Canada: A Novel Part 17

Along the way I tell them if not the facts, at least some of the lessons of my long life: that to encounter me now at age sixty-six is to be unable to imagine me at fifteen (which will be true of them); and not to hunt too hard for hidden or opposite meanings-even in the books they read-but to look as much as possible straight at the things they can see in broad daylight. In the process of articulating to yourself the things you see, you'll always pretty well make sense and learn to accept the world.

It may not seem precisely natural to them to do this. One of them will often say, "I don't see what this has to do with us." I say back, "Does everything have to be about you? Can you not project yourself outside yourself? Can you not take on another's life for your own benefit?" It's then that I'm tempted to tell them about my young life in its entirety; to tell them teaching is a gesture of serial non-abandonment (of them), the vocation of a boy who loved school. I always feel I have a lot to teach them and not much time-a bad sign. Retirement comes for me at a good moment.

It's well and long accepted that I'm American, though I've been naturalized and have held a pa.s.sport for thirty-five years. I decades ago married a Canadian girl, fresh from college in Manitoba. I own my house on Monmouth Street in Windsor, Ontario, have taught English at the Walkerville Collegiate Inst.i.tute since 1981. My colleagues are polite about my forsaken Americanness. Occasionally someone asks if I don't long to "go back." I say, Not at all. It's right there across the river. I can see it. They seem both supportive of my choices (Canadians think of themselves as natural accepters, tolerators, understanders) but also are impatient nearly to the point of resentment that I even had to make a choice. My students, who are seventeen and eighteen, are generally amused by me. They tell me I talk "like a Yank," even though I don't, and tell them there's no difference. I tell them it's not hard to be a Canadian. Kenyans and Indians and Germans do it with ease. And I had so little training to be American anyway. They want to know if I was a draft dodger long ago. (Why they even know about that, I can't fathom, since history is not what they study.) I tell them I was a "Canadian conscript," and Canada saved me from a fate worse than death-which they understand to mean America. Sometimes they jokingly ask me if I changed my name. I a.s.sure them I did not. Impersonation and deception, I tell them, are the great themes of American literature. But in Canada not so much.

After a while I don't chime in anymore. Canada did not save me; I tell them it did only because they want it to be true. If my parents hadn't done what they did, if they'd survived as parents, my sister and I would've both gone along to fine American lives and been happy. They simply didn't, so we didn't.

Over the years my wife and I have taken an occasional vacation "down below." We have no children and represent, in a sense, the end of our respective lines. So we've gone only where we've wanted: skipping Orlando and Orange County and Yellowstone, tending instead toward the significant historical and cultural sites-Chautauqua, the Pettus Bridge, Concord, and D.C., which Clare considers "a bit much," but I consider to be fine. I've enrolled in summer inst.i.tutes taught by Harvard professors, visited the Mayo Clinic once, and we've often driven down-and-through on our trips back to Manitoba.

I have never been back to Great Falls, but have been told it's a friendlier town-still a town, not a city-much better than when we lived there in 1960 and I was whisked away forever. None of that-taking me over the border-could happen now, since the towers, and with the border being sealed. It is a long time ago. My parents a.s.sume an even smaller place in memory. I often remember Charley Quarters saying to me, as we sat in lawn chairs watching geese, that something "went out" of him when he drove back to Canada from the lower forty-eight. I feel the opposite. Something always feels at peace in me when I come back. If anything goes out, it's something I want to be out.

On a driving trip to Vancouver we did once stop in the town of Fort Royal, Saskatchewan. My wife knows everything about those days and is sympathetic and slightly curious, since I don't repeat the stories over and over. I told it once when we were young, a.s.suming she should know, and since then have not much revisited it.

Fort Royal itself was scarcely there. The drugstore, the empty library, the empty brick school-all gone. No trace. Two rows of empty buildings, a co-op gas station, a post office, the disused elevator. The train yard was in operation, but seemed smaller. Oddly, the abattoir (called, now, "Custom Prairie Meats") persisted. And the little Queen of Snows Hotel with a portable sign out front, saying GOOSE SHOOTERS: FALL'S COMING. BOOK YOUR HUNTS! The Leonard itself was among the missing-its s.p.a.ce at the edge of town disclosing no sign of it. It was summer-early July-and the harvest hadn't yet commenced. Most of the town residences were still there, on the short squared streets, many with the Maple Leaf flying-nonexistent fifty years ago. But there seemed to be no place for someone to work. Everyone drove, I supposed, to Swift Current or farther.

Partreau, which we later drove past, was altogether gone. Even the elevator husk. It was as if a great vengeful engine had come through and plowed it under and salted the earth. I drove us out into the wheat fields-the crop thick and undulant. The sky was high and clear blue, the hot wind gusting and dusty and dotted with snapping gra.s.shoppers. Hawks patrolled, lazing in the great warm dome or sitting sentry in a single tree, here and there. I didn't say so, but I drove us-to the extent memory could lead me-near to the place we buried the Americans. It's odd how a piece of ground can hold so little of its meaning; though that's lucky, since for it to do so would make places sacred but impenetrable, whereas they're otherwise neither. Instead, it all becomes part of our complex mind to which (if we're lucky) we can finally a.s.sent. The great fields of grain swayed and hissed and s.h.i.+fted colors and bent and lay back against the wind where we stopped our car. I got out and breathed in the rich odors of dust and wheat and something vaguely spoiled-a thin seam only. The Americans lay under their ground, as they would've by now, even had they lived on longer. I stood, hands in my trouser pockets, toes in the dust, and tried to make it all signify, be revelatory, as if I needed that. But I couldn't. So I walked back to the car, my wife waiting in the heat, watching me curiously. We turned back toward the west and the distant, invisible mountains and left that place forever, once again.

Chapter 69.

Last fall, before my sister died, I went to visit her in the Twin Cities. It is only an hour's flight from Detroit Metro, which we all use as if it were ours. I hadn't known she was there. In planning a party for my retirement, my students "looked me up" on the computer to find out what they could-something embarra.s.sing or touching; someone who might've been looking for me; an old girlfriend, an army buddy, a police warrant. You can't keep much a secret anymore (though I've done better than most). They found a "looking for" message "posted" on some site. It merely said, "Looking for a Dell Parsons. A teacher. Possibly living in Canada. His sister is ill and would like to be in contact. Time is a consideration. Bev Parsons." A phone number was given.

It was a powerful shock to me to see my father's name on the sheet of paper the students rather solemnly handed me, wanting me to know they'd had lighter-hearted intentions, but obviously understanding I should see this.

I had never seen my father again, or my mother, once they went away to prison. The day in the Great Falls jail was the last time. There were letters-one or two from Mildred-that found their way to me. One telling me, also shockingly, that my mother had committed suicide in the North Dakota prison for women. (I was by then at St. Paul's High School, in Winnipeg, and can't remember much of what I felt.) But there was never anything from him once his prison term was over-if he survived it. I concluded he must've felt I was better off wherever I was, and nothing could be gained by revisiting a life that was over long ago. Which I came to believe was true, though it was not that I forgot him. In a previous visit with Berner, in the town of Reno, Nevada, in 1978, she'd told me she believed she'd recognized our father in a service station casino in Jackpot, Nevada, perched on a stool, feeding quarters into a slot machine with what Berner said was a "Mexican girl" sitting beside him. He'd had a mustache. She admitted she sometimes confused this sighting with a man she'd seen in a bar in Baker, Oregon, and who had been alone. "But either way he was still handsome," she said. "I didn't speak to him." Berner was a drinker and such stories from her were not unusual.

But the thought that my father-at age ninety-could be at my sister's side, seeing her through a bad time, and seeking me out in the world to ask a.s.sistance, was tantamount, and surprisingly, to feeling my whole life was not only under a.s.sault but in jeopardy of never even having been lived. They were all still there, waiting for me, numinous, obstinate, staring, unerasable. It made me realize how much I'd wanted to erase them, how much my happiness was pinioned to their being gone.

Berner and I had seen each other only three times in the fifty years. These elliptical family relations are possibly more typical in America. I can't generalize about Canada and Canadians-feeling that I am barely one of them. But we saw a lot of my wife's parents before they died. We still see a good deal of her sister, in Barrie. Canadians and Americans, however, are alike in so many ways, it's probably an unfair distinction to insist on.

I'd always felt I should see more of my sister, and if you'd asked me I'd have said I was that kind of brother. But it simply hadn't happened. Her life turned out to be different from mine. I have had one wife and been a high school teacher and sponsor of chess clubs through my entire working years. Berner had had at least three husbands and unfortunately seemed able to please herself only on the margins of conventional life. I lost track of most of it. She was a hippie until that played out. Then the wife of a policeman, who treated her badly. Then a failed late-in-life college student. Then a waitress in a casino. Then a waitress in a restaurant. Then a nurse's a.s.sistant in a hospice. Another husband was a motorcycle mechanic in Gra.s.s Valley, California. No children were involved. And there was more that made her life seem not a good one, though she never said that.

When we visited her in Reno, she was with a man named Wynne Reuther, who said he was related to Walter Reuther. They were both drunk. We ate dinner in a rathskeller place at a casino. Berner, whose freckled skin was puffy and her flat facial features exaggerated, had acquired a sneering, raspy laugh that revealed too much of her tongue. Her narrow gray-green eyes were hawkish and cold. She treated my wife sarcastically and didn't seem to remember or to take in that we were Canadians. She possessed the same wrangling strangeness that always fascinated me-her "hauteur" our father called it. When we were children, we were always two sides of one coin. But now, at dinner, talking noisily over this Reuther fellow, she seemed to me just another extra human being, in spite of mannerisms and hand gestures and an occasional ghostly "set" to her features that I recognized. Eventually she said that I-not Clare-talked like a Canadian. Which didn't bother me. She said Canada was "nondescript," which annoyed Clare. She finally said to me that I'd left my country behind to fend for itself. After that I had a displaced argument with Wynne Reuther-something about Iran-which cut the evening short. The last thing Berner said to me, as we stood in the dark, sweltering, desert car park-Interstate 80 full with its burden of trucks banging above us in the orange sodium lights and the bright casino glow-was: "You gave up a lot. I just hope you know that." She knew nothing about what she was saying. She'd drunk too much and was bitter about the "subst.i.tute life" she'd led instead of the better one she should've led if it had all worked out properly-our parents, etc. Of course, she was right. I had given up a great deal, as Mildred told me I'd need to. Only I was satisfied about it and about what I'd gotten in return. "It's so odd what makes people different," Clare said, almost whimsically, when we were in the car and all of that was behind us. "Nature doesn't rhyme her children," I said, happy to remember the line of Emerson's, and to have a place for it to fit perfectly. Though what I felt that night was impermanent, incomplete, and sad. I thought it was possible I'd never see Berner again.

I arranged to meet her at the Comfort Inn that is by the huge mall near the airport in the Twin Cities. There was a polite disagreement on the phone over who would come to see who, and once that was settled, whether I would drive to her house in a rental car or she would drive to get me.

"I have to be able to go home when I get tired," she said on the line to Windsor, her voice sounding worn but positive-as if I wouldn't be able to take her home when she was ready. She had a small, harsh cough and sounded hoa.r.s.e. "I'm doing my chemo on Tuesdays," she said, "so I wear out fast."

"Is Dad there?" I said. "Bev Parsons" was st.i.tched into my brain. I didn't want to see him. But if he was alive and looking after her, I didn't very well see how I could deny it.

"Dad?" Berner sounded incredulous. "Our dad?"

"Bev Parsons," I said.

"Oh, for goodness sake," she said. "I forgot. No. I finally decided to jettison my old awful name. Berner." She said it ruefully. "All those years with that being me. Like bad luck. His name seemed better for me. I always envied it. I could keep my luggage-if I had any."

"I always liked your name," I said. "I thought it was distinctive."

"Good. Then you take it. It's unoccupied. I'll will it to you." She laughed again.

"How sick are you?" Suddenly, because of the telephone, and not being face-to-face, it was as if we were not young, but adults who could ask such questions. Twins of another, better kind.

"Oh my," she said. "I'm just taking chemo for something to do. I've got two months. Maybe. A lymphoma you wouldn't want. Really." She breathed audibly into the receiver. A sigh. She'd always sighed, though never resignedly.

"I'm sorry," I said. And we were back being near strangers. Of course, I meant it.

"Well, me too," she said and seemed in good spirits. "The cure's all that really hurts. And the cure's not even a cure. You'd better come on, though. Okay? I want to see you. And give you something."

"Okay," I said. "I'll come next weekend."

"Are you still Mr. Teacher?" she asked.

"Still till June," I said. "Then I retire."

"I'll have to miss your graduation, I guess." She laughed the harsh sneering laugh I remembered from the last time, when she'd told me I'd given up a lot.

"She just wants to see if you'll come." Clare shook her head resolutely. She was helping me pack a small bag. I intended only to be there a day and a night. "And, of course, you will."

I said, "If your sister was sick and dying, you'd go." Our house on Monmouth Street sits beside a small park and has vestigial elms, front and side. Both were in clamorous gold display. It was October, the time you live for at our lat.i.tude.

"I would," she said, and patted me on my shoulder and kissed my cheek. "I love you," she added. "Whatever she wants, you give it to her."

"She doesn't want any more than my coming," I said. "She wants to give me something."

"We'll see," she said. My wife is a chartered accountant and tends to see the world beyond her small circle of intimates and close family as a dedicated negotiation, pro versus con, profit versus loss, give versus receive-though not evil versus good. These views have not left her cynical-only skeptical. In her heart she's generous. "You'll get whatever's coming to you, whatever it is," she said. "Tell her I send her warm wishes-if she remembers me."

"She does," I said. "She'll appreciate that. I'll tell her."

It was cold in Minneapolis, a city I have always liked from afar for what seems to be its down-to-size, polished and st.u.r.dy optimism. We occasionally routed ourselves through there on the way to Clare's mother's in Portage la Prairie, taking the ferry across the lake to Wisconsin.

I was outside the Comfort Inn in my overcoat, looking up to a few squads of hurrying southerly ducks, when Berner drove up in a dented blue Probe, rust adhesions scabbed around its wheel wells and across its hood and roof. She rolled down her window. "Hey, big boy. Got time for a quickie? A quickie's all I've got." She looked terrible. Her face, smiling up through the window, was mustard color. The puffiness from thirty years ago was gone, as was the girlish down on her jaw. Her eyes looked played out behind a pair of oversize red-frame gla.s.ses-the kind older women wear to look younger. She was thin-almost as when we'd been young. She looked like an elderly woman whose teeth were large for her mouth. Her flat face appeared to have fewer freckles because of her makeup. Her once frizzy hair was gray and spa.r.s.e.

"I just have to drive back by the house," she said, once we were going. "It's not far. I forgot my oxy-whatever. Then I thought we'd go to Apple-bee's. I'm comfortable there. You know?"

"Wonderful," I said. She wore a clear shunt taped on top of her right hand-for her chemo. Everything she did was requiring a large effort and difficulty-including seeing me. Her car was a jumble inside. A dirty green chenille bedspread covering the bucket seats. The radio was taken out. A strip of duct tape was patched over a gouge in the dashboard vinyl. The back seat held a tire and some jack equipment. Berner had on a long quilted purple coat that wasn't new, and white furry boots. She gave off a p.r.o.nounced hospital smell-rubbing alcohol and something sweet. She was clearly very sick, as she'd said.

"I'll take my pill once we've eaten." She was negotiating Sat.u.r.day morning surface-road traffic near the mall. "I'll have thirty good minutes. Then I'll have to get home. Get you back to the hotel. Or else I'll start driving backwards and upside down. I'm an addict now. I never was before. It's cured my allergies. That's pretty good." She smiled. "Did you recognize me? Yellow's my new fall shade. It's 'cause my liver's snafu'd. That's what's going to escort me out, I guess. It's supposedly okay."

"I recognized you," I said. I didn't wish to seem sober sided if she wasn't. "Is there anything I can do?"

"This." She leaned back in her seat as if something in her middle had bitten her. She breathed in deeply, then out deeply. "Unless you want to teach me math. I thought it'd be good to learn math again before I died. I used to be good at it, remember? It's all different now. Dying must make you thirst for knowledge. As well as other things." She smiled. "I've missed you. Sometimes."

"I remember," I said. "I've missed you."

"Of course, you have a memory. I can't seem to find mine." She turned and looked at me seriously as if I'd said something I hadn't. Her look was meant to represent warmth toward me. To welcome me and make me know she missed me. "I remember you, though," she said and raised her chin in a way that was like our father more than her. It was a gesture of mine, as well. I experienced a sudden pang of longing then-to be young, for all of life to have been a dream I would wake from on a train to Seattle.

"So you like being Bev?" I had not touched her yet, but I clumsily reached and patted her shoulder, which felt thin under her quilted coat.

She coughed harshly and fanned her face. "Oh, yes," she said and swallowed what she'd coughed up. "I've been Bev fifteen years. It's my normal. Poor ole Berner fell down under the bus someplace. Couldn't keep up with my pace."

"I like it," I said.

"Dad didn't do so good with Bev. I thought I'd give it a try. They were just kids, you know? Both of them."

"No, they weren't," I said, not expecting myself to speak to this so harshly. "They weren't at all. They were our parents. We were the kids."

"Okay. Touche," she said, driving. Her hands were red and raw looking. "Don't you say that? Touche? Touche ole?"

"Sometimes."

"Touched," Berner said, and nodded and smiled tolerantly. "I'm touched. I'm touched in the head. So are you. We're twins. The zygote doesn't forget."

"That's right," I said. "We are."

Berner's house was a newer white double-wide down a straight, narrow lane of other double-wides, most newer with neat, tiny yards and single saplings wired to the ground and sporty cars parked in front on the curbless hardtop, and TV dishes on all the roofs. Children were out on Sat.u.r.day morning. Enormous silver jets rose into the fall sky a mile north of us. Their engines made little noise as they disappeared.

Berner pulled into a paved drive. A small man stood at the end of the trailer, feeding lettuce leaves into a raised wire rabbit frame inside which several fat gray and white rabbits pressed forward into the little opening.

"There's the most patient white man in the world, and the world Scrabble champion. He's tending his flock." She opened her door out and encountered trouble moving her legs from under the steering wheel. "Just give us a little push, hon." Berner looked pained and was straining. "Hard to get me going once I'm stopped. I won't be a minute." She'd begun speaking with a soft southern accent as we got close to her house. "We're not married," she said back down inside the car. "But he's the best husband I never had. I had to get a good one once, right? He's shy." She stood up stiffly and looked toward the man, who was latching the pen door. He wore cowboy boots and jeans and a nylon windbreaker and the kind of bright red cap my students wore, but his was on straight. "I forgot something," she called out to him. He looked at her but didn't answer. "My fix," she said and with difficulty began walking toward the front steps to get her medicine.

Down the lane in the chilly suns.h.i.+ne, many of the other trailers, which were long-side-face-the-street, had American flags flying on aluminum poles in their yards-as if someone had sold everyone a flag. Berner's yard lacked its flag. Some lawns had paper placards in the gra.s.s advocating whatever the residents believed in. ABORTION KILLS. MARRIAGE IS A SACRAMENT. NO TAXES. It was all catching on in Canada-with the government: the nervous American intensity for something else. The inevitable drift northward of everything.

The small man in the red cap and boots stepped to a second rabbit cage and began feeding in more lettuce from a silver mixing bowl at his feet in the gra.s.s. His windbreaker had a Confederate flag st.i.tched to its back, and some lettering underneath that I couldn't read. He was shrunken and tough and angular and dried out-older than Berner by a lot. A religious person, long saved, I imagined, watching him through the winds.h.i.+eld's sunny glare. Somewhere would be a motorcycle. A giant TV. A bible. Everyone had stopped drinking years ago, and were now waiting. It's what happened to them, I thought. Ending here, this way. It had become my habit to champion my own course in life, as if mine could teach everyone something. It wasn't so admirable, since it couldn't. Least of all my sister, who'd taken her life into her own hands, and accepted it. I didn't know what to call her, I realized.

The small man closed the second pen and carefully latched it. He bent and picked up his silver bowl and looked at the car while he was leaning. Then he stood up and stared straight at the reflecting winds.h.i.+eld. Possibly he could see me in the seat, waiting for Berner-waiting for Bev. He raised the bowl in a gesture of greeting, smiled an agreeable smile I didn't expect. He turned and walked in a stiff, dignified way to the corner of the trailer and was gone. He didn't see me gesturing back. He didn't want to meet me. I understood perfectly well. I was late on the scene.

In the car headed to Applebee's, Berner seemed improved. She'd put on more makeup and exuded a cherry smell and had begun chewing gum. She'd brought back to the car a Cub Foods plastic grocery bag with-I guessed-whatever she planned to give me inside it.

She turned on the heater and informed me she was cold all the time, couldn't get warm to save her life. She scratched at the clear tape keeping the shunt fixed to the back of her hand and shook her head when I noticed it. She seemed to want to push her wide tongue out between her lips, which I took to be a manifestation of the drugs. She also spoke less in her southern accent now that we were away from the trailer. "He's from West Virginia," she said. She was thinking about the man who was not her husband, and being amused by him. Ray was his name. He was a dear. He knew everything about her and didn't care. He'd been in the U.S. Army a long time, but was retired. She'd met him in Reno and he'd moved her out to the Cities a decade ago. He'd had a brother here. The trailer was her almost wedding present. He raised the rabbits "for the table," and cried every time he had to harvest one. They went to a church. "Of course, I don't believe anything. I just go to humor him and to be nice. He knows I'm officially Jewish on our mother's side. Though I'm non-observant."

She said she'd become interested in China and its growing dominance; was worried about "illegals," taxes, 9/11, "the threat." She remembered Clare's name and that she was an accountant. She said she wished she could visit us and knew Windsor wasn't that far from the Cities. She said she and Ray had both been for Obama. "Why not? You know? Something different." She asked me if I'd voted for him. I told her I would've if they'd let Canadians vote. Which made her laugh, then cough, then say, "Okay. You're right. There's a good point. I forgot you left our country behind. I can't blame you." Once again, she knew nothing about my life, wouldn't have cared to at that point. She was working steadily to cling to some semblance of herself for me. All we had together were our parents-fifty years ago-and each other, brother and sister, which we were trying to make the most of, at least one morning's worth. She seemed, for that time we were in the car, to be able not to seem sick, not bitter that our lives had gone so askew and unfairly for her (now, especially). She seemed to locate an old self, to look at me with her former skepticism and love, which made me feel young and naive compared to her old and wise. I liked it. I was glad Clare hadn't come. Though it was not how I'd featured things. I'd thought of a trailer; but after that, a sick room with lowered lights, a TV without sound, a dresser top filled with medicines, oxygen, the haze and aroma of death all around. This was better. Under different, more promising circ.u.mstances we wouldn't have cared to spend a day together. It was death's lenience.

"You know"-we were turning into the Applebee's lot, crowded with Sat.u.r.day mall-goers in and out of big SUVs, and motorcycles and pickups-"I always tell myself, *Remember this. It may not be this way in six months.'"

"I'm not so different from you there," I said. "We're still the same age."

"But you don't know how many times that's turned out to be true. In my life? Six months has been a lifetime." She looked at me stonily, her jaw muscles working under her beige flesh, her tongue restless in her mouth.

"I do know," I said.

"Well," she said and sighed again the resigned way. Once when she'd sighed, it had always been with impatience. "I'm trying very hard to resist this gradual dying. It may not seem like it. But I am. I feel like"-she stared down at the keys in the ignition, reached one finger and gave them a pointless jingle-"I feel like, sometimes, my real life hasn't even started yet. This one hasn't been up to standard, you might say. Which is nothing you caused. I walked off down that street all by myself that summer. Remember?"

"I do," I said. "I remember it clearly." I did.

"Do you regret not having any kids?" She'd begun staring out at the traffic on the access road. A large bus pulled past, bound for the mall, its windows full of women's faces, all framed by short haircuts. She clicked off the engine and the heater. Outside the noise was m.u.f.fled but constant.

"No," I said. "I never thought about it. I guess I see enough kids."

"It's the end of the line, then," she said, triumphantly. "The Parsons line ends here in the Applebee's lot. Almost."

"Clare and I say the same thing."

"You feel like you've had a wonderful life? Now that I've told you about how I feel? It's okay to say you have. I'm glad." She turned her face toward me and for that instant showed no sign of strain, only relief. Her face would look that way to me forever.

"I accept it," I said. "I accept it all. I married the right girl."

"We all accept it. That's not an answer." Her dry lips wrinkled and she looked with displeasure back at the bus gone past. "What choice do we have?"

"Then, yes," I said. "I have had." Though I wasn't sure I thought that.

"I'm your big sister." She sniffed in mindfully. "You have to tell me the whole truth. Or I'll come back and haunt you." She smiled to herself, pulled up her door handle and began again to move her feet painfully out. "I can do it myself this time," she said. We stopped that talk then and never returned to it.

In Applebee's we sat by a big window that looked out on her rusted car, which was more battered than I'd thought, with its bent Minnesota license plate and its rear b.u.mper snapped off. No other cars in the lot looked like it.

Berner seemed jolly, recovered from our grave talk, as if this clamorous, TV-distracted, kitsch-cluttered jangle was just what she needed and knew its mission was to make the terminally ill forget their woes. She kept on her purple coat, which needed dry cleaning.

She took her gum out, wrapped it in a paper napkin corner, and set it on the window sill. She ordered a martini and encouraged me to, but said she couldn't drink it with her medication. She just liked seeing it in front of her, like the old days, all set to do its little magic. I ordered a gla.s.s of wine to make myself relax and to be in the spirit.

"Did I say," she said (she had the plastic grocery bag beside her in the booth), "that I'm not going to commit suicide? I forget what I told you. Chemicals is the s.h.i.+ts."

"You didn't mention that," I said. "I'm glad to hear it though." I held up my wine to toast her.

"One suicide's enough for a family of four," she said. We'd only been sixteen then, and in no position to take command of much. The site of our mother's resting place was one more thing I'd relinquished. "I'm not really fixated on them much," she said, letting one finger-on which was a tiny, badly faded tattoo of a cross-stroke the stem of her gla.s.s, as she perused the menu, which showed bright-color pictures of the things you could order. "Sometimes I think about them and their big robbery." (She emphasized the word.) "I have to laugh. All of us just spinning off like that. It was the event of our lives, wasn't it? A great big f.u.c.k-up, and everything piled on top." She squinted behind her gla.s.ses and leaned up on her elbows and stared at me to let me know precisely what it meant to her that she was on the way out of her troubles. I felt awful about her, and for her, and I couldn't do anything to fix anything.

"It leads you nowhere to think about it," I said, which was the minimal truth.

All the young waitresses had begun raucously singing "Happy Birthday to You"-to some elderly customer across the restaurant. Other customers had begun rhythmically clapping. The University of Minnesota football team was playing on twenty TVs. There had been occasional cheering, then groaning about that.

"No," Berner said. "It truly doesn't." She looked away from her martini, as if she'd just heard the singing and clapping. "It's a secret we share, isn't it? With the whole world. Letting things slip. It connects us up to the rest of humanity. That's my take." She smiled for no apparent reason. I remembered her writing to me as her life was commencing: We feel the same and see things the same. She'd already begun sharing the world then, whereas I hadn't. I'd been abandoned in it. I wondered if I was somehow deceiving her now, in some way that mattered. Was I giving to her my real, most genuine self? Was it true what I'd said about my life? I wanted not to deceive her. It was all I had to give her, and it had always been a preoccupation of mine-given my past, and that I'm a teacher, where you're always acting but trying not to. It's never clear, since we all have selves to choose among. "Maybe you have a hidden wild streak," she said. "And maybe I have a hidden regular one. A tame one." She'd let her mind stray onto some interior conversation we weren't exactly having.

"Probably," I said and sipped my wine, which was stale. "At least half of that's maybe true."

"Okay." She lowered her eyes. She'd caught herself straying off. Her brown-and-gray hair was thin in front and brushed severely back. She'd applied rouge when she'd gone inside her house. Her ears were pierced, but she was wearing no earrings. Her lobes were pale and softened. "And are you still the chess man?" she said and smiled at me to designate she was paying attention now.

"No," I said. "I teach it. I was never good at it."

She looked around suddenly as if our food was arriving. Her soup. My salad. Though it wasn't. "Speak of the devil," she said, and lifted the Cub Foods sack and set it on the table. "So." She sighed and took out of the sack a sheaf of white notebook pages that were dry and hole-punched and tied together with what looked like stiffened bits of shoelace that were a color not so distant from Berner's skin. "I didn't want to send this to you." She set her hands down on top of the pages to keep them close, then looked at me and smiled. "I didn't know if I'd like you. Or if you'd like me, and would even want it." She sighed again, this time very deeply, as if something had defeated her.

"What is it?" I asked. Faded, ink handwriting was on the top page.