Tomorrow she would forget the past and think only of the future. Yesterday was part of the encircling never. She had seen it advertised at the airport. They were going to have a party for the elderly there. Tomorrow Pearl was going to make every effort to relegate the gigantic physical world to its proper position. The waitress arrived with the gin and tonic and placed it beside the other one, which Pearl had hardly touched.
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Pearl began to drink them. Her gold wedding band clicked against the glass. The ring was part of the encircling never. Outside, the sun continued to shine maniacally. Her hands were her ugliest feature. They were square and prematurely wrinkled. Walker would find her. She suddenly knew that. A man of the world. A man of extremes, of angers, ambitions. He and Walker looked very much alike. Their coloring and weight were the same. Their thick hair, their mouths. The difference was, of course, that Pearl saw Walker with her heart. Once, however, Pearl had made a very embarrassing mistake.
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She had mistaken Thomas for Walker. It was shortly after she had come to the island, late one evening, on the landing outside their bedroom. His back was to her. He was facing the bookshelves. Thomas turned and looked at her, his gaze flat and ironic, uncharged by love, and then had brushed past her, saying nothing.
She had been grateful to him for ignoring the mistake but she had gone to her room, trembling, sweating with fear. And she had sat there, looking at objects in the room, not grasping their purpose or function anymore, very frightened, her desires and basic assumptions in doubt.
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Lamps, baskets, photographs, little jars of pills and scents. What were they for? What did the faces of things represent? What was it that she was supposed to recognize? When the door to the bedroom had opened, later that night, Pearl had firmly shut her eyes. The figure in the room approached and stood over her. On the island there were a dozen children, more or less, and five adults.
Thomas, Walker, Miriam and Shelly were family. He had been her teacher at college. From the way they told it, Shelly had kidnapped him. Pearl supposed that she herself had been kidnapped as well. The family certainly did things in an unorthodox way. Shelly had gone off to school and come back with a husband and a baby. Pearl was never sure whether she should count herself among the children or the adults. The shirts or the skins. She spent most of her time with the children. They were always seeking her out and speaking outlandishly to her. Pearl felt that they had driven her to drink.
But that was all right. They were just children. She was fond of them really. She blamed Thomas for what had happened to Johnny. Johnny was a sensitive child and Thomas had pushed him too hard. Thomas thought Johnny was bright and he was determined to make him brighter. He had been a nice little boy, wistful and impressionable but with simple needs. The last time Pearl had gone into the room she had seen ants. There, in a committed procession, had come a hundred ants.
Miriam had seen them too. Had not ants come to Midas as a child and filled his mouth with grains of wheat? Had not insects visited Plato in his infancy, settling on his lips, ensuring him powerful speech? Johnny had started dying, or whatever it was analogous to it, two months ago, in August. August was the month when Sam was born. August was also the month for the birthday party. The children had always celebrated their birthdays collectively. At the birthday party, Johnny had announced that he felt inhabited.
He was inhabited by hundreds. There were cells in his body and all stronger than he. He lay with his face in the pillow, his poor little body like a graveyard in which the family dead of several generations had been buried. He had had beautiful eyes. Before he got his notions, he had been normal enough, gorging himself on chocolate rabbits at the appropriate time of year, learning how to sail and water-color and so on, and doing everything with those beautiful and commanding eyes which were a luxurious violet color like certain depths of the sea.
In his illness, he said that he could see the blood moving though the veins of things. He said he thought he could induce the birds and the butterflies and animals of the picture books to come to life, to totter out of the books, leaving holes behind them. He said he was sure he could do this except he was afraid.
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The child was overstimulated. He had been reading since the age of four. They all read at four. He worried about the people who wrote to Miriam and told her the terrible things that had happened to them. Thomas encouraged him in these worries because he thought they honed the mind. Thomas told Johnny he could do anything if he just set his mind to it. Miriam had four-month-old twins, Ashbel and Franny, and Thomas was probably at them, even this very moment.
He would hold the twins and talk to them in French, in Latin. He would talk to them about Utrillo, about knights, about compasses. When they got to puberty he sent them off to boarding school and forgot about them. In the bar, she took a breath of air, as though she were tasting freedom, and coughed slightly. She liked her baby.
She was glad they were together, alone. She was glad that neither one of them would ever have to see Thomas again. She supposed, however, that the baby might grow to miss his cousins. Pearl herself would not miss Walker much. It was true that once Pearl had seen Walker with her heart but that was no longer so. He was very seldom on the island. She imagined that it simply might be taking women out to lunch and then sleeping with them.
She had often wished, in the months when she was pregnant, that he would have been content enough to do just that with her, instead of bringing her back to his family and marrying her. He could still have given her her baby but she would not have had to spend that lonely year on the island where she was the only one, it seemed, with any ordinary sense at all. She was going to keep Sam calm and common. She would not let him play in a questionable manner. Everything would be bought in a store and have some sort of a guarantee. When he got sick, she was going to call a doctor.
Even when Johnny weighed only eighteen pounds, Thomas had not called a doctor. He had brought over a psychiatrist. It was like contacting a voodoo priest, Pearl thought. The psychiatrist had come over to the island in a velour jogging suit and had spoken at length about love, rage and the triumph of hateful failure. The psychiatrist had suggested that Johnny was a very willful, angry, even dangerous little boy.
They all realized that Johnny was willful. He had always gotten everything he wanted, usually just by the demands of his beautiful, insistent eyes. As for the idea that Johnny was angry and cruel, how could anyone, least of all Miriam, believe that? Miriam could only remember him as the child who fell asleep on her white bed after a day in the sun, smelling wonderful, tiny sea shells stuck to his bottom. There was a smell of sex and death and cooking, Miriam said.
The slap of bodies coupling and quarreling was terrific. The racket of baroque construction. The cries and slithering, the giggles and complaints. The babies and fabulous animals. The darkness, Miriam said to Pearl, held only the path. Pearl put a pretzel log in her mouth. It tasted as though she were eating her napkin. Miriam made wonderful pretzels. Pearl might never get a decent pretzel again.
Miriam was the best cook Pearl had ever known. She loved to bake and make. She never wearied of it. The gathering, the selecting. The boning, chopping, grating. The only day she ever made a mistake in the kitchen was the day her husband, Les, had abandoned her, a week before the twins were born. Les had been a mess. Les was a borderline simpleton with a big handsome face and a large appetite. Miriam had never paid much attention to him. She was too busy with her sewing, cooking, shopping. How Miriam loved to shop! She approached supermarkets with joyously clenched teeth.
Pearl had never done well in supermarkets. She saw Miriam as a successful conqueror penetrating a hostile country, routing out the perfect endive, the blemishless peach, the excellent cheese. Miriam had confided to Pearl once that she was glad Les was gone.
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Miriam had told Pearl he had a business bright and shiny as a carrot. Pearl looked at the rings of moisture her glass had made on the barroom table. She rearranged Sam in her arms. There was a crack in the formica that had hair in it. Pearl put her cocktail napkin over it. On the napkin were animals drinking and playing poker. Pearl put her hand over the cocktail napkin. It was a face made up from the heads and parts of animals. All the children thought it terribly witty. They envied Johnny for having it.
Johnny adored Thomas for having given it to him. Pearl had never thought it very witty. She found it disgusting. A picture razored from an art book.
Today's Book of Poetry: Changelings - Cassy Welburn (Frontenac House Poetry)
Antlers, ears tusks, haunches, tails, teeth. No wonder Johnny had nightmares, that wretched thing being the last he saw before he fell asleep at night. Well, that was rather witty, Pearl thought. Pearl could not remember what he looked like. Sometimes her memory was not good at all.
Pearl would be the first to admit that her mind was like a thin pool, on the bottom of which lay huge leaves, slowly softening. Or had Thomas said that to her once? She remembered enough, actually. More than she cared to. She remembered Miriam confessing to her once that she had taken to spanking Johnny. I heard two ravens make a plan,.
So low as planes they did swoop down,. And many commentators moaned,. I watched the ravens feed on war,. When you must wade for miles through ragged-robin, the rain-knives. When you dream of a woman fucking goats or men with horns;. We were alive that evening, on the north Yorkshire moors,. Pheasants strutted, their feathers as richly patterned. It kindled and started to lick, and you laughed.
Smoke and stars meant my thoughts loosened,. Clare Pollard reads from Changeling Clare Pollard reads four poems from Changeling and talks about the book's themes. View Extract Related Reviews. Clare Pollard Bedtime Publication Date: