Crossings (24 page)

‘What are you doing that for?'

‘Ah, they expect you to.' Tossing in some wrapped soap as well.

‘But we don't need
towels.
'

‘Haven't you ever lifted anything?'

I don't answer.

‘I don't believe it. When you were a kid? Penny candy.' He thinks about it. ‘Stamps. When you worked in offices. Stamps is the same thing.'

‘No.'

‘You never did anything buckshee?'

‘What?'

‘Slugs in phones.'

‘No.'

Years later, I do it once, to see. Thirty-two cents of liver from Eaton's meat counter. Walk right out, expecting lightning to strike me dead.

‘Did you do that
too
?' Francie laughs. ‘So did I. A lipstick from Hudson's Bay. I had to. We were always so damn superior, you know?'

I refuse to speak to him, and he refuses to put the towels back.

When he pays at the counter, I am sure the clerk knows. I'm sure it's all over my face.

We catch the bus to Campbell River. I don't say anything for miles.

‘For christ sake, a couple of measly towels!'

‘If
I
ever decide to sell my soul,' I say loftily, ‘it won't be for a pair of towels. It'll be for a million dollars. It's too petty, it's undignified.'

‘You lost your soul now, eh?' He snorts. ‘Do you good. You're so fucking high and mighty.'

When I was six, the devil came to me and said, ‘I can stop all this. In the twinkling of an eye.'

But I knew all about his being able to quote scripture. I was on the floor, rocking back and forth. It had gone on a long time. More than a week.

He was dressed all in black satin, with a great cape, and the cape was lined with red. Just like in the funnies, except for his face. A wise dark face, full of suffering. A small thin man, he smiled at me. Not at all like Epstein's Satan. More like his Michael, spare and muscled with denial, rising sorrowfully above. He seemed so sorry for me. I could see he really did want to stop it, the asthma.

My mother came in to see what I was yelling about. She said, ‘You were saying “No” over and over.' I didn't tell her this time it was the devil.

But sometimes, I worry. I've always been so damned lucky. And the wish is equal to the deed.

Before I was kicked out of confirmation class—the second one—I asked about the text that goes ‘But I say unto you that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery already in his heart.'

‘Does that mean thinking is as bad as doing?'

‘Yes.'

And so it seemed to me that, logically, if you thought a thing, you might as well do it: since each was equally as sinful as the other. In fact, not only ought you to acknowledge the thought, but in some way you were compelled to perpetrate the deed. Not to do so made one into a whited sepulchre. It was arguments like these that pissed the Reverend Manfred off. And so he told me to leave. I had too much pride in my intellect, he said. ‘I've done everything I can for you. I allowed you to refuse confirmation last year.'

‘That was the Trinity issue.'

‘Yes. And I put you into an adult class, and you still think you're too clever for God.'

I think, at the end, we agreed that faith was a matter of grace and God in His divine wisdom had not seen fit to grant me grace.

But I've always been lucky.

At Campbell River we caught the sea plane to the island. I don't remember its name but we came down at a cove called Miller's Landing.

The island had one taxi and we took it to the buddy's cabin.

It was on an inlet. The cabin stood on a bluff above the sea. Below were oyster beds, and out in the ocean, a dry rock with gulls wheeling over it. Behind the cabin was a wooded ravine. I never remember the names of trees. The ones that burst into flower in spring and fall. Little tips of blood rust on their white petals. In memory of the crucifixion. And thin white trees, delicate, their bark chewed off to the waist by something. Deer? We never saw any. And the ones with strips of burnt orange peeling away like origami paper. A stream ran down the bottom of the ravine. Among the lush green grass, tender as snails. And tiny blue flowers were everywhere. It was all green and blue. Deep green, forest green, velvet, lime, grey blue, mauve blue, royal, ink, madonna. And out there, the sea, falling away to the bottom of the sky.

Mik had the key. Inside everything was spare and neat and clean.

There were bunk beds. We had bought groceries when we landed, but we took no liquor. I never thought of it then, but for Mik it must have meant something. I'd never go to a cabin for a week now without at least two bottles of something.

In the mornings, the leaves and the blades of grass had great teardrops of dew on them. You'd soak your jeans to the knees just walking to the stream for water. The gulls swerved and hooted like boisterous kids and the wash of the ocean below made me feel as if we were on a great ship, rocking softly through abandoned seas. The air was so clear and fresh it could have come from an artesian well. You drank it with your mouth.

We picked oysters and made stew. We swam. We made love.

The first night, in the soft light, like clear tea, from the kerosene lamp, Mik held me for a long time. He kissed my nipples and then took them in his mouth. When he came into me, he said, ‘No. Lie still. I'll show you something.'

His breath was warm and slightly tobacco-y. We lay together very still, his love swelling in me, his arms around me, his hands cupping my buttocks. Mik never made love like a gentleman, on his elbows. We lay so still the bed went away, and the cabin, and we were in the great deep, suspended. Golden light, dimly green, filtered through the shifting fronds, and all was baroque with time never seen, great arches encrusted with starfish and cornucopias of porcelain. Towers and steeples soared up until you could not see them anymore, lost in undulating mists far above. I was under the sea at last, slippery and silk, silver and single, whole, not moving, as salmon do, resting in their element, gills moving imperceptibly, breathing.

His sweat on my tongue. The Russians say you never know a man until you have eaten so many pounds of his salt. When we came, we came together, still silent, still immobile, the great long crest taking us together in the molten dark.

We did not speak of it. We passed into sleep.

Ben had said, ‘There is nothing in the act of love which is degrading. Everything done in love is pure,' reading the chapter on experimental foreplay. Last night, talking to Edna, I remembered suddenly Ben's Great Experiment. He'd shit in me but he wouldn't give me a baby. And then he asked me to douche with Lysol. I'd forgotten that. Dear god, I'd forgotten that. And they say you never forget the first one.

 

WE MET THE blind girl.

We'd gone out to the rock island in the buddy's boat. In the middle, in a natural cup, was an aquamarine pool of water, and there we made love. The sun was white, the sky noisy with glare, and we made love to each other in the blues and greens of the pool.

When we are leaving, I see the sail boat.

‘Oh look. There's somebody there. In that cove.'

We walk over and find them, the large Danish family and the blind girl.

I saw her again, in the doctor's office. We went on the same day, every Saturday morning, at the same time. I would sit, large and pregnant, and not speak to anyone for fear she would recognize my voice. I was so ashamed. Once she sat right beside me on the leatherette bench, and looked into my eyes. I thought, My god! She's got her sight back. As if somehow she had seen me that summer.

They are clambering over the rocks looking for oysters. In the forest above their cove stood a huge timbered house. They are not allowed to live in it, and so they live in the sailboat moored in the water. It is a Welfare regulation. So long as they live in the house, which they own, they are not eligible for assistance. They are required to sell it, and it is up for sale. Impossible on this lonely island. They never go inside, except to get tools or cans of food or books, which they then carry out to the rocks and row across to the sailboat. Ten children. They are brown and strong, with white hair and good teeth, and the eldest girl is a mule deer, leaping from rock to rock, her long hair flying behind her, her voice calling to the others. They see us now and come running toward us, delighted. Now they are standing in a circle, subdued, grinning, nudging one another to shush.

‘We're over to Jackson's place,' says Mik.

They smile.

‘For a holiday. He gave us the key.'

They smile.

‘I'm Mik O'Brien and this is the Missis.'

They shake hands with us, introducing themselves separately, overcome with shyness and joy. When the eldest girl puts out her hand, it is two degrees off. Her blue eyes stare past my head. ‘Ingrid's blind,' says one of her brothers.

‘Come with us,' she says and we all go out to the sailboat—in bunches of five and four and three—for tea.

It is a large ship. Perhaps they call it a sloop, I don't know. It has a library and an organ, and a round smiling mother baking bread. The father is lean and tall and brown, and he too smiles all the time. They give us a concert on the deck, before tea. The youngest children sing, their clear voices rising into the still air. Ingrid plays the organ and her father the violin. One of the brothers has a recorder. Another brother tells me he would have brought his guitar if he'd known, but it is in the house.

They stay there all winter round, on that boat. The children take lessons by correspondence.

‘And you never go into the house, not even in winter?'

‘No. It is a foolish regulation, but I have given my word.' The father has been hurt in a logging accident, and cannot work yet.

‘The Missis here, she's a teacher,' says Mik. ‘Taught at the university.'

‘You're a professor?' There is such awe in his voice.

‘No, no. A teaching assistant. It's not the same.'

‘You taught at the university,' says Mik. ‘Same difference.'

‘She's a writer too.' Yes, they listened to the radio. Yes. They'd heard it, did I write that?

‘'Course, Ferris is her maiden name. Now she's O'Brien.'

‘You are on your honeymoon,' says the mother, smiling.

Mik goes red and denies it, and they all giggle.

They come over every day after that, bursting into our field with laughter, knocking carefully at the door of the cabin. Bringing us buns and cakes, and once—from Ingrid—a rose done in luminous red satin, the petals perfect, a calyx of green ribbon, one tender leaf. I kept it for years and Anna wore it for dress-up. But one day I threw it out, dead and bedraggled, like a real rose. In one of my passions of clean-out, feeling guilty for having so much.

I turned it over in my hand and wondered at it. It was vulgar, really. The leaf was out of a kit. Like a vase made out of shells.

‘Me? I'm an engineer,' says Mik.

I look at him.

‘Well, I studied for a boiler makers' certificate,' he says to me later. ‘That almost makes me an engineer. Maintenance engineer.'

‘I wish we hadn't lied.'

‘So, it don't hurt them,' he says, getting mad.

‘It makes me feel ashamed.'

‘Which lie you talking about?'

‘All of them,' I say, lying.

‘Yah? Like saying we was married.'

‘You don't have to put that on. All that rotten grammar.'

‘All right! We're not married. You know what you can do about that.'

‘They're so good, it shines out of them.'

‘So, are we hurting them?'

‘No.'

She sat beside me, a large-boned girl in dun and city dust, her lovely hair caught back somehow into plaits, messily, coarse, little frizzled bits sticking out around her freckled face. Her sweater had balls of wool all over it and her stockings were thick, the kind Grandma wore. She turned her great blue eyes on me and I thought, in panic, My god! She can see.