nidus: "Zero Degrees" by Wendy Murray

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No. 7

Fall 2004

Evelyn had this dream of crossing the equator on an ocean liner. She'd done little trips: Bologna, Ankara. But she was always very careful to check in the atlas that her trips wouldn't take her over that line at zero degrees. Her grandmother, who always smelled a little strange and wore a fuzzy pink hat with a brooch on the side, used to go back and forth to New Zealand. The family would go and see her off at the docks in Southampton. Grandmother climbing up a gangplank to the S.S. Canberra or the S.S. Oriana. When they crossed the equator, grandmother would say, "anyone who was crossing for the first time was labeled an equator virgin and would be thrown into the ship's pool by one of the crew dressed up as Neptune." Evelyn didn't remember what happened to grandmother but she did know that the Oriana was relegated to Mediterranean cruises and the Canberra was scrapped.

Evelyn couldn't waste that one degree north to one degree south on a wide bodied aeroplane where it would pass unnoticed amidst pretzels and duty frees. So Neptune and the equator went into the wicker basket in the corner of her room along with learning Russian, playing the clarinet, spinning wool, and the broken wind chimes.

***

She'd always had an atlas. Along with the hand-me-down National Geographics with their photos of exotic people doing routine chores like brewing bark or buttering their hair. She liked the articles on butterflies or flying monkeys, but it was always the people that drew her in, with their dusty feet and worn hands and watery eyes. They made her cry with their hollow ribs and unexpected hope. But it was the atlas that she read at night propped up on her knees. She'd turn the pages that smelt of old cardigans and see names like Gibraltar or Tanganika or British Honduras. All pink. All belonging to Queen Victoria who, thankfully, was dead.

Her parents never felt like anybody else's parents. They were earnest people. Both had worked very hard for Proctor and Gamble at a place called Port Sunlight. They treated their three children like they were adults from the day they were able to eat peas with a fork. Apart from being knocked out of the cherry tree by her brother George she didn't have any memories of being touched intentionally. It was her father's mother who had the fuzzy pink hat.

But father was very clear that there wasn't room for his mother in their house on a permanent basis which was why she was always going to New Zealand. Apparently there was "family" there and she was looking for a place to settle. Her father smoked a pipe and had a rack of two-toned ones on the mantelpiece. Her mother was brought up Presbyterian and had strayed from the path to marry her Catholic father which meant that her mother's family would have nothing to do with any of them.

"Better off without," her father would say. "Yes Bernard": her mother would reply and stack the dinner plates carefully.

When Evelyn left school and went to college in Northhampton her parents sold the family home and moved to a nice bungalow on the South Coast. Her two brothers were off and away. George was doing something with oilrigs up near Aberdeen. Peter had joined the Foreign Service and was stationed in Cologne, Germany, where he had met and married a tall woman called Gertha.

When her parents moved, they took what they needed from their bedroom, the living room and the kitchen. And everything else was left to the new owners with a note taped to the banister with twenty pounds to have the charity of their choice come and take everything away.

George had a heated exchange about his collection of Liverpool football programmes. Peter said that he would have liked to have passed his hockey stick onto his unborn son. But she, Evelyn, who was the youngest, she still had so much of her life stuck in drawers, in boxes, on shelves and under the bed. School reports, underwear, postcards, ballet shoes, a Spanish doll collection, photographs, ribbons, stamps, lip balms, books, unsigned valentines, hairbrushes, five-year diaries.

"Dear Mother and Father," she wrote, "How could you be so careless with my life? How do you expect me to remember myself when you offer my past up to charity?"

But she never sent it. She knew they wouldn't reply. So she sent a "Welcome to your New Home" instead and they sent a thank-you card back.

***

She started training as a computer programmer at Northampton Poly. But after a year she knew that she would shrivel up if she had to work behind a solid door, so she changed to Physical Education and graduated with honours and a whistle between her teeth. She went off for a month around Spain on a train with a backpack and less than schoolgirl Castillian. She saw where Salvador Dali waxed his moustache and Lorca wrote "Blood Wedding." She stood looking at the Sagrada Familia for a whole afternoon and cried. She saw the windmills that inspired Don Quixote and the palace of Prince Juan Carlos. She leaned over the bridge at Ronda and imagined heretics being thrown into the valley below. She had sulfur baths and drank Jerez sherry. She picked oranges off trees and looked at North Africa from the rock at Gibraltar. She ate squid cooked ten different ways, she used bread instead of a fork. She saw the remains of oils slicks on the beaches of Galicia and stood against the walls where bulls would have rushed past in Pamplona. She went to mass and prayed in Latin and asked the Virgin Mary not to let her remain one for her whole life and by the end of August she was back in England with sturdy shoes and a windbreaker to start her first job as junior P.E. teacher at an all-girls school in Hampshire.

***

Suzanne taught English. Evelyn had moved into her spare room at the beginning of the Easter term. Three months of being in the staff accommodations with all these senior teachers and their face creams and breakfast rituals were sending her round the bend. So after a Christmas spent in St. Petersburg which, she decided, was the coldest place on earth and where she would have given her viyella nightgown for a bath that resembled hot, she was very happy to move her two suitcases into Suzanne's extra bedroom.

The way it worked in these small public schools was that you had a subject and you taught everyone from elevensies to leaving age. So Suzanne went from E. Nesbitt through the "Chronicles of Narnia," to the sisters Charlotte, Emily and Anne, stopping off for a bit of "The Pardoner's Tale" and the Indecision of Hamlet. She was great fun. She was also a very bad cook. So it settled down to where Evelyn, who could do no wrong with a saucepan, would cook in the evenings and Suzanne would sit down on the bench in the kitchen, stroke the cat, sip her glass of Portuguese rose and tell stories from literature and those who tried to learn it.

That's the way it worked for a whole year. January to January. They went out occasionally to the cinema. Took a trip about once a month to London where Suzanne was a "friend" of the National Theatre and had first dibs on preview tickets. They used to go swimming every Friday night to the local pool which had so much chlorine, that their eyes would stay red until Sunday.

***

Evelyn attended mass while Suzanne slept in late and then they would comb the local car boot sales. They played scrabble and Suzanne always won. They played golf and Evelyn pretended to hit her ball into the rough. They went to chamber music concerts and had contests as to who would conk out first.

***

That summer, Suzanne went home to her family who lived in Ullapool on the West Coast of Scotland. Evelyn went to join them for a week or so before scooting off to do a walking tour of Scandinavia. She found she had a lovely time with these Suzanne-looking people who all called each other strange names like Frogley or Bambar, ate smoked haddock for breakfast, and dressed in evening clothes for dinner on Wednesdays.

Over the summer holidays the senior P.E. teacher tore the cartilage in her knee and Evelyn found herself Officer in charge of netballs, hockeyballs, rapiers, squash racquets, climbing frames and sweaty, complaining, blue-kneed girls.

Those autumn evenings she would open the Portuguese rose before taking off her windbreaker and Suzanne had had a chance to put down her briefcase and she would lie on the floor of the kitchen near the stove, where the pilot light would give off some warmth and let her leg muscles relax so her mouth could talk about things other than goalposts.

***

And it was in January, when Evelyn was putting together the second of two sauces for lasagna and Suzanne was sitting on the bench by the window with the cat splattered on her lap. When the glass of wine was half drunk by the chopping board, as she put the spinach in with the cream and the cheese, when the rain was hitting the French doors at a slant as only rain can do when it feels it's been overlooked, when the slippers that Suzanne had given her for Christmas which came up to her knees making her feel like a toasty Hiawatha, when she was talking about having gone to Venice for New Year and how alone she had felt in St. Mark's Square on New Year's Eve with all of those linguine-shaped Italians and their cashmere everythings and how she had come back to the hotel before midnight and eaten a squashed pear that appeared at the bottom of her suitcase and written a poem which she had then crushed and had thrown off the balcony, with her hand going round and round at the end of a wooden spoon, going round and round in the white and green sauce and Joni Mitchell singing all about some Richard, and the slippers comforting her after eight hours of running on frozen pitches with a whistle in her lips and commands from her mouth, she saw Suzanne in front of her. Suzanne's face coming towards her. And her hand kept stirring as she and Suzanne met at their mouths. Joni Mitchell sorted it out with Richard. She thought about that pool on board the SS Canberra and the sailor dressed up as Neptune. She felt the line of the equator split her up through her middle. She was thrown into the water with her new slippers and she saw the pink fuzzy hat catching the spray and she sighed out with breath bigger than Botswana.

"Let's go there this summer," she said.

nidus is an online publication supported by the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh's English Department.

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