The Story: Love, Loss and the Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories

by Victoria Hislop

That summer, we were presenting ourselves, not pictures. We were driving back from Vancouver, where we lived, to Ontario, which we still called “home,” in our new car. Five days to get there, ten days there, five days back. For the first time, Andrew had three weeks’ holiday. He worked in the legal department at B. C. Hydro.

  On a Saturday morning, we loaded suitcases, two thermos bottles – one filled with coffee and one with lemonade – some fruit and sandwiches, picture books and coloring books, crayons, drawing pads, insect repellent, sweaters (in case it got cold in the mountains), and our two children into the car. Andrew locked the house, and Cynthia said ceremoniously, “Goodbye, house.”

  Meg said, “Goodbye, house.” Then she said, “Where will we live now?”

  “It’s not goodbye forever,” said Cynthia. “We’re coming back. Mother! Meg thought we weren’t ever coming back!”

  “I did not,” said Meg, kicking the back of my seat.

  Andrew and I put on our sunglasses, and we drove away, over the Lions Gate Bridge and through the main part of Vancouver. We shed our house, the neighborhod, the city, and – at the crossing point between Washington and British Columbia – our country. We were driving east across the United States, taking the most northerly route, and would cross into Canada again at Sarnia, Ontario. I don’t know if we chose this route because the Trans-Canada Highway was not completely finished at the time or if we just wanted the feeling of driving through a foreign, a very slightly foreign, country – that extra bit of interest and adventure.

  We were both in high spirits. Andrew congratulated the car several times. He said he felt so much better driving it than our old car, a 1951 Austin that slowed down dismally on the hills and had a fussy-old-lady image. So Andrew said now.

  “What kind of image does this one have?” said Cynthia. She listened to us carefully and liked to try out new words such as “image.” Usually she got them right.

  “Lively,” I said. “Slightly sporty. It’s not show-off.”

  “It’s sensible, but it has class,” Andrew said. “Like my image.”

  Cynthia thought that over and said with a cautious pride, “That means like you think you want to be, Daddy?”

  As for me, I was happy because of the shedding. I loved taking off. In my own house, I seemed to be often looking for a place to hide – sometimes from the children but more often from the jobs to be done and the phone ringing and the sociability of the neighborhood. I wanted to hide so that I could get busy at my real work, which was a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself. I lived in a state of siege, always losing just what I wanted to hold on to. But on trips there was no difficulty. I could be talking to Andrew, talking to the children and looking at whatever they wanted me to look at – a pig on a sign, a pony in a field, a Volkswagen on a revolving stand – and pouring lemonade into plastic cups, and all the time those bits and pieces would be flying together inside me. The essential composition would be achieved. This made me hopeful and lighthearted. It was being a watcher that did it. A watcher, not a keeper.

  We turned east at Everett and climbed into the Cascades. I showed Cynthia our route on the map. First I showed her the map of the whole United States, which showed also the bottom part of Canada. Then I turned to the separate maps of each of the states we were going to pass through. Washington, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin. I showed her the dotted line across Lake Michigan, which was the route of the ferry we would take. Then we would drive across Michigan to the bridge that linked the United States and Canada at Sarnia, Ontario. Home.

  Meg wanted to see, too.

  “You won’t understand,” said Cynthia. But she took the road atlas into the back seat.

  “Sit back,” she said to Meg. “Sit still. I’ll show you.”

  I could hear her tracing the route for Meg, very accurately, just as I had done it for her. She looked up all the states’ maps, knowing how to find them in alphabetical order.

  “You know what that line is?” she said. “It’s the road. That line is the road we’re driving on. We’re going right along this line.”

  Meg did not say anything.

  “Mother, show me where we are right this minute,” said Cynthia.

  I took the atlas and pointed out the road through the mountains, and she took it back and showed it to Meg. “See where the road is all wiggly?” she said. “It’s wiggly because there are so many turns in it. The wiggles are the turns.” She flipped some pages and waited a moment. “Now,” she said, “show me where we are.” Then she called to me, “Mother, she understands! She pointed to it! Meg understands maps!”

  It seems to me now that we invented characters for our children. We had them firmly set to play their parts. Cynthia was bright and diligent, sensitive, courteous, watchful. Sometimes we teased her for being too conscientious, too eager to be what we in fact depended on her to be. Any reproach or failure, any rebuff, went terribly deep with her. She was fair-haired, fair-skinned, easily showing the effects of the sun, raw winds, pride, or humiliation. Meg was more solidly built, more reticent – not rebellious but stubborn sometimes, mysterious. Her silences seemed to us to show her strength of character, and her negatives were taken as signs of an imperturbable independence. Her hair was brown, and we cut it in straight bangs. Her eyes were a light hazel, clear and dazzling.

  We were entirely pleased with these characters, enjoying the contradictions as well as the confirmations of them. We disliked the heavy, the uninventive, approach to being parents. I had a dread of turning into a certain kind of mother – the kind whose body sagged, who moved in a woolly-smelling, milky-smelling fog, solemn with trivial burdens. I believed that all the attention these mothers paid, their need to be burdened, was the cause of colic, bed-wetting, asthma. I favored another approach – the mock desperation, the inflated irony of the professional mothers who wrote for magazines. In those magazine pieces, the children were splendidly self-willed, hard-edged, perverse, indomitable. So were the mothers, through their wit, indomitable. The real-life mothers I warmed to were the sort who would phone up and say, “Is my embryo Hitler by any chance over at your house?” They cackled clear above the milky fog.

  We saw a dead deer strapped across the front of a pickup truck.

  “Somebody shot it,” Cynthia said. “Hunters shoot the deer.”

  “It’s not hunting season yet,” Andrew said. “They may have hit it on the road. See the sign for deer crossing?”

  “I would cry if we hit one,” Cynthia said sternly.

  I had made peanut-butter-and-marmalade sandwiches for the children and salmon-and-mayonnaise for us. But I had not put any lettuce in, and Andrew was disappointed.

  “I didn’t have any,” I said.

  “Couldn’t you have got some?”

  “I’d have had to buy a whole head of lettuce just to get enough for sandwiches, and I decided it wasn’t worth it.”

  This was a lie. I had forgotten.

  “They’re a lot better with lettuce.”

  “I didn’t think it made that much difference.” After a silence, I said, “Don’t be mad.”

  “I’m not mad. I like lettuce on sandwiches.”

  “I just didn’t think it mattered that much.”

  “How would it be if I didn’t bother to fill up the gas tank?”

  “That’s not the same thing.”

  “Sing a song,” said Cynthia. She started to sing:

  “Five little ducks went out one day,

  Over the hills and far away.

  One little duck went

  ‘Quack-quack-quack.’

  Four little ducks came swimming

  back.”

  Andrew squeezed my hand and said, “Let’s not fight.”

  “You’re right. I should have got lettuce.”

  “It doesn’t matter that much.”

  I wished that I could get my feelings about Andrew to come together into a serviceable and dependable feeling. I had even tried writing two lists, one o
f things I liked about him, one of things I disliked – in the cauldron of intimate life, things I loved and things I hated – as if I hoped by this to prove something, to come to a conclusion one way or the other. But I gave it up when I saw that all it proved was what I already knew – that I had violent contradictions. Sometimes the very sound of his footsteps seemed to me tyrannical, the set of his mouth smug and mean, his hard, straight body a barrier interposed – quite consciously, even dutifully, and with a nasty pleasure in its masculine authority – between me and whatever joy or lightness I could get in life. Then, with not much warning, he became my good friend and most essential companion. I felt the sweetness of his light bones and serious ideas, the vulnerability of his love, which I imagined to be much purer and more straightforward than my own. I could be greatly moved by an inflexibility, a harsh propriety, that at other times I scorned. I would think how humble he was, really, taking on such a ready-made role of husband, father, breadwinner, and how I myself in comparison was really a secret monster of egotism. Not so secret, either – not from him.

  At the bottom of our fights, we served up what we thought were the ugliest truths. “I know there is something basically selfish and basically untrustworthy about you,” Andrew once said. “I’ve always known it. I also know that that is why I fell in love with you.”

  “Yes,” I said, feeling sorrowful but complacent.

  “I know that I’d be better off without you.”

  “Yes. You would.”

  “You’d be happier without me.”

  “Yes.”

  And finally – finally – racked and purged, we clasped hands and laughed, laughed at those two benighted people, ourselves. Their grudges, their grievances, their self-justification. We leapfrogged over them. We declared them liars. We would have wine with dinner, or decide to give a party.

  I haven’t seen Andrew for years, don’t know if he is still thin, has gone completely gray, insists on lettuce, tells the truth, or is hearty and disappointed.

  We stayed the night in Wenatchee, Washington, where it hadn’t rained for weeks. We ate dinner in a restaurant built about a tree – not a sapling in a tub but a tall, sturdy cottonwood. In the early-morning light, we climbed out of the irrigated valley, up dry, rocky, very steep hillsides that would seem to lead to more hills, and there on the top was a wide plateau, cut by the great Spokane and Columbia rivers. Grainland and grassland, mile after mile. There were straight roads here, and little farming towns with grain elevators. In fact, there was a sign announcing that this county we were going through, Douglas County, had the second-highest wheat yield of any county in the United States. The towns had planted shade trees. At least, I thought they had been planted, because there were no such big trees in the countryside.

  All this was marvellously welcome to me. “Why do I love it so much?” I said to Andrew. “Is it because it isn’t scenery?”

  “It reminds you of home,” said Andrew. “A bout of severe nostalgia.” But he said this kindly.

  When we said “home” and meant Ontario, we had very different places in mind. My home was a turkey farm, where my father lived as a widower, and though it was the same house my mother had lived in, had papered, painted, cleaned, furnished, it showed the effects now of neglect and of some wild sociability. A life went on in it that my mother could not have predicted or condoned. There were parties for the turkey crew, the gutters and pluckers, and sometimes one or two of the young men would be living there temporarily, inviting their own friends and having their own impromptu parties. This life, I thought, was better for my father than being lonely, and I did not disapprove, had certainly no right to disapprove. Andrew did not like to go there, naturally enough, because he was not the sort who could sit around the kitchen table with the turkey crew, telling jokes. They were intimidated by him and contemptuous of him, and it seemed to me that my father, when they were around, had to be on their side. And it wasn’t only Andrew who had trouble. I could manage those jokes, but it was an effort.

  I wished for the days when I was little, before we had the turkeys. We had cows, and sold the milk to the cheese factory. A turkey farm is nothing like as pretty as a dairy farm or a sheep farm. You can see that the turkeys are on a straight path to becoming frozen carcasses and table meat. They don’t have the pretense of a life of their own, a browsing idyll, that cattle have, or pigs in the dappled orchard. Turkey barns are long, efficient buildings – tin sheds. No beams or hay or warm stables. Even the smell of guano seems thinner and more offensive than the usual smell of stable manure. No hints there of hay coils and rail fences and songbirds and the flowering hawthorn. The turkeys were all let out into one long field, which they picked clean. They didn’t look like great birds there but like fluttering laundry.

  Once, shortly after my mother died, and after I was married – in fact, I was packing to join Andrew in Vancouver – I was at home alone for a couple of days with my father. There was a freakishly heavy rain all night. In the early light, we saw that the turkey field was flooded. At least, the low-lying parts of it were flooded – it was like a lake with many islands. The turkeys were huddled on these islands. Turkeys are very stupid. (My father would say, “You know a chicken? You know how stupid a chicken is? Well, a chicken is an Einstein compared with a turkey.”) But they had managed to crowd to higher ground and avoid drowning. Now they might push each other off, suffocate each other, get cold and die. We couldn’t wait for the water to go down. We went out in an old rowboat we had. I rowed and my father pulled the heavy, wet turkeys into the boat and we took them to the barn. It was still raining a little. The job was difficult and absurd and very uncomfortable. We were laughing. I was happy to be working with my father. I felt close to all hard, repetitive, appalling work, in which the body is finally worn out, the mind sunk (though sometimes the spirit can stay marvellously light), and I was homesick in advance for this life and this place. I thought that if Andrew could see me there in the rain, red-handed, muddy, trying to hold on to turkey legs and row the boat at the same time, he would only want to get me out of there and make me forget about it. This raw life angered him. My attachment to it angered him. I thought that I shouldn’t have married him. But who else? One of the turkey crew?

  And I didn’t want to stay there. I might feel bad about leaving, but I would feel worse if somebody made me stay.

  Andrew’s mother lived in Toronto, in an apartment building looking out on Muir Park. When Andrew and his sister were both at home, his mother slept in the living room. Her husband, a doctor, had died when the children were still too young to go to school. She took a secretarial course and sold her house at Depression prices, moved to this apartment, managed to raise her children, with some help from relatives – her sister Caroline, her brother-in-law Roger. Andrew and his sister went to private schools and to camp in the summer.

  “I suppose that was courtesy of the Fresh Air fund?” I said once, scornful of his claim that he had been poor. To my mind, Andrew’s urban life had been sheltered and fussy. His mother came home with a headache from working all day in the noise, the harsh light of a department-store office, but it did not occur to me that hers was a hard or admirable life. I don’t think she herself believed that she was admirable – only unlucky. She worried about her work in the office, her clothes, her cooking, her children. She worried most of all about what Roger and Caroline would think.

  Caroline and Roger lived on the east side of the park, in a handsome stone house. Roger was a tall man with a bald, freckled head, a fat, firm stomach. Some operation on his throat had deprived him of his voice – he spoke in a rough whisper. But everybody paid attention. At dinner once in the stone house – where all the dining-room furniture was enormous, darkly glowing, palatial – I asked him a question. I think it had to do with Whittaker Chambers, whose story was then appearing in the Saturday Evening Post. The question was mild in tone, but he guessed its subversive intent and took to calling me Mrs. Gromyko, referring to what he alleged to
be my “sympathies.” Perhaps he really craved an adversary, and could not find one. At that dinner, I saw Andrew’s hand tremble as he lit his mother’s cigarette. His Uncle Roger had paid for Andrew’s education, and was on the board of directors of several companies.

  “He is just an opinionated old man,” Andrew said to me later. “What is the point of arguing with him?”

  Before we left Vancouver, Andrew’s mother had written, “Roger seems quite intrigued by the idea of your buying a small car!” Her exclamation mark showed apprehension. At that time, particularly in Ontario, the choice of a small European car over a large American car could be seen as some sort of declaration – a declaration of tendencies Roger had been sniffing after all along.

  “It isn’t that small a car,” said Andrew huffily.

  “That’s not the point,” I said. “The point is, it isn’t any of his business!”

  We spent the second night in Missoula. We had been told in Spokane, at a gas station, that there was a lot of repair work going on along Highway 2, and that we were in for a very hot, dusty drive, with long waits, so we turned onto the interstate and drove through Coeur d’Alene and Kellogg into Montana. After Missoula, we turned south toward Butte, but detoured to see Helena, the state capital. In the car, we played Who Am I?

  Cynthia was somebody dead, and an American, and a girl. Possibly a lady. She was not in a story. She had not been seen on television. Cynthia had not read about her in a book. She was not anybody who had come to the kindergarten, or a relative of any of Cynthia’s friends.

  “Is she human?” said Andrew, with a sudden shrewdness.

  “No! That’s what you forgot to ask!”

  “An animal,” I said reflectively.

  “Is that a question? Sixteen questions!”

  “No, it is not a question. I’m thinking. A dead animal.”

  “It’s the deer,” said Meg, who hadn’t been playing.

  “That’s not fair!” said Cynthia. “She’s not playing!”

  “What deer?” said Andrew.