“It was them out-of-town pickers that the new foreman hired, eh? Them interinits,” Sidonie hears Len Platt saying, in front of the Red and White Grocery.
Mr. Defoe comes to talk to Father and drink whiskey in the parlour. None of the family is allowed in. “Business,” Father says. There is no shouting, but after Mr. Defoe leaves, Father seems smaller, in a frightening way.
And then he comes over again two evenings later, driving his red truck up the driveway into the yard. Sidonie has been getting the eggs. He brakes the truck beside her and stops. His sandy hair looks damp, and he smells like soap. Sidonie notices the black hairs on the forearm resting on the open cab window.
“Hello, Sidonie,” he says. “Is your sister home?”
Sidonie feels herself scowl. She wants to say no, but Alice has already seen the truck: The back door slams and Alice strides out, wearing a blue skirt and white blouse. Her tanned legs are bare, and she has sandals on her feet, and her pale pink toenail polish looks shockingly nude in comparison to the bright red polish most women are wearing.
Sidonie asks, “Alice! Where are you going?”
“See ya,” Alice says, climbing into the truck beside Mr. Defoe. He reverses and turns the truck, nearly crushing the mock-orange bush, and then speeds down the driveway.
If Mr. Defoe marries Alice, he’ll be Sidonie’s brother-in-law. But maybe it would be a good thing. If he were married to Alice, he couldn’t treat Father badly, could he? Perhaps Alice will convince him to change his mind about hiring away all of the orchard workers. Perhaps she is doing that right now: talking earnestly but sweetly to Mr. Defoe, explaining why it’s better to cooperate.
Though, to be honest, that doesn’t sound like Alice.
When Sidonie brings the eggs into the kitchen, she says to Mother, “Alice went somewhere with Mr. Defoe.”
“Shhh, I know,” Mother replies. “We don’t need to announce it to the world.”
Sidonie understands: Father isn’t meant to know. Is that right? It seems dubious: Alice ought not to be going around with Father’s enemy, especially behind Father’s back.
But then, maybe it’s going to be a surprise. Alice will convince Mr. Defoe to work with Father, as all of Mr. Inglis’s previous foremen have done, and then Father will be very happy and relieved. That must be it.
Mother had burned herself out on Alice, that was the matter. She had expended all of her imagination and energy on preparing Alice for something that was starting, that summer, to look as if it wouldn’t happen, and she was panicking. That was it.
And Father? What had he been thinking? What had he hoped for Alice? That seems less clear. Had he left matters like that to their mother?
He had been so much taken up with other things: the orcharding business was at its peak, demand for fresh fruit among easterners and Americans very high, so prices good, but many orchardists entering the market, and labour scarce.
Mr. Defoe. She has not thought of him in a long time, though she supposes now that in some way she has never not thought of him. He certainly wasn’t what Mother hoped he would be. Not good enough for Alice, anyway. They should have seen that.
VETCH
Cynthia visits one Sunday — on the pretext, or Sidonie assumes it is a pretext — of bringing Sidonie a large, hanging planter filled with bright-coral petunias and that ubiquitous little blue flower used to fill flower baskets.
“Happy Mother’s Day,” Cynthia says.
Really, it is embarrassing. She is not Cynthia’s mother. There is no need for this sort of thing. She assumes that Cynthia has really come to check on her progress with the boxes. She feels hemmed in; she is not ready to hand over her gleanings yet. But then she thinks, happily, of the dresses: yes, those Cynthia might have right away. She lugs the trunk up to her living room, opens the lid. “Go ahead,” she says.
Cynthia is so pleased that Sidonie feels guilty, fraudulent. She sits back, though, while Cynthia begins to lift out the transparent packages with their pastel folds.
Can she remember the stories behind the outfits? She can. She names their occasions, briefly, for Cynthia: valedictorian speech, competition speech, trip to Vancouver, visits to different associations. Blue poplin, pink shantung, eggshell sharkskin. A floating, ruffled frock in aqua cotton lawn: she remembers Alice and Mother sewing this dress. Fifty-four separate pieces, Mother had said, half boasting, half complaining. Yards of ruffles; a dozen pearl buttons, each with a tiny fabric loop.
A cloud of white inside cellophane packaging; Cynthia exclaims when she sees it, wants to open it. But it’s not Alice’s wedding dress; it’s a short white formal dress with layers of tulle in the skirt, a boned bodice with a deeply scooped neck. Cynthia holds it up by the ruched shoulders: Alice’s graduation dress?
No. Her Lady of the Lake gown. Her graduation gown is in another bag, drifts of embroidered, sequined tulle, pale blue. There doesn’t appear to be a wedding dress.
I know she had one, Cynthia says. There are photos.
Yes, there are. But what has become of the dress? Sidonie, looking through the album, finds the picture but doesn’t remember this garment at all.
“Perhaps it was borrowed,” she says.
It was common to borrow a dress, especially if the wedding was a small one, or hurried.
When Cynthia had shaken out the white frock, something small and hard had fallen out of its folds, bounced and rolled under the chair. Cynthia had not noticed; she was looking at the dress, and she didn’t, of course, hear the small thud. For no reason, except, perhaps, her own reticence, Sidonie had left it lying.
When Cynthia leaves, she retrieves it, kneeling to feel beneath the sofa. It’s a small piece of carved jade, a little stylized cat. It has a hole through it for a cord. She knows exactly what it is: netsuke, an ornamental button for a Japanese coat. She has never seen it before, but as she holds it in her hand, she thinks that she knows where it has come from.
It’s Masao who shows Sidonie the chocolate lilies and Indian paint, which grow not on the sunny, grassy, hillsides, but on the north-facing slope above the camp, where the spruce trees grow black and scaly, draped with old man’s beard, and the irrigation pipe curves its way, galvanized tin on wooden trestles, around the outcrops of the hills. Here the forest is cool, shadowy, unfamiliar. Under the half-pipe, which leaks, mosses and ferns grow, and violets, and a chain of small ponds, thick with cattails and yellow water lilies, painted turtles, frogs.
Masao lives in the pickers’ camp with the single men who work the orchards. He is a nephew of Mr. Tanaka, who plays chess with Father. Masao and Mr. Tanaka are not the only men from the camp who come to their place to work, but Sidonie knows them best because of Mr. Tanaka playing chess. But Mr. Tanaka is old: a businessman. He used to be. He wears glasses and speaks very little, and has a kind of harsh voice, grey threads in his hair. Masao is different: his face is round, full of light. He is taller than Mr. Tanaka, and, while they both speak perfect English, he talks like the kids Sidonie knows, while Mr. Tanaka is abrupt and formal. Both Masao and Mr. Tanaka were born in Canada; even Masao’s parents were born in Canada, Father says. They are Canadian citizens. What happened to Masao’s parents is a disgrace, Father says. But Mother and Mrs. Clare say, you never know; they are different from us. And look what the Japs did to our boys in Asia.
Sidonie is not supposed to go over the hill to the camp, and in fact would not venture on her own, but one day, when Masao and Alice are joking over the sprinklers, Masao invites Alice and her to come and see his house, and so they do, without Alice telling their parents. (How old are they at this point? Alice perhaps fifteen, and Sidonie ten?) One Saturday Alice just says, “Come with me,” and they walk up the hill to the top, just where the road curves and begins snaking down the hill again to the lake, and then turn and go into the camp, which is a collection of tiny cabins sheltered under very large pines and fir trees. Sidonie has been before, of course, in Father’s truck, when he drives Masao and Mr. Tanaka home
after a chess game, in the winter, when it is dark at suppertime and the snow thick on the ground. But she has never gotten out of the truck, only looked through the window at the neat wooden cabins with their green trim and roofs, and the clearings of vegetable gardens and swept dirt yards. Now she is anxious; they are not supposed to go to the camp, are they?
But Alice hurries her along and seems to know where to go. It is the tiny cabin on the end, no bigger, Sidonie sees, than the room she and Alice share. Alice knocks on the door, and it is opened by Masao, who bows a little, the way he does sometimes when he’s nervous, and asks them to come in. Sidonie is enchanted by the cabin — a little house, with everything you could want. A little stove, like the one in the wash house, only smaller, black, with a round plate that can be lifted out (there is the little handle that slips into the slot) to put wood inside. On the stove is a kettle, and there is a countertop with a basin, and some shallow shelves holding a blue-and-white teapot and cups, as well as bottles and paper packages all neatly folded. There are two narrow bunk beds with patchwork quilts, and a tiny table, painted with orange and green chrysanthemums, and a calendar and a painting of ducks on the wall. Everything you could want, and so clean.
Sidonie and Alice have to sit on the lower bed, because there are no chairs. Alice spreads out her blue chambray skirt and shakes her hair over her shoulders. She doesn’t look around her as Sidonie does, but instead looks at Masao with a sort of mocking look, a challenge. Daring him, Sidonie thinks, or daring herself. Sidonie wriggles and tries to pull her own skirt smooth under her legs. It has ridden up, and the quilt, which is made of hairy thick pieces of wool fabric, as from people’s overcoats, is itchy against her thighs.
“Sit still,” Alice says. “Stop bouncing!” But Masao, who has been putting crumpled brown leaves from a twist of brown paper bag into the teapot, sits beside Sidonie and smiles at her. “Want to play a game?” He gets off the bed and reaches under it, suddenly, kneeling and bending to the ground to retrieve a box. His shirt slides up, showing the worn waistband of his black trousers, his lean brown back. Sidonie watches his back, which is curiously appealing. She wants to touch it, the smooth lean evenness of it. Then she looks up guiltily, to see that Alice is looking at Masao’s back, too.
Masao emerges from under the bed, as if from underwater, smoothing down his hair and clothes, grinning. “Here.”
Inside the flat box: a board, like a chess board, only with little curved legs, and made out of wine-coloured wood, and a bag of black and white checkers. The white checkers are made out of something natural — not celluloid or stone — perhaps ivory or shell — and the black pieces are stone, polished like glass marbles. The black pieces, Sidonie sees, are slightly larger than the white in diameter, but from a short distance they appear the same size. Why is that?
“You can play this with an opponent,” Masao says, “or by yourself. See?” He moves pieces, his fine fingers not much bigger than Sidonie’s own.
“What small hands you have,” Alice teases. “Like a girl’s.” Sidonie thinks Masao will be mad, but he isn’t. He laughs and holds his hand, palm out, in front of Alice. She presses hers against it.
“My palms are bigger,” Masao says, “but your fingers are longer.”
Alice slides her hand up a little so the bases of their fingers meet, and her pink fingertips extend past Masao’s. “Yes,” she says. And then slides her hand down again, so that once again they are palm to palm.
Sidonie watches for a moment, feeling that she does not quite know this aspect of Alice. Then she turns her attention to the game, which is kind of like chess, but different, too. When she finally manages to figure it out, the light from the small, high window has shifted, and Alice is saying that it’s time to go. Beside Sidonie is a small blue-and-white cup half full of pale yellow tea, already cool. She can’t remember drinking it, though she recalls its thin, bitter, floral taste.
Sometimes when they walk up the camp road, Masao meets them before they reach the cabins, stepping swiftly out of the shadows under the trestle to intercept them. Once, Sidonie, startled, screamed, and after that Masao would try to surprise her, perching on top of the trestle to dangle the feathery ends of grasses on her neck, or springing out to tickle her sides. Sidonie will then chase him through the trees, laughing and panting. Alice doesn’t chase, but laughs at both of them, mocking, but not with her usual meanness.
Alice says, “If you mention this at home, we won’t be allowed to visit anymore,” which she doesn’t need to say; Sidonie understands it. She and Alice are not supposed to go into the pickers’ camp, where the workers for Mr. Inglis’s and Father’s orchards live. Many of them are rough men, strangers. But there is more than that edict behind Alice’s concern: Alice does not like to be seen in public to be friends with Masao. Sidonie has noticed that they do not walk home together from the high school bus, and Alice does not go with Masao to the Teen Town dances, or to parties at friends’ houses, or sit with him at the beach. Yet Masao comes to their house, and from spring thinning through fall picking, they will see him in their orchard almost every day.
Now, fifty years later, she understands.
She has not seen Masao for years. He’d be living still — not yet seventy. She had not found him at his little shop in the plaza, now that she thinks of it, when she was last here more than twenty years ago. She tries to recall what has taken the shop’s place. Is it the insurance broker or the bakery? But the premises have likely changed hands more than once.
It would, in fact, have been 1963 when she saw him at his store, when she had come back with Adam on a kind of honeymoon trip. Mother had said that Masao had opened a shop, a music store, in the new plaza on the highway, and Sidonie and Adam had driven down to where the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, the Red and White food store, the café and drug store and hardware store stood, a small row of false-fronted buildings. And there was Masao’s shop: Kobe Music. And Masao coming around from behind the counter, looking surprised, happy, shaking hands with Adam, squeezing Sidonie in a hug.
Adam had wanted to buy a record — a recording that Sidonie knew they could find easily in Montreal. But then Mr. Tanaka had come out from a back area, even smaller than Sidonie remembered (she towered over him, now) and wobbly, and somehow, having forgotten how to speak English, and insisted, in grunted Japanese, in sign language, that the record should be a gift. Sidonie had been paralyzed with awkwardness, but Adam had known what to do: the record was accepted as a gift, with many thanks from Adam, and bows from Mr. Tanaka. And then Adam had to buy another record, which he did, from a stash Masao produced from a back shelf. “Still in its jacket,” Adam had marveled. “This is rare. My father will be amazed.” But Sidonie had recognized it as one of Masao’s own.
After, Adam and Sidonie were beckoned into the back room, where Mr. Tanaka served them green tea in the tiny porcelain cups with no handles that Sidonie remembered from their cabin, and Masao, with an ear for the door chimes, sat and talked to Sidonie in his old teasing way. Has she learned to speak French yet? Does she talk more in French than in English? (That wouldn’t be hard!) And has she broken all of her new wedding dishes yet? And has she learned to cook for her new husband, or poisoned him with her awful food, like the last one? Adam had smiled, and Mr. Tanaka had laughed and rubbed his hands together.
Mr. Tanaka, Masao said, had had a stroke. Since his stroke, he can’t remember how to speak English, though he still understood it, some of the time. “When he wants to,” Masao said, mischievous again, and Mr. Tanaka had chuckled, as if he got the joke.
And Sidonie’s father had loaned Masao a good part of the money to get the store started: did Sidonie know that? That was very generous.
Her discomfort, then, that Masao had clowned, and kowtowed to Adam. Or so she had seen it.
He’d likely be living in the same house — the little brown-painted bungalow with its porch and maples that he had bought back in the late sixties. She imagines him there, on his kn
ees cleaning out the peony beds, as old Mr. Tanaka had done, coming inside to make tea, to put something on the stereo. Imagines the sandalwood and jasmine smell of his house, the shade of the bamboo blinds.
Perhaps she could give him a call. He must be in the telephone book.
She will ask Hugh if he has heard from Masao first, perhaps. That’d be the smart thing. She and Hugh could make a visit together, next time Hugh is in town.
But later, she thinks: foolish, foolish. What would she and Masao have to say to each other? Even with Hugh there. She has witnessed these conversations between the elderly, on meeting old acquaintances. The shock of alteration, the awkwardness, the inventory of memories, not always shared, the slow trickle-in of grief, the ineffable sense of loss. The descent into the maudlin, if alcohol has been imbibed.
A pointless exercise. Pointless and painful.
She will not speak to Hugh, after all.
Sometimes she and Alice and Masao do not go to Masao’s cabin, but instead head through the trees, following the irrigation pipe as it skirts the camp and then makes a line across the ridge of the hill. On the other side is a rough granite outcropping, and from this mass of rock, the lake stretches out for fifty miles in two directions, north and south. The hills on the other side are far enough away to be blue, and the lake is cobalt on sunny days, steel when clouds dull the sky. Sometimes the paddle-wheeler can be seen, traveling between the dock, invisible at the base of the hill a mile below, and Fintry, on the other side, and sometimes little sailboats, white specks moving back and forth.
In the rock outcropping is an old gold mine, like a cave. They must not go inside, Masao says, for the shaft has partially collapsed, and they might fall down and be crushed. The opening is full of spiders’ webs and old lumber: Masao lifts a board to show the black widow clinging underneath, shiny as coal. He uses his penknife to flip the spider over; underneath is the red hourglass. Sidonie feels a sort of horror at the mine that extends to the outcropping itself. She shakes when she first sees it, even though Masao shows her the trove of white quartz pieces in front of the mine opening.
After Alice Page 12