The Rowing Lesson Page 20

  I float in the bath, closing my eyes, my wild hair spreading like ink in the water, while you both stand at the door, watching. Ophelia, Ma whispers. That’s right, you say. Sent into the world to drive her father mad.

  Get thee to a nunnery! Off with your head! You catch me kissing Marius in the kitchen on top of the ironing table late on a Friday night, after the flicks. I’m sorry, Dr. Klein. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. The poor chap blushes so furiously he almost bursts into flame. At least he isn’t a rubbish like some of the other ones, the ones you won’t let me see, small town skollies with their half-smoked cigarettes and chipped teeth or the chap who paddled down the river at the Wilderness in a canoe, more than an hour of paddling just to see me, sweat on his bare chest, a signet ring gleaming on his left hand. You sent him packing and I spent hours and hours weeping big, salt tears which fell into my tomato soup like rain.

  Sometimes children eat the removed hair, which turns into a hairball, you tell Ma. I’m drifting to sleep on the swells and troughs of your voices. A Trichobezoar, you announce proudly, remembering a word you learned at least thirty years ago. No wonder she’s always complaining of a stomach ache! Bezoars can cause all kinds of complications, from constipation to loss of appetite, vomiting to severe abdominal pain. Ma loves it when you speak disease, viruses and ailments and symptoms pouring out of you, not to mention the stack of medical journals in the lav, with their photos of ulcerated legs, bulbous tumours and disfigured faces. She stops her knitting and asks, What’s the treatment?

  First you have to find the hairballs, either by doing a barium X-ray exam or a gastroscopy. Then you do a gastric lavage, a thorough washing out of the stomach. I can smell the grimace on your face, your sour down-twisted smile. Is she eating the hair on her head as well?

  Remember when she was two or four or six, Ma says, clucking over a dropped stitch. How she’d twirl curls around her fingers, playing with her hair endlessly. Perhaps that was a dress rehearsal for the terribly plucked brows, the scabs and the sores and the stomach aches? If it goes on, you say grimly, we should definitely look into it.

  You don’t wait longer than that night. You and Ma tiptoe into my room and creep towards me in the sleeping dark, an advance of the Shapeless Snuffling Night Terrors. I’m lost in the black cloud of hair on my pillow. You stand over me, watching my sullen mouth, tongue finally quiet, the swaddled baby you brought home from the nursing home suddenly grown immense. You have a small flashlight in your hand, the kind you used to look down sore throats. I lie very still as Ma runs her fingers through the dense cloud, searching for holes, bald spots. The moving circle of light from the flashlight turns my hair into a field of billowing grass and you are the field mouse darting between long stalks, trying to find a clearing. You don’t see my half-tickled smile as I moan and shift, sinking under the mountain of your shadows. The light moves down, down as Ma lifts a corner of my nightie and you shine the flashlight onto my Mons Veneris, my rounded eminence. My eyes are squeezed shut now, and there’s a sudden draft of icy cold sweeping over me, beginning where you are, at the root of my tightening thighs.

  Ma steps back. You flick off the switch, put the light in your pocket. Exactly how many candles did Betsy blow out on her birthday cake? Sixteen? Seventeen? Mrs. God beckons and you leave the room as I pull the covers over my head the way I used to when I was five, six and seven.

  You can’t count anymore. There were too many candles crowding the cake, too many inches between us plus the thousands and thousands of unaccounted for hairs. You shake your head. There are no holes on my head or my pubis that you can clearly see but you remember the groaning, my hand drifting over my lower abdomen in the dark. Perhaps there really is something there, yesterday’s hairball or the large colon tying itself into a granny knot.

  In the morning you tell me about the barium X-ray. You shouldn’t have breakfast, my girl. We have to clean out your large intestine. I take the laxative you give me, just as I always take your medicines and treatments, trained from infancy to be a good patient, excellent at succumbing. Ma writes a letter to the school which says that I have pain in my lower gastrointestinal tract. I spend hours and hours in the toilet, reading Regency romances, a lost world filled with upswept dos and Empire waisted dresses, phaetons and fops. The next morning you and Ma take me to the hospital at the crack of dawn, to get it over with.

  Star-spangled stairs, the nurses of yesteryear floating past in their capes, singing “Silent Night.” I sat on your shoulders like a prize, an important hat. Today I’m still special, the doctor’s daughter, the same nurses bobbing and smiling at us as we walk the halls. That’s Sarie Boshof, Ma says to me as we turn a corner and practically bump into a white uniform.

  The nurse has a crisp part in her brown hair, a careful ponytail. She’s a patient of your father’s, Ma says. Her mother was the one with porphyria, the royal urine. I look at Sarie as if I’m as old as Noah. Hello Dr. Klein, she says. Hello Mrs. Klein. You must be Betsy. Your father is always talking about you and now here you are, in the flesh. Sy’s baie slim, nê? She’s the clever one.

  She has pain in her abdomen, Ma explains. The pain’s pain lifts me onto its shoulders. I can still see everything just the way I used to, but from a position of vast superiority. Hey, remember how you used to bring her to the hospital on Christmas Eve, to listen to the carol singing? Ag, shame man, she was just a lightie. You give her one of your special Christmas box smiles, trimmed with that special ha-haah laugh. Of course I remember, nursie.

  I walk into one of the X-ray rooms between you and Ma, a prisoner of my own plucking. She hands me a hospital gown, always the drabbest, saddest kind of dress. My hands shiver as I tie a long bow in the back. I’m still shivering when she tells me to climb onto the table and hold myself in the foetal position. Sarie flits around the room like a black-and-white butterfly, in case you need her. I can see her out of the corner of the eye pressed closest to my right knee. Funny how body parts drift apart, disassemble, how the foot is a stranger to the ear, how the eye won’t have anything to do with the buttock.

  I lie there as still as a quagga, turned into a fascinating skin for someone’s floor, the very quietest of Snufflies. When you insert a tube into my rectum for the barium to pass through, the table sinks beneath me, my mouth falls down. In the close dark, I find myself looking at a giant squid in a giant case in an immense museum. The museum guards are all nurses, singing “Silent Night” silently as the barium spread like a red tide. I close my giant squid eyes while Ma takes the X-rays, just the way she used to when she worked at Groote Schuur.

  Sarie Boshof, sampler of my shame, denizen of my knee cap, mote in my sad squid eye. She could be in the room with you right now, counting your bad numbers, watching the clicking, spitting machines draw pictures of your heart. Ag, shame man. Ag foeitog.

  Later, when you and Ma examine the pictures, you notice a slight distension in the splenic flexure. You end up taking me to First Prize, a fancy surgeon by now and Chief Family Operator. He’s removed a benign cyst from one of Ma’s breasts, cutting and sewing his way through brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, nephews, nieces and in-laws. He welcomes me with his trademark, a shrill whistle right into the ear, echoes of Uncle Wolfie. Then he examines me and spends several moments staring at the X-rays. If it is a hairball, maybe it will pass right through, he says, in his soft, sing-songy voice. Keep an eye on it.

  For a few days, you inspect my stools but you can’t see anything. I stop complaining about the pain in my abdomen. All my animals are in perfect order, thank you very much, the Snufflies mixing nicely with the squid, the quagga and some of the lesser vertebrates.

  When I go to have my hair cut, I ask the hairdresser to cut it very short, like a boy’s.

  The animals prefer it that way and so do you. Ma says I look more beautiful than ever, and that she can see my eyes, finally. My eyebrows are almost gone by now but I can see my whole face in the mirror, white and luminous like an egg.

 
What about the gastric lavaaage? I ask, making my voice plummy and droll. It sounds like a special beauty treatment. Am I going to have one of those too? You say, No lavaaage for you, my dear.

  Off to the nunnery!

  Chapter 17

  THE SPHYGMOMANOMETER IS whispering secrets to the ECG machine, and the ECG machine is spitting out swear words on paper in between globs of black ink. The IV stand and its hanging plastic bag jiggle in time to the sighing of your blood pressure cuff and the catheter is the biggest moany-groany of the lot, saying over and over again, you left me high and dry, boetie. You gave up the ghost.

  Simon and I are posted like sentries on either side of your bed, and now the machines are shooting at us, spit balls and paper planes that land on our eyebrows and in our hair. You’ve finally had enough.

  When I bend over to see if you’re still breathing, the blood-pressure cuff slips from your arm onto mine, and pulls my arm back so quickly and fiercely that I hit myself in the face. Simon’s struggling with the cords of the IV wrapping his legs and his feet and pinning his arm to his sides. He’s pulling the tubes with both hands but it’s hard to break free.

  Your pillows are filling up then emptying out, like giant white bladders. Your sheets are shifting and flapping, sails on a boat that’s coming around. I can hardly see in the blizzard of spit and piss that’s flying around the room. Simon, I’m shouting but he can’t hear a word I’m saying. The sphygmomanometer is hissing and wheezing like a child with croup.

  You’re in the eye of the storm, a wan smile playing on your lips. Look, Simon! I’m pointing at your amused face through the gauze of fluids and solids floating past. But Simon’s buckling over, stumbling out of the room, the largest spitball landing squarely on the back of his head.

  You are my strongest child, you once said, handing me a case of wine to carry into the house. Well, I’m going to show you all over again. You put the machines up to this, and I’m not afraid of them or of you.

  In the half-dark, the cords twirl one last time, and then finally shudder and settle. The air is clear now, and a deep quiet flows into the room. All the machines are shinier than ever before. You’re still alive, even though the spaces between your breaths are longer and longer. I notice that my teeth are chattering, that my hands and feet as cold as blocks of ice. “Not talking = madness,” you wrote, and now it’s come true.

  * * *

  THE OLD PAIN is spreading, a spring-tide covering the beach, edging up the shoreline, lapping at the rough grass, finding its way onto the stoeps of the beach houses. But where’s Maisie? The tide is rushing towards you and you’re running now, looking for her everywhere. There’s a plane roaring overhead and you look up and there she is in the sky with Ronald, her husband, and they’re flying over the Du Toit’s Kloof mountains.

  Everybody else drives over the mountain but Maisie’s different. She flies. The chicken is stringy and Stella’s upset, pacing and shouting because they’re late, late, late. She’s a woman who eats by the clock, a woman who respects the twin needles of time. Maisie and husband Ronald land at the Worcester aerodrome and we’re all there to watch them land. No, we’re not staying for lunch or for tea or for supper, they say. We have to fly before dark, before the sun goes down and we crash right into the side of the mountain. They don’t even offer you a ride, a loop-de-loop over the Breede River, and the patchwork farms. They plop me on the wing and take one, two, three pictures which they send years later in a foreign envelope, airplane wing girl with bow in her hair, nine years old. You and Ma, Simon and I stare up at the sky like village idiots as they disappear again, with a bellow from the plane’s engine and a breezy wave.

  She loves me, she loves me not. The sound of the sea is deafening, and you can hear Arnold Toynbee above the noise, with his grand pronouncement, The Jews are the fossils of history! Bloody anti-Semite, sticking it to the Jews like that. We’re not a dead civilization, no matter what Mr. Hitler tried to do to us!

  Your voice is coming out the old wireless radio at Chantry. She loves me, she loves me not. I’m a fossil, I’m not a fossilwww . . . Sssssh. . . . zzzzz. . . . Wheeee . . . V for Victory! May 7th, 1945. Germany surrenders! But the war’s not completely over. England’s on the air, all ravaged and torn. “The evil-doers are now prostrate before us . . . But let us not forget for a moment the toils and efforts that lie ahead. Japan, with all her treachery and greed, remains unsubdued.” If I live long enough to eat Mother Bun’s chopped herring and sticky taiglach, none of you buggers are going to stop me from fighting this war, from going as far east as I can.

  AND YOU’RE NOT going to stop me from taking the boat up the river either, you tell Stella, who is watching you from her beach chair on the lawn of the Fairy Knowe Hotel, her face set in an attitude of grim concern, a plastic-covered library book rustling in her lap.

  It took you almost an hour to get the boat into the water, Dumbleton’s grandson, directing you from the little beach, as you backed your car with the boat-trailer hooked onto it towards the river. The wheels of the trailer slowly inched backwards into the mud. It took all your strength to release the winch and let the boat glide into the water. You wouldn’t let the boy help you with that although you took his arm as you climbed into the boat from the jetty. Fuel-pump check. Oars check. Oarlocks, check, check. Once you left one behind.

  It’s May 7th, 1997, old chap. Fifty-two years to the day after Germany surrendered! You tell this to one of those black, long-beaked birds sitting on the skeleton of a tree on the opposite bank, watching you as you gear up to start the engine. Simon used to do this, in the old days. His kids must be old enough to help you by now. You can’t remember when last they were here. Was it before you got sick? Before the operation to take out the bad piece of your colon, the inflamed train, hell on wheels?

  You pull the cord to start the motor. It doesn’t snap tight the way it used to, and fire the little five-and-a-half horsepower engine. There’s no putt-putt, no whiff of petrol, no sound of churning water just the empty, whirring of the cord, motion without action. You look up, briefly. Even the clouds are stacking up against you. You take the handle in your hand again, inhale, pull . . . downstroke, upstroke, downstroke . . . The motor’s still dead. You bend over, squeeze the bulb on the petrol tank, giving the engine a little more juice. Stella gets up, leaving the book in the chair. She stands at the edge of the lawn, a few steps away from the wooden jetty, her arms folded across her chest. She doesn’t want you to go. She doesn’t want to worry about whether you’ll come back or not.

  The river is very full, you tell her. I wonder how far up Ebb ’n Flow I can take the boat. She says, I still don’t think you should go. You take the cord between both hands and pull as hard as you can. Stella bites the dust. She has to eat her words. Downstroke, upstroke . . .

  Dead. Rage is blackening the sky, the river, the other boats. Get away from me! Go sit in your bloody chair! The Dumbleton boy, who’s been working on a boat at the other end of the jetty, looks up at you, as if you called him. It’s flooded, you pant. Have to wait. Stella’s back at her post, the book in front of her like a shield. For an instant, you see a column of smoke rising from her. Jesus Christ! She’s smoking again! Remember that slip of a girl, smoking like mad, a laugh as big as a house. I’m going to grab in and take those tonsils out, you used to say. I can see them from here.

  Then you remember that she hasn’t smoked a cigarette since 1965. Not that you miss the cigarettes, mind you. You were one of the first doctors in Worcester to tell your patients to stop smoking. You grew to hate Stella’s cigarettes, the sour ashtrays, stale air in every corner of the house. She got so sick one winter, wheezing and coughing for weeks, that you finally said to her, You have a choice, Stella. Smoke or breathe.

  She gave up, and gained inches and pounds for all the lost smoke. Maybe that’s when her laugh evaporated too. Or maybe it happened when the last child left home. Was it when they stopped having New Year’s Eve dances at the Wilderness Hotel? The fir
e that burned down the old buildings? The new management? Maybe it was the new management everywhere, shopkeepers, salespeople and chemists younger than your own children, not to mention women doctors, women lawyers, women everything. Remember how you hated the way Dorothy May’s leg jiggled, how it was never still? She became professor of medicine somewhere, didn’t she? You pull the cord in a fury. Bloody fucking bitch!

  There’s a sharp pain on your left side. Dammit. You sit down on one of the wooden seats, your legs crossed under you, purpling varicose veins threaded through your calves. All I want to do is take the boat up the river, putt-putting between the canoes and the swimmers, the rope-swingers and the same old birds on the trees. Have a heart, chaps. Have a heart.

  Stella is talking to the Dumbleton boy, and she’s pointing at you. Jesus Christ, woman. It’s not that bad. She’s still pointing, as if you’re lost at sea. I’m still here, chaps, alive and kicking. You almost wave and make a face at them but that would let her know that you noticed. You make a point of staring at the sky, folding your arms. I could be swotting for the seventh degree. I could be writing my speech for the annual Lodge dinner. Stella hates those dinners. She hates it all.

  Now the little bastard is coming over to tell you something. He’s still wet behind the ears, but he towers over you already. He’s going to be at least six foot two, Marfan syndrome or not. In two long strides, he’s in the boat next to you, folded over the engine. With a quick flick of his arm, he gets the motor started. There are tears in your eyes. Thank you, old chap. He gets out of the boat quickly, ducks away.

  He bloody well saved my life and doesn’t even know it. I wonder if old Dumbleton is a Freemason. In Stella’s old house, the orange-and-black manx cat twitches in front of the wireless, rubbing against the corded fabric of the speaker, listening to the Yanks roaring The War’s over! in Times Square. Now she’s behind the cabinet, looking for Americans buried in there. An unearthly yowl erupts. The heart of the city is breaking. Stella, her brothers, her uncles, her aunts, babies and grannies, the Old Man and Mother Bun stop in mid-sentence, mid-thought, mid-everything. The cat leaps out from behind the wireless, its stub of a tail still smoking. So that’s where the smoke was coming from. The wireless crackles and dies.