Home Schooling (28 page)

“I'm not selling,” he said. “Not as long as I live.”

“People always say that,” Sarah said, picking at her blister. “You'd be surprised how many people say that. But sooner or later, they sell. They always do.”

“Not me,” Graham said. “I'm staying here. I'm never leaving.”

“You think you won't leave,” Sarah said. “But you will. You'll see.”

“If you'd wear gloves,” he said, “you wouldn't get blisters.”

“I lost them,” she said. “They wore out.” She picked up the rake. Graham got off the ladder and started carrying it toward the garage. One of the dogs was stretched out on the grass next to Sarah, the other rooted around nearby in the tulip bed. Those dogs adored Sarah. She'd once told Graham they were her family. And now he'd lost them.

In the house he sat down with his book, turning pages, unable to concentrate. At ten o'clock, Sarah phoned. He clutched the phone. All this time he'd feared a knock at the door with bad news: we regret to tell you. Thank God it wasn't bad news. Sarah was in North Vancouver, with Darla, who'd called that morning to say she'd just undergone emergency outpatient surgery for an ovarian cyst. “Poor Darla, she's still groggy from the anaesthetic,” Sarah said. “I'm going to stay with her tonight. I'm going to try to get her to eat something. Graham, are you there? How are Hamlet and Quinn?”

“They're fine, I guess,” he said. He hesitated. In the mirror above the telephone his image surged up, dank and full of deceit. You little liar, Marty and Debbie used to accuse each other.

“You guess.” Sarah laughed. “What does that mean? Have you given them their dinner? Did you take them for a walk?”

“They've had some exercise, yes,” he said.

“Don't forget to bring them inside tonight, okay? Tell them I'll be home soon. Are you there, Graham?”

“I'm here. I miss you,” he said.

“I miss you, too, sweetheart,” Sarah said. “See you Saturday. I'll let you know what ferry I'm taking.”

During the night he woke. He went to the window and saw the dogs in the yard. In the moonlight, they appeared pale and insubstantial,
yet they were real enough. He raised the window; they stared up at him, their eyes glinting in the moonlight. Or perhaps it wasn't moonlight. Perhaps this was the light of dawn. He staggered back to bed. He told himself the dogs would be on the front porch in the morning, waiting to be let in. But when morning arrived and he went downstairs, he found they had, once again, disappeared.

He read to his class the poem “Ozymandias,” by Percy Bysshe Shelley: “The lone and level sands stretch far away.” What this poem tells us, he said, is that even our most enduring monuments crumble and dissolve into nothing. Given time, all things will end. The Earth and its creatures and Earth's brightest star, the sun, and even the universe, unimaginably immense as it is, will wind down, run out of energy, cease to exist, at least in any recognizable form. He told his class that when the news came on the radio that Elvis had died, he was finishing work on a deck he'd built on the back of his house. His wife, Annette, had gone into the kitchen for a couple of cold beers and when she came out she told him: Elvis is dead. And they had both sat there, disbelieving. August
16, 1977
.

Another thing: the poet Shelley died at sea, in Italy, in a sudden squall. His friends cremated his body on a beach. At the last moment someone leapt forward and plucked the poet's heart — which must have seemed immortal, or at least capable of immortality — from the flames. It was also said that an Englishwoman who'd known Shelley later met him on a street in a little Italian seaside village. He had looked well and cheerful, she'd reported and had smiled graciously as he passed by.

Graham sat at his desk with his head in his hands, picturing the dogs, the damned dogs,
at that very moment
loping home with burrs in their coats, their tongues hanging out, flecks of foam on their muzzles.
If he willed it to be so, it would be so.
They would have had some kind of doggy adventure and then, satiated, their
animal lusts for space and distance and conquest satisfied, they would have returned home and even now, even now, they would be sleeping on the porch in the morning sun.

He'd phoned Marty — she lived not far away — and asked her to call by the house later this morning and let the dogs in. I'm pretty sure they'll be there, he'd said, and Marty had said they'd better be, hadn't they, and he'd said yes, they had.

Kathleen walked into his classroom and took a look at him and said, “Graham. Are you okay?”

“I'm okay,” he said. He tried to smile at her.

“Are you sure? You don't look so good.”

“Well,” he said. He began to tell her everything, not leaving out the painful fact that he'd seen the dogs at dawn and had failed to bring them inside.

“Have you phoned the animal shelter?” Kathleen said. “The police? Did you talk to your neighbours?”

He picked up his pen as if to make a note of her suggestions. “The animal shelter,” he said. “Yes, of course. I don't really have any neighbours.”

“Animals,” Kathleen was saying. “They rely on us and we always let them down, don't we? We always do. When I was a little girl I had a guinea pig. It was one of those longhaired guinea pigs, all fluffy and soft, like a dandelion puff. One day I came home from school and it was gone. In its place on my dresser there was a goldfish in a bowl. I knew it was my fault. My mother had warned me enough times that if I didn't clean out its cage she'd take my guinea pig to the animal shelter, but I didn't believe her. For kids the hardest thing is developing a sense of responsibility, isn't it? The goldfish died, too. The bowl was too small, I guess.”

Graham looked at Kathleen, at her translucent skin, her slight overbite, the delicate curve of her neck.

“It took me a long time to forgive my mother,” she said. “Maybe I didn't ever forgive her.”

He got up and wrote the date on the chalkboard, pressing too hard, so that the chalk snapped and flew into the air and landed at Kathleen's feet. She picked it up. He walked around her and sharpened a pencil in the electric pencil sharpener. The playground was beginning to fill up. Kids were chasing each other around. They were dressed in bright summer clothes, although the wind was cold and there was a feeling that, in spite of the clear sky, rain was on the way. He glanced at Kathleen, who was staring at the chalk she held between her fingers, like a cigarette. He could see the perfect part in her hair, the clean white of her scalp. She went over to the Elvis poster and ran her thumbnail over the yellowing sticky tape he'd used to mend the small tear in the corner. “I can't believe you still have this,” she said. “I can't believe it. Do you remember,” she said, “when people used to see him all the time, at a fast-food restaurant or a laundromat?”

“A laundromat?”

“Yes. And at motels, airports, and, you know, hitchhiking at the side of some interstate highway in the rain or something, with an old suede hat pulled down low so you could barely make out his face. But, still, people seemed to know who he was. In real life, of course, they would never have seen him, not unless they bought tickets. But when he was dead, he was everywhere. He belonged to everyone.”

“Yes,” Graham said. “He did.” He looked at Elvis's pomaded hair gleaming in sunlight filtered through bougainvillea leaves. If he moved slightly, his arm would touch Kathleen's arm. Her hair smelled of flowers and he recalled the feel of it, silky and cool, and how it used to catch on his shirt buttons or his watch strap and Kathleen would pretend to be annoyed, but she wasn't, not really.

She handed him the chalk. “I hope it turns out well for you,” she said, before walking out into the hall. Somewhere in the distance a door slammed. He heard children's voices, laughter, a teacher calling out that there was no running in the halls, no running allowed,
then silence. All morning he couldn't stop thinking about what Kathleen had said. How true, he thought, how amazing: what had vanished forever would always be in some sense more vivid, more real and accessible, than what in fact existed.

That night he made himself a simple meal of scrambled eggs and toast and ate slowly, with a reserved, almost finicky grace. He had a sudden vision of his mother eating in the same fashion, taking little fastidious bites, chewing furiously, her hand curled tight around a balled-up napkin as if for ballast. He remembered how unfair he'd thought it, that he had to make do with this life, that the body he occupied was his body, and the woman at the table was his mother, and that was how she ate now, alone, making lightning-fast stabs with her fork, like something mean and sneaky far down on the food chain.

Graham's father had been a pharmaceutical company salesman whose visits home had become increasingly rare events, like the questionable return of an unstable comet, nothing but gas and ice particles and an insufficient quantity of vivifying dust. Graham used to carry around in his head a stark yet strangely satisfying image of his father in the one place he never actually saw him: alone in a hotel room in the evenings, sitting on the edge of the bed, methodically sampling the goods. A little Valium, a little Librium, onward and upward through the Phenobarbitals, then inexorably down again, a trombone player inching toward a risky tremolo, a moody indigo riff.

Why not blame the drugs? Why not be generous and blame the drugs? He'd been there himself. He remembered his mother saying, in a flat, angry voice: I always knew he'd leave, I always knew. They'd kept moving west, he and his mother, until they reached Vancouver Island and there was nowhere else to go. Renata got a job, a series of jobs. She called herself a widow. When she was mad at Graham, when she hated him for just being there with his big feet and his
acne and his rock music, she would scream at him that he was just like his father. When in fact he was nothing like his father.

He thought of his mother's gold hair, gold to the day she died; her cigarettes, her bangles and sparkly rings. When his first daughter was born, his mother came to stay for a few weeks with him and Annette. She held the baby as if it were a live charge. Then, like the wicked jealous queen in a fairy tale, she turned to Graham and announced: “I had such a strange dream! You and the baby were left on your own. Just you and a motherless child. It was the saddest thing.” As she spoke, she gave Annette a sly, sidelong glance. That was his mother: tactless, cruel, prescient.

Years later, he and Kathleen had stayed behind after a staff gathering at a pub. He'd started to talk about his mother. He told Kathleen about the awful little jobs his mother had taken, cleaning houses, addressing envelopes, selling lingerie. He talked about the mean places they'd lived, the sleazy apartments, the meals of toast and tea. He heard himself sounding amused and bitter and ironically distant. It was the beginning of the Christmas holidays. Kathleen was wearing a corsage her grade-five class had made for her, construction-paper holly leaves dusted with gold. Some of the glitter had rubbed off on her chin. She told him she had a wonderful family, the best parents in the world. Her father was a dentist. Her mother was a teacher. She had two brothers, two nephews and a niece. “I just don't have anyone of my own,” she said, savagely pinching a few drops of lemon juice into her Diet Coke. “But maybe that will come.”

“Of course it will,” he said. He covered her hand with his. He told her what his mother had said to Annette, years before Annette had died. “It was like a curse,” he said. “It was the wicked fairy's last gasp, a poisoned arrow, the ace of spades.”

“Well, you don't have to believe that,” Kathleen said. “You don't have to believe garbage like that. Your mother didn't have the power to make someone die. She wouldn't have wanted you to think that.”

“You don't think so?”

“I don't,” Kathleen said stoutly. He touched her hand. He remembered feeling such gratitude, as if she'd absolved him of a grievous sin. Together they'd gone out to the parking lot and there, as a few wet snowflakes fell from a low sky tinged pink by overhead arc lights, they clung to each other and kissed in a wild, desperate, hurtful fashion, their teeth clashing, gold glitter adhering to Graham's mouth, a sharp metallic tang. At last they tore themselves apart and said goodnight, goodnight, and kissed again, this time tenderly, lingeringly, and drove away in their separate vehicles.

And then there was a time of waiting, of waiting for some indication from Kathleen that she wanted to see him, or for some inspired act of reconciliation on his part, but neither occurred, and that year Kathleen transferred to another school. For her, the staircase was always ascending. It always led to another, more spacious realm. She used to tell Graham he needed to decide what it was he wanted out of life, meaning, he thought, that he had to choose between his devotion to his daughters and his love for her. Quite possibly, however, there was a wider implication to her remark: namely that, on close inspection, his life didn't stand up all that well; it consisted of fractured, isolated fragments that maybe matched and maybe didn't. Here he was as a moody, disadvantaged, fatherless adolescent. Here he was as a young husband building a house in an enchanted forest, except the enchantment was thin and permeable, no protection at all, really. Here he was as a widower with two high-spirited young daughters, and here he was in his current phase, married for the second time (Dad, are you sure you want to marry Sarah, or is it just sex or something, because it's not too late, you can still change your mind, you know), and now Sarah, his dearest Sarah, was in North Vancouver and her beloved dogs were out there somewhere in the waning light and plainly his sole task was to retrieve them for her.

In the living room he turned on a lamp, although it was early evening, not yet dark. Beside the lamp, on a small table, stood his mother's Matryoshka dolls, which Sarah, who tended to be claustrophobic, had arranged in a row so they wouldn't suffocate, trapped one inside the other. Their painted eyes glittered mockingly at him.