The Ladies' Lending Library

by Janice Kulyk Keefer

  It takes them a good twenty minutes. At first the sand is hot; it stings as it sprays across his face, over the lips and eyelids he’s trying to shut tight. Of course you’re not supposed to bury anyone’s face, that’s against the rules, but sand meant for your shoulders always ends up in your eyebrows and salting your moustache. Soon, however, the children reach the excavating stage, when the sand they heap over their father’s legs and chest and arms turns heavy, damp, like cold brown sugar. He imagines his body rising up like some mountain range—the Rockies or the Himalayas. He thinks of his head islanded in all this sand, taking in the sounds of his children, their frantic pleasure, the gravity of Laura’s directives: “Not like that, Katia, you’ll cause a cave-in at his elbows,” and Katia’s blithe disregard: “Hey, his kneecaps keep showing through, they look like volcanoes!” A scrabbling pressure on his chest—”Somebody get the baby, she’s ruining everything!”—and then a crescendo of yells as Darka carries off Baby Alix.

  At last, when the children have stomped the sand down with their feet and then heaped on another few pails for good measure, comes the chief delight. Their father, shaking his head and yawning as if roused from a hundred-year sleep, flexes first one arm, and then the other, tries and fails to shake a leg free, wriggles his toes and sets off the first of the avalanches. Until, with the roar of a lion, he heaves his whole body up in one great rush, throwing fans of sand into the air as he plunges into the lake, the children screaming as they run in after him.

  Once they’ve splashed him clean, and he’s dived down to grab their ankles, once they’ve all lined up to wriggle through his outstretched legs, he tells them it’s Tato’s time now, which means he swims out, with his powerful, steady crawl stroke, far away from the group of small, tanned bodies. Bonnie, standing on a rock so the water reaches only to her waist, watches him with her fingers in her mouth, sucking anxiously each time his head disappears, praying, Pleasepleaseplease let him come up again. But at last, after he’s swum sixty, seventy, eighty strokes so that his handsome head is only a dark dot, he turns, waves—and comes back to them. How they love it when he stands up on the first sandbar, ten feet tall, the water streaming down his arms and chest, and how they love the way he cleans the water from his eyes with the flat of his hands, then combs his thick brown hair straight back with his fingers. He is the best-looking father at the whole beach, the best swimmer, and the only grown-up, besides Uncle Peter, they will ever include in their play.

  Now it’s leapfrog on the sand, Max pretending to trip and making spectacular, somersaulting falls. “Horsing around” is what Sonia calls it, standing at the lookout post on the edge of the lawn while Marta’s still in the washroom. Horsing around. Her father had never played with her or her brother like that—and yet he’d been a good man, decent and hard-working even after his accident, managing the pain with sips of what he called “medicine,” from a shot glass. But never to excess—he was always dignified, her father. Unlike Peter. Unlike Max, making a fool of himself now in front of everyone. She bites at her lip, pushes her hair out of her eyes. He makes a fool of himself and they love him for it—when they are grown and think back to their summers at the beach they will remember playing leapfrog with their father, burying him in sand, and never spare a thought for the days and days she’s spent washing and cooking and cleaning, rubbing calamine lotion on sunburns, cutting up endless watermelons, making hundreds of jugs of lemonade.

  “Soniu! Shcho tam?” Marta’s voice, flapping from the porch off the kitchen.

  “Nothing,” Sonia shouts back, knowing how it annoys Marta when they speak to her in English. What would happen, she asks herself, if, instead of turning back to the cottage, where Marta will be sitting with a heap of darning (she has found a plastic bag of the children’s socks with great holes rubbed through the heels, socks Sonia was going to use for cleaning rags)—if, instead of turning back, she were to run down to the beach and join them, laugh and tumble with them on the sand? Go if you want to. She hears a voice, her mother’s voice, like a flower tucked behind her ear. But something huge and smothering settles on her shoulders, pushing her back to where her sister-in-law is waiting for her, holding the door open, letting in the mosquitos they’ll be swatting all through the slow August night.

  It’s Bonnie he catches in his arms, swinging her high, high in the air and down to his shoulders, wading with her into the water. It’s the last treat of the afternoon, one of them getting to ride on their father’s back to the rock they’ve christened Australia; to lie down in the sun beside him, having him all to herself for a whole half-hour.

  His daughters are all dear to him—Laura because she’s his first-born, the details of her infancy and childhood etched on his memory, so that with each subsequent baby he’s relived Laura’s first tooth or word or step. Katia because of her flair for mischief, the way she dances her way through life without caring what anyone will think or say, knowing she can outwit them all. And Alix because she’s still a baby, and he has no idea yet of what she will become. But Bonnie is the gentlest, and with her red-gold hair, her brown, gold-speckled eyes, the most beautiful by far. No one in his family or Sonia’s has that colouring. None of the children looks like her mother—is that why, in spite of nursing them through fevers and all the childhood diseases, dressing them so smartly and making sure they get their vitamin this and that, and brush their teeth at night, she’s held herself apart from them? As if her heart’s a small room into which she’s locked herself, with no place for anyone but her parents’ ghosts and whatever she thinks she might have made of herself if she’d never married, or at least, never married him.

  “Bonnie,” he says, sitting her down on the rock, heaving himself up to its broad, blank face, the water sluicing off his back, trickling through the brown thicket of his chest. “Bonnie, I want you to be a help to your mother this week. It’s hard for her with Chucha Marta here.”

  “Yes, Tatu,” Bonnie says, shifting closer, leaning her small, damp body in its frilled suit towards him.

  “You know your mother’s still sad about Baba Laryssa. It takes a long, long time to get over …” His voice trails off; he is reluctant to say the word death in front of his daughter, just as he wouldn’t be able to tell an off-colour joke, or swear in the presence of any of his children.

  “Tell me again about Chucha Marta,” Bonnie asks, “and why we have to be nice to her.”

  He sighs, and stretches out his legs so they lift slowly from the water, then splash back.

  “You know that when Baba Motria and your Dyeedo Martyniuk came to Canada—”

  “There was a war on.”

  “Clever Bonnie. Can you tell me which war?”

  “Worldwarwon.”

  “Exactly. And at that time, the part of Ukraine where Baba and Dyeedo were living was under Austria.”

  Bonnie pictures her grandparents in a pool of murky water; someone is trying to hold their heads under, the way Pavlo Vesiuk tried to do with her last week, though she never told on him.

  “If Baba and Dyeedo hadn’t escaped, secretly, in the middle of the night, Dyeedo would have been taken into the Austrian army. He would have ended up in the trenches, he would probably have been killed. A friend came to warn him: they had to flee.”

  Bonnie bites her lip at the word flee: it’s a sign that something terrible is coming, the part in the story she can never understand.

  “You know that Baba and Dyeedo had two little girls back in the old country. They were very sick; they had diphtheria. The name doesn’t matter—what you have to remember is this: there were no doctors and no medicine. No one knew if those little girls would live or die—they were far too sick to be moved. And so …”

  He doesn’t say they got left behind. He doesn’t say it was ten years before the sister who survived got off the train at Union Station, a sign round her neck, so that the parents who couldn’t recognize her any more, and the brother she didn’t know existed, would be able to greet her. He doesn’
t say that Marta did not laugh or cry or spit or smile all the way from Union Station to the dark, narrow house on Dupont Street where she finally fell asleep clutching the carpet bag that had been her only luggage, and sucking her knuckle. He doesn’t want his daughter to know what he knows.

  “You have to be kind to Chucha Marta because of what a hard life she’s had. She doesn’t mean to be scolding and complaining all the time—it’s just the way she is, like someone with a handicap, with a blind eye, or a wooden leg. A week isn’t such a long time, Bonnie. Be as nice to her as you can, it’ll make things easier for your mother. I’m trusting you—you’re the only one I can trust to help me out like this.”

  Bonnie puts her arms around her father and leans into his chest. The thick hair tickles her, the ooze of suntan oil that hasn’t yet washed off in the water. She is thinking not about Chucha Marta, nor about Baba Motria and Dyeedo Martyniuk, long in their graves. She is wondering whether Chucha Marta’s sister is with Baba Laryssa, looking down at them all from the edge of God’s eye in Heaven.

  “Okay, Rybochko? We’d better go back.” Little fish: it’s his pet name for her, though he’s long been reconciled to “Bonnie.” Funny, how after his father’s thunderings and his mother’s head-shakings, he’d finally come to realize that Bonnie is the perfect name for this daughter, the only name that could ever do her justice. Rybochka is a pet name, a private name, but Bonnie is the name under which she will sail out into the world, a flag spelling happily ever after. Funny, too, how after all these years and all these second thoughts, he has never been able to confess as much to Sonia: You were right, and I was wrong. What if he had told her last night, when they got into the sagging bed together, the bed with the antique mattress he’s been meaning for years to replace? With something new, untouched and unstained, far too good for the cottage. Far too good, but never good enough, and yet exactly what is needed now.

  Bonnie clambers onto her father’s back, hugging his neck just tight enough that she won’t fly off when he dives. It always terrifies her; her stomach is a knot like a tangled skipping rope as they plunge. Holding tighter as they hit the water, she swallows a mouthful, coughing and spluttering, as her father calls out, “Dobreh, Rybochko?” and she can barely answer back, “Dobreh, Tatu.” And it’s true; everything is fine as they swim back to shore. As long as they’re together like this, everything will always be fine.

  Hungry or not, the whole family sits down to what Sonia calls “a proper supper” at six o’clock each Sunday, while everyone else, Katia keeps pointing out, eats sandwiches on the beach, or does a lazy barbecue—hot dogs, hamburgers, relish for a vegetable—on the lawn. “We are not,” her mother answers, “everyone else. Decent families sit down to a proper Sunday meal together.” You are a decent family, sing the ham that’s been roasting for the past three hours, the potato salad and runner beans and glazed baby carrots on plates Laura thinks of as planets stuck in low gear, or seats on a Ferris wheel with a stalled motor. Plates her mother heaps with food, then hands to Max to pass round, the first one travelling from Darka to Laura to Katia to Bonnie to the guest, Chucha Marta.

  “Is anything wrong, Marta?” Sonia calls out to the woman sitting with lips pursed, fork poised to stab the ham as though it were going to rise from the plate and attack her. Marta’s shrug is the only answer Sonia gets: Things can’t help but be wrong in a household run by such a featherbrain, so what’s the use of asking? Immediately, the ham on Sonia’s plate starts to looks raw and slippery, the potato salad becomes a pile of furred, white pebbles, as Max says, “Smachnoho,” and the eating begins.

  What little talk there is takes place in Ukrainian, the children reduced to “Please pass the milk” or “May I have the butter?” “I suppose the traffic will be bad tonight,” Sonia says to no one in particular, to ease the strain. Max just shakes his head, and Marta, making a comment on the stupidity, the waste of buying summer cottages, might just as well be spitting out a caterpillar.

  Sonia sits back from her plate, on which the food’s been cut up into pieces small enough to fit the baby’s mouth. She is studying some screen inside her head on which is projected the intricate ballet of bringing Marta to the cottage in the first place. Max driving through a brown haze of traffic down Queen Street, going under the railway bridge, past the sweet stench from Canada Packers to the mausoleum of a duplex in which Marta’s been waiting since nine that morning. There’s no need for him to stop off at home, since his cottage gear is stored at Kalyna Beach—his new swimsuit, his golfing pants, his windbreaker and short-sleeved shirts, which he hardly ever wears. For the most part, he spends the weekend in droopy trousers smeared all over with oil stains, or a faded swimsuit in place of shorts, with an even more faded appliqué of a woman in a black swimsuit doing a jackknife from an invisible diving board.

  Chucha Marta’s house is the last of the dozen or so houses Max grew up in. Against all common sense, he gave it outright to Marta when their mother died, though she’d willed everything to him: house, furniture, books (all the Ukrainian classics, plus Ukrainian translations of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, none of which Marta will ever read, but whose spines she lemon-oils religiously). Marta makes him wait at the door, forcing him to ring the bell and pound where the knocker should be, till she feels paid back for the endless hours he’s kept her waiting. When she finally opens the door she doesn’t kiss him or even say his name in greeting, just points to her suitcase at the top of a steep flight of stairs (she’s refused Max’s offers of free renovations: moving her bedroom downstairs, putting in a bathroom on the main floor so she could rent out the top floor if she wants, or simply board it up).

  Staring down at her untouched plate, Sonia allows her imagination to add scrolls and flourishes to the script she’s devised. She watches Max struggle with Marta’s case to the car—there must be bricks in it, or gallon jugs filled with powdery dirt from the doll-sized yard. She sees her husband opening the back door for his sister, who refuses to sit beside him in the front—That is the wife’s place, Marta’s saying. Thank God I am no man’s wife. Two blocks on, she makes him turn back; she has to check that the stove’s turned off, the upstairs windows closed, the door to the summer kitchen locked. When she gets back into the car at last she makes him swear, yet again, that when he returns to the city late on Sunday night, he’ll stop by—then and every other night that she’s away—to make sure no one’s broken in.

  By the time they reach the highway it will be hopelessly clogged, and will continue so for the next three hours. Marta, thank God, will have nodded off to sleep, though she’ll wake up every time traffic slows to a standstill; wake up to give Max assorted pieces of her mind on whatever subject occurs to her—the small investments he’s made on her behalf (she suspects him of trying to steal her life savings), the bills he sorts out and pays for her, the weather (those Russians are putting chemicals in the clouds, preventing any rain from falling—didn’t he know that? She heard it from the bishop, the same one who addressed the congregation when the Russians sent up Sputnik, assuring them that they’d find green cheese up there, and nothing more). Sonia lifts her napkin to her mouth to smother her laughter. Max doesn’t notice, but Marta stares at her, those flinty eyes that seem to nick the surface of everything they touch.

  “I’ll get the dessert,” Sonia says, scooping up her plate before anyone notices how little she’s eaten.

  “Chucha Marta,” one of the children calls out. Sonia clutches the bowl of Jell-O she’s rescued from the overcrowded fridge. It must be Katia speaking—who else would dare to provoke her aunt’s attention? Calling her Chucha, too, when the child’s been told again and again that the proper title for their aunt is “Teetka,” that “Chucha” was Laura’s invention, baby talk they all should have outgrown by now. But Chucha Marta she remains and always will to her nieces, especially Bonnie. She, not Katia, is the brave one calling on her aunt.

  “What!” Marta barks.

  Bonnie waits as if there’s somethin
g in her mouth that she needs to finish chewing. And then she blurts out: “What was her name? The sister who got left behind.”

  Silence thick and quivery as the lumps of Jell-O Sonia’s dishing into the mismatched bowls. “Shh,” Laura hisses; Katia kicks Bonnie under the table, and even her father stares down at her as if she’s said something so terrible she will have to be punished. But she hasn’t been able to stop thinking about the dead sister all that afternoon. Suddenly the table and the faces turned to her with such ferocious disapproval go murky, as if they’ve been plunged into dirty water. Bonnie stuffs a finger into the corner of each eye, to stop the tears.

  “Sonia, are you going to stand all night over that bowl? Can’t you see your husband needs to get on the road? It will be midnight before he gets home. Give us the rest of our dinner!”

  “Here you go, Marta,” Sonia says, making a point of serving her first. Isn’t it just like Marta to go for two birds with one stone, accusing her of being a bad wife as well as a heartless sister-in-law?

  Max takes out his handkerchief and mops his forehead. Thank God Marta didn’t hear. What an idiot he was, talking to Bonnie this afternoon—now he’ll have to unsay it all, warn her not to bother Marta again, to keep out of her way. Sonia will be after him, urging him to stand up to Marta, have it out with her at last. If only he could get her to talk about that time in the war, what had happened to her after she’d been left behind; if only she would come out and accuse him—he hadn’t even been born when it happened—then maybe she wouldn’t have this power over him, making him bow to her every wish, and making Sonia rail at him.

  She’s risen from the table, Sonia: she’s clapped her hands. “We’ll have to hurry now. Come on, girls—pospeeshymo! Max, you can have your coffee later.” Sonia holds out his jacket in one hand, the car keys in the other.