Resistance

The day of Daniel’s confession started in an ordinary way, with a call from Kaye’s mother – a beginning that Kaye would examine in detail later (poking at it, parsing it), trying to find clues to what she had known and what she hadn’t. In the morning she hadn’t known what was going to happen, but by the time she went to bed she knew everything. In between she found out that her husband was sleeping with a girl of twenty-six, a master’s student of his from the environmental studies department, a girl who might have been a younger, shabbier, messier version of Kaye herself. Or at least one part of herself – the lean, uncompromising self she had been at one time.

But the day had begun as those days usually did, with the scramble to pack a lunch for Sarah, the hasty goodbyes at the door, the moment of silence – then the call from Kaye’s mother.

“Kaye!” Margaret exclaimed lavishly, making Kaye wince.

“Mother!” Kaye exclaimed back. “Why do you always sound surprised when it’s me? You’re the one phoning.”

Kaye’s mother threw back her head and laughed richly. What a lark her daughter was. What a perfect straight man. Kaye knew her mother had thrown back her head and laughed even though she couldn’t see her, she was that present in the room. Like a very large ghost, she filled the area above Kaye’s head with her dyed ash-blond hair, her burgundy nails, her legs stubbled with persistent growth. She had yards and yards of female pulchritude. A hideous word, yes, but one that Kaye had chosen long ago to describe her mother’s particular kind of beauty.

“Now listen, honey, have you got a minute? Has Daniel left? Has Sarah left for school?”

They had left, it was true. And it was also true that no matter how irritated Kaye sometimes felt at the sound of her mother’s voice, she liked these calls, she waited for these calls.

They were close, mother and daughter. They had stuck together through thick and thin. Thick mother, thin daughter, Kaye thought – because sometimes it felt like that; as though her mother, that plentiful and immense woman, cast such a shadow, and contained so much, that she contained even Kaye herself.

People noticed their closeness. They compared Margaret with their own mothers, in their late fifties or early sixties, and said that Kaye was lucky, because her mother was so interesting, so alive. Other mothers had receded, becoming pale, or frosty, or diffident; or taking up causes. Daniel’s mother had become a pro-choice activist in Sudbury, defying the church, defying her husband. Interesting, of course – but nothing to match the livid, arresting quality that Margaret gave off.

At fifty-nine she was in her prime, magnificently in her prime, like a full-blown moon – carrying all her past selves inside. Retired actress. Radio host. Now she and Kaye’s father had bought a sailboat, and they headed up the coast each summer scouting for northwest coast sculptures, bartering, collecting. She had become known for her talent, her eye. Someone famous in Ketchikan had even given her a Tlingit name.

Now Margaret was telling Kaye a story about Kaye’s father. He had become a source of bafflement and amusement to them since he had retired. They watched him as though he were a peculiar and interesting bird – something, perhaps, with a rare, proboscis-like beak. Last month he had started reading Proust – five pages a night. “He always hated Proust!” Margaret said to Kaye. “His mother made him read Proust to her in that ugly room she never left, with aspidistra hanging from the bedstead. I can’t believe he’s reading Proust.” But this was nothing compared with what he had done the day before on their yacht. It had been a suddenly warm day for October, an Indian summer day, and Margaret, in a mood of celebration, had peeled off her shirt, slathered her breasts with baby oil and stretched out on the foredeck. Giles had slipped away from the wheel to get his sunglasses, forgotten why he’d gone below deck and settled in for a little nap.

“Kaye – picture it – all at once we’re careening towards an enormous freighter from Taiwan. I had to crawl across the deck, throw something over me, grab the wheel. Meanwhile, about fifteen deckhands had caught sight of me, and they were all cheering madly.”

As was so often the case, once her mother got going, Kaye felt something dark stirring inside her: a feeling that her mother had escaped scot-free, gotten away with the gold or some such thing, while she – Kaye – was caught. Punished.

“Listen,” Margaret continued. “I read something in the Sun this morning and I thought you’d get a kick out of it. Apparently there’s this real estate agent in Topeka, Kansas – and guess what he’s doing.”

“Mother, I couldn’t possibly.”

“He’s buying up abandoned missile silos all over the Midwest and he’s turning them into houses. Can you imagine! And apparently people are buying them like hotcakes.”

“Perfect for the nuclear family.”

“Oh, honey – when I read that, I couldn’t help thinking of you, back in your anti-nuclear days. You could be so ornery.”

“Not precisely how I remember it, Mother.”

“Oh, come on. You were damned ornery, you have to admit it. Do you remember that time you destroyed our dinner party?”

Kaye’s heart was beating slightly faster. Of course she remembered. It was a frequent memory, a talisman, something she carried with her even now, almost twenty years later.

It was back when her parents lived in Shaughnessy and she was in first-year university. She had plunked herself down on the burgundy couch in the living room and one of her mother’s friends had asked her, just casually, what she was doing to keep herself busy. Kaye had answered that she and some other students were organizing a viewing of If You Love This Planet.

“Oh, Helen Caldicott,” Lena Marsden had shrieked. “She’s ghastly.”

“A ghoul, darling. She’s a ghoul!”

“She’d be more bearable if she got her facts straight.” This was from one of the straight men – an accountant, like her father. One of the dull spouses.

It was then that Kaye had risen into the air – or so it had felt – springing out of her seat to float above them, an angel of vengeance and light. Then she had described, point by point, what the effect would be of a nuclear bomb dropped on Vancouver. Yes, she had done this a bit breathlessly; yes, with a red face and palpitating heart; but nevertheless she had recited the whole thing – the sacred litany of destruction – from the fallout floating up as far as the troposphere, to the lack of burn beds, the disease, the lacerations, decapitations, wind fires. “And if you did survive in a fallout shelter,” she had said, “when you came out, there would be rotting corpses everywhere – because ninety percent of Vancouver’s population would be dead – and the survivors would soon die too, from a synergistic combination of starvation, radiation, sunburn, infection and grief.”

At which point – at least in Kaye’s recollection – her mother had stood up and said, in her rich actor’s voice, that she did hope everyone was ready for dinner.

“You were the absolute death of dinner parties,” Kaye’s mother said now, always thrilled by a spectacle, even in retrospect.

And what could Kaye possibly say in response? She looked out the window at the clear sky and a plane high up, like a toy, heading towards the airport.

She wanted to say that perhaps her mother should rethink her attitude. Had the prospect of nuclear war really been all that funny? In the old days that’s what she would have said, and for a second she wished that she could still be that single-minded. The insistence of the young. We are born once, they had sung. Born for a purpose. And they had circled the weapons, singing and crying, throwing
their bodies again and again against this huge dark wall, this impenetrable thing.

But that was over now. She wasn’t that person any more. And people were living in the silos that she had prayed in front of. Turning them into condos.