There was a pause, the kind of shrewd, resonant pause that would be fatal on daytime radio, and then she said: “It’s funny you should ask that. I don’t usually go in for being center stage, it’s not my thing. But I was having a few personal problems at the time. And, I don’t know, I felt this urge to do something wild and strange. Well, I had my brother who owned this bull, and I had a girlfriend in the china business, and it just sort of fit together. It was a really great feeling. My self-esteem was zilch before, and I kept getting these colds. I thought, hey, maybe there’s some connection. Speaking of colds, you sound like you’ve got a humdinger. What you want to do is get yourself half a dozen oranges and eat them throughout the day, all six in one twenty-four hour period. I guarantee it. I’ll tune in real soon and see how you’re doing, okay?”
“LOVE IS THE ONLY enchantment we know,” the woman in the green blazer was saying.
She had a touch of gold on one of her front teeth. Her brown shoes were scuffed on the toes like a child’s.
She was standing in a corner of the Safeway parking lot early Thursday morning when Tom walked over to buy a bag of oranges. She was talking to a rather heavy middle-aged man with a bald head and a face like a dish, and speaking in a tone so mild, speculative, and cheerful that Tom wanted to rush up to her and pay her an elaborate compliment: her eyes, her hair, her grasp of experience, the portentous beauty and simplicity of her utterance.
Later, as he was peeling oranges over a garbage bag, the phrase came to him again: Love is the only enchantment. This, he said to himself, is how a Chinese gong must feel when it’s struck by a hammer in its absolute center.
∼ CHAPTER 7 ∼
How Fortunate She Is
FAY MCLEOD’S FOUR GRANDPARENTS ARE DEAD, BUT SHE DOES HAVE an active and official godmother, a woman of sixty-five named Onion who was present at her christening thirty-five years ago and who lives a mere two blocks away from her in a condominium on Wellington Crescent. Onion is an ungodly woman, but she takes her godmotherly bond seriously.
Rafe, the condo doorman, who greets Fay by name when she comes to visit Onion, wears a strange sky-blue uniform that makes him look like a character in a Spanish operetta. He is a compulsive chatterer but a persevering mechanic, tinkering endlessly with the fountain in the lobby, an affair of plastic and anodized copper that at least twice a week overshoots its rim and soaks the soft gray carpet. Onion Boyle lives twelve floors up in an apartment that overlooks the Assiniboine River.
Onion. She acquired her name – just how and why no one can remember – when she was in medical school, one of only three women enrolled at that time. Fay’s mother, Peggy, another of the three, was called Carrot, though the name didn’t stick. The third girl, known as Rhubarb Leaf, married a Baptist missionary and went with him to India, where she still lives, a passionate, pious woman who every Christmas writes a letter to her former classmates, beginning: “My dear Carrot and Onion, may the Light of Jesus direct these poor words of mine.” Onion, reading these letters, gives a snort of impatience. She is known for her tart pessimism and salty tongue.
Until her retirement a year ago, she worked as a pathologist, and during most of that time – nearly forty years – she was engaged: engaged to be married, with a ring, a diamond solitaire, large and rather forlorn looking in its four platinum claws, to another pathologist, a man named Strom Symonds. Fay should know Strom well after all these years, but she doesn’t. He is a thick, white-bodied, silent bachelor with hair whiskering out of his ears, a golfer, a fisherman, a lover of big-band music, a dancer of rumbas, only now he is a patient in the stroke unit at St. Boniface Hospital, speechless and paralyzed. Once, years ago, he had turned to Fay in a restaurant and said, “Without Onion there is nothing of value in this world for me, nothing.”
Why have Onion and Strom never married? Fay, who drops in on Onion at least once a week, usually on Friday evenings on her way home from the Handel Chorale, has never come out and asked. Fay and Onion generally have a glass of wine together, sometimes two or three, since Onion is shyly fond of drink, and talk with easy pleasure about local politics, women’s rights, nutrition, heart disease, the biography of Lucy Maude Montgomery and how that poor tortured woman suffered all her life from cystitis, the weather, the latest adventures of Rafe and the lobby fountain, and, quite often lately, as the tide drops in the wine bottle, Strom’s blood count, Strom’s medication, Strom’s failing pulse rate – but they never touch on the reason Onion and Strom have chosen to live separately all these years. (Fay’s mother believes it must be a sexual problem, a dysfunction, with one of them, or perhaps both, but Fay defends the values of the single life, vigorously or mildly, depending on how she’s feeling.)
Tonight Fay tells Onion what she’s told no one else – how hard it’s been for her to adjust to living alone again, without Peter. The last few weeks of their parting were so senselessly drawn out, and now his absence is so – so sudden. Her evenings feel airless and unbalanced. At first there was a sense of relief, but now she wonders if she made a mistake, if she and Peter shouldn’t have persevered, making the best of things, as most people seem to do. “What do you think?” Fay asks Onion.
Of all the people in the world, she can speak most directly to Onion. It’s always been like this. Onion is not quite family, not quite friend, but a presence that hovers between the two. Their investment in each other’s lives rests on consideration rather than instinct, on something that has been constructed out of happy accident and allowed to have its way. Fay loves her but would never formulate the thought in words, never say, I love Onion. It would embarrass them both.
At 9:30 in the evening there is still enough tattered sunlight to coat the river, a pink border meeting a band of blue and bending out of sight. Fay keeps her eyes on the large window and waits for Onion to respond with her usual snagging, ironic voice, to say something dissonant and loyal, like “I always did have my doubts about that man” or “I never thought he was good enough for you.” She seems about to speak, a pulse starting behind her lips, but all she does is lean back on the headrest of her chair and close her eyes, sighing.
Fay has seen this chair a thousand times, but tonight she notices how ill-proportioned it is, one of those ubiquitous Danish designs from the late fifties. Doesn’t Onion mind that aggressively grained teak and hard-souled orange upholstery? Why does she hang on to something this ugly?
She is a lean old obdurate woman with legs like sticks of chalk. Lunch for her is an apple. Dinner is a boiled egg. No scent of any kind attaches to her. To speak of devotion to the world of the senses would make her sniff. Her face is spare, clean, organized, alert, but tonight her half-closed eyes are adrift. Fay wonders if she is thinking about Strom in his hospital room across the river. Can she be grieving as she sits there, feeling her loss, her injury, that shell of the self that breaks against another? Perhaps. Probably. Yes.
“I really came by,” Fay says, “to invite you to Sunday lunch. I’m having the whole family. Even Bibbi’s coming. Promise me, Onion, that you’ll come.”
LIKE HER MOTHER, and even her sister, Bibbi, Fay attaches importance to her immediate surroundings. She likes white walls, dark polished floors, brilliant handmade rugs, interesting furniture, comfortable chairs, good reading lamps, plenty of books and pictures, and, when she can afford it, fresh cut flowers on the coffee table. In her apartment, which has been carved out of a former house, there are nine-foot ceilings and angles of wall that darken subtly in lamplight, and here and there remnants of the original stained glass. She particularly likes the colored window in the kitchen, a design of interlocking leaves and curled yellow flowers dating from the twenties, which casts bright blobby reflections on the kitchen floor and also serves to block out the rundown brick apartment building across the street.
On Saturdays she cleans her apartment. She notices, with a measure of detachment, that she’s been cleaning more thoroughly lately, since her thirty-fifth birthday, since Peter’s departure, since Fletcher Conrad. Wit
h her rubber gloves, her brushes and rags and chemicals, she cleans not just avidly but furiously. Jabbing at corners. Scouring. Bashing. Today she finds a trail of black grease on the floor of the utility room and experiences a perverse shiver of satisfaction. She will annihilate it with steel wool, then buff the white tiles back to gloss and perfection.
Such triumph is obscurely worrying, but she’s not yet willing to think about what it means.
Briskly she irons a red cotton tablecloth for tomorrow’s lunch. She loves to see a dining table with a red cloth. Her dining room is small, really only a corner by a window, but in a pinch she can seat ten, though Matthew and Gordon, her nephews, will have to sit on the oak coffee table, raised up on cushions.
It’s bourgeois, she knows, and vaguely discrediting, the gratification she gets from setting a table, the alignment of silver, the lovely rolled napkins. She’ll buy white flowers in Osborne Village this afternoon, just a few, maybe lilies if they have any, and arrange them in a low frosted-glass bowl she has.
All morning there have been rain showers, but now a fan of sunlight cuts across the table, and she stops to admire the effect. How fortunate a woman she is to possess this kind of skewed double vision. To be happy. And to see herself being happy.
HERS IS NOT a reticent family. Everyone, in fact, is talking at once, talking as they cut through the tender chicken breasts and hearts of artichoke, as they reach for another spoonful of rice salad, as they pass the crusty bread, as they raise glasses of white wine to their lips, as they brush crumbs from the tablecloth or mop up a few drops of spilled milk with the corner of a napkin.
Sonya is talking about how she’s getting a permanent groove in her bottom from sitting on the edge of the bathtub and coaching her two sons in the art of effective teeth brushing.
Fay’s mother and father are discussing, and politely disagreeing about, the medical treatment their friend John Brewmaster is undergoing at the Mayo Clinic, and Fay’s brother, Clyde, is stumbling his way toward a statement about the civil-rights aspect of fluoridated water, saying that in the end it all comes down to society’s collective wish.
Yes, Bibbi says, her eyes smiling, that’s all very well, but measuring the will of society has become an impossibility now that pollsters have become our generals and the media our legislators.
Onion says, sharply, hoisting an eyebrow, that something or other is perfectly self-evident, and Fay’s Great-Uncle Arthur, eighty and deaf, is pointing to the example of Mackenzie King, how he wouldn’t survive five minutes under the scrutiny of a television camera, and neither would Roosevelt, for that matter.
Fay is clearing the table and saying, “Now listen everyone, be sure to save room for this marvelous dessert I’ve toiled and slaved over,” eliciting groans of pleasure around the table and an appreciation for the phrase – toiled and slaved – which is part of an ancient and complex family joke.
And six-year-old Gordon is dreaming, humming, singing over his untouched plate, the light from the window glowing on his smooth forehead, while Matthew whines and whines because his fingers are covered with butter, until Sonya turns to him and says, “Just lick them off, sweetie, we’re all family here.”
ON MONDAY MORNING, going to work, Fay missed her bus by seconds. It was raining, a cold rain, and though she waved frantically at the driver, he didn’t see her.
“Oh, damn it, damn it,” she mouthed into the wind.
A truck drew up along the curb, a small clean yellow truck; the truck’s cab was like a little car. A woman with curly red hair rolled down the window and asked Fay if she’d like a lift downtown.
Between River Avenue and Market Street she told Fay her life story. As a young girl she’d worked at Eatons, the drug and cosmetic section. One day a tall American came along and asked her to dinner. He’d been watching her for days. “Here I was with my red hair and freckles, I guess he thought I was colorful if nothing else.” She married him and went to live on a farm in North Dakota. They raised pigs, seven hundred at one time. It was a terrible marriage. “You’re acting like your mother,” he accused her all the time, but how could she help it? Her mother was inside her, as mothers are. “Our sex life was awful. He just wanted me to lie there and stare at the ceiling, not touch him at all.” It was her father-in-law who urged her to think about another life. After seventeen years she left the marriage. Back in Canada, she discovered her childhood sweetheart in the middle of a divorce and custody battle. They married seven years ago. “There’re lots of sevens in my story.” She’s never looked back. Life is bliss, sex is good. “We’ve got his kids and my son, he plays jazz piano at the Nostalgia Club, and in a year Jim’ll retire. I give pottery lessons, I’m having a show next month. My name is Molly Beardsley.”
“I KNOW MOLLY BEARDSLEY,” Beverly Miles told Fay at lunch. “Jim Beardsley’s first wife was my sister’s best friend.”
This kind of thing is always happening to Fay, circles inside circles. Last week Hannah Webb told her she’d attended an evening seminar on menopause given by a marvelous woman, a Dr. McLeod. “That’s my mother,” Fay said. “Peggy McLeod? That’s my mother.”
The population of Winnipeg is six hundred thousand, a fairly large city, with people who tend to stay put. Families overlap with families, neighborhoods with neighborhoods. You can’t escape it. Generations interweave so that your mother’s friends (Onion Boyle, Muriel Brewmaster, and dozens more) formed a sort of squadron of secondary aunts. You were always running into someone you’d gone to school with or someone whose uncle worked with someone’s else’s father. The tentacles of connection were long, complex, and full of the bitter or amusing ironies that characterize blood families.
At the same time, Fay has only a vague idea who the noisy quarreling couple on the floor above her are, and no idea at all who lives in the crumbling triplex next door, though she knows, slightly, two of the tenants in the building across the street. Her widowed Uncle Arthur lives one street over on Annette Avenue, but she knows no one else on that street. Some days she can wait anonymously in the bus shelter at River and Osborne and speak to no one, and the next day she’ll run into any number of acquaintances. These surprises used to drive Peter crazy, the oppressive clannishness they implied and the embarrassments, but Fay again and again is reassured and comforted to be part of a knowable network.
When her former lover, Nelo Merino, was tranferred to Ottawa and wanted her to come with him, she had to ask herself, in the sternly analytical style she favored in those days: Do I love Nelo more than I love these hundreds, thousands of connections, faces, names, references and cross-references, biographies, scandals, coincidences, these epics, these possibilities? The answer, and it didn’t take her long to make up her mind, was no.
Geography is destiny, says Fay’s good friend Iris Jaffe, and Fay tends to agree.
“I FORGOT to tell you,” Fay said to her mother on the telephone, “that Hannah Webb was at that seminar you gave at the Y last week.”
“Hannah?”
“You know Hannah Webb. Our director.”
“Really? Was she there? Well, there was such a huge turnout. I never did get a chance to look at the registration list.”
“She said she found it extremely helpful.”
“Oh good, I’m glad.”
“And that you were a marvelous woman. How do you like that? Sympathetic, she said. But with a practical grasp.”
“Heavens.”
“You must have seen her there. She’s got grayish-goldish hair. Sort of piled up with combs. Lovely hair. She’s about five-foot, six. Probably wearing a white raincoat?”
“Oh dear, there were so many there, you’d be surprised.”
“She asked you a question during the discussion, about hot flashes. What caused them.”
“Oh, of course! I remember now. Well, I can’t have been very helpful on that subject. I mean, we don’t know for sure about hot flashes, what brings them on.”
“She said you had some good ideas for han
dling them. She was really pleased she’d gone. She’s been having a rotten time.”
“Isn’t that amazing.”
“What?”
“I mean, that your director discusses her hot flashes with her staff.”
“Well, she’s very –”
“You’ll never guess who else was there. Marlene Fournier.”
“Marlene Fournier? Becky Scott’s aunt?”
“We had a good chat afterward about Becky.”
“I haven’t seen Becky in years.”
“She and Calvin are in Newfoundland now. Some job with the federal government, in fisheries. They love it there, the freedom. And she and Cal have just had their first baby. A boy, I think Marlene said.”
“I wonder if he looks like Cal.”
“Or Cal’s mother. Remember her? That gorgeous Icelandic coloring. A nordic Amazon, or is that possible?”
“It’s Cal’s father I remember. I had him for math two years running.”
“That’s right, you did. A miserable man. Exceedingly dour.”
“I saw him about a month ago. He remembered me, or so he said. He was part of a tour group at the center. From that Green Pillars place.”
“Green Pillars? You don’t mean the retirement home?”
“That place way out on west Portage.”
“I didn’t realize Calvin’s father was as old as that.”
“Time goes.”
“It certainly does.”
DO MERMAIDS TALK? Do they possess language? The question interests Fay, but she’s found scant evidence of actual speech in mermaid lore. Even their songs are wordless. Their underwater journeys and adventures, their consuming drive to tempt and console – all remain wrapped in silence. And, disappointingly, the legends in which they figure are almost never satisfying as stories. What Fay uncovers are mostly fragments, blurred visions, partial accounts, and even these tentative offerings are underpinned by the suggestion of hard drink and the deceptive algebra of the imagination trying to make a story out of an absence of linearity.