WASH

the water disturbed by a moving boat

One morning I was lying in bed on my side, my eyes slightly open, watching the leaves of the Norway maple outside our window shimmer with green and sun. Hetty stirred next to me, sat straight up and yawned. She looked down and shook me a little with both hands, leaning in to whisper in my ear, ‘Let’s go to the islands.’

Her breath was cosy against my face and I was tired, but I sat up straight too and smiled. I’d been so scared that she had stopped wanting to do things together, just the two of us: that our time had passed again.

The Toronto Islands were close to the mainland—a few bits of land that had dropped from the mouth and been forgotten about. You could get there on a small ferry that didn’t take very long, and we had heard there were houses there and pretend beaches, places where people sunbathed nude and drank tallboys of beer on blankets. As we walked down Spadina, down the hill that eventually led to the dock, Hetty told me what she knew about the various islands already, facts from the people she worked with mixed with things she had read when she googled behind the bar at night.

‘People live on the islands—Torontonians, or Toronto Islanders maybe they’re called? It’s hard to get a house there, though. You can’t buy one. You have to go into a ballot and then you get to rent.’

‘That sounds ideal.’

‘Yeah,’ Hetty said. ‘And it’s pretty hippie over there—to live—I’ve heard. Like, you can’t just have a pool and a four-wheel-drive and go waterskiing. You have to respect the culture that already exists.’ She stopped to pull at her ponytail, taking out a bobby pin and putting it between her teeth while she tied her hair up again. ‘It’s nice.’

I could feel the wind coming off the water as we crossed over the bridge that stood above Lake Shore Boulevard and ducked through the bushes to walk along the bike path. The water of Lake Ontario shimmered in the near distance. Hetty was smiling when I looked over at her. I loved Toronto just then, and the feeling of being in a place where you lived but didn’t come from, where you were essentially invisible. We could explore without having to be tourists, and pretend we were locals until we opened our mouths and spoke. We could live without the eyes of people who had known us a long time watching and waiting. I took Hetty’s hand, curling each of my fingers around hers.

After we had bought our tickets at the terminal, Hetty said she wanted to sit near the water to wait for the ferry. To the side of the gates there was a little spot of grass and we lay down with our bags as pillows. There were so many noises—water splashing stoutly up against land, tyres on bitumen, children screaming, parents laughing and yelling and pleading. I wondered if it was school holidays but couldn’t work out when they might be. The sky above was beautiful, with chubby clouds hanging in little groups as if they were talking to each other: little cliques of clouds and a sun in the middle that warmed my eyelashes. The clouds were prettier here. Even when it was grey the sky seemed perfect.

The honk of the ferry as it approached the dock was long and swollen. We stayed stretched out on the ground, then slowly gathered ourselves. If Hetty hadn’t been there I would have been rushing. I didn’t like to be late for things: arriving at the last minute after everyone else was settled twisted my insides. Hetty arrived whenever she did with a cute face saying sorry and such lazy grace that no one could blame her.

I picked up my duffel bag slowly, deliberately, to make sure the day was meditative and I would enjoy it. With Hetty there, hurry clotted and waned. She had always told me that I helped her see more clearly and remember what she needed to do and when. Maybe this was true, but my constant inner paddling dismayed me. Hetty was a piece of grass swaying lightly in any kind of wind. I couldn’t deny that it felt like the happier way.

We decided to sit outside on the deck, to watch the water and let the wind mess our hair. There weren’t many others coming with us: a few older women in walking boots with kerchiefs at their necks; a solemn young couple and their tiny dog; a family with two little children who were screaming, their small red hands held tight by the parents’ larger ones. There was a feeling moving through the air inside the ferry that I couldn’t put my finger on—a sadness that didn’t involve the heart. I was glad we were sitting outside with the view, and the green smell of lake water.

‘I just can’t make myself believe this isn’t the sea,’ Hetty said, leaning over the edge, her face raw. ‘It looks like ocean water. It feels like it when it sprays up on my face.’

‘You can’t see the edge of it. That’s the problem,’ I answered, though it didn’t really feel like a problem, but more of a curiosity, an odd fact.

‘Oh well. It’s a beautiful lake. A beautiful whatever-it-is.’ Hetty spread her arms out a little in the hard air, and turned to grin at me.

As the ferry moved slowly across the water Hetty brought out a bottle of rum, the label eaten half away. She swigged and passed it to me and I followed, the liquid burning down my throat and into my chest like a tiny fire. The bottle was small and we shared the whole thing while Hetty told me about how she felt all sorts of things for Dill, but he didn’t seem interested, and I disagreed and told her how his face moved forward and up and down more when she was there, and sometimes it froze, as if he wasn’t sure quite what to do with it. I told Hetty how it felt funny to be in the room with the two of them, with so much heat, and how I reckoned he was actually obsessed with her, and who wouldn’t be.

She laughed a little, and asked me if I was just saying that, and I told her I wasn’t. I could feel the warmth in my chest fading at the thought of Hetty being in love with someone proper, someone kind and real, because that would really take her away from me. I resigned myself to trying to find someone of my own, someone else, while Hetty told me how she thought about having sex with Dill in the shower and wished he would walk in on her. Then we arrived, and stepped off the ferry, our faces flushed and our hair wild, and we were there on the islands.

I felt I should ask Hetty more about her plans for Dill, whether she was imagining they would become boyfriend and girlfriend. It seemed almost boring, to be with him, to settle into something, to be contented and slow, but I knew that was probably what she wanted. When I was little, my dad had often told me that I was ‘determined to be miserable’, and I had taken this very seriously. He must have known me best, my father, with his weak chin coated in bristles and his certain voice, because he saw how impossible I really was.

I didn’t ask Hetty anything more. She let things go, Hetty; she didn’t push conversations if she felt someone wasn’t interested, and though I had never taken advantage of this part of her before, I did that day. It seemed like it would be exhausting to go over it any longer, and I had nothing helpful to offer her. I didn’t know how she could find out if Dill liked her too, though I was pretty sure that he did, that he would have to, if she had shone her eyes in his direction. It wouldn’t be helpful for her to ask me how to do it. Maybe I was burnt out from Sean, from the years of holding Hetty together when a man had pulled her apart. I knew Dill was nothing like Sean, but it didn’t seem to matter.

A large white cat greeted us at the dock, despite appearing weary of visitors. I leaned down to ask if I could pat it and it sprang away, its big fluffy body moving quicker than I would have thought possible. It was colder here than on the mainland, and the air was slightly wet. We were on Ward’s Island, the part where people lived, because Hetty wanted to see what the houses were like, and the people.

As we walked up the path towards some buildings that might have been public toilets or a community centre or a shop, I imagined what it would have been like to grow up in a place like this. It was quiet, and the air with its little droplets and occasional puffs of sharp was not like the air in Toronto. The cool seemed to be coming from a bigger sky with more clouds. As a child I would have cycled around here on a little bike, with my hippie island friends, and we would have been able to hide behind the bushes I could see, from our parents and our siblings, and our cats and dogs, and the mainlanders who would have been coming over for a peek, even back then.

I told Hetty I would have liked to have lived here as a child, and she agreed. We hadn’t seen anything yet, but it felt a little bit special, with the silence and the green all around. The grey-haired women with their kerchiefs had stayed on the ferry for the next stop, as had the teenage couple and the harried family, their expressions making me determined I would never have kids. We were alone.

Hetty loved the houses. I watched her face as we walked down a sort of street near the water lined with one-storey brick veneers. Most were mute and earthy in their decoration, but one was loud and crowded with sculptures made of forks and a skull as a doorknocker. There was a tabby licking itself on the porch next to a looming Peruvian torch cactus in a black pot, and music coming from within, slightly too loud. That house seemed out of place, and I wondered how tolerant the islanders were to those who moved in and didn’t maintain their home as well as the rest, or had different ideas and tastes.

I told Hetty there would be an older man somewhere behind those curtains, that brick, with long grey hair and collapsed cheeks from forgetting to eat. He would have won the Toronto Island lottery because he had entered when he was drunk, or as a joke, or because he was quietly insane and made tiny decisions that upheaved his existence all the time. He would talk in grunts that were barely audible, and would own no cats but feed hundreds of them.

Hetty laughed and nodded so much she fell sideways into one of the trees at the edge of his property, decorated with loops of FRAGILE tape, making me laugh and the cat get up and angrily meow at us to go away. I thought to myself that the old man’s efforts were beautiful.

We walked a large part of the island that day, the wind in our ears telling us to move forward. Hetty wanted to get to the Gibraltar Point Lighthouse, which she had heard was made of crooked bricks and a bright-red door. The occasional person would pass us as we neared the end of the residential section—mostly older men or women with burnt cheeks and practical haircuts. We walked through what seemed to be an abandoned children’s adventure park, then past a beautiful, clean area with a fountain and monuments and couples sitting on stone benches.

On the bushy road nearing Gibraltar we saw groups of teenagers and older hippies trailing along with dogs and blankets and bongs or guitars, one group wrapped up in their coats and carrying an old couch. I could feel that there was life behind the bushes, and I knew that would be where the edges of the island met the water of Lake Ontario.

At one point we dipped down through an opening in the foliage and a clear view of the water, and walked along the dirty sand. There were men there, lying or sitting on coloured towels, and some of them were naked. They were middle-aged, with pot-bellied stomachs and skinny, vulnerable legs, and when I saw the penis of one of them it looked so small and harmless I didn’t feel anything. Hetty pulled at my arm and I looked at her face, which was big-eyed. She was mouthing Sorry but I shook my head and told her later she hadn’t needed to be. It would have been like being upset about a worm.

We flopped on a bit of beach that was brown and crunchy, past the nudists and their quiet displays. I wanted to feel close to the environment, so while Hetty lay on the towel she had brought, I lay on the sand itself, picking up a handful and moving it between my thumb and my finger. I wondered why there was sand here, on the edge of a lake. Maybe it had travelled here with the ocean.

‘Hey, Hetty, maybe you’re right—I think you are right, actually. This is the ocean. There’s sand and everything.’

I brought a handful up to my face and let it scatter. It felt cold and heavy against my closed eyes, skin.

‘You always know how to make me feel better,’ Hetty replied. My eyes were still shut, and I was wondering how to open them without the sand getting in.

‘It’s so nice to hang out,’ I heard her say, and I brushed the sand from my skin, feeling my heart beat a little faster. I opened my eyes and looked over.

Hetty was lying on her back on the towel, which she had brought with her from Melbourne, the one that I had seen her dry herself with after swimming since we were young. It was tattered around the edges but intact in a way it really shouldn’t have been after so long. Her legs were bent, one crossed over the other, one skinny foot hanging free.

‘I’m sorry I haven’t been around much,’ she said.

I told her it was okay. It was okay, now that she had acknowledged that it wasn’t really. That was all I needed. I was partly weak, partly docile, partly aware of how much I still needed her. She wouldn’t be pushed away easily, but I didn’t want to try. I believed we had decided to come to Canada together because we were both invested in our friendship, despite my feelings which she knew nothing about, and that since we had been here she had neglected it. I also knew that it wasn’t deliberate, this neglect: it wasn’t purposeful.

‘How are you, anyway?’ she asked, studying my face for a few seconds. When Hetty looked at you, it was like she was right there with you—like you weren’t alone.

‘I’m fine!’ I answered, in a voice she could have questioned for its quaver.

‘Good,’ she said, smiling at me as if she believed it. ‘That’s so good to hear.’

Later I would wonder what it would be like if Hetty and I had a different kind of friendship, or if we were different people: the kind who laid it all out and hoped for the best. I had been hurt and I hadn’t been okay—not really. But I didn’t tell her. I didn’t want to ask more of her, to tie her down. And I didn’t want a reaction. Instead we questioned, gently, her first and then me, and didn’t try to tether each other. It suited us both, suited our passivity and our fear. But our friendship hadn’t grown in years.

We ended the day silently, on the ferry back to Marjorie, our hair damp from a long swim in the lake water. Hetty held my hand occasionally and put her chin and then her ear on my shoulder as the water moved beneath us. I could feel her hanging on. We both wanted to be each other’s person, but our bodies were moving apart. She seemed to need me to know it was just a brief change in the current.