Frances Itani - Requiem

She went upstairs and Lena followed, offering to help, and five minutes later the two women reappeared, carrying dinner.

Pete, the other three men and I had been apportioned three cubes of beef, one medium potato and four green beans. On the women’s plates were two cubes of beef, half a potato and three beans. I tried to imagine the conversation between Pete and Petra while they were doing the calculations, but I couldn’t come up with the words. Ron barrelled down the steps with a new bottle of wine and served it out among the men.

We all bent over our laps, and the plates were emptied in moments. Except for Pete, the other men stood in unison and began a silent, undeclared hunt for food. I followed. Up and down the steps, into the kitchen and back again. The word hunger was not mentioned. Nor were the words second helpings . Ron went over to the bar, licked his index finger and wiped it across the bottom of the empty pretzel bowl, gathering the last grains of salt. Another man and I went outside to the patio to tackle scrapings on the barbecue rack. No one had thought to ration or hide the remaining liquor, and all of us, finding no more food, settled down to drink. There was still wine—each couple had arrived with a bottle—and an almost full bottle of Scotch.

And then, as if on cue, a chain of events familiar to everyone but Lena and me began to unfold.

Petra announced, “Button-button time,” and the men tromped up the stairs and called out to me to join them while the women chose a hiding place for a large black button. The only rule, according to Petra, was that the button must stay in the basement.

Back we came. I looked at Lena, who was still on the sagging couch, and I reached down and squeezed her hand. If the game was meant to be fun, no one was laughing. The men were milling about, searching for the button. Ron was on hands and knees, his thick palm groping beneath an armchair. I stood like a statue. Others were crawling across the floor while Petra and another woman called out, “Warm! No. Cold. You’re freezing. Ice!” And then, in sing-song voices, “Someone in the room is boiling. You’re hot!”

Lena, expecting equal humiliation for the women’s round, sat stiffly while giant men peered into shadows like caged animals trying to escape. Fingers grazed upper ledges and shelves. Lena and I both understood that this was a continuation of the search for food. We watched helplessly.

And then, I decided to rescue us. I announced that we had to check in on Miss Carrie before it was too late in the evening. She had asked us to drop by, and we’d promised to do so on our way home.

“Miss Carrie,” Petra murmured. “We never see anything of her. She’s the old woman who lives at the opposite end of the street, isn’t she? A bit dotty, I think.”

Lena and I turned away, not daring to speak. The yellow dog yipped as we blew our goodbyes back to Petra and Pete, who saw us off at the side door. Lena tucked her arm in mine until we reached Miss Carrie’s house. The lights were off. Miss Carrie had not, of course, asked us to check on her at all.

“I feel like waking her up and telling her about the party,” Lena said. I could tell that she was upset. “Is that why we love her—because she doesn’t judge us?”

“She’s been around for a long time, since the beginning of the century,” I said. “She was born shortly after Queen Victoria died. She’s wiser than most people; she measures things differently.”

We continued on, to our own front door. The storm was over. Lena tilted her head back and took in a long, slow breath of damp air. “Curtains of blue, curtains of black,” she said. “Just look up there.”

I followed her gaze upwards. No stars were visible, but there was an eerie beauty to the chill and the darkness.

“It’s too much,” she said. “How long will it take before people will be used to having someone different in their midst? And how different? The same under the skin.”

“I’m used to it,” I said. But we knew that already.

“Ottawa is a small city,” Lena pronounced. “A white city, mostly.”

That was true, too. But we’d also seen graffiti scribbled across a subway wall during a recent visit to Toronto, which was not an entirely white city. DEATH TO MIXED RACES we read as our subway car rolled past. Random hate, it seemed, could be anywhere.

And in Montreal, hadn’t we kept our own marriage ceremony small, only five people present? The two of us, the minister, and Lena’s sister and husband as witnesses. Our world wasn’t ready for mixed marriages, but that hadn’t stopped us. And Lena had been protecting wounds of her own. Her sister, whom she loved, had drawn her aside just before the ceremony. “What about children?” her sister asked. “Have you given enough thought to that?”

As if any future child born to us would belong to a stigmatized breed. The question, Lena told me later, had come from love and she understood that, but the underlying message had been: You still have the chance to change your mind . Lena had fought her sister off on her own terms.

We walked around to the back entrance of the house so that we could prolong our time in the night air. We unlocked the door, headed for the kitchen, opened the fridge door and closed it again. We were past hunger, wobbly from drink. Lena began to laugh as we climbed the stairs. Once started, she couldn’t stop.

“You looked like hunters and gatherers on the prowl,” she said. “If you could have seen yourselves. All the big men trying to fill their bellies. And button-button was the last straw.” She was doubled over now, and I joined in. “The poor yellow dog,” she said. “No wonder it’s eating the basement steps. It’s starving.”

We went to bed and turned out the lights. Once more, Lena ran her finger over the scar on my forehead. And then, so lightly I scarcely knew her hand was there, she traced every feature of my face, ending with my lips.

“You’re going to have to tell me how the scar got there,” she said, through a yawn. “I need to know.” And she fell asleep.

I was thinking about Ron squeezing himself onto the couch next to her, and I reclaimed her now and pulled her towards me. She was still asleep, but she turned to her side and slid her thigh over mine. And then she woke again.

The next day, Miss Carrie announced that she had decided to fly to Winnipeg to visit her antiquarian friend Lill, who was recovering from surgery. A few days later, Lena and I drove her to the airport, helped with the tan-coloured leather luggage that had belonged to her Mommy in another century, and promised to pick her up on her return. She intended to stay four weeks, because she wanted to be useful. Letters began to arrive soon after her departure, and we were entertained with a letter a week, for the next month.

Thank you for seeing me off, even though I had to travel without the items that refused to turn up, including extra spectacles and favourite garters. Lill has recovered from her operation, but yesterday she tripped and twisted her foot. She sprained her ankle and must walk with a stick. She insists on bending forward to pick up the many things she drops, even with her foot newly swollen .

An old aunt, age one hundred and two, lives in a room beyond the dining room, where I am not to go. An attendant comes and goes, unseen, through a side door. The aunt eats behind a heavy curtain; perhaps she splashes or has spills. Lill and I sit at an extended dining table, which I crawled under and latched from beneath because of its precarious state of balance. Lill pretends that every part of this is normal. The aunt belongs to the family of Lill’s late husband, Beau. I’m told she has thin hair, wears a “piece”—not her own. Since my arrival, she has been grinding her teeth behind the curtain. Lill says Beau’s side of the family all had good teeth in their day. I deduce that the strain of my visit is the cause of the grinding .