2025 MFP: A Swelling

Hi again. 

I get stuck in circles revising the story for you. There’s the frame of the barn: the wood has greyed now, and little whitefooted mice ripple through the hay, crawling with pitch-dark dots. I watch the guest house. Next to it the yellowbrick cottage, handsome with its weathered roof. The land all around like a stamped-in cardboard box. What else? The Methodist church, gawky as a little boy. The Polish hall where they tell the same jokes as us but with inscrutable punchlines. Memory tells me it’s the eighties. There is a thin weird light powdered onto each surface as if through a sieve.

I am young, broad-hipped, and hungry as a parasite. It has been ages since I’ve seen -M. with his long elegant hands, the sesame shaped spot on the wrist, the left ring and middle finger fused together, almost webbed. I am growing my hair long again to measure time. In my imaginary locket he wears tweed and elbow patches, but I’m sure that in reality he wore something tackier and far less obvious. He left me last with a written note and a couple signed receipts. -M. is what he wrote under the notes he left for us, was how he signed letters, even cheques. The tellers at the bank in town wanted him dead for it, at least the ones who weren’t stunned into rude silence by the fingers around the pen. 

I find it difficult, my memory being what it is and my feelings even now, to sort out which details belong only to me and which to share with you. I thought by telling you these things you might better understand what I want from you, but I get a migraine looking at them all laid out on the little writing desk. 

My mother was a retired instructor of ballet who saw in the flat prairie a sort of unending sprung floor. In girlhood her strict mother had punished her by forcing her to walk barefoot down miles of gravel road, oblivious to the prickly career it would inspire. Before my father dragged us out east and the chronic pain set in, you could always see her about three thousand kilometers down the road, a tiny pirouetting dot across the plain. In my young womanhood in the yellowbrick part of Ontario, -M. had come to town as an interpreter for the Germans or Poles or whatever. My father, before the drama I described to you last time, did us one final kindness by salvaging and rebuilding a small guest house on the property, each broad plank just a splinter of the future absence. It was tiny and white with just a narrow bed, writing desk, nightstand and lamp, all now modestly speckled in ink and rusty droplets. 

When -M. moved in I was still living at home with my Russian books, barely speaking, even to my mother, who shared and understood my love of silence. She would sit forever tapping out little dance steps, making the porcelain twirl, the vegetables, even a dead mouse for just a second when we tried hopelessly to clean up the barn. Often we would look up from our reading or knitting at the same moment, each of us with a big daffy grin or bright, wet cheeks. We understood each other in the cover of silence as men only dream to. Young and hungry as I was though, I craved another, clumsy sort of choreography.

First I saw him through my window, apologizing to my mother in the parched grass. She looked amused, hands on her hips, laughter and relief in her eyes. We had rented out the guest house only twice before, each instance a stinking, boozy disappointment. I recognized him as the sort of tall narrow man who curled his shoulders in, and hardly spoke above a whisper in an effort to shrink himself. I tried to piece him together further through the glass. Later that night when I entered the kitchen to meet him, he shot up from his chair, folding his hands behind his back (hiding, I realize now, the lovely lefthand fingers.) Definitely an American: applecheeked, cornfed like an overgrown Rockwell boy but without any mischief. Very good and very clean, and what else?

I regarded him and he regarded me back, standing very straight. Small and orderly teeth. He was to stay with us until September, when he would return to school somewhere in the US. There was a plate of pork and cabbage set out in front of him which he didn’t seem to notice. “Surely you’ll have a lot to talk about,” my mother smiled. “He’s an interpretator.”

Our first interactions were remote albeit intimate, as he immediately adopted our ritual of bringing the household’s weekly letters and library books into town.

Of course we were skittish around one another. I found his plain grace unsettling. He wore a thin gold chain around his thin gold neck and lived in nearly the same monastic rhythms I did. His apparent loneliness was elegant and literary to me, and made my own feel glamorous. Catching one another reading slack-jawed in moments of unselfconscious focus, we shared barely perceptible smiles of complicity. It made me feel older, and quite relieved I had gone through the motions with the dead neighbour’s fumbling son the summer prior. When we began testing the waters of polite conversation, he was bashful everywhere but in eye contact, which I carefully returned.  I would sometimes hear him, in conversation with my mother, borrow my turns of phrase. Once I placed a library book in the household’s “Returns” stack, I would often see it materialize the following week on his nightstand through a fissure in the little guesthouse window. 

Thus began my rosy fixation. If he felt my surveillance he was certainly a good sport about it. Even as I was running errands in town and shuffling papers around the university aid office, I still felt I was keeping an extra pair of eyes (maybe my mother’s) on him from afar. In spite of my close examination, it took me halfway into July to clue into the existence of a fiancée, a good natured girl in Quebec to whom he wrote long, detailed letters, when my mother pointedly handed me one to bring to town, unsealed. I had obviously handled dozens of his letters before, thinking nothing then of the name Marie-Angèle. Now it battered against my eyelids. I imagined her and burned. 

Waiting for the bus on some sodden corner, I tore open the cream envelope and felt my pulse skip and twirl. Nice handwriting, curly like the sandy hair that sprouted generously from his warm brown arms, but rather legible, only not to me. The letter was entirely written in French. With my meager school French, I deciphered that he had been reading Nina Berberova, that he was arranging to conduct oral history interviews with some “ancien” Polish tobacco farmers, and that he was very much enjoying his stay with the aging and childless dancer. 
Affectueusement, -M.

In town, I made myself a copy. I licked the original shut and dropped it in the box. 

A little fracture and a deeper burning. At first it was a relief to have him safely out of my reach. Separated by his engagement, I could pine and press my face to my pillow as I had since girlhood, imagining it was the broad, faraway shoulder of Alyosha Karamazov, or Elliott Gould, now tawny, bookish -M. But why my omission from the letter, whose existence implied stacks of earlier ones? Why, beyond simple goodness, was he so attentive? Why would he borrow my words, taste them slowly, and spit them back out at my mother? When I returned home I passed him as he solemnly transcribed a long, leaden interview alone in the yard. I folded my copy of his letter, slid it into a book on the nightstand, and slept a long and formless sleep. 

For the rest of July I tried to affix a question mark to each look I flashed him. I experimented with the hemlines of skirts. I lay at night, thinking, “You hopeless, hopeless, whore.” I found him out in the grass, now glossy and full, and asked him about his work, saying things like, “That is so interesting.” He never failed to smile when I would approach, folding the right hand over the left. He never mentioned Quebec, or any of the lovely women there who were so spoiled to get two lovely names. 

Some unseasonably cold night later in the summer I soaked for hours in the tub. I felt warm and amorous and thought of him richly and without shame. Steam rose from my flushed skin, and I dawdled and ignored the sharp maternal raps at the door. My languour was only interrupted when I heard a little curse from outside the propped open window. I sat up and listened longer, but could only hear the frogs singing. I stood up, a little dizzy, my senses fogged. It was surely the voice of -M., and something had surely gone on. 

My brown plastic shoes hissed through the grass. I remember thinking that hissing was the average sound of the universe: the wind hisses through the trees whether they’re dead or alive, the faucet hisses with the ghost of water when the hydro’s out. With my dowdy housecoat and its faded green flowers I found him just outside of the barn, only freshly abandoned in those days.

He looked fragile, sitting there prodding at a spot under his watchband. He looked up at me with a little embarrassment. 

“I can’t believe I didn’t consider the possibility of ticks.” He raised his wrist to show me. There was a tiny black thing wriggling and stuck in the indentation his watch had left on the underside of his wrist. He laughed and shivered. 

“What were you doing in the barn?” I asked, smiling like a frightened dog.

“I wanted to find somewhere quiet to transcribe more.”

“Isn’t it quiet in the guesthouse?”

He paused a moment, staring up at a naked beam of salvaged wood. I couldn’t understand and wouldn’t push it. 

“What should I, um,” A pause. “Do I have to go to the hospital?” He asked in consternation. 

I laughed, mostly out of discomfort, and his face grew graver. Ticks were only an annoyance to me then, no danger. I was endeared by his squeamishness, and said, “I had a tick last summer and got it out myself. Would you let me try?” Of course it wasn’t true. His eyes were big and trusting and I thought of every deer I had seen, with the lovely soft ears lumpy with ticks. I wanted to suck at his flushed ears like that. I wanted to enter head-first. 

His left hand was beautiful, womanish and odd. The swelling tick gave me justification to stare openly for the first time. I never thought it appropriate to ask, but then it recurred constantly in my thoughts of him, recurred against my pillow. He watched as I stared, and said nothing. The tick was engorged, and its legs pedaled slowly, almost methodically. I could tell he couldn’t bear the sight of it, and followed his gaze to a big terrycloth flower on my shoulder. I tore into the house and returned with tweezers and some nasty alpine liquor.

Without asking, he reached over and grasped the bottle’s neck, taking a long, deep drink straight from its mouth. I laughed: it was the first time I’d ever seen him drink, and I have always gotten a private thrill from seeing a man in hysterics. The awful medicinal smell of the alcohol pushed up our noses and my eyes felt glassy and hot.

I turned his wrist over in my hand and felt my skin prickle. My first time touching him. I was glad then that he couldn’t stand to watch me work as I couldn’t quite steady my hands, in spite of whatever assurance I tried to project. Forgetting my mother’s alcohol which probably would have sent the tick running and retching, I grasped the body, and after a moment’s resistance in which every part of -M. stiffened, I tugged it free. 

“It’s over, not too bad.”

And just as his posture relaxed and I saw that not every bit of him could unstiffen just like that, I involuntarily tensed my hand, squeezing the tick and exploding the little swollen body onto us both. 

        “Dear Marie-Angèle,
        Do you understand me like this?”

 I typed, and then pulled loose a fresh page.

        “Dear Marie-Angèle,
        I think of you often. I hope you don’t mind my writing in vulgar English. It comes more easily to me when I’m like this. I miss you. Did you get the letter I wrote you about Nina Berberova? Oxford County is making me feel like a White Russian in Paris if I don’t think too hard, close my eyes, plug up my ears. I can’t remember the shade of your eyes, will you remind me? 

        M. A., I’m worried that my letters haven’t reached you. There have been gaps. How much do you need to know? I’m worried the lonely landlady is being selective with which envelopes she puts in the box. I’m worried we’re losing one another. Have I told you about the grown daughter? How do you honestly think I’ve been spending my time? 
Affectueusement,” 

I had made several other abortive attempts that sounded nothing like -M., whose warmth and placidness only made me colder, more neurotic.  Never mind that I typed instead of copying out his loopy script. It was all too urgent (I was young) and my tone was loopy enough. I folded the finished letter and hid it next to my copy of -M.’s original letter in the same nightstand book. 

In all my private contemplation I had never quite decided how it would be with him in bed. Large hands, wavering, watery voice: a bit of a gamble. Of course when the tick erupted it was as if we had both been specially marked, or that we had been given express permission to leak all over each other, which did happen that night, I think. Or perhaps the next. I remember a separation, then a coming together. It was decided that night that I loved him, even if I was never quite so sure what that meant. Did I have to be good if I was so young? I was distracted from my dull ache with a new, bright one. We were very quiet. We could not kiss very long without laughing in wonder. It was as if it had been transmitted directly to my mother, who knew immediately. 

What remained of August hissed by. Some days we behaved as strangers and became acquainted again at night, always in near silence. When we talked it was dissolute, unfocused, more about ideas than our own lives. I had dallied before, but this was my first time sitting up and reading the paper in bed with someone. He introduced me to this basic intimacy which ruined me for several who came next. He was open with me but expertly avoided the subject of his engagement, and I’ll admit to you now that in those days it was not a major concern for me. Anna Karenina was a philanderess too, and like many young girls I related to her in the black shade of my eyes. Invisible Marie-Angèle floated merrily above me as I slept, occasionally disturbing my dreams, never causing a single nightmare.

The air dried out and he gathered his things slowly, mournfully. As if no one waited for him, as if he had no correspondent. I felt feverish but glad to see him go, thinking his departure would surely make me think straight. He had an early morning for his early flight, for which he was already late. His stirring woke me, and he kissed me finally, deeply. I measured his lateness against the time it took. No kiss is sweeter than one that complicates a travel itinerary. 

Imagining that he would still putter around, that he would surely wake me up for some small, hushed goodbye speech, I fell back asleep. I awoke to realize that he had left, trading a cursive note signed “-M.” for the library book on my nightstand, along with both of the letters I had stuffed it with. Of course he thought to take it back to town with him. Perhaps to allow himself one last book of mine, this one containing certain of my back pages. I didn’t leave the narrow bed all day: my mother knew to bring my meals there. 

I would like to say that was the last time I saw him, but you never really get such neat bookends. When my mother died in November, there were still old suitors (hers and mine) turning up with hobbyfarm eggs, some even with stern-faced wives in their wake. Just by virtue of sticking around, you get to know people who were complete nonentities to you; who only ever existed in theory, like you. And men will always hang onto the women they pestered in their youth. They never quite get over such things, and then they seek you out, and for what? I wish I could trap each tenderness in amber for display on the mantle: translucent, finite, an object of just a moment’s contemplation. But amber isn’t a letter. It holds more information. And so I had to be choosy in my decision of what to include for you. After you were here, and saw what felt like a museum of my mother’s life, hosted grimly by this adult orphan. Before I forget, allow me to thank you for your grace, and for the flowers.

Affectionately,