The Death of Small Creatures (9 page)

Four

Skate Wing (July 2006)

My desire to
be loved and kept by a man begins at age ten. My fifth grade teacher, Mr. L, holds out his arms to me. He is smiling, delighted. I have just given him a hot pink pin that says,
Being sexy is a hard job, but somebody has to do it.
“Thank you!” he says, even though the pin is inappropriate, especially for a Catholic schoolgirl.

As he moves toward me to give me a hug, I laugh and run away, leave him standing there with his arms extended. Thus, my duplicitous relationship with men begins, desire and aversion at once: desire because I want them to fill the void that is me, and aversion because they can't fill the void after all.

It's a perfect
evening: blue July sky, Garry oaks through the window, twinkle lights strung around the banisters and trees outside.

Leigh asks the waitress for a quiet table for two, but it's a busy night and there are no tables available.

Leigh insists. “Can't something be done?”

The waitress says, “Let me see what I can do,” then dashes away, only to return a moment later with good news. “We don't have any regular tables for two,” she says, “but we can offer you one of our private dining suites.”

The waitress leads us through the sea of beautifully adorned tables spread with white linen tablecloths and fine flatware and silver. People smile as we make our way through, escorted like VIPs, and I flush with embarrassment at this special attention.

The private dining suite is a gorgeous little enclave with dark wood walls, soft lighting and a heavy decadent curtain on each side.

These kinds of embellishments tend to frighten me, the lavishness of it all; I attribute this to my blue-collar upbringing, dinners of meat and potatoes, meatloaf, meatballs and anything else having anything to do with grade-A beef served conservatively next to potatoes or rice. I grew up eating in front of the TV.

“It's like a little kingdom,” I say.

The special tonight is skate wing. A fish shaped like a skate: my initial analysis leaves me confounded. Later I will learn the truth about the skate, a species of fish resembling the stingray that has been overfished and whose population is steadily decreasing. I imagine the skate like a stingray willowing through the water with its wings expanded, the lovely caress of water flowing over and under the wings, the small face of the fish in the middle and the long deadly stinger a wisp, a live wire trailing behind.

Endangered.

I think of the wings of the skate sliced off and the remaining middle part of the fish, that face of it, drifting off to sea.

In the 1400s
in England, a gentleman sent a pair of gloves to the woman he wished to marry; if she wore these gloves to church on Sunday, it signalled her acceptance of the proposal.

In Wales, a lovesick man would carve a spoon of wood and send it to the woman he wished to marry; if she wore the spoon on a ribbon around her neck, it meant she accepted his proposal.

I know it's coming, my marriage proposal. I asked for this, harassed Leigh into doing it, said time and again, “Are you ever going to marry me?”

So now I look at him sitting over there across the table from me, smiling, thrilled with how the evening is unfolding. He loves our special room, the special attention. The pretence of good service seems to please him more than the occasion at hand, more than the pending marriage proposal. I sense this intuitively.

The implications of acceptance are vague but profound. To say, “Yes,” or better yet, “Yes, I will.” I will what? I will spend the rest of my life with you, I promise? Preposterous. I will never leave you, I know it? Ridiculous. I believe in this absurdity no more than I believe in the tooth fairy. And yet…

I maintain a pleasant demeanour.

We're having a wonderful time.

It's as if the universe has set the stage for something divine to transpire between us, or the universe has set this beautiful stage as a test, to see if I can decipher the truth beyond the beauty, to see if I can make the right decision despite the trinkets of stars hanging above the treetops, and the summer breeze drifting through the restaurant, lifting the hems of tablecloths and rousing my senses. Or do I mean lulling my senses?

It's intoxicating.

I smile.

I feel sick.

We're living in
the top portion of an old heritage house now. It's like living in the gut of a ship.

We moved in at the end of the summer. Our old apartment building across from the high school on Caddy Bay Road caught fire. We left our red walls behind.

“You have three days to move out,” the fire chief said, even though our place was relatively undamaged. But the smoke wreaked evil—the co-mingling of the natural and unnatural elements of those things that form the architecture of modern human co-habitation, of communal living—the scent of burnt wood and plastic mingling with paint and carpet, a hint of fried electrical wires and a subtle undercurrent of fibreglass, all those sloughed-off skin cells, all the hair from everyone's hairbrushes, maybe even asbestos.

It was the plumber welding pipes in the wall behind the bathroom sink in 304 who did it, the spark from the plumber's blowtorch. The plumber did it to us.

This is what communal living smells like up in flames—a post-mortem of human decay and industry, capitalism up in smoke. I couldn't help but think we deserved this, because the scent of a house fire is like a warning. It smoulders. It shrugs. It whispers from the ashes,
It isn't natural to live this way
.

Only one soul—a cat—died in the fire.

Going back many
hundreds of years, every woman had the right to propose to a man on February 29, the leap year, the day considered to have no recognition in English law, thus the day was leapt over and ignored, hence the term leap year. It was considered to have no legal status, therefore, neither the day nor tradition had legal status. A woman would consequently take advantage of this day beyond tradition and propose to the man she wished to marry.

The waiter brings us our skate wing. I look down upon it, note its shape, its ravaged capacity for deft motion through water, its other wing amputated, perhaps lying over there on Leigh's plate, the other wing, the other half. Are we dining on the same animal ripped in half? I cannot help but feel a sense of travesty.

Oh, where's the severed capacity for flight?

The ocean is so far away.

I'm standing on
the deck, staring at the moon.

I smell herbs from the garden. The boys, the three young chefs living in the suite below, keep an herb garden in the yard, along with three potted tomato plants, so the air holds the tang of fresh basil and mint, combined with the hearty sweetness of the tomatoes. Morning glory has twirled up the trellis, and the white blossoms have pursed shut into little funnels reaching into the darkness.

The sky is so black and starry. Nothing is in the way. Nothing stands between me and
it
, whatever
it
is, that thing that compels us into action. And I don't mean perseverance but rather something more in line with necessity, to live despite ourselves, the surge of being.

I feel it in the hard times more than in the joyous times. It feels like a hard, round object the size of a golf ball moving down my throat, then taking up residence in the hollow region of the guts, as if we come with an empty space inside us in order to harbour the pain of existence.

My heart contracts.

Halloween last year:

Here's a dilapidated jack-o-lantern sitting out on the deck in the rain. The Modigliani portrait of the beautiful woman with an elongated nose gazes at me knowingly from the corner of the living room. The flames in the gas fireplace lick the glass panel that separates the open flame from the world. The glass panel gets dangerously hot.

I have warned Leigh's children to be careful. “Watch the glass. Don't sit so close.” I have never had to warn the oldest boy because he seems to have acquired in his small-for-his-age delicate body an evolved understanding of a three-dimensional universe, how we fit, what precautions must be taken in order to come out of it all in one piece. I sense this in the way he reads diligently, hair tussled, always curved into the process of whatever he's doing.