Good to a Fault

by Marina Endicott

  She picked up her teacup and stalked out the back door.

  Clary could hear herself shouting after her, “Fuck you, Mrs. Pell!” But thank God she found that she had not actually done it. Her head was itchy.

  Trevor and Dolly sat very quiet. Even Pearce was still.

  “Well,” Clary said. “I guess we’ve got a problem.”

  Oh my God, she thought. All of them. And me? She turned suddenly to Pearce, unable to bear it if his head was—infested—that was the word for it. And Darwin—and the hospital! Had they been sending lice over to Lorraine?

  Clary sat down on the kitchen floor. Dolly and Trevor stared at her from their chairs. Pearce leaned down, over the arm of his high chair, stretching to touch her with his applesauce spoon.

  “I don’t know what to do about this,” Clary said. “I have no idea, I’ll have to look it up.”

  But she couldn’t look it up, because her computer was at work, and it was no longer her computer, or her work. She had nothing left of her original life. Only lice. Her mother would have been so appalled! Clary could hear her—standing beside Mrs. Pell, in fact, saying “We never had lice…” That made her laugh, but only for a second.

  Driving down the dark length of 8th Street to the drugstore, she could feel self-pitying tears seeping behind her eyes, but she dismissed them for now. Later on, she promised herself, in bed. After she had done whatever you had to do—washed their hair with toxic chemicals and combed them with those sharp tiny-toothed combs until everyone was ready to scream with tiredness and frustration. Then she would cry. She hated them all, even Pearce; she hated lice, and the whole dirty business of being human. The shame of having to tell Iris Haywood that they had lice almost made the tears spring forth. And Paul. He had visited, had sat on the chesterfield—the squalor of it felt like a weight pressing on her head.

  The headlights were not working properly. When she parked at the drugstore she saw the car reflected in the glass front: her left headlight was burnt out. The complication of getting the headlight replaced was so overwhelming that she had to lean against the car door for a moment before she could get the children out to come trooping in with her, parkas over their pyjamas. What a relief it would have been to leave them in the car. But a woman last winter had left her car running at the store and come out to find it gone, and her baby with it. If they were her own children she could weigh the likelihood and decide; but they were Lorraine’s. She only had them in trust. Trust her to let them get lice.

  Darwin didn’t have lice—Clary phoned the hospital and the nurses checked—and neither did Lorraine. Trevor and Dolly did. None on Mrs. Pell, that Clary could find. None on Pearce: no live ones and no eggs, no matter how painstakingly Clary searched his round, sweet head.

  She took the advice of the kindly pharmacist and washed everybody’s hair with tea-tree oil instead of the poisonous stuff, and put her energy into hair-combing to get rid of the eggs, rather than obsessive cleaning. But she stripped, vacuumed and remade the beds (trusting that sheets which had lain unused twenty years in her mother’s linen closet were safe), and put every stuffed toy and pillow in garbage bags outside to freeze for a few days. Finally, at midnight, she got the de-loused, subdued children into their lavender-smelling beds.

  She let them watch videos all day on Friday and cleaned around them, pausing only to make meals. She even vacuumed the car, hauling her mother’s old Electrolux out to the driveway in the bitter cold. Mrs. Zenko saw her and came out to help, and when Clary told her what was going on she laughed till she had to hold on to the side mirror.

  “It’s combing that does the trick,” she said, echoing the pharmacist. “I’ve got a very good metal fine-tooth comb myself, left over from my girls’ school days—I’ll come over when you’re through out here and give you a good going-over,” she promised. “What a thing! But it’s all a matter of luck and whose coat hangs next to whose.”

  When Mrs. Zenko went through Clary’s head she found no bugs at all. Darwin came back from the hospital and took over the children’s hair, combing through strand by strand gently, patiently, checking each hair and pulling away the tiny, sticky eggs and telling them long-winded jokes.

  Clary blew through the house once more with the overworked vacuum until it seemed to her to be possible to live there. But Mrs. Pell might be carrying some eggs that she’d missed in her first panicky check. She took a cup of coffee out to the workshop.

  “Hi,” she said, when Mrs. Pell answered the door. “I’ve brought the rat-tail comb. I’ll check your hair for you.”

  Mrs. Pell stared at her, without any observable social response.

  “It won’t take long,” Clary said. She sighed. “Can you hold the coffee?”

  Mrs. Pell took it and creaked aside to let her into the workshop. Clary transferred the comb and oil from under her arm. She looked around, trying to be neither furtive nor obvious.

  “Satisfied?” Mrs. Pell said, her voice catching like a rusted saw in green wood.

  “Of course!” Clary said quickly. “It’s your home, you keep it as you wish.”

  But she seemed to want to keep it fairly orderly. There was a smell, but that might be old-woman smell, rather than poor housekeeping. Cozy warm out here, with the furnace going. The bed was made, the tumbling-blocks quilt neatly spread over the blankets.

  “I should wash your bedding again.”

  Mrs. Pell grunted. “Don’t be so hasty. Shouldn’t run old things through the wash just because you think they’re lousy.”

  Understanding her, Clary said, “I meant to tell you, I want to give you that quilt for your own. When Lorraine—wherever you are. It’s yours.”

  Mrs. Pell moved her bottom lip up toward her top lip, nothing that could be called a smile. Then she said, “Don’t just tickle me with your eyes. You going to check my head? Take that chair out into the light, can’t see well enough in here.”

  Clary took the old kitchen chair out into the snow. Mrs. Pell stumped after her, sausage feet in snow boots. They shifted the chair till the light was right, and then Mrs. Pell sat, arms folded, braced against the rat-tail and the fine-tooth comb. Clary worked through her old grey scalp, section by thin section, burying her fingers in the grey horse-hair skeins, pulling through, checking, looking down in the brilliant sunshine. No need to talk, and nothing to say anyway. Mrs. Pell’s old neck strings stood out strong on the back of her head, depending on how her skull twisted inside its papery bag of skin.

  “Would you like a haircut?” Clary asked, testing the water.

  “Hmmpm,” Mrs. Pell said, which Clary took to mean possible acceptance.

  “My aunt Bet, Grace’s mother, used to go to the beauty school every few weeks, and they’d give her a cut and set. Sometimes a perm, even. They had a seniors’ day discount.”

  Mrs. Pell tilted her head on its bony stalk to catch Clary’s eye. “They do a good job?”

  “Not bad,” Clary said. “You could try it out.”

  She pulled the rat-tail down another line of scalp and divided off another strand of hair. Another, and another. No lice to be found. The sun shone on them, as warm as you could expect, that late in the year.

  31. Potlatch

  Paul was having a party. Urgent papers all over his desk: the sermon, the call to giving. But every Christmas since his ordination, against Lisanne’s yearly protest, he had held a parish party at his house on December 6th, early enough that no other party conflicted. The Feast of St. Nicholas. He had a fondness for that narrow, looming, eaves-dropping, purse-tossing, pickle-barrel bishop. Old Nick, the devil’s name. Saints and demons, rewards and punishments…He could not drift off into consideration of devils and their place in the pantheon, because he was tied down to earth, to the calendar, December 6. He flung his hands up in the air, smacked them down on the strewn papers, and went home.

  On the kitchen table, surrounded by cookbooks—Lisanne had forgotten those—he made a list. Chili? the heading said, and underneath, things th
at matched, for a good, frugal party. Then he drew a thick zig-zag through it. Nobody likes chili. Tourtière, for Christmas. Cinnamon sticks, eggnog, spruce boughs. His mother had always made white fruitcake, at the last minute. The battered scrapbook of recipes fell open as it always did to the splattered card in Binnie’s handwriting, Current Biscuits, with her squiggly drawing of herself: a long-haired girl waving at him, electric eyebrows surprised. He would make biscuits too.

  Clary would come, with the children and Darwin. Unless he was at the hospital. These days Lorraine was fluttering through the engraftment period like a pale moth, waiting for Darwin’s stem cells to be accepted by her body and begin to proliferate, cells riffling through her in cascading, exponential, astronomical multiplication. They’d said several weeks, but nobody had told Paul how many several was. Maybe they did not know. Lorraine was under restricted access until it had settled, so he had not visited her lately. Even when the engraftment was successful (he phrased it that way carefully in his head), the onset of graft-versus-host disease would be the dangerous time. He had e-mailed the doctor he’d become friends with during Binnie’s illness, to find out what to expect, and Julian had replied quickly:

  GVHD can kill patients from overwhelming multisystem organ failure. The balance is to have engraftment with a little GVHD (which is difficult to control). Other scenario is horrible, which is no engraftment, leaving patient with no marrow function. Usually a terminal situation…

  How much of all this did the children know, or Clary? He hated having that knowledge, the long unwinding tapestry of Binnie’s life, and illness, and death. Doctors must find some way of carrying that contagious experience.

  Darwin did all right with it, most of the time, but one night he had come banging on Paul’s door at 2 a.m., drunk and miserable. That was the benefit of being single again: he could pull Darwin in and drink with him, listen to him rage against illness and death, and put him to bed in the spare room without having to consult or appease Lisanne.

  Lisanne’s lawyer had served the papers. Before vestry meeting on Tuesday night Paul had been climbing the steps of the church when a young man came up to him, looking like he might need a handout, and then slapped a sheaf of papers at Paul, crying “You’re served!” on a reedy note of triumph. You’re It!

  No amount of delay would change any of it. He would remortgage the house, give her half, halve the RRSPs…The division of spoils was not complicated. Lisanne had bought a bright red car. She was marrying an editor. He had to assume that she had been sleeping with him for some time. You couldn’t change horses in mid-gallop unless the other was saddled and ready, tlot-tlotting along beside you like the highwayman’s horse, ready for Bess the landlord’s daughter, the landlord’s black-haired daughter, to jump over, Red Rover. Her black hair flying, a sudden laugh cracking open her face, reaching toward the other, with joy.

  He would make fruitcake. Curried shrimp. Yule logs. Lark’s tongues.

  The kitchen was empty and cold, December clawing in under the back door. Paul put on his coat and went to shop for plates and candles, and a draft-excluder. Christmas crackers. A new cover for the duvet.

  Darwin lay on Lorraine’s bed, curled over her feet, almost fetal. She had been out for a long time this time; coming back to the surface was weirdly difficult. Like swimming up to the starry glittering border between out and in. If she let herself, she would slip back down and be lost in blueness, wavering down to black. Darwin’s arm across her ankles was anchoring her here. Or she might be dreaming him. Dreaming the bed.

  She had got used to this. In the morning they were going to start giving her something different—she had forgotten. They were so careful to tell her what was happening, and so distinct, removed from her. That border lay between her and them—they were in, she was out still, still out in the blue, not well. Dying, it was possible, possible. She had to rally because she was not yet allowed to go, she had three children. She could breathe, still, she could keep breathing slowly and calm down, not be afraid, most of the time she could.

  The afternoon slant of the light had not changed for hours, but it must have, it must have. This must be some other afternoon. Darwin was asleep in the chair. Look at that, he never was asleep when she was awake. He was the chain back up from her to the kids and he would not let go. She drifted to Clayton, wondering without any effort where he was, what he was doing, why he was not her anchor and never had been, but she was his. So long since she had thought of him, of what he had found to do. How he was surviving, without her or the kids to hold him steady. Clayton? she called to him through the water. Are you okay?

  He would hear her, he would dream of her, or think about her while he did whatever he was doing. She could see him walking down the street, a sad body going along, slanting back while going forward, because he never wanted to be doing whatever he was doing, poor Clayton. Some square of her heart was perpetually sorry for him—it was distracting her from curing this. She had to stop that.

  She fell through the ocean for a while, not knowing the word for deep. Darwin’s hand moved and pulled the sheet taut over her feet and made her shift under the sheet, he was pulling her back in, reeling her in again, up again into the air. It was easier to stay down but Darwin was right, she had to come up and open her eyes—the lights were on. It was darker, finally, some time must have gone by, some part of the day or evening. She had gone through another day and could float. Clayton’s boat Irresolute, drifting somewhere in the fog and ice.

  Paul shut the lid on a trunkful of booze, an elephant snootful. Bill Haywood had been at the liquor store at the same time, buying a specially selected case of superior red wines. Paul felt poor and young—when would he ever buy a case of wine? Two 24s of beer, two bottles of white, two red, a vodka and a Scotch, and he was out of money. This divorce business was expensive. He shrugged that off. He had room on his credit card. He would spend it all on the party if he wanted to. After decades of dry frugality, Paul felt a growing desire for profusion or purge, the need to blow everything, fill the hollow space with pleasure and vengeful excess. Before the lawyers divided their assets, he would have some use of all the years of penny-pinching. He told himself that this was a common expression of sorrow, a reasonable part of the grieving process for the marriage. Whatever, his squalling monkey-mind shot back. More!

  He put twenty dollars into a panhandler’s cup. He was an idiot, a broken man, attempting to stave off soul-hunger and beat back the intimidation of solitude with the consolation of philanthropy.

  At the butcher shop—he’d never been in there before, far too expensive—he bought a huge sirloin tip. They told him how to roast it so he could serve it cold. A ham, too; then he spent two hundred dollars in the grocery store on olives and chips—every fancy treat he’d ever fancied. He could see the festive sideboard filling, and it fed an appetite he’d never had before: an overwhelming need for potlatch. Everybody was dying, or already dead, or leaving other people, and the year was dying into winter, and the only thing to do was make some noise.

  Dolly was allowed to go to Ann’s after school. Ann’s mother had finally called back. She was a strange, dim woman, like a flashlight with the batteries almost run down. But she had said she’d pick the girls up from school, and Clary had agreed. It was an adventure, to be going to someone’s house. Ann had told Dolly stories about her family, mostly made up. But if she made weird stuff up then there was other, real stuff going on. Dolly knew that Clary had meant to look Mrs. Hayter over before she let her go there, but Pearce was sneezing and crying with a little cold, so Clary was not as picky as she might have been. Mrs. Hayter looked okay, anyway, in a plain navy coat with her grey van, a special-edition one with swirly paint on the sides.

  Clary told Mrs. Hayter she would pick Dolly up at suppertime, and they went off in different directions, Dolly and Ann driving away in the leather-seated van with the sunroof and the television in the back seat. The leather was really dirty, and the TV didn’t work any more, An
n said. It was missing the on/off knob and there was something crusted on one side of the screen. Ann’s mother didn’t pick up Ann’s brothers, they came home on the bus from the high school, but they weren’t home yet. Dolly was a little scared of the idea of them, plus Ann did not talk about them much, which made Dolly think they were probably trouble. Ann’s mother went right to her room when they got home, without saying anything.

  Ann took Dolly into the kitchen and went through the disorganized pantry closet looking for a snack, but all she found was broken crackers. She said, “Want to look at my Barbies?”

  But Dolly didn’t want to bother with Barbies, they were childish and boring. Instead, with a kind of pride, Ann led her to her father’s den in the basement, to a big black chest of drawers. In those drawers were flat arrays of dirty pictures. Dolly had seen Playboys before at houses where her mom cleaned, but these creeped her out totally, yucky black and white things with naked people fighting and other stuff, with masks on their faces—Dolly almost gagged.

  She said, “This is lame,” in a scornful voice that she knew would make Ann stop showing them to her. Ann was easy to boss. It was cold for playing outside, but they got their boots and coats on again and wandered around in the pink playhouse in the back yard, but it was dirty too and sharp with the stale winter smell of plastic. Dolly had nothing to say to Ann after looking at those pictures. They opened and closed the shutters for a while, and then Ann said they should go back inside. There wasn’t anything to do out in the yard, anyway. Ann had her hand on the back doorknob when they heard a crash in the front hall, and two big boys yelling at each other.

  Ann dropped her hand but stayed staring at the door.

  Dolly said, “I know!”

  “What?” Ann’s eyes never moved, even though she was listening to Dolly.

  “Let’s take the bus downtown and look at the Christmas decorations.”