Suddenly Light, page 11
She stumbled into her apartment where her father was asleep on the couch. He hadn’t been drinking though. There were no cans—probably just weed.
She was buzzing. She went to the balcony and looked out over the balconies across from her, crowded with bikes and chairs and strings empty of laundry in the cold. Sometimes plants or a cat in the window. So many lives stacked together; it always made her feel small—she would feel this way for a long time, at school and everywhere else. But now, like a ringing in her ears, everything seemed more alive, illuminated and humming from within.
She tried to brush her hair out, but the frozen gel was brittle. She put her head into the hot shower stream and melted it off.
She towel-dried and changed into grey sweatpants and a sweatshirt, but as she was pulling off the purple pants, she felt the paper crinkle in the pocket, and remembered the question.
She took the paper out and opened it.
what will happen to me?
“I Didn’t See Any ChildrenWith Balloons”
Her husband died and left some money. She sold the business—a car repair shop where she did the bookkeeping—and retired. And then she did something unusual. She bought balloons and sat on the corner, in the seat of her walker, and waited for children to walk by. And when one did, she gave them a coloured balloon, smiling, almost shyly—as if she did not know why she did this either—and the child shyly accepted it. And sometimes, if she had not seen many young children, she gave a balloon to an older child or a teenager, and they were embarrassed—some tossed the balloon quickly, others carried it awkwardly for some time. Driving the streets around the neighbourhood, you were reminded of her because you occasionally saw a small child holding a balloon—red, blue, pink—or saw one discarded in a bush. Once a balloon was waiting alone in a bus shelter, at the top. Sometimes you looked up and saw one released, floating away.
I knew her because I opened a dog-grooming business in the shopping plaza near her corner. I saw the children walking by with balloons for weeks and never knew why —until, driving by her corner one day, I noticed her sitting there with the clutch of balloons. Without thinking I tapped the brakes as I passed her, caught by the colours, and a car horn bleated behind me, annoyed. “All right, all right,” I said. I sped up a little, still looking back over my shoulder at the woman, her long greying hair over a dark coat.
It had taken a long time for my business to pick up. I remembered many long hours at first, with nothing to do before I had enough regular clients—frankly it was a boring area, with a series of strip malls offering mediocre services and retail. And I remembered looking out the front shop windows and seeing the children holding balloons. So when I finally saw her, saw the round, bobbing colours, it felt as if a small mystery had revealed itself to me. The woman who owned the coffee shop in the plaza said her name was Marta.
One of my first regular clients had a nasty-looking old greyhound mix, with angry eyes set in her brindle face. That dog looked at me with real hatred. Her owner wanted me to bathe her every single week—it wasn’t my fault. She was muzzled during the bath but tried to snap at me anyway, she was so angry. Frankly her attitude was just making it last longer than it needed to—which I explained to her patiently as I sprayed her down. Some dogs just didn’t get it. The owner was a chatty woman, however, and talked about Marta more than once. The greyhound would stand there looking at me with those monstrous eyes, one on each side of her head like a shark, and the owner would be chatting away, flopping her hand as she talked.
I heard about Marta’s husband and his business, their two daughters, how one of them died as a child in the hospital and the other one grew up and did well enough in school to get an important job in New York. Her name was Aleksandra. But she was far away now. And then Marta’s husband died, and she was abruptly alone. Maybe the balloon thing made her feel less lonely. Most people agreed this was the case. And they were fond of her—a mix of pity and amusement, the kind a neighbourhood has for its eccentric. I felt a little fond of her as well. The weirdo, like me.
My business was finally picking up after almost nine months of boredom and then a quietly growing desperation. But the clients came, and they stayed. For the next six months, I overworked myself and delayed hiring an assistant for fear the clients would suddenly disappear. Rob was annoyed with me working late every night and coming home an empty shell, opening a bottle. But exhaustion overtook me, so I hired a person to help, and finally I had a business going. My part-timer occasionally did work so that I didn’t have to, and instead I emailed clients. I was sleeping longer, full nights, and my body relaxed with relief.
I kept my favourite client, a huge, heavy mutt that was halfway between an Irish wolfhound and a fat teddy bear, almost obscenely covered in thick fur that was occasionally deep grey and occasionally chocolate coloured. What a happy beast. Bison, they called him. I saw him once every two weeks, and those fourteen days in between felt long. Once his owner cancelled his appointment and I was so disappointed, I had two glasses of wine with lunch. I thought of Bison’s face—a happy, round thing, split open in the middle with friendly winks of white teeth and a fat pink tongue. What a good dog.
I saw Marta throughout the week as I drove around the neighbourhood to run errands or drop off cards. One Wednesday, I was running across the street to another plaza to buy a charging cord, and I was passing her. I had changed my appointments for the day so I could catch up on receipts and the spreadsheet. I thought I might say hello.
I nodded at her, feeling almost self-conscious because I had already heard of her life but had never introduced myself. I hesitated as I passed, suddenly shy, but she spoke.
“You are even more interesting up close,” she said.
Her eyes were glittering. I thought she was having some fun with me; I thought she might have meant me being gay. Some old people made a thing about it, made odd comments. But there was a rise in her voice, bracing herself for a bright response. So I said, “What would you expect from a dog groomer?”
She laughed at me. “I’ve never met a dog groomer, so I wouldn’t know what to expect,” she said. “I just saw you across the street, and I liked your cap. It’s Italian. And then you got close, and I saw your shoes.” She was amused so she continued, “What kinds of dogs?”
And we talked a bit about my business for a short while—I told her how I left my other job to try to start this, and how it was going so far. I even dropped a joke about my husband being the breadwinner and me being the person who tries a hobby business—a little self-deprecation I didn’t usually share because I was still self-conscious about it, feeling indulged. Then I asked about the balloons.
It was a question she deflected so skillfully, with a small smile, her eyes turning a little humble: “Oh, it doesn’t matter. Unless you want one?” And she put a balloon in my hand. Then she spoke of the qualities of helium—the second-most common element in the universe—and eventually concluded with a joke about humidity that I didn’t fully understand.
So I walked back to my store, carrying the balloon. And I stood in my store holding it for a few moments before even realizing she had deflected my question entirely. I felt like a child, confused, standing there and holding it. A bright yellow balloon.
Marta and I became friends and yet, months later, she still would not explain the balloons. At first she teased and deflected, and then later the question made her quiet—so I stopped asking. I remembered what the locals had told me: despite the easy and smiling eyes, she was probably lonely. And really what did my question matter—the balloons.
Marta was a woman who wasted no time becoming friendly. If she liked you, she rushed into it. Said everything. Said sad things, too. Her smile was too big, her face would easily flush with amusement, and she was tall and lean and had expressive hands that danced around when she talked. Her hands seemed to almost pantomime what she was talking about—if she was telling a story that took place during a walk, her hands would kind of run from left to right, fingers waggling like legs. If she told a story that involved picking fruit, there she was, twisting and pulling something out of the air. She seemed very young, sometimes, in a way I found difficult to describe to Rob—as if her many years had not changed anything from a plainspoken child of eight or nine. Like she was simple. Sensitive, naive, but also bold and unafraid. She liked my stories about dogs; she thought they were good people, worthy of discernment. She reminded me of an old, lean shepherd, with sagacious eyes and long, fading hair.
Not many people around my shop made an impression on me. An interesting phrase—made an impression. Rob used it frequently, about colleagues or clients, as if we were all soft things and other people pressed into us and left an imprint. And I liked the neighbourhood well enough for our weekly interactions: Shini, henna-haired and short, proud, busy, with the tidy coffee shop on the corner of our plaza; Bill, tall, big bellied, who owned the dry cleaner’s and worked with his wife, Ina, who was small and wiry like a bird—they both seemed overwhelmed by life and work. Then there was Pri’s shop with European chocolates and Turkish candies; it was a bright store, but she had sharp eyes and didn’t like when people parked in the plaza and walked elsewhere. She called parking enforcement many times. I think they were quite tired of her, but she was right—there were bylaws. Pri was intimidating, well-dressed, and wore makeup every day.
They were all interesting, but none of them pressed on me. Somehow Marta, in her humble posture, in her conspicuous place on the corner, somehow she left an impression—a quietly compressed area around her.
No one else talked like her. She once described someone’s heartbreak as her heart fell like a pecan from a tree.
Who says something like that? Unselfconsciously? I asked Rob.
Rob said, I don’t think pecans fall from trees.
I said he was missing the point, but he looked it up, his face tipped down into the blue light of his phone.
Actually, yeah, he said, pecans fall from trees. In fact you are supposed to pick them up quickly so they don’t rot on the ground or get snatched by rodents.
I told him Marta once said I had the face of someone who was very happy but didn’t know it.
Rob considered that more thoughtfully, looking at my face.
Do I seem like someone oblivious to my own happiness? I asked him.
I do think, he said carefully, there are some things that you don’t know. And then he smiled and put his hand on my arm: And I do think you are happy.
I always felt self-conscious around her—exposed. Like when a bright child says something embarrassing to you, loudly, plainly, without realizing the offence. Her eyes were kind but overwhelming. You wondered what you could keep from her, but you felt guilty about it, as if she sensed the concealment. And so I gave up on affectation. And soon I told her everything.
“Your problem,” she said, “is the distance.”
She had pulled down a yellow balloon and was turning it gently in front of her face, enjoying the colour, and then turning slightly to smile at me. And then she corrected herself—“Most people’s problem, actually.” And she considered this, her eyes straying over my shoulder.
“What distance?” I asked. We were talking about my sister and her issues with our family.
“You build this distance between how you feel, and what you do,” she says. “And I’m not sure what to tell you—the longer the distance, the more tired you’ll be. Exhausted, after a lifetime of it.”
“But she’s my sister—I can’t just say these things.”
It was autumn. There was a bright blue scarf around Marta’s neck, high, close to her chin, and her cheeks were softly coloured in the cooler air. She wore good gloves, tight stitching around the fingers. She had half a dozen balloons left—the yellow one, and blues, reds, one green. She was not sympathetic to what I had said.
“Think about two things,” she said. “One—how you feel. Two—what you do. I cannot give you advice about your sister because you already know how you feel, what you want to say, but you won’t do it. You’ll do something different. And you’ll be reasoning to yourself, or to me, about the distance between those two things. But it doesn’t matter. The distance will wear you down—in this and in everything.”
She was not looking me in the face. Her hands were busy rearranging the balloons.
“Marta, do you have any sisters?” I asked.
“No,” she said. Serious, and then laughing, “Thankfully.”
“Well, you can’t tell them what to do.”
“Timothy, please,” her patience was thinning. “Sisters, family, okay—customers, neighbours—people, all these people are bumping into each other, everybody drawing up distances from each other and how they truly feel, what they truly want to say or do. Between who they are, and who they are around someone else. Now, all we have—”
A child and his father were walking toward us. We saw them at the same time, and I stood back, alongside Marta’s walker, to let them approach. Her mood flipped completely, and she selected the yellow balloon, holding it out.
All four of us became shy—the moment between the small boy, overwhelmed, and Marta, her face colouring deeper. The yellow balloon hung out in the air between them before his very short arm rose to reach it, the father and me watching, standing back, averting our eyes for brief moments and then looking back, hoping the two of them were happy. All of us embarrassed and confused. Finally the boy held it.
“What do you say?” asked the father. The boy looked up at him, nervous. “You say, ‘thank you,’” the father said.
“Thank you,” said the boy.
The father was pleased and smiled and they walked on—the small child holding the balloon and still looking at it with wonder, as if it would pull him up and away.
Marta smiled after them and then up at me.
Then she sighed. “Now all we have is this,” she paused, waving her hand around at the rest of the world. “Some kind of construction—a web, complicated—of all the people we know and the distances we keep between them and ourselves. You’ll get very old one day, and you’ll know what I mean.”
“So you want me to tell the truth to Karen? Make her cry? Make my mother upset?”
“Sure, rather than standing here, telling me—which does nothing.”
She paused, thinking. Then her tone fell a bit, became quieter, softer. “If you love somebody, tell them. Tell them tomorrow. Or better tonight. Rather than spending three months lying in bed, in the dark, looking up at your ceiling. If you’re angry with someone, tell them. Run into it. Don’t keep this distance between you and the truth.”
I was unconvinced. “Being nice, being polite, it holds all the world together. If I told Karen what was wrong with her—all the ways she ruined her life, how she upsets all of us—everything would break apart. If everybody did that—”
“Lots of things would break,” Marta said.
“Everything would break,” I said.
“I know,” she said, finally. “That’s why nobody does it. And so we carry on.” She did little marching motions with her arms, the balloons gently jostling above her.
I had nothing to say to that; it was a disappointing conclusion. I was still beside her walker on the grass and we both faced the street. At the intersection cars lined up patiently and then shuffled through the lights at their turn. I didn’t want to talk about Karen anymore.
“You realize”—she laughed suddenly—“you realize you’re talking to the Weird Balloon Lady? Who decided, one day, I want to give balloons to children? And then gave balloons to children? Almost no distance there.” She held up two fingers to me. “Two things, right?” She ticked down one finger: “I want to give balloons to children.” She ticked down the second: “So I give balloons to children.”
She sat back in her walker. “I didn’t care what people thought.”
“I always tried to ask why, but you ignored me,” I said.
“Why is a detail only.” Always deflecting. She rested her hands in her lap. “Anyway, it’s liberating being the weirdo,” she said. “No distance.”
It was the third week of November, a Monday, and I had a strange feeling about the neighbourhood. Looking out the windows, something was off. And then it was mid-afternoon, I was between appointments, leaning on the counter and looking out at the streets, a few people walking by on the sidewalk, and it hit me. I hadn’t seen any children looking up, carrying those balloons.
I went outside, and Marta was not on the corner. I went over to the coffee shop and asked Shini, have you seen Marta? And she said she hadn’t. Maybe she was sick.
I went back to my shop, not knowing what to do. I finished the next two appointments and caught up on emails and then locked up for the night, looking over my shoulder as I turned the key in the lock, looking at the empty corner where Marta usually sat. Rob was texting Coming home? and I texted back Yeah home in 20. Marta had not seemed sick when I saw her on Saturday.
Tuesday and Wednesday came and went—still no Marta. Children walked by without balloons. But they were my busiest days, so I was in the shop until almost seven thirty at night. Rob was impatient for me to get home for dinner. She’s sick, he said, maybe you can ask around and visit her.
On Thursday Shini told me she did not know where Marta lived. More than that, she did not know who might know.
I called my client with the greyhound, and she was animated, pleased to hear from me out of the blue. “Timothy, Timothy,” she said—she always said my name in twos when she was excited—but then she became sympathetic, disappointed she could not help me.
