With Hal, worried and upset we weren’t making enough money. Needing me to put my arms around him and tell him everything would be alright, looking at me with eyes that knew I’d been someplace else for the last several months, and not with him, not really. He knew I was slipping, he had to know, and he reached out to me and told me we didn’t have enough money to pay the mortgage and the insurance and couldn’t I, wouldn’t I even consider—
I took it in. So he’d quit looking at me, quit involving me.
In the kitchen that warm summer day, while I waited for the kettle to boil, and Gran came down the stairs from the bathroom, I wanted to tell her — in those few seconds it took for her to cross the kitchen — I wanted to tell her my mother gave the ring to me and I’m the one who pawned it, traded it for a couple of mortgage payments and some car insurance, and that I was leaving, going off with my lover, and isn’t it the right thing to do, Gran? Wouldn’t you have done the same, if you could have? Don’t you wish you did? Don’t you wish?
And I almost did.
I stood outside the Legion in Stirling on a Saturday night, the week before Johnny left, while everyone else was inside celebrating Aunt Ruth’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. I stood there while it rained, waiting for my feet to take me to my car.
I was coming.
I even opened the door and sat inside and turned the key and the wiper blades kept saying yes, yes, yes, yes. Then I saw Hal, standing outside under the white light. He didn’t move. He just stood there in the rain. Waiting. Pleading, with his silent, silent eyes.
I told Ben about the Legion scene once before, when we were talking about defining moments, when he was in a talkative mood, pensive and worried about what he was going to do next, concerned that he couldn’t hear that voice that always tells him what to do. It seemed it had have left him for good.
We were sitting on the dock and I told him I knew I shouldn’t have stayed with Hal, that night in the parking lot of the Legion, I knew it. I told him I should have gone off with Johnny.
When I asked Ben if he was listening, he said yes, but he continued looking out over the lake with other things on his mind, so I stopped, and didn’t bother telling him how I never saw Johnny again, that I mailed the note and the shirt the next day, that I stood in the post office feeling faint, afraid I was going to vomit on the marble floor, or crawl into the corner and wince.
I didn’t tell him what happened in the bathroom at the Legion that night, that I ran into Aunt Viv and Aunt Ruth just before I thought I was leaving for good — that Aunt Ruth was crying because her husband told her his anniversary gift was paying off the debts she’d piled up on the credit cards, which Ben wouldn’t understand anyway, because he didn’t know anything about Aunt Ruth’s obsession with redecorating or how Uncle Norman had spent their entire marriage telling her, her home is her life and it should be enough to make her happy.
How could I ever explain the frazzled excitement she experienced when she pulled out swatches of paint and wallpaper and laid them across the red metal table on my mother’s porch? Or tell him about Aunt Viv’s sarcasm, which vented anger at her husband’s unwillingness to die. He was dying for years. No one should live that long like that, with oxygen tanks and soiled beds, and a leash around her neck, keeping her from going anywhere.
I didn’t tell Ben I saw Aunt Viv and Aunt Ruth embracing, wiping each other’s tears, fighting to get past the rush of truth, which had caught them both unaware in the freshly painted bathroom of the Legion. I said Uncle Norman was a son-of-a-bitch and they scolded me for talking that way. He was a good provider, they said. He just didn’t understand women. I apologized and watched as they washed their faces, and Aunt Viv pulled out her lipstick and green eye shadow and rose-red blush, and they made themselves up all over again before they walked back out to dance to Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin.
I stayed in the bathroom for a while and smoked a cigarette and couldn’t help but notice all the spots the painters had missed with the beige paint. Flecks of old white paint were still showing in the corners and in the indentations between the cinder blocks on the wall. It was a sloppy job, I decided, and they should never have been paid.
Of course I left the bathroom certain I wouldn’t have to look at its poorly painted walls ever again, never imagining I’d be back in less than hour, reapplying mascara that had run down my face on the dance floor and onto Hal’s white shirt. Never imagining that I’d end up here, all these years later, divorced and lying next to Ben, losing him as he slips away and leaves me empty and barren, down there, where I’ve filled myself with dozens of lovers and still find myself — never mind. I’ve collected a few good stories along the way. We only covered the pale blue silk patch on my left breast, the plaid flannel on my elbows, and the swollen green polyester near my hip, on the right side.
I’ll probably never tell Ben I was thinking about Johnny earlier tonight, when we were making love in the lake, when he cried out this is the best, this is the best, and he gave himself up to me, completely, and I had him, all of him, everything in him, in my hands and between my legs and we went further and further out, deeper into the blackness until I couldn’t feel my feet touching the bottom.
I was thinking about johnny, then. About the article I read last year in a Toronto paper, how he’s been commissioned to carve hundreds of faces in logs for the city parks. There was a picture of him, inset, in the top corner of a larger picture of three logs he’d already carved, with the faces of old men I could have sworn I’d seen before staring out at me.
He looked the same. Older, but the same. And I wondered what ever happened to that shirt — if his wife, an artist from northern Ontario, the article said — if she found the shirt one day while she was cleaning out closets, if she threw it into a pile for the Salvation Army, if someone else in the world was walking around with our story on his back. Some unknowing soul clothed in split-rail fences and tulip stitches and birds on a wire just before they leapt into their future.
The night Ben and I got stuck while making love was a night like all the others I’d seen at Oak Lake.
That’s how I’ll begin.
With something familiar.
With the same dark sky that greeted me every time Ben called in the middle of the night and I drove out to see him — on the wheels of one long-ago moment — under a sky full of stars, sprinkling tiny specks of light on a lake rumoured to be bottomless.
And then I’ll tell the story.
How I drove home the next morning with a piece of his black Levi’s shirt in my pocket, thinking about my Aunt Ruth and my Aunt Viv, who still hasn’t booked her trip to Italy even though her husband died three years ago, afraid to leave the house alone. About my mother, who asked me the other day if I thought the way she fixed her hair made her look older than she is. I suggested she go to a hairdresser for a new style, but she shrugged and said my father always trimmed it and she managed fine.
We were all sitting with Gran, in the dining room at the nursing home, on her ninety-sixth birthday. There was a cake with candles and the staff was about to sing for her. Gran was in between my mother and myself, looking at a bird on a feeder outside the window, not knowing or caring what all the fuss was about.
Not remembering I told her that day on the porch that I was the one who had her mother’s ring, while my mother looked the other way to hide what she knew was the truth.
Not remembering the ring at all.
I rubbed Gran’s back and thought of Mary-Beth’s rocks, the embedded vertebrae of the tiny and unknown, and how Gran’s skin had become thin and barely covered the bumps and grooves of her own disintegrating spine.
And how I left Ben’s cottage just as the sun was coming up, left him sleeping, shrivelled and retracted from inescapable decision. Safe. How the heavy scent of calcium chloride followed me on the cottage road and out to the highway, then disappeared in the early morning air as I drove back into town.
Chapter