The Ladies' Lending Library

by Janice Kulyk Keefer

  He looks as if he would like to run out and perform that precise punishment on Tania and Katia. Instead, he takes off his glasses, breathes against them till the lenses steam, polishes them with a pale blue handkerchief in his shaking hands. His wife brings her gaze back from the portrait of the Youthful Queen to Mrs. Maximoynko’s small, heart-shaped face, so incongruous against her steel-wool hair, the bulk of her breasts. Pani Durkowska is anxious to change the subject; thankfully, she remembers that they need a length of copper pipe to repair the bathroom sink: her husband is a real handyman, she tells Mrs. Maximoynko, using the English word, hendy-men. The proprietor of Venus Variety checks her supply of hardware, sells them the pipe, and bids the Durkowskis good day.

  The old people walk out into the stinging light, shoes scraping over the asphalt as they make their way along Tunnel Road, back to their cottage. For it is far too hot for them to be on the beach at this hour: they have had their morning walk long before breakfast and will return when the families are all indoors eating their suppers, and the beach is deserted. The Durkowskis prefer quiet pursuits: reading, gardening, playing solitaire. Perhaps they are not so very disappointed, after all, that their Beachside Ukrainian School has come to nothing.

  Katia and Tania are far, far ahead of the elderly couple, on the part of Tunnel Road that goes to the Shkurkas’ cottage—they still call it that, even though Mr. Shkurka’s been gone for the past eight years—“probably married again and fathered a dozen sons.” At least that’s what they’ve heard Katia’s aunt Zirka say on the Plotskys’ veranda, talking with the other mothers. The girls are a little drunk with what Katia calls “being bad.” It’s their defining attribute; their mothers have had endless phone calls from their Ukrainian School teachers—Miss Marchenko, who wears her hair in a lofty coil, and whom the girls call Bagel Head in her hearing; Mr. Khriniuk, who does have a peculiar habit of tapping his front teeth with his forefinger, and whom they’ve christened Pan Pecker.

  Pan Pecker had caught the girls drinking Cherry Cokes at the Sombrero Restaurant next to the Funeral Parlour when they were supposed to be in class, doing dictation; the week before that, they’d disrupted the rehearsal of the Harvest Dance by the most disgraceful jerking and shoving (by which Miss Marchenko meant the Twist). The only way their mothers could get them to behave was by threatening to take them out of Ukrainian School altogether, which would have meant that, except for the summers, they’d never have seen one another at all. For Tania lives in the north, and Katia in the west end of the city; and though Sonia and Sasha see a lot of each other at Kalyna Beach, once they’re back in Toronto they could be living in different provinces. Chastened, the girls would behave for a few Saturdays, and then come up with some new piece of deviltry—Pan Pecker’s word for it—whereupon the long, complaining phone calls would begin again.

  Dark hair, dark eyes, olive-coloured skin over their toothpick bodies—they are so alike they could be twins, thinks Lesia Baziuk, catching sight of Tania and Katia from the front porch of Mrs. Shkurka’s house. The women are sitting at a small table facing the road: Mrs. Baziuk has opened her little case of cosmetics and is showing Nettie Shkurka the five different shades of nail polish Avon is stocking this season. Mrs. Baziuk has one eye on Mrs. Shkurka’s face, its show of superior suspicion at the names and colours of the products; Nettie is such a prude that she’ll end by rejecting any hint of what even a bit of face powder and a natural-tint lipstick could do for her, settling instead on the invisibles: moisturizer, cleanser and the inevitable cotton balls.

  Lesia Baziuk’s other eye is trained on her son, Billy, who is sitting patiently on the porch steps below them, looking out at the road, his hands folded nicely in his lap. Every morning she gives him his medicine, one pill to ward off seizures, the other, as the doctor said, to settle him down and make her life a little easier. For Frank Kozak gives her no help at all with Billy. “Another guy has sown the seed and done the deed” had been his response to Lesia’s first few pleas for assistance. Now, she wouldn’t trust him to comb Billy’s hair or shine his shoes. Frank Kozak, as everyone knows, thinks only of himself: besides, he’s always tippling from that sleek, silver flask he keeps in his pocket wherever he goes. He is also married, though not to Mrs. Baziuk, whose husband died in a hunting accident many years ago. When the children are nearby, Frank Kozak is referred to by the adults as Mrs. Baziuk’s “special friend.” Sasha has been heard to exclaim that she can’t for the life of her understand why Lesia Baziuk has anything to do with him, and Sonia Martyn responds that it might have something to do with Frank’s having a clean and decent job, working for the Insurance.

  Lesia’s made sure he’s kept that job; at home, she ladles his booze out to him, glass by glass, calculating how much he can take and still do a reasonable day’s work; she’s arranged to get a portion of his paycheque deposited in her own account each month. His boss is a kind man with a son Billy’s age; he is willing to overlook a lot to help Lesia out, as long as Frank’s numbers keep adding up all right, as by some miracle they do. There’s a trust account in Billy’s name, and when the time comes he’ll have to go into a Home, but not while there’s a breath left in her body. He’s an affectionate boy, obedient and thoughtful in his own way. Unlike those giggling show-offs. Cruel as if they had—Mrs. Baziuk thinks for a moment—knives instead of hearts in their chests. Jackknives! She can see the faces they’re pulling as they look at her Billy; she tells herself that it’s their mothers who should be pitied instead of her—better to have a sweet, slow boy like Billy than those two she-devils.

  What his mother can’t see, and what the girls are making faces at, is Billy’s hand pumping at his crotch. This isn’t a matter of peanut butter sandwiches: Billy is old enough to drink, and drive, and even get married. “Meat on a stick,” Katia whispers to Tania, who snorts with laughter as Mrs. Baziuk shakes her fist and shouts down the road, “Have you no shame?”

  Mornings belong to the beach. The children spend their time running back and forth between the water and the dunes: roasting, then plunging into the lake, running across the sandbars till the water rises up to their knees, and then their waists, and then their shoulders. They play tag, or practise dead man’s float, or just bob up and down: on stormy days they dive right through the breakers, swallowing pints of water and spluttering onto shore only when their mothers force them out, hovering with faded beach towels, rubbing them dry till their skins feel as though they’ve been pushed through graters.

  Mostly, the weather is cloudless: by the time the children have quit the lake and raced to their different fortresses behind the dunes, they’re seared with sun. On the east end of the beach, the boys are sequestered; on the west, the girls. Even though two of those boys, Yuri and Andriy, are their cousins, the Martyn girls have agreed to their banishment, on the beach, at least, and in daylight. But in the evenings, when their mothers lie slumped on sofas, having cooked supper and swept the floors for the hundredth time, having rinsed out bathing suits and hung them on the line with the sodden, sand-clumped towels, some of the older boys and girls go off in groups of three or four, walking along Tunnel Road, playing tag at the edge of the woods, spying at the lighted windows of other people’s cottages.

  Right now the Martyn girls and their friends—Tania, Vlada, Lenka, Rocky-short-for-Roksolana—lie flopped on their towels for as long as they can stand the sun. Every so often, they spring up and sprint to the water, shrieking at how the sand is cooking their feet. Their mothers grumble as this same sand sprays into their faces while the brown bodies leap by, an exotic species of animal they’ve no idea how to name.

  Between nine a.m., when the mothers march the children down to the beach, and noon, when it’s time to gather them up and head back to make lunch, the women may get five minutes all to themselves, spread-eagled on their blankets, drinking the sun through their pores, the hot sand cradling their bodies like the most gentle of lovers. Sometimes it’s so still they can hear flies crawling over the d
ebris of potato chips or browned apple slices; sometimes a strong, warm wind plays over the women, fanning skin redolent of baby oil or the first-aid smell of Noxema. Waves thump the shore and a few gulls screech lazily overhead while, neither far away nor too close by, children’s voices bubble up like water from a spring. When the children are being good, making sandcastles or playing tag behind the dunes, their mothers can shut their eyes and let themselves drift, as if they were pieces of wood bobbing up and down in water so clear and shallow it could not drown a spider.

  On her cotton blanket, red bleached-out to pink, Sonia stretches her body into the endless air and sun; she’s a kite floating wherever the wind will take her. Max and Marta are still far, far away in the city, small black ants she could stretch out her finger and crush, one after the other. No one is drowning, no one is crying or shouting or grabbing at her; she could sleep here forever and ever. Except that a shadow’s suddenly fallen across her, a cold, soaked towel of a shadow that knows her name, and sits down beside her, and begins to talk. Because the shadow is married to her brother, and Sonia will never hear the end of it if she pretends Zirka is merely a cloud passing overhead, she must stop being that kite sailing away and attend to what her sister-in-law is saying in that piercing voice of hers.

  “She’s growing up fast, your Laryssa.”

  “Laura. She only answers to Laura, now.”

  “Fourteen in November, isn’t she? We’d like to buy her something special—it’s an important birthday, she’s getting to be a young lady.”

  “We’re getting her contact lenses. There’s a man at the Medical Arts Building who fits them.”

  “Bozhe, Soniu—it’s dangerous, putting things in your eyes. You can go blind. I know I’d never forgive myself if—”

  “Max has checked it out—it’s perfectly safe. They’ve been wearing them for years in the States. And I know girls who’ve worn them without any trouble—models I used to work with.”

  “Oh. Models.” Zirka’s voice puckers with disapproval. She may have worked before she married, but at a respectable job at Beaver Bakery, making and decorating cakes for birthdays and weddings. Whereas Sonia had exposed herself to photographers (from outside the community, most of them); she’d even spent time in New York, staying in hotels meeting heaven knows who. Of course, the Metelskys had been as poor as fleas; whatever Sonia earned must have come in all too handy but still—“Models,” Zirka repeats, nodding her head. “Like the one you named Bonnie after—what was her name?”

  “Bon-nie Mac-Leod.” Sonia produces the syllables as if they were weights from a pair of kitchen scales: years ago she’d been taught how to pronounce them correctly: Not clee-odd, Sunny, but clowd, like those puffy white things up there in the sky.

  “What a time you had with Max’s father over that name.” Zirka’s voice is like the reek of an opened bottle of nail polish. “What was it he said? I remember, I was visiting you in maternity, and Mr. Martyniuk came in and shouted—the whole ward could hear him—‘Bony! What kind of name is that? You gonna starve her?’”

  “I have a headache, Zirka,” is all that Sonia says. Though she can’t keep herself from remembering what had followed the “Bony” crack: what Zirka, mercifully, hadn’t stayed on to hear. He’d said it right there in the hospital room, her father-in-law. He’d leaned right over her, to where Max was standing, as if he’d meant to grab his son by the shoulders; as if she weren’t there lying in the bed between them, her newborn in her arms. “You gonna let her get away with naming her that?” he’d roared. And then, “Three chances she’s had now and she can’t even give you one son?”

  Max had knuckled under, pleading with her to change their child’s name from Bonnie to anything Ukrainian: Oksana or Marusia or Motria, after his mother. But she’d stood her ground. Staring into her baby’s face, the tight-shut lips and buttoned eyes, all she’d been able to think of was Bonnie MacLeod. How forthright and free she’d always been, that friend of her lost life—how stunningly unburdened. That’s what she’d wished for this new child; with her whole heart she’d wished for her the gifts she’d so envied in Bonnie MacLeod.

  “Your poor Laryssa,” Zirka was saying. “Of course, she’ll look much prettier without glasses, and if she can manage to lose some weight … It’s so important when you’re at that age to look your best. And children can be so cruel,” she adds smugly.

  Sonia doesn’t deign to reply. How dare Zirka say a word about Laura’s size: doesn’t she know that all girls on the verge of puberty put on puppy fat? And Zirka’s one to talk: look at her—look at her youngest; now there’s a fatty in the making! Laura’s chubbiness will melt away, all in good time, isn’t that what she’s been told, over and over? Yet she acts as if it’s her mother’s fault she’s gaining weight, her mother’s fault for making the Jell-O and lemon meringue pie that Laura loves, always first in line for second helpings, first in line for picking fights, taking offence, being difficult. Sonia’s headache stabs in earnest now; she feels the first squirm of nausea. Stretched on her stomach, her cheek nuzzling the blanket, sun beating down on her bare back and long, long legs, Sonia tries to turn Zirka’s words into horseflies buzzing round her, settling on places she can’t reach to swat; letting them drink their fill before they leave her be. It’s not her fault that Laura’s the way she is.

  Before she’d emerged from the womb they were already fighting. A breech birth: “You look like a battlefield inside,” the nurse had told her, after the anaesthetic had worn off. Things had gone from bad to worse, Laura biting the nipple with her milk teeth when put to the breast, or else refusing to nurse, so that there’d been endless fussing with a breast pump before Sonia had given up, at last. She’d felt such a failure, her breasts deflating like pricked balloons, Laura throwing up formula in her lap or into a pile of freshly washed diapers. After all the hopes she’d had, with that first pregnancy—this great lump of a Laura with glasses thick as a telephone book, and the fine, limp hair they can do nothing with, in spite of pincurls and home permanents. Perhaps if they dyed it, gave it some body … Maybe Laura would be happier that way—sunnier—with contact lenses and blonde hair. Maybe she’d stop picking fights with Katia, who can’t help being as clever, as pretty as she is, dark and thin and dancing almost before she could walk. While Laura still trips over her own two feet: bandages on her knees, a scowl on her face, and that huge, sharp chip on her shoulder. So much like Marta it’s terrifying.

  Max is bringing Marta with him tonight: she’ll be here for a whole week, Sonia groans to herself. Every summer since they bought their cottage at Kalyna Beach, Max has brought his sister up to stay. Because it’s so hot in the city, he always says. Though, as Sonia’s told her husband once, ten times, a hundred times, it’s Marta’s own fault she nearly boils herself alive: she won’t open the windows for fear of burglars; she refuses to turn on the fan they bought her because it costs money, and besides, how can she complain about the heat if the fan’s turned on? Max is also bringing Marta because he feels guilty, has been made to feel guilt all his life about his only sibling, who plays him like a virtuoso, pulling from him any tune she wants. She’ll complain about the children being too loud, tracking sand into the cottage, which she’ll then insist on sweeping up, though the doctor’s told her it’s bad for her to exert herself. She’ll find fault with the cooking, and the poorness of the children’s Ukrainian. Most of all, she’ll shake her head and mutter darkly about how Sonia’s failed to produce a son: Girls are useless. It’s the boy that counts.

  If she could only let it all go in one ear and out the other, the way her mother had counselled her. Her mother was the only one who could handle Marta—the only one whom Marta had respected, or perhaps, feared enough not to try to lord it over. Why is it her mother who’s dead and not Marta, Marta who’s always off at somebody’s funeral, then phoning to announce that she’ll be the next to go? Why take a woman who loved life so, even the hard life given her; why take someone who was always singing
or laughing, or helping out this or that neighbour, and leave that mean, sour rind of a woman instead?

  Reluctantly, Sonia turns onto her back, opens her eyes and stares through her dark glasses straight up into God’s blue, blue eye. Zirka puts a hand like a stone on her sister-in-law’s head:

  “You really ought to have a hat on. No wonder you get those terrible headaches, lying in the sun like this.”

  Sonia sits up, raking her fingers through her hair. Her skin is the colour of brown sugar, her eyes are almost turquoise, Zirka thinks. Her father was Polish, wasn’t he, half Polish? She looks like a Pole, not a Ukrainian.

  “It must be nice to have Darka to take the children off your hands,” Zirka goes on. “Especially Alix—though I guess you couldn’t ask for a better baby, so … quiet all the time. And thank heavens Annie Vesiuk is such a strong swimmer—it makes me nervous, all these children in the water, and no lifeguard around. My Yuri has his Junior badge, he can always pitch in if there’s an emergency. And Annie’s boys—it’s incredible, isn’t it—eight boys and all of them champion swimmers. Even the baby’s started and he’s only six months; she has him right in the water with the rest of them. Eight boys! You and Annie should trade recipes, Sonia.”

  This time Zirka’s voice makes Sonia think of a sink full of cold, greasy water, the drain choked. “I’m going to check on the girls,” she says, not caring if Zirka thinks her rude for walking off. But instead of struggling to the girls’ encampment at the top of the dunes, Sonia stops halfway, turning her eyes in the direction of the lake, as if looking for a boat on the water, or some distant sign of land: a place where she will feel, at last, guiltless, requited, home.

  “Make sure she keeps her hat on, and don’t you dare let her out of your sight.”

  Darka drops the baby into Laura’s lap and makes for the lake; Alix immediately scrambles to Katia. Nearly three, Alix is small for her age, small and thin and even darker than Katia, her eyes and hair black instead of brown. And she holds herself so rigid, it’s like a bundle of sticks falling into your lap when she plunks herself down, sucking her two front fingers, her black eyes watching everything, everyone. Bonnie hands Alix a plastic shovel to dig with and a small blue sieve. The baby holds the shovel in her hand as if she’s never seen anything like it before, and then, as if to reassure them, as if she were a grown-up joining in a child’s game she only half remembers, pats the shovel against the hot, loose sand. Baby Alix has never said even a single one of these words, though all her sisters were chattering away by the time they were two. Language stays locked in her throat like a safety pin she’s swallowed, but that’s bound to show up, sooner or later, like in an X-ray on the cartoons. Or so their father tells them. There’s nothing wrong with her, she’s perfectly capable of speaking, the doctor says so. If anyone asks about Alix, they are to say that she’s perfectly normal, bright as a button, though it’s never explained what buttons have to do with it. She’s just taking her time, that’s what they’re supposed to say: good things are worth waiting for.