Landing (7 page)

Hmm, handwriting's kind of like Morse code, slow and serious. It's so much more tactile than print, I'll grant you that. Here's a smear for instance of the remains of my raspberry tart:

Síle.
P.S. Happy Valentine's Day.

Struggling to decipher the crazy handwriting, Jude's first impression of this letter was that it was indeed written to kill half an hour. And was that "Kathleen (my girlfriend)" as in friend or as in ... On the second reading, she paid more attention to the bits about waiting six weeks and a struggle of wills, and the pointed reference to Valentine's Day. It must have taken quite a while to copy by hand. She licked her finger and touched it to the brown smear at the bottom of the page, tasted it. Raspberry reawakened in her mouth, and she thought,
What a flirt!

She reread the letter twice more; she was too excited to eat lunch. She sat down at the kitchen table with her fountain pen and a not-too-yellowed page of Ireland Museum notepaper.

22 February

Dear Sile,

Got your letter just after I e-mailed—snap! Very good to hear from you.

I know, snail mail takes a while, but just think: If our ancestors hadn't communicated with each other on something as lasting as paper, over the last thousand years or so, there wouldn't be much trace of them left.

Jude was aiming for thoughtful, but it was coming out preachy. Time to switch topics.

Yeah, I think about George L. Jackson, mostly when I cant get to sleep. Thanks for letting me know about him. Not that a handful of facts tell you much about who someone really was.

Rachel Turner,
née
Dorridge, born Chichester, April 3, 1938. Arrived Toronto September 1957. Worked Ladies Apparel Department, Eaton's. Married—

Stop it, Jude.

I keep having to consult my dictionary. It explains "moveable feast," but when you say you and your neighbour have an MBA, I presume you're not talking about a shared Master's in Business Administration?

If spring's around the corner in Big Ireland, you're clearly not just five hours ahead of me, but a whole season. Here in Ontario it's a shiny winter afternoon, and the sidewalks are covered in thigh-high jagged mounds of beige snow, so I prefer to walk on the street, which squeaks underfoot. Some houses still have their Christmas lights hung along the eaves. I'm particularly proud of the icicle outside my bedroom window, which is almost as long as I am.

Oh god, this was like some schoolgirl's essay on "A Winter Day."

My mother's house is on Main Street, just two blocks from the crossroads. I keep trying to saying "my house," but it feels like one more tiny way of letting Mom disappear.

Well, what was the point of writing to this stranger at all if Jude couldn't say what was on her mind? She pressed on.

The museum is only another block away; how's that for a low-stress commute? Last summer when I busted up my knee playing street hockey with some ten-year-olds, I was able to hop to work. You know, this crossroads community (officialspeak for a one-horse town) really isn't so "hideously homogeneous." We've got flower-arrangers and fundamentalists, yeah—and last year someone did chalk RUG MUNCHER (i.e., me) on the door of the museum—but also a gay-run guesthouse, two Web-site designers, a day trader and a Buddhist. When you live in people's pockets you learn how out there some of them are. There's a guy in a rotting mansion just north of town who sets his Labrador on fallow deer and is rumoured to have an unnatural relationship with her. His wife left him a long time ago, or some say she's buried in the woods ... Uh-oh, on reflection that's going to confirm all your prejudices about rural creepiness, isn't it?

It's true that if I want a strawberry-pear smoothie I've got to use my mother's Moulinex. Try again: MY Moulinex. No, cut that; it'll always feel like my mother's Moulinex. Síle, it just occurred to me that I envy you for losing your mother when you were too young to really know what was happening.

Oh lord. This was more real, but—

Sorry, that sounds cruel, and dumb. Of course it's better to have a mother when you're growing up—but right now I miss mine so much that all my bones hurt.

The letter was taking a rapid nosedive.

This letter is taking a rapid nosedive, but I guess there's no use pretending I'm fully compos mentis these days. That's another thing about handwritten letters, they're more honest. If I'd tried to scribble over the above, you'd have seen it, whereas e-mails let people edit their feelings.

Maybe she should e-mail a revised version of this after all. She pulled viciously on one ear lobe. How hard could it be to answer a letter? Not too gushy, not too cool; not too ninety-year-old, not too seven. Somewhere in between "Dear Valued Customer" and "Dear Woman of My Dreams."

That phrase stopped Jude short. She laid down the pen. She'd forgotten the dream till now; she couldn't even remember if she'd had it last night or a few nights ago. It was simple, and mortifying. Síle O'Shaughnessy reclining on a cloud, nude and brown as a figure by Gauguin, looking straight out, unashamed.

Jude started scribbling the first lie she could think of.

There's the phone, better go answer it.

Till next time, Jude.

P.S. I like your line about flying free like a kite—except that if you've ever flown a kite you may have noticed they have to be anchored firmly by the string or else they flop out of the sky?

Well, the length of that P.S. blew her story about the phone ringing, but never mind. Jude would have liked to enclose something, a flower maybe, but there was nothing growing out there in the frozen mud. Instead, she searched the sideboard, and ended up dropping into the envelope a tiny inch-long feather from a Canada goose.

Ah, but when the post knocks and
the letter comes
always the miracle seems repeated—
speech attempted.

—VIRGINIA WOOLF
Jacob's Room

Re: Technology etc

Hey Jude (as the Beatles put it), thanks for your astonishing ginger pumpkin loaf, I take back any aspersions I've ever cast on pumpkins. I love the old Hudson's Bay Company tin you sent it in, I'm going to store my bangles in it. To make this a mutually beneficial arrangement (forgot to tell you, that's what MBA means) I'm posting you some Irish truffles, since North American chocolate doesn't deserve the name.

"Rug muncher" is a new one on me, but after several minutes of reflection I believe I've worked it out! I still maintain that small towns are creepy, but mercifully you don't come across like a smalltown girl; all those childhood years browsing in the adult section of the library must explain it, I suppose.

Got your last e-mail in my hotel in Boston--I'm deeply flattered that I've caused this quantum shift from post to e-mail, can I tempt you to move on to Instant Messaging next?--or texting if you'd only get a mobile...

Yes, Kathleen = girlfriend as in partner not as in female friend, sorry. (I mean sorry for the confusion.) Our two Englishes only pretend to be the same language! The one that always confuses me is "mad,"--when an American tells me he's mad I visualize a straitjacket.

Right now I'm in the crew lounge at Dublin Airport. No, my movements are not like "the random firing of electrons," since you ask, they're as highly structured as a monk's. Four days on, three off, and we bid for our schedules in strict order of seniority. Luckily few are as senior as me because so many have switched to jobs on the ground, and a third of my unlucky colleagues have been given the heave in recent years. Our airline used to be classy, but always on the brink of bankruptcy, so after 9/11 it had to reinvent itself as lean and mean, a.k.a. cheap and nasty.

Still: flying's in my blood, because I was born at 30,000 feet. My Amma--who'd been an air hostess herself--insisted Da take her for a last-minute visit to her parents in Cochin. (High-caste communists, a funny combo.) She was more than eight months on, but the rules weren't as strict in the sixties, and on the way home to Dublin she suddenly had me in the aisle!

You ask how I "stay so charming all the time" during flights--well, I fake it. I've never quite expoded and screamed "Yiz are all a shower of bitches and bastards" (as folklore has it a former colleague once did) but I've come close. Ah no, the truth is a flight attendant has to basically like people or the job would start draining her like a vampire on day one. Speaking of which, time to go through security...

Re: slurs on "Frozen North"

Síle, I just checked an atlas and I'll have you know that Ireland, Ont., is ten degrees further SOUTH than Dublin. I admit the snowbanks are still hip-high but the sun's dazzling.

So, a partner as well as a house; you sound pretty settled to me, for all your talk of freedom...

Re: the museum, it's a lovely 1862 schoolhouse; when the town tried to flog it to a sinister Heritage Village, a bunch of us formed a protest committee. Persuaded an old farmer called Jim McVaddy to donate his priceless Canadiana on condition the town handed over the schoolhouse for a museum--and then managed to beg start-up money from a private foundation. Since I was just about the only one under retirement age (and I'd been interning at a Children's Pioneer Museum half an hour away while doing my BA in the evenings), I wangled the one paid job. In year five,
Backroads and Byways
magazine has hailed us as "one of the more charmingly maverick little museums in Ontario"(!).

I just had a turkey sub with Rizla. The garage/ café is run by the Leungs: see, this area is not entirely populated by the "Waspy pioneers" of your imagination. Gong Leung goes into Cantonese whenever she's bitching about the customers. Their daughter Diana looks totally Canadian and it occurs to me it's because she wears braces. My friend Gwen always says you can tell a Brit (meaning, from your islands) by the bad teeth, but I've assured her that yours are extremely white and even.

Re: Quakers

I keep picturing you in a gray Victorian bonnet, Jude, it's unnerving. But the Quaker thing does help explain your purist oddities. I love the way you say "We built our Meetinghouse at Coldstream in 1859" as if you were there--time traveler! My Amma was Hindu, but the Church insisted she convert to marry Da (already pretty much lapsed, ironically), and he claims it was "simpler for her to change everything" (country, job, primary language, religion, marital status) all at once. Huh, rather her than me!

I chose my house in Stoneybatter because it's handy for the airport, but I love it now. (I'm a Southsider by birth but the rougher charms of Dublin's Northside have grown on me, whereas Kathleen, having grown up with five siblings in a gray housing estate well north of the Liffey, calls my street "grotty" and prefers me to spend my days off in her flat in sedate Ballsbridge.) Basically Stoneybatter's a rare example of an inner-city village: small 1870s artisan's dwellings, plus nasty council flats, but so overrun by artsy professionals these days that it's nicknamed Luvviebatter. The contrast between the indigenous population (fish fingers and stew) and the "jumped-up trendy hoors" as we're known in the vernacular (who buy goat's cheese and cilantro) keeps things lively.

Re: when will you be fully "together" again, ah come on, it's only been six weeks. My ex Ger, when her mother died she went into a year-long slump. Whoops, possibly not the most helpful thing to say, but my point is, go easy on yourself, Jude, will you?

Re: Web site

Nah, I'm not insulted that you call the museum's site "desperately in need of a revamp," Síle. It was set up many summers ago by the Petersons' granddaughter, but then she went to South Korea to teach ESL. Yeah, that would be fantastic if you could fix it so it no longer says "School Workshops coming soon in 2003!"

I thought of you yesterday at Paddyfest in Listowel (about forty k to the northwest of Ireland, Ontario), there was a great ceilidh going on. I had to stay in my stall and hand out leaflets about historic attractions till Cassie and Anneka took a shift so I could go dance. They live nearby in Stratford--C. does box office for the theatre festival, A. wigs--and they've just managed to complete adoption procedures for Lia, who's obsessed with wheels. They've invited me over for Oscar night despite the fact that I haven't seen any of the nominees. (I hate to admit this to a "cinema slut," but it's a rare movie that holds my interest enough to make me sit still for two hours.) Since Mom died all my friends keep wanting to hook up with me, I guess they're afraid I'll turn into Norman Bates if left alone. (Note cunningly inserted reference to classic film.)

Re: Canadians, mock all you like but our inventions include basketball, insulin, the gas mask, ketchup, and international time zones.

Re: vegging on velvet sofa

Well hello there, Jude the Obscure. I should be meeting Trish (yes, before you ask, she's another ex, the first in fact) at the Balkan film festival's opening gala but it's pissing rain so instead I'm curled up on my purple sofa with my cat Petrushka (named for the girl in
Ballet Shoes,
which was my favourite novel till I hit puberty and discovered
Gone with the Wind),
who keeps scratching her head on the corner of my laptop, which accounts for any typos. I can hear footsteps going down the street and a boy and girl having an argument in Dub accents so strong you'd need subtitles.

Re: time zones, politics has made such a pig's ear of the map. I just checked online and Russia's got eleven zones, whereas China insists on keeping all its citizens to the same time, which means the sun comes up at 5am or 9am depending on which province you live in. And just think, you could be sipping tea at 4pm in Argentina, when due
north
of you in Venezuela it's only 2pm!

Beside me is the remains of a vast carton of pad thai--ordered in from one of the six restaurants round the corner. For a tomboy, Jude, you're turning out to have weirdly housewifely traits such as the cooking everything from scratch. I bet you grow rutabagas, don't you? (I have no real idea what a rutabaga is, it came up in the
Guardian
crossword my colleague Fintan was doing in the crew lounge in L.A.) But then you also chop firewood and all that sturdy pioneer stuff. Whereas I'm just a lazy, nail-painting consumer, sigh. (Wretched trampoline currently gathering dust under my four-poster.)

Re: Rizla, I think I'd like him. Since you came out, have you and he ever wound up competing for the limited supply of local talent?

Re: what crimes I've ever committed

Here goes. Vandalism. Defacement of currency (at fourteen when I stamped NO NUKES on banknotes). Driving without a license, driving without insurance, reckless driving under the influence of alcohol and marijuana. Grievous bodily harm: in grade eleven I broke the nose of a bitch called Tiffany-Lou. See, I'm not a Victorian bonneted kind of gal at all.

I have a scar around the base of my ear from playing tabletop. That's amazing that most of you Irish don't learn to drive till your twenties, because all kids in Ontario do is drive around looking for trouble to get into, like mailbox baseball. (Can you figure that one out?) Anyway, tabletop is when a bunch of you go on the back roads and climb onto the car roof with your drinks (cheap wine--Moody Blue, Black Knight, or Lonesome Charlie). So, this particular white-knuckle ride, Rizla was driving (fifteen years older than the rest of us but NOT a sobering influence), hit a pothole and I nearly tore my ear off.

Re: competing, nah, my tastes and his rarely overlap.

Re: as to when I "came out"--hm, I'm not sure I was ever in. I wasn't too concerned about being "normal," maybe because Quakers aren't keen on dogma or fitting in. I brought home some boys and some girls, and Mom never expressed a view (though I'm sure she had her preference). I guess my policy's been to make no grand statements and tell no lies. Unless you count my haircut as a statement? But I've had that since I was four.

Re: virtual coffee

I love it!
Gals
roaring round on
skidoos.
Jude, your English is much stranger than mine, I'll have you know.
Gazumping
is just a real-estate technicality, by the way, not as exciting as it sounds. Many thanks for the tiny zipped bag of water labeled "Genuine Ontario Icicle Tip." I put it in my freezer but it's come out as flat as a credit card. (A parable about globalization?)

I agree, it's very peculiar getting to know each other at electronic arm's length. (We'll have to actually meet in the flesh again one of these years.) So today I've brought you to my favourite Dublin Italian café to teach you what real coffee tastes like. I've also ordered you an impeccable
torta limone.
We're gazing out at the boardwalk erected along the Liffey to give it the look of the Seine, but the tourists slip-sliding along in the rain with plastic bags over their heads do slightly spoil the impression...

Re: Coming Out (which we aged crones of thirty-nine definitely used to pronounce in capital letters), in my case it was a dramatic and somewhat traumatic result of joining a feminist group at college and falling for Trish, but had a happy ending as Da is a die-hard liberal.

Re: being "undomestic partners," Kathleen and I both prefer having our own spaces, and after all, with my schedule I'd be gone more than half the time anyway. I cohabited with Ger for nine months while she drove me slowly insane with her sloppiness. I was three years, on and off, with a pilot called Vanessa, who was memorable in several ways to do with moodiness, alcohol, and (unproven but likely) cheating with a girl in personnel. Vanessa would never have moved in with me, because she was shitscared of the airline finding out. The irony being that she had a Garbo-in-pants air about her and everybody knew already.

Re: International Date Line, flying east across it so you slip from today to yesterday is indeed unsettling. When the captain makes the announcement, I always get this inane impulse to glance out the window, as if there'll be a visible seam down the Pacific.

Re: what I do all day

Right now I'm writing 300 words on forerunners (precognition of things not invented yet) for a newsletter called
Pathways of the Past.
In our archive we have an article from 1867 about a young Mitchell man, coming home late from a dance in a neighbour's parlour, when this roaring black machine with white lights going "faster than a bull could run" nearly knocked him into the ditch. Now, I know you call me "riddled with superstition" just for not liking to open an umbrella indoors or have thirteen at table, but doesn't that sound like a car? Maybe time occasionally curves back on itself, like when you're hemming something and the thread gets knotted into a loop.

Except you probably don't sew either, do you, Síle?

I forgot to tell you that Mrs. Leung let me pay for the strawberry rhubarb pie you and I were telepathically sharing at the Garage yesterday--which I take to mean the community now considers me officially out of mourning. Though I'm hardly fixed yet: Last night when I came home from a great slide show on Ojibway arrowheads, I happened across Mom's reading glasses in the back of a drawer and cried for about half an hour.

Not that she was always fun to live with. We did a lot of speculating about our neighbours, but often she'd just watch her little TV and knit all evening, and she'd snap at me if I forgot to keep the stove stoked up. But nowadays I keep talking to her in my head. Which is much like a long-distance friendship, I guess...(Good if occasionally frustrating.)

Re: dead mothers

I know what you mean. Mine will always be thirty-five and radiant, stirring a pot of chai, blowing me a kiss. As a rather misogynist Bengali proverb puts it, "Only when a woman is dead can we sing her praise."

I can't believe you're still up to your knees in snow, in March; I almost wish I was there to wade around in it.