I don't remember the sinking of the Ocean Ranger off Newfoundland in 1982, but I was only 14 at the time (such a self-involved age) and living through the most grief-producing event of my own life-- my parents had decided to tear us from our friends and familiar setting (seven years since we had been schlepped from New Brunswick to Ontario) and displace the family to Alberta, and although my father didn't work in oil, he was chasing the good times of the oil boom that brought so many Maritimers out to the West back then. I had, just the year before, gone on a band exchange with a girl from St. John's, and she and her family were warm and funny and generous people. They didn't seem to have that much, but as they drove me around, proudly showing off the city that they loved, it was apparent that they had everything that mattered. With this frame of reference, I should really have been more aware of this real life disaster, and it may have been within this frame of reference that I found myself sobbing, barely able to read the words through the tears, at several points as I read this book.
Although you know pretty much right away that Helen loses her husband Cal in the disaster, when this scene happens, I could barely get through it:
Somehow Helen had picked up on the idea that there was such a thing as love, and she had invested fully in it. She had summoned everything she was, every little tiny scrap of herself, and she'd handed it over to Cal and said: This is yours.
She said, Here's a gift for you, buddy.
Helen didn't say, Be careful with it, because she knew Cal would be careful. She was twenty and you could say she didn't know any better. That's what she says herself: I didn't know any better.
But that was the way it had to be. She could not hold back. She wasn't that kind of person; there was no holding back
Somewhere Helen had picked up the idea that love was this: You gave everything. It wasn't just dumb luck that Cal knew what the gift was worth; that's why she gave it to him in the first place. She could tell he was the kind of guy who would.
Her father-in-law, Dave O'Mara, had identified Cal's body. He told her this over the phone.
I wanted to catch you, he said. Helen had known there wasn't any hope. But she felt faint when she heard Dave O'Mara's voice. She had to hold on to the kitchen counter. She didn't faint because she had the children in the house and the bath was running.
It gave me a turn, her father-in-law said. I'll tell you that much.
There were long stretches in the phone call where neither of them said anything. Dave O'Mara wasn't speaking because he didn't know he wasn't speaking. He could see before him whatever he'd seen when he looked at his dead son, and he thought he was telling her all of that. But he was in his own kitchen staring silently at the floor.
…
Helen lost her peripheral vision. She could see a spot about the size of a dime in a field of black. She tried to focus on the surface of the kitchen table. It was a varnished pine table they’d bought at a yard sale, and in that little circle she could see the grain of wood and a glare of overhead light. She had willed the spot to open wider so she could take in the bowl with the apples and the side of the fridge and the linoleum, and then the window and the garden. Her scalp was tingling and a drip of sweat ran from her hairline down her temple. Her face was damp with sweat as if she’d been running.
…
Helen was in a panic as if something very bad was going to happen, but it had already happened. It was hard to take in that it had already happened. Why was she in a panic? It was as if she had split in half. Something bad was going to happen to her; and then there was the other her, the one who knew it had already happened. It was a mounting and useless panic and she did not want to faint. But she was being flooded with the truth. It wasn't going to happen; it had already happened.
You don't want to see him, Dave said.
…
Dave kept talking and didn't know he was talking, but it was also an effort to talk; Helen could tell. Dave sucked in air through his teeth the way someone does when he is lifting something heavy. He kept saying the same things. He kept saying about holding Cal's hand. Not to worry about the ring. She would get the ring, he'd make sure. That Cal's glasses were in his pocket. That Cal had on a plaid flannel shirt. The receiver felt sweaty and it was dark early in the afternoon because it was February, and it would be dark for a long time. It was silent out in the dark except for the wind knocking the tree branches together.
I wish I had the time to copy out every scene referring to Helen's loss, because they were touching and brutal and beautiful and relentless-- I think relentless is the most appropriate adjective because, although I have never suffered this kind of a loss, I can imagine that it is the unrelenting nature of grief that most debilitates a person; the moments when you have forgotten to remember that central loss, some rare moment of peace, when suddenly, wham, it all comes flooding back, fresh and horrifying, and conveying that experience is what Lisa Moore achieves in February.
In addition to the story, the themes, that overwhelmed me while reading this book, I was also astounded by the craftsmanship of the writing. The beautiful turns of phrase, the nimble interspersing of present and past, even the use of colons and semi-colons made me stop and marvel at their inclusion-- making me wonder if they were used in specific places simply to make me go back to parse why they had been placed in exactly the place they sat, rereading key phrases, as though the author knew she would be forcing me to pay closer attention. I was also stunned by several small scenes that so perfectly described a mundane type experience that I had to reread them, just to see how Moore had achieved such simple perfection. An example of what I mean:
The one woman at the table full of men, her mouth full, raises her escargot prong, a wet grey slug hanging from the end. She has slug in her mouth and her lips are glossy with slug juice. John is surprised to find this erotic. Butter. It is garlic butter that makes the woman's chin greasy, and she is trying to get the men to shut up…
Butter and the sweat of a boiled organism, all muscle. John tries to think of a muscle in the human body that is the same size as a slug. Natalie is bobbing in her seat and waving the little fork. The men wait. One by one, they fall into an agitated silence…
Natalie Bateman puts her fingers over her mouth and chews and chews and rolls her eyes comically because this is a table of men held up by a miniature fork. Her eyes water and she takes a gulp of champagne and John sees she is beautiful…He watches her wrinkle her nose when she drinks from the champagne glass.
More personally, as the mother of girls, I could identify with the following passage, and am encouraged that I will survive the natural loss of them from my everyday life:
The girls left hair on the sink and in the drain, and they shaved their legs and left a ring of grey scum around the bathtub, and they talked on the phone, and the parties they threw, the cold smell of cigarette smoke in the morning and beer and all the windows open, the freezing air coming in.
And they fought with each other, her girls; they bickered. A hairbrush hit the wall, someone borrowed someone's something or other without asking. Where's my new sweater? She took my sweater.
But just let someone outside the family make a disparaging remark. Just let some outsider say something about one or the other of the girls and see how they flew together, to defend. They took care of one another. there was the worry of them driving with drunk boys, the worry of illness or no date for the prom, or they wanted expensive things for Christmas or their birthdays, or there was some injustice with a teacher, some threat of expulsion, or they wanted a job or someone wanted to marry them. And then, without warning, they were gone. They had all grown into their own lives, and it was very quiet. Helen had thought she would have to claw her way out of that quiet, and then, very soon after, she was grateful for it.
Having just read Survival A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, and attempting to evaluate February through its lens, I would have to admit that it seems to fall into Atwood's critique of CanLit's Victim motifs. As Atwood says in her book: What happens in Canadian literature when boy meets girl? And what sort of boy, and what sort of girl? If you've got this far, you may predict that when boy meets girl she gets cancer and he gets hit by a meteorite. Indeed, on Cal and Helen's wedding night, the mirror in their hotel room shatters, seemingly from a simple glance from Cal. It buckled, or it bucked, or it curled like a wave and splashed onto the carpet and froze there into hard, jagged pieces. It happened so fast that Cal walked over the glass in his bare feet before he knew what he was doing, and he was not cut. It was not that the breaking mirror had brought them bad luck. Helen didn't believe that. But all the bad luck to come was in Cal's glance, and when he looked at the mirror the bad luck busted out. I will assume Lisa Moore is more familiar with Margaret Atwood's work than I am-- is it significant/coincidence that Helen and Cal meet in 1972, the same year Survival is released?
This is my first 5 star book of 2013, and it earns every stellated point of it. A work of perfection, not least of all, because it made me feel.
As a final note, how strange that Cal and Helen have a Nova Scotia Duck Toller, the uncommon dog breed that my family had when I was little; the dog that was so hyper he was given away to a farm; the dog that ran away from the farm and found his way back to us in St. John; the dog that later became sick, and my Dad and his friend Clifford took that dog into the woods to shoot him, which, in the end, my Dad had to oblige his friend to do. Why was I told all of this (at 6 or 7) as though it was a touching story about my Dad? There's something more to this, and after some simmering, and some degree of Magical Thinking, I found more parallels: Like Cal and Helen, my parents had a shotgun wedding, and coincidentally, my parents were married on Bell Island, the obscure lump in the hazy distance that Helen spies through her binoculars from the kitchen window of their "summer home around the bay". Like with Cal and Helen's kids, I have been told that my brothers and I were all failures of birth control, haha. And then the differences: while Cal assumed the personal risk of working on the oil rig for the stability of his family, my parents decided to destabilise our family, repeatedly moving us ever westward before they decided to start retracing eastward(eventually by themselves) back to their roots. And then, most peculiarly, while Cal risked his own safety to search for his missing dog in a storm, my own Dad had to repeatedly try to get rid of our own Nova Scotia Duck Toller. Like I said, I suffer from enough Magical Thinking to feel that these coincidences are meant to mean something to me, and I'll be simmering on them for some time to come.
