The Marzipan Fruit Basket Read online

  THE MARZIPAN FRUIT BASKET

  Copyright © 2017 Lucy E. M. Black

  Except for the use of short passages for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced, in part or in whole, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanically, including photocopying, recording, or any information or storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Collective Agency (Access Copyright).

  We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

  Cover design: Val Fullard

  eBook: tikaebooks.com

  The Marzipan Fruit Basket is a work of fiction. All the characters and situations portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Black, Lucy E. M., 1957-, author

  The marzipan fruit basket / short stories by Lucy E.M. Black.

  (Inanna poetry & fiction series)

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77133-377-1 (softcover). -- ISBN 978-1-77133-378-8 (epub).

  -- ISBN 978-1-77133-379-5 (Kindle). -- ISBN 978-1-77133-380-1 (pdf)

  I. Title. II. Series: Inanna poetry and fiction series

  PS8603.L2555M37 2017 C813’.6 C2017-900311-9

  C2017-900312-7

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Inanna Publications and Education Inc.

  210 Founders College, York University

  4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3 Canada

  Telephone: (416) 736-5356 Fax (416) 736-5765

  Email: [email protected] Website: www.inanna.ca

  THE MARZIPAN FRUIT BASKET

  stories by

  Lucy E. M. Black

  INANNA PUBLICATIONS AND EDUCATION INC.

  TORONTO, CANADA

  For Michael and Andrew

  Table of Contents

  Silver

  Local Woman Missing

  South End

  School Days

  Maid of Honour

  The Monkey House

  The Wages of Sin

  A Love Story

  A Hawk in Winter

  Oliver Hambley

  Blue Eyes

  The Yellow House

  Blue Mountain

  The Shoe Tree

  The Whale Watcher

  Gridlock

  Roadside

  Mrs. Harris

  Romaine Hearts

  The Canadian Shield

  Creamers

  Suzette’s Garden

  The Marzipan Fruit Basket

  Garden Story

  Acknowledgements

  Silver

  SILVER HAS A SWEET VOICE, delicate features, and dainty hands that sweep the air. Her dark hair is usually pulled up in a tight knot, and she walks upright with extended neck and carefully turned-out feet. Years of pliés and sweat at the barre have shaped her. She was named after the birch trees at the edge of the woods. People assumed that she was named Silver for her soft lyrical voice, but the name came before we heard the music in her.

  On her fifth birthday, Gran bought her a ballet dress. It had several layers of tulle sewn onto a lycra body and a row of tiny sequins that ran along the shoulder straps and neckline. Mother helped her pull it on and adjusted the delicate fabric around her pudgy waist. “Now you must learn to tip toe,” said Gran, “and when you can do that, I will pay for ballet lessons.”

  Father worked at the mine. He stayed with us for ten years before it shut down. I like to think that he wanted us to travel with him and to be a part of his new life, but I do not know if that is true. I remember him kneeling down and saying that he would always love us, and I remember the smell of his Old Spice. Mother did not come outside to see him leave. She cleaned the house when he was gone.

  Silver is only sixteen and she is missing. When I look at her picture, I imagine that I still see the mark of her boyfriend’s fingers. He is often rough with her. Once, when she was showering, I glimpsed shadowed bruises in green and yellow along the inside of her legs and was sickened by the sight of them. We warned her about Danny’s temper, but she was in love. “It’s only when he’s depressed,” she said, “when he feels that he’s not getting anywhere.”

  We learned that Danny had quit Carleton’s, where his job was to feed bark-covered logs through a ripsaw. He left town with his guitar and a knapsack the day before Silver disappeared. We were hopeful that she had gone after him. Danny O’Connell is in his twenties and works gigs at local bars crooning old Gordon Lightfoot songs. He can’t hit the high notes, but it doesn’t seem to matter much to the crowd. He looks great with dark shoulder-length hair, black jeans, a close-fitting shirt, and tight little ass. The audience always goes nuts, especially when they’ve had a few drinks. Their applause feeds his fantasies.

  I waken from my sleep, damp and frightened. In my dream, the soft green calls me, and I begin, bare-footed, to step through a field. The clover resists the crushing feel of me, and I am sprung weightless above it, where I hover in the calm. The breezes gather to embrace me, and I am pushed forward gently, my arms stretched out to the dark sky. I am drawn to a thicket of bush where the shadows pull me further into the cool blackness. I am coming for you, I call. I am waiting, is carried back to me in the wind, and, in a rush of emotion, I start awake, filled with a heaviness that bears the loss and the grieving of her.

  The police searched our homes and buildings. While they knocked on doors and poked through the secrets of our poverty, the men stalked the woods in organized sweeps. They said that the car would make locating her easy. She was last seen in a bar near the highway. It’s a run-down shack that sells weed from the back door. I can’t imagine why Silver would go there. The bartender said she came in with a townie and that they sat in the corner until three in the morning when he turned off the lights and left. He said Silver looked wasted and was slumped way down in the booth. He thought she would sleep it off and that he would find her there in the morning. It happens sometimes.

  A few of the regulars said that the townie drove a tan pick-up with a ram’s head on the hood. They all said the truck looked pretty new and had a light bar on the roof and an old spotlight on the driver’s side. The kind of stuff that assholes use to jack deer. He was in his thirties and slung his arm around Silver like they were an item. We asked the police to run license numbers for tan Dodge trucks, but they said there wasn’t enough to go on.

  A week after she went missing, the police found the car. It was burned out, but they could still read the VIN. It was off the highway on a stub road, about two hours from home. It was burned too badly for them to say if it had broken down or run out of gas. We waited for the rest. “Nobody inside,” was what they said. “No signs of a body.” My chest hurt from having held my breath.

  After that I spoke to Gran. I told her about my dream and about floating through the woods until I heard Silver’s voice. She said it must be a sign and that our connection was so strong that Silver was summoning me. I borrowed some cash and a van and drove to the city.

  I camped in the first hotel room for three days. Each morning I rose, showered in the rust-stained cubicle, and drank bad coffee made with hot tap water and a jar of instant. In the evenings, I walked the entertainment strip hoping for a glimpse of her. I went to th
e ballet studio and talked with her teachers and other dancers. Everyone said she would be found if she wanted to be found. Runaways are common.

  I had the dream again last night but did not hear my sister’s voice. When I phoned home, my mother cried. She is afraid that we will both become lost. She told me that she heard an owl hooting in the night, a sign of death. I promised to find Silver, and I promised to return with her soon. When I hung up the phone, I was filled with shame because I felt inadequate for the task.

  I didn’t have a plan, only a strong sense that I must move quickly to find her. I drove west, stopping only to use the rest stations briefly and to sleep in the van. Early this morning, I arrived in Kitwanga and pulled over to look at the mountain peaks. The season is changing. The greens have dulled since I left home and taken on a tired brown. The morning air was cold, and I had to turn on the window defroster. A pair of osprey circled overhead, and I squinted to look at them. Another warning sign. Instinctively, I locked the doors, breathing quickly, my stomach heaving, and started to drive again, far too fast at first, fishtailing away from the gravel shoulder.

  I have tried hard to find Danny. First, I believed that he was still on the road, chasing his dreams, and then that he had found work in another saw mill. I imagined him bending over a log somewhere, with gloved hands, whistling to himself while the blade spins hungrily, spewing chewed bits of wood into the air. He is coated in a dusting of wet wood, with the cavities in his nostrils lightly powdered. His eyelashes blink repeatedly to remove fine residue. There is a streak of sweat down his back, building a light orange strip of damp sawdust. His jagged fingernails are blackened from the sharp edges of bark ripping at them through his sodden gloves. But then I imagine him greased and oiled for a show somewhere, his hair tied back in a sleek ponytail, his jeans pressed and waiting for him to struggle into.

  It is Silver that I can’t see. Is she in a hotel room somewhere waiting for him to return, or is she curled in a small ball sleeping securely, her tummy pumping air in a child-like rhythm? Are they together, or is someone else keeping her from us? These thoughts come to me and I am filled with panic. I stop driving and get out and kneel at the side of the road. I gather a handful of earth and inhale its fragrance. It is dry like the season. There is no promise of life in this soil, just the whiff of decay. I remain kneeling until a large truck passes. Embarrassed, I stand up quickly, brushing the dust from my knees.

  Local Woman Missing

  THE HEADLINE IN THE LOCAL PAPER caught my attention. Local Woman Missing. Annie Prosser, thirty-eight, was last seen Friday night on Regional Road 59. Prosser is described as 5’8” with shoulder-length brown hair, wearing a purple jacket. I often noticed her striding out of the village early in the morning with a brown vinyl purse swinging by her side. I put down the newspaper and looked out my kitchen window. Miles of rich, rolling farmland spread in every direction. I am safe here in the openness and light.

  Ladybug! Ladybug! Fly away home. We recited this as children when we saw a ladybug, and then we’d puff air on it to help with its flight. There were little ladybugs stitched inside the label of my underwear as a child. “Show me the ladybug,” he’d say, pulling me close. “I want to see the ladybugs.”

  Ashdon has been my home for six years. We moved from the city. My husband’s job in international finance allowed him to work largely from home. The house was a ruin, far worse than we had been led to believe by either the agent or the home inspector. The mice, chipmunks, raccoons, and bats were unhappy with our arrival, and we spent several months establishing ourselves as the dominant species. All of the money we had set aside for special projects was quickly absorbed by the structural work. Groups of contractors moved in when we did. Buckets of tools and stacks of materials were deposited in all of the rooms that I had tidied, in what turned out to be a futile attempt to carve out a small, calm, living space.

  And then, unexpectedly, my husband announced that he found himself, “out of love” with me. He blurted this out at breakfast. While he finished eating, I went to our newly painted bedroom and packed him a suitcase. I wasn’t angry, particularly. I was mostly full of wondering. And so he left, and I, having seen the house at its most vulnerable, felt obliged to stay and finish alone what we had started together.

  My father’s voice: you are so stupid and so ugly, it’s no wonder he left you.

  I was in our village gas station/post-office/convenience store last week when I saw that someone had tacked up a picture of Annie. “She was young then,” said Millie, “married with a real nice little boy. They had a house in Ramsey. He must be seventeen by now. The boy. You have no idea’r,” continued Millie, “how her mother suffered. The woman ought to be given a medal. I couldn’t do it,” she declared. She nodded at me for emphasis, her chin tilting up and down, like a small glass woodpecker I once had that bobbed to drink from the edge of a cup. I stood there and waited, knowing that if I were patient she would fill the space between us with story. Millie leaned across the counter and began.

  “Lydia Prosser was teachering in the city. Taught in one of them schools with foreigners and the like. She got herself mixed up with a fella’ who come from family with coin and they didn’t hold no truck with her. And so Lydia and him came here and didn’t he just up and die before the baby was born. Well then, his family won’t have no never-mind with the girl and she’s all by herself, and the proud thing just about froze herself to death the first winter. That’s how come it be that her daughter, Annie, came out as strange as ever. Always running after a puff of cloud or a bit of wind, and the fellas hangin’ around her like moths to a flame, and Lydia not knowing how to keep her safe. Finally, one day, Doc Webb says as he’s heard that there’s a place in the city that can help with such a child, and so Lydia takes her there and then they puts electricity to her head. She comes home a few months later, calm as a dove but with no more sparkle, and she marries a Culham, has a boy, and then goes all strange again.” Millie pulled away from me to eye the effect.

  “Yes,” I said, “it’s very sad.”

  “Men have urges,” my mother had once said by way of explanation. “They can’t help themselves. You must learn not to provoke him.” But I would not learn. I fought every touch. I hid from him when he called, and I cursed him when he began to scratch his calloused fingers along my bare arms and legs.

  I was in the front garden one afternoon when Earl drove by in his pick-up and waved at me. Earl had been kind, doing all sorts of useful repairs when things broke or simply stopped working. All he would ever take for his trouble was a cup of coffee and a piece of pie. Even when I said there was no rush, and that I didn’t want to take him out of his way, he’d trundle over after milking “the girls.” Hands in his overall pockets, he’d nod at me and say, “Thought I’d see what was what.” When he was done his small chore, he would say, “Well, that’s all right for now then,” and stand there awkwardly, waiting for me to offer the exchange.

  Alone, in the quiet, I can sometimes feel myself cringing with the recollection of his voice and the violence of his hands.

  Days later, I saw a small dark object ahead of me in the gloaming. Perhaps an animal or a piece of debris. I slowed the Audi, braking tentatively. As I drew near, I saw that it was a small huddled figure. I stopped my car and put on the hazards. She turned to look at me when I opened my door.

  “My bag is empty,” she said. “They told me to wait for more.”

  Don’t wait. Hide. Disappear. For God’s sake, don’t draw attention to yourself.

  “Who told you that, Annie?” I asked. Speaking quietly, standing far away so as not to frighten her. “Who told you?”

  “Fuck you, you cock-sucking whore, you son-of-a-bitch fuck-headed old bag.”

  I moved further back and waited.

  “You have no appointment,” Annie continued, “and therefore the judge requires you in accordance with a marriage from which point it might
be possible.”

  “I can take you home now,” I offered, “to your mother.”

  “I’m marled,” she responded, “and the sky is turning again.”

  “Please come,” I encouraged, “I’ll get you a nice cup of tea.”

  “I only take raisins, you see. They told me that,” she answered.

  She was jittery in the car, fidgeting with the window controls and pulling at the seatbelt. It was a short drive to the Prosser house. I turned into the lane, and Annie jumped out, leaving the door ajar. I put the car in park and got out to shut her door. By the time I had done so, she had run off, disappearing behind one of the outbuildings.

  I drove to the cemetery months after my father’s death and touched the letters of our shared name on the cold stone. Then I cried. But it was with sheer relief.

  I walked to the side door and knocked loudly. Old farm equipment was discarded in the yard, and the remnants of a rusted stove and ringer washing machine were nearby. Mrs. Prosser came to the door wearing a thin cotton housedress and a flowered apron. Her grey hair was loose around her face and shoulders. Most of the local matrons wore their hair cut short, barbered and permed, or pulled tightly into unforgiving little buns. “Yes’m,” she said by way of greeting.

  “Mrs. Prosser,” I began, “I picked up Annie. She ran over there.” I pointed between the large banked barn and the drive shed.

  “Thankee, then,” she replied, “I best be after her.”

  I stepped back from the door, expecting her to come outside and to join me, but she stepped backwards instead. Into the darkness. I stood there stupidly for a moment before leaving.

  My father shadows me. Taunting and criticizing. When my husband left, and when the contractors finished, I was alone in a big, empty house. And his voice found me there. Whispering behind the walls.

  South End