The Ladies' Lending Library

by Janice Kulyk Keefer

  But none of the girls assembled in the little hollow behind the dunes says anything nasty about Alix. If the boys were here it would be different—they would tease the legs off a spider. They are such babies, the girls agree. Any boy older than thirteen is off at the Ukrainian summer camp in Oakville, a camp run along military lines whose discipline, the fathers argue, is good for boys of that age—“that age” meaning old enough to argue with their fathers and be rude to their mothers. At camp they learn to carry messages across enemy lines, to dig trenches and communicate by semaphore—explained to their sisters as something involving flags and cunning. Any boy older than thirteen is at camp, except, of course, for Billy Baziuk, who spends every second of every day and night with his mother. As for the boys at the beach this year, they occupy themselves by hanging round the service station across the road from Venus Variety, inhaling the sharp smell of gasoline from the pumps, or else diving from a raft anchored at a part of the lake where the sandbars stop and the water’s cold and deep and dangerous.

  Today the boys have decided to forgo the diving raft: overnight, a huge driftwood log has rolled up onto the beach. None of them has ever been in a canoe; some have never seen one, unlike their friends at English school who go to summer camps with names like Gitchigoumi and Oconto, learning to identify animal tracks and survive in the bush. So the boys decide to turn their find into a galley instead of a giant canoe; eight of them sit astride the log, paddling furiously out into open water. They’re going to Australia, the huge rock thirty yards offshore, close enough that you can swim back easily if you’ve got your Junior badge. Even so, the mothers take it in turns to pace along the shore, and the girls take no chances, posting spies at the edge of the dunes where they spread their beach towels and sit rubbing baby oil onto their arms and legs, already brown as barbecued duck. The tall, rough grass makes a perfect screen, and the dunes themselves could be the high walls of a Cossack fortress, below which Turks and Tatars lie plotting.

  The girls’ talk jumps about like the sand fleas they bury in shallow graves at the edges of their towels. Bonnie, who has just turned nine, is the youngest; Laura the oldest, and Katia and Tania have both turned twelve this summer. As for the others, they take up the slack between Laura and Bonnie. There’s something insistent, authoritative, about this ranking due to birthdate, something Laura’s grateful for, knowing as she does that otherwise they’d never give her the time of day, not only Katia but all the other girls at the beach, except for Bonnie. If Anastasia Shkurka were here she’d have a natural ally, but Nastia is delicate, prone to sunstroke and heat rash, and her mother keeps her inside in the mornings, when the sun is hottest.

  Somehow the conversation turns to Nastia, to how sickly she is, how pale and nervous.

  “I don’t think she’s delicate at all,” Tania observes. “I think Nastia Shkurka’s about as delicate as a rubber tire. She hasn’t any guts, that’s all.”

  A thrill goes through the group of girls on hearing the word guts—it’s a boy’s word, and there’s something daring just in hearing Tania speak it.

  “If Nastia woke up one morning with a pimple on her face she’d get a heart attack,” Katia crows. “Nasty Nastia.”

  “Shut up.” Laura says this out of loyalty, not because it isn’t true. If Nastia were to grow a pimple she probably would walk round with her chin cupped in her hand, to hide it. She’s always scared to do things her mother wouldn’t like—things her mother would never find out about in a hundred years, like looking at the book Laura found in Sonia’s bedside table, and brought with her once to the Shkurkas’ cottage. “You shut right up,” Laura says, adding a word that’s higher up on the forbidden list than guts: “Dupo. Smerdiucha dupo.”

  The girls shiver. Everyone knows that there’s a war going on between Katia and Laura. Their last fight has acquired mythic status among the girls at Kalyna Beach; everyone’s heard how, that one day it rained, that day of being cooped up indoors with already-thumbed-through books and decks of cards with the queens or aces missing, Katia had started teasing Laura about her weight. Laura had thrown a book at her—a book that had hit not Katia, but the statue their mother had brought up to the cottage and placed on the mantelpiece, a plaster statue in the shape of a boy and girl kissing under an umbrella. The Martyn children knew the story of that statue by heart: how it was the first luxury Baba Laryssa had ever owned, the first thing she’d ever possessed that couldn’t be worn or eaten. Dyeedo had bought it for her just before he died: it was priceless, their mother claimed. Though if it were such a treasure, why was it up at the cottage? And why had the children heard their father refer to it, when their mother wasn’t around, as “that monstrosity”?

  The statue had fallen almost noiselessly; Katia had quickly swept up the pieces with dustpan and brush, but Sonia had known at once. She’d marched in from the screened porch directly to the garbage can, slipped the lid open and, with her bare hands, pulled out the shards of the statue. And then she’d had highsterics, as Laura called them. When she’d finally got around to asking which of them was responsible, Katia had yelled “Laura,” and Laura, “Katia.” They had both been punished: made to stay indoors the whole of the next clear, sunny day, with Laura forbidden to visit Nastia, and Katia to run off to Tania’s. As for the statue, its pieces were put in a cardboard box, labelled in Sonia’s uncertain script, broken statu, and placed on the shelf beside the screen door, so that every time they went in or out of the kitchen, the girls would see it, and feel appropriately guilty.

  But they didn’t: they were preoccupied with other feelings. It hadn’t been the punishment so much as the sense of injustice that had poisoned the aftermath, each of the sisters convinced that the other was to blame, both unwilling to bury their differences and unite against their mother. There’d been something else, as well, something ugly and invisible, like a terrible smell that seeps into a room. For the first time in all the years of their being sisters, Laura and Katia had understood that in spite of what people were always telling them, there was something thicker than blood. There was the possibility of something sharp and hard and persistent, something you couldn’t un-feel. Instead of deflecting their shame at having broken their baba’s treasure, instead of whispering to each other, “stupid old statue,” and “who cares if The Monstrosity got broken,” they’d put an icy silence between them, broken only by jabs at each other whenever an audience cropped up.

  Smerdiucha dupo. Laura’s taunt hovers in the air, a party balloon that won’t pop. Hearing it in Ukrainian is far more exciting for the girls than if Laura had used the English words—it’s as if they’ve overheard their grandparents swearing. Everyone waits for Katia to hit back, knowing she’s taking her time, waiting for effect, preparing an insult far more devastating than “smelly bum,” when Bonnie pipes up in her sweet, clear voice. “Tell us a story, Laura,” she pleads, picking up a fistful of sand and letting it dribble out her fingers, the white and black grains finer, even, than salt and pepper pouring from their shakers. “Tell us Ball Erectory.”

  Tania sniggers. When Laura pokes her with her elbow she puts her hand to her lips, as if the snigger were a fly that had flown into her mouth and disappeared.

  “It’s called Ball Rectory, Bonnie, and I told it yesterday, and last night, and I’m sick of it.”

  Laura’s been elected storyteller this summer—from the “English” girls at school she’s picked up dozens of ghost stories that they’ve learned at summer camp along with how to make pine-cone necklaces and miniature teepees out of birchbark. Ball Rectory is about Albania, whose lover is killed by an evil lord in a duel. She has a child out of wedlock in a convent, and both of them perish of hunger and cold at the hands of the Abbess, who is the sister of the evil lord, and who is tortured ever after by the wails of the perished Albania and her newborn child.

  “I’m sick and tired of that story,” Laura grumbles. “I’ll tell you Cleopatra instead.” Bonnie exhales slowly, careful not to let her sisters se
e her relief; determined to keep the peace for as long, and as invisibly, as possible.

  The girls lie spread out on their towels, sometimes spitting a few grains of sand from their mouths, or twitching their bodies when flies crawl up their calves. Laura alone sits cross-legged, reciting from the Souvenir Booklet. Her voice takes on a deep, reverent tone, ringing out over the blankets and echoing between the dunes:

  We, as we read of the deeds of the Queen of Egypt, must doff our modern conception of right and wrong; and, as we pace the courts of the Ptolemies, and breathe the atmosphere of the first century before Christ, we must not commit the anachronism of criticizing our surroundings from the standard of twenty centuries after Christ.

  “Is that English?” Tania asks. Laura ignores her, but then Katia joins in.

  “What does anachronism mean?” Katia’s only asking because she thinks Laura doesn’t know—that she can trip her up in front of all the others.

  “It’s a kind of sin,” Laura says loftily. They seem to expect something else, and so she blunders on. “It’s something you commit. Like Communism.” She’s thinking of the photograph that appears in the book above the words she’s just recited, words picked out in huge black print. The picture shows a banquet hall with silk-draped walls under green and purple lights that remind her of the peels of cucumbers and eggplants. It’s a small picture, but you can still see a man whose skin only goes as far down as his hips, and whose legs are covered with fur. Two other men are wearing skorts like in gym class, and ladies in bikinis perch like budgies on swings, watching as the men in skorts dance between lighted torches.

  Beautiful and seductive Cleopatra was, but she was also a hereditary ruler, a woman of rare spirit and courage, cosmopolitan and yet superstitious, ardent and at times, lonely. And always proud. Her conversation was known to be scintillating, her mind keen.

  This is the part Laura likes best, for though she knows she’ll never be beautiful, a rare spirit and scintillating mind are things she can train herself to acquire, the way she was able to cure herself of flat arches by picking up marbles and pencils with her toes every night for a year. The word ardent especially enchants her: it makes her think of small golden arrows, thin as fishbones and with flames instead of feathers at their ends.

  Cleopatra’s father, Ptolemy XIII, had stated in his will that she was to share the throne of Egypt with her younger brother, Ptolemy XIV. But he plotted against her and threatened to kill her and she was forced to flee to Syria.

  “Who’s Syria?”

  Impatient with the interruptions, Laura stops quoting from the Souvenir Booklet. She tells them how Julius Caesar, having defeated his rival in battle, travels to Alexandria to decide who should inherit the throne of Egypt, and how Cleopatra has herself wrapped up in a carpet and carried in to him, just like a hot dog in a bun, so that her brother won’t find out and stab her in the back. Tania nods hearing this; her brother is nine; he would stab her in a minute, she says, if she didn’t watch out. Laura ignores her.

  “Cleopatra’s faithful retainer, Apollodorus, who is silently and hopelessly in love with the Queen, carries her into Caesar’s apartments as if he were trying to sell him the rug.”

  “Why would Julius Caesar need to buy a rug if he was Absolute Master of the Roman World? Why wouldn’t Apple—whatever his name is—take the rug to Caesar’s wife instead?” Katia’s questions are imperious.

  “She was in Rome,” Laura shoots back. “The wife doesn’t matter—Cleopatra does. When she stepped out of the rug—”

  “Like a showgirl from a cake?”

  “—he was charmed by her beauty and her cleverness, and fell in love with her forever after.”

  “But you said he had a wife.”

  “If all you’re going to do is make stupid remarks, I won’t tell you anything,” Laura fumes.

  At which point Darka returns, dripping water from her brassy hair and clutching a movie magazine with the words SYBIL’S ANGUISH screaming from the cover. Darka bends down to wipe Alix’s nose; the baby retaliates by grabbing the magazine, tearing off the back page and crumpling it into a ball, which she proceeds to suck on. Darka retrieves the rest of the magazine; expertly, she spreads out her towel, flopping on her back, pulling her straps down from her shoulders. The girls nudge one another—even Laura’s included—at the sight of Darka’s big breasts bulging under the top of her two-piece. And then their heads dive down and they pretend to sleep; the noise they hear this time is a mother’s flip-flops climbing up the dunes.

  It’s Sonia, all out of breath, her hand like a visor over her dark glasses. All she sees is the baby stuffing paper in its mouth while Darka soaks up sun like a great, soft starfish. “Darka,” she shouts.

  The edge in her voice makes Laura think of the strip of metal on a pack of wax paper.

  “I need you up at the cottage, it’s time to start lunch. Bring the baby with you.”

  Darka slowly folds her arms and legs together, and, her eyes still closed, starts pulling up the straps of her bathing suit. For some reason this irritates Sonia more than the baby’s chewing on the page from Darka’s magazine.

  “For God’s sake, don’t take all day, Darka, I’m not paying you to sunbathe!”

  “You’re not paying me, period,” the girls hear Darka grunt as she stands up and kicks her feet into her flip-flops. The baby bats at her with the plastic shovel as Darka stoops to pick her up.

  When she reaches the path to the cottage, Sonia turns and calls to her daughters: “Laura, Katia, Bonnie—shake out your towels and come up with us. Right now! Do you hear me? No dawdling. Laura!”

  Laura just sits with her fine hair flapping into her eyes, listening to the howls of Baby Alix. She is saying her mother’s name over and over to herself, as if calling her Sonia rather than Mama will diminish her power, shrink what Laura calls the World of the Mothers, a world apt to swell up over their children and press down on them at the same time. A world of Because I Said So, and I Told You So; of What Is It Now? and That’s Just The Way It Is. It’s this last refrain that troubles Laura most, the law, verging on commandment, that life—everyone’s life, from Chucha Marta’s to Baby Alix’s—is fixed in a pattern rigid as the wool of Baba Motria’s kylym, the black rug woven by Baba Motria herself, a treasure, a monstrosity like the statue of the boy and girl beneath the umbrella. Recalling the stiff heaviness of the kylym, Laura thinks of how different men’s lives are from women’s. In men’s lives there’s some give to the weave, there are holes you can slip through and escape from, like Nastia’s father did; as Uncle Peter tries so hard to do with his jokes and his play-acting. Whereas women are stitched fast to their lives: stitched and slammed and stuck together like the wool of the kylym, with its clumsy, shrimp-coloured roses, its mouldy-basement smell.

  Bonnie is running over to their mother, telling her not to worry, that they’ll all be right up, so that Sonia can turn to leave, her dignity intact. The girls follow her up the hillside, Laura lagging behind on the worn logs that serve as steps. When she reaches the top, she pauses, reluctant to cross the lawn to the cottage. Clutching the edges of her towel round her neck, she whispers, “Thus stood the great Marc Antony at the Battle of Philippi, when he faced Brutus on the desert sands!” She lets the towel drop; she is dragging it behind her as she walks across the crabgrass to the kitchen door when, halfway there, she stops. From the patch of tall weeds beside the sleep-house comes a sudden rustling sound. As if someone is crouched in the shadows, someone who means no good, like Cleopatra’s brother. Suddenly, Laura forgets about Cleopatra; suddenly, she knows that something dark and cold is hiding in the weeds. It’s not something out of a story, or a souvenir book, but something real, over which she has no power, even of words.

  Darka’s started yelling at her out the kitchen window, ordering her inside to eat lunch. Shaking, Laura turns her back on the weeds and runs up the stairs, slamming the screen door in that savage way her mother can’t stand.

  After lunch, every
one’s happy to stay inside: if you were to go outdoors your skin would turn lobster red and all the next day you’d have to lie in a darkened room, your back and shoulders puffing, then peeling while your mother says I-told-you-so and pours on calamine lotion that stains the sheets a cloudy pink and gives off the odour of medicine. After lunch, you stay shut up at the cottage, digesting your meal; you nap, if you’re too small to do anything else, or leaf through comics and old magazines on your bed. By three o’clock it’s safe to go swimming again; everyone goes back down to the beach, the same procession as in the morning but quieter, calmer. The mothers scold less and hardly shout at all: they’ve had time to drink coffee or tea, to visit each other, or just to lie down with cold cloths on their heads while their children sleep and stay out of trouble. Spreading their blankets back over the sand, the mothers know that the most demanding part of the day is done. Later, when they stare out their picture windows or from lookout points to the sun setting over the lake, they will remind themselves how it’s been another perfect day, and how lucky they are to be at the cottage instead of in the city. How much simpler it is to cook and clean when they haven’t got their husbands around checking up on things, asking them how much they paid for the roast, expecting their dirty shirts to be washed, ironed and put away as soon as they’ve been tossed in the direction of the laundry hamper.