The Ladies' Lending Library

by Janice Kulyk Keefer

  In her parents’ room, on the makeshift vanity table with its faded cotton skirts and rough, plywood top, lies Sonia’s paltry array of makeup. Three tubes of lipstick standing like soldiers in their shiny golden tubes: Pretty Pink, Koral Kiss, Ice Peach. A round container of face powder: MADAME DUBARRY under the picture of a lady with a pale satin dress and grey hair puffy as a mushroom. Inside, the powder puff smells the slightest bit sour, as if it should be left in the sun instead of shut up in a box, in the pale, pink dark. When Laura puts back the lid, a rim of powder sighs onto the table: she picks it up on her fingertips, rubbing it along her nose to make it look longer, finer, as the magazines advise. Her mother doesn’t wear eye makeup—she says it’s cheapening and besides, her eyelashes are naturally dark and thick. No fingernail polish, either. Sonia’s father had made her promise she would never paint her nails; it’s one of the stories each of her daughters but the youngest knows by heart, and Alix will learn it soon enough. How, the morning that Dyeedo Metelsky noticed, on the tips of his daughter’s hands, ten blood-red ovals, he’d brought over a basin of scalding, soapy water, demanding she wash that poison off immediately and never even think of painting herself again!

  Laura frowns, wishing there was something here she could use to transform herself, something scarlet or gold or inky-black. She can’t bring herself to put Sonia’s lipstick on her mouth; it would be too much like having to kiss her mother in company, showing what an obedient, affectionate child she is. Even if there were any eye makeup she could put on, it would all be hidden by her glasses, and if she were to take off her glasses she wouldn’t be able to see what she looked like in the mirror. Why is she the only one of them all to be short-sighted? Baba Laryssa wore glasses, but that doesn’t help: Sonia always looks at her daughter’s eyes as if Laura had ruined them just to spite her. Why couldn’t Katia have been the one needing to sit closer and closer to the television screen, and to the blackboard at school?

  Baba Laryssa’s glasses had had small, thick, rimless lenses: when she took them off, her eyes looked naked and so raw they made Laura think of an onion cut in half. When she’d first seen Laura in glasses, Baba had told her to take them off as often as she could, so her eye muscles wouldn’t get lazy. But once the lenses had slid over her eyes and the world jumped into sharp, stinging focus, Laura could never be without them. She’d even tried to wear her glasses to sleep, in case there was a fire in the middle of the night, and she needed to see to escape the flames. Now her eyes are so weak she can see next to nothing without her glasses, only blots by day, and blurred circles of light by night. Her mother has perfect vision, and her father has eagle eyes—that’s how he made it through the war, he says: he could see the snipers before they fixed their sights on him.

  A fly bumbles against the screen, trying to get out through holes far too small; it’s too stupid to notice the rip farther up, through which it flew in. Too stupid, or else its eyes are bad, like Laura’s. She turns away from the mirror, running her hand over the curved iron footboard of the double bed. How can it be so cool against her palm when this room is so hot, the air so thick and stuffy? She tries to imagine her father lying sleeping here tonight, his body like the prince disguised as a bear in “Snow White and Rose Red.” Once she’d come into her parents’ room when she wasn’t supposed to; had seen her father coming out of the bath, a tall, heavy body with pads of dark fur all over it. She couldn’t imagine how her mother could fall asleep beside a man who looked like a bear. Brown hair on the backs of his hands and springing out of his open shirt; dark brown eyebrows and hair so thick on his head, he’d joke about taking the lawn mower to it. Not bald like Mr. Plotsky, who is always mopping his shiny scalp with a pocket handkerchief, but thick dark hair combed straight back from his forehead.

  When she was younger, Laura believed that her father unzipped his skin every night; that he stepped out of his pelt the way he’d step out of his car coat after shovelling snow. She believed that her mother had some special gown she wore at night, stiff as armour, thin as silk, to keep her from being eaten up by the bear. Laura was very, very stupid once; she knows that now. Sliding open the closet door, not to touch anything, only to look, she drinks in the good, dry smell of the lavender talc her father always buys her mother for Christmas. It’s concentrated, this scent, in the clothes left hanging so sadly on their hangers, as if their only joy lay in hugging Sonia’s skin. The closet, unlike the vanity table, is packed full: shorts, skirts, pedal-pushers and blouses all in bright, cool colours, a garden of flowers hung by their metal stems. Thoughtlessly, Laura pushes farther and farther into the deep, narrow closet, feeling the texture of the cloth: satiny, or nubbly, or gauzy. Until she comes to the very end, to something that feels like nothing else under her fingers. She pulls at it, tugging it past the other clothes till at last she holds it up to her eyes, a long shimmer of gold. The dress Cleopatra wore on her triumphal entry into Rome, bringing her son Caesarion to be crowned.

  Gingerly, Laura holds up the dress, her legs in their usual knock-kneed lock. In the full-length mirror on the back of the bedroom door she confronts her body. It’s an entirely different shape from her mother’s. It’s more, she knows, like a tub of lard than an hourglass, and the collarbones which, on Sonia, project like a pair of budding wings are swallowed up by fat—puppy fat, Laura’s heard her mother call it. So—a dog in a tub of lard, that’s what she looks like, but somehow it doesn’t matter with this dress. There’s no waist to it; the material expands to cover her, seems to melt the thickness of her waist and thighs. If she were to step into it, she would become Cleopatra: everything about her would change, would turn clear and sharp, the way the world had done when she’d first put on her glasses. Outside, a squirrel starts chittering as she pulls the dress over her head, not even bothering to tug off her shorts and her top, fighting down the panic she always feels when she’s getting dressed, as if the cloth is out to smother her.

  It looks all wrong; it looks ridiculous. Because of the bra sewn into the material, foam cups like pointy balloons: if you press them they collapse like those cakes at the store, the ones Katia and Tania spoil by pushing down the maraschino cherries. If she could take out the foam cups, it would fit, it would have to fit; it would be perfect. She tugs the dress back over her head, trying not to panic when the cloth sticks; she grabs the scissors from her mother’s sewing basket under the vanity—the big, clumsy ones, since the smaller set is missing—and presses a steel tip against the tight, white stitching binding the foam to the gold lamé.

  Once all the other ladies have gone, and they are on their own inside the Plotskys’ dark, low-ceilinged cabin, Sonia attempts to deflect the urgency of Sasha’s summons. She pre-empts her with a question: Does Sasha think it’s normal, this obsession their daughters have with their bodies? For Tania and Katia are always going on about breasts and bras, right in front of everyone.

  “Of course it’s harmless,” Sasha sighs, lighting another cigarette, shaking the match out and exhaling in that actressy way of hers. “If they were boys they’d be comparing the size of their wienies, and seeing who could pee the farthest. I’d much rather have them discussing how big their boobs are going to be than worrying that they don’t have a penis, wouldn’t you?”

  Sonia makes no reply—she’s remembering the sight of Darka in a halter top: at sixteen, the girl has bigger breasts than Sonia’s were when she was breast-feeding. And then she blushes, thinking of how, with all her movie magazines, sixteen-year-old Darka knows more about sex than she had known on her wedding day. Men are like that. Like what? You’ll find out.

  “Look,” Sasha declares, “that’s the least of our worries.” She rests her cigarette in one of the asbestos ashtrays Nick or Tania have made in Arts and Crafts at school.

  Sonia watches the cigarette burn itself down: though she disapproves of smoking, she also thinks it extravagant, letting all that good tobacco go to waste. Sasha sighs, and Sonia blushes: she’s convinced Sasha can read her though
ts. Sasha-the-Gypsy, the one who knows everything about them all.

  “You saw that performance Zirka just put on,” Sasha begins. “Why was she on the attack like that—in public, in front of the whole damn Lending Library, for Christ’s sake? She’s had a whole week to ask Nadia what was going on between her and Peter—if there was anything going on, that is, other than Peter being even more of an idiot than he always is.”

  “Don’t, Sasha. You don’t know him, you don’t understand—”

  “All I understand is that Zirka’s onto something that we’ve been too stupid, or too lazy, to notice. She may not be a rocket scientist, but she’s nobody’s fool. She’s nosed something out between Nadia and Peter and she wants us to know about it—wants Nadia to know that we know. She’s made that clear enough.”

  “He got a little drunk, that’s all,” Sonia says. “He got a little drunk, and he started acting, the way he always does. For God’s sake, Sasha, it’s been twenty years—”

  “Eighteen, by my reckoning. But forget Peter for a moment. Let’s focus on Nadia. For her to have acted so out of character, to have shown her feelings like that—she might as well have blown a trumpet or shouted from the rooftops, as slap Peter’s face.”

  “Doesn’t that just go to show it was all a joke, just like Peter’s ham-acting?”

  Sasha puts her hands to her head. “I wish I could believe that, Sonechko, I wish I had the least goddam clue as to what is going on here. Nadia hasn’t been herself all summer—since before the summer. She’s always been so remote, so perfectly controlled. And Peter—if he’d just been drunk and full of himself, he would have thrown himself at me, or Annie, or even Zirka. But he went after Nadia. He went out of his way to make a fool of himself and a spectacle of Jack Senchenko’s wife.”

  “You’re starting to sound like Zirka,” Sonia says.

  “Don’t I know it,” Sasha moans. “But listen, Sonechko, you’ve got to help me with this: it’s important.”

  Sonia nods, and Sasha speaks, but her words drift about Sonia’s head like the furred parachutes of dandelion seeds. Sasha has given her a headache with her cigarettes and suggestions. The only way to keep her balance is to think of something else, which she manages to do, though it doesn’t keep her head from hurting. A picture of the broken statue flashes into her mind, or rather, the moment of the statue’s breaking, the moment it started to fall from its place on the mantelpiece, the lines along which it would smash already shivering. And then, on its heels, comes an image of Baba Motria’s kylym, woven back in the old country and transported, at such cost and trouble and for such small purpose, to the new. Sonia has always hated that kylym. Max’s mother had given it to her just before she died, expecting it to be hung in the place of honour on the living room wall. Instead, Sonia had laid it down in the rec room, where the children had worn holes in it, driving their tricycles over it. Max has never said a word about the banishment of the kylym: he too dislikes it. There is something so constricted about the weave, so dismal about the black background and the pink and orange roses—for all the world like two-day-old funeral flowers.

  Sonia is holding the two things in her head: the shattered plaster statue, so frivolous in its uselessness and fragility, and the rugged, worn kylym, shelved in the basement. It will outlive them all, she thinks, its weave as strong as her memory of the river in the Old Place, the deadly urgency of its current.

  “Do you get it now, Sonia? Do you understand why this is so important?” Sasha is pleading once again, this time almost angrily.

  Sonia nods, yes, oh yes, though to what, exactly, she really can’t say. Speak to Peter: of course she will speak to Peter, this very weekend.

  “I have to go,” she says, moving to the door, putting her hand on the latch.

  Once down the veranda steps and back on Tunnel Road, she exhales deeply, as if it had been she, not Sasha, lighting up.

  Darka’s curlers are the hard kind, filled with stiff bristles and fastened with plastic pins like bayonets, for all they’re such a pallid pink. She’d wanted foam rubber; it was too expensive, her mother said, but that wasn’t the real reason—Darka holds out her hand, scrutinizing fingernails naked as earthworms—the real reason was that her mother had wanted to punish her. Wait till you have a daughter and she goes wild and breaks your heart, after all you’ve dreamed for her, done for her.

  What’s the point? Who is here to look at her fingernails except Sonia, who’d have a fit if Darka were to paint them up? She might as well have shaved her head as bleached her hair—who is there to care? Dead and buried, that’s what she is; she might as well throw herself into the lake, walk out into the water with a ball and chain around her leg. At home they’ll all be going to the Hot Spot for Cherry Cokes and cheeseburgers tonight: if she were home, Jamie would pick her up in his red convertible, his black-and-white dog in the back seat, the radio blasting. They’d drive all over town and she wouldn’t get home till after one. She’d have to sneak into her room by climbing the fence and then jumping up into the Manitoba maple right outside her window. All the next day her mother would walk around with swollen eyeballs, showing off how she’s been sobbing her heart out over her wayward daughter. Olya doesn’t need to worry, make herself sick over nothing; if she had half a brain she’d know that. But how can Darka tell her? There’s no language between them any more, no shared hopes or plans, however much Darka wants to escape from the kind of life her mother’s led, and however much Olya dreams of a future for her daughter, a life not dissimilar, in fact, to Sonia Martyn’s.

  Darka drums with her fists on her thighs, then pushes her palms over the cloth of her shorts, fingers outspread like powerboats, idling. She thinks of the city, how good she feels with the hardness of pavement under her feet, and a thousand shop windows to pore over when she skips a day off school and walks around downtown for hours on end. She is thinking of the attention she gets, not just wolf whistles but looks of interest, admiration from men in costly suits and well-cut sports jackets. All of a sudden, Darka smiles; her pretty face burns with something like beauty. All because of this feeling she has, more than a hunch, a glow that starts in her toes and spreads itself through her whole body. Sometimes she feels it give off this golden hum as she’s walking down the street or into a room, or when she just sits, as she’s doing now, waiting. The golden hum tells her she is somebody special, that no harm can ever come to her, that wonderful things are about to happen. She won’t end up in a dump on Bathurst, like her mother; she’s headed for far-off places, she’ll wear orchids and a snakeskin dress; men will leap to light her cigarette in its ebony holder. Lean, handsome men always at her elbow, lighters clicking, her face reflected in their eyes, in the satin trim of their dinner jackets.

  Nonsense, her mother calls it, dime-novel romance, nothing but daydreaming. Sonia’s word for it is loafing; she’s always on at her for loafing on her bed with her movie magazines. Loafing! When all she wants, Darka assures herself, is to work: real work for real pay. She could have got that job at the Hot Spot: she could have made big money this summer instead of the pennies Sonia’s doling out, not to her, but to Olya, to spend on school supplies and a new uniform for Darka’s last year at Saint Demetrius. Why didn’t they just slap her in reform school, instead? Good as jail here—nothing to do except slave over a washtub or a sink and run after the kids, rude, mouthy, even the baby a handful. Alix hardly ever sleeps for more than an hour in the afternoon, and it spooks her sometimes, the kid never talking, never making a sound, hardly even laughing or crying—and they think she’s dumb just because she failed her year!

  When Darka had bleached her hair, Sonia lit into her as if she’d robbed a bank. Beauty’s only skin deep; men look for more than glamour in a woman; sex isn’t everything; you want to be looking out for a respectable man, the steady kind that talks marriage. Well, she’s not even thinking about getting married yet, she has a life—doesn’t anyone here understand that? She’d rather die than marry a lawyer or account
ant and be buried with a pack of kids at a cottage for eight weeks every summer. They think they’re so smart with their advice, and their frowns, and the click-cluck of their tongues. They think they know everything and they haven’t a clue. She’ll show them, won’t she just? But how, marooned as she is among mothers and children? She could have been spending the summer with Jamie Ashford. She says his name aloud, loving the Englishness of it, the soft cadence of the normal-sounding name. He knows her as Darlene. She’s never told him her last name: she’s never had to. All he has to do is look at her and she can feel his eyes turn into the warm palms of his hands, sliding over her shoulders, down to her breasts.

  Darka sinks back against the sofa, as deep as the curlers will allow. Closing her eyes, she puts both hands to her face, the bones of her cheeks and jaw, the roundness of her throat. She holds her breasts, stroking them with her thumbs through the thin cotton, as if they were her only friends in all the world, the only ones who understand her and love her no matter what she does. All golden, orchids, his lighter so close that if she were to stick out her tongue instead of the cigarette she would catch fire, burn, burn up altogether.

  A candy on the pillow beside her: a red candy, smaller than the nail on her baby finger. Alix touches it so gently she can hardly tell if it’s smooth or sticky. Candy hearts her sisters give her—stick out your tongue—laying them on the very tip. She has to flick them into her mouth so they don’t drop in the dirt. Never, ever eat things that fall on the floor, they’re poison.

  Poi-son. Ot-ru-ta. Heart. Ser-tseh. Red. Cher-vo-na. Alix watches the words fly in pairs, English and Ukrainian, across the sky inside her head. Where her mouth is, there’s a window, dangerous; the birds think they can fly through it, they throw themselves so hard against the glass they break their wings and have to limp back to their roosting place. Pulling their heads in small, so small that no one can find them.