It is always hot summer when her year turns. It makes her feel special. It is always hot afternoon when everything is still and she walks down the street, her flip-flops going slimy from the sweat, even the wildest dogs lounging in doorways or under cars, their tongues hanging out. She walks to the corner store for more gum, the change jangling in her pocket. Later this afternoon they will go out for dinner, Katya and her mum, who is called Estelle, and her uncle, who is called Randolph, to the place on the river, and Katya will eat crab. There will be a big tank in the window, with crabs swimming around in it. There will be sea vegetables growing from the mire on the bottom; the owner’s one concession aside from the tank’s relative roominess to the comfort of the crabs.
Randolph gets the creeps from the crabs, but he doesn’t say anything. He loves Katya too much, and, as always, admires her feistiness, her bravery. Estelle is wearing a white suit; she looks slim and pure, her brown hair has waves in it. Katya is wearing a clean T-shirt over her shorts and not the green velvet dress which was offered to her by her mother. Her hair is cut in bangs and quite short but not too short, so that it curls under just above her shoulders. Her brown legs under the table are wearing not flip-flops but new white sandals. Randolph: I am not sure whether he, too, is wearing a white linen dinner jacket (where would he get such a thing?) or his overalls over a purple T-shirt, his safety goggles up on his head, where he has forgotten to take them off. He watches Katya with an intense interest. I inject myself into his interest: it is awed, admiring, completely absorbed. Estelle watches, too. She is cool, a little distant; she sips her drink, which tastes faintly of lime Kool-Aid. She is in love with Randolph.
Their window overlooks the river. The window is huge, made of plate glass. You can look straight down and see the river moving; it gives you a funny sensation, as though you are floating, or on a ship, for the restaurant is built on a bridge, exactly on the river. They say it is bad geomancy to live right on the river, and this accounts for the owner’s edginess; it is his electromagnetic currents being perpetually out of balance from the amount of time he spends at his business. When you look at him his image slips out of itself, but just as you go to rub your eyes to make sure you aren’t seeing things it slips back in.
“Thank God he doesn’t sleep here,” Estelle says, smoothing her skirt, even though she is sitting down and it’s hidden under the tablecloth. I cannot get a clear picture of Estelle; I cannot tell whether or not I like her. I know that Randolph (Katya’s father is dead) is essential to Katya’s survival, with his pockets full of change, his dogs, and his extremely loud, dirty machines. Estelle plays the other side: her house is cool and clean and crisp; she likes things nice, she plays music in the afternoons. There are always flowers in the window; the sun shines through the vase, and the water, filled with yellow pollen, looks like liquid gold. Katya loves her mother fiercely, but she stays a little bit distant, or, perhaps, merely respects the distance her mother has created with her white curtains, white couch and white rug, and opera music. Because of her mother’s sadness. Katya is afraid she knows what her mother is sad about, beyond simple loneliness. Randolph is safer. Randolph is necessary. Randolph offers freedom, dirt, noise, a clear cheerful gruff surface. The uncomplicated superficiality of men: all the messier emotions that turn into complicated neuroses in all the women she knows, absorbed, subsumed, transformed by the noisy, friendly machines the men work with. Men are better. Men are safer. Usually, Katya sides with the men. And yet, if she was to choose one of them, if she had to choose one, Randolph or Estelle, to raise her for the rest of her childhood, she would choose Estelle. With Estelle she sits at the kitchen table at the back of the house, looking out at the garden. Estelle makes her peanut butter and cucumber sandwiches, and lime Kool-Aid. “What did you do today?” asks Estelle. “Was it fun? How is your uncle? He cut me some roses? How nice.” Estelle puts the roses in a vase. They are climbers, cut from the bush. Randolph lives in the old house, the Summers’ family house, surrounded by old climbing roses. He is Estelle’s brother. Katya and Estelle live in a smaller, newer house on the outskirts of town; there is light yellow wallpaper with tiny butterfly prints all over it. Estelle teaches piano. Katya always tries to be out of the house for the piano lessons, in the afternoons.
They are raising her together, by unspoken agreement. In winter she goes to school but work doesn’t stop in the summertime and so, all summer long, during her mother’s lessons, Katya goes to Randolph’s.
The air in the bedroom glows faintly with illuminated dust; cigarette smoke, pollen, the disintegrated wings of moths, particles of skin. Onto this screen Katya’s body projects its secrets, a hologram of emotion. Because of Monsty I am able to insert myself into the feelings of any of the people in the story: into Katya’s child-self, into Randolph, even into the happy river that meanders below their feet, day in and day out, page after page.
Estelle is more opaque; the distance she places between herself and the world since her husband died has made her more difficult to read. Or else it’s my own temerity. I know beneath her cream linen jacket she harbours pain; the pain of her loss, the pain of being in love with her brother. Katya knew this, even as a child; I can suddenly feel it. Yet she never told me, never shared this, and what other painful secrets? Withholding her trust, feeling she always had to show me only her flowers. She knew I withheld part of my love. I want to give her that part now, the part always held in reserve. It is Monsty who showed me the way. The invisible one, always felt with the wisdom of the body.
Harker and Serena
THE LONG THIN POLES by the water were round, not square. De-limbed and peeled trees, not railroad ties. Gifts from the river, which flooded each spring. Basketballs, pieces of cordwood, plastic planters, actual railroad ties. Serena always figured railroad ties were okay for flower beds, but not for vegetable gardens. Who wanted to eat creosote?
She dragged them home and pushed her found logs into shapes, making raised beds at the foot of the back stairs. A squarish shape. A triangle. She filled them with wheelbarrow loads of topsoil she dug out of the woods. Pushing and pulling one of the logs in hopes of perfecting the corner of her shape, Serena noticed carvings. She tried to decipher the pattern but it made no sense. It wasn’t English or Egyptian. It appeared runic, but it wasn’t Ogham. Maybe someone upriver had invented it.
After a year went by her teenaged sons Jake and Blake caught two more of the strangely carved poles. Then April was rainy as always and suddenly there were six. Maybe upriver a stack of carved poles someone had left by the bank was shrinking, just as her pile grew. Serena pulled the poles away from the edge of the flood. She began taking Jake and Blake to the river after a big rain or a sunny day had melted more of the remaining snow. She had a hunch the poles might turn out to be worth something.