Such a dear boy, she says to herself. For all his soft-heartedness and lack of sense. She can’t blame him for that. It was Libby who took advantage and didn’t know her place, who made him think he should come in from the fields and still have to do more. Like clearing the table or wiping his crumbs off the counter or rinsing the bar of soap when he’s dirtied it. Such little things. It would be easier for Libby to do them herself rather than always nag. So when Anke notices the soap is covered in muddy bubbles that puddle on the sink’s crackled porcelain, she gives it all a rinse. There, you see? She has flushed an argument down the drain by doing the chore herself.
Anke knows her pies are done by the particular aroma of hot fruit. Years of baking have given her a sense about such things, a knack that once allowed her to keep a sparse, uncluttered kitchen. Now there are drawers full of new gadgets. A bouquet of whisks when one fork would do. Timers and thermometers for everything, when Anke can throw together a six-course meal and bring it to the table just as everyone suddenly realizes they’re hungry. All without looking at a clock.
And that’s another thing. Libby has a clock for every room and always wears a watch, constantly checking to make sure they’re all set at the exact same time. As if the world revolves around those clocks and not the other way around. Anke has woken up every day for fifty years at 5:15 am, and she doesn’t need anyone to wake or tell her the time.
Lost in her thoughts of Libby, Anke has almost whipped the cream into butter. Her favourite fork for the task lashes deftly through the thickening foam, the sound of it changing, becoming dull as the cream’s volume increases in her mother’s old enamelled bowl, chipped by two generations of everyday use. She won’t add sugar or vanilla to her cream. No need for such extravagance. Especially on a Tuesday.
Outside Libby watches a robin settle on a fence post and shuffle its wings into place, its red breast pushed out to announce its springtime intentions. Libby once discovered a dead chick fallen from its twig-and-fluff nest which was littered with broken blue egg shells. The chick’s featherless wings were splayed as if ready for flight, while above, its siblings in the nest squawked for worms to be thrust into their open mouths.
“The world is cruel like that,” Libby says to the robin. It cocks its head and looks at her closely with one dark eye, then the other. Anke would say the same. About the world being cruel. Except she wouldn’t stop along her way to feel sorrow. Nothing is safe until it’s dead, is how she’d put it. Libby buried the chick beneath the tree and placed a stone on its grave.
Inside of her, Libby’s baby is still, when only yesterday she felt it flutter its limbs. The doctor assured her last week that a bit of blood wasn’t much to worry about. So long as there wasn’t more. And there hasn’t been.
“Don’t go getting attached before it’s time,” Anke had told her, but Libby was fully committed to this child from the moment she held the pregnancy test and watched the indicator strip turn blue. That was more than sixteen weeks ago.
Libby turns towards the sun. “Do you feel that?” she says. She touches her belly, but there’s no response. Like when the lights go out in a storm, she struggles to sense the outline of something that recently seemed so clear. It won’t come to her and, instead, she tries to remember what it was that had driven her out of the kitchen.
“No point trying to help now,” Anke says without looking up from a sink full of dishes. “Just change out of that dusty dress before supper. And if you can manage that, then set the table. You may as well know I’ve invited Mrs. Larsen and her son from next door. Seems his new wife ran off to visit her mother.”
“Is Meryl’s mother all right?” Libby says, but Anke continues as if Libby hasn’t spoken.
“I don’t know what that girl was thinking, going off with nothing at all made to eat. Old Mrs. Larsen isn’t the woman, or the cook, she used to be.”
Old Mrs. Larsen’s only problem is that she’s sour, Libby is tempted to say, imagining the woman’s miserly, puckered face. Small wonder Anke is her most faithful friend. Libby pushes the thought away, concentrating on a wave of fatigue.
“I’ll set the table, Anke. I’m going to eat later, though. I’m not feeling very well all of a sudden,” Libby says, and it’s the truth. The thought of sitting down to supper with a pair of condescending old ladies makes her head feel light. Already, the room seems to be moving sideways.
The doctor said not to worry, she tells herself again. But was that really what he’d said? Right now she only remembers hearing her child’s heart beating for the first time. The cold tape across her belly, measuring a new pound of progress.
“And what excuse should I make for you?” Anke says, provoked by the scent of outdoors on Libby’s clothes. “No, you’ll sit and eat with us. You can have your nap once our company’s gone.”
Libby leans against the table and feels vacant, has to stop to count on her fingers how many plates and how many forks she needs to complete her task.
“Call me when they come,” Libby says without looking back. Moments later, she examines her face in the bathroom mirror. It seems featureless. As though her eyes and mouth and nose need to be pencilled in. She gives in to a compelling need to sit down.
She tells herself she’s just lightheaded from her walk, and lets the coolness of the tiled floor catch her slowly. Such a beautiful blue. She’s always thought the mosaic, with its patterns of cerulean and cobalt, its reliefs of yellow, a strange choice for Anke, when everything else in the house is so plain. Her husband once told her the floor was his mother’s own design, although this is the first time she’s thought the tiles familiar in another way. But it refuses to become clear to her as she tries to make sense of a resonating ache, an inward physical agony that feels like both pain and grief.
She follows the pain with both hands, from the rise of her belly down between the cradle of her hips to her pelvis and beneath the sturdy elastic of her new maternity underwear, where her fingers find blood, warm and sticky and thick.
“Anke!” she calls, too softly at first, her voice growing louder and higher-pitched with each wave of pain that pauses only to surge through her back until she feels she will crack open like a gourd splitting in the sun. She leans and slides into the discharge.
“What’s this?” Anke says at the door. “What are you doing down there?” She steps closer, trying to see what Libby is staring at. Why she’s curled on the cold floor, her fingers exploring the tiles.
Libby lifts her head, then lays it back down, unable to hold its weight. She presses her wrists to her forehead, smearing it with blood, and begins to cry.
“Oh,” Anke says, seeing more blood on the floor, a shallow pool spreading out from underneath Libby. She should have known. In fact, she tells herself that she had known and had chosen to ignore her intuition. The way she knew when they sent her daughter home twenty years ago, saying the fever which was present before her fall and the blood from her nose that stopped only to start again were not unusual symptoms for a two-year-old. A bug and a bump; that’s how the doctor had referred to it. And assured Anke that such typical childhood incidents were like vaccinations. They would, in the end, make the girl stronger.
“Well, I suppose it wasn’t meant to be. And you’re not the first to — ” Anke doesn’t finish the sentence. She reaches under the sink for a stack of old towels. She presses a cold wet cloth into Libby’s hands and bends to examine her, finding a tiny lifeless form in the puddle between Libby’s trembling legs.
With a pair of scissors taken from Libby’s bathroom drawer, Anke severs the link between mother and fetus. A girl, just as Libby predicted. Tiny. Barely a person. With translucent skin and eyelids that will never open. Arms and legs too fragile to handle with her own suddenly clumsy hands. She gently places the baby in her palm and squints to count its fingers and toes.
“She would have been perfect, Libby,” Anke says. But before she can show her, Libby has another contraction and is thrust into another spasm of pai
n.
“It’s almost over,” Anke says, tenderly placing her granddaughter on a soft towel and covering her with a washcloth. She takes Libby’s hand.
After Libby’s womb has emptied, Anke helps her into bed. “I’ll call the doctor and ask if there’s anything else we should do,” Anke says, her voice falling as she remembers that they’re still expecting company and it will be up to her to make the necessary excuses. “And I’ll tell the Larsens you’ve had a bit of a headache from being outside,” she adds. “No sense them knowing everything that goes on around here.”
She sets a tumbler of water and an aspirin on the nightstand next to Libby and arranges more towels underneath her before going back to the kitchen.
When Matthew comes in from the field, Anke is carrying a mop and a bucket full of chemical-smelling water towards the bathroom. She had hoped to clean up before he came, so he wouldn’t overreact. But he has surprised her by being early, and now there is nothing to do but tell him what happened. “I’m sorry, I would have come to find you,” she says when his questions become accusing, “but I’d have had to leave Libby alone. The doctor has been here and will see Libby again in the morning.”
Anke lets him go and remains in the bathroom doorway long after he’s gone to be with Libby. Another father too late for the death of his daughter.
Anke mops her blue and yellow tiles, smeared once again with blood. She knows the ceramic won’t stain. Even the broken ones, scattered behind the shed, remain true to their colour.
“Libby at least had me,” Anke says to herself. She touches her face, surprised to find it wet with tears. When Anke lost her child, she was alone and afraid, watching Ruth’s blood pool on the mosaic floor. It streamed into the runnels of grout, where it clotted and dried. Later, she had begged her husband to tear up the floor, but he insisted on simply scrubbing it clean with bleach. That’s when all her intentions for improving the house were put away. After Ruth’s death, she would allow only what was necessary. Sturdy, practical fittings and drab colours. None of the sunny Tuscan yellows or saturated blues she loved. No red. Only beige, the colour of old wax.
But the tiles remained, reminding her of how much could be lost if she cared too much. In truth, she was glad to move upstairs last summer where there were fewer memories. Little to remind her of anything. Especially not of the daughter who made her think in colours.
“The world is cruel like that,” Anke says, stiffening herself so she can welcome her guests. Suddenly, her thin peach pie seems stingy, not sensible. And Old Mrs. Larsen looks just old. Anke hesitates, removes a plate from the table. She’s glad that Libby has always had more sense than to listen to her pessimism.
Libby has not slept. Not even with the prescription Matthew picked up. The pills make her feel vague, not sleepy. She’s lain awake two nights in a row watching her husband, wondering how he can bury a child and then just close his eyes. Without anyone to tell her the answer, she listens to the noises the house makes. Until now she has never noticed. Its old bones settle like sighs. Like Anke, who so often sighs before withdrawing into silence.
Libby hears Anke’s feet touch the floor upstairs and knows it’s 5:15 am without looking at the clock. She expects to hear her mother-in-law next in the kitchen, lighting the stove for her percolator and dropping a slice of bread in the toaster. Instead, Libby hears the shush of her bedroom door being pushed over the carpet.
A long moment passes before Anke says, “Libby? I need to show you something.” Anke knows without asking that her daughter-in-law is awake. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have come.
Libby wraps herself in the mud-brown velour robe Matthew gave her last year for Christmas. The one Anke had picked out from the Sears catalogue and ordered, as always, without first asking her son.
Outside, the air is still and fresh with moisture. Pale yellow light has steeped the horizon in the exact shade of camomile tea.
The women walk side-by-side, Anke carefully guiding Libby, and Libby allowing herself to be led like a child.
“I thought it would disappear with enough time,” Anke says quietly when they finally stop in front of the potting shed. In the early light, it looks restored. Not new, but as though well-rested after a night of good dreams.
“I used to love walking down to this shed. It was the one place that felt like my own. I thought my daughter and I would share it — ”
Libby stops and whispers, “Daughter?”
Anke nods and looks away. “Ruth wasn’t even two when we lost her. Afterwards, I tried to forget. I thought I was supposed to. But forgetting someone completely takes even more stubbornness than I have.”
Anke looks at the shed and all the life brought back to it. Like a grave someone’s tended after long neglect.
“There’s blue pottery in the garden,” Libby says after a while. “I’ve collected most of it.”
“We had too many tiles. Enough to do two bathroom floors,” Anke says. “After Ruth died, I smashed the rest and scattered them here. I cleaned out the shed and refused to let anyone go near it.” She takes a deep breath. “I’m glad someone’s growing flowers in there again.”
“I think Ruth is a lovely name,” Libby says. She opens the door to the shed. Reaches for Anke’s hand. As they step inside, she points to a row of young plants, still in their pots, their green berries shedding the last of their umbilical blooms. “My tomatoes are growing.”
Anke can almost taste them.
ICE HOUSE
ALTHOUGH THE ICE HOUSE AT THE BACK of the butcher shop has been empty for more than a year, the smell of the meat it once kept frozen is still encased in the wooden maze of meat lockers. Ani steps through the open door, which is heavy and thick like the door of a vault, into the once-familiar alleys of dead ends. She shines a small circle of light ahead of her and instead of a young woman home from college, engaged to be married, she’s twelve years old again.
Tracing her way by memory she makes two right turns and a left past a second bank of lockers before taking another right into the old ice-storage room. For years the room was stacked with crumbling pyramids of bagged ice, made by two machines kept near the front of the store. It was Ani’s job, after school, to scoop it into plastic bags. Afterwards, she would push them down a long cement hallway to the ice house in a rusted grocer’s cart that dripped melt-water from one frozen room to the next. The wheels, which squealed but were never greased, had gradually deepened decades-old furrows in the plank floor, its grain swollen and split at the rings by water that had seeped in and frozen. After so many years of damp, the wood became soft and splintery, as though covered in hangnails.
“Ani?” her mother calls, her voice distant. She’s in the hallway, just outside the ice house. “Ani, are you in there?”
“I’m here,” Ani says, waving the light so her mother can find her. While she listens for the tentative footsteps — her mother has always been afraid to walk alone in the dark — Ani closes her eyes and tries to re-imagine the way out.
Back when she stacked ice here, she forced herself to memorize the different turns in case the power was suddenly cut off and the lights went out, leaving her to find the door before becoming too cold. She practiced by tying a blindfold, a strip of old butcher’s apron, around her eyes and feeling her way along the walls of meat lockers that customers rented to store their extra cuts of beef and pork. That way, if the freezer’s motors droned to silence and the light withdrew into the walls, she would know what to do. But the day it finally happened, Ani was facing the wrong way. She became disoriented and lost her sense of direction. Reaching blindly into the space around her, Ani had scuffed along a few inches at a time, hesitation causing her to trip and her already frozen fingertips to bump into the solid hedges of wood.
From the time Ani turned nine, she lived with her mother and stepfather, Clive, in an apartment above the old red-bricked butcher shop with its deli in front. Before that she and her mother lived alone on Seventh Street in a small, blue-sided house
with evergreen trees in front and a big backyard with a garden. Every spring, while Ani watched from a distance her grandfather decided was safe, he and one of her uncles drove down the back alley with a grain truck full of manure to spread on their garden. After they negotiated the truck into just the right position, by inching it back and forth in the narrow alley, they tilted the grain box until the manure began to spill over the back fence. Wearing rubber boots, they climbed inside and shovelled out the rest.
If it was a cool day, the garden steamed with the rich, composting fertilizer as the men tilled it into the soil with pitchforks. Afterwards Ani would hold the garden hose for them to wash their hands under, then go inside and carry out glasses of pink lemonade that tonkled with ice cubes, and plates of pink-frosted cream cookies her grandmother sent from the farm in an ice cream bucket.
“Sometimes a little shit is all a potato needs before it can grow,”
her grandfather said, pulling Ani onto his lap for a whisker rub as he sat on a sun-worsted lawn chair and they admired the garden together. Ani laughed behind her hands.
“Just don’t repeat that to your father,” her mother said later, trying not to laugh herself. “I have enough problems.”
A few weeks after the manure was delivered, Ani’s grandfather always came back into town to help them plant the peas and carrots, radishes, corn, potatoes, and the pale green kohlrabi Ani liked to eat raw and still warm from the sun. With an old, rusted hoe, he’d carve furrows into the soil and Ani would follow behind dropping seeds.
The butcher shop was downtown on Central Avenue, surrounded by parking lots and other stores on a one-way street where the traffic noise was constant. Upstairs, the apartment had windows on two sides, the south-facing ones overlooking a barely-used parking lot. From the east windows, Ani could watch the deliveries of freshly-slaughtered animals. Cows, pigs, lambs, and sometimes a deer, if a hunter wanted sausages made.
Mennonites Don't Dance Page 5
