Brighten the Corner Where You Are

by Carol Bruneau

  “How come you weren’t already snapped up, a gal so eager and willing?”

  “Was waiting for you. Now I’m snapped up good!”

  Emery answered with an ear-to-ear smile.

  How come, I wondered, the ride back from a place is always quicker than the ride going there? “Next stop, the Grand Hotel!” I trilled like a bird, I was so happy. The evening wasn’t done yet.

  Emery didn’t say anything, keeping his eyes fixed on the road.

  Soon enough we pulled into town. Traffic crawled down Main past the Majestic. The nine o’clock was just getting out. I looked for Mama, didn’t see her.

  It was five or six blocks to the Grand. Parked outside it, I straightened my dress and scarf and coat, fished my hat from between the seats. Emery’s overcoat looked a little the worse for wear. Glimpsing it made me bashful. I giggled. Nerves, I guess. We sat there for the longest time not moving, watching people going inside. You could see the lobby through the big brass-fitted doors, it was all marble and potted palms, ladies and gents milling about. The men had moustaches like Clark Gable’s, the ladies wore jewels in their hair and shimmery dresses. I imagined them waltzing into the ballroom, and I guessed up how that ballroom would look. Finally, Emery opened his door and got out, following behind as I got out and made for the entrance. A man wearing white gloves and tails held the door for me. Jazz music drifted out. A saxophone’s bleat gave me a thrill. I hoped it would be Charlie and his band onstage; sometimes he had Joe close up shop by himself so he could sneak off early to play. I couldn’t wait to see him dipping and swaying, blowing into his horn. But as I stepped inside, the man in gloves stopped Emery. “Formal attire only,” the fella said.

  “But I promised the gal—”

  “Sorry, bud.”

  Emery snorted, disappointed. He gave me a funny look which I caught through the corner of my eye. I wasn’t about to go in alone without my date, the date of my dreams. I won’t lie, I felt disappointed too. Crestfallen, like they said in books. But, as we got back into the car, what mattered was our being at each other’s side. Though his silence worried me. He needed cheering up.

  “So what’s it like in Woods Harbour, anyways?”

  Emery didn’t answer right away. As he wheeled out of the parking lot, he glanced over at me, shook his head. “You are a case and a half, aren’t you.”

  “You could tell me how it looks.”

  “Woods Harbour? It’s Upper Woods Harbour I come from, to be exact.” A smile played across his jaw and I figured he was guessing up scenery in his head as we drove past Frost Park. The park’s chestnut trees were bare and gloomy in the dark. “Well, since you asked. It’s low and marshy and has lots of islands and more seals, probably, than people.”

  Now we were talking! His words were all I needed to guess up the rest: green and gold marshland, seagulls, mist, a big old white homestead, a captain’s house, overlooking the sea.

  “Satisfied?” With his word-picture of Upper Woods Harbour, I figured he meant. He swerved to make the turn onto Jenkins Street, the less-travelled route to Hawthorne. We passed the harness shop.

  “Oh yes. Thanks.”

  On Hawthorne, our front porch light was on, the parlour light blazing. When he pulled in by the curb, I turned and leaned over and gave him a big smooch on the cheek. “That was grand tonight, Emery. Except for the Grand.” He gave a belly laugh then. He is like Father, sloughing off a misfortune, I thought, waving to him as he drove off. Like Father, letting a disappointment roll off him like water off a duck’s back, I could tell.

  Mama was waiting up. Her eyes went straight to my dress. A thread had pulled at the hem, a sequin dangled loose. “So, my darling, where’d you go? Did you enjoy yourself? Have a good time?” Her anxious smile made me spill over with joy.

  “Oh, Mama. The best.”

  In the dark of those nights Ev worked next door I learned to miss him, the lean, bony warmth of his body against mine up in the attic loft. Never mind that makeshift bed was only ever meant for one person. In the mornings after he returned long-faced with fatigue from his watchman’s shift, his snores would filter downstairs while I puttered around as quiet as could be. Oh, I had no trouble scrambling down a ladder back then. I would sit still as a toad in my corner until he was rested enough to come down and fix breakfast.

  Not only was I poor at heavy lifting and cleaning, I had hardly learned to cook—that is what happens when people care for you. When they believe they are better at doing things than you are. After a while—call me lazy—you say, Go ahead then, suit yourself. My lack of housekeeping abilities freed me up to do as I pleased.

  One such morning I looked at the dustpan and thought, land, wouldn’t a bit of paint be just the ticket to spruce that thing up? Its metal was rusty, a sight for sore eyes. By the time Ev came down to light the fire, I had done that dustpan up real nice with bright red poppies and hung it from a nail between the calendars and the clock. I figured those flowers might give that cuckoo a reason for staying popped out.

  When I told Ev so, he clicked his tongue. “You’re some cracked. But that’s one way of looking at it. That bird’s gonna be happier with flowers by it than without.” He spent the afternoon trying to get the clock to work, with no luck. He just wasn’t so sure about the dustpan’s usefulness after I’d got my hands on it: the paint took forever to dry. “Try and sweep up a mess and watch what don’t stick to that paint. Forget sweeping, you might’s well give up on it.” He grumbled but promised to keep an eye out for another dustpan on his next trip to town. I knew where he would go to find it, the spot where people—you know what some folks are like—disposed of stuff that was still perfectly good. Even Aunt once said so, living all her life cheek by jowl with the town dump.

  “Waste not, want not.”

  “You got that right, woman.”

  In those honeymoon days, sure, the town dump proved as good if not better than Shortliffe’s for yielding what we needed. Housekeeping items became the objects of my desire. Having the right tools can make you look like something you’re not. More important, cookie sheets, cake pans, tea trays, and muffin tins cried to have pictures painted on them, just like scraps of linoleum begged to become pot holders. You name it, Ev found it. He brought such items home by the week, seeing what-all I could do with them. Didn’t matter a whit if these things were rusty or worn in ways regular folks would turn their noses up at.

  Regular folks like Mama’s people and Father’s.

  You could say Ev took to testing me, aiming to see if there was one item he could find that I could not beautify. The flowers,birds, and butterflies I painted on his offerings brightened the place up. They brought sunshine inside on gloomy days.

  Ev would act miffed. “Goddamn. You don’t quit, there won’t be an inch of bare wall to stare at.” But he didn’t try to stop me. He only brought home more old stuff for me to spruce up. Like it was a test of some sort. If there was bitterness in his words, I preferred to consider it a kind of wonder at what I’d get up to next.

  “Ah, g’wan—I’m just teasing you,” he said. “Do what you want. Though you act like the goddamn place is yours to do with whatever you please, like it’s your place too. Don’t know what give you that idea. Only reason I let you move in was I pitied you. Now look where it’s got me.”

  I guess I fancied myself a Rumpelstiltskin or whoever that one was that spun ratty wool into skeins of gold. The more I stuck on the walls, the more padding we had against the cold pushing in between the shims.

  “That’s right,” he said. “More padding—installation, you mean.”

  I suppose some might say it could be a bit of a tight squeeze at times in that house.

  Now and then Ev would look at me and say, “Don’t you have someplace to go?”

  The answer was no.

  “Find me more paint and I’ll keep out of your hair.�
�� It was as much a dare as it was a promise. A veiled if idle threat that I could walk out of his life as easily as I had walked into it. I like to think it kept Ev on his toes. For marriage to succeed, Mama used to say, it helps for husband and wife to have interests of their own. Touring the dump occupied my man by day while six nights out of seven he kept watch over the ladies and gents next door, making sure none of them escaped or acted up, seeing that each stayed in their own wing and in their own bed. Not that Ev didn’t have plenty of work around our place to occupy him. And mining the dump for treasures was more than a hobby; for Ev it was a job and a calling, the way prettying-up old stuff was for me. You could say his devotion fed mine.

  Truly, if I had been able to hop, pick, and peck like a crow through the dump’s piles of plenty the way Ev could, I would have accompanied him. I’d have been Ev’s shadow.

  By the time we had spent our first winter together, the pride I wore from childhood had dissolved like tarnish stripped from silver with hot water, tinfoil, and a bit of baking soda. Of course, Ev was a little territorial, a bit like Joe that way: the dump was his for first pickings. The same as in summer when he staked out berry patches, flapped his arms to chase the robins away, a living scarecrow. Don’t imagine he made many friends among the gulls that hung around the dump, either.

  What’s yours is mine and what’s mine is yours. That’s what marriage is all about, talk-wise anyhow. But show me the perfect marriage and I will show you a bare mudflat at high tide. What was mine was Ev’s, of that you can be sure. But what was Ev’s did not always have to be mine.

  And let me tell you about the date we went on while we were still what I like to call newlyweds. April 1938. We had to wait for winter to let up before Ev could take the car out—oh yes, a horse and buggy or sleigh would’ve been ideal. “Time we went on a date, I guess,” Ev had said. I imagined us walking into a movie house and watching Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks smooch onscreen.

  Snow still lay in patches on the ground. I was wrapped up in a blanket to fend off the chill as we motored to town. Setting there in the passenger seat, a proper missus, I imagined I was Mary Pickford and that Ev’s mother’s gold wedding band had a diamond in it, and the faded kerchief on my head was daffodil-coloured chiffon. Behind the steering wheel, Ev was Douglas Fairbanks—well, maybe not quite so dashing as that, so I will say Buddy Rogers. The real star of the day was the scenery. I kept my eyes on the bay’s hard glint as we got closer to town.

  My belly knotted as we pulled up the street near Aunt’s tidy white house. I had not seen her since the dead of January, when she slipped me some money in an envelope. I had half expected her to say, “Here, I am paying you to think twice about marrying him.” But no. It was a tidy sum to pay the preacher with.

  Ev drew in alongside the dump and hopped out. Hopped was the word for how Ev moved, him being like a big tall bird in my eyes—maybe some sort of crane. I could see Aunt’s kitchen window just across the way, on the far side of some trees bordering the trash piles. The sunshine blazed off it like copper.

  “The fuck you waitin’ for? Go to it, girl. You wanted a wedding present? Better late than never. Fill your boots!”

  Oh, and nimble! Watching him leap past a smoking pile of rubbish I thought how he would make a graceful bird look ungainly. He stooped and rousted up a white enamelled pail with only part of the bottom rusted out, then a pair of gloves, then a doll, and a bicycle seat, and, oh my land! A phonograph record, a 78. It wasn’t till I got close up that I saw the doll had no legs, the gloves no thumbs. Ev tossed the disc. It spun towards my waiting hands like a flying saucer. Only when I caught it did I notice the crack through it. I could have cried. “Stairway to the Stars” read the purple label, by Glenn Miller, lyrics by Mitchell Parish sung by Paul Whiteman.

  What a terrible, terrible shame.

  I spied a rat with its eyes pecked out. Alongside it was a clock with no hands, part of a birdcage, and a lone boot with the toe out of it. The waste! But none of it came anywhere near the waste of that beautiful broken record.

  “Well, don’t just stand there. Start digging—what are you waiting for? Christmas?”

  I guess Ev thought I was slacking off. Already he had laid his hands on what must be a gem. Whatever it was was wrapped in newspaper and stuffed inside a string bag. He tore away the paper and, oh my, there was the sweetest little bowl. Blue china with pink china roses and the word Baby on it.

  “What’s it even mean? ‘B’ is for—? You got any use for it?”

  “Nope.” The sight of it set me shivering. Of course, I was already cold, having left the blanket in the car. I watched Ev turn the bowl in his hands before he chucked it down. Bits of china flew up as it hit the burnt edge of a brick.

  I summoned up the stairway song’s thrilling words in my head, let them stick there.

  What I said about pride being a tarnish that rubbed off is a bit of a lie. Buffeted by the wind off the bay, I wondered if Aunt might peek out her kitchen window and see us.

  “Time’s a-wasting—here!” Ev tossed the thumbless gloves at me. “Might get some use out of these, if you are scared of getting your hands dirty. I ain’t leaving till we have given ’er a good going-over. Think I burnt half a tank of gas to take you for a spin, you got another think coming.”

  He was right, we should make the most of our outing, though I worried about Aunt up to her elbows in a sink full of dishes, spying the car and me searching for treasures. I have no idea what she would have thought. Well, actually, I do.

  “I’m cold,” I said and looked towards the car. I kept thinking about what the song said about climbing to the stars with your love beside you. I stooped and picked up a scrap of brown linoleum, just the right size for a pretty little decoration, and shoved it in my pocket.

  “Whoa, now—did I say we could leave?” Ev’s voice grabbed at me the way the wind did, sharp around its edges. So I stayed put, darting my eyes over the ground from trash pile to trash pile as he kept digging. A bottle sailed past me, and some cans. Then he was tugging on my sleeve. “Oh my jeezus, what have we got here?” He had unearthed what looked like a cabinet, nice wood under its patina of slime. “Is this what I think it is? Whoa, shit—we hit the mother’s load, woman.” He dredged the thing up, got it standing on its feet. He was right, it was a find, all right. A windup Edison like the one we’d had in Yarmouth. It even had the handle you cranked. When he lifted the lid, sure enough, it was the old kind of phonograph that played cylinders, the same as Mama’s.

  “Slim fucking pickings today, that’d be your fault,” he teased, wrestling the phonograph into the car. “What are you standing there for? Git in, woman, before you freeze your arse off. That is a goddamn sin about that record, though. Ain’t no way you could patch it?”

  “Doesn’t matter, it wouldn’t work anyways.” I was gleeful. I couldn’t wait to try out our find. “Take me home and warm me up.” I cast a clever, tilted gaze at him.

  Now, maybe you people down there are wondering, just a little, why I chose to marry Ev. Truth be told, I wondered sometimes myself. But my reasons weren’t worth dwelling on. The fact was, I was his very own Mary Pickford, and he was my own true Buddy Rogers. Which would make everything easier and harder as we strolled through life. Driving home with our booty, that’s how I felt.

  With a pang of missing Mama, I put on her record, the one record I owned, cranked the machine’s handle till it would crank no more, the spring inside wound tight as could be. As Al Jolson’s voice leapt out and filled the house, Ev got a pained look. I saw how it wasn’t easy for him, giving up his bachelorhood and adapting to a shared life. And maybe he liked how I could lose myself in painting, as it kept me out of his hair.

  One day he came home with a set of real artists’ oil paints and a set of brushes, and a magazine he’d found with all kinds of coloured pictures in it. There was one with a gal in a red bathing suit about to ste
p into a lake surrounded by snowy mountain peaks that weren’t like anything you’d see in our neck of the woods. I listened to “Sitting on Top of the World” as I did my best to copy that scene on a board.

  I could not get enough of the way Jolson wrapped world round his tongue so it sounded like woild. If those paints and brushes weren’t a ticket to heaven, that record was my comfort and joy. It was my lifeline to the things I had left behind.

  8.

  Whispering Hope

  Now, on the subject of the dump, let me jump ahead some twenty-eight years to the first time that young police officer came sniffing around. After the constable drove off, I wondered if the complaints he’d raised had roots in other lies, lies meant to scapegoat Ev. Had someone spread falsehoods about Ev’s visits to the dump? Say there’d been a robbery, the last place most people would look for their missing goods became the first place? Maybe some Nosy Parker had reported Ev treasure-hunting and the least likely of thieves had got blamed for another’s thieving. All it took was one false accusation, and the next you knew a whole shit storm could brew up.

  One thing I could vouch for: Ev was no thief. Tell me what kind of thief is as honest as the day is long. I should’ve said so to the cop. I should’ve told him what Olive Hayden said once, about her husband offering Ev more than a dollar a night and Ev turning it down, saying he didn’t do much of anything, nights at the almshouse, to deserve a raise. Too bad the right words never strike till it’s too late.

  Ev came home unexpectedly early that evening after the cop’s visit. He caught me working on my crow painting. I tried too late to cover it with a rag. He threw the rag aside. He’d been drinking, I could smell the dynamite juice off him—whatever they sold at the liquor store that had replaced his former concoctions.

  “That don’t look like a cat picture to me. Who ordered the queer-looking bird?”