Ursula Pflug - Seeds and Other Stories

And so Angelique and Mort picked up and moved. Angelique built a new garden and planted it and then they came, and there were more of them than there had ever been at the farm. Eventually she got used to them and didn’t worry about being crazy anymore and even got to like them and as she did they seemed to change, but it was Angelique who was changing.

Since their move she wonders whether men still snowmobile on the Ouse, whether the ice ever gets thick enough anymore. Angelique always went the day after, when their trails had not yet been covered by new snow. Once she found part of a deer carcass on the frozen river, half eaten by coyotes. Farther on, a loose leg, its knee socket gruesomely mobile, which her dog found fascinating. On the way home she came upon a little hunting shack, barely larger than an outhouse, but with a window and a chimney. Angelique was afraid to look into the window. What if someone was inside? And why was she both brave and foolish enough to leave the trail?

Angelique still goes on long walks alone, except on the country roads around the village. The Ouse runs through her backyard now, home to blue herons, snapping turtles, otters and a beaver which, like the Pleistocene Castoroides, is almost the size of a sub-compact car. In the village she doesn’t have to worry about people raping her or shooting her accidentally, even in deer season.

Smoking; skinny dipping alone; walking off trail; bears: it seems these things don’t frighten Angelique as much as they do other women, even if they should. What frightens Angelique is something else. Like Angelique’s mother, only in England, Virginia sunk stones into her pockets, submerged herself in the first Ouse.

Home from her walks, Angelique removes stones from her pockets and lines them up on the windowsill beside the postcards of her mother’s drawings. The stones are not from here, not from now; they tell the story of a different kind of life. Angelique counts the stones sometimes. One for each child, one for herself, one for Mort. Because of this, one day the river’s name will have a new meaning, the meaning of a stream that winds its way between worlds.

THERE WERE SEVERAL PAIRS of knee-high green rubber boots on the mat, including a pair that belonged to Sandrine and three that were Randy’s. They were the kind of boots people wore to go fishing or hunting, with a felt lining. It wasn’t possible to buy them in the city at all. She took her own shoes off by the door as she always did. Because of this almost universal rural habit, Sandrine thought, country houses generally had clean floors even when inhabited almost entirely by men.

Changing from boots into slippers, Sandrine remembered with some dismay that her husband’s name wasn’t Randy at all; it was Mike. Said husband was sitting at the table working on the crossword puzzle. He looked up and measured her with a lingering elevator glance from head to toe and toe to head. He didn’t say a word but gave her the slightest of nods, after which he got up and put on the kettle for tea. When it was done they sat at the table and drank it.

Watching him work on his crossword she knew with a dead certainty he wasn’t called Mike—not Mike nor Randy, either. She wished he would speak and give away his name. How could she forget such a thing? It wasn’t as if she was eighty-two and had dementia. She was a young woman, thirty-four, in possession of a nice house in a small Ontario town and two beautiful small children who were away for the weekend, visiting their paternal grandmother two towns over.

She also had an unusually attractive husband whose name she’d forgotten. How could that be? She knew he’d been grating on her nerves lately, to the point where she’d been indulging in escape fantasies. Was forgetting his name some kind of karmic retribution for her unkind thoughts? Sandrine did a quick mental check: had she been in a car accident or recently suffered some other serious bump to her head? Was her aphasia caused by a concussion? Alas, none of these seemed true. She simply didn’t know.

Just as strangely and suddenly as her husband’s name had fled, Sandrine saw in her mind’s eye diagonals of green lozenges printed onto the back of the upholstery of the seat in front of her. It was a childhood memory. She’d been on the train with her father in North Africa. She didn’t think of the trip often and wondered why the memory was chasing her now, taking over, hanging on, not giving up. Looking out the window at the purple-black watchman hollyhocks guarding the vegetable beds, Sandrine wondered whether she would ever remember the trip again. Memory was a strange and fickle thing. She should make a note before the image fled, perhaps on the back of the phone bill that sat on the kitchen table, with its varnished veneer top and white lacquered legs.

Sandrine looked at her husband and smiled; he was so gorgeous it was hard not to. He smiled back and bent over his crossword as if he welcomed the silence. That’s what being married for a long time got you: the possibility of making and drinking tea all without needing to speak. Sandrine figured it for a good thing, most days.

She remembered camels she’d seen, slurping out of buckets at an oasis near Djerba. At some point her father had gotten off to go on an important visit alone, and the train had sped on through the night without him. Sandrine remembered sitting alone in her seat, trying to converse with strangers in languages she didn’t know well, wishing for blankets, more money, apples, friends, all of the above. In the end she’d fallen asleep counting lozenges, noticing their patterns, how they repeated. She’d written in her journal, but not about pomegranates or camels or the magical train ride itself. Instead she’d described the strange upholstery on the back of the seat in front of her. Sandrine had been so young at the time, a child really, thirteen or so, scribbling in a notebook that might still be in a carton in the attic. If she saw it, would she even recognize the book? Why was she thinking of it now?

She’d learned that often enough the timing and content of certain thoughts had significance. Djerba, the Island of Dreams, was in Tunisia, a country she had visited at thirteen with her father. He had wanted her to see the place of her birth and after her mother had died had used part of the insurance money to pay for the trip. Had their train really crossed the old Roman causeway to Djerba, or had they taken a bus or taxi for this last leg of the journey? It was all so long ago she wasn’t sure. Maybe the train had been a dream train, just as Djerba had been Ulysses’s Isle of the Lotus Eaters.

How could Sandrine even know such obscure literary trivia? Maybe, sitting on the train, she’d read a tourist brochure whose useless facts were now emerging from her subconscious like flotsam escaped from lengthy entrapment beneath the waves. Maybe some kind of mischievous metaphysical imp had taken up residence in her brain, excising important data, such as her husband’s name, and replacing them with dreamy poetic childhood memories whose relevance, if any, she couldn’t fathom. At least not now, not yet.

Was it even a real memory? And if false memories weren’t inserted by evil therapists and hypnotists, as often alleged, where in fact did they come from? Anyway, evil therapists usually inserted memories of childhood abuse, and the train memory, while dripping with anxious feelings of abandonment, wasn’t about abuse.

Sandrine felt tempted to haul a stepladder into the bedroom and unfold it under the trapdoor. She’d climb to the top step, tea in hand. It was the kind of minor eccentricity she liked to indulge in. She told people she was practising for menopause. She’d even walked the streets of her village carrying a coffee mug, and not the stainless travel kind but a proper ceramic mug with daisies and ewes on it.