Red Plaid Shirt

by Diane Schoemperlen

  “Just between you and me,” my mother said right after Rita phoned to say she’d sold the fabulous coat, “I think mink is a waste of money. It’s only for snobs. I wouldn’t wear one if you gave it to me. ”Ten years later, my father bought her a mink jacket trimmed with ermine and she said, hugging him, “Oh, Ted, I’ve always wanted one.”

  It was an extravagant winter, with new records set for both snow and all-time-low temperatures. My father seemed to be always outside shovelling snow in the dark, piling up huge icy banks all around the house. He would come in from the cold red-cheeked and handsome, trying to put his icy hands around my neck. Rita came over less and less often. She said it was because her car wouldn’t start half the time, even when she kept it plugged in.

  On warmer days when Rita wasn’t working, my mother often took the bus downtown to her apartment. When I came home from school at three-thirty, the house would be luxuriously empty. I curled up on the chesterfield with the record player on and wrote in the datebook Rita had given me or worked on the optimistic list my friend, Mary, and I had started: “One Thousand Things We Like.” Well into its second spiral notebook, the list had passed seven hundred and was coming up quickly on eight with

  cuckoo clocks

  Canada

  lace

  my mother’s hair

  comfortable underwear and

  having a bath without interruptions

  being the most recent additions.

  My mother returned just in time to start supper before my father got home from work. She was distracted then in a pleasant sort of way, all jazzed up and jingling from too much coffee or something, gabbing away gaily as she peeled the potatoes. Rita had given her some old clothes which could be made over into any number of new outfits for me. There was a reversible plaid skirt I’d always admired and wanted to wear right away but my mother said it was too old for me.

  One Saturday afternoon when we had been out shopping together, my mother suggested we drop in on Rita before catching the bus home. I had never been to her apartment before and as we walked up Northern Avenue to the Barclay Block, I tried to imagine what it would be like. Small, I supposed, since Rita lived alone—and was, in fact, the only person I’d ever known who did. Such an arrangement was new to me then, a future possibility that became more and more attractive the more I thought about it. The apartment would be quite small, yes, and half-dark all the time, with huge exotic plants dangling in all the windows, shedding a humid green light everywhere. The rooms smelled of coffee and black earth. The furniture was probably old, cleverly draped with throws in vivid geometrics. The hardwood floors gleamed and in one room (which one?) the ceiling was painted a throbbing bloody red. I thought that Rita and I could have coffee there just the two of us (my mother having conveniently disappeared) and she would tell me everything I needed to know. Why did Geoffrey hang himself, what happened to the baby, do you go out with men sometimes, do you think I’m pretty, do you think I’m smart? She could tell my future like a fortune.

  We climbed a steep flight of stairs up to the second floor. The smell of baking bread rose up cheesy and moist from the Italian bakery below. I’d forgotten that my parents had lived here once too, until my mother said, “I always hated that smell, we lived in 3 b,” and pointed to a door on the left. I could not imagine anything at all about their apartment.

  My mother knocked loudly on Rita’s door. Further down, another door opened and a woman in her housecoat leaned out into the hall, expecting somebody, I guess, or maybe just spying. “Oh, it’s you. Hi,” she said and ducked back inside.

  My mother knocked again, and then once more.

  “Maybe she’s working,” I offered.

  “No, she’s not. She definitely told me she was off today.”

  “Where can she be then?” I was pretty sure I could hear a radio going inside.

  “How would I know?” my mother said angrily and sailed back down the hall.

  Only once did I find my father and Rita alone in the house. I came home from Mary’s late one Saturday afternoon and they were drinking rum at the kitchen table, with the record player turned up loud in the living room. They seemed neither surprised nor sorry to see me. There was something funny about Rita’s eyes when she looked up at me though, a lazy softness, a shining, which I just naturally assumed to be an effect of the rum. She poured me a glass of 7Up and we sat around laying bets on the playoffs, which were just starting, Montreal and St. Louis, until my mother came home from shopping. As it turned out, the Canadiens took the series four games straight that year and skated back to Montreal with the Stanley Cup.

  Rita stayed for supper and then for the game. I went back to Mary’s and then her father drove us downtown to the Junior A game at the arena. Rita was gone by the time I got home and I went straight to bed because I’d had one shot of rye in Lorne Puhalski’s father’s car in the arena parking lot and I was afraid my mother, who still liked to kiss me goodnight, would smell it.

  They were arguing as they got ready for bed.

  “She lost her son, Violet, and then her husband too,” my father said, meaning Rita, making her sound innocent but careless, always losing things, people too. But he was defending her, and himself too, protecting her from some accusation, himself from some threat I’d missed, something unfair.

  “Well, I know that, Ted.”

  “Don’t forget it then.”

  “That’s no excuse for anything, you fool.”

  “I didn’t say it was.”

  “Be quiet, she’ll hear you,” my mother said, meaning me.

  Clues (1984)

  Every Friday just after lunch, Linda Anderson went out to their wheezing blue Chevy in the driveway next door and sat there honking for me—a ritual which irritated my mother marvellously and made me feel like I was going out on a heavy date. We were going grocery shopping.

  Once in the car, I would admire Linda’s new lilac skirt, multicoloured sandals, or glittering earring and brooch set. She made the jewellery herself from little kits she got every week through a special mail order club in the States. She was always wearing something new and flamboyant to, as she cheerfully put it, “perk myself up a bit. I know I’m plain.” Even then I could see that this was true. Linda was one of those young women I’ve often seen since, on buses or trains, pale and rabbity-looking with slightly buck teeth and round eyes, baby-fine hair, light brown or dirty blonde depending on how you look at things. One of those young women destined to be always unhappy, unhealthy, or alone.

  In the Safeway store I pushed the cart while Linda joyfully loaded it up, tossing in items from either side, checking her list, flipping through the fistful of discount coupons we’d been dutifully clipping from magazines and newspapers all week. This did not take on the stingy penny-pinching quality it did when I was forced to go grocery shopping with my parents on Saturday. Then, my mother led the way, my father pushed the cart, which was invariably one of those balky ones with the wheels going in all directions at once, and I lagged along uselessly behind. My mother didn’t even need a list. She bought exactly the same things every week. You could count on it.

  The Safeway on Saturday was full of disgruntled men and hectic children. But on Fridays the shoppers were mostly women, moving smoothly and courteously through the aisles, sure of themselves, experts in their element.

  Linda dropped her purchases one by one into the cart. Kraft Dinner, cream corn, Brussels sprouts, dish soap. Gallons of milk. “Neil’s a real milk-drinker.”

  Green beans. “Neil hates green beans but they’re on sale.”

  Macaroni. “Neil just loves my macaroni and cheese.”

  I felt myself to be collecting these clues, learning everything there was to know about Neil Anderson and so, by extrapolation, about men in general. Neil, like all the other desirable men in the world, was swarthy and slim, brooding, sensitive, and hard to please.

  More items were checked off the list. Tomato soup. “It always comes in handy.”

/>   Fish for Friday. “We’re not Catholic, but still, it’s nice.”

  Cheese slices. “Last night I made this new casserole with sausage and cheese slices and was it ever good.”

  Linda was always trying out new products, new dishes. She had a whole shelf of cookbooks in her kitchen, from which she liked to read me recipes out loud: Apple-Ham Open-Facers, Inside-Out Ravioli, Lazy Day Lasagna. She prided herself on both her cooking and her shopping. Being seven years younger, I was immensely interested in the entire procedure, confident that this was one of the inevitable things which lay in store for me — shopping and cooking for my husband and our eventual children — they would all love everything I served them.

  We waited at the meat counter while the butcher in his bloody apron sliced four chops off a big chunk of pork. The vertical blade whined through the flesh, silver teeth grinding on bone. The man in line behind us, wearing tinted glasses and a uniform of some kind, said, “That’s just how it sounds when they cut the top of your head off to do an autopsy.” Linda smiled and nodded, dropping the chops into the cart, which I was already pushing away. Now the butcher was spearing slabs of dripping liver with a pointed wooden stick.

  On the way to the checkout stand, we had to stop at the candy counter to pick up something for Neil, licorice pipes or jujubes or a chocolate-covered cherry. “I have to get him a little treat or he’ll be mad at me,” Linda explained coyly, making her husband sound like a spoiled child or maybe a snake she had managed to charm, but just barely.

  The Andersons had moved into the house next door on the first of July, newly married, just come to Hastings from Newberry, a dumpy little town to the north. Jobs were easier to come by then and within a week, Neil was working at the same paper mill as my father.

  In the beginning Linda came over to our house several times a week. She could sit at our kitchen table all afternoon just chatting and drinking coffee with my mother. We soon knew all about her.

  Her maiden name was Jessop. Her family had been in Newberry for decades. They owned both the dry goods store and the funeral parlour now, though they’d started out with nothing just like everybody else. Linda was in the middle, with two older sisters and two younger brothers. There had been one older brother, Lance, but he was dead now, beaten to death outside the Newberry bar by a jealous husband from a neighbouring town. The husband had then driven home, on a tractor no less, and killed his wife with a pitchfork. “As I see it,” Linda said, “he knew he’d get caught so he figured he might as well finish the job.”

  Linda and Neil had been childhood sweethearts. “His family is basically no-count,” she admitted. “Oh, don’t tell him I said that, he’ll kill me.” As if I would. She was drawing me into a womanly conspiracy, lush with the promise of fat secrets and special knowledge.

  But they were good at heart, the Andersons. In fact, one of Linda’s brothers would soon be married to one of Neil’s sisters. “It’s a real family affair.”

  They were renting just until they could afford to buy a house in one of the new subdivisions. They planned to have three children and were getting busy on that right away. “I can’t afford to wait too long,” Linda confided. “Both my sisters were cut open for cancer when they weren’t much older than me. So I suppose it’ll get me too in a few years.”

  Linda’s life, past, present, and future, was endlessly interesting to her, and to me too. But my mother wasn’t much for socializing or sitting around gabbing all day, so, after the first few visits, she developed the habit of drifting inconspicuously back to the dishes, the dusting, or rolling up socks. Linda hardly seemed to notice her defection and I was flattered to think that it was really my company she sought in the first place.

  Once, after Linda had finally gone home to start supper for Neil, my mother said viciously, “That girl’s a feather-brain!” and threw the dishtowel across the kitchen after her. “And don’t you go getting any crazy ideas, young lady.” I could not have said exactly what she meant—ideas about what? men, marriage, babies, cancer?—but I knew, grudgingly, that she had a point of some kind.

  Linda had other stories besides her own—a repertoire of alarming gruesome tales which, for a time, I neither doubted nor forgot. But I didn’t repeat them either. There was the one about the man who murdered his son and his dog with an axe. The woman found strangled in her car beside the Number One highway. The man who chopped up his wife and kept the parts in the freezer, all packaged up and labelled.

  Such things happened all the time, in California, Paris, Vancouver, Brazil, but they could happen to anyone anywhere. There was no reason to think that you would be spared. You could no longer know what to expect of people, especially men, in this crazy world. There were so many of them, all equally unpredictable. Most of the time there was no telling what they might do. According to Linda, the men were depraved savages who might run amok at any time and the women were helpless obvious victims, dying all over the place. The best and the worst of her stories were those in which the killers were never caught.

  One afternoon Linda asked, “Did you hear about those kids?", casually stirring more sugar into her third cup of coffee. My mother was defrosting the fridge with pots of hot water.

  “No,” I said. My mother sat down at the table, wanting, I suppose, to hear the news in spite of herself.

  Linda settled in to tell the story. “This couple took their four kids to an arts and crafts show at the community centre. When they left, two of the kids, a boy and a girl, went on ahead. But they never got home. They found them the next day, strangled, side by side, in a field not far from the centre.”

  “Here in Hastings?” I asked, for lack of any other response.

  “Yes. Right here in Hastings.”

  My mother jumped up from the table, knocking her chair over backwards, and stomped out the door, muttering, “Garbage, garbage!” Which could have been either what she was going to do, put out the garbage, or her opinion of Linda, or both.

  That night after supper I went through the newspaper page by page, hoping that no one would ask what I was looking for. On the second last page, I found the small headline, kids found dead, above a half-inch story.

  Two children found dead in a schoolyard in Caracas, Venezuela. They’d been left at home alone and discovered missing when their parents came home the next day.

  I was both disappointed and relieved. Linda, in her hurry to tell us something horrible that we didn’t already know, got the story all wrong. She was looking for proof that she was justified in her cheerful expectation of tragedy. After this, there were many times when I suspected her of lying, trying to make me as frightened as she was. This did not immediately make me like her any less, although it probably should have and would now.

  I was soon spending more time at Linda’s house than she did at ours. My mother, I could see, had succeeded in making her feel, if not exactly unwelcome, then certainly unappreciated.

  The Andersons’ house was just the way ours had been before we renovated. We called them war-time houses. They were single-storey squares with dugouts instead of basements, small cozy or cluttered rooms all opening off the kitchen, and wooden steps front and back.

  When we were too hot and miserable to do anything else, Linda and I sat out on her front step in our shorts, watching the traffic and sipping pink lemonade. Occasionally a carload of boys would slowly cruise by, whistling as we stretched and admired our legs in the sun. We were feeling like sleepy cats and ignored them.

  My legs were a deep reddish-brown, so dark by August that my mother said, “You look like a little Indian.” Linda was fair-skinned but neither burned nor tanned, remaining all summer long a marbled, bluish white. “Too much sun is bad for you anyway,” she said. “It’ll give you cancer.” I didn’t believe her and continued to cultivate my colour. I couldn’t help but notice that the blue veins in her thighs were beginning to bulge and break.

  When it was cooler or raining, we sat inside, usually at their stylish new breakfast
nook, which Neil had built himself and Linda had wallpapered in a blue and orange pattern featuring teapots and coffee mugs.

  While Linda talked, polished her salt and pepper shaker collection, or fussed and cooed over Twinky, the blue budgie in his cage by the window, I took careful note of everything in the house. The teapot clock, the ceramic Aunt Jemima canisters, the hot pot holders which read “Don’t Monkey With The Cook,” the plastic placemats with kittens, roosters, or roses on them—she changed them once a week.

  Every detail was important to me, an avenue into the esoteric intricacies of married life, a state of being which seemed to me then divinely blessed, glamorous, intimate but clean. I needed to know exactly how you achieved such a permanent and inviolable state of grace. As far as I was concerned, their perfect happiness was a foregone conclusion, stretching sanguinely out to embrace infinity. Any connection or resemblance between their marriage and that of my parents was remote, if it existed at all. It did not occur to me that either my parents had once been just like Linda and Neil or that Linda and Neil would one day be just like my parents, solidified and decidedly unromantic.

  Linda, herself still quite convinced of the powerful magic of homemaking, was more than happy to answer my nosy questions. I was digging for information, especially about Neil and what it was like to live with a man.

  “How do you make an omelette? What tv shows do you watch? Does Neil help with the dishes? How often do you vacuum? What time do you go to bed? Do you ever stay up all night? Which side of the bed do you sleep on?” The questions I was afraid to ask were the most important.

  Their bedroom door stood proudly always open, displaying a dainty doll in the middle of the white chenille bedspread, her voluminous pink skirt spread around her in layers like a cake. At home the bedroom doors were always shut tight, a concession to privacy, shame, or not having made the bed yet.