Guide to Animal Behaviour (2 page)

“Ted,” I say, nodding toward the Satellite, “you think you could move your car? I appreciate the help and all, but the other guests will want to get out.”

Then I race around by the rock path to the back door, hurrying inside before Mama catches her breath and follows me.

A shadow slips down the hall into the guest bedroom. The house is silent except that I am almost sure I can hear Glenna's heart beating. Then I notice a slip of paper and a pencil stub on the kitchen table. Trembling, I begin to read.

“E.A., I wasn't stealing the van. I just wanted —”

The letters slope off drunkenly and stop, as though she lost heart with her explanation, as though she realized how futile and humiliating it was to make any explanation at all. But it is still a note, a message addressed to me. It is something. I suddenly forget myself and stride down the hall. I pause at the guest bedroom door and listen. She is crying again, but muffling it. I can barely stand the pain she is in.

I take a ballpoint from the plastic penholder in my breast pocket and scribble beneath her words: “G., You don't have to tell me.” I add the phrase, “Welcome home,” but black it out. Then, “I love you,” and black that out, too. The pen slips in my sweaty fingers and skips as I try to write against the door. I end the note with “Love, E.A.” and leave it at that.

Then I knock softly and push through.

Glenna is sitting on the bed, hunched over, with the United Airlines bag cradled in her arms. When I hand her the note, she straightens up, pushes her hair back defiantly and rubs the heel of her palm across her lip.

She stares at the piece of paper for five minutes. Maybe she is trying to decipher the blacked-out phrases. Maybe this is just an excuse not to look at me. Anyway, I know it doesn't take five minutes to read a six-word message.

I take advantage of these minutes, though, to look around the room. There are some female things on the counter in the bathroom, combs, hair dryer, Tampax, conditioners and shampoos. Beyond that, she doesn't seem to have unpacked anything. I peer at the airline bag, pondering its secrets. In fact, there are a couple of baggage tags, and I memorize the codes to give to Sheriff Buck.

Glenna begins to rummage in her pocketbook. I offer her a tissue from the box on the dresser, but she shakes her head no without looking at me. Then I hold out one of my pens, which she takes. She turns the note over and begins to write.

“E.A.,” I read, standing next to her, then she stops to think.

Inadvertently, my hand brushes her shoulder. A wisp of hair trails across my knuckles. Nothing more. And it wasn't anything I meant to do, not a caress or a liberty I was taking. But she twists away.

She writes, “E.A., Don't touch me. Don't come in this room again. Don't expect anything from me.”

I reel backward toward the door, wounded, sweaty and feeling like a fool. My eyes sting. But I glance back once before I leave, and she is staring at me. When she reaches up to press a tear from her cheek with a forefinger, I see the tan line where her wedding ring used to be. She sees that I see and, pressing the hand into her lap, covers it with the other.

The look in her eyes is neither angry nor apologetic. Suddenly I see how she has changed. Though she trembles and tears spring to her eyes, she carries herself with a new and unaccountable dignity, as though she has learned some secret about sorrow and tragedy.

Later, in the office, after I have recovered and checked in two sets of new guests, I call Sheriff Buck with the transit codes. At first, he is boyishly excited, but then he catches the grave, neutral tone in my voice and senses that I have begun to stop caring about the rabbit hunt into Glenna's past. In ten minutes, he telephones back.

“Shit, E.A.,” he says, “she went to the North Pole. She went clear up into Canada. Way up, E.A.! Those tickets are for flights between Montréal and some diddly little place with an Indian name. I can't even find it on the road atlas. There ain't nothing but ice and snow where Glenna's been.”

I hang up, not wishing to hear more, and imagine my wife journeying north from the summer heat of Ragged Point, away from everything she'd ever known, north into another country, to where the people and houses begin to thin out, north beyond the tree-line, to a desert of ice and rock. I take out the
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ATLAS
I keep in the office and look up the place Sheriff Buck has named. It is a dot on an otherwise empty island far above the Arctic Circle. Someone has drawn an
X
over it with red ink.

During the night, I am afflicted with nightmares. As soon as my head hits the pillow, I find myself in a world of twisting, heaving ice. Everywhere I turn, seams of gray water open up with a fearful ripping sound. In the distance, I make out a figure, drifting away from me. A great, white bear looms above her — I feel sure it means to take her in its ugly embrace and bite her head off.

I scream, “Glenna! Glenna!”

When I awake, I am crying into my pillow, and my wife stands in the doorway, her face set in an expression of stern and terrible pity. She says nothing, but continues to stare at me as though trying to puzzle something out. I am all twisted up in sheets sodden with sweat, and for a time, I am uncertain whether this is still the dream or not.

Glenna wears pale blue baby-doll pajamas which I gave her on a birthday and which she must have retrieved from our dresser drawer earlier in the day. Poised in the moonlight, she is all legs and eyes. The odours of her shampoo and bath powder cause me pangs of nostalgia worse than any pain I have felt since she left.

I want to cry out again. I want to pretend I am still asleep so that under the guise of unconsciousness I might tell her of all my secret fears, my nights of loneliness, my mute love. But, presently, with Glenna standing there, I really do fall asleep. When I wake up again, solitary in our nuptial Posturpedic, it is to the sound of the van door slamming shut and the engine catching. The terrors of my dreams return. For a while, I cannot move, can only listen as the van sound disappears in the distance.

When I finally stumble into the breezeway in my boxer shorts, the morning sun is like a drop of blood on the horizon, and Mama is standing next to the Firbanks' banana-yellow Satellite with a cigarette and her claw-hammer and a look of silent judgment on her face.

The men at the Dunkin' Donut are quiet and constrained. It is clear from Brent Wardlow's stricken eyes that he believes Ragged Point has lost another wife for good.

Sheriff Buck tells how he staked out Gulf Haven for half the night, expecting Glenna to make a break for it after the way Mama treated her. He had intended to flag her down on the coast road and remonstrate with her. But something held him back.

“It just didn't feel right, E.A., trailing her in the dark. It peels my guts. But she's got her own life to live, you know what I mean? I'm sorry, bud.”

I nod and sip my coffee, pretending that the moisture in my eyes is because my tongue is burned. Even at a distance, Sheriff Buck has sensed Glenna's new, inviolable dignity. I tell the men about the
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ATLAS
and the tiny red X.

‘There'd be Eskimos,” says Elder Ottman, the Baptist minister, “maybe a mission or a government store, maybe even one of those Royal Canadian Mounties.” Eyebrows shoot up. “Eskimos,” he adds, “means ‘eaters of raw meat.'”

“Gawd!” says Bubba, spluttering into a napkin.

An uncomfortable silence follows. I have not mentioned my nightmares or the vision of Glenna standing in the doorway. The men are too sensitive to press for intimate details. It is all so painful. Every word, every gesture, is understood to be a many-levelled message of commiseration, shared hopelessness and awe. For there is a restlessness amongst the women of Ragged Point, as there is amongst the women of the nation, as though they have all inhaled some passing interplanetary dust.

Elder Ottman's wife recently stopped watching soap operas and began to check books on oil painting out of the town library. Lois Motherwell, Andy's mother, has moved a typewriter into the boathouse, neglecting her duties in the drygoods store, and claims to be writing a novel. Five young mothers have hired a babysitter and spend their afternoons hang-gliding off Rattler Peak.

To tell the truth, when the husbands relate these exploits, mornings at the Dunkin' Donut, it is not difficult to detect a note of pride in their voices. As well as anxiety. For who knows (this is the common feeling, never expressed in so many words), who knows where it will end?

Our meditation is shattered suddenly by the arrival of Stu Bollis, the man who drives the fish-delivery truck. Horn blaring, he nearly dents Sheriff Buck's municipal Plymouth in his rush to park.

“She ain't gone, E.A.!” he exclaims, pushing the screen door open with a slap. “She ain't gone. I knew you'd think she was gone the minute I saw the van.”

“Where is she, Stu?” I ask, trying to shake loose the skin of ice congealing over my thoughts.

“Down at the point, parked in the pines. I seen her sitting on the rocks, with her pants rolled up, just looking out at the water. I reckon she is thinking, don't you?”

I nod to Sheriff Buck, who grabs his Stetson as he and Bubba come after me. He lays rubber down Water Street, pops the siren once for the stoplight at Jefferson Davis, then hits sixty-five leaving town. At the Ragged Point turnoff, he pulls a U-turn and drops me on the gravel. He and Bubba give me the thumbs-up as they head out.

I walk nervously through the pines where the van is parked, past the log barrier, picnic tables and wire trash baskets and onto the rocks. Tide is out. Pelicans and laughing gulls cruise a hair's breadth above the waves. Glenna is seated just as Stu described her, only there is a pile of fresh sand dollars drying next to her hip and her feet are sandy and wet.

She looks up and smiles. We both glance toward town and see Sheriff Buck's Plymouth creeping along Water Street so that he and Bubba can keep us in sight as long as possible.

Glenna shakes her head and giggles, then lies back on her elbows and preens in the sun. Her expression says, “Oh my, I had forgotten how much I love the heat” — a sentiment I can surely understand, considering where she has been.

But her look also fills me with sadness for what I have lost. In spite of my resolve to keep things upbeat, I suddenly have to put my hand over my face to suppress a sob. It is only natural to want things to stay the way they are. I love the new Glenna, maybe more than the old. But she is different now, aloof and unapproachable.

Then I become aware of Glenna's hand touching mine on the tidal rock. It is an electric gesture that sends a thrill into my bones. She covers my hand with hers, then takes it up and laces her fingers between mine. I dare not look at her. I dare not say a word. I dare not even return pressure for pressure against her slim and fragile digits.

My wife stands and pulls me up. I keep my eyes steadily fixed on the gulf, with its comforting emptiness festering under the sun. All is vanity, the slapping waves tell me. All is flesh, and the flesh abideth not.

We collect the sand dollars in my baseball cap. Somewhere between the water and the van, she takes my hand again.

Gulf Haven is just as we have left it, except that the back door stands open, and our house has the atmosphere of a desolate cave. It is also unusual not to see the Firbanks sitting in their lawn chairs next to the Satellite, drinking from high-ball glasses and casting sour and disapproving glances at everything through their aviator Ray-Bans. Glenna and I are setting the sand dollars on the stone porch to dry when we are disturbed by the sound of a chair scraping inside.

When I go there to check, I find Mama and the Firbanks seated at the kitchen table. There are drink glasses on the lazy susan. The air is choked with tobacco smoke. Worst of all, in the centre of the table, Glenna's airline bag has been turned inside out and a number of items placed on display.
Evidence
is the word that comes to mind, when I see the look on Mama's face.

Three pairs of eyes bore in on slim, blonde Glenna, as she slips into the room behind me. I feel like a judge, or that I am about to have some terrible truth thrust upon me.

The things on the table are foreign and add to my confusion. Clothing made from animal skins. An ivory box with tiny black figures etched on the cover. A pair of high fur boots with leather laces. Things difficult to connect with Glenna in her Princess Di haircut and white sweatpants.

Like a croupier sliding a pile of chips, Mama advances an object across the table with her claw-hammer. It is a tiny, jet-black statue, with ivory accessories, minutely carved so that the stone seems to billow and fold itself into whitened creases. My curiosity aroused, I peer more closely, all too aware that Mama has engineered this moment, my discovery, my acquiescence in judgment, though I don't quite know what the judgment is yet.

There are two people, a couple — Eskimos, I can tell. The man holds a barbed ivory spear, no bigger than a pipe cleaner, with a piece of twine attached to the end. Next to him stands a woman and a dog.

My body gives an involuntary shiver. The hair begins to crawl up the back of my neck. There is something uncomfortably intimate about the statue, and familiar. The man clutches the woman's hand; the woman holds the dog on a twine leash. Their eyes are fixed on some icy horizon. They exude an air of remoteness, as though they had just stepped out of the Stone Age, from a time when the human race was younger, prouder and fiercer.