Vanishing and Other Stories

by Deborah Willis

And with this, her life was given sudden direction: marriage, motherhood. They honeymooned at Niagara Falls, which Katherine called the perfect place for a suicide.

  “What did you imagine it would be like?” Penny asked. “When you got married?”

  “Imagine? I didn’t imagine anything.” Katherine raised a dark, sculpted eyebrow. “When it comes to marriage, imagining is the worst mistake a woman can make.”

  NEAR THE MOTEL there is only one grocery store, which stocks bruised apples and cheese that grows mouldy in an open cooler. There are pawnshops and a used-book store that sells the kinds of paperbacks Katherine never allowed in the house. When Penny hears a knock on her motel door, she opens it cautiously, the chain still bolted.

  David is in the same suit but without the briefcase. His tie is loosened and the top button of his shirt undone. “Came to see if you wanted to go for a walk.”

  “A walk?”

  “It’s what I miss most about Wales—wandering the hills. Here everyone owns a car, don’t they? I’m starved for walking.”

  “Where would we go?”

  “The world is ours.” He gestures beyond him, toward the wallpaper that curls away from the hallway’s corners and leaves a mess of dried yellow glue. “Come on, love. Let’s go.”

  They end up at Nose Hill, an expanse of prairie. Wind hits them from all directions and brittle grass sways and pricks Penny’s nylons. She is thankful for her glasses, which keep the dust from her eyes.

  When she walked home from school with Andrew, there was conversation. They discussed Soviet history and the books Penny read. They gossiped about mutual friends and laughed over the insanity of their parents. Walking with David is different. He points out bits of nature he finds important—June grass, purple clover—but that’s all. They walk downhill until they find shelter from the wind, then sit with their backs to the slope. Grass reaches their shoulders, and the sides of their bodies almost touch.

  “Maybe it wasn’t the best weather for this.” There is a pout to David’s voice, a youthful disappointment. He plucks a blade of switchgrass, peels the seeds away, and watches them fly from his palm.

  Penny looks at the low, monochromatic hills. “It all seems the same. How do you find your way out?”

  David puts his arm around her. It’s a proprietary gesture, and there’s something comforting about this, about being owned.

  “I’m going to be married next year,” she says. “His name is Andrew.”

  “I know.” David smiles at her. “I haven’t forgotten.”

  She should stand up and leave. The virtuous characters in novels would do that. But his lack of artfulness is charming. He is as straightforward as this place he’s taken her to. The sky is blue and clear, and the grass moves with the wind. It’s nothing like the tangle of buildings and streetcar cables she’s used to.

  “Look,” he says. “A coyote.”

  “Where?”

  He directs her gaze to a thin doglike thing farther down the hill. The coyote stares at them, and its bony, disapproving face reminds her of a certain kind of woman she often saw in east Montreal. The kind who watched Penny and Katherine through her window, with arms crossed, and who could tell they had stumbled into the wrong neighbourhood.

  Penny inhales, feels the air in her lungs. She lets David’s arm stay on her shoulder, and the coyote jumps, disappears into the grass.

  HER THIRD ENGAGEMENT was to Andrew, who lived only two blocks away. They played games on the street with other children, and later walked home together from university. During these walks they compared childhood memories. They found that they’d shared a faulty, childlike understanding of the war they’d lived through. When Andrew heard people speak of Occupied France, he thought it had something to do with his own family, since they often received letters addressed to Occupant. The thought that he was somehow to blame gave him years of stomach cramps and bad dreams. Penny had similar nightmares. As a child she dreamed she was a soldier, knee-deep in snow and unable to move. The war she fought was on St-Laurent, and her parents were on opposing sides.

  Finding these similarities made them giddy, because most of the time they seemed to live in different countries, raised by families so unalike they could have been oceans apart. Andrew’s mother had none of Katherine’s glamour: her clothes were ironed but shapeless. And unlike Katherine, she never retreated into books or her own cantankerous nature. She served hot cocoa and biscuits when her son arrived home from school. She cooked full meals, and the dishes were washed promptly after dinner. Her home was tidy, without any dark, messy corners that could be explored. Penny and Andrew had to remain in the kitchen or living room, and Penny was not to stay late.

  It was easier for them at her house. Penny’s father ignored Andrew much of the time, and Katherine had a laissez-faire attitude to her daughter’s sexuality. If there had been a mistake—even the unthinkable, a pregnancy—Katherine would likely have crossed her arms and said, “Well. What do you suppose you’ll do now?”

  Andrew and Penny spent most of their time in her bedroom, whispering and finding reasons to touch each other accidentally. Penny would lean on Andrew’s shoulder or he would brush his hand against her leg. The rest of the time they did homework in the kitchen. Andrew was studying to be an engineer—his specialty was refrigeration systems—but as an elective he took a Russian class. Penny helped him study, though she didn’t speak a word of the language. She held up flash cards with simple phrases spelled out in Andrew’s sloppy Cyrillic.

  “Here is a banana.” He read slowly from the cards. “Here is a pencil. Here is a catastrophe.”

  “You’ll never be allowed into Russia,” Katherine called from the living room. She had the ability to read a novel and eavesdrop at the same time. “They have no use for modern refrigeration over there. It’s cold enough as it is.”

  “I don’t need to go there,” Andrew said. “Freedom and justice will come to us.”

  If Penny loved him, it was partly for his politics and the romantic nature they betrayed. It was while helping him with his Russian at her kitchen table—in view of her mother, if Katherine had cared to glance up from her book—that Penny first kissed him. That was the beginning: her initial victory. With every subsequent advance she allowed him—to put his hand over her shirt, then under it—the more devoted he became.

  THE MOTEL SERVES WEAK COFFEE and muffins and calls this the Continental Breakfast. Every morning, the business and rodeo men shuffle into the lobby. They look hungover or homesick or both. They eat standing up and speak to each other in clipped, joking sentences. For Penny, it’s like another language.

  “Heard you got blitzed with that girl—the Saan clerk.”

  “She was all show and no go.”

  When they notice Penny enter the lobby, they stop talking. Only David smiles at her. He pours her a cup of coffee and drops a sugar cube into the cup. The other men watch this silently. Penny can only guess what they say after she’s gone.

  OTHER THAN THE SECRETARIES, she is the only woman in the French department. Most of the professors are men from France. Others are from Spain or Italy, but speak enough French to get by in a classroom. These Europeans, she can’t get enough of them. They invite her for lunches in the university’s cafeteria. They hold doors for her. They look her up and down, though she wears nearly the same outfit every day.

  One of them—a man named Gérard, who got out of France during the war—invites her to a party, to which she wears her usual green skirt and blouse. The professors are too busy drinking and pursuing each other’s wives to notice her clothing anyway. Perhaps because she’s young—just twenty-five—they gently exclude her from their sexual arrangements. They understand that she is unmarried and therefore still a child—or the equivalent, a virgin. They ask her about her research and make sure her wineglass is full. Only late in the evening, when everyone has had too much to drink, do some men dance with her. They press her body so close that she smells tobacco and wine on their breath
. One says he likes her perfume, despite the fact that she’s not wearing any.

  Don’t believe what you hear, Penny writes to Donna after she stumbles back to her motel. The Bible Belt is full of sin and debauchery.

  AFTER THREE MORE WALKS—beside Fish Creek, along the river, and once along Bragg Creek—David and Penny go on a different outing. She wears a wool suit she bought with her first paycheque. In the store she thought she looked like Jackie Kennedy: a skirt cut above the knee, and big buttons. The wool is pink, a summery rebellion against the coming winter. Now she regrets her choice. She feels conspicuous. On her left ring finger she wears the slim gold band with a squint-diamond her parents gave her when she finished her studies.

  David looks at it. “What’s that for?”

  Penny sits with her hands in her lap and doesn’t answer. As her mother used to say, there are certain indignities a woman must avoid.

  They stop at a pharmacy, where the saleslady has a blue rinse through her hair. Penny would have used the dignified Latinate word contraceptive, but David leans against the counter and asks for a box of Frenchies. It costs $1.05, and Penny can’t believe it’s this cheap and easy to change your life.

  On the way back, he drives fast. Penny feels a gentle carsickness but nothing else. She knows that some decisions don’t make themselves felt right away. No revelation, no pang of regret—just a slow discovery, later, of what you’ve done. A minor injury that worsens.

  “You know what this means, don’t you?” Penny watches the blur of houses out the window, and the first scraps of snow that hit the windshield. “Now we have to get married.”

  She sounds like a child explaining the rules of a game. And maybe that’s why David laughs.

  WHEN HE LEAVES in the mornings, Penny tries to mark papers but can’t concentrate. Most often she ends up squatting in the bathroom, staring into her garbage can. The contraceptives aren’t perfect. She’s heard that sometimes they tear. Sometimes they slip off. Penny picks them from her garbage and examines them. She thinks: We trust our future to this? They are smoky white and thin-skinned. She holds them to the light and they look sad, as though they are weeping.

  INSTEAD OF GOING FOR A WALK, David drives Penny along roads she’s never seen. They are heading to the edge of the city, away from the restaurants and office buildings. Out here the houses are square and simple, and look as though they’ve been assembled by children. No one cares for their lawn and the grass comes up in patches.

  “This used to be an army town,” says David, and there is entrepreneurial lust in his voice. “It’s nothing now, but it’ll change.”

  He stops the truck in front of a bungalow with faded blue siding, his newest acquisition. One side of the porch has collapsed, and there’s no walkway, only the frosted ground.

  “This is it.” He unlocks the door and shows her around the empty rooms. He taps on walls and tells her to ignore the carpet that lifts away from the rooms’ edges.

  “What do you think, angel? It’s heaven, isn’t it?” He shows her one of the bedrooms. “This room’ll be your study,” he says. “This the nursery—for Dai Junior.”

  Penny knows he’s joking. But still, she lets herself imagine. Their homes would be like this one, in a constant state of renovation. She would continue to teach for a while, but soon she would get wrapped up in David’s ideas, his schemes—maybe become his partner, or his bookkeeper. Maybe she’d be good at it. They would have lots of children, and these kids would grow up with practicality as well as the brash confidence of the nouveaux riches. On weekends the family would go for brisk walks. They would probably own dogs.

  “It’s nice,” she says, and steps into the master room. She presses her face to the large south-facing window. There is a view of other houses that look like this one, some empty lots, and roads without sidewalks. Penny wonders what this property says about David. She is thinking with her Montreal mind, a mind that associates place—not only street, but precise location on that street—with identity. She hasn’t yet understood the freedom of this city, the way it allows David to move from place to place without bestowing judgment on him, without locking him into a grid of language, religion, ethnicity. Nothing labels his past or decides his future. She hasn’t yet realized how quickly he can move on.

  PENNY RECEIVES A POSTCARD from Donna, sent while she was on her honeymoon at Niagara Falls. It’s as full of half-truths as Penny’s letters. We’re having a great time! I didn’t want to come here at first—you know me and heights—but I’m getting used to it. Our hotel is super.

  Penny stares at the postcard’s image. The water looks cold and dangerous. She imagines leaning against the railing and feeling the spit in her face. Marriage, she thinks, must be lonely too.

  She doesn’t know how to reply to Donna, so instead she writes Andrew a letter. Then she walks along the frosted sidewalk to the mailbox. Snow fell the night before and the city is hushed. The lid of the postbox creaks from the sudden cold.

  She imagines Andrew in Montreal, at the desk in the bedroom he’s slept in since he was born. It faces the window, and is made of dark, scratched wood. His hair hangs over his forehead and he continually brushes it out of his eyes. Penny can see grooves in it from his comb. He is surely reading. In his last letter, he wrote that he had discovered Tolstoy’s later, short works. His elbows rest on either side of a book that he has nearly destroyed with love, underlining phrases and folding over corners.

  I was wrong. I never loved you.

  She doesn’t mail the letter. Instead, she tucks it into her pocket, a possibility she’ll carry with her.

  A PHOTOGRAPH OF PENNY’S MOTHER hung on their kitchen wall. The glass was coated with dust, but the photo was stunning: Katherine en pointe, her arms in third position. She wore a white bodysuit and a skirt that fanned out broad and white. Her chest was as pale as her tights, her legs as slim as the leafless, winter trees outside Penny’s motel window.

  Katherine has remained as thin as in the photo—she lives off toast and marmalade—but her body has a brittle look now. She spends her time on the couch. She reads and nurses her injury, which is as haunting and unpredictable as a ghost. Apart from her walks, she rarely moves. Her digestion is slow and painful, so she dislikes eating and has taken up smoking instead. Her teeth are edged in black. “By the time I reached twenty-six,” she has said, “my body was dead to me.”

  It had been years since Penny noticed the photo. But two weeks before she left on the train, she stood in the kitchen and stared at it. Katherine was at the table, drinking coffee from a stained cup. Penny’s father was in the living room, listening to the radio.

  Penny touched the glass, traced the outline of her mother’s body with her finger. She used to beg her mother to speak of that graceful, former self. Katherine had told her of the studio where she danced: its crumbling brick walls and the exposed piping that leaked onto the floor. Even in winter the rooms were too hot, and the dancers’ sweat formed condensation that dripped down the mirrors. There was a smell of hair lacquer, rosin, and blood that seeped from the dancers’ blisters onto the silk of their shoes.

  “Tell me about when you were in Paris,” said Penny.

  Katherine looked up from her book and seemed pleased. “What do you want to know?” Then, just as she did when Penny was younger, Katherine imitated her dance instructors. “Mesdemoiselles, des tendus, s’il vous plaît.” She stood, paraded through the kitchen, and snapped her fingers. “Light footwork, please! You sound like a pack of elephants.”

  This had always made Penny laugh, and it still did. But now she saw something dark in her mother’s imitation of these women. Women who had once danced onstage, and who still hungered for that light. Who lived with the bitter knowledge that their bodies had betrayed them, that time had betrayed them. Women who understood, already, what it was like to die.

  “I’m going to get married,” Penny said. “Andrew and I are going to get married.” She had meant to do this properly, with Andrew and
her father present, all of them at the table.

  Katherine’s face took on its usual expression—an almost theatrical sternness. It was the expression of a woman who felt wronged: denied a life of grace and beauty. Given, instead, a two-bedroom walk-up, a broken body, and a host of chores that made her feel bored and incompetent.

  “Things are different now,” said Penny. “Things for women are changing.”

  Katherine only laughed at that. She reached for her novel, but Penny grabbed the book before her mother could hide herself in it. “You worry he’ll disappoint me?”

  There was the sound of the radio in the other room.

  “Of course he’ll disappoint you. But that’s not the worst part.” Katherine stepped toward Penny and touched her daughter’s hair. “Disappointing him. That’s what’ll kill you.”

  She slipped the book from Penny’s hands, then walked out of the kitchen. When she moved slowly, her limp was more noticeable.

  Penny went to the doorway and watched her father. He was so absorbed in the news—the Cubans and Americans were having a standoff, the world frozen in a moment of choice—that he didn’t notice her. He still wore the suit he’d worn all day at the bank, and leaned with his elbows on his knees. He looked worn from standing on his feet, performing the underpaid, bureaucratic duties of a clerk.

  For once, he didn’t seem distant or unknowable or strangely quiet. Penny felt as though she understood him. He wanted a peaceful house. A bright, cheerful child. A wife who could love him and who could cook. Like Andrew—who wanted an orderly, contented home, the kind that keeps childhood nightmares at bay—he had the simplest desires.

  PENNY SURVIVES THE ENTIRE YEAR, despite having to fail her favourite Margaret. The faculty party this week is to celebrate the end of term. One of the European professors orders a crate of wine and uncorks every bottle. Penny doesn’t keep track of how many glasses she drinks.