A Good House

by Bonnie Burnard

  When she couldn’t continue she would fade back into her stack of pillows and pronounce, “We are really, really despicable, every one of us,” and Bill would respond with his own line, “We’re not so bad we can’t get worse.” If Sylvia was very tired, the kids just squeezed her feet through the blankets as they made their way out of the living room.

  Bill left Sylvia’s daytime care to her mother because he still had to show up for work at the hardware store. And he still sat in the front booths of the Blue Moon with the other men who worked uptown, the wits, as they were called. The wits knew the situation with Sylvia Chambers and they tried to accommodate it, tried to group their working bodies around it. Normally they passed the time talking politics, casually confusing the facts and enlarging the issues to the point of hopelessness, repeating like slogans the words damnpoliticians and highertaxes. Some days, for a change of pace, they attacked rumoured advances in science or technology, their suspicions banked up by the always reliable tag team of half-baked information and rampant skepticism. But with Bill’s situation as it was, they stalled, hesitated a half beat before they spoke, tempered their jumpy, mocking, scatter-gun talk with oblique half-phrased sentiments and couched clichés carefully aimed to miss the mark. They endured the occasional silence, asked short, gentle questions, not for any answer but for the gentleness itself.

  This couldn’t last. Worn down and fed up with gentleness and care, they conceived a plan.

  The men knew that Sylvia had been moved down to the living room and that there was only the one bathroom in that house, so they decided that a group of dilettante carpenters would build her a downstairs bathroom. Archie Stutt was signed on and both grandfathers and the Anglican minister. Trevor Hanley, who had the Chev Olds dealership, said he’d come, said he was all warmed up because he’d just put the finishing touches to a shed out at the cottage last fall. And Archie said that he’d talk to the new guy at the Esso to see if he could be had.

  Bill didn’t put up any resistance. Although he’d pulled the old picket fence down on his own when he got home from overseas, he couldn’t help with something like this because even now, more than ten years after he’d had to start relying exclusively on his left hand, it wasn’t entirely trustworthy, not with precision work, not with heavy tools. And he wasn’t in any position to leave his job at the hardware.

  But he used his discount to pay for most of the materials and he borrowed a thirty-cup coffeemaker from the Presbyterian church. He made new coffee every morning and put it on a makeshift table in the kitchen near the back door because it was March and the ground was hard, the work was cold.

  * * *

  THE CONSTRUCTION STARTED from the outside. In the beginning the neighbourhood dogs congregated to bark their interest and this caused the yard squirrels to run straight up the hickories to hide in the winter branches. The squirrels returned when they saw there was nothing much to be feared and the men gave them names, engaged them in conversation. The new guy’s language was rougher than what the older men were used to but they toned him down by declining to respond in kind, by taking the trouble to choose their own words. They were in the habit of controlling talk this way and they didn’t think badly of him, they just assumed he’d been raised differently. Perhaps by wolves, the minister suggested early on.

  Most of the men brought their own shovels and hammers and saws, their own tape measures. They dug through the thin snow into the earth, broke through the shallow frost with the mildest profanity and a bit of extra push from their steel-toed boots on the blades of their shovels. They hauled the lumber from the snowed-on pile in the driveway, built a frame for the foundation, and mixed cement in one of Archie’s wheelbarrows. After it was poured, Archie fired up a propane heater under a makeshift tent, which was only an old stained tarp thrown over the lawn chairs, to help the cement set.

  They framed three walls out square on the cold ground and pounded them together and after the walls were up Trevor Hanley made a sketch of a low-pitched roof that he said they would have to build with particular attention, making sure that the join to the house proper had integrity because if there was ever going to be a leak, that was where it would want to be.

  The plumber came over to install the drain. He drilled holes through the old foundation wall and soldered extensions to the existing water lines in the basement and when he said he had all the lines he’d need they built the subfloor, leaving him only a trap door, which he said was likely good enough. They covered the wall studs with plywood and tar paper and with siding that someone would paint white in the spring to match the rest of the house. The Anglican minister threw a half-dozen bundles of shingles onto the roof and climbed up after them.

  Archie and a couple of the men on the town payroll dug a long trench from the new bathroom drain to the sewer line out on the street and laid a five-inch pipe to make the connection. Soon after the pipe was buried the wide snake of mounded dirt that would settle and sink by summer was covered by the last of the drifting snow.

  The men moved inside, brought their tools and their noise and their blunt male talk into the kitchen. They used mallets to gouge a door-sized hole in the kitchen wall, trimmed the opening carefully with handsaws. The kids cleaned up, shovelled sawdust and chunks of plaster into boxes to be carried out to the garage and hauled away to the dump when someone had the time. Insulation was stuffed between the studs and covered with top-grade plywood and then a cupboard arrived and a mirror and a sink and a toilet. The plumber came back, and the electrician, bringing with him a small electric space-heater. A thick grey carpet was glued to the floor so it would be warm on Sylvia’s bare feet in the middle of the night.

  The grandfathers took off in one of Trevor’s brand new ’55 Chev pick-ups, a demonstrator, he called it, which meant it was the truck Trevor wanted to drive that year, and after cruising up and down the streets discussing just who might have a loose door lying around they pulled into Bert Wynne’s driveway and, sure enough, Bert had an oak door that he’d saved for just such a purpose up in the rafters of his shed. They offered him twenty dollars but he settled for ten, and after the door was home and hung on its frame with new, stronger hinges, Archie patched and smoothed the ragged plaster that surrounded it.

  When the work was finished a dozen men pulled chairs around the kitchen table or leaned on the counter to share a forty-ounce bottle of Canadian Club, courtesy of Archie Stutt. They drank quietly, satisfied with themselves. There were no jokes and the few starts at gossip faded off from lack of worthwhile embellishment.

  Sylvia’s mother stripped the old kitchen wallpaper and burned it in the barrel down by the creek. She stayed with the paper as it burned, used the crowbar to push it down and down again into the fire. Waiting for the fire to do its work, she pulled her thick old cardigan tight and turned to watch the rush of the cold April creek on its way to the lake.

  She repapered both the kitchen and the bathroom with a pattern very close in colour and design to what she’d stripped. It took her three days. She was helped by Margaret Kemp, who let herself off early from the hardware store.

  The bathroom fixtures were pale sandy pink. Because she asked him to, Patrick drove Daphne down to Sarnia and over the Bluewater Bridge to Port Huron to buy two expensive sets of thick pink American towels and on the way home they stopped uptown at Clarke’s for pink Kleenex and toilet paper, which was new on the market and very popular.

  When the bathroom was absolutely finished, the men were invited back one evening for coffee and a slice of Sylvia’s mother’s specialty, double dark chocolate cake. Paul was the one picked to throw open the door on their work. Sylvia sat in a kitchen chair pretending she hadn’t been watching and listening all along, hadn’t already begun to use the toilet. She told them they’d done a tremendous job, said it would be so convenient for her, and, “Tell me, how can I ever thank you?”

  * * *

  TWO MONTHS AFTER its completion Sylvia was standing in the bathroom in the middle of the nigh
t, washing her sweaty face and neck, when she fell. She watched herself go down in the mirror. In the few seconds it took their father to get to her, the kids had time to make it only as far as the stairs where they could hear her loudly going after God a dozen different ways and then after their father, telling him in a cold middle-of-the-night voice that he would be doing them both a favour if he would just give up on pretending to understand.

  “Give it the hell up,” she said to him. “It doesn’t help me.”

  And then they heard him helping her up to her feet, trying to soothe her with choked words and his own disciplined sobs.

  Doctor Cooper dropped in twice a day every day after the night of the fall to give Sylvia shots in her hip, telling Bill privately that he should be warned that this drug might alter her nature a bit, there was no telling really, but it was the very best available for now.

  Reverend Walker from the United Church came once a week, usually in the morning. On his first visit, after he had been served his coffee and muffin, he asked Sylvia’s mother if she would leave them for a time and she did so reluctantly, closing the door behind her with perhaps a bit too much force. Bill told Sylvia he’d back Walker off if that was her wish but she said no, it was all right, he was only doing his job. She told no one what they talked about those once-a-week mornings.

  Margaret Kemp began to come directly from work at the hardware to cook supper. She was an exceptionally tall, plain-faced, buxom woman in last year’s low-heeled shoes who took care to camouflage the fullness of her figure with a slouch and close attention to dress patterns and pretty print blouses that she did not tuck into her narrow skirts. She wore just a touch of lipstick and it had never occurred to her to pluck her eyebrows. She would sometimes lick a finger to shape her brows but she would have been surprised to hear this.

  Margaret dug right in. She scoured pots, scrubbed the kitchen floor on her hands and knees, stood Paul up on a kitchen chair to unscrew the ceiling light fixture so she could rinse the long-dead flies down the drain.

  She could cook all right, but with no past experience judging appetites, she had a difficult time getting the quantities right. After a week of it she decided there was no such thing as too much, that whatever might be left over could be used up some other way, in a soup or a casserole or a stew. She decided better too much than too little and often she didn’t have to decide anything at all because Bill’s mother had sent a pot roast or someone from down the street had dropped off another ground-beef casserole.

  She didn’t sit down with them at the table. While Bill and the kids ate she went into the living room and found some nice music on the radio beside Sylvia’s bed and then she brought basins of hot water and a washcloth and the softest of the towels, closing the door to the others and pulling the paisley drapes, turning back the sheet. When the bathing was finished she returned with a fresh basin and they washed Sylvia’s hair, which had been cut short for the first time in her life and was now completely without sheen. There was always a jar of Noxzema on the table beside the bed and Margaret rubbed it on Sylvia’s back and arms and legs and feet, vigorously working the skin to try to keep the circulation going.

  After Sylvia was clean, refreshed was the word she used, she chose one of the dozen nighties she’d been given since she’d been known to be sick and the two of them got it on her. Margaret changed the bedding religiously and quickly, helping Sylvia up and over to a chair, stripping the bed and making it new in no more than a minute. Without asking anyone’s permission, she brought out the best quilts, after she’d found them carefully wrapped in the linen cupboard on one of her few trips upstairs.

  She cooked separately for Sylvia, holding back a little on the salt and spices as Cooper had advised. She made good cream soup, mushroom or chicken or potato, served it in one of Sylvia’s china soup plates. Sometimes she made salmon croquettes or Waldorf salad, enough for the two of them and no one else.

  Sylvia appreciated all of this, particularly the bathing. She said that was almost the worst of it, not being able to keep herself fresh, and she refused to let her mother or Bill or Daphne bathe her. One late afternoon, while Margaret held a large hand mirror so she could comb her wet hair into place, Sylvia said to her, “Isn’t life strange?”

  Margaret held the mirror steady, tried to keep her own face hidden behind it. She had no way to guess what Sylvia was going to say. She had heard that some people spoke honestly when they believed they were dying, and sometimes to near strangers. She attempted to prepare herself, wondering how she could possibly be of any help to Sylvia when she herself had no faith, no magic, no way to believe in anything except the life that was right there in front of her. All she believed, all she’d ever been able to tell herself, was, You can’t know what is going to happen to you and there usually isn’t much choice when it does. Of course she could be strict with herself about this, that there was nothing whatsoever to be gained by crying or complaining or quitting, but how could she say such things to this pale woman in this bed? If there were other things you could say, they were not presenting themselves today.

  But it wasn’t about that, not at all. When Sylvia continued she said only, “We have known each other all this time and never really been friends until now.”

  Margaret put the mirror down on her lap and bravely reached to tuck a strand of hair behind Sylvia’s ear. “Oh, well,” she said. “Separate lives.”

  “But not now,” Sylvia said. “Not any more.”

  Margaret nodded.

  “I need you to help me with something,” Sylvia said. “If you could.”

  “Yes,” Margaret said, anticipating something practical now.

  “Some time soon this is all going to get quickly worse,” Sylvia said. “Like everyone else, I’ve been thinking about the kids.” She stopped for a minute to measure her words. “I’d guess Patrick will go to anger, and Paul to tears. Daphne, I just don’t know. Is there any way you could…?”

  “Yes,” Margaret said, not because she understood what was expected of her but only because Sylvia believed it had to be a woman, otherwise she would not have asked. And here she was, a woman. “Yes,” she said. “I will.”

  Margaret sometimes showed up with a few groceries and one time books from the library, some light history, a couple of dog-eared mysteries, but none of the books got read. Sylvia did ask for a good atlas, which Margaret drove into London to buy, and she spent some of her hours studying the changes in the world.

  After a few weeks Margaret brought Daphne in to sit on her mother’s bed and gave her the tray with the china soup plate and the silver spoon. She stood at the dusty picture window until the soup was half gone, asking Daphne questions about her schoolwork and her friends. She knew who Daphne’s girlfriends were because she often saw them walking on the street together uptown, nudging shoulders as they talked, still a bit playful but serious too, newly careful with Daphne and with each other. You could see it in their posture, in their stern faces, the eyes that brazenly searched another’s eyes with the promise of understanding. None of the girls came inside the house now, the farthest they could be coaxed was just inside the kitchen door, but this was easily recognized as one more clumsy, misplaced, well-meant gesture of respect.

  As Daphne finished spooning the soup to her mother, Margaret wondered how the boys would feel if she sent them out to the dusty windows with some newspapers and a bucket of vinegar water and then after the dishes were cleaned up she got her Harris tweed coat and her purse, said her goodnights, and let herself out the back door.

  * * *

  THE GRANDPARENTS USUALLY dropped in after supper, after Margaret had left. They were sometimes accompanied by one of Sylvia’s brothers and his wife or by her sister from out of town or by Bill’s brother from Windsor with his cheerful wife and their young children. Kitchen chairs were carried in and placed haphazardly around the room, facing Sylvia. The nieces and nephews were allowed to sit briefly on the bed to embrace their aunt and then they sprawled
out on the carpet to play secret little whispering games or snap or jumping jacks.

  The adults tried to talk about things Sylvia might find interesting, Sandy Koufax and the Brooklyn Dodgers, Lassie, James Dean being killed like that, but everyone listened too politely, too attentively to the speaker, almost all of them were too unnaturally quick to laugh or offer agreement. Sylvia heard their words not as sentences deliberately formed to tell a person something but as dull, one-at-a-time thuds against the dull silence that had begun to wall her in. She heard the words as small, well-meant blows against a concrete bunker. Although she did not ever ask, Could they please just shut up and go home.

  Occasionally they would forget themselves and talk just to each other, for which she was occasionally grateful. The most astute among them watched her closely as they talked, recognized for what they were the small, jerking movements of her hands, the slight ducking of her head as if to avoid something flying too low above her.

  Daphne decided it would be nice to use the silver tray from the buffet to serve the cookies or squares the women always brought, and Bill’s father, a heavy, large-boned man who spoke slowly and loudly, made a huge fuss over her as she circled the room with the tray, said she was coming along so nicely. Sylvia’s father, thin and wiry and wheezing with emphysema, paid no heed to the conventions expected of him. He cried openly and said awful heartfelt things like “You were always the strongest,” and “Half a life,” and “Why can’t I be taken instead,” and always when he started the others took a deep, collective breath and prepared themselves to put an end to it.

  The third or fourth time this happened Paul had to turn his suddenly streaming face to the living-room wall and, recognizing himself in his grandson, Sylvia’s father left his armchair to go to Paul, making it worse. Patrick, who in just these few short months had learned to carry love as an unspeakable pressure inside himself, got up from his chair so fast he knocked it over. He took the stairs in five great leaps and slammed the bedroom door and after that night he wouldn’t sit with them, would not even say hello when his grandfather came in the kitchen door.