The Ladies' Lending Library

by Janice Kulyk Keefer

  He’ll undress in the dark, roll in like a driftwood log beside her, the sag in the mattress pushing their bodies together, no matter how hard she tries to keep to her side. Tonight he’ll be too tired, highway-tired, much too tired. But tomorrow, after a day spent fixing the roof or tinkering with the septic system or replacing the rotten wood on the porch steps; after getting too much sun, and putting up with the kids quarrelling over who is to hand him the nails, and who will hold the hammer when he doesn’t need it—then he’ll turn out the lights after they’ve undressed with their backs to one another; he’ll turn to her and she’ll lie there beneath him, good as gold. What else can she do, when you can hear through the skin-thin walls every sigh or cry anyone makes in their sleep?

  Max wants a son. Ever since she was pregnant that first time with Laura he’s had the name picked out: his father’s name, Roman. A boy called Roman had followed her home from school all one winter, a skinny, dwarfish boy she couldn’t stand to have near her. Give him his son and he will never bother her again, that’s what it means, his turning to her each Saturday night, his body so heavy it crushes the life from her. And yet no one is a better dancer—so light on his feet, whirling her across the floor as if she were swans-down chased by a summer breeze. She sees herself and her husband like those tiny dolls placed on the top tier of wedding cakes, gliding over the stiff white icing, while all around, people are watching, envying. Law’s such a respectable profession; he’ll go far, all the way to Q.C. Such a handsome man, so distinguished looking in his tuxedo, the spotless white cummerbund, the deep red carnation in his lapel. He would always bring her a gardenia—roses were common, he used to say: she deserved something as rare as she was. A gardenia, a cummerbund—had she really married him for that? And has it really led her to this? A house in the suburbs, a tumbledown summer cottage, a body scarred with stretch marks, like silverfish crawling over her belly and across her thighs: an aging body stranded in the washed-out garden of her pyjamas.

  Never mind, she has one sure consolation: her dress for the Senchenkos’ party. She has hidden it away, like the book in the night-table drawer. Sonia tiptoes to the closet, reaching into its soft depths, finding the dress—the gown—by the metallic feel of the fabric. She can hear her mother’s tongue clucking at the clinging folds, the low-cut neck, but as she holds the dress up against herself she is overcome by its sheer gorgeousness, the cloth dropping from her breasts like golden rain. Slippery and cool like rain, her skin drinking in the gold. If she were to step into the dress, study herself in the mirror, move in the clinging fabric as if she were on a runway and about to launch herself on a sea of unknown, admiring eyes … But she resists the lure: she makes herself shove the dress to the very back of the closet; she swears not to look at it again, to try it on, until the night of the Senchenkos’ party, lest she damage its rareness with too much looking.

  Sitting on the end of the bed, facing the satin headboard (too good to be thrown out, too soiled to use at home), Sonia counts the waves beating against the shore as if they were knocks at a door she’d double-bolted. She longs for the city—not the vast, empty-seeming suburb where she lives now, but downtown where she used to work: the streetcar sparks and honking of horns, the wholesale fabric sellers on Queen, the roar of sewing machines in the factories on Spadina. Her mother’s house on Dovercourt Road: sitting out on the porch on summer nights, people walking by, calling hello, everyone breathing in the scent of melting chocolate from the Neilson factory nearby. And it doesn’t matter how hot it gets on summer days, how steamy and drenching; in spite of the lake, in spite of Sunnyside pool, no one expects you to jump into the water.

  Whereas here, if one of the children were drowning she wouldn’t be able to run in and rescue her. It’s got so bad now that she can’t go down to the water’s edge without the hairs on her arms sticking into her like pins, her fear like a rag in her mouth. Even if all four of them were to plead with her from the bottom of the lake, their arms stretched out, their mouths wide open, she wouldn’t be able to put a foot—not so much as a toe—into the lake to save them.

  The children think it must be God’s hand drawing ridges in the sand beneath the water every night. The God whose eye is painted on the dome of the cathedral back in the city: one huge, blue, unshuttable eye, trailing gold and locked in a triangle.

  There is no churchgoing at Kalyna Beach: no onion-bulb cathedral, no bishop with a glass eye and thick black veil strung from a pillbox hat high on his terrible grey head. No cross to kiss, no thick, consecrated bread to force down to an empty stomach, no incense smoking from censers in front of the ikon screen with its gold grapevines and glimmering lamps. Here there’s just the bay, what they call “the lake,” though it’s a mere scallop on a gigantic body of water stretching farther north than any of them has ever dreamed of going. The lake and the cottages on the bluff above it, and the tree-tunnelled roads behind them. And the beach, of course, a snaking shore of sand coasting up to dunes with spikes of grass like long, green needles stuck in a cushion.

  Sometimes the lake’s a pale blue, cloudy as shards of glass smoothed to pebbles by the waves. Sometimes the lake is orange, rose, peach, after one of the perfectly calm, bright days, when the children have camped out at the beach, except for the naps they’re forced to take in the afternoon, lying in cedar-scented rooms, watching leaf-shadows dart and flicker on the walls. After sunset, when darkness pools in the roofs of the cottages and the cars stranded beside them, the lake becomes the colour of night itself, so that if you were to flout the rules and sneak down for a swim, the children think, you would emerge with skin blue-black, telltale as ink.

  But their days are far too full of sun and sand and water for them to think of anything but sleep by the time dark falls. Under the covers of their narrow beds the older ones may read with flashlights, but when they hear the grown-ups yawn and stumble off to sleep, the children finally give in. Letting their eyelids shut at last, they walk out the doors of their dreams to shores where it’s impossible to tell where water ends, and sky begins.

  A gilded barge with sails of purple silk and a hundred silver-mounted oars beating through the oiled and snaky waters. Pyramids on either side of her; palm trees like huge green moths overhead. Charmian and Lotos kneeling with jewelled beakers of strawberry juice. Languid under a canopy of cloth of gold, her raven tresses fingered by the breeze raised by her slaves’ ostrich-feather fans, her bosom rising like dough in a mixing bowl, she waits for Marc Antony. Together they will rule the world and found a dynasty of mighty kings and queens.

  Sails billowing, oars beating through the waves—but the harder they beat, the clearer it becomes that the barge, far from moving, is stuck in water thick and stiff as week-old Jell-O. She is about to call to her oarsmen to go faster, faster, when the chief slave, who has the face of her younger sister Katia, turns to her with her hands on her hips, saying, “You—Cleopatra? Who do you think you’re kidding? You’ve got no breasts, your hair’s the colour of dirty dishwater, and you wear glasses. Big, ugly, blind-girl glasses!” And then the voice alters: “What on earth do you think you’re doing, spilling strawberry juice all over the clothes I’ve just washed!” For Katia’s taunts have turned into their mother’s exasperated scolding; the billowing cloth of gold is a ripped flap of screen, and waves, not oars, pound at her ears.

  It’s still dark when Laura wakes, though she can make out a streak of light at the window, feel it like a tongue against her open eyes, as if she’s got specks in them that have to be licked away. She wants to close her eyes and turn herself back into Cleopatra on her way to Tarsus: if she only tries hard enough, she will be able to shove the light away. But it has woken Bonnie, too; here she is shivering beside her, a corner of the bedsheet clutched in her hands.

  “I’m scared, Laura. Please, can I come sleep with you?”

  Laura sighs and shoves herself to the edge of the mattress. “All right. If you promise not to kick.”

  “I promise. But some
times I kick and I can’t help it. Tell me a story, Laura, please?”

  Bonnie is nine, by which age Laura would never have dreamed of confessing night terrors or daytime fears. Laura is the only one who knows Bonnie’s secret, and she marvels at her small sister’s talents as an actress. Of all the sisters it is Bonnie people describe as open, sunny, just like a little daisy. They know nothing of the monsters lurking in cupboards and drawers, waiting to jump out and grab her the moment it gets dark each night. It’s become a ritual at the cottage for Bonnie to fall asleep next to Laura, who must then lug her back to her own bed and tuck her in as best she can. It’s become a ritual, as well, for Bonnie to crawl back beside Laura as soon as she wakes up each morning. It’s just as bad at home, where Bonnie has a room all to herself, a room Laura has to inspect each night, closing every drawer, shutting the closets, making sure the windows are locked tight.

  That night last winter when they’d watched Boris Karloff in Dracula, Bonnie had taken a small pad of coloured notepaper and drawn a cross on every sheet. Then she’d torn them all off and thumbtacked them to the headboard of her bed. Laura’s face burns to remember how cruel she’d been—telling Bonnie that she, Laura, was really Dracula, and that just when Bonnie was drifting off to sleep she would steal to her room and bite her neck till the blood ran dry. What use, then, could paper crosses be? Bonnie had ended up in Laura’s room, burrowing into her bed and pleading, “Even if you are Dracula, won’t you let me sleep with you?” How stricken she had felt and how full of love for the sister who’d so wholly forgiven and forgotten. As if Bonnie really were as carelessly bright as a daisy, and as incapable of resentment or revenge.

  Bonnie snuggles as close as she can to Laura, hands clasped over her heart like the Praying Hands on the Easter card someone’s stuck to the wall. Laura doesn’t need her glasses to see the look on her sister’s face, so warm and so golden. If she hates Katia for being quick and clever and pretty, then why doesn’t she hate Bonnie even more, since, though she looks so little like their mother, she is, as everyone says of Sonia, perfectly beautiful? Bonnie has never fought with their mother, nor has she staged the astounding tantrums Katia has—Laura is prone to sulks, instead—yet Laura loves Bonnie with that fierce, selfless love she’d have given to the dog she will never be allowed to have. Because I have enough to do as it is; you can’t even pick up after yourself, how are you going to take care of an animal? It isn’t a toy, you know, I can’t just throw it in a box when you’re tired of playing!

  Feeling Laura’s body stiffen beside her, Bonnie unlocks her hands, stroking her sister’s cheek till Laura gives in.

  “All right—but just one story, a short one, because I’m still sleepy. I’ll tell you how Caesar arrived in Alexandria after—”

  “Not a Cleopatra story, Laura. Tell me the one about Our Mother. When she worked at the Sportswear Factory, and Mr. Streatfield picked her out from all the sewing machine girls.”

  Laura sighs: she is as tired of this story as Bonnie is of Cleopatra.

  “One morning at Modern Sportswear, the owner, Mr. Streatfield, happened to be walking along when he saw a beautiful young girl behind a sewing machine, and he said to her, ‘You ought to be modelling those shorts instead of sewing them. Come to my office this afternoon, and we’ll see what we can do for you.’ And so Our Mother went to his office with a hatpin hidden in her sleeve—”

  “Because Baba Laryssa told her to watch out for men,” Bonnie prompts.

  Laura gives a sigh disguised as a yawn, knowing that this time, like all the others, she won’t be allowed to leave anything out. “Because Baba Laryssa always told her, ‘Men are like that,’ and Our Mother would say, ‘Like what?’ and Baba just said, ‘You’ll find out.’”

  Bonnie closes her eyes. Laura goes on with the story, wondering all the while how many weeks or months her mother had worked in the sportswear factory before Mr. Streatfield discovered her. Why was he in such a dingy place, if he was such a famous designer? What did the other girls think when he singled their mother out like that? Mr. Streatfield is an old, fat, bald man with yellow-stained fingers, so why would their mother have needed that hatpin? Her mother has never ever struck her, even when she gets so mad her lips go white. How would she have dared stick a hatpin into Mr. Streatfield—and where?

  When Laura reaches the part of the story where the handsome lawyer notices Sonia Metelsky’s picture in an ad for Beaver Bakery in the Ukrainian Herald, she waits for a whole minute, listening to Bonnie’s soft breathing weave through the beating of waves on the shore. Gently, Laura disengages her arm, which is falling asleep under the weight of her sister’s head. She lies back on the pillow, shutting her eyes as best she can against the sun that has risen higher and higher with each sentence of the story being told. Crash, crash, crash goes the water—there must be a wind, perhaps a storm’s on its way, although the sun promises another hot, clear day. She loves the sound of the waves breaking; she can never hear it enough. It’s the part of being at the cottage that she misses most when they’re back in the suburbs, in the big split-level house where no one else has lived before, the trees chopped down, and all the grass in patches on the front lawn, sewn together like a quilt.

  Across from her lies the white-painted wall, all the cracks and stains that will leap into view when she puts on the glasses that sit on her nose like a fat blue butterfly, glasses that she’s tried and tried to outgrow. When Elizabeth Taylor auditioned for the lead in National Velvet, they told her they wanted someone taller; she went home, grew three inches and got the part. That’s what it says in the Cleopatra Souvenir Booklet: “How she accomplished the trick she doesn’t reveal.” Laura’s parents wouldn’t take her with them to see Cleopatra—they said she’d have to wait until she was older; it wasn’t suitable for children. She’d done everything, crying, pleading, being helpful around the house; she’d even gone to her father as he sat in his den, watching the hockey game: “If you love me you’ll let me see Cleopatra. It’s educational, please Tatu, if you love me you’ll take me with you. I bet you don’t love me, I bet you wish I’d never been born.” But it was the Maple Leafs against the Canadiens and she couldn’t tell whether he hadn’t heard or didn’t want to answer her. She’d never asked him again, and so her parents had gone to Cleopatra without her. When they brought her the Souvenir Booklet she’d thrown it into the wastepaper basket, snatching it out when they’d left her to mope, staying up half the night reading, learning it by heart.

  In a low voice, Laura recites the final lines of the story Bonnie has asked her to tell: “And Mr. Streatfield was going to take Our Mother to California, she was going to model a new line of Outdoor Wear, when she met Our Father, and he proposed, and she got married and had us instead.” She wonders, for a moment, if her mother had felt the same despair at giving up California as she herself had felt at not being able to see Cleopatra. And then she frowns, lines forming like staple marks between her eyebrows. She isn’t going to make excuses for her mother: that’s bad strategy; you must never feel sorry for the enemy. Listening to the waves slap against the shore, she turns towards her sister, to the small, warm body that smells so sweetly of soap and sun.

  “Darka, leave them, it’s better to let them drip-dry. It’s more”—and here Sonia pauses for a moment—“hygienic”—a word she’s learned from Reader’s Digest.

  The children have been fed, the soggy Rice Krispies scraped from cereal bowls into the garbage, and the bowls washed, dried, put away. Sonia’s forever telling Darka not to bother with drying, but will Darka ever listen? She seems to enjoy making Sonia feel guilty—little flutings of guilt like burned pastry-edging on a pie—at how hard Darka’s being forced to work. There are beds to be made, clothes to be scrubbed in the old tin tub down in the cellar, baskets of cotton sheets to wring out. Slaving at the wash while they traipse off to the beach, Darka grumbles to herself, hands reddening as she flaps each piece of laundry before pegging it on the line.

  At all of th
e cottages nearby, children are being sent to collect shovels and pails, beach balls and towels; mothers are gathering blankets and baby oil. Family by family, they begin the processions down from the log and board-and-batten and shingled structures cresting the small bluff over the lake, along the zigzag paths between scrub and saplings, to each day’s brand-new, shimmering bay.

  By ten in the morning the sun has sizzled you through—you have to wear flip-flops and goggle-eyed sunglasses, you have to don beach hats with wide brims and fading raffia flowers woven into the straw, remnants from distant honeymoons in Jamaica or the Bahamas. You have to cart coolers filled with lemonade and iced tea, picnic baskets with snacks for the children, calamine lotion for insect stings. And even though you’ve remembered everything you could possibly want or need, and have laden yourself and even the smaller children with bits of that everything to carry down to the water’s edge, something will always be forgotten. Messengers will endlessly ascend and descend the zigzag paths between the beach and the abandoned cottages.