‘Dress, Rehearse’

– by Laura Legge

On her mother’s carpet, ridged and dark as a burned peach stone, Farah used to stage revenge tragedies with her older sister Faye. The whole community of Red Wing would congregate to watch, and their mother would fill their cups with a gift both still and sparkling. Now Farah sits on that same pilled carpet, watching wind thrash a window her mother has never curtained, leaving it bare as an exposed nerve. And the pain of this weather rouses her, as if the nerve is hers. After three years in federal, she is sensitive, intolerably sensitive, to wind and to light.

Her mother, seventy, elegantly bearded, is on the phone with Faye in the kitchen.

A condition of Farah’s release is that she will never again speak to Faye, with whom she committed the crime; and since Faye is suffering through two life sentences, this impossible amputation is, in fact, possible. So the kitchen is an icy island full of lemon curd and silver tins of tuna. Farah does not dare to enter. Better to cross legs on the carpet, where the storm may make her high teeth scream, but at least she is not a housebreaker.

When her mother is done on the telephone, she brings Farah a ceramic of smoked tea, charred over pine tar. First we will make your spirit into velvet, she says. Then we will rinse you clean. No report of the kitchen heart-to-heart. She has been ordered to keep her girls’ lives separate.

Plumes from the tea plumb her nose, haul at its little hairs. The world is both more muted and more intense than she remembers it being. This is her first view of it in

daylight; last night, bitter car seat, blue notes on the radio, high-mast lights smudging at cap and base like wild tempera. They had arrived at midnight. Her mother had bundled her in a fire blanket and wound her down to an air bed in the basement, a place dawn and dayglow could not reach.

Farah covers her mouth with a free hand, just as her mother goes to pour smoked tea into it. The result is a scald, a surface wound, and a rash of maternal guilt and irritation. Why did you do that? her mother asks. Everything would have been fine.

Everything would have been so good for us. The tea has made a crooked stain on the carpet.

Her mother’s voice is a jump rope and Farah has forgotten how the song goes, how and when she is meant to step. It is an old-new kind of talk. For three years, everything had slowed and simpled, you could spend days unraveling stories, you could make a morning of a mouth wash recipe. Anger was just anger, it was salty like a canteen noodle. Everything was so immense that nothing was big at all; a guard would force you to crawl and growl like a mutt, but you were not his only pet, so you could simply speak his name and expect your audience to understand.

You said you would rinse me clean, Farah tells her mother. I would like that. With no soap, I would like that.

And yes, this guess is precise––her mother wants to be needed. She beams. She gets a rag from the kitchen and tries to absorb what the rug has not already taken. Okay, my treasure, she says. Let’s get you to the laundry room.

Surely she is misspeaking. The laundry room has an arctic floor and corners full of cobwebs; it is where clothes go when the bodies are removed from them. She must

mean the bathroom, its radiant heater, its portrait of their put-down hound, the hook on the back of the door with its blue housecoat hanging. Maybe she has grown old since

Farah last saw her. Maybe she is losing her language.

But she leads her younger daughter to the laundry room, where she fills the industrial sink with water, not even pegging her finger under the faucet to check the temperature. She says, Okay, tadpole, the bath is ready whenever you are. Farah removes the institutional grey pullover but stops short of tugging off her shorts, cotton socks and jersey. Her thighs are furred and scarred, her upper arms turned fish-scale by rationed soap. Hives, blood blisters, a purple tick bite––what good could live inside such badly marked skin?

Her mother seems, on some level, to understand. She moves to one corner and stands facing the cobwebs. Take some private time, she says. I’ll just be over here.

So her mother starts to sing “Little Wheel Spin and Spin,” oblivious to how sincerely beautiful she is making the room, while Farah strips bare beside the industrial sink. She feels under the basin for a flannel cloth and with it scours her seams and hinges.

Water itself is softer here. She flinches when the flannel catches open skin, but mostly the sensation is one of revival. Body-time is a birthright. Every woman deserves to be washed clean.

Is that better, Faye? her mother asks.

And then the room is glacial again, and the pipes are picked bones, and the bodies of deathwatch beetles are choking the floor drain. Farah, her mother says. Of course I meant Farah.

It is too late. She has said what she has said, and the cloudland has broken with rain. Farah dries herself on a wool runner, the first piece of cloth she can find. Its tiny spines are barbaric. But she refuses to dress again in the institutional pullover, so she stays wrapped in the prickly runner. Her mother leaves the room long enough for the industrial sink to drain. She comes back with the blue housecoat and holds its sleeves wide open.

Baby, she says. Don’t we all make mistakes?

Such a cloth does not belong on Farah’s manikin of marks and lesions. Her matted hair, dripping wet, will pervert that perfect shade of blue. But her mother forces the robe around her, and the thorny runner falls to the ground. The silk is painkilling.

Until she remembers the fatal stories she tells herself each day, she lives for a moment in that skin-deep pleasure.

That evening, Farah ascends the basement stairs in a cotton tunic, clean but with furrow lines. Her mother has crowned the dining table with a ring of gold coin daisies, a ghost orchid in the centre. And adorned it with the tatted table linen, the mill of mustard seeds, all the extraordinary trappings Farah’s presence alone would not merit. This, not a word from her mother, is how she knows company is coming.

The butter-notes of a roasted duck come ringing out of the kitchen. A one-two on the front door makes the daisies dance. Can you get that? her mother calls, over the hiss of ice plant in an oil bath. Farah flattens her tunic as she walks toward the door, a failed effort to look decent. Through the peephole she sees the neighbour’s daughter Euclide, who is Faye’s age and who grew up playing jackstones and Mother May I? with her.

Euclide was a bramble then, dirty and tangled, while Faye and Farah were tended gardens. Now Euclide has a clean part in her red curls, a manmade path through a rose patch.

Farah opens the door. Euclide stumbles backward, catching a corner of the welcome mat with her black-buckled shoe. I didn’t know you would be here, she says.

Her tone is not unkind, but simply stark.

Farah says, I didn’t know you would be here, either! She does not mean to cover that sentence in sauce. But it comes out anyway, dark, salty, masking her earnest intent.

And Euclide, who had seemed on the verge of embracing her, arches her long spine. She walks past Farah into the cloakroom, where she tussles with her tight shoes and her silken cape, knotted tightly around her neck. She leaves both on the slate for Farah to tidy, which she does out of guilt while she listens to her mother rain flattery on their special visitor.

They are in the kitchen, her mother and Euclide, Let me look at you, child, you are so beautiful, squash blossoms plunging into batter, Isn’t your face sweet as September, a knife on wood, a fork on a softened root. At the table there are four chairs, three with cushions cross-stitched by her late grandmother, one with a fraying rush seat. Of course, she waits patiently on the rush.

A few minutes later, her mother leads Euclide from the kitchen. Euclide is holding the duck, bordered by port and blood oranges, while her mother is carrying a glass bowl of grilled flora––bush beans, squash blossoms, sunset chard. She disappears into the kitchen and returns with a palmful of fried ice plant, then scatters those little blushes onto each ashen plate. Help yourself, girls, she says.

Farah should be grateful for this centerfold meal, the brown fowl with its necklace of fat beads, the loving cup of marigold wine. Instead she is nauseated by this breast her mother has carved. Euclide is heaping a mallard mountain onto her own plate, her lips parted as sharply as her hair. This looks delicious, she says, and eats without waiting for anyone’s grace.

The conversation feels like a life sentence. Farah’s mother asks Euclide if she is still engaged to Faye’s childhood fling, that half-blind boy who’d always had his good eye on her, and Euclide flashes a fluorite ring. Euclide asks Farah if she has been looking for work. Nausea seems a more peaceful option, so Farah tucks into her plate of duck.

The world has turned her animal; she may as well stay at the trough. She lets fat dribble down her chin, chasing it with well water full of sediment.

To the general table, Euclide asks, Have you heard from Faye?

Snout in the trough. Pig digging, as if for truffle. We speak weekly, her mother says. She starts to slice iceberg lettuce into bars on her plate, the knife-edge screeching against the ceramic.

And how is she holding up? Euclide asks.

The lettuce has turned to floss. Hoping to save her mother from this off-limits talk, Farah asks Euclide to say something different. Again she wants to sound kind, but her words come out dentate. And so, tooth for a tooth, Euclide bites back where Farah’s meat is most tender.

She says, You know your mother had macadam thrown on her at the grocery store? Someone burned all the rose bushes in front of this house and spread salt in the rubble.

She had not known. From their many phone calls she had learned trivia, how many pines were now in the pineta, how many partridges she had gunned for church dinners––but this she had not known.

Her mother starts to cry, a spectacle Farah has not seen before. But she does not cry into her lettuce strips, or the gold coin daisies, or the chain-stitched napkin on her lap.

She stands up, bends at the waist beside Farah, and cries directly onto her daughter’s dirty hair nest. Farah does not know what to do. So much has never been taught to her. So she sits with her shoulders hunched forward, a pubescent posture, her heart a pin-pillow full of needles. She lets her mother’s tears salt the earth of her hair. She lets her mother’s tears rush out as confession, and when they are done rushing, she lets her mother sit and start her chard in silence.

Her mother, blouse dark with macadam, paying for almonds with her eyes cast down. Somehow it helps to have an image. Much simpler than the Overgloom, I am a general degenerate, I ruined lives in ways I cannot name. Euclide, her austere hair-part, her graceless place in this house. But Euclide, wording a photo not found in the town archive.

How about I get the groceries for a while? Farah says, slight upturn at the edge of her mouth.

Her mother stays buried in the blossoms. Though Euclide upturns, too.

When the meal is over, the three of them scrape their own dishes. Farah watches through the doorway while her mother and Euclide eat blackberry tarts in the kitchen.

Gore-purple lines their gums. They do not offer any to Farah, and she is just as glad. She

would forget the taste as soon as she was finished; this frame, her mother and the fruit and the gothic wallpaper, will carry her through the shiver hours of the night.

A week later, Farah takes a hand-hot shower and sees heaven. Diamonds on her lashes, beads down her breastbone, she feels her hidden self come out to shimmer. Her first time under the waterfall head in the bathroom. Her first time consenting to soap. The scars on her arms hold their strange cacography, but now as the wash-cloth wends over them, they do not sting.

Outside the bathroom’s open window, she hears her mother using garden shears.

The rosebushes have lushed up. The bushes have grown so bramble-busy she has to pare them back. The shearing turns to plainsong in the shower steam, so pure that Farah feels a row of gooseflesh rise. If only she could live here, behind a wall of glass, beneath a waterfall.

Then the shower runs cold. Her mother has set a time limit, for economy’s sake.

Farah’s hidden self scuttles back inside, boring into her heart with its bone-tail. Once dry, she dresses in a starched white blouse and a tartan jumper her mother has sewn specially for this first appearance in the community. A perfect replica of the matching jumpers she and Faye once wore on their Bergamot Missions, when they would bring oranges and

Lady Grey to shut-in elders.

The sound of shearing has stopped. Now a rock dove, calling for its mate, plugs the silence.

Farah heaves. All dry. With a blue ribbon in her hair, she is ready to go to the grocery store.

Amid the predatory colours in the produce aisle––vats of chokecherry, white peaches, all these fresh crunchables corrupted by wax––Farah sees a single red apple on the floor. A greyhound on a short lead noses into the fruit, which looks flawless from where Farah is standing. He rolls the apple over, revealing a great contusion on the other side. The owner, a woman with blue stockings around her ankles, jerks him neckward to a neat display of milk.

Farah has been asked to find three things for her mother’s hardtack: flour, salt, and butter. The ease of this task is insulting, but no matter, her basket is soon salted and buttered. She crouches by the low flour shelf, which has been picked lean, and reaches for a fabric sack with a blackwork label. As she pulls it closer, one corner catches on an exposed nail, spilling flour everywhere. Fuck. She falls to her knees. Hell behind the eyes, heating up then holding back. Farah feels the Partition start, her limbs each cleaved from her core, her core split into leavings. Her left hand is tingling and her right hand is dead; her breasts cannot rest side by side. She is a mirror broken so finely it reflects nothing.

Blue stockings appear beside her, followed by the long nose of the hound. And though she wants to beg pardon for being here, for making such a repulsive mess, Farah is too Partitioned to move or speak. Instead she waits for the dog to lap up her flour puddle.

Some trouble? the woman asks. She is holding a baguette toward Farah like a lifeline.

I’m just trying to help my mother make dinner, Farah says. Despite the split between her brain and her hand she grips the bread, pulling herself partway to standing.

But the woman’s face sharpens suddenly, and she lets go of the bread so Farah falls and nicks her skull on the sharp shelf. What changed? The shower ran from comforting to cold. What changed?

On the grocery store linoleum, Farah lies down flat. The dog tongues the dirty flour and not her face. She starts to cry. Or her eyes start to cry while her throat stays open and oil-smooth. The woman with the blue stockings says, Buy your shit somewhere else.

Only a mask could save her. A head of cauliflower, a head of iceberg lettuce, something solid to hide behind. There is no other way for her to escape this store unharmed––now they have discovered her, their pest, their predator, and they will pour rot-gut and ruin onto her head. The blue stockings walk toward the wholesome sweeteners. Farah empties the remaining flour onto the floor and puts her head inside the sack. Through the ripped corner she sees her escape route. She will have to leave here unrewarded. Her mother of all people will understand.

Then Euclide comes clumping down the aisle in her silver-buckled shoes. This should not be a shock––the whole town stocks their pantries on Saturday––but it comes with the force of one. Get into the truck, she says. Farah eats up this authority, Farah dines on this iron charge. Each time she makes a choice she ends up in some scrape, needing to be saved. But she knows how to lace her shoes and walk in the lines someone else has laid down.

It’s unlocked, Euclide says. Get inside. I’ll buy the bits for the hardtack.

Hardtack, how had she known? Her mother, blank and facing the curtainless window. Had she phoned?

Hardtack, her belly is bloating well before supper.

Farah manages to leave the store and make it to the seat of Euclide’s pick-up.

When she was a teenager she would ride on this same seat, Faye in the middle, with all the windows rolled down. They had wanted to feel everything. They had cranked the soundtrack to some melodrama and let the gusting wind gun through their hair. Freedom,

Faye had called out. Let’s never stop driving. They were growing up into a world that loved them; when they landed in a ditch, having swerved to keep a robin living, someone stopped straightaway to get them back on the road.

Less than an hour later, Euclide drives Farah home to her mother. The house feels tense, as if all of the furniture had been talking about her before she arrived. Her mother’s carpet is greyed by a silt that usually only settles in the apple barn. Euclide had insisted that Farah be the one to bring the groceries inside, so with the two paper bags shielding her chest, she enters the kitchen. Her mother is on the phone.

Can you hold on a minute, my little kidney bean? her mother says into the receiver.

After listening for a minute, she says, Right, I’ll send more money for your phone card. Make good choices. You are loved.

And then Farah’s mother is hers again, bumbling around the kitchen, brewing smoked tea. When she asks how the grocery store was, Farah cannot keep her shame inside. She tells her what happened, to which her mother responds, I feel your pain. Farah

genuinely believes her, which mostly feels hideous. But in small part it is a relief, if only because words did not divide them.

Euclide says, Remember when we were little, and you guys used to put on those plays?

The stage-carpet, now covered in grey silt.

Why did you stop? she asks.

So much had gone to shit, so swiftly. Euclide would have her own memories of the same people, the same events, and who was Farah to shatter that shadowbox? She says, I lost interest in acting, and her mother nods, as if to say she has routed that question gracefully.

Well, I was thinking, Euclide says, that we could do another performance. You and me. To explain things to the town.

Her mother holds the tea to Farah’s lips, and she parts them ever so slightly, letting in a stream of seared pine. It roasts her throat, but so too it brings her to a woodland, encircles her with the pleasure of green trees. The ghost of her mother’s phone call is still in the room, and Farah would simply be here, haunted, had she said no to the tea.

She tells Euclide she will try. Euclide nods and turns to the stovetop to thicken citron. On its own the hardtack is plain, but with that soft fruit, its nature changes completely.

On her mother’s carpet, ridged and dark as a burned peach stone, Farah has arranged a circle of rockers and recliners. For a month she and Euclide have rehearsed a piece of

theatre-in-the-round, tuning the language each time, hunting for the mean between honest and likeable. A story is a story, Euclide had said one evening, exhausted by a particularly long rehearsal. And Farah had said, Please, be patient. I’m writing the place where I belong.

At noon, as instructed, several town members ring the door chime. Farah’s mother meets them at the door with bannock and berry compote. By the time they reach their seats, the audience has already been plied with survival food. Though invited, the woman with the blue stockings does not show. Well, anyway. It took Farah a full week to use soap in the shower.

In this play, neither character is named, though Farah is some facsimile of herself,

Euclide of Faye. They have both washed themselves completely, leaving their wet, clean hair pulled into buns, and dressed in plain cotton tunics. This is different from the revenge tragedies she used to stage with her sister, where each scene involved a new scarf and sunhat and ketchup packet. Euclide uses a long pole to peel the curtain back from the living room skylight, offering a circle of sun to Farah. The audience grows quiet.

They have rehearsed a series of tableaux to explain all that happened, events that have imprinted each person in town distinctly. Farah is to give a short and palatable introduction to the play, at which point Euclide is to enter, and they are to build toward a vision of death together, gently turn the house into a potter’s field.

Farah steps into the crude spotlight.

Farah, with her throat scrubbed clean.

She says, off-book, Faye, I am paralyzed by life without you.

I have always been afraid, of oncoming trains, of barns at night, but those were living fears, violet-coloured fears, nothing so cruel as the recurrence of days I did not choose to occupy. And worse, the words I say are worthless, I am forever trying to learn something I used to know, when we wore hair-bows and acted for the town, how to wake up, how to look at an earthworm and be eager about it, how to chew bread without it becoming a great labour, you know, how to want things, how to love them once you have them––Farah is crying now, and she closes her eyes to keep the tears hidden––and if I ever see you again all I will ask is, Can we talk about it? because all I need to hear is the truth, no matter how sad. It will bring the violet back to me.

For a while, the world around her is silent.

Then someone speaks. It is a man’s voice she barely recognizes, maybe the fiancé’s, Faye’s half-blind love. We can talk about it, he says. And Farah is so stunned, she opens her eyes and shows her tears. In all of their rounds of practice, Euclide and

Farah have not accounted for such a shining response.

Farah sits in one of the few empty seats in the circle. Her hidden self is shimmering, almost imperceptibly.

Start anywhere, she says.