Love Enough (8 page)

“Well,” June began, “I suppose wake up.”

“But I don’t … I can’t now.” Sibyl turned her attention to a brown patch of skin near her left wrist and began brushing it with her right thumb. The small brush strokes would turn into rubbing in a moment, and then she would need the key to the washroom to go scrub the spot fully.

“Dream something else then,” June said.

The woman’s thumb hovered over her wrist, she smiled at June. “Yes, I can do that. I think I can do that. I’ve had many other dreams, you know, lots of others.”

“Choose one then, Sibyl.” June’s voice urged enthusiasm. “Choose another one.”

“I had one where I went to the mail and found a package
and there was a rubber band around it and I took it into my room and opened it and inside there were three gold keys. I didn’t know what to open with the keys. I left them in the box for a day and lying there, they looked like bright metallic babies. But they were not babies. They were metal keys, gold shiny keys and each had a red ribbon—and did I tell you about the buds of flowers in the box, they were metallic too. What does it mean, do you know?”

“I’m not sure,” June replied. “Should it mean anything?”

Sibyl rubbed the palms of her hands together. The Clorox made them itch. June heard her pop psychology tone and felt a small self-disdain. She had not anticipated that sentiment in herself. She was not a psychiatrist, she was not a counsellor, the archive did not do that kind of work. Gloria, the head archivist, became agitated when Sibyl came to see June. After Sibyl left, Gloria said to her, “This is not Queen Street Mental Health.”

June and Gloria were the only employees at the archive. Not exactly employees, they were a collective of two, recording women’s social action in the city. Gloria was a historian and June, of course, the social activist. So naturally they would clash, though they were perfect for an archive. One, to rush madly in, the other, to pull the brakes. It wasn’t their job to save any one woman, Gloria said. “Big Picture, June.”
This was an archive of feminist social history. A hot arrow flew up June’s nostril. Yes, and Sibyl is a casualty, June said bitterly.

By way of history, which is really allegory after all, June’s father had told her, “Only read the business section of the newspaper.
That
is the news. The other parts are the casualties.” He had said this to her from the veranda of the house where he lived with a second family. It was where she had discovered him quite by accident one morning when she was late for school and took a shortcut down an unknown street. He did not explain the identical house with his identical chair and his identical glass of whiskey on the identical banister. When June arrived home that afternoon, there he was in the same position, it seemed, with the same advice in her own house. That time he added, “The other parts are the casualties and the fantasies.” Her father was a bright man haunted by certain failures; certain situations that should have gone his way but didn’t. June and he found solace in the business pages of the daily newspapers. He taught her how to read the architecture of a society in the printed word of passing governments and rising industry. He had been promised a job by a politician for pulling in votes in their area and he had been totally ignored after the man’s victory. That was
in another country, another city. And June has stored this information like a jewel in a safe. Her father might have failed personally but not politically. That is, he had been correct about the world.

Sibyl appeared a week later to report to June on the progress of changing to another dream. She was trying to settle on a dream strong enough to displace the Clorox dream. A dream such as that, as everyone knows, has to be fairly powerful. It had left her with papery, itchy skin and various compulsions. She was forced to carry around a bottle of Clorox on all her journeys throughout the city, to scour subway seats, to spray bus shelters, door handles, money boxes and railings in the streetcars and buses. She had adapted one bottle with a spray mouth for easier use. Such a powerful dream needed a replacement more powerful still, since it had virtually taken over her entire life, to the extent that Sibyl was besieged by her impulses. She felt responsible for bleaching the entire city. “Who sent the keys?” she asked June, “Did you send the keys? When I touched the first one last night it softened and bent.”

“I didn’t send the keys,” June told her, and then she asked the woman, “Did you see a door anywhere?”

“I told you, there’s no door.” Sibyl was radiantly annoyed with June.

“Well,” June said, “I think you have to find a door for the key.”

“Anyway, forget the keys, they don’t help. There’s no door I said!” Sibyl glowed with anger and then subsided. “I’m here about the magnesium and mercury. I have to swallow magnesium and mercury and everything will turn out right.”

“Who says?” June asked. Why was she in this negotiation, this relationship, with this woman?

“Do you know where I can find magnesium and mercury?” Sibyl asked. That’s all she wanted, June now saw. She had lost credibility asking about a door.

“Mercury is not good for you,” June said, “they’ve found it in dead fish.”

“You don’t know that for sure, do you? You’re not a scientist, are you? You don’t know anything. The magnesium and mercury drink is not poisonous for me.”

At this difficult point, as Sibyl got up to go, Gloria walked by the door, her head rigid.

“Dream something else, Sibyl.” June was desperate.

“I have to go,” Sibyl whispered. “I’ll tell you how it works out.”

Where Sibyl spent her other days June did not know. Sibyl detailed her dreams, not her whereabouts. She must
live somewhere, June thought. She could not live on the streets, her Clorox fetish would not work there. Sibyl had told her she’d been thrown out of several shelters because of her habits, compelled as she was to sanitise each space she occupied and the paths leading to it. She had tried to adjust. She carried small perfume bottles to disguise her Clorox. One small green bottle from Christian Dior, one atomiser from DeVilbiss, one Givenchy bottle and one eau de cologne by Elizabeth Arden. She showed them to June as you would jewellery, a certain pleasure beaming through her damaged face. These bottles, of course, were not hers to begin with—she’d acquired them through various means June could only guess at. The atomiser was Sibyl’s favourite—she did tell June she had swiped that one from her last job. She’d emptied the perfume, which she thought stank, and filled the bottle with Clorox. It wasn’t very large but it was elegant and she hoped people appreciated that elegance: there were two Greek women reaching for a god on the bottle. Sibyl had been fired for its disappearance, though they could not prove she had taken it. The world is unfair, she told June, they did not prove it, yet they fired me. They should have to prove it.

Magnesium and mercury. June hoped no place was mad enough to sell the woman mercury. Magnesium was harmless
enough, though she didn’t know what it did in great quantity. Perhaps if Sibyl remained preoccupied with a search for mercury it could replace the Clorox fetish. She might let the bleach fall away as not effective, and of course no one in their right mind would sell Sibyl mercury.

Perhaps it was memory loss Sibyl wanted. Mercury would do that, displace all the good minerals in the body and induce memory loss. Or perhaps Sibyl wanted to slow down the energy, the adrenaline she devoted to cleaning and disinfecting herself and the world from whatever disease she thought they had. Sibyl saw the invisible diseases that were quite possibly there.

You never know who you’ll meet in this city. Apart from the constant construction and reconstruction occasioned by winter, there are the appearances and disappearances of people. One could, as is often the case, disappear into someone else. One could become totally invisible. And so Sibyl disappeared, became invisible after that last visit. June looked for her and waited for her. She prided herself on knowing the city, but Sibyl knew it much better and disappeared. June checked the shelters and the vans that served the homeless. She went to Lansdowne and Bloor, the corner where she’d first met Sibyl, where Sibyl had first hinted at the realities of dreams. Once or twice she thought
she caught a glimpse of her, but hurrying quickly to meet the figure it would turn out not to be Sibyl. Who knows who she may have disappeared into. Perhaps she had become a dental assistant, to find mercury. Perhaps she found the door to the key and walked into another life.

Sibyl’s dream keys had stayed in June’s mind and puzzled her. There were three gold keys, Sibyl had said. June wondered if they stood for time or simply the letter “k,” which needs three gestures. June could not believe her own ineptness. She had tried to play about in someone else’s life without having the wherewithal let alone the imagination. People think they can save other people but really they’re trying to save themselves. Now June understood that she had to figure out what part of herself she had been trying to save when Sibyl approached her.

June hates referencing her own biography, she thinks that when people do this they draw false parallels. Her mother was a cheerful woman. A woman who did not want to know very much except that life was good. And so June never told her of meeting her father on the veranda of that identical house on another street. Later June abstracted that her mother probably knew, but did not need it confirmed: it would have spoiled her mother’s sense of goodness. And still later June thought, why must such arrangements always
appear as betrayal? It was a betrayal by her father, of course, but only in the context of totalizing it as a betrayal; that is, of having that set of emotional formalities laid out in that particular way; that teleology, if you will, of domesticity.

June doesn’t believe in a codex of childhood events that adjudges the state of one’s present life. She knows this is the way people think they come to “understand” things about a person: this is what they share in coffee shops and in bed together, and this is what they extrapolate into friendship and familiarity. Not her. She rarely offers her lovers a catalogue of her past or her childhood. Now is now, she thinks. Here is here.

But perhaps she had caused Sibyl to lose faith in her who, in hindsight, read Sibyl’s dreams literally. Key, door … June was slightly embarrassed for weeks after Sibyl disappeared from her. She spent three weeks looking for her so that she might redeem Sibyl’s faith in her, to offer some other suggestions for the presence of a key—or three keys—in a package. She had forgotten, of course, that when you are not in a position to order your life, disorder has its own order. Which is not like the disorder of order but like the order of disorder. People with ordered lives, as June’s was relative to Sibyl’s, have nothing to offer people whose lives are in disorder. They moralise and
psychologise and proselytise and pretend they know, but that is their own anxiety and impatience. They have no idea about disorder. It is a different country. A different set of principles. And people with ordered lives always think that people whose lives are in disorder are looking for their kind of order. They think their kind of order is happiness, when their kind of order is gluttony and selfishness. And with all this order, June thinks, we are creating wreckage and disorder, piling it up like a midden.

Things don’t remain the same in this city. Perhaps Sibyl froze to death in an alleyway. June has been keeping an eye on those statistics too.

P
erché non hai tenuto di più a Mercede? Perché non hai tenuto di più a Mercede? Perché non hai tenuto di più a Mercede?

The older woman watering the porch stops to look at her. “It’s you?”

“Yes it’s me, Lia.”

“Well, so it’s you then.”

“Yes it’s me.”

“Gesu Cristo.”

The hose falling limp from her nonna’s hand squirms and bounces, the water uncontrolled. Lia points to it, leaning Jasmeet’s bicycle on the tree in the front yard, then runs
down the side of the brick house on Russett Street, to turn the tap off. When she returns, her nonna says again, “So it’s you.”

“Yes, it’s me.”

Renata is wearing a house dress, a pair of slippers, some old-fashioned glasses, and now she places her hand across her chest. Lia goes back to Jasmeet’s bicycle, she holds it like a fence. She says to her nonna,
“Perché non hai tenuto di più a Mercede?”
She has learned this sentence by heart. She’s practised it in quiet moments for years. She knows no other sentence in this language. She doesn’t know what she expects to happen after she’s said it. She expects a heart attack. She expects a fall to the sidewalk. She expects a change in the amount of oxygen in the air. Her grandmother drops her hands in a gesture of supplication. That’s all the Italian Lia knows.
Why didn’t you love Mercede better?
Even if Renata answers in that language, Lia would not understand. She only came to say this sentence, to register it, to have it said.

There, it’s done. Lia climbs onto the bicycle and takes the first step on the pedal. It levers a gushing of Italian from her grandmother. It begins softly, pleadingly, and becomes louder and more rapid as Lia pedals down the sidewalk. She looks back. The early summer envelops her
hair, her articulating legs, her shiny face. She waves and waves as if to say see you soon, until her nonna is lost in the curve of the street.

Renata looks down at the hem of her house dress and the hose fallen from her hand.

She is not an old woman. In her own head though she remembers the day she became an old woman. It was the day Mercede left home. Everyone thought of her as an old woman after that. She might as well have been a widow—no daughter, no future wedding, no son-in-law to be proud of. Shame. In her head she is herself. Renata. That self before Mercede’s rebellion. In the life everyone sees, she wears house dresses peppered with little flowers, from the stores on College Street. Dressed like this, she sweeps the veranda endlessly, extending her long brush strokes to the sidewalk and to the sewer drain. But in her head her legs are bare, her face is rich,
ricca
and smiling. The girl, Lia, hadn’t seen that, she’d only seen an old woman sweeping. She wishes she could have shown Lia the woman in her head; the woman who thought Mercede was right to run off, she was right to go dancing late, she was right to wait until they were all asleep, pack her things and run away. Live. But she was also the one who never, ever, said so to Mercede. She was jealous of her
daughter—and she was afraid of that thought. She was paralyzed by Mercede’s going and then all the blaming—from her husband, Joe, from the neighbours. She had to defend herself, so she bought some of the flowered house dresses that everyone wears and buried Renata, the jealous one, inside. Then the neighbours left her alone—and by that time Mercede was truly lost. When Mercede reappeared with first one child then another and all the troubles, Renata was grateful she had another chance. She bore it all, the coming and going, and Joe’s cursing.