Hi, It's Me, page 18
Must have been an hour since we saw the new girls drive in and I still have not heard from the Ph.D. student. My sense of expectation has prevented any sort of forward movement. I’ve paced in circles round and round the house, upstairs and down, waiting for something.
I am killing time before we are to have what has been presented to me as a pre-meeting meeting. There is a discussion happening at the town hall soon and the women are preparing to confront those in power with some proposals: they would like the farmhouse to be zoned as a business; they would like the farmhouse to be omitted from mail routes serviced by male postal workers; they unanimously object to the tentative sale of a nearby property.
See, the property was promised to the women by its previous owners, two elderly women who moved in together after the death of their husbands. Mariam, Sue, Andrea, Lynn, and my mother have been setting aside savings for the purchase. But then the property’s owners passed away not far apart and without much warning, and their children are eager to sell the house to a fast and high bidder. The woman have it in writing, via letter mail, that the late owners wanted them to have it, though only as an expression of excitement at the thought of what sort of garden they might grow.
This was the original reason for planning to attend the meeting. They had been expecting they might be able to make an offer then and there, and purchase the property. That is, until it was revealed that the money would no longer be divided among them. Instead it all went to me, including the responsibility of telling everyone else what she has chosen.
Why did she want me to have it? I can’t help but wonder.
Just tell me what to do with it and I will do it. Show me any sign, in any way. I will do it.
How free I would feel to believe in any one thing. Is that what the women are doing here? Have they submitted not to their beliefs but to having beliefs at all? Half-baked, arbitrary, solid and enduring.
* * *
—
FIRST I MUST PREPARE a dish to be brought to the town hall meeting. I’ve offered as a way of having some time to myself. Plus, I wanted a reason to get away from my cellphone. If I am to go back upstairs and see that the Ph.D. student has still not reached out, I might lose my mind. The women feel it is important that we present some sort of offering at the town hall meeting. Usually, they tell me, there are small quartered sandwiches, coffee and tea from big urns. They want to demonstrate to the community the value and abundance of their garden, and their humble and selfless behaviours. Or so I’ve extrapolated. I’ve been instructed to use only food in storage in the cellar, or straight from the garden itself. In the cellar there are baskets of russet potatoes, yams, McIntosh apples, jars of preserved sliced apples, strawberry jam, pickles, pickled red onions, dried black-eyed peas, dried scarlet runner beans, big papery heads of garlic braided together, and frilly bunches of dried herbs. I like to be down there surrounded by the cold wet concrete smell and the subdued colours of the preserves. The cellar is dug out, but only halfway, so one half is a two-foot-tall crawl space that looks like a graveyard of pieces of insulation, old broken boards, nails, and dirt. I feel nervous about looking too closely at the crawl space; it always seems I’ll see something I don’t want to.
Coming up the unstable wooden staircase with jars of preserves cradled in my arms, I am relieved by the way the light from the upstairs window shines through the cellar doorway.
I leave the preserves and herbs on the kitchen counter and go outside to the garden. It is an indescribable day. The sky is a pure, clear blue with big scalloped clouds like a portrait of heaven, and the river is so still and perfect, and the grass in the field so green, and nobody anywhere.
It is when I am appreciating the absence of disruption in the skyline—so contrasted with the small square of sky I might see in Toronto, interrupted by the angry sky-scraping teeth of the business district—that I realize the tree is gone.
Some strange fear holds me in my place, from where I can see just the very short, wide stump of the tree where not long ago I sat up so high. By the neighbour’s barn is a pile of firewood, chopped and stacked so neatly.
My mother!
Oh, it’s as if I’m looking at a pile of her limbs.
I fear I might scream, and I place my hand over my mouth.
Ah! Is this why they do it? Have I finally figured it out? But the silence doesn’t harm them. They want us to be hysterical, but they don’t mind when we are not. There is not a thing we can do.
Oh, but it’s horrible. What have I ever done to him? I covered for his piggish son. I let them both appease me. I did what all of us women do and I didn’t say a word.
I wish early death on the father. I wish chronic erectile anxiety on him. I wish for the mother never to come back from wherever it is that she is. My hostility makes me feel light-headed. I do not wish early death on the father. Forgive me. I turn again and look at the pile of lumber.
I am reminded of my mother’s document, about the “severed cancerous limb.”
I am afraid that if I go and confront the man he will chop me up, too. Perhaps now I’ve learned my lesson. I turn my body away from the neighbour’s lot and decide I will not look again. I will live the rest of my life as if I haven’t seen. This will be my punishment. Just like the women with their bitter silence, mine will go unnoticed.
The season has restricted what is available in the garden: kale, zucchini, radishes, salad greens, bush beans, and new small carrots. Later through summer there will be swollen and warted gourds, flowering bean pods, berries and melons, tall strong stalks of corn. No, that’s not right. It’s zucchini, bush beans, radishes, that are having to wait until summer. Now is pumpkins, scarlet runner beans? Carrots and potatoes? Yes, potatoes in those big bloated bags. No. All through the soil are small peeking eyes of vegetables, little arches of backs of gourds, tiny spouts like splayed fingers.
The carrots in the garden have grown through rocky soil and have sprouted into pairs of legs. When I pull them out, I am surprised by each of them in their individuality. One particularly small root has its two legs crossed like an elegant lady’s. I find myself envying them. How ridiculous!
There is sexuality in everything. Grief and hunger, too. The way the various plants twist, blush, bulge, reproduce. The death of the big tree. The ripeness of the tomato, the way the carrot penetrates the ground. I am reminded of the rape allegory of Goblin Market. I feel turned on by the aggression of the Rossetti poem, and by its disconnection from reality. Perhaps it is modern life that has robbed me of my sex. Cellphones, shopping malls, contemporary trends in design and architecture. The new world is hot pink and plastic.
When I was young I felt a certain frustration from time to time, located somewhere, ambiently, in my lower body. I didn’t have the vocabulary to consider that I was turned on. I would fantasize extensively about administering vaccinations to beautiful women. It was always that! I worried I was evil. The syringe perhaps was a penetrative device sufficiently un-phallic so as not to confront anything in myself. In my earliest sexual dreams, too, I was always penetrating and never penetrated.
I can only access my sexuality with a leap. It takes a delicate and elaborate combination of imagined circumstances for me to open myself to physical pleasure. Here is what one might consider the rules:
• A lack of active desire on both parts
• Zero coercion
• Zero resistance
• A certain professionalism
• Both parties partially covered or clothed
• Unrelated but constant verbal communication
That, in addition to a physical technique that cannot be taught and can only be performed by myself. Plus, I often am interrupted by thoughts. Midway through I will think, suddenly, My friend Ian, or Political violence, or Times I have been untruthful. There is no coming back once my mind has wandered. More often than not I give up, do something else.
It is, I’ve said before, like religion. The belief has to be there to open the portal. It is like the Ouija board. It is like the afterlife, or so they say. I am astounded by the idea that a person could be aroused by accident. I have heard women tell stories of driving over back roads, horseback riding, about their boyfriends controlling remote vibrating devices clipped into their underwear at expensive restaurants. For me, a person may as well be touching my bicep.
And how humiliating! For them, of course. A person is so vulnerable when they wish to please. Even more so when they believe it is working. I am so cruel to these men, with my faking it. It’s just I tried once to be honest. For nearly six months I was seeing this man, and I never once pretended it’d happened. After a while he became impotent, and then, dejectedly, he got a prescription for sildenafil, and he became unable to achieve orgasm. Then he was broken, too. It is me, I wish I could tell them all. It is all me. I am not right! I have a bicep between my legs.
So, now I pretend. Well, until I stopped altogether. Perhaps that is all behind me.
It is with a great sense of dread that I realize I have turned myself on with all of this inane musing. It is a feeling like my lower body is saturated and heavy. Like a wet towel needing to be wrung out.
I uproot another bifurcated and ladylike carrot from the ground and brush off the soil on my overalls. I take a bite of her crossed left leg below the knee. First checking the window for anyone watching, I duck down close to the soil and spit it into my hand, and bury the severed root.
Chewing-and-spitting is what my friend Lucy calls “soft bulimia.” We used to do it together at restaurants in our teens after running club, perfecting our technique with discretion. We would order big dishes of fried rice, burgers and fries, baked ziti, anything hot and caloric. Then we would talk and laugh, intermittently lifting our napkins quickly to our mouths.
Like anything, this comes with problems. Firstly, there is no satisfaction. To part with the food is even more difficult than to avoid it altogether. Plus stomach acid is produced when a person is chewing, not only once they swallow, and so when there is no food available to digest, the stomach is put through torture. There is damage to the teeth, too, or so they say. I don’t know what it is. All of that exposure to sugar and other bad foods? I’ve been searching my whole life for the perfect method. In fact, I thought I’d found it, not long before the last time I went into treatment. I was twenty-six, the summer before beginning my master’s degree, and I started chewing nicotine gum. I’d heard it’s an appetite suppressant, and already on occasion I’d chewed gum just to put something in my mouth. But I’d stopped smoking then, and the milligram amount on the packages meant nothing to me. I guess I’d been chewing 2 mg for a month or so, and one day a 4 mg box was on sale. I was burning through the package on the TTC, my leg shaking wildly, a certain headiness overtaking me, when I passed out and fell out of my seat onto the floor.
I should not have allowed myself to taste the vegetable.
Greedily I tear a tomato from its vine and pierce its skin with my teeth, spit it into the garden like chewing tobacco. Then I bite off more of the carrot—its other leg.
I hold the pulp of it in my mouth so long I nearly gag, thinking too hard about its colour, how it’s been moulded into the convex curve of the roof of my mouth, how it’s been made warm and wet by my saliva. I swallow it, just to get rid of it.
I uproot everything I can find buried, bulging and ripe, in the ground, or hanging from twisting vines. I fill my basket with the produce by the handful, reach in every now and then and remove something, and eat it ferociously. What is best to eat is the tomato. It is sopping wet beneath its tight bursting skin and it has a hint of something meaty in its flavour.
The tension in my jaw begins to relax. Always when I starve, the ache sets in. Really, that’s the part that always wears me down. The contraction of my stomach, the sparks in my eyes, the rush when I stand up or ascend a staircase—I long ago learned to associate these feelings with progress. But the jaw aches and aches, and I begin to salivate. I become liable to bare my teeth at anything.
I begin eating, sometimes not even chewing all the way, and swallowing big painful mouthfuls. I cannot stop, as if the food promises me some sort of climax. When my basket is so heavy that my arms grow tired, and my stomach is so full of food that I can barely stand up straight, I stop. I have ravaged the garden. There are torn leaves and stems, big clawed-up holes in the dirt, posts and markers and ribboned stakes lying haphazard all over the ground.
I bring the produce indoors with a certain sheepishness. I feel as if I’ve fucked it.
The women are around the dining room table chatting.
“Just about time,” says one of them, and in my haze I do not even know which one. I nod and tip my basket at them.
I get to work in the kitchen, running cold water over the vegetables. I am making a pico de gallo with the tomatoes, white onions, cilantro from the kitchen herb garden, and a serrano pepper; a potato salad with dill and celery seed and Andrea’s homemade mayonnaise from the fridge; a cold bean salad with apple cider vinegar, rock salt, black pepper, and Italian parsley; kale massaged with olive oil and roasted in the oven; and cucumber sliced in ribbons with a vegetable peeler and pickled with white vinegar, white sugar, salt, pepper, and dried cayenne. The recipes are written in my mother’s slanted handwriting on yellowed cue cards. Some of the cards are stained with identifiable ingredients pertaining to the recipes written on them. For example, a red splotch on the card for pico de gallo.
“Sorry,” I call. “Are we getting started?”
“In a moment,” says Mariam.
I carry on with a performative gusto that might suggest I am not interested in the food. That instead I am consumed by my thoughts, should any of the women be watching through the sliver of the kitchen visible to them. I pierce the skin of a tomato and some of its mucus-y seed squirts out onto the cutting board. Its moisture brings out the scent of garlic in the board and makes me nauseous.
They discuss various acts of aggression from local men: the letters, the vandalism, a man who shouted obscenities from his window when Lynn was walking down the street. They discuss the Freemasons and their meetings in the church basement. They discuss how the neighbouring property—the one rented to the new girls from the university—was promised to them by the owners before they passed but now is being sold by one of the owners’ sons to one of the Freemasons and his family. They discuss the possibility of bankruptcy. No one has told me this before.
“—if you knew or if she told you that there were multiple revisions made to the will.”
I realize that Sue is speaking to me.
“Oh,” I say. “Really?” I pop my head out of the kitchen.
I still cannot wrap my head around my mother’s original will. She wanted to make sure the money would be divided evenly. But really, I can’t square it with her personality. It’s not that she didn’t care; I don’t mean it like that. But she was very much of the teaching-to-fish versus the giving-of-the-fish school of thought. This is what made her a strong academic.
I go and join the table. I worry the bloating of my stomach is causing a bulge in the overalls. I sit up straighter, flex my abdominal muscles. I think of produce inside of me and I feel nauseous. The wet weight of the tomato, the grit of the root vegetables, the sour spinach leaf.
Mariam passes me a leather-bound diary, the current “day book” where I am to record the details of the meeting. She has written the first half in her neat hand. There is a shelf of the same type of books—different sizes and thicknesses, but all bound with black leather—logging details of Mariam and my mother’s extended family, spanning three generations. It began with my great-grandmother Maple recording an entry at the end of each day for the last twenty years of her life (from forty-four to sixty-four). It is only now that the book has been repurposed as a communal record of the women’s business and political dealings. I write the number sixty-four down on the page. I’ve always thought of my great-grandmother as having been so old. Sixty-four now seems such an early age to die.
“Alright,” says Mariam, and laces her fingers together. “Please just try to get down what’s important.” She smiles at me, and it is revealed in her smile that this is a task I am being assigned for my own benefit. No one will review my notes, I bet.
In the original books—I flipped through when left alone—there is an absence of emotion. There is a record of weather, of visitors, of planting and harvest, of birth, sickness, marriage, and death. I feel resentful of the current day book, which is filled with town gossip, in-jokes, doodles, and email addresses. It all seems so unserious.
The possibility of bankruptcy weighs on the mind the same as loss of love. Here I’d thought they’d found a way out, achieved certainty, and they were just in a different kind of relationship. They were married to the town and its statistics and fluctuations. Without the business they are just four women. Tethered by what? They would move on, wither. I, again, would be lost. Certainly if they cannot as a group keep the business afloat, I myself can do nothing. I am lacking experience, lacking practical abilities and skill with numbers. My only offering is my mortal fixation on finality. And the inheritance, of course.
“I could buy the property,” I offer.
The women feign varying amounts of eagerness at my suggestion.
Mariam says, “It would be a very quick decision, you know. We would be telling them at the meeting.”
“Oh,” I say. “I meant this property.”
