A Good House

by Bonnie Burnard

  It had been a wretched winter, long at both ends, with weeks of high wind and sleet that had made driving treacherous. Then for one solid month after Christmas there was nothing but new snow, wet and dangerously heavy on the roofs. Lots of people had decided to climb up to shovel their roofs clean that year, Bill and the boys among them. Margaret had got herself through the winter imagining this month at the lake and after they had spoken for the cottage she told Bill that it might be the last summer with all of them together, and for this reason they should do what they could to make it one of the best summers they’d ever had.

  She was very much looking forward to Patrick’s wedding. She had her dress, which was not the expected mother-of-the-groom beige but teal blue with panels and a very low-cut back, and Bill had bought his first new suit since Sylvia’s death, a good navy pinstripe that should do him another seven or eight years. Aside from the groom’s dinner, which was to be held the night before the wedding and which they had decided to have at the cottage, they didn’t have any particular responsibilities at their end. The wedding was to be quite small because Mary wasn’t much for ceremony and her parents, nice people who had always lived in London and who had a cottage down the lake, said when Margaret called to offer her help that they had everything under control.

  Patrick and Mary seemed to Margaret perfectly matched. Where Charlotte appeared to be just a run-of-the-mill phoney, Mary was forthright, pleasantly frank and blunt. She was never rude, not even slightly, but if you asked her for an opinion, you might as well be ready because you’d get one. You could tell listening to her that she would have been astonished to be told she was blunt. And meeting her mother you could see it was not likely that she would be mellowing with age. Like her mother, Mary had large, wide-set eyes, a very thick head of dark hair, and good, delicately squared shoulders. But she was gracious about her appearance, laughed about it, said she was more than happy to be told that she looked like Jackie Kennedy, who wouldn’t be? Although Margaret neither said nor indicated anything of the sort, she was pleased to see that Mary had almost cured Patrick of his habit of taking refuge behind his sulky little moods. When he did try to escape, Mary went right in after him to haul him out.

  And Murray had his own someone. Charlotte was quite unlike any woman Margaret had ever known but she’d had a good talk with herself about Charlotte and she had decided that at the end of the day, if that was what Murray wanted, they were all going to have to learn to like it. There had to be something there, something Murray could see. He wasn’t a fool.

  There was no question at all in Margaret’s mind about Paul and Andy. Three years married, two kids, bang, bang, and another due soon. They’d had a big country wedding out at Andy’s church on a hot Saturday in June. There were two hundred people in the pews, friends, relatives, neighbours, and then a wonderful country meal and a dance of course. The only thing that spoiled it was Andy’s dad’s coughing, not because it interfered with the vows or the music but because it made a few of the people who loved him think they might be back at the church sooner than they wanted to be. And so they were. A year later, after he was gone, and gone quickly, diagnosed, cared for, and then dead inside of two months, his wife moved into town and Paul and Andy had a farm to run. But they were doing all right. They planted only cash crops and there was no livestock, so it wasn’t a twenty-four-hour kind of farm.

  That left Daphne. As far as Margaret knew there had been no one at all since Roger Cooper. But Daphne was only twenty-three. And she worked shifts at the hospital which had to make a social life difficult, the odd hours, the fatigue, the constant regime of having to grab some sleep when you got the chance.

  Aside from wanting each of them to connect with someone who was good enough, who was comfortable and dependable and, given the choice, easygoing, Margaret didn’t care much what the kids did with their lives otherwise. She assumed they would be able to make their living. They were all smart, exceptionally smart in her opinion. As far as she knew they were doing fine.

  Most of them spent the best part of the first Sunday at the lake lying on the sand on blankets drinking illegal beer from picnic tumblers and then swimming out to the third sandbar and back to cool off. By noon, Bill had taught Sally how to float. He had been a strong swimmer since the war. Before he left for overseas he’d come out to the lake alone and taught himself, tested himself way out past the last sandbar. He’d started Sally off with the dead man’s float, face in the water, arms extended, holding her up with one trustworthy hand under her small rib cage. When she had almost mastered that, he turned her over to face the clouds. With his hand light on her spine, over and over again holding and releasing her, he told her that floating was the first and most important part of swimming, that if you could relax your body, if you could get that feeling, the rest was only technique, just muscle control and breathing.

  After lunch Bill and Margaret walked down the beach to the store to buy overpriced butter to go with the lobsters. Murray had brought the lobsters, eight of them, packed in ice in a cooler in the trunk of his Mustang, explaining that he’d got in on a shipment from Nova Scotia arranged by a friend of a friend of a friend at work. When they got back with the butter they went upstairs to bed for the most stifling part of the afternoon.

  Murray did the cooking that night. He used an old roasting pan he found on the back porch, boiled the lobsters up two at a time. Patrick rummaged around until he found the extra leaves for the oak table and then Margaret covered it with newspaper, put out two big loaves of homemade bread and a bowl of her potato salad, the sterilized-under-boiling-water pliers from the trunk of Bill’s car, and several pretty little sauce dishes filled with melted butter and wedges of lemon.

  When they were finished with the lobster eating, she was going to give them fresh peach pie.

  * * *

  PATRICK’S GROOM’S DINNER was held the Friday night before the wedding. They’d had two good weeks of sun. Everyone was brown, even Bill and Patrick and Paul and Daphne, all of whom had been going to work most days, Bill just into town and Patrick and Daphne into London and Paul out to the farm. Even Murray, who had been coming and going from Toronto, taking long weekends. Paul tanned the fastest of course. His face and arms were brown all summer, every summer.

  They’d got quite a bit of enjoyment out of the boat. Mary and Sally sometimes took lunch and went up the lake to Port Franks, twice all the way to Grand Bend. And every evening after their walk, Bill and Margaret pulled sweaters over their bathing suits and went out on the water, cutting the motor to drift and watch the sun go down, returning in the dark, quiet and sometimes holding hands like middle-aged European film stars as they walked toward the cottage.

  At the end of the first week, Mary and Daphne and Sally had gone into London to the bridal salon for their final fitting. Mary had long ago sketched her dress for Margaret. It was plain winter-white satin with a full, ankle-length skirt, a tight bodice, a high collar, and a row of tiny satin-covered buttons running down to the small of her back. She had found the dress in Vogue, had taken the magazine with her in March to see if it could be copied. Daphne and Mary’s friend Joan, who was to be maid of honour, were going to wear full crinoline-skirted pale pink lace, had been more or less directed to lace by Mary’s mother who, having wisely restrained herself from directing her daughter’s choice, felt more than entitled to guide the attendants, explaining with blunt confidence that there should be a bit of show to this occasion. Sally’s dress was an exact but smaller copy of Mary’s, pink to match the others, but satin. And she was to have wrist gloves secured with tiny satin-covered buttons.

  Without being asked, Sally had decided that while they were at the lake she would take on the job of keeping Neil and Krissy entertained. It was obvious to everyone that she had set herself this responsibility. She spent most of the time rolling around on the floor with them or flopped in the hammock or down at the edge of the water digging in the fine, clean sand with old serving spoons, filling brightly
painted sand pails to build castles for them, pulling them back out of the water when they crawled or toddled too far away. She got them to help her collect unusual stones and pebbles along the water’s edge, tried to make them understand exactly why the stones were nice. Her arms were so small it was hard for her to lift or carry the kids, so the others watched her at a confident distance and intervened once in a while when it was necessary. But they did so quietly and quickly, as if it were hardly necessary at all.

  Because Sally was so helpful, Andy spent a lot of time on the porch couch reading first Crime and Punishment and then The Feminine Mystique. She drank a lot of juice, watched small boats pull skiers back and forth, watched the waves roll in. One afternoon she called Margaret out to see a bunch of kids, they would have been eighteen or nineteen, horsing around in the lake. Margaret said she’d heard their antics from the kitchen. Two of the guys were diving and then blasting up under their squealing, laughing girlfriends, between their legs, lifting them up out of the water and tossing them backwards. The third guy was dunking his girlfriend’s head, holding her under with both hands, letting her up and holding her under again. She fought it, she flailed and thrashed, but the more she fought, the harder he pushed. And he was stronger of course, he was a very big guy. When the girl finally got free, got her footing, the boyfriend suddenly dropped his arms and bent down sharply into the water. “I bet she kneed him,” Andy said, pleased with the possibility.

  The girl ran out of the water and grabbed a towel on her way past the blankets where they’d all been sitting, sunbathing. Then she climbed into one of their cars. The others had stopped to watch her go, and just before her boyfriend got to the car, and he was surprisingly quick to come after her, she had rolled up all the windows and locked the doors. “I’d guess that girl has just made up her mind,” Margaret said. “Let’s hope she can stick to a decision.”

  Most afternoons Andy carried the transistor radio around with her from chair to couch to chair, sang a wholehearted “She Loves Me” and a plaintive “Return to Sender,” kept time with her hands on her distended stomach. Sometimes she got up to dance around the porch with her arms raised above her head and her hips swaying seductively in her baggy plaid shorts and sometimes she sang and danced her way down to the water to cool off, wading in just to her thighs, bending down to splash her face and her arms and her shoulders. Margaret kept an eye on Andy and watching her she thought more than once that she was behaving as if she were all alone in the world, as if she couldn’t be seen. She wondered if she had done that herself, carrying Sally.

  The morning of the groom’s dinner, Patrick and Paul and Murray took Paul’s pick-up into town to go to the liquor store and to get what was needed from the house. Margaret wanted the big dining-room table and the chairs brought out because she thought everyone should be seated and there was no way to make the cottage table hold them all. She told Bill she didn’t want a buffet, would not serve a buffet for Patrick’s dinner. She gave the boys a list of the things she wanted from the house, most of which she’d wrapped and boxed up before they came out. The two linen cloths, her own china as well as Sylvia’s, her own silver and Sylvia’s, the lead crystal glasses, the blue punch bowl, the trays. The butter tarts from Mrs. Rinker. The liquor. Lots of film.

  When Patrick and Paul and Murray got back from town, Bill said they should set up in the porch so they could watch the sun go down over the lake while they ate. So the picnic table and the Muskoka chairs were carried from the porch out onto the sand beside the barbecue and the dining-room table was unloaded from the truck and brought around to the front and in through the wide screen-porch door. Getting the cottage table out to the porch was not so straightforward, and after ten minutes of trying to manoeuvre it through the narrower main door, they had to give up and take it off its pedestal, which wasn’t easy, given nuts and bolts and screws untouched for decades. After nearly an hour and three different wrenches from Paul’s truck, the two tables were finally joined end to end, and they were not dissimilar. When they were covered with the linen cloths they looked as Margaret had hoped they would look, like one long banquet table.

  Bill had gone into Clarke’s before lunch to get the roast he’d ordered, a big rolled rib, and he’d started it over a hot fire in the middle of the afternoon, adding a few coals every half hour or so and then just leaving it covered to finish on its own as the coals turned to hot ash. Several people who had been walking the beach with their dogs had to run up to the barbecue to pull the dogs away, and one guy, holding his German shepherd firmly by the collar, asked about the chances for an invitation to dinner. This was just a friendly, aren’t-we-all-so-damned-lucky kind of question, asked only to give Bill the opportunity to talk about the meal they were going to enjoy that night and about Patrick and Mary, about having a second son who was ready to tie the knot.

  Margaret and Mary and Daphne had got up at dawn to try to beat the worst heat of the day. They’d made a huge pot of lobster bisque, the leftover lobster squirrelled away in the freezer after Murray’s dinner. They’d baked the angel food cakes and three dozen pull-apart rolls. They’d scrubbed the sweet new potatoes and shelled the fresh peas, which were to be creamed, and cut up the asparagus and the carrots, which were to be caramelized. While they worked Andy sat on a stool in the corner of the kitchen with Krissy on her lap, talking to them and taking pictures of them washing and chopping the vegetables, stirring the bisque, beating the eggs, picking one last time through the nuts for bits of shell. By noon they were all sweating buckets and Margaret said they likely didn’t even need the damned oven, the kitchen itself could cook the dinner.

  Late in the afternoon, after a rest upstairs with Bill and then a quick swim with a bar of soap, Margaret made a Waldorf salad with the apples she’d got at the cold storage. Instead of walnuts, which no one liked, she used the hickory nuts she’d gathered the previous fall from the ground under the last remaining backyard hickory and smashed with her hammer on the cement stairs that led to the cellar.

  The younger women went for their swim and then they changed into sundresses and put the vegetables on to cook and started to set the long table. The blue punch bowl was filled with Sylvia’s lemonade and for dessert, on silver trays, there was the choice of Mrs. Rinker’s butter tarts or angel food cake, with a milk-glass bowl of fresh strawberries and another of stiff whipped cream to follow the cake around the table. Murray came to the kitchen with a small jar of expensive British horseradish for the beef so Margaret kept her own back.

  There were nineteen of them for dinner. Mary’s parents came over from their cottage, bringing with them her elderly grandfather. Sylvia’s mother drove out from town with Bill’s father and Mary’s friend Joan brought her boyfriend Dennis, who had a guitar and very long dull hair. Charlotte came from Toronto, arrived just as they were dishing everything up. She had stopped at one of the fruit stands on the highway and bought a bag of mushrooms and when she appeared in the kitchen offering them, Margaret almost opened the fridge to put them away for another time but then caught herself. “Oh,” she said. “Just the thing we’re missing.” She quickly scrubbed a pan clean and melted a spoonful of butter over high heat to fry the mushrooms with a quickly chopped handful of sweet onion.

  When the table was ready, after Bill had carved the roast and piled it on the platter and the potatoes were tossed with butter and a bit of mint and all the bowls were brought out from the kitchen, Bill put Patrick at one end of the table and Mary at the other, insisting. Everyone else sat wherever they wanted and when they were seated, instead of grace, Murray, who was to be Patrick’s best man, stood to offer a toast. Happiness, he said. And health. A long life. Comfort. Joy. Great, mindless, sweaty sex. Progeny. Lifelong friends. Naked ambition. Success. Blue skies. A ton of money or just enough, whichever. A split-level in the suburbs or not, whichever. A red Porsche. Holidays in the sunny south. He wished all these things for them, claimed he spoke for everyone here present.

  They ate and drank
and talked and lied and laughed on that sloping porch. Neil and Krissy were passed around and across the table like treasures, fed strawberries and peaks of whipped cream from their Great-grandfather Chambers’ finger. Mary’s mother had brought a camera and Paul got up with Margaret’s, took two rolls of film, making sure he got shots of everyone. Sally was so happy she cried. She had been walking around and around the table lightly touching everyone as she passed behind them, and when she squeezed in to stand between Margaret and Charlotte, she could no longer hold it back. The talking gradually stopped and everyone watched as she tried to explain her tears, and when they were finally understood, Charlotte was the one who reached out to comfort her.

  An evening breeze flowed around their shoulders and the sun went down for them just as they’d hoped it would, slowly and beautifully, the red and orange and pink and mauve descent filling the sky above the shining water and then spreading, moving in across the water toward the shore. They talked as long as they could over the table but when the darkness brought cold air in off the lake they decided to move inside. Paul lit one of his fires and Dennis started to play his guitar, although not very well. The other men got out the rye and the gin and the crokinole board and the cards for euchre and all the women but Mary, who was after all the bride, and Andy, who was by this time extremely tired, and Sally, who was upstairs getting Neil and Krissy settled down to sleep on their army cots, started to clean up the dishes so the men could bring the tables in.

  Charlotte stayed out on the porch long enough to pick up The Feminine Mystique from the hammock, asking no one in particular, “Who among you is reading this horrid thing?” Then she tossed it down and walked to the kitchen carrying the silver tray of leftover tarts in one hand and the empty salad bowl in the other.

  Seeing Charlotte with her hands full, concluding that she had decided not to sit this one out, before she could put a stop to it, Margaret thought, Now this is an occasion. She took the tray and the salad bowl, handing them off to Mary’s mother, and then she turned Charlotte by the shoulders and reached to tie a fresh apron around her waist. It was the first time Margaret had touched her. Feeling the jumpy bones beneath Charlotte’s firm flesh, she thought, perhaps as punishment for the earlier thought, Oh, how awful for her.