The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [45]
My parents, as you know, first met on a train in Scotland. They had both walked the same road to the same rural station, a road thick with dust, and my father's boots and trouser legs were covered with fine powder. He stamped his feet, frustrated by the dust that was determined to cling. He looked up to see a young woman watching him, amused. He thought that her skirt was spattered with mud, but upon closer view he saw that the material was embroidered with tiny bees. Her shoes were spotless and shining. Had she floated to the station? ‘Don't be silly,’ she answered. She told him that she polished her shoes with a special homemade varnish that ‘repelled’ the dust. It had something to do with static electricity. Hadn't he heard of static electricity? My father replied that indeed he knew quite a lot about electricity – he had started out as an electrical engineer, after all – but perhaps he hadn't given enough thought to shoes. ‘That's not surprising,’ my mother said. ‘It takes a woman to put two such practical things together.’ And that's when my father learned a piece of wisdom he was to follow the rest of his life and passed on to me: ‘No two facts are too far apart to be put together.’
My father possessed an enviable equanimity. If he sat on something painful – if I'd left a toy in the crease of the chesterfield – or if he tripped over something I should have put away, he picked it up, ready to complain. But then, upon inspecting the object more closely, all blame was forgotten; he'd stand there wondering how it was made, by whom, and where; he began to ponder the kind of machinery necessary to mass-produce such a product, possible improvements to the design … He worked with machines all day and then at home continued to fiddle and ruminate; he penetrated mechanisms with a sixth sense. His hands were deft with nuts and bolts, circuitry, solder, springs, magnets, mercury, petrol. He fixed walkie-talkies, dolls, bicycles, ham radios, steam engines; he seemed to see into the heart of any machine at a glance. Children from the neighbourhood left their broken objects on our doorstep with a note propped up or shoved inside: ‘doesn't ring’ ‘wheel stuck,’ ‘won't cry any more.’ When the object was fixed, he put it back outside to be claimed by the satisfied owner.
My mother was deft in another way. Sometimes my father had fits of private despair, of professional disappointment, anger at a job poorly done. I was attuned to my mother's work of restoration – the plate of biscuits; the bar of chocolate on my father's worktable; a sealed note, the envelope painted beautifully with an architectural detail or a valve or a latch – and then the whole house seemed readjusted, like the hands of a clock. Chaos was restored to its rightful place, that is, once again left to me and, when they came to visit, my cousins – four children who liked to build things and then blow them up, or blow things up and then rebuild them. We worked best together when implementing morally questionable schemes, like the heist of the sweet shop that involved, among other strenuous tasks, the digging of a tunnel from the end of our garden out to the street. We'd progressed about five yards before winter set in. The tunnel caved in sometime during the spring rains and remained there, a muddy scar.
Avery reached for Jean's hand, the hand that had once served as a map of the Sahara. Through the open window they could hear new arrivals at the Wadi Halfa station shouting for porters, and for a moment Jean thought of the huge clock that dominated the little waiting room.
– I loved when my father made use of my mother's hands when he ran out of useful digits on his own, during complicated demonstrations, folding her fingers into stress coordinates, said Avery. Years later, I remembered this habit of his and began to wonder if my father had used other parts of my mother in private demonstrations I never saw. I liked the idea