Hunters Bay

“I do.”

The sound is dry and comes out in fear.

Her ice blue eyes never leave mine and her hair looks more beautiful than I have ever seen. Under her white halo, golden blond, and curled perfectly down to her shoulders. Her smile is genuine and soft much like her eyes. I can’t help but think that I must be the luckiest man in the world, but then again, don’t we all. And in this moment particularly, across from the one you love more than anything in the world, or so you pronounce – especially on this day. And I do – love her. Of course I do, funny, isn’t it; love, the way it treats people, or maybe it’s the way people let it treat them, I really have don't know, and really I don’t care. One thing I know for sure about love is that it hurts like hell, if I had to imagine what hell might feel like – constricting and confined, hot, filled with uncertainty, and chaos, no room for good feelings, and even worse for those of us who are claustrophobic.

For some reason I can sense the coming of an episode.

I tell myself to breathe and I slowly inhale, allowing my thoughts to gravitate towards my chest. I can feel it rise under my three piece suit.

It is either hot in this church or my tie is too tight.

I can feel a fan somewhere behind me blowing air on my sweaty neck and some of it runs down my back. I don’t shiver but I want to.

In the pews I can only make out a couple faces among the many who have decided to join us on this unusually warm autumn day here in the small Town of Hunters Bay. My Ma and my uncle Cassidy are sitting in the front row with Barbs parents, Judy and Richard Dunson.

Soon Barbra Dunson will be Barbra Kilowack. We will run out of this church and drive off to the airport and before we know it we will have our toes in white sandy beaches and Pina coladas in our hands with plastic flowered necklaces draped over our Acapulco shirts. We will eat fruit naked on the balcony of our hotel suet. The salty ocean air will blow as we fuck under the hot sun. Together we will dance away the night and when the locals ask us about our story we can show them our rings and tell them the good news.

              The priest then turned to me and said, “And do you, Brody, take Barbra, to love, and to care for, for all your life . . .”

When the Bank closes at 5:00 I stick around until 6:00 because that’s when Barbra gets off work at the salon. I first noticed her as I was walking to my car, I thought it was Ma, but Ma would never wear her hair up the way Barbra did, not in public. I had only ever seen my Ma with her hair like that on mornings that uncle Cassidy slept over.

He had been sleeping over for years, maybe he had always been sleeping over, I never asked questions because Ma always told me boys do; and do not ask. But girls, well, girls lived in the clouds Ma would say, “Girls asks about everything, but they never do anything about it.”

Really I don’t know what she was talking about – I never asked. I was always quiet; as far back as I can remember. In school I accelerated in mathematics. Numbers made sense, still do, they are the only thing in this world that never changes. It’s the only thing that ever really made any good sense to me. But being that I was a small boy, much smaller than the rest of my classmates, I was held back a year.

It was my Ma that convinced the school to hold me back. She insisted that my fragile body was underdeveloped and the potential for rough housing with the other boys was likely to result in trips to the hospital. My Ma was never one for hospitals. I was born in a kiddy pool out back of her house. The same house she has always lived in. Same white paint and red shutters for forty-five years.

At first I watched her from the bank window. I could see her across the street in the salon talking to the customers while she washed, cut, and coloured their hair. She moved elegantly and always had an infectious smile that seemed to radiate through her clients.

All those women would enter the salon looking like they were forgotten about. They had husbands but they were never home. When they were they ate the food that their wives cooked and drank the beer that was in the fridge. Others spent most of their time in the garage fixing the car or making repairs on the boat for when summer came around. Always oiling their guns and talking about the latest local tragedy.

Small towns never keep secrets for long.

Hunters Bay is exactly how it sounds. A small community near Muskoka that is mostly populated with retired people who would rather live out the remains of their life by the calm waters and woods of Northern Ontario than the subdivision cookie cutters of suburban city life.

It is a place where nothing ever happens, and when something does, there is this saying we have, “It will make it half way around the bay before it’s even over.”  

I’ve come to believe this to be true.

When I told Ma about Barbra, whom at the time I was referring to as the girl from the salon, she was ripe with me. She was always lecturing me about blond women. She was blond, at least at one time she was, before the gray set in and she started dying it and cutting it and, well, that’s how she met Barbra.

I should have known then that it was always too good to be true. What would a woman like Barbra Dunson want with a scrawny pencil neck bank manager like me? Maybe if I had introduced myself or drove up just as she was leaving work one day, handed her a flower, told her I had noticed her from the window of the bank, thought she had a nice smile, and maybe she’d like to go out sometime, catch a movie at the drive in, maybe if I had just said all the things Ma told me to say, maybe then it would have been different.

Maybe. . .

That was the first mistake in a long line of mistakes. It was as if one act of omission led to another and another and another. Until the itch returned several months later when I had accidentally ran into Barbra at the drug store. I was getting my prescription of Thorazine refilled. Standing at the counter, the pharmacist handed me the blue paper bag, I turned to leave when I stepped right into her. I hadn’t noticed her because I was busy opening the bag to examine the bottle. Too many times had I walked the entire way home to open a bottle of Mr. Kilowskie’s Viagra.

I nearly knocked her over. Our foreheads hit like two stones being smashed together by children’s hands. My glasses fell to the floor. She picked them up for me and when I put them on I could see that the edge of my glasses had cut her just above the eye. A little blood but it was nothing more than a scratch. Still I felt terribly guilty and in a panic I apologized for being so clumsy.

She introduced herself as Barb, reassuring me that she was fine. I think I was more startled than she was, yes, of course I was, looking back on it now, of course I was – the only thing she wasn’t expecting was the blood.

There were a couple other incidents that I should have paid more attention to rather than just shrugging off as odd. Love has a way of making you ignorant, willfully blind, naïve. It gets into you and like muscle tissue it stretches and strengthens. Love has always been a pool of quicksand, a mirage, a dream that I swore could have been real.

 Ma never took kind to company and to bring a woman over, not to mention, a woman I was seeing, was just about the most hurtful thing I could do to her. She said she would need me. She said that I was not capable of having another woman other than her in my life. She said that only she could care for me the way I needed to be cared for. So it was to my great surprise that Ma played nice with Barb.

I assumed that because they were acquainted from the salon that maybe Ma had ironed out her dirty laundry while Barb replenished her youth. Women were always leaving the salon with big hair and big smiles, Ma included. I thought maybe they knew each other in ways I would never be able to understand nor care to – and I was right, half right, I should have cared more, I should have asked some questions, but I never asked questions, and I let what I thought was love, have its way with me.

Of course when Barb asked me to marry her after only three months of seeing each other I was taken back. My finger nails even bled that night. I hadn’t stopped chewing them from the moment I said yes.

The weight of the word in my stomach was nothing compared to the feeling it left in my throat, as if a rope had been tied around a boulder and slowly pulled on, scrapping the edges until it broke through my teeth onto her hand that rested above one knee.

The other knee had been firmly placed in the dirt. I saw the knee before I saw the ring.

I saw the ring and then I saw Ma.

What would she say?

Always in the back of my mind – quick to respond – like a kneejerk reaction, you don’t even notice until your already done reacting, and it’s too late by then – its half way around the bay.

The wedding was starting at 3:00. Barb wanted to wait in the basement before walking the aisle. I asked Ma if she could wait with her seeing as Rich couldn’t manage the church stairs with his bad hip. He waited at the entrance of the church so he could walk Barb down the aisle, which I wasn’t convinced he could do. Barb would end up being the one walking him down the aisle.

There was twenty minutes before the ceremony was about to begin. Quietly I retreated to the basement from the kitchen entrance, which was located at the back of the church. I could hear my Ma and Barb. They weren’t talking, it was more of a whisper, when suddenly I could hear weeping or what I thought was weeping.

When I walked around the corner of the stairwell I expected to see Barbra crying and full of realization of what she was about to do. I half expected her to run away or disappear like a ghost, never to be seen again. She was just as likely to walk straight up to me and say “goodbye” and I would stand there dumbfounded like I did often.

When we would fight, Barb would threaten to leave me and I would tell her how I would do anything for her. Beg her even. I would beg her to stay. She wasn’t going anywhere but she liked when I begged. She liked to treat me like a dog.

Ma always told me she liked her men like she liked her dogs – obedient.

Ma never had any men around. And she never had no dog neither.

Turns out Ma and Barb were both into cats, not dogs.

In the dim, poorly lit room I could see my Ma pressed up against the wall of the church, right next to a photo of our former Priest, Father Daniels. Barbra’s lips pressed against Ma’s. Their lips smacking echoed through the room, while their tongues cleaned the back of each other’s throat.

Barbra never kissed me like that, neither did Ma.

I slowly retreated from the kitchen to the stairwell.

Silence filled everything.

In the pews I can only make out a couple faces amongst the many who have decided to join us on this unusually warm autumn day here in the small Town of Hunters Bay. My Ma and my uncle Cassidy are sitting in the front row with Barbs parents, Judy and Richard Dunson.

Soon Barbra Dunson will be Barbra Kilowack. We will run out of this church and drive off to the airport and before we know it we will have our toes in white sandy beaches and Pina coladas in our hands with plastic flowered necklaces draped over our Acapulco shirts. We will eat fruit naked on the balcony of our hotel suet. The salty ocean air will blow as we fuck under the hot sun. Together we will dance away the night and when the locals ask us about our story we can show them our rings and tell them the good news.

              The priest then turned to me and said, “And do you, Brody, take Barbra, to love, and to care for, for all your life . . .”

I tell myself to breathe and I slowly inhale, allowing my thoughts to gravitate towards my chest. I can feel it rise under my three piece suit.

It is either hot in this church or my tie is too tight.

I can feel a fan somewhere behind me blowing air on my sweaty neck and some of it runs down my back. I don’t shiver but I want to.

“I do”