Each morning she made herself a simple bag lunch of buttered homemade bread, a piece of cheese, an orange or apple, and a thermos of tea. She ate it on the bench in front of the health unit. It never occurred to her to eat in a restaurant. She couldn’t bring herself to pay what the clapboard outside the café next to the health unit advertised—a buck fifty for a bowl of soup and a sandwich that she could make herself at home. It was robbery. Yet one day she forgot her bag lunch and there she was, an hour’s drive from home, with a couple of hours to kill before her next job. She had taken extra afternoon work, as school was out during the summer and she didn’t have to drive the two handicapped children home. She’d have to feed herself somehow, and pass the time.
The café was nearly empty, as it was between coffee time and lunch time. It was an adventure for her, going inside. She chose a booth large enough to hold several people, because it was near the window, looking over the bench on which she sat most lunch hours. She stared at this bench, suddenly shy, unwilling, unable to look around the café, until the waitress came by with the menu and a glass of water. The waitress said, “You alone?”
Augusta stared at the woman’s apron. Her question felt like an indictment. Did she expect that Augusta was meeting some man? Or had Augusta missed a sign over the door, like the ones over the bars that said Women Must Be Accompanied by a Gentleman? “Alone?” she said.
“Is anyone else joining you? Lunch hour starts in about fifteen minutes. The place gets pretty crowded.”
“No, no it’s just me.”
“Well, you can sit here if you want, but if a big group comes in I might have to move you over to one of the smaller tables.”
“I won’t be long.”
“Pardon?”
“I said I can’t stay long. I have to get back to work.”
“All right then. Just so you know.”
“I’ll get a sandwich. What you have on the board outside.”
“The soup and sandwich?”
“Yes, that’s fine.”
“All righty. Coffee?”
“Yes. No. Tea, please.”
It was only then that she looked around at the place. It was a small café called the Silver Grill (later she found out from Joe that the locals called it “The Swill”). The whole place smelled of tomato soup and fried onions. Someone sitting at the counter on one of those spinning stools could watch as the cook grilled his cheese sandwich. Parallel to the counter and grill, one long line of high-backed red booths ran along the window. Augusta sat in one of these. In between the booths and counter was a row of small tables. The blue-green walls were bare except for a monkey calendar over the grill and a large, delicately carved wooden clock that hung over the door. It was like a large cuckoo clock except that, as the clock hit twelve and its doors opened, a stage emerged on which several brightly coloured figures circled in and out of the clock, dancing to a lively music-box tune. The figures were little men and women chased by Death, a skeleton in black robes holding a scythe. Augusta was enchanted. She’d never seen anything like it. She watched the clockwork people, spellbound, until the music-box tune played itself out and the stage and all its figures retreated.
The place filled quickly with men and women from the offices around, and with workmen, many of whom still wore their army jackets or pants. The booths along the window were the first to fill, then the row of small tables, then the stools at the grill. She would have to move and she hadn’t even finished her soup, or touched her sandwich. She spooned down the soup quickly, nervously, eyeing the waitress as she ran back and forth. Why had she come here? She could have bought some fruit at one of the grocers. Going hungry was better than sitting here waiting to be embarrassed. Then there they were, coming in through the café door: a group of women all dressed beautifully, or so it seemed to Augusta. They were office staff by the looks of them, working women. Sophisticated women. Laughing women. They glanced around the café, at Augusta all alone in the large booth, and then started to leave. The waitress caught them and directed them down the aisle towards Augusta. “You’re going to have to move, miss,” the waitress told her.
“I’m just about finished.”
The group of office women stood around the table awkwardly, trying not to look at Augusta, tittering among themselves.
“I’m sorry, miss,” said the waitress. “I warned you it would get busy.”
“You can put my sandwich in a bag, then. I’ll take it with me.”
“I’ll just move you over there, miss.” The waitress took the sandwich and coffee over to the counter, and so Augusta was forced to fold her skirt beneath her and take the last swirling stool. It was all men seated at the counter. She felt the fool sitting among them, and was embarrassed that the laughing women who had taken her booth could surely see the hole in the calf of her stocking. The men at the counter had been talking heatedly and went silent when she took the stool in their midst. She was pretty in her way—sturdy and muscular from farm work and housework—though she didn’t know it then. Her skin was clear and rosy. The young man sitting to her left grinned at her, but she ignored him. She accepted the cook’s offer of more water for her teapot and stared straight ahead, at the clothed chimpanzees on the calendar hanging on the wall. After a time the men went back to their conversation and talked around her back, as if she weren’t there. They were using the kind of language that made her stomach turn and her muscles flinch as if she had been hit. She found herself hunching over her sandwich, holding her elbows close to her body.
Finally the man to her right said, “Hey! Cut the swearing. There’s a lady present!”
She turned to him, to smile her thanks, and met a jangle of medals that hung over his heart. He was an older man, Manny’s age. Had he been an officer? Neither Manny nor Karl had fought; they were farmers and were needed at home. They were pretty, those medals, very impressive.
“Don’t mind these,” he said. “They don’t mean nothing.” He grinned and Augusta smiled right back. He held out his hand and she took it. “Joe. Joe Cumberland.”
“Augusta Olsen.”
After a time he said, “There’s a table free now. Why don’t we take it?”
“Yes,” she said, surprising herself. “Let’s.”
What did they talk about during that first conversation? She didn’t remember now. Likely about nothing at all, the weather and the cost of things, the meaningless chatter that lovers use to test the waters. What was said wasn’t so important. How long the conversation went on was. The talk had to last until they agreed on each other. It was a dance they didn’t even know they were doing at the time, and one where she took the lead. She brushed away her hair and he scratched his forehead. She touched her lips and he wiped his mouth with his napkin. Even if they didn’t know it yet, everybody else could see it. Anyone sitting in the Silver Grill that day could have looked at Augusta and Joe and said, Those two there, they’re lovers, or if they aren’t yet, they’re going to be.
Though their words said nothing, their bodies said everything, agreed on everything. And when the timing was right, her hand, moving almost of its own accord, reached over and casually brushed the sensitive hairs on his arm. If he didn’t pull away, if he let the touch electrify the hairs on his arm, then the second dance would begin and it would be his turn to take the lead. Men generally forgot the first dance, Augusta thought, remembering only the part they played in seduction, and supposed that they were the seducers, the hunters, and women their prey. And yet it was her body that had opened the conversation and offered the first invitation, or Joe would never have been so bold as to take her hand or suggest a walk to someplace hidden away. But then, why should he remember? There was so much more ahead; the dance had only just begun.
Five
TODAY, WHEN THE train stopped at Duncan, there was a girl overdressed for daylight standing outside a corner delicatessen across from the station. She was smoking a cigarette. A large handbag was slung over her shoulder, so she likely wasn’t
a clerk from the deli sneaking a smoke on her break, and in any case the clothes were a dead giveaway. An attempt to impress. An attempt to please. The girl was waiting on a man. There were several empty outdoor tables behind her, so she could have taken a seat and waited there. But no, she was nervous. She was smoking. What if he didn’t show? Sitting down and waiting was a kind of risk; it said, I really want this, I’ll wait for you. Standing and waiting was something else. It said, I won’t wait for ever.
In the first few weeks with Joe, Augusta had sometimes stood outside the café, waiting in such a manner, impatience pressed on her face, though she carried that little white pea of hope in her belly. Later, when she trusted that he would come, she was willing to sit with her cup of tea and plate of cinnamon toast, and wait. She even came to enjoy her few moments alone in the café, surrounded by the voices of the unemployed men as they argued up, up into obscenities on their twirling stools. The laughter of the office women at first frightened her and then later, when she came to trust that she was not the target of it, warmed her. Some of the women even gave her little smiles and nods—as if she were one of them—as they found their tables. But they wouldn’t nod or smile if Joe was with her. They understood that he would take up her attention. So she came to enjoy waiting on Joe, watching the music-box clock. She sometimes even felt a sting of annoyance that he turned up so soon, because he would make demands on her; he would expect to be entertained and she had been enjoying her few moments of peace.
Just a day after that first coffee-shop dance, he walked her into a movie theatre for a little cool relief. She had bathed for him that morning, standing in the steel tub and pouring water over her head, and had put on her good dress. She went to the café early, before eleven, and chose a table for two this time, facing the clock, so she could both see the figures dance at eleven, and watch the door below. She scanned the line of unemployed men sitting on the stools at the counter to make sure Joe wasn’t among them. Then she waited.
Joe arrived at noon, dressed in his army coat, his medals flashing, because a man, even a punctual man, never thought to wait for a woman. He searched for her, and when he found her he sat at her table, not waiting for an invitation. She looked down at her hand stroking the handle of a fork, and then glanced at him, flirty, smiling as Helen had once smiled at Harry. “What say we catch a movie?” he said. “A matinée.”
Walking from the summer sidewalk into the movie theatre was a relief but a shock too. From hot to cool, from white concrete light to bottom-of-the-river dark, she went with Joe into hiding. Hot outside, Lord, what a summer it was! The grasses along the fields at home were tinder ready to ignite. Karl’s corn crop had leapt towards the sun and was now curling brown at the leaf tips from thirst. Augusta followed Joe into the theatre, praying that he couldn’t smell the sourness that heat and nerves had draped around her, praying that no one would see them, praying Joe would take her hand in his for the first time.
Joe was tall, a big man, and when she’d spent so many years feeling large and awkward beside Karl it was a relief for Augusta to feel diminutive, and protected. His eyes were dark brown, almost black, and he was balding and proud of it. “A man losing his hair has more vigour, if you get my meaning,” he told Augusta. Although in private he was brash and playful in a way Karl would never be, he almost always showed his best manners in public. He stood when Augusta left the table to use the washroom, and took her arm as they walked down the street, as a Victorian gentleman might have.
At first they ate only in the café, or brought lunches to eat on the floor of the hotel room. But later, as they became braver (brazen, Augusta thought now), they sometimes took lunches into the park, where anyone could have seen them lying on the grass together or talking over the picnic table. One day a sudden thunder shower engulfed their picnic and they were forced to take shelter under the park table until the rain passed, sharing canned kippers and giggling like teenagers.
They were reckless in their infatuation. Joe often drove Augusta out into the countryside, to the farm and ranch land surrounding Kamloops, where they waded into fields and chased each other through corn before hiding in it to husk and eat the unripened corn raw. One day they came across a number of hives a farmer had moved into an alfalfa field. Augusta climbed through a barbed-wire fence to raid the hive for a bit of honeycomb and to show off a few of her beekeeping skills. Joe watched her take off the lid and inner hive cover, pull out a frame of honeycomb, and shake off the bees. She cut out a chunk of honeycomb with Joe’s jack-knife, and handed it to him as she put the frame back and closed the hive. They ran back to the car with their stolen honeycomb, laughing and licking their fingers. Joe took to calling her his “little honeybee” after that.
He was comfortable like the smell of soap, like clean sheets, like good coffee shared. While Karl blessed Augusta with quick, half-embarrassed pecks, Joe’s kisses were a slow, involved exploration of her face. After lovemaking he combed her hair and kissed the nape of her neck. At other times he chased her naked around the hotel room, and tickled her on the floor.
There was that day in the department store when she stopped to run her fingers over a lipstick display. Knowing Joe was watching, she suggestively fondled the bright red plastic lipsticks placed there to demonstrate the colour choices. Joe snatched one of the lipsticks from the display, slid off its lid, and said, “Look at me.” He painted her mouth right there. The women standing around the makeup counter giggled and a clerk with a made-up face came over and said, “May I help you?”
Joe said, “No thank you. I’m already being helped,” and kissed Augusta firmly on the lips as the crowd of women clapped and cheered him on. Then he stood back, recapped the lipstick, and handed it to the clerk. “I’ll take this one,” he said. Augusta was flushed. She was a movie star playing the part and he was her leading man. It didn’t matter that she didn’t know his middle name, and couldn’t remember if he took his coffee black or with cream or if he preferred his steak well done or raw. Giddy from his attentions and the delight of the crowd, she tripped on the first step of the escalator going down to street level. Joe steadied her and turned to the two women behind them. “You’ll have to excuse my wife,” he said. “She’s had too much to drink.”
Augusta giggled and hit him playfully with her purse, but the thought that he’d called her his wife thrilled her. Was it possible? Could it ever be possible? “Do you think we could ever get married?” she said, once they were back at the hotel and both of them were lying naked on the bed, after lovemaking.
Joe turned on his side to face her. He must have seen how important it was that he go on playing the part, that he go on pretending. “If I weren’t already married, if you weren’t already married, we would.”
She didn’t push things. She knew so very little about him. She had no real idea what his life was like outside their afternoons together. He never offered the name of his wife, or even suggested whether he had children, though Augusta was forever complaining about Karl and Olaf and her life at the Whorehouse Ranch. In her turn Augusta never mentioned the Reverend. She knew it would be the Reverend, and not Karl, that Joe would be jealous of. When he had occasion to refer to Karl, he called him “the boy.”
“Olaf doesn’t pay Karl,” she told him. “And he works him like a slave.”
“If the boy was a man he’d stand up for himself.” He grinned at his own small joke.
“I won’t hold my breath waiting for that to happen.”
“Why do you bother staying? Why not leave?”
“I’m not going back to my father’s farm.”
“There’s other things you can do.”
“The jobs at the clinic don’t pay enough for me to go out on my own.” She half hoped he would offer to help set her up in an apartment, so he could visit her there, but then what would that make her? In any case he didn’t make any such offer.
“How about waitressing? Or secretarial work?”
Augusta shook her head. “I d
on’t want to talk about it any more.”
One day she waited for Joe until a quarter to three, drinking too much coffee, reading the cook’s newspaper. Having read everything else, she flipped to the obituaries and scanned the page. There was Joe’s picture, labelled with another man’s name. Augusta felt herself reeling backwards, the walls and all the people of the café shooting away from her. Then, just as suddenly, she was shunted back to her booth, her coffee, the newspaper. She squinted at it. The picture wasn’t of him; it didn’t look anything like him. Why had she thought it was Joe? He arrived at that point, out of breath and sweating, apologizing for missing lunch but not offering any explanation. There was time for one kiss before they both ran to their separate lives.
She didn’t tell him that she’d imagined she’d seen his picture in the obituaries. What was there to tell? But she did tell him about some of the visions she’d had. “Isn’t that something?” he said.
“You believe me?”
“Sure, why wouldn’t I?”
“Karl doesn’t.”
“There’s plenty of things that we’ll never see with our own eyes that are true nevertheless. I believe I’ve lived several lives.”
“You have?”
“And you have too. Maybe we were husband and wife and our souls have met up for a little while in this life. Or perhaps I was your dog.” Joe took everything lightly, even his own beliefs. It was something that annoyed Augusta, at a time in her life when she took things so seriously.
There was no phone on the Whorehouse Ranch and, though they hadn’t discussed the issue, Augusta understood that she could never phone Joe’s home. That would make for complications, suspicions. And certainly they never spent the night together. How could either of them possibly explain a night away? So it was an affair conducted in daylight. The closest they came to night was the half-light coming through the closed curtains of the hotel window. She never touched his face in darkness, or saw the change of colour in his skin under candle-light. They made love in daylight; argued in the café in daylight; stopped in the middle of the street for a daylight kiss, comforted by the misconception that the city was large enough to hide them.
A Recipe for Bees Page 12
