Vital Signs (3 page)

Anna rarely talked about those early days between us—or about anything in her childhood, for that matter—as though memories embarrassed her. “I don’t miss it. I was a baby when we left,” she said to me after we’d been together a couple of years and I asked her why she disliked it when her parents talked incessantly about Istanbul, or when people asked her about her background. Her voice became sharp. “You think there’s a more exciting place called the past, where they do things better, where they live with more flair. It’s not true.”

Her family was like a prism of loss: her mother wrote long, nostalgic letters to her friends in Istanbul; her father never learned English properly and didn’t care to; her brother escaped the weight of their longing by reinventing himself as an American.

“Kiss me,” Anna would say whenever I asked her if she wanted to make a trip back to Turkey.

But it is I who would like to travel there, back in time to the Istanbul of Atatürk, where Anna’s father was born the year the office of the Ottoman Sultanate was abolished and an emboldened, hopeful republic established. I want to interrogate Anna’s grandmother to learn the grace of her dervish heritage, to see her perform the whirl—forbidden to females—in the intimacy of her home, where, Anna’s mother told me, she was renowned for out-whirling even the fittest of men. I want to watch her spin and to assemble my humility before her.

The past is punishing Anna for unrequited love, inflicting itself randomly, then enlisting the present and
future and conflating them all to torment her. And this feeling has not been as alive in me for over a decade as it is right now: this urge to take her, here, in front of our good neurosurgeon. I’d unbutton her palm-green blouse slowly—perhaps with my teeth—and release her overripe breasts and take one, the left one, in my mouth, to feel the nipple pucker on my tongue. The urge grows complicated at the thought of entering her, though. My first instinct is to move hungrily—she likes a gentle ride, but she can also be desperate to be subdued roughly, with a smack on her ass to make her skin smile. But this new marriage, just begun, this “worse” part of the deal, makes me hesitate about a playful fuck. Oh, but I would plant myself deeply in her, stay there, forever, let the surgeon separate us if need be. But why would that need be?

“I’ll drive up tomorrow,” Sasha says on the phone when I call her from home later in the day.

“No need, not so soon; she’s fine,” I mumble.

“She’s going to have her head cut open!” she shouts to challenge my
fine
.

“She hasn’t agreed to it yet …”

“Of course she hasn’t; she’s terrified. I’ll see you tomorrow; I’m staying the weekend,” and she hangs up.

I realize my daughter is saying that she’s going to get a sub for her part in the chorus of
Dirty Dancing
, which she has been in for almost two years at the Royal Alex. This gesture is quintessential Sasha. The girl who has lived to dance from the age of four always knows her priorities. She stands out among the other dancers in the chorus because she is the least ambitious; she stands out because her hunger doesn’t interfere with her delight.

I take an hour or so before I call the other two. Sasha will have already called to fill them in, with a gentle clarity I could never manage. When Fred finally calls me back after I leave a message on his pager, his encumbered voice promptly sets me to sketch a graphic to represent him.

“Dad, have they mentioned the possibility of embolization?” Fred asks. His voice strains as though I’ve scolded him. I must have scolded Fred too much as a child.

Charlotte doesn’t answer her phone, but her voice mail clicks in: “Leave me a message; I don’t read minds!”

Charlotte is stone, and yet I believe there’s something flammable beneath the surface. Perhaps her sign should come with a warning. I leave a message as I stand in the hallway outside what was once her bedroom, where her trophies for the debating team, chess team, and young entrepreneurs’ club still line the shelves above her desk. I can still feel the determination that intimidated me even when she was a teenager.

“Please call me,” is all I’m able to say.

When the five of us gather around the Sunday lunch prepared effortlessly by Anna, I feel such an enormous sense of relief that I am close to letting go of all concern. I slice a sliver of the rosemary-garlic lamb and notice how perfectly cooked the just-pink meat is.

“Rabbits, hundreds of them, bounded as the corn came down around them, and if you open up the pie then all the blue jays fly out and in them there are twenty-four, twenty-five, no, twenty-seven babies each year, and the winds will take them away, and if Mike says he wants that, then okay.”

Sasha reaches over to lower my hand, which has shot up with the knife in it, as though she’s afraid I intend to use it on someone. I look at her with annoyance, then at all of them.

Fred cuts his lamb as though slicing into an I-told-you-so pie. His grey eyes flicker with neither humility nor grace. And yet. His hands are gentle. My son is not physically strong; he has soft hands and a soft face, but there is steel in his soul. When he was eleven years old, he told me that the best thing in the world was playing Civilization, when the barbarians invaded and took on his Mongolian villagers, battling in hand-to-hand combat, eventually losing to Genghis Khan, or when he was awarded gunpowder as he moved up the levels and used it to expand his empire. “Pa paaaaa!” he said, mimicking the computer game’s sounds, “the greatest feeling.”

Anna pushes her chair back from the table and crosses her arms. She smiles, knowing we are watching her, and says, “Eat up, then,” and I wonder what she means by “eat” and what she means by “then,” and if she really is saying “Fuck off, now.” I watch her cross her legs and begin to shake her foot up and down, and then in little sideways movements, then sideways and circling. It’s something she does—a nervous tic. Five years into our marriage that foot became irksome; the shaking felt like the rattlings of
a mad woman. It contained within it all that Anna never said to me, even though she claimed to talk about her feelings so easily and had asked me to talk about mine. How I despised that foot and its compulsive, constant motion.

You hit me, there in the street, because I didn’t know why women always had so many questions I had to answer
.

As I stare at the pale heel that gapes from the sole of her sandal, I notice a callus, scaly and hard like a boat-hull barnacle, protruding from her big toe. I consider kneeling to lick it moist and soft, beg it to whisper my name and recount to me the days after the Bloor cinema, to give it all a date, a title, a proper heading in Anna’s life accounting.

“Mom, we need to know what you want to do about all of this.” As usual, Charlotte cuts through to what everyone else cannot express.

“Charlie,” Sasha says, “I think she’s just told us.” What has Sasha understood from Anna that the rest of us have failed to grasp? How does she know?

“Look, I’m sorry everyone, to be like this again, but get real. If we don’t do something there’s a chance her brain will burst open like a water balloon. You want to watch that?” Charlotte says.

Anna’s foot stops circling the air. My lips part, but I only lick them and stay quiet.

“Charlotte,” Fred says, “You’re a complete bitch.”

“Fred!” I shout, and for the first time in years I am the disciplining father again.

“Mom, I want to play you the music from the show at Toronto Dance, and, oh, I have some photos. We start rehearsals soon, so I’m quitting this run of
Dirty.”
Sasha announces a significant event in her life—and changes the subject—with an insouciance that neither of her siblings would ever be able to manage.

As Sasha stands up, her ribcage moves like a purl stitch that Anna once showed me as she was knitting a sweater for Fred. I gasp, and I see that the others have also traced the perfect, fluid line. Fred has taken hold of his left wrist. Anna reaches for Sasha’s hand, and I realize that it’s been a long time—two, maybe three years—since my wife has worn her wedding ring. Why do I only now consider the significance of that?

I didn’t know the blondeness would make me want it again and again. I thought it would be just once
.

“Dad, let’s go outside. We need to talk,” Fred says and I nod.

Charlotte looks at me as though this is all my fault. “Fred, in a second. First,” she says, intercepting us and pointing with her chin in the direction of the kitchen, indicating to her brother that she’d like a private word with him. She looks at me with scorn.

“Dad, give me two secs. I’ll meet you on the porch,” my son says, accommodating us both. The two of them get up to conspire, and I push my chair back and head outside.

After our first date, and the foreign film that I will never be able to remember, I lost all capacity for sleep. I would
work long days at DesignAge’s trendy office on Queen Street West. I was prolific, and my design for a large optical chain, with an outline of spectacles buried in the firm’s name, became my first major coup. Suddenly I felt like a man who could not fail at anything. For the entire eighteen months before we were married, I was high on my own brilliance. Anna’s presence in my life seemed to confirm it, and that must have been why I asked her to marry me—because I wanted to secure the feeling for eternity.

Anna saw through me. I know now, decades on, that she was aware of every false move, every manic, gonad-driven step I took and didn’t take, and yet she never let on that she could detect the slippery eel of fear inside me.

“How’s your love life?” she asked me one evening over the red-checkered tablecloth at Fran’s on College Street—a cheap night out because I was saving for a car. I looked up from my roasted chicken and chips. Her face betrayed nothing ironic, no hint of a trick.

“It’s good,” I said, stupidly.

“Why’s that?” she asked, still looking serious.

“Because you’re in it,” I replied, treading lightly.

“I’m in it,” she repeated back at me.

I looked at the prunish green peas on my plate, then up at her with a weak grin. “For good?”