In the morning, curling up cold, and a wanting for darkness. Was there a night before? Was there a broken down Buick in the back yard? Were there brothers, were there tomatoes turning old, shrinking, in the hard blue morning light through a single-paned, drafty, cracked kitchen window? Don't you know?
She rose, she had no psychology. In the bathroom, a potted rosemary. The water, cold, had no theory, and from here to the blushing retiring stars was no thought. The water was cold, and out the window the grass was white, and she could not help it. The telephone, a housecoat, the receiver.
'Hello.'
'Rosemary.'
'Yes?'
It was her sister, who had psychology, who was what she was taught. And that was all. Yes?
'Rosemary?'
'Yes yes.'
'Don't you have to work?'
'No.'
'Where's Neil?'
'Don't.'
'Well?'
'I said.'
'Well, where is he?'
'This isn't good enough.'
The receiver, the telephone, a housecoat, a cloud of steam. A radio speaking. In the Lebanon, cedars did not fall, in the Dardanelles, a little girl did not fall from the sky. The water was suddenly hot, and threatened cold. She drew out of the water, half-wet, undecided, and bore the housecoat like a reason into the kitchen, where the radio was speaking, and she stopped the speaking and she demanded music. Slow, slow. And? Did the brothers object? The French academics? The soldiers on the borders of the Lebanon?
She bathed, and the sun did not move, and the shadows rose up from under the cedars under the fence, quickly and then slower, and she didn't notice that, and she washed her hair, thinking of toads and frogs. Toads were not frogs; toads were pitiable. They appeared on paths, pitiable and soft, breathing, their skin important in the shade of cedars. Their skin, and boys poured gasoline on their important skins, and that was only a small wound, 'You're all right,' her father said, he said as though he knew (but what did he know, exactly, except that his skin was dull and no longer important?), and sure enough her knee healed over and she never thought of it again, never never. She washed her hair, the soap went into her eyes, she was not weak, the water became cold. At any rate there were not cockroaches. The cold floor, and the carpet through the bedroom, and then the cold floor, and in the kitchen was a basket, and in the basket blackening bananas and shrinking tomatoes, well, what did you expect? Was there love? In the other room, the telephone did not call. A car going by, an American car, rusted about the petticoats; a rook in the rowan, red berries, a strip of grass, a regret.
Her sister's name was Vivienne. It was a lie.
It was the lie she told Vivienne because it was there and it didn't matter. Vivienne operated very well on this level. Distant stern advisor making sure her moral obligations were fulfilled by warning her little sister off the path to ruin. The lie was never told. The lie was the noise that came when their words brushed against one another as they blasted across the country in those black wires that connected all the tall wooden poles together. The lie made her feel good. Made her enjoy her dog and husband and sofa-set and dildo a little bit more.
She used the dildo in the living room after her TaeBo twice a week. She put her sweat towel down on the hardwood floor, folded in a pleasing square. She sat down on it, then stretched out and used the dildo and afterward her body would blush warm and the sweat on the floor was a dewy imprint of feet and shoulders. By the afternoon, she had almost forgotten the act. She had forgotten the fantasy immediately. It was a lie, too. It was the lie Vivienne told herself.
The floor was cold and her feet were cold and hard against it. There was a patch of light that was warm and reclining in it there was the middle-aged cat with the brown eyes that stared and projected something that was not love but looked as beautiful. The cat was a woman because she had produced babies. Five. The cat had been most beautiful when Neil called the boxer over to come and see the babies. The boxer whose eyes she did not look into as much as the cat's.
She felt the air crackle or maybe that was just shock rippling out from the moment in both directions through time, skewing the thing as it happened. She couldn't look away. The mother pounced, rebounded off every available bit of dog flesh with every claw extended. Did the claws ache to stretch so far in their sheaths? Rebounded from television and flesh and wall and flesh and on and on. Sometimes the flesh was Neil's as he froze there for two full passes before pulling the dog away by its collar. The blood that splashed on the floor had been bright red on the sticky-hot linoleum.
Three years. Maybe four years ago. She could figure it out if she wanted to but that was not the game she was playing. The floor was cold and cold was clean and the broom in the corner was used twice a day and the corner was a good place to put it because then it would be used twice a day. Her feet were dry and cold brushing against the woman's warm, stretched fur and she wished to be small in the patch of light and to stretch against the woman. The mother. The woman who ate the fifth baby the day before she fought the boxer.
Vivienne had psychology and could be hurt in places that she did not even think of.
That is why she had called Rosemary two weeks ago, early on a Saturday morning, when one of them was alone.
"I dreamt I lost Neil. But I was his mother. I was pushing a cart in the supermarket and when I turned around he was gone. I ran up and down the aisles, just terrified, and then I found him eating candy from a little girl's hand. And then I slapped her hard across the face, but she just stared at me with these weird, calm eyes."
Rosemary had told her only fruit before bed. Receiver. Telephone. Patch of light as she stroked the mother's fur. The mother might teach her how to forget. Or how to take it and move on.
Two weeks ago--she was sure of that. He had laid in her bed for the first time and traced his fingertips over her body--she had cried a little for him to finally touch her. Her tight skin had at last found a purpose for beauty. She could hear her nerves hushing as they brushed against his. The law said they were siblings. And now lovers. And in the morning, sunlight had warmed her heavy curtains.
He had whispered in her ear about Vivienne's fantasies on the kitchen floor and she had cringed while he laughed. It was meant to be fun, but she didn't want to know about her sister, as he buried his fingers inside her. But she had moved herself even harder against him, as though by needing him she could take him for herself. This is how she had lured him. Needing him through the years, until she was too formidable for him to ignore. She hoped he hadn't come for the thrill of cheating on her sister.
Hard feet on the linoleum in the kitchen as she mixed a protein shake. As it slipped down her throat she rubbed her flat belly and thought of the first time he had seen her fight. Vivienne, Jake and Father all there too. Mother's mind long gone by then and little Ben just as far away on his missions in the Mediterranean. The men were the ones she wanted anyway. Her hands were like theirs now, though she was only twenty-four, splintered like the wood they worked. Her hands wrapped tightly and stuffed into leather gloves. They had watched from the first row.
Her trainer held the mouth-guard in front of her lips and she had opened wide for it. Glanced at Neil whose face was stricken by her body. Arms capped with round handfuls of shoulder muscle. Belly tight and carved in muscular ribbons. She raised her fists to the sides of her head and made her eyes cold and dead. This was how she looked to her opponents--eerily relaxed. And after the fight, when she had taken the other woman down and swept her arm into a perfect threat at the elbow, Neil had kissed her with disbelief. "You're a killer." Two weeks ago, he had nestled like a baby in her bed, and for the first time in a long while she had risen with the sun.
She didn't go in. Fisher called at eleven and she told him she wasn't coming in, and he didn't say anything, and that hurt. She ate because she had to, and she turned on the television, and she turned it off. The backs of her legs insisted. There were troubles she could not address, falsehoods she could not correct, children she could not save, demands she could not ignore. She rose; she stretched; she went out in shorts and ran.
It was the same. Treading, thudding, unfurling, running; emptying like a birdbath empties; and soon, soon, no thought, and the sun, a tree, a treetop, the distance shortening insensibly. The blood knew not, the sun knew not, the breath pounding knew not, knew not, the blood, the sun, the breath pounding, the earth moves, the earth moves, but not, but not for thee.
Turning the corner at the bottom of Liall Street, there was a boy on a bicycle. A white cat in a window. The sweat came, and it scored her face. In the school yard, a swing still agitated; dog shit, lascivious. I don't know you, she mouthed, I don't know you. A helicopter. She regretted, instantly, that her feet must fall on the cracks; but they must.
In the night, at the cottage, she had heard them, whispering, and she had heard them, she had, and childhood was a thing that inhabited one like a dead thing hungering after life. A whisper, a laugh; all things are broken, and it is only the lie that assembles. Here is a hand that strokes a flank, a pillow kissed, a whisper (but not for thee), a gasp rich with the force of wrong, a laugh forced beneath voice, and here are eyes wide, and where are those eyes? Whose eyes are they? As the sun languished in the lake and the fish ventured into the incomprehensible air--as the fire built in the circle of burnt stones--as the tops of the cedars vanished into the emptying sky--nothing, nothing assembled; meaning stumbled, and facts remained defiantly singular. Mother called, there was the smell of meat. Mother's hands trembling, hands, fingers, fine, thin, boned and thin, hard small fish swimming in the yellow porch light, which was swimming with flies. Her father called up from the circle of burnt stones, and came up, and they went down to the fire. Potato salad. Secrets. There would be no moment, relaxed and unafraid, to say, I love you. To say that, really to say that; the audacity, the foolishness of that, just that, alone. But all this was only what one thought, when one conjured up the past as one conjures a rope, a basket, a boy, and then, what, there, where, the boy is gone, the rope collapses, the old man is alone, applauded, abandoned.
She had watched her brother in the afternoon, drawing the small boat up onto the small beach, below. She had pushed her hair behind her ear, as though someone had been watching, and she had imagined that her face was freckling. Large crows called in the steep forests. His back was slim and sinewy, and he knew all that she cared for him to know, and what he did not know, she did not care for him to know. All this was fine, and she was happy, enough. Her bathing suit was dull red; her belly made it round, and she did not know to be ashamed. Her legs had moved out from her hips, and her hips had moved out from her legs, and her breasts had only begun. She listened to the chuck of the waves, and she fancied herself a poet; she watched her brother move satisfied and aware of his sex up the small beach to the grass, and she fancied herself a woman. Somewhere, the late daffodils were dropping their petals, exhausted, but she was not looking.
Her brother Jake was climbing the hill, hands and feet in the grass, toward the line of trees that curled behind the cottage and stretched back further than she knew. His chest heaved but was not winded by the climb--he had been hiking these hills since he was a boy. Now he was almost a man, and as he crested the hill, he looked off toward the forest and smiled at the girl who was waiting for him inside.
Her feet hit the concrete sidewalk as she remembered picking herself up out of the grass and not being able to stop herself from running toward the trees after them. His lean, muscled arms and the girl's skirt pushed up around her waist. The sight, and Rosemary crouched low in the cedars. The scent of moist earth. Her brother's eyes very suddenly alert and focused on her face. She had run deeper into the trees and her father, her brother Jake, had found her before dark, cold in her bathing suit. They gave her a pullover sweater and walked silently home on ahead.
She gritted her teeth now and pushed herself over the hill toward home. The earth would not stop moving if she wanted it and Neil would not be on her couch watching television when she opened her front door. She undressed quickly and stepped into her tub, cried a little while the hot water washed her. When she masturbated she lay under the falling water and wrestled with the image of Neil above her. Neil and Jake and then Father and Vivienne and she could not finish until she became very angry. The water ran cold and she remembered swimming in the cold lake, a very young girl, when she had been clean and calm.
Her mother, Mother, was reaching out to her and Vivienne in the water. Long, slim arms and hands. Thin chest but warm and her hands were clutching so Rosemary was vaguely afraid of being pulled down should her mother stop swimming. Mother could swim well. All the way to the island across the water. When the three of them finally returned home to the beach, Rosemary was tired and her legs heavy. Vivienne six years older--she had a bikini and long, black braids. Rosemary was swimming in bottoms only and she had a small scar on her chest from falling on the rocks the summer before.
Mother would often swim to the island in the evenings, and she would return looking breathless and smiling. She said you could see the stars better out there, and she described lying down on a large, flat rock. Mother, who seemed to float above common life. And Father would keep his head down and sip hot coffee from the fire, or drink his beer with Jake. Ben was never old enough, or wasn't quite the right son. When Mother returned in the evening, the men stayed silent as Vivienne pestered about going with her next time. Rosemary knew not to speak. When it came to Mother you didn't ask.
Neil Guderun, who was born in Grimsby, whose father was an electrician, IBEW Local 105, married Vivienne Samson on a Saturday in June, 1997, and failed to give her children. There was white bunting at the reception. His uncle Theo pushed his way to the microphone and made rapid breathless wet bellowing sounds. He was upset. 'Too many goddam tables is the whole. And we're we can't. Don't be stupid! You're stupid, I said it, there! There, I said it. I said it. I said I'm going to say it, and there's stupid in this world, and goddam it. Fucking chinamen. Am I right? Who the hell are you? D'you know my son?'
Everyone remembered that, because it was the only memorable thing everyone had seen. They had danced anyway, as one does, and they had graciously forgotten it until the next day. Neil Guderun, who was a graduate of Blessed Trinity Secondary School, who fell three courses short of a civic engineering degree from Ryerson Polytechnic, long-nosed, curly-haired, strong of shoulder and feeble of leg, whose ears were terribly waxy, who had worn glasses since he was two years old and had never bothered about contact lenses.