Here is another piece that I have written for my short story class. I'm still editing, but it's pretty close to being done. Just thought I'd throw it up in case anyone is interested... :)
‘Waiting’
1
I wasn’t surprised when the letter came in the post. But maybe I should have been. Maybe my heart should have fluttered, my breath caught in my chest like a bee trapped in the kitchen. But it didn’t. My name was scrawled across the envelope with swooping loops and dots nowhere near their i’s. It wavered. Old age does that. Jean’s usual ‘American Lung Association’ stamp was pasted crookedly in the corner and stamped over with the date. There was a cigarette burn next to it. It left behind a small blackened hole. I could see an eye peaking out. A black and white picture, or maybe it was sepia. I touched my finger to it, lingered.
A cup of tea quivered in my hand. Extra cream. No sugar. The muddy water spilled onto the envelope, blurred the eye. It wept. I slid my finger under the seal. She had licked it there, a bit of her lipstick was smudged on the edge. Orange. No, coral. The glue clung to my skin and it was sticky. I rubbed it on my dress. A part of her was left there, clinging to the fabric. Maybe it would stay fastened to the thin threads forever. Bubble gum under a table.
The letter slipped out from its casing and I worried that I wouldn’t be able to hold onto it. That it would slide out from my fingers, fall to the floor and burst into fuzzy shreds. Like lint. Bellybutton lint. But it didn’t do those things. It stayed between my fingertips, feeling a bit damp. Wilting. The picture was black and white and from a time almost as long ago. I wondered if it was I who had snapped the photo. It seemed oddly familiar, like a smell, but I couldn’t place it.
He smiled from the page, but his one eye was distorted from the tea. His eyes looked over my shoulder. Who was there? I couldn’t remember. But maybe I had never known. I tried to read the words that she had written in that space, on his typewriter. The P’s were faint, R’s a bit too heavy. But I already knew those things. Birth. University. Love. Death. A neat little package. A tidy red bow. I only wanted the picture.
His face was fastened to the refrigerator with a sailboat magnet. A holiday in Cape Cod. I waited for the afternoon when Peter would notice it, tear it away, and put it with the rubbish. Onion skins, potato peelings, the top of a strawberry. It would likely be weeks, or months before that happened—his eyesight was failing after all. So I waited. Waited to be sad. Waited to feel something. Anything.
I wasn’t surprised when the letter came.
John always had a bad heart.
2
There was music and it was happy. Patriotic, even. A symbol crashed and I worried that I had gotten red stains on my face. Barbeque sauce seeping out between two buns and into the skin around my lips. An uneven clown smile. I wiped at it with the back of my hand, but there was nothing there. An orchestra was squeezed into the town pavilion, but it had been too windy. A sheet of music escaped from its clothespin and danced around the stage. The trombone player looked lost. His eyes darted to the conductor. Then back down to the bell of his horn. Back. Forth. It didn’t seem to help. These people wouldn’t know the difference anyway. Hogs waiting for their slop. Corn cobs or carrots. It didn’t matter.
A fattened bumble bee was whirring around the pavilion, distressed. A shrieking little girl had plucked all the clover from the lawn. Gathered the white blooms in the sagging front of her dress. Dying. Mustard pollen ground into the cloth. The bee will be hungry tonight. I wondered if he had a little bee family. Photos tucked in his wallet. Three hundred sons and a daughter. Or a Queen. Was he married to the Queen? No. He must just be a worker. A servant. A nobody. The conductor was sweaty. But it was hot. Beads of sweat slid down the dark hairs on his neck. He flicked his baton. It narrowly missed the bumble bee as it took another lap. I wished it would have stabbed him, right between two stripes. Black and yellow. But no one would have believed me if it had happened. Our little secret.
Beneath my body, the earth was cool, wet. It seeped through my clothes, touched my skin. Mother Earth. Post-mortem grasping. I shivered and licked the perspiration from my upper lip. Felt the soft, sun-bleached hairs with my tongue. Salty. Sticky. John sat next to me. Too close. His breath smelt of egg and mayonnaise salad. A finger brushed my thigh. Wicked away some of the condensation. Left a crease. He tried to say something. But the timpani started thundering just then. Cannons. I didn’t hear or care. The bee whipped past my ear. His fuzzy chest grazed my cheek. A spindly leg caught in my hair. He plucked it out and flew away, a single strand trailing behind him. A blonde ribbon.
I watched him float away. The ribbon caught on a branch and waved there. It looked like a crime scene. I hoped no one would die here. Then I might be a suspect. Or a victim. But this wasn’t a town for crime, for danger, for anything. It was a blank space. A tightly sealed hope chest. A nice photo for a postcard. It was safe.
Our mothers sat at a card table, draped in red and white and blue, fanning themselves with fistfuls of cards. I had never seen my mother play Bridge before. I had always assumed that when she left on Tuesday evenings, she was going to a filthy motel room or maybe a strip club. But maybe she was more innocent than I had given her credit. The two women laughed over something I couldn’t hear. My mother pressed her cards to her chest. The other woman swiped her brow with her arm. They were flushed and maybe a little sunburned. But they were happy. And simple.
When the music finally stopped and the crowd began to dissipate, taking with them their brightly colored blankets and foldable plastic beach chairs, I could hear Lake Huron. The heralding of a late afternoon fisherman, buzzing past in his tin boat. A soft, wispy clump of algae clinging to the post of a dock. Waving us farewell. The lingering odor of charcoal stung the inside of my nose. Singed a hair there. Our mothers grabbed us each by the wrist and toted us back the cottage. A seagull was complaining about something I didn’t understand. I felt the urge to grumble too, but I wasn’t sure about what.
3
I had forgotten there was a piano at Ipperwash Beach. It took little to remember again. The yellowed keys. Old, familiar teeth. Padded hammers hitting the keys. Thudding just before the notes sounded. It always seemed to be out of tune. But this was only a cottage, and precision didn’t matter. In fact, it was rejected all together. A tuned piano wouldn’t have sounded quite right.
John kissed me for the first time while my mother played the piano. We hid in the linen closet. Stacks of table cloths, damp with humidity. Some striped, some patterned, and some plain. A moth flew out, left sparkling powder on my cheek. I tried to remember what it was that she was playing just then. Beethoven? Or maybe Bach—I could never tell the difference. My lips were sunburnt. So were his. The melody sounded liquid. Green, and frothy. A nocturne underwater. It was Debussy. Yes, of course. That was unmistakable. Le Mer. Tumbling waves. A swelling tide.
Each note she played was a little off. But not. She strung them along. Beads on fishing line. Each one jarred, but still, meshed. It was the tuning, I’m sure. It made it darker, mysterious. I pretended to be French. And cultured. And older. I pressed my face against his. Our lips stuck together. I felt the jagged dryness of his lips. The heat of his breath. It burned. After a while, we parted. A flake of chapped skin ripped off me and stuck to him. Then fell to his shirt. Rested in a crease. A scale. Pale and stiff.
A hallow note lingered in the closet. Clammored around, looking for escape. A bumblebee trapped in the cottage. Tapping against a window.
4
I stared through the palms reaching above me. Over lapping blades. Yellowed with too much rain and too little sun. They didn’t belong here. Mother had forced them on the deck. New ones each summer. Convicted to brightly stripped pots. She’d always wanted to be somewhere else. Maybe they reminded her. Coconut oil slicked between her shoulder blades. A sunburn freckling her nose. I preferred it here, though. The same sun, but a cool northern breeze instead of a hot, sticky one. There aren’t palms on the deck anymore. There haven’t been for some time. In a strange way I miss them. Miss her. Miss that time. I suppose it doesn’t matter now.
John and I used to meet in the ice shed. It was tucked between three, tall pines and was constructed of driftwood. Or maybe it just looked that way. I was told that in winter, his father would chop out chunks of the lake with a hatchet. He would stack them in the ice sheds. Piles and piles of magazines in the doctor’s office. Frozen. Preserved. Waiting. When summer came, we’d take turns riding the ice blocks around in the shed like seals, or whales, or sea horses. It was always changing. Once, he touched me in the shed. My legs were straddling the biggest block. We had been saving it. His fingers raked across my skin. Leaving little ruts carved into the sand. I thought that the ice blocks might melt. Slip through the cracks in the floor. Slither down to the lake in shiny bands.
All I could remember seeing was his eyes. They seemed frightened, but the rest of his body didn’t. And neither did mine. I suppose we were awkward or maybe just uneducated. But it was better that way. I’ve never had better.
Afterward, I stretched myself out under the palms again. Watched a bead of sweat edge between my breasts. Swollen, firm, young. I fretted over the way my bathing suit was situated on my body. Tried to decipher his finger prints from the red and white stripes. I knew they were there, but I hoped they didn’t show. A Lady Macbeth predicament. He came to lie next to me. A little to close. I edged away. But the hairs on my arms reached out to touch his skin. I know that he looked at me. I know that he tried to say something. I stared into the palm blades, watched the colors turn from yellow to green to black. I squeezed my eyes. Waited for him to stop looking, to stop whispering. Waited for simplicity to return to me. Deep, gasping breezes. Unintelligible bird chatter.
I don’t think there would have been ice sheds in mother’s world.
5
John was there when I married. Mostly because he had to be, but I wished that he hadn’t come. I wished that he’d have gone to the cottage instead, put out some more palm trees in pots, rearranged the loungers out of the shade—forgotten about me all together. It would have been easier that way. The preacher’s voice droned like a sea lion and I wondered if John would ask me to dance later. I fantasized over it. A waltz maybe. Or a fox trot. Those had been our favourites. I was sure he’d remember at least that much. Maybe his hands would linger at my waist. Toy with the tiny transparent beads on my dress, hesitate at making contact.
The white dress made me itchy, but my mother was happy. A perfect match. A boy from a nice family. She was old fashioned that way. She said we’d make beautiful babies. I wasn’t so sure. The way his one front tooth jutted over the other made me nervous. Even during our vows. I couldn’t stop staring. Maybe he was worried over the mole on my cheek or my uneven lips. The upper always plumper than the lower. But just—a pouty guppie. I suppose I’d never really know how he felt about my lips, or anything else really. He always seemed content. In his simple way, he was content.
That was the reason, really: he was always nice enough. Nice enough to not say no. At the time I held it against him. Perhaps he was too careful. He made me worry that I’d break, shatter into shards. A block of ice, dropped onto the pavement. I was better before him. Before the posh apartment in the city, before the quaint, blue house in the suburbs. The cottage made me better. Wildness, virility made me better. John made me better.
He never did dance with me after all. Instead, he watched and waited. For what or whom, I wouldn’t know. I watched him lean against the wall, fiddle with his pocket watch. My husband’s cheek hot against mine, his ear obstructing my view. At each twirl, I thought I might catch his glance, but then it would flit away again. Minnows slipping through my fingers. A shallow tide pool. He faded into the striped walls. Softened into the right colors. He left.
6
I went back to the cottage one autumn with the children. Because that’s what friends do. They visit. Their father stayed home. He didn’t like the water anyway. He was a sinker. A weight. A boulder. It was best that way. He wouldn’t belong to this place. It would have rejected him. Spat him out, washed him up. Drift wood. Dull and smoothed over.
John’s wife and children were lovely; I hadn’t expected that. They looked like a advertisement: crouched over a sandcastle, squinting at the sun. Jean’s breasts were larger than mine, but they weren’t better. They spilled from her polka dotted swimsuit—overripe and intrusive. I knew that he preferred legs. Hers were too tan and too stumpy. I examined my own. Pale and freckled, but long. They always had been, I was a gangly kid. She looked up at me and pretended to be surprised. Smiled. Waved. Posed. She balanced her cigarette carefully between two fingers and a fat clump of ash tumbled to the sand, plopped into the porcelain curve of a zebra mussel shell. I pretended I didn’t see.
One night, after it was quiet. I went to the linen closet. Felt the familiar fabrics with my fingers. Tested their weights. Found the old holes. Maybe they were the same. Maybe they were different. I couldn’t tell. It didn’t matter anyway. I waited there. For a moth. For a kiss. For John.
I waited for music. But it didn’t come.
7
We slept in different beds by then. It was more comfortable that way. No accidental touching. No disrupted dreams. No sex. But I didn’t mind, really. Before I went to sleep, I looked at John’s picture on the refrigerator. His eye was still blurred. It wrinkled. A dried tear. I tore it from under its magnet and watched it float to the floor and slide under a cabinet. The edge jutted out, but had no identity. It could have been a newspaper clipping now. Or maybe an expired coupon for orange juice at the grocery. It pushed past a ball of dust and twisted hairs. I left it there. A burial with no eulogy. Better there than the rubbish.
I could hear my husband breathing. Sputtering with phlegm. A cough. He thrashed and then settled. I scooted in behind him because I wanted him to be my lover. I wanted it to be like it never was. His elbow jabbed my side. After all this time, he still wasn’t used to me. But I wasn’t either. I was an accidental. A double sharp. I dropped the needle onto a spinning record. Listen to it whir, crackle. Debussy was always my favourite. But he must have switched it. It was Mozart. I hated Mozart. But I didn’t change it. It didn’t matter much anymore.
I closed my eyes and thought of powdered wigs. Men in high heels. Pastel blues and pinks. Maybe green. Women traipsing around in dresses with giant hips. Baroque was frustrating. I preferred music that dissolved me. Dissociated my body into shapes, colors, shades. My toes melted into a frothy tide pool. Arms, two towering waves. Teetering, foaming. Then falling over each other. I suppose I always was an impressionist.
I waited to slip into a dream. A dried, cracked bar of soap. Drifting to the bottom of the tub, circling the drain. Darkness. Death.
Maybe I’d hear John’s voice there.
Maybe I’d hear music.
