June’s body held something of the miraculous. Looking at her this closely, Evandie was left with a sense of all she could not know. The woman June had been, those years that stretched back to the early 1900s, lay calm and lost, and in the calm was the notion that June’s death was as it was meant to be. In this stillness, before June’s past and memories would be subsumed by the crush of time, something of their essence still hung in the room, like the sound of her voice.
z
In the early evening of that February day, Evandie sat on the bus on her way home, tired, her feet hurting and with a pain in her shoulder that made it difficult to turn quickly. Five o’clock, she thought, and already dark. Snow fell softly. Between stops, the bus driver turned off the aisle lights and for a few minutes Evandie watched the houses, strip malls and apartment buildings pass by. She held her purse on her lap. When she closed her eyes and heard the rattle of the bus and muted conversations of the other passengers, she thought of the slant of winter light and the silence that had filled June’s room. Then she thought of Carolyna, who she knew at that moment was listening to Percival and his friend in the living room, a night like so many before it, and so many to follow, a night so ordinary that in the future it would be completely forgotten. Evandie tucked her chin into the collar of her coat as the bus, with each stop and lurch forward, moved her closer and closer to home.
Weekend
On a sunny Saturday morning in July, Thomas and Vanessa, both in their late twenties, sat side by side in Thomas’s Toyota, the car he’d bought when he was at university six years earlier that was old even then. They were on their way to visit his mother, and although Vanessa had spoken with her on the phone many times during the year she’d been living with Thomas, they’d never met. The car rattled, and Vanessa tried to find the source by placing her palm on sections of the dashboard. “I hate that sound,” she said.
The sky above, seared by the circle of sun, filtered to the palest blue at the horizon. Laid out before them, the road between Kingston and Ottawa stretched in long, straight miles of gray pavement. “Monotonous,” Vanessa said.
Thomas turned to her and smiled. “Who, me?”
“No, silly.”
When Thomas had called a week earlier to tell his mother, Amy, that they planned to marry, she congratulated him and said they should visit the following weekend. “I know, I know, you’ve been busy with the new place and all, but it’s been almost a month and you haven’t made it here yet.” Dressing for the trip, Vanessa changed three times before settling on white capri pants and a pale blue T-shirt. She was tall, her body flat with the straight lines of a teenager, and her blonde hair was pulled into a ponytail. She wore flip-flops accented by a cluster of rhinestones, and she kept taking the shoes off and putting them back on, tucking her long legs under her, and then stretching them out in front of her.
“Don’t worry,” Thomas said. “She’s going to adore you.” He knew that even if his mother didn’t approve of Vanessa, his feelings would not change; he’d chosen her and would give up anyone to be with her. These thoughts made him feel expansive and confident, so that he hummed and drove quickly with a lightness of spirit, finding in the flow of traffic, in the music on the radio, and in the way Vanessa fidgeted beside him, evidence of an overriding happiness.
z
Vanessa’s mother had died at fifty-three, when Vanessa was in high school, and for the last year her father had been living in a retirement home in Scarborough, outside Toronto. A month earlier, when Vanessa and Thomas were driving from Edmonton where they’d met, to their new jobs and home in Kingston, they stopped to visit her father. Vanessa’s sister Pat met them at the retirement home, and at the hottest hour of the day the four of them sat in the garden, a fenced area behind the building. There they spoke for over an hour, while Thomas told them about his mother, who worked for the government in Ottawa, and his father, who lived outside the city with his second wife, in the same small village where Thomas had grown up. What he did not say was that he still avoided thinking about his father with his new wife, and that when he did it seemed that the anger he’d known when his parents first separated had been replaced by a complicated regret, feelings he found easier not to contemplate.
Later, as they continued their drive to Kingston, Vanessa told Thomas that Pat had called him a charmer. “But what does she know?” She smiled over at him, touching the side of his face, but he didn’t answer and kept his gaze on the two lanes of traffic before him. He turned on the radio, and although he looked to Vanessa as if he had nothing on his mind but driving, he was thinking about Vanessa’s father, realizing he had no clear idea what the frail, tired man had thought of him. In the courtyard they’d sat beneath an umbrella, while her father smoked, something his daughters chided him about. The sun lit the brilliant red of geraniums in flowerpots and the emerald of the grass where patches of sunlight pooled. It was June, one of the first hot days of the year, and when Pat made a comment about the summer being a long time coming, Thomas agreed. Glancing at Vanessa’s father, he saw a flicker of derision on his face, a dismissal of their bland conversation, and by extension, of Thomas himself. He grew quiet, sensing that Vanessa’s father had recognized something of Thomas’s own fear that his civility and conventionality were a thin veneer that barely hid the fact that he could appear ludicrous at times, deferential in his interactions, especially with women. The thought spread through him like a fire let loose, making his glance shift from the garden to the nearby thoroughfare where cars raced by, until Pat called him back with a question about how he’d met Vanessa.
The thought of Vanessa, how the world paled when compared to her, filled him with enthusiasm to tell the story of their first meeting in the office of the engineering firm where he worked after graduating, so that he felt restored to his former sanguinity and the day became bright again. The story made Pat and Vanessa laugh. Even Vanessa’s father was smiling, and Thomas wondered if perhaps he had misread him. It was only later that Thomas felt again the father’s disapproval and a concern that in the years to come, despite Vanessa’s coaxing, he would never feel close to him. Now, a month later, when they’d settled into their new jobs in Kingston and moved into an old house they were spending their weekends renovating, they were again on a highway, travelling to meet another parent, an occasion that would further solidify them as a couple and make it clear their allegiances were now primarily to each other.
z
Thomas was surprised when his mother opened the door to them. Her hair was past her shoulders, longer than he’d ever seen it, and was a pale honey colour. She was wearing makeup, which surprised him also, and she looked fit in her jeans and T-shirt, slimmer than the last time he’d seen her, which had been at the funeral of his grandmother, more than a year earlier.
“Oh, my, let me get a look at the two of you,” she said, drawing Thomas to her and giving him a hug. “And Vanessa, how nice to finally meet face-to-face.” She turned to Vanessa and held her at arm’s length for a moment before hugging her. When Thomas glanced into the apartment, he saw Paul, his mother’s boyfriend, seated at the kitchen table, a glass of wine and a partially eaten sandwich on a plate before him. Paul stood and walked toward the hallway, smiling. Of average height, he had light brown hair and was dressed in jeans and a pale blue shirt. Thomas thought he looked like a model for casual attire, and yet something too precise in the crease of his shirt, in the fade of his jeans, gave an impression that was the opposite of casual.
“Tom, I think you met Paul at the funeral last year,” Amy said.
“Yes, yes, we met briefly,” Tom said, leaning in to shake Paul’s hand.
Thomas knew his mother had been seeing Paul for a while and it was because she spent last Christmas with him that Thomas had made an excuse to avoid returning home.
Paul clutched Tom’s hand tightly and both men stared long enough at each other for an uncomfortable silence to settle, bro
ken finally when Amy said, “But Paul I think you haven’t met Vanessa”. Vanessa smiled and Amy noticed her white even teeth. “So where’s your bag?” she said.
“In the car. I’ll get it in a minute,” Thomas said.
“We’ve planned a dinner out tonight,” Amy said as they moved into the kitchen from the hall, “at a restaurant in the market.”
Paul said, “My daughter, Karen—she’s your age, Tom—she’s going to meet us there.”
“Oh, really, how nice.” But a prickly sensation at the back of his neck made Tom’s look darken. Amy put her arm around his shoulder and said, “My boy. Isn’t he wonderful?”
z
There can be nothing more intriguing, Amy thought, than those moments when you notice your child has changed, that his features have broadened, his beard thickened, his hair turned a darker shade, that through these and other less obvious changes, like a turn of phrase or a new thoughtful expression, he has moved away from you, moved away from being at your side to being before you, a person with opinions and thoughts of his own. She was thinking how happy, how truly happy, she was that he was with her and in that instant felt a sensation bordering on awe, so that she put her arm around his shoulder and said again, “My boy.”
A moment later she was putting together plates of cold chicken and roast beef, bowls of coleslaw, macaroni and potato salads, the salads her mother had always made and that were Thomas’s favorites. He had gone to fetch their suitcase from the car, and Vanessa was helping to carry the plates from the fridge to the table. Paul stood by the door, talking to Vanessa. “Sorry I didn’t wait for you two.”
“Well, we didn’t even know when we’d be here; it’s kind of hard to tell, with the traffic and all.” With the counters crowded with utensils and food and the flowered curtains flowing over the sink into the room, Vanessa found the kitchen cramped. She too had been surprised by Amy. She expected someone more serious, statelier in appearance, not this woman who moved quickly from the fridge to table, who pushed Paul with a playful shove and said, “Okay, mister, you’re in the way. Make yourself scarce.”
When they were alone in the kitchen, Amy asked Vanessa, “So, have you chosen a date yet?” She stopped setting the table, looked at the young woman who at that moment was pulling a strand of hair behind her ear, and Amy thought how she would not have chosen this thin, tall girl for her son.
Thomas came into the kitchen and said, “I told you, it’ll be next September, but we haven’t chosen the day.” Amy recognized the harsh tone of willfulness that in his youth had always meant he was angry.
“Come with me, Thomas,” she said, “I’ll show you where you two will be sleeping.” Thomas knew the spare room, it was where he slept when he visited, but he followed his mother.
“Are you okay?” she said when they were alone.
“Yeah, of course, what do you mean?”
“You seem upset.”
“Why would I be upset?” He put his bag on the bed. “I’m a little disappointed, that’s all, that my mother and my future wife won’t be spending time alone.”
“Oh, I see. It’s Paul.”
“It’s not about him, specifically. I’m sure he’s great, but for this weekend, don’t you think . . .”
“Don’t I think what, Thomas? Seeing as I’m meeting your girlfriend, I thought you’d like to spend some time with my boyfriend.” They both stood looking down at the bag on the bed. “This is the longest we’ve ever gone without seeing each other, Tom, and I don’t like it.” She turned to look at him. “I don’t like that you don’t know Paul, that you don’t know what he means to me.”
“Forget it, Mom, just forget it.”
Amy left the room and went to the washroom, standing with her back to the door. Her heart was pounding and her eyes stung from the threat of tears.
z
The restaurant was crowded and dark, lit by candles and dim overhead lamps. When Karen was late Paul called her cell phone but there was no answer. “She must be lost; she doesn’t know this part of the city well.” They were seated in the middle of a crowded room with a chair left empty at the end of the table.
Earlier in the day, Amy, Thomas, and Vanessa had visited the grave of Amy’s mother, June, in Beechwood Cemetery. The sun fell in puddles of light, touching the tombs scattered like stones on a wide shore. Amy had always liked the randomness of this cemetery; it seemed fitting to her that the stones meandered over the fields in a haphazard way. June was buried with Amy’s aunt Margaret, who had bought a plot for four more than seventy years before when she was married to her first husband.
By the graveside, the sun poured on their skin as if it were hot honey, in the eerie quieting of the place, it seemed to Thomas as if the wind was made of a thousand voices. And yet he knew it was really only the sound of it caught in the high branches, jittering the leaves and jostling the bushes along the road. They looked down in silence to the head and foot stones and Thomas thought of his grandmother as he had known her. He thought of Christmas dinners spent at Amy’s cousin Sophia’s house, when his grandmother and her sisters would gather together, laughing and recalling the stories from their youth, the way the city had looked in the 1920s and 30s, the marriages and children since. But she was real, Thomas thought, kneeling to push leaves from the foot stone with her name, just as real as Aunt Margaret with her long cigarette holder, an object that fascinated him when he was a young boy. And just as real, he thought, as all those names on all those stones that surrounded him where he knelt; all signified lives lived, stretching back into past decades and centuries. They all ate dinners at night, breakfasts in the morning, worked at something dear to them, experienced special times when a child was born, or a parent died, all held these moments of love earned or denied. The clattering cacophony of their lives caught in the hot stillness of this simple Saturday afternoon.
“I didn’t know grandma was buried with Aunt Margaret.”
“That’s right, you had to rush off,” Amy said.
“I had a plane to catch, Mom, remember?”
“This is a pretty place,” Vanessa said. She missed Paul, who had gone back to his apartment to get ready for dinner. She missed the way he put her at ease, with his effortless conversation that filled in the awkward moments. Thomas with his mother made Vanessa nervous; there seemed to be a new harshness to him, something pointed and tinged with anger which excluded her. “Bit full of himself, isn’t he?” he said about Paul when they were alone getting ready to go out. If it weren’t for her attempts to keep the conversation light, she knew Thomas and his mother would be letting whatever lingered between them sink the day into unhappiness.
“Oh, yes, it’s nice,” Amy said, but she thought, Can’t she say anything more insightful?
Karen arrived half an hour late; Paul was right, she’d been lost. Thomas wasn’t sure if it was the fuchsia shirt she was wearing and flowered culottes, but the room suddenly seemed full of her and her exuberance. Her arms were puffy like the arms of a doll with twist-on hands; Thomas noticed because she kept her elbows on the table and spoke with her palms open. He thought she’d already been drinking and then with them she drank two glasses of red wine in quick succession.
“So, Vanessa, what do you think of Ottawa?” she asked, and before Vanessa could answer she moved to Thomas. “And Thomas, Dad said you’re a city planner.” Karen didn’t seem to notice Thomas’s reluctance to say more after a noncommittal “yes,” as she continued the conversation with a lengthy description of her own job as a legal assistant, ending with, “And Vanessa, you’re a physiotherapist, right?”
Paul’s glance never left his daughter’s face, nor did his smile diminish, and he’d mouth certain words she was about to say. Amy had often witnessed the attention Paul paid his youngest daughter, and she knew he did this because Karen was the only one of his three children who had not refused to see him after he separated from
their mother. She could see Thomas judging Karen, as she herself had initially judged her, as willful and self-absorbed.
When they were almost finished dinner and Karen had started on her third glass of wine, she said, “So, what do you think, Thomas, about my dad and your mom? Kind of weird, eh?”
Amy’s fork hit her plate and she looked toward Karen who kept her attention on Thomas.
“Weird, how?” Thomas said.
“Well, weird, to think at their age, you know,” she turned now from Thomas to look at Amy, her eyelids drooping. “I mean it’s kind of creepy to think about.” She was holding her glass of wine precariously with two fingers while leaning across the table. “I mean, don’t you think it’s kind of perverse?”
“I don’t know, no, I don’t think so,” Thomas said. The table had become quiet, and he thought that this must have been what she wanted to say since she arrived.
Alert to the new tone in the conversation, Paul said, “I don’t think Karen meant anything by what she said, did you, Karen?”
“Of course not. Why is everyone so serious?” Karen said. “I just thought you’d agree, Tom, what with the two of us being from broken homes, that you’d see it the way I do.” The sound of muted conversations, the low utterance of music and utensils on plates, crowded around them. “I guess it’s because I was just at my mother’s house before I came here and saw how she was going to have dinner alone, and look at us, living it up, out on the town.”
“Karen, please.”
“Please what, Dad?” She turned to look at him for the first time since sitting down. “Please don’t have an opinion? Please be quiet?” Her face was scalded with indignation. But she quickly smiled and looked at her glass. “I’m probably too old for this tantrum.”
The View From the Lane and Other Stories Page 19
