The Opening Sky (6 page)

“You know,” Liz says, “it’s an awful thing to say, but this makes me glad my mother is gone. I can’t help it. She’d see someone who’d been happily married for twenty-five years, and she’d drop her voice and get that awful smug expression on her face and say, ‘She got into trouble. They had to get married.’ ”

Aiden picks up the wine bottle and Liz slides over her glass. “And then there was us,” he says.

“Yeah, then there was us.” Well, they did have that hand-fasting ceremony in the living room – their neighbour Wendy’s idea, some sort of Scandinavian tradition. Liz was wearing an empire-waist frock that showed off her pregnant tummy. Her mother arrived in a pink mother-of-the-bride suit and hat, trying gamely to turn the occasion into something it wasn’t.

“I keep wondering how the Oliphants are feeling,” Liz says. “But that’s crazy. It used to be the boy who was blamed when this happened. For ruining your daughter. Now it’s the other way around. They’ll be thinking she’s stupid, or she trapped him on purpose.”

“They’ll be fine once they meet Sylvie,” he says.

She wants to grab his ears and give them a sharp twist. A
force of nature
, he always calls Sylvie, as if she can do no wrong. Since the news broke two days ago, not a word has been uttered about the trip to France, the fact that Liz paid a deposit of two hundred euros on the apartment in Sarlat, the fact that just that day she’d bought their airline tickets. For the very week this baby is allegedly due. Liz is no more selfish than the average individual. She grasps the scale of things. She doesn’t need much, just,
Liz, I know you had your heart set on that trip
. That’s all.

“Great supper,” he says.

“Umm.”

“You went to a lot of trouble.”

“Well, what else can I do?”

“What indeed.” He changed before supper, while they waited. He’s wearing his best jeans and a soft white cotton shirt Liz bought for him at a kiosk in a market. You can see how worried he is in the set of his mouth. His hair is a colour no one could name: sandy hair turning grey. It looks poignant to Liz, old age creeping up on boyishness. At this moment it’s hard to hold anything against him.

“I’m trying to keep calm,” she says. “I forced myself to go to yoga, but it was so bloody crowded. The woman beside me wouldn’t use a proper mat. She was working on a little cotton towel and she kept slipping. She toppled into me twice during the standing poses.”

“You should have said something.”

“I did. I said, ‘You know, the studio provides yoga mats.’ And here she’s one of those chemical sensitivity types, she says, ‘I can’t use synthetics because of the off-gassing.’ Oh, whatever, it was just too crowded. On the way out I said to the teacher, ‘You need to put a cap on class size,’ and of course she gets all self-righteous and says, ‘You’ve obviously never done yoga in India.’ ”

“You’d think everybody would be out shopping.”

“Christmas drives them to yoga. It’s the shtress of the season.”

“Oh, Jade was teaching.”

Poor Aiden, he knows her rants by heart.
Feel the shtrength as you shtretch
. Liz used to think this annoying speech affectation was just yoga teacher Jade (it’s her
shtick
, as Aiden put it), but now she’s hearing it everywhere from a certain age and class of woman. There’s always something in yoga.

Well, there’s always something in everything. When she was in high school, in synchronized swimming, her coach would stand on the edge of the pool in a tangerine Speedo and chant, “Synch or swim, synch or swim,” which made no sense whatsoever. And again, she notes, savouring the taste of a sun-dried tomato on her tongue, she is thinking about synchro in the same breath as yoga, when actually it’s different in every way possible – the fact that in yoga you are constantly reminded to breathe while in synchro it’s the reverse, and the fact that yoga is from a realm so foreign to her mother that even from the grave she can have no opinion about it, whereas her mother was in love with Esther Williams and the aqua-musicals. Her mother’s enthusiasms always involved things that eventually mortified Liz, in this case the rubbery bathing caps with lurid lime-green flowers, the grotesque nose plugs, and figures like the kip split: head down in the pool and frantically sculling, Liz and the other girls would slowly, slowly spread their legs in synchronized display, presenting a pornographic row of slashes sheathed in Lycra to the dads and boyfriends drooling from the bleachers.

Yoga, it seems, is not about displaying anything. It’s about – well, she really couldn’t tell you what it’s about. But today, for a moment, she got it. At the end, in Savasana, when her petty irritations suddenly fell away and she lay quietly feeling her stomach move up and down. The thought of all those people breathing in
the dark, that was what calmed her. All their ragged thoughts floating above them. She didn’t sink very deeply into her own self, but she tuned into them: thirty women and a few men lying vulnerable, side by side on the studio’s tiled floor. That in itself was helpful. Who knew the pains and troubles being borne by the brave strangers in that windowless room? How tragic was her situation in comparison to theirs?

Liz puts down her fork and surveys the kitchen again. Her beautiful kitchen with the warm cork floor in a checkerboard pattern of charcoal and cream, the craftsman cupboards, the high ceiling with its schoolhouse lights (real, not reproduction). If she were in the Oliphants’ shoes, if she had walked into this home for this sort of meeting, what she saw would run contrary to all her expectations. She’d know at a glance that it would not be simple to work out the whole story. She’d figure there had to be something a bit off, but it wouldn’t be easy to spot. Nothing like … her eyes catch the mark on the granite countertop, a stain in the perfect shape of Newfoundland, where vinegar was spilled and lay undetected overnight. Nothing as obvious as that.

They finish their dinner. Aiden goes to set up the fire and Liz feeds the dog. If the past is anything to go by, Sylvie will show up ten minutes late for the meeting and she won’t say a word about missing supper.
Never explain, never apologize
. Isn’t that what we all aspire to?

Liz loads the dishwasher and gets a plate microwave-ready for Sylvie, just in case. Just as she’s putting it in the fridge, the side door opens and Sylvie slips in. She goes straight down to the basement without so much as a hello. Liz’s emotions coalesce into a familiar helpless rage and she backs out of the fridge and tips the contents of Sylvie’s plate into the compost pail.

Straight down to the basement. Like a rude finger raised in Liz’s direction. She’s got a gorgeous second-floor bedroom with huge windows, but by choice she’ll hide in a cave favoured by a certain loathsome brown beetle you never see anywhere else in the house. Sleep on a musty futon where the damp of Red River clay sweats coldly through the floor and the walls. Shower in a thundering tin stall where the previous owner kept his cat litter. Screw you, she’s prepared to say to her mother, even now.
Screw you and your so-called life
.

Liz stands for a minute with the plate in her hand. She opens the freezer door and cold, stale-food air wafts out. She hears the basement shower start up and she turns her eyes to the tumble of plastic and tinfoil packages that make up her frozen stash. Stollen, she’ll serve the stollen she made for Christmas. She gets out the log and unwraps it. Breathe, she says to herself, leaning on the big butcher knife, feeling it sink in evenly. Not everything is about you. The basement suits Sylvie; down there she can believe she’s being subjected to Third World deprivations. Consider the Oliphants. No doubt true Chamber of Commerce types, and they’ve raised a kid who wants to wipe humans off the planet. Though apparently this doesn’t involve keeping it in his pants.

Liz wraps up the remaining stollen and stows it back in the freezer. She reaches into the fridge for the jar of homemade tapenade, calculating. There’s still Christmas and New Year’s.

Aiden is in the doorway. “Did I hear Sylvie come in?” he asks.

Liz tips her head towards the basement door. “Is this too much?” she asks, gesturing at the tapenade. “I don’t want to go overboard.”

“Looks okay to me,” he says. “But I’m not quite ready. I can’t seem to find the shotgun.”

“Oh, babe,” she says, and reaches for him. He lays his head on her shoulder and she says, “This is a kick in the gut, eh?” and he
says, “It’s a kick in the balls, babe,” and they hug until she feels his warmth seeping into her. She’s afraid she’ll start crying and she lets him go.

When she’s alone again, she runs her fingers through her hair, looking at herself in the window of the microwave. Her reflection lifts its chin in the black glass. She knows how to run a meeting – it’s one of the things she’s best at. Aiden doesn’t do groups. It will be her; she’ll be the one who takes the lead.

They’ll offer wine first, but she’ll set up the coffeemaker just in case. She’s at the sink filling the carafe when headlights turn off the street and a grey minivan rolls up the driveway. There’s a fitting hesitation in the way the van drives up and stops, and in the slowness of the simultaneous opening of the front doors, and the gravity with which two people get out, in the manner of a gangster film or a funeral. Just two. The woman was driving. She’s wearing a red coat, Linda Lundström or a knock-off. She has a tangle of grey hair, but otherwise she’s a dead ringer for a legendary figure from Liz’s past, Mary Magdalene Calhoun. And then they’re moving towards the house and the mop of hair lifts, and Mary Magdalene herself looks up towards the window. She sees Liz peering out at her and produces a mournful smile.

Sylvie is just climbing the stairs from the basement, her fingers working her towel-dried hair up into an elastic. “Sylvie,” Liz says, “didn’t you say Chris and Maggie Oliphant? Isn’t that what you said?”

The front doorbell rings. “No,” Sylvie says, standing in the kitchen, her eyes averted. “I have no idea where you got that,” and Liz sees in her flushed face and the set of her shoulders that she’s known perfectly well all along.

S
EVEN PEOPLE IN THE GLASGOW-PHIMISTER LIVING room for a meeting of the Montagues and the Capulets. The dog lies smugly on the rug, as though he’s just succeeded in rounding them all up. On the hearth a little fire dances. The Christmas tree is a seven-foot balsam from New Brunswick – not the most graceful tree in the supermarket parking lot, a balsam, but it is fragrant, and beautifully decorated, because Liz has a knack for that sort of thing. From her perch a red-cheeked, yellow-haired angel surveys the living room, the prickly bifurcated tip of the Christmas tree up the back of her papier-mâché skirt.

Sylvie’s in the swivel chair below, one leg tucked under her and one bare foot on the rug so she can give herself a shove whenever her terror threatens to reach up pudgy hands and choke her. She darts a glance at her mother, who’s sitting with her legs and arms crossed, and then she turns her eyes back to the man who’s talking. Someone she’s never met before – George Oliphant, Noah’s real father, one of those sad old hippies. He’s staring at her; they all are. Five parents in this room focused on her like hungry ghouls, gawking at her stomach and her boobs, suddenly swollen and
voluptuous. Humiliation sears her throat like heartburn. For being Bristol Palin. Worse – for not knowing, for being the sort of girl who gives birth in a toilet at Walmart and says, I had no idea.

Aiden, on a corner of the couch, notes them all staring at Sylvie. But really, he thinks, who can blame them? His daughter, who always has a bloom about her, is incandescent tonight. Her jeans have a frank three-cornered tear on the thigh. She’s wearing her
SORRY FOR WHAT
’
S ABOUT TO HAPPEN
T-shirt, and the tender swelling of her tummy is plain as day. For a second this pregnancy seems a natural climax to all her adolescent transformations, which have taken him by surprise day after day. Then she gives her chair a little swivel and he sees how scared she is, and his own sadness laps at his rib cage. For all she’s losing, poor kid, for the cruel lesson she’s facing in the narrowing of things. He enjoyed twenty years of adult idylls before he had to deal with parenthood.

Five loving parents assembled now, but to be frank, the only ray of hope Aiden can see is Noah’s mother. When she stepped through the front door with Noah, sober-faced, behind her, he could have wept with relief at the sight. Not one of those toned, tanned, brittle, cruise-going Tory types – no, thank Christ, she was a comely, comfortable woman dressed in a loose tunic thing in rich colours, a woman with a warm smile and a confident voice and the calm light of self-knowledge in her eyes. And then Liz came down the hall and they were greeting each other – she was someone Liz knew!

Maggie laughed politely and possibly reprovingly. Then they rose in Aiden’s mind, the
GAP
women who used to hang around this house, a clowder of back-to-the-earth types wearing striped leotards under woollen skirts, their kids exuding an unfamiliar body odour from the chickpeas and tofu they were forced to subsist on.

“It’s just Maggie,” she said. “It’s been Maggie for a while. And this is Noah, of course. My big son, all grown up. Noah, go find Sylvie, honey. It’s fine, go on. Listen, I am
so
sorry Krzysztof can’t be here. He’s doing a seminar at the Banff Centre and we’re going to meet up in Calgary for Christmas.”

Taking Aiden’s arm familiarly, she bent down to unzip her boots and slip into the shoes she’d brought in a drawstring bag, all the while outlining the complications already plaguing their Christmas – the flying and driving in various directions across the country, and Krzysztof’s mother, who’d just moved in with them, and her own mother in Calgary, showing signs of dementia. And then suddenly she caught sight of the dog and bent over again, to pat him. “What a big head!” she laughed. “And look at his little hind legs! He’s like something out of a
New Yorker
cartoon.”