by Jamie Zeppa
Downstairs in the kitchen, potatoes were boiling on the stove, and the table was set. “What can I do?” Laura asked Vera.
“Everything is done,” Vera said, her mouth a straight, colourless line. She did not approve of sleeping in the daytime. It was worse than lazy: it was giving in.
“Well, I’ll do the dishes after,” Laura said. Vera did not answer.
In the living room, the baby was sucking on a plastic ring and gurgling in his playpen. Laura dropped onto the sofa, and Dawn climbed into her lap. “Let’s play king and queen, Mommy.” The king and queen had different ways of doing things. The king slept on his back with his arms straight by his sides, the queen on her side with her hands folded delicately under her cheek. The king ate with a soup spoon, the queen with a dessert fork. “You be the king,” Dawn said. Laura was always the king. “Now, this is how they eat their oranges,” Dawn said, demonstrating. The king broke his orange in half and peeled segments off with his teeth. The queen laid out segments in a line and ate them one by one.
“Do you like this game?” her daughter asked.
Laura said, “Yes.” She didn’t have to do anything except lie down with her arms by her sides, or remove orange sections with her teeth.
From the doorway, Vera said, “Why are you letting her eat that? You’ll spoil her appetite.”
Laura took the orange from her daughter’s hand and folded it into a tissue. “Let’s save this for dessert.”
Dawn said, “Do you know how the king dies?” She stretched out on the floor, extending her arms to make a T. “This is how the king dies.”
“I see. And how does the queen die?”
“She dies like this.” Her daughter pulled her arms down by her sides.
“Isn’t that how the king sleeps?” Laura asked.
Her daughter sat up and pushed her hair out of her eyes. “Yes,” she said solemnly. “The queen dies like the king sleeps. When the king goes away, she has to die. But then she wakes up.”
The fog came rushing back. It dried up Laura’s eyes and the inside of her mouth, but she knew anything she drank would be heavy and metallic against her tongue. “I have to go lie down for a minute,” she told her daughter. “Stay down here with Grandma.”
Back in bed, she stared at the ceiling, afraid of sleep. If she could sleep and not dream. If she could sleep and not wake. Lying there, she wondered where she had gone wrong. A woman and a man met, they fell in love, they got married. Certainly, there had been deviations, the jilting of Warren and the running away, the “getting in trouble,” but they had been in love and were going to get married anyway; she wasn’t the first girl whose baby had arrived early, and she wouldn’t be the last. Aside from that—maybe even including that—it was a typical story.
But the storyline began to falter a few months after they returned to the Soo. He went to work and she went to work, and when she came home, she sewed new curtains and waited for him and when he came home, he changed his shirt and went back out. She was happy because she was married to the man she loved. He was angry because he was out of cigarettes or the liquor store was closed or the Angelinis downstairs kept playing that goddamn ancient Perry Como song over and over, it was driving him out of his fucking mind.
People said the beginning was the hardest. Dean would settle down after the baby arrived. He would come home at night instead of going out with Will Wharton and the rest of them, thudding up the stairs at three in the morning with a new leather jacket that cost a week’s worth of groceries. And when Dawn was born, Dean did seem transformed. He bought two dozen roses and carried the baby around and around the hospital room, introducing her to the flowers and the window and the world outside. His face shone. He was a father! He was the luckiest man in the world, married to the most beautiful woman in the world, with the sweetest daughter, and 1965 was going to be the happiest year of his life. But on the day they were discharged, he forgot he was supposed to pick them up, and she had to call Vera and Frank for a ride home from the hospital.
She swallowed her anger and her worry about his absences and the money, and they burned away slowly in a vat of acid in her stomach, because this was what marriage meant. It meant sacrifice and hard work, especially in the beginning. But how long was this beginning going to last? Even after Dawn turned one, Dean still went out with Will and the guys, none of whom were married, none of whom had any reason to be anywhere at any particular time. They were a bad influence on Dean, calling him up at all hours, keeping him out late. Was it too much to ask of a husband that he go to work in the morning and come home in the evening to where she was sitting, dressed up, made up, the smell of roasted meat beginning to seep from the oven, the whole place spotless, and their daughter bathed and dressed in fresh pyjamas? All he had to do was walk in the door at 6:00 and take off his coat and hang it in the closet and say, “Hi, honey, what’s for dinner?” instead of slamming the door open at 9:45, dropping his coat on the floor, calling out over his shoulder as he changed his shirt, “I need my other jacket,” and then rushing back out into the night, leaving her sitting in a deeply creased linen skirt, her carnation lipstick flaking, the Swedish meatballs shrivelled in a tray on the stove.
If he would come with them on the weekend to the park, where Dawn toddled after the pigeons, clapping excitedly when they lifted off the ground in a fluttering blur and settled a few feet away. If he would call her from work and say, “Honey, let’s leave Dawn with her grandparents. I’m taking you to dinner. Do you remember when we went to that restaurant and ate three baskets of bread and then ran down the street, laughing our heads off?”
If he would remember that they had an appointment to have a family portrait taken at 3:00 on Saturday afternoon instead of forgetting and then claiming he had never agreed to meet them there and then asking why they didn’t go ahead without him.
If she could have more of those moments after sex, when he came back to her and put his arm around her and made her laugh so hard she had to press her face into the pillow so she wouldn’t wake Dawn. And more of those afternoons when he came home singing, and scooped up Dawn and whirled her around, and kissed Laura and told her she smelled delicious. Or waltzed with the three of them around the kitchen.
When it was good, it was very, very good—that line kept starting itself up in her head. It set her teeth on edge, and she had to snap her fingers in her ears to chase it away. The question was, if it could be that good in those moments, why was it so wrong the rest of the time?
In the evenings, in his absence, the apartment looked vaguely sinister: the brown vinyl couch looked oily; the rag rug looked like a stain; the armchair looked like it was ready to snap shut, trapping whoever was sitting in it. Stop it, she told herself, and shook herself vigorously, slapping her cheeks and bare arms. She told herself, I don’t have to wait for him. I’m not going to sit here and count the minutes. To prove it, she picked Dawn up and ran with her, squealing with laughter, around the apartment, until she was breathless and collapsed onto the bed, where Dawn burrowed into the sheets and Laura pretended to find her and lose her and find her again. But when she checked the clock, only eleven minutes had passed. “Do you want to go see Grandma?” she asked Dawn and put her in the stroller. On Sylvan Avenue, she drank tea with Vera in the kitchen, trying to keep her eyes off the blue clock above the sink. She had to be careful with Vera. Vera would notice if Dawn’s sweater was missing a button, or if there was a trace of dirt between her fingers, and she’d get up in the middle of whatever Laura was saying and get out her sewing kit or a washcloth. She also had to be careful in her answers to Vera about Dawn’s schedule: Vera was a fierce defender of fixed mealtimes and early bedtimes; she would be horrified to know that Laura kept Dawn up with her on those nights Dean didn’t come home, and then let her sleep beside her in the bed. On the whole, it was best to steer Vera away from the here and now.
But she had to be careful with the past, as well. Once, shortly after Dawn was born, she had started to tell V
era how she and Dean had met in Toronto. “When he was looking for his real mother,” she’d said, and Vera had dropped her teaspoon with an angry clatter. “I am his mother!” she said.
Laura said, “No, no, I know. I meant—”
Two tight pink circles had appeared on Vera’s cheeks. “I’ve put up with that nonsense from the time he was fourteen. His real mother, his real father. We wanted him! We raised him! And what do we get? Frank and Vera.”
Laura was shaken, seeing Vera on the verge like this. It was impossible to imagine tears, but there were other kinds of breakage.
Even if the conversations were sometimes fraught, sitting in the house where Dean had grown up steadied her and quelled the startling ideas that flew around her head when she was alone with Dawn in the apartment. Like the idea that Dean wasn’t ever coming home. Like the idea that he wasn’t even real. Crazy ideas. How could he not be real when she was married to him and sitting right here beside his mother?
If she didn’t visit Sylvan Avenue, she walked around the apartment, picking up toys, straightening the furniture. She didn’t have to wait for him, but what else was she going to do? Without him, the story didn’t make sense. The story was Laura and Dean and their daughter, Dawn. The story was that they were a family, that Dean was her husband, and husbands went to work in the morning and came home at night, and if they were going to be late, they called, and if they weren’t going to come home, it was because they were away on business, not because they had offered to drive some guy they’d just met in a bar and his sister to Sudbury. The story was not Laura and Dawn, alone in the apartment. It was not Dean yanking the folding closet door so hard it came off its hinges and yelling, “Jesus Christ, I hate this fucking shitty apartment.”
In which case, Laura thought, his misery was understandable: he was cooped up in a tiny apartment he’d always hated. So she called Mr. McCleary at the bank, and he offered her three days a week; then she called Vera and asked if she would watch Dawn during the day. “We want to buy a house,” she told Vera. She didn’t tell her that they were behind in their rent. She told Dean she was going back to work, and he told her he was going to quit his job at the plant and sell advertising time for the radio station on commission. “No, Dean,” she said. “Don’t do that.” At least at the plant the paycheque was guaranteed. But it was too late. What he’d meant to say was that he had already quit. With his first paycheque from the radio station, he went out and bought a white Thunderbird. “See?” he told Laura. “I told you I’d make a fortune.” A month later, when he missed a payment, the dealer called. It was an oversight, Laura explained, and the dealer said he’d thought so. He called again the next month, apologetic but firm: “Laura, I’m sure you understand—” Of course she understood: when you bought a car and didn’t pay for it, they would call and send letters and then lawyers until they got their money. What she didn’t understand was why Dean didn’t get this; why, when she said, “The bank called,” his face darkened and he said, “Those fucking bloodsuckers”; and why, when she tried to explain, he said she was just like them, a banker, a bloodsucker.
Then Mr. Angelini came up and said they had to go. “Just one more month,” Laura pleaded, and he said, “One more month, one more month. Is that the only song you can sing?”
Dean didn’t come home that night, and she lifted Dawn out of her crib and carried her out to the taxi and knocked on her in-laws’ door until Vera came down in her bathrobe, her hair in pincurls. Together, they put Dawn to bed in Dean’s old room. Laura tried to make it seem like a momentary trouble—they had overextended themselves, it seemed, even though both of them were working—but Vera saw through it. “It’s not your fault,” she said grimly. “I know that.”
Relief coursed through her. She’d been afraid Vera would blame her, would think she was out spending money on new clothes or having her hair done. But Vera said, “He’s never had an ounce of sense when it came to money. Spends it hand over fist and then wonders where it went.” She shook her head. “I thought he would settle down after he got married.”
Laura said, “Oh! He has settled down. I mean—” She didn’t know what she meant. She didn’t want Vera to think that she had failed to make him turn over a new leaf.
Vera said, “Well, you can always stay here. Until you get back on your feet.”
Dean would hate it, but Laura didn’t see that they had much of a choice. Mr. Angelini said he would change the locks if they weren’t out by the end of the week. And maybe if they were here, Dean wouldn’t feel so free to disappear for long stretches, or yell when she asked him where he was going, or push over the kitchen chairs because he couldn’t find his car keys. His parents would help her set him straight. And it was just for a while, until she could sort out the car loan and the other bills.
Plus, she was pregnant again.
She took a second job as a typist two days a week at the Sault Star, working alongside Deb McKenna, who claimed to have forgiven Laura for jilting her cousin, because hey, these things happen, right?, but who showed far too much interest in the state of Laura’s marriage, never failing to mention that she had seen Dean on his way somewhere at some odd hour, jeez that guy is always on the go, isn’t he, Laura? Laura put up with it, though, because she had no choice, the same way she put up with Will Wharton, who made deliveries of paper and ink to the Star and always made a point to come in and say hello to the wife of his good buddy Dean. Once, pretending to nearly drop his stack of invoices, he brushed his hand along her backside and then pretended nothing had happened. Surely, then, Dean could put up with living at his parents’, and if he hated it so much, he might come to his senses and return the car and start saving money so that they could move out and be in their own place before the new baby was born.
Frank and Vera rearranged the whole house for them, moving their own bedroom to the sunroom downstairs and leaving them with the second and third floors. They moved Dean and Laura’s couch and TV into the attic room, which felt cold and hollow no matter how many throw rugs and doilies Vera brought up. “At least we’ll have our privacy,” Laura said, coming to sit next to Dean on the couch and taking his hand, but he pulled away and looked at her with ugly eyes, flat and dull like old pennies.
She missed their old apartment with the little balcony overlooking the fruit trees and tomato plants, and Perry Como’s “Prisoner of Love” soaring up from downstairs, but she had money now to pay some of the bills that had piled up. She ate with Frank and Vera most evenings, and it was easier, not having to cook after she had been running around at work all day, and at least when Dean did not come home for dinner, she didn’t have to eat alone. Vera didn’t like the way Laura let Dawn suck her thumb, or how Laura let her fill up on milk and spoil her dinner, or how on the weekends Laura disrupted the routine Vera had worked to get Dawn into during the week. But Vera meant well, and it was only temporary, and what choice did she have, anyway?
Then a black fog started to overtake her, and she wanted to sleep all the time. When Dawn cried, her heart started to race. The doctor said it was nothing. Pregnant women got tired. She should eat properly and get a good night’s sleep.
The night before Jimmy was born, Dean came in early and found her crying on the sofa in the attic room. He took her hands away from her face and wiped her eyes very gently. “Hey, hey,” he said. “Look at me. Laura. Look at me.”
She looked at him and hiccupped. “I feel so bad,” she said.
“I know. I know. I’m sorry.” He put his arms around her and rocked her. He said everything would be different from now on. He would be a better husband and a better father. He was turning over a new leaf.
“You always say that,” she hiccupped.
“I know,” he said, “but it’s different this time. I promise. I promise. You’ll see.”
Jimmy was an angelic baby, white and pink and gold, with fine hair and round eyes. Dean looked stricken when he held him for the first time, and Laura thought, Of course. He wanted a so
n. All fathers want a son. This time, he remembered to pick them up at the hospital. He had a bag of toys—trucks and a baseball glove and a little beanbag monkey with a straw hat and a pipe. He’d bought things for Dawn, too, and told her how lucky the baby was to have such a good, smart, strong big sister. He carried Dawn on his shoulders and the baby in his arms. Dawn tugged at his ear and said, “Giddyup, Daddy,” and Dean neighed and pretended to bite her leg while Dawn shrieked and held on.
It was good. Dean came home at night. He took Dawn out so that Laura could have some peace and quiet. They came tumbling back in, waving balloons, fencing with pussy willows, sticky with grape juice. On Saturday mornings, he practically destroyed Vera’s kitchen making pancakes. He fell asleep on the sofa with Jimmy on his chest.
When it was good, it was very, very good.
Everything happens for a reason, Laura thought, watching Dean show Dawn how to hold the baby. “Thatta girl,” he said. “See how he’s looking at you? He knows you’re his big sister. He knows you’re always going to look out for him.” The unhappiness had hollowed her out so that she could hold more joy. Things had finally turned around.
ALL THE KING’S HORSES AND ALL THE KING’S MEN
Within three months, things had turned back. Dean was coming home late again. He said sales were slow; he wasn’t making enough on commission, but he would be damned if he would go back to the plant. It meant they had to keep staying at Vera and Frank’s. It meant Laura had to go back to work at the Star. (The bank had let her go. “Take time off. Put your feet up. Stay home and look after your kids,” Mr. McCleary said, pretending he was doing her a favour.) The black fog crept back. When the baby cried, she was terrified, and she couldn’t say why. Shocking thoughts came to her, and she lacked the strength to keep them out. I hate my life. I hope I fall down the stairs and die. In the mirror, her eyes looked sticky and her lips pulpy. Hideous. She put her hands on her stomach, gripping the apron of excess skin that hung over it. Fat. She felt feverish, and strange pains ran up her back and into her chest. Sick.
