The Winter Vault by Anne Michaels Page B

waiting – and it was the ordinariness of the words that was so moving, even as a girl I felt this, that such ordinariness should always sound that way, as if the wind had found its language. ‘Voices sweet as fruit,’ my father said, a phrase I'm sure he'd saved for me in his mouth the entire day. Another time, he took me with him in the middle of winter, it was after a storm and again we walked, this time in snow-white darkness. From the mill roof hung immense icicles, almost to the ground, a frozen waterfall, twelve or fifteen feet long; it made me think of a painting I'd seen, of mammoth baleen in the moonlit ocean … Always he would show me these things as if they were secrets, not just there out in the open for anyone to see. And it's true, hardly anyone ever noticed the miracles my father noticed. We took the train back to Montreal together in the dark, and I fell asleep leaning against his wool coat, or his cool short-sleeved summer arm, full of the day's beautiful secrets and the irreducible knowledge that my mother was not with us. That she would never see these things. And that is when I realized we were looking for her.
    Children make vows. From the moment I saw my father sitting in the kitchen, her sweater draped across his chest, about a month after she'd died, I knew I would never leave him, I knew I would always look after him.
    When I think of it now, only now, I realize we lived in a hush, as if my mother had been all the happy noise we'd ever known. After she was gone, our range of expression shrank – to the small, to the significant. I ached and longed for her. I've missed her every minute of my life. Each morning I woke up, I walked to school, I cooked our dinner, and I never stopped missing her. I remember the first day at school after she died, all the children knew and they avoided me – they were too young for pity, they were afraid. She left a small garden that I kept tending – for her – as if one day she would come back and we could sit there together and I would show her how well her lilies had grown, show her all the new plants I'd added. In the beginning, I was afraid to change anything and it was momentous when I dug the first hole. Then planting became a vocation. Suddenly I felt I could keep on loving her, that I could keep telling her things this way …
    It was hard trying to learn simple things like what kind of clothes to wear or what was expected of me by watching my schoolmates, seeing what they wore and how they behaved, listening to them talk. My father had one sister, much older than him, who lived in England and she visited us once. My aunt seemed so vibrant, so exorbitant in her habits – so free and at ease. She wore silk dresses and velvet hats and when she arrived she gave me a pair of bright red woollen mittens trimmed with tartan ribbon. I remember how frightened I was to wear those mittens in the schoolyard. What if someone said something to make me not love them as much? I thought everyone would laugh at me – something so jolly and pretty could not belong to me, could not be for my hands! It was wrong, gauche, a display of happiness above my standing. But of course no one noticed them at all. And those mittens had a kind of magic in them: they had not been ruined by words. Long after my aunt returned home, her gift continued to make me bolder and, very slowly, I began to wear what I liked, and be what I liked. And again, no one seemed to notice or care. I wore my mother's old-fashioned cardigans and her lace-up Clapp shoes, which she'd always called her ‘house shoes.’ There were our two birthday parties each year, just my father and me, always with an elaborate store-bought cake with heavy ropes of icing along the edges. The thought of those cakes makes me weep because he did not know what to do to please me, how to please me enough. All his love went into the choosing of a cake, the colour of the icing, the sugar decorations – almost as if it were for her.