The First Dewberries
~
I
HEART BURGLARY
ANNABEL NEVER EXPECTED to receive a call from her daughter, Ilsit, so late in the evening and on a Tuesday. Ever since Ilsit and Harold, her husband of twenty-one years, had moved to Toronto, Annabel became used to regular Sunday afternoon calls from her. The couple's move to the city came about soon after their wedding and with the hope that Harold could grow his business selling home furnishings, a range of designer goods which Ilsit thought refined but which Annabel called “ostentatious” behind Harold’s back. Such were his mother-in-law‘s country tastes, a distinction that cannot be overstated. Plus there were her generational differences, Annabel having lived through those very difficult, nearly impoverished years before some war. Still, she had been relieved at her daughter's wedding. She, if not Ilsit herself, had been keenly aware of an eighteen-year-old woman’s dwindling options. Which is not to say that Ilsit was unattractive. She caught the eyes of the young men in town, despite a certain indescribable something that kept her from being beautiful. Since puberty she’d been fair-skinned with dark hair that she always, always, always wore up, and a smile which took a slightly vindictive turn at its left corner. And she was also fairly bookish. Like in a nascent writerly-type way. The town she’d escaped from was where Annabel still lived in their deteriorating but memory-laden farm house – which Annabel's great-grandfather had built (in even difficult-er years) – in a rural valley surrounded by several bodies of water outside of Vancouver, and some distance from Montreal. But probably reachable from Ontario, if you own a car. Which many more people do nowadays.
“Is something the matter?” demanded Annabel; she could hear her daughter's breath quicken.
“No. Everything’s fine.” But after some minutes of conversing, Ilsit hazarded her question: “Mom, do you ever think of Augie Firnable?”
Annabel's gripped the receiver more tightly to hear the boy's name uttered after so many years. After so many residents of the town had long-forgotten the accident. After the spot in the field, near the kissing gate that lead from the Firnables' land onto their own, had long been worn over and trod down by the harsh seasons.
However, perhaps Annabel never answered the phone. Never spoke to her daughter that Tuesday night of all nights. Perhaps, instead, she took out the preserved stack of letters between her mother, whose face had always possessed a certain indescribable something that kept her from being beautiful, and her father, who was almost certainly barrel-chested. She sat sipping a coffee mug filled with rye, and carefully unfolded the letter from the week after Augie's death:
Dear husband George, late-1800's
The seasons are especially season-y this season. I have a deeply felt inner life that no one will ever know about, at least while I'm alive. Out in our field, the handsomest of the Firnable boys has just suffered an Industrial Age accident. I fear this will have subtle reverberations in our town for several generations, and that our daughter Annabel in particular will mine it for lots of metaphors, especially if she ever gets divorced. If only her looks didn't possess that certain indescribable something that keeps her from being straight up beautiful. She deserves a higher education, even though that would be fucking crazy.
Subtextually,
Georgiana
