Guide to Animal Behaviour (19 page)

It's bad. Suddenly, all breasts become ominous objects, growths hanging clamped to your chest like limpet mines, getting ready to kill you. Only three pearls come out. We get the X-rays and look for the other two, holding the plastic negatives up to the light in Susan's basement. I'm shocked to see the white ghost bones and the fibre nets of Susan's organs.

She's still healthy, still makes love (later, her breath turns sour, and lumps appear like black pearls beneath her skin), only our love is more violent and perverse. She craves a pain she can enjoy. Her eyes are greedy for it. Perhaps it is some kind of voodoo she makes against the pain that will come later. Or (I never tell her this) perhaps it is only that she hates herself, that she sees herself as already dead, and only the pain can make her feel alive.

She throws her head back, her eyelids slip shut and she sighs, “Kill me, kill me” meaning “Save me, save me” or “Love me, love me.”

Susan's real self begins to emerge. At first, as she loses weight, she is more beautiful than I could have imagined. The mask does not drop away, but it becomes more expressive, more complex in its implications (what it hides). She begins to weave again. She sits for hours at her loom with the baby on the bench next to her. She doesn't do this for the sake of art; it's so that Gabriela will retain an image of an industrious, capable mother. Gabriela, of course, has very little to say, but shows a surprising aptitude for entangling herself in whatever Susan is doing.

My obsession with photographing her (during this period, I take hundreds of pictures) seems morbid to Susan, but she puts up with it. I take photographs of all her activities: pictures of Susan cleaning house, sitting on the toilet, shopping, weaving, caring for Gabriela. I do a whole series of photos of Susan sleeping and another of Susan's face during orgasm. I do black-and-white studies of different parts of her body: hands, ear-lobes, nape of neck, nipples.

One day I follow her to work and spend an hour shooting her as she cuts the galleys into columns of print, waxes the paper and pastes the stories, headlines and ads onto her layout board. In her hands, the lines of type seem to curve and intersect like the cloth strands of her tapestries.

Secretly, we both know I am making provision for a future she will not share, getting ready for the time when she will be absent. She, too, is getting ready. Nights, now that her parents understand our situation, I sometimes sleep in her bed. (Nothing was said, only things became, for them, suddenly clear; they have begun to treat me with a certain gentle deference and formality which are tokens of their affection.) In the middle of the night, I'll wake up and watch her breathe. When she stirs, she sees that I am weeping. “I miss you already,” I say. “It hurts so much I can hardly stand it.” “What's the worst thing?” she asks. “I'm afraid that when you die it will be awful, that you'll choke or vomit and be terrified.” She stares at me, saying nothing, and I know I have said the words she would have said herself.

We discuss Gabriela endlessly. Her parents are too elderly to cope alone, Susan thinks. I say I want the baby, that I'll take care of her because of the part of Susan that's in her. Susan says, “Yes.” But the next thing I know, she has made up a questionnaire and mailed it to all her relatives and friends. It begins, “I am dying of cancer. Soon my baby will need a new family. You can help me decide what to do about this by filling out and returning the following information sheet.”

The things Susan wants to know include: “Do you believe life is a journey or a trial? Am I being punished? What are your thoughts on hope? Has my life been a waste? Will you continue to love and cherish my baby girl even if she is a flop? How many times a day do you feel joy? Have orgasms? What is the reason for men?”

After the forms come back, we make trips to conduct interviews, until Susan finally decides to leave Gabriela with an older sister in Medicine Hat. The sister has twin boys a year old than Gabriela; her husband is an ex-rodeo rider who owns his own air-freight business which specializes in transporting horses. “I want her to have some men around,” says Susan, “the kind of men that'll make up for her father.” “What about me?” I ask. “You're her auntie. You'll always be there. You'll keep her from growing up ordinary. When the time comes, you'll tell her everything about me. She'll need to know.”

One day (it's winter now) Danny and I take Susan and the baby to the city zoo. Danny is already looking for an apartment; our house is up for sale. Susan insists on carrying Gabriela as we walk among the pens and cages, until she gets tired and hands the baby to my husband. She leans on me as we walk; she's forgotten her mitts, so I give her one of mine, and we walk with our arms around each other, our bare hands buried in one another's coat pocket. To our surprise, Danny's good with Gabriela. He makes her laugh, holds her up to the fences to pet the animals and talks, talks, talks to her, though she never says a word back. “She's in love,” says Susan. “She can't take her eyes off him.”

We are all sad, feeling that, though we are together, we shall soon be apart for good. No one is angry. The level of disaster that has befallen us makes it seem impossible that anyone person could have caused it. Walking through the zoo, we feel the dignity of companions in tragedy. We are not defeated, even though certain things are almost over, almost behind us. There is a sense in which I find this deeply satisfying. This is the way all life should be, I think, wishing only that Susan could go on dying, that my husband could go on leaving me, that we could forever be dispensed from living our humdrum lives — that desert of emotion.

We pause to smoke a joint at the bison pen, where the huge, lumbering beasts stand with their faces to the wind, chewing their hay. Susan and I are reminded of the day we watched the bull gore the woman from Saffron Walden. We have avidly followed Ruth Hawking's subsequent career in the papers — she has been arrested once for shoplifting and twice for reckless driving leading to minor accidents. Susan, always so restrained, gets the giggles whenever she sees these announcements. She says, ‘That woman the bison gored is
still
alive!”

The zoo bison look ungainly and alien, which they are, left over, as it were, from another time. The fences, the baled hay, the feeding rick and the low zoo buildings in the background, all contribute to this sense of dislocation. Except when seen attacking women, they are somewhat boring. They produce in me, for example, only a mild anxiety, a feeling that things aren't right, that there is much to be guilty for.

I look at Danny and say to Susan, “You know, he's not such a bad guy. I haven't been a very good wife to him.” Susan starts to laugh. She gets hysterical and has to sit down on the cold ground. My hand is tangled in her coat pocket so that I fall down with her. Our laughter startles the bison, which glance warily in our direction.

Danny comes over with the baby to see what's wrong. Susan tells him what I said, that I haven't been a very good wife. Danny grins. He says, “That's an understatement.” “That's what I said,” says Susan, snorting with laughter. “Poor bunny,” I say. “I'm sorry.” He hands me the baby and helps us up. Tenderly, he pulls Susan's coat together at the throat and tucks her scarf in.

She watches. She soaks things up through her eyes. She stares at Gabriela for hours on end, hungrily absorbing every whim and turn of emotion. As she gets closer to the end, everything but the child becomes superfluous. “I don't want to forget her,” she says. (What she means by this is a mystery about which I cannot bear to question her.)

About an hour before Susan dies, she opens her eyes and says to me, “Well, here we go.” Her lungs begin to fill up, her breathing grows shallower. She makes a horrible bubbling sound in her chest, which I suppose is what they used to mean by the phrase “death rattle.” Her mother holds her head. I sit on the bed, clutching Susan's hand.

Soon she is breathing air only into her throat. Then I think she must be dead, but her mouth keeps opening as though she were still breathing. It opens once or twice by reflex. I think this time she must really be dead. But then her chin moves once more and I feel a tremor in her hand. I say, “Go, baby sweetheart. It's okay. I'm here. You can go and not be afraid because we're here with you.” Finally, she is dead, though I am not certain when the borderline was crossed, only that she is on the other side. Her mother lets her down and starts, through her tears, to sing a lullaby.

Susan's head is thrown back and slightly to the side, her mouth open. I recognize the pose. I've seen it in old paintings — it is the moment when the soul escapes through the mouth on its way to become a star. That's an out-dated mythological reference, I know, a leftover, like the bison. But I haven't got anything else. It just looks like that.

I go to see Ruth Hawking. (Her husband's name is in the new phone book.) This is a little pilgrimage for Susan. But Ruth is gone. She left him with the kids and flew back to Saffron Walden. Her husband, a lonely, harried man, tells me, “She had a difficult time adjusting to life in Canada.” He invites me in, but has nothing more to add, and I leave after a few awkward minutes. (“Men!” I say to myself.)

3

I go to Medicine Hat for a visit. I like the area. All of a sudden, it strikes me that I really want a place of my own just outside of town where the dry chinook winds blow endlessly in the caragana and nothing stops the eye. I take Gabriela for a drive to look at real estate. (I get a list from a broker.)

Communication is now possible, up to a point. We stop at a roadside table to eat our picnic lunch. I take out a ball of yarn and begin to teach her the Cat's Cradle. I don't really know how to make a Cat's Cradle myself, but I have brought a book and there is plenty of yarn. She is a reserved and intelligent child with Susan's eyes. Watching my fingers fumble with the yarn, her face becomes a mask.

I say to her, “There are certain things you have to know. Suicide is not an option. Life is always better under the influence of mild intoxicants. Masturbation is healthy, the sooner started the better. It's a sin not to take love where you find it. That is the only sin. I have photographs of your mother.”

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Some of these stories have been previously published in the following magazines and anthologies.

“Story Carved in Stone” in
Descant,
Vol. 19, No. 3, Fall 1988;
The Journey Prize Anthology
(Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1990). “Story Carved in Stone” won the 1990 National Magazine Award for Fiction.

“Swain Corliss, Hero of Malcolm's Mills (now Oakland, Ontario), November 6, 1814” in
The Quarterly,
No. 13, Spring 1990.

“Why I Decide to Kill Myself and Other Jokes” in
The Fiddlehead,
No. 155, Spring 1988;
The Journal of Literary Translation,
Vol. 20, Spring 1988;
88
Best Canadian Stories
(Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1988);
Best American Short Stories
(Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1989).

“The Canadian Travel
Notes
of Abbé Hugues Pommier, Painter, 1663-1680” in
Fire Beneath The Cauldron
(Saskatoon: Thistledown Press, 1990).

“The Obituary Writer” in
87
Best Canadian Stories
(Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1987);
Canadian Fiction Magazine,
No. 65, 1989.

“Turned into a Horse by Witches, Port Rowan, U. C., 1798” in
This Magazine,
Vol. 21, No. 2, May/June 1987;
Open Windows: Canadian Short-short Stories
(Kingston: Quarry Press, 1988).

“A Guide to Animal Behaviour” in
The Iowa Review,
Vol. 17, No. 2, Spring-Summer 1987;
Open Windows: Canadian Short-short Stories
(Kingston: Quarry Press, 1988).

“I, A Young Man Called Early to the Wars” in
The Fiddlehead,
No. 144, Summer 1985.

“The Travesty of Sleep” in
Canadian Fiction Magazine,
No. 67/ 68, 1989;
The Third Macmillan Anthology
(Toronto: Macmillan, 1990).

“Woman Gored by Bison Lives” in
The Third Macmillan Anthology
(Toronto: Macmillan, 1990).