So he was awake, and listened, and snuck across to the other side of the house to look out the window there, where he could see what was going on out on the street. He says there were flashing lights but no siren, so it's no wonder I didn't hear anything.
When I get up in the morning my father is in the kitchen frying bacon. He knows how to do this, though he never does it in the city, only over campfires. In my parents' bedroom there's a pile of crumpled sheets on the floor, and the blankets are folded up on a chair; on the mattress there's a huge oval splotch of blood. But when I come home from school the sheets are gone and the bed is made up, and there is nothing more to be seen.
My father says there has been an accident. But how can you have an accident lying in bed asleep? Stephen says it was a baby, a baby that came out too soon. I don't believe him: women who are going to have babies have big fat stomachs, and my mother didn't have one.
My mother comes back from the hospital and is weaker. She has to rest. No one is used to this, she isn't used to it herself. She resists it, getting up as usual, putting her hand on the wall or on the edges of the furniture as she walks, standing hunched over at the kitchen sink, a cardigan over her shoulders. In the middle of something she's doing she has to go and lie down. Her skin is pale and dry. She looks as if she's listening to a sound, outside the house perhaps, but there is no sound. Sometimes I have to repeat things twice before she hears me. It's as if she's gone off somewhere else, leaving me behind; or forgotten I am there.
All of this is more frightening, even, than the splotch of blood. Our father tells us to help out more, which means that he's frightened as well.
After she gets better I find a small knitted sock, pastel green, in my mother's sewing basket. I wonder why she would have knitted only one sock. She doesn't like knitting, so maybe she knitted one and then got tired of it.
I dream that Mrs. Finestein from next door and Mr. Banerji are my real parents.
I dream that my mother has had a baby, one of a set of twins. The baby is gray. I don't know where the other twin is.
I dream that our house has burned down. Nothing of it remains; blackened stumps dot the place where it's been, as if there has been a forest fire. A huge mountain of mud rises beside it.
My parents are dead but also alive. They're lying side by side, in their summer clothes, and sinking down through the earth, which is hard but transparent, like ice. They look up at me sorrowfully as they recede.
32
It's Saturday afternoon. We're going down to the building, to something called a Conversat. I don't know what a Conversat is but I'm relieved to be going to the building, where there are mice and snakes and experiments and no girls. My father asked if I wanted to bring a friend. I said no. My brother is bringing Danny, whose nose runs all the time, who wears knitted vests in diamond patterns, who has a stamp collection. They sit in the back seat--my brother no longer gets carsick--and talk in pig Latin.
"Or-yay ose-nay is-ay unning-ray."
"O-say ut-what? Awnt-way oo-tay eat-ay ome-say?"
"Um-yay um-yay."
I know that some of this, at least on Danny's part, is for my benefit. He has confused me with other girls, girls who wriggle and shriek. Once I would have replied with something equally disgusting, but I have lost interest in such things as eating snot. I look out the car window, pretending not to hear.
The Conversat turns out to be sort of like a museum. The Zoology Department is throwing itself open to the public, to give people a crack at Science and improve their minds. This is what my father said, grinning the way he does when he's partly joking. He said people's minds could use some improving. My mother said she doesn't think her mind is capable of further improvement, so she's going grocery shopping instead.
There are a lot of people at the Conversat. There isn't that much to do for entertainment on the weekends in Toronto. The building has a festive air: its usual smells of Dustbane and furniture polish and mouse droppings and snakes mingle with other smells, of winter clothing, cigarette smoke, and women's perfume. Streamers of colored paper are taped to the walls, with arrows of construction paper at intervals, along the halls and up and down the stairs and into the different rooms, to show the way. Each room has its own displays, grouped according to what you are supposed to learn.
In the first room there are chicken embryos at various stages of development, from a red dot to a big-headed, bulgy-eyed, pin-feathered chick, looking not fluffy and cute the way they do on Easter cards, but slimy, its claws curled under, its eyelids a slit open, showing a crescent of agate-blue eye. The embryos have been pickled; the scent of formaldehyde is very strong. In another display there's a jar of twins, real dead identical human twins with their placenta attached, gray-skinned, floating in something that looks like dishwater. Their veins and arteries have been injected with colored rubber, blue for the veins, purple for the arteries, so we can see that their blood systems are connected. There's a human brain in a bottle, like a giant flabby gray walnut. I can't believe there is such a thing inside my head.
In another room there's a table where you can get your fingerprints taken, so you can see they aren't the same as anyone else's. There's a large piece of Bristol board with enlarged photographs of people's fingerprints pinned up on it. My brother and Danny and I all get our fingerprints taken. Danny and my brother have made light of the chickens and the twins--"Awnt-way any-nay icken-chay or-fay upper-say?" "Ow-hay about-way ome-say ewed-stay in-tway?"--but they weren't in any hurry to stay in that room. Their enthusiasm for the fingerprints is boisterous. They make fingerprints in the centers of each other's foreheads with their inky fingers, saying, "The Mark of the Black Hand!" in loud, ominous voices, until our father passes nearby and tells them to pipe down. Beautiful Mr. Banerji from India is with him. He smiles nervously at me and says, "How are you, miss?" He always calls me miss. Among all these winter-white faces he looks darker than usual; his teeth shine and shine.
In the same room with the fingerprints they're handing out pieces of paper; you're supposed to taste them and say whether they taste bitter, like peach pits, or sour, like lemons. This proves that some things are inherited. There's also a mirror where you can do tongue exercises, to see if you can roll your tongue up at the sides or into a cloverleaf shape. Some people can't do either. Danny and my brother hog the mirror and make gruesome faces by sticking their thumbs into the sides of their mouths and pulling the edges of their eyelids down so that the red shows.
Some of the Conversat is less interesting, with too much writing, and some of it is only charts on the wall or looking through microscopes, which we can do whenever we want to anyway.
It's crowded as we shuffle along the halls, following the paper streamers, baby-blue and yellow, in our winter overshoes. We haven't taken our coats off. It's very warm. The clanking radiators are going full-blast, and the air is filling with other people's breath.
We come to a room where there's a cut-open turtle. It's in a white enamel tray, like the ones in butcher shops. The turtle is alive; or it's dead, but its heart is alive. This turtle is an experiment to show how the heart of a reptile can keep on going after the rest of it is dead.
The turtle's bottom shell has a hole sawed into it. The turtle is on its back so you can see down into it, right to the heart, which is beating away slowly, glistening dark red down there in its cave, wincing like the end of a touched worm, lengthening again, wincing. It's like a hand, clenching and unclenching. It's like an eye.
They've attached a wire to the heart, which runs to a loudspeaker, so you can hear the heart beating throughout the entire room, agonizingly slow, like an old man walking up stairs. I can't tell if the heart is going to make it to the next beat, or not. There's a footstep, a pause, then a crackling like the kind of static on the radio that my brother says comes from outer space, then another pulse, a gasp of air sucked in. Life is flowing out of the turtle, I can hear it over the loudspeaker. Soon the turtle will be empty of life.
/> I don't want to stay in this room but there's a lineup, in front of me and behind. All of the people are grown-ups; I've lost sight of Danny and my brother. I'm hemmed in by tweed coats, my eyes as high as their second buttons. I hear another sound, coming over the sound of the heart like an approaching wind: a rustling, like poplar leaves, only smaller, drier. There's black around the edges of my eyes and it closes in. What I see is like the entrance to a tunnel, rushing away from me; or I am rushing away from it, away from that spot of daylight. After that I'm looking at a lot of overshoes, and the floorboards, stretching into the distance, at eye level. My head hurts.
"She fainted," somebody says, and then I know what I have done.
"It must have been the heat."
I am carried out into the cold gray air; it's Mr. Banerji who carries me, making sounds of distress. My father hurries out and tells me to sit with my head down between my knees. I do this, looking at the tops of my overshoes. He asks if I'm going to be sick and I say no. My brother and Danny come out and stare at me, not saying anything. Finally my brother says, "Eee-shay ainted-fay," and they go back in.
I stay outside until my father brings the car around and we drive home. I'm beginning to feel that I've discovered something worth knowing. There's a way out of places you want to leave, but can't. Fainting is like stepping sideways, out of your own body, out of time or into another time. When you wake up it's later. Time has gone on without you.
Cordelia says, "Think of ten stacks of plates. Those are your ten chances." Every time I do something wrong, a stack of plates comes crashing down. I can see these plates. Cordelia can see them too, because she's the one who says Crash! Grace can see them a little, but her crashes are tentative, she looks to Cordelia for confirmation. Carol tries a crash once or twice but is scoffed at: "That wasn't a crash!"
"Only four left," says Cordelia. "You better watch yourself. Well?"
I say nothing.
"Wipe that smirk off your face," says Cordelia.
I say nothing.
"Crash!" says Cordelia. "Only three left."
Nobody ever says what will happen if all of the stacks of plates fall down.
I'm standing against the wall, near the GIRLS door, the cold creeping up my legs and in under the edges of my sleeves. I'm not supposed to move. Already I've forgotten why. I've discovered that I can fill my head with music, Coming in on a wing and a prayer, Keep happy with the Happy Gang, and forget almost anything.
It's recess. Miss Lumley patrols the playground with her brass bell, her face clamped against the cold, minding her own business. I'm still just as afraid of her, although she's no longer my teacher. Chains of girls careen past, chanting We don't stop for anybody. Other girls promenade more sedately, arms linked two by two. They look at me curiously, then away. It's like the people in cars, on the highway, who slow down and look out the window when there's a car accident by the side of the road. They slow down but they don't stop. They know when there's trouble, they know when to keep out of it.
I'm standing a little out from the wall. I put my head back and stare up into the gray sky and hold my breath. I'm making myself dizzy. I can see a stack of plates as it sways, begin to topple over, into a silent explosion of china shards. The sky closes to a pinpoint and a wave of dry leaves sweeps over my head. Then I can see my own body lying on the ground, just lying there. I can see the girls pointing and gathering, I can see Miss Lumley stalking over, bending with difficulty to look at me. But I'm seeing all this from above, as if I'm in the air, somewhere near the GIRLS sign over the door, looking down like a bird.
I come to with Miss Lumley's face looming inches away from me, scowling more than ever, as if I've made a mess, with a ring of girls around her jostling for a better look.
There's blood, I've cut my forehead. I am taken off to the nurse's office. The nurse wipes off the blood and sticks a wad of gauze onto me with a Band-Aid. The sight of my own blood on the wet white washcloth is deeply satisfying to me.
Cordelia is subdued: blood is impressive, even more impressive than vomit. She and Grace are solicitous on the way home, linking their arms through mine, asking me how I feel. This kind of attention from them makes me tremulous. I'm afraid I will cry, great sopping tears of reconciliation. But I'm far too wary for that by now.
The next time Cordelia tells me to stand against the wall I faint again. Now I can do it almost whenever I want to. I hold my breath and hear the rustling noise and see the blackness and then I slip sideways, out of my body, and I'm somewhere else. But I can't always watch from above, like the first time. Sometimes there's just black.
I begin to be known as the girl who faints.
"She's doing it on purpose," Cordelia says. "Go ahead, let's see you faint. Come on. Faint." But now, when she tells me to, I can't.
I begin to spend time outside my body without falling over. At these times I feel blurred, as if there are two of me, one superimposed on the other, but imperfectly. There's an edge of transparency, and beside it a rim of solid flesh that's without feeling, like a scar. I can see what's happening, I can hear what's being said to me, but I don't have to pay any attention. My eyes are open but I'm not there. I'm off to the side.
PART
SEVEN
OUR LADY OF
PERPETUAL
HELP
33
I walk west from Simpsons, still looking for something to eat. Finally I buy a slice of take-out pizza and devour it en route, with my fingers, folding it in two and gnawing. When I'm with Ben I eat at regular times because he does, I eat regular things, but when I'm alone I indulge in junk food and scavenging, my old, singular ways. It's bad for me, but I need to remember what bad for me is like. I could begin to take Ben for granted, with his ties and haircuts and grapefruits for breakfast. It makes me appreciate him more.
Back at the studio I call him, counting the hours backward to the coast. But there's only my own voice on the message, followed by the beep, the Dominion Observatory Official Time Signal, ushering in the future. Love you, I say, so he can hear it later. Then I remember: by now he's in Mexico, he won't be back till I am.
By now it's dark outside. I could go out for something more like dinner, or try for a movie. Instead I crawl onto the futon, under the duvet, with a cup of coffee and the Toronto phone book, and start looking up names. There are no more Smeaths, they must have moved or died off, or got married. There are more Campbells than you can shake a stick at. I look up Jon, whose name was once my own. No Josef Hrbik, though there are Hrbeks, Hrens, Hrastniks, Hriczus.
There are no more Risleys.
There is no Cordelia.
It's strange to by lying in Jon's bed again. I haven't thought of this as Jon's bed because I've never seen him in it, but of course it is. It's a lot neater than his beds used to be, and a great deal cleaner. His first bed was a mattress on the floor, with an old sleeping bag on top of it. I didn't mind this, in fact I liked it; it was like camping out. Usually there would be a tide line of empty cups and glasses and plates with scraps of food surrounding it, which I didn't like as much. There was an etiquette about such messes, in those days: there was a line you crossed, from ignoring them to cleaning them up. Whether the man would think you were moving in on him, trying to take him over.
We were lying on that bed one time, right at the beginning, before I'd started to pick up the plates, when the bedroom door opened and a woman I'd never seen before appeared in the doorway. She was wearing dirty jeans and a wan pink T-shirt; her face thin and bleached-looking, with huge pupils. It looked as if she was on some sort of drug, which was beginning to be a possibility, then. She stood there saying nothing, one hand behind her back, her face tight and blank, while I pulled the sleeping bag up over me.
"Hey," said Jon.
She drew her hand out from behind her back then and threw something at us. It was a paper bag full of warm spaghetti, sauce included. It burst when it hit, festooning us. She went out, still without saying anything, an
d slammed the door.
I was frightened, but Jon started laughing. "What was that?" I said. "How the hell did she get in?"
"Through the door," said Jon, still laughing. He untangled a piece of spaghetti from my hair and leaned over to kiss me. I knew this woman must have been a girfriend, or an ex-girlfriend, and I was furious with her. It didn't occur to me that she might have reason. I hadn't yet encountered the foreign hairpins left in the bathroom like territorial dog pee on snowy hydrants, the lipstick marks placed strategically on pillows. Jon knew how to cover his tracks, and when he didn't cover them it was for a reason. It didn't occur to me either that she must have had a key.
"She's crazy," I said. "She should be in a bin."
I did not pity her at all. In a way I admired her. I admired her lack of compunction, the courage of her bad manners, the energy of simple rage. Throwing a bag of spaghetti had a simplicity to it, a recklessness, a careless grandeur. It got things over with. I was a long way, then, from being able to do anything like it myself.
34
Grace says grace. Mr. Smeath says, "Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition," and reaches for the baked beans. Mrs. Smeath says, "Lloyd." Mr. Smeath says, "It's harmless," and shoots me a sideways grin. Aunt Mildred contracts her whiskery mouth. I chew away at the rubber plant Smeath food. Under cover of the tablecloth, I tear at my fingers. Sunday goes on.
After the stewed pineapple Grace wants me to come down into the cellar with her to play school. I do this, but I have to come up the stairs again to go the bathroom. Grace has given me permission, the same way the teachers in school give you permission. As I come up the cellar stairs I can hear Aunt Mildred and Mrs. Smeath, who are in the kitchen doing the dishes.