A Good House

by Bonnie Burnard

  When he picked her up on the Saturday night, getting out of Margaret’s Pontiac to go inside and meet the mother, Sandra came down the stairs in a sundress her mother said she’d got an A for in Home Economics. It was dark red with a full skirt and thin straps which Sandra identified, when they were in the car on their way out to the lake, as spaghetti straps. Spaghetti straps required a strapless bra, she told him.

  Less than a year later, when they were finally finished with each other, Patrick guessed it was the irresistible weight of her breasts against those straps, that and nothing much else that had got him through the summer.

  The Casino sat high in the dunes above Lake Huron. It was large and square, cream stucco with a dark red roof. Downstairs there were slot machines on a gritty cement floor, not very clean washrooms, and long benches against the cement-block walls. There was a concession where swimmers and sunbathers could buy potato chips or Coppertone for their tans, and, beside it, a big pop cooler. You had to lift the lid and reach down through ice water for a bottle of Coke or Canada Dry or Orange Crush and more than once a kid who had just come in after hours and hours of playing in the afternoon sun stuck an arm down and promptly slumped to the gritty cement floor, out cold.

  Upstairs, the hardwood dance floor was surrounded by a wraparound balcony with shutters that could be dropped quickly if a storm came up off the lake. You could stand out there between dances and listen to the waves lapping on the sand and stare out over the shining water toward Michigan. Or you could look up at the stars and the moon in the dark sky above the water, at the clouds that threatened to obliterate the light as they drifted across it. Patrick had been coming out to the Casino dances since he was fifteen and he had never once been with a girl who didn’t like to do this, who didn’t soften looking out at the water or up at the sky.

  The band was always the same. They played mostly country and western with a few polkas and square dances thrown in, sometimes a jive. On a good night they could be talked into trying “Sixteen Tons” or “Moments to Remember” or “Blue Suede Shoes” or “Heartbreak Hotel.” There was no booze, not inside anyway, not that you could see.

  Patrick and Sandra recognized nearly everyone around them but they danced only together, oblivious to the people they would ordinarily dance with at least once or twice. And no one bothered them because a first date gave you that right, to ignore people you knew, to pretend you couldn’t see their faces, couldn’t hear them speaking even though they surrounded you, same as always.

  On the way home after the dance they didn’t talk as much as Patrick had thought they would. Standing on her porch under a naked two-hundred-watt bulb that lit the entire yard and half the barn, with one of the black Labs thumping its tail eagerly against his legs, he leaned in to kiss her and when she kissed him back, he took his chance to cup her heavy breast in his hand. But she pulled the hand away and wrapped it around her back. He assumed she had a set of rules in mind. Although it was the biggest breast he’d touched, it wasn’t the first. And a guy could be forgiven. The rules varied from girl to girl, more than you’d think.

  The Wednesday night after the Casino dance he took her into Sarnia to a show, a war movie, which they watched low in their seats, holding hands as soon as the plot was well established, Patrick’s arm quickly closing in around her shoulders. On the way home after the show there was finally quite a bit of talk. Sandra started it by saying how sorry she was about his mother’s death and when he tensed up she quickly said she understood how awful it must be for his family. She told him she was sure it would make him feel better to talk about it, that she really believed talking helped. When he reached to turn up the radio, meaning to say that the song shouldn’t be missed, she was obviously annoyed that he wasn’t even going to try to put it into words for her but she went on bravely to more ordinary things: what he was studying, what he wanted out of university, where she herself thought she might want to go when she graduated. The goodnight kisses took place in the dark of the car, although they were still too few for Patrick and his hand was still very firmly guided. He knew what he’d be doing, wasn’t very happy about what he’d be doing when he got home into his own warm bed.

  The show had been a slacks-and-sweater-set date but on the Friday night, when their only plan was to do something and Sandra appeared at her door in a pale pink angora sweater and a wraparound skirt, he drove straight out to Lake Huron. He made two slow trips up and down the beach, nodding and waving at the other guys, mostly high school types who were driving the beach with their girlfriends, and then he turned off to follow the road that twisted back to the inland lakes. He parked the car beside one of the smallest lakes and they leaned forward together to look up through the windshield at the stars. After what he believed was long enough, he said he’d check to see if there was a blanket in the trunk and she helped him spread it out on the soft grassy sand.

  Sandra was easy enough to get along with. She laughed a lot and sometimes threw her head back when she did as if she’d never in her life had such a good time. He started to miss her through the week, got so he couldn’t remember how he had filled his time before he’d asked her out.

  He did miss Murray, who had stayed on alone in London, to work. They’d both decided that residence was not for them so before Patrick moved home they had hunted around one morning and found an apartment near the campus and Murray was living there until September, working at the Ancaster Inn on the other side of the city. When Patrick told Bill about their decision, explaining that residence was more than half full of assholes, it seemed to Bill that Patrick might be getting unnecessarily surly.

  Their apartment had once been just the upstairs of a normal house. It had a narrow living room across the front with big windows overlooking Richmond Street, two bedrooms, a small kitchen, and off the kitchen a back porch with a staircase leading down to a derelict backyard. There was an old fridge, a stove that was on its last legs, and a grey arborite table with two red chairs. They had borrowed a truck to pick up a couch and a couple of armchairs at the Sally Ann, bought two twin beds at Eaton’s, and raided Margaret’s stash in the basement at home for lamps and curtains and pots and pans and dishes and cutlery.

  Patrick and Murray tried to describe their apartment one night when everyone was in the living room watching I Love Lucy. Bill’s face looked attentive but he laughed nearly every time Lucy opened her mouth, pounding the arms of his chair in appreciation. Margaret wouldn’t let Bill watch his other favourite show, The Honeymooners, not if she was around anyway, because growing up she’d had enough of sloppy, angry men screaming to last her two lifetimes and how could this possibly, possibly be funny?

  She had understood for a long time that the invective at her own girlhood kitchen table, the blind faith in strict rules and the outrage that followed their breaking, had been prompted mostly by a sick longing for order, for a kind of peace, and she knew this longing was not unusual, probably not even despicable. But now, from the vantage point of middle age, standing at the kitchen sink, at her kitchen sink, she recognized that all of it together had been nothing more than ordinary selfishness and stupidity and perhaps even laziness, all of it together had only been her father’s way to make things easier for himself.

  She guessed Bill likely turned on The Honeymooners when she wasn’t home. He’d told her that Art Carney was the one to watch, not Gleason, said the way Carney survived Gleason was what made it so enjoyable.

  In a commercial for Everlasting pots and pans, when the boys saw the chance to bring everyone’s attention back to themselves, they announced that neither Margaret nor Daphne would be allowed to come in to clean their apartment. This claim to independence caused a look to pass quickly from Margaret to Daphne, one look among the many they would come to perfect between them, “the repertoire” it would eventually be called, after enough time had passed.

  Sometimes Patrick and Sandra drove into London to see Murray. They would pick him up for an early show or just sit around talking
before he had to go to work at midnight. Sometimes they arrived with groceries and Sandra made her Home Economics recipe for chili or stuffed green peppers or apple crisp. A few times a month they stayed overnight, telling everyone Murray was going to be there when he wasn’t.

  Because Murray never had anyone at the apartment and because he drove home every time he had a couple of days off, Patrick assumed he had nothing special going for him in the city and it seemed reasonable to ask Sandra to set him up with someone. She soon had several possibles for consideration but Murray wasn’t biting. He worked, he slept, he drove home to see his parents, he went over to the house as usual to spend some time talking to Daphne or Paul or to Bill and Margaret.

  Patrick didn’t say so directly, but he thought Murray’s reluctance was peculiar. He couldn’t comprehend why Murray was dragging his feet, especially since Sandra was willing to help with the hard part and the rewards were substantial. But he gave it up, carried on alone, left Murray out of it.

  He had started to go out to Sandra’s and sit around on the porch with her father and the dogs if she was washing her hair or something, and soon he didn’t have to ask her out any more, she’d just tell him if she had to do something else. They would go to a show or lie around one house or the other watching television until they couldn’t stand it any longer and then they would drive out to the lake to find a private depression in a grassy dune.

  Like Daphne, Sandra had two more years of high school, and one night out at the inland lakes after they’d spread the blanket on the sand, at her insistence they began to discuss a time other than the present. Sandra didn’t see the future as he did, as something entirely unknown but wide open, she saw the future as something you could put together, something you could cut out and assemble, like a red sundress. “What we need to have,” she told him, “are concrete plans.”

  Patrick knew something was required, that he had to offer something up in return for the weight of her breasts in his hands, the strength of her legs locked behind his back, so he said he’d likely still be in school, he wanted to keep going as long as he could, so why didn’t she just plan on Western? Thinking this and saying it too soon after thinking it, he was for the first time annoyed with her, and then, almost immediately, with himself.

  On the way back into town from the lake his annoyance solidified and shifted and landed square in his lap. Yes, they were having a good time, and yes, he hadn’t had any satisfactory action at Western, and yes, it was all normal and usual and probably expected, but there was no damn way it was going to be so thoroughly nailed down, not with him in it.

  He replayed the blanket conversation in his head and then pushed back to a couple of other conversations he hadn’t paid enough attention to. Now he was mad, and sitting tight beside him in the front seat of Margaret’s Pontiac, Sandra picked up on his anger. She pulled away to get a good look at his face.

  Almost from the beginning she had said the word love when there was no good reason to say it. He didn’t need to hear it, he had never given her any reason to believe he needed to hear it. He thought now, turning onto her concession, that he should have told her right from the beginning that he didn’t particularly like all the romantic talk, the love stuff, that he thought in fact it was a bit simple-minded.

  And even at the start of this first dissolution of what he would much later in his life describe with a hard-won edge in his voice as a first affair, he knew that ending it was not going to be a cold-blooded exercise. This urge to stop her, to stop himself, was as hot as the urge to begin had been, easily as hot.

  How to get it done, that was what he thought about as the summer cooled down. Fast or slow? And was there anyone to ask? Murray wouldn’t know. Paul wouldn’t know. But not Bill and certainly not Margaret.

  * * *

  MURRAY HAD FINISHED the year on the dean’s honour roll and he was more than happy to stay on in London at the apartment for the summer. After exams he quickly got himself a job as the night desk clerk at the Ancaster Inn out near the highway, undercutting any assumptions people might have had that he was counting on a free ride. He had never before found a job on his own, although he’d done his time in the office at the mill learning how to keep a ledger and he always helped out at Bill and Margaret’s and cut the grass at home, washed the cars, sometimes washed the dishes if his mother had one of her migraine headaches.

  His parents had called him every two months or so that first year to say they were coming into the city and would he like to meet them downtown at the Iroquois for dinner, and one time they’d invited Patrick and Daphne to come along too, but they never went near the residence and they didn’t have many questions. They were content to let him manage the details of his life on his own. When he told them about the desk clerk job, they both said that sounded fine. His mother said he would get to meet people he perhaps wouldn’t get to meet otherwise and his father said working with the public was valuable experience for anyone.

  He’d got lucky with his residence roommate, a studious Jewish guy from Toronto named Geoff whose marks hadn’t been high enough for U of T, but who wanted to transfer there after first year if he could pull it off. Geoff studied all the time, was devoted to his books, asked for and got Murray’s help with some of his essays. His father was a big-name journalist who had covered the war in France and Italy and then in the Philippines, and although his expectations never left the room, Geoff didn’t see him because he still had to be out of the country a lot, even in peacetime. He just couldn’t take the time to visit, understandably. Geoff said his father had a million stories, fantastic stories, and he tracked him through the world not by the pieces he wrote for newspapers but by the postcards taped above his bed, a small but growing gallery of exotic locales with the private, scribbled messages turned to the wall. He went home with Murray and Patrick a few times for the weekend and occasionally they hauled him down to the Ceeps for a wasted evening, buying him beer and telling him his skin was turning a putrid green from too much time at the books, that he’d never get laid if he didn’t put out at least a bit of effort. They won’t come to you, they told him, all the pretty horses.

  Pretty horses notwithstanding, Geoff’s marks had been high enough for the desired transfer to U of T and after they were packed up he’d offered Murray his hand and thanked him for the help with the essays and told him if he was ever in Toronto, if he ever needed anything at all, to look him up, for sure.

  In June, almost comfortable with his desk clerk job, Murray agreed at the last minute to book a night off sick so he could go home to take Daphne to her high school formal. She hadn’t really explained herself when she called to ask him so he assumed her on-again, off-again nonsense with Roger Cooper had left her stranded with a new dress and no date. At the dance, feeling a bit out of it, he spent perhaps too much time standing under the streamers talking to the teachers, but they had a nice time, Daphne told him she’d had a really nice time. And she got to show off the dress, which he understood to be the purpose of the exercise.

  He drove home whenever he had a few days free to see everyone. When Margaret began to really show, it seemed all right to say something so he told her she looked great. She continued to make him feel welcome, setting a place for him at the table without making a big deal about it. Once she took his hand and brought it to her stomach so he could feel the soft punch of what she said was probably an elbow or a foot or a baseball bat.

  At the Ancaster Inn he hardly saw anyone after midnight. He learned to put the registrations and the receipts in order for the bookkeeper and to clean up any mistakes made during the day shifts, which were the busy shifts. He always had a novel under way. Over the summer he went through all of Faulkner and then Steinbeck, ignoring Hemingway because even though Hemingway was supposed to have been a journalist and Murray was interested in journalism, from what he’d heard he was pretty sure he wouldn’t like the fiction. He wasn’t all that drawn to the tough stuff, the bulls and balls.

  He didn�
��t see many of the motel’s usual clientele, the families. By the time he came on they were all tucked in for the night and when he left at dawn they were still sleeping or just up, just getting organized to go back on the road. He did see the evidence of a few obviously illicit affairs, men who registered late and alone and good-looking women who walked out through the lobby quickly in the middle of the night.

  And he met Crystal, his first high-class hooker, a long-legged bottle redhead in very expensive clothes who arrived at the inn every three weeks through the summer on the arm of a man who called himself Mr. Crystal, who was her manager, her pimp. Mr. Crystal was a slight, boisterous man in a high-gloss white summer suit. When they registered he always left his mauve Lincoln Continental under the awning out front with the keys in it, running, and he always took two connecting rooms.

  Crystal was a busy lady. All of her calls came in through Murray, through the switchboard which looked just like he had imagined a switchboard would look and which he’d almost mastered by the end of the summer. Sometimes, wide awake and brisk in the middle of the night, she would call down to the desk for tea and a muffin or something. There were no busboys on after midnight and, except for the calls prompted by the presence of Crystal herself, the switchboard was pretty quiet, so Murray would go into the kitchen and make her a pot of tea and grab a muffin or a Danish and take them down the inside corridor to her room. Eddie, the second-in-command maintenance man, would sometimes be in the kitchen with a couple of his crew, eating yesterday’s Danish, drinking coffee, and they would razz him, tell him he should demand a real good tip from a woman that well off.