Swimmers in Winter Page 2

  feel how your breathing makes more space around you.

  They say that you might have to climb to get to heaven, but to get to hell, you just walk right in. I’ll tell you what: no one’s going to see me climbing any steps to heaven, that’s for certain. Not with these hips and knees. They’re like the rusted gears of a bicycle left out in the rain. Sticking, clicking, hurting.

  No, I’ll just go straight in, and keep going down the block.

  You never know what a corner will turn around for you. Sometimes, it’s a stranger who waits for your company, collar up, cap low, cigarette still aglow, feet so tired and used to running for escape when the need arises. They won’t meet you until you notice them first. They’ll wait and see. Take their time.

  I was always one to notice, because—because that’s what I was like.

  Did a friend tell me so? More than once?

  In the kindest way, sure.

  “Do you mean I was generous with my attentions?” I finally asked her. “That I was giving?”

  “Well, you are that too.”

  Tell me what I am tonight.

  Sometimes the corner you round, on the street or in your mind, will turn you a terror, and you’re so sick in your speed you may not notice the terror is catching up.

  No.

  Let this darkness be a bell tower

  and you the bell.

  No. I’ll turn away if I can manage it. Take this slow slide-step forward and away. See? It’s the looking back that makes me lost again.

  Oh, these aching hips, these knees that every day seem to argue back harder.

  This body is an oyster and my life is a shell. I fear I will be pulled out in the end, unwilling. Torn from my casing. I will feel every bit of the letting go. Tearing. I will be alive to the swallowing, and the pain of the end will ruin me.

  Or will I be slurped into the last of all mouths, gently, tenderly? A tasty morsel, a bit of flesh. A reminder of real desire as I go. The ocean, my original bed.

  For now, I’ll be the old woman who uses the door frame as her walking stick. Leaning on it while the bell tolls. While I toll it. Age hasn’t stolen much of my hearing, though it’s managed to nibble away at the full range of my voice. With a blessing, they say, comes a curse. I’ve always known that.

  There’s a trick to it, I used to believe.

  Find the blessing that’s worth it. Then run like hell from the curse.

  I know this sound. It shudders the air around me. Ringing, ringing. Louder than before. But let me be the bell. Quiet friend, let me be the bell.

  Let this darkness be a bell tower

  and you the bell. As you ring,

  what batters you becomes your strength.

  Move back and forth into the change.

  Who wrote that?

  Which poet was the first who found those words as beautiful as love inside his mind?

  Of course, I forget. Only I know they are not mine. That peace and its great beauty are not yet mine to speak.

  They say the entrance to the stage is always open if you know how to find it. This is my last stage, but I’m not ready for an encore. No, not prepared to be left alone out here, solo until the end, left out in the downpour, waiting for time to wash itself over me, only to find I’m all dried out.

  What have all my acts amounted to?

  Small and forgotten, most of them, and so early on, too late to go back and rearrange enough of my choices to erase the mistakes. If I had the chance to do so? Honestly, about half—well—at least a third of my past would vanish.

  Here’s the thing: I have always chosen to put down my defenses when faced with the kind of attention I wanted. Yes, you could call that a fault, but it’s also required for the stage; it’s one part of the work of seduction. I learned this when I was a singer and a tambourine player. The crowd waits for you to notice them, and only then do you start to give them what they want, reveal yourself to their attention. The choices of rhythm and speed for this revelation are mostly yours, until they’re not—but it’s the transaction of desire the crowd is really looking for, and what they want to believe is the end result, the payoff, every night.

  They want what they think is your heart, but only if you make them believe they can know what it contains.

  This became instinctive to me over time—an instinct grown out of habit more than intention, though I will admit it was first born of passion. But no one could own me. That was what I promised myself every night, on and off the stage. I was my own keeper, my own maker, and it would always be that way.

  Life has its own current, though. No matter your will, there’s the rush and the undertow. The truth is that I’m not a swimmer. If I learned how to stay afloat, it was only because I knew what drowning felt like.

  Let me remind you I’m still very much alive tonight, in the liquid of the moonshine, bathing in what is made rich by the sinking of one lucky penny. Up to my neck in a little reflecting pool of night wishes only. The depths turn to shallows, and the shallows turn to shadows. Will I come ashore, washed up?

  Where am I?

  A little room of my own where at least I can close the door. I can’t afford to live on my own now, so I’ve moved in with my great-nephew. A rug on the floor, books on the shelves, a radio I can sing along to. My window looks out on a street that rattles with traffic once or twice during the day and folds in on itself at night when I draw the curtains closed—it’s not my type of street, too still, but it passes the day to watch it. Surrounding me in this semi-detached brick house is his young family.

  My great-nephew teaches at a university, never knowing if his job—like the one I had at the munitions factory during the war—will be there from fall to winter to spring. He got me a book of poetry from the university, reads it to me now that my eyes are almost all out of vision. He thinks the fine-tuned words will give me comfort, thinks I still feel enough to need it.

  Which is true, if feeling is the mind’s last song. I do sing it. The brain’s a precious thing. Floating in its juices in the skull, not so unlike the oyster in the shell.

  I’m surprised and grateful that he engages my mind, by which I mean he understands I still have my own will. I think he’s curious what I might do next.

  What was the poet, and who was the book? It travels to me across time and space, the sound of the poet’s words takes me turning round and round, until my feet leave the ground. I float. I close my eyes—there’s no need to look. I go. No, not up any stairs to heaven. Instead, the words take me to the stranger on the corner and the touch of their hand. The words are the witnesses to my confessions.

  Move back and forth into the change.

  What is it like, such intensity of pain?

  If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

  In this uncontainable night,

  be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,

  the meaning discovered there.

  I think I know well what it is to turn myself to wine, to not let myself drown, or at least to drown differently. But who else am I in the mystery and in the meaning?

  Don’t make me go out on the stage yet. Let me hover here for now. I’m not ready, and finally I’m old enough, almost eighty years, to know it.

  Well, listen—

  I won’t go out there unless I can bring the band with me, for one last sheltering storm of sound. The dancers are waiting, just beyond the circle of light where I stand, with their eyes on me. Florence is there, her fingers to the mandolin strings. I haven’t thought of her in ages. She and the other musicians, they watch me for a sign. My inhalation, enough for the first note to pitch and lift its song, my right foot raised, they wait for my toe to touch the floor, the tambourine to come down. The first beat of my final encore.

  My untidy bed unmade yet again. Look what’s in it. All the undoing, every wave in my original bed, coming to break against the shore.

 
Move back and forth into the change.

  What is it like, such intensity of pain?

  I steady myself in front of the closet’s full-length mirror and try to fix my eyes on the old woman I see in reflection. She wavers for a minute under my gaze.

  I’ve made it this far, out of the doorway and into the closet. Ha!

  On a hanger inside is a men’s suit.

  I reach up heavily, my arms and shoulders moving under water, and manage to get it off the hanger, to hold it up and recall how it felt when I had it on.

  In the mirror, I blink back, growing indecipherable.

  The suit is longer than me, long to the floor, the ankle cuffs drag more than they used to. I’m an old woman whose world has grown several inches taller. Now, great-nephew can lean over and kiss the top of my head as he says goodnight.

  “Good night, Magda. We can read again tomorrow.”

  “Good night, my son.” Oh, but that was a slip of the heart, or the mind, or the tongue.

  He doesn’t seem bothered, but then, I can’t quite make out his face in the lamplight.

  “Sleep well, Auntie.”

  “I wish you every dream.”

  Was that only earlier this evening? Or else I’m plummeting backwards. Gravity sees there’s a job for me to do down below. As if this body hasn’t done enough labour, in war and in love. I’m sunk by gravity, the pressing mask of night seeks to flatten me. It takes me lower to the ground. How will I breathe when I get there?

  But see how it is. I can still notice the world around me, yes, the faces in the crowd. I’m open to distraction, and this is what leads me to pause. To notice. To meet their eyes.

  I can’t deny that it has led to the wreckage I built. And the shelters I’ve found.

  Down there, spread against the earth, I’d begin to admire the edges of the blades of grass as if they were the young scaffolding of an emerald-green cathedral. Life. One of the great hues of the planet. One I’ve never seen this close before. Not these blades of grass in particular, and not any cathedral—well, in pictures, but not in person, because the church threw me from its holy halls as soon as it saw my fatal flaw.

  The error at the heart of me. That exquisite error that changed my life. Its invitation, which was, simply, to live.

  What is it like, such intensity of pain?

  If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

  In this uncontainable night,

  be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,

  the meaning discovered there.

  What time is it? Who will keep it?

  The musicians raise their hands to the instruments. Florence is there and she waits with pleasure, with mine in her hands.

  She is that perpetual first real lover.

  But stop.

  Maybe I’ll seek another face I can recognize, in the crowd gathered here to watch.

  Quiet friend who has come so far,

  No, there’s no one else tonight.

  So, who will find me in this dimming mirror?

  Squinting as though this will help me to see, I slide my wrinkled hand with its curvature of blue veins along the collar and the sleeves of the suit, first the left one, then the right. I touch each button and the dark leather belt of the pants. The buckle, grown dull, still carries its own weight—no rust yet that I can see. I pull the zipper up and then down. My hands shake despite me. I move them across the fabric to feel how threadbare and worn it is in places, but still complete.

  Did the suit belong to me? I had more than a few sets of men’s outfits, both suits and factory clothes.

  If I’m honest, I was always taking them off to climb into someone’s arms.

  When I look back to my reflection in the mirror, I can almost see a lover standing beside me, the glow of the lamp glinting in their eyes.

  I blink and we drift out of focus. I blink again and I can’t see them there at all.

  Who do I have left to hear my confessions?

  When I was young, what I longed for most was to be able to make my own choices, to be someone of my own making. Keeper of myself.

  The Second World War came, I was twenty-one, and like many girls tied up in uptight Hogtown, biding their time, I began to work. While the war raged, no man would marry me, which meant I had no reason to start a family. Factory work, the war effort: that was the new path a girl could clear through her wilderness when she left home.

  I wonder, though, if I would still be alone had I had babies to mother. Would they be here now to keep me company, keep me tethered longer to my life? Would they be my anchor?

  A selfish wish perhaps, an unanswerable question—the kind I’m good at asking. I’d raise a glass to it, every time.

  If not for Florence, how would I have known myself? I learned from her, before she let me go. A lover teaches you to understand the limits of yourself, and how to lose them. Both the limits and the lover. I could drink to that truth too.

  But enough of drowning in spirits.

  Florence was the first girl who tried to call me home. We met at the factory, where we fell into step and pull and lift with each other as machinists on the assembly line. I can picture her now, in her last-ditch tight coat and worn-down boots. Bold and honey-eyed.

  We tossed ourselves away in relief at the end of each day, long after dark, when the streets cleared out. Usually, we headed to the basement of the Silver Lounge, crowded with girls, or to the Rideau, which is where she first kissed me, leaning up against the wall in that smoke-and-laughter-filled room, for what seemed like several glorious hours. Later, in the warmer months, we’d leave the bars for the park. Allan Gardens was a big sprawling patch of green, and we went there for cover, though it was never safe enough to stay for long.

  Rolling in the leaves at night. Her mouth above mine. Her hair brushing my face like a filament of stars. I let her break me down, and I buried my fears beneath her, filling her with new hunger, almost too quickly, because we had no cover. We both acted like thieves, the way we took from each other, thinking we had found a home.

  Florence was the girl who opened me up to the night. I loved the music she made on street corners, turning tunes to passersby, or sitting on the old bed in her small rented room, playing songs for me to sing with a voice that did not know its limits.

  What can I hear? It’s like a melody in the night air. There it is again. The sound of a mandolin. Florence’s music. Or is this a dream to me too?

  I’m used to the night. Sleep hasn’t come easily for a long time. Was I dreaming, just a minute ago, of standing there in front of the mirror at the closet door? Or, did I find my way back to bed, only to wake again? I can’t recall.

  I lie here on my back in the dark while shapes and shadows float past my eyes, as if I’m a diver looking up at the surface. There’s a little pale light coming from the window, and I can’t tell if it’s from a streetlight or the moon.

  Listen, the music is louder than before. Her melody strains.

  In this uncontainable night,

  be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,

  the meaning discovered there.

  I tried on a men’s suit and jacket for the first time when I was twenty-four.

  We’d started a band. I was the one singer so far and we needed to find another, an alto, for harmonies. Florence thought a lot of me, but she knew my voice had its limitations, so she sought another voice to complement mine, to really make it sing.

  The suits would be our stage look, she said, and we could wear them offstage too. I put one on, and it just felt right. The suit of my desires. I walked the length of Florence’s rented room in it. She told me the clothes were castoffs, but didn’t tell me how they’d come to her. Wearing it, I moved with a feeling of buoyancy and endurance—what they now call confidence—as if I could swim a long distance, as if I could dare to make it from one far shore to another.

  Fl
orence sat on her cot in the corner, watching me. I can still picture her distinctly, leaning back, relaxed and intent, her hand poised with its cigarette over an ashtray that rested on a pile of musical scores. She wrote that music, as I recall. It was her freedom in the floating world.

  “I’ll get more suits,” Florence said abruptly, as was her way. But I knew well enough by then that she would’ve given me the clothes off her back.

  “This is the only one you have?” I asked.

  “Go on then, take it. Just be careful when you wear it. Especially out on the street.”

  I could not refuse her gift.

  Let this darkness be a bell tower

  and you the bell. As you ring,

  what batters you becomes your strength.

  I’ll ask for a truth now, because I’m alone.

  Why couldn’t Florence have stayed with me a little longer?

  The war gave us no centre to hold onto; it spun us out. We were still young, everything had happened so fast, and we were working, making our own money. How were we supposed to settle with so little time to do so?

  On top of that, we were made to feel wrong for who we were. It often felt like our own flaws were all we had to live for.

  But listen to me now: I was my own keeper. I was trying to be my own maker.

  It was like crossing a bridge over the flow of life—that river that threatens to rise in its terrors and wonders.

  Toward the end of the war, our world crumbled. The jobs disappeared, the police cracked down on us; our music rose and then faded. The men who had fought were slowly returning, or not returning, lives gone and other lives broken. Their victory a small flag in the midst of the destruction and desecration that war brings.

  Three of my brothers had left to fight, and only one came home. His son was born two years later, and that son had a son, my great-nephew. The only one in my family I’ve grown close to. Maybe the only one who cares.