My brother looked back and forth between the two of us until my grandmother turned her attention to him and said, “And you, mister, you should be sitting quiet too. God knows where you get your manners.” Yet I knew she did not expect conflict from him; all serious matters, the only kind of power important to her, were elements that involved women in the family. Her dealings with him—perhaps because he looked and acted like my father at that age—and even her tone as she chastised him was often comic, as if he were a dog, unruly and innocent.
z
My grandmother was sitting up in bed, her feet, twin points under the blankets, a net over her head covering pin curlers, like rows of tiny artillery. On my way back from the washroom I could see them from the hallway—my grandfather reading, my grandmother putting cream on her elbows. “Did you turn the light off?” she asked when she saw me and when I responded she said, “Good. Now get some sleep.” Well into the night, from the room where my brother and I lay, I could hear them, as cars passing before the house created wide arcs of moving light on the ceiling. I knew they were speaking about my mother because her name was the only word I could make out.
The next morning, from the large picture window in the living room, we could see snow falling so thick it was difficult to make out the neighbours across the street decorating their house with Christmas lights. My mother, caught in Montreal by the snowstorm, called to say she might not be back until after dinner. After the call, my grandmother put down the receiver. “Well, that’s just typical,” she said to my grandfather. “For one thing there’s not enough room at the dining room table.” My aunt, uncle and cousin were coming for their customary Sunday dinner. “So the kids will have to eat in the kitchen. And I hate making a mess in two rooms.”
z
Later in the day, my grandmother stood by the front door as snow continued to fall, welcoming my aunt and her family, “Come in, come in. It’s just awful out there.” When they entered the front hall she added, “Joe, you can put your galoshes here,” pointing to a plastic mat she had cleaned and put in the hallway. “The TV is on downstairs everyone,” she said to my uncle and me and to then to Monica: “Why don’t you go and watch it with your Grandpa?”
“Good idea,” my uncle said and went through the kitchen to the stairs that led to the rec room.
My grandmother moved to the stove and shook salt into a large pot of vegetable soup while I stood in the kitchen doorway, Monica beside me. My aunt and grandmother busied themselves with the dinner, with their backs to us. Standing like this they looked remarkably similar, two thin straight women, the same height with aprons tied in bows at their waists.
“Well I had it out,” my grandmother said. “I just told her.”
“What did you say?” my aunt asked.
“I told her it wasn’t right with two young kids to work where she does, to see those men she sees. I just told her to remember she shares my last name. Do you know what she said? She said, ‘I’m going to live my own life.’ How could she be like that?” The steam from the pot created a mist on the window. “I was right, wasn’t I, to say something, I mean?”
“You have to do what feels right, Mom,” my aunt said.
I watched a car creep by on the street. My grandmother said, “And now she leaves them here with me because she’s stuck in some snowstorm and I’m just supposed to feed and look after them. And God knows what she’s really doing.” She stopped chopping and put her hand on her hip. “Besides, I think living with her has perverted them, especially Amy.” I moved around into the hallway where she could not see me, but where I could still see the window. “Just before you came, I caught her up in the attic eavesdropping over the grill. Listening to us. She’s become a moody little thing, really, her mother’s daughter.”
Monica went to her grandmother’s side, “When’s dinner, Grandma?”
“Well, my, look who’s here.” My grandmother bent down to hug her before saying, “Such a good girl.” Out the steamy window I could see Christmas lights that snaked around the windows and doors of the houses across the street, smeared red, yellow, and green circles.
z
That afternoon my brother and I had been told to stay in the rec room. The thought made me itchy and so instead, when I knew my grandmother was busy, I went to the attic. There I knew I could sit alone in front of the dormer window, watching the snow and listening to the house beneath me. The room was disorganized and I liked not having to listen or care; that I could let the sounds of their voices simply drift up and dissipate into the attic’s cool air.
I fell asleep and an hour later woke to my grandmother mounting the steps. When she saw me, she said, “When I call you, you come. Do you understand?” She was wearing a white blouse and grey skirt, pearls around her neck, hands on her hips. Her apron was patterned with daisies and bluebells. I remembered this detail because I was staring at the fabric rather than looking at her face. There had been times when I’d sensed her anger, but it had never been so close before. Her shoes, black and laced, made a chafing noise on the floor, as she pushed me in front of her toward the stairs, and there was a kitchen smell emanating from her, warm and yeasty. “What’s the attraction up here anyway?” She stopped and we could hear classical music playing from the den and my grandfather’s cough. “So that’s it. You were listening to us, like a little sneak. Listening to us so that... What? You could tell her?” She hurried me down the stairs and at the bottom turned to face me and spat the words: “You are just like her.” There it was. The truth, as she knew it, the truth we were locked on either side of.
It seemed an immeasurable amount of time that we stood like this, her face close to mine, her eyes dark with anger and I wonder what forced time to resume. The sound of a door shutting perhaps, a car in the lane way or the bark of a neighbour’s dog, these sounds crept into the moment, but what stayed was the intensity of her expression. Antagonism and then derision gathered there, freezing for a terrible instant, receding gradually and leaving finally an uncompromising inaccessibility and I felt, not for the last time, that sense of childhood hopelessness and entrapment.
z
After my grandfather’s death when I was in my early twenties, my grandmother stayed alone in the house where they had lived for more than forty years. I’d think of her there, imagine the rooms closing in. The winter veils of snow moving across the yard, the neighbourhood children coming home in the mauve light of four o’clock—she must have seen all this from the window in the kitchen that looked out onto the street. That same window where in 1957 I saw the smudged orbs of colour from the Christmas lights. What would she think standing alone by that window, the rooms of the house she knew so well behind her, clean and silent?
z
On a winter day, ten years after my grandfather’s death, my grandmother died. My mother called to tell me that my aunt had found her at the bottom of the basement stairs when she’d gone to pick her up for Sunday dinner. She’d been dead several hours.
I see her lying there so clearly, it is as if I’m there. It’s as if in my heart I’m there as a child, sitting in that room, not moving, being quiet, my hands in my lap. I look at her; the tangle of her eighty-five-year-old body, a knot that cannot be untied. Snow piles against the basement window making it difficult to see the yard or the light. I can hear the wind’s howl breaking the winter silence. And in a fierce revelation I finally understand the merciless power of youth and patience.
First Snow
When my marriage was first failing and I would try to understand what it meant for the future, I’d think back to my aunt Rita’s house on the evening my uncle told his family he was leaving. I had not been there that night, but I heard my mother and aunt speaking the following day and I remembered it had snowed, the first snow of 1958, the year I was six. I had always loved my aunt’s home, a large stone house on a street where other large brick and stone houses stood divided by arbours a
nd laneways. I knew how her living room would have looked on that November evening, with its furniture caught in the light of dusk, mirrors along the wall, and the set of double doors that opened onto a patio.
In my imagining of that night, my cousin Claire is my age and sitting on the yellow floral chesterfield, she wore a blue dress covered by an embroidered white smock with a ruffled slip of eyelet beneath, the kind of dress a heroine in a children’s story might wear, the kind of dress I would have loved to own. Her shoes were black patent leather and her ankle socks bright white and rimmed with lace. She was the beating heart in that immaculate room of high ceilings and satin curtains, precious with youth although her face was flushed from crying. When a door closed upstairs, she stopped, straightened and listened, looking toward the sound. Tears sat on her smooth cheeks like dew.
At the sound of someone descending the stairs, Claire wiped her tears away and waited. As the night filled the room, so had an atmosphere of secrecy, of a complicated silence. She leaned over and snapped on the table lamp beside her. It was a quick sound, a period at the end of a sentence. My uncle appeared at the door, dressed in a large brown coat and fedora. His unhappy face hung like a heavy sack. “Claire,” he said.
“Yes, Daddy.” The light made all the difference for the room now seemed sunny, the glass of the coffee table gleamed and the mirrors reflected the room crisply, giving a sense of clean, limitless space.
“Everything is going to be okay,” he said. “I’ve spoken with your mother.” He was in the room now, not far from his daughter who had tucked her legs beneath her. “Yes, Daddy,” she said again. Outside long scarves of loose night drifted down pathways, caught on hedges, and tangled in the dead flowers and weeds of their garden.
The silence was broken by the sound of a radio coming from the upstairs bedroom of her brothers, Jim and Glen. Their joint room was on the first landing; it was large with a bed on either side, a basketball hoop behind the door, clothes on the floor, books, papers scattered on the dressers and their shared desk. Jim had pronounced features, heavy eyebrows, and a stubborn cowlick in his dark hair while Glen was fair with blue eyes, his hairline already receding. Glen squinted from the effort of tossing a basketball in the air with one hand. It made him look angry. The radio on low played Elvis Presley, “Love Me Tender.” At thirteen, Jim, younger by three years, stood before his brother. “It means we will probably have to move, that’s what it means,” he said. They were dressed similarly, in corduroy pants and ski sweaters; Glen’s tied in a knot around his neck. “Well, so,” he said, “We’ll be okay.”
“What if they ask us to choose?” Jim said.
Glen stopped tossing the ball and sat up. “They wouldn’t ask us to do that.” He did not want to be part of this dilemma, this family. The day before he’d met a girl, someone new at school, and now nothing was as real to him as her face, her clear blue eyes, the feeling he had as he walked away. Even as he spoke to his brother he was thinking of the way her hair was drawn back and how her smile made him swell with anticipation, almost happiness.
My aunt opened the door. “Boys?” Her presence was unassuming but her voice spiked with worry. This is a stupid waste of time, Glen thought and began to toss the ball higher as Jim turned sadly to look at her.
My aunt was a small woman, gentle and easily flustered. She was wearing a gold satin dressing gown that matched the blonde hair piled on her head; soft curls fell about her neck. She moved as if in a trance. “Boys,” she said again, “I don’t want you to worry, I…” she stumbled a little into the room, sat on the edge of Glen’s bed and moved her hand to her cheek. “I,” she raised her head. “I mean, we’ll be fine, one way or the other.”
Neither boy spoke as she stood and left the room. She moved slowly, lifting her dressing gown and as she walked, the sound of heavy fabric dragging on carpet followed her. Her bedroom was cream and gold and behind the bed’s quilted satin headboard was a wall of mirrored tiles. She stopped when she entered the room and looked at herself in the mirror. Just a few minutes before, her husband had stood where she was standing, as she had looked out the window and let his words sink into her. Even as he spoke, part of her was detached, watching the night move over the street.
Her arms hung motionless by her side, her head tilted, as if she were straining to hear distant voices, her pain so pure it was a stillness that reached out and settled into the room. How could she know there would be days in the future when she would again be content, when she’d arrange flowers and make meals and sit with her son watching television? She heard Glen and Jim speaking over the sound of Glen’s basketball and she wondered if Claire had spoken with her father before he left.
z
In my imagining I leave her here and move to the attic, my favourite room of their old house. At the top of the stairs hung a cord that turned on a light bulb when tugged. It swung for a moment like a loose eye, forcing the shadows of boxes, garment bags and furniture to sway about the room. Past the clutter, out the dormer window that looked down at the front of the house, snow fell on cars in laneways and on the street, collecting on windowsills and in doorways.
On the path that led from the front door, my uncle stopped and turned back to look at the house. His face was hidden, lost in the shadow of his fedora, arms loose by his side. He stood like this long enough for snow to gather thick on the rim of his hat. Then he closed the top button of his coat and pulled the scarf tight around his neck. He wants to be someone different, I thought. He wants to start over. It was such a simple wish that looking down on him even I could feel it.
When my uncle was gone, snow filled the sidewalk where he’d stood; only a sense of absence remained. The house below lay quiet. My thoughts from this evening stall here, in the attic, where I stand wondering if my aunt and cousins are now sleeping; if they, each in their own way, have returned to their separate worlds. The snow is thinning; a few lost flakes wander before the window. Soon the evening’s final darkness will consume the view and I will be left standing by the window looking out at the cold sky, and it will appear to me, not for the last time, like the future descending.
The Wedding
Amy stood on the steps of the church, holding a bouquet of assorted flowers: pink carnations, gardenias and baby’s breath, a bouquet her mother had made that morning with twine and white ribbons. Seven years old, she was to be the flower girl in her sister Natalie’s wedding and had been sent ahead to the church with her uncle Joe, aunt Dorothy and Claire, a cousin and the daughter of her aunt Rita. Rita with her two sons, Jim and Glen, were already on the grounds of the church when Joe drove his lumbering Plymouth into the gravel parking lot. On the top step of the wide staircase Amy stood by the two large doors that when opened gave her a view of the vestry and nave, a billowing dark space smelling of wood polish and incense. But mostly she watched the crowd on the lawn and pathway —friends and relatives mixing with those of the groom, Johnny.
Earlier, as maid of honour, Claire had gone to the bride’s house to be photographed with the bridal party before the wedding. Now at the church, she looked perfectly photogenic. Tall and blonde, she wore a purple lace dress that gathered at her waist and flared to just below her knee; on her feet, satin high heels with pointed toes, dyed the same colour as her gown. Now, from the top step by the church doors, Amy watched her aunt Dorothy pin a wide brimmed hat on Claire, her expression intent as she held pins in her mouth and spoke rapidly around them. “You’ll still have to hold it in the wind—this is really just a lick and a promise.”
Amy looked past Claire and Dorothy to the far end of the pathway from where her aunt Margaret with her uncle Phil approached. There she is, Amy thought; the last time Amy had seen her aunt the week before she’d promised to buy Amy the bride and groom ornament that she’d seen in a photograph of the bridal cake. Margaret and her husband were walking arm in arm, her other hand holding her coat shut, and Amy worried because she could not see th
e dolls (as she thought of them) or any place they could be hidden. She rushed down the steps. “Where’s my bride and groom?” she asked without preamble. But Dorothy had seen Margaret too and was asking her sister about the outfit she was wearing.
“What?” Margaret said in a distracted way, unhooking her arm from her husband and bending slightly to speak with Amy, but then immediately straightening to answer Dorothy. “Oh no, I decided to wear this instead.”
“My dolls!” Amy said.
“Your dolls?” Margaret echoed. “My, don’t you look sweet.” She turned to Dorothy, “Doesn’t she look sweet? The prettiest little girl, don’t you think Dorothy?”
“Oh, yes, the dress’s cute,” Dorothy responded. “But June and Natalie kept her up all night finishing it and I think she’s a little crabby.”
I am not, Amy thought. “The dolls, Aunt Margaret, you promised.”
“What is it sweetie? What dolls?” Margaret turned to Claire who was standing beside Dorothy, “That’s a beautiful dress, Claire, very attractive.”
“Thanks, I like it too,” Claire said.
Amy’s voice rose, “But you told me, you said you’d get them for me.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Amy,” Margaret stood straight and looked down as she spoke. “What dolls?”
“On the cake. You promised.”
“Oh, the ornaments.” Margaret arched her back as if she was about to laugh at the thought. “Well, not today, today’s the wedding.” She waved to her nephew Jim. “You have a job today Amy. You can’t play with dolls. Besides aren’t you getting too old for that?”
z
At that very moment the bride was alone in the upstairs washroom of her home; she was dressed in a slip having removed her wedding dress after the photographer and the bridal party had left. She applied lipstick and eyeliner for the sixth time that day. “What are you doing in there?” her mother, June, said from the hallway.
The View From the Lane and Other Stories Page 4
