Vital Signs (4 page)

Her eyebrows twitched towards one another. She raised her fork, piled high with the starchy pith of her baked potato, and took a mouthful. Doubt rattled through a chink in our familiar silence. I watched her, from under my lashes, as I cut into the chicken breast on my plate and, as I waited for her to say something, took a bite. Our chewing and swallowing was interminable.

“There was this couple today, on the subway,” she began, finally, then paused to take a sip of her wine, “and the man was talking, about his work—he was some kind of marketing trainee guy—and he kept saying, ‘so, as far as I’m concerned,’ blah, blah, blah … before every point, ‘as far as I’m concerned,’ and he just kept talking and talking, and looking at her for a reaction and then just talking at her, almost like he was trying to convince her of something. But he was just telling her about his day: the man he was working with had been sick and he’d taken over his accounts. Nothing that required convincing. The woman—she was very beautiful. And pouty. Around my age, I think, or maybe a little younger. She just looked straight ahead and nodded, while he nattered on and on at her. I watched him talk until it was like he slowly ran out of gas, and the talk went sluggish, and sputtered,
because when he looked at her maybe he thought she wasn’t listening, so finally he just shut down. They sat staring forward for a little while, and then she looked at him, put her head on his shoulder, and started picking at a button on his jacket. Then she started talking. It was like she was taking up the baton he had dropped. She was off: telling him about her day, looking at him like she was begging him to pat her on the head or something. He just stared ahead, not even nodding. Just blinking now and then.” Anna took another sip of wine and then another forkful of baked potato.

I was all too familiar with the scene she’d described, that subtle dance of abandonment that couples go through, when one leads and distances, while the other begs like a dog for scraps of attention, and then the positions reverse. I picked up one of the peas, now cold and even more shrivelled, and gently squeezed it without bursting the skin.

“Marry me,” I said, looking up at her.

Her eyebrows did that twitch again, but then she smiled.

“You’re something else,” she said.

I had to ask her again, several times, before she agreed. When she told me that story about the couple in the subway, I took it to mean that we weren’t like them—that things were right and balanced between us and that we didn’t do the abandonment dance. But now I wonder if I got it all wrong, if maybe what she meant was that I should be more like that guy, and the story had more to do with my not talking to her enough, or not using my words with enough authority—
as far as I’m concerned
.
Maybe I wasn’t giving her the pleasure she could have had from a more talkative man. Perhaps it was only me who was comfortable with silence.

“I’ve found a job,” she said casually one evening when she’d come to my apartment with a bottle of wine and some blueberries, her favourite. Instead of excitement, I detected a note of resignation. That this is what people do: they graduate, they get a job, and they come home with blueberries.

“Hey, great! Where?” I stood up from my desk.

“George Brown,” she said, then turned on the tap and ran water over the fruit. George Brown College had been her first choice out of all the colleges she had applied to, and the first one to respond to her unsolicited letters asking about possible positions for teaching English.

“Two courses, five groups, so that’s twenty hours a week,” she said, and I wondered if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” I asked.

She put the blueberries in a bowl and swept her long hair behind her ear and over her shoulder. She walked towards the table; I met her there and we both pulled out chairs. I kept my eyes on her.

“Those who can’t … teach …” she said and took a handful of berries.

I shifted in my chair. “But you can.”

“Can what?”

“Whatever you want.”

Her smile was clenched as she shook her head.

“Do you want children?” she asked after a short silence.

“I don’t know,” I said, feeling ambushed. Why was she asking me that now?

Much later, I would prod her about her decision to teach. There were things she knew deeply—things to do with literature, politics, food, the directions to my brother David’s cottage on Georgian Bay. There was her own Turkish history, her status as an immigrant, as one of untold millions who, like her family, had contorted their identities to become North Americans. Yet she chose to limit herself to paragraph construction, apostrophes and the proper use of commas.

Soon after she started teaching, I overheard her talking to Susan in the kitchen of our first apartment: “My mother never admitted she wanted more, but she never seemed satisfied. If she’d been allowed to, she’d probably have run a state, let alone a business, as well as bring us up, but you can’t have it all. I won’t be like her. I won’t.”

Her voice had been so determined that I had stepped back and returned to the living room.

Anna’s father had been a teacher, greatly respected by the expats with whom he drank coffee at the local Turkish café on Dundas Street. Her mother had wanted to be a dancer—a dervish like her own mother, perhaps because it was forbidden—but in Toronto she had helped her husband to run a shop while raising Anna and her brother. Anna told me that her mother had often stared into space, a look that told Anna she was imagining the life she could—but didn’t—have, thanks to the burden of a
husband and children, and the Canadianness they were all meant to be learning.

Her parents died within two years of one another, both from cancer. These parents—the brainy Fatih and the dainty Lale—had been intertwined with our lives, excellent grandparents and babysitters to our children, keen gardeners, and players of bridge and other tabletop games. While Anna showed her parents a quiet respect, she seemed to view their lives as unremarkable, and very rarely spoke of the accomplishment of their reluctant integration into a new culture, or the simple happiness that existed between them. Her brother Joseph—Joe—had moved to Miami in his twenties and had last made an appearance at their mother’s funeral, a decade ago. Before the service, brother and sister had argued on the same steps of the funeral chapel in suburban Etobicoke where, many years before, Fatih and Lale had stood with a sense of dutiful relief, having just signed the monthly instalment plan that would ensure that their own funeral services and interment were no burden on their children.

“You think you’re special?” Anna had managed to choke out through tears. “You’re not special. You’re just like the rest of us, and when you figure that out, let me know.” She turned away from her brother and composed herself by smoothing down the cropped black suit jacket that gathered at the waist to accentuate her slim figure. Carefully picking her way up the remaining stairs in her delicate-heeled shoes, she walked with dignity into the chapel. Her hair was now cut to just below her chin, but the life-long habit of swinging
it over her shoulders and pinning it behind her ear was still a tic, like the itching of a phantom limb. When I asked her, later, what had happened between her and Joe, she shook her head and brushed the air with her long thin fingers to dismiss the question, but then she began to cry. She buried her head in my shoulder, sobbing, saying, only, “my mom.”

When our children were growing up, Anna didn’t dramatize her family for them the way I did, telling my grandfather’s stories, recounting traditions and farmers’ superstitions. It wasn’t as though she was embarrassed about who she was or where she came from; it was more that her family was then, and our family was now. This was her accomplishment—a single-mindedness of purpose that has by association shaped my life. I resented her for it for many years. And yet, all along, it has also been that humility that I am fatally attracted to.

By the time she finally agreed to marry me—”Okay,” she said, a tear sliding from the outer corner of her eye towards her ear, her breath hot, chest heaving, her sex still spasming, holding me inside her—I felt disarmed. From that day on, I believed that one day Anna would out me, and I would be seen for the fraud I was, and she, she would … what? Rule the world, no doubt. I’d let her, I’d decided, and would be content that if I had to lose her I would lose her to her own, bashful power. I still can make no sense of why that hasn’t happened.

“Did you know that, Dad?” Fred says, touching my shoulder. I look up and realize he has been standing there
without my noticing. “You didn’t hear me. Never mind. I’ll call you with the details later.” What details? I have been far away, staring out at the horizon, not hearing a word he has said. He returns inside.

The day is overcast and the air sticky; finally some of the summer heat is arriving. I raise my hand to my neck and squash at least three blackflies with my fingers, wiping them off my skin. There’s a hum that is much bigger than insects, but I can’t trace it. Sasha comes onto the porch, and I look down at her as she stands beside me, gazing out towards the asparagus ferns as though she’s spotted something. I notice she’s holding a digital camera the size of a business card. I look over to where she is gazing, but don’t see anything particularly scenic, then my eyes return to the camera. Suddenly I am struck by its size, and I try to decipher how it can hold my image, or hers, or that of the landscape before us. How are such things possible? For the first time in years, I am in awe.

“What’s that sound?” I ask, now more bothered by the humming noise from out in the field.

“They’re fertilizing,” Sasha says, as she slips the camera into the back pocket of her jeans. She looks up at me. “Look, Dad, I think Mom wants to talk to all of us. We just have to let her take the time she needs.” She holds the top of my arm as if about to squeeze my bicep, the way she did when she was a child, but she and I both know how my flexing now would fail that habit of love. I look at her face and think of pickles. Sasha suffered with terrible acne as a teen and a few scars remain. Her eyes are pale green like blanched cucumbers. She is not beautiful, not the way Charlotte is, but she is so much more attractive. Her face is concerned and yet confident. Nothing daunts her.

“I catch her sometimes,” I start, thinking it’s only to Sasha that I might be able to say these things, “watching her reflection in a glass window or public mirror, and she’ll do a kind of ‘Boo!’ and pull a face, as though the real her had caught her physical self off guard, as though she knows it’s all a joke.”

“Everyone does that, Dad, don’t you?”

There’s a misshapen silence between us. I rerun Anna’s “and you do the same for me one day” from the night we met. My guilt sickens me.

“Charlotte’s leaving, and I think Fred is too. Dad … Charlotte said something a minute ago,” Sasha begins, but then breaks off. Her eyes are glassy. “Is there something she’s angry with you about? ‘He won’t stay alone
long,’ she said.” Sasha sneaks a look behind her toward the kitchen, to make sure she’s clearly out of earshot. I hear the muffled sound of Anna and my distant daughter laughing.

It’s Charlotte I’ve disappointed the most.

“Sometimes, when she feels most strongly, she has to lash out,” I say to Sasha, and I realize that I have invented this version of Charlotte and that in fact I know nothing about her at all.

“Let’s go in,” I say, wiping more blackflies off my neck.

When I return to the table and sit down, Anna and Fred emerge from the kitchen and sit with me. Sasha pulls out a chair and we wait, silently, for Charlotte to join us, but when that wait feels too long, Fred asks Anna if she has made up her mind.

“It’s important to act quickly,” he adds. “There’s no time to waste, and even so, if you tell them now, there’ll be a waiting period. Scheduling, tests, preparation, pre-op stuff …”

“I know,” Anna says clearly and forcefully. “And if the buckets are filled …” She hesitates, and I hold my breath, “the farmers in the park become sugar for the king. You mustn’t hobble them up in the rickets and make wretches of them. It’s the law, and when riches sway and the moon makes its choice, well then, feet will rock, lemons will fall—”

“Mom, it’s your decision, and your time,” Sasha says abruptly, a horrified look on her face, corking the flood of her mother’s nonsense.

“Sasha, please, cut the airy-fairy crap,” Fred cuts in.

Charlotte enters then and stands behind Fred. The two of them seem to breathe in as one, positioning themselves as their mother’s sentinels.

“Remember, Mom, this thing will get worse, not better,” Charlotte says, and shifts the weight on her feet.

“And the technology these days …” Fred adds.

“We have a stake in it, too—”

“Charlotte, you selfish bitch!”

“Sash, please,” Fred says. “If you recall—”

“I CAN REMEMBER THE FIRST WAS TREES!” Anna’s raised voice cuts Fred off. “If the storm was France’s creamy hotel, it would not smell like this. Don’t you see the smell, the way it makes everything cold?” She stops herself, then looks at her fingers collected together obediently on the table. “I remember,” she says, her voice now barely audible, but still insistent.