Ten years later, and I still feel like I’m living in the upside down.
I’ve been having this dream, lately. I’m walking in a deserted landscape. Everything’s grey, twisted, destroyed. A layer of creepy fog brushes against my legs. Excalibur is with me and I’m holding the reins, leading her somewhere, although I’m not sure where. The ground is loose, uneven, and I keep stumbling, though I never fall. But my shoe catches on something and when I look down I see a woman’s hand sticking out of the soil. I don’t scream, because for some reason it makes sense. Like I should expect to see it. Instead I carefully brush the soil from what turns out to be Evie. Evie’s lifeless body. Evie in her ragged leather armour. Looking peaceful, like a dove. I hear a voice.
“Ho! Hey! Mush!”
My father, dwarfed by Excalibur, is sitting astride the horse, trying to tell her where to go. He points to the horizon, where a city, silhouetted by a falling star, or a nuclear explosion, ominously waits for us.
I told this dream to my psychologist, who asked me what I thought it meant.
“That’s your job,” I said.
“But it was your dream.”
“So?”
“So you know better than I do.”
We sat there in the quiet for a little while. When this happens she usually asks me where I’ve “gone” when I finally bring my eyes back up to her.
As if I was anywhere else. I’d been intently examining the carpet pattern.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I was thinking about my dad.”
“You miss him.”
“Of course.”
“Where do you think he was pointing you?”
I hadn’t considered that. It was only sitting on the GO Train later that I thought about her words again, and my dream. I was taking the train out to the suburbs, where I would board the bus that would take me to Durham.
From my apartment window in Toronto, facing east, you get a comparable cityscape to what I saw in my dream. Before the sun has risen, when the sky is just slightly coloured, the buildings that make up the downtown black obelisks in its light. But I was certain that it wasn’t a sunrise in my dream. Closer to sunset, but not that either.
I wasn’t sure what it was.
* * *
I keep choking on this weird feeling that caught me again as I was staring out the train window. A feeling I can’t name but that’s been bothering me ever since I agreed to come out here, and maybe even before that, too. It’s the same feeling I get reading Kent Adler’s book Homesickness, except when I’m reading Adler’s poetry that feeling is somehow something I want to have. It’s a feeling of imminence. Like something is coming and I don’t know what.
But it’s big and it’s going to change a lot.
The poem that most affects me like this is “October 23, 2012”:
Heeding the birds
As a car peels out
I locked the garage
An entire flock
As a bear moves
Shaggy with death
And car horns
Heard in delirium
Waiting for the light
Of a passing vehicle
I feel like I know exactly what he means. Like I’m with him, waiting to be overcome. He was from Durham, too, so I think he understands. Except for Adler the poem was set in the future, his future, a future I think he knew would never arrive, and for me it’s my present, more or less.
Tom thinks it might help me to do meditation. He’s always putting on bells or chimes on his phone or on the computer or on the stereo (his mom in Victoria sent him a Buddhist chimes CD in a care package last April) and telling me to close my eyes and breathe. Usually I resent it; it’s none of his business, but I tried doing some on the train. I did the one where you picture yourself at the bottom of a pool of water, each exhale a stream of bubbles carrying your troubles away and to the surface.
It was a little difficult getting settled. The train was crowded and I’d been facing two middle-aged day traders or securities executives or bank robbers or whatever, loudly gossiping about their colleagues or their rivals or both, talking tactlessly about moving crazy sums of money from one account to another. The numbers they used really were astounding, casually referring to amounts I never thought were possible outside of news reports, more money than I could ever dream of seeing.
Before a seat opened up and I was able to sit down I stood next to them and watched their stubbled chins move over this landscape, so foreign to me, with a confidence and lack of self-consciousness that I’d always wanted and never known.
And never would know.
Seated I tried to imagine myself under a great quantity of water, placing myself in the midst of an immense cool blueness, nourishing and safe, like a blanket of amniotic fluid. But no matter how hard I tried to imagine the toxins rising out of me with my exhalations, bubbles rising and bursting on the surface far above, I just couldn’t concentrate on my breathing. I couldn’t still my thoughts. I couldn’t go where I needed to go.
Whenever I opened my eyes and caught a glimpse of my neighbours’ tailored suits, trendy coffees, muted accessories, and expensive-looking phones — I got angry, angrier than I had any right being. The water I was trying so hard to peacefully bury myself under turned to a fierce boil. Instead I took a book out of my bag and stared hard at the men when they weren’t looking, trying to will them into getting a nosebleed or a migraine. Something to make them feel fragile, or at least the possibility of fragile, even for a moment. As fragile as I felt nearly every day, whenever I stopped and caught myself.
It didn’t work.
Which is just as well, because it wasn’t their fault, even though it was. But it was only their fault in a way that was so much larger than them it felt useless to make them the target of my anger. I wanted a kind of security that just wasn’t available to me, even though it might have been, maybe, a long time ago. But I had so much trouble letting it go. That was one of the reasons I was coming back to Durham, as much as I hated to admit it.
I’d stopped getting nosebleeds when I finally went off the acne medication in my undergrad, but I still felt like I was on the verge of getting them. There was still the possibility. I mean, spiritually.
In a way those businessmen would never understand.
When I was a little kid I remember that everything seemed so simple. Even if I wasn’t particularly popular in my classes I always did well in school and was praised by my teachers. That changed by the time I got to high school, but I still believed in my underlying competence. I was still able to write Evie even though I’m not sure I believed in anything else. I still thought it would lead to something.
Even just in myself.
Now everything feels so hard. I’ve made so many sacrifices to keep working and writing and they haven’t amounted to anything. I just feel drained and exhausted. I’m no closer than I was then, although I have made solid inroads into establishing a lifetime of feeling poor and trapped.
Really solid inroads.
Sometimes when I’m lying on the couch with a book open and abandoned on the ground beside me Tom will come and sit down gingerly in the armchair next to me, and say, in a saccharine voice that I once used to love because it felt like the mark of someone who cared about me, “Sarah, I think we need to talk.”
But what he means is: Sarah, you need to talk. It’s never about us, though on that subject I have a lot I could say, but about how I could be doing more to centre myself, to take pleasure out of the everyday, to appreciate what I have, and to expand my support network. And I don’t want to do any of that, although I think it might be nice to have more people to talk to so that I could occasionally complain about him.
Not that he’s so bad.
But one of the reasons I was so excited about leaving our apartment for a week was to get away from us, for at least a little bit.
To still myself and take a breath and look around.
The truth is that sometimes I want to be depressed. Maybe I need to be, I don’t know. It’s not a problem that anyone needs to solve, especially not someone who doesn’t really understand the cause. I mean, as much as I love Tom, or at least think I do, it seems difficult for him to see that my problems are larger than my immediate circumstances.
And maybe sometimes I need to acknowledge that, too. I don’t know.
It’s been a long time since I’ve been back to Durham. For a few months after I started school in Toronto I used to come down every week — nominally to see Tiff and Jess if they were in town, and Carl, who I’d gotten in the summer before my final year of high school (to add something light to the house, something for me). But I also came back home to feel attached or connected to something when everything else in my life felt so new and strange and different. I wanted the comfort of the house I grew up in, I wanted to hide in my room under the covers and look at the pathetic willow out the front window. I wanted to see my mom. Even if I didn’t see her very often, because she was already dating Dan and didn’t want me to know (I knew). Even if we fought a lot. There was still something comforting about spending time next to her, in eating her home-cooked meals, tastes familiar from childhood, in sitting on the couch together as we silently watched something dumb on television.
But then things got busy. I started to feel like I didn’t have time enough to call home, let alone to spend my entire weekend travelling back and forth on a bus. And Mom and Dan got married, and after he moved in it didn’t feel so much like my home anymore.
Looking out into the hills and the fields and the calm after the bus I transferred onto in Brampton escaped the suburbs and entered the empty highways on the way to Durham, surrounded by nothing but forests and fields and meadows, green turning yellow and gold, haze of life floating in the air, a clarity, homes dwarfed by the emptiness on either side, I realized how hungry I was to see it all again, to break out of the grey that I inhabited and into something that I was surprised to discover seemed alien and different to me now, but also deeply urgent and real, like it was somehow rising out of me even as it rushed past me on the other side of the window.
* * *
Carl was waiting for me when I unlocked the front door to the house, a little white-and-orange arrow streaking to the entrance. I pushed back with my foot, catching him off-balance, forcing him to sit back and blink slowly in the darkness. When I had the door closed behind me and put my stuff on the bench he brushed my leg and chirped meaningfully, which I knew meant I want food. Instead I picked him up, cradling him like a child, holding him close to my face, and I know he liked it because his whole body was soft and he was purring, but he also tried to bite me on the nose because he was hungry, so I pitched him forward and let him hit the ground and take a few steps forward.
He’s not like most cats, because he chirps instead of meows, but also because he carries himself not at all like a cat but like a weird, insistent human baby, though also a sharp one, if you’re not careful. He doesn’t mean anything by his sudden moments of ferocity — sometimes I think he thinks that’s what it means to show love: to bite down as hard as possible into the one you care about, to get your claws stuck in their hand as a means of demonstrating the depth of your feeling.
The house had changed a lot in the years since I’d left it. First Mom had re-shingled the roof and redone the floors, a dark, cool granite over the pale and fading hardwood that was there before. After Dan moved in they’d updated the living-room furniture and bought all-new appliances, taking down the far wall in the kitchen and bringing the room out fifteen feet to make room for a harvest table that stood in the sunshine pouring down through newly installed windows, large and angled and running pretty much from the floor to the ceiling of the new extension. To be honest, it looked pretty good. When I called home — which wasn’t often — Mom would complain that Carl had taken an interest in the drawstrings for the new venetian blinds, plucking them with his claws when he was hungry and trying to get her attention. She said that some days she wanted to strangle him or throw him outside to fend for himself.
But I told her he was too soft and pliant to survive out there on his own. He’d never been outside in his whole life, except once when he was six months old — after hours of searching I found him covered in cobwebs and cowering out behind the shed.
“I know, honey,” she would say, in a tone of voice that made me worry that she didn’t know.
There was a note on the bureau in the foyer with some basic instructions, and that note explained there were more notes left around the house, wherever Mom and Dan thought they would be helpful. As if I didn’t know the house at all or couldn’t figure it out on my own. How hard was it to understand the thermostat, which I had adjusted up and down as soon as I was tall enough to reach the switch? The note in the kitchen explained that they hadn’t had time to feed Carl that morning because they were running late for their flight. But they’d had time to write a note saying so? Also, it concluded, there were pork chops and mashed potatoes in the refrigerator. “Bon appétit! ” she had written, with a little smiley face at the bottom.
After I got Carl his kibble, changed his water, and scooped out half a can of wet food, I opened the refrigerator door and stood in the light for a few minutes, totally dazzled by its contents. I have never been able to keep my fridge as well-stocked as my mother does, both due to economic and moral reasons. I took out some eggs, the mashed potatoes, the pork chop, some cooked peas, and the butter, and I fried the eggs, mashed potatoes, and the peas together and slid the pork chop into the compost.
I’m a vegetarian — I’ve been one for a while.
(It wouldn’t have kept.)
(I know I’m still a brat.)
I sat at the table by the windows and watched myself eat in the reflection over the black, trying to make details out in the backyard. I thought there were a few trees that hadn’t been there last time, and maybe the outline of a new barbecue. I could hear Carl by the cabinets, inhaling his food.
I knew my mom was much happier than she had been before, much happier, more comfortable, but I sometimes wished I didn’t have to see it.
When I finished eating I poured myself a glass of orange juice — more for the novelty than anything, since I don’t buy it myself — and went to sit out in the living room. I didn’t want to go upstairs yet.
I don’t know why, exactly.
I remembered my mother telling me that the couches had recently been professionally cleaned, but they were still plastered with Carl’s little white hairs. Above the mantel there were new photos in bronze frames, many of people I didn’t recognize. An older photo, with a label running along the bottom, caught my eye — my mother’s grandfather and his brothers: Joseph, Edward, Robert, leaning against a worn-out wooden fence in front of a barn. The Stuart homestead was about forty minutes up the road, in a town I’d only known through the stories my grandfather had told me about his childhood. We visited it, once, but by that time it had long belonged to someone else — we’d only stood out by the car and peered down over the new white picket fences, trying to imagine the poverty and the wilderness of a time before, as it was in the stories, when they’d still had to clear and prepare the land, piece by piece, themselves.
All of the brothers looked to be about the same age I was in the photograph, in their midtwenties. I took a long, close look at Edward, whom I’d always been told I resembled, but I didn’t look anything like him. Or at least I hoped I didn’t — he was short and stout and his ears stuck out like a goblin’s. And on the whole his features were much sharper than mine.
Or maybe that was just my imagination.
I liked to think in any case that my personal appearance had rebounded from the lows of high school. I’d learned how to dress myself in my early twenties, finding clothes that fit me and flattered my body, which had never really been so bad. I went running occasionally, too. Sometimes I did crunches or yoga with Tom. It had been a long time since I’d had any real trouble dating.
Beyond the trouble that everyone has and which always follows me around.
I noticed that there was a pile of Carl’s barf hardening in the corner by the window. It was difficult to say how old it was. I went into the kitchen and got some paper towels and a rag and the bottle of vinegar and let the vinegar soak into it for a little while.
“Bad Carl,” I said, while I was wiping up the last of the barf, much later. “You’re very bad.” But I think he could tell that I was happy to be saying something, anything, in that large and empty house. He raised his head from where he was lying on the couch and gave me what seemed like an odd kind of smile.
My phone buzzed on the coffee table. It was a text from Tom: “going out with Jerry. if i don’t talk to you later have a goof night.”
I decided to ignore the typo. I didn’t want to be petty. When I texted him my “good night” he responded with a smiley face.
I hate it when he does that.
As promised, there was a cheque with the note in the foyer. I wondered briefly why it was so much smaller than I expected it to be. Watching the house wasn’t a vacation for me. Not really. That’s what I’d told her. I was missing a whole week of work. While I was thinking this over I did the dishes, slowly, letting my hands linger under the hot water. Carl went back and forth underneath me, rubbing first one leg and then the other. He was really a sweet cat. I gave him a bit more kibble, to make up for the morning, grabbed my stuff, and went upstairs.
At the far end of the hallway, across from the landing, was my parents’ room. The door stood ajar, three or four inches, as if there were someone inside waiting for me.
I tried to ignore it.
There was a note on my bed. It was from my mother, explaining that it had just been made up.
“Don’t worry,” it said, “I’ve washed the sheets tons since the last time you were here. Over and over. And over again!” There was another smiley face by her name, but it didn’t matter. The note was an arrow, flying at just the right height and speed. I threw it on the floor, next to the stacks of boxes that had been moved into my room during the basement renovation.
I tried to, but found I couldn’t, cry myself to sleep.