A Good House

by Bonnie Burnard

  Sitting there waiting for a reasoned calm to overtake her, willing it, because it was something very much like calm she was going to need, she listened to the excited voices on the other side of the partition as they interrupted and contradicted and verified each other, each one of them fighting to hold her own in the chaos. It is chaos, she thought. That’s what they provide for each other. There was a softening of the voices and then the more distinct sound of only two or three of them still standing at the mirrors and then the certain silence of an emptied room. Calm in an empty washroom, she thought. Well, fine.

  She opened the cubicle door to a wavy, squared-off reflection of her small, proud, evidently beloved self in a deep raspberry linen two-piece dress, the colour Jill’s decision and just exactly right for this day, for this night of dancing. Turning on the tap at the sink, at the mirror, which was not wavy at all if you stood close enough, she saw in the damp, god-awful light that her bare shoulders looked cold but that her hair, a thick, robust, and envied silver grey, was holding fine, and that the skin on her neck beneath her jaw was smooth and taut, and that her face was broken, illuminated by a clean, white, unanticipated smile. A smile from nowhere.

  At the house, before they’d come over to the dance, she had gathered her hair and tied it at the nape of her neck with a soft, wide silver ribbon and she understood now, in this clammy quiet, that she had gathered and secured her hair deliberately, to expose the widow’s peak, to remind at least a few of the dancers, to remind herself, that there had once been among them a very pretty woman named Sylvia. Who would have danced her heart out on a night like this. So, she thought, placing a hand over each bare shoulder, watching the smile die off like one of Jill’s alien dreams, this is the kind of thing I might do with my life. I could amuse myself with the arrangement of hair, and memories. I could make myself smile.

  The music had stopped. When she came out of the washroom, she saw that Maggie and Jill had gone to the middle of the cleared dance floor. Everyone made a large circle around them as Maggie lifted the satin hem of her gown and Jill pulled Sylvia’s white lace garter down and slipped it over Maggie’s arched foot. A small herd of young men stood ready, not one of them even pretending to look anxious to be anyone’s groom, and when Maggie turned to throw the garter over her shoulder toward them, it was caught by Andy’s six-year-old grandson Tom, a soccer player in his first suit, who dove hard to the floor to make his catch. It looked as if Jill had decided that she might want to wear the garter too, some day, because she kicked off her buttercup yellow heels and chased the squealing Tom through the crowd to make him give it up.

  Patrick and Murray, after they’d had their turns with Maggie and Margaret and Daphne and Jill and Andy and Sarah and Meg, danced with their wives, sometimes switching off, although Stephanie and Kate tried to assure them they didn’t have to be babysat. These two women did have much in common and when they were not up dancing they were content to huddle together at one of the front tables, a white woman in a black dress and a black woman in a white dress, watching the dancers and drinking wine and chatting easily, guessing correctly that the people who moved past the table who couldn’t recall their names would call them simply the second wives. But they didn’t care. This was what they were, almost happy sixty-year-old second wives.

  After several glasses of wine, certainly more than she might have had under normal circumstances, Kate leaned close to Stephanie’s ear. “So tell me,” she said. “Has everyone just always known?”

  Stephanie shook her head. “No,” she said. “No. Not at all. I’ve always assumed it was some married doctor. Or two married doctors.”

  Kate lifted her wineglass at Patrick’s son John, who was dancing past with a child lifted up into his arms, his own sweet daughter done up in a layered froth of pale organza. As they danced, the child rested her fat cheek on his shoulder and watched the strangers’ faces floating around her own, fighting with all her small might to resist the pull of sleep.

  “I wonder if I did realize,” Kate said, “at some subterranean level. And it would be interesting to know now how much I actually care.”

  “I’m sorry for you in this,” Stephanie said, thinking, God help me, what a paltry combination of words.

  “Maybe it’s all right,” Kate said. She was grinning at Margaret, who looked almost jubilant in the sturdy young arms of the best man, what was his name? Mark. “There is a possibility that I can live with this,” she said. “It would take a very large effort to foul things for Maggie and Jill. And what kind of person would do that?” She turned to look at Stephanie’s face. “Am I such a person?”

  Stephanie, too, was smiling at Margaret and Mark, who were approaching the table now. “This Mark,” she said, just under her breath, “is an astonishingly handsome young man. Oh, if I were young again,” she said, “I’d have me some of that.” Studying the small movements of Margaret’s face as she came near, a face that was at that moment a miraculous combination of absolute control and a beautifully aged contentment, Stephanie decided that this thing they had ahead of them, the death of Daphne’s private, puzzling lie and the subsequent exposure of the bald and simple truth, could easily, with just a bit of carelessness, turn into something beyond even Margaret’s orchestration. “I can’t say if you are such a person,” she said to Kate, quietly. “I shouldn’t say. But I think not.”

  Kate had pulled her chair up closer to the table to allow Margaret to pass behind her. “I suppose I think not too,” she said, and just as she was saying these words, Margaret leaned down to kiss the top of her head. A coincidence, she thought, surely. Margaret was the last person who would believe she could be bought with a kiss on the top of the head.

  After the short visit from Margaret and Mark, Sarah drifted by the table and throughout the evening Andy sat down with them several times and started to talk, but she never stayed long. Someone always turned up to coax her to her feet and she went every time, eager and laughing and by the end of the night sweating, which she said had embarrassed her once upon a time but didn’t now. All night people made a point of telling Andy how wonderful she looked. For some reason, maybe Krissy had given her a nudge in that direction, she had started to colour her hair blond again and she could still dress because she hadn’t gained an ounce in forty years, not since she was a teenager. She’d tell you this.

  It was an open bar. Murray had asked Patrick to cut a cheque for the liquor. There was still some money left in the girls’ account, the bulk of it held there to cover Jill’s tuition. Most of the guests had danced this floor many times before, most of them had no memory at all of a time when they couldn’t dance and they thoroughly enjoyed a night of nothing else but. When things were well under way, some of the outsiders who had been claiming that no, they couldn’t really dance, were being pulled reluctantly to the floor to confess that well, maybe they could, and when some of them started to sing as they danced, Crank tried to play songs they might know.

  Late in the evening, Patrick and Murray excused themselves from Stephanie and Kate, freshened their drinks at the bar, and left the dance to walk out through the lobby and then through the big double doors that led to the rink. They found it all in empty darkness, hot with summer heat and full of the threat of echo, and after their eyes adjusted to the absence of light they stood together at the boards and saw that where there used to be a summertime grid of water pipes laid on a bed of sand, there was now only an expanse of dull cement.

  They turned and found the balcony stairs and climbed up in the dark, sat down together front and centre. “Best seats in the house,” Murray said.

  Patrick leaned forward. “I have to say that it is small,” he said. “Even if that’s what people usually say coming back to something, it’s nevertheless true.”

  “It was, my friend,” Murray said, “always small.”

  Patrick was looking out over the ice and up to the scoreboard, which even in the darkness he could see was new and much larger, much more elaborate than
it had been in his day. “You would have seen that,” he said, “sitting up here watching. We didn’t. We thought we were the cat’s ass and then some.”

  “That I remember,” Murray said.

  “It felt so damned big. Although that sheet of ice was a good deal smaller for guys like Paul.” He stopped for a minute, looked down at his drink. “Every coach likes a long stride. Guys like Paul could get the puck from anywhere.”

  “It’s been eleven years this summer,” Murray said. “And I have not yet found a way to think about him being gone.”

  Patrick drained his Scotch. “Andy our travelling lady seems to be doing all right,” he said. “It’s much better for her with Meg in London. There was never any other way to go with that.”

  “She should remarry,” Murray said. “She shouldn’t be on her own now. There’s no reason that I can see.”

  “Well,” Patrick said. “People marry and people don’t marry. You’ve likely noticed.” He stood up quickly to start down the dark stairs. “Although looking at Andy tonight makes me suspect she’s not entirely on her own. Daphne mentioned something to Stephanie about a guy from Toronto, some stud in his forties, no less.”

  “I hope he hasn’t got his eye on her money,” Murray said.

  “I hope not too,” Patrick said. “Because he won’t be seeing much of it. Andy is extremely close with her money. Instinctive and careful and firm. In that respect, she’s quite a bit like your mother.”

  Murray laughed quietly at the memory of his mother’s financial acumen, and as he got up to follow Patrick back to the dance he finished his own drink and crushed the plastic cup in his hand, tossing it behind him into the darkness. He was perhaps a little drunk, something he had not intended. Just before he took the first step he put a question to Patrick’s descending shoulders. “How’s the cummerbund now?”

  Patrick didn’t stop or hesitate. “It seems to have got itself straightened around,” he said. “Although I’ll be glad to take the damned thing off. I always am.” He continued down the steps. “In case you’re wondering, this afternoon was understood to be just a simple screw-up,” he said. “That’s what people think. And more to the point, it’s what Maggie and Jill believe.”

  “Is it?” Murray said, beginning his own descent. “Then maybe you would be kind enough to tell me what Daphne believes.” He had to raise his voice because Patrick was almost at the bottom of the balcony steps. He could hardly see him down there and what he saw wasn’t so much a man as the probable shape of a man. “And what Kate believes.”

  * * *

  AT DAPHNE’S THE next day, after the rest of the gifts had been unwrapped and lunch was being served by the Presbyterian women, this time on card tables set up on the wraparound porch, Bill arrived. He was unexpected because he had told everyone he wasn’t going to be there. He’d walked over, had got himself dressed in his suit pants and a fresh white shirt, which he’d buttoned wrong down near his belt. He had even remembered his tie, although he hadn’t knotted it. He wore the tie draped over his small hunched shoulders the way you would wear a harmless carnival snake. The old camera he’d dug out of Margaret’s kitchen junk drawer swung down heavy from his neck and as he approached the porch it bounced against his sunken chest.

  It was not his intention to go inside Daphne’s house, so he stopped to talk to the Presbyterian women for a minute and one of them soon fixed him a plate of food he said he didn’t want, bits of strange cheese, slices of lukewarm spiced-up chicken, cold chopped broccoli that was supposed to be some kind of salad. He stood waiting, holding his paper plate and eating what he could manage to get down. The women were right there hovering over him, he could hardly refuse to eat. And Patrick’s Stephen had that godforsaken video thing pointed in his direction again.

  He was waiting until word got to Maggie that he was on the porch. He knew she’d come out to him. He was here to insist on his picture. Maggie and her new husband and himself and whoever else wanted to be in it. He was not going to listen to any talk today about who arranged for things, who paid for what. He’d paid for enough things in his life to get a picture out of it. If no one would drive them uptown, they could walk. It wasn’t that bad a day.

  When Maggie came out through the wide open doors, he was annoyed to see that she wasn’t in her beautiful white gown and when she got close enough he said so. “Where’s your dress?” he asked, squirming in her strong arms.

  “Oh, Grandpa,” she said, giving him her biggest bride smile. “Silly Grandpa.” Maggie had not seen much of Margaret and Bill since she had started her doctoral work and soon, after she and Josh got packed up for the big move to California, she wouldn’t be seeing them at all, although she would be closer to Aunt Sarah in Vancouver. She did realize that there was every chance that one or both of them would die while she was gone. Unlike her mother, and unlike Jill who argued loudly with her grandfather, and because she was not required to exercise it very often, Maggie had been able to adjust herself to Bill’s condition with a firm, one-time-only decision. If he said something offensive, she simply didn’t hear it. It did not compute. Today she was just happy to have a flesh-and-blood grandfather to tease. Some of her friends didn’t. “That was for yesterday,” she told him. “The bride dress was only for yesterday.”

  By this time Daphne and Margaret had come out to the porch to see what was going on. They were standing outside the open doors at the head of a bunched-up pile of the rest of them, Josh, Jill, Patrick, Murray, Andy, Sarah, Meg, all of them together in a cosy little group holding their plates of food, their forks hanging in mid-air as they listened. Margaret noticed the unknotted tie immediately. “Oh, sweet man,” she said quietly, meaning it to be only to herself. “So this is what you’ve forgotten today.”

  “Go get your dress back on,” Bill told Maggie. He set his plate of food down, balanced it gingerly on the porch rail. “We’re going up to the Town Hall for my picture.” He lifted the camera in his hand to show everyone that he meant business.

  No one stepped forward to try to tell Maggie what she should do. They stood just where they were, waiting to see what might happen, quiet and wary and ready, one way or the other, for things to proceed.

  Standing at the edge of the steps, Stephen lifted the video camera and began to record again. He focused first on the weird old camera trembling in Bill’s hand and then he panned to Maggie and Josh, who was beside her now with his arm around her bare back, and then he swept across the tables of food and some of the Presbyterian women and back again to a medium shot of Daphne, who seemed to be close to laughter, and then over to Margaret and Sarah, who was still in her peach dress, and to Stephanie and Kate, who were leaning side by side against the railing, their arms touching as they talked quietly between themselves.

  And then he zoomed in on crazy Jill who, after she’d grinned and pulled him up to dance last night, had responded to his first, hesitant, hopeful telling of his news, which was not news of course to the people in his real life, the young men who would never be grooms, whose lives would never provide an excuse for family celebration, with an immediate and brutally confident equanimity, as if she’d been waiting and ready to be told, as if he had flattered her with his trust. As if she believed it would be helpful, would be best just to throw him over her shoulder and carry him through whatever was to come. He could imagine this, his own body gone slack, Jill pushing forward undaunted by the extra weight and singing at the top of her lungs, yelling fierce obscenities to intimidate the enemy. And wasn’t that the risk with rescue? If you allowed it, you could find yourself in someone else’s hands? Although Jill’s hands, of all these beautiful hands, were perhaps the most beautiful.

  Hearing the girl behind him, hearing them come, he turned the camera toward the street to get two guys flying past on Rollerblades, pulling between them a long-legged girl who was squealing in either terror or joy, and when they were gone he got all the cars parked at the curb, the Jag and Patrick’s new Lexus in particular, and from the
cars he lifted the camera up to the dappled light in the just-quivering leaves of the front-yard maples and to the bright blue Ontario sky exposed between the leaves. Finished with the sky, he came back to the wraparound porch, to the far corner of the porch where the kids were climbing over and under and around the overturned Muskoka chairs, to Patrick and Murray, grey-haired men in cut-offs and stupid hats who had moved to stand one on either side of Bill, and then to Andy and awkward, hesitant Meg, who was the only one looking directly at the camera, the only one on the porch who seemed to realize she was being captured. And then he began to move down the steps, thinking if he stood far enough away, maybe as far away as the sidewalk, he might be able to get a full, wide-angled shot of everyone, the whole mess of them, together.

  “Come on, people,” he said, moving carefully backwards. “Strut your stuff.”

  * * *

  A FEW DAYS later, after three carloads had driven down to Sarnia for Uncle Gerry’s funeral and then most of them had gone their way, those left behind would sit around Margaret and Bill’s living room to watch Stephen’s wedding videos, to see themselves in action. They would watch Jill as she came down the aisle ahead of her sister, grinning at Josh and Mark, and wasn’t she an incorrigible flirt, and they would once again admire Maggie’s beautiful gown as she walked slowly forward, followed by her unanticipated crowd of escorts. They would see themselves standing up from their chairs after it was done, after all the promises had been made. They would laugh watching the bridal party fool around down at Stonebrook Creek while the still photographer worked so hard to pose them, first on the wide footbridge for several shots and then down at the water. They would see Josh reach back to help Maggie, their hands lifted and extended to each other like dancers from another century as she tried to get a foothold beside him on a large, flat rock that had been placed deliberately and probably with some difficulty at the edge of the current.