Doris
had been very careful. To not prepare
her speech too meticulously. Too much
control hindered the dance. For her it
was all a dance. Everything: a great
intricate choreography, a Divine configuration of infinite steps, movements and
combinations. One must find one’s place,
one’s step, rhythm and movement in the Dance in order to fully
participate. Yet even those who resisted
the Dance, through their very resistance became part of it. Their very negation fulfilled their part in
the Dance. As a young woman she had had
questions, nothing but questions. No
answers. At sixty-three she still had no
answers, though she felt that she was running out of questions. She felt that the first half of her life
she’d spent trying to find and formulate the questions. And now she was learning how to ask
them. The answer was in the asking.
The chamomile tea steamed in the mug
next to the National Geographic. A bird
of paradise had been painted onto the mug.
Doris had opened the magazine to a photo of two huge blue parrots. Alice gave her the mug for her
birthday. She bought it at Murchie’s,
Vancouver’s vintage coffee and tea emporium, and Doris knew she paid
handsomely for it. Alice with her taste
for fine things, shopped regularly there, and in other establishments where
Doris wouldn’t think of setting foot in.
They were very different sorts of women.
Even their shared profession teaching English Literature they approached
differently. Doris always
challenged her students to apply to their present day lives and the needs of
their community the moral dilemmas and lessons contained in the great works of
English literature. Alice tended more
towards aesthetics and metaphysics. Sam had dismissed her as an “Ivory Tower
Tootsie.” Never in her life had Doris
had such a devoted friend as Alice. They
could comfortably pass hours together in each other’s presence without having
to mention a single word. She had told
Doris once that she had on her a very calming effect, and by her own admission
Alice had a very anxious, nervous and high-strung nature, which she concealed
artfully. The first time they met and
chatted together in the faculty lounge, Doris had found Alice to be slightly
intimidating, with her blonde good looks and her film star glamour. She was new, having just completed her
practicum, and immediately Doris loved her, and particularly because Alice
looked nothing at all like anyone’s idea of a professor of English literature. But she never failed to bring into a room with
her a presence of beauty: she was a beautiful introvert. Too beautiful to be bookish and possibly too
bookish in order to be beautiful? She
had never been short of male admirers; Doris had always held in check her prim
moral outrage over Alice’s tendency towards pathetic young men. She had so much more going for her than her
looks, but Alice didn’t really appear to know this. She wasn’t envious of Alice, she didn’t think
that she was. Even at Alice’s age Doris
looked much older. But many women of forty
looked older than Alice who was well into her fifties. Doris herself had never been a beauty. The men had never lined up to court her and
she had never expected that they would.
Unlike so many of her compatriots who, during the war, had cheerfully
sacrificed their maidenhood in the service of England, Doris had remained a
virgin until she married Sam, just shy of her twenty-eighth birthday amid the
guns and bombs of the fledgling state of Israel. Their passion was short-lived. Theirs had been a marriage of minds? Sam had been practical to a fault. The niceties of courtship had never worked
for him, and besides, having already been through one war, here they were,
three years later, getting married in the midst of another one. Not that Doris had expected much. There was a war on. But Sam, with his large nose, saturnine face
and premature baldness already suggested a brooding vulture. His three years in the death camp had left
him flayed, eviscerated. He had nothing
left to give, and Doris was a seasoned care-giver. She must have nursed over a thousand bomb
victims in London. Had they ever really
loved each other? Theirs had been a
pragmatic union. She didn’t weep at her
husband’s funeral and then for three months she maintained a decorous silence
to calm the light and dancing heart she had been struggling to subdue.
This had lately become Doris’ way of
unwinding at night, seated thus at her kitchen table, sipping herbal tea while
looking idly at a National Geographic. These pictures of the Amazon Rain Forest
were particularly lovely. The blue
parrots were called Hyacinth
Macaws. A beautiful name. There were two in the photo. They were huge, the world’s largest parrots
it said, with massive, frightening charcoal-coloured beaks and gleaming
feathers—what colour would she call that?
Like the flowers. Hyacinth. Deep ultramarine blue with hints of violet
and turquoise. And they were
endangered? Threatened. By the pet trade, and by environmental
degradation. Were Glen to ever begin painting
again, Doris would try to commission from him such a painting, or maybe of a
bird of paradise, with its sweeping golden plumes. Perhaps a painting with both? And then she’d give it to his mother for
Christmas, since Alice had more of a penchant for fine and beautiful things
than Doris ever would. It wasn’t that
she didn’t appreciate beauty. She simply
didn’t enjoy having to own anything.
Unlike Alice she had always striven to keep her earthly pilgrimage as
simple and uncluttered with things as possible.
Doris didn’t really know how Alice would welcome such a gift, were it
executed by her son, but commissioned by her.
It might be awkward. And there
was this whole matter of getting Glen interested again in painting. He still hadn’t recovered from his
trauma. But all healing had to come from
within. It couldn’t be imposed on him.
Doris was worried about Carol, who
was clearly traumatized. Who drove
herself relentlessly. Not unlike Doris,
before her health started to break down.
She was better now. The cancer was still in remission. Unlike Sam, she had been very lucky. She was
sure that the death camp had thoroughly ruined his immune system. It was during her illness that Doris learned
of the Dance. As she was sure that Carol
would once she was older. She had slowed
a little, with age, and since her cancer had not recovered her full
energy. Likely she never would. She had
no other health issues, no arthritis.
Doris sometimes longed to return to Israel, to the kibbutz and to the
olive groves they’d tended. She had
never seen an olive tree in Canada. But
for their decision to live in a Palestinian refugee camp, they might have
remained in Israel. They were expelled
for being anti-Zionist, for being un-Jewish, for being traitors, for treason. Doris and Sam Goldberg had publicized that
the Jewish Nation might eventually disinherit itself by pursuing similar
policies to what the Nazis had inflicted on them. Sam, for having survived the death camps, was
a particular embarrassment. By his very
existence he had shamed the nation-state of Israel.
They never had children. Sam had no wish of bringing into global
peril another generation. Doris
conceded, though on entering menopause she had experienced nine months of black
depression. Never before nor since in
her life had she wanted to kill herself.
Unconsciously her left hand ran deftly across her breasts, then rested
gently over her stomach. She thought
that she just might try to bribe Glen to do her this painting, that maybe this
would kick-start again his artistic career.
“BASTARD” was the only word that
Dwight could form with his selection of Scrabble tiles. Carol spelled out “PINOCHET”, which Margery
protested was a proper noun. “Not in my
vocabulary he ain’t”, Carol said. Two
damsels in distress for Dwight to rescue.
As he’d done for Jeanne who had stolen his children from him. Their
children. Dwight had been an exemplary
father, raising his infant son almost single-handed while Jeanne worked full
time in the library. She almost couldn’t
wait to get back to work. Dylan was just
three months old and off she went. What
kind of mother… Dwight still managed to finish two plays while his son was
being toilet trained. And what Jeanne
had missed of their son’s progress, his little crises, his small triumphs. Dwight and not Jeanne had seen him cut his
first tooth, and Dwight and not Jeanne had witnessed their son’s first smile,
watched him sit up for the first time, begin to crawl—she hadn’t even been
there for his first unassisted footstep.
When Dwight first met Jeanne in university he was rescuing her from an
abusive boy friend. She sought refuge in
Dwight’s apartment, moving from his couch to his bed. In six months they were married. It was when their infant daughter was taking
her first steps that Jeanne was swept off her feet by an oil executive twice
her age. The divorce was sudden, quick,
brutal and seamless. They moved to
Toronto after the court had ruled that Jeanne’s new husband in his Rosedale
mansion would be providing a better life for the children. Jason would be six now. Annie was almost four.
Margery told Dwight to start
dating again. He didn’t want to. He was through with women? How could he know? He was still seeing a psychiatrist in order
to cope and unravel the Sargasso tangle of the breakdown that had
followed. Dr. Elizabeth Montague was
still trying to convince Dwight that either he dump Margery or marry her, that
she would otherwise be standing in for Jeanne in a way that couldn’t possibly
be healthy. That his insistence on
regarding Margery as his sister was an acting out of denial that was simply
prolonging his need to come to terms with the castration that Jeanne had
visited on him. But he didn’t need to
date since he reasoned that Margery adequately filled his void for female
companionship. She wasn’t merely a
sister to him, and this he was sure was understood if unspoken between
them. He had remained for more than
three years completely celibate. Dwight
thought that he might have a monastic vocation.
In carefully measured professional language Dr. Montague told him that
he was being ridiculous.
Dwight had never in person spoken to
nor seen his ex-wife’s second husband, though he’d seen his picture in the
paper. Smug, balding and jowelly. That Jeanne would desert him for such a
troll, such a toad, someone so unabashedly repulsive. He’d made an utmost effort to not even think
of visualizing how their possible—or theoretical—sex life might look. Dwight wanted his children back. Not simply to see them, but to have them,
possess them. They were his. He still had fantasies of killing both Jeanne
and that hideous old bastard she was fucking.
Dwight, not himself a violent man, had confessed this to Dr.
Montague. But now he had Margery to take
care of, and the beautiful Carol, who could stay with them forever as far as he
was concerned.
As though reading Dwight’s thoughts,
Carol said, “I’m going home tomorrow. I
think I’ll be okay. You’ve both been
very kind. Thank you.”
Not even Margery knew that he was
seeing a psychiatrist.
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