Visitors

It is one hundred years ago, give or take a few. Women move about candles differently. Men have ceremonial swords sometimes, or wear Panama hats. There are animal heads mounted to things, their inlaid crystal eyes bulging, and dark wood and dust which is either in fashion or isn’t. My sister has helped me remove my eyebrows, and each morning I replace them with dark lines in pencil. I drag the pencil down, pressing hard, one hard line. I am deciding my mood for the night. I decide on “tart.” Everything chimes and glows and overheats as things do not overheat any longer. The world is made of paper screens and could go up in flames at any moment, and does, often. We breathe in the smoke of the world, and it does not weaken our constitutions or give us asthma or any sort of fever. We stick our fingers into the ashes and draw moles onto our round white faces, a pair of French dolls.

We live in the townhouse of a wisp of an old aunt who is off in Rhode Island taking care of some unimaginably older, slighter auntlet. We have invited over some wax-haired boys from McGill University. They are studying Chosser and some old oily Greeks, and they will bring us liqueurs and creams and candy with combed hair and starchy shirts.

Now I have set out all the china and silver. Now we have called for some cold roast beef and salad, cheese, jellies. There is a whistling outside and the sound of starch crunching, and I know that our visitors have arrived.

The glasses glow green, and the cherries a lacquered red. Those gentile boys are here, Ruthie says, her fine, dark hair damp against her forehead. We each wear the sort of crochet set that you may still be able to find at the friperie if you are very young and very lucky. The whistling grows louder like a steaming kettle and I cannot raise my eyes to the frosty window, not before putting on the sleepy, moonbeamish smile I practiced earlier in the auntlessness of the day. The window is crisscrossed with icy lines and frames the scene below, the car all bent out of shape like a bad idea in the wastebasket, the boys wild-eyed and bloody. There’s been an accident, someone says.

I shuffle down the stairs with the realization that I couldn’t name any one of them. They’re so cute, though, even with the shock. Spoiled blond heads, cool thin-lipped smiles, downy mustaches and little glasses, now all cracked and useless. Through the door they are framed again like a war picture, one limping, the second sitting still, the third rattling on brandily about the ice and the sleet and the swerve. In the trembling hands of the one sitting still, a pink confection box tied with a brilliant ribbon, daubed with dark red fingerprints.

We usher them in, pour the cold white wine, and drink lots.

The food is laid out, the silverware all polished, and the boys are still stiff from their accident. We settle around the small table, sitting close, Ruthie and I remembering our manners and forgetting the drama of the car wreck. You must be starving, you poor things, we say. They sit, trying to mirror our languour, groping at the crystal glasses, knees knocking with mine under the table, and I watch as the put-on ease on the still one’s face twists into something else. The limping one turns to catch an instant of eye contact with the brandy-breathed one, taking a sniff. The conversation pauses.

A moment of haughty blond laughter. Ruthie and I straighten. The boys look at one another, still looking near-concussed. What is it? The limping one looks at me and says, the smell. The air, it’s thick. The courtier’s hands are perfumed with civet. They laugh, a pack of hyenas in silly broken glasses. The very uncleanly flux of a cat. More boy laughter.

Before their arrival we had doused ourselves in the aunt’s old European perfumes, musky and dark, resinous, smoke-coloured, animalic. We think we smell like a pair of silent film stars, so redolent the perfume fills the air with captions to speak for us. To them we smell like a couple alleycats in heat.

We laugh in shame, cheeks burning, and push the roast beef around, eyes cast down, and rush the meal along, both imagining the next swerve in the ice. Soon enough there we stand in the doorframe, Ruthie in her beaver coat, me still draped in someone’s stained old sports jacket, watching them, sloshing with wine, stagger and slip as they push their car up the ice and sleet of Sherbrooke.

Hannah Berger

The Whip-poor-will

Visitors

NightSinging