One Hundred Days of Rain Page 8

  Are you in love with her. Again the show. Now she can hear instruments, a tambourine, bells on a strap, electric mandolin. She waits, schooling herself to a patience she doesn’t feel.

  Why would you ask me that, he asks, the shimmy & tinkle slowing finally to silence.

  Our son said you were.

  Whooping, weaving, ducking, he goes off into peals of theatrical laughter. She’s already bored in her unwilling role of audience, it’s a thankless one. She’d like to do a little performing of her own: yawn audibly, crack her knuckles, hold a conversation with someone else while still on the phone. Laugh at something on TV, except she doesn’t have one. But of course she doesn’t.

  Yeah, he says finally, thoughtfully, as if it’s just occurred to him himself. I guess I am.

  74.

  She is disappointed in weather. She thought that when rain ended her troubles would be over. But the clear sky brings her more bitter cold than she thinks she has a right to expect. Walking in the alley in the crisp morning air, sharp as a just-bitten apple, she measures the circumference of the big jots of rain that sit like cushions on car roofs. They’ve driven in that morning, from Abbotsford or the Townships, with their cargo of weather. Two blocks away is the photocopy shop next to the court, where the clerk helps her make three copies of her latest affidavit: denunciations, denials, I verily believe it to be true. Her response incomplete & mistaken, no doubt, as usual. She’ll take the copies to the court registry, be told by a barely civil clerk that they won’t do, maybe be told what to do to make them right. Maybe. The clerks aren’t supposed to help her: it falls under the category of legal advice. Mercy’s opposite. She already knows she’s a fool at this kind of thing, she doesn’t need to be told again, but there’s no choice in the matter.

  It was hailing at three o’clock last night, says the man in the photocopy shop as the machine whirrs and illuminates between them. Hailing and snowing.

  What were you doing up?

  I came down here. I had something to look after.

  She brings this knowledge like a gift from outside to her own office when she trickles in later. Somebody said it hailed at three in the morning downtown.

  Where’d you hear this?

  At the copy shop.

  And the guy in the shop told you this?

  Yeah. He said he was down there in the middle of the night.

  Sounds like a worried man, says her boss. Nobody comes down to his business at three in the morning, not unless he’s worried about something.

  75.

  A bigger apartment is available upstairs in her building. She goes to look at it. They need more space she’s aware. The thin life of a bachelor apartment unsuitable for two really. Her boy is growing.

  Number eleven is crowded with someone else’s belongings, the two slipcovered, oversize sofas, the table and chairs. There’s an inside room in which, the landlord says, the current tenant is asleep. They tiptoe like unwelcome visitors, at least she does. The sink is minute and encased in a tall cabinet: she sees she will have to stand on a stool to do the dishes. Three steps up to the small bath. Perhaps this apartment by the front door belonged to the caretaker once. How bad can it get. She imagines drunks leaning on the intercom at four in the morning.

  The apartment is on the northeast corner of the building, looking out over the street. There will be the constant noise of traffic. She meets the tenant who wants to take her old place, who’s moving in turn from the front. Musical rooms. It’s the noise, the tenant explains, staring. I can’t stand it any more.

  But you get used to it, right?

  Six years and I never got used to it.

  She pretends she can adjust to anything but there’s her son to consider. She goes to see the child at his father’s, sits on a leather sofa, begins seriously to talk about the new apartment, but almost at once her child interrupts.

  Yay. Let’s move.

  She reminds her boy of the noise, the lack of a window in the one small closed-off room, but her child disregards both of these things.

  The child’s father comes into the room, looks round complacently at his yolk-coloured walls. He’s moved himself, she remembers, from the back of his building to its front. She never saw the old place: they weren’t speaking then. I had a real freakout when I was trying to decide about moving in here, he says unexpectedly. My friends told me I was crazy. Then I got in here and I was like, Oh yeah. Light. Air.

  She wakes far too early the next morning, in her bed in the middle of the room, that she closes like a drawer in the daytime. This one room has been so many different things. Dining room, living room, study, office, bedroom. The simplicity pleases her. Still it’s true they have outgrown their current space. Her boy’s feet dangling off the edge of the mattress. There will be windows on two sides in the new place, downstairs. Friends can hail them from the street if they want. Traffic swishing outside. Even more places to watch rain as it falls.

  76.

  Easter. A time of renewal or so it’s said, bruited about even, the possibility of growth. So many chances for anniversaries and fresh starts and here is another. She arises from her dented bed filled with resolution. She will sort that errant paper, the piles of it she’s been augmenting all year. She will put her taxes into order this time, really. Everything due at the library will be returned, all the languishing dry cleaning rescued, perhaps she will even begin cleaning for their move. The sills and lintels can’t accumulate much dust in a month, can they? It isn’t too early to wipe down her fridge now, surely?

  And all this virtue deserves its reward. She will actually find lingerie this time, not just poke dispiritedly amongst the piles before giving up and going away again. Sets of it, in cotton candy colours: pink sherbet, lavender, innocent blue. She will shop for candy too, the good kind: dark chocolate Easter eggs, pretend carrots in a twist of orange foil. What about music? She hasn’t bought any in years, it’s a disgrace. Perhaps she’ll even find a suit, a new suit for Easter, now that would be nice. Why she’s got so much to do.

  The sky outside, what she can see of it from her window, abets her in these fine resolutions. It is blue and strewn with fat tufts of cumulus. They move in a lazy panorama, not hurrying.

  But what’s this? When she glances at the sky again the white has begun to silt in, filling up the cracks between clouds. The sun recedes behind these wispy layers, a faraway friend getting smaller, waving, waving helplessly. Mouthing advice. Soon rain will come, listen to what it wants, do its bidding.

  77.

  Everything would be perfect if only. This time it’s a walk in the green, but the park at the end of the block is fenced off entirely. First it was the public washrooms they razed. Then the children’s playground attached to the school, chained against weekenders. Finally the block was entirely closed off by a metal grid with a sign on it about how this was being done for her benefit. Improvements. A timeline for the bulldozers to ignore. She sees the dog people behind the fence. They got in somehow. We went to all the planning meetings, her neighbour with the aged Pomeranian explains. We told them the dog park was self-policing.

  Did they listen to you?

  Of course not.

  She writes a letter about how the park is her child’s backyard, how they cannot go a season without it. Sends it to the name on the sign. No reply.

  78.

  The season has changed, not gradually as you’d expect but flipped like a switch, the air so soft now she doesn’t even notice the window being open. She’s looking after Nurse’s dog while Nurse works at the Catholic hospital two blocks away. Saints preserve us. The dog lays his heavy head on her knee and then gives up and goes away again, his paws clicking on the polished wooden floor.

  Men go up the stairs and come out the elevator in the building opposite, on the floor above. The floor below is obscured by its overhang, in its turn indifferently dappled by the cling of rain. She makes herself breakfast, makes phone calls, combs out her hair in the bath. She should put on
some clothes: this mere towel around her waist isn’t decent. Wet hair drips onto the crook of her elbow and down her back.

  All of Good Friday’s intentions have ebbed away. Yes, she should cycle to the natural-foods co-op for beef and organic butter but it’s so far to go, and look, the rain has begun again. It’s two-way rain. On the one side she can tell herself it’s not much: just get out in it, you won’t even notice. On the other she can use it as excuse.

  She chooses the latter. Yesterday she walked: to the corner store for a week’s worth of heavy groceries, seven oranges, two lemons, two limes. To the usual shops. To the bank and then through the shopping mall on the way home, fingering merchandise she won’t buy.

  79.

  Rain again, spring rain, starting last night as wet slashes to the face, irregular, erratic. She catches one full in the lips as she walks, a promissory note. More to come.

  Rain starts this way and builds and by nightfall there is glitter everywhere and the small thick noise of its falling. Instead of going out into rain she falls asleep. She wakes often in the night: the air is warmer than she is used to, the quilt heavy on her. Nurse’s dog, here still, restless, thumping.

  By morning rain has resolved itself into silence. The coating of it on the glass opposite. She’s lost her hat somewhere, she can’t really go out. Not unless she wants to get wet, with her wanton hair.

  80.

  Sunshine today. The two of them late again, they’re late, they’re incredibly late as always. Back to work, back to school, back to the packed lunches and the search for containers, back to the tightness at the back of the throat, forward and back, unraveling. Shuttle. The sky clear as far as the eye can see. It’s as if it never rained, not once in their lives. Forget me blue.

  81.

  This morning she wakes to rain. Cars outside swish through the wet. Will she ride? She has a tight black skirt that cleaves to her hips. The amount of her earnings, gathered in preparation for tax time, astounds her. It comes to her with equal astonishment that she has survived the year. Downstairs in her apartment building is a free shelf, offering up the humblest of discards: dented saltshakers and flimsy plastic dishracks, dollar store discards she discovers anew with cries of internal triumph. And all the while she has been offering up these enormous sums, as she sees it now, to lawyers. In trust.

  The rain gives a luminous almost beautiful quality to the yellow lamps shining opposite. There are so many different colours of grey. One so pallid as to be practically negligible, the sky holding rain ready to drop. One dark and stone-coloured. A handful shot through with other colours: a pale flashing kind of lavender, the dark slatey blue of night coming on, even white turning up at the edges, like particoloured covers.

  82.

  They turn into the city (they become part of the city, they enter into it, this enterprise) on a blue day. Here is puffiness, cloudsful, in the sky. Here is surprised sudden summer. How she drinks up these unpredictably dry days. The sun, far above, impersonally caressing them.

  How it all begins to change. How the sky grows dirty with it, like a cloth soiled from cleaning: an imperceptible then overlaid filthy grey. A creeping darkness clouds her in, outside, and then the sentinel drops. Meek they are, the Uriah Heeps of rain.

  Us?

  Oh nothing.

  And the rain, murmuring as if to itself: Don’t fuss, mustn’t grumble, no, not at all, not a thing, I’ll just fall here.

  And here and here and here. Like armies or termites they count on being ignored until they can overwhelm. And thus the rain comes, finally, with great violence. The people cluster in doorways and under overhangs, helpless and uncertain. An incidental sorority. The girls in white fluffy summer skirts and little flat shoes. Their small shirts and smaller undershirts. The boys’ hoods, the last resource of the wetted, flimsy and inadequate. The people who believed, faithful & betrayed. Wet bounces off the pavement, diagonal slash of water-filled sky, repeat, lose count, overwhelm. A man in a white shirt, soaked to the waist, walks for his car gesturing before him with a small black device. A dowser, a blind man.

  The next day: la-la-la sunny, like it never rained.

  83.

  In the grassy pocket park by the market, overlooking the inlet, a sidewalk preacher shouts his wares. She wanders over possessed.

  Nobody wants to listen to you, she shouts, standing in front of him. He controls a wince, but can’t refrain from turning slightly, cushioning himself. How much easier to shout than to be shouted at! She is invincible. She goes on and on, matching his every word.

  Later, back at the house, S’s neighbour out walking her dog. The neighbour stops to talk. She confesses what she did.

  Mm. Did you ask him how long he’s been doing this?

  She didn’t ask him a thing.

  Ask him how many people he’s converted. Then, after he tells you, tell him he might want to consider a different approach.

  84.

  Times she misses M. An ache she doesn’t want to admit even to herself. So many things tainted now, the feel of M’s body in the bed next to hers (tightly clasp) overlaid with their last fight. No bed or body to regret now. M reading reports on the couch. The back of her neat, shorn head above a polo collar. What little is left.

  85.

  Rain again. How summer isn’t coming. The afternoon sun, golden, shafting in at a slant. And these puddles lying crossways on the road, deep and still. Take a memo, Miss Jones. Let it run as follows: There was rain today, there will be rain tomorrow.

  Slashes on the windowpane. Dribbles on the fall. Gloomy morning, gloomy noontime, gloomy day with no hint of what is to come. The future. Will it be warm and sunny again? Or bloody like this forever?

  Cutting bread and then, sharply, skin. Red speckles on the wrap, on the bread. Spotted.

  Rain starts up again in the afternoon. The sound of rain a thousand shushes, a phalanx of Spanish soldiers: sssss. The blood slows, thickens, clots.

  86.

  When something is bad there comes a time when she needs it. When that sudden sick feeling in the stomach, that sudden gut sock, that sudden drop is like manna. When she doesn’t feel right unless she is reeling from another awful revelation. The poison like milk. She sucks it down from a tube and when the tube is taken away without warning, without notice she feels a sudden irrational sense of loss and panic as she blunders in its wake. The rain starts and she doesn’t even have sense to cover herself or get out of the way. She stumbles and lurches a great foolish baby, half-skinned, only partially formed.

  She tells herself she can get used to the repeated stupid appearances at court, to the horrible accusations, to the looming up, apologetic but determined, of the next officer. This one, at the airport, enforcing an access order nobody was trying to evade. Your ex-wife, he’ll say, trying. She’ll interrupt: my wife. Might as well claim it for what it is, make the worst case possible. It’s a strategy, like chemotherapy.

  She congratulates herself on perfecting her response to strangers who mention her marriage. Universally appropriate, she’d like to think. Wry smile. Oh that, she says. Oh her. Like it’s a joke, as if it matters that little to her. Inside she’s seething as usual, pot on the boil. The roiling, though she’d never acknowledge it, feels a little bit comforting, a little bit like something she knows.

  She’s longing to talk about it, to go over it again & again like the tongue goes back to a bad tooth, but she thinks it’s only decent to pretend. A bad relationship, she tells herself sagely, everyone’s had them. So we were married. So what. Lots of people get married. Lots of times it doesn’t work out. The platitudes ring hollow. Secretly she feels her loss is tragic: singular & profound. Secretly she understands: this dissolution is a puzzle she is required to solve. A labyrinth within whose painted lines she consents to remain. Who did what to whom. Who was wrong, who was beyond the pale (M, of course, it’s obvious, can’t everyone see that?), whether in fact she was to blame. In any way. Whether she had been herself, or someone wor
se. And how exactly it all went wrong, at what moment their marriage stopped being a container with a few insignificant cracks, when it turned into a casualty. Could no longer hold water. These are questions she will have to answer, to somebody’s satisfaction. Hers maybe.

  She was so surprised when she saw a labyrinth for the first time: no maze of walls but simply a circle traced on the floor of a church hall, infinitely looping back on itself. She learned then that a labyrinth uses nothing to keep you in, except for your own steps stuck to the pattern.