Friend of My Youth (7 page)

“Still, if his had been shortened you’d be named the same.”

“His isn’t shortened.”

“I never said it was. I said if it had been.”

“So why say that if it isn’t?”

He must feel the same thing she does—the slow but irresistible rise of a new excitement, the need to say, and hear, dire things. What a sharp, releasing pleasure there is in the first blow, and what a dazzling temptation ahead—destruction. You don’t stop to think why you want that destruction. You just do.

“Why do we have to drink every time?” Neil says abruptly. “Do we want to turn ourselves into alcoholics or something?”

Brenda takes a quick sip and pushes her glass away. “Who has to drink?” she says.

She thinks he means they should drink coffee, or Cokes. But he gets up and goes to the dresser where he keeps his clothes, opens a drawer, and says, “Come over here.”

“I don’t want to look at any of that stuff,” she says.

“You don’t even know what it is.”

“Sure I do.”

Of course she doesn’t—not specifically.

“You think it’s going to bite you?”

Brenda drinks again and keeps looking out the window. The sun is getting down in the sky already, pushing the bright light across the table to warm her hands.

“You don’t approve,” Neil says.

“I don’t approve or disapprove,” she says, aware of having lost some control, of not being as happy as she was. “I don’t care what you do. That’s you.”

“I don’t approve or disapprove,” says Neil, in a mincing voice. “Don’t care what you do.”

That’s the signal, which one or the other had to give. A flash of hate, pure meanness, like the glint of a blade. The signal that the fight can come out into the open. Brenda takes a deep drink, as if she very much deserved it. She feels a desolate satisfaction. She stands up and says, “Time for me to go.”

“What if I’m not ready to go yet?” Neil says.

“I said me, not you.”

“Oh. You got a car outside?”

“I can walk.”

“That’s five miles back to where the van is.”

“People have walked five miles.”

“In shoes like that?” says Neil. They both look at her yellow shoes, which match the appliquéd-satin birds on her turquoise sweater. Both things bought and worn for him!

“You didn’t wear those shoes for walking,” he says. “You wore them so every step you took would show off your fat arse.”

She walks along the lakeshore road, in the gravel, which bruises her feet through the shoes and makes her pay attention to each step, lest she should twist an ankle. The afternoon is now too
cold for just a sweater. The wind off the lake blows at her sideways, and every time a vehicle passes, particularly a truck, an eddy of stiff wind whirls around her and grit blows into her face. Some of the trucks slow down, of course, and some cars do, too, and men yell at her out of the windows. One car skids onto the gravel and stops ahead of her. She stands still, she cannot think what else to do, and after a moment he churns back onto the pavement and she starts walking again.

That’s all right, she’s not in any real danger. She doesn’t even worry about being seen by someone she knows. She feels too free to care. She thinks about the first time Neil came to the Furniture Barn, how he put his arm around Samson’s neck and said, “Not much of a watchdog you got here, Ma’am.” She thought the “Ma’am” was impudent, phony, out of some old Elvis Presley movie. And what he said next was worse. She looked at Samson, and she said, “He’s better at night.” And Neil said, “So am I.” Impudent, swaggering, conceited, she thought. And he’s not young enough to get away with it. Her opinion didn’t even change so much the second time. What happened was that all that became just something to get past. It was something she could let him know he didn’t have to do. It was her job to take his gifts seriously, so that he could be serious, too, and easy and grateful. How was she sure so soon that what she didn’t like about him wasn’t real?

When she’s in the second mile, or maybe just the second half of the first mile, the Mercury catches up to her. It pulls onto the gravel across the road. She goes over and gets in. She doesn’t see why not. It doesn’t mean that she is going to talk to him, or be with him any longer than the few minutes it will take to drive to the swamp road and the van. His presence doesn’t need to weigh on her any more than the grit blowing beside the road.

She winds the window all the way down so that there will be a rush of chilly wind across anything he may have to say.

“I want to beg your pardon for the personal remarks,” he says.

“Why?” she says. “It’s true. It is fat.”

“No.”

“It is,” she says, in a tone of bored finality that is quite sincere. It shuts him up for a few miles, until they’ve turned down the swamp road and are driving in under the trees.

“If you thought there was a needle there in the drawer, there wasn’t.”

“It isn’t any of my business what there was,” she says.

“All that was in there was some Percs and Quaaludes and a little hash.”

She remembers a fight she had with Cornelius, one that almost broke their engagement. It wasn’t the time he slapped her for smoking marijuana. They made that up quickly. It wasn’t about anything to do with their own lives. They were talking about a man Cornelius worked with at the mine, and his wife, and their retarded child. This child was just a vegetable, Cornelius said; all it did was gibber away in a sort of pen in a corner of the living room and mess its pants. It was about six or seven years old, and that was all it would ever do. Cornelius said he believed that if anybody had a child like that they had a right to get rid of it. He said that was what he would do. No question about it. There were a lot of ways you could do it and never get caught, and he bet that was what a lot of people did. He and Brenda had a terrible fight about this. But all the time they were arguing and fighting Brenda suspected that this was not something Cornelius would really do. It was something he had to say he would do. To her. To her, he had to insist that he would do it. And this actually made her angrier at him than she would have been if she believed he was entirely and brutally sincere. He wanted her to argue with him about this. He wanted her protest, her horror, and why was that? Men wanted you to make a fuss, about disposing of vegetable babies or taking drugs or driving a car like a bat out of hell, and why was that? So they could have
your marshmallow sissy goodness to preen against, with their hard showoff badness? So that they finally could give in to you, growling, and not have to be so bad and reckless anymore? Whatever it was, you got sick of it.

In the mine accident, Cornelius could have been crushed to death. He was working the night shift when it happened. In the great walls of rock salt an undercut is made, then there are holes drilled for explosives, and the charges are fitted in; an explosion goes off every night at five minutes to midnight. The huge slice of salt slides loose, to be started on its journey to the surface. Cornelius was lifted up in a cage on the end of the arm of the scaler. He was to break off the loose material on the roof and fix in the bolts that held it for the explosion. Something went wrong with the hydraulic controls he was operating—he stalled, tried for a little power and got a surge that lifted him, so that he saw the rock ceiling closing down on him like a lid. He ducked, the cage halted, a rocky outcrop struck him in the back.

He had worked in the mine for seven years before that and hardly ever spoke to Brenda about what it was like. Now he tells her. It’s a world of its own, he says—caverns and pillars, miles out under the lake. If you get in a passage where there are no machines to light the gray walls, the salt-dusty air, and you turn your headlamp off, you can find out what real darkness is like, the darkness people on the surface of the earth never get to see. The machines stay down there forever. Some are assembled down there, taken down in parts; all are repaired there; and finally they’re ransacked for usable parts, then piled into a dead-end passage that is sealed up—a tomb for these underground machines. They make a ferocious noise all the time they’re working; the noise of the machines and the ventilating fans cuts out any human voice. And now there’s a new machine that can do what Cornelius went up in the cage to do. It can do it by itself, without a man.

Brenda doesn’t know if he misses being down there. He says
he doesn’t. He says he just can’t look at the surface of the water without seeing all that underneath, which nobody who hasn’t seen it could imagine.

Neil and Brenda drive along under the trees, where suddenly you could hardly feel the wind at all.

“Also, I did take some money,” Neil says. “I got forty dollars, which, compared to what some guys got, was just nothing. I swear that’s all, forty dollars. I never got any more.”

She doesn’t say anything.

“I wasn’t looking to confess it,” he says. “I just wanted to talk about it. Then what pisses me off is I lied anyway.”

Now that she can hear his voice better, she notices that it’s nearly as flat and tired as her own. She sees his hands on the wheel and thinks what a hard time she would have describing what he looks like. At a distance—in the car, waiting for her—he’s always been a bright blur, his presence a relief and a promise. Close up, he’s been certain separate areas—silky or toughened skin, wiry hair or shaved prickles, smells that are unique or shared with other men. But it’s chiefly an energy, a quality of his self that she can see in his blunt, short fingers or the tanned curve of his forehead. And even to call it energy is not exact—it’s more like the sap of him, rising from the roots, clear and on the move, filling him to bursting. That’s what she has set herself to follow—the sap, the current, under the skin, as if that were the one true thing.

If she turned sideways now, she would see him for what he is—that tanned curved forehead, the receding fringe of curly brown hair, heavy eyebrows with a few gray hairs in them, deep-set light-colored eyes, and a mouth that enjoys itself, rather sulky and proud. A boyish man beginning to age—though he still feels light and wild on top of her, after Cornelius’s bulk settling down possessively, like a ton of blankets. A responsibility, Brenda feels then. Is she going to feel the same about this one?

Neil turns the car around, he points it ready to drive back, and it’s time for her to get out and go across to the van. He takes his hands off the wheel with the engine running, flexes his fingers, then grabs the wheel hard again—hard enough, you’d think, to squeeze it to pulp. “Christ, don’t get out yet!” he says. “Don’t get out of the car!”

She hasn’t even put a hand on the door, she hasn’t made a move to leave. Doesn’t he know what’s happening? Maybe you need the experience of a lot of married fights to know it. To know that what you think—and, for a while, hope—is the absolute end for you can turn out to be only the start of a new stage, a continuation. That’s what’s happening, that’s what has happened. He has lost some of his sheen for her; he may not get it back. Probably the same goes for her, with him. She feels his heaviness and anger and surprise. She feels that also in herself. She thinks that up till now was easy.

I

Offerings
the book is called. Gold lettering on a dull-blue cover. The author’s full name underneath: Almeda Joynt Roth. The local paper, the
Vidette
, referred to her as “our poetess.” There seems to be a mixture of respect and contempt, both for her calling and for her sex—or for their predictable conjuncture. In the front of the book is a photograph, with the photographer’s name in one corner, and the date: 1865. The book was published later, in 1873.

The poetess has a long face; a rather long nose; full, sombre dark eyes, which seem ready to roll down her cheeks like giant tears; a lot of dark hair gathered around her face in droopy rolls and curtains. A streak of gray hair plain to see, although she is, in this picture, only twenty-five. Not a pretty girl but the sort of woman who may age well, who probably won’t get fat. She wears
a tucked and braid-trimmed dark dress or jacket, with a lacy, floppy arrangement of white material—frills or a bow—filling the deep V at the neck. She also wears a hat, which might be made of velvet, in a dark color to match the dress. It’s the untrimmed, shapeless hat, something like a soft beret, that makes me see artistic intentions, or at least a shy and stubborn eccentricity, in this young woman, whose long neck and forward-inclining head indicate as well that she is tall and slender and somewhat awkward. From the waist up, she looks like a young nobleman of another century. But perhaps it was the fashion.

“In 1854,” she writes in the preface to her book, “my father brought us—my mother, my sister Catherine, my brother William, and me—to the wilds of Canada West (as it then was). My father was a harness-maker by trade, but a cultivated man who could quote by heart from the Bible, Shakespeare, and the writings of Edmund Burke. He prospered in this newly opened land and was able to set up a harness and leather-goods store, and after a year to build the comfortable house in which I live (alone) today. I was fourteen years old, the eldest of the children, when we came into this country from Kingston, a town whose handsome streets I have not seen again but often remember. My sister was eleven and my brother nine. The third summer that we lived here, my brother and sister were taken ill of a prevalent fever and died within a few days of each other. My dear mother did not regain her spirits after this blow to our family. Her health declined, and after another three years she died. I then became housekeeper to my father and was happy to make his home for twelve years, until he died suddenly one morning at his shop.