Lawrence watched his aunt and uncle and for the first time felt sorry for them, for their age, for the thickening of their legs, for the difficulty they had walking and hearing. “Yes, it’s a good day,” he said to his uncle Joe, whom everyone in the family liked, so pliant and kind was his nature.
“Where’s Sophia?” Lawrence asked after the silence stretched away from them. Sophia was his Uncle Joe and Aunt Dorothy’s only child, a girl of fourteen.
“Over there, standing with Jim and Glen.” She was a slight girl, with dark hair, wearing a plaid jumper, smiling quietly at something Glen was saying.
“Oh yeah,” Lawrence said, “I see her now.” He noticed that since he’d last seen her she’d grown taller and as if to hide this fact, she stooped slightly and seemed to look and listen to her cousins in a shy, off kilter way.
z
Sophia didn’t really want to stand with her male cousins. She’d have much preferred to be one of the bridesmaids, wearing a purple, flared dress and wide brimmed hat, standing with them, like one more flower of the bouquet. She hated her dress with the ardour and concentration only a fourteen year old is capable of; she hated its somber colours and Peter Pan collar, this dress her mother had chosen at a store in one of the better shops in Brockville where they lived. When her parents dropped her off at the church and went to Natalie’s house to help with the bridal preparations, she joined Jim and Glen and tried to fight the anger that simmered slowly within her. She noticed her mother and father had come back, bringing her cousins Amy and Claire, but she kept her gaze from them, unwilling to be caught in her mother’s cloying attention. She saw them by the front steps, her father speaking to Lawrence, her mother fussing over Claire’s hat and was glad their attention was diverted. Sophia’s grey eyes looked blue in certain light and she was only beginning to display the beauty that would distinguish her in later years, but on this day she thought of herself as awkward, unattractive, certainly not pretty enough to be a bridesmaid. These bitter thoughts occupied her and made it difficult to follow Glen’s stories and jokes.
As her cousins spoke, she watched the groom behind them, joking and pushing his friends. She’d met Johnny a few months earlier when Natalie and he drove to Brockville to introduce him to Dorothy and Joe. After a meal of potato salad, grilled vegetables, ham and chicken (“he may not like ham, not everyone does,” Dorothy had said when planning the meal), Natalie and he had taken Sophia for a ride in his car. Sophia sat in the back, the same spot where she usually sat in her parents’ car. Except before her, on that day, was a version of her future: they listened to Buddy Holly as Johnny drove smoothly over the familiar streets of Brockville. He laughed and said, “We tell Amy that there’s a tiny band in the dashboard, that that’s where the music comes from.” Natalie sang along with the radio, ignoring him, her hand out the window, moving dart-like on the current of air. Watching the groom on his wedding day, Sophia remembered her alert feeling sitting in the back seat of the car, listening to him and Natalie speaking, and feeling a sense of muted dread at the utter familiarity of the streets and landmarks, as they headed back to her home.
“Hi, Sophia,” Johnny called from his group when he saw her looking at him.
“Oh, hi.” And he turned to his friends as she gathered her attention back on her cousin Glen who was now speaking about his friend’s new sports car.
z
“So, when will Natalie be here?” Lawrence asked his uncle.
“Your Mom said to give them half an hour or so, so I guess it’s time to go get them.” But Joe did not move, instead he folded his arms across his chest and looked out once again over the crowd before the church.
“Joe,” Dorothy called. “Joseph,” her strident voice woke him from his contemplation. “Isn’t it time to go?”
It was a short drive to the house, three blocks that brought him from the busy street of the church into the heart of the nearby housing development, and as he drove he thought of the wash of change that had led to this moment, and how it felt for this instant like there was a slowing, a pivot, so that he could see from its vantage the past and the future. Was it for this reason that when he parked in front of the duplex and walked slowly to the door, he was reluctant to hurry? Why, when he knew that the crowd he just left by the church was anxious for the bride to arrive, to start the day, did he stop before ringing the bell?
But June answered the door before he rang could ring. “She’ll be here in a minute,” she said, and Joe could hear the rustle of Natalie’s gown, like a premonition, the sound in his imagination of a mythical creature perhaps, from a tale told in his distant childhood.
“They should all be in the church by the time we get back, and the bridal group in the front hall waiting,” he said. “Except the photographer, that is.”
“Good.” Because their conversation was tinged with suppressed excitement, they were looking at each other closely until they realized they were not speaking and a glance so intimate passed between them that they both simultaneously looked away. “Natalie,” June yelled.
“I’m right here, Mom.”
“Well, good. Let me carry the train of your gown.” And the three of them carefully moved out to the car, depositing Natalie in the back seat, as if she were the wedding cake that her aunt Rita was, at that moment, worrying about.
The ride back to the church took less than four minutes. Natalie looked at the streets of her home; there sat the neighbourhood bully who tormented Amy and Stevie, on the stoop of his house watching her with uncharacteristic awe, and there on the corner, the house of her best friend with someone in the back yard hanging laundry, common, human activity, piqued with a significance Natalie felt but could not name.
By the time they arrived at the church the lawn and pathways were clear. The photographer was standing by his car, struggling with a lens case, but when he heard the gravel from Joe’s car, he looked up and smiled. As he did, a long ash fell from his cigarette onto his camera and he stood abruptly sweeping it away, blowing onto the lens. “He smokes too much,” June said absently. When the car stopped, and the door opened, Natalie emerged, one delicate foot at a time. She stood finally, clutching her bouquet to her waist. What is that sound, she wondered, until she realized it was the sound of her flowers shaking against the satin of her wedding dress.
z
“Beautiful,” the photographer said. And Natalie smiled, with her hand on her Uncle Joe’s elbow, and her mother crouched, trying to keep pace, holding the train of the gown, she walked the pathway to the large cement steps, where Amy had just been standing, thinking about her bride and groom, thinking how unfair life was and that she’d never forgive her aunt Margaret. The doors were propped open at the top of the stairs. She could see rows of heads in the pews and people standing in the vestibule and could hear a loud clatter of voices until they were overtaken by the sound of the organ, and her pace, and the pace of her heart, fell in line with its rhythm.
Studebaker
The car was a black 1951 Studebaker, with rounded bumpers, running boards along the side and padded benches upholstered in heavy grey corduroy that squeaked when you sat on it. When the snow started my sister, Natalie, her boyfriend, Johnny, and I were on our way home from my grandmother’s house where we’d picked up a birthday gift for my brother. The radio, on low, played “Chantilly Lace” by the Big Bopper, and when I asked my sister where the sound came from she explained there was a miniature band, smaller than any of my dolls, locked in the dashboard of Johnny’s car. Then Johnny and my sister turned to each other and laughed. “That’s right, kiddo,” Johnny said without looking at me. I felt small between them, and angry at their teasing, so I tucked my chin into the scarf my mother had tied around my neck and looked at my boots. They were made of brown rubber with metal side buckles, fluffy rims, and came to the edge of the seat, larger by far than my actual feet.
Even though she was only seventeen, to
me my sister was grown-up; she was given the task of looking after my brother and me, making our meals and supervising our nightly baths. This was the winter my mother began work at a dinner club called The Red Door in the west end of the city. The entrance door was indeed red, and shaped like a cartoon version of a door, higher on one side than the other. She began as a hostess and was expected to dress formally. I remember her leaning back to make sure the seams on her nylons were straight and her slip not showing below her dress—a dress that tightened at the waist and flared to just below the knees. She wore lipstick and often her front tooth, which stuck out slightly, would show a small smear of red. The chore of beauty, its routine, the care it demanded in choosing clothes or ensuring that hair curled or hung a specific way, was always a major concern to my mother and sister. In later years it would be my inability to care about such rituals that would define me as a different sort of woman.
My sister was beautiful. She had sandy-coloured hair, green eyes, arched eyebrows, a nose as perfect as a cat’s, with full lips and I knew, even as a child, that strangers looked at her differently than anyone else. Beauty tells us there is an ideal, one that the mass of us with normal-sized eyes, a mouth just a little too low on the face, or a nose slightly misshapen or large, never attain. On this night, Natalie was wearing a scarf over her head, tucked into a long bulky coat. When static overtook the song playing on the radio, she turned it off and started humming “You Are My Sunshine.” She’d often sing this song when she bathed me, or made toast in the morning, and her humming of it now seemed wrong, out of place, adding to my fear that we would be stuck here, away from home in the cold.
Johnny turned the wipers on and was staring with intent past their swish into the storm. He was a tall, thin, twenty-one-year-old, who already had a job at Canada Banknote where he made printing plates, and he and my sister were talking about getting married. She still attended high school and spent more than an hour each morning, fixing her hair and makeup, singing Buddy Holly songs and jiving with the door jamb in front of the mirror as she tried on different clothes. My favourite of her outfits was a dark green skirt made of felt-like material with a puppy near the hem, and a leash that meandered around the skirt to the waist. Sometimes she wore a crinoline, and its rustle would wake me, when she’d stand on my bed to view herself in the mirror of the vanity across the room.
She unwrapped her scarf and coiled it around my lower face, covering my mouth. As it became colder the wool of the scarf became white from the moisture of my breath, and against my lips felt like gauze. “I don’t like the sound of that,” she said to Johnny. What she didn’t like was the sound of the engine that sputtered, coughed and finally stalled. Heading home on St. Laurent Boulevard close to the junction for Cyrville where the city turned to the country, Johnny veered to the side of the road. “Wait here,” he said and jumped out of the car. “Like where does he think I’m going?” my sister said. I had put my head on her lap and she patted my back, still humming. The snow, which had started as tiny picks of ice on the windshield, had thickened and was now obscuring our view of the street. During our drive, there had been other cars, moving as cautiously as us, but gradually fewer and fewer were seen, until it seemed we were alone on the road. When we had sputtered to a stop another vehicle slowly approached and when it drew up beside us, two boys Johnny knew jumped out. They yelled hello to my sister through the window and went to where Johnny was standing. We heard one of them say, “Thought we recognized this old rust bucket,” and then they buried their heads under the hood. We heard their voices, punctuated by snorts of laughter, continue in the jovial, jostling way of boys.
It was a school night, which meant my sister had homework and chores to do in the house and after a few minutes of listening to Johnny and his friends, she said in a pointed way, “What’s taking so long?” waking me from near-sleep. Johnny came back in the car, “It needs a boost but the guys don’t have their cables, so they’re going to call a tow truck. They can drive you home, if you want.” When he said this, I thought of the rooms of our home, of my mother in the kitchen, my brothers upstairs, and of the dinner smell of potatoes and sausage, still lingering in the air. “No, we’ll wait with you,” Natalie said. She shivered and moved her hands from my back, and rubbed them together. When I looked up she did not look down and I saw determination in the outline of her jaw.
It turned out to be a long wait as we watched the snow’s slow falling, the way it silently and steadily collected on the road and sidewalks. At first my sister and Johnny talked back and forth over my head but soon their conversation slowed and stalled. Our breath created a layer of frost on the windows and Johnny used the scraper to scratch thin ribbons of it from the windshield, they fell on the dashboard like shaved white chocolate. But soon he gave up clearing the window and tucked his chin into the collar of his coat and we continued to wait.
Silent, cold and shivering, I thought of my father, of driving in his 1947 Plymouth, when he was still well enough to drive. In this memory it was a clear winter day. The sun made the buildings look hard, as if they were covered by a lacquer. My father used arm gestures out the window to indicate if he needed to make a turn, and I wondered what they meant and wondered too where in the line of cars at the light we would end up, that it must mean something to be first or third, to be in a black car, to be the fourth child of my mother. And the red and green of the signals, everything was a clue, a matrix of order and meanings. As I grew older, I lost this sense that there was a design to everything, but in those days I saw a deep significance in colours and numbers and those tiny fates, like where you end up in the queue at the traffic lights.
A few weeks after that day, my father became ill and retired to the upstairs bedroom where he was to spend the rest of the winter, his last. At night we’d hear him recite the rosary, and the chant would fill the hours between early evening when we were put to bed and the morning, when my mother would wake me and my brother, when she would make us boiled eggs and finger toasts and I’d watch the yolk spread into the bowl, like a leaky sun.
By the time my father died he had been moved to a hospital, an austere building in the west end of the city. The room where he lay with three other men was overheated; the radiator hummed and a ceiling lamp spread a dirty light over the walls, the beds, and metal furniture. My father sat up to speak, his voice low and his hands shook, and what he said trailed off into silence. In Johnny’s car as I lay my head on my sister’s knee and she moved her mittened hand to my back. I remembered the last time I saw my father: his new frailness, the faintness of his voice as he tried to speak to my brother and me.
The man who arrived in the tow truck had a cropped white beard and small dark eyes with a woolen toque pulled over his forehead, and when he knocked to tell us he was there his face through the window frightened me and his anxious expression reminded me of a large fish appearing at the glass of an aquarium. Johnny jumped out of his seat, his hands still tucked under his arms, bounding from foot to foot. My sister and I heard the man say, “Lots happening tonight, five boosts in the last hour alone.” While he talked and Johnny continuing moving to stay warm, the man put his head under the hood and I heard him clanging tools and attaching cables from his truck to our car. Johnny came back to the front seat, started the engine and it roared to life, with the same force as the relief that flooded me. The man standing in front of the car smiled at the sound.
My sister kept her arms around me to keep me warm and no one spoke on the way home; we watched as the streets became more familiar—there was the home of Alexandra, my sister’s best friend, there the house of the retarded boy who swept the street in the summer, and there, finally, was our home, the red brick duplex with a white door. The awning over the front door was under an upstairs bedroom—this was to be my room, years later when I became a teenager, where I would lie and listen to the rain falling on the awning like a scatter of coins. But this was years before such thoughts would claim m
e, and by the time we got home my brother had been asleep there for hours.
The porch lamp lit the mounds of snow on either side of the walkway with a warm yellow light. We parked on the street and my mother met us at the door. Before she could speak my sister said, “I know, Mom, but it wasn’t our fault, the car broke down.”
“Oh my God, you could have frozen out there.” She took off my mitts and rubbed my hands between hers. “Let me see those paddy-paws.” My mother wore an apron over her grey pencil skirt, the skirt she had worn to work, and her hands, when she took mine, felt smooth, like worn velvet.
z
Sixteen winters later on our way to Santa Cruz in California, I again found myself in a car beside my sister, this time the 1970 Nova that she had received as part of her divorce settlement from Johnny. I was visiting, on holiday from my first job. In the mornings when I woke in the spare room of my sister’s apartment, with the sun shining through the blind and the sound of traffic at that coming from the nearby highway, I’d think of the bus I took to work in Ottawa how at that moment it would be stopping to pick up the same passengers, and how if I were there with them we would be pulled through the same routine of streets and traffic.
By the ocean in Santa Cruz it was windy and cold enough to wear a jacket, although the sun lit the buildings on the shore with a blinding light. The restaurant where we ate was empty except for another couple. “It’s a work day, that’s why it’s so quiet,” Natalie said. “You should see this place in the summer, it’s crazy.”
The View From the Lane and Other Stories Page 6
