The World Afloat Read online

  “You don’t add tomatoes until the last minute, otherwise the salad gets mushy,” she said.

  But Axel wouldn’t stop nagging about the tomatoes. For a full half hour he nagged, so she threw a tomato at him. Until then, she said, she had been one of those people who go along with things too much.

  Later that night after everyone had left, Axel was still going on about the way she had let the salad get mushy. “Because you told me to put the tomatoes in too soon,” Elaine said, and then she said she wanted a divorce. “Finish your living without me.”

  Later that month she moved in with her daughter. That’s all. The tomato she threw hit Axel on his old shoulder. The look on his face.

  We Appreciate Him Now

  He was standing at the table saw in his other form as Uncle Ernie. There was the smell of sawdust about the workshop, and I think something dramatic in nature like his being ahead of his time.

  I was eleven years old and had been harbouring the worst kind of big deal, raging against the unfairness of my aunt.

  Ernie didn’t appreciate people empty of purposeful activity, which described me much of the time.

  “Stop jabbering,” he said. He was short and bald and wore green work clothes. “Start collecting elastic bands and string. Start sorting, counting, and storing.”

  He meant I should take my mind off my situation.

  I saw the saw in his shop. He knew what he was talking about. His mind was a workbench. For years he’d been rolling silver foil into balls. My aunt was a hectoring person.

  He wasn’t offering me advice in the form of perversity, but as a general kindness, a helpful hint. I thought about elastic bands and string and calmed way down.

  I’m supposing Ernie was unhappy in his life’s work, which was being a janitor. I’m supposing he was unhappy with his dominant wife and that this caused him to be in danger of his mind cracking open and leaking out the way a dropped egg does.

  But that didn’t seem to happen. Instead he had those silver balls, which stayed intact. Over the years he rolled this activity over my aunt’s objections, mostly.

  “Stop doing that,” she’d yell. That did happen when Ernie died. After the funeral she found seven silver balls in his workshop.

  I think he was ahead of his time with his emptied mind, the result of perpetually smoothing a piece of silver foil and adding it to a larger and larger ball. Out there in his cold workshop he was like an adept practising mind control. He got the foil from cigarette packages and wrapped chocolates. Everything he did was done slowly and with purpose.

  I’m still in there with the sawdust smell of him!

  His Trouble

  He’s exhausted from living among boarded-up houses in Mesa, Arizona. And now a thirty-day notice has been stapled to his front door as if that doesn’t deliver a person to the bottom rung of the ladder.

  He’s Canadian, belly-rounded, wife-dead, alone. The situation proceeds from there. “Fuck it, and fuck it again,” he says, meaning the world and all his trouble.

  He’s filing hardship claims with the U.S. government but being sixty-eight and an alien – good luck. He’s got TV and drinking his Canadian pension and bad veins and no medical and trouble with his back and the times that were.

  I sent him not much money for his good luck.

  One time he said he was like Christ because he never aged. “Like Christ,” he said. This was during the years his wallet was full of cash due to his correct opinions about horses.

  Couple Sucks Same Candy

  Culturally, for Ron and me, Shoppers Drug Mart is all there is. So when the cashier called me Lovey while handing over my bag of toilet paper and shampoo I felt happy, fulfilled. I was still feeling that way when an older man holding an apple pie behind me in the checkout line at Safeway tapped me on the shoulder. “Look at that,” he said, pointing at a headline in the National Enquirer – “Jen Pregnant and Alone.”

  “Aren’t you glad you’re not famous?”

  I thought about this on our drive home and decided, yes, I’m glad we’re not famous. Because imagine a man on a motorcycle taking a picture of Ron and me sharing the hard candy Ron found in his jacket pocket. It must have been there for years. A lime one wrapped in clear plastic. We didn’t think twice. I sucked the first half and Ron finished it off. But after that I saw the headline – “Couple Sucks Same Candy” – and knew the world would find us disgusting. So full marks for anonymity.

  At home we continued our afternoon by pulling apart the jigsaw puzzle from Christmas. Only the sky, the head of a fish, and a few trees were finished and it was just about March. The puzzle had become a burden. You could spend hours and hours and only find one matching piece so that pretty soon night would be falling with supper nowhere in sight. It was a revelation when I told myself that some things in life could go unfinished and Ron agreed. Actually, pretty much everything can go unfinished, we decided, and especially the jigsaw puzzle, which we had come to hate.

  There was a bowl on the side table filled with the pieces of a large bear that would never inhabit its shape. They went into the jigsaw box, along with the broken sky, the head of a fish that would have been in the bear’s paw, and the several small trees.

  “I wouldn’t mind taking my life apart and returning it to an attractive box,” I said – mindlessly, I suppose, because of not having to finish the puzzle – and Ron said, “Think again.” “Oh right,” I said. “I’d forgotten about that.”

  So I thought instead how happy I am with our home and all the machinations thereof. And with my goldfish, Hilda, who gives me no trouble, and with my little commercials for the family, who frequently do: our girls with their toenail palace, and our son, Boyd, who still wants to be an astronaut, and my brother, Doug, who’s never paid me back for totalling my car in 1979, a sweet little Volkswagen. And I thought about Nature. How every once in a while there’ll be a day with sun. And a few clouds. Ones the way I always want them to be. Clouds like shampoo foam.

  Juliet Nearly Succumbs

  That Juliet is beginning an adventure is established in the opening moments of the story. That her husband will be absent from the foreign city where Juliet was to meet him is also established. Tariq, his much younger colleague, will entertain her in his absence.

  Well, then, what is expected begins unfolding with the sudden arrival of Juliet’s older legs wearing dresses when before they’d been covered with stiff beige slacks.

  Luckily, her face at fifty-six is without jowls and her neck remains intact. Unlike us she will keep. Unlike us music will play around her everywhere she goes. This music tells us that even though husbands may be best she is now mostly with Tariq – on foot, in a car, on a train or a boat.

  Beneath glaring sunlight, then, and in city streets, Juliet wanders with Tariq. Her dresses are yellow, black, or turquoise culminating in a flowered dress, which is worn when Tariq clasps a silver necklace around her neck at a street stall. She has now, we know, been anointed goddess and is no longer small like us.

  Later, there will be white wine and quiet sweating on her hotel balcony and we will sweat, too. But still there will be no touching, though many warm looks will be exchanged and Tariq will continue to softly grab her name whenever he can.

  Her name means Seems young though she is old. His name means Desert flecks in bright sunlight.

  His name flutters our breaths, certainly, but the absent-husband days will soon come to an end, we fear.

  But not yet! Not before Juliet and Tariq visit the pyramids wearing worthy black slacks. Together they will look longingly at the desert and at the empty sky with birds flying overhead. Then they will take more languid walks through the story. This walking and looking, we know, is the prelude to finding the door to removing Juliet’s clothes.

  These facts have pale skin and clear blue eyes and dark skin and wetly brown eyes and once giant breasts in the form of small pyramids, which strike us as an authentic representation of beauty.

  Into the distan
ce, then, we yearn for Juliet and Tariq to walk naked and in time to the sitar music that was playing at the mosque earlier in the day when Juliet delicately removed her shoes.

  Too soon, though, her husband returns. His name is Mark, which means Short, rugged, lovable, and not unhandsome.

  The music that is now playing sounds wistful and does not even begin to console us over Juliet’s loss of Tariq.

  Bit Part / Twin Peaks

  They don’t say why it is happening. Why the falls keep falling. Why the young woman wrapped in see-through plastic is found by the side of the river. Why men gather there to poke at her body amazed.

  They tell us through music that the most marvellous flowers become organs of decay. Then shoot the days and nights with a soft kind of evil.

  Black light, grey light, cloud, intermittent rain, a slight wind as if ghosts were drifting by; these things calm us for the next peaking moments.

  As the sawmill burns; the crazed phantom overpowers the lawyer; the dreamtime midget acts like a dream; the beautiful waitress is steadily abused; the Log Lady cradles her piece of wood and speaks movingly of transcendence.

  Throughout there’s the sombre music, the swollen river, and then, finally, me showing the sheriff a good time in the seedy motel. They say I’m the one-eyed Jack disguised as a schoolgirl. I’m wearing white knee socks, a black patch over my left eye.

  They don’t say why I am happy.

  Nothing Could Be More Like Life Than What We Were Watching

  “This is it,” you said. “This is what hope becomes after you lose it.”

  We were staring at a field of weeds and brown grass. A worn path travelled across it.

  “That path,” I said, “has seen better days, as have I.”

  “That field,” you said, but didn’t finish.

  Then a dog wandered into the centre of the field and peed. He was a harmless old thing, used to being unmolested and fed.

  Someone large and wearing a black cape and hood came next and strode headlong down the path as if on an urgent mission, passing by the dog that now lay cowering on its back.

  “Lost hope must look like a grainy black-and-white film,” you said, “with death striding across every frame.”

  A woman’s screams were then heard from a house across the field. We knew she was young, Swedish, beautiful, and had ground glass into her vagina because her tiresome husband in 1888 was once again demanding his tiresome right ...

  “There are so many things you would never think to tell anyone,” I said.

  He Could Be Droll

  My father could make stew last a week, a razor blade last six months, and disdain for a second marriage last a lifetime. He once told me how to make scrambled eggs. “Beat the eggs in the driveway with a wooden spoon,” he said. “That way violence stays out of the kitchen.”

  From the time I was very young he lived in quiet buildings, among ghost-like people. I had to tiptoe through airless hallways to find his rooms. Inside we spoke in whispers. It was like a game. “Pretend we’re mice,” he’d say.

  His kitchen was small, clean, well ordered.

  Unlike that other kitchen where a bowl of gravy was thrown against the kitchen wall and my father fled through the door.

  Autumn Idyll

  Byron’s manhood often occurred spontaneously. “When did spawning salmon become a religion?” he asked.

  “When we became celebrants of dead ends,” I said.

  That day anticipation stirred in Byron like a poplar about to shed its leaves. “Let’s make a pilgrimage,” he said.

  So hand in hand we walked into the yellow light. Me, calmly like a queen among rabble; Byron, with his damp anxiety.

  The salmon climbing those wooded stairs to die. The velocity of the water just so ...

  Steak Soup

  We were poor and plain. There wasn’t much about us; we were run-of-the-mill invisibles. Looking back this was young and sweet. We had babies, a shaky car, lost jobs. Obviously, we were at the start of the problem years.

  So we took the insurance, cut back, and just kind of winged it. And all around people showed mad support. If we were invited out and served steak we brought home the bones and had soup for a week. We didn’t mind. It was “I’m me,” and “You’re singing,” and it was all pretty exciting.

  Some nights we’d dress up like we were going to a party and then head for the living room. Friends would be there with a six-pack and a plate of cake. It was good to celebrate the curtain staying risen. It was impossible not to be alive. We danced to “Mellow Apples,” that Roy Rogers tune, winding the cassette back with a pencil to play the song again. I felt so cowboy. I was on some kind of frontier. Your mother kept bags of Mars bars and a case of Scotch at her apartment. A wise woman; we loved to visit!

  Now and then the car blew up. We learned to experience this as random fireworks.

  And once when we were scavenging through the lost-and-found bin at the kids’ elementary school, a beautiful Depression-era feeling overcame me – steadfast, fireplace warm. From that time on I registered my ability to create this feeling and offered myself copious thanks. My narratives kept us going. It was vital to weave complex storylines. We were living a long-haul text, part of which was hoping our luck would change.

  It finally did after the kids had left, when we’d begun to love certain institutions. So what’s the problem now? Why the sour face? We’re still here, on some kind of last frontier, aren’t we? And you’ve got these spanking new dentures.

  The Freshest Look Is an Odd Shape

  At three I was imitating and doing fun little skits for the family. At five I knew, Okay, this is something I like. At eight I was pretend crying in front of the mirror and my mom was like, “Oh boy, here we go, we know what’s up for Tyler.” At ten I was taking trapeze lessons and swinging by my knees on the bar Uncle Jay rigged up in the backyard. At thirteen I was wearing yellow because yellow is the colour of a high I.Q. And by high school I was perceived as having these quirks and doing weird things. I wore a rooster costume to school dances a few times. I did handstands that came completely out of nowhere, like in a bank lineup or ordering a Blizzard at Dairy Queen. And I talked outside of humans like a poet. About how clouds that hate are the ones that cry, how mountains feel awkward all the time, how paintings really want to be touched. And this was just ordinary living.

  The school counsellor, Mr. Rash, said, “Is your world the one where the only big welcome is to win the grand prize, the $100,000 cash, the $25,000 gift coupon to the Brick, and the new Chevrolet Trax?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s the one where I’m like a little Arabian horse. Just perfect.”

  Orange as a Ball

  We leave Keith in the van working on his bag of jujubes. He’s difficult after an outing, wanting to be alone.

  Marilyn, on the other hand, can’t wait to get inside, already she’s got American Idol on. Maybe it’ll improve her mood. Here’s hoping. She was foul on the trip home, hating the boots she got at Value Village. But I know the real reason for her mood is Norman, her undertaker boyfriend. He’s got some other woman pregnant. Marilyn is thirty-eight years old and having not much of a life.

  Her twin Mona’s the same. We picked her up soaking wet by the side of the road. I said, “What the hell happened to you?” And she said, “Man, whenever I see a loose animal it makes me feel so weird!” So that’s Mona.

  Then there’s my sister, Lena – Keith and the twins’ mother. She’s doing better now. She likes her new hospital bed. Lex, her ex, set it up in the living room using his good arm. Nothing’s the matter with Lena as far as I can tell, just wants to be the centre of attention. Well, who doesn’t? Keith’s been the centre of attention for years. I see he’s out of the van now playing by himself under the back porch light. One-person baseball using the dog’s bone as a bat and a skull painted orange as a ball.

  As for me, I’m the aunt living in the basement. I go to the mirror; I look at my melancholy face. And I say to
myself, Lighten up for Christ’s sake, think of something good. So here is something good. We’re not afraid of Disney anymore. The good news is Disney’s not going to put mouse ears on the Coca-Cola sign. It’s fine. Everybody’s calmed down about Disney.

  Some of the Many Reasons

  There were spiritual difficulties. She simply would not drain away the nonsense. She had no outpourings of generous beauty. She halted all discussions of our future beyond sharing my bed. I did not have excellent teeth and was a ruin for her mother. I was felled by her demonstration of the verb whine. The stars when I looked at them seemed irregular. I was always stopping short of bodily anguish. Her hectoring had no halting. Nature did not have a command of words and remained uncommunicative. There was just the cool moon and me with a heart of oak.

  The one who has it right is the guy standing on the Six-Mile Highway happily shouting, “I’m leaving another woman on her front porch shaking her fist at me!” A guy like me with ice-cream stains on his shirt, who might otherwise spend many hours alone and loving his dog.

  “Sparky, I’m back!”

  The Times Felt Like Doctoring

  Dr. B. told me to open my heart wide. I did and he saw stuff in there he can’t unsee. Like soft outrage hiding my inner dwarf and the fact that I am quite sick about vanished days, the ones that were all about me.

  Dr. B. talked quietly and massaged my hands. He’s highly skilled and carries out established procedures.