Parallel Rivers Read online

  “Good morning, Mrs Meerschaum! Coolish day now, isn’t it?” Mrs Tod the grocer’s wife, with her perpetual sniff and her two bonny grandchildren.

  “Good evening, Hannah. So she’s gone back? A lovely lady! You’re quite alike, you know? I expect you will miss her! Shame she couldn’t stay for the summer. You must come round one of these mornings.” Alison Newton, who has Parkinson’s disease yet still manages to produce tiny arrangements of silk flowers.

  Yes. My sister’s gone home to her Ladysmith. Larry and I have much to prepare for, much to share, though he does not know it yet. He speaks Welsh to his mother, while with me he’s still a clam, a dear tight clam. But I’m making progress all the same. I’m nothing if not patient.

  It rained and rained as Natalie and I retraced our motorway route back to the airport. We were rather quiet, but it was a comfy silence.

  “I’d like to see London again sometime,” she mused. “We could meet there and go to look at the old school — if it’s still standing.”

  I wouldn’t answer. George deserted me for London, twice. The second time the city swallowed him and left no trace. He answered none of my letters. He simply disappeared and a year later I heard of his accident. And London and Constance Spry had taken away my sister all those years ago. When a child, I used to think the city must be a three-ring circus of flower sellers and market gardens. The blue Thames winding so seductively. A slum or two, of course (Natty and I had read Dickens), the dark compost from which grand houses sprang, opulent buildings with studded doors and brass knockers. This imagined city disappeared the first time I saw London for myself, and yet it is the fairy town, the botanical capital, that casually shipped my sister to Canada and my George to the grave.

  What is Ladysmith? I picture trees, epic evergreens, falling.

  We seemed to be going round in circles, roundabout after roundabout. Nothing but cars and rain. Then the dreadful clarity of the airport. Suitcases disposed of. A hug, quickly felt. Natalie’s plane vanishing into sheets of rain. On the motorway again I nearly took the turnoff to London, but didn’t: Larry was expecting me home next day, I’d a long drive to Wales.

  Natalie!

  This morning I miss her, achingly. Half-asleep, I feel sure she still inhabits the house; her bags, her clothes will be strewn round the front room, and today I’ll melt, I won’t be angry or snide with her at all. She’s gone, though. Her room holds the sleeping boy, Larry, whom she insisted I could not possibly take on. What happened to the word I’ve just been framing — in my sleep? It fitted Natalie to perfection. A single word. Inconstant? Some of that. The word suggested more of joy, of mystery, something of our childhood, no doubt. About Larry (asleep, skin so white, hair long and black) she was of course wrong.

  The day she left really was the end of spring.

  “It’s raining, Hannah.”

  “We have the most intelligent conversations,” I said.

  “You can’t just keep him. I know what you’re going to say. It’s none of my business. How old is he? Ten? Nine?”

  “His father’s in prison, Natty. His mother can’t look after him. She’s happy I’m to care for him.”

  “There must be an agency to help these kids.”

  “Yes. Of course . . . Look, we can’t argue like this.”

  “And it can’t be legal. He’s not yours. He’s awfully young. My God, he calls you Aunt Hannah. You think you’re kind of adopting him, don’t you?”

  “No. I don’t want a son. It’s just for a while. It’ll be good for me — for us both.”

  “You’re not going to cry, Hannah?”

  “Silly!”

  “Well, I don’t know. You seemed happy by yourself. You seemed better adjusted than when George was alive. Well, you did! Your letters were so cheerful. I remember when Alan was that age.” She shudders. “And what happens when you get used to having him here and his parents decide they want him again, what then?”

  “We’ll be fine, thank you so much. His mother and I understand each other. I’m not going back on my word. He needs stability, and I can offer it. That’s final.”

  “You know nothing about him . . . But we mustn’t argue, you’re right. We’re just tense because I have to leave.”

  “You’ve seen him, Natty, you know he’s not a delinquent.”

  “Let’s leave it.”

  And she began to cry. My sister. Incautious. Inconsistent. I’m describing myself. But the sun is shining today. This afternoon Larry and I will plant the sweetpeas.

  The first time George left me I wrote to him in London. I took off my gardening gloves long enough to scrawl two lengthy missives, sat on the patio scribbling furiously till it got too dark to see. Two versions. I drank brandy late into the night. Rang up Manny, got the poor man out of his bed, then went into a crying jag for about half an hour. I threw away the letters and, before falling asleep, wrote George one line.

  My darling, can we not touch?

  And he replied by return of post.

  Darling, no.

  I’ll be sixty-two next month. That’s not old! Yet I feel like a foolish, blinkered old woman, in love with a boy, frightened I’ll lose him.

  Today he comes bounding in from playing football.

  “The train was late. O! and Auntie Hannah, Robert says it’s okay, then! This weekend, I mean. His dad says I can stay till Monday. We can go to the first game of the season and — O, you know what? I saw a man with a kitten in a field when I was on the train. The man kept throwing the kitten away from him. The kitten came back every time. The man got more and more rough. Then the kitten sat down with her ears back, she didn’t understand that game, O no. The man scratched his head and laughed. By then the train was past. Can I have my tea now? Please?”

  “You comb your hair, boy. And wash your face.”

  “Look you don’t fall!” he shouts, pushing me out of his way. We are playmates in the kitchen. I pretend anger; he fakes resentment, then giggles when I try to grab him to tickle his ribs.

  “No! No! No!” he wails.

  Parallel Rivers hangs in my bedroom now. Manny died nearly four years ago, an old man, tending his carrots in the Llangollen valley, planting scarlet runners and tomatoes to the end. I can hear the television and sometimes the fire crackling through my open door. In a minute I’ll call Larry and tell him his mother wants him to go home next month, she wants him home for Christmas, “Just for Christmas, look you! All right, then?”

  Just to London. Just to Ladysmith.

  How often have I followed each blue stream from left to right, top to bottom? All my life I’ve loved my mother. This boy Larry should be with his own. No, I won’t miss him. It’s past his bedtime. He’s past the age of stories and so am I.

  SHOELACES

  One

  I’m concerned about my underwear which, though clean, lies in the hallway outside the door of the apartment. My blood soaks weakly through the warm facecloth in the bathroom. The man who hands me a brandy still breathes heavily as he sits opposite me in the living room. He says he’s curious about himself. I laugh and he says, “You’re happy, Penny.”

  “You say that with such emphasis.”

  “But you are happy. Lately you’ve seemed distant, ill at ease. Now you are content. Isn’t passion strange?”

  “I’m amazed I swam the length of the pool. I never dreamed I could swim that far underwater. What a shock to crash into the side. I’m curious about you, too. Yes, a bit. I wonder why we both find you so interesting.”

  “But one has to question one’s motives, why one reacts a certain way in a certain situation. It’s natural. What we did just now in the hall shows me how little I know about myself. As a woman you must wonder why you enjoy, sometimes, being invaded. Don’t you?”

  We turn to watch a moth tap against the living room window. The insect flutters gently, seems to crawl between branches of the tree, over the lurid sky, to trespass on the dark mountains on the other side of the strait.

&n
bsp; “You think I enjoy being invaded.”

  He’s relaxing now. The deep flush has ebbed to his neck and ears, always the first and last area of his face to register emotion. Getting up, he leans against the wall that separates the little kitchen from the living room, and stares through the French windows. These take up more than half the wall. The moth has gone. The lights of the city shimmer just beyond the bottom section of the sundeck railing. The black region is the ocean, and the minute lights of the American town at the foot of the mountains across the strait seem very bright. The sky’s pink is fading rapidly. We hear the sound of voices in the hall.

  “I’ll get it.”

  When he’s gone, I look around his apartment. Always so tidy. A picture of me above the desk dominates the dining room. He had me pose my hands very carefully. Hands and bare arms take the foreground in most of his snaps of people. He considers fingers more expressive than faces. In this shot my face is in shadow, luckily: I’m wearing a pretty silly grin. My hands look like puppets, Pierrot and Pierrette. I stare above them, into the deeper greys, trying to see the strings. You’re happy. I never like that assured tone in his voice. You enjoy being invaded. I suppose that’s what it is. Invasion. On the wall above the stereo hangs an expensively framed poster. The picture of a little girl, perhaps six, reading graffiti on the chipped plaster face of a public building. Lesbians wear short hair and laces in their shoes. I always imagine the next moment of the scene, in which the girl will look down at her own pink ballet slippers.

  He says there’ll be a location meeting tomorrow, implying that I should go, so I make coffee, insist once more that I feel just fine, and drive home.

  I left the television on to discourage burglars. Before I close the door behind me, I’m greeted by Johnny Carson, who’s stroking the shoulder of a woman I suppose he’s interviewing. I try to close the drapes, but the hooks stick. I yank at the material, pulling the rod loose from under the valance. Chunks of dust float down. If he came here to live with me, I’d have to clean up my act. I turn off the TV, pick up the abstract rabbit from the window sill. The plastic film stapled to the outside frame appears to breathe, inflating and deflating with the wind. Through the pulsing reflection — a dark-haired woman with white hands cradling a piece of blond wood — stark branches scribble out the empty street. Maybe we would paint the kitchen and the boot room. My hair, which I didn’t put up after the accident, feels heavy.

  I lie in bed watching thin white lines intersect the grey half-light. Six stitches. The lines shift when a car purrs by. At the hospital they cut away some of my hair, the nurse joking that I was lucky to have so much. Someone offers me a cup and the lines wrap the handle, tie the handle to my fingers. I want the coffee, but can’t move my arm. When I see the blood on the water, he runs toward me. God! What’ve you done? My body sweats. I’m stroking a furless rabbit, to soothe its trembling. Again, I see myself dive into the swimming pool. Keeping eyes open underwater, I feel vital as I skim the blue tiles. And then I crouch at the bottom of the silent pool, push off: my head breaks the surface, smashes into the overhanging lip.

  I wake just before dawn with a terrific headache. At work I clock in and say good morning to the other cashiers.

  “Hey! What happened to you?”

  “Banged my head at the pool.”

  I stand outside the circle of women, keeping the Special Offer counter between us. The newest girl comes in, late as usual, looking spry and defiant. Taking position close to me, she preens herself and begins to chat about the man she lives with — they went to a lecture last night on public access to computer networks. This social period before the store opens is nerve-wracking. Out of the corner of my eye I watch the assistant manager arguing with the meat section manager. Behind the showcases of red meat they circle each other, waving their arms frantically. I tell the girl I may soon be living with a man — he wants to move in with me.

  “Oh great! Go for it, I say. I think it’s boring to live alone. If I’m not living with a guy, I always find a roommate.”

  Some crows are shrieking out in the vacant parking lot, fighting over a large moist object that leaves a trail, a series of imprints, as it’s half-dragged, lifted and dropped. The cashiers laugh loudly. I’m just about to say that I like living alone, that I don’t like company all the time, when the girl whispers, “I like your hair up like that,” and leaves my side to join the others. Her name’s Helen. She’s several years younger than I, slender and quite pretty. Her face has that fresh-scrubbed look that I know is make-up skillfully applied. She treats men, staff and customers, with a kind of petulant flirty disdain. As the assistant manager strides onto the floor, the group of cashiers disperses, each woman glancing at the clock.

  He raises both hands, rocks on the balls of his feet. Helen rearranges the cigarettes above her checkout. A seagull plunders the crows’ prize and the crows flap away, cawing indignantly.

  The end of the day is filled with sun and I refuse my usual ride home. Helen yells, “See you!” from the open door of her lover’s car. I see a severe, bearded face leaning forward from the driver’s seat. I touch my stitched head more than once as I walk home. Last night after the accident I insisted that he make love to me in the hall outside his apartment. And I had an orgasm, my face down, cheek pressed to the carpet, my fingers under my belly, while he lunged away somewhere behind, invisible. The carpet smelled funny, kind of fermented, and I focused on a deep cigarette burn, attributing to it an incredible significance for an instant. Then the muscle spasms, fading; the touch of hands stroking my sides, my back; his rasping breath at my neck; his whispered, We should get inside before someone comes. The trees along the boulevards look stalwart, their bark green in the bright cold sun. I see in the neighbour’s garden, in the dark soil under an azalea bush, three groups of snowdrops. I must plan what I should say to him. Yes, I want to live with you. But let’s not rush into anything, let’s have coffee and talk about it. I have to get certain things clear in my mind. Someone walks behind me as I’m putting the key to my front door. I turn, but it’s only two women pushing baby carriages along the sidewalk.

  The woman next door looks up, startled. She’s burning garden refuse in a forty-five gallon drum.

  “Hello!” I call. “You’ve got snowdrops already!”

  She does not return my greeting, but struts awkwardly from the wheelbarrow to the fire and throws in a handful of twigs.

  “The smoke smells nice!”

  This elicits the briefest tight-lipped smile, and she turns her broad back to scurry once again to the wheelbarrow.

  It’s cold in the house. Soon it will be spring. I see the quick shadow of the black mouse cross the kitchen floor. As always, I’m shocked. I gasp. And still, as I walk from room to room, turning up each thermostat, I question the creature’s existence. He’s simply too fast, too fleeting to be real; the hint of an actual being.

  Two

  We sit on the cedar chairs still damp with dew, under the patio roof (Kurt bought the chairs as a moving-in present) and eat sourdough rye toast and eggs scrambled with a pinch of dill, a pinch of curry powder. This foggy morning we both wear heavy sweaters. We’ve just finished gulping down brimful glasses of buttermilk (his idea — it’s a drink I’m not fond of). I watch the cigarette smoke leave his mouth.

  “What about your friends?” he says.

  “Oh, I haven’t any friends left — they’ve all moved away.”

  “But you never phone, you never write to them.”

  “There’s the girl at work I told you about. Helen. But I’m not sure I really like her yet.”

  “Well, why not invite her? That’s the way to find out. Is she married or living with someone? Is she single?”

  “She’s living with someone.”

  “Listen. Why don’t you tell her we’re having a potluck next Friday. I’ll invite Mal and Cheryl. We’ll have a quiet party. I’d feel more comfortable if some of our guests were people you’d invited.”

 
He’s settled in fast. The house already seems more his than mine. He keeps saying he wants me to carry on my own life as much as possible, he doesn’t want me to see myself through his eyes only. This issue of my lack of friends disturbs him. He’s set up his metalworking tools in the second bedroom and blows fuses regularly. He tells me it’s important to have extrarelationship extrawork interests. In a few weeks, once the current shoot wraps, he plans to begin digging in the garden. When we meet in the house, he looks at me oddly. But I can’t remember what I did with myself before he moved in. Now, I read cookbooks. I mend clothes and check off items on my Clothes Needing Repair list. He is gone all hours of the day and night. He hasn’t noticed or hasn’t mentioned the new elbow patches on his casual sports jacket yet.

  “Look,” he says. “She’s putting out washing. Surely nothing will dry in this?”

  We have to strain to see into the next yard, the fog is so thick. And while we watch the woman next door’s hands spread the laundry, smooth the edges of each article into the deep fog, some children start to sing.

  “What are they singing?” I ask. “I can’t make out the words.”

  We sit a long time this morning, staring in silence at the muted colours hanging still, dripping, while the woman’s hands whisk here and there, leaving pegs like punctuation marks where they linger.

  “Mm. Isn’t it peaceful?” he says. “Couldn’t you stay like this forever?”

  The children’s voices play round and round in my head and I feel quite strange, as if I’m becoming invisible, somehow falling away.

  “Right,” he says. “I should be going. You’ll be late. I’ll give you a ride. I’ll stop in at the hardware store on my way home tonight and buy some mousetraps.”

  In the car we’re silent and I wonder why I didn’t want to agree with him about the peacefulness, about staying forever.

  The man he introduces to me as his oldest friend wears a Latin moustache and his shoulders are massive. He’s a grip — I must ask again what that is — and lifts weights at a fitness centre twice a week, plays squash whenever he finds the time. His wife, a bony woman in clumsy glasses, spends much of the evening finding the exact word. She speaks slowly, wrinkling her brow, and her mouth looks as if it seldom smiles. She works at the fitness centre giving massages. Physical therapist, please. I show her to the bathroom and she carefully places the swaddled baby in the tub.