THERE WERE SEVERAL PAIRS of knee-high green rubber boots on the mat, including a pair that belonged to Sandrine and three that were Randy’s. They were the kind of boots people wore to go fishing or hunting, with a felt lining. It wasn’t possible to buy them in the city at all. She took her own shoes off by the door as she always did. Because of this almost universal rural habit, Sandrine thought, country houses generally had clean floors even when inhabited almost entirely by men.
Changing from boots into slippers, Sandrine remembered with some dismay that her husband’s name wasn’t Randy at all; it was Mike. Said husband was sitting at the table working on the crossword puzzle. He looked up and measured her with a lingering elevator glance from head to toe and toe to head. He didn’t say a word but gave her the slightest of nods, after which he got up and put on the kettle for tea. When it was done they sat at the table and drank it.
Watching him work on his crossword she knew with a dead certainty he wasn’t called Mike—not Mike nor Randy, either. She wished he would speak and give away his name. How could she forget such a thing? It wasn’t as if she was eighty-two and had dementia. She was a young woman, thirty-four, in possession of a nice house in a small Ontario town and two beautiful small children who were away for the weekend, visiting their paternal grandmother two towns over.
She also had an unusually attractive husband whose name she’d forgotten. How could that be? She knew he’d been grating on her nerves lately, to the point where she’d been indulging in escape fantasies. Was forgetting his name some kind of karmic retribution for her unkind thoughts? Sandrine did a quick mental check: had she been in a car accident or recently suffered some other serious bump to her head? Was her aphasia caused by a concussion? Alas, none of these seemed true. She simply didn’t know.
Just as strangely and suddenly as her husband’s name had fled, Sandrine saw in her mind’s eye diagonals of green lozenges printed onto the back of the upholstery of the seat in front of her. It was a childhood memory. She’d been on the train with her father in North Africa. She didn’t think of the trip often and wondered why the memory was chasing her now, taking over, hanging on, not giving up. Looking out the window at the purple-black watchman hollyhocks guarding the vegetable beds, Sandrine wondered whether she would ever remember the trip again. Memory was a strange and fickle thing. She should make a note before the image fled, perhaps on the back of the phone bill that sat on the kitchen table, with its varnished veneer top and white lacquered legs.
Sandrine looked at her husband and smiled; he was so gorgeous it was hard not to. He smiled back and bent over his crossword as if he welcomed the silence. That’s what being married for a long time got you: the possibility of making and drinking tea all without needing to speak. Sandrine figured it for a good thing, most days.
She remembered camels she’d seen, slurping out of buckets at an oasis near Djerba. At some point her father had gotten off to go on an important visit alone, and the train had sped on through the night without him. Sandrine remembered sitting alone in her seat, trying to converse with strangers in languages she didn’t know well, wishing for blankets, more money, apples, friends, all of the above. In the end she’d fallen asleep counting lozenges, noticing their patterns, how they repeated. She’d written in her journal, but not about pomegranates or camels or the magical train ride itself. Instead she’d described the strange upholstery on the back of the seat in front of her. Sandrine had been so young at the time, a child really, thirteen or so, scribbling in a notebook that might still be in a carton in the attic. If she saw it, would she even recognize the book? Why was she thinking of it now?
She’d learned that often enough the timing and content of certain thoughts had significance. Djerba, the Island of Dreams, was in Tunisia, a country she had visited at thirteen with her father. He had wanted her to see the place of her birth and after her mother had died had used part of the insurance money to pay for the trip. Had their train really crossed the old Roman causeway to Djerba, or had they taken a bus or taxi for this last leg of the journey? It was all so long ago she wasn’t sure. Maybe the train had been a dream train, just as Djerba had been Ulysses’s Isle of the Lotus Eaters.
How could Sandrine even know such obscure literary trivia? Maybe, sitting on the train, she’d read a tourist brochure whose useless facts were now emerging from her subconscious like flotsam escaped from lengthy entrapment beneath the waves. Maybe some kind of mischievous metaphysical imp had taken up residence in her brain, excising important data, such as her husband’s name, and replacing them with dreamy poetic childhood memories whose relevance, if any, she couldn’t fathom. At least not now, not yet.
Was it even a real memory? And if false memories weren’t inserted by evil therapists and hypnotists, as often alleged, where in fact did they come from? Anyway, evil therapists usually inserted memories of childhood abuse, and the train memory, while dripping with anxious feelings of abandonment, wasn’t about abuse.
Sandrine felt tempted to haul a stepladder into the bedroom and unfold it under the trapdoor. She’d climb to the top step, tea in hand. It was the kind of minor eccentricity she liked to indulge in. She told people she was practising for menopause. She’d even walked the streets of her village carrying a coffee mug, and not the stainless travel kind but a proper ceramic mug with daisies and ewes on it.
She looked at her husband meditatively chewing on his pencil end. All she had to do was ask. Was his name Ethan? Or maybe Karl Johan? If it wasn’t either of those, then what was it? Maybe she’d written his name in one of her notebooks. In fact, that was highly likely.
Very quietly, so as not to disturb his chewing, she got up and tiptoed down the hall. The bedroom closet was capacious enough to hold large objects such as the stepladder in addition to their meagre supply of clothing. Leveraging the ladder out through a selection of her man’s plaid shirts, she opened it beneath the pink trapdoor in the ceiling. The trapdoor was pink because Sandrine had once painted the walls and ceiling, rebelling against her husband’s blues and browns and camo. It was his house; he’d inherited it along with two or three other nearby properties both large (a swampy hunt camp) and small (a cottage on one of the lakes), and every damn wall or floor or roof or exterior wall on or in each of his houses, sheds, and barns was either green or blue or brown. Sandrine remembered how when they’d begun dating she’d taken whatshisname for financially struggling because of his frayed shirts and ailing trucks. She was used to city signifiers of prosperity: clever phones and name-brand clothing. His little white clapboard house near the Brookside canal, the one she’d moved into after they’d married, had been so unassuming she’d felt a little sorry for him. Later she’d found out it was a country thing; folks had houses and plots of swamp and cedar bush tucked away all over the county, bits and pieces that had been in the family for generations. Many families were cash poor but land rich, their various parcels having been acquired during earlier times when land had been cheap to come by, having then been recently expropriated from the local Michi Saagiig. It was still cheap, comparatively speaking, tucked away in this forgotten Eastern Ontario township.
Sandrine stopped in mid-thought halfway up the ladder, imagining a house painted in camouflage. She smiled. It could be quite wonderful, certainly a talking point. Would she use the green-and-brown kind or the greyscale kind? The different types of camo had different names; Sandrine just didn’t know what they were. What she did know was that she had once painted the bedroom not camo but a flaming flamingo pink. She’d done it when her husband was away hunting, just to prove that she had some say, to prove that pink was a good colour. If he hated pink so much he shouldn’t have married a girl; a moose would’ve done just fine. Moose, after all, were brown.
Still parked halfway up, Sandrine pictured Mike’s winsome moose wife and giggled. Then she climbed back down to retrieve the flashlight that always sat on her nightstand in case of a power failure; there were lots of those in the country, just as there was lots of camo. Truth was the pink had gotten to her, too—the much and suchness of it; maybe a paler pink would’ve done the trick just as well, proved the point, made her husband laugh instead of groan.
Once back at the top she pushed the trap door out of the way. It wasn’t hinged, just a loose slab of wood squared a little irregularly to fit the slightly irregular square someone had long, long ago cut into the ceiling. Sandrine hoisted herself up and turned on the flashlight.
She’d bring the box of books down, she figured, or she’d sit up there all night, opening one book after another, trying to find the passage about the lozenges woven into or printed onto the train upholstery. If she were smart, once she’d found it she wouldn’t slip the book, unlabeled, back into its box. She’d slap a sticky note on the page, or she’d get a fine-point marker and write on the cover, or she might even take the book and carry it down the ladder to keep on her night table until it drove her crazy and she could no longer stand the presence of this chapter from an earlier life, recorded in neat cursive hailing from the days before her handwriting had gone to hell.
Amazingly, the box was right near the hatch, as if someone had pushed it there for her perusal. Or else she’d had this same idea a month ago, and forgotten. Just like her husband’s name.
She selected a book from the top layer, opened it in the middle and read aloud. Over the course of a lifetime I have found that random thoughts, like dreams, can be cryptic messages from the soul, disguised or veiled, yes, but requiring only a bit of personal pondering, inspection or introspection, to parse their meaning and significance.
Not the passage about the lozenges, not at all, but maybe there was a connection nevertheless. For instance, hadn’t she just been thinking that often enough the timing of certain thoughts was significant? Did that mean there was a reason she was thinking about the train in Africa on which her father had left her, promising to meet her in Tunis the next day while he went to visit an old French girlfriend living in the south, in Tataouine?
What happened, Sandrine? Did something happen on the train that you’ve shut out? Is that why you’re thinking so much about the damn train suddenly? Djerba’s other name was the Isle of Forgetting, after all. Or is it the feeling of abandonment by your father that you’re still, decades later, trying to heal? Maybe nothing beyond his departure had to have happened for you to feel so neglected. Maybe the train voyage was perfectly innocent and nice, if a little bit frightening as you spoke neither Arabic nor French well, and Tunisia isn’t the sort of country in which young teen girls travel alone, then or now. Did something happen on the train, Sandrine? Think a little harder. Maybe, like her husband’s name, she’d written it down in one of the notebooks, whatever it was, if there had even been anything. There were so many books in the box. Layers and layers of books, not in any kind of order. She looked at the one she held in her hand with its green cover and creamy lined pages, not all of them full. She hated wasting journals. She could resume writing in this one, just to confuse the hell out of herself when, in another ten years, she got it out of the box so she could look for her husband’s forgotten name again.
What was the point of even having a husband if you couldn’t even remember his name from one moment to the next? She closed the book again, looked at the cover, which all by itself ought to offer clues. Without perusing the interior, she ought to be able to discern both the approximate year and her place of residence at the time of writing. Maybe even where she’d gotten the journal itself, whether it had been a gift or something she’d purchased in a stationery store, unable to help herself, knowing she shouldn’t buy it, not really, because it was expensive and the rent was due.
She opened the book to a random page.
The café I am sitting in is like the café on Sixth Street, she read. That one was a basement café with nice white cups and healthy carrot bread. She would leave her apartment and walk there during the day. The clerks were supercilious. She felt her loneliness and her poverty were both recognized and snickered at, a little. She was cute enough and her thrift-store coat was of good wool and a becoming cut; with a church-sale silk scarf she thought she looked quite good. And yet anyone must be able to tell that she was poor and lonely, bored and aimless.
Sandrine couldn’t remember having written this, nor could she remember the café, but there had been a lot of those over a span beginning approximately at the time of the trip to Tunisia and ending when she moved into her husband’s house and started a family. She never went to those sorts of cafés anymore, mainly because there weren’t any in Brookside or Stony Creek, villages that favoured Canadian Chinese and breakfast specials. She examined the handwriting. It was undeniably her own, evoking the long-gone days before her cursive had gone to hell. She felt a little regretful looking at her beautiful penmanship, wondering whether she could relearn it. Trying to recover lost cursive would be sort of like going back to French or pottery, both skills she’d once been not half-bad at but had left by the wayside at some point.
Probably the same point at which she got pregnant, if not before. She’d taken up reading about nutrition and child development, consequently both French verb conjugations and wheel throwing had seemingly vanished—poof!—from her brain as if they’d never been there at all. Did it even matter? She wasn’t with Mike or Randy or Euell or Darrel because of his name but because, with him, she no longer had to be that person, the one who scribbled obsessively in sad cafés, the one who had looked out the windows of a train that had seemed, forever, to pass through the North African night. On Djerba there were three-thousand-year-old olive trees, still living. What did trees that old dream of? An older dream than that of the Romans, by far.
What happened on the train, Sandrine? She had in the end tired of the years of lonely views and focused just on the upholstery, its patterns repeating, over and over. Clack clack clackety clack. Eventually the train had left North Africa and gone back to Canada as only dream trains can.
Sandrine heard her husband enter the bedroom. She listened to him sit down on the bed; it must be late, even by her standards. She began her descent, clutching the little green hardcover book with its descriptions of thought processes and sad cafés, if not train upholstery. Later she’d leaf through it again, and hopefully come across a list of lovers’ names that would end with her husband’s.