February (16 page)

We all learned that way, Barry said. He was steady, neither fast nor slow, and sometimes he stood holding his forehead, working out the math of an angle. She had noticed a small tremble in his pinkie finger when he stood that way.

He kept a pencil behind his ear. It was solitary work and he sized up everything he did. He knelt on one knee, and placed the spirit level, and drew the pencil over the wood, and put the pencil back behind his ear. His work required physical strength, and that wouldn’t last forever.

Helen could guess that Barry had not saved; he had the face of someone who worked hard and spent what he earned. It was a wrinkled and tanned face. And the eyes. They were the kind of eyes people would remark on, and they were hard to get used to.

Helen listened when Barry’s cellphone rang. The ring was a theme song from a
TV
show, but she could not place the tune. Something from the early eighties, something the kids had watched back then.

She guessed that Barry was Catholic. They knew each other, the Catholics did. She could tell without asking. It was in his posture and the way he spoke. He was from the Southern Shore. His stories had to do with sacrifices that paid off, and minor redemptions. There was a self-deprecating humour to his stories, and he was willing to let a silence stand. There was respect for privacy and a belief that pleasure required mystery and that there was mystery behind every bald and ordinary fact.

Helen could picture Barry in his twenties with a sink full of dishes and cans of Vienna sausages stacked in the cupboard. She could see the apartment. The people who would have visited and slept on the couch for months, and the women who would have hung around, halfway lost or on the way to somewhere else. Maybe he had been hard on women.

Barry was a self-taught carpenter, and his was a kind of knowledge that accepted how fast everything else was and it refused to be that fast.

Finicky, he said. You want to take your time. Helen had hired him to cut two arches from the living room to the dining room and to expose the fireplace and put down hardwood floors, and he would also do the painting. She wanted two bookshelves moved. And she wanted big windows in the kitchen.

The sills are rotten, she said. She ran her fingernail over the wood and the paint crackled up in pieces.

I’m not a painter, Barry told her. Helen would have to wait before he committed to the painting. He would have to see.

There are other guys will paint for you, he said. He squinted at the ceiling, his hands on his hips.

If need be, he said.

Helen had seen that his work was in demand. You won’t be available, she asked.

I’m pretty steady on, Barry said, up until June. Then I can’t be had for love nor money. He winked at her. She saw he was reliable even though he could have afforded to be sloppy. There’s only a few master carpenters in town, he said.

In October he put down the sub-floor and she stayed out of his way. It rained most of the time and there was fog. It was cold and she felt it in her wrists. If her friends visited, she introduced them to Barry and he nodded or he touched his cap, but he was absorbed.

The hammer was methodical and from the third floor, where Helen was, it sounded as though it were full of thought and knew how to drive an argument home. Not insistent, but declarative and certain.

She would be in her study sewing and would forget, for long stretches, all about the hammer.

Sometimes Barry would call out that he was going for coffee. Or that he was packing it in for the day.

I’ll leave these tools, he’d say.

He would tell her it was a nice evening. He would call out to her about the sky.

You should see this, Helen, he would say. There’s a bloody big red sun. That was Catholic. That was a Catholic thing to say.

There was a strain of loyalty in him that Helen could almost smell. Of course he didn’t go to mass or take communion. None of them practised any more, her generation. They’d gone to confession as children and been cowed by the idea of original sin, and they had been confirmed, and they still prayed.

None of them really believed, but they had been led to think that whatever existed was out there, whether they believed or not.

Barry stood up straight when he answered his cellphone and looked out the window. There was a bird feeder attached to the glass with clear suction cups, but the birds never came to it.

He said: What time should I pick you up? When he hung up, he whistled a part of the cellphone tune.

He has someone living with him, Helen realized. Someone he drives places, someone depending on him. He was not available.

. . . . .

The Portal

THERE WAS A
smashed portal, and that is key. But everybody knows this already; there is always a key, there is always a portal. A wave of ice hit the window and it smashed. The metal lid had not been drawn shut over the glass, as it should have been, and the window smashed and water got over the electrical panel and short-circuited it. The men had to operate the ballast doors manually and they didn’t know how. But everybody knows that; so let’s just take a moment. Just slow down.

Imagine instead a man with his feet up—for the sake of argument—and a cup of coffee cradled near his crotch, and maybe he’s reading the manual. For the sake of argument: he has a manual open on his lap, and he’s going to place a call later to his wife, and he’s also got a book. It’s a long shift. Later on he will read the book.

Do we know what they had on the rig for supper that night? Helen does not know. She is imagining pork chops with applesauce and she is imagining big steel pans of mashed potato on the steam table, dusted with paprika, smoothed over, decorated with parsley. The men won’t eat the parsley. The Newfoundland men won’t. Cal wouldn’t.

The rolls were good. The rolls had butter melted over the top of them and they were salty, and there were stainless steel bowls of ice with smaller bowls in the middle full of pats of butter, and each pat is between two squares of waxed paper . . . But we should think about the manual. We should think about the portal.

It wouldn’t be a cup of coffee, it would be tea. And this guy has been on duty in the ballast room for about forty-five minutes and he’s leafing through the manual. If it’s coffee, it’s instant coffee. This is the part of the evening Helen likes to think about best—when the man in the ballast control room is having his instant coffee.

Imagine his surprise when the ocean forms itself into a fist and flies across the ballast room through that portal. The ocean burst through the window sometime between 7:45 and 8 p.m. So there is time for the man to have his coffee after supper.

We can imagine that in a moment.

First there’s the idea of ballast.

But first there is this: The ballast operators learned on the job or they learned through private study. Which means they leafed through the manual. They read it through.

There was a manual and they read it; or they did not read it.

Where’s the bloody manual?

The ballast control operators had been promoted from the drilling floor. They had marine experience or they had drilling experience, or they didn’t have very much experience in anything. They had no experience.

But they were in charge of maintaining stability. The company liked you to learn on the job because that way you learned the way the company wanted you to learn. They wanted you to learn a certain way, and that way can loosely be called, or referred to, or otherwise spoken of as
their way
. You learned their way. The company’s way. Which was: Don’t answer back. Which was: Do you want a job or not? Which was: All you have to do is read the manual. There will be long hours in the ballast room while you are on duty and that’ll be a good time to peruse the manual. Later on you might get a few courses, but it’s all in the manual.

There was a policy concerning who got promoted to the ballast control room, but the company didn’t follow it. One fellow didn’t have any drilling or marine experience at all. But he had a good attitude. It helped if you had a bit of university education. Or an education went against you. It was all about whether you wanted to learn. If you expressed interest. It depended on your attitude.

The portal and the fist of water, a piston driving itself through that portal, a fist of ice with stone knuckles; the ocean has become part monster, part machine, driving its paw-piston through that plate of unbreakable glass or whatever the hell and smashing it to smithereens . . . but forget the portal.

It’s still quiet in the ballast room.

Very quiet.

We know what’s going to happen so it’s hard to appreciate the quiet, but let’s just take a moment to do that.

Let the man have his instant coffee. Helen likes to imagine the time before things started to go wrong. When things start to go wrong it gets spotty. She’s easily confused. She tries to run down the corridors, she tries to find out where Cal is, what he’s doing, but she gets lost. He’s in his bunk but he won’t stay there. She doesn’t want him in his bunk. She wants him playing cards. She wants him with the other men. They would have been anxious, but they had faith in the rig. They had faith in that monstrous-large hulking mass of metal. It’s easier if there are a few men sitting around a card table and Cal is one of them. It’s easier if he’s playing a hand of 120s. As far as she knows, Cal never played a game of poker in his life, and if he bet it was with quarters. She gives him a pocket of change. She lets him win a little. She can see his hand cupping a little mountain of coin and dragging it towards him. She sees the way he lays down a heart he’s been hoarding.

Inside the control room there’s also a panel with brass rods that allows the ballast control operators to control ballast manually, and here’s the thing.

Here’s the thing.

Helen has a hard time with this part. Why would this part choke her up? Why do her eyes smart when she thinks of this part? There’s worse to come, but the brass rods are what get to her.

Those brass rods. Nobody knew how to use the brass rods. If they’d known, the rig wouldn’t have sunk. She has learned. Helen has read the reports; she has studied the diagrams; she knows where the rods go and why and how. Because those men didn’t know and they didn’t know, they didn’t know, and it could happen to any one of us.

You might get attacked by a fist through a window and you can bet Helen is ready. She wakes up in the middle of the night knowing where each rod goes, and she will never forget. Brass rod, appropriate solenoid valve located under the mimic panel.

The man in the control room has got the cup of instant coffee and he’s reading the manual, but here’s the thing: the manual didn’t say how to control the ballast if there was an electrical malfunction.

So he can read the manual all he wants.

He can read it backwards if he wants. Or he can read it in Japanese. It’s never going to tell him what to do.

And so the water from the broken portal hits the electrical panel and short-circuits it. The men do not know if the ballast doors are open or closed, but they think they are open so they try to close them. Or the other way around. The rig starts to list very badly. And Helen is desperate to find Cal now. Where is he? She is racing through the corridors, she is running down hallways, and she passes a card game and there’s an empty chair at the table and the men have no faces but they’re Cal, and she’s running and there’s a lot of noise now, down the corridors, and she’s banging on doors.

She can’t imagine where he is. She can’t even imagine.

. . . . .

Her Profile, 2006

AND YES, OF
course, Helen had let the girls talk her into online dating. Yes, she had.

You’re not a dinosaur, Lulu said. Lulu was putting makeup on her mother. Brushing a cinnamon shimmer onto her eyelids. Lulu was a beauty technician. She had won awards at home and abroad. Lulu worked hard, hours on her feet, and her joints ached and her knees were shot, and she had no medical and no pension, but she had her own business.

Lulu dated men, most of them younger than her, and danced in big stadium-like bars and drank hard. She cut hair and did manicures and pedicures, and she did things with body mudpacks and a sensory deprivation tank that were pseudo-spiritual, and she intimated in all that she did and all that she said that if you took care of your image it would improve your soul.

She could do things to you, Lulu’s advertising claimed, that would provoke self-discovery. What Lulu did to you would provoke a profound and unrelenting interest from the opposite sex. Or the same sex. She sold organic vitamins and wizened mushrooms and certain tinctures and resins that Helen was convinced were mildly poisonous. Perimenopausal women all over the city swore by her chakra massages and cactus juice. There was a chakra point smack dab in the middle of the vagina, as far as Helen could tell from looking at a diagram featured on one of Lulu’s pamphlets, and Helen did not allow herself to think about it.

Lulu visited Helen to raid her mother’s fridge. She visited not so much to talk but to draw all the curtains and get drowsy on the sofa while her mother cooked macaroni and cheese. Lulu cleaned out Helen’s liquor cabinet and cooked up limp vegetables and ate Helen’s peanut butter with a spoon. Helen waited on her hand and foot. Lulu was a waif. She was sexy and petite and lazy as a cut cat.

Mrs. McLaughlin is an example, Lulu stage-whispered as she applied Helen’s eyeliner. She stood back with her arms crossed over her chest to survey her work.

And Mrs. Buchanan, she said. Remember Mrs. Buchanan, she taught grade four? They are both Internet dating.

Lulu had a sponge and she was touching Helen’s cheeks. You are still a beautiful woman, she said. And she dabbed Helen on the nose.

The girls had said a computer. The girls had said online dating. And Helen had tried it. Sometimes now she woke up in bed in the middle of the night zinging with humiliation.

She had written online with candour. What a fool. She had been earnest. She did not put her picture up; the girls said, Don’t send a photo. The girls said: There’s plenty of time for photos later.