The Taste of Ashes
Sheila Peters
Caitlin Press
Halfmoon Bay, BC
for Marie Manrique
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Part II
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Part III
Chapter 21
Part IV
Chapter 22
Acknowledgements
Resources
Part I
1
When the radio clicked on at 6:15, Isabel Lee was still half-asleep. Clear skies. Temperatures rising to the mid-twenties. Current temperature, one degree. A danger of frost in low-lying areas. She jolted awake. Throwing off the covers, she pulled a sweater over her nightie, stuck her bare feet into her clogs, and rushed outside to rescue her flowers.
Sunlight touched the peak of the mountain across Railway Avenue, but her house was in shadow. The heavy dew soaking the grass froze her feet and cold air coiled around her legs snaking right up under her nightie as she turned on the tap and unwound the hose. Determined to trick the cold into leaving another few days of life to the frost-tender lobelia, the tubs full of nasturtiums, and the dahlias that would look glorious if they were given a couple more weeks, she sprayed them all. The summer in this small town tucked between three mountain ranges five hundred miles north of Vancouver had held so little heat this year, everything had come so slowly, that each flower was worth fighting for in spite of the chill that had tunnelled its way deep into her bones by the time she went back inside.
She turned up the heat and waited, standing over the hot air vent as the furnace rattled and coughed, forcing warm air up between her feet. They were still lovely feet, she thought, with long toes and perfectly polished red toenails. Her ankles and calves were slender, and the shape revealed as the blue-flowered nightie billowed and subsided showed a flat stomach and breasts still holding their own against gravity. She grimaced as her feet prickled into warmth and scrubbed her fingers through the dark blonde hair that sleep had spiked into a frazzle.
The radio blared upstairs, the only other presence in her small house. The announcer reminded drivers to slow down for the children returning to school and she groaned to think of the store swarming with list-packing mothers and kids already wired from a couple of hours in a classroom. Instead of a day ringing up sales, she longed for a cigarette, a drink, and a man’s warm body. It had been almost three years since she’d given them all up. Three years since she had tried, unsuccessfully, to stop her daughter from packing up and driving away. She was moving, Janna had screamed, to a town where no one knew her. Or, more specifically, where no one knew her mother.
Trudging back up the stairs for a shower, Isabel felt the same helpless anger she always felt when she thought about that day. Every one of her forty-eight years made itself felt in the way her hips ached after spending hours just the day before hunkered down weeding the same flowers she was trying so hard to save. She wondered if she’d ever limber up again.
†
By the time the early afternoon lull hit the store, Isabel was wishing the morning frost hadn’t tricked her into putting on a long-sleeved cotton sweater and heavy denim skirt. Sun slanted across the checkout counter where she leaned to take the weight off her feet. She sorted through the jumble of security tags, sale price stickers, and the stack of bulletins sent out from head office over the long weekend. The store sweltered under racks of dark fall fashions — burgundy and green velour everywhere. The only summer clothes left were mustard yellow shorts sets in the discount bin, outfits so ugly they’d been marked down to $1.99 and still weren’t moving.
She was thinking of ducking into the washroom to peel off her pantyhose when Lily Thomas, bent almost double by a disintegrating spine, wandered in. Thin grey hair curled out from under a black felt cap, and a once-fine pink wool coat, belted at the waist, drooped below her knees. White ankle socks and black high-top runners completed the ensemble. Squashing an old beaded purse under one arm, she sifted through the shorts sets, held one pair up to the light, shook them out, fingered the tags, and dropped them back into the pile. She drifted toward another sales rack, then doubled back. Rooting around underneath, she pulled out the eyelet lace tank top Isabel had tucked in the bin as treasure for the sharp sighted. Mrs. Thomas had scored, though God only knew who would wear it.
Isabel was on her way over to ask her how best to protect her dahlias from the frost when a bright flock of girls twittered in and scattered among the fake leather tops and tiny skirts. Grade eights, probably, fresh from their first day at the high school, and somebody had a clothing allowance. Before the door had even closed behind the girls, three young men tumbled into the store, laughing at the tag line of a joke. Friends of her boys, they’d filled the house with their unfinished voices as they played hours of video games and munched through a thousand plates of nachos. Whenever they needed wool socks or long underwear and were strapped for the kind of cash the higher-end stores charged, they’d come to see Isabel.
“Hey, Mrs. Lee. Heard from Trevor?”
“He’s drilling in Mexico, raking in the dough. You boys got yourselves some work?”
“Going into the bush for Ajax. Need some new woollies is all.”
She sent them over to one of the younger clerks. Isabel often forgot she wasn’t nineteen and had to hold back from flirting, from making God knows what kind of fool of herself. She remembered her confusion when her younger son, Trevor, away for months on his first job diamond drilling for a mining company up north, came home and picked her up with his new muscles. She could barely think who or where she was as he swung her around. His big dream since he was a kid, he’d said, was to pay off the house. Slapped down six thousand dollars to put against the mortgage. No more turning out pockets for cash on the first of the month. No more begging the bank for a few more days.
Isabel struggled against sudden tears. Here she was, forty-eight, six years the assistant manager of the store, making $12.50 an hour. The chemical smell of new running shoes made her sneeze. Her back ached from lugging box after box, year after year, of limp clothes, of pillowcases and duvet covers, of fuzzy slippers and rubber boots, moving a mound surely as high as the mountain across the railway tracks from her house. Her dreams she had to keep small. That her oldest child, Jason, would leave his idiot wife. That her second, Trevor, wouldn’t be killed on the drill rigs. That her baby daughter, Janna, would one day screw up her perfect life plan and need her mother’s help. That when she did, Isabel would still be clean and sober and ready.
A young couple dropped a pile of towels, sheets, and dishcloths on the counter. Isabel was ringing up the sale when the man grinned and pulled a black satin nightie from under his jean jacket. The girl shrieked and held it up to her cheek while one of his hands crept around to do a little dance on the side of her breast.
Isabel looked away. She ordered her own nipples to lie down as she bagged their purchases and tried not to look at the man’s hand sliding across the girl’s butt on their way out the door. While she rang in three pairs of yellow rubber boots for the little blond kids lined up like Russian dolls behind their mother, her thoughts wandered to the new shipment waiting in the back. She’d heard there were some slinky skirts coming in, long with a slit up the side
. And those shiny sweaters that sit low on the shoulders. She ran a hand up and down her neck. With a nice chain to sit here — she rubbed a spot just above her breasts — she could put together a pretty outfit. Pretty enough to imagine herself as young and hopeful as the schoolgirls who, in little groups, began to appear at the counter wearing their new clothes. One girl’s black lace T-shirt flashed peeks at a red bra and enough cleavage to make a swimsuit edition.
“No returns if you wear them out of here,” Isabel warned. “Your folks might not like everything you’ve picked.”
They frowned and insisted, twisting and turning as Isabel cut off their tags and rang them in. She gave them bags for the clothes they’d worn into the store and watched them convulse into giggles as they brushed by the boys picking socks out of a bin by the door.
A clerk whispered in her ear, “Radousky’s snuck in.”
Isabel sighed. Once they’d found Richard Radousky stretched out drunk under one of the racks in the teen section looking up the empty dresses, no doubt imagining them full of warm and moving flesh. Isabel hadn’t been surprised. She remembered sitting on his lap in her father’s office at the back of the house, liking the tobacco smell of him. Later, her mother at her elbow, fingers a circle of pain pressing her bones, saying, “He is not your friend, Isabel. Remember that. Never is he your friend.”
“He’s watching the girls.” The clerk nodded toward the change rooms.
Isabel inhaled her anger. When her mother went into the hospital, her father’s friends had spilled out of his office and filled the house with beer and smoke. She was sixteen then. Her boyfriend, Jason’s soon-to-be father, swaggered in there with them. Her elbow hard in Radousky’s face as he wrestled with her in the hall. She looked across the store. From a distance he looked younger than he was, and with the sports jacket over the black T-shirt and the grey hair swept back, he looked like somebody famous. He was about the same age her dad would have been if the booze hadn’t finally killed him. Her dad who was as indiscriminate in his choice of friends as he had been brilliant in his choice of a wife.
She planted herself to block Radousky’s view of a girl pirouetting in front of her friends, her little body flashing in and out of the mirrors on the pillars. A flounced velour skirt with a v-neck top, all dark green.
“Very nice, honey, but the shoes aren’t quite right,” Isabel said.
The girls and Richard Radousky looked down at the new Nikes, bright against the ratty brown carpet.
“Go pick yourself a nice pair to match. We can lay away whatever you don’t have the money for. Give you a couple of days to work on your mom. Now who’s next?”
Another girl danced out of the change room in a fake leather violet mini and matching jacket over a slinky silver shirt tight across her tiny breasts. Isabel backed up, sending Radousky scuttling into the oversize lingerie. She took his elbow and steered him toward the door.
“The Legion’ll be open by now, Richard. You must be feeling thirsty after watching that little show.” She squeezed hard, her gardener’s hand a vise.
He wrenched his arm away. “There’s things I could say, Isabel.”
“No doubt,” she spat. “But you’re not going to because both you and I know the fathers of those lovely little girls and, what’s more, they know you.”
His old eyes drifted over her body as he backed out the door, a cigarette in his hand. “Couple of them probably know you, too.” He flicked his lighter and blew smoke through the closing door.
She felt the same helpless anger she’d felt that morning. Anger, too, at the longing for the bar that Radousky’s smoke blew through her. For the feeling she got halfway through the first glass of draft, the sliding into a long amber silkiness. A muscled arm reaching out to keep her steady.
†
As the day dragged to a close and the last girl flounced out the door with her bag of dreams, the clerk came up from the back with her jacket on. “Mrs. Thomas is asleep in that chair in the linen section. She’s got piles of stuff in her lap. Should I wake her up before you cash out?”
Isabel had forgotten her. “You go on home. I’ll take care of her.”
As the door snicked shut behind the clerk, sweet children’s faces smiled down on Isabel from the walls above the Girls and Boys department. She moved between the crowded racks, running her hands across the neat stacks of towels, pillows, and duvets. Sometimes she wished for an earthquake or a storm to trap her in the store with the other clerks. They’d build a camp with all the bedding, wrap themselves in flannel nightgowns and fleecy jackets, laugh and tell stories.
She drifted from rack to rack, held up a dress shot with silver thread, and draped a glittering scarf around her neck. She wondered what outfit she would buy if she could afford anything in the world. Some little Yves Saint Laurent shift for a few thousand dollars? Italian leather pumps, dark red, maybe. Or a pale yellow dress and tan leather sandals. As if there’d ever been much call in her social circles for Armani frocks.
She fluffed up a pink housecoat. Maybe she and Mrs. Thomas could have a pajama party, leaf through Vogue or Cosmo and talk about the days when Mrs. Thomas was the mystery woman from the New York fashion house who presided over the Fifth Avenue Salon. Isabel had been afraid of her severe black dresses and harsh voice. She hated the stiff clothes — quality, her mother insisted — that felt wrong on her little girl’s body. She longed to try on something soft and swirly from the rack of party dresses: shimmering silk or glittering chiffon. Sweetheart necklines. One of them the perfect dress that would finally reveal her in all her beauty. When she was old enough, her mother promised.
By the time she was old enough, her mother was dying and their beautiful lakeside home was a ratty lounge where all the drinks were free. The Fifth Avenue Salon had become a video store, and Mrs. Thomas had given up on the town’s women and retired to her little house beside St. Mary’s Church to create a tangled garden stuffed full of anything and everything that could bloom before it froze.
When had she become this soft crumpled creature snoring in a chair at the back of a third-rate chain store? Someone who never seemed to know exactly who Isabel was. The floor around her was strewn with dresses, nightgowns, sweat pants, and two winter jackets. Her own coat, as worn and dingy as Janna’s abandoned plush pig, fell open to reveal a food-stained white blouse and black skirt. Her scalp showed pink beneath the thin frizz of hair.
“Mrs. Thomas,” Isabel whispered, and the grey eyes fluttered open, blurry behind the glasses. One hand clutched the purse. The other opened, dropping a crumpled tissue.
“I need a tent,” she said. “Do you have any bargains on tents?”
“Most folks are thinking about putting away their camping gear, Mrs. Thomas. The nights are getting cold.”
The old lady started upright. “Is it going to freeze tonight, Isabel?”
She did know her name, Isabel thought. Did she remember seeing her that night so long ago now? Standing in her dahlias, semen running down her leg onto her feet, bare in the warm black dirt.
“The radio gave out a frost warning. We should get ourselves home and start covering things up. After this terrible summer, it would be a shame to lose everything so early.”
The old woman’s eyes slid over Isabel’s face. “I don’t remember a worse.”
“How are your dahlias? Mine still need a couple of good warm weeks to be at their best.”
“My dahlias.” The old woman’s face froze in distrust.
Isabel struggled on. “Those old varieties are the best. That one with the bronze leaves, what’s it called? Bishop something?”
“I have a dress, a nice red and white cotton print, it would look lovely on your mother.”
“I’ve managed to get hold of some of those apricot Masquerades. Maybe we could do a swap.” Isabel tried to keep the longing out of her voice. “I could give you a hand lifting all the tubers, once the frost does come.”
Mrs. Thomas’s fingers brushed Isabel’s sweater
. “You don’t have the same eye for style your mother has.”
All the tiredness of the long day gathered in Isabel’s legs; she slid down to sit at Mrs. Thomas’s feet. Sometime she’d ask her about her mother. About the beautiful dresses still hanging in the closet after her father died. They were probably worth good money now, the ones she hadn’t worn out. After she’d made the down payment on her house with what little was left of her father’s estate, she’d sat Jason and Trevor down on the couch in their new living room. She’d modelled dress after dress and told them where their grandmother had worn each one. Her picture on the mantel. The eight-year-old Jason kicked his skinny legs at the coffee table. Little Trevor, solid and serious, watched her every move. When she came through the door in the white cotton print, his dimples appeared. White cotton strewn with tiny blue and black flowers, a blue belt. A square neckline, and sleeves that were hardly there.
The new me, Isabel had thought, stretching to fasten the buttons at the back the next day. My chance to start again.
She’d worn it to her first confession since her mother’s funeral, felt its pressure across her shoulder blades as she knelt and bent her head to tell the stranger behind the screen of her plans to get her Grade 12 now that both boys were in school. She was going to get off welfare and become a teacher. She spilled out all the ways she’d failed her mother’s memory. Her too-young marriage to Jason’s father. Her hopeless fling with Trevor’s father. Her fights with her own dad. She’d had to lean close to catch the conditions of her forgiveness, the English awkward in the priest’s mouth. Purified, she’d worn the dress the next morning to take communion. Her mouth open to the long fingers of the young priest visiting, they said, from Central America. The wafer dissolving on her tongue.
“You haven’t put your mother in a home, have you?” Mrs. Thomas was angry.
She’d worn it a few weeks later, that night in the parking lot behind St. Mary’s. She’d watched that same hand move across the space between them, wondering, as it trembled in the dark like some moth, where it was going to land. Finally, two fingers on her lips. Her mouth had opened, tasting soap and the smell of a steering wheel. She’d taken the fingers inside and run her tongue around them, over the nails, the ridges of the knuckles, and he was helpless. It was all up to her — his fear, intoxicating.
The Taste of Ashes Page 1
