A Good House

by Bonnie Burnard

  She was looking, she supposed, for an artifact unique to another century, something rarely seen any more, some small thing meant to be solid against rot. She assumed the treasure would be shiny, expected the sun to throw the necessary light.

  1997

  MAGGIE DREAMED THE night before her wedding day that Kevin Costner, or someone like him, who was with her at a run-down rainy cottage on some river, had a very short, perky penis that he proudly called a smart penis and that someone else, some dark Robert Mitchum film-noir type, standing half dressed and hunched in a shadowy alley doorway smoking a cigarette, had one that was a foot long and thin as a pencil and apparently exhausted, worn right down to almost nothing. As she came to consciousness, these disparate images, these quite separate men crowded together in one lusty dream frame, tried hard to cling to the rafters of her brain. But they were fading fast, they were being booted out the back door, asked to leave with the sleep that made them. Well, she thought, not quite ready to open her eyes, that wasn’t very bridelike.

  When she did open her eyes to the light from the window, the men were gone, completely and immediately gone. It was almost as if they had not been real at all. Throwing off the duvet, getting up to walk to the bathroom, she thought, I am only anticipating fidelity, I am only putting foolish things behind me. And then, levelling a steady gaze at her face in the dappled mirror above the cracked pedestal sink, she thought, Hollywood. Nothing happens without Hollywood. Not even the dreams of a bride. She turned on the tap and laid some Colgate along the bristles of her toothbrush.

  When Maggie and Jill were teenagers Daphne had often asked about their dreams, perhaps as a kind of quick, maternal, psychic check-up. As with nearly everything else in those days, sometimes they played it straight and sometimes they did not. Only once in a while, when they were at some loss or in some muddle, when they really needed her to be tuned in to them, did they actually tell Daphne a version of the truth. Otherwise they thought and said that she was being invasive, that she was just trying to shove herself into their lives.

  The water was pouring out steaming hot so she knew no one else had showered yet. She wanted it to be as hot as her skin could stand, tested it on her open palm, told herself that even the water pressure this morning might be taken as a good omen. She stepped into the tub and pulled the curtain closed.

  One summer she and Jill claimed to be having the same dreams, the details varying only slightly, the promise or the menace easily reflected from one dream to its sister. Daphne stopped asking after that summer. She told them that, try as she might, she could no longer make any sense whatever of the insides of their heads, that they were now and possibly forevermore beyond her comprehension.

  Jill had proposed a theory then that dreams were really alien life forms, floating around at large in the night air, wafting through clouds and shingles and ceilings and blankets in search of an empty, welcoming brain where they could relax and thrive. She said she figured by the time the dreams discovered that they could not make it in a human brain, could not thrive, it was too late to get out. They were already dying. “Pffftt,” she’d said, snapping her fingers. “Dead and gone.”

  Daphne’s ordinary conversation with Maggie and Jill had always been loaded up with words like wafting and welcoming and thrive and gone. The only children’s stories they’d had from her were those filled with what she named the best words, the weird, strange, yummy words. She said what actually happened wasn’t nearly as important, and besides, if they were paying close attention, it was always pretty much the same old story anyway: “Be careful, children. You are all alone. Be very good or else.”

  By the time Jill was old enough to hear this, Maggie was in grade four and quite used to asking the hard questions. Of course she had challenged her mother, of course she had wanted to know, “Or else what?” and Jill had chimed in after her, imitating almost everything Maggie did then, everything she could manage.

  Cuddled together with the two of them, her own body solid and calm in the middle of the bed, their two small clean bodies wiggling and wrapping themselves tight around her, their lovely little fingers pulling on the ribbons that were threaded through the bodice of her nightgown, Daphne told them, “Well, something will come and get you. Eat you up. There won’t be a trace of you left. You know that.” She gave them this nonsense to make them snort and giggle, to make them flail their arms and legs in theatrical fear, to allow them their beloved dramatics. She could offer such nonsense because she believed and they believed that they were both already smart enough to seriously doubt many of the things the world offered.

  Their storybooks had been packed and brought with them when they moved from London into the old McFarlane house. They had their own shelf on one side of the small fireplace in the den, where they sat unread but dusted, waiting patiently for grandchildren, Daphne said. All the other shelves were filled with the small boxes Daphne had started to collect when she graduated from nursing. Many of the boxes were finely crafted wood, some of them were glass, some were clay. One of them, Maggie’s favourite, brought back from Italy by Aunt Andy, was pressed tin.

  So Maggie knew what any kids she might have with Josh would get to hear at their grandmother’s knee. And she had wondered how Josh might counter Daphne if and when they did have kids. He would counter her. Josh liked to believe that he himself relied exclusively on logic and consideration, and because of this, or in spite of this, he had no patience with Daphne, with what he called her never-ending attempt to influence. The first time Maggie had brought him home from graduate school to meet everyone, to show him how her life had been, he hadn’t been able to restrain himself. Sneaking across the hall, into her bed, holding her in his beefy arms, he’d started to mumble something he obviously considered benign about the implications of feminism, about women making very odd choices and how those choices could have a severe impact on other, innocent people.

  She’d thrown him out of her bed, before she knew she was going to do it she’d pushed him to the floor, the thud when he landed a loud giveaway in the nighttime quiet of the house. He had been very surprised. The following night, back in Toronto, she’d noticed a bruise on his hip in the shape of a pear.

  Standing under the hard stream of hot water, thinking about Josh’s resistance to her mother, which by September would be moot because they’d be three thousand miles away and up to their ears in books and papers and seminars, and then thinking about the tone of his voice when he’d said that word choice, the cool, academic detachment, Maggie thought, not for the first time, Isn’t it peculiar that the people who love me best know so little about the way life, my life, works.

  Above the noise of the water bursting out to cleanse her long bride body she could hear Jill at the bathroom door, pounding. Jill was more excited about this wedding than she was, had been for weeks. “Miss,” Jill yelled. “I’ve got some breakfast for you.”

  Maggie opened the door wrapped in one of the nearly threadbare beach towels Margaret had picked up for them in Port Huron ten years before, when they’d first started swimming every chance they got. This one was hers because it had the clipper ship. Jill’s had a giraffe.

  Jill was clowning, standing erect like a French maid holding a tray of coffee and orange juice and two banana muffins. She had just turned nineteen. Recently and often, Bill had told Margaret it was like having Sylvia back and it was almost true, Jill was very much like Sylvia in the face, maybe especially in the gestures. Maggie had always looked more like Daphne, although just lately shades of Murray’s tall and quietly elegant mother were seeping through, the way she sometimes lifted her chin when she was listening, her long feet, her confident, muscular hands.

  Jill set the breakfast tray down on the sink. “One last day a virgin,” she said, picking up a banana muffin, looking it over. “You lucky girl.”

  “Really?” Maggie said. “Well, I’m certainly relieved to hear that.”

  Jill took a bite of the muffin. “What are we going to do wi
th ourselves all morning?” she asked. “Josh is coming when?”

  “I’m pretty sure it was left that Patrick would meet the plane in London,” Maggie said. “Patrick has their tuxes, so I expect Josh and Mark will arrive when Patrick and Stephanie arrive.”

  “Then we have at least some time,” Jill said.

  “I think,” Maggie said. “I think we should put on our bikinis and lie around the backyard until someone comes out and tells us we have to go get dressed. We could take a dip or two in the pool.”

  Just after they’d moved into the McFarlane house, when the girls were nine and sixteen, the Stewarts beside them had installed a backyard swimming pool. Making his approach, the backhoe driver had been forced to cut across Daphne’s property and when all was said and done he’d chewed up the grass pretty completely and nipped several chunks out of the hedge. Daphne had watched him from the dining-room window but made no complaint and since that day the girls had been offered generous access to the Stewarts’ pool. Some afternoons Jeannie Stewart, who was still trim enough to look good in a bathing suit, brought out a pitcher of lemonade and joined them for a quick dip before she stretched out on her chaise with her novel. They were fish in that pool.

  They swam and sunbathed until twelve-thirty, when the guys Daphne had hired came around the corner of the house to start setting up the chairs and the sound system and then they went up to shower again, to wash the chlorine out of their hair before they put on their gowns.

  Daphne was already dressed, waiting in the kitchen for Maggie to call her. She had written down what she wanted to say, the small, folded sheet of notepaper was tucked in her pocket, but when Maggie did call her she walked up the stairs and into the bedroom totally unprepared for what was waiting for her there. Seeing these young women put together so beautifully, in their light-as-air make-up, their thick, naturally wavy, summer-streaked hair falling, just falling, on their shoulders, she thought, I’ve done this. I’ve done this with Murray.

  Jill, in pale yellow silk with very high clunky heels to match, was bent down fussing with Maggie’s satin hem. Hearing her mother behind her, she carefully lifted the heavy skirt of the bridal gown to reveal Sylvia’s white lace garter high on Maggie’s thigh. “It is kind of pretty,” she said. “Tacky but pretty. Did you already tell us what she’s supposed to do with it?”

  “She’s supposed to take it off at the dance and toss it over her shoulder at the men,” Daphne said. “To see who will be the next groom.”

  “The next groom,” Jill said, laughing. “That’s mint.”

  Daphne almost asked Jill to leave them for a few minutes and then she thought, No, if I say it to both of them at once, they will have exactly the same words in their heads later, when they might want to talk about this. She sat down on the bed. “Love,” she said, taking one of Margaret’s deep breaths. “I am happier for you today than I can say. I’m happy that you are so very accomplished and still able to give yourself over to someone.”

  She waited for one of them to speak but they were occupied, they were very busy bracing themselves. They both knew there would be more than this, knew just looking at her face.

  “We got along all right,” Daphne said. “I’m very sorry if the way I decided to do things has hurt either of you in any way, but as far as I can tell we got along all right.”

  Maggie was lifting her heavy hair in her hand, fluffing it the way she’d once fluffed Margaret’s breast. “Everything’s fine, Mom,” she said. “It is.”

  “Yeah,” Jill said. “Let’s not do this today, shall we?”

  Jill was smoothing Maggie’s skirt again, adjusting the modest satin train. She was thinking about the several thousand times the word father had come up in her life when she was a kid, taking her by surprise every time, like a string of firecrackers thrown at her feet. She was thinking about all the other times she could have used, would have been grateful for, an explanation, or a justification, or the truth. When she would have kicked down a door to hear some version of the truth. But of course, of course, the thing would get told not when a daughter needed to hear it but at some other, decided time, when a mother needed to tell it. As if a daughter’s place inside a secret was nothing. As if the waiting was nothing.

  A little later in their lives, when they did talk about their father and to their father, when they and everyone who mattered to them knew and knowing was all right, Maggie and Jill both confessed that listening to their mother the day of the wedding they had been terrified that she was going to stand up from the bed and pronounce a name, that she was going to just hand it over on a tray, like the head of John the Baptist. Jill confessed that what had frightened her most was the possibility of two different fathers, the possibility that they were not full sisters which, looking back, she could see was just enormously, wondrously stupid, because how could that have made any difference?

  Daphne had not written down anything more and she had made a promise to herself that whatever happened in that room, she would not start rambling. She picked up Maggie’s headpiece from the bed and handed it to Jill.

  “Have you cut my rose yet?” Maggie asked.

  When they were in the planning stages for this day, Maggie had refused an elaborate bridal bouquet, asking why couldn’t she just carry a rose from the garden instead. Soon after they’d moved in Daphne had started to bring Mrs. McFarlane’s garden back to life, had taught herself how to keep the roses going, replacing worn-out bushes one at a time as necessary. And she’d got the house itself almost back to the casual elegance of its Mrs. McFarlane days. It hadn’t taken much, a softer green for the kitchen cupboards, a new kitchen floor laid over the old grey linoleum, fresh paint for every wall, the woodwork properly cleaned and buffed to a shine, the floors stripped of their yellowed varnish. And all the French doors brought down from the third-floor attic and hung again between the living room and dining room and at the vestibule and at the entrances to the sunroom and the den. It was Mary who found the stack of French doors under a tarp in the attic and she’d found an ancient, stunningly ugly but carefully boxed chandelier up there too, which Mrs. McFarlane must have decided against years before. Even after she’d announced she was going to leave Patrick, Mary had still come to help Daphne and the girls get settled in, her own affection for the house evident in the way she touched the heavy front doors, the banister, the thick plaster walls.

  Standing up from the bed now to leave her magnificent daughters, Daphne asked, “What colour rose do you think?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Maggie said. “Pink? Red? White?”

  “Red,” Jill said. “Dark red would be extremely, utterly sophisticated.”

  Maggie had asked no one but Jill to stand up with her. She had never had only one best friend because she had seven or eight really good friends, a couple from summer jobs, two from university, three still from high school. And having only Jill simplified things because Josh had just one good friend, Mark. Anyway, she had never dreamed of a big production.

  Daphne was going to give her away, although Daphne said, when she was told by the United Church minister that this was still the custom, “Just so we understand each other, I’m not actually giving her away. Not on your life.”

  And Patrick. After the minister’s visit, Daphne had told Maggie if she wanted a man there too, she had a couple to choose from, although perhaps Grandpa shouldn’t be asked. “Then it has to be Uncle Patrick or Murray,” Maggie said. “And I suppose it should be Uncle Patrick, because he’s blood.”

  “Blood,” Daphne said. “Is that what he is?”

  * * *

  WHEN SHE CAME in from the garden with Maggie’s dark red rose, Josh and Mark were sitting in the living room, looking a bit stiff but nonetheless exquisite in their tuxedos. They were having an early and likely necessary drink with Patrick and Stephanie. Murray and Kate’s Toyota had just pulled into the driveway, and Sarah, in a wide-brimmed straw hat and a wonderfully short peach dress, with Jake and Natalie, the cousins no
body knew, following close behind her like goslings, was walking over to the Toyota with her arms flung open. She was laughing, calling out something Daphne couldn’t hear. Although he’d had his plane ticket, Rob had not come back with them for the wedding. His job had disappeared out from under him, the result of some multinational cost-saving merger, so he was in Seattle, at an interview set up by an old friend from home, from England. He was scrambling, this was how Sarah had put it to Margaret. When Margaret told Daphne, clearly worried and angry and rattled because there was nothing she could do to help them, she’d been as close to tears as Daphne had ever seen her. “God, there’s a lot of costs being saved,” she’d said. “Every new day, wherever you turn, costs being saved.”

  Margaret and Bill were sitting out on the wraparound porch in the wobbly, many-times-repainted Muskoka chairs. Through the big living-room window, Daphne watched her father reach over to take Margaret’s hand, looking for comfort against the onslaught of his family. They had just yesterday had word that his brother Gerry, Uncle Gerry, had died after a long stay in hospital in Windsor, and that Aunt Eileen was not in good shape at all, so there was that, too, to think about today, and the funeral to attend on Monday. And another funeral on Tuesday, at least for Margaret and Bill.

  Charles Taylor, who had become an old man, had also died, some time in the last week. He’d been missing for a few days and finally some kids had found him under the railroad bridge two miles past the golf course, beyond Livingston’s gully, drowned in Stonebrook Creek. It had never been a particularly hard crossing under that bridge but it was thought that Charles had lost his footing on some mossy rocks and gone down hard. On hearing this sad bit of news, Bill had told Margaret he only hoped Charles had knocked himself out cold before he had to suffer the insult of drowning. Margaret did not tell Bill or anyone else that she believed the tarnished silver whistle she’d found in the turned garden soil that May afternoon must surely have belonged to Charles at some time, or that its presence in their garden was a mystery she sometimes pondered.