Kathleen Winter - Annabel

Joan said, “I can’t remember her name in the movie, but her real name’s Bo Derek.”

“I don’t see how anyone can go to see movies in that ratty old cinema in Goose Bay,” Jacinta said. “Half the time they put the last reel on first or the projector breaks down altogether.”

Eliza said, “You know what really pisses me off about that movie?”

“Um,” said Joan, “could it be the fact that the only thing that happens in it is they play Ravel’s Bolero ninety-nine times and the women have no personality, just a number given to them by men like prize pigs at a county fair?” She took a swig of her Oban.

Jacinta said, “I want to ask you something.” The third glass of wine was for her the magic glass. At a Christmas party or an evening out with other families, she had two glasses. The third glass was the glass that floated her above. She did not have that glass as a rule, but this was not a night when the rule applied. “I know you’re having sex with your husband again,” she said to Eliza. “I know all about the leopard-skin boots and the Valium. What I want to know is you, Joan, you’re not on Valium? You’re not on anything that artificially enhances your sex drive?”

“My what?”

“I just want to know if anyone besides me here looks at an erect penis as a ludicrous object all of a sudden.”

Joan looked at Jacinta as if she were finally seeing the light.

“I mean, I have no problem with Treadway. As you know, he is a good man.”

“Yeah, he’s that,” Joan said.

“He’s a really good man. I figure if I can’t get along with him, I might as well go crawl off by myself into a little hole somewhere.”

“But you don’t want to have sex with him.”

“It’s menopause, right? I mean, one month I was ‘Hello Mister Penis, how are you tonight, happy to see you in all your cheery Mister Penisness. Good job, Mister Penis, yes, I like you.’ Then the next month, ‘Whoa there, bucko, you most ludicrous of creatures, what in the name of God do you think you’re trying to do? Go near my vagina? Get in it? Why would you want to do that? Oh, most ridiculous idea.’ If it wouldn’t have mortified Treadway I’d have burst out laughing.”

“Valium will fix all that.”

Joan settled into the cushion with the needlepoint windmill on it. “I didn’t need menopause. One night when I was twenty I looked at Harold and his cock was a nose, his nipples were eyes, and his little bush of hair was a woolly moustache.”

Eliza spit pina colada on the floor. Harold walked around Croydon Harbour a neat little man. If you had to explain to an alien what a human man was like, if you wanted the straightest, neatest definition, you might pick Harold Martin as your example.

“From October to July,” Joan said, “he never takes his insulation off.” She had explained to them that Harold had made himself an undergarment out of house insulation, the silver kind that has a layer of bubble wrap between two layers of foil. Harold tied this around his torso with Velcro. “So the effect is enhanced.”

“I don’t mean to ridicule my husband,” Jacinta said. “I’m just sorry that I seem to have gone through a gate and he’s still on the other side.”

“What’s on your side?” Joan asked.

“I’m hanging around the gate looking back at my husband, waiting for him to even see the gate. He just thinks it’s another part of the fence.”

“Don’t you go feeling sorry for him,” Joan said. “You think he’s puttering around there in the dandelions in the same old field, but he’s not. You think he can’t see where you are, but he can. He can see just fine. He just isn’t talking about it. Rest assured, though, that if you passed away tomorrow, Treadway would suddenly become the liveliest man in Croydon Harbour. You would look down from your new home and be amazed. You’d say, ‘How come he wasn’t like that when I was with him?’ He would suddenly become everything you’ve wished him to be for years.”

“Why do you think that?”

“He would lose ten pounds. He would start eating vegetables. He would go to the Garden Club and offer to plant Persian rose bushes by the boardwalk. You’d want to descend right back down from heaven and go to bed with him on the spot.”

By the time Treadway knocked on Eliza Goudie’s door, Joan and Eliza had forgotten what a husband looked like. They had drunk so much that the sight of Treadway on the doorstep puzzled them. An alien creature had found its way to the house. Only Jacinta recognized him, and he knew, when he saw her, he did not want her to accompany him to the hospital in that state.

“I have to go in to Goose Bay, on an errand. In case you went home and found me not there. I didn’t want you to worry.”

“What errand?”

“Valves for my compressor.” She was in no condition to hear about Wayne. Treadway did not want to drive over the wilderness road to Goose Bay with a hysterical woman in the truck. So he lied. “Maynard White has them and I need them before I go into the bush.”

“What about Wayne?”

“Wayne is at a sleepover.”

“Where?”

“He’s at a sleepover with Roland Shiwack’s kid.” The other two women were making a racket in the living room. They had recovered from the feeling that a husband on the doorstep had elicited and were listing habits their own husbands had not revealed until after a few years of marriage.

“Harold refuses to eat chicken,” Joan said, “because he says they pee through their skin.”

“Pee?”

“He says their skin is constantly bathed in pee and he doesn’t see how anyone can eat it. He says if you watch the back end of a chicken you’ll see chicken shit only.”

“Is everything all right?” Jacinta asked Treadway. Orion’s Dog Star hung above his shoulder, and she remembered she loved him, and he did not look his ordinary self. He looked as if he wanted to say something no one in the world but herself could understand.

“My husband,” said Eliza in the distance, “is a connoisseur of his own farts.”

“What do you mean?” Joan asked.

“Everything’s fine,” Treadway said. “If you go home, watch your step. There’s not much of a moon.”

“I might stay here.”

“Better do that, then.” And he gave Jacinta a formal little hug.

“Your coat is damp.”

“It’s only a bit of night dampness.” Treadway left her in the lit-up doorway and climbed into his truck.

The northern lights were putting on a show of pink along with the turquoise and silver, which was unusual, and normally Treadway would have stopped the truck and got out on the side of the road. His parents, and his grandparents, had respected the mystery of those lights in a way people did not do now. The elders looked at them the way English children once lay in fields and picked dreams out of clouds. Sounds had come from the sky then. Only the old people heard them now. Treadway, though twenty years younger than most of the good listeners, had heard the moaning song. But he did not hear it tonight. In his childhood he had broken a leg in three places, and his mother had taken him to Goose Bay, and the anesthetic had been too strong. He had not woken at the right time. The doctors had told his mother this was all right. They had sent her home to wait for news. When she got home, Treadway’s father asked her where Treadway was, and when she said, “I left him at the hospital,” his father had driven his truck over two rivers after midnight instead of waiting for the morning ferry, and had brought Treadway home and laid him in a cot by the stove. Whenever Treadway heard his father tell that story, it always ended with “I’ll never know how she could leave him like that.”