A Good House

by Bonnie Burnard

  Murray’s parents were on their first Caribbean cruise, so the big brick house beside the United Church was dark and empty. Murray unpacked but he didn’t stay even long enough for the heat to come up before he got back in his car. He had every reason to go over to Bill and Margaret’s. More reason now. He assumed he would be welcome to join them for Christmas dinner but he offered to buy the turkey anyway and Margaret said sure, that would be fine, although she would appreciate it if he let her go up to Sylvia’s father at Clarke’s and pick it out herself. Last year Bill had gone up on his own and after a Christmas drink or two out back with everyone he had come home with a twenty-eight pounder and, although she hadn’t said so and would not have said so, she believed the meat in a younger, smaller bird was just a lot more tender. If quantity was going to be an issue, better two smaller birds than one monster. That was her policy.

  Margaret knew that with all this help around she had it much easier than most new mothers. She rested, aware of her good fortune. When Sylvia’s mother asked discreetly if her milk was coming down all right, Margaret put her hands to her astonishing breasts and laughed out loud, said there was enough for Sally and likely quite a few others. Sally thrived.

  * * *

  IN EARLY APRIL of the following year, at the end of a beautiful first long week of spring, Margaret stood with her hands buried in soapy water at the kitchen sink watching evening overtake the backyard. Sally was in her basket on the floor at her feet, sleeping as she always did with her small fists curled and her arms uplifted in the position of surrender, her soft scent almost visible. Margaret liked to stand at the kitchen window watching the shadows from the trees make their way across the grass. There were patterns she could anticipate now. She didn’t know if it was having Sally or just more time alone since she’d given up her job, but she saw things here, lovely things, all the time.

  The rolling April sky was threatening to do something before nightfall and three yard squirrels were quarrelling stupidly over the hickory nuts they’d hidden in the fall, chasing each other across the garage roof and halfway up the trees, around and around the lawn chairs, which were still overturned from the winter. Bill had been talking about having the back hickories cut down, using the space they took for a shed to store the odds and ends that accumulated, of their own volition, he said, in the garage. He said he could disguise the shed with a trellis or an arbour, maybe add a garden bench. He said with some of the shade gone Margaret could plant some vegetables out there if she liked.

  Patrick had come home for Easter to work a week at the feed mill because one of the full-time guys had some heart trouble, and as Margaret rinsed the glasses under the hottest possible water she heard him coming quietly down the stairs. Sylvia had been correct about her oldest son. Lately he had been spending a lot of his free time in his room with his stereo, listening to records, and he always moved quietly now, you never quite knew where he was. He was too well mannered, too thoroughly trained for much outright anger, for outbursts, and she would not have thought to use the word depressed because that word was saved for people who were in serious difficulty, but she did come up with the word cranky. She assumed that a good part of his crankiness was directed at her, although she did not dream that Patrick would tell her what was on his mind. From what she had seen so far, they were not in the habit of levelling with each other in this house, certainly not the way she was used to anyway, with screaming matches and foul, ugly words that had to be mopped up the next day, with mindless accusations that still rang clear miles and years away. And she wasn’t about to teach them how.

  Patrick walked into the kitchen wearing a new ball glove, his Christmas gift from Murray. He was working it with his fist, pounding it, giving it shape, and when he pushed the screen door open to leave she stopped him with a question. “When you consider the fact that men generally have longer legs,” she said, “do you believe the greater distance between the bases really does make baseball a harder game than softball?”

  His face showed mild surprise but he thought for a minute and gave her a serious answer. “Well, I think that’s the idea,” he said.

  “I wonder,” she said. “Sometimes I wonder if I couldn’t have played baseball, given my legs.” She turned to look at him. “Your mother and I played softball together,” she said. “She was a top-flight first baseman and I myself was a half-decent shortstop. You likely don’t remember,” she said, “but sometimes your grandparents brought you guys to the park to watch in your pyjamas.” And then to give him some context, to give him a way to imagine it, she told him, “This was when the men were overseas.”

  He was halfway out the door, leaning against the screen, waiting.

  She picked up the pile of plates from the counter and lowered them carefully down through the water. “Although no one ever put it in so many words,” she said, “your mother and I were pretty much the backbone of that team. We were good,” she said, nodding once and firmly as someone would after any fair judgement. When she said, “One year we came this close to the provincial championship,” she lifted her hand from the suds to show him the smallest possible space between her thumb and forefinger.

  Patrick looked at her soapy hand and for just a split second, but surely, his face softened. There it is, Margaret thought, and, Now maybe that’s done. Then he gave her his own clumsy nod and turned his face to the sound of Murray’s car on the gravel in the driveway.

  Margaret raised her head to smile at Murray through the window. She knew he would be watching to see if she did, they all kept an eye on her to see what she might do. And she knew he would be able to see the smile because she had been walking Sally up and down the streets in her high, proud buggy in the evenings and now she understood better than some that what looked from the inside like a square of shadowy darkness was really in the dusk a square of framing light. Murray would see the smile and not as a freakish reflection as she saw it, but clearly, unmistakably. Seeing it, he might put one more tick in his Margaret’s All Right column. She realized that Murray, too, had needed time to get used to things. She had watched him grieve, maybe not as obviously as the others, but not less.

  “Sally and I might come to some of your games this summer,” she offered, and although Patrick had nothing to say to this, he did take the time before he jumped the steps to use his elbow against the closing of the screen door so Sally wouldn’t be frightened awake by a bang.

  The last part of what Margaret had told Patrick had been a lie, had been what her notoriously blunt, profane, and long-deceased father would have called a bare-assed lie. She had hardly known Sylvia. They had never played on the same ball team and neither of them had ever got close to any championship.

  She did have a memory of the Chambers kids on the bleachers those summers when the men were away. They would already be bathed and ready for bed, Paul and Daphne wrapped in blankets in their grandparents’ arms, Patrick running loose with the other boys. Banks of park lights had been installed to illuminate the diamond for night games, sometimes there were two a night, and she did remember warming up behind the bleachers, glancing over once in a while to see how the other game was going and seeing Sylvia on first base slamming a fist into her glove, yelling ball talk with the other women, jumping funny little jumps on the bag to keep herself revved up.

  And what’s a lie, she thought, against everything else? Against Sylvia’s bone-thin dying? Or Bill’s having to learn to love a second woman a second way? Against her own stale life above the Hydro office, the small rooms holding like swamp gas the uncut smell of her own body, her own habits, her own little difficulties. Against her living-room view of the cenotaph, where a name she had once said softly and often was etched two inches high in the granite column, her view of that column fouled by filthy windows she could neither open nor get anyone to wash. Against the secret, muffled, after-the-war footsteps of a man not her husband mounting the stairs late in those long evenings above the Hydro office, the pleasure of his company, his praise, and
then the hush of broken, wondrous promises. What, pray tell, is a lie?

  She was ninety per cent certain Patrick would never mention the championship to anyone, he wasn’t that type, and even if it did get mentioned one day, she could rear up and say, Sure we did, of course we did. She could talk about those years long enough to make them all believe they misremembered. And they would defer to her, just as surely as they watched her. Truth be told, she thought they should be ready to offer a few lies on her behalf.

  Alone now, she turned from the window and looked down at the basket at her feet. And then she snapped her sudsy wrist hard in the air above the basket, releasing a cluster of rainbow bubbles that fell in slow time down to her perfectly formed Sally who, sleeping, could neither reach to touch them nor watch with an innocent’s bewilderment their bursting.

  1963

  THEY RENTED DUNWORKIN for the entire month of July. Other years Bill had taken his holidays when they were at the lake, but because it was only a fifteen-minute drive from town and because he couldn’t see sitting around on his duff for four whole weeks, he decided not to that summer. The plan was that he would go back and forth to work every day and Margaret and Sally would stay put. The rest could come and go as it suited them.

  Dunworkin was one of the oldest and biggest cottages on the beach. It was painted a muted light green, and it sat in the dunes, was tucked into the grassy dunes for protection from the winds off the water. As part of the deal, a fourteen-foot cedar-strip outboard with an easily managed twenty-five-horse motor sat beached on the sand in front of the cottage, and after an evening spin out on Lake Huron, when it was time to make the turn to come in for a drink, Bill sometimes made a game of testing the strength of his middle-aged eyesight against the block letters painted on a board above the screen-porch door. Like most of the other cottages up and down the beach, Dunworkin had always had its name, was probably named soon after it was built in the twenties, or maybe before, when it was still just someone’s good idea.

  It was a magnificent cottage. Across the front, a deep, screened-in, slightly sloping porch with hinged board shutters that in good weather were left hooked up to the ceiling held a picnic table for card games and Margaret’s jigsaw puzzle, several Muskoka chairs painted either a deep cherry red or black, an old canvas hammock at one end and at the other a swinging couch suspended from the ceiling on rusty chains.

  Inside the cottage proper there was a large main room with two old maroon sofas and several low-slung upholstered chairs, none of which matched each other or anything else, and beside these a few rickety little tables, each with an ashtray, one with a stack of Reader’s Digests and National Geographics for rainy days. The ceiling was a grid of rough-weathered beams and painted plywood. The walls had been finished with good pine panelling and the floor was covered with broad pine planks. Visible footpaths had been worn into the planks’ grain from the front door back into the kitchen and from the kitchen past the big oak dining table to the open staircase.

  The fieldstones in the fireplace on the end wall had been darkened with years of smoke curling out before the fire got going properly and above them a heavy, broad mantel held a spread-out collection of necessities and treasures: pink shells from some ocean, four arrowheads, a red flyswatter, a flashlight, a transistor radio, a small, decorative Japanese fan, and a large box of Eddy matches. Beside the fireplace the owner had left a well-stacked supply of dry wood and a beat-up wicker laundry basket filled with newspaper and kindling.

  There was cottage art. Hanging above the mantel a large, heavily framed oil depicted a man in a small boat who was making his way through dense, drifting fog toward a looming clipper ship, the man sitting hunched against the elements, the long oars just lifted from the water, the only real light the painter allowed caught in the drops falling from the oars back into the sea. On the wall at the kitchen door a small framed needlepoint sampler firmly admonished all who entered to leave their troubles behind them and taped to the wall beside the stove a 1963 calendar, courtesy Trevor Hanley’s Chev Olds, had been turned to July, to Saskatchewan. It was the kind of calendar with each month of the year matched to a picturesque colour photograph of a touristy scene from one of the provinces and July was an aerial shot of two lonely but evidently prosperous prairie farms, each of them surrounded by a rectangular shelterbelt of trees and by worked fields, muted tan or green. A small river twisted across the photograph and the sky above the fields was a western summer blue, bouncing with light. And hanging perpetually crooked on the pine wall beside the front door there was another, quite-a-bit-smaller oil painting, this one of a tiny-waisted turn-of-the-century woman dressed in a voluptuous rose dress and a wide-brimmed pink hat. She carried a parasol against the sun and offered the room an old-fashioned, come-hither smile. Bill named her the Tart of Dunworkin and straightened her every time he went out the door.

  Compared to town, the kitchen was primitive but adequate. There was hardly any counter space but there were two large banks of pine cupboards, both hot and cold running water at a deep porcelain sink, and a fridge new enough to have a decent freezer across the bottom. The prize was the stove. It was an old six-burner with both a baking and a warming oven. In May, when they’d come out looking for a cottage to rent, it was the stove that had clinched it for Margaret. This was a stove she would have traded her own for.

  Upstairs there were five bedrooms and a screened-in sleeping porch that sloped down toward the beach in agreement with the porch below it. There were beds of every kind, old double beds very high off the floor that had once been good pieces of furniture, likely picked up at auction sales, newer single beds on wheels, a rollaway, three army cots.

  When the owner had shown them the cottage, he had followed them from room to room and Margaret hadn’t had the nerve to inspect the mattresses with him standing right there, but as soon as they’d brought everything in from the cars, the first thing she did was go upstairs to lift and turn each of them. When Daphne brought up the basket of sheets and blankets, Margaret told her she had been hoping for something fresher on the other side but these warhorses had been turned before, many times. Then she said they would just have to do, wouldn’t they?

  Everyone came for the first weekend, all eleven of them. Bill and Margaret and Sally, who was six, Patrick and Mary who were to be married in two weeks in the chapel at Springbank Park in London, Murray on his own again because his wife Charlotte was in Hamilton at her parents’, Paul and Andy with their arms full of Neil and Krissy and all their attendant gear, Andy pregnant again with what she called their last baby for sure, and Daphne.

  None of them mourned Murray’s wife’s absence. He had brought Charlotte up the previous summer, just before they were married in Toronto, and everyone had been first surprised and then disappointed. Charlotte dove right in, and while they understood that working for a television station might make someone necessarily forthright, she couldn’t seem to have a conversation without trying to enlarge herself. She paid an extraordinary amount of attention to her appearance, changed her clothes three times a day, expected other people to change theirs. She sat at the supper table puzzled as if she didn’t quite know how to manage just one fork, dropped names like Tolstoy and Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent and Bloomingdale’s, drank only what she called the best Scotch, assumed ignorance, presumed envy. Looking across the supper table at Sally, who at five was freckled and bony and sometimes clumsy and often left in general but happy disrepair, Charlotte told them that she herself had been an unusually beautiful child. She was without question pretty, with her mink-brown eyes and her snub nose and her white, gleaming teeth and she did have the body of a slightly underfed showgirl. But she wasn’t the first good-looking person they’d had a chance to eat supper with. They’d never heard anyone say such a thing.

  After Murray decided to marry her, he told them that her father had three car dealerships in Hamilton, that he’d got a pretty good start in the fifties. He said her mother was a great woman, very funny
, and a big volunteer. None of this explained anything.

  Patrick in particular detested Charlotte and was always ready to call her the Queen if Murray wasn’t around to hear it. Bill and Paul simply ducked out when she came into a room, the sight of her reminding them always of some important thing they’d forgotten they had to do. Daphne tried the hardest, taking the trouble to slip Charlotte a few easy clues. After the third meal at Margaret’s table in town she handed her a fresh tea towel, meaning to say, Margaret looks tired, she cooked, you ate, now maybe you could help dry the damn dishes. She deliberately and repeatedly said Margaret’s name, meaning to say, It would be a really good thing if you stopped calling Margaret Marg. She carefully referred to her niece and nephew as the kids, meaning to say, If you’d pay attention, you would see that we are not the kind of people who want the kids called the children. Charlotte might have saved things if she’d noticed and adapted a bit but it looked as if she couldn’t be bothered. And they hadn’t wanted much. Margaret told Bill the absence of a patronizing tone of voice would have done it for her.

  No one could imagine Charlotte at the lake anyway, so far away from a decent hairdresser, the sun so hot, the flies so thick on a muggy day, the mattresses turned but still clearly suspect under Margaret’s crisp sheets.

  * * *

  MARGARET WAS FORTY-NINE and Bill had turned fifty-one that March. Bill’s hair was mostly grey and he had what he liked to call bandy old-man legs. This would have astonished him even five years before, his legs going. They had always been strong, for most of his life his strength had been in his legs. He was deeply embarrassed to wear the Bermuda shorts Margaret and Daphne had decked him out in the summer before, two identical pairs of them, plaid, but he wore them then and he was wearing them again this year. What else could you wear at the lake? He drew the line at sandals. He was either in his normal shoes and socks or he was barefoot.