‘Not from her mother, anyway. She’s tearing her hair out trying to figure out what to feed her.’
‘I can imagine. Some days I don’t know what to make. I was saying to Neil the other day I wish they’d invent another meat.’
Annabel laughed.
‘So what does she eat, just vegetables and potatoes?’
‘No, she eats cheese and eggs. So if I make pork chops I scramble her up some eggs. And she loves baked beans, I make them every Saturday now. Just like in the old days. Curly loves them, too. I never knew this but if you have bread with the beans it’s supposed to be the same as meat. Jenny-next-door told me that. She doesn’t eat meat either.’
‘The one who makes the cheese?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, there’s your answer.’
‘What?’
‘Where Lucy got the idea not to eat meat.’
‘Oh … I don’t know. Her mother says she just came up with this on her own. But you never know with kids.’
‘Mmmm, these are good.’
‘Here, have another one.’
‘So they must have cows if they make cheese. Jenny. And they don’t eat meat?’
‘She won’t eat it. But he does. Poor man, I always give him a ham sandwich with his tea. She’s been giving me recipes, though, like you add powdered milk or nuts to things. For protein. I made two batches of these squares, one with coconut for the Bazaar and the other one with walnuts. I don’t find them as good, though. The ones with walnuts.’
‘Walnuts are expensive.’
‘I know. And us with a freezer full of beef.’
The squeak of the hinges on the porch door: Lucy, holding a bulging Co-op bag. She hands it to Annabel.
‘Lucy, you remember Hilda.’
‘My, you’re after getting big!’ Hilda says.
‘Do you think?’ Annabel says. She looks inside the bag. ‘I didn’t think she grew a-tall this winter.’
‘And look at that blonde hair. My hair used to be that colour. Now it comes out of a bottle.’
‘Jenny sent me some chard,’ Annabel said. ‘Do you want some?’
‘No thanks. It’s not something we eat.’
‘Is that right? I could eat that whole bag by myself, with butter and salt and pepper. Lucy likes it too, don’t you, Lucy? How do you say chard in French?’
Lucy shrugs.
‘She’s our little French girl, was I telling you? She goes to French school in Sudbury; it’s called French Immersion and it’s –’
‘They got that in Margaree now,’ Hilda says.
‘French Immersion?’ Annabel says. ‘Are you sure?’ She looks a little crestfallen. ‘Donnie Roach was here last week and he was going a hundred miles an hour with the parlay-voo and Lucy understood every single word he said; say something in French, Lucy.’
Lucy reaches for a coconut square.
‘Yours are on the counter. But wash your hands first. Say something in French for Hilda.’
‘Fromage.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Cheese.’
‘No, no, say a whole sentence.’
‘Fromage fromage fromage fromage.’
DEAD SERIOUS
The phone rang while they were in the middle of baking. Lucy was holding a carton of molasses upside down over a bowl of batter and Annabel had her hands in biscuit dough. So they had to let it ring. ‘It’s probably Donalda,’ Annabel said. ‘She’s not working today.’ After she had scraped the dough from her fingers with a bread knife, rinsed her hands under the tap, and dried them on a tea towel, she dialled her cousin’s number.
– Was that you who just called?
The carton of molasses near empty except for its dark-coated insides. A thin brown filament twirls and loops into the batter.
– I thought so.
– Oh, is that right?
– Did he say what was wrong?
– Tsk, tsk.
Dissolving molasses stars and bows. Sinking polka dots.
– No, Curly’s in Truro. He can’t pick them up.
– Not the auction, that’s on Wednesday. He said something about a Belgian. I’ll get Lucy to pick them up. Her little friend next door is gone and she’s got nothing to do anyway.
– No that’s next week they’re going. I don’t know where she went today.
– Usually it’s Toronto.
– No-no she’s Canadian; they’re both Canadian. She’s from Toronto and he’s from Manitoba.
– No-o-o, he can’t go anywhere with those cows.
– Well, I suppose.
After lunch Annabel said, ‘Here’s my money’ and tucked a ten-dollar bill in the back pocket of Lucy’s shorts. ‘And here’s Donalda’s,’ folding a second one in the other pocket. ‘Mind you don’t mix them up now.’
When Lucy comes back from the store she hands Annabel the four bingo cards and places the change that she has separated – Annabel’s in the left back pocket of her jeans and Donalda’s in the right – on the kitchen table.
‘Which ones are mine?’ Annabel says.
Lucy points to the pile of coins nearest the wall. Annabel purses her mouth and the vertical grooves between her nose and lips (the ones her lipstick likes to climb) become pale as scars.
‘No, no,’ she says. ‘The cards! Which ones are my cards?’
Lucy shrugs.
‘I thought I told you not to mix them up! If Donalda wins how will I know it wasn’t with one of my cards?’
Bingo, Lucy was learning, was like all the games that adults played.
Dead serious.
Every Tuesday after supper Annabel slipped on a pair of black polyester pants, pulled a lipstick across her dry lips and draped a cardigan over her shoulders. Her purse hanging on the crook of her arm, she stood at the window to wait for Donalda to pick her up. They were going to the Legion Bingo. The next day she always complained (‘growled’ Curly said): it was always the same people winning; everyone smoked like a chimney – she had to wash her hair and hang all her clothes on the line; that Marcella Angus A. was at her table again her mouth going a hundred miles an hour you couldn’t even hear the numbers.
She never won.
On Friday nights Donalda came over for the TV Bingo.
A Holy Hour: the cousins side by side on the chesterfield, bingo cards spread on TV-Dinner tables in front of them, bingo markers at the ready. The living room curtains are drawn. A murky light the colour of bathwater seeps from the ceiling lamp. Lucy is only allowed to stay if she doesn’t talk.
‘Under the B, ten,’ Colonel MacIvor says on TV. He is a round-faced round-headed bald man with a broom moustache. Annabel talks to him as if he is right there in the parlour.
‘Colonel, Colonel, Colonel …,’ she says when he’s not calling any of her numbers. But then she’s getting a good run of them and the little knobs of brown flesh on her cheeks quiver with each stomp of her marker.
‘Was he in the war?’ Lucy wants to know.
‘Shh! shh! shh!’ Annabel says. Then later, capping the marker: ‘In the war. Colonel, you mean?’ She laughs. ‘No-no. His nerves are bad, he’s always been on a pension.’ To Donalda: ‘The things she comes up with.’
Whenever Colonel stops pulling the numbered balls out of the wire cage to announce that a potential winner has just called in, Annabel says: ‘Aarrcchh.’ While he reads out the numbers, her fingers beat on the snack table. And then: ‘Collie MacPhail from Scotsville?’ Her face a study in scorn and disbelief. ‘Him with the big teachers’ pension.’ She was also annoyed when the winner was a rookie or a dabbler: someone who had not plunked his twenty dollars at the Legion week in and week out. Someone who had not paid her dues.
She never won.
ROBIN JONES AND WHITMAN
A twist of the
silver knob and a gush of peanuts falls into Lucy’s cupped hand. She takes them back to her seat on the low shelf by the window. The game: pop a peanut in her mouth every time someone walks in. The tall boy who pumps gas opens the door (peanut). Her father once worked here and Duncan says she can have the job when she’s old enough. Duncan pushes the door open, holds it for a man behind him (peanut, peanut). Lucy asked him how old that would be (fifteen, he said) but only to be nice. She doesn’t think she’d like pumping gas much. A woman comes in holding her car keys (peanut). She hands them to Duncan behind the counter, says, ‘I’ll pick it up after work.’ ‘Okay,’ Duncan says to the woman as another man comes in (peanut). There’s the smell in here, for one thing. Of gas and rubber and the inside of Curly’s truck times ten. But maybe by the time she’s fourteen she’ll want to work here. The tall boy answers the phone while he rings in the first man’s sale. ‘MacDonald Irving,’ he says. A third man walks in (peanut). Then everyone leaves, including Duncan, who opens the door to the part of the garage where Curly’s truck is getting fixed. Curly said it wouldn’t take long but he was wrong. She sees him beside the new tires outside, his hands in his pockets, talking to a man and a woman. A fat man walks in (peanut) sits on the chair beside the pop cooler and starts reading the news-paper. Curly has lost his chair again. Qui va à la chasse perd sa place, as Monsieur Mire always says. She looks at the row of black-rubber-somethings on the wall above her. Maybe that’s what smells. Duncan comes back in (peanut). Then the boy (peanut). Then Curly again (peanut).
‘Can I go for a walk?’ she says.
‘The truck’ll be ready soon, I don’t want to go looking for you.’
‘I’ll just go to the Co-op and come back.’
‘I want to take off as soon as the truck is fixed. I have to go pick up those chickens.’
‘I’ll just go as far as Robin Jones.’
‘Okay. But don’t go in anywhere. And come right back.’ She offers him some peanuts but he shakes his head. ‘And watch when you cross the street.’
‘Grampie …’
On the sidewalk in front of Robin Jones. She’s just turned around to go back to the garage when she sees a woman coming towards her. A quick little woman, she reminds her of the stiff-legged birds you see at the beach, running in and out of the surf. If you keep walking, doing whatever you’re doing, the birds stay where they are. But if you stop to watch them they fly away.
Up close, the woman has large grey eyes and high cheekbones, a flat, heart-shaped upper lip. She stops in front of Lucy. ‘You’re Blaise’s girl, aren’t you?’
Lucy nods.
‘Someone told me that but I didn’t believe it.’ She cocks her head. ‘You don’t look like him one bit.’
Lucy shrugs.
‘Not one little bit. I suppose you look like your mother.’
Lucy’s mother is fat and round. Lucy can’t see how she could look anything like her. She shrugs.
‘Maybe you look like me,’ the woman says. And then she begins to cry. Right there in front of Robin Jones, with cars and trucks going by and people coming behind them on the sidewalk. Big tears roll down her face and her mouth is red and ugly. Lucy stands there for a while not knowing what to do then she walks away as fast as she can.
BIRD ON A WIRE
Eric Petcoff sat on the three-legged stool he had built out of scraps of lumber and rested his head against Blondie’s plush odorous flank. He talked to her as he began to squirt milk from her teats. ‘Hey Blondie, Blondie, how’s it going Blondie?’ And sometimes he sang.
‘Bird On a Wire’ was their favourite.
Blondie was his best cow ever, a dainty Jersey who did not fidget while he milked her and had big fat teats you could really get your hands around. Twice a day he’d pull on the old green windbreaker with the scorch mark just above the waistband – from his habit of leaning against the wood stove – grab a clean pail from the porch shelf, put on his rubber boots and go meet her at the barn.
He had built the barn even before they began to fix the house. They had wanted horses, Jenny especially, but also cows and chickens and sheep. They had a dream of growing all their own food, of being self-sufficient. Over the years, the barn had sheltered a variety of animals, including a Clydesdale, a donkey and an Araucana hen that laid blue eggs. Of all these creatures, none had given Eric as much satisfaction as the milk cows. He loved everything about them: their large placid eyes, their slow bulk, their calm undemanding nature and love of routine. For the only thing a cow wanted in life was to walk through the same door every day, to stand at the same stanchion, to eat the same food at the exact same hour and be milked by the same person: Blondie didn’t give half as much milk when Jenny milked her and the next day her swollen udder would reproach him for his delinquency. Eric discovered that he also liked routine. It was something he had not known before he had cows.
In the evening Blondie waited for him at the side door by the manure pile. When he opened it she walked in, sometimes missing the step – she was both dainty and clumsy, looked up at him as if to say It’s not my fault I have so many legs, and he had to encourage her with a little shove. After clamping the stanchion around her head, he scooped feed out of an old freezer he kept for that purpose – the perfume of molasses rising up then, mingling with the earthy smells of hay and manure. While Blondie licked up the grain with her big tongue, he cut open a bale of hay and put a flake of it in front of her. Then he tied her tail with a rope because she liked to flick it across his face while he milked. He wouldn’t have minded so much if it hadn’t been matted with manure. Sometimes he put the radio on and listened to the news on CBC but most of the time he just sat on the three-legged stool, his hands working the teats, his mind lulled by the subtle changes in the sound of the milk as it filled the pail. He had come to think of milking as his meditation, a little like the TM his friend Lorne practised except that he had a nice pail of warm milk to show for it afterward.
On this night, however, Eric’s mind was not empty or still. Thoughts and images bled into each other like paint on wet paper. A hundred-year-old farmhouse clad in flaking white paint. Japanese knotweed peering in all the back windows, making the interior shadowy and cool. Silent rooms littered with empty teacups and bouquets of dead wildflowers, outsize purple canvases leaning against the walls. The smell of oil paints and mildew and decaying fruit. A woman’s sinuous brown braid (its silky heft in his hand) and the way it fell over her bare breasts as she reclined on the daybed in the studio.
They had met at Lorne’s summer solstice party. He had noticed her when they first came in, a small woman wearing jeans and a peasant blouse. She was cradling a bottle of beer against her chest. The next time he looked her way she was gone.
Later. He was smoking a joint outside with Teddy and Karl. The children were playing hide-and-seek. Someone was starting the bonfire.
‘Did you see what Camille is driving?’ Teddy said.
‘No, I didn’t,’ Karl said.
‘Let me guess: another Volvo,’ Eric said.
‘How about a gold Jag?’ Teddy said.
‘Fuck off,’ Karl laughed.
‘I kid you not. A ’69. She drove it from Rhode Island.’
Santana ran by, a look of wild happiness on her hot face.
‘Higdon’s gonna have to learn how to drive,’ Karl said, pulling out another joint. Which is when Lorne arrived with the new woman.
‘This is my new neighbour, Cathy,’ he said. And then, half-closing his eyes, ‘She’s an artist.’
She was a small woman but wiry. She looked strong. Maybe it was her auburn hair, all pulled back into a taut braid. Her thick eyebrows trying to hold hands. Her rather wide hips.
‘Where’re you from?’ Eric said as he passed her the joint.
‘Kingston,’ she said before inhaling. She held the smoke in her lungs for a few seconds, exhaled, ‘But I’ve been in T
oronto the last few years.’
‘Going to live here full-time?’
‘I’m giving it a shot. What about you? You here year-round?’
‘Yeah. We’ve been here ten years.’
‘Who’s we?’
‘My wife and daughter.’ She nodded and turned her keen bright gaze away. He felt like he was a pair of shoes she had briefly contemplated trying on at a store.
But after the circle broke up he found himself walking beside her as they entered the house.
‘I have to find the can,’ she said. ‘Where is it?’
‘Outside. They have an outhouse.’
‘Oh.’ She made a face and he laughed. And then she laughed, too. Their laughter made a warm lively space around them.
‘I’ll show you where it is.’
He led her to the opening in the woods and the narrow trail, so worn that even under the dark covered sky the tree roots stood out like the veins on a man’s forearms. She stumbled on one and he held out his hand. She took it.
The night. Settling on his body, his face, his hair. A cloak of leafy smells, damp humus, cool hidden stars. A mist of furtive little sounds, some faraway, some nearby. The moist cracklings under their feet, a bird call, a gurgling. His breath. Hers. All possessed with urgency, as if things had to happen quickly on this, the shortest night of the year.
At the outhouse he said, ‘I’ll wait for you,’ and stepped away. The door creaking open in the dark, banging shut. A rustle of clothing. The rush of urine falling into the chasm. ‘This is embarrassing,’ Cathy said when she came out, wiping her hands on her jeans. She laughed. They had walked back slowly. Toward the glowing windows of the house, the sparks of the bonfire in the sky. The party was a roar now, laughter and conversation doing battle with the music. On the doorstep, she pressed both hands on his forearm, lifted up on her toes, and kissed his cheek.
‘You’re very gallant,’ she said.
In the bright light of the kitchen he saw the speckles of white paint dusting her nose and cheeks. And that pretty little gap between her front teeth.
Lucy Cloud Page 14
