The Globe and Mail, February 19, 1998 5 page

Today I went again to the cemetery. Someone had left a bunch of orange and red zinnias on Laura's grave; hot-coloured flowers, far from soothing. They were withering by the time I got to them, though they still gave off their peppery smell. I suspect they'd been stolen from the flower beds in front of The Button Factory, by a cheapskate devotee or else a mildly crazy one; but then, it's the sort of thing Laura herself would have done. She had only the haziest notions of ownership.

On my way back I stopped in at the doughnut shop: it was heating up outside, and I wanted some shade. The place is far from new; indeed it's almost seedy, despite its jaunty modernity-the pale-yellow tiles, the white plastic tables bolted to the floor, their moulded chairs attached. It reminds me of some institution or other; a kindergarten in a poorer neighbourhood perhaps, or a drop-in centre for the mentally challenged. Not too many things you could throw around or use for stabbing: even the cutlery is plastic. The odour is of deep-fat-frying oil blended with pine-scented disinfectant, with a wash of tepid coffee over all.

I purchased a small iced tea and an Old-fashioned Glazed, which squeaked between my teeth like Styrofoam. After I'd consumed half of it, which was all I could get down, I picked my way across the slippery floor to the women's washroom. In the course of my walks I've been compiling a map in my head of all the easily accessible washrooms in Port Ticonderoga-so useful if you're caught short-and the one in the doughnut shop is my current favourite. Not that it's cleaner than the rest, or more likely to have toilet paper, but it offers inscriptions. They all do, but in most locales these are painted over frequently, whereas in the doughnut shop they remain on view much longer. Thus you have not only the text, but the commentary on it as well.

The best sequence at the moment is the one in the middle cubicle. The first sentence is in pencil, in rounded lettering like those on Roman tombs, engraved deeply in the paint: Don't Eat Anything You Aren't Prepared to Kill.

Then, in green marker: Don't Kill Anything You Aren't Prepared to Eat.

Under that, in ballpoint, Don't Kill.

Under that, in purple marker: Don't Eat.

And under that, the last word to date, in bold black lettering: Fuck Vegetarians-"All Gods Are Carnivorous"-Laura Chase.

Thus Laura lives on.

It took Laura a long time to get herself born into this world, said Reenie. It was like she couldn't decide whether or not it was really such a smart idea. Then she was sickly at fast, and we almost lost her-I guess she was still making up her mind. But in the end she decided to give it a try, and so she took ahold of life, and got some better.

Reenie believed that people decided when it was their time to die; similarly, they had a voice in whether or not they would be born. Once I'd reached the talking-back age, I used to say, I never asked to be born, as if that were a clinching argument; and Reenie would retort, Of course you did. Just like everyone else. Once alive you were on the hook for it, as far as Reenie was concerned.

After Laura's birth my mother was more tired than usual. She lost altitude; she lost resilience. Her will faltered; her days took on a quality of trudging. She had to rest more, said the doctor. She was not a well woman, said Reenie to Mrs. Hillcoate, who came in to help with the laundry. It was as if my former mother had been stolen away by the elves, and this other mother-this older and greyer and saggier and more discouraged one-had been left behind in her place. I was only four then, and was frightened by the change in her, and wanted to be held and reassured; but my mother no longer had the energy for this. (Why do I sayno longer? Her comportment as a mother had always been instructive rather than cherishing. At heart she remained a schoolteacher.)

I soon found that if I could keep quiet, without clamouring for attention, and above all if I could be helpful-especially with the baby, with Laura, watching beside her and rocking her cradle so she would sleep, not a thing she did easily or for long-I would be permitted to remain in the same room with my mother. If not, I would be sent away. So that was the accommodation I made: silence, helpfulness.

I should have screamed. I should have thrown tantrums. It's the squeaky wheel that gets the grease, as Reenie used to say.

(There I sat on Mother's night table, in a silver frame, in a dark dress with a white lace collar, visible hand clutching the baby's crocheted white blanket in an awkward, ferocious grip, eyes accusing the camera or whoever was wielding it. Laura herself is almost out of sight, in this picture. Nothing can be seen of her but the top of her downy head, and one tiny hand, fingers curled around my thumb. Was I angry because I'd been told to hold the baby, or was I in fact defending it? Shielding it-reluctant to let it go?)

Laura was an uneasy baby, though more anxious than fractious. She was an uneasy small child as well. Closet doors worried her, and bureau drawers. It was as if she were always listening, to something in the distance or under the floor-something that was coming closer soundlessly, like a train made of wind. She had unaccountable crises-a dead crow would start her weeping, a cat smashed by a car, a dark cloud in a clear sky. On the other hand, she had an uncanny resistance to physical pain: if she burnt her mouth or cut herself, as a rule she didn't cry. It was ill will, the ill will of the universe, that distressed her.

She was particularly alarmed by the maimed veterans on the street corners-the loungers, the pencil-sellers, the panhandlers, too shattered to work at anything. One glaring red-faced man with no legs who pushed himself around on a flat cart would always set her off. Perhaps it was the fury in his eyes.

As most small children do, Laura believed words meant what they said, but she carried it to extremes. You couldn't say Get lost or Go jump in the lake and expect no consequences. What did you say to Laura? Don't you ever learn? Reenie would scold. But even Reenie herself didn't learn altogether. She once told Laura to bite her tongue because that would keep the questions from coming out, and after that Laura couldn't chew for days.

Now I am coming to my mother's death. It would be trite to say that this event changed everything, but it would also be true, and so I will write it down: This event changed everything.

It happened on a Tuesday. A bread day. All of our bread-enough in a batch for the entire week-was made in the kitchen at Avilion. Although there was a small bakery in Port Ticonderoga by then, Reenie said store bread was for the lazy, and the baker added chalk to it to stretch out the flour and also extra yeast to swell the loaves up with air so you'd think you were getting more. And so she made the bread herself.

The kitchen of Avilion wasn't dark, like the sooty Victorian cavern it must once have been, thirty years before. Instead it was white-white walls, white enamelled table, white wood-burning range, black-and-white tiled floor-with daffodil-yellow curtains at the new, enlarged windows. (It had been redone after the war as one of my father's sheepish, propitiatory gifts to my mother.) Reenie considered this kitchen the latest thing, and as a result of my mother's having taught her about germs and their nasty ways and their hiding places, she kept it faultlessly clean.

On bread days Reenie would give us scraps of dough for bread men, with raisins for the eyes and buttons. Then she would bake them for us. I would eat mine, but Laura would save hers up. Once Reenie found a whole row of them in Laura's top drawer, hard as rock, wrapped up in her handkerchiefs like tiny bun-faced mummies. Reenie said they would attract mice and would have to go straight into the garbage, but Laura held out for a mass burial in the kitchen garden, behind the rhubarb bush. She said there had to be prayers. If not, she would never eat her dinner any more. She was always a hard bargainer, once she got down to it.

Reenie dug the hole. It was the gardener's day off; she used his spade, which was off-limits to anyone else, but this was an emergency. "God pity her husband," said Reenie, as Laura laid her bread men out in a neat row. "She's stubborn as a pig."

"I'm not going to have a husband anyway," said Laura. "I'm going to live by myself in the garage."

"I'm not going to have one either," I said, not to be outdone.

"Fat chance of that," said Reenie. "You like your nice soft bed. You'd have to sleep on the cement and get all covered in grease and oil."

"I'm going to live in the conservatory," I said.

"It's not heated any more," said Reenie. "You'd freeze to death in the winters."

"I'll sleep in one of the motor cars," said Laura.

On that horrible Tuesday we'd had breakfast in the kitchen, with Reenie. It was oatmeal porridge and toast with marmalade. Sometimes we had it with Mother, but that day she was too tired. Mother was stricter, and made us sit up straight and eat the crusts. "Remember the starving Armenians," she would say.

Perhaps the Armenians were no longer starving by then. The war was long over, order had been restored. But their plight must have remained in Mother's mind as a kind of slogan. A slogan, an invocation, a prayer, a charm. Toast crusts must be eaten in memory of these Armenians, whoever they may have been; not to eat them was a sacrilege. Laura and I must have understood the weight of this charm, because it never failed to work.

Mother didn't eat her crusts that day. I remember that. Laura went on at her about it-What about the crusts, what about the starving Armenians?-until finally Mother admitted that she didn't feel well. When she said that, I felt an electric chill run through me, because I knew it. I'd known it all along.

Reenie said God made people the way she herself made bread, and that was why the mothers' tummies got fat when they were going to have a baby: it was the dough rising. She said her dimples were God's thumb-prints. She said she had three dimples and some people had none, because God didn't make everyone the same, otherwise he would just get bored of it all, and so he dished things out unevenly. It didn't seem fair, but it would come out fair at the end.

Laura was six, by the time I'm remembering. I was nine. I knew that babies weren't made out of bread dough-that was a story for little kids like Laura. Still, no detailed explanation had been offered.

In the afternoons Mother had been sitting in the gazebo, knitting. She was knitting a tiny sweater, like the ones she still knitted for the Overseas Refugees. Was this one for a refugee too? I wanted to know. Perhaps, she'd say, and smile. After a while she would doze off, her eyes sliding heavily shut, her round glasses slipping down. She told us she had eyes in the back of her head, and that was how she knew when we'd done something wrong. I pictured these eyes as flat and shiny and without colour, like the glasses.

It wasn't like her to sleep so much in the afternoons. There were a lot of things that weren't like her. Laura wasn't worried, but I was. I was putting two and two together, out of what I'd been told and what I'd overheard. What I'd been told: "Your mother needs her rest, so you'll have to keep Laura out of her hair." What I'd overheard (Reenie to Mrs. Hillcoate): "The doctor's not pleased. It might be nip and tuck. Of course she'd never say a word, but she's not a well woman. Some men can never leave well enough alone." So I knew my mother was in danger of some kind, something to do with her health and something to do with Father, though I was unsure what this danger might be.

I've said Laura wasn't worried, but she was clinging to Mother more than usual. She sat cross-legged in the cool space beneath the gazebo when Mother was resting, or behind her chair when she was writing letters. When Mother was in the kitchen, Laura liked to be under the kitchen table. She'd drag a cushion in there, and her alphabet book, the one that used to be mine. She had a lot of things that used to be mine.

Laura could read by now, or at least she could read the alphabet book. Her favourite letter was L, because it was her own letter, the one that began her name, L is for Laura. I never had a favourite letter that began my name-I is for Iris-because I was everybody's letter.

L is for Lily, So pure and so white; It opens by day, And it closes at night.

The picture in the book was of two children in old-fashioned straw bonnets, next to a water lily with a fairy sitting on it-bare-naked, with shimmering, gauzy wings. Reenie used to say that if she came across a thing like that she'd go after it with the fly swatter. She'd say it to me, for a joke, but she didn't say it to Laura because Laura might take it seriously and get upset.

Laura wasdifferent. Different meantstrange, I knew that, but I would pester Reenie. "What do you mean, different?"

"Not the same as other people," Reenie would say.

But perhaps Laura wasn't very different from other people after all. Perhaps she was the same-the same as some odd, skewed element in them that most people keep hidden but that Laura did not, and this was why she frightened them. Because she did frighten them-or if not frighten, then alarm them in some way; though more, of course, as she got older.

Tuesday morning, then, in the kitchen. Reenie and Mother were making the bread. No: Reenie was making the bread, and Mother was having a cup of tea. Reenie had said to Mother that she wouldn't be surprised if there was thunder later in the day, the air was so heavy, and shouldn't Mother be out in the shade, or lying down; but Mother had said she hated doing nothing. She said it made her feel useless; she said she'd like to keep Reenie company.

Mother could walk on water as far as Reenie was concerned, and in any case she had no power to order her around. So Mother sat drinking her tea while Reenie stood at the table, turning the mound of bread dough, pushing down into it with both hands, folding, turning, pushing down. Her hands were covered with flour; she looked as if she had white floury gloves on. There was flour on the bib of her apron too. She had half-circles of sweat under her arms, darkening the yellow daisies on her house dress. Some of the loaves were already shaped and in the pans, with a clean, damp dishtowel over each one. The humid mushroom smell filled the kitchen.

The kitchen was hot, because the oven needed a good bed of coals, and also because there was a heat wave. The window was open, the wave of heat rolled in through it. The flour for the bread came out of the big barrel in the pantry. You should never climb into that barrel because the flour could get into your nose and mouth and smother you. Reenie had known a baby who was stuck into the flour barrel upside down by its brothers and sisters and almost choked to death.

Laura and I were under the kitchen table. I was reading an illustrated book for children called Great Men of History. Napoleon was in exile on the island of St. Helena, standing on a cliff with his hand inside his coat. I thought he must have a stomachache. Laura was restless. She crawled out from under the table to get a drink of water. "You want some dough to make a bread man?" said Reenie.

"No," said Laura.

"No, thank you," said Mother.

Laura crawled back under the table. We could see the two pairs of feet, Mother's narrow ones and Reenie's wider ones in their sturdy shoes, and Mother's skinny legs and Reenie's plump ones in their pinky-brown stockings. We could hear the muffled turning and thumping of the bread dough. Then all of a sudden the teacup shattered and Mother was down on the floor, and Reenie was kneeling beside her. "Oh dear God," she was saying. "Iris, go get your father."

I ran to the library. The telephone was ringing, but Father wasn't there. I climbed up the stairs to his turret, usually a forbidden place. The door was unlocked: nothing was in the room but a chair and several ashtrays. He wasn't in the front parlour, he wasn't in the morning room, he wasn't in the garage. He must be at the factory, I thought, but I wasn't sure of the way, and also it was too far. I didn't know where else to look.

I went back into the kitchen and crept under the table, where Laura sat hugging her knees. She wasn't crying. There was something on the floor that looked like blood, a trail of it, dark-red spots on the white tiles. I put a finger down, licked it-it was blood. I got a cloth and wiped it up. "Don't look," I told Laura.

After a while Reenie came down the back stairs and cranked the telephone and rang up the doctor-not that he was in, he was gadding about somewhere as usual. Then she phoned the factory and demanded Father. He could not be located. "Find him if you can. Tell him it's an emergency," she said. Then she hurried upstairs again. She'd forgotten all about the bread, which rose too high, and fell back in on itself, and was ruined.

"She shouldn't have been in that hot kitchen," said Reenie to Mrs. Hillcoate, "not in this weather with a thunderstorm coming, but she won't spare herself, you can't tell her anything."

"Did she have a lot of pain?" asked Mrs. Hillcoate, in a pitying, interested voice.

"I've seen worse," said Reenie. "Thank God for small mercies. It slipped out just like a kitten, but I have to say she bled buckets. We'll need to burn the mattress, I don't know how we'd ever get it clean."

"Oh dear, well, she can always have another," said Mrs. Hillcoate. "It must have been meant. There must have been something wrong with it."

"Not from what I heard, she can't," said Reenie. "Doctor says that better be the end of that, because another one would kill her and this one almost did."

"Some women shouldn't marry," said Mrs. Hillcoate. "They're not suited to it. You have to be strong. My own mother had ten, and never blinked an eye. Not that they all lived."

"Mine had eleven," said Reenie. "It wore her right down to the ground."

I knew from past experience that this was the prelude to a contest about the hardness of their mothers' lives, and that soon they would be onto the subject of laundry. I took Laura by the hand and we tiptoed up the back stairs. We were worried, but very curious as well: we wanted to find out what had happened to Mother, but also we wanted to see the kitten. There it was, beside a pile of blood-soaked sheets on the hall floor outside Mother's room, in an enamel basin. But it wasn't a kitten. It was grey, like an old cooked potato, with a head that was too big; it was all curled up. Its eyes were squinched shut, as if the light was hurting it.

"What is it?" Laura whispered. "It's not a kitten." She squatted down, peering.

"Let's go downstairs," I said. The doctor was still in the room, we could hear his footsteps. I didn't want him to catch us, because I knew this creature was forbidden to us; I knew we shouldn't have seen it. Especially not Laura-it was the kind of sight, like a squashed animal, that as a rule would make her scream, and then I would get blamed.

"It's a baby," said Laura. "It's not finished." She was surprisingly calm. "The poor thing. It didn't want to get itself born."

In the late afternoon Reenie took us in to see Mother. She was lying in bed with her head propped up on two pillows; her thin arms were outside the sheet; her whitening hair was transparent. Her wedding ring glinted on her left hand, her fists bunched the sheet at her sides. Her mouth was pulled tight as if she was considering something; it was the look she had when she was making lists. Her eyes were closed. With the curved eyelids rolled down over them, her eyes looked even bigger than they did when they were open. Her glasses were sitting on the night table beside the water jug, each round eye of them shining and empty.

"She's asleep," Reenie whispered. "Don't touch her."

Mother's eyes slid open. Her mouth flickered; the fingers of her near hand unfolded. "You can give her a hug," said Reenie, "but not too hard." I did as I was told. Laura burrowed her head fiercely against Mother's side, underneath her arm. There was the starchy pale-blue lavender smell of the sheets, the soap smell of Mother, and underneath that a hot smell of rust, mixed with the sweetly acid scent of damp but smouldering leaves.

Mother died five days later. She died of a fever; also of being weak, because she could not manage to get her strength back, said Reenie. During this time the doctor came and went, and a succession of crisp, brittle nurses occupied the easy chair in the bedroom. Reenie hurried up and down the stairs with basins, with towels, with cups of broth. Father shuttled restlessly back and forth to the factory, and appeared at the dinner table haggard as a beggar. Where had he been, that afternoon when he could not be found? Nobody said.

Laura crouched in the upstairs hallway. I was told to play with her in order to keep her out of harm's way, but she didn't want that. She sat with her arms wrapped around her knees and her chin on them, and a thoughtful, secret expression, as if she were sucking on a candy. We weren't allowed to have candies. But when I made her show me, it was only a round white stone.

During this last week I was allowed to see Mother every morning, but only for a few minutes. I wasn't allowed to talk to her, because (said Reenie) she was rambling. That meant she thought she was somewhere else. Each day there was less of her. Her cheekbones were prominent; she smelled of milk, and of something raw, something rancid, like the brown paper meat came wrapped in.

I was sulky during these visits. I could see how ill she was, and I resented her for it. I felt she was in some way betraying me-that she was shirking her duties, that she'd abdicated. It didn't occur to me that she might die. I'd been afraid of this possibility earlier, but now I was so terrified that I'd put it out of my mind.

On the last morning, which I did not know would be the last, Mother seemed more like herself. She was frailer, but at the same time more packed together-more dense. She looked at me as if she saw me. "It's so bright in here," she whispered. "Could you just pull the curtains?" I did as I was told, then went back to stand by her bedside, twisting the handkerchief Reenie had given me in case I cried. My mother took hold of my hand; her own was hot and dry, the fingers like soft wire.

"Be a good girl," she said. "I hope you'll be a good sister to Laura. I know you try to be."

I nodded. I didn't know what to say. I felt I was the victim of an injustice: why was it always me who was supposed to be a good sister to Laura, instead of the other way around? Surely my mother loved Laura more than she loved me.

Perhaps she didn't; perhaps she loved us both equally. Or perhaps she no longer had the energy to love anyone: she'd moved beyond that, out into the ice-cold stratosphere, far beyond the warm, dense magnetic field of love. But I couldn't imagine such a thing. Her love for us was a given-solid and tangible, like a cake. The only question was which of us was going to get the bigger slice.

(What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves-our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies. Now that I've been one myself, I know.)

My mother held me steady in her sky-blue gaze. What an effort it must have been for her to keep her eyes open. How far away I must have seemed-a distant, wavering pink blob. How hard it must have been for her to concentrate on me! Yet I saw none of her stoicism, if that's what it was.

I wanted to say that she was mistaken in me, in my intentions. I didn't always try to be a good sister: quite the reverse. Sometimes I called Laura a pest and told her not to bother me, and only last week I'd found her licking an envelope-one of my own special envelopes, for thank-you notes-and had told her that the glue on them was made from boiled horses, which had caused her to retch and sniffle. Sometimes I hid from her, inside a hollow lilac bush beside the conservatory, where I would read books with my fingers stuck into my ears while she wandered around looking for me, fruitlessly calling my name. So often I got away with the minimum required.

But I had no words to express this, my disagreement with my mother's version of things. I didn't know I was about to be left with her idea of me; with her idea of my goodness pinned onto me like a badge, and no chance to throw it back at her (as would have been the normal course of affairs with a mother and a daughter-if she'd lived, as I'd grown older).

Black ribbons

Tonight there's a lurid sunset, taking its time to fade. In the east, lightning flickering over the underslung sky, then sudden thunder, an abrupt door slammed shut. The house is like an oven, despite my new fan. I've brought a lamp outside; sometimes I see better in the dimness.

I've written nothing for the past week. I lost the heart for it. Why set down such melancholy events? But I've begun again, I notice. I've taken up my black scrawl; it unwinds in a long dark thread of ink across the page, tangled but legible. Do I have some notion of leaving a signature, after all? After all I've done to avoid it, Iris, her mark, however truncated: initials chalked on the sidewalk, or a pirate's X on the map, revealing the beach where the treasure was buried.

Why is it we want so badly to memorialise ourselves? Even while we're still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants. We put on display our framed photographs, our parchment diplomas, our silver-plated cups; we monogram our linen, we carve our names on trees, we scrawl them on washroom walls. It's all the same impulse. What do we hope from it? Applause, envy, respect? Or simply attention, of any kind we can get?

At the very least we want a witness. We can't stand the idea of our own voices falling silent finally, like a radio running down.

The day after Mother's funeral I was sent with Laura out into the garden. Reenie sent us out; she said she needed to put her feet up because she'd been run off them all day. "I'm at the end of my tether," she said. She had purply smudges under her eyes, and I guessed she'd been crying, in secret so as not to disturb anyone, and that she would do it some more once we were out of the way.

"We'll be quiet," I said. I didn't want to go outside-it looked too bright, too glaring, and my eyelids felt swollen and pink-but Reenie said we had to, and anyway the fresh air would do us good. We weren't told to go out and play, because that would have been disrespectful so soon after Mother's death. We were just told to go out.

The funeral reception had been held at Avilion. It was not called a wake-wakes were held on the other side of the Jogues River, and were rowdy and disreputable, with liquor. No: ours was a reception. The funeral had been packed-the factory workmen had come, their wives, their children, and of course the town notables-the bankers, the clergymen, the lawyers, the doctors-but the reception was not for all, although it might as well have been. Reenie said to Mrs. Hillcoate, who'd been hired to help out, that Jesus might have multiplied the loaves and fishes, but Captain Chase was not Jesus and should not be expected to feed the multitudes, although as usual he hadn't known where to draw the line and she only hoped nobody would be stampeded to death.

Those invited had crammed themselves into the house, deferential, lugubrious, avid with curiosity. Reenie had counted the spoons both before and after, and said we should have used the second-best ones and that some folks would make off with anything that wasn't nailed down just to have a souvenir, and considering the way they ate, she might as well have laid out shovels instead of spoons anyway.

Despite this, there was some food left over-half a ham, a small heap of cookies, various ravaged cakes -and Laura and I had been sneaking into the pantry on the sly. Reenie knew we were doing it, but she didn't have the energy right then to stop us-to say, "You'll spoil your supper" or "Stop nibbling in my pantry or you'll turn into mice" or "Eat one more smidgen and you'll burst"-or to utter any of the other warnings or predictions in which I'd always taken a secret comfort.

This one time we'd been allowed to stuff ourselves unchecked. I'd eaten too many cookies, too many slivers of ham; I'd eaten a whole slice of fruitcake. We were still in our black dresses, which were too hot. Reenie had braided our hair tightly and pulled it back, with one stiff black grosgrain ribbon at the top of each braid and one at the bottom: four severe black butterflies for each of us.

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 597