The Ladies' Lending Library

by Janice Kulyk Keefer

  The community has never quite known what to make of Sasha. Partly because her father wasn’t Ukrainian, or even Polish, but Russian, and thus the worst kind of enemy by old country standards. Partly because Sasha’s mother had suffered from some kind of wasting disease, which left her in no condition to rein in her wild and reckless daughter. But mostly because of Sasha’s father’s politics. Viktor Shcherbatsky was a Red; he’d marched with Tim Buck in the worst days of the Depression, and he’d got his daughter singing the “The Internationale,” hoisting a red banner and striding all the way down University Avenue one fine Labour Day during the war. The Catholic priest had called at the Metelskys’ house that very evening, warning them to keep away from Viktor Shcherbatsky and his family. If the Metelskys didn’t watch out, he warned, if they kept associating with such dangerous people, they’d be shipped back, once the war had ended, to toil on the collective farm that had gobbled up those narrow strips of land they’d left behind and never sold. Laryssa Metelsky had heard the priest out, she’d bid him good day, and she had kept on bringing pots of soup over to the Shcherbatskys, as Sasha’s mother became weaker and weaker, at last taking to her bed, and from there to the dark, narrow plot she’d managed to save up for in Prospect Cemetery.

  Sonia lifts a plastic tumbler of watery gin to her mouth: just the smell of the liquor makes her giddy. “Ta deh!” she can hear her mother say. It was the only thing she’d said after the priest had left them with the stale bread of his warnings about the Shcherbatskys. Ta deh was her mother’s favourite expression, a cross between “no way” and “so what?” and a charm against that imagination of disaster that had scarred and so diminished her husband’s life. For Laryssa Metelsky had been a clear-eyed optimist, never letting herself worry past peevneech—midnight—the start of a new day. If only, Sonia thinks, she’d inherited her mother’s unshakeable confidence, instead of her father’s moods. “Ta deh,” Sonia whispers. Hadn’t her mother been right, after all? Neither Sasha nor her father had brought any grief to the Metelskys; even “The Internationale” had done Sasha no harm. True, when she’d run off aged nineteen with Ivan Plotsky, everyone had agreed it would be the end of her. But look where Ivan’s ended up: in advertising of all things, where the money’s even better than in law or dentistry!

  Sasha has English friends in the city, women who do volunteer work for the Museum and the Art Gallery, in which most of the ladies on the veranda have never set foot. It’s as if these places were on far-off planets, the cool, thin air of which they could never hope to breathe. Sasha never goes to church; her kids have practically brought themselves up. Tania does much of the cooking now; Nick shovels out the house when things get too bad. Yet Sasha’s children adore her. Sonia would never want to be as slapdash and careless as Sasha, and yet she’d never be able to bear Kalyna Beach without her. What if Ivan decides he’s bored with the cottage—not a proper one at all, but a dark log cabin built some sixty years ago by a pair of lunatic spinsters who’d actually wintered-over in it? What if Ivan finally persuades Sasha they should sell the cabin and buy a farm instead, somewhere near Guelph or Newmarket? Where will the rest of them be? Minus dirty books and fast talk and Sasha’s hoarse, smoky laugh. Her splash and verve, which, time and again, Sonia takes in dumbstruck, like a kid at her first circus.

  The ladies are back to talking about Cleopatra. A cigarette in her waving hand, Sasha holds forth:

  “Rex Harrison’s all right—and some of the actors in bit parts, you know, Hume Cronyn and Roddy McDowall and, oh yes, oh my, Cesare Danova—now there’s a man! But Liz Taylor? Her idea of acting is to heave her boobs up and down.”

  “No.” Silence follows on the heels of this single word, for it has been spoken by Nadia Senchenko—Nadia, who almost never speaks at Sasha’s tea parties, Nadia with her clear-as-crystal English from England.

  “I disagree,” Nadia continues. “I think Taylor is convincing, in the first half, at least—a woman who knows exactly what she wants and means to have it. She’s in love, of course, but she also wants power, she’s capable of wanting power not just over a kingdom, but over her own life—”

  “On your knees!” Sasha’s mimicry is perfect, if a bit abrupt: it’s as if she’s trying to shut Nadia up rather than encourage her. “Don’t we just wish we could tell our husbands that—and make them obey?”

  “What about Burton?” Zirka pipes up. “What do you think about him, Nadia, about Dick and Sybil?” It’s as though she’s been waiting for a chance to spotlight her brother’s wife, to fix her centre stage.

  Nadia does look a little like she’s on a film set, with her capri pants and silk shirt, and her hair twisted up on top of her head. She speaks as though Zirka’s question is a fly to be brushed away. “I think I prefer Shaw’s version of the story—and Shakespeare’s too, of course.”

  The names Shaw and Shakespeare blow a chill among the women. Theatre for them is what happens in the church basement on Mother’s Day and Shevchenko’s birthday: poetry recitations, a little folk dancing, speeches. Except for Sasha and Nadia, of course, though Sasha’s never been to London-England, like Nadia. Ivan has taken her to New York and even to Los Angeles on business trips. Sonia’s been to New York, but that was as a runway model—they’d worked her so hard she hadn’t wanted to do anything but throw herself into bed at night, having pushed a chest of drawers against the door of her hotel room, as she’d promised her mother she’d do.

  No one feels comfortable around Nadia except for Sasha. This is curious, considering that Nadia’s father was a professor of Religious Studies, and Sasha’s a Communist. It’s not that Sasha’s always running off to Nadia’s—Sasha doesn’t go anywhere much except down to the beach and back up to the cabin, trailing the smoke of her Export As, her face buried in whatever book she’s devouring at the moment. Nadia’s famous for being a loner and a night owl: they say she stays up till three or four in the morning, and sleeps in till lunchtime. All kinds of impossible rumours float in Nadia’s wake: that she goes swimming in the nude at midnight, that she lives off smoked oysters and sparkling wine, that she’s writing a book, though no one can swallow this last one. But still, where Sasha’s merely outrageous, Nadia’s mysterious: not romantic-mysterious, but opaque, frightening. She isn’t pretty at all, but there’s something about her that makes you want to look at her again and again, hoping she won’t look back. She used to draw a little, paint a little, before she got married, the ladies seem to remember. And now she’s enrolled for a degree at the University of Toronto, where her son will be starting Engineering in the fall: he’s smart as well as rich, Jack Jr: he’s skipped two grades at that fancy school they sent him to. Nadia’s supposed to be studying for her courses while she’s up here—there are reports of textbooks lying all over her cottage: books on the history of art, of all things, and expensive reproductions of work by the Old Masters. It makes Sonia nervous. Nadia could tell you exactly what and who an Old Master was, without blinking an eye; Sonia, on the other hand, never had a chance to get past grade six, in either her old or her new country. Once Katia caught her writing waistpaper basket on a shopping list and looked at her as if she were a beggar. Clever, pretty Katia, who’d rather spend her time in Sasha’s sloppy home than helping her own mother; Katia, who worships her father and declares she wants to be a lawyer when she grows up, or even a judge.

  “—better than The Robe,” Stefka’s saying. “He was in that too, with Jean Simmons, remember?”

  “I liked him best in The Rains of Ranchipur,” Halia sighs. “With Lana Turner. They put some kind of brown dye on his skin—he plays an Indian prince, and it’s so sad when—”

  “He’s a weakling,” Zirka blurts out. “He’s let that Taylor woman make a spectacle out of him. The way she flaunts herself—”

  “We’re supposed to be seen and not heard?” Sasha hits back, doling out the remains of the gin, a teaspoon each, into the ladies’ glasses.

  Annie Vesiuk wades in now. “But, Zirka, she’s
a movie star! It’s her job to make things spectacular.” It’s just like Annie to want to smooth things over. Annie’s the perfect sport, a blue-ribbon mother. She doesn’t have a jealous bone in her body, Annie, though her husband must see a hundred nurses every day, and you know what men are like, even the best of them. Annie who wears no makeup, and makes no effort to hide the varicose veins snaking up her calves and thighs—such muscular legs, Sonia thinks, pitying her a little, but envious, too, of how strong Annie is, how tireless, cooking, cleaning, wiping noses, rinsing out endless diapers and bathing suits, never complaining. Eight boys, as well as a mother-in-law in permanent residence. You and Annie should trade recipes.

  “Any woman,” Zirka continues, leaning in, her round face reflected in Nadia Senchenko’s dark glasses, “any woman who could walk out on her husband, the father of her children, in order to chase after another woman’s husband, is plain indecent. Even the Pope’s condemned her—’a woman of loose morals,’ that’s what he’s called her. Don’t take my word for it, you can read it for yourselves in the Catholic Times!”

  “I can understand being married twice,” Sonia ventures, “if you’ve been widowed. But four husbands, and now five, if he gets his divorce?”

  “One died—don’t forget that,” Stefka volunteers. “Mike Todd, he was something in the movies, not an actor, a producer. It was tragic—he was the love of her life.”

  “Of course he was,” Sasha jumps in. “He gave her a $90,000 diamond bracelet as a wedding present.”

  “I can’t remember husband number one—he was somebody’s son, somebody wealthy, maybe in real estate.” This from Stefka, catching the ball from Sasha: the women are trying to keep Zirka from getting back on her high horse.

  “And then Mike Todd,” Halia adds. “He died in a plane crash.”

  “No, no, Michael Wilding—the Anhleeyetz—the gentleman. She made mincemeat out of him, all right,” Sasha grins.

  “And then Mike Todd, and after that Eddie Fisher. But she didn’t have any children by Eddie Fisher.” Stefka speaks with surprising authority. “There was that article in Life—do you remember the pictures of her little boys and the girl, asking who their daddy’s going to be this time?”

  “She can’t have any more kids, did you know that?” Annie says sadly, as someone says Shh, and there’s a pause, during which Annie blushes, remembering that Zirka, too, has had her problems making babies.

  Zirka dashes into the breach. “Eddie Fisher has kids of his own—and a wife in a million. Debbie Reynolds—she can out-act Elizabeth Taylor any day of the week!”

  “Neither of them is exactly Sarah Bernhardt,” Sasha observes.

  “Debbie Reynolds is a lady,” Zirka trumpets. “Taylor’s nothing but a you-know-what!” And then, taking a step towards Nadia, addressing her words to no one but Nadia, she pounces: “Any woman—any decent woman would be satisfied with one husband, especially if he’d given her children and enough money to get by on. More than enough. So what is she after? I’ll tell you: she’s only after—”

  The ladies aren’t listening to Zirka any more. They are too busy watching Nadia as she rises calmly from her chair and goes to lean against the railing, turning her back to them all.

  “Sex!” Zirka cries, so shrilly that the girls under the veranda bite their lips, trying not to give themselves away in their delight. “It’s nothing but sex. It’s dirty and selfish and disgusting.” And now, with Nadia turning her back on her, Zirka trains her volleys on her hostess. “Just like those books of yours, Sasha Plotsky—you ought to be ashamed of yourself, passing them around. What if the children get their hands on them?”

  Sonia’s face goes red as a bowl of borshcht. Half of the things in those books make her squirm, and the other half go straight over her head. Death by Desire. She ought to be passing that one on, now, to Halia or Annie. She can’t imagine Annie reading them—maybe she doesn’t need to, having been a nurse.

  Sasha starts piling glasses on a scratched aluminum tray. “I don’t notice you saying no to all those disgusting books, Zirka.”

  “You want me to bury my head in the sand? You want it so that I don’t know what’s going on under my very nose?”

  “Shh, Zirka, it’s crazy to make such a fuss, and over what? A movie star, a woman none of us even know!” Annie has stretched out her hand, is pressing Zirka’s plump little knee.

  Zirka shakes her off. And then, without taking another step, she crosses the line the ladies have drawn so carefully around their reading and gossip and the lives they lead from day to day in the confines of Kalyna Beach. “Ask Nadia,” Zirka shrieks. “Ask Nadia what she thinks about women who lead on other people’s husbands!”

  The ladies look down at their feet in their flip-flops and frayed sneakers. They are all remembering—how can they not?—the party on this very veranda last Saturday night, the get-together hosted by the Plotskys and graced by the Senchenkos. Zirka is exaggerating, as she always does. Peter got a little drunk, that’s all. Everyone had been having a wonderful time, lots of laughing and teasing and more than a little tippling, when suddenly there was a noise like a gunshot: the unmistakable sound of a hand smacking a face. And there had been Peter Metelsky, looking as startled as anyone; he’d been kneeling before Nadia Senchenko, his hand over his heart, his eyes staring up into hers. He’d been reciting some nonsense from Cleopatra, pretending he was Marc Antony before Egypt’s beauteous Queen, or some such foolishness. After the slap, he’d gone through the motions of a rejected suitor, his forearm to his brow, his head all hangdog. Vaudeville, pure vaudeville. Everyone had laughed, especially Jack, who’d slapped Peter on the back, and told Nadia he’d find her an agent. The whole veranda-ful of people had laughed, and shrugged, and relaxed again.

  Of course it was nothing to worry about—it was only Peter hamming it up, for old times’ sake. And Nadia, bored with his attentions, maybe a little under the weather, or the least bit sozzled, had let him have it. She’d felt insulted, ridiculed: Nadia’s no Cleopatra, and the one person she bears no resemblance to whatsoever is Elizabeth Taylor, with her violet eyes and double row of eyelashes, and a bosom large and quivery as angel food cake. Everything had settled down, no one had bothered to talk or fuss about it until now, with Zirka determined to make a scene, bang her shoe on the table, force a response of some kind from poor Nadia.

  Nadia is still leaning out over the railing, staring at the lake. Slowly, she turns round so that she’s facing them all. She takes off her glasses, and her dark, myopic eyes blink helplessly, unable to focus on any one of the faces before her.

  “I was thinking,” she says at last, “about our Labour Day party, our zabava. You’ll all be coming, won’t you?”

  It is, of course, the perfect response—the only possible reply. And the ladies, who are staring at Nadia as though she were some master-diplomat brokering a peace treaty among half a dozen warring states, fall into line. Of course, they tell her. Of course they’re coming to Nadia and Jack’s zabava. Even Zirka nods, biting her lips as if she enjoyed the taste. Who could possibly miss a party—the party—at the Senchenkos’ cottage? Nadia slips her glasses back on again and leaves her half-full tumbler on the dented tray before nodding goodbye to Sasha and the rest of them, and walking down to the shore.

  The ladies watch her graceful progress until she’s vanished from their sight. Sasha gets up from her chaise longue and throws her cigarette over the railing. From their vantage point under the latticework, Katia and Tania watch it burn down into the sand.

  “Ladies,” Sasha says, in her throaty voice, “the gin’s all gone and our husbands will be home before we know it. I haven’t got a clue whether my kids are where they’re supposed to be, or whether they’ve gone off and got themselves drowned.”

  Halia and Stefka, Annie and Sonia, still-smouldering Zirka—they all unpeel themselves from their chairs, rising a little unsteadily. One by one they take their leave, Sonia last, about to hide the fact that she’s still got a g
lass full of watery gin by spilling it into the bushes off the veranda. Before she can do so, Sasha’s taken the incriminating object from her hands, and Sonia feels more than ever like the youngest in the group, the one who isn’t fully accepted, the tagalong.

  “Stay for a minute, will you?” It’s not a request, nor yet an order, but a plea.

  “I can’t, Sasha, I’ve got to get the kids to the beach.”

  “It’s important, Sonechko. We need to talk. Inside.”

  When the veranda stops shuddering over their heads, its planks holding nothing but the shadows of empty chairs, Katia and Tania creep out from under, their legs stiff as dresses ironed till they scorch.

  “What do you think is going on?” Tania whispers. “Do you suppose old Maximoynko told on us?”

  “So what if she did? We didn’t take anything. She didn’t catch us, did she?”

  Tania doesn’t answer. She’s thought of something else, now, some other trouble they could be blamed for. Billy Baziuk on the porch steps, playing with himself. She looks up at Katia, who’s been thinking the same thing.

  “It’s not about him,” Katia says. “Nobody saw that but us.”

  “How do you know? Maybe his mother did—she’ll say it’s our fault. And our mothers will think we’re just as bad as he is, they always do.”

  The girls stare at one another, and shrug. Then they spit into the palms of their right hands and clap those hands together, folding and interlacing their fingers. It’s their ritual of friendship—more than friendship, or even sisterhood. It’s their sign that they’ll remain loyal to each other till death do us part. Down in the dark beneath the porch, the Barbies are stuck like scissors in the earth, and the scissors lie forgotten, blades pressed primly together, trying to gleam.

  The cottage is as quiet as if Martians had landed and carried everyone away. Sonia’s off at the Plotskys’, Bonnie and Alix are fast asleep; Darka’s slumped on the sofa with a Hollywood Romance slipping out from a Life magazine. But she’s not reading, and she’s certainly not looking at the bright blue spill of lake through the picture window put in with such labour and at such expense the year before. Perhaps she’s asleep—yes, Laura decides, Darka’s dozing, which is far better than she’d hoped for. As for Katia, who cares where she’s off to as long as she’s not here?