“Leonard Wellman dropped by while you were out.”
“Really. How did he seem?”
“Very well. He sends you his best.”
“He’s a dear soul. And a darned good poet.”
They were cleaning up after dinner. While Emily stacked the dirty dishes on the counter, O ran water in the sink. The kettle rattled on the burner as it came to a boil.
“Did he stay long?”
“Not too long. It took him awhile to work up the nerve to talk to me. He said he thought at first I was you – that you’d discovered the fountain of youth.”
“That’s very funny.”
As Emily set the dishes down on the counter beside her, O caught the faint odor of cigarette smoke. So perhaps she hadn’t quit completely, after all. O wondered how many other things were being hidden from her. She shut off the water and started washing the dishes, putting them on the draining board to drip.
“How was the doctor’s appointment?”
“You know, there’s something about sitting in a waiting room full of heart patients. You can almost hear their minds whirring, wondering which of them will croak first.”
“That’s just your imagination.”
“Exactly.” She picked up a tea towel and began to dry.
“What did the doctor say?”
“My cholesterol levels are a little better – probably thanks to you. He’s still not happy about the blood pressure, though. He wants me to try another pill. I’m going to have to build an addition onto the medicine chest! Oh, and he said I should get more exercise. I’m too sedentary, he says. Good Lord, I’m seventy years old.”
O could imagine how difficult it would be to have Emily as a patient. She was cantankerous at the best of times, and she didn’t take well to being told what to do. The kettle came to the boil. Emily dropped two bags into the teapot and poured the steaming water over them.
O took a deep breath. “Leonard was telling me about the poetry readings you used to have here.”
Silence.
“He showed me the photo of you and him and the other early members.”
More silence, broken only by the sound of the lid of the teapot being put in place, the clatter of cups and saucers being set out – one set deliberately mismatched.
“And what else did he tell you?”
“Just what a wonderful thing the readings were. How important you had been to a lot of young poets.”
“Leonard talks too much.” She began hunting through the cupboards. “What happened to those cookies I bought?”
“You ate them.”
“All of them?”
“Yup.”
“That can’t be true. You must have had some.”
“Not one. They had coconut in them. I’m allergic. I eat coconut, my throat closes, I die.”
“Really?”
“Uh-huh.”
Emily stirred the tea in the pot with a spoon – just in case it wasn’t strong enough already – and poured it into the cups. She took the mismatched cup and saucer for herself and gave the other to O. What she really wanted, O suspected, was to light up a cigarette. Cigarettes calmed her, and talking about the readings had obviously touched a nerve.
“Why do you always do that?” asked O.
“What?”
“Mismatch your cup and saucer like that?”
“Just to be perverse, I suppose.” She fiddled with the handle of her cup, scratched her neck, and ran her fingertips over the skin. It was red and angry looking. Likely a reaction to all the chocolate she’d been eating since trying to cut out the cigarettes. But this wouldn’t be a good time to bring that up.
Emily sat staring at her cup. She had dropped down into one of the mind chasms she regularly fell into. After a couple of minutes, she clambered back out.
“When I was young, there were coffeehouses where poetry readings regularly took place. There were small magazines, where new work was published, small presses devoted to publishing poetry. None of them made any money, of course, but that wasn’t the point. I don’t think any of us ever expected to make a living at it. We were happy just practicing the craft, carrying on an honorable tradition.”
While she talked, she turned the cup around on the saucer.
“It was exotic to be a poet in those days. There was excitement in the air. People were bursting with ideas, eager to break new ground. It’s not like that now. Poets are an endangered species. They don’t appear on the WWF list, but they’re every bit as endangered. I don’t know how anyone even begins to write poetry these days, or how they keep at it. It’s a lonely business – you don’t write poetry in an office pool; you write it alone. But where are the supports now? Where is the audience? They simply don’t exist.”
O had heard enough. “Maybe that’s why the Green Man readings were so important,” she said. Emily looked up at her. O swallowed hard and went on.
“I mean, if it’s true that poets are more isolated than ever, aren’t they even more in need of supports like that? And if the people who provide them grow discouraged and give up, don’t they just become part of the problem?”
She’d said more than she meant to, and far more bluntly than she should have. You could have cut the silence with a knife.
Emily rose from the table and took her cup to the counter. Disappearing down the hall, she came back moments later with her sweater and her purse. “I’m going for a walk,” she said. “I shouldn’t be long.”
Translation: I’m totally ticked off with you, and I’m going out for a cigarette.
O sat at the table for a while, rehearsing her apology for being impertinent as her tea grew cold. An hour later, her aunt still hadn’t returned.
As she waited, O slipped off the elastic from the bundle of mail that had been delivered to the shop that morning and went through it. Junk mail and bills. Then, at the bottom of the pile, a letter addressed to her. It was from her father. She retreated to her room, where she could read it undisturbed.
He thanked her for her letter and was glad to hear she was doing well and adapting to living with Emily. He reminded her that Emily might be a little crusty on the outside, but that she had a heart of gold underneath it all.
O read happily along, hearing the sound of his voice in the words and missing him. In her letter to him, she’d mentioned that, though he was in Italy, Emily had recently seen him staring in the shop window one afternoon, looking not as he did now but as he’d looked as a boy. She also mentioned seeing the same boy on the wall.
When she wrote the letter, she’d wondered whether she should mention it at all. She didn’t want him thinking they were both losing their minds. So she’d just tossed off a couple of sentences at the end, making light of the whole affair. His response surprised her.
On your last birthday I gave you a little silver pendant in the shape of a hand. I told you that someone had given it to me a long time ago, when I was about your age. That someone was a mysterious girl I happened to meet one summer day. She’d somehow lost her memory, and I walked with her through Caledon, hoping something we saw might jog it back.
It was a hot day, and at one point we stopped under the awning of a bookshop to get some shade. That shop was the Green Man. As I was looking in the window, I noticed someone at the back of the shop – an older woman, smoking a cigarette and carrying an armload of books. She glanced toward the front and saw me there.
The woman I saw was Emily – not as she was then, a young woman in her twenties, but as she is now. I think she must have recognized me, because she walked toward me. But just then I realized the girl I was with had wandered off. There was no telling where she might go, so I hurried after her.
I found her at the end of the dead-end street that ran beside the shop. She climbed on top of the wall there and went over. So I followed her. But as I was sitting on the wall, I took one last look back toward the shop. All I could see from there was the back of the building. A door opened on the top floor and a girl came out onto the deck, carrying a box. She looked down and saw me, and a strange expression came over her face. I didn’t know why then, but I do now. That girl was you, looking back through some seam in time at the boy who would one day become her father.
The girl I was walking with finally did remember who she was. When we said good-bye, she gave me the pendant that I gave to you.
All these things that I was sure were lost down a tunnel of time forever have suddenly come back. My grandmother once told me that nothing ever vanishes. Everything is always here, is always now. I didn’t know what she meant then, but I think I do now. I told you the Green Man was a remarkable place. Take care of yourself, O, and take care of Emily. Write again soon.
Lots of love,
Dad
She folded the letter and tucked it away in her journal. The room had begun to fill with shadows. A sense of strangeness lay over everything. She had the sudden awareness of things existing not only in space, but also in time. From the pictures on the wall to the paperweights on the dresser, from the books on the shelves to the curtains in the window – everything was steeped in time. The door that separated past from present had, for some reason, opened here. She wondered what else might slip through.
The spell was broken by the sound of Emily returning from her walk. She called up the stairs to say that she’d picked up a tub of ice cream from one of the shops down the street and it was melting fast.
O realized this was Emily’s way of saying she was sorry for the wedge that had come between them. She hurried downstairs, and soon they were sitting together at the table, basking in the bliss of Chocolate Delight.