Annabel (17 page)

“Why do you think that?”

“He would lose ten pounds. He would start eating vegetables. He would go to the Garden Club and offer to plant Persian rose bushes by the boardwalk. You’d want to descend right back down from heaven and go to bed with him on the spot.”

By the time Treadway knocked on Eliza Goudie’s door, Joan and Eliza had forgotten what a husband looked like. They had drunk so much that the sight of Treadway on the doorstep puzzled them. An alien creature had found its way to the house. Only Jacinta recognized him, and he knew, when he saw her, he did not want her to accompany him to the hospital in that state.

“I have to go in to Goose Bay, on an errand. In case you went home and found me not there. I didn’t want you to worry.”

“What errand?”

“Valves for my compressor.” She was in no condition to hear about Wayne. Treadway did not want to drive over the wilderness road to Goose Bay with a hysterical woman in the truck. So he lied. “Maynard White has them and I need them before I go into the bush.”

“What about Wayne?”

“Wayne is at a sleepover.”

“Where?”

“He’s at a sleepover with Roland Shiwack’s kid.” The other two women were making a racket in the living room. They had recovered from the feeling that a husband on the doorstep had elicited and were listing habits their own husbands had not revealed until after a few years of marriage.

“Harold refuses to eat chicken,” Joan said, “because he says they pee through their skin.”

“Pee?”

“He says their skin is constantly bathed in pee and he doesn’t see how anyone can eat it. He says if you watch the back end of a chicken you’ll see chicken shit only.”

“Is everything all right?” Jacinta asked Treadway. Orion’s Dog Star hung above his shoulder, and she remembered she loved him, and he did not look his ordinary self. He looked as if he wanted to say something no one in the world but herself could understand.

“My husband,” said Eliza in the distance, “is a connoisseur of his own farts.”

“What do you mean?” Joan asked.

“Everything’s fine,” Treadway said. “If you go home, watch your step. There’s not much of a moon.”

“I might stay here.”

“Better do that, then.” And he gave Jacinta a formal little hug.

“Your coat is damp.”

“It’s only a bit of night dampness.” Treadway left her in the lit-up doorway and climbed into his truck.

The northern lights were putting on a show of pink along with the turquoise and silver, which was unusual, and normally Treadway would have stopped the truck and got out on the side of the road. His parents, and his grandparents, had respected the mystery of those lights in a way people did not do now. The elders looked at them the way English children once lay in fields and picked dreams out of clouds. Sounds had come from the sky then. Only the old people heard them now. Treadway, though twenty years younger than most of the good listeners, had heard the moaning song. But he did not hear it tonight. In his childhood he had broken a leg in three places, and his mother had taken him to Goose Bay, and the anesthetic had been too strong. He had not woken at the right time. The doctors had told his mother this was all right. They had sent her home to wait for news. When she got home, Treadway’s father asked her where Treadway was, and when she said, “I left him at the hospital,” his father had driven his truck over two rivers after midnight instead of waiting for the morning ferry, and had brought Treadway home and laid him in a cot by the stove. Whenever Treadway heard his father tell that story, it always ended with “I’ll never know how she could leave him like that.”

And it is true it is hard to know how much anesthetic to give a young person. Wayne’s doctors had not been in agreement about it and had given him a measurement between the doses allotted a child and an adult. It put him in a state between waking and sleeping, and dulled the pain from the cut Dr. Lioukras made to open the vagina that had been hidden. The flesh was a centimetre deep, and when he cut it, Dr. Lioukras asked the nurse to get a stainless steel bowl from the trolley immediately.

Wayne had not seen the blood, which was copious, because the staff had erected a sheet the way they did with all gynecological operations. He saw the masked faces move in slow motion through a gelled lens, and heard their voices as a stretched, continuous murmur, with now and then a word plopping out whole. He heard blood and anomaly and
oh
. He heard
rush
and
no
and
never
. He heard Thomasina say, “No,” and he heard the staff ask her to stand back, and he heard her cry out. But the sounds were muted. What came close, what rushed head-on at him, was the colour red. Red can be black-red, and this was. It can be scarlet, and it was this too. When you close your eyes in a field in the sun and you are young and the world has not imposed memories on you that can’t be erased, there is a red-orange that sits against your closed eyes and contains the warmth of all future summers, and the red rushing headlong behind Wayne’s closed eyes included this red too. It scared him, the swirling red world, yet it thrilled him too, and the anesthetic had pinned his arms and legs to a soft, soft cloud. He could not get up from the dizzy red world no matter what looked out from it at him, and, like the words rising from a murmur of sea-sound, there was something half-formed in the red world, looking at him, and he did not know what it was, though he felt it was drowning in blood and trying to speak, but the red whirlpool was going too fast. In his anesthetized world, sound from the unconconscious rose up, a sound that normally comes to the waking world only through portholes like the northern lights, or the voice of an owl, or the ground whispering.

Wayne heard the sound become louder and drown the voices of the staff. The inchoate red world took form: a red trench, a tunnel, a map of the womb inside him and the passageway leading from it, which had all been closed and that he had no idea existed. The red world knew everything in him, and it showed him the map of his own feminine parts, and they were the most vivid, living, seductive red he had known in waking or in dreaming life. He heard the sound of himself falling into this tunnel, a long, low moan, then a shout. The staff heard it, and none of them had heard this before outside a birthing room. The youngest nurse ran out of the operating room, downstairs to the walk-in fridge in the back of the cafeteria, and drank a carton of Old South ruby red grapefruit juice mixed with crushed ice.

16

Falling Away

T
HERE IS A FALLING AWAY IN
all little families: families having a mother, a father, and one child. There is a new world for every child, sooner or later, no matter what kind of love has lived in the home. Strong love, love that has failed, complicated love, love that does its best to keep a child warm through layers of fear or caution. One day the layers begin to fall. Before his night in hospital, Wayne had not broken from his mother, but he had begun to yearn for the unnameable mystery young people want.

The morning after Wayne’s operation, Jacinta had woken on her own couch with a hangover. Why was the house cold? It was cold in a way she remembered from uninsulated houses of her friends, in winter, in St. John’s. A cold that pried into your joints and tormented you. Treadway never let the house get like this. Five thirty in the morning was late for him to rise. Every night he made sure there were dry splits ready in the box beside the stove. He twisted newspaper and set the splits in a pyramid. Then came pieces of slab from Obadiah Blake’s sawmill, and junks of the same black spruce that sent incense from every chimney in the cove. Jacinta rose, still in her party clothes. She had stumbled uphill at three in the morning and had noticed the truck was gone, but Treadway was always leaving it with Maynard White for one reason or another. He had said something at Eliza’s door about valves. And he had told her Wayne was sleeping over at Brent Shiwack’s, which was unusual. Wayne was not the most popular boy in Croydon Harbour, and Brent Shiwack was not his friend.

Jacinta went down the basement stairs and lit the fire herself. She cut soaked apricots into the little pot of oats and made fruit porridge for herself, and tea with the bag in the cup. When Treadway was in the bush for months at a time, and Wayne at school, she got into a routine of being alone. But this day she grew lonely, so when Treadway came in the door in the afternoon she was glad to see him. But he was not glad. He did not light up at all when she hugged him. His body felt like one of the cold logs out by the fence. He told her what had happened: the blood, the surgeon, the loss of their secret. But there was a new part he did not mention.

“Thomasina Baikie,” he said, “told Wayne everything. And told me more besides.”

“Where is he?” Jacinta felt elation, even while she could see her husband’s face might not recover from its careworn collapse. The life that had drained out of Treadway began filling her face. He saw it. Why was life coming into her when he felt this way?

“Goose Bay.” He opened the fridge, took out his bread, made himself a Maple Leaf bologna sandwich with mustard, and put the kettle on. He sat at the kitchen table, ate the sandwich, and waited for his kettle to boil.

“Is he by himself?”

Treadway shrugged, his mouth full. “There were nurses.”

Jacinta had slung her coat on Treadway’s La-Z-Boy when she came in, and now she put it on. The keys were beside his saucer, and she grabbed them and shoved on the easiest shoes and went out with no scarf, which she never did. Even in summer Jacinta wore a silk scarf or a thin cotton one around her collarbones, but not this day.

When she reached the hospital, she went straight to Wayne’s room and saw that he was so pale his freckles looked as if they were floating in cream. She hugged him and he clung to her, and it was the first time since he was a baby that she could allow love unimpeded to escape her heart and flow to her child. It buzzed like the power line on her old back lane in St. John’s. She had not freely loved the girl part of Wayne, as the girl had not been acknowledged to exist. Jacinta kissed her child on the forehead. She rubbed her own tears into her face and they stung the nicks that the wind had chafed, and she brought her child home.

But the falling away had started. When the child separates from its parents to explore the new world, the parents can do one of two things. They can fight it with rules, pleading, tears, and anger: “Why do you want to go out in minus-fifteen-degree temperatures in that T-shirt when you could wear the wool I’ve warmed for you over the woodstove? It’s so cosy.” Or they can admit the new world exists, dangerous and irresistible. Cosy is not what awakening youth wants. Safety is not what it wants. The material world is not what it wants either.

“Why does Dad watch the stock market report every night?” Wayne asked his mother. She was peeling carrots and he had been writing a poem about Remembrance Day for the annual school contest. “You know what his slippers remind me of?”

The blade on the carrot peeler was loose and it rattled. Jacinta kept the tap running to rinse fluffs of peel off her knuckles.

“You know the holes in them? Dad’s brown socks poke out right where a mole’s nose would be. I pretend his slippers are moles.”

Treadway ordered a supply of Torngat Heavy-Spun work socks from the Hudson’s Bay Company every spring and fall. “You don’t mind if you lose one,” he said, “when they’re all the same. I can never understand why people have socks in a dozen colours and sizes. People like to make work for themselves, I guess.”

“Why does he, Mom?”

“What?”

“Watch the stock market every night.”

“Your dad bought some gold and he likes to track it.”

”Dad bought gold?”

“A little bit. Enough to get by if there’s some sort of crisis in the world. Not for long. Just enough to pass through the crisis. So he likes to keep up on how the price fluctuates, and he likes knowing what’s going on with prices of other things while he’s at it. He’s just interested in it. People can be interested in things.”

But the moles, Wayne thought, were blind. He suspected they were dead. What was the good of having feet if all they did was act like dead moles?

“How come he does the same thing every night? He falls asleep in his chair and he snores. Doesn’t he find it boring?”

“That’s precisely why” — Jacinta flung a carrot in the sink — “your father goes on his trapline for six months of the year. He can’t stand it in here either. Your father is more interesting than you think. I suppose you wonder the same thing about me.”

Wayne looked at her guiltily. He had wanted to ask the night before, as Jacinta read Luke and then John through the stock market report, “Are you hoping God wrote something new in there since last night?” He had begun to wonder, as autumn darkness closed in, why both parents were satisfied with such quietness. With no brothers or sisters in the house, there was no one to share his restlessness.

“Anyway — oh, I hate this peeler.” She threw it down. “Where’s my little white knife? This makes the carrots fluffy. I hate fluffy carrots.”

She searched in a drawer with her back to him. “You might think I’m boring as hell too, but that’s what happens to people who get married and have a kid and buy carrot peelers and Mr. Clean and all the rest of it, and make sure everything goes okay for their kids at school, and go to the hospital in Goose Bay five times a week . . .” She grew louder. Medical follow-up had meant the two of them had been back and forth to see the doctors many times. Wayne got his stitches out and started a new regimen of hormones. They had to meet Dr. Lioukras and go over signs and symptoms: what to do if the abdominal swelling recurred.

“Women start out,” Jacinta said, “with all kinds of passion. Every time I saw an ordinary old starling I’d look at the gold line around every one of its little feathers. Gold. I saw everything like that. Sharp. Edges of leaves. Sounds. Rain. I loved going downtown with all the streetlights, looking at shoes in shop windows. Portholes all lit up on a big boat from England. But you know what kills me? I’m too tired to do that now, even if I could. Even if St. John’s Harbour was at the end of that fence where your father left his tent bag. Women don’t have tent bags, Wayne. Not Labrador women. Men have the tents. I wouldn’t mind my own tent. Mine would be different from your father’s, I can tell you that.”

“What would yours be like?”

Wayne was stuck on verse two of his Remembrance Day poem but didn’t dare ask her for help. His mother hated the way the school made assignments out of every holiday: Remembrance Day, Christmas, St. Valentine’s Day, even St. Patrick’s. “It’s the same every year,” she complained. “I think they do it because no one in that place has a scrap of imagination. If it weren’t for pumpkins and reindeer and bloody leprechauns all over the walls, they wouldn’t have a clue what to be doing with the youngsters.”

Remembrance Day nearly drove her insane: every child in the school trying to imagine what it was like in the trenches and asking their mothers what rhymes with poppy. Maybe, Wayne thought, that was what the matter was with her now.

“My tent? Well . . . it’d have a string of Chinese lanterns, for one thing, and I’d find a way to have music.”

Wayne knew it didn’t matter what rhymed with poppy. He knew the difference between real feeling and doggerel you wrote for homework. Why did there even have to be words? He sank more teeth-marks into his pencil and tasted the paint and wood. Names of things got in the way. What was a poppy if you didn’t call it a poppy? If you just watched one and refused to give it a name. Thomasina was a good one for naming things in a way that still let you ask questions. That night in hospital, waiting for Treadway, she had tucked the cool sheet around Wayne’s neck and talked about his operation. Thomasina had not called it an operation, or a surgery.

“Those waters rushed, didn’t they.” Her hand had cooled his forehead. “They rushed over the landwash. Our bodies are made mostly of water, Annabel.”

“You’re calling me that again.”

“I am. Is it all right?”

“I liked it when I was little. I thought it was Amble.” He remembered it had felt like a name you would call a newborn puppy or a child you loved. “But it wasn’t Amble. It was your little girl. Annabel. I like that too.”

“Your mother and I were good friends. There were things we both lost. Things that have to do with you and why you’re here. But you have to wait for the doctor. And for your father. It’s not my place.”

“What did you call the rushing thing?” He had been half asleep. Treadway’s voice was in the hall. Thomasina went out to him. “Rushing . . . what was it?” The hall grew louder. “Dad?” Was Treadway shouting? Treadway never shouted. Wayne had not discerned the words. Rushing. Landwash. Annabel. Lost. He slept.

Dr. Lioukras had done his best. He believed you could talk to any child over the age of eleven as if the fully realized person inside had begun to open, and he had tried to use words that were true. The limitations of medical language were no greater, in his mind, than those of language as a whole. Science, medicine, mythology, and even poetry shared a kind of grandeur, as far as he saw. He had two copies of Donald J. Borror’s
Dictionary of Word Roots and Combining Forms
, which broke biological terms into their earliest known fragments, and he read it just for fun. But even Donald J. Borror was having a hard time helping him now.

“This is one time,” he told Wayne, who sat propped up in bed balancing green Jell-O cubes on a knife and letting them melt on his tongue, “when medical science has given itself over entirely to mythical names. A true hermaphrodite” — he said it as if the state were an attainment — “is more rare than all the other forms. It means you have everything boys have, and girls too. An almost complete presence of each.”

“Only my balls aren’t the same as the other boys’. I saw in gym.”

“Right. You have only one testicle. And your penis. If you weren’t taking your pills . . .”

“My pills are about that?”

“Yes. Your penis wouldn’t be as large as it is now.”

“What would it be like?”

“Hermaphroditism is so rare. It’s not certain. You would become more like a girl than you are now. You’re already a girl inside.”

“Inside?” How could he be a girl inside? What did that mean? He pictured girls from his class lying inside his body, hiding. What girl was inside him? He pictured Wally Michelin, smaller than her real self, lying quietly in the red world inside him, hiding.

“You’ve been menstruating. That’s what the fluid was inside you. Menstrual blood that couldn’t escape.”

“Has it escaped now?”

“We let it out.”

“But it happens again, right?”

“In girls, yes. Every month. But in your case we don’t know how often.”

“Can it get out now? New stuff?”

“We’re hoping” — Dr. Lioukras had eyes you could see uneasiness in right away — “that with new medication, it will stop.”

“But if it didn’t stop, would it get trapped again?”

“You would have to come in again, like this time, if it happened. You would need another gynecological intervention.”

So it was with names — suture, true hermaphrodite, menstrual blood, gynecological intervention — that the doctor had done his best to acquaint Wayne with the story of his male body and the female body inside it. Dr. Lioukras was not happy with the talk. He had wanted it to be about life, and possibility, not blood and stitching and cutting. He had to remind himself that the work of a surgeon is poetry of a kind, in which blood is the meaning and flesh is the text. Without his work, he told himself, many people would be buried early among the stones on Crow Hill, over the slow, cold inlet, and would feel no more joy, or life, or love.

Now, after the operation, Wayne felt the power of names in a new way. His father ate his evening toast, sometimes with a kipper. Jacinta crocheted. They did not look outside at the night. Wayne tried to remember a time before he knew the word for
sky
. You explained away the mystery of the night, he thought, by naming its parts: darkness, Little Dipper, silver birch.