lain down on a rock for a nap one afternoon while his mother and father went out hunting. (For what? I wondered. What did dinosaurs eat?) And then when he woke up he was trapped inside his bed and nobody could ever get him out.
It was a sad rock, then, but also a very special rock that I was happy to have and would take special care of because it had something in it that had once been alive, so in a way it was almost like a grave, and I knew how important it was to take care of graves. (My father and Sol and Nina went to visit their father’s grave twice a year.) But I was also disappointed with the present. More disappointed than happy, I had to admit. Was it that I had thought at first that the rocks were the beginning of something, and now I understood they might not be leading to anything but more rocks? Was it that the most recent rock was, in fact, a grave?
The accompanying card said: Oldman River, Alberta, 13:00, May 7th, 1956, clear, 58 degrees F, still . The name was as evocative to me, in one way, as Gem and Rainy lakes had been. I immediately saw craggy rocks all around it, their faces like those of old men, with fossils embedded in them. (I would be surprised years later to see just how accurate my mental picture of that landscape had been.) But I didn’t see my mother in that landscape. I just saw the rocks and the river. And a bigger problem with the river was its location. There was nodoubt that Alberta was farther from Montreal than Manitoba or Ontario. Which meant she was getting farther from me, not closer. Which was another source of disappointment.
I pasted the index card into the scrapbook but couldn’t pretend the scrapbook was a project that was going well. Its pages remained mostly empty, and the ones that had something pasted in were not anything anyone else would find interesting: scraps of wrapping paper; stamps; index cards with place names, dates and weather conditions written on them; a page with the heading LIKES , and then three words below that heading: Rocks, Lakes, Geese . Four words if you counted Birds , which was crossed out. The Queen’s scrapbook, by contrast, was full to the brim with fascinating pictures and articles. Just a few weeks earlier I had added a photo of the entire royal family, Princess Anne looking particularly beautiful in a dress that must have been caught in a slight breeze at the moment the photo was snapped, because it billowed all around her in a swirl of light, cottony blue.
There was no question that my scrapbook about my mother was becoming boring to me. Even my fantasies about my mother had started to dry up. It was not that I was no longer curious about her. I was very curious. But curiosity does require something to feed it, and the pickings on that front were decidedly slim. I was famished. Hence my excitement when I felt the pulsing from the empty notebook that had once been my mother’s. Maybe it wasn’t as empty as it seemed. The thought came to me like a jolt. Maybe she had written in it. And maybe that’s why she had left it behind, because she had written in it, but in invisible ink, which she knew, somehow, that I would figure out.
The phone rang. That too hit me with a jolt. I wasn’t sure what to do. It was as if I had been caught doing somethingI shouldn’t, even though it was just someone calling on the phone who couldn’t see me, and I wasn’t, in fact, forbidden to look at the notebooks. It was not only permissible for me to be doing what I was doing, but natural. (“It’s natural to be curious about where we come from,” Elka said.) But things that were natural could still be embarrassing, like being caught by Carrie’s mother with no clothes on when she came into Carrie’s room while we were playing doctor. And I wasn’t sure that the pulsing I felt from the book was the same kind of natural as the curiosity Elka had been talking about. So I put the book away before I went to the phone and by the time I got there it had
It was a sad rock, then, but also a very special rock that I was happy to have and would take special care of because it had something in it that had once been alive, so in a way it was almost like a grave, and I knew how important it was to take care of graves. (My father and Sol and Nina went to visit their father’s grave twice a year.) But I was also disappointed with the present. More disappointed than happy, I had to admit. Was it that I had thought at first that the rocks were the beginning of something, and now I understood they might not be leading to anything but more rocks? Was it that the most recent rock was, in fact, a grave?
The accompanying card said: Oldman River, Alberta, 13:00, May 7th, 1956, clear, 58 degrees F, still . The name was as evocative to me, in one way, as Gem and Rainy lakes had been. I immediately saw craggy rocks all around it, their faces like those of old men, with fossils embedded in them. (I would be surprised years later to see just how accurate my mental picture of that landscape had been.) But I didn’t see my mother in that landscape. I just saw the rocks and the river. And a bigger problem with the river was its location. There was nodoubt that Alberta was farther from Montreal than Manitoba or Ontario. Which meant she was getting farther from me, not closer. Which was another source of disappointment.
I pasted the index card into the scrapbook but couldn’t pretend the scrapbook was a project that was going well. Its pages remained mostly empty, and the ones that had something pasted in were not anything anyone else would find interesting: scraps of wrapping paper; stamps; index cards with place names, dates and weather conditions written on them; a page with the heading LIKES , and then three words below that heading: Rocks, Lakes, Geese . Four words if you counted Birds , which was crossed out. The Queen’s scrapbook, by contrast, was full to the brim with fascinating pictures and articles. Just a few weeks earlier I had added a photo of the entire royal family, Princess Anne looking particularly beautiful in a dress that must have been caught in a slight breeze at the moment the photo was snapped, because it billowed all around her in a swirl of light, cottony blue.
There was no question that my scrapbook about my mother was becoming boring to me. Even my fantasies about my mother had started to dry up. It was not that I was no longer curious about her. I was very curious. But curiosity does require something to feed it, and the pickings on that front were decidedly slim. I was famished. Hence my excitement when I felt the pulsing from the empty notebook that had once been my mother’s. Maybe it wasn’t as empty as it seemed. The thought came to me like a jolt. Maybe she had written in it. And maybe that’s why she had left it behind, because she had written in it, but in invisible ink, which she knew, somehow, that I would figure out.
The phone rang. That too hit me with a jolt. I wasn’t sure what to do. It was as if I had been caught doing somethingI shouldn’t, even though it was just someone calling on the phone who couldn’t see me, and I wasn’t, in fact, forbidden to look at the notebooks. It was not only permissible for me to be doing what I was doing, but natural. (“It’s natural to be curious about where we come from,” Elka said.) But things that were natural could still be embarrassing, like being caught by Carrie’s mother with no clothes on when she came into Carrie’s room while we were playing doctor. And I wasn’t sure that the pulsing I felt from the book was the same kind of natural as the curiosity Elka had been talking about. So I put the book away before I went to the phone and by the time I got there it had
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