The Ladies' Lending Library

by Janice Kulyk Keefer

  They say you can choose your friends but not your family, but what is Peter to Max? Neither one nor the other. His wife’s brother, no-account, devil-may-care—what was it in the commercial?—debonair, that was the word for Peter. Rogue, idler, jack of all trades, master mimic—he’d been taking off Rex Harrison just now, and to the life. In spite of himself, Max holds out the cigar case as if he had a hundred more Havanas back at the cottage. Sonia hates the smell of them, they give her headaches, she is famous for her headaches; but look at Peter, his life shot all to hell, yet smiling like he hasn’t got a care in the world. Peter, who never gives a thought to the power-monger-men in Moscow, Cuba, Washington.

  They sit side by side on a boulder by the shore, as if they were the closest, the easiest of friends: two men gliding into middle age, whose hair is starting to thin. Peter’s is carelessly tinged with grey, as if he’d been painting a ceiling and had forgotten, as usual, to put on a protective cap. But Peter is lean, still has an athlete’s body. He played what at university? Soccer, baseball, various amatory sports—he got in on a serviceman’s scholarship, but let his grades drop like a pair of pants round his ankles. Had Peter ever had so much as a scrap of ambition—was there anything he’d ever meant to become before good looks, and easy charm, and native laziness got in the way? A teacher, a doctor, a plumber, for God’s sake? No, nothing so exalted, so practical, but an actor—an actor!

  Max throws his cigar as far as he can towards the lake, waiting for the hiss of fire on water. He’s remembering the ass Peter made of himself acting up last weekend, at the Plotskys’ party. Remembering, too, some shred of gossip—and Max is, most often, immune to gossip, so he can’t be sure he isn’t making it up—about Peter having fallen for someone in his youth, fallen hopelessly, as you’d expect a man like Peter to do: no sense of proportion or judgment. A miracle, that he’d ended up with Zirka Senchenko, and through Zirka, her millionaire brother. Better luck than he deserved, although God knows that woman would drive you to worse than drink. He coughs to cover his thoughts—as if Peter had that trick in his bag, mind reading, of all things.

  “Christ, the traffic’s awful—I swear it gets worse each time I come up—and I thought leaving after supper there’d be no one on the roads.”

  “It was okay when I drove up,” Peter says, flicking ash into the remains of a fortress the kids have been building, a moat lined with small, white pebbles. “But I started out at two o’clock. I decided to take the afternoon off, things are always slow on a Friday.”

  “Funny, it’s the busiest time of the week for me.” Max can’t keep a flick of disapproval from his voice, and Peter can’t help catching it, wearing it like a rose in his buttonhole.

  “Man’s got to live a little before that big old spitfire pilot in the sky trains his guns on him. Haven’t you ever cut a workday short, Max?”

  “No.”

  “Not even when you were courting my sweet sister?”

  “If I were the type to play hooky from the office, there’s no way your sweet sister would have let me look at her, never mind court her.” Max hasn’t meant to say this much, he’d meant to ignore the question, or change the subject. Peter’s capable of taking his answer as a sign that he wants to talk, not about the things men usually talk about, the way they talk—stock market, sports, politics—but things better left private, things you don’t even want to think about, never mind confess to someone like Peter Metelsky.

  “Things aren’t going so well between the two of you these days, Max?”

  “I don’t discuss my private affairs. Besides, you’re one to talk.”

  “I thought as much. Sonia’s funny like that, always has been. Goes off the deep end. About our mother, I mean, all this grieving—”

  “Sonia’s a wonderful woman.”

  “Of course she is, Max, of course she is. So are they all—wonderful women.”

  He’s waiting for Max to ask him something about Zirka, about the desert of their marriage. Max knows that if he gives even the slightest sign—a shrug, a grunt—Peter will tell him everything. As if Max wanted to hear, as if he doesn’t have enough on his hands with Sonia, Marta, Laura—a houseful of women at war. Peter at least has sons. If only, Max thinks, the next one could be a boy, everything would be all right again. There is still time for a boy. It wouldn’t weigh on her so much, then, her mother’s death, and she’d stop worrying so much about Alix, thinking it’s her fault the child won’t speak, is so cold, so closed off to them all. Saying she hadn’t wanted her, and the child knows it, is punishing her. Crazy talk: the child is going to be fine, she’s a late bloomer, that’s all; it’s only if they keep worrying, carrying on about her that there’ll be a problem. Hasn’t the doctor said so? Always having to hug some guilt to her chest, is Sonia: some thorn or spike of glass. He has never known a woman with so small a gift for happiness.

  And yet she was beautiful, is still so beautiful he can be stunned, winded, just by looking at her. Seeing her when she thought she was alone, or the rare times when she couldn’t give a damn how she looked, how decently she was dressed. Like on the afternoon she stormed into his office, crying out—her father had been rushed to hospital, he had to come with her now, right now, this very moment. He’d almost forgotten about the client sitting there, had almost gone to her and taken her in his arms to comfort her, tell her all would be well, he was with her, he’d make sure that nothing bad would happen. But by the time he made his excuses to his client and spoke to his secretary to cancel the remaining appointments, Sonia had already left. And she refused to greet him when he showed up at the hospital, ten minutes after she’d arrived. Fifteen minutes at the most, he’d swear to it.

  “Better be getting back,” Peter says, throwing his cigar butt, like Max’s, into the water. It falls instead onto the soaked sand at the very rim of the lake. Peter shrugs, jams his hands in his pockets. But he makes no move to rise. “They’ll be wondering where we are,” he says at last. “They’ll be thinking us drowned at the very least. We should be so lucky.”

  Max isn’t taking any bait. Though he knows what Peter is saying—knows what he, Max, would like to be able to ask, if not of Peter then of someone who’d value the question, even if he had no answer. Not a priest, not a teacher or doctor, not even the huge blue eye painted on the cathedral dome, but just someone he doesn’t know and will never meet again. Some perfect stranger who happens to walk by and see him, sitting here by the water:

  Is this what my life, and hers, have come to—just this, and no more? If those men in high places, with their oh-so-powerful fingers, decide to push that button, will it all have been for nothing. And my daughters asleep in their beds—if they’re spared to grow up—will there be nothing more for them than this? A man like Peter, a man like me? A man whose life will add up, at the end of each week, to five days slogging at the office, two days at the cottage fixing a few of the hundred things that have gone wrong or need replacing, six hours’ driving here and back, when the traffic is bad?

  Peter stretches out his arms and yawns so lazily, so voluptuously that it has to be an act. “Two whole days I’ve got free, forty-eight fine and blessed hours, and I’m not going to spend even one of them fixing a single thing, no matter how many fits Zirka throws.”

  “Lucky you. Enjoy yourself.”

  “You taking any time off this summer?”

  “I have to make up for the time I took off when your mother died.”

  It sounds like a reproach. It is. Sonia collapsed, and Peter was no goddam help—you’d think a brother would be able to support a sister, talk to her, make her see sense the way a husband couldn’t. Useless, Peter: utterly useless.

  “Good night, then, Max.” Peter is starting to walk away, not in the direction of his cottage but farther up the shore.

  “Good night. And Peter—”

  Max waits for a moment, until he assures himself that Peter has stopped walking, has turned to face him.

  “Don’t act the fool
in front of everyone again. Once a summer’s more than enough.”

  If Peter’s angered by Max’s warning, he doesn’t show it. “‘Good night, sweet Prince,’” he calls out. “‘Flights of angels,’ and all that.” He resumes his stroll down the beach, in the direction of the highest bluff, the one the kids have named Gibraltar.

  Max, climbing heavily up the steps to the cottage, doesn’t answer. The porch light’s out, the window looks like a socket without an eye. He knows she’ll be asleep, or pretending.

  He’s lying with his back to her, snoring, the sheets and covers rolled around him, turning him into a thick white spool of thread. For a while Sonia stays in bed beside him, knowing she won’t sleep but that it’s far too complicated to get up, and that while he sleeps so soundly, she is safe. Once again she goes through the list of things that have to be done in the next two days: get Max to buy the lumber to fix the porch steps; stand over him to make sure he actually does the carpentry; handle Marta’s interference, her snorts of criticism. Then, when he’s finished the steps, when he’s in a thoroughly bad mood, about to head back to the city along with all the thousands of other husbands in their lonely cars, hand him the letter to give to Olya, whom he has never really cared for, and who lives far enough away from them for it to be an imposition. Hand Olya the letter and reassurances about Darka, lies about what a willing help Darka’s been.

  And last of all, Peter. Talk to Peter, though how can she begin to say anything to him about so painful a subject? If Sasha thinks he’ll listen to her because he’s her brother—but what business is it of Sasha’s, anyway? Why doesn’t she talk to Nadia instead; butter wouldn’t melt in that one’s mouth: I’d rather read Shakespeare. Peter’s never taken advice, that’s why he’s always in one kind of a mess or another. She told him all those years ago it would be a mistake, marrying Zirka: he had only smiled at her in that careless way he had, smiled and never really trusted her again. Thinking of Peter makes Sonia’s legs and arms cramp up; her heart performs its somersaults the way it always does when she forces herself to be still, to lie back and relax. Surely it must be getting on to morning?

  At last she rises silently, cautiously, without letting the bedsprings creak even once, groping her way to the kitchen for a drink of water. The stove clock with its cracked face tells her it’s only two. Not a sound from the room where Marta’s sleeping—Darka’s room. Darka’s been packed off to the sleep-house, and Sonia doesn’t like the arrangement at all, it makes her nervous not to have the girl under her roof. Though what good would that do—how could you keep the worst from happening, when what was supposed to have been the best has turned out as it has?

  Carefully, as gently as if she were touching the face of one of her children, Sonia opens the side door and looks out across the lawn to the sleep-house. Still as the grave, she thinks, pulling the lapels of her pyjamas closer. She doesn’t want to think about graves, she can’t stop herself hearing her mother, in her hospital bed, in pain so fierce you’d think it was skinning her, saying, “I would grab at a straw floating in the river to keep on living.”

  The kitchen clock says 2:14, as if to spite her: it seems to her hours since she left her husband’s bed, opening the door onto a skyful of stars. Sonia makes her way once more to the children’s rooms, going in to them, covering them if the blankets have been tossed to the floor, sometimes bending to stroke their hair. By Laura’s bed she stops for the longest time, afraid to touch her—she’s no longer a child, she has lost that ferociousness, that fever-sleep the little ones are still consumed by. And here, sleeping spoons beside her, Sonia’s golden one, her sweet, sunny Bonnie, whom she always has to keep herself from kissing, from throwing her arms around and holding, lest the others see that she’s Sonia’s favourite, the only one she loves without reserve.

  Across the hall, Katia lies with her arms flung back, as if she is dancing wildly in her dreams. But when Sonia bends over the baby, the one who will only let herself be kissed when she is sleeping, she gives a little cry that makes Katia stir in her sleep; stir but not wake. Alix’s round, black eyes are wide open, staring up at her mother like pools into which the whole night has fallen. “Go to sleep,” Sonia whispers, using the old language, the one in which her mother sang lullabies to her in the Old Place. But Alix keeps staring up at her, her eyes accusing, as always. Until it seems to Sonia that the only way she can close them is by taking the baby into her arms, pressing her head against her breast, and carrying her outside.

  Out onto the veranda, and the stairs that so badly need fixing. So warm, still, though it’s the middle of the night, a dark fragrant with pine and cedar, not the chocolate smell of summer nights at her mother’s house downtown. Not her mother’s house any more: it was sold weeks after her death. They’d had to scramble to clear it out, lugging boxes and boxes of what Max called junk to the basement of their house in the suburbs. Lamps and blankets and cooking pots; an envelope of yellowed paper on which, in pale purple ink, were marked the fields that had never been sold, that now lay under the jaws of some giant tractor on a collective farm. Moyee polya—my fields: words like a tongue dipped in chocolate, as soft as the most expensive velvet. Or the angora muff Mr. Streatfield had once given her as a present, and that she hadn’t dared to show her mother, keeping it always in her drawer, taking it out sometimes to hold its impossible softness to her face.

  Settling herself on the top step, holding Alix against her, feeling the child’s open eyes against her breast, Sonia tilts her head to look up at stars scratched upon the sky, endless and unreachable. She remembers waking up from the anaesthetic after Alix was born, waking in an isolation room, a belt of stinging blisters below her breasts, around her back, cinching her tight, so tight the skin felt rubbed entirely away. Shingles, it was called; it had been too painful for Sonia to nurse the baby, and so her mother had looked after the child, feeding her from a bottle every few hours. If it hadn’t been for Baba Laryssa, Alix would never have thrived, and now her baba is lying in a place dark as a night without moon or stars, without the smell or feel or even the memory of milk, or skin, or angora.

  Sonia gathers Alix to her, the child’s body no longer stiff in her arms, no longer holding out against her but soft, collapsed into sleep. So that the mother can drop her mouth to her baby’s head and kiss the thick, dark hair, not demanding anything back, just feeling the soft warmth of the small body next to her own. “She’s dead, baby, and I will die, and you will die too, and there’s nothing any of us can do about it.” The boat out from Gdynia, the Marshal Pilsudski, with the brass band and the sailors more like machines than men in their uniforms so spanking new, trouser creases you could cut yourself on. Holding Peter’s hand, pushing through a forest of trousered legs and thick wool skirts, lisle stockings. Till they got to the railings and held on for dear life, breathing in the salt sting of the sea so far below. No river that could drown her, filling her nose and mouth with dark; no river but a blue-black road that would take her away, forever. From the village where she couldn’t face anyone, could hardly breathe any more; from the best part of her life, the child she’d once been in that village: at home, at one, complete.

  The stars are sailing wherever it is they are meant to go, or not meant, it is all the same, thinks the woman sitting on the rotting steps of a summer cottage, holding a sleeping child against her breast. Throwing her head back and staring up at that starry, inky double of the sea, that road that she will never travel now, no matter how urgent, how huge her longing. The child’s mouth lies open at her breast as if she were about to nurse, drinking the milk her mother no longer has, and never wants to have again. Sonia recites, very softly, the words of the rhyme her children have taught her, words that have no meaning for her, or a meaning that is faint, unreadable, like the print on a dress that has been washed too many times:

  Ladybug, ladybug,

  fly away home.

  Your house is on fire,

  your children are gone.

  All
save the little one,

  whose name is Ann,

  And she’s hiding under

  the frying pan.

  Part Two

  Keepers of Secrets

  Sunday afternoon, when it’s still too early to think of tonight’s traffic and tomorrow’s appointments, Max goes down to the beach. He’s finished whatever jobs could be compassed in a forty-eight-hour stay: putting a patch on the leaky roof, fixing the latch on the kitchen door. The steps on the front porch will have to wait till next summer. These two hot, empty hours in the afternoon are his gift to himself: he’s going to bake in the sun for a while, and then play with the children. Sonia’s up at the cottage with Marta, who refuses to come down to the beach: she will get sunstroke, the arthritis in her legs is so bad she can barely move, she needs to take her medicine at three. It has already begun, the two-step Marta and Sonia will perform for the next six days of Marta’s stay: Marta piling up objections, Sonia attempting to knock them down: you will not get sunstroke, thanks to the beach umbrella bought at the hardware in Midland, just for your visit; the hot sand will be good for your arthritic legs, much better than a heat lamp; you can take your medicine with some lemonade I’ll have ready in the cooler I’ll carry down to the beach. But as in any dance, only one person can lead: already, Sonia has bowed to her partner, spending the best part of the day keeping her company in the stifling cottage, while the rest of them enjoy the breeze rustling the grasses in the dunes, or send beach balls spinning across the sand.

  “Tatu,” Katia yells, rushing up to where Max lies spread-eagled on his blanket. “Tatu,” she cries, “please let us bury you!”

  At first he pretends not to hear, but then, as the other children dance around him, even Laura, who’s been in one of her moods all weekend, he flaps his hands on the beach blanket, a signal for the kids to jump on him and tickle him till he begs for mercy. Until he finally rolls over and off the blanket, landing on his back on a platter of pale, dry sand.