She takes a deep breath. “I guess I’ll just have to figure it out for myself.”
“Joanne …” Ellen stops. She doesn’t know how to say what she wants to tell her. “Joanne, give yourself some room. You and Stan both need a little time. You’re both upset right now. Don’t do anything you’re going to regret.”
Joanne looks at her mother for a long moment.
“It’s okay. I’m not making a sudden decision.”
Ellen thinks she is taking her advice and feels relieved. She’ll discover later that Joanne was simply telling her, in that oblique way she sometimes uses, that she’s already made up her mind.
There’s a last hug with Jana and it’s time to go.
“Mom, you really should get an answering machine,” Joanne calls as Ellen walks down the corridor to the departure lounge.
Ellen turns.
“That’s one of the advantages of getting old. You don’t have to do what other people think you should any more. I’ve decided to be eccentric. A Luddite. And don’t go sending me one for Christmas. I won’t use it.”
For just a moment, Ellen can see the child in Joanne as she laughs at her mom. She steps through the gates, leaving Joanne and Jana behind.
The flight home is uneventful. She’s thankful the seat beside her remains empty. She flips through the pages of a magazine to give her hands something to do. What she really wants to do is think, to find a solution. Stan and Joanne are in trouble. That much is evident. Joanne didn’t want to talk about it, but from what she didn’t say, it was easy to guess they’d been having problems for some time. Lissy’s death was a catalyst, but not the cause of what was happening. Has Stan been seeing someone else? It didn’t seem likely. He isn’t really the type. Has Joanne met someone else? Again, it didn’t seem likely, but perhaps she has her maternal blinkers on.
Ellen doesn’t think they’re having money problems. Stan earns a good income. Still, things aren’t always what they seem. Neither said anything that offered an insight. Briefly, she wonders if history is repeating itself; if they don’t communicate any better with each other than she and Al did — or, more accurately, didn’t — there were serious problems ahead.
Jana is the one who generates the most concern. She’s a sweet little girl who’s at that wonderful age when questioning begins. There are lots of whys in her vocabulary as she sorts out her world, but not the important questions. Those will come later. What she needs right now is unconditional love from both her parents. Once the reality of Lissy’s death hits home, she has to be reassured that she was in no way responsible. That she is still loved.
Ellen worries that given their present states of mind, neither Joanne nor Stan will even recognize Jana’s concerns. Kids don’t usually come out in the open and say what’s bothering them. Sometimes they don’t even know. You have to look behind their actions to figure out what’s going on. And in the Glacier City that her daughter and son-in-law currently occupy, Ellen isn’t the least bit sure that’s going to happen.
Ellen hops a bus home, extricates the fistful of junk mail crammed into her mail box, and heads for her apartment.
Her bike is waiting. It draws her eyes, like a puppy dog that meets you at the door. She’s sure it’s asking to go out for a ride.
“It’s a little too late right now,” she murmurs. Then she stops. Why is it too late? She gained time on the flight home. It’s just mid-afternoon. After the tensions of the past week, a ride would feel wonderful. It takes only moments to dig her biking clothes out of her dresser.
Fifteen minutes later, she’s on the road. It feels good. She heads for a hill — suddenly she feels the need to sweat. Halfway up she realizes the ten days away have exacted a toll. It’s a much harder ride than she remembers. It’s time to honk, to stand up on the pedals and pump hard. Her feet bite into the bike pedals, pressing urgently against them as she levers herself into a standing position and powers her way up the hill. Her breath rasps and her lungs burn, but it helps ease the deeper pain. This hill has a designated bike lane, so she doesn’t have to elbow for position with cars. There’s enough latitude to spin the front wheel from one side to the other, reducing the grade from a straight climb to a diagonal slant. Still, it becomes harder and harder to maintain forward momentum. Her gluteus clenches with painful hardness as she strains against the pedals, willing them to turn, watching the slow passage of the tire treads crossing in front of the fender.
An hour later she’s home again and headed for the shower. The blessed, soothing ease of hot water pours over her body, massaging the sore spots and unknotting tightened muscles.
There’s still time to shop, restock her depleted fridge, and do all the other things that need doing. But she’s glad she went for a ride first. Ellen pats the bike, as she might pat a faithful horse or a good dog. It’s silly, but she doesn’t care. Here, her actions don’t have to be defended.
Half an hour later, as she towels her hair dry, the phone rings.
She half expects it to be Joanne, making sure she got home safely. Is this a turnaround for the nights Ellen used to wait for Joanne to arrive home from dates? But it isn’t. The voice takes her by surprise.
“Hi, Babe. I hoped I could catch you. I phoned earlier, but you don’t have an answering machine.”
“Hi, Al.” She’s damned if she’s going to defend her lack of an answering machine to him. Or even acknowledge it.
“Have a good flight?”
“Yes, thank you.” What can you say about a plane flight? Nothing uneventful happened. The weather was calm. It was just a flight.
“What I’m calling for — I wondered if it would be okay if I came over for a while?”
If he came over for a while? Why on earth would he want to do that?
She doesn’t want to wallow in Lissy’s death with Al. That’s something she’ll work through in her own way, on her own terms, in her own time. There’s nothing else left to talk about.
“Just for a little while,” he says, as though he’s read her mind.
Habit kicks in again. There’s no reason for him not to come — other than her misgivings. Or that she doesn’t want him to come. Or that she’s never learned to say no to him.
“Uh … sure. That would be fine.”
“Maybe I could pick up a pizza on the way over? Are you doing anything for dinner? We could go out somewhere if you’d rather.”
“No. No. That’s fine. I don’t want to go out. Pizza will be great.”
“Okay. I’ll be there in about an hour.”
Her eyes fly around the apartment. What needs to be done? Dusting? Vacuuming? What needs to be put away?
Forget it, she tells herself. Whatever he wants, he isn’t coming to inspect the place. In truth, she’s surprised he even knows where it is. His cheque goes directly into her bank account each month, not mailed to her home. Still, it wouldn’t have been difficult for him to get her address from one of the kids.
She takes another look around the place. The suitcase is still sitting on a chair. Quickly, she moves to pick it up. Then she stops and sets it back down again.
“I can have a suitcase on the chair if I want to,” she says, to no one in particular. “This is my home.”
For good measure, she finishes rubbing her hair dry and drops the damp towel on top of the suitcase. Then she picks it up. There’s no point in getting the suitcase wet just to annoy Al. She spreads it over the bathroom hamper and finds a dry towel to hang on the rack. It doesn’t match, but she doesn’t care.
By the time Al and his pizza arrive, she’s feeling like a cat with its back arched and ready to spit. All it will take is one wrong word, but the word never comes. It turns out to be a pleasant evening. Whatever it was he wanted to talk about, he doesn’t seem inclined to bring it up right now. They finish the pizza, she puts on a pot of coffee, and they ramble idly through an odd conversation.
He’s doing well. He’s thinking of renovating the house — expanding the half bath in the ba
sement to a full bathroom. “It would be better for the kids if they come to visit,” he says. “They could use the rec room like an apartment.”
“Are they planning to visit?” she asks.
He shrugs. “Not that I know of, but better to get it done before they come.”
“Don’t you think they’d rather stay in their old rooms instead of moving down into the rec room?”
Again the shrug. “Well, that’s okay if they’re by themselves, I guess, but if they come with their families it isn’t going to be too convenient.”
She looks at him. “Al, Joanne is the only one who has a family. The others aren’t even married yet. It’s going to be a long, long time before you have to worry about accommodating a whole bunch of people.”
He grins.
“Well, yeah. I guess you’re right. I’ve just been thinking about it and I thought I should run it past you before I did anything.”
She’s not the least bit interested in what he does with the house, she realizes. He can bulldoze it down for all she cares.
But he isn’t finished yet. “I mean, I know you’ve got a lot of emotional stock invested there, and I wouldn’t want to hurt your feelings or anything like that, so I just thought I’d … um … kind of float the idea by you and see what you thought.”
Emotional stock? In a hypothetical bathroom?
“That’s very considerate, Al, but it really doesn’t matter to me. If that’s what you want to do, then go right ahead and do it.”
He mulls that one over. “What I mean is, I guess I wondered if you might sort of look at the plans and help me figure out what I should put in there. You know, tiles and colours and that sort of thing.”
Ellen looks at him.
“Al, there are only so many ways I can say this. I’m not living in that house. I’m not going to live in that house. It truly doesn’t matter to me what you put in there. Just do whatever pleases you.”
He gives her that look again, the one that says, I hear the words you’re saying but I’m having some difficulty with them because they aren’t the words I expect you to say and, in my greater wisdom, I know you don’t really mean them.
“Honestly, Al,” she adds, as if she hopes a little extra emphasis will get her point across.
“In fact,” she continues, “I guess I’m surprised that you’re even planning to stay there. I mean, it’s an awfully big house for one person.”
He nods agreement.
“Well, yeah, sometimes it is. But I’m used to it, you know how it is.”
She shakes her head.
“No, I really don’t. That size of a house takes a lot of looking after. And one person doesn’t really need all that room. It was too big when just the two of us lived there. That was something I always hoped we’d do once the kids left — sell it and get a smaller place that would be easier to look after. But it never quite worked out.”
“Jeez, Babe. I never knew you felt that way about it. I remember how sentimental my Mom was about her house. She never wanted to change anything.
“I guess what I remember best is that you could always depend on things to be the same. Like the Christmas tree — it was always in the same place. And the coffee table was always in front of the fireplace. And the big coat tree was always in the front hall, just beside the door. Remember that coat tree, Babe?”
Indeed she did. It was the ugliest coat tree she’d ever seen. The story was that Al’s mother wanted a coat tree for the front hall and had in mind a shiny brass tree full of scrolls and curves and bright reflections. Al’s father spotted this one at an auction one day and bought it for two dollars. It looked like it might have come from a schoolroom somewhere, possibly around the turn of the century — old enough to be ugly but not quite right for an antique. It was made of heavy dark wood with heavy metal hooks. No graceful scrolls, no gleaming brass. No sleekly designed hangers, just metal hooks in staggered rows to accommodate six coats, cloaks, hats, or whatever they were designed to hold in those long-ago days when the thing was new.
Al’s mother hated it. From the minute she first laid eyes on it, she hated it. But Al’s father had bought it and placed it in the front hall, so that was that. Even after his father died, the monstrosity stayed there. It stayed until she died, years later. When they moved, Al wanted to bring it to their new house, but Ellen refused. It was one of the few times she’d put her foot down and vetoed one of his suggestions. Her stand generated a three-day sulk, but she didn’t care. Eventually, he got over it. Each time Ellen entered their front hall, she was happy not to see it there.
Looking back, there was a lesson to be learned. The world didn’t end when she said no. It didn’t even quiver. Her mind reverts to the present. The notion of Al spending weekends vacuuming, dusting, and doing housekeeping things doesn’t reconcile itself with the man she lived with for all those years. But of course, she reminds herself, the Bimbo probably looked after all that while she was there.
She realizes he’s still talking and tunes back in.
“Since Verna left, I have a cleaning service in every other week. Doesn’t cost that much and it isn’t like one person makes that much of a mess.”
Ellen’s hands busy themselves stacking things on the table.
“There’s still a chunk of pizza left,” she says. “Would you like to take it home with you? Maybe for lunch or something?”
“No, that’s fine. You keep it.”
“No, thank you. It’s far too much for me. I don’t usually eat pizza, and I don’t think I can handle it two days in a row.”
“Okay. If you’re sure you don’t want it.”
Oh, please! She thinks. Let’s not go through this gavotte over a chunk of leftover pizza.
She stands abruptly.
“I’ve got some aluminum foil. I’ll wrap it up for you.”
“Okay, thanks. Then I can just pop it in the microwave.”
She laughs. “Al, you know darn well you can’t just pop it in the microwave. You’ve nuked a hundred pieces of pizza and you’ve never used foil on any of them. Don’t start getting helpless at this stage of your life.”
He smiles.
“Touché. In that case, could you wrap it in Saran so I don’t have to put it in something else first?”
“I can. I’ll even put it on a paper plate first.”
Despite the cheerfulness of their banter, she’s cross with herself. She doesn’t know why she’s even bothering to do this. It makes more sense just to leave it in the box it came in. But, no, she’s looking for an exit line and offering to wrap up the leftovers is a graceful one.
At last, Al picks up the clue, gathers his pizza, and leaves with a big smile and a friendly hug.
“It was good to see you again, Babe.”
He glances around.
“Nice place you’ve got here. But then, you’ve always had good taste.”
Ellen almost laughs out loud. If she had such good taste, how come she ended up married to him?
— 10 —
THE DAYS SLIDE BY. Ellen hears from Al at intervals. She rides, ignoring threatening skies and blustery winds, trying to make up for lost time. Her legs and lungs complain. Her seat breaks out in rebellious blisters. She should know better. She does know better.
“I know you can’t make up for lost time,” she mutters. “Once it’s gone, it’s gone forever, but why does it take so long to catch up?”
Her muscles aren’t fooled. They grumble during the day, twitch and flex during the long, restless nights. But still she rides. Months pass. Holidays flit by, unnoticed and uncelebrated.
She phones Joanne as often as she dares, inventing such transparent reasons to call that Joanne finally breaks into laughter.
“Mom, I’m okay. You don’t have to worry. I promise I’ll call if I need you.”
“Okay. Then I won’t call again, unless …”
“Unless nothing,” Joanne interrupts. “I know you love me, and I love you too. But you don’t have to c
all twice a week.”
Ellen has a love-hate relationship with her phone. At times she resents it heartily. It rings at the wrong times, and doesn’t ring when she wants it to. She’s fed up with endless busy signals. Call waiting is even worse. She hates thinking that someone is measuring the importance of her call by putting her on hold while they talk to someone else. She hates the music they play, and hates even more the inane announcements that interrupt the music.
She is driven to distraction by people seemingly talking to themselves in the stores, on the streets, at the bus stop, when they are really talking into cell phones.
“I’m not eavesdropping,” she tells herself. “They talk so loud you can’t help but hear. And most of it is so stupid.”
She has no patience with aimless conversations. Joanne is like her in that way, but both Geoff and Robbie thrive on long, floating discussions. It doesn’t seem to matter who they talk to, they go on for hours at a time. When they were still home, they were far worse than the girls about tying up the phone line. Ellen’s friends laughed when she complained. In their homes, it was daughters, not sons, who monopolized the phone.
“I should be so lucky,” they’d tell her, winking at each other.
When Robbie lived at home and Geoff moved away, they found solace in calling each other. Later, she’d ask what they talked about. Not directly, but casual comments, like: “So, what’s new with Geoff?” There was never a definite answer. It seemed as though another level of communication was going on that had nothing to do with words. It should have been the twins who were that close, she thought.
Jennifer is somewhere in between. She starts well, then partway through a conversation Ellen can almost hear the gears changing and a display screen flashing the message “Enough!”
On the Rim Page 14
