The Best Thing for You

by Annabel Lyon

  My daughter tells me you’re a journalist, Mr. Pass.

  She let nothing show. She had told her father exactly what this boy she’d met did, but he was determined to put everyone in the room in his place. Privately he would call her suitor a mechanic. Overnight he would grow chary of touching her, with a pointedness that said she had changed hands, how did she like that?

  Well, not exactly, sir. He shot her a sheepish sideways smile as though realizing she might be dumb after all. Actually –

  You might as well know we think Anna’s too young, her father said. Eighteen is too young for what you have in mind, her mother and I agree.

  No, no, no, he said. I mean, sir, there’ll be chaperones. My whole family will be there, I don’t guess we’ll have a minute to ourselves all weekend. I have sisters, he said, appealing suddenly to her mother.

  Sisters, how nice, her mother said.

  Anna doesn’t ski, her father said.

  The lodge belonged to Buddy’s uncle, a hearty roguish twenties type with slick hair who called his nephew Bernie and pretended to have a heart attack when he met Anna. She would remember the weekend as a collage of hair and gloves and teeth and coins, for sleigh rides and hot cider, dropped and gone in the snow. Buddy’s sisters were both cheerful plain tomboys with good skis who had brought assorted girlfriends and boyfriends and country cousins, a noisy athletic crowd that treated Anna with a kind of amiable deference, like they would an exotic, expensive cat. They had cast her as the rich city girl, the catch, the juicy Juliet with the pretty muff and the useless boots whose parents almost didn’t let her come. Finally, the friendly little cousin she shared a room with told her she was Buddy’s first serious girlfriend and they were all keeping their fingers crossed.

  Buddy himself grew ruddy in the wintry air, horsing around with snowballs and taking her for walks in the woods. On one such walk he jokingly said, You might as well know I intend to marry you.

  You do?

  Sure. He scooped up some snow, packed it with excess attention, and popped it at a tree trunk. That all right with you?

  She thought of home, her parents’ closed kingdom. She noticed how his mouth stayed open as he concentrated on his aim. It seemed a small enough thing to get used to.

  The wedding was a swell affair and a strange procedure. She remembered it in the black and sudden white of exploding flashbulbs. Her white-gloved fingertips on her father’s black-sleeved arm, the brief unchaste kiss, the nagging weight of the second ring, the cracked cake, the honeymoon in a downtown hotel room. Out on the bay the freighters were tipped with bits of lights, and the North Shore mountains were a dark mass against the last light in the sky. To the south were Kitsilano, the beaches, Point Grey. Straight ahead, west, were the islands, studs in the crawling sea. A rich man’s view. His skin smelled of soap and smoke. She wept with the pain, expectedly.

  An argument, this one brushed with malice sticky as tar. She had bought some books.

  But they’re second-hand, she said.

  It was the bulk of them that seemed to aggravate him: ten books. Ten books! Before it was over he had reminded her of his meagre income, his miserable inheritance, his own worrisome health, his troubles over the house – when the lawyers advised him to sell, his mother had cried. Greedy, he said now. Women were greedy, also stubborn. They didn’t know the value of a dollar. They were sentimental, they formed sentimental attachments to objects, they lacked a sense of fitness and proportion, they spent money like it was toy. She would have to take them back.

  Not my books, she said. Oh, Buddy, not my books.

  He was firm. He lectured her again, patiently repeating himself. If she did not take them back, he said, he would have no choice but to suspend her allowance. She was irresponsible, like a child, and spendthrift, and sulky. She saw it was his increased responsibilities at work that had given him this new taste for supervision, and determined to shred his new composure.

  At least I don’t send my friends to check up on you, she said.

  He offered to.

  Peretti, they meant, when she was still sick. He had returned one evening when her mother-in-law was at bridge, to tell her her husband would be working late, and to see if she needed anything.

  No, thank you, she had said.

  May I, he had started. Then, instead: How are you feeling?

  Ever so much better, she said. It was true. The fever had broken, leaving her feeling weak and saintly, cool, a little thin at the edges but back on land, certainly.

  Have I upset you?

  They had been sitting across from each other in the living room. She had not made a move to light the lamps as the day waned, hoping he would take the hint, but darkness had fallen and he had stayed.

  No, she said. Her voice seemed loud in the dark. His face wasn’t clear. She said again, more softly, No.

  That evening, I meant. In the kitchen.

  No.

  No, he repeated. Well. He sat forward and she wondered if he was gathering himself to leave, the way a bird gathers itself to launch. He said what she had been thinking: I can’t see your face.

  He wasn’t checking up on you, anyway, her husband said. I don’t send people to check up on you. That’s quite a hell of a thing to say.

  I suppose it is.

  You suppose it is. What’s got into you, anyway? You’re getting damn hard to be around, you know that? You never used to be so, so –

  It’s your precious job. I suppose you think –

  – anything to do with my job. Such a –

  I’m bored, Buddy. I’m going out of my mind.

  Such a bitch, frankly.

  They stared at each other. Now they were somewhere.

  Yes, well, she said. Suppose we do something about that.

  Now you’re just being silly, he said, because she was putting her coat on. From upstairs her mother-in-law was calling, Buddy? Buddy, what’s going on?

  It was a warm night, with a few white points of stars and shreds of high cloud, and a moon like a thumbprint. She had told him the truth and he had not even shrugged. Out of my mind, that was what she had said. It was the correct phrase. Stepping out of the front door, she felt she had left a small space for a larger one, a place without heat or pressure or constraint, and if she were careful she might remain there for a while, until she had completed certain tasks. Later she might have to come back to the world and to her own small self, but she had a window now.

  You’re joking, the butcher’s boy said.

  They sat in the café again, mid-morning this time, as passing automobiles struck flares of light off the saltcellars, tipping the boy’s ears with a lurid translucence. They were the only customers. Behind the counter, the waitress swept. On the high ceiling a pair of fans slowly wheeled, like the lazy noses of planes, their big orbits telescoped down to her hand idly circling a spoon through her coffee. Since the night of her decision she had seemed to live within the gearwheels of a perfect watch.

  Now the boy sat across from her, squinting in the strong light. The sun cut a line across their table, cutting her off at the wrist, painting her out with shade. I must be practically nothing to him, she thought: a dim nearness, a voice only. She stayed back in it.

  I couldn’t do that, he said.

  Well, you don’t expect me to, do you?

  She had him on the rack. He was trembling again, thoughts written on his skin like a girl’s.

  Look at you blush, she said.

  Don’t you – doesn’t your husband –

  His fingers fidgeted with the detritus on the table between them, a napkin, a sugar sachet. They could not keep coming to this same café, she decided. The risk was too great. Peripherally she sensed the waitress and for a moment felt a pulling tiredness, the eyes-closed colourlessness of despair. There were too many details to keep in balance, too many pins and cogs. One slip would jam the whole mechanism, flip her life to farce, or worse. The boy, too, she saw, was hesitating. He thought himself the hero of a grand p
assion, had not realized until a moment ago that there could be humiliation in success as well as in failure. She would have to work him for a while, like a dough.

  I wouldn’t ask you if I could do it myself. If there were another way.

  I’m too young.

  Are you, suddenly?

  The look he planted on her then.

  It’s easy, she murmured. You go into the drugstore. If there’s a lady in there you buy a paper and go to another drugstore. When you find a good one you just go up to the man and ask. You say, I want –

  The sachet tore in his fingers, sending a spray of sweetness across the table between them.

  I want –

  He reached across the table to cover her mouth with his hand. She pushed it away. Will you? she said.

  He nodded.

  Like an artist, she saw the prettier ways it might have been done. I can’t eat, she might have said, I can’t sleep, do you know how thoughts of you distract me? She might have seized his wrist, just now, and suckled the sugar from his fingers. But these were the cheap possibilities, the gaudy strips of celluloid to leave on the cutting room floor. Her style was colder. She was here at all because of that cold empty place. True, she might not have lied, might simply have taken what she needed from the cheerful mess in Buddy’s bathroom drawer (he was constantly losing count, running out, constantly), but she needed the boy to see that he was capable of doing things for her, things he never expected of himself, things that might at first have seemed impossible.

  The waitress was not the same one as the first time, but that was just luck.

  I don’t like this café, she said. Let’s not come here any more.

  Then there was the house to prepare.

  In the bedroom her husband’s parents had shared she remade the stripped mattress, swathing its faded, faintly stained cabbage roses in a snap and drift of white linen. She gathered up her mother-in-law’s fripperies – a china goose-girl, a nosegay of dried primrose and clove, a toilet set, lipstickery, framed photographs of the baby Buddy – and hid them in the top drawer of the bureau. It would not matter if she put them back in the wrong places when the time came. She had moved them to dust, she would say, that was all. Anyone could run his finger along the windowsill and see that was true. They had set no assignation yet and as she moved around the room she felt pleasantly detached, mechanical, as though she were carrying out tasks which had been allotted to her but which of themselves meant nothing. Anyone watching her would see nothing out of the ordinary: a woman fixing a room. Even if she chose to go down and open the door to the basement (as she did now) and sit on the top step for a while, the most she could be accused of was curiosity. She had been sent down here once or twice to fetch pickles or a bucket, waving a hand in the absolute dark before her, swatting like a kitten for the string to the single bulb, and once her husband had hidden below in the crook of the unbanistered stairs and grabbed her before she’d found it, snatching her off her feet and down into the darkness with him. That had been a terrible thing to do. Now she sat dreamily in her kerchief, chin in hand, noting the essential (only one door in or out, that she sat in; no windows; concrete walls) and the inessential (her husband’s old toys, train set, a bicycle, skis, preserves, steamer trunks emblazoned with great emblems of locks and corners decked like epaulettes, a mangle and rack). What harm, what crime, in looking? What crime in an act of imagination?

  That night she served peaches and pears for dessert.

  Are these my own? her mother-in-law asked.

  Why, yes. You don’t mind?

  Her mother-in-law did not touch her spoon. Preserves are for winter, she said. It’s almost May.

  Have I done wrong?

  Her mother-in-law lifted her eyes from the fruit and smiled and said softly, You greedy, wasteful girl, and started to cry.

  Across a shaved lawn she could see a nurse conducting a game of croquet. The players tapped the balls with their mallets, distance gently disjointing sound’s ball from action’s socket, and stood back out of each other’s way. The intense quiet gave it the aura of a championship match.

  Anna!

  The players looked up as one. She understood they had been soldiers, boys whose families could afford private care.

  Her husband stood on the stone steps of the nearest building, waving her over. The sanatorium was several Victorian buildings set on rolling, discreetly gated grounds. You did not walk from one building to the next but rather took a small bus. In the farthest buildings there were some very sad cases but there were no bars on the windows here, and when she first escaped to this bench a young nurse had come trotting after her, offering to bring a cup of tea out to the lawn. There had been a tiny bit of a scene, inside.

  The doctor would like to talk to us, he said, when she reached the portico.

  How is she?

  She wants a private room.

  Inside a second time, then, where the halls smelled acceptably of floor wax and disinfectant. The ceilings were high and to the wall outside the doctor’s office was stapled a large crucifix.

  You didn’t mind the little mix-up, I hope? the doctor said. Our patient expressly forbade –

  Of course, her husband said.

  You must not take it personally, the doctor told Anna, crinkling his face. One of the symptoms of this kind of breakdown is paranoia. Our patient will manifest a strong dislike of a loved one, often triggered by the most trivial incident. Naturally she would refuse to see you. In her current state she barely knows who you are.

  She seemed quite rational just now, her husband said in a low voice.

  Grieving is a complicated process, a mysterious process. You must think of it as the soul caring for itself.

  Yes, of course, Anna said.

  They walked back across the lawn to the bus stop.

  Did you tell the doctor about the dessert? she asked.

  I told him.

  I didn’t know it was his favourite. Your father.

  Of course you didn’t.

  I wouldn’t have put it in front of her if I’d known –

  All right.

  They watched the shuttle bus toil up the hill, so slowly that it seemed to run not on oil and gas but on a small child’s winding.

  Can you fix her house up? he said suddenly. Make it nice?

  Her mind scuttled, a spider, reaching in every direction at once.

  I just don’t think you should sell it without her consent. It will be one more blow.

  They sat in the car on the sandy grass verge of the dirt road watching the waves roll up the beach. Behind them loomed the ancient tangled forest of the University endowment lands. He had driven her here once when they were courting and then lost his nerve. Perhaps because of that first occasion it had become their holy talking place. He liked to trap her here on rainy Sundays and talk about his dreams and plans for them, and when necessary to pick at such recalcitrant shoelace knots as arose in their lives. He liked to smoke out the open window and talk or just watch the rain through the windshield while she watched his profile, or curled obediently under his arm. He could never see the ugliness in the metal sea, the endlessly dripping trees. Often he would bring his camera and practise while she stayed in the car, curds of headache curling and thickening in her skull.

  She could be in there a month, her husband said. I’m cutting corners as it is, putting her in a shared room, but there’s no other way I can afford it.

  What’s the room like?

  I didn’t think it was bad. There’s a curtain separating the beds. The other woman wasn’t there. The nurse told me she lost a baby.

  Oh.

  (She wondered if that was the woman they had seen on their way upstairs, before the nurses stopped them, apologetically but firmly, and sent Anna back down; the quite young, dazed woman who had looked directly at Anna as though she recognized her and said, I’m cold.)

  How is she?

  She was only half-awake because of the medications. But just as I was
leaving she said she wanted her own room. She was pretty clear about that.

  Maybe she meant she wants to be home. In her own room with her own things.

  You don’t want her living with us, is that it?

  She said nothing, was silent long enough for him to become repentant. Then she said, Let’s go home.

  Are we friends?

  Buddy, please, let’s go home.

  I’m sorry. But I don’t like arguing with you. It’s all we seem to do any more.

  Well, I don’t like it either.

  Truce?

  She touched his cheek with her hand. It was enough, apparently.

  What a lousy day, he said in a more normal voice, turning the key in the ignition.

  The boy stood with his pants in his hands, hands pink to the wrist because she had sent him to wash them, they were so cold. He had smelled chokingly of aftershave and she had told him to wash that off too.

  Have you got them? she had asked first thing, and he had laughed and pulled an envelope of prophylactics from his jacket pocket and tossed them to her, frightening her a little. She had expected certain things but not playfulness, not happiness. She had been reassured by his delivery boy’s bicycle, its wheels glittering in rhythm with her thoughts as he walked it into the back shed as she had directed, but then his face had confused her.

  Have you done this before? she asked.

  Curiosity killed the cat.

  He had actually said that, the very words.

  They kissed for a long time in the kitchen. She had decided this would be the worst part, and therefore it was. There was no natural spark between them, no comfort. His hands were clumsy and cold. But even as she doubted curiosity quickened deep in her, a worm in the brain, and again it was as though she could look into darkness and see shining a single thread, a filament of a path through to the other side. If that was the way forward, she would go forward. She would do one thing and the next thing and see what happened then.

  He pulled away from her, flushed, almost unrecognizable, and said something thickly that she didn’t catch. When he repeated it she felt a great wincing contraction of pity coupled with an electric eagerness to proceed. The filament glowed white-hot along its length. She sent him to wash.