Surfacing Read online

  The shore bushes rustled: it was Joe, coming down behind me. He squatted on the stone beside me; his cup was only a third full, sprinkled with leaves and green-white berries.

  "Take a rest," he said.

  "In a minute." I was almost finished. It was hot, light glared from the lake; in the sun the berries were so blue they seemed lit up from within. Falling into the cup they made a plink like water.

  "We should get married," Joe said.

  I set the cup down carefully on the rock and turned to look at him, shielding my eyes. I wanted to laugh, it was incongruous, it wasn't what he would call his trip, the legal phrases and the paperwork and the vows, especially the finality; and he'd got the order wrong, he'd never asked whether I loved him, that was supposed to come first, I would have been prepared for that. "Why?" I said. "We're living together anyway. We don't need a certificate for that."

  "I think we should," he said, "we might as well."

  "But it wouldn't make any difference," I said. "Everything would be the same."

  "Then why not do it?" He had moved closer, he was being logical, he was threatening me with something. I swivelled, scouting for help, but they were at the far end of the island, Anna's pink shirt tiny and blazing like a gas station banner.

  "No," I said, the only answer to logic. It was because I didn't want to, that's why it would gratify him, it would be a sacrifice, of my reluctance, my distaste.

  "Sometimes," he said, placing the words evenly and deliberately, pegs in a peg-board, "I get the feeling you don't give a shit about me."

  "I do," I said. "I do give a shit about you," repeating it like a skipping rhyme. I wondered if that was the equivalent of saying I loved him. I was calculating how much getaway money I had in the bank, how long it would take me to pack and move out, away from the clay dust and the cellar mould smell and the monstrous humanoid pots, how soon I could find a new place. Prove your love, they say. You really want to marry me, let me fuck you instead. You really want to fuck, let me marry you instead. As long as there's a victory, some flag I can wave, parade I can have in my head.

  "No, you don't, I can tell," he said, unhappy rather than angry; that was worse, I could cope with his anger. He was growing larger, becoming alien, three-dimensional; panic began.

  "Look," I said, "I've been married before and it didn't work out. I had a baby too." My ace, voice patient. "I don't want to go through that again." It was true, but the words were coming out of me like the mechanical words from a talking doll, the kind with the pull tape at the back; the whole speech was unwinding, everything in order, a spool. I would always be able to say what I'd just finished saying: I've tried and failed, I'm inoculated, exempt, classified as wounded. It wasn't that I didn't suffer, I was conscientious about that, that's what qualified me. But marriage was like playing Monopoly or doing crossword puzzles, either your mind worked that way, like Anna's, or it didn't; and I'd proved mine didn't. A small neutral country.

  "It would be different with us," he said, disregarding what I said about the baby.

  At my wedding we filled out forms, name, age, birthplace, blood type. We had it in a post office, a J.P. did it, oil portraits of former postmasters presided from the beige walls. I could recall the exact smells, glue and humid socks and the odour of second-day blouse and crystallized deodorant from the irritated secretary, and, from another doorway, the chill of antiseptic. It was a hot day, when we stepped out into the sun we couldn't see for an instant; then there was a flock of draggled pigeons pecking at the scuffed post office lawn beside the fountain. The fountain had dolphins and a cherub with part of the face missing.

  "It's over," he said, "feel better?"

  He coiled his arms around me, protecting me from something, the future, and kissed me on the forehead. "You're cold," he said. My legs were shaking so much I could hardly stand up and there was an ache, slow like a groan. "Come on," he said, "we'd better get you home." He lifted my face, scrutinizing it in the light. "Maybe I should carry you to the car."

  He was talking to me as though I was an invalid, not a bride. In one hand I carried a purse or a suitcase; the other was closed. We walked through the pigeons and they blew up around us, confetti. In the car I didn't cry, I didn't want to look at him. "I know it's tough," he said, "but it's better this way." Quote, unquote. His flexible hands on the wheel. It turned, perfect circle, and the gears interlocked and spun, the engine ticked like a clock, the voice of reason.

  "Why are you doing this to me?" I said, losing control. "You'll ruin it." Then I was sorry, as though I'd stepped on a small animal by accident, he was so miserable: he'd abdicated, betrayed what I'd assumed were his principles, in order to be saved, by me, from me, and he'd got nothing by it.

  I took his hand; he let me hold it, frowning at me, sullen as a doormat. "I'm not good enough for you," I said, motto, the words printed on a scroll like a fortune cookie. I kissed him on the side of the face. I was stalling for time, also I was afraid of him: the look he gave me as I drew away was one of baffled rage.

  We were sitting outside in the chicken wire enclosure; Joe was in the sandbox with his back half-turned to us, scraping together a large mound of sand. He'd finished his pie, the rest of us were still eating. It was too hot to eat in the house, we had to keep the stove going for two hours. They had purple mouths and blue teeth which showed when they talked or laughed.

  "That's the best pie I ever ate," David said. "Just like mother used to make." He smacked his lips and posed, pretending to be a T.V. ad.

  "Stuff it," Anna said, "you can't afford just one measly compliment, can you?"

  David's purple mouth grinned. "Aw," he said, "that was a compliment."

  "The hell," Anna said. "I've met your mother."

  David sighed and leaned back against his tree, rolling his eyes to Joe for sympathy. But he got none and so he gazed up at the sky instead. "This is the life," he said after a while. "We ought to start a colony, I mean a community up here, get it together with some other people, break away from the urban nuclear family. It wouldn't be a bad country if only we could kick out the fucking pig Americans, eh? Then we could have some peace."

  Nobody answered him; he took off one of his shoes and began scratching the sole of his foot thoughtfully.

  "I think it would be a copout," Anna said abruptly.

  "What would?" David said, overly tolerant, as though she'd interrupted him in mid-sentence. "Kicking out the pigs?"

  "Oh shit," Anna said, "you just won't."

  "What the hell are you talking about?" he said, feigning hurt. But she sat hugging her knees, smoke breathing through her nostrils. I got up and started to collect the plates.

  "It turns me on when she bends over," David said. "She's got a neat ass. I'm really into the whole ass thing. Joe, don't you think she's got a neat ass?"

  "You can have it," Joe said. He was levelling the sand mound he had built, he was still angry.

  I scraped the ends of crust into the stove and washed the plates, the water turning reddish blue, vein colour. The others ambled in; they didn't feel like playing bridge, they sat around the table reading detective novels and back issues of magazines, Maclean's and The National Geographic, some of them were ten years old. I'd read them all so I went into David's and Anna's room with a candle to look for more.

  I had to climb up on the bed to reach the shelf. There was a high pile of books; I lifted it down to where the candle was. On top was a layer of paperbacks, the average kind, but underneath them were some things that were out of place: the brown leather photo album that ought to have been in a trunk in the city, along with my mother's unused wedding presents, tarnished silver bowls and lace tablecloths, and the scrapbooks we used to draw in when it rained. I thought she'd thrown them out; I wondered who had brought them here, which one of them.

  There were several scrapbooks; I sat down on the bed and opened one at random, feeling as though I was opening someone else's private diary. It was my brother's: explosions in red and
orange, soldiers dismembering in the air, planes and tanks; he must have been going to school by then, he knew enough to draw little swastikas on the sides. Further on there were flying men with comic-book capes and explorers on another planet, he spent hours explaining these pictures to me. The purple jungles I'd forgotten, the green sun with seven red moons, the animals with scales and spines and tentacles; and a man-eating plant, engulfing a careless victim, a balloon with HELP in it squeezing out of his mouth like bubble gum. The other explorers were rescuing him with their weapons: flame-throwers, trumpet-shaped pistols, ray-guns. In the background was their spaceship, bristling with gadgets.

  The next scrapbook was mine. I searched through it carefully, looking for something I could recognize as myself, where I had come from or gone wrong; but there were no drawings at all, just illustrations cut from magazines and pasted in. They were ladies, all kinds: holding up cans of cleanser, knitting, smiling, modelling toeless heels and nylons with dark seams and pillbox hats and veils. A lady was what you dressed up as on Hallowe'en when you couldn't think of anything else and didn't want to be a ghost; or it was what you said at school when they asked you what you were going to be when you grew up, you said "A lady" or "A mother," either one was safe; and it wasn't a lie, I did want to be those things. On some of the pages were women's dresses clipped from mail order catalogues, no bodies in them.

  I tried another one: mine also, earlier. The drawings were of ornately-decorated Easter eggs, singly and in groups. Some of them had people-shaped rabbits climbing up them on rope ladders; apparently the rabbits lived inside the eggs, there were doors at the tops, they could pull the ladders up after them. Beside the larger eggs were smaller ones connected to them by bridges, the outhouses. Page after page of eggs and rabbits, grass and trees, normal and green, surrounding them, flowers blooming, sun in the upper right-hand corner of each picture, moon symmetrically in the left. All the rabbits were smiling and some were laughing hilariously; several were shown eating ice-cream cones from the safety of their egg-tops. No monsters, no wars, no explosions, no heroism. I couldn't remember ever having drawn these pictures. I was disappointed in myself: I must have been a hedonistic child, I thought, and quite stodgy also, interested in nothing but social welfare. Or perhaps it was a vision of Heaven.

  Behind me someone came into the room, it was David. "Hey lady," he said, "what're you doing in my bed? You a customer or something?"

  "Sorry," I said. I put the album back on the shelf but I took the scrapbooks into my room and hid them under the mattress, I didn't want them spying.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  At night Joe kept turned away from me, he wasn't going to compromise. I ran my fingers over his furry back to show I wanted a truce, the borders restored to where they'd been, but after he twitched me off and grunted irritably I withdrew. I curled up, concentrating on excluding him: he was merely an object in the bed, like a sack or a large turnip. There's more than one way to skin a cat, my father used to say; it bothered me, I didn't see why they would want to skin a cat even one way. I stared at the wall and thought of maxims: two can play that game, marry in haste, repent at leisure, least said soonest mended, traditional wisdom which was never any help.

  At breakfast he ignored me and the others too, hunching over his plate, mumbling replies.

  "What's with him?" David said. His new beard was sprouting, a brown smudge on his chin.

  "Shut up," Anna said; but she glanced at me, inquisitive, holding me responsible for it whatever it was.

  Joe wiped his sweat shirt sleeve across his mouth and went out of the house, letting the screen door slam behind him.

  "Maybe he's constipated," David said, "it makes them grouchy. You sure he's been getting enough exercise?" Then he went "Arf, arf" like Popeye, wiggling his ears.

  "Stupid," Anna said fondly; she rumpled his hair.

  "Hey, don't do that," he said, "it'll all fall out." He jumped up and went to the mirror and rearranged the hair down over his forehead; I hadn't noticed before that he combed it that way to cover the patches where it had once grown.

  I gathered up the bacon rinds and the crusts from the toast and took them out to the bird tray. The jays were there, they saw I had food and told each other about it with hoarse cries. I stood quietly with my hand outstretched but they wouldn't fly down; they winged overhead, reconnoitring. Perhaps I was moving without knowing it, you had to convince them you were a thing, not an enemy. Our mother made us watch from inside the house, she said we frightened them. Once people believed the flight of birds was a portent: augury.

  I heard the mosquito whine of a motor approaching; I left my handful of crumbs on the tray and went out on the point to watch. It was Paul's boat, white-painted and squarish, handmade; he waved to me from the stern. There was another man with him, sitting in the bow, backwards.

  They pulled in to the dock and I ran down the steps to greet them; I caught the rope and tied it. "Careful," I said as they stepped out, "it's rotten in places."

  Paul had brought me a huge wad of vegetables from his garden: he handed me a bouquet of swiss chard, a quart basket of green beans, a bundle of carrots, a brain-sized cauliflower, bashfully, as though the gift might not be acceptable. The proper reply would have been an equally large or perhaps larger assortment. I thought with dismay of the spindly broccoli and the radishes already gone to seed.

  "Here is a man," he said. "They send him to me because I know your father." He stepped backwards, effacing himself, and almost slipped off the dock.

  "Malmstrom," the man said as though it was a secret code; his hand shot towards me. I transferred the swiss chard to the crook of my arm and took the hand, which squeezed mine confidentially. "Bill Malmstrom, please call me Bill." He had trimmed grey hair and an executive moustache like the shirt ads, the vodka ads; his clothes were woodsy, semi-worn, verging on the authentic. Slung around his neck was a pair of binoculars in a suede case.

  We walked to the land; he had taken out a pipe and was lighting it. I wondered if he was from the government. "Paul, here, was telling me," he said, looking around for Paul, "what a nice place you have."

  "It's my father's," I said.

  His face drooped into the appropriate downward curve; if he'd been wearing a hat he would have taken it off. "Ah yes," he said, "a tragedy." I distrusted him: I couldn't place the accent, the name sounded German.

  "Where are you from?" I asked, trying to be polite.

  "Michigan," he said as though it was something to be proud of. "I'm a member of the Detroit branch of the Wildlife Protection Association of America; we have a branch in this country, quite a flourishing little branch." He beamed at me, condescending. "As a matter of fact that's what I wanted to discuss with you. Our place on Lake Erie is, ah, giving out so to say. I believe I can speak for the rest of the Michigan members in saying we'd be prepared to make you an offer."

  "What for?" I said. He sounded as though he wanted me to buy something, a magazine or a membership.

  He swept his pipe in a semi-circle. "This lovely piece of property," he said. "What we'd use it for would be a kind of retreat lodge, where the members could meditate and observe," he puffed, "the beauties of Nature. And maybe do a little hunting and fishing."

  "Don't you want to see it?" I asked. "I mean, the house and all."

  "I must admit that I've already seen it; we've had our eye on this piece for quite some time. I've been coming up here to fish for years, and I've taken the liberty, when no one seemed to be here, of having a stroll around." He gave a small harumph, a voyeur of good social standing caught in the act; then he named a price that meant I could forget about Quebec Folk Tales and children's books and everything else, at least for a while.

  "Would you change it?" I asked. I foresaw motels, high-rises.

  "Well, we'd have to install a power generator, of course, and a septic tank; but apart from that, no, I expect we'd like to leave it the way it is, it has a definite," he stroked his moustache, "rural charm."
/>   "I'm sorry but it's not for sale," I said, "not right now; maybe later." If my father had been dead he might have liked the proposal but as it was he would be furious if he returned and found I'd sold his house. I wasn't sure I'd be the owner in any case. There must be deeds hidden, property titles, legal papers, I'd never had any dealings with lawyers; I would have to sign forms or charters, I might have to pay death duties.

  "Well," he said with the heartiness of a loser. "I'm sure the offer will still be open. Indefinitely, you might say." He drew out his wallet and gave me a card: Bill Malmstrom, Teenie Town, it said, Togs for Toddlers 'n Tots.

  "Thank you," I said, "I'll keep it in mind."

  I took Paul by the arm and led him to the garden, as though to reciprocate for the vegetables: I felt I had to explain, at least to him, he had gone to a lot of trouble for me.

  "Your garden, she is not doing so good, ay?" he said, inspecting.

  "No," I said, "we just got it weeded; but I want you to have ..." I gazed desperately around, seized on a withered lettuce and presented it to him, roots and all, as gracefully as I could.

  He held it, blinking, discouraged. "Madame will like that," he said.

  "Paul," I said, lowering my voice, "the reason I can't sell is that my father's still alive."

  "Yes?" he said, perking up. "He came back, he is here?"

  "Not exactly," I said. "He's away right now, on a sort of trip; but perhaps he will be here soon." For all I could tell he might have been listening to us at that moment, from behind the raspberry canes or the burn heap.

  "He went for the trees?" Paul said, hurt that he hadn't been consulted: he used to go too. "You saw him first, before?"