KAREN. I’VE BARELY DARED think of her, thought today of the skirt I gave her years ago. I suddenly realized it was a going away present. A goodbye present: I only saw her once more after that. But which of us was going away?
And now I can’t not think of her, back on Salt Spring after ten years, in this little cabin where we stayed—a sleeping loft, a little cook stove, and, amazingly, the same even more faded blue print curtain on the window.
Karen’s son was named Moon. What was Moon’s father called? I feel I could retrieve his name, if it was important enough. But it’s not.
Homes. What are they made of? After squatting in this cabin and others, working and camping all over British Columbia for years alone, I met Karen and Moon. We hit it off and in the end they lived with me here for almost a year, and then we forged a life plan together. We’d work, buy land, make a family of ourselves. I thought Toronto, my home town, and not Vancouver or Victoria. We didn’t even tell Moon’s father—Karen had stopped forwarding their address or lack of it after what happened the last time he took his son for a weekend. Finding the child uncontrollable, he’d returned Moon to Karen’s doorstep at midnight, not even staying to make sure she was home.
We had little money and hitchhiked, the three of us, with backpacks and rolled tents. It was September. Moon was nine, I was twenty, Karen was twenty-nine. Moon thought it high adventure to sleep in ditches when we weren’t let off near a campground at night; to coax a flame from damp kindling; to strike the tent himself some mornings; to eat beans and scrambled eggs cooked in a pan over a fire. I remember Karen even offered to demonstrate how to skin and cook a roadkill porcupine. “Gross,” Moon told me, “but quite edible with onions.”
“Must you?” I declined. Now I think it a shame I didn’t take the chance to learn this extra life skill.
sss
Enzo had woken from a dream in which their daughter Katie’s fort had red gaillardias woven through the dishevelled pile of kids’ sleeping bags, signifying, he knew even in the dream, limitless joy. Ending in a disastrous mood as often as not, but still, he’d had such a great time with Katie and her friends, had been even somewhat lax about nutritious meals and bedtime and teeth brushing but perhaps that was the point. If one stopped obsessing over propriety for a sweet short moment sometimes lasting an entire weekend about their hair their baths their laundry their three square, they let you into their incredible secret, more: would teach you how to participate in infinite joy.
But the next morning, their daughter’s amusing nine-year-old friends gone home, Enzo worried again. Right at this moment Azalea might be kayaking in the cold and wet. He was surprised to find no anger in himself at her leaving, ditching him with the kid. He just wanted her home safe. Badly.
sss
I remember Karen and I walking in the railway lands at the foot of Bathurst Street, a break from job-and-apartment hunting. We came upon an empty old boxcar and found a plastic bag of toiletries and other small items, a sleeping bag, a comic lying open beside it. “Let’s sit and read the comic,” I said, completely charmed.
Karen replied, “It’s their home; it would be rude to go in without being invited,” and I was humbled, feeling as always she saw more than me. I so desperately wanted to wear that home as my own, just for a few minutes. I would trespass for the sake of my fantasy, not even seeing how fragile this tiny home was, how doubly important to respect its ephemeral boundaries.
Living in a city again I needed to work so I could pay for rent and food; knew already how hard it would be to save a down payment, not spend it in bars and restaurants, on clothes, anything to wash the feel of eight hours of shift work away. On Salt Spring we’d been able to live rent free in our borrowed cabin, eat off the land, at least to an extent. I loved it. It was Karen who grumbled. She already had a child, even then almost ten years old. He’d be a young adult now. For how long was I oblivious, as she hardened herself against the disapproving gaze?
The cabin is on Crown Land. My old friend Elm pays a pittance for his lease. “What is public land for if people can’t make homes on it,” Karen used to say, and with what fervent desire I wanted her to be right.
sss
Why didn’t Azalea write or call? It had been more than a week. Enzo read her computer journal, for herself alone. He began at the beginning. Azalea wrote, five years before:
I bought Karen a skirt. I don’t know why. We’ve never felt the need to make showy gifts to one another. We had such dreams, Karen and I. I remember how, after we came east, two months into city life I hated walls already. I missed tents badly; just enough of a roof to keep the rain off. Karen and I worked in clubs at night, and soon all the peace of the forest had gone to noise. But not quite all; so often as I hustled tables, I was kayaking along a forested coast in my mind, watching for whales.
And now Enzo and I have a house full of appliances. Why? So that our daughter won’t grow up to be like Karen. We live as if we believed machines could protect us. Yet Karen grew up surrounded by appliances too, and they didn’t protect her. Even more than Karen, I wonder what Moon’s doing now.
Before it came back to him Enzo briefly wondered who Karen was. He wondered who his own friends were. Scrolling through pages he saw that Azalea wrote about Karen more than she wrote about him—he could think of no one who took up as much space in his life. Except, of course, for her. Azalea herself.
Who were his friends? His mother, his daughter. Azalea, Enzo had thought, but now he wasn’t so sure. Did friends walk away from one another? Was that sometimes a necessary part of friendship? And the question begged asking: abandon one another to what?
And which of them had abandoned the other?
There were old friends from high school and university he talked to once or twice a year. They seemed so far away from his life now, a distance too large to be breached. They wouldn’t be able to offer comfort if he called, because he wouldn’t tell. Tell them what?
Azalea’s gone.
And Karen? She was a single mother, a few years older than Azalea. The two women had travelled the west coast before they came to Ontario, where Azalea met Enzo, did the married thing. Went back to school. They had a child.
But what happened to Karen? And what happened to Azalea, to make her leave?
sss
I phoned Enzo to tell him I’m not coming home yet, to dependably shop for school clothes, set the alarm, pack lunches for the big day. He didn’t tell me I was cruel or neglectful, just told me Katie was fine and asked me when I’d come. Not sure, I said. I felt selfish, yet what about his cruelty? How impassively he sat by while I lost myself in years of laundry and cooking and scrubbed floors and isolation, so often alone with the child. The baby drove me crazy in love and towards desperation in equal measures. I wrote papers for school in the wee hours and broke into occasional sobs of exhaustion Enzo found unaccountable.
I suppose I’m having a bit of a nervous breakdown, leaving as I so suddenly did but without crying jags, temper tantrums, or an inability to get out of bed. This time I just bought a plane ticket instead, without warning Enzo. Looking for some peace, wanting to be alone. And now I am alone, yet not feeling isolated at all. Funny, that.
sss
Enzo began a journal, after Labour Day weekend came and went, after Katie chirped through Cheerios and scrambled eggs, onto the school bus.
8 September: The man who lent her the cabin then still lives in the same house in Victoria; she called him, asked if she could use it again. Was happy he remembered her. He works in broadcasting now, calls himself Elmer again.
Perhaps, right now, Azalea sits at the wooden table, writes by kerosene lamp, for (I imagine) it’s a heavy overcast day. She listens, awed by how happy she is, to the surf on the stones outside the window. Yesterday, kayaking, she saw orcas.
It was his first journal entry, ever. Suddenly, he was like Azalea. And Karen too, he’d bet twenty bucks; he suddenly remembered the two women talking: how soothing they found their journals. Azalea gone, no longer reminding him where his car keys were, his memory quickened. Funny how that worked.
sss
Why is this the only place I can talk about God, even to myself—far from any neighbours, not even a road, only a kayak to go coastwise around to the village? Because my life here is so potentially dangerous I need one. As are all our lives, every day, but we hide behind machines so we don’t have to look. Dangerous, yet beautiful, and most importantly what seemed necessary: the right to make a small home out of small things. Wash each night one cup one spoon one pan.
My computer is an appliance that doesn’t wash dishes or clothes; instead, it rinses my soul. I wonder whether Enzo has booted up my journal at home—it’s not password protected. If he was away, and he kept one, would I be able to resist? It terrifies me to be possibly so exposed, even to my husband. Enough complaints in there about him to be sure, gentle as he is. And perhaps better there than spoken aloud always—for I’m no paragon myself. Yet part of me is relieved by the possibility: at last he’d know all.
I remember the night Karen and I traded journals, read our way through one another’s lives and minds by lamplight. It was the next morning we decided we could buy land together.
sss
By early October, Azalea still wasn’t home, although she’d called twice more from the village, so Enzo knew at least she was alive. He worried alone now over the list of possible calamities as they usually did together at the beginning of each cold season: chimney fires, power failures, frozen pipes. So much for calling themselves suburban; they were still technically in the country, at the edge of the little town north of Toronto. The faceless minivan shame of living in suburbia, without even the town services that made it worthwhile. Continuing with his snooping, he read an entry near the end of Azalea’s first year’s diary:
Reading back through the whole year on New Year’s Day it strikes me this journal literally saved my life. Must remember to tell that to the next suicidal person I talk to. For, sigh, there will be one as surely as there will be another winter. And Karen? I hope she’s well. I haven’t seen her in months. She didn’t seem well when we saw her last.
Karen again.
Enzo felt terribly guilty for reading, but couldn’t stop. Reading her journals was like eating soup made out of Azalea.
sss
I remember fifteen years ago a squatter friend telling Karen she was bourgeois to want a house. She said: “I want to rest. I want to retreat from this life. It’s too harsh. I want my son to have a roof.”
I can hear her saying it, clear as day, just as I can hear his scornful reply: “Cop-out.”
And Karen never got her house, least not when I still knew her.
Our Toronto apartment had a working fireplace. I remember one winter night I went to Alexandra Park and collected deadfall. It felt peaceful, a country thing, akin to our old life on the islands, gathering rosehips. I remember a passing man stopped, stared at me with pity and scorn, thought I was so poor I couldn’t afford twelve-ninety-eight for a fire-log, wrapped in plastic, printed in four toxic colours, from the corner store. Leave the deadfall to rot until the parks department guys came in their green trucks to clear it away. I was so offended. Yet it couldn’t have been the first time I suffered the disapproving stranger’s gaze: surely, before, I just didn’t notice, too scornful myself, a reverse contempt that suddenly, that snowy night, was no longer there to protect me. A fallen shield.
I’ll go home next week. But who is home?
sss
They lost touch with Karen. Azalea was busy with the baby, with part-time classes, with starting a daycare centre in their village. Karen frightened them, each year poorer and more unkempt, skidding from restaurant work to welfare. But they didn’t say it, even to themselves: we are walking away from her, hand in hand. Not looking back.
Enzo fantasized he’d find Karen. A coming-home present for Azalea, so she’d stay. He knew real life didn’t work that way. And saw it then: he’d find Karen, give her the spare room, and still Azalea wouldn’t come. A shuddering laughing thought.
sss
Thanksgiving morning.
Coasting in a borrowed kayak I found the cabin last night; my memory hadn’t failed me. It is still here, not fallen down. Someone has come, one year or another to make repairs. More importantly there’s kerosene in the lamps, stacked wood outside.
Someone has been here recently: strings of wild rosehips hang in the window, drying. Yet they’ve gone again: the ocean-facing windows are shuttered.
There’s a journal lying open on the table—I wonder whose it is? I’m writing in it but haven’t read it yet. If overly secretive, they wouldn’t have left it here lying open. I will read it tomorrow, a Thanksgiving present to myself.
I look out the window, see a witch’s moon, a crescent horned moon. My mother would have liked it, in the years before. It reminds me of the moons on that skirt her friend gave her. Stole it out of the household money Enzo gave her for groceries: fifteen dollars a week until there was enough; she didn’t dare tell him she wanted to buy a hundred-dollar skirt for my mother. She told me, though; I think I was twelve. She wasn’t working then; new motherhood had already burned through all her savings. Funny how I remember these details; surely these people have forgotten me entirely, and yet when I was a child they were so important.
I lived here when I was very small, when my mother was still happy. Used to watch her chop kindling while I strung rosehips for a useful game. Her friend took care of me when it was my mother’s turn in the kayak. What was her name? Oddly I remember her husband’s name but not hers.
A flowering bush.
Rhododendron?
My mother was happy here. Here she had a friend.
It is only here that the moon is my namesake. Writing helps.
sss
In a boxcar in the decommissioned railway lands south of Richmond Street a woman sat wrapped in blankets. Reflexively she rummaged through her belongings for the little packet to see how much was left. Promised herself again that tomorrow she would find a detox program, check in.
She wore three layers of skirts, the bottom skirt a hippie treasure, an expensive item given her years before by a friend: midnight blue silk with stars and crescent moons printed in gold. The stars and moons were nearly washed away.
The woman never wore this skirt on the outside, but only as the bottom layer, next to her skin. She felt that as long as she never wore it on the outside, the street layer, she wouldn’t be murdered. Never reveal your true name.
What was the woman’s name, her friend who gave her the skirt? She didn’t remember.
A fat orange moon rising in the southern sky, through the open door of the boxcar.
Years ago, she lived in a place so different from this. They had a kayak, she and her friend. They took turns paddling the ocean waters, looking for whales.
Once she had a friend.
Once she had a son.
She remembered the son’s name.