The cupboard was full of – imagine it – food! The fridge was full of – wonder of wonders – food! The buggy was back on its nail on the porch; the sauce was simmering on the stove; the water was boiling for pasta; and there was garlic bread in the oven. All was right with the world.
O knew how to cook. It had been a simple matter of survival. Growing up with just Father and her at home, making dinner for the two of them had become her job as soon as she was old enough to be trusted not to burn the house down.
It had taken her some time today to get used to the unfamiliar kitchen, to find where everything was, to figure out exactly how the gas stove worked.
Twenty minutes ago, Aunt Emily had come to the bottom of the stairs in the shop and called up, “What on earth are you doing up there? It smells delicious.” Now she was tucking into her second plateful of spaghetti. “Your father said nothing about your being such a wonderful cook,” she said. “I haven’t eaten this well in ages. I used to be a pretty good cook myself, when I was younger. It’s hard to keep it up when you live alone.”
A question formed in O’s mind. She wasn’t sure whether to ask it or not. “Why did you never get married, Aunt Emily?”
Silence. Her aunt looked down at her plate.
“I’m sorry,” said O, blushing. “It’s really none of my business.”
“Don’t be silly. It’s a very good question. I’m just not sure I have a good answer. When I was your age, I would never in my wildest dreams have imagined I wouldn’t marry. What can I say? Things happen – things you never expected. Life takes turns, and you go with them.
“At about the time most people start thinking about getting married, I was beginning to write. I poured everything I had into that. Then I went away to school, and afterwards I traveled – by car, all over the country – with a suitcase crammed with clothes and a backseat full of poems. I just wrote them and pitched them back there. Lord knows how many poems I lost that way! It didn’t matter. I felt that as long as I hung on to the poet, the poetry would come.
“Now and then, I’d gather the best of them together and send them off to a small press I knew that specialized in poetry. They liked my work, and a couple of those early collections were published. I took what jobs I could, where I could find them, but none of them were what I really wanted to do. I wanted to roam and write poems, like Kerouac and Corso and all the other vagabond poets I’d read about.
“When you’re constantly on the move, it’s hard to get to know people well. The time just slipped by. I guess poetry was my guy. We’ve been together a long time – though we don’t talk much anymore.” She took a piece of garlic bread and mopped up the sauce on her plate.
“Now don’t follow my example, you hear me? You don’t want to waste your culinary skills on yourself. But there’s little danger of that. I’m sure a pretty girl like you is beating off the boys.”
“I wish. I’m not even allowed to date yet.”
“Well, I’m sure your father’s just looking to do what’s best for you. He’s a good man. He’s certainly cared for me over the years. If it hadn’t been for him, I wouldn’t have this place.”
O gave her a puzzled look.
“So he never told you about that. Well, it’s true. Twenty-eight years ago, after having been away for a long time, I came back to Caledon. There was something I had to take care of. Once that was done, I didn’t feel like moving around anymore. I wanted to set roots down in one place – this place.
“One day I was out walking, wondering what I was going to do with the rest of my life, and I found myself on this street. I looked up, saw that sign, and – well, now you’re going to think I’m a bit mad – it spoke to me somehow. I stood at the window awhile … and then I went in and looked around, and I discovered two of the little books I had loosed upon the wind sitting on the shelf in the poetry section. I plucked up the courage to introduce myself to the owner, and he recognized my name. I can’t tell you what a wonderful feeling that was!
“I fell in love with the place. Pretty soon I was dropping by almost every day and got to know the owner quite well. He was a poet himself, a grand old creature from another era. He believed in poetry strongly enough that he shed his kindly influence on all who came near.
“It was a quiet shop even then. So he was glad for the company, and I was eager to learn everything I could about the business. I knew I had found my home.
“Well, things went on like that for a couple of years, and then, one day, he let it slip that he was thinking of retiring and was going to have to put the place up for sale. He asked if I might be interested. I jumped at the opportunity. I had already been working for some time in the shop by then and had learned quite a bit about the business. When I look back on it now, I see that he’d had his eye on me as his successor and had been quietly teaching me what I’d need to know for some time.
“Unfortunately, I hadn’t any money to speak of. That hasn’t changed. I tried to get a bank loan, but they turned me down flat. Poets, it seems, are poor credit risks.
“Your father had already moved out West by then. I talked to him on the phone and told him about the offer to buy the shop. He asked the name of the place, and, when I told him, he asked me if it was in the west end – a corner shop with a carved sign. When I said yes, without so much as a pause he offered to loan me the money for the down payment.
“He said he thought it was my destiny to have this shop. Now ‘destiny’ is a mighty big word, and it struck me as a strange thing for him to say. But I guess he was right. It has been my destiny. Over the years, this shop and I have come to fit together like hand and glove. It’s the best thing that ever happened to me. And I owe it all to your dear father. So that’s the story. Except –” She poured herself a cup of tea.
“What?”
“You’ll think I’m crazy.”
“No, I won’t.”
“I saw him today.”
“Who?”
“Your father. I was opening the shop after lunch, and I saw him standing outside.”
“That’s impossible. Dad’s in Italy.”
“All the same, I saw him. Not as he is now, but as he was as a boy.”
O felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise.
“He was standing outside the shop, looking at me through the window. When I walked toward him, he turned away. And by the time I got outside, he’d gone.” She picked up her tea and wandered off into the living room.
“You must be mistaken,” said O, feeling a sense of unreality wash over her.
“No, it was him, all right. I’d know that boy anywhere.” She set her tea on the edge of the book-cluttered coffee table and sat down.
“What was he wearing?” O heard herself ask.
“Well, you know, that was very odd. It looked like a pajama top.”
“Long sleeves, with blue cuffs and collar,” O heard herself say.
Her aunt stared at her. “That’s right. How do you know?”
“After you went down to the shop, I was out on the deck going through one of the boxes from my room. I noticed a boy sitting on the wall at the end of the dead-end street, looking back at me. That’s what he was wearing. There was something familiar about him. But it can’t have been Dad. It was just someone who looked like he did back then.”
“I suppose,” said Aunt Emily, sipping her tea, letting the silence wash over them. “Of course, there is another possibility.”
“What do you mean?”
“We live in the midst of mysteries, my dear. They surround us on all sides, and, for the most part, we take no notice of them. Take Time, for instance. What is it? Where does it come from? Where does it go?”
She leaned forward and took a book from one of the piles on the table. “Imagine that this book is that very small piece of reality we call the present – you and I, here, now.” She stood it between two tall piles. “This moment stands between a future that is not yet real and a past that is no longer real.” She placed her hands on top of the piles to either side. “Before we know it, it too has slid into the past, and another moment has come to take its place.
“But what if it is not as simple as that? What if all those past moments still exist, as real as the books on this pile, but hidden from the present moment by a thin fabric, like the painted backdrop in a play? Say that in certain places that fabric were to wear thin and tear, and what lay on the other side were to spill out? Perhaps they would be places where the pressure of the past had grown so great that it could no longer be contained.
“Maybe the Charles I saw at the window spilled over from the past. Maybe he did once stand at that window, walk down that street, sit on that wall as he did today. And if a boy with a buggy could slip through, perhaps other things could cross over in the same way.”
It was clear she was no longer talking to O, but to herself. The words hung in the air, like the smoke in the closed car.
Aunt Emily stood up. “I think I’ll go heat up this tea.”
Nothing more was said of the matter, but for the rest of the evening O found her eye drifting repeatedly to the book propped between the two piles on the cluttered coffee table.
Time was hard to keep track of at the Green Man. One day flowed seamlessly into the next. Before she knew it, they had turned the calendars to June, and the weather was heating up. Their lives had fallen swiftly into a pattern. They ate breakfast together, then went down and opened the shop a little after ten.
Since her “incident,” Aunt Emily had taken to closing the shop for an hour at noon to eat and rest a little before reopening. But after O had been there two weeks and had begun to learn her way around the shop a little, she abandoned the practice. She started leaving O alone while she went upstairs, assuring her that, if anything came up, she was just a shout away.
Most days, they closed a little before six. After dinner, they read and listened to Aunt Emily’s jazz collection and chatted the evening away.
O noticed things about her aunt that reminded her of her father: the way she held her head to one side when she listened to you, the infectious laugh that bubbled up from somewhere deep inside her when something struck her funny.
Despite their difference in age, she found she was quite comfortable with her aunt. But, then, Aunt Emily was not your normal adult. There was still a lot of the child about her. Maybe that was what made her a poet.
One evening as they sat together, O took a book from the top of one of the piles – a collection of Chinese poetry translated into English. She started reading and was quickly captivated by the simplicity of the words, the clarity of the images, the deep emotion that pulsed below the tranquil surface of the poems.
When she glanced up, Aunt Emily was snoring in her chair. Her glasses had slid to the end of her nose, and her book lay slack in her hands. As O sat looking at her, the words of a poem came into her mind. She grabbed a pencil and a scrap of paper and quickly wrote them down:
Sleep steals quietly into the room.
Eyes grow leaden and close like flowers.
Books grow drowsy on the shelves.
If you listen, you can hear
The murmur of dreams in the still air.
As she crept quietly from the room, she heard her aunt moan softly in her sleep.