by Vicki Delany
I assembled the dessert while the two women scraped the few remains into the garbage and stacked the plates in the dishwasher. Jackie dipped her finger into the whipped cream and licked it off with a mischievous smile. “That all looks perfectly lovely. Bit early for strawberries isn’t it? They must have cost a pretty penny.”
I shrugged. “What’s money when it’s for your family?”
She laughed heartily. “That’s what I say. Unfortunately, Dave doesn’t agree. The skinflint.”
The dessert turned out to be a beautiful, sculpted arrangement of cake, berries, and cream. Everyone suitably oohed and aahed as I carried it in.
Jason slipped scraps of cake under the table to an eager Sampson. Even if I hadn’t seen the movements of the boy’s hand, the thumping of the dog’s tail would have been a sure giveaway. I pretended not to notice.
The children were excused to watch TV while the adults settled back into their chairs.
Once again, Jackie and Aileen got to their feet to gather up the dirty plates. “Now you sit and relax, Rebecca,” Aileen said, although I had made no move to get up. I did the cooking. Someone else would do the dishes. Doesn’t everyone’s household work that way?
“Coffee, everyone?” Shirley asked.
They mumbled in agreement.
Dad asked Jimmy how things were going with his work. Jimmy made a non-committal reply. Jason stood behind his great-grandpa and put one arm around the thin, stooped shoulders. Al smiled at his grandson. Generations of McKenzie men. A lump formed in my throat, and for the first time in my life I felt a slight twinge of family sentimentality.
Then I imagined that I could see my grandfather, Big Jim, standing behind the little tableau, an eavesdropping ghost. The burgeoning pang of sentiment disappeared in a flash, replaced by the sour taste of bad memory.
My mother had made something new for Thanksgiving dinner one year. A butternut squash casserole, runny with streaks of melting butter, dark brown sugar not yet fully mixed in, tiny pools of maple sugar forming on the top. I’d watched her make it and was practically drooling at the thought of actually eating it. Imagine—a child looking forward to squash. She had carried it up the road to the big house where Grandma was preparing the traditional turkey dinner.
Even as child, it was perfectly obvious to me that my grandmother didn’t enjoy the work. That there was no joy in getting the celebration meal on the table. Years later I would flip through cooking magazines and be shocked to discover that for some women preparing the holiday meal offered a pleasure all in itself. I still only half-believe it.
For some reason my grandfather objected to the squash. Indian food, he called it. Then he picked up my mother’s Corningware pot (one of her very few good things), held it high above the table, looked my mother in the eye, and threw it. I can still see the dish shattering in a spray of white porcelain and tiny blue flowers and orange squash dripping down the pattered wallpaper.
Everyone continued eating and my dad downed his beer. I might have seen a single tear form in the corner of my mother’s eye. But maybe I didn’t. Every bite of that dinner stuck in my throat, not even trying to make the long journey down to my stomach. When we got home, I slipped into the bathroom, stuck my fingers down my throat and brought it all back up.
“Now what are you thinking about there, Rebecca?” Al’s cheerful voice dispelled the ghosts of dinners past. “You look all serious like.”
I forced a smile. “I’m wondering what I’m missing back at the office.”
“I’m quite sure they can get along without you for a day or so,” Liz said, placing a perfect sneer around the word you.
I smiled at her as I might at a shark or a corporate head-hunter come to plunder my department. “No one is indispensable, for sure. But in my experience, some are more so than others.”
She stared at me, a blank expression on her podgy face. I felt a tiny twinge of guilt at striking back at someone so outmatched.
Tough.
Jackie, Dave, and Jason left first, Liz and the twins following on their heels. Tomorrow would be a long day for us all.
My mother’s children settled around the kitchen table nursing mugs of coffee, while Dad, Al, and Aileen plopped themselves in front of the TV. Sampson snoozed at my feet.
“Funeral tomorrow,” Shirley said. As if we didn’t know.
“Hard to believe that we won’t see her again.” Jimmy sighed and peered into his cup.
“Not to come through that door ever again. With an apron full of tomatoes or peas.”
“I’ll miss her letters,” I said. “I already do. Those letters were so… her. Her personality came out on paper perfectly.”
“I tried to talk her into getting a computer,” Jimmy said. “Told her that it would be an easier and faster way to write to you. But she wouldn’t hear of it.”
“Too expensive,” Shirley said. She peered into the fridge. “There’s a bit of cake left. Anyone?”
We shook our heads, and she cut a slice for herself. “Wouldn’t have thought you could cook like that, Becky.”
“Well, I can,” I snapped. Fooled her.
Al poked his head around the door. “Time to be going, Shirl.”
My sister gulped down the last forkful of cake and put the plate into the dishwasher.
We all trailed out to the front porch. Dad, Jimmy, Aileen, and I waved goodbye as the lights of the car dipped down the hill. Sampson dashed into the dark woods in hot pursuit of some small, nocturnal animal. I hoped it was small.
As I turned to call after the dog, my peripheral vision caught Jimmy giving his wife a slight nod. Aileen took Dad by the arm and guided him inside. “Have you laid out what you plan to wear tomorrow, Bob? Shall I check it over, make sure everything is as Janet would expect it to be?”
The night muffled his reply.
Jimmy cleared his throat. “I’m glad you’re home, Rebecca.”
“Where else would I be on the day before my mother’s funeral?”
“I only mean that it’s been a long time since you’ve been here.”
“Nothing to come for. Mom gave me all the news.”
“Look, Becky.” He turned abruptly and gripped my upper arms, his handsome face a picture of—what? Could it possibly be pain? His fingers were strong, the muscles of his arms well-exercised and powerful.
I broke out of the grip with an abrupt upward slice of both arms. “Don’t you touch me.”
“Listen to me.”
“No. I don’t have to listen to you. Not now. Not ever. I’ll sit with you at my mother’s funeral, because Dad expects it. But then I never want to see you again.”
“Everything okay?” Aileen stood in the doorway. The living room lights shone softly behind her. The fabric of the blue dress swayed in the light wind coming off the lake.
“Fine, dear, fine.” Jimmy smiled, his perfect white teeth shining in the moonlight. Growing up in a family without much money, and in a town without much of a dentist, lucky Jimmy always had perfect teeth. I had suffered through years of adult orthodontistry as soon as I scraped together the money to pay for it.
“Good.” Aileen took his arm and hugged it to her side. “Nice night. Full of promise for the beauties of summer yet to come, don’t you agree, Rebecca.”
“Perfectly lovely.”
“We’ll be on our way,” she said. “We’ll be here at 1:45 to pick you and Bob up.”
Jimmy looked at me.
I looked at Aileen. “We’ll be ready.”
“Good night then.” They walked down the steps, and their silhouettes merged with the scented velvet night.
“I was thinking, Jimmy,” I called.
“Yes.” His voice sounded particularly deep in the darkness.
“I heard that you know Jennifer Taylor. The girl who disappeared. Terrible, eh? Her family must be so worried. They’ll never find her alive. Don’t you agree?”
Aileen sucked in her breath. A pebble rolled down the hill, and their footsteps
faded away—hers soft and hesitant, his hard and angry.
I didn’t feel any better.
Chapter 13
Leaving the last of the cleaning up for the careful attentions of the house fairy, I crawled into bed. Dad watched TV for a long time, and I lay awake listening to the incomprehensible mumble coming from the sports channel. The lacy curtains on my bedroom window were open wide, and outside a full moon shone, round and white. Light flooded in. At last Dad switched the TV off and padded about the house in his going-to-bed routine. Sampson shifted her bulk under the covers, and I actually smiled, thinking of my mother’s horror at the sight of a dog allowed up on the bed. In a moment of sheer, unadulterated madness, I’d offered to speak at tomorrow’s funeral, and I still had no idea what I was going to say. I’d started to work on a speech on the plane from Vancouver, but it was so full of greeting-card sentiment that I deleted it with disgust as the pilot commanded us to put up the seat trays and straighten our chairs in preparation for landing. A reference to the dog on the bed might be a good opening.
What else could I say about a woman who had struggled to protect me from the vicious savagery of her own family but couldn’t protect herself? Who saved every penny she earned so that her youngest daughter could escape? Who buried her head in her chest when her husband buried his head in a bottle? Who taught her children about common decency and good manners while they listened to a rising crescendo of swearing and shouting from the back shed?
What could I possibly say about the mother who encouraged me to apply for every scholarship that came up? Who kept a secret bank account and handed it all over to me when I left town never to return? Yet who had stood by and allowed her oldest daughter to be married off to the town nerd because she was, in my grandfather’s sainted view, a disgrace to this family.
I glanced at my bedside clock. Well after midnight. Dad’s snores echoed down the hall. Sampson twitched and chased rabbits and cats in her dreams.
I still didn’t have a speech.
Suppose I dissolved into tears and had to be helped from the podium? Would anyone mind? Probably not.
My feet felt the cold hardwood floor. Sampson came awake instantly, jumping off the bed to stand beside me.
Once again, we made our way down the dark staircase. I decided to dig back a bit. Into the murky past. I pulled the top off the second crate. The dust rose in a gentle cloud, visible in the strong beam of my flashlight, to dissipate like the flimsy memories it protected.
I started to read.
I hate him, I hate him. I hate him so much. Oh, God, what have I done to deserve this? What have I done that You would punish me so?
I slammed the book shut. I was looking for some emotion, to be sure. Some understanding. But this was not meant for me.
But if not me, who? My mother must have known that she would die some day, probably soon. She was seventy-seven years old when her heart gave out. Why then did she leave all these notebooks in these old tea chests? So her children would consign them to the rubbish heap, unread? Or so her youngest daughter would find them. And finding them, read them?
Perhaps even she didn’t know.
I pulled out another book. This one was a good quality journal with a picture on the cover of the scrubbed, smiling, mundane faces of the Brady Bunch, dating it nicely.
The house seems so lonely now that Rebecca is gone.I miss her more than I thought possible. Bob too, although he would never say so. Poor Bob, he has missed so much in life, shut off from all emotion the way he is.
But Rebecca writes all the time, and she seems to be having such a grand time. I do wish I been given the chance to go to university. Unthinkable, of course, in my day, for a girl from a shopkeeper’s family. Still, it would have been nice. I only hope that Rebecca isn’t having such a wonderful time, all the boys she must be meeting and all the parties she will be going to, that she neglects her studies.
I am so proud of her.
“Wow,” I spoke aloud. Sampson assumed that I was talking to her and abandoned her attention to a dishrag that had become trapped between the freezer and the wall. She cocked her big head to one side and gave me an inquisitive look. I rubbed her chin. My mother loved me. And she was proud of me. Wow! Not that she had much to worry about in the boy and party department. I had been a frightened, shy, unattractive girl, all long awkward limbs and bad haircut, from a poor family in one of the poorest parts of the province. I didn’t go to university for the social life. Just as well, because I didn’t have one.
That day’s journal entry went on to talk about Liz’s success in earning her baking badge at Brownies.
The best place to start is at the beginning.
I replaced the Brady Bunch journal and pulled the first tea chest out, the one tucked away at the back. It was covered by a solid layer of dust. Good thing I don’t have allergies.
The books in this chest were older, plainer, packed in reverse order, the newest at the top. The first journal would therefore be found at the bottom. A few were moldy, some showing traces of insects and damp. I dug down, piling the fragile books carefully on top of the other two chests. At last, I reached the bottommost book. It was plain brown leather, small, about five inches by seven, and surprisingly heavy for its size. Even through the miasma of years, damp, and neglect, my fingers felt the quality of the little book. A quality that didn’t appear to be repeated in any of its later fellows.
The spine cracked like a gunshot as I pulled back the cover. I winced and loosened my grip. The ink on the first page had faded to an ugly brown, the color of old dried blood.
The Diary of Miss Janet Green. July 17, 1943
The words were large and bold. The journal was the only place in her world that this girl, daughter of shopkeepers, could be bold. Forthright. Unleashing the universal female desire for self-expression. I imagined a teenage Neanderthal girl crawling away from the family fire to carve her diary on the cave walls.
Today, I met HIM. HE is the most wonderful, perfect, handsomest, smartest man in the entire world. I am IN LOVE. Is it mere happenstance that only last week I received this diary from Aunt Joan for my 17th birthday? It can’t be. I am sure that I was meant to start the rest of my life in the pages of this very book.
Gee.This was embarrassing. The paragon of virtue no doubt didn’t spare a second thought for the tall, gangly, so-young Janet Green. We’ve all done it. Fallen hard for the biggest jerk in town, school, club, church…whatever. The one who never looked at us again and for whom we ate our tender, innocent hearts out. My mom was seventeen when she started this book. To modern ears she sounded more like a twelve-year-old. But times were different.
I turned the page. It was filled with two words, over and over again. Bob McKenzie, Bob McKenzie…
The paragon of manly virtue was my father.
***
There were no windows in the cellar to mark the passage of time or the rising of the sun. I read on and Sampson chased dishrags and moths until my father’s feet tracing the well-worn path to the bathroom sounded overhead. Instead of heading back to the bedroom once the toilet was flushed and the water turned off, his footsteps moved into the kitchen.
Morning.
The morning of my mother’s funeral.
I still didn’t have a speech. But I had a lot to think about.
***
The church was full, nearly standing room only. It was a small church, to be sure, for a small community. When Ray’s grandmother died at age 102, the huge cathedral was almost deserted and the aging priest’s voice echoed around and around in the cavernous chamber. At the time I thought that there is not much in life sadder than the funeral of someone so old that they have outlived all friends and most relations.
My mother’s coffin rested at the front of the church, surrounded by stiff, formal bouquets, the wood buffed so highly that one could see one’s face in it. If anyone was brave enough to put their face that close.
The minister droned on. I paid no attention, think
ing of nothing but Ray’s funeral. There is something sadder than an empty funeral, and that is the funeral of a man so young that everyone he worked with, the men on his recreational sports teams, his wife’s colleagues, even neighbors and old school friends, pack the tiny funeral parlor and spill out into the hallway. Ray had had no religious beliefs, having abandoned the Catholic church long ago. His death had been so sudden, and threw me into such shock, that I exerted no control over anything that happened in the few days after. His sister arranged for her own priest to perform the service, although the man had never met Ray. My husband would have hated every second of his own funeral.
Sharp elbows in the ribs from Dad on one side and Shirley on the other. Time to pull out of remembrances. I was on.
I climbed the two steps to the lectern, cleared my throat, wiped my palms on the skirt of my designer suit, and wrung the white cotton handkerchief I’d found in the back of my mother’s dresser drawer between my hands. And spoke my mother’s eulogy.
I didn’t have any notes, having never managed to prepare a speech. So I spoke from my heart. About the dog on the bed and how angry that would have made her. And about the modest bank account she kept untouched so that all the money would be there for me when I was ready to go to university. How she sat up late helping me fill in forms for the scholarships I needed to supplement the bank account. About her bus trips to Toronto to visit me. And about her joy in seeing the sea again after so many years, the first time she came to visit me in Vancouver.
I returned to my seat in a daze and Dad gripped my hand as I sat down.
At last it was over. The family filed out first, as was the custom, and stood blinking in the soft sunlight falling on the fresh green grass. The carefully tended flowerbeds were bursting to life in carpets of purple and yellow and white crocuses. A handful of adventurous tulips and daffodils struggled to push their fragile, soft moss-green heads above the rich black earth.
New life all around me. Birth of a different sort—plants pushing themselves free of the dark comfort of the nurturing soil and into the wider, welcoming world.
