Elizabeth walks west, along the north side of the street, in the cold grey air that is an extension of the unbroken fish-grey sky. She doesn’t glance into the store windows; she knows what she looks like and she doesn’t indulge in fantasies of looking any other way. She doesn’t need her own reflection or the reflections of other people’s ideas of her or of themselves. Peach-yellow, applesauce-pink, raspberry, plum, hides, hooves, plumes, lips, claws, they are of no use to her. She wears a black coat. She’s hard, a dense core, that dark point around which other colors swirl. She keeps her eyes straight, her shoulders level, her steps even. She marches.
On some of the lapels, breasts, approaching her there are still those reminders, red cloth petals of blood spattered out from the black felt hole in the chest, pinned at the center. Remembrance Day. A little pin in the heart. What is it they peddle for the mentally disabled? Seeds of Hope. In school they used to pause while someone read a verse from the Bible and they sang a hymn. Heads bowed, trying to look solemn, not knowing why they should. In the distance, or was it on the radio, guns.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
A Canadian wrote that. We are the Dead. A morbid nation. In school they had to memorize it two years in a row, back when memorizing was still in fashion. She’d been chosen to recite it, once. She was good at memorizing; they called it being good at poetry. She was good at poetry, before she left school.
Elizabeth has bought a poppy but she hasn’t worn it. It’s in her pocket now, her thumb against the pin.
She can remember when this walk, any walk through this part of the city, would have excited her. Those windows with their promises that are, finally, sexual, replacing earlier windows and earlier promises that offered merely safety. Tweeds. When did that happen, the switch to danger? Sometime in the past ten years the solid wool suits and Liberty scarves moved out in favor of exotica: Indian imports with slit skirts, satin underwear, silver talismans to dangle between the breasts like minnows on a hook. Bite here. And then the furniture, the milieu, the accessories. Lamps with colored shades, incense, whole shops devoted to soap or thick bath towels, candles, lotions. Enticements. And she was enticed. It once made her skin burn merely to walk along these streets, the windows offering themselves, not demanding anything, certainly not money. Just a word, Yes.
The goods are much the same now, although the prices have gone up and there are more stores, but that caressing scent is gone. These days it’s all merchandise. You pay, you get, you get no more than you see. A lamp, a bottle. If she had a choice she would take the former, the other, but there’s a small deadening voice in her now that cancels choice, that says merely: False.
She stops in front of a newspaper box, bending to look in through the square glass window. She should buy a paper, to have something to read in the waiting room. She doesn’t want to be left with nothing she can concentrate on, and at the moment she can’t bear the kinds of magazines they keep in such places. Full-color magazines, brighter than life, about health and motherhood and washing your hair in mayonnaise. She needs something in black and white. Bodies falling from tenth-floor balconies, explosions. Real life. But she doesn’t want to read a paper either. They’re full of the Québec election, which will happen in three days and in which she is not the least interested. She’s no more interested in elections than she is in football games. Contests between men, both of them, in which she’s expected to be at best a cheerleader. The candidates, collections of grey dots, opposing each other on the front pages, snorting silent though not wordless challenges. She doesn’t care who wins, though Nate does; though Chris would have. There was always that unvoiced accusation, directed at her, as if who she was, the way she spoke, was a twist on his own arm, an intrusion. The language question, everyone said.
• • •
There’s something wrong with my ears. I think I’m going deaf. From time to time, not all the time, I hear a high sound, like a hum, a ringing. And I know I’ve been having difficulty hearing what other people say to me. I’m always saying, Pardon?
No, I haven’t had a cold. No.
• • •
She rehearses the speech, then repeats it to the doctor and answers the doctor’s questions, hands in her lap, feet side by side in their black shoes, purse beside her feet. A matron. The doctor is a round, sensible-looking woman in a white smock, with a light attached to her forehead. She questions Elizabeth kindly, making notes in the Egyptian hieroglyphs of doctors. Then, after they go through a door and Elizabeth sits down in a black leatherette chair, she looks into Elizabeth’s mouth and then her ears, one after the other, using a light on the end of a probe. She asks her to hold her nose and blow, to see if there are any popping sounds.
“No obstructions,” the doctor says cheerfully.
She fits a set of headphones onto Elizabeth’s head. Elizabeth stares at the wall, on which hangs a picture done in painted plaster: a tree, a fairy-faced child gazing up at the branches, and a poem in scrolled script:
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a Tree.
A Tree whose hungry mouth is pressed
Against the Earth’s sweet flowing breast ....
Elizabeth reads this far, then stops. Even the idealized tree in the plaster oblong looks like a kind of squid, its roots intertwined like tentacles, sticking itself onto that rounded bulge of earth, sucking, voracious. Nancy started biting her in the sixth month, with the first tooth.
• • •
The doctor twiddles buttons on the machine attached by wires to Elizabeth’s headphone, producing first high science-fiction sounds, then low vibrations, rumors.
“I can hear it,” Elizabeth says each time the sound changes. She can tell what kinds of things this woman would have in her living room: chintz slipcovers, lamps with bases made of porcelain nymphs. Ceramic poodles on her mantelpiece, like Nate’s mother. An ashtray with ladybird beetles on the rim, in natural colors. This whole room is a time warp.
The doctor removes Elizabeth’s headphones and asks her to go back to the outer office. They both sit down. The doctor smiles benignly, indulgently, as if she’s about to tell Elizabeth she has cancer of the ears.
“There’s absolutely nothing wrong with your hearing,” she says. “Your ears are clear and your range is normal. Perhaps you may have a very slight residual infection that causes plugging from time to time. When that happens, just hold your nose and blow, as you’d do in an airplane. The pressure will clear your ears.”
(“I think I’m going deaf,” Elizabeth said.
“Maybe,” said Nate, “there are just some things you don’t want to hear.”)
Elizabeth thinks the receptionist looks at her strangely when she says she won’t be needing another appointment. “Nothing wrong with me,” she says, explaining. She goes down in the elevator and walks through the archaic brass and marble lobby, still marching. By the time she reaches the outer door the humming has begun again, high-pitched, constant, like a mosquito or a child’s tuneless song, or a power line in winter. Electricity somewhere. She remembers a story she read once, in Reader’s Digest, while sitting in the dentist’s waiting room, about an old woman who started hearing angel voices in her head and thought she was going mad. After a long time and several investigations they discovered she was picking up a local radio station through the metal in her bridgework. Reader’s Digest repeated this story as a joke.
It’s almost five, darkening; the sidewalk and road are slick with drizzle. Traffic packs the lanes. Elizabeth steps across the gutter and begins to walk diagonally across the street, in front of one stationary car, behind another. A green delivery truck jams to a stop in the moving lane, three feet from her. The driver leans on his horn, shouting.
“You idiot, you wanna get yourself killed?”
Elizabeth continues across the road, ignoring him, her pace steady, marching. Does she want to get herself killed. The hum in her right ear shuts off like a cut connection.
There’s nothing wrong with her ears. The sound is coming from somewhere else. Angel voices.