Mushed Cookies and Sylvia Plath’s Poetry in Rain City

An excerpt from The God of My Art: A Novel. Helene and Matthew are outside a bakery on Fraser Street in Vancouver.

As Matthew stepped out with the grease-stained bag in his fist, the rainfall turned torrential. He hesitated under the eave then pulled me in under the overhang. Rain ran off my bare arms in rivulets; my hair stuck to my cheeks.

“Even the monsoon rains in India give you more warning than this,” he grumbled, letting go of my arm. We stood there watching the water gush from the sky, splashing up off the sidewalk and streaming in small rivers toward the storm drains. He offered me a chocolate chip cookie. The moisture in the air and the wet on my hands dampened it to a mess of melted chocolate and mushy dough.

“So,” he asked, when the cookies were gone and the rain was still streaming down, “do you know any poetry?”

I was about to recite Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” which I had obsessively memorized in high school, when Matthew crumpled up the paper bag into a tight wad and tossed it through the rain into a nearby trashcan. Most likely, he wouldn’t recognize Plath’s poetry anyway, those words I had made my own as a teenager—Daddy, I have had to kill you—and realizing this distanced me from him. Standing there in silence in the doorway, his damp arm brushing mine, I sensed once again the chasm separating our experiences.

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