On the darkening streets the poppies blossom, for Remembrance Day. They’re made of fuzzy cloth, red like valentine hearts, with a black spot and a pin through the center. We wear them on our coats. We memorize a poem about them:
At eleven o’clock we stand beside our desks in the dust motes of the weak November sunshine for the three minutes of silence, Miss Lumley grim at the front of the room, heads bowed, eyes closed, listening to the hush and the rustle of our own bodies and the booming of the guns in the distance. We are the dead. I keep my eyes closed, trying to feel pious and sorry for the dead soldiers, who died for us, whose faces I can’t imagine. I have never known any dead people.
Cordelia and Grace and Carol take me to the deep hole in Cordelia’s backyard. I’m wearing a black dress and a cloak, from the dress-up cupboard. I’m supposed to be Mary, Queen of Scots, headless already. They pick me up by the underarms and the feet and lower me into the hole. Then they arrange the boards over the top. The daylight air disappears, and there’s the sound of dirt hitting the boards, shovelful after shovelful. Inside the hole it’s dim and cold and damp and smells like toad burrows. Up above, outside, I can hear their voices, and then I can’t hear them. I lie there wondering when it will be time to come out. Nothing happens. When I was put into the hole I knew it was a game; now I know it is not one. I feel sadness, a sense of betrayal. Then I feel the darkness pressing down on me; then terror.
When I remember back to this time in the hole, I can’t really remember what happened to me while I was in it. I can’t remember what I really felt. Maybe nothing happened, maybe these emotions I remember are not the right emotions. I know the others came and got me out after a while, and the game or some other game continued. I have no image of myself in the hole; only a black square filled with nothing, a square like a door. Perhaps the square is empty; perhaps it’s only a marker, a time marker that separates the time before it from the time after. The point at which I lost power. Was I crying when they took me out of the hole? It seems likely. On the other hand I doubt it. But I can’t remember. Shortly after this I became nine. I can remember my other birthdays, later and earlier ones, but not this one. There must have been a party, my first real one, because who would have come to the others?
There must have been a cake, with candles and wishes and a quarter and a dime wrapped in wax paper hidden between the layers for someone to chip a tooth on, and presents. Cordelia would have been there, and Grace and Carol. These things must have occurred, but the only trace they’ve left on me has been a vague horror of birthday parties, not other people’s, my own. I think of pastel icing, pink candles burning in the pale November afternoon light, and there is a sense of shame and failure. I close my eyes, wait for pictures. I need to fill in the black square of time, go back to see what’s in it. It’s as if I vanish at that moment and reappear later, but different, not knowing why I have been changed. If I could even see the undersides of the boards above my head it might help. I close my eyes, wait for pictures.
At first there’s nothing; just a receding darkness, like a tunnel. But after a while something begins to form: a thicket of dark-green leaves with purple blossoms, dark purple, a sad rich color, and clusters of red berries, translucent as water. The vines are intergrown, so tangled over the other plants they’re like a hedge. A smell of loam and another, pungent scent rises from among the leaves, a smell of old things, dense and heavy, forgotten. There’s no wind but the leaves are in motion, there’s a ripple, as of unseen cats, or as if the leaves are moving by themselves.
Nightshade, I think. It’s a dark word. There is no nightshade in November. The nightshade is a common weed. You pull it out of the garden and throw it away. The nightshade plant is related to the potato, which accounts for the similar shape of the flowers. Potatoes too can be poisonous, if left in the sun to turn green. This is the sort of thing it’s my habit to know.
I can tell it’s the wrong memory. But the flowers, the smell, the movement of the leaves persist, rich, mesmerizing, desolating, infused with grief.
Five — Wringer
Chapter 21
I leave the gallery, walk east. I need to go shopping, get some decent food, organize. When I’m by myself I revert to the times when I would forget about eating, stay up all night working, go until I felt an odd sensation I’d identify after some thought as hunger. Then I’d go through the refrigerator like a vacuum cleaner, sucking in whatever there was. Leftovers.
This morning there were eggs, but there are no more eggs. There’s no more bread, there’s no more milk. Why were there eggs and bread and milk in the first place? It must have been a stash of Jon’s, he must eat there sometimes. Or could it have been that he got this stuff for me? It’s hardly believable. I will buy oranges, yogurt without the jam. I will have a positive attitude, take care of myself, I’ll feed myself enzymes, and friendly bacteria. These good thoughts carry me until I’m right downtown. This is where Eaton’s used to be, here on this corner, yellow and foursquare. Now there’s a huge building in its place, what they call a shopping complex, as if shopping were a psychic disease. It’s glassy and be-tiled, green as an iceberg.
Across the street from it is known territory: Simpsons department store. I know it has a food hall somewhere. In the plate-glass windows there are heaps of bath towels, overstuffed sofas and chairs, sheets in modern prints. I wonder where all this cloth ends up. People cart it away, stuff it into their houses: the nesting instinct. A less attractive concept if you’ve ever seen a nest up close. There must be a limit to how much cloth you can cram into any one house, but of course it’s disposable. You used to buy for quality, things that would last. You kept your clothes until they were part of you, you checked the hemlines, the way the buttons were sewed on, you rubbed the cloth between your finger and thumb. The next windows contain disgruntled mannequins, their pelvises thrust out, their shoulders flung this way and that, making them look like hunchbacked ax murderers. I guess this is the look now: surly aggression. On the sidewalks there are a lot of androgynes, in the flesh, the girls in the black leather jackets and tough boots of boys, crewcuts, ducktails, the boys with the sullen pouty look of those women on the front covers of fashion magazines, their hair gelled into quills. At a distance I can’t tell the difference, though they themselves probably can. They make me feel outmoded.
What are they aiming for? Is each an imitation of the other? Or does it only seem that way to me because they’re all so alarmingly young? Despite their cool poses they wear their cravings on the outside, like the suckers on a squid. They want it all.
But I suppose that’s what Cordelia and I looked like then, to older people, crossing the street right here with our collars turned up and our eyebrows plucked into sceptical arches, swaggering in our rubber boots and straining for nonchalance, on our way down to Union Station where the trains came in, to put our quarters into the photo machine, four shots in monochrome, wallet-sized. Cordelia with a cigarette in the corner of her mouth, her eyelids half closed, trying for sultry. Ultrasharp. I revolve through the revolving doors into Simpsons, where I become lost immediately. They’ve changed the whole thing over. It used to be sedate wood-rimmed glass counters, with gloves in standard models, appropriate wrist-watches, accent scarves in floral prints. Serious-minded good taste. Now it’s a cosmetic fairground: silver trim, gold pillars, marquee lights, brand-name letters the size of a human head. The air is saturated with the stink of perfumes at war. There are video screens on which flawless complexions turn, preen, sigh through their parted lips, are caressed. On other screens are close-ups of skin pores, before and after, details of regimes for everything, your hands, your neck, your thighs. Your elbows, especially your elbows: aging begins at the elbows and metastasizes. This is religion. Voodoo and spells. I want to believe in it, the creams, the rejuvenating lotions, the transparent unguents in vials that slick on like roll-top glue. “Don’t you know what that junk is made of?”