abstract embrace. You think you should not look at her, for if you do you will become mere belly. Your appetite peaks.
You count the beats in a phrase, wanting the song to end. You can see Rae waving the bottle, beckoning you to come back.
Rae is one of my oldest friends, you offer to Robin as you move away from the dance floor. Rae’s heavy glare terrifies you.
Not for long, is what Robin says.
It would be so easy. So easy to lie down in the shadows of the clock striking twelve. We’re here! for this one hour only, the hour you first meet. The one and only hour self-contained in its own light.
Will you ever pick up a girl and take her home, promise her nothing, massage her feet, tell her she is beautiful and never see her naked again? Robin wants everything. She lacks nothing. She is unmanageable. She believes in her thoughts. She feels no shyness about her voice.
She needs you.
It is now ten in the morning, and she has finally gone to work. The two of you will not speak today. Don’t ask her when next you see her, Do you love me? From now on, only ask questions the answers to which you are prepared to hear.
Is anyone there?
You walk on the mountain. Robin has asked you out on a second date and now she asks as you roll a snowball, Have you always been afraid of women?
You would have given anything to be able to tell her all the things of your life.
I’m afraid of lies, you say.
Robin stops walking and turns to you. The strong muscle of your heart clenches.
I promise you this, Nora: I will not lie.
All the light in the world and all its inky darkness will still seem to overwhelm me tomorrow. 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
