somewhere back on the road, sometime between his slouching into the driver’s seat and the end of this fifteen-minute journey from our summer cottage to the next village. I don’t know. Maybe he spotted Indians in the hills. Maybe he felt our little wagon train was under threat and we are far, far from any army outpost. Rescue is not likely. He won’t say a thing about it, though, to my mother or to me, his sole passengers. He is a tight-lipped man. Being provider and protector is one devil of a job in a big country, I can see that.
It’s a fine afternoon and the sky is a slaphappy blue but I wish there were a slight breeze, just enough to ruffle the leaves a little, enough to break up the menace of a still, hot day. I want to open the window but my dad would not like this, so I don’t. If you open the window, the air conditioning in the car, one of the few features he knows how to operate without having to ask anyone, will not work properly. I would rather have real air play over my face, but I try not to think about it. I try not to feel tyrannized by air conditioning. We are nearly there. I hope I will not be sick. I feel hot and cold and somewhat nauseous and the tension level in the car is high, pressing on my temples, making my heart race. My mother is looking out of her window and she says something in febrile, purposeful tones. She is always ready to dispel gloom.
‘I just saw the most beautiful bird!’ she says, or something like that. We are nearly there. The Indians are on the warpath and this last stretch of road seems endless to me, fraught with danger. I am unarmed. Dad won’t teach me how to use a gun because I am a girl and it is unseemly and he thinks I won’t need it. He will protect me. I hope so.
I wish he’d say something. I wish I were a boy. Then maybe we would not be taking this sissy journey to the chemist for a herbal remedy for depression and my dad would not be so mad at me.
I could be Doc Holliday. That would be very good. I have a deadly disease and I deal with it in a manly way. I have no time for it. It does not diminish me. There will be no gauzy visions of angels, no lingering goodbyes. I retch and splutter grudgingly into squares of white linen. Goddamnit, there goes another hanky. Pitch it into the fireplace. Good shot.
My woman gives me that boring look, her eyes sparkling with fear and pity.
‘Stop that! Get out! Leave me alone!’
I reach for the whisky and I don’t bother with a glass. It is possible I drink too much. Never mind. As long as I can shoot straight. As long as I can stand up for my friends and walk an unswerving line to the O. K. Corral. On that day, I’ll be wearing my finest, no fraying cuffs.
There’s a knock on the door. Here comes Wyatt. He leans against the door and walks over to the bedside table and picks up my whisky bottle, meaning, this much already? It’s only eleven A.M. We don’t speak, though. Don’t worry, Wyatt. I’ll be there. He knows that. I cough.
‘See a doctor.’
‘No doctors.’
‘Get some rest,’ he says, heading for the door.
Dad just spoke.
‘What?’ I say. ‘Sorry, what?’
‘We are not going to any other shops. Just the chemist. I’ll stay in the car. You have ten minutes.’
I start singing in my head, the tune from the Sturges film Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. O-KAAAY … co – RAAL! O-KAAAY … co – RAAAAL! I almost sing it aloud. I want to, because it might make my dad laugh, but I worry that for once it won’t, that he won’t join in and I’ll feel bad, worse than I do already. The song rises, then dies in my chest and I miss my chance and that’s the hell of this thing, this sissy, crackpot, sneaky disease which is not okay, like consumption with its angry, show-off blood on wads of linen.
‘Jem?’
‘Yes?’
‘Did you hear what I said?’
I can see Dad’s eyes looking at me in the rearview mirror. He has wild brows and his eyes are narrowed, weather-beaten lines running from the corners toward his temples. He is a handsome man in an unruly way and he has a gunslinger’s gaze. This comes from years of squinting into a high sun and into duststorms and sharp night winds. It comes from a perpetual state of wariness and the need to see around things and be ready at all times. Anything can happen but you must stay cool. You have to master the distant look and know how to forage the horizon for looming dangers such as wild beasts, Apaches, and other gunslingers with sharp, squinty vision who might be on your trail.
When my dad talks to me, the little muscles around his eyes bunch up, giving him that gunslinger look. I have the distinct sensation he is not having a good time having to make words, having to speak at all. It’s the way he is and you have to get used to it. His vision is acute, he is the only one in the family who doesn’t need glasses.
‘We are not going to any other shops – just the chemist.’
‘Right.’ My dad looks at the road now.
I practise a gunslinger squint. I can see my reflection in the window, which I keep closed due to air conditioning, and my face is dappled with tree leaves and other passing things, but I can see my eyes. I look silly, because a gunfighter cannot wear glasses and look cool. A good cowboy does not wear specs. I think about those crazy glasses you have to look through at the optician’s, your chin resting in a cup. They are like the periscope sights that a U-boat commander needs to spot enemy vessels. The optician slips different lenses into the apparatus with maddening speed and he keeps saying in bored tones, ‘Better or worse? Better or worse?’ until I want to scream and I am so confused and pressured by him, I stumble out with eyeglasses of magnifying strength. I can spot spiders several paving stones away, but people look spooky. No one should have to see in such gory detail.
Better or worse? I asked myself each time I was put on a new medication. New medications and higher and higher doses. Better or worse? I asked myself, my heart thudding, hallucinating kaleidoscopic visions, sweating through the chic French pyjamas I wore because I felt so cold, soaking my white linen sheets, bringing towels back to bed, scared and ashamed after vomiting into the toilet on the hour through the night. This is a good medication. In small doses it is not always therapeutic. It is definitely helping you and I think you should not keep going on and off it, says the doctor. It is working.
Okay. Cool.
Dad is looking at me again in the mirror. Now what? Nothing. He looks at me this way because he is not all that wild about me right now, the crazy, drugged-up daughter, and also because he is a cowboy and that is the way they look at people. I used to be a cowboy, too. Dad and me in the Wild West, stalking the main street, bringing home the vittles for Maw, not before sliding onto bar stools, our packages falling around our feet.
‘What’ll it be?’
‘Mâcon-Villages,’ I say.
My dad nods and gestures with his eyes for me to repeat this to the barman. My dad does not like to speak French unless it is strictly called for.
‘A glass of Mâcon blanc, please,’ I say.
My dad drinks single malt. Doubles with a splash on the side. He hunkers down over his drink and lights a thin cigar. Thin but not skinny. His eyes slide slowly to one side or upward as he checks out the crowd, but his head hardly moves except for a slight raising of the chin, the better to draw on his cigar. We do not say much.
