I can feel my molecules.
My fingers clench and press on the opposite hand’s knuckles, wrenching, small strands of sinew click back and forth, my hands are aged and their skin loose, too soft, plentiful, my molecules feel as if they are each a different temperature.
Of all things I think of the scarecrows we adopted when we were children. My sister Sea named hers Androcles and I named mine Mars. It is only their names I think of now, I put them on repeat in a calm neutral voice, one bouncing with syllables the other a single small shape.
Sea’s real name is Claire for which there is no short form, no implied nickname, so we used her initial which eventually worked itself into a body of water. We called her Sea. The doctors here call her Claire but she’s been Sea for so long there is no Claire, so when the one called, believe it or not, Dr. Kildare, when he says Claire is dying it’s as if he is saying that about a stranger, perhaps the woman in the next bed who hangs behind the pale curtain and occasionally mutters to no one for help.
I am not sure this is the way to start the kind of story I want to write, or the one you want to read, but hang in there, it looks like Sea is stirring.
She used to rage and I wait for it to gather like I did when we were children, I was afraid when things didn’t go her way, I sacrificed my own preferences to align better with hers for it mattered little to me the small things in life, what mattered was Sea’s happiness, for when Sea was happy so was I.
No matter the way it appeared this was not weakness on my part, it was strength.
We said at night in our prayers God bless Androcles and Mars, we slept with the windows open, I had trouble sleeping and used to watch them, my elbows on the windowsill, my hands knotted as they are now. I was always suspicious Sea wasn’t really sleeping in the same way I am now suspicious she isn’t really dying.
We live in the perfectly digestible northern hemisphere of Canada where the stars are like alkaseltzer.
There’s a lack of consistency in the landscape, it feels incomplete, there’s no rhythm or comfort it’s all jarring, all dangerous, there are false moons which cannot be explained unless they are lesser known planets, waves here go out, and trees fall to the sky.
You never get used to it.
We had acreage on Lake Superior, I don’t recall it ever being sold so I suppose we still do, it was like a beautiful glitch in the forest, a fistful of gorgeous terrain like The Sound of Music, it felt false, the perfection of it I mean, all the usual riffraff swept beneath the green carpet which was spread out for us on weekends.
We had a stretch of beach the contents of which changed from day to day, it made me believe in God.
Mornings we woke up into a science fiction novel, my bearded father climbing over gigantic glowing driftwood, my fearless mother swimming in the lake, a small moody dot.
My name is Grace, my mother’s maiden name, she gave it up for Gough, the very opposite of Grace, a sound that might accompany choking, my sister Sea never married, she dropped her middle name of Doris and changed her last name to Grace, she is Sea Grace and I, I also never married, am Grace Gough, we both of us have to spell our names out for strangers.
S-e-a Grace she says, Grace G-o-u-g-h I say, her numbers are improving Dr. Kildare says without relief, his doctor syllables remain heavy and firm, he gives the nurse instructions, I do not understand most of what he says but I do understand that tomorrow they will slide the tube out of my sister’s throat.
As he leaves the enormous white room he suddenly turns and in a language he thinks appropriate he says she’s out of the woods now and there’s God again, changing up the beach.
We found our scarecrows in the field as if they’d fallen from the bitter beaks of birds.
Mars first, covered in a parachute of web and feather, in the mâché I recognized a kerchief I’d lost to the wind years before, I claimed him as my own while Sea sharpened her eyes and searched for another heap. I watched her. I believed God at that moment was scrambling to get a heap together for her, I knew she’d find one and she did, she called her scarecrow Androcles and without thinking about it I said mine’s Mars.
Some things are like that when they’re meant to be.
Now they spin within my smallish black hole of macular degeneration. Occasionally I see a twirling limb, a loose shoe, the spark of a wing, for we made our scarecrows into angels with astonishing wings.
Auntie Silver, who wasn’t our real aunt but our only neighbour, she lived across the field, she said we ruined her view, that our scraggly scarecrows snagged her eye which had previously rolled happily back and forth along the boiling horizon, she’s the one who gave us the idea of making them angels, she said we must make them flow and helped us construct garments and then wings, we did it over the winter when Androcles and Mars were lost to the white, she gave us buttons and string and spools of matter, strange leftovers, she offered never-worn necklaces which we hacked apart and strung into the fleshy webbing. We tried attaching the wings directly onto our scarecrows in the spring but eventually we tied them to broomsticks we pounded into the ground separately, Auntie Silver said they made her devils go away.
What devils? we asked for we’d never heard such a claim but she wouldn’t answer.
She left us everything in a scribbled will when she died, all her remaining jewelry, Sea took the emerald pendant, I claimed the diamond eternity band, her favourite, I am wearing it now, there are enough diamonds that they don’t all get swallowed in my black hole.
I have learned to aim my line of sight, if Sea were a fox it’s her right ear I try for so her face, as she wakes up, dangles in my periphery where I can’t properly see it but certainly I get the idea of it, the way I could tell my mother’s mood when she was just a dot in the lake.
Everything all your life is practice for what comes at the end.
Everybody who said we’d never marry didn’t know about the field ceremonies.
Sea opens her eyes, she holds them in the way of women who study the distance as they hang out the warshing. How far did I miss by? they ask the horizon, their fingernails clean but torn, the hem of their dresses unravel and the wind takes their hair, evidence of sleeplessness in the skin at the eyes and a handful of freckles across the nose, there’s an interior pull we never talk about, goes from throat to thigh, it’s not desire so much as it is a particular kind of digestion, the bile comes when we think there’s maybe no poetry after all – it’s a lump Sea said to me and my face went numb – and this digestion, it never ends.
Sea’s eyes come at me did they get it?
She means the lump of course and it’s ridiculous but I don’t know, I didn’t ask, queue Dr. Kildare who enters the white room through the windy doorway, clears his throat and sings hello Claire.
Sea gives him the same searching eyes and now I know what it is, that look, we are trying to figure out if we can make a run for it, if there’s time.
Did you get it? we both say at once and the question hangs in the air, he doesn’t know who to look at, which of us is stronger or weaker, which of us can stand the bad news or which of us can stand the good news. I search the area of his fox-ear but he’s hard to read, I think it’s deliberate, a sort of misguided bedside manner, I want to say this is not tv, suspense is not required, don’t go to a commercial now.
He looks back and forth between us like cat’s cradle and says time will tell.
Well I could have fucking told you that.
I think “north” where the waves go out and wet slaps through the leaves.
Slowly I allow this atmosphere into the white room one drip at a time until there’s a freshness in the air when she wakes again like after a summer rain, a tinge of blue hangs in the washed corners, August is running out, she says let’s go to the lake when I’m better and we smile at one another through fire.
It is one hell of a drive.
Sea holds her healed uterus, she tells me that when she touches the scar it tickles the roof of her mouth.
I have an adequate sense of direction, I know where north is, it’s what I seek from the clothesline, but I have no reliable reflex when it comes to left and right. I used to draw magic marker stars on my right wrist and ankle for Twister – or was it my left? – I simply don’t get the messages, so when Sea hollers go left! I go right which is the way after all, there’s not much of a road but enough, it’s mostly rock.
Our father used to laugh at our back-seat panic, our mother licked her lips at the blue lake, I imagined the car sliding into a fault forever but it’s different when you are at the wheel. This is the Canadian Shield, it is scarred but without fault, the rock is slick and uneven, we roll, I steer and lurch and jab the car between jack pines dipping their toes into the lake. At this point our mother would have released herself from the too-slow car, she’d be in the water, dotting. I look over at Sea and she seems to be in the same whirl of delight that I’m in, we land like a spaceship at the perfectly flat rectangle of old, we open our doors in unison, my left foot her right click the rock our doors slam at the same time and like we are in a musical we keep time, we meet at the front of the car, hold hands and walk to the edge of the blue.
I notice for the first time that she has a limp, what’s that game where you change a vowel, she has a lump, or was it a consonant, she had a lump.
We spent the rest of the summer, every weekend to the lake, during the week me in our farmhouse, Sea across the field.
She took over Aunty Silver’s place a long time ago, we didn’t want to be the spinsters who lived together like the arsenic and lace aunts or the hush hush sisters, it’s not like we did not try love, we did, each of us had our fevers, our tugs at the clothesline, and we never talked about it, we did not conspire nor consciously decide to remain alone, together, but here we are working on our scarecrows again some fifty years later, at first we can’t tell who is who but Androcles still wears the pom-pom scarf Sea made, it is now twizzled and stretched, upon Mars threads of my old kerchief still hang, and our ragged childhoods are returned to us.
Through the grey bones of winter we can barely see one another’s house, the line of smoke from my sister’s chimney makes it look like hers is dangling from the sky, Androcles and Mars rise as snowmen, not the plunk plunk plunk of graduated circles, they are like abandoned equipment, Androcles on the left like he’s climbing a white ladder, Mars on the right – or is it the left? – like a nearly invisible crane.
There are no details to share, pacts of blood were involved, but let me again mention our field ceremonies, our loose white dresses pointing north.
Sea’s clothesline looks south and mine looks north, our laundry flaps around us, we watch the same curve in the same field where our secret husbands live, I see everything, always have, from Seas’s point of view which I consider equal to or greater than my own, certainly the reason for my life-long confusion about what’s left and what’s right.
We don’t long for our scarecrows to be real, we don’t long for us to be unreal, we simply long.
The seasons keep on presenting themselves; we get older.
I think of the lake, always I think of the lake.
Of course I shouldn’t drive especially in winter.
Even after all these years Sea still holds her abdomen, her left hand, I think it’s her left, always in place, fingers spread as if to catch any bits that might go asunder. She is older than me by ten months, summers we are the same age, she was one grade ahead of me and always demanded a heftier share of the universe and I let her have it, I served it to her, I didn’t care, and again this required, still does, more strength than weakness, two things which can for some people be as hard to tell apart as left and right is for me.
She thinks I am only visiting, that perhaps I will take her with me to town, there’s a sale on sheets at Steadman’s and I know she needs sheets, I see the ones she hangs on the line, like the opposite of my black hole you can see right through them, circles of her house or the sky, sometimes the circle is aimed at her uterus and the hand that’s always there, she is essentially single-handed which is exactly what Aunty Silver told us to be, single-handedly you two can get it all done she said.
We didn’t know what she meant. We asked get all what done? but she was never good at answering us, Auntie Silver, she liked us to figure things out for ourselves.
Which we did.
And we got it all done, me and Sea.
After that first harrowing trip we started going to the lake in the winter, too, our excursions running high to risk, we enjoyed the danger, we once had to be extracted from a snowbank and every time we pass that swerve of road one of us says there’s the spot! and we have a laugh, the police officers thought we were arsenic and lace and Sea went a little hush hush on purpose, her eyes open too wide, her overdose smile.
We park on the road-rock and sloth-walk to the landing pad where we stand in the gigantic whiteness, I aim for the forest’s fox ears but here my black hole fits in, I get distracted looking for it.
The lake is open, Lake Superior never freezes, sometimes the shoreline is crammed with ice circles sloshing against one another, pancake ice it’s called but this is different, I’d say it’s tombstone ice and I guess Sea thinks so too because she uses it as a segue.
I found new lumps, Grace, and I’m not going for treatment.
Strength, not weakness.
I still go to the lake every weekend no matter what, sometimes once or twice during the week as well, I pass the swerve and say it out loud as if my sister Sea is in the seat beside me, holding her uterus, clicking the itchy roof of her mouth with her tongue.
I buried her, single-handedly, on the horizon beside her beloved Androcles, her tombstone is an appropriately shaped rock upon which I chiseled, it took me the entire summer, Sea Grace.
When I aim for heaven from my clothesline I see her name.
