What We Both Know Read online

  I dress quickly and facing away from the mirror. My body on certain days seems too much to bear. My mother said once on her birthday, clutching at her head, “But I still feel twenty-five!” She was sixty-five and making a joke, but the joke came out sounding like despair. I do not feel this way, but I don’t know what to make of my age either. My clothes are modest, in dark and earthy colours. I disguise the curve of my lower half, that way it looks like it must belong to somebody else.

  Sometimes I wonder if Baby can see me.

  I must set him up with enough things to do while I am out of the house. At present he is still doing his great important work of watching the old interviews, of consuming himself once more. Each morning he wakes up empty, must drink himself down. Then a little life shines through him, like the pink of a flamingo. It’s only due to the fish they eat, you know.

  To his right he has a stack of books: some his own, some others he likes to flip through. To his left, an e-reader loaded with more of his own, and more of others’. I’ve laid everything out on the waxy kitchen tablecloth. Its red check is tacky and out of place among the other, noble furniture in the house. It’s just he’s liable to spill. He runs his hands over it uneasily when he’s thinking, as if he might be able to place the thought if he could just feel the warmth of the wood of the table. I always think of his mind as fading away, when perhaps really it’s that it’s buried under layers?

  Another pot of coffee brewing, and there are leftovers in the fridge from the restaurant last night. Limp asparagus and some mushroom ravioli in cream sauce. I’ll zap it before I go and leave it on the counter for Baby. He doesn’t have much of an appetite midday. We have our breakfast and most days it’s a fight to get anything into him before dinner. Left on his own he’d be content with a dinner roll and a glass of beer.

  “Okay?” I say. If I leave now there will still be good produce at the market. By noon the fresh herbs are all but gone.

  He puts his finger on a word in one of the books. “Market?”

  I nod. “Do you want to come?”

  “No,” he says, into the book. “Well, no, I don’t know.”

  “Just a couple things. We could have samosas and hot chocolate at the indoor tables.” Surely it would be easier to leave him, but he wants to go fewer and fewer places. I feel it’s my obligation to press him.

  “No,” he says. He shakes his head. “No.”

  He closes his book with a certain punctuation. There is turbulence running across his face. Then, rearranges his stack, opens another one, and twirls one finger in the air like he’s conducting. “Ah,” he says. “Yes.”

  At the restaurant last night, Pauline’s friend Laurel sat with her baby on her knee and her arm across the baby’s chest and the baby periodically reached out her hands at something, straining against her mother’s arm. When we raised our glasses in cheers, the baby was not held back by the arm for a moment or two, and she sat still with her back against her mother’s body. Once or twice Laurel chewed small bits of food and then placed them in her baby’s mouth. I kept sneaking glances in awe, wondering when a mother and child separate into two people. I watched my own mother leave most of her plate, asked her if she wanted to try some of my meal. She declined.

  * * *

  —

  THE MARKET IS ALIVE with movement in all directions. A woman with her hair pulled back and a canvas bag over her shoulder leans forward over a counter, points at a cut of meat. A gangly college student shouts coffee orders to a hunched older man who dries metal parts on his apron by an espresso machine. I see a couple of people I’ve known since childhood, with their families, and I act as if I haven’t. I order an Earl Grey latte and take it to the indoor seating area where I sit at a bar along the back market wall, two seats down from a well-groomed baker sipping a double espresso. Most weekends I buy a loaf of sourdough from him or from his sister, and sometimes these long twisted breadsticks with rosemary. Though their family are friends of my parents, I assume that they do not remember me.

  “When do you eat a food like this?” Baby asked the first time I brought home the breadsticks. “It’s not a meal, not a breakfast, not a dessert. In twenty-four hours it’s hard as a rock.” Once in a while I’ll bring some home just to needle him. We eat them alongside hard cheeses, broken pieces of dark chocolate, prosciutto and salami.

  The baker is looking at me, I can tell, but when I turn he turns too. I wonder if I am multiple people to him; if he recognizes me but isn’t sure I’m not someone else. I return to the stands every weekend, pick up more or less the same items, but I’ve made no move to develop a rapport. It’s not that I don’t want to. I always feel I’m watching the market like a film, alone and unable to affect anything, but playing a small, silent role. A half-participant.

  I could turn to the baker and say something. We could walk arm in arm through the market, filling my cloth bags with fresh produce and little containers of whipped honey and long slender beeswax candles, in pairs of two connected at the wick. I could offer him one, ask if he could give me a ride home and on the way stop at his house to clip the candles apart, place one on his dining room table where I would lay down and offer myself. I feel sick at the thought. Lately when I have a sexual thought my breasts ache—not in desire but in panic. I dress carefully, rarely look at them. Sometimes, all of a sudden, my nipples will harden. Each time it makes me uneasy, like trying on a piece of clothing that is too young for me.

  “London fog?”

  I am shaken from thought. “What?” I say to the baker.

  “I can smell it.” He smiles.

  Somehow I feel molested. What else can he smell?

  I smile. “Any sourdough left today?” I ask. I try to communicate to him that he represents bread to me. That’s it.

  * * *

  —

  CATHERINE IS READING A passage to us from her journal at the dining room table. The dinner dishes are in front of us, streaked with red sauce and dry basil. My head is elsewhere. I’m wanting to get drunk. No one has reached for a second round from the bottle, so I don’t either. It’s when I’m drinking that things fall into place around me. A woman grins childishly at me in the mirror. Whatever it is I think I am otherwise falls away, a small death. I haven’t been out in a little while. Not since I left the city. In my memory, I am unable to separate the city from my drunkenness. What else did I do there? I went to work, I waited out the weeks, the weekends fell through my hands like water. Each Friday, Saturday evening felt like my last, pulling through piles of once-worn clothes, looking for something that might make me outgoing.

  Pauline used to say I romanticize negative things. “It’s your gift and your curse,” she said. “You love to feel bad.” Recently I’ve slowed down. Well, I am slowing. I take things easy. Try not to make anything into something more than it is.

  Baby is fading. He has been lulled by the sound of Catherine’s voice, indifferent to what she’s reading. I hear anything about a woman and I connect it to Pauline, see things that aren’t there. This makes me tense, and I drain my glass to appear unaffected. Catherine goes on, doesn’t seem to consider whether or not we’re following. Her voice is hoarse from our earlier laughter, and the dry wine. I keep returning to her mouth, as if I might learn something about how to speak. Always I am searching for ways to conceal myself, to become more like anybody else. Her lips are thin and pale, with small delicate lines in the surrounding skin. She reads how she was not expressive with her mother. Things went unsaid.

  With Pauline, the problem is no one person was enough. We could pass her off, myself, her ex-boyfriend, her roommate, one at a time, but she always felt the absence of the others. That is, when she wanted us. At other times she spent long stretches alone, gave few details of her whereabouts. When she needed us, she needed us. She would call in the middle of the night, sobbing, then hang up, deny it in the morning. Plus we all had problems ourselves. I felt I couldn’t care for her and care for myself, not enough at least. It was her leaving that made me stop caring so much for myself. If she could meet the person I am after losing her, things might go differently.

  Catherine reads a line about losing a book in the lake, having dropped it off the side of a dock.

  “What was the book?” Baby says, suddenly alert again. “Pauline?”

  “I don’t remember,” says Catherine.

  Baby sometimes will slip and call Catherine “Pauline.” He doesn’t mean to, but he has begun to merge them. It startles me each time, as if he is casting a spell. A curse. I can’t lose one more. Plus, this is his way of distancing himself. He has given up on the notion of having fathered Pauline, for fathering would include too much failure. Just think of what has come of it.

  Catherine goes on about her mother, how she connects her mother to her female friendships, how she feels she is a mother to all women. The death of her own mother opened a vast empty space for her to fill. Plus it signalled the end of the transition from youth. Now, at fifty-six, she is truly, finally, a woman. She says this as if with an edge of scolding, perhaps at least condescension. I have my mother. I have my eggs. It must frustrate her to see that I am not happy. This causes me to feel naked, that she seems to know about my dissatisfaction. She knew me in childhood; we never connected.

  I saw a therapist, after Pauline. “Is it fair to say you were depressed as a child?” they asked.

  Now Catherine and her mother walking by the canal in the wind, in Montreal. They are in long jackets, I imagine. The unpleasant weather romanticizes things, gives them a reason to be quiet. Really it was summer, I’m beginning to realize as she reads on. There is a sun slowly setting. Catherine reads, “We searched for more to say.”

  I look to Baby and see he is ready to sleep.

  Catherine and I move to the front porch to drink the rest of the bottle of wine. She has borrowed a blanket and an oat-coloured lotion I bought at the market in town, rubs it into her hands and over her knuckles. She has a peculiar way of doing it; she’ll put some in her palm and rub her other hand’s fist into the cream, back and forth. It’s a wide shallow tub, and she scoops out the cream with three fingers. She feels at home in our house; I can see in the way she moves through it, the way she comes in without knocking.

  My mother still brings her up on occasion, when she really gets into it about Baby. It’s always, “That tramp!” I didn’t see Catherine the first few times she came to the house. I was seven, maybe eight, hiding upstairs in my bedroom. I heard three voices, my mother’s the most infrequently. From the sounds of it my mother stayed downstairs in the living room. Baby brought Catherine up to his office and when she was leaving they talked about a number, I saw, crouched at the top of the staircase, that he took money out of his wallet and gave it to her. That first night my mother slept in my bedroom with me, silently. Then she always slept in my room when Catherine had been to visit, then she slept in my room a lot. How sick I had felt when I’d first learned about the things I could do with just myself, with my body, and how I’d had to do them so secretly and quietly in bed beside my mother. Afterwards I would say a prayer that I might die in my sleep, as punishment for being so sick.

  Catherine hums, sips her wine.

  “Are you cold?” I ask her.

  She moves her head back then forth. Her mouth is pressed upward at the corners.

  “I’m sorry he wasn’t all there tonight.”

  “Oh,” says Catherine. “He means well.”

  I have a sense of urgency about wanting to enjoy the evening. The small amount of remaining light and the chill creeping under our wool blankets. There’s not too much left.

  “I’ve always read him my journals,” she says. I realize I’d not answered her earlier, perhaps suggesting I disagree. “I’m a writer, too, in that way,” she smiles.

  Again I search for something, anything, to say.

  Catherine goes inside and retrieves little butterfly-looking curled cinnamon cookies from a tin. Something nags at me. Something has changed, and maybe it’s that she wants to leave, or unrelated to me she wants to be alone, to go to sleep. Was I meant to say something, perhaps reassure her, about her mother? Do something some specific way, accept her into me in a way I unknowingly resist? Really, I would. I can’t decipher which of us is resisting. There is no reason we cannot be something. It’s just I can’t be with her without feeling my mother must somehow be aware.

  Then it is gone. Now, as a slackness returns to her cheeks (a dimple disappears), I have to wonder if there ever was a change. She bites into a cookie with one hand cupped under her chin to catch the crumbs, sprinkles them into the grass beneath like seedlings.

  3

  EARLY MORNING AND OUT the window the landscape is like a postcard. I am at the small wooden desk in my office with a single drawer, packed full of scraps and lists and receipts. My back aches in the kitchen chair, but I use the pain as a timestamp signifying I’ve been here long enough to’ve gotten some good work done. Mindlessly I sort through the papers in my desk drawer searching for something of meaning.

  Wind whistles through small undetectable holes in the window frame. I’ve spent hours trying unsuccessfully to locate and fill them in, to prevent the small ladybug-looking beetles—they’re not ladybugs, Baby insists—from crawling inside to escape the freezing temperatures. I’ll admit I will smack one of them with a heavy hardcover every now and again. So many of them I spare, and bask in my own goodwill. It is when I find them crawling in shiny hair-legged networks on the windowsill that I abandon my altruism. You may imagine then that the whistling wind is only a reminder of the bugs’ easy access.

  I become distracted so easily by the sounds of the house. It winds itself up in the morning, vibrates with light and life, and then slowly shrinks back into itself at night, groaning as it relaxes in the dark. From in here, I can’t tell which sounds are the house and which are coming from Baby. Though his bedroom is the closest room to my office, we are separated by the stairwell, and I am given the illusion of remoteness. Once or twice I think I’ve heard the first stirs of his waking. Any time there is complete silence I am prevented from working. I have to wonder if he is up to something—if any moment disaster will strike.

  Really I may be overly concerned with Baby’s routines. There was only once when he got himself into trouble, trying to remove the screen from the kitchen window so he could water the seeds I’d planted. Otherwise it’s with no small amount of trouble I try to discern where his need ends and my anxiety begins. Besides, now the window planters are wooden troughs of snow.

  So, the memoir:

  I must keep things as true as possible. I mustn’t embellish as a narrator, as I am not the narrator. It is important that I leave no trace of myself. For this reason the work has been coming out cold and mechanical. I’ve felt unable to insert myself into the room—it’s just, I really wasn’t there.

  It’s all coming so slowly. If I cleaned it up I might have a chapter or so, at best. I don’t know how he does it. I used to watch him during my childhood, the way he could sit at his desk for hours and it would come right out of him. Perhaps he is right that I really just don’t have the touch.

  I try to break it down into a system, as if made up of small individual parts, or of numbers. Each word must go somewhere, and then it all must break even. A number of words per day for a number of days. If I am to discover the formula—neutral and objective—the memoir will be perfect. Or it will go unnoticed altogether…

  Ah, he is up.

  He goes downstairs to dress in his office.

  Soon we begin again. The eggs, bouncing in their shells in their bath of boiling water. The toast jumps up when the toaster’s timer dings. There is a full-bodied kitchen smell filling the downstairs.

  Baby takes his place at the kitchen table, places his hands flat on the tablecloth. We exchange a sheepish smile, as if we still are new to this old, tired routine.

  I am distracted by the challenges of the chapter I’d been working on upstairs. It’s an early portion, about mine and Pauline’s childhood. Baby taking a break between promotional tours, becoming increasingly agitated by the static environment of the domestic household. Causing different types of trouble just to punctuate the passage of time—bringing women into the house, drinking late into the night, spoiling one or both of us so that my mother would be made the enemy. No matter the scene, if it takes place in the house, I can’t help but see things from the perspective of Pauline’s doorway. When I try to write downstairs, in the opposite corner of the house, the details are all obscured by the staircase. I try and try to be a writer but instead I am a sister.

  “Nice day out,” says Baby.

  “Like a postcard.”

  I crack an egg against the countertop.

  4

  WE ARE TO BE at the literary agency for noon, when Baby has a meeting with Mark Richman, his agent of forty-five years. While he’s there I will pick up Baby’s prescriptions, and use the Xerox machines at the post office to scan some of his documents and mail them off to the government office in Ottawa. The morning has been difficult. See, I’d planned to get some work done prior to the drive into Toronto, but Baby was having difficulties with his wardrobe. Just something simple and nice, I’d told him. Each time I left him to get dressed I would return to find him on the edge of the bed, watching the closet like a television. Really he wanted things to be chosen for him. I was being difficult, too. I resent when I know what he wants. At the suggestion of a wine-red button-down we’d gotten on our way.