Purple velvet and red silk and paisley greens and gold. Years ago, I took a navy jacket and began covering it with pieces of my lovers’ clothes. I wear it now, as I lay otherwise naked under a blanket in Ben’s cottage, with a piece of his black Levi’s shirt in my jacket pocket. I snipped it earlier, a small piece from the bottom right side, near the seam, so he wouldn’t notice it missing for a while.
Ben shut his eyes a few moments ago.
He didn’t want to talk.
Sleep will take care of this, Sadie. Sleep, he said.
Quit talking.
Quit thinking.
Just go to sleep.
I was in between men when Ben showed up. A knock at the door. There he was. Canvassing for money for a family whose home at Oak Lake burned to the ground earlier that spring, just after the warm air began melting the ice on the water. I was making dinner, the television was blaring from another room, my children were whining about their grumbling stomachs and why can’t I stop being so cheap and buy some extra channels so there’s something worth watching.
I went to the door with a black-handled flipper waving in the air, yelling for the kids to turn it down, watch the burgers, and set the table — which I wouldn’t have done if I knew who was standing on the other side, listening to another frantic, bitchy, burned-out woman. At least, that’s the way I imagined he saw things, or how I see myself when I let the reel roll back in my mind. A frantic woman I hardly recognize who takes me by surprise, knocks me out of breath with her hurried, scattered state.
I could have just given him some money. I had close to thirty bucks in my wallet. I could have let it go at that, but I didn’t. I didn’t see a wedding ring.
No, he didn’t know what caused the fire. Yes, he knew the family. They live across the lake. Or they used to. He’s just trying to help. Everyone needs help from time to time.
I could arrange a big yard sale at the literacy centre to raise money, I said. I’ve done this kind of thing before. I’ll call him with a date and the details. What about a yard sale and barbecue?
An exchange of phone numbers and the door closed and I watched him walk down the street to the next house with his good looks and good intentions and all of my thoughts in the palm of his hand.
It often happens this way for me.
I’ll go for long periods of time without seeing anyone then all of a sudden someone shows up like a gift on God’s wind and consumes my every waking moment. The sleeping ones, too. A complete takeover of my daydreams and night dreams, and the precious few moments when I’m actually alert and aware that another world exists outside the new one that’s just been created and tossed into the universe, waiting for its history to begin. How will this turn out?
Even in my brief moments of awareness, he’s there — when I’m teaching someone how to read a newspaper, or defending my right to wear the clothes I do to my embarrassed and hopelessly conservative seventeen-year-old daughter. I can hear the sound of the telephone ringing before his next call. What he might say. What I might bring up. How we’ll get from here to there. It always happens this way for me and I kick myself for still obsessing about boys at 49.
I make myself wash the car and shop for hot dogs and talk to people on the street. I tell myself I’m doing all these things and functioning and at worst appearing only slightly distracted. See. I’m not paralyzed by my obsessive thoughts. See. I’m in control of them, letting them in fully one moment, when I lie down for a nap after work before making dinner, shrinking them to a smaller screen against the bigger picture in other moments — multi-tasking with whatever demands my attention at the time.
I toast buns, fry Spanish onions, and try to talk everyone into buying a date square for another $1.50. It’s for a good cause. He shows up and carries larger items to people’s trucks and car trunks and tells me I’ve really done a wonderful job and aren’t we lucky it didn’t rain. He was sure it was going to rain the way the wind picked up last night and covered the stars with a sheet of cloud and pushed the waves up over the dock. Have you spent much time up at the lake, he asks.
Several summers, I tell him, with my kids, at the little beach where the canteen is. I keep forgetting there really is a lake up there. It’s strange, I say, the way it sits at the top of the Oak Hills, a tiny lake smaller than most of the farms that surround it, just five minutes from town, in a bedroom community of expensive suburban homes with fenced-in pools and central air, and long and winding heated driveways that melt the winter snow. Even some of the old cottages on the lake are being replaced by three-storey Cape Cod-style homes with cathedral ceilings and state-of-the-art kitchens.
It’s hard to think of it as a lake, I tell him.
Lakes are supposed to take you hours to drive to, with miles of wilderness around them and nothing but endless water ahead of you when you stand at the shoreline — not something you pass on a regular basis along the highway, and hardly ever notice, and never think of when you long to be lying on a hot dock with a gin and tonic and a good book and no worries beside you.
I hadn’t thought about Oak Lake in years.
We packed up the barbecues and let the other volunteers divvy up the unwanted yard sale items and took some of the leftover food up to his cottage. It was late in the afternoon, on a Saturday, the only time I would see the cottage in the daylight. Darkness would usher me in for the next year.
You see, he has this girlfriend. Everyone likes her. All the neighbours, his friends, everyone. She’s a nice girl. She wants to move in with him. He doesn’t want to hurt her. He doesn’t want to live with her, either, so he puts her off. The cottage needs fixing up. His ex-wife is suing him for more child support.
He loves his kids.
He does what he can.
He’s in between things.
He just wants to fish all summer and make decisions with a rod in his hand and a smoke in his mouth.
He’s being honest, he says, at least with me. Can I handle it? He doesn’t have the energy to deal with anything else.
We made love against my better judgement, which I’ve learned to set aside with frequency and consistency over the years, and toasted his thirty-ninth birthday, which was the day before, and picked a place for me to park my car the next time I came up to the lake — after dark, so the neighbours don’t notice, so no one will say anything to a certain someone, so his life doesn’t get more complicated than it already is. We picked the fork in the road, not far from the cottage, and sort of chuckled over the irony of our choice. The heavy scent of calcium chloride that kept the dust down followed us out to the highway, then disappeared into the midnight air as Ben drove me back into town.
I keep thinking about standing at my kitchen sink in my Storyteller’s Jacket, scrambling eggs for dinner, waiting for the phone to ring, for Ben to call. How the anticipation ran up my sleeve, skipping tike a stone over a quilted history of similar moments, putting its arm around my shoulders and rubbing my back with nostalgic affection, time passing.
I scrambled back and forth myself, between the counter and the stove, adding salt and cayenne pepper, and throwing utensils into a sink full of eggshells and dirty bowls while Van Morrison sang about old loves. I grabbed a salad out of the fridge and vowed to take down all the posters advertising concerts i couldn’t afford to go to, which hung like dangling carrots under borrowed inspiration. The scribbled lines and curves of my own handwriting formed the words of some other, wiser souls on sheets of recycled paper from the literacy centre. I retained nothing and carried on, forgetting what it was I felt I needed to remember.
The phone rang and I talked quickly, breathlessly, to a friend about the downside of love on the sly, trying to fit all the details into one long, uninterrupted sentence before my daughter or my son walked into the kitchen