There was something about Fred that attracted people. My mother, who was not a flirtatious woman – she went in for wisdom, instead – was livelier when he was around. Even my father liked him, and would sometimes have a beer with him when he got back from the city. They would sit on the porch of Fred’s cottage in Betty’s yellow wicker chairs, swatting at the sand flies and discussing baseball scores. They seldom mentioned their jobs. I’m not sure what Fred did, but it was in an office. My father was “in wallpaper,” my mother said, but I was never very clear about what that meant. It was more exciting when they talked about the war. My father’s bad back had kept him out of it, much to his disgust, but Fred had been in the Navy. He never said too much about it, though my father was always prompting him; but we knew from Betty that they were engaged just before Fred left and married right after he came back. Betty had written letters to him every single night and mailed them once a week. She did not say how often Fred had written to her. My father didn’t like many people, but he said that Fred wasn’t a fool.
Fred didn’t seem to make any efforts to be nice to people. I don’t think he was even especially handsome. The difficulty is that though I can remember Betty down to the last hair and freckle, I can’t remember what Fred looked like. He had dark hair and a pipe, and he used to sing to us if we pestered him enough. “Sioux City Sue,” he would sing, “Your hair is red, your eyes are blue, I’d swap my horse and dog for you… “ Or he would sing “Beautiful Brown Eyes” to my sister, whose eyes were brown as compared with my own watery blue. This hurt my feelings, as the song contained the line, “I’ll never love blue eyes again.” It seemed so final, a whole lifetime of being unloved by Fred. Once I cried, which was made worse by the fact that I couldn’t explain to anyone what was wrong; and I had to undergo the humiliation of Fred’s jocular concern and my sister’s scorn, and the worse humiliation of being comforted by Betty in the kitchenette. It was a humiliation because it was obvious even to me that Betty didn’t grasp things very well. “Don’t pay any attention to him,” she said, having guessed that my tears had something to do with Fred. But that was the one piece of advice I couldn’t take.
Fred, like a cat, wouldn’t go two steps out of his way for you really, as my mother said later. So it was unfair that everyone was in love with Fred, but no one, despite her kindness, was in love with Betty. It was Betty who always greeted us at the door, asked us in, and talked to us while Fred slouched on the couch reading the paper. She fed us cookies and milk shakes and let us lick out the bowls when she was baking. Betty was such a nice person; everyone said so, but no one would have called Fred exactly that. Fred, for instance, did not laugh much, and he only smiled when he was making rude remarks, mostly to my sister. “Stuffing your face again?” he would say. “Hey, baggy pants.” Whereas Betty never said things like that, and she was always either smiling or laughing.
She laughed a lot when Fred called her Betty Grable, which he did at least once a day. I couldn’t see why she laughed. It was supposed to be a compliment, I thought. Betty Grable was a famous movie star; there was a picture of her thumb-tacked to the wall in Fred and Betty’s outhouse. Both my sister and I preferred Fred and Betty’s outhouse to our own. Theirs had curtains on the window, unlike ours, and it had a little wooden box and a matching wooden scoop for the lye. We only had a cardboard box and an old trowel.
Betty didn’t really look like Betty Grable, who was blonde and not as plump as our Betty. Still, they were both beautiful, I thought. I didn’t realize until much later that the remark was cruel; for Betty Grable was renowned for her legs, whereas our Betty had legs that started at her waist and continued downwards without a curve or a pause until they reached her feet. At the time they seemed like ordinary legs. Sitting in the kitchenette, I saw a lot of Betty’s legs, for she wore halter tops and shorts, with her yellow apron over them. Somehow Betty could never get her legs to tan, despite the hours she spent crocheting in her wicker chair, the top part of her in the shade of the porch but her legs sticking out into the sun.
My father said that Betty had no sense of humour. I couldn’t understand this at all. If you told her a joke she would always laugh, even if you got it mixed up, and she told jokes of her own, too. She would print the word “BED,” making the E smaller and thicker than the B and the D. “What’s this?” she would say. “It’s the little dark E in BED.” I didn’t get this joke the first time she told it and she had to explain it to me. “Little darkie,” she said, her slightly protruding teeth shining with good humour. We had never been to the United States, even though we could see it across the river, a strip of green trees that faded west into the blue of Lake Superior, and the only black people I had seen were the characters in the comics. There was L’il 8-Ball, and the Africans in Tarzan, and Lothar in Mandrake the Magician, who wore a lion skin. I couldn’t see what any of them had to do with the word “bed.”
My father also said that Betty had no sex appeal. This didn’t seem to bother my mother in the least. “She’s a very nice girl,” she would answer complacently, or, “She has very nice colouring.” My mother and Betty were soon collaborating on a scheme for making the preserving easier. Most people still had Victory gardens, though the war was over, and the months of July and August were supposed to be spent putting up as many jars of fruit and vegetables as you could. My mother’s garden was half-hearted, like most of her housekeeping efforts. It was a small patch beside the outhouse where squash vines rambled over a thicket of overgrown tomato plants and a few uneven lines of dwarfed carrots and beets. My mother’s talent, we had heard her say, was for people. Betty and Fred didn’t have a garden at all. Fred wouldn’t have worked in it, and when I think of Betty now I realize that a garden would have been too uncontained for her. But she had Fred buy dozens of six-quart baskets of strawberries, peaches, beans, tomatoes and Concord grapes, on his trips into the city; and she persuaded my mother to give up on her own garden and join her in her mammoth canning sessions.
My mother’s wood stove was unbearably hot for such an operation, and Betty’s little electric range was too small; so Betty got “the boys,” as she called Fred and my father, to set up the derelict wood stove that until then had been rusting behind Betty’s outhouse. They put it in our backyard, and my mother and Betty would sit at our kitchen table, which had been carried outside, peeling, slicing and talking, Betty with her round pincushion cheeks flushed redder than usual by the heat and my mother with an old bandanna wrapped around her head, making her look like a gypsy. Behind them the canning kettles bubbled and steamed, and on one side of the table the growing ranks of Crown jars, inverted on layers of newspapers, cooled and sometimes leaked or cracked. My sister and I hung around the edges, not wanting to be obvious enough to be put to work, but coveting the empty six-quart baskets. We could use them in our hideout, we felt; we were never sure what for, but they fitted neatly into the orange crates.
I learned a lot about Fred during Betty’s canning sessions: how he liked his eggs, what size socks he took (Betty was a knitter), how well he was doing at the office, what he refused to eat for dinner. Fred was a picky eater, Betty said joyfully. Betty had almost nothing else to talk about, and even my mother, veteran of many confidences, began to talk less and smoke more than usual when Betty was around. It was easier to listen to disasters than to Betty’s inexhaustible and trivial cheer. I began to think that I might not want to be married to Fred after all. He unrolled from Betty’s mouth like a long ribbon of soggy newspaper printed from end to end with nothing but the weather. Neither my sister nor I was interested in sock sizes, and Betty’s random, unexciting details diminished Fred in our eyes. We began to spend less of our playtime at Fred and Betty’s and more in our hideout; which was in a patch of scrubby oak on a vacant lot along the shore. There we played complicated games of Mandrake the Magician and his faithful servant Lothar, with our dolls as easily hypnotized villains. My sister was always Mandrake. When we tired of this we would put on our bathing suits
and go wading along the shore, watching for freighters and throwing acorns into the river to see how quickly they would be carried away by the current.
It was on one of these wading expeditions that we met Nan. She lived ten lots down, in a white cottage with red trim. Unlike many of the other cottages, Nan’s had a real dock, built out into the river and anchored around the posts with piles of rocks. She was sitting on this dock when we first saw her, chewing gum and flipping through a stack of airplane cards from Wings cigarettes. Everyone knew that only boys collected these. Her hair and her face were light brown, and she had a sleek plump sheen, like caramel pudding.
“What’re you doing with those?” were my sister’s first words. Nan only smiled.
That same afternoon Nan was allowed into our hideout, and after a cursory game of Mandrake, during which I was demoted to the lowly position of Narda, the two of them sat on our orange crates and exchanged what seemed to me to be languid and pointless comments.
“You ever go to the store?” Nan asked. We never did. Nan smiled some more. She was twelve, my sister was only eleven and three-quarters.
“There’s cute boys at the store,” Nan said. She was wearing a peasant blouse with a frill and an elastic top that she could slide down over her shoulders if she wanted to. She stuck her airplane cards into her shorts pocket and we went to ask my mother if we could walk to the store. After that, my sister and Nan went there almost every afternoon.
The store was a mile and a half from our cottage, a hot walk along the shore past the fronts of other cottages where fat mothers basked in the sun and other, possibly hostile children paddled in the water; past rowboats hauled up on the sand, along cement breakwaters, through patches of beach grass that cut your ankles if you ran through it and beach peas that were hard and bitter-tasting. In some places we could smell the outhouses. Just before the store, there was an open space with poison ivy, which we had to wade around.
The store had no name. It was just “the store,” the only store for the cottagers since it was the only one they could walk to. I was allowed to go with my sister and Nan, or rather, my mother insisted that I go. Although I hadn’t said anything to her about it, she could sense my misery. It wasn’t so much my sister’s desertion that hurt, but her blithe unconsciousness of it. She was quite willing to play with me when Nan wasn’t around.
Sometimes, when the sight of my sister and Nan conspiring twenty paces ahead of me made me too unhappy, I would double back and go to Fred and Betty’s. There I would sit facing backwards on one of Betty’s kitchen chairs, my two hands rigid in the air, holding a skein of sky blue wool while Betty wound it into balls. Or, under Betty’s direction, I crocheted sweaty, uneven little pink and yellow dolls’ dresses for the dolls my sister was, suddenly, too old to play with.
On better days I would make it as far as the store. It was not beautiful or even clean, but we were so used to wartime drabness and grime that we didn’t notice. It was a two-storey building of unpainted wood which had weathered grey. Parts of it were patched with tar paper, and it had coloured metal signs nailed around the front screen door and windows: Coca-Cola, 7-Up, Salada Tea. Inside, it had the sugary, mournful smell of old general stores, a mixture of the cones for the icecream cones, the packages of Oreo cookies, the open boxes of jawbreakers and licorice whips that lined the counter, and that other smell, musky and sharp, part dry-rot and part sweat. The bottles of pop were kept in a metal cooler with a heavy lid, filled with cold water and chunks of ice melted to the smoothness of the sand-scoured pieces of glass we sometimes found on the beach.
The owner of the store and his wife lived on the second floor, but we almost never saw them. The store was run by their two daughters, who took turns behind the counter. They were both dark and they both wore shorts and polka-dot halter tops, but one was friendly and the other one, the thinner, younger one, was not. She would take our pennies and ring them into the cash register without saying a word, staring over our heads out the front window with its dangling raisin-covered fly-papers as if she was completely detached from the activity her hands were performing. She didn’t dislike us; she just didn’t see us. She wore her hair long and done in a sort of roll at the front, and her lipstick was purplish.
The first time we went to the store we found out why Nan collected airplane cards. There were two boys there, sitting on the grey, splintery front steps, their arms crossed over their knees. I had been told by my sister that the right thing to do with boys was to ignore them, otherwise they would pester you. But these boys knew Nan, and they spoke to her, not with the usual taunts, but with respect.
“You got anything new?” one of them said.
Nan smiled, brushed back her hair and wiggled her shoulders a little inside her peasant blouse. Then she slid her airplane cards slowly out of her shorts pocket and began riffling through them.
“You got any?” the other boy said to my sister. For once she was humbled. After that, she got my mother to switch brands and built up her own pack. I saw her in front of the mirror about a week later, practising that tantalizing slide, the cards coming out of her pocket like a magician’s snake.
When I went to the store I always had to bring back a loaf of wax-papered bread for my mother, and sometimes a package of “Jiffy” Pie Crust, if they had any. My sister never had to: she had already discovered the advantages of being unreliable. As payment, and, I’m sure, as compensation for my unhappiness, my mother gave me a penny a trip, and when I had saved five of these pennies I bought my first Popsicle. Our mother had always refused to buy them for us, although she permitted ice-cream cones. She said there was something in Popsicles that was bad for you, and as I sat on the front steps of the store, licking down to the wooden stick, I kept looking for this thing. I visualized it as a sort of core, like the white fingernail-shaped part in a kernel of corn, but I couldn’t find anything.
My sister and Nan were sitting beside me on the front steps. There were no boys at the store that day, so they had nothing else to do. It was even hotter than usual, and airless; there was a shimmer over the river, and the freighters wavered as they passed through it. My Popsicle was melting almost before I could eat it. I had given my sister half of it; which she had taken without the gratitude I had hoped for. She was sharing it with Nan.
Fred came around the corner of the building and headed towards the front door. This was no surprise, as we had seen him at the store several times before.
“Hi, beautiful,” he said to my sister. We moved our rumps along the step to let him in the door.
After quite a long time he came out, carrying a loaf of bread. He asked us if we wanted a lift with him in his car: he was just coming back from the city, he said. Of course we said yes. There was nothing unusual about any of this, except that the daughter, the thinner, purple one, stepped outside the door and stood on the steps as we were driving off. She folded her arms across her chest in that slump-shouldered pose of women idling in doorways. She wasn’t smiling. I thought she had come out to watch the Canada Steamship lines freighter that was going past, but then I saw that she was staring at Fred. She looked as if she wanted to kill him.
Fred didn’t seem to notice. He sang all the way home. “Katy, oh beautiful Katy,” he sang, winking at my sister, whom he sometimes called Katy since her name was Catherine. He had the windows open, and dust from the rutted gravel road poured over us, whitening our eyebrows and turning Fred’s hair grey. At every jolt my sister and Nan screamed gleefully, and after a while I forgot my feelings of exclusion and screamed too.
It seemed as if we had lived in the cottage for a long time, though it was only one summer. By August I could hardly remember the apartment in Ottawa and the man who used to beat up his wife. That had happened in a remote life; and, despite the sunshine, the water, the open space, a happier one. Before, our frequent moves and the insecurities of new schools had forced my sister to value me: I was four years younger, but I was loyal and always there. Now those years were a cany
on between us, an empty stretch like a beach along which I could see her disappearing ahead of me. I longed to be just like her, but I could no longer tell what she was like.
In the third week of August the leaves started to turn, not all at once, just a single red one here and there, like a warning. That meant it would soon be time for school and another move. We didn’t even know where we would be moving to this time, and when Nan asked us what school we went to, we were evasive.
“I’ve been to eight different schools,” my sister said proudly. Because I was so much younger, I had only been to two. Nan, who had been to the same one all her life, slipped the edge of her peasant blouse over her shoulders and down to her elbows to show us that her breasts were growing. The rings around her nipples had softened and started to puff out; otherwise she was as flat as my sister.
“So what,” said my sister, rolling up her jersey. This was a competition I couldn’t be part of. It was about change, and, increasingly, change frightened me. I walked back along the beach to Betty’s house, where my latest piece of grubby crocheting was waiting for me and where everything was always the same.
I knocked on the screen door and opened it. I meant to say, “Can I come in?” the way we always did, but I didn’t say it. Betty was sitting by herself at the iron table of the breakfast nook. She had on her shorts and a striped sailor top, navy blue and white with a little anchor pin, and the apron with the yellow chickens coming out of their eggs. For once she wasn’t doing anything, and there was no cup of coffee in front of her. Her face was white and uncomprehending, as if someone had just hit her for no reason.
She saw me, but she didn’t smile or ask me in. “What am I going to do?” she said.
The Story: Love, Loss and the Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories Page 93