“What?”
She moves. “Someone is at the door.” She opens it to see a stranger, a man slightly younger than herself. He is tall and blond with a beard and mustache. Not at all like her father. But his eyes do sparkle.
“Hi. I’m here to see Sheryl. You must be Denise.”
“Oh, I was about to tell you,” says Sheryl. She has turned off the music and is right at the door. “This is Mark,” she says. “I was going to tell you, Denise,” she repeats. Her hand caresses his shoulder then slips into his hand. “Come,” she says. “Let me take your coat and I’ll pour you a glass.”
Denise cradles her own glass and rubs the wine stains on her sweater. “A small accident,” she explains as Mark passes through to the kitchen with Sheryl. She closes the third volume of Britannica on the sofa and waits for an end to the muffled voices in the kitchen and a return to the living room.
“Did I tell you that Mark is a realtor?”
“Uh, did you tell me that Mark exists?”
“All right. Fair enough. I was just going to.”
“Well,” says Mark as he looks around, “so this is where you’ve been hiding. The house I’ve been hearing about. Cozy. Solid enough. Maybe could use a little staging, but I think it has appeal.”
“You can check it out more tomorrow,” says Sheryl. “You don’t mind do you Denise?”
Denise considers her meaning. Does she mind if Mark stays over? Does she mind if Mark inhabits their personal space and the space of her father and mother and even Vern? Does she mind if he calculates the value of her family’s existence? Does she mind if he fucks her sister within earshot, in her mother’s bedroom? “Sure, go ahead. If that’s what you want to do?”
“Well, it’s your choice too.”
“Not one I was aware of until now.”
“Sorry. I was going to talk to you about it but time slipped away on me. Maybe we should pick up another bottle, Mark. Give Denise a little time. The Barrel is still open. We can get there before it closes if we hurry.”
The house is still. Quiet as a chapel. Denise begins to sing under her breath. Sheryl has already set out the butterfly china on the dining table, destined for Mrs. Harris. What else is in store with those two?
Denise has made up her mind. At the same time, she begins to panic. She wedges the front door to stay open, opens the trunk of her car, and in stages loads the volumes of Britannica willy nilly along with some familiar old titles. She is breathless when she hears a siren. It feels like she is committing a crime.
She knows who the local police are. She knows they have come to her door. She knows very well that loading her books into her trunk is not an offence, but she wavers in the doorway just the same, ready to be chastised; it reminds her of facing Alice in times gone by, uncertain of accusations in the making.
“May we come in?” they say.
She brushes the stains on her sweater. “Just had a little spill,” she says.
In turn the officers explain in careful tones the shocking news to her. Sheryl was the driver. She had probably not expected a delivery truck coming out of the alley at that time of night, just before she would be turning onto Main Street. She was apparently in a hurry.
Mark was lucky. He could just walk away, which he did. Their spouses were spared insinuating stories, and merlot was never mentioned.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica has been returned to its rightful place in the corner bookshelf, and whenever Denise comes to her house, mostly on weekends, she sits on the sofa while she enjoys a glass of wine and turns to look out the window to see who might still be there. She watches out the corner of her eye in every room of the house to determine the appropriate spot for each one in her family. The butterfly china is back in the cabinet, and she especially watches there.
She recently read that the typical encyclopedia owner of the eighties opened the books just once or twice a year. She has surpassed that hundreds of times over.
Special Occasions
HELEN MALTBY LIVED FOR SPECIAL OCCASIONS. I met her at one of these. It was at my Uncle Alvie’s eightieth birthday party where grey heads predominated and jokes about Alvie living with aids—hearing aids, nursing aids, Rolaids and Band-Aids—made the old folks laugh. I sat with the band of younger relatives near the bar. Most in our group looked like they were hit in the face with a lemon cream pie when they heard such jokes. I didn’t think it was all that bad.
To be honest I have never quite fit in with my cousins. Several of them, divorced and relegated to second-rate condos with bedrooms duplicated for the time share of their children, went on and on about their trips to Cuba or Costa Rica, about the quality of Australian wine and Canadian brie, and the merits of their running or fitness clubs. They still think they’re the cat’s meow. I was born a century too late; I would have married back then and lived a good and honest life.
Helen was married to Uncle Alvie’s best friend, Charlie Maltby. This was a second marriage for Helen and Charlie, since their first spouses died about twenty years ago. This gave Helen a whole new set of occasions to attend.
Everyone marvelled at her spunk and determination to have fun that afternoon at Uncle Alvie’s party. She did the Charleston once she got the band to play the right music, and we said we hoped to be just like her someday, if we should live that long. As if being old and the partying sort were automatically at odds. It crossed my mind that maybe they should be.
Helen joined us at our table and participated in one of those typical conversations that inspire people to exclaim, “Isn’t it a small world!” and to shake their heads in disbelief that they both know so and so who is the stepmother of so and so (in this case me) who happens to live just two doors down from…. Well, you get the idea. I lived just two doors down from the Maltbys, although I hadn’t met them until Uncle Alvie’s party. This is why I got to know them more after the do.
Helen had three children and nine grandchildren. I know this because each time I visited her she asked me to go over the newest additions to her photo albums. She was chief recorder of main events: birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, and visits, but not so much funerals. There were pictures of her family with gifts opened and held up as inventory for the camera, people arranged in groups for proof of their attendance, flowers delivered and snapped by Helen’s camera as evidence of their arrival, and shots of Christmas trees with multicoloured lights that obscured the individual ornaments. I think the ornaments would have told a story of their own, if I could just see what they were, but that’s my sentimental nature coming out. I tend to think such things are chosen for symbolic meaning. I’m not close to my family, in fact I’d just as soon forget about them most of the time, but I knew Helen’s children and what they might like, even though I hadn’t met them.
I imagined how Helen’s children would decorate their Christmas trees. Raymond, the eldest, and his wife Emily and their children would have small opaque glass balls, medieval elves, and strings of dried cranberries. Maybe even strings of popcorn. I think they would have had Helen and Charlie over for cranberry whiskey cocktails and Irish stew, and the whole family would string dried cranberries to drape on the tree.
Her daughter Angela was harder to guess. I think she was short of money. One day, when I was over, Helen was writing out a cheque for five thousand bucks. Five thousand big ones! And though she asked me to, I kind of forgot to mail it for her, until she began to fuss because Angela had called to say she hadn’t received it. I think maybe Angela would have homemade ornaments. Things like starched, hand-crocheted snowflakes and Styrofoam angels—a big one for the tree top—and knitted miniature socks with hard candies inside.
The youngest, Ben, would have all those moose characters and cartoon athletes and colourful birds and festive nests. I think he’d even put a bird on top of his tree. I’m not sure Helen would like that.
Raymond and his family took up a lot of
space in Helen’s albums. She would say, “They are very good to us,” with a tone of voice that had a hint of indignation, as though there were those who were not so very good.
Angela lived in Nanaimo. “So,” sniffed Helen, “we don’t see her very often.” I had the impression that Angela lived in Nanaimo just to aggravate her mother. Angela was divorced and her children had scattered across the mainland. This family seemed to be photographed in two batches each year, not including the school pictures they sent dutifully until the children graduated. One batch would have the thick Vancouver Island vegetation as a backdrop, taken at Easter when Helen and Charlie made their annual visit to Nanaimo. The other would be here in Helen’s rock garden or around her cottage at Sylvan Lake, taken when Angela came out on vacation. Helen said I was like her second daughter and someday she would take me to the cottage.
Ben was hardly in any pictures after his childhood. His ex-wife and children were there more often than he was, and for the most part you would see him putting his hand up to block the camera’s eye. Helen had more newspaper clippings of him than anything. Oh, I didn’t tell you that she had a substantial set of scrapbooks as well.
Ben was in the news a lot. There’s a story about him: when he was about twelve, he and two other boys from their hockey team went on strike to support their goalie, who had been suspended for uttering nasty words to the coach. The boys preferred to get rid of the coach, though they wouldn’t say why. “We have good reasons,” they were quoted as saying.
“What were they?” I asked. “What were the reasons?”
Helen just shrugged her shoulders.
“And who won out?”
“I don’t remember,” she replied in a vague sort of way.
In his thirties, Ben was featured in the Calgary Herald. He had started up Ben’s Sport Shop on a shoestring and later parlayed it into a lucrative string of stores across Western Canada. There were photos of him presenting prizes to local athletes and accounts of him starting up the Handicap Games. He wore T-shirts or soccer shirts, probably from his store, and Helen would always click her tongue and shake her head with a mix of pride and disapproval. “You should dress up for the occasion. Especially when you’re in a position like that!”
I made a point of dressing up when I went to her place, and she always commented on how nice I looked. I am in her photo albums too. Especially for the times I brought flowers or I wore a fancy dress. Then it was like a special occasion.
You’d think Ben would have made more of an effort for his mother, but it was Raymond that she seemed most fond of. She always told me how he used to help her with dinner or escort her to church or take her on trips with his family when her first husband died. I did sometimes wonder, though, what Raymond was up to. Like, what was in it for him? What made him such a peach?
Maybe he was just interested in the treasures she collected over the years. There was a miniature porcelain figurine, made in France, displayed in her china cabinet, a woman of the fifteenth century, with pouffed up white hair and delicate porcelain lace over a pink and burgundy gown. I think I would have liked being a lady in those times. Every time I visited I told Helen how much I loved that ornament. She said it was very dear, but maybe she’d have to will it to me since I liked it so much, and since I was so good to her. But, I thought, I wouldn’t be surprised if Raymond and Emily nab it when Helen isn’t thinking straight. And what if she dies suddenly? No one will know her intentions. And who knows if her family would honour them anyway?
Around November I thought to myself, I am going to have the most fabulous Christmas tree and I am going to invite Helen and Charlie over for Christmas cake and eggnog—like family. But I couldn’t decide what kind of decorations to buy. I saw some crystal angels, but they were sooo expensive. Then Charlie passed away. Right before Christmas.
Helen was a widow again, so I began to go there twice a week to do errands for her, picking up groceries and medicine and mailing out letters. I was very good to her, but she got upset with me when her EpiPen disappeared and I forgot to pick up a refill at the drug store. I told her I was sorry. But she was annoyed. She said she would just have to search through her stuff, it was time she did that anyway, time she sorted things out and unloaded some of it before she was gone—if you catch her drift.
The very next day I decided to make her a Valentine’s cake with her favourite seven-minute frosting, tinted pink of course, just to cheer her up. It was a maple chiffon cake with five egg yolks and eight egg whites. Eight! I didn’t have enough vegetable oil so I topped it up with just a smidgen of peanut oil. Hardly any.
I wore my red silk blouse and black velveteen pants. She was thrilled and she wanted to take a picture of me holding the cake, but this time I insisted on taking one of her. She was going to hold the knife, like wedding couples do, and pretend to cut, but I think pictures should capture people in action. I insisted that she go ahead and just enjoy herself. I wanted to capture the true spirit of the occasion.
That was her last set of photographs. I took the film and had it developed myself—it was time I started my own album.
No one in her family even asked who made the cake. I’m sure they could figure it out. After all I was the one who finally took her to emergency. I was the one who was there when she needed someone.
You have to know that I didn’t even think about the peanut oil. I knew about the peanuts, but oil never crossed my mind. Honest to God!
I have that figurine on my dresser. I pick it up each night and polish it with one of Helen’s silk hankies. I intend to take proper care of it. She meant for me to have it! And I do follow things she said, way more than her family ever would. I always make sure my hair and makeup are done just right, and I do dress for the occasion.
JANET STORIES
Life in Cars
A MOTOR IDLES BELOW HER third-floor apartment. Janet peers downward through slanting blinds as interlude to her Audrey Hepburn movie marathon. She has seen these two before. Scruffy girls. Agitated blonde and tenacious brunette. This characterization is determined by the movement of their hands in the bucket front seats of the Jeep parked just below. The back seat is not visible. Brunette, with a round face and a medium bob, is the driver in more ways than one. She repeatedly calls or texts someone, then pulls out a packet from her bag, grabs a thick book from the back, and hands it to Blonde, who has been tossing and fingering her hair in a continuous replay of a shampoo commercial, except her hair is stringy. White powder is emptied on top of the book and lined up quickly. Janet has seen enough on TV to fill in details that she does not actually see here. Blonde bends over with what might be a straw and comes up even more unhinged. She looks out her side window, fixed yet twitchy and detached. Brunette inhales next. For her it seems like a chore, a job to be done. She packs her wares quickly like an Avon lady and wheels back out of the parking stall and down the lane. Two young girls. Someone’s granddaughters.
Janet remembers life in cars when she was in high school, travelling with older boys in roomy sedans and classmate girls who aimed to prove they could easily smoke Number 7s and drink bottles of Pilsner or lemon gin, like the guys they hoped to impress. Girls apparently going wild as they vomited in ditches or made out with inebriated abandon, missing curfews, yet able to rebound for another week of school and another weekend in cars.
Blonde and Brunette parked here on a warmer day, two weekends before. Their rap music blasted up, heavy on the bass, through Janet’s balcony doors, getting her attention in the first place. The girls twisted in their seats, dancing and flirting with evident bodies in the back. Blonde lowered her window, letting in cool air, and turned on her knees. She lifted her midi-T, flashing what Janet assumed were small bare breasts to those in the back. On drugs, she had thought at the time, and today it is confirmed.
Necking in cars was a staple in Janet’s day. Maybe a hand made it under her sweater, even onto the cups of her bra,
but it was mandatory to push the hand away, at least for a time. Copping a feel was supposed to be a happy accident. Discretion was understood, at least in the minds of girls. Even those who went on to become pregnant could be covered, in a magic show kind of way, with a wedding and tales of love and romance.
She has been watching Roman Holiday on cable. Love happens to Audrey Hepburn and reporter Gregory Peck. Audrey is a princess, under the spell of a sedative, kind of like Sleeping Beauty. Gregory discovers her asleep on a bench. She has escaped her country’s embassy and her royal duties in the back of a delivery truck. He has no idea that she is the princess he is scheduled to interview. He awakens her, like a handsome prince, but she remains groggy and vulnerable, so he takes her to his apartment and makes sure she sleeps on his couch. (Understood—it is a movie from the fifties.) Even when the truth is known, once Audrey is back to travelling in limos, Gregory refrains from reporting her lapse in princesshood, and they acknowledge their love from afar.
Movie over, Janet peers through the blinds again while Macklemore plays. It’s “White Walls,” they say, on a preview to Video Countdown before the next movie starts, and she thinks about Blonde and Brunette. She usually flips the channel or makes some tea, but now she strains to hear the lyrics. He is singing about wanting to be free, to just live. Sounds a little sixty-ish to her, except he wants to do it all inside his Cadillac. And then Schoolboy Q chimes in about white hoes snorting coke in the backseat and inhaling his love. Well, Blonde and Brunette did remain up front.
Dear Hearts Page 14