“Liked them? I loved them. I haven’t been able to stop looking at them. Tell him from me that he really shouldn’t have — okay?”
“You can tell him yourself tomorrow. We’re coming in to celebrate!”
“Right on,” I said. “I’ll get the place cleaned up.”
IV
Violet Budd
Sun pours through the dining room’s floor-to-ceiling French windows, lighting up blond and red strands in Lucy’s mop of hair. Violet knows it is going to be another draining afternoon. She still has two papers to finish for the next morning — her final two papers — and isn’t sure if she can pull it off. It takes all her energy to keep focussed on the task at hand, which is to keep Lucy occupied while lunch is being made. Violet doesn’t have much appetite. The heat combined with humidity always upsets her stomach. And the stress of having to meet one more school deadline is not helping.
She stares out the window, across the gardens of her old neighbourhood. Lines from an essay she once wrote for a creative writing seminar enter her mind with startling clarity: “Decades of professional landscaping have created a pastoral idyll in which dappled light and a church-like hush work together to mollify the upper-middle class soul.” She was supposed to write a faux memoir. No one in her class knew that she was writing the real thing, and that underneath her carefully messed-up punk look and aggressive bad manners was a nice middle class girl. “There are no human sounds, just the country cacophony of cicadas jamming with starlings while crickets keep a steady beat.” Violet was disappointed to get only a B+. “The avenue, left fashionably potholed, is deserted, as are the gardens of the other Tudor-style mansions.” The professor was a half-dead, white European male.
She looks out on the grounds of her once home, at the kidney-shaped pool, at the waterfall, at the wrought-iron fences — they are nothing if not tastefully ostentatious, she thinks. She finds it hard to believe she once played endless games of hide-and-seek in these back gardens. She finds it hard to believe that she was ever that child, unaware of her privilege, so comfortable in her surroundings.
“Mom!” Lucy’s hot little hands on her cheeks. “Mom, you’re not paying attention.”
“I am, Lucy. I am, really.”
From her seat on the parquet floor, Violet can hear her mother chatting with Brian in the kitchen, his monotonous responses sometimes making his mother-in-law laugh. Anyone listening in would think Brian and her mother have an easy-going relationship. Between noon and five minutes past, Violet’s mother beats a track from the kitchen to the dining room, carrying platters heaped with quiches and locally made cheeses, spicy sausages, B.C. lamb, roast duck (for Violet’s dad), cabbage rolls, back bacon (for Brian), fresh baguette, pickles and preserves. Her mother’s high colour, her dishevelled hair and her harried demeanour might easily fool the uninitiated into thinking that she has spent the whole morning preparing lunch. In her rebellious years, especially if they had guests, Violet would have called her bluff, made a show of asking her mother when she had sneaked away to Charelli’s and how much she had paid for the feast. But Violet is no longer interested in confronting her mother. She has no appetite for it. If anything, these days Violet looks for ways to put the woman at ease.
“Mom, I’ve told you a million times not to use your wedding china when Lucy is here. What if she breaks something?”
“They’re only things, Violet,” says her mother, who likes to portray herself as a free spirit.
Violet knows that as soon as her mother has finished preparing lunch, she will come sweeping down on them: “Oh Lucy, I’m so sorry I’ve neglected you. What are you playing, and can I play, too, please?” Her dramatic entrances sometimes startle Lucy. While her mother waits for Lucy’s invitation to join in, Violet notes how she remains standing instead of squatting down and making herself smaller. She has forgotten how to put a child at ease, Violet thinks. Lucy knows her grandmother has little interest in her games. Violet is certain that Lucy also picks up on the disgust her grandmother bears towards her granddaughter’s collection of chewed-up and paint-chipped Burger King toys. Violet does her best to keep their play date moving along.
“Oh, Yaaaay! Panther-Gran wants to play,” Violet chimes in enthusiastically, when Lucy finally tells her grandmother where to sit.
The older woman finds it difficult to settle into the purely passive role that Lucy assigns her. “It’s nothing personal,” Violet tells her mother privately. “She’s the same way with me. All she really wants you to do is watch.”
Violet knows this isn’t as easy as she makes it sound. When Lucy says watch, she means watch. She does not mean read a book or look at TV with the sound turned down. She does not mean file your nails or even gaze off into space, daydreaming. And while it is charming at first to follow how Lucy forces her miniature toys to interact, giving each one a different voice, Violet knows it soon becomes mind-numbingly boring. Sooner or later, Violet knows her mother will crack under the strain. Uninvited, she will attempt to give voice to one nibbled-on Burger King character, only to be silenced by Lucy’s famous black look. Or she will reach out and pick up one of the tiny figures. At this, Lucy will sigh, stopping her game until she has prised the tiny monster from her grandmother’s hand and replaced it on the exact spot from which it has been removed.
Squatting on the floor, surrounded by Lucy’s mutant army, her pantsuit cutting painfully into her, a glassy smile on her face, Violet’s mom looks just one frayed nerve shy of a breakdown. Violet wonders if she is just this way with Lucy or was she always this way. She racks her brain for memories of days spent sprawled on the carpet with her mother among a jumble of toys, but all she can recall are interminably long Sunday drives or argument-filled trips to fun parks. “More power to her, then,” says Brian, “for at least trying with Lucy.”
Her mom and Lucy’s only successful outing in that entire year in B.C. is an afternoon they spend at Beacon Hill Park. Her mom enjoyed the alpine and rock gardens, though she thought the park overall was far too crowded. Lucy loved it because of the petting zoo. She fell in love with the baby goats and cried when she found out she couldn’t ride the baby donkey. It was on that day-trip they first played the panther game: Lucy the innocent bunny rabbit hopping along while Violet’s mom lay crouched and waiting in the rhododendron bushes.
Panther-Gran, the name was an immediate hit. “Come on, Panther-Gran, time for bed!” Violet’s dad will sometimes say, with a little growl. Brian thinks the name sounds like an over-the-counter medication, a supplement to remedy osteoporosis. Violet knows the name appeals to her mother for several reasons. It gives her the chance to tell everyone how much she looked like Cat Woman when she was young. And it acts as a kind of public notice, proclaiming to the world that she is a fun and involved grandmother.
“Where’s my Lucy-Lu?” Violet’s dad walks briskly into the room. “Where’s my little nose miner, eh?”
“Poppy!” yells Lucy, running over and throwing her arms around him.
“There she is!” He scoops Lucy up into his arms where she begins to pepper his cheeks with kisses.
“You smell, Poppy.”
“Oh, Poppy just went a little heavy on the cologne this morning.”
Lucy scrunches up her face: “You’re funny, Poppy.”
Violet sees how much her father enjoys his time with Lucy. He goes out of his way to make her laugh. He often says how much Lucy reminds him of his baby sister, Maureen, who died when he was eleven. “Poor Maureen,” he opines, in his old Duncan voice. The sound of that accent transports Violet to her Uncle Willard’s sawmill, or to the banks of the Cowichan River with her dad and Uncle Wade, fishing for cutthroats and browns, and terrified she will hook one of the enormous salmon that sometimes swim lazily into view.
“Time to strap on the feed bag — what do you say, Lucy?”
“Yay, Poppy!” she howls, and immediately begins to gallop around the dining room table.
“Dot, now that wouldn’t be Clem’s
Country Cuts Muscovy Duck, would it?” he gushes, clapping his hands and then rubbing his palms together.
Dot gives him the dead-eye: “Harold, dear, just how long did you say you spent at the nineteenth hole?”
Lucy titters. Violet sighs inside. Every Sunday he arrives home from the Uplands half cut, and every Sunday they insist on playing out their little charade: her playing at being pissed off, him at being recalcitrant.
Brian backs in through the kitchen’s saloon doors, carrying a bottle of red and a bottle of white wine in one hand and four crystal glasses in the other. He is deeply tanned, and except for dark circles under his eyes — the result of staying up too late playing on the computer — Violet thinks he has never looked better. He is wearing a pair of grey flannel pants and a green linen shirt.
“Everyone for wine?”
“Sure thing,” says Violet’s dad. “But I’ll do the honours, Irish.”
“Of course!”
Violet notices that when her dad is around, Brian assumes a formality that is at odds with his usual laid-back ways. Sometimes he even calls her father “sir.” That one always makes Violet smirk. She assumes that her husband is being ironic, but over the course of the year she has begun to second guess this. She notices that his accent changes whenever he is around her parents. His voice gets plummy, and he adopts what he assumes are Canadian vowels into his speech. He also affects a more upright posture, often clasping his hands behind his back. It doesn’t quite come off, Violet thinks; he looks more like Jeeves than the Lord of the Manor.
At first she thinks he is just nervous, intimidated not only by her parents but also by the affluent surroundings. Violet knows her home is a long way from the row house he grew up in on Bridgetown’s Wall Road. But if he finds the juxtaposition jarring, he doesn’t let it show. Violet notices that he never complains about going there for lunch and even suggests that they visit more often.
“If I didn’t know better,” she says, “I would think you were developing a taste for the high life.”
An expressionless Brian tells her she is imagining things.
“Oh, really?” Violet is suddenly irritable. She tries hard to keep her tone light. “If you think I’m imagining things, just go and look in the mirror. Since when do you wear dress pants and an ironed shirt, eh? What’s next, my little social climber, boat shoes and Ray-Bans?”
“Fuck off, Violet.”
Violet’s father doesn’t like Brian. He calls him the poet behind his back, the suggestion being that he is impractical and a dreamer. He also makes fun of Brian’s mid-Atlantic accent and often teases him about it, which Violet finds interesting, given the broad adjustments her father has made to his own inflection.
“Say ‘bucket,’ Irish,” he will suddenly demand. When Brian complies — and it always amazes Violet when he does — her father might say, “Jeez, you’re sure you’re not from somewhere up around Fanny Bay?”
It bothers Violet enough that she mentions it to her mother. Her mother simply says that things were different when Violet’s father started out. When Violet presses the point, her mom says he had no choice. She says his accent and manners were a requirement of the social circles he moved in and that they developed after his reputation as a lawyer had won him a place in that world. “The order is crucial,” she argues. “Harold thinks Brian is putting the cart before the horse.” Violet takes from this exchange that her father thinks Brian is also something of a pretender.
And the fiasco of the website does nothing to change her father’s opinion. Brian, from necessity, takes an interest in web design, a skill he develops during the day while Lucy naps and Violet is at school, and practices again at night after Lucy has gone to bed. He often sits up all hours trying to figure out kinks in the code. When Violet complains to him about sleeping alone, he says that it will all be worth it, that HTML will give him a means to make money on the side. She watches his interest grow to the point where he begins to talk about how he can make a living from web design. Technology is one of only a few subjects that Brian and her dad are comfortable talking about. For these reasons she is willing to swallow her reservations when her father asks Brian to create a website for the Law Society.
It takes Brian almost eight months of nights and weekends to complete the site which her father and most of his colleagues find nearly impossible to navigate.
“It’s not my fault,” Brian says, “I developed it to the current standards. Your dad and his cronies are just too arrogant to admit their ignorance of the new medium.” Violet thinks he probably has a point. She also knows that the site ends up costing far more than her father thought it would, Brian demanding to be paid by the hour. In total, he bills the B.C. Law Society a little over $11,000, most of which — Violet suspects — comes out of her father’s pocket. When she suggests to Brian that he might have overcharged for the work, he is vehement that he has not. He claims that her father is just looking for something for nothing.
Violet’s Diary Axiom #763: The sense of entitlement of those who are highly paid exists in direct proportion to the size of their salaries. My dad does not think he is in any way overstating the case when he says that he has worked for everything he has achieved.
Violet’s Diary Axiom #764: A common fallacy among the wealthy is that wealth and success exist in direct proportion to drive and intelligence. My dad turns a blind eye to foreign specialists who drive taxi cabs, as well as to highly educated single mothers who live in squalid apartments.
Violet can see from the very first that her father and Brian are oil and water. Her father is driven and direct, while Brian prefers to approach the world both at a walking pace and in a roundabout manner. She knows Brian is conciliatory as long as he feels he is not being asked to give up too much, though what he considers too much is something of a mystery to Violet. “It’s different in every situation,” he says, “but I know it when somebody crosses the line.” Violet also thinks of her husband as being naturally self-effacing and funny. Once, crossing the border at Fort Erie, on their way back from a Rolling Stones concert in Buffalo, the Canadian Customs official looked at Brian’s passport and said, “Ireland for the Irish, eh, son?”
Brian just looked at him in puzzlement and said, “I don’t know who else would want it.”
Violet suspects Brian is also the victim of a good deal of prejudiced thinking. Because of his nationality, she knows a lot of people expect him to be both full of blarney and a heavy drinker — like her dad — and are disappointed when they find out he is only one of these things. And even when he has been drinking, she knows he is more likely to affect airs than lapse into some crude stereotype of Irishness. “Identity for Brian,” she once told Keppie, “is a game of mix and match. He likes to play against expectations.”
They pile food on their plates: cabbage rolls and potato salad for Lucy, duck and lamb and bacon for Violet’s dad and for Brian. Her mom, sticking to her diet, arranges a small triangle of quiche, a tuft of garden salad and a glob of tabouli on her plate, making sure there is plenty of white space separating them. Violet takes a little piece of everything; it is her duty as a mother to eat, she reasons, her duty to stay healthy.
“So, Violet, how was BUS-IN-ESS school this week?” Her dad’s drawl and faux-Brit intonation are back, accentuated now by a note of sarcasm. Though her father approves of her late-flowering desire to acquire a professional credential, he does not approve of her chosen career path. More than once he has asked her to explain just what is so masterful about business administration. It is clear to Violet that he considers the term a smoke-screen, a deliberate attempt to give the appearance of professionalism to an occupation he thinks to be the rightful livelihood of charlatans. “Entrepreneurs are born, not made,” he will bark, pouring freely from the rye bottle.
“It’s going great, Dad. When I hand in my final two papers tomorrow, I’m done. I’ll have my degree.” She tries to sound as chirpy about it as she can, tries to hide the fact — as much from h
erself as anyone else — that she is exhausted. Those hundreds of hours of lectures, as well as the hundreds of assignments she has completed in just one year have silted her brain. Has there ever been a drier program of study? she wonders: three-hour discussions on statistical applications in management; human resources seminars delivered by an ex-corporate big-wig, a man who made everyone think of the Manchurian Candidate; courses in financial management and accountancy, delivered by instructors who all seem to share a similar sense of bitterness at being universally regarded as bean counters. Course after course in marketing in Canadian and in world environments; taxation law; economics; and women in management, the latter delivered by a statuesque blond in Prada shoes, who began each session by cleaning the lectern and computer keypad with antiseptic wipes.
Though Violet will never agree publicly with her dad, she has to admit that her scepticism about her chosen career has grown over the year. The whole experience seems to her less about learning a set of practical skills and more about swallowing theory. The closer she gets to graduation the more pumped-up she feels, ready for anything and nothing at the same time. And then there is all the new terminology she has to learn how to use. Luckily, her friends in the program also feel the same way about the new lingo. Early on, Violet decided to take a leaf out of Keppie’s book and work up a parody. It has made her a minor celebrity at the Grad Club:
“See, people, it’s not rocket science to run your idea up the flagpole; though sometimes you’re going to have to swallow the frog before you can push the needle. Sometimes you’ll even have to shoot the puppy, so it’s best to get your ducks in a row, touch base with the net-net before you make the big ask. That way you can hit the ground running, stay ahead of the curve and be ready for the next paradigm shift. The trick is to remember that the USP, the solution, is always somewhere between jumping the shark and just adding water. Forget that piece of wisdom and you’ll be screwing the pooch in a boiler room, or you’ll end up nothing more than a bottom-feeding desk jockey knife-and-forking it towards blue sky thinking.”
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