Twenty-Six (6 page)

Arvel had grown up in Albion Mines. Jackie had grown up in New Glasgow, a nearby town. She had no siblings, no aunts, uncles, or cousins. In the seven years since her parents passed away, her husband’s family had become her only link to a sense of rootedness or permanence. Her mother had a cousin in New Glasgow with whom Jackie was not on good terms. There were a few old friends from school, but most of the people she’d known then had gone off to university and either not come back, or come back changed and disconnected from her somehow. Colleen Chisolm had been her closest confidante after high-school graduation, and they had stayed in touch, but it had been years now since Colleen herself had moved to Halifax, and it was hard to stay close over that distance. Tomorrow she’d be living with Colleen and it would be Arvel who was a hundred miles distant.

By looking around her, by examining the possessions they’d collected, she could trace a history of her life with Arvel. There was a pattern, as easily identifiable as the rings in the stump of a cut tree. Their bed, a ragged double mattress with no box spring and no frame, was from the meagre early period of their marriage. For a short time, a week, perhaps, it had been the only piece of furniture in their old apartment, a tiny one-bedroom on Bridge Avenue, bordering the Red Row. They had not conceived a child for the first time on this mattress. That had taken place before they were married, on a blanket at Melmerby Beach. But the first signs of the miscarriage which ended that pregnancy had started while she’d been lying on this mattress: the few days of heavier and heavier spotting, followed by the intense, painful cramping.

The kitchen table was too small for a family of four and was surrounded by chairs that did not match each other or the table.
She still thought of the table as new. Six years was such a short time. But the varnished surface of the tabletop was scratched and pitted, the result of countless turbulent meals.

The living-room furniture, two matching couches and a wingback chair, were on the outer edge of the concentric rings. They were Scotchgarded, nylon-wool, button-tufted furniture, made by Sklar, and paid for in two payments less than a year ago, when Arvel’s mining cheques had started coming in.

She wandered from room to room, taking a final look at what she’d be leaving behind in a few hours. She felt removed from the house already, as though in deciding to leave, in knowing she’d be gone in the morning, part of her had already left. As she looked at clothing and furniture, it struck her that all those things would have to be sorted through and divided. Final decisions would have to be made.

From the floor of the closet in the hallway she dragged a grey plastic storage bin to the centre of the living-room floor. This was the box of memorabilia. All the loose ends of memory in her history with Arvel and before. When they had moved out of the old apartment on Bridge Avenue, all of the things this container held had been scattered about, some in smaller, disintegrating boxes, some loose at the bottom of drawers. Jackie had gone out and bought this box. She’d taped a label to the lid that said “Memories” and thrown things in in no particular order. She’d planned to sort through it all at a later date, but had never done so.

She snapped the lid from the box and sat on the carpeted floor to examine the contents. The smell of yellowing paper and closed up dust rose into her nostrils. On top there was a scroll of paper tied with pink ribbon, a religious certificate. It was her
first confession or confirmation document. The next thing that caught her eye was a square of yellowed newspaper. She picked it up and looked at the photo from the
New Glasgow Evening News
. This was a photo she’d seen several times before. It was Arvel at age two or three, sitting on Santa’s knee. Arvel’s big, square face was recognizable even as a toddler. The caption below the photo read: “Checking it twice. Santa stopped by the Steelworkers’ Hall last Thursday to double-check on his list of children who were being naughty or nice. Little Arvel Burrows, from Albion Mines, claims he’s been a good boy all year.”

Jackie felt her throat thickening with emotion and snapped the lid quickly back on the box. She found a pencil on the shelf above the bar in the closet, and added a note to the label: “Arvel: half of these things are mine and half are yours. We’ll have to go through it some time soon.” She placed the box back inside the closet and closed the closet door, and considering what she’d just written on the box, realized that she had been putting off writing a note to Arvel.

She dug in a drawer full of cookbooks in the kitchen and found a spiral notebook that looked as though it had never been used. Opening to the first page, she wrote
Dear Arvel
at the top. It was such a strange thing to be doing: writing a note for the husband she was leaving. It was an act from a soap opera. The page she was writing on was smaller than letter-size, but it seemed enormous and empty, white as a blank mind. What did she want to say?

I’m sorry
, she wrote. She paused a moment and considered keeping the note to these two words.
I have moved to Halifax with the girls
.

She almost wrote “Love” before her name at the bottom of the note, but realized how strange that would look to him.

The girls had migrated to her bed and were both asleep, curled beneath the ragged quilts when she entered the room. Not wanting to disturb them by turning on the overhead light, she crawled into the corner where the desk lamp stood on the floor. She switched on the lamp, aiming the broad end of its cone-shaped shade at the nearby wall, and changed into her flannel nightgown in the subdued light. She moved Melanie to the edge of the mattress and rolled Kate gently beside her to make room for herself. She set the alarm on the clock radio for seven, switched off the light, and crawled wearily between the sheets. She lay a short time awake, her eyes open in the total darkness.

She remembered what this house had looked like the day they’d moved in, how big it had seemed compared to the apartment they were moving out of, how hopeful she’d been of her future here, how her life had seemed to be taking a shape she’d felt positively about.

She thought back to when she and Arvel had first started dating. There had been a dance for which they’d gotten dressed
up: she in a gown of some sort, he in a dark suit with a white boutonniere in the lapel. It must have been a wedding party, what else would he have dressed up for? They had only been seeing each other a short time, and she could remember the remarkable sight of him in that suit: so large and powerful a man somehow tamed or gentled by his attire. She remembered dancing close with him that night and the soft way he spoke in her ear as he held her. That tender, beautiful side of her husband was real. It was a part of him she’d always tried to nurture.

She’d been optimistic when he’d started working in the mine. Their financial troubles ended overnight. She saw Arvel’s self-confidence surfacing, especially since his recent work on the organization drive for the union.

But they always found themselves shouting at each other. Drinking had been such a large part of his life for so long that he never managed to step away from it completely. Always some irresponsible action managed to further erode her faith in him.

She closed her eyes and concentrated on breathing slowly through her nose, and before long she drifted into an uneasy sleep.

It was almost five thirty when she opened her eyes. Something seemed to have happened. A motion or a noise. She sat up in bed and listened, then put her head back to the pillow and drifted off again.

It was the phone that woke her next, what seemed like a very short time later. She staggered to the kitchen and picked up the receiver.

“Hello,” she said.

“Is Arvel at home?” a woman asked. She offered no explanation of who she was.

“No, he’s not,” Jackie said. “Who’s calling?”

“Is he at work, today?” the voice said.

“I’m not …” Jackie hesitated. “I’m not exactly sure, but I think he’s twelve to eight this morning. Who is this?”

There was a click, and the line went dead.

M
eta had drunk her fill of Tokyo again. She took the secret key from its hook inside the cupboard, climbed into the elevator, and pressed the button for the twelfth floor. As the ancient lift creaked its way to the top, she prayed no one else would get on. She wanted a Japanese-free zone for herself, a small space around her with only her and her own cultural expectations in it. She had to be secretive on her way to the roof anyway, as she did not want anyone to see that she had a key. She was one of the only residents of the building to have one. Yuka, her neighbour from across the hall, was the building’s unofficial superintendent, and had surreptitiously copied her one from the storage box mounted on her kitchen wall.

When the door opened at the twelfth floor, she rushed down the hallway, through the door at the end, and up the two flights of stairs to the steel door that led to the roof. Once through the door, she instantly felt her insides loosen, relax a little. It was the perspective that did it. This was the only place she knew in
Tokyo where you could stand back and look at something from a distance. The building was only twelve storeys tall, but it stood close to the crest of a hill in Shinjuku Ward. As she leaned on the chest-high concrete ledge, she could see in one direction all the way to the skyscrapers at Shinjuku Station, the few tops of blue-and-red neon signs that rose up in the foreground only a hint of the glitter of Kabuki-cho. In the other direction she could see clear to the Sunshine Plaza tower in Ikebukuro. Slightly north of the centre-point between the two gleamed the white roof of the Big Egg, Tokyo Dome, where the Yomiyuri Giants played their home games.

The air was crisp and, for Tokyo, wintry. The lower temperatures made the air, usually laden with pollen, cooking smells, auto exhaust, sewage, and industrial effluent, seem relatively brisk, odour-free, and refreshing. She sniffed some in and held it in her lungs a moment before exhaling. The
NHK
forecast she’d listened to on the radio had said
kumori, tokidoki, yuki desu
. Cloudy with the possibility of snow.

It would be good and cold at that moment in Nova Scotia, and Meta closed her eyes very briefly, pictured the big fields below the Red Row covered with snow all the way to the river.

There was no cure for culture shock, she knew. After a year and a half in this foreign environment, she’d learned that culture shock came and went in surges. Only time would make the fed-up feeling, the sadness, the mental fatigue, go away. And they would eventually return. But coming to the roof helped her clear her mind. Moving above and away from so many of the things that physically boxed her in was always a relief. Getting a broad view of the sky was a reminder that she still inhabited the same planet on which she’d been born.

This fresh wave of culture shock had come on in mid-afternoon Friday, two days ago now. Classes had been doing “how to” speeches, something most Japanese students were very good at. The culture was built around the kata, the series of programmed moves carried out in the martial arts. There was a prescribed and accepted way of doing almost everything, from greeting someone a certain number of years older, to arranging flowers in a vase, to wrapping a gift. For most of the morning and past the lunch hour, she’d sat through speech after boring speech. From “How to Smoke a Cigarette” to “How to Sharp a Pencil” to “How to Make a Maki Roll.”

Then, completely unexpectedly, a bright but usually silent and reserved student, in a class of students with mid-level English abilities, walked to the front of the room with an easel under her arm. The full attention of the class had transformed her from a shy and contained young woman to a broadly smiling, highly animated performer. She set up the easel, established eye contact with everyone in the room (the first item on Meta’s evaluation form), and peeled back the cover sheet of the easel to reveal the topic of her speech: “How to Curse Someone with Straw Doll.”

She had all the transitional words perfectly positioned. From “First, you must select your victim,” accompanied by a drawing on the easel that showed a large disembodied hand pointing an index finger at a frightened-looking asexual cartoon figure, to “
Next
, you obtain some hair or clothing” all the way through to the conclusion: “Please follow these steps carefully, and your victim will become sick,” here she bent over and mimed vomiting. “Or will surely die.” She lay her head gently on the podium and closed her eyes calmly in mock acceptance of her inevitable
fate. The procedure described was a traditional Japanese form of voodoo called
nenokoku mairi
, practised at night, in secret, on the grounds of a shrine. Meta had read a reference to it a few months before in an article in the
Tokyo Journal
.