hanging off the arm of a guy with a guitar strapped to his back. She looked overjoyed to see him. There was no sign of fierceness now. She hugged him with one arm, not quite disentangling from the musician. She introduced John, calling him
a really fantastic friend,
and did not provide any identifying information about the musician who was tugging her away.

We’re late, Sophie explained to John. She shrugged, as if being late was a little caprice she shared with the musician, a cute quirk to which they had become inexplicably vulnerable as a couple.

After this chance encounter John had been briefly but thoroughly heartbroken. He saw what he had lost: the scratchy scarf she wound around her neck; she was gawky and too tall; she had a camera, was always concocting some kind of memento; once he’d seen her twist the foil from someone’s cigarette pack into an origami swan. He was thirty-two at the time; what was wrong with children? He found himself looking at backpacks and Snuglis. It was the fact that children were not portable that frightened him. Not portable enough. He racked his brain but he could not remember the musician’s name.

After Sophie, John discovered he enjoyed sleeping with younger women. Five, ten years younger. These young women were not in any hurry to get pregnant; they were militant about protecting against it. He loved their Face-books and pink cellphones and cotton panties, more athletic and good-humoured than sexy, with half-funny quips scrawled across the ass. He loved the hundreds of pictures they took of themselves with cameras held at arm’s length, their Mike’s Hard Lemonade and midnight binges of chips, dressing and gravy, and the empty beer bottles on the faded Arborite and chrome tables they picked up at the Sally Ann and frequently threatened to sell on eBay for a fortune. He liked their lip gloss with flavours from childhood (watermelon, bubblegum), and just how fast they were to parse a romance or a brawl.

They were fast/slow at sex, both diffident and indefatigable, petulant only in a sort of parodic way, and above all, generous. Ultimately, it didn’t seem to be about them. It was as though they had all read Dale Carnegie and expected to get somewhere by being friendly. He found there was plenty to go around, and he could not get enough.

John’s parents, before his father died, had spent time around the bay and eventually bought land near a lake where they spent their weekends. John had liked the saturated intensity of those childhood evenings, his mother and father on the wharf holding plastic glasses or enamel camping cups with rye and ice. His mother’s crocheted bikini, her dark tan. His parents would watch him fish and they would drink, sometimes talking to each other, sometimes not. When they spoke to him they spoke quietly, knowing their voices carried over the still surface. He could hear a neighbour’s fishing line at the other end of the lake, unfurling, cutting through the air.

His parents had been more together than apart. They had grown together; they had been the same. John did not want that for himself.

. . . . .

Helen Dating, 2006

AND SO, AFTER
many emails, Helen had a date. She had said she would be wearing a purple coat and she would be at the bar, and it was awful sitting there alone with her gin and tonic.

Every eye was on her, knowing she was a fraud. Knowing she did not belong in a bar. She was a hunk of meat hanging on a hook, waiting for a buyer. She had been to Halliday’s that afternoon and the butcher had opened the door to the walk-in fridge and she’d seen what must have been, at one time, a cow, hanging from a hook.

She had smelled the frost and mineral-laden air. The rusty smell of frozen blood, and she’d seen the skeins of yellow fat. The butcher had come out and smacked his hands together and rubbed them back and forth, and he’d laid a steak on the stainless steel cutting board and turned on the saw, and he’d cubed it for her. Little stiff cubes with frost fibres in the purplish flesh, and this, Helen realizes now, is herself, her own heart, sliding back and forth under the blade.

Her heart was loud in her chest and it would be a lie to say she wasn’t exhilarated. None of her friends would have the guts to do this, to stay on this bar stool, to wait. She did not know one person who could do as she was doing.

The poor young waitress behind the bar—she tried so hard to look like there was nothing strange about Helen. She tried to look like she had never in her life heard of loneliness or decay or rot or maggots or something slower and less dignified, this middle-aged need to touch someone. The bartender mentioned the weather and her courses at university, she made small talk, and Helen kept saying, Pardon me? Because she couldn’t hold the beginning of a thought together with the end of it; she was too scared.