When Alice Lay Down With Peter by Margaret Sweatman

Author:Margaret Sweatman [Sweatman, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-36598-9
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2002-10-21T16:00:00+00:00

I MISSED HELEN while she was on her travels, but I didn’t envy her. I like it here. Inland, where the river flows up the middle of the continent. The sun will skin you alive. And in winter, we are so thoroughly bereft of heat and light, we can know cold for what it is: the end of ourselves. A message from dead stars: There’s nothing out here, lucky for you, so cheer yourselves with one another. The days are as broad and free as the wings on the heron swinging over the slough. And come winter, the days will be as crisp and short and dark as an eighth note.

Eli and I received her belated postcards, which I would read to him, inconclusive things rather like the effusions of a lover who has already left you for somebody else. She began to use the word “dashing.”

“What?” asked Eli, peering at her script.

“She says Dover is dashing.”

In dismay, he looked again at the yellow photograph: boats, a castle. We received postcards from cafés on the Continent (she had learned to say “the Continent”), and from coffeehouses in London. From these scraps, we learned that it was really nice overseas. And she mentioned a lot of shoes. She was, it would appear, buying many pairs of shoes.

I wrote her back, c/o a postbox in London. The anonymity of her address was a kind of sanction for intimacy. It was awkward at first, when she’d recently left and I still hadn’t hung up the clothes in her room and I still adopted the mother’s postponement, the politely maternal attitude of waiting, my first letters to her full of questions (which she never answered) and bits of information that had been carefully chewed till everything came out all grey. “Is your coat warm enough?” “Do you like overcooked beef?”

Eli and I were parents in waiting, standing in a triangle with one side missing. For a time. And then, after several weeks, something shifted and we began to face each other. We had a marital affair. We ate at funny hours. Winter was as imperative as sleep. We were living off the remains of last year’s rodeo money.

From this romantic cocoon, I wrote letters that gradually grew more reflective, chronicles of hibernation, snoozing notes about love and life, very effective emetics, I’m sure. Helen became a steady white porch light on the other side of an impassable field. Our correspondence never corresponded, my confessions to her deflections. During the cold months, our worry over her was numbed by our snowed-in helplessness, the pleasing darkness. Which, of course, must come to an end.

We woke up in March. Helen was to board the Titanic in April. She’d walked a beach at Brighton, had luncheon in Piccadilly, shot ptarmigan at Dundee. It was her fate that her body would exceed her, like a social class, like an addiction or a disease.

I blamed her for enjoying the banality of the age, the blond, blue-eyed world in evening dress,

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