Tell it Slant. Beth Follett
The sun will continue, but I will stand here at the window with my fists clenched, tense and strangely calm, transfixed. The sky beyond the sun will be a mass of black cloud. A third course of the storm will hit the city before noon.
I know I have made a dream out of imagination, out of intelligence. I must not blame Jefferson.
What did you do today, Nora? he asks each night when he comes home, the smells of the ranging outdoors clinging to the wool he wears.
I made this collage out of magazine scraps, Daddy. See? Sitting all afternoon, in the middle of the living room carpet with my leotard-clad legs spread wide as I could make them go, the sound of scissors cutting red construction paper like something I could carry away with me, torn glossy magazines everywhere. See? Everyone had to walk around me, Daddy.
He does not seem pleased. Did you tidy up and put your things away, Nora?
O, yes, Daddy. Will you look at my picture?
Very nice.
Jefferson: The holy provider, the mind we read. Some nights he does not come home until after I have gone to bed, and the next day he is invincible mind. He tells me about this world as if the world we are given were all there is.
What is the world, Jeff?
Water, mostly, you’ve got to learn to sink or swim. Swim to the banks. Dry out in the hot sun.
In which direction lie the midden flies, Daddy?
Do you always have to be so moribund, Nora? The world is what you make it. I believe that at certain times in a life, a person is held back by nothing at all. At certain times a person can do anything.
You look very alive, she says, her wild eyes feverish in the dark at the end of the bed, and then she goes into the bathroom and shuts the door.
How to respond to swift change in this tracing of Robin’s movements? Is she alive too? Is she trying to teach you a lesson? Punish you? Or is she as worried as you? Who can lay bare their hearts?
You go to the bathroom door. Are you crying in there, Robin? you ask.
Of course not, she slurs.
Anything wrong?
Her voice rises up. Nothing. What about you?
No, Robin. Not yet.
Well then, she says. I’ll come out. We’ll drink a toast. A toast to the end of the day.
The backyard in Port Credit is all of my childhood. Long and wooded with old maples and one tall black walnut. My younger cousins and I follow my sister Grace through the trees and over the narrow green lawn and grey driveway, the Merry Men to her Robin Hood, the wild horses to her cavalier, the wives and molls to her soldier. We three — the cousins and me — bruised and bloody as proofs of our devotion to the spirited Grace. She scares the shit out of us.
Remember when Maid Marian kissed you full on the lips, Grace?
No.
The adults call her leader of the pack. She organizes the whole neighbourhood into teams with her rules and her punishments and threats. It is between us then as it is now.
Remember when you threw me off the top of the slide, Grace?
Yeah.
Remember how we used to hug naked in the bathtub?
We never did that, Nora.
Your oldest sister Jeannette spends most of her free time inside with her head in a book, tumbling among the words. You love reading just as much as Jeannette and see nothing perverse about it but your parents read Dr Spock and become mad about fresh air, trying to lure Jeannette out of doors with the promise of a peaches-and-cream complexion.
You see Jeannette exactly as she was, and she was yours. She develops a ritual of picnicking alone in your mother’s rose garden, spread out on Grandmother Flood’s old steamer carpet with a stack of books and a thermos of cold milk. You’re quiet as a worm as you try to sneak up on her and share her spot in the sun. Get out of here, Nora. Go on, lose yourself! I love you but you’re a pain in the ass. You wonder how she stands it there in the garden, for your mother, in an effort to deter deer from nibbling her roses, has tied bars of Ivory soap throughout it, and the smell is overpowering.
Jeannette is top of her grade for five years in a row, and Grace and you do not even try to compete. She is tender, brilliant — a bright star in the schoolyard. And then — just before her sixteenth birthday. She has been reading, has stopped on her way home from debating club, has been standing still against the rough bark of a maple tree, oblivious to the flash and turn of spring traffic, her book held before her dark swooping eyes, enraptured by poetry’s own sweet self. And then around the corner an old Chevy comes flying at random toward Jeannette and her tree.
When Grace and you return to the scene of the accident a few days after the funeral, you find a copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass soggy in the ditch, wrenched from Jeannette’s hand.
There was a child went forth every day, And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became, And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day, Or for many years or stretching cycle of years.
You don’t speak of Jeannette in the years following her death. There is no compensation in touch for the lack of words between parents and children. Grace and you understand the rules: You are forbidden to discuss her. Put your toys away. Sink or swim.
Nothing will bring her back, Jeff tells you when he discovers you weeping among the hand-me-down clothes in your closet, a candle burning dangerously close to the soft falling cotton.
It’s best to get on with living now, Nora. We only live once and if we are brave we live life the way we like and like it all the time we live it. Don’t you think Jeannette would want you to be brave?
You don’t know what Jeannette would want but you are sure you and she would lie together in the dark, telling each other over and over your own rendition of the story of the day she died. In each remembrance you will try to be less vulgar about what hurts. If this pleases Jeannette, you never know.
Let’s talk, says spoilsport to optimist, three months into Robin’s skin. You’ll bolt. You will.
No I won’t. I’ve given it up. I don’t care about her other lovers. I want to learn how to love. I came from Toronto looking to love.
We’ll see, stubborn girl.
Robin puts her tender mouth on yours. This takes the world by surprise.
Nothing is given to us, Nora, she says, her female body exposed.
Robin begins to teach you about silence. The tick of a second hand. A world turning. Systems hardening and cracking. Bone ground down beneath the skin. Crumbs tracked through a forest.
The unbearable mind, alone.
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