The porch was already shadowy. Ann had lit the two tall yellow candles, though not the little white ones that were clustered round them. The yellow ones had a scent of lemons, which she was probably counting on to dispel any stuffiness in the room. Also she had opened the window at one end of the table. On the stillest evening you could always get a breeze from the poplars.
Karin used both hands to hold her skirt as she went past the table. She had to hold it up slightly so that she could walk. And she did not want the taffeta to make a noise. She meant to start singing “Here comes the bride” just as she appeared in the doorway.
Here comes the bride
Fair, fat, and wide.
See how she wobbles
From side to side-
The breeze came towards her with a little gust of energy and pulled her veil. But it was held to her head so tightly that she had no worries about losing it.
As she turned to go into the living room the whole veil rose and drifted through the flames of the candles. The people in the room no sooner saw her than they saw the fire that was chasing her. She herself had just time to smell the lace as it crumbled-a queer poisonous edge on the smell of the marrow bones cooking for dinner. Then a rush of nonsensical heat and screams, a brutal pitching into darkness.
Rosemary got to her first, pounding her head with a cushion. Ann ran for the crock in the hallway and threw water, lilies, grass, and all onto her fiery veil and hair. Derek tore the rug up off the floor, sending stools and tables and drinks crashing, and was able to wrap Karin tightly and suffocate the last flames. Some bits of lace stayed smoldering in her soaked hair, and Rosemary got her fingers burned, tearing them out.
The skin on her shoulders and on her upper back and on one side of her neck was marred by burning. Derek’s tie had kept the veil back a little from her face and so saved her from the most telling traces. But even when her hair grew long again and she brushed it forward, it could not altogether hide the damage to her neck.
She had a series of skin grafts, and then she looked better. By the time she was in college she could wear a bathing suit.
When she first opened her eyes in the room in the Belleville hospital, she saw all sorts of daisies. White daisies, yellow and pink and purple daisies, even on the windowsill.
“Aren’t they lovely?” Ann said. “They keep sending them.
They keep sending more, and the first ones are still fresh, or at least not ready to throw out. Everywhere they stop on their trip they send some. They ought to be in Cape Breton by now.”
Karin said, “Did you sell the farm?”
Rosemary said, “Karin.”
Karin closed her eyes and tried again.
“Did you think it was Ann?” said Rosemary. “Ann and Derek are off on a trip. I was just telling you. Ann did sell the farm, or anyway she’s going to. That’s a funny thing for you to be thinking about.”
“They’re on their honeymoon,” said Karin. This was a trick- to bring Ann back if it was really her-to make her say, reprovingly, “Oh, Karin.”
“It’s the wedding dress making you think of that,” Rosemary said. “They’re actually on a trip looking for where they want to live next.”
So it was really Rosemary. And Ann on the trip. Ann on the trip with Derek.
“It would have to be a second honeymoon,” Rosemary said. “You never hear about anybody going on their third honeymoon, do you? Or their eighteenth honeymoon?”
It was all right, everybody was in the right place. Karin felt as if she might be the one who had brought this about, through some exhausting effort. She knew she should feel satisfaction. She did feel satisfaction. But it all seemed unimportant in some way. As if Ann and Derek and perhaps even Rosemary were behind a hedge that was too thick and troublesome to climb through.
“I’m here though,” said Rosemary. “I’ve been here all the time. But they won’t let me touch you.”
She said this last thing as if it was a matter for heartbreak.
She still says this once in a while.
“What I remember most is that I couldn’t touch you and wondering if you understood.”
Karin says yes. She understood. What she doesn’t bother to say is that back then she thought Rosemary’s sorrow was absurd. It was as if she was complaining about not being able to reach across a continent. For that was what Karin felt she had become- something immense and shimmering and sufficient, ridged up in pain in some places and flattened out, otherwise, into long dull distances. Away off at the edge of this was Rosemary, and Karin could reduce her, any time she liked, into a configuration of noisy black dots. And she herself-Karin-could be stretched out like this and at the same time shrunk into the middle of her territory, as tidy as a bead or a ladybug.
She came out of that, of course, she came back to being a Karin. Everybody thought she was just the same except for her skin. Nobody knew how she had changed and how natural it seemed to her to be separate and polite and adroitly fending for herself. Nobody knew the sober, victorious feeling she had sometimes, when she knew how much she was on her own.
Before The Change
Dear R. My father and I watched Kennedy debate Nixon. He’s got a television since you were here. A small screen and rabbit ears. It sits out in front of the sideboard in the dining room so that there’s no easy way now to get at the good silver or the table linen even if anybody wanted to. Why in the dining room where there’s not one really comfortable chair? Because it’s a while since they’ve remembered they have a living room. Or because Mrs. Barrie wants to watch it at suppertime.
Do you remember this room? Nothing new in it but the television. Heavy side curtains with wine-colored leaves on a beige ground and the net curtains in between. Picture of Sir Galahad leading his horse and picture of Glencoe, red deer instead of the massacre. The old filing cabinet moved in years ago from my father’s office but still no place found for it so it just sits there not even pushed back against the wall. And my mother’s closed sewing machine (the only time he ever mentions her, when he says “your mother’s sewing machine”) with the same array of plants, or what looks like the same, in clay pots or tin cans, not flourishing and not dying.
So I’m home now. Nobody has broached the question as to how long for. I just stuffed the Mini with all my books and papers and clothes and drove here from Ottawa in one day. I had told my father on the phone that I was finished with my thesis (I’ve actually given it up but I didn’t bother telling him that) and that I thought I needed a break.
“Break?” he said, as if he’d never heard of such a thing. “Well. As long as it isn’t a nervous break.”
I said, What?
“Nervous breakdown,” he said with a warning cackle. That’s the way he still refers to panic attacks and acute anxiety and depression and personal collapse. He probably tells his patients to buck up.
Unfair. He probably sends them away with some numbing pills and a few dry kind words. He can tolerate other people’s shortcomings more easily than mine.
There wasn’t any big welcome when I got here, but no consternation either. He walked around the Mini and grunted at what he saw and nudged the tires.
“Surprised you made it,” he said.
I’d thought of kissing him-more bravado than an upsurge of affection, more this-is-the-way-I-do-things-now. But by the time my shoes hit gravel I knew I couldn’t. There was Mrs. B. standing halfway between the drive and the kitchen door. So I went and threw my arms around her instead and nuzzled the bizarre black hair cut in a Chinese sort of bob around her small withered face. I could smell her stuffy cardigan and bleach on her apron and feel her old toothpick bones. She hardly comes up to my collarbone.