The Ladies' Lending Library

by Janice Kulyk Keefer

  Once they reach the sand, the children run straight to the water, hair flying, arms churning. Their mothers snatch up the very youngest and call the oldest back to spread out the blankets, securing the edges with stones so the wind won’t keep flapping them about, flinging sand into everyone’s eyes. No one has beach umbrellas or folding chairs—only the Senchenkos and the Plotskys possess such luxuries, but Nadia never comes down to the beach, and Sasha’s umbrella’s been ripped by her children, who are rough and wild and allowed to get away with murder. Katia spends most of her time at the Plotskys’ cottage, eating Cheez Whiz sandwiches, practising cartwheels inside the living room, and plotting mischief. Not something Sonia encourages, of course, but she can’t help relying on anything that keeps her two oldest daughters out of shooting range of each other. Why can’t they get along—why can’t they be friends, best friends, like Katia and Tania?

  Katia Martyn and Tania Plotsky. They’d begun their conspiracy their first summer at Kalyna Beach, when they were seven-year-olds. Selecting a patch of smooth, packed sand at the edge of the lake, they’d seized their shovels and started to dig. They were on their way to China, they’d explained to their mothers, who were concerned that someone walking along the beach in the dark might trip into the hole and break an ankle. By then it had become quite a deep hole, and they’d agreed to set up a cairn of stones to alert passersby. The next day, when their fathers had come up for the weekend, Mr. Martyn had hunkered down beside them, observing the digging. In the course of the afternoon he’d given them a lesson in elementary geology, explaining how, under the earth’s crust, there was a fiery kind of liquid stone called magma. He’d even taken a stick and written the word magma in the sand for them, as if on a blackboard at school.

  But the girls had gone on digging: geology was all very well, but it had nothing to do with their plans, which were far more important than magma. Once they got to China they were never going to come back: they would wander the earth, getting jobs in circuses to pay their way. Katia was going to be a trapeze artist, Tania a bareback rider (she had been on the ponies at Centre Island lots of times). They would send postcards to their parents every now and again, but they knew even then that family and adventure do not go together. They did not plan to marry, or have babies; they never once toyed with the idea of disguising themselves as boys. Katia had had a low opinion of boys, confirmed by what Tania had told her of her brother’s anatomy: that he’d been born with a peanut between his legs, and a little sac like a change purse. For some time afterward, Katia had refused to eat the peanut butter sandwiches Baba Laryssa would make her for lunch, throwing them into the bushes behind the sleep-house, instead.

  Mr. Martyn had come down that night and filled in the tunnel the girls had constructed. The next morning, they’d refused to believe such a disaster could have happened—they’d walked up and down the beach, thinking they must have been digging somewhere else, that so magnificent a tunnel couldn’t just have vanished overnight. “Explain it to them,” Sonia had pleaded with Max, who refused, saying, “Let them think the waves washed it in. They’ll forget about it soon enough.” And it was true that the girls, having finally accepted this first defeat, had given up on digging holes; they had started plotting a quicker, more reliable route to China. They would run away to sea. To save up for their passage, they had started filching nickels from drawers where their mothers kept their loose change, collecting coins in small glass jars that they would bury under the trees, marking each spot with an X of pebbles.

  Katia and Tania have outgrown the digging of tunnels, but China has remained their code word for acts of risk and rebellion. It’s to a suburb of China that they’ve agreed to run right now, disappearing down the beach, their long, dark ponytails streaming out behind them. Sonia knows they are off to the store; she also knows she should run after her daughter, scold her—she’ll gorge herself on cream soda and Fudgsicles and have no appetite for lunch. Instead, Sonia calls out from the faded red blanket where she’s settled herself; calls to the water’s edge where Darka is hunkered, watching Baby Alix kick her little legs against waves splashing up to her waist. Is it dangerous? Sonia wonders. Are all the other mothers staring at her, whispering about how careless Sonia Martyn is, how she’ll end up one day with a drowned child on her conscience? What if she asked Darka to bring her the baby and run after Katia? Alix could make sand pies with the plastic moulds that lie forgotten near Sonia’s blanket: gay, bright colours, nothing like the dreary aluminum in which real food is cooked. But Darka doesn’t hear Sonia call, or pretends not to. It is just as well—if Katia’s fetched back, she’ll make a scene in front of everyone. The baby will lose interest in the sand pies and wriggle back to the lake, into the water where her mother, a grown woman, will be terrified to follow her. And that, in truth, is the real reason Darka’s spending the summer with the Martyns at Kalyna Beach.

  Darka in her polka-dotted two-piece, from which breasts and buttocks brim, always threatening to spill. She’s only sixteen but, as the mothers say, “fully developed,” which is another way of saying, “trouble.” She alarms and irritates the women lying in groups of twos and threes on worn cotton blankets with the stitching coming loose at the edges, blankets no longer good enough even for the beds at the cottage. All of the women were once as pretty or at least as young as Darka is now, but they would never have flaunted themselves the way she does. Flaunt: it’s a word they employ often that summer, talking of Darka Marchuk. It gives them a deep satisfaction; so does the phrase they use over and over as they watch the way the girl parades the softness and fullness of her body, the obvious pleasure she takes in the bounce of breasts and bum. Has she no shame? Shame they were born with, an old-country birthmark flaring in the shared bathrooms and bedrooms of their own teenaged years in rooming houses on Manning Avenue and Shaw Street. How they’d cowered inside their drab, prim, good-girl clothes, bodies hunched, skins pitted with secrets.

  They’ve known each other for years now, these women sitting on blankets, examining their legs for varicose veins, or flapping their arms periodically in attempts to improve what their magzines call “muscle tone.” They have attended each other’s weddings, watched each other’s bellies swelling with children, and those children growing up and up. They’ve shared church pews as well as beach blankets, served out varenyky and houbtsi at banquets in community halls, taken turns driving each other’s children to Ukrainian School on Saturday mornings, gossiped about each other’s marriages, ferried cakes and casseroles to each other’s houses when a new baby or a death arrived. Mrs. Vesiuk, Mrs. Stechyshyn, Mrs. Bozhyk; Mrs. Plotsky and Mrs. Metelsky. Annie, Stefka, Halia, Sasha, Zirka. And Sonia Martyn (once Martyniuk, but altered when her father-in-law developed political ambitions) born Sonia Metelsky. She’d modelled for five years before her marriage, under the name of Sunny Sloane.

  It’s good of Sonia to have Darka up to the cottage, the women agree; it will give poor Olya a rest. Nothing but worry that girl has been from the day she first put on a skirt. And who better than Sonia to take her away from the city, where the boys clustered round her like flies on a coil of sticky paper? They’d sewed side by side at the sportswear factory, Sonia and Olya; even when Sonia had stopped sewing and started modelling, they’d stayed closer than sisters. But when Olya married Walter Marchuk the friendship had cracked, like a thin dark line along a china cup out of which you must drink gingerly, never pressing too hard. There is no Ukrainian word for snob; these women, growing up as they had in rooming houses downtown, their parents working at foundries and meat plants and factories, have had little chance to practise snobbery. Sonia has pulled away from Olya, they believe, out of fear, as if her good luck in marrying Max could be put at risk were she to try to keep up old ties. Sonia’s a bad one for fears and superstitions—she takes after her father that way, the women agree.

  No, it isn’t snobbery that’s spoiled the friendship between Olya and Sonia, its just—marriage, the women sigh, each of them shaki
ng her head, patting a stomach that the control panel built into her bathing suit never flattens enough. The friendships you make after marriage are never as strong as the ones that come before: it’s your girlfriends you lose on your wedding day, as surely as you lose something else on your wedding night. And who knows the arithmetic of it all, whether what you gain is worth what you have to give up? You married because you fell in love, or else because you were so afraid no one would have you that you grabbed onto the first boy who ever asked you out. In either case you were stuck for life, for better or worse, only it was hardly ever for better—at least, any better than you had a right to expect it would be.

  Unless you were Nadia, and who could have foretold what her fortune would be? They’d all laughed at her for getting hooked by Jack Senchenko, who’d got off the train from Canora with wheat in his hair and a bellyful of ambition. Only Nadia had seen him through his own eyes, for what he was going to make of himself. A professor’s daughter, was Nadia; a professor’s daughter with an English accent and an education. No one had ever been good enough for her, certainly not Peter Metelsky, who’d have flown to the moon and back if she’d snapped her fingers. Who could blame her—think of that spectacle he’d made of himself last Saturday night, at the Plotskys’ get-together! Of course she’d given poor Peter the shove—she had far bigger fish to fry, which was why Peter had ended up with Jack’s sister, Zirka, as a consolation prize. That’s why they’re lying on the same blanket now, Sonia and Zirka, a husband and brother in common and nothing else.

  Sonia’s hair is the colour of buckwheat honey with not a trace of grey; of course she doesn’t dye it like Zirka does, she’s never been a bottle blonde. Do you see how her hipbones jut out below a stomach flatter than a washboard, for all that she’s had four kids, and lost another along the way? Just look at Zirka beside her: short, stocky like her brother, Jack; the dumpling, Sasha calls her, and not just because of her figure. She has nothing upstairs but flour and water, Sasha explains—and a little native cunning. Poor Peter …

  They all call him that, with a sigh built into the “poor,” because he’s such a charmer, Sonia’s brother: handsome as any movie star, far handsomer even than that scar-faced Richard Burton. One thing you had to say about the Metelskys, they had looks on their side. Good looks and bad luck: Jack’s had to bail Peter out more times than you can count. If it weren’t for Jack’s help, the Metelskys would have had to give up their house a long time ago. And Jack had given them the cottage as a present, hadn’t he? Of course he could afford to—he’d made a killing, buying up the lakefront property years before anyone thought of spending their summers here, selling lots to all his friends in the Ukrainian community, telling them they’d have a beach that was nashi, no snooty WASPs around, the kind that expect you to be a janitor or a garbageman if your name ends in “ski” or “chuk.”

  They’ve had to work hard, the cottagers of Kalyna Beach, to become respectable in the eyes of what they call their “English neighbours,” even if those neighbours are Scots or Irish or Welsh, even if those neighbours’ families have been settled in Ontario for a hundred years or more. “Tell me all about your tribe,” a business associate of Jack Senchenko’s had once asked Nadia at a dinner party: “I hear your people have some very colourful customs.” “Ask him about his ancestors painting themselves blue,” Sasha had bristled, when Nadia told her the story. “Tell him about the daggers our men slip into the waistbands of their sharovary.” But one of our men was a senator now, and another a judge; one a provincial MP and another a surgeon at Saint Joe’s; the last thing the community needs is a spoiled, careless creature like Darka getting into trouble, bringing shame on them all. What are her parents up to, letting her run around the way she does?

  Darka doesn’t hear the women whispering together on their blankets, throwing her glances like poisoned darts. She picks up Baby Alix as if she were a book with especially hard covers, tucks her under her arm and bounces up to the dunes where the girls’ encampment lies.

  Mrs. Maximoynko’s store is called Venus Variety, but not on account of its wares: beach towels, pails, shovels, licorice ropes, jawbreakers, Black Cat, Player’s and Export A cigarettes, Hostess Twinkies, Corn Flakes, bakery cakes wrapped in Cellophane that gives them a chemical smell, hot dog buns and Maple Leaf wieners, condiments, serviettes, sanitary napkins (kept behind the counter), baby oil and odds and ends of hardware, for emergency repairs. There is nothing remotely resembling erotic or contraceptive devices for sale, and while the shelves have a few issues of Archie and Superman comics, what Mrs. Maximoynko calls gerrrrlie magazines are out of the question. She keeps a clean shop, under the portrait of the Youthful Queen in Coronation Robes beside the Canada Dry clock over the counter.

  The store was called Venus Variety when the Maximoynkos bought it years ago. It’s unlucky to change names, and besides, Mrs. Maximoynko likes the sound of it, the Vs at the start of each word, the ripple of vowels. Under that name is written her own, M. MAXIMOYNKO, PROP., and beside it, taking up all the leftover space, is a picture of the cloud-wrapped planet spinning like a top, commissioned from an acquaintance of Mr. Maximoynko, a man who was a portrait painter back in Ukraine, and who now works at General Electric.

  Tania Plotsky is wandering the centre aisle of the store, sucking on a licorice rope that leaves stains like bruises on her lips. In front of her walks Katia Martyn, her head bobbing up and down. Mrs. Maximoynko knows what she’ll find when she’s finished ringing up the Durkowskis’ groceries (a tin of alphabet soup, a jar of pickles, a pint of cottage cheese). All the cakes along that centre aisle will have the maraschino cherries in their middles pushed down to the filling, the Cellophane stretched tight, if not broken, so she’ll have to put them on the Reduced for Quick Sale shelf. She’d have spoken to Sasha and Sonia about their daughters long ago, but Sasha is one of her best customers (she spends a fortune on cigarettes and hot dogs each week) and Sonia’s been low since the death of her mother, whose health had started to suffer at Christmas, and whom they’d buried before Easter. Cancer they said it was: Sonia had nearly gone out of her mind with grief, was what they also said.

  “Katrusiu, Taniu,” Mrs. Maximoynko cries out from behind the cash register. “Shcho vy tam robyteh?” And then she switches to her broken, superbly theatrical English: “I aska Momma. You gonna get it, vunna dese days.”

  The girls rush out of the shop, slamming the screen door behind them; as soon as they reach the road they collapse, writhing, kicking out their feet, helplessly abandoned to their laughter. “Did you see her tsytsi when she was yelling at us?” Katia shrieks. “They were shaking like—” “Hostess cupcakes!” Tania supplies, which sets them off into fresh snorts of laughter. Finally they wind down, wiping their mouths with the backs of their hands. Propped against one another, they start singing a song they’d had to learn at Ukrainian School: My chemnyi deetyh, Ukrayeenski kveety. Their high, sweet voices dart in with the flies through the worn screen door. We obedient children, flowers of Ukraine.

  Mrs. Maximoynko shakes her head, and her massive bosom shakes in sympathy. Pan and Pani Durkowski nod. (They are always addressed by these Ukrainian equivalents of Mr. and Mrs.; they seem to demand that dignity, for all that they work as janitors at the cathedral hall.) When they’d first come to Kalyna Beach, they’d gone round to the various mothers, suggesting they could organize a morning program for the children right on the beach. Calisthenics and recitations from the national poets, followed by a round of Ukrainian folksongs. All the mothers had thanked them, saying what a wonderful idea such a program would be, but when it came to the first session, half of the children hadn’t shown up, and the rest had wandered away before the stride jumps were finished. The mothers apologized, but there was nothing they could do. “They go to Ukrainian School all year,” one had explained, “so they really want a holiday while they’re up here.” And as Sonia Martyn had ventured: “The children were born here, they don’t feel the same way about the old coun
try as we do, there’s no point in forcing them.” But then, Pan Durkowski had growled to his wife, look at those Martyns, changing their name, making it English-sounding. Their children had been the last ones of all to be enrolled at Ukrainian School. In vain had Sonia explained that Laura, who had spoken nothing but Ukrainian till she was five, had come home from English school one day with a note from the principal: It would be better if your child stopped speaking Russian in the playground.

  “Russian!” Pan Durkowski had snorted. “The idiot principal thought that they were Russian?”

  Pani Durkowska had tried to explain it to her husband: “Max has to be careful, he has his practice to build, and Sonia has always been frightened—” adding, under her breath, “the way all of us who weren’t born here are frightened—that we could be picked up and shipped back, without so much as a word of warning.”

  “But to let some stupid Anhleek believe there is no difference between speaking the noble, the ancient, the beautiful Ukrainian tongue and being Communists!” Pan Durkowski had roared. “That is a crime, I tell you—a crime as bad as murder in the first degree!”

  He is fond of roaring, Pan Durkowski: here he is now, thundering forth as his wife stares up at the portrait of the brown-haired, pudding-faced woman in diamanté armour, to whom she’d sworn allegiance at her citizenship hearing the year before. “Who is going to carry on the battle?” he exclaims, bringing his fist down hard on the counter, so that the jawbreakers rattle in their jar. “Who will hold their hands over their hearts and march off to free our poor Ukraine? The youth of today? Pah! They have no respect; all their parents teach them is to put out their hands for whatever they want. While in the Homeland, children are beaten for speaking Ukrainian instead of Russian in the schools! Beaten!”