The Ladies' Lending Library

by Janice Kulyk Keefer

  On her pillow a candy, like a cinnamon heart, the kind that burns on your tongue. A candy, but no sugar smell like the one her mother sprays on her neck; she pushes the pump, a cloud comes out and makes a smell like candy. This one has black spots so small she has to blink to see them, pushing with her finger. It stops being a candy: hairs shoot out its sides, black hairs like the ones round your eyes. Alix watches the red spot push itself up her finger, tickling her skin. Lets it crawl up one finger to the finger on her other hand, climbing up and over, like on the monkey bars at the school when they’re waiting for Bonnie. Up to her arm, meeting the fence her finger makes, and down again, and up and down. Till she holds it to her mouth and blows, gently. Two small, dark scarves shoot out from the red, a buzzing sound, and it’s gone, her finger bare now, nothing.

  If she knew its name she could call it back. When her mother wants them she calls and they have to come; even if they run away, their names catch up with them. Names can’t catch you till you say them out loud; you must never, never let them go, you must keep them safe inside, heads tucked tight, blind, under their wings. But that small, red crawling thing—not a fly, flies buzz—she wants it back, she wants to keep it. Pushing down off the bed, her feet meeting the sand on the floor. Little lines up and down all over the windows, little squares where the flies crawl, they get trapped inside; Katia squishes them with her bare fingers. Katia, that’s dis-gus-ting. Not fly, not mukha, that’s not its name. When she finds it she’ll hold out her finger, whisper it back to her hand: carry her hand to her mouth, and the thing will step with its small, small feet onto her tongue; she’ll close her mouth and keep it forever, flying inside her.

  Darka and Laura hear it at the same time, through different walls: a crashing sound from the baby’s room, smack of wood against wood. Darka jumps up from the sofa and runs to where Baby Alix has fallen from the chair she’s dragged to the window. Darka holds her and lets her wail, a gush of sound you could almost mistake for words; maybe it’s the way she speaks, thinks Darka, singing to her, taking the baby’s hands and clapping them together: toshi, toshi, toshi, svynya v horodi. Till the child forgets what she’s crying for, listening to the nursery rhyme, watching the face of the grown-up girl, the girl who talks and talks and talks, words flapping out her mouth, disappearing forever.

  Laura stays frozen in her mother’s room, sitting on the floor, her back against the bed, the scissors gleaming in her lap. At the sound of the crash, the scissors forgot the small nick they were taking out of the tight, white stitch; they jabbed into the cloth, fine and slippery as her hair but golden, shining. Now there’s a hole she can never patch up. Alix keeps wailing, sounds flooding out of the mouth that makes Laura think of the mail slot in the front door at home, not a mouth at all, not something that belongs to Alix’s body, but something hard and metallic stamped down on her. Darka’s heavy footsteps, the door to Alix’s room banging shut, and then Darka singing nonsense rhymes, making baby-talk against the baby’s silence, now that the shock is over.

  So it wasn’t Sonia coming home, the smash she’s heard: but what does it matter? As soon as she does comes home, she’ll know. If Sonia went crazy about the breaking of a useless statue, then she will kill Laura over the dress, just for taking it off its hanger. Laura grips the scissors in her sweaty hands; now that she’s started she’s got to finish; maybe her mother won’t notice the foam cups are gone, maybe she’ll think it looks better this way. Laura stabs the blade into the tight white stitches, breaking them one by one, breaking their little necks. Until at last the foam falls into her lap, and the dress stops being a dress, is just a pool of something bright, a loose skin that can hardly cling to its hanger as she shoves it to the back of the closet.

  Now the screen door slams; now her mother’s really back from Sasha’s tea party, calling to them all to get ready to go back to the beach. Laura manages to steal out before anyone sees that she’s been in Sonia’s room. And all the while, in the dark press of the closet, her mother’s dress runs its hands up and down itself, learning the holes slashed into its skin.

  “Didn’t you hear her?” Darka shouts from the kitchen, as Laura runs out the door and across the lawn, disappearing behind the sleep-house, where she stoops and pushes a bundle of hacked sponge-rubber and short, ripped threads under the foundation blocks.

  From the top of the dunes, where she’s come to find her children, Sasha looks down to the beach, her shadow streaming away from her in the afternoon sun like a lightly fastened banner. She puts her hand to her eyes, counting heads, finding Tania and Katia at last at the very edge of the lake, letting the small waves roll in over their legs and splash up to their waists. The boys seem to have set up camp on Australia, where the driftwood log is pulled up like a delivery van—there’s Nick’s red head flaming among all the brown and black and blond heads of this summer’s crop of boys. What are they plotting, far away from their sisters and mothers? Most likely they’re chanting that silly song Nick brought back the other day, driving Tania crazy by singing it over and over, in a whining, baby voice:

  What’s your name, little boy?

  My name is Lemmie.

  Lemmie what, little boy?

  Lemmie kiss you.

  No doubt it will be kissing parties next—did those come before or after playing doctor? Sasha decides it doesn’t matter, not at this age.

  She should call out to her kids, round them up, organize a massive cleanup of the cottage before Ivan gets in. A cleanup whose effects will last a few hours or so: a day if they’re lucky. Entropy, Sasha long ago decided, is her native element. Then why is she so determined to keep everyone together, everyone where they belong at Kalyna Beach? “Everyone” being the couples who are her friends and more—her family, she supposes. Family into which you are born and that you adore or worry over or put up with, as the case may be. Nadia, Peter, Zirka: triangle heaven. How can Sonia be so blind?

  But maybe she’s right, Sasha thinks, stubbing her cigarette out in the sand and folding her arms in that defiant way she picked up from her father. Maybe the best thing is to be dumb, and blind, and deaf; to let things play out and get back to normal, as they always do. Maybe what had happened with Nadia slapping Peter, and Zirka laying into Nadia, was just the usual combination of liquor and hot weather and boneheadedness. Zirka’s histrionics might just have been a way of showing how important she thinks she is, how much her feelings matter—have to be made to matter. How had Peter stood it all these years?

  “Ah, but she can cook,” Sasha says out loud, shaking her head. She starts wondering, as she always does at this time of day, how she is ever going to sling a meal together, and whether she can get away with serving Ivan hot dogs for dinner. The kids have eaten them four nights in a row, but that’s fine with them, they won’t even notice.

  No one will notice, everything will be fine. Sasha decides she’s too tired to think anything else, right now, as she unfolds her arms and takes a last look over the lake. She wonders, again, what the boys could be getting up to, all of them clumped together like that. Maybe it’s nothing so innocent as a song about kissing. After that episode at the service station last week—setting fire to a roll of tarpaper, thank God the owner had been working late, had seen what they’d got up to, though they’d all run away before he’d been able to put his hands on even one of them. Thank God, again, Sasha thinks, for she’s not at all sure that Nick hadn’t had a hand in lighting the match. The fathers had read them the riot act, forbidden them to go anywhere near the service station, which meant that the boys now had to bribe their sisters or cousins to fetch them their contraband from Venus Variety: jawbreakers and Popsicles and wax shaped like a jawful of teeth, with some kind of syrup inside.

  What would Sonia ever have done with boys? Sasha wonders. Maybe they would have cured her, once and for all, of her fearfulness, her lack of confidence, her habit of always looking at the wrong side of the cloth. Although where Peter’s concerned—but Sasha stops herself; she’s had
her little talk with Sonia, there’s no point going over that ground again. And so she heads back to the cabin, whistling a Cole Porter tune she especially likes, and thinking that before she starts supper, she’ll plow through one more chapter of the book she’d been reading just before the ladies dropped by for tea.

  On the rock they call Australia, Yuri Metelsky is launching the Cossack Brotherhood of Kalyna Beach. Australia, he announces, will henceforward be known as the Seech, after the island fortress established by the Zaporozhian Cossacks in the sixteenth century, or seventeenth; he can’t remember which. It’s not so much of a stretch to convert Georgian Bay into the mighty Dnipro, as none of the boys has ever seen Ukraine’s principal river except in blurry photographs in which it looks to be made of cement instead of water. Yuri is exactly Katia’s age, and a natural choice for leader, not that there’d been any pretense of choice; as the whole thing is his idea, he takes ownership of the risks, and of the glory too.

  If he could have his way, he’d dress up his band of brothers in baggy satin trousers and scalp locks. But the sharovary have been left behind in the city, and there’s hardly time for anyone to try to grow a khokhol, the long dangling lock of hair that identifies the warrior. They will have to make do with swimming trunks and crewcuts. For it’s the spirit, he tells the boys, the spirit, not the clothes, that counts. It goes without saying that secrecy is paramount—all the boys are sworn to keep the broad, flat rock’s new name to themselves: the Seech is not to become the laughingstock of mere girls and women, and as for the Brotherhood, it is sacred.

  Teyko and Olek, the youngest boys, are shaky on their Ukrainian history, and so Yuri repeats, as well as he can, the lessons he has learned at Saturday School, or at least, the only part of the curriculum that holds any interest for him. Cossacks—the Kozaky—are free agents owing nothing to masters or mothers. They chose to throw off their chains as labourers for landlords (Rapacious Russians and Plundering Poles) who worked them like slaves. Striking out for the wild east, they lived as frontiersmen—sort of like the cowboys in Gunsmoke—in perfect equality, fraternity and justice. When Pavlo Vesiuk interrupts to ask why, if they’re all equal, there has to be a Hetman, Yuri pulls a face as if disgusted by the stupidity of the question. “I am your Hetman because I’m the oldest and because it’s all my idea, anyway. So if any of you wants to challenge me—”

  He breaks off with his hand in the air, clutching an imaginary, spike-studded mace, symbol of the Hetman’s authority. His younger brother, Andriy, quickly intervenes: “Of course you’ll be Hetman—we can’t have a Seech without one,” and the other boys agree, all except Pavlo, who crosses his arms and sticks out his lips in that funny way he has of showing disdain more than displeasure.

  No one remembers, afterwards, that it was Andriy who stood up for Yuri’s right to lead them. Andriychyk, or Little Andriy, they call him, though he’s just as tall as his older brother, and a good deal heavier, as well. Andriychyk or, as the boys prefer to call him, Pampushok or Pampukh, after the doughnuts filled with rose-petal jam or poppy seeds that their babas make. The cruelest nickname of all is provided by the girls, who’ve dubbed him Titty because of the way his chest and tummy wobble over his swimming trunks when he plays on the beach. Once Sonia had caught Katia taunting her cousin in this way, and sent her up to the cottage for a whole afternoon as punishment.

  “The cossacks were warriors,” Yuri is insisting to the boys gathered round him; there is just enough room for them to sit at Yuri’s feet and for Yuri to perch on a small jut of rock that Pavlo refers to, sarcastically, as “the throne.”

  “Meaning?” Olek inquires. It’s a habit he’s picked up from an older brother, who responds to almost any kind of speech, especially anything in the lecture department, with this one-word question.

  “Meaning,” says Yuri patiently, and a little triumphantly too, “that we have to prove ourselves as warriors. We can’t just ride around on a log and talk big—we have to do something, something courageous and—”

  “Warlike,” Pavlo finishes for him. “And just what are we going to declare war on, Yuri? The lake? Our mothers? Your cousins and their dumbbunny friends?”

  There is a long silence, until finally, of all people, little Teyko pipes up: “We could kidnap Darka!”

  “Girls aren’t allowed into the Seech,” Yuri says sternly. He stands up, arms folded and knees locked, pitching his voice as low as he can. “What we’ve got to do is something big and brave, something worthy of the Zaporozhtsi.”

  He will think up something appropriately warlike, he promises them all. They will meet at the Seech at exactly the same time on Monday and he will inform them of his plan. For the moment, all must be secrecy, on pain of—

  He hesitates. Pavlo smirks, and Andriy offers, “the Hetman’s Fury,” after which Yuri nods sternly, and springs onto the driftwood log, motioning for the rest of them to follow him. They must paddle back to shore and return to the cottages where their mothers are waiting dinner for them, before anyone suspects what they’ve been plotting.

  Tinned peas and mashed potatoes are transferred from their pots onto six plates of three different patterns, spread out on the counter. Never enough room on a counter, especially in this hole of a kitchen, Sonia thinks. For the past five years, Max has been promising to tear it out and put in a new one for her, twice the size. He hasn’t ruled out a dishwasher, like the one at Nadia’s place: he says he’s waiting till they get all the bugs out of them and the price comes down to something he can afford. One for the cottage and one for the home, and then what will she have left to wish for?

  When she was Bonnie’s age she’d fetched water from the pump they shared with five other families in the village. Her hands still carry the scars of blisters from the thin metal handles of the pails she carried; she tried always to hide them when she was modelling, or else to wear gloves. They were ruined, her hands, when she was still a child: she had worked since the time she was old enough to close her hands round a hoe or a needle or the teat of a cow. And yet, compared to the other children in the village, she had been spoiled. Especially compared to Peter, who always earned beatings for daydreaming when he should have been working, beatings with a switch across his small legs or skinny back. Peter, the man of the family, expected to stand in for his absent father.

  Six plates: for Sonia, Laura, Katia, Bonnie, Alix—and Darka. Darka setting a bad example with her elbows on the table, chewing gum stuck to the edge of her plate—but until Max gets here Sonia needs Darka on side, can’t trust herself alone with the children. Baby Alix is staring out of those huge, black eyes of hers. Laura and Katia are fighting again—Laura’s face purple with rage; Katia’s eyes bright, hard as pebbles. She must have been teasing Laura, jabbing at her weak spots, and God knows … But Sonia stops herself from pitying her first-born; two years older than Katia, she should be able to stick up for herself instead of snapping and sulking. No wonder Katia’s always kicking her under the table, pinching her ribs: Laura, the perfect target. Sonia knows, she knows everything they get up to, but she’s not God, it’s not for her to stop them killing each other inch by inch.

  The peas have boiled dry: she’d left them just for a minute to change into a skirt and blouse, for Max’s return, but the peas are branded, each one of them, with a small black scar. They are the only green vegetable she has left; she’ll put mint sauce on them, the children won’t notice the burnt taste. She bites her lips to distract herself from the pain zigging across her scalp, homing in behind her left eye. First Zirka this morning, twisting all those knives she keeps at the ready, and then Sasha in the afternoon, Sasha and her cigarettes, Sasha and the plots she’s concocted from all those books she reads and passes round. Another spasm stabs through Sonia’s body, up from her heel, along the length of her leg, across her breast to the top of her head. A spasm of irritation so pure, so lethal, she sees the tunnel scorched inside her, she can feel her body smoking.

  “For God’s sake, Laura, stop
playing with your food and eat up. And stop smirking, Katia, it makes you look like a little jar of poison.”

  Katia mashes her peas with the back of her fork, lifts them to her mouth and makes a great show of swallowing them. Laura sits staring at her plate, her spine rigid.

  “I said, eat your peas, Laura.”

  “They’re burned.”

  “They’re not burned. If Katia can eat them, so can you. We don’t waste food in this family, you know that. If you’d even once had to go hungry, you wouldn’t put on this—this ridiculous performance.” It’s not her own voice speaking, it’s something from a radio show, Lux Theatre, from which she learned English at Sasha’s house when she was a twelve-year-old. This has nothing to do with Laura, or the peas on her plate, but by this point Sonia can’t stop herself. She stands up from the table, her hands on her hips, the jut of her elbows pinning them all. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’ve been up to, all of you, sneaking money from the change drawer, buying candy at the store. No wonder you can’t eat your dinner. Why do I waste my time cooking for you? Go on, be stubborn, you can sit there all night for all I care. But just you wait till your father comes home!”

  “With Chucha Marta,” Katia says, almost innocently.

  Laura hasn’t even shifted in her chair, her hands on either side of her plate, wrists cocked at the table’s edge. When she was younger, she would hollow a door into her scoop of mashed potatoes, push her peas inside and seal them up with a spoonful of potato she’d left at the side of her plate. No one would notice but Katia, and Katia had been different then; she’d looked up to her.