“Well, math was never my totally strong point,” I say. He smiles benignly. We exchange news of our parents, who when last I heard from them were in Kenora, and heading west.
“Still counting the old budworms, I guess,” says my brother.
I remember how he used to throw up by the side of the road, and his smell of cedar pencils. I remember our life in tents and logging camps, the scent of cut lumber and gasoline and crushed grass and rancid cheese, the way we used to sneak around in the dark. I remember his wooden swords with the orange blood, his comic book collection. I see him crouching on the swampy ground, calling Lie down, you’re dead. I see him dive-bombing the dishes with forks. All my early images of him are clear and sharp and Technicolor: his baggy-legged shorts, his striped T-shirt, his raggedy hair bleached by the sun, his winter breeches and leather helmet. Then there is a gap, and he appears again on the other side of it, unaccountably two years older.
“Remember that song you used to sing?” I say. “During the war. Sometimes you whistled it. ”Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer‘?“
He looks perplexed, frowns a little. “I can’t say I do,” he says.
“You used to draw all those explosions. You borrowed my red pencil, because yours was used up.”
He looks at me, not as if he doesn’t remember these things himself, but as if he’s puzzled that I do. “You can’t have been very old then,” he says.
I wonder what it was like for him, having a little sister tagging along. For me, he was a given: there was never a time when he didn’t exist. But I was not a given, for him. Once he was singular, and I was an intrusion. I wonder if he resented me when I was born. Maybe he thought I was a pain in the bum; there’s no doubt that he thought this sometimes. Considering everything and on the whole though, he made the best of me.
“Remember that jar of marbles you buried, under the bridge?” I say. “You would never tell me why you did it.” The best ones, the red and blue puries, the waterbabies and cat’s eyes, put into the ground, out of reach. He would have stamped the dirt down on top of the jar, and scattered leaves.
“I think I recall that,” he says, as if not entirely willing to be reminded of his former, younger self. It disturbs me that he can remember some of these things about himself, but not others; that the things he’s lost or misplaced exist now only for me. If he’s forgotten so much, what have I forgotten?
“Maybe they’re still down there,” I say. “I wonder if anyone ever found them, when they built that new bridge. You buried the map, too.”
“So I did,” he says, smiling in his old, secret, maddening way. He still isn’t telling, and I am reassured: despite his changed façade, his thinning hair and provisional suit, he is still the same person underneath. After he has gone back, to wherever he’s going next, I think of getting him a star named after himself, for his birthday. I have seen an advertisement for these: you send in your money, and you get a certificate with a star map, your own star marked on it. Possibly he would find this amusing. But I’m not sure that the word birthday, for him, would still have meaning.
Chapter 60
Jon has given up his eye-damaging geometrical shapes and is painting pictures that look like commercial illustrations: huge Popsicles, giant salt and pepper shakers, peach halves in syrup, paper dishes overflowing with french fries. He does not talk about purity any more but of the necessity of using common cultural sign systems to reflect the iconic banality of our times. I think I could give him a few tips from my own professional experience: his peach halves could be glossier, for instance. But I don’t say this.
Increasingly, Jon paints these things in my living room. He’s been gradually moving in his things, beginning with the paints and canvas. He says he can’t paint at his place because there are too many people in it, which is true: the front room is silting up with American draft dodgers, a shifting population, all of whom seem to be friends of friends. Jon has to step over them to get to the walls, because they lie around on their sleeping bags, forlorn and smoking dope, wondering what to do next. They are depressed because Toronto isn’t the United States without a war on, as they thought it would be, but some limbo they have strayed into by accident and can’t get out of. Toronto is nowhere, and nothing happens in it. Jon stays over three or four nights a week. I don’t ask what he does on the other nights. He thinks he is making a large concession, to something he assumes I want. And maybe I do want it. When I’m alone, I let the dishes accumulate in the sink, I allow colored fur to grow in jars of leftovers, I use up all my underpants before washing any of them. But Jon turns me into a model of tidiness and efficiency. I get up in the morning and make coffee for him, I set two places at the table, with my newly acquired ovenproof earthenware in off-white, with speckles. I don’t even mind doing his laundry at the Laundromat, along with my own.
Jon is not used to having all these clean clothes. “You’re the sort of girl who should get married,” he says one day, when I appear with a pile of folded shirts and jeans. I think this may be an insult, but I’m not sure.
“Do your own laundry then,” I say.
“Hey,” he says, “don’t be like that.”
On Sundays we sleep late, make love, go for walks, holding hands.
One day, when nothing has changed, nothing has been done or happened that is any different from usual, I discover I am pregnant. My first reaction is unbelief. I count and recount, wait another day, then another, listening to the inside of my body as if for a footfall. Finally I slink off to the drugstore with some pee in a bottle, feeling like a criminal. Married women go to their doctors. Unmarried women do this. The man in the drugstore tells me the results are positive. “Congratulations,” he says, with disapproving irony. He can see right through me.
I’m afraid to tell Jon. He will expect me to go and have it out, like a tooth. He will say “it.” Or he will want me to sit in the bathtub while he pours boiling water into it; he will want me to drink gin. Or else he will vanish. He’s said, often enough, that artists can’t live like other people, tied down to demanding families and expensive material possessions.
I think about things I’ve heard: drinking a lot of gin, knitting needles, coat hangers; but what do you do with them? I think about Susie and her wings of red blood. Whatever it was she did, I will not do it. I am too frightened. I refuse to end up like her.
I go back to my apartment, lie down on the floor. My body is numb, inert, without sensation. I can hardly move, I can hardly breathe. I feel as if I’m at the center of noth ingness, of a black square that is totally empty; that I’m exploding slowly outward, into the cold burning void of space. When I wake up it’s the middle of the night. I don’t know where I am. I think I’m back in my old room with the cloudy light fixture, in my parents’ house, lying on the floor because I’ve fallen out of bed, as I used to do when we had the army cots. But I know that the house has been sold, that my parents are no longer there. I have somehow been overlooked, left behind.
This is only the end of a dream. I get up, turn on the lights, make myself some hot milk, sit at the kitchen table, shivering with cold.
Until now I’ve always painted things that were actually there, in front of me. Now I begin to paint things that aren’t there.
I paint a silver toaster, the old kind, with knobs and doors. One of the doors is partly open, revealing the red-hot grill within. I paint a glass coffee percolator, with bubbles gathering in the clear water; one drop of dark coffee has fallen, and is beginning to spread.
I paint a wringer washing machine. The washing machine is a squat cylinder of white enamel. The wringer itself is a disturbing flesh-tone pink.