Agassiz Stories

by Sandra Birdsell

  “I am the lady of the house,” she said from behind raw knuckles.

  “Oh, I beg your pardon, Ma’am.” He blushed. “But you don’t look old enough. You two could be taken for sisters.” I thought I would be sick.

  My mother laughed, a short harsh bark as if to say, don’t think I believe that malarkey because I don’t.

  “Could I have a moment of your time?” he asked quickly and demonstrated how filthy the couch was by placing a handkerchief over the end of the vacuum cleaner hose and vacuuming to show the amount of dirt left behind even though she had just cleaned it.

  “I had no idea,” Mika said, cheeks flaming.

  “That’s quite all right, Ma’am,” Big Max said. “It’s not as bad as some I’ve seen. Let me tell you. The lady next door,” he said and raised his eyebrows.

  “Oh,” Mika said.

  “You wouldn’t believe it.” He handed her a card which said, “Max and Company. Specialists in At-Home Rug and Upholstery Cleaning.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” my mother said. She held up the circle of dirt as though it were a piece of soiled underwear. “I could do it myself. With a brush and soap suds.”

  “That’s true. You could. But all you’d really be doing is grinding the dirt in deeper. We have special equipment which sucks it all away.”

  My mother frowned, wiped her hands on her dress and sat down on the piano bench. “How much?”

  He told her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, getting up quickly. “But I don’t think I’ll bother. The couch,” she said, her words cut off suddenly as the teeth slid downwards.

  Big Max wound the vacuum hose around his neck and picked up the machine. He looked tired. “That’s quite all right,” he said. “You’re under no obligation whatsoever.” He walked through the kitchen, the hose trailing and bumping along after him, into the back porch to the screen door. He set the machine down and took another handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at his neck. “Say, I wonder. Could I bother you for a drink of water?” he asked. “It’s been a long day.”

  Mika rushed to the kitchen sink to oblige. Big Max went to the top of the driveway, stuck his fingers into his mouth and whistled. Along came Max, pants too long and rumpled over his dusty shoes, his jacket, a polished cotton windbreaker, hung open, sleeves jammed to his elbows, buff collar turned up. He had a long, thin face and an expression of boredom which I later discovered was exhaustion from staying awake nights, trying to keep track of his father. Max wasn’t handsome in the dark, pouty, thick-lipped way most girls required. He had dirty-blond hair and a fuzzy mole on one cheek. But the reddish fringe of a moustache made him interesting. Big Max introduced us, winking at me as he did so. He clapped Max on the shoulder. “Meet my right arm,” he said. “No work to be had in Vancouver, so Max here says, there’s money to be made in the east. And so here we are. I see you don’t think there’s anything wrong with putting the kids to work either,” he said and motioned to me.

  “Certainly not,” Mika said. “I had to help out and so do they.” She sat on the edge of the kitchen chair, feet hooked in the rungs, while they sipped at the water, being patient although I knew she was straining towards the sound of the washing machine, the load that should be rinsed and hung out to dry.

  “The boy’s lonesome for his mother,” Big Max said quietly with sad eyes as he handed her his empty glass. Max’s eyes met mine, wavered, and he looked up at the ceiling. I saw the flicker of his tongue in his cheek. “We’re just trying to make enough to pay off a few bills and then head back home. You know how it is,” he said. “The wife’s getting tired of waiting.”

  “Oh yes,” Mika said. “Bills. I know.” She glanced at Max and chewed her lip.

  “I’d throw in the chair as well,” Big Max said. “I’d do the chair and the couch for the same price I quoted. Only, don’t tell the neighbour.”

  Mika hesitated. She looked up at the clock. She sighed and got up from the chair and went over to the cupboard. She turned her back to them as she counted out her teeth-relining money. “You may as well do all the chairs,” she said, “the dining room ones as well.”

  “There you go, kids, your big chance.” Big Max slid the car keys across the counter. “You’re on your own this afternoon. See what you can do.”

  When Max and his father had finished cleaning Agassiz they moved on into Winnipeg. Big Max let Max have the car to drive out and pick me up. The summer was long and hot. I knew that I wouldn’t be going back to school and so meeting Max was a diversion, a way to keep from thinking about what to do. I carried the vacuum hoses around my neck. I became their apprentice.

  Max was sitting at the table doing the books. Even though we had cranked open all the windows in the trailer, it smelled of dirty socks and stale bread. The noise of traffic on Portage Avenue was deafening. “And what are you going to do this afternoon?” Max asked his father.

  “What are you, a cop? I give you a chance to make some extra money and you ask questions. I thought you were broke.”

  Max threw aside his pencil. “We’re broke. You and me. And no wonder. I suppose you’re going out with her this afternoon?”

  Big Max cleared his throat and drummed his nicotine-stained fingers on the table. “What d’ya say, honey,” he said, winking and nudging me in the ribs. “Let’s ditch this guy.” He smoothed his sparse hair which was gathered up from one side of his head and slicked down over his bald spot. He looked at his watch, got up and pulled aside the curtains. “She’ll be coming around the mountain,” he sang.

  “Get serious,” Max said. “We promised Doris we’d send her a hundred a week. Where’s the money coming from this week?”

  “She’ll be coming around the mountain when she comes.” He stopped singing. “We’re just going to a movie, son. That’s all.”

  “And you’re taking the whole works of them with you.”

  “Well, we couldn’t get a sitter.”

  Max grew pinched around the mouth. “Christ. I’ll bet Buzzy hasn’t been to a movie since we left.”

  “Great balls of fire,” Big Max said as Malva opened the trailer door and stepped up inside. “Speak of the devil.”

  “God,” Malva said. She looked disappointed to see Max and me there. “You saved my life. I’m just about beat.” Malva was a large, pink and white floral-printed woman with jet black hair which stuck out in all directions, white sandals and a large woven handbag with multicoloured straw flowers. She had an electric-pink cupid’s bow running up and out of her natural lipline and a pencilled beauty mark on her cheek. Bits of her drooped now, a strap slid down one arm. I noticed a run in her stocking.

  “It just doesn’t pay to dress up in hardware,” Malva said in a high little voice. She crossed her thick leg and tucked the run out of sight.

  Big Max grew perky and flushed and jauntily crooked his elbows at his sides as he hurried over to the refrigerator and took out two beers. “I told Malva to drop in after work and take a load off,” he said.

  “Load, is right,” Max said, but his father appeared not to notice. His hand shook as he poured the beer into glasses and set them on the table.

  “Why don’t the two of you get off your bums? Go out and do something,” Malva said. “I know if you were mine, I’d damned well make you.”

  I’d met Malva several Saturdays in a row. The only thing she could talk about well was her kids. That Cal, I don’t know what I’m going to do with him besides kick his arse, she’d say. Do you think you could come around and have another talk with him? Or, Millie’s being a regular pain lately, she’d say, and go on to describe something cute Millie had done, disguising her pride in complaints. Max would smoulder while his father made sympathetic noises and opened more and more beer until Malva would fall apart at the table, shrieking at his corny jokes, her grown-out permanent hanging down onto her forehead in sweaty black strands. Once when Big Max went to the bathroom, I said to Malva, “Why don’t you go home where you belong and look after your
kids?”

  Her face twisted and crumpled and she began to cry silently, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, removing the painted-on beauty mark. “You,” she said and glared at me through swollen eyes and a puff of smoke, “don’t know what it’s like.”

  Like the run in her stocking, Malva was flawed, as far as I was concerned. Play with matches, get burned. Jump off a roof, suffer gravity, I’d learned. It was the law of consequences. And Malva had broken the law. She was a divorcee. “You don’t know what it’s like,” was no excuse. If you can’t stand the heat, don’t go into the kitchen in the first place, I reasoned and although I disliked my mother’s clenched-jaw approach to life, I was still proud of her because she had not broken any of the laws. She had not run away from us or taken a lover. She had played it straight.

  “I’ll drop you and her off,” Max said, scooping up the keys from the table top.

  Malva and Big Max looked at each other over their beer glasses. Big Max set his down, licked foam from his top lip.

  “It’s okay,” Big Max said. “We’ve got time to spare. We thought we’d take a cab on over to the house.”

  “Cabs cost money,” Max said.

  We dropped them off in front of Malva’s house. From every corner of the yard, kids came running, clutching and grabbing at Malva’s dress, her purse.

  “The most they’ll be able to do with that bunch around is rub varicose veins under the table,” I told Max as we drove away. “Don’t worry.”

  Minutes later, Max and I cruised a likely looking street, one shaded by an arch of elm trees and graceful, sweeping birches nodding from front lawns. We chose a less imposing house, one without the clipped, precise look of the others, where the birch was overgrown, pushing against the front window and shutting out the light. There were weeds among the flowers. As we rang the doorbell, I had the feeling we were being watched. The chimes echoed inside and immediately the door was opened by someone who looked like the wife of a United Church minister. She stood in a cave of a hallway, above her, a dazzling chandelier, around her, dark walnut walls. In contrast, she was a pastel person in her pale blue dress and hair. She wore a soft painless look on her long face, which matched her dress, uncreased, unflinchingly serene. She would not say shit if she had it in her mouth, Max said later. Oh dear, she might say, or my, my.

  Max explained we were working our way through college.

  “Yes, yes,” she nodded. “I think that’s just wonderful,” she said, not waiting for him to finish his whole line. “I have had three in university, and I know how difficult it must be for you young people. Wonderful,” she said in a voice I couldn’t imagine ever being raised, “that you young people are willing to work like this. I do admire your industriousnesh,” she slurred when Max went out to the car to get the cleaning equipment.

  “She’s bombed,” I whispered when Max came back. As we wound our way through more walnut hallways, she strained to appear steady, picking her way among the solid furniture as though she walked across a creek on stones.

  “I apologize for the mess,” she said as we entered the living room, but there was no mess. The furniture was arranged predictably around the edges of an oriental carpet. Judging from the dust on the tabletops and the plumped cushions on the furniture, I felt that it had been a long time since the room had been a real mess.

  She wobbled slightly and leaned against a chair. “This is the one that could use cleaning,” she said, indicating a royal blue loveseat. “Do you think you could manage it?”

  Max gave her an estimate. “I think that’s very reasonable,” she said and I could see him kicking himself. “But before you begin, I think I shall pop into the kitchen and get us all something nice and cold. It’s a warm day. Do you young people like iced tea?” she asked and smiled at the wall beside my head.

  “Amazing,” Max said when she’d left the room. “A quiet drunk. I’ve never met one before.”

  She returned with a tray and three glasses. Max seemed mesmerized and became serious and quiet, getting her to talk so he could catch her in a slur. An hour later, we were still drinking iced tea and refusing stale Fig Newtons. I unpacked the equipment but Max ignored me. He asked for more tea. The woman grew talkative, lively, and two spots of colour rose in her cheeks. She took Max to the fireplace and showed him photographs on the mantle, naming and placing each person. I began to vacuum and so they moved on into the dining room to continue their conversation away from the noise. Max took out his wallet and showed her pictures of Doris and Buzzy. And so I went on ahead and mixed the cleaning solution and poured it into the machine. I foamed down the love seat and began working the suds in. My hands turned brilliant royal blue.

  “Shit,” Max whispered, “didn’t you test it first?”

  I shrugged. That was always Big Max’s job, to make sure the fabric was colour-fast.

  He groaned. “Get it off, fast. I’ll keep her talking.”

  “Isn’t it rather uneven, blotchy?” the woman asked when I’d finished.

  Max explained the way his father would. That was how velvet was. It’s the nap, he said. The problem of the nap. It would look entirely normal when dry. She seemed satisfied. She blinked in the sunlight as we said goodbye at the door. “You are very fortunate,” she said to me, “to be going to university. I made certain mine went. But do they appreciate it?” she asked. She hung on to Max’s arm. Her voice had risen.

  Max shrugged loose and smiled as he backed down the stairs. “I certainly do, Ma’am,” he said. “I appreciate every single thing. Hurry,” he said to me, “the old dame’s going to fall apart.”

  We stepped into the house trailer hours later to the startling sight of the kitchen nook folded down into its bed, rumpled blankets, beer bottles, a pizza box and crumpled Kleenex. The impression left behind in the blankets of two sweating bodies.

  “I guess they did more than rub varicose veins.”

  “Shut up.” Max’s tense face looked bruised beneath the eyes. His skin took on a sour odour. He went about the trailer kicking doors, clearing away the evidence of his father’s tryst, going further than he needed to, washing dirty socks in the sink, cleaning out the cupboards and discarding rotting food. And then he went to the payphone on the corner and called his mother in Vancouver.

  “Malva’s a pig,” Max said, slapping a card down in front of me.

  “Malva’s a pig,” I said because he was in no mood for disagreements.

  “How could he do this? To my mother?” He snapped several more cards down. “If you could’ve heard her. She was crying.”

  I arranged my hand. To me there was nothing sad about adult problems. It was entertaining to watch grown people make shambles of their lives. It was like poking a wounded caterpillar with a stick and watching it curl into itself. “Why don’t you do something about it?” I asked.

  Do something, my mother had pleaded, finally coming to me for advice one day. He’s taken off, she said, and he says he’s not coming back.

  Who, Dad? I asked because the idea was silly. She was silly for believing it. Where would he go?

  Places, she said. He has places. Where do you think he goes every night? She stood at the buffet, looking out through the lace curtains towards Main Street. She was crying. I was impatient to be out and gone. It was Saturday night. It was then that I told her, no wonder. Look at yourself. Do yourself up, why don’t you? Fix your hair, put on some makeup. Don’t be such a drag, I said. And maybe he would stay home with you.

  “Like what, do what?” Max asked.

  “Think,” I said and played my first card.

  “Guess what,” Max said the next day when the coins had clanged down into the box. I heard traffic sounds, he was calling me from the phone booth on the corner. “The Thing has asked me to babysit so they can go out pubbing.” Plastic banners above the used car lot flapped in the wind, sounding like waves on a large lake.

  “And one of the kids is going to get sick while they’re out.”

 
“They are?”

  “And you’ll have to call the pub and tell them to come home.”

  And so began a summer of sabotaged dates, faked emergencies in Vancouver, hatched by Max and his mother and me from the telephone booth on the corner, the conference room for our war games. Malva and Big Max never had a chance. I saw him deflate slowly. When he was with Malva he was jumpy. They got on each other’s nerves. The climax came one night when Big Max had too much to drink and Max slipped out and arranged for his mother to call Malva’s house, something she’d never done before, and he persuaded his father to talk to Buzzy who was sick again. And Buzzy started sobbing and saying, come back Daddy, and Big Max began to cry as well and then Malva began wailing in the kitchen about not wanting to hurt children and then Doris got on the line and began to cry and several minutes later, Big Max was promising to leave for Vancouver that same night.

  “You would not believe what happened to my parents,” I think Max said. “They’re like two lovebirds.” Maybe I made that up.

  “Good, I’m glad. I love happy endings.”

  “Not only that,” Max said. “Our business took right off when we got back to Vancouver. We have five cleaning vans now. As a matter of fact, I’m in Winnipeg to see if I can interest anyone in a franchise.”

  Through my front window, I saw smoke curling up from the city, the brewery chimney. We live close to Larry’s work. He’s a body man. Would I like to get my hands on that body, he jokes when a stacked woman walks by. He works in an autobody shop several blocks away. It’s his own. Around us, different odours compete for my attention, the garbage incinerators, the brewery, a potato chip factory. The faint wail of a siren threads its way along my nerve endings and I listen for the kids.