wore her wounds with pride, and that this was necessary if she were to protect her sense of identity. The girl had been travelling with Jem for who knew how long, in the United States and now here in Canada. She looked only a few years older than him, but she was definitely the chaperone. Giggy could see that many would feel that her nephew was both feeble and egotistical. But Cora, she saw in him the kind of person that she was destined to support – such a one as she herself might have become had she not been queer and a woman. And so Giggy recognized her younger self in Cora’s overreliance on melancholy as a form of joy, on contentment as fulfilment. The matriarch could only hope that Cora’s growing love for Jem (for she truly believed that all must eventually love him) would allow her to shed some defences. He may not teach her to swim through the onslaught of vindictiveness and malice as he did, as if it were only the exhaust and whine of a Sea-Doo. But for now, Cora could at least manoeuvre in his wake and learn that indifference was at times the most effective form of self-defence.
Cora’s high valuation of responsibility, Giggy felt, meant that she had the patience, but not the adventurousness, to have peeled the strips of skin off Robert. The older woman could not help but wonder, as well, how patient Robert had to have been to have let himself be so ensnared. It almost frustrated her, the sense that his point of view, the unique materiality of his experience, was just beyond the grasp of her clumsy fingers. Giggy had once watched Lady Clasp, who lived across the east field, use a pair of tweezers to strip the skin from boiled tomatoes. After the roiling water had inflamed the pieces of fruit, their tissued skin puckered, seeming to beg to be pulled back. The veterinarian, her flaming locks hairnetted, had approached each of the orbs with a tenderness verging on a perfectionism almost Catholic in its ceremony, Futurist in its faith. There was a symbiosis, a sort of conspiracy, it seemed, between the woman and the glowing orange-red globes. The recent crime, however, must have required more than a Kmart kitchen utensil and the skills of the village vet. Robert, it had been conjectured, must have been peeled with something like a scalpel or an Xacto knife. Despite signs of restraints, it was felt the delicacy of the procedure had required that he had been coerced somehow into participating. The lab had found no substances in the young man’s system that would have knocked him unconscious, nor signs of severe restraints. Oh, a body in protest, ruminated Giggy, that might be the title of my memoirs. And she began kneading her chafing flesh once more.
The lack of evidence either in favour of or against Cora had gnawed on Giggy’s already stressed mind so persistently that she’d finally decided to donate it, the chaise longue on which Constable Loch had discovered the red stain, to the Lake Wachannabee Bazaar. Since they had yet to attain confirmation of a crime and nobody had pressed charges, there was no basis for taking evidence, but Giggy felt it best to let the furniture go regardless. She’d never expected that her humble gift would attract much attention, but the townsfolk began to gobble the fruits of speculation from each other’s baskets as if starved for gossip. At first, she was most perturbed to find so many pronouncing her name with a soft ‘G,’ but soon this gaucherie was surpassed by the one declaration consistent in all their accusations: the wealthy lacked morals. ‘It is at times even too easy to conceal,’ bewailed the matriarch in language decadent in its convolutions, ‘the actual poverty from which I, like the black grapes of Sicily, have grown.’
Giggy’s eyes focused on the point at which the geese had disappeared, and she began to worry again about her decision to give the furniture away. An exploratory nail had revealed the slit to be almost five inches long. She could slide her hand into it as if it were a pocket. Giggy saw the slice symbolizing the monetary sacrifices that poorly clothed her life, the vulgarity that she had otherwise been able to hide from the social classes against which she still humiliatingly defined herself. It was like playing Patience without wearing underwear, a habit she had picked up in the 1980s from the maid of a Moroccan civil servant and which she hesitated to break because it was now one of the traits by which she was defined.
The tear in the fabric seemed especially uncouth to her because she had never noticed it before. Might have somebody else? Might have the constable? Why had she ever brought the thing up from the basement? Could Constable Loch have construed her desire to get rid of this furniture now as an admission of guilt? She didn’t want to admit any guilt, but for some reason everything in her house had become guilty by association. The accusation of murder had spread like skunk scent off the Prussian blue mat and into the nooks, crannies and wainscotting of the many-chambered house. She had initially thought that buying new furniture would clean her home of the moral taint but then realized that this would only reinforce the suspicions of the town, ultimately positioning her as a flying buttress for the hate-mongering pillars of the community. She now couldn’t understand why the constable had suggested she give the piece to the bazaar in the first place. Perhaps this was his way of provoking her to plead guilty. But if she had no intention, could she make the plea? Where does the legal system draw its own little pencil marks of ethics?
Presently, the community belched its fumes of suspicion almost solely upon Cora, although the information Jem received from the gossips on grocery day was clearly skewed by odium. Giggy herself had never known Cora to spend a night outside the villa, and the two women shared a bedroom. One morning the family had found the word ‘OMDALISK’ spray-painted across the limestone wall of the Cubist gazebo, and they assumed it to be a reference to Cora’s Asian ancestry, her jet black hair and eyes. It was Jem who had been able to define the misspelt word, for he had himself once been compared to an Oriental concubine, albeit for purposes purely cordial. Giggy had suggested to the younger woman that if she wanted her reputation to change she should wear more makeup and start riding a girl’s bicycle, but Cora, who grew up in Las Vegas, had never adequately considered the concept of gendered machinery, and Giggy herself could not explain. She knew it had something to do with skirts and scrotums, and so she said. Maybe it was a difference in the metal V connecting the handlebars to the seat. Or the number of tassels on the handlebars or how long they dangled. She’d proposed that it had something to do with pedal-pushers, and so Jem began wearing a pair just to prove her wrong. That had only been for one day, after which he switched back to his cut-offs, the same pair he wore now as he lay asleep yet stroking the frayed threads of the denim.
‘Darling, wake up. It’s almost nighttime.’
‘Mmmmm. You know, when you whisper, you sound like Eva Gabor.’
‘You knew Eva?’
*
And still, despite the night verging on taking over, nowhere to be seen was Constable Loch. ‘No, they wouldn’t look like asterisks,’ Jem chuckled. ‘I’m quite sure that geese when flying tuck their old legs away for protection from high wires. I’m sure I would.’ And then, after a pause, ‘Not FOX but maybe FAX; I don’t think a flock of geese can make circular letters and still make a V from below. They can’t spell C-O- … COAX, for example.’
Jem could not come to tell his aunt, who had been so gracious in offering him a job as chef in the Winter Garden in order to keep him from becoming, as she put it, ‘a tendered loin of the New Orleans streets’ … he couldn’t come to tell her, who had paid for his Greyhound fare all the way from Louisiana and had complimented his drawl and had even let him bring Cora along … he couldn’t come to tell her that it was he, yes, he, who had suggested that the posters that created such a patchwork over so many of the telephone poles in Wachannabee County, that were taped helter-skelter to community mailboxes, even tacked next to the ‘Pets for Free’ section of the bulletin board in the post office (kittens, rabbits, kittens, kittens, rabbits), that it was he who had suggested that the posters carry the boldly blazoned phrasing ‘INCLUDING QUEEN ANNE’ and nothing more. Everybody knew what Queen Anne was:
‘Who else in Lake Wachannabee would have such a thing?’
‘What is a chaise longue, really?’
‘It means long house.’
‘Who in the twenty-first
