I stand at my kitchen sink today, waiting for the phone to ring, and I’m there again — back in the gardens of vivid recollection, listening to music on a transistor radio, the smell of anticipated love sitting in the damp morning soil, which I turn over and run my fingers through and carry around for hours under my nails until I wash my hands.
I’m in the barn, stripping wash stands and flat-to-the-walls and dry sinks. I feel the heartburn from breathing the chemical stripper as I peel back the layers of paint, removing my gloves, using my bare hands to get every bit. Waves of prickly heat run over my body thinking about him, the possibilities, the unknown, as I get down to the original finish and realize I’ve hardly noticed the time.
Then Hal’s voice mumbles something about it all being a waste of time, this stripping. People — the ones with real money — want everything “as found.” If it’s still got bird shit on it, it’s worth more, he’d say. The rougher, the better. And a little bird shit is as good as gold.
Most of the people who used to drop by our barn on a Saturday or Sunday still wanted what we called “honey money pine” finish by Min-Wax, so I continued to strip and peel away the layers — and wonder about the furniture that was once a backdrop for family photos, or a reminder of a bad fight where fists were slammed and legs kicked, or the place where love rolled around under the sheets and children were conceived.
In winter, we would work upstairs, in the empty bedrooms where we planned to put our kids some day. When we had kids. I’d help lug cupboards and weigh scales and bedroom sets up the narrow staircase as Hal cursed the sharp turn at the top and yelled for me to move back a little, to the right, to the left, to the extra space that wasn’t there. Then we’d work for months inside one of the bedrooms, opening the frozen windows when we could, to breathe. To let the cold, grey air into our lungs.
In the workaday haze that was my life, I didn’t see Johnny Marks coming.
I saw Hal and our barely-make-a-living antique business, and the vegetable gardens behind our house, and the empty rooms we planned to fill upstairs.
I didn’t see Johnny Marks coming, even though he’d been part of my life ever since I was old enough to yearn for the kind of love that didn’t demand silence and the occasional quick look the other way — didn’t ask for tradeoffs and tradeins of tidbits, and parts, and whole chunks of your being, and the oddest appreciation for what you got in return, no matter how much less it was worth to you.
Pawn shop love.
Johnny came to housesit at his sister᾿s while she went travelling for a year in Europe with her husband and her two daughters. He moved into their farmhouse, on the seventh concession, two roads over from our place. He looked after their beef cattle, and repainted the house, and carved the faces of old men and old women on the cedar fences in the fields behind the house, and along the road — a series of bumps and grooves you wouldn’t see unless you knew they were there, secretly sitting in the man-made boundaries of dead wood.
He showed up one day, when Hal was someplace else. He brought a chair. It used to belong to his grandmother, he said. He remembered sitting on it when he was a kid, watching his grandmother make his favourite fudge. Maple walnut.
He found the chair in his sister’s barn, with peeling white paint, and red paint under that, and flecks of pale green paint under that. He wanted it restored. How much would it cost? He’d pay any price. He couldn’t stand seeing it painted in three different colours and covered in dust and chicken shit anymore.
“Some people would pay a fortune for a chair like that,” I told him, “especially with the chicken shit on it.”
“Some people have chicken shit for brains,” he said.
“My husband always prices the jobs,” I told him, wondering in my own mind how that came about in the first place when Hal always asked me how long I thought it would take to complete the task, and what the cost of the materials would add up to.
“Well, whatever it is, I’ll pay it.”
Johnny stood in a three dimensional picture, framed by the thick beams that outlined the huge doorway to the top of the barn, with a horizon of summer-green behind him.
“What difference does it make what it costs,” he said, his face shadowed by the strong afternoon light behind him. “If you’re going to do something, are you going to change your mind because it costs a hundred bucks instead of fifty?”
“To some people, the price you pay makes all the difference,” I said. I was conscious of the way the light pushed past him and spilled over my face, a spotlight on every micro-expression he might catch if he was paying any attention at all. I tried not to give anything away.
“Then their minds weren’t really made up, were they,” he said, a question and an answer at the same time, and I wasn’t sure if we were still talking about his grandmother’s chair, which stood only a few feet away with his past, and maple walnut fudge, and my future lying in the crevices of the spindles I’d be stripping tomorrow.
He hung around for a while, wandering through the maze of refinished furniture and works-in-progress, asking me about this piece and that, and did I make a living doing this? He carried his cigarettes under the sleeve of his striped T-shirt and ran his fingers through his hair, which was thick and messy and made him look like he just woke up.
“You should soak your hands in aloe,” he said, a thought that came out of nowhere.
“Do they look that awful?” I held them up for inspection. I was used to the dryness and hardly noticed how much the chemicals were changing the texture and colour of my own skin.
“My sister has half a dozen plants lining the kitchen window serving no useful purpose in life. I’ll bring you a couple when I come back for the chair.”
He shook my hand before he left, the softness of his skin bathing my own chapped hand in tenderness that wasn’t part of a quick business handshake, and I couldn’t remember the last time Hal had held my hands. Or I held my own. They were for work. A separate entity. I had forgotten they were there, at the end of my arms, with all the pleasures of touch at their mercy.
I told Johnny to come back next Tuesday. I would have the chair finished by then. I walked with him through the barnyard, over to the driveway where his car was parked. The ground was dry. It hadn’t rained in weeks. I was listening to the sound of our feet moving in unison over the cracked dirt path, and the chatter of the barn swallows that lined the telephone wire stretching in from the road. Something from inside of me leapt into the air as the swallows picked up and flew away above our heads in a single, sudden move of force and unanimous decision
After Johnny left, I remembered Hal was going to Toronto the following Tuesday to deliver a few pieces to one of our regular customers. He wouldn’t be home when Johnny came back for the chair.
I never planned to have an affair with Johnny. There wasn’t time for that — for planning. Sorting, sifting, thinking things through. He appeared that day in the doorway of the barn with his grandmother’s triple-painted chair. He came back the following Tuesday to pick it up, stripped and waxed and restored to its original finish. By Friday morning, we were walking through the fields behind his sister’s house, looking at the faces he carved in the fences — the old men and old women who knew what we would know one day. That’s what he said.
By Friday afternoon, I gave myself up to him and let him have me right there in a field, and all the way back to the house, and in the kitchen, on the floor, near the chair. It was meant to be, he said. He knew it was going to happen, since the first moment he saw me. He said I knew it, too. And I guess I did. I didn’t plan it, but I knew it, and I couldn’t pretend I didn’t.
In the fields that day, I only knew not having him was more unbearable to me than any act of disloyalty I was committing. Grabbing my chance was everything. Planting myself on the ground, letting him, and his perception, and certainty, push me into the soil where I had a chance to grow all over again,