That summer, I retreated to the front porch of my mother’s house — the third house on the left past the Harold Cheese Factory — where the McCann women regularly gathered for cheese curd and tea and Aunt Viv’s homemade cherry wine. Of course, their last names changed when they got married, but they always thought of themselves as the McCann women. There was something reassuring about it.
Hal thought I was there more often that I was. When I wasn’t with Johnny I did go, to sit with the women who had always been in my life, to see if I’d spot something of myself in their eyes, to see if they noticed any change in me.
My father would retreat to the drive shed whenever the McCann women arrived. He’d go off and fix some old boat motor he’d found at the dump, for the fibreglass boat he brought home years before, which still sits to this day, dry-docked in the tall barnyard grass, with a bird’s nest under the hull.
My mother never learned how to swim and didn’t like the water and refused to go out in it with him. It sits — a symbolic reminder of the one thing she wouldn’t do for him — in the same place where those rusty relics he called farm implements used to sit. Just throw a little Massey-Ferguson red on them, Charlotte, and they’ll be as good as new, he’d say. And she would. She’d stand out there in the hot summer sun, swatting horse flies, painting bright red the spokes and the prongs on the hay cutters and the rakes and whatever other ugly contraptions he’d drag home, boasting about his keen eye to spot a piece of rusted machinery that could still be useful.
I was the only McCann woman of my generation who was still in the area. My younger sisters and female cousins were scattered throughout the province and rarely made it home anymore. My brothers were here and there and made the odd appearance with a girlfriend or new wife who was interested in sniffing out the past.
I was the one who sat on the porch with them — with my mother, and Gran, with Aunt Viv and Aunt Ruth — and I was accepted as their equal, expected to understand their private jokes and recall the lost lyrics of songs they danced to when they were young. Don’t you remember that one, Sadie? Surprise. Surprise. They were always surprised to remember I was half their age, less than a third of Gran’s life. I never said a word to any of them about my affair with Johnny, but it hung like a question mark in my own mind at the tail end of every subject we covered.
I told Ben part of that story already. I remember because he asked me if my father would be willing to sell the boat for fifty bucks and I couldn’t imagine him selling it at all, and I really couldn’t imagine Ben driving up there, to the place where I grew up, talking to my father, and hauling that boat away, leaving his footprints on sacred earth. My earth, which he barely knows about and stomps on frequently when he doesn’t call or makes me wait four weeks to see him again.
It all slips away. My tight grip on where I came from. He walks all over it and clouds my vision with the dust he kicks up in his silence.
I never told him this.
He’d only interrupt me, or stop my words with his beautiful mouth, or say I’ve got it all wrong and rationalize my rationalizations until I forgot what it was I was trying to get my head around to begin with.
I only told him about the boat. He asked me if fifty bucks would pay for it. I told him I couldn’t bear going up there, seeing it tied to the dock, sitting in the lake, bobbing up and down in stormy waves, being caressed by gentler waters under a sliver of the moon. Being where it should have been all along.
That’s as far as we got.
His phone rang and Ben ran inside to answer it, leaving me on the dock to wonder why he couldn’t just let it ring until it stopped. When he came back, he had a dismissive look on his face, as if it might persuade me it was only his friend, Bill, drunk and distressed over the sudden flight of his wife — the one with the beady eyes and the beak-like mouth, the one he said never stopped complaining about how bored she was living in the country, how she missed the sound of six-lane traffic and screaming sirens and pollution warnings on the radio.
I might have believed it if it didn’t take him another half hour to move closer to me, to separate the words he’d heard over the phone from what I was saying, to return to the position we were in before he leapt to answer the call. My legs over his legs. His arm around my shoulder. His feet hanging over the dock. His free hand catching fireflies and drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. Running his fingers through his hair.
He was asking me about the pale blue silk patch on my right arm. I was telling him it came from a scarf that belonged to a man named Glen, a sculptor who spent half the year in Italy working with the finest marble, how it reminds me of my Aunt Viv, who once planned a trip there. I was telling him all of this when his free hand began unbuttoning my blouse and he suggested we take a swim. Was Glen a good lover, he wanted to know. Did he do anything special? Yes, I said, as a matter of fact, he did do something very special. He rubbed my feet like he was sculpting clay. He’d rub them for hours with his strong hands, and he listened to my stories. He liked my stories.
Ben said he liked my stories, too, and would like to hear more about Aunt Viv and her trip. I said she never went away. She only planned to. He said I could tell him all about it. Later.
I didn’t think about it at the time, when he was stripping me and kissing me and telling me how much he wanted to fuck me, but I thought about it before.
About telling him why Aunt Viv never went to Italy. The way Aunt Ruth used to paint her house, over and over again. The kitchen, the bathroom, the stairway, the kitchen, the bathroom, the stairway.
About the shirts my mother mended and made do with, and the flea markets she used to wander through, looking for a small item that would give her a lift. A candle too pretty to burn. Some old rhinestone buttons. Something luxurious and frivolous for under five dollars.
The way Gran used to complain about everything. The money Ruth wasted on paint. The food at the nursing home. The mystery person who kept stealing everyone’s hand lotion. How Gran sat, rigid and frayed, like the broken threads of woven osier in the seat of the rocker. That was her chair, near the purple clematis, the shadiest spot on the porch.
They were there in the beginning, that first summer when Johnny Marks showed up with his grandmother’s chair. They were still there the following summer, after I mailed that brown package and left the post office without any blood in my veins.
They remain as bookends.
They sit on a shelf I pass regularly and sometimes stop in front of, letting my fingers touch the volumes that stand between them, holding the details I’ve managed to keep in good shape. Crisp and clean, without dog-eared or ripped pages, like new every time I see them. Separate from everything else.
Under the roof my father patched a dozen times — behind tiger lilies and irises and three generations of peony bushes — on a wooden floor with peeling grey porch paint and splotches of cherry wine stains, I learned how to build the shelf that love sits on. I learned how to make it sturdy and unadorned so it looks like it belongs. Plain and simple, another piece of furniture holding some untitled books, which become obscured by the pockets of air that puff out of Ben’s mouth and make their way into a bag of endearing things about him, which I carry with me when he’s not around. Of all the things to cling to. Apnea. And the streaks of laundry soap on his shirts.
I’ll think about them when I’m trying to knock him down a peg or two. He snores. He walks around looking like yesterday’s laundry. He doesn’t work. He can’t even catch a good fish.
He stumbles through
He stumbles.
And makes me wish I could, too.
Stumble and fall, and not bother getting up right away to brush myself off, but lie instead, on the ground I land on,