The Ladies' Lending Library

by Janice Kulyk Keefer

  He’s supposed to drive them out to Painter’s Point to see the sunset, the way he always does on Sunday nights. Marta knows perfectly well that Max prefers to wait till dark before leaving for the city—he says there’s less traffic, or at least, you don’t get so frustrated when you can’t see how slowly the landscape’s going by.

  Marta folds her arms across her narrow chest. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “But, Marta, it’s so beautiful, and besides …”

  Besides, if she doesn’t come, then Sonia can’t go, because someone other than Darka will have to stay behind with Marta, as if Marta were more helpless than Baby Alix. Marta, who lives every day and night of her life alone in the dark, twisty, narrow house on Dupont Street. Marta, who rushes to shut the curtains on every window as soon as the sun goes down. Marta, who takes pleasure, Sonia’s sure of it, in crossing her at every step.

  “How can I come along? Use your head, Sonia, there’s no room in that car of yours.”

  “Laura will hold Bonnie, and Katia can easily squeeze in beside you. I’ll have the baby on my lap—”

  “You want to squeeze me in till I can’t breathe? Do you know what that will do to my heart?”

  “I never said—”

  For Christ’s sake, let’s just go before I pick up the axe and split someone’s head open. Of course Max hasn’t said this out loud, he’s simply grabbed his jacket and slammed the screen door behind him. The children rush after him. Sonia scoops up Alix in one arm, and shoves the other arm through Marta’s, walking her sternly to the car.

  As for the sitter without a baby, she stands on the porch, her hands on her hips, the roots of her bleached-out hair shining darkly in the bold evening light.

  Painter’s Point is a fifteen-minute drive from Kalyna Beach: it’s in a provincial park, and the view of the lake from the hills is especially lovely at sunset. They’ve watched the sky turn from gold to rose; now the sun is caught in a narrow band of cloud and looks like Saturn in Bonnie’s Wonder Book of the Stars and Planets.

  The girls are sitting cross-legged near the edge of the bluff, apart from their parents, who are stationed at a picnic table farther back, with Alix and Chucha Marta. The grown-ups could be in three different rooms: one in a Toronto office, one at the North Pole with a baby on her lap, one in an old country that has the dim gleam of a black-and-white photograph. The parents are angry: what’s worse, they can’t even have their argument and be done with it, because of Chucha Marta. Yet while Marta pushes Sonia and Max apart, she brings Katia and Laura together, as close as shared hostility permits.

  “I hate her,” Laura says. “I wish she’d fall into the lake and drown.”

  “We should feed her salad made from rhubarb leaves,” Katia suggests.

  “What if we took her for a walk down Tunnel Road and through the poison ivy patch?”

  “She hates walking,” Bonnie reminds Laura. “She’s got arthritis.” She was going to tell her sisters about her plan for Chucha Marta, but decides that it has to stay a secret. And so she sits with her chin in her hands, her fingers caging her ears as Laura and Katia rhyme off all the reasons Chucha Marta is so awful.

  Because she’s jealous of their father, who is handsome and successful.

  Because she’s jealous of their mother, who used to be a fashion model, and is beautiful and married to their father.

  Because she was made to polish their father’s shoes up to the day he got married.

  Because she never got married.

  Because her house is small and dark and the only chair with upholstery is still in its plastic wrapper, that’s gone all cracked and yellow.

  Because she has a mole like a piece of chewed-out gum on her forehead.

  Because there’s always a funny smell in the bathroom after she’s used it.

  Because all she can cook is beans and wieners.

  Because she’s never learned to speak proper English.

  Because she’s got fallen arches and has to wear men’s shoes.

  Because she was born a girl. If she’d been a boy they would never have left her for dead in the old country.

  Sonia is watching the water that refuses to catch fire from a crimson sun. The weather’s turning, and they’ll be stuck in the house together the whole week long. If only she’d listened to Mr. Streatfield all those years ago, become the signature model for Sunny Sportswear … But where would she be now, at her age? There was no work, no paying work, for models getting on to forty. If only she were clever like Sasha, or solid, practical like Annie; if she could have done something else than stand before a camera showing off clothes she didn’t own, and a smile that wasn’t hers, she might have been able to be happy. Being happy, she’s decided, is like being beautiful: no matter how good your skin or bones, you have to work at it. She counts on her fingers the women she knows who could be called happy. Men she leaves out of it. They don’t need happiness—they have their jobs, their factories and offices and professions. But if happiness is something you’ve got to struggle for, what about misery—the kind of pure misery, powerful as ammonia, that Marta’s drenched in?

  Marta was a child once—children are born neither happy nor sad, they get slapped at birth but it’s to make them breathe, not cry. Sonia’s mother had once said something about a woman she knew having drunk sourness in with her mother’s milk. Maybe that’s what happened to Marta. Of course she’d had a hard start in life, they must never forget what happened to her. Sonia’s mother would never have left a child of hers alone somewhere for eight hours, never mind eight years. Sonia swallows hard and puts her arm round Marta’s shoulder, wanting to say something welcoming, comforting. Marta shakes her off, glaring at her as if she is allergic to, or even terrified of, tenderness. All Sonia can think of now is how she’d like to grab the kerchief off Marta’s head and tie it round her face instead, like a gag.

  “Girls!” They can tell from the sound of their mother’s voice that she’s just as angry as when they started out.

  “Come on, kids, I’ve got a long drive ahead of me.” Even their father sounds cross.

  They know better than to point out that there’s still a blob of sun that hasn’t dropped into the lake. They brush off their shorts and walk back to the car, following their father and mother and Chucha Marta, who carries her big black handbag on her arm as if it were the coffin she’d spent her life savings on.

  Max emerges from the bathroom with his hair brushed, his face damp and fragrant from the soapy water he’s splashed across it. One by one he picks up the girls and kisses them; even Laura he holds high, and Laura weighs as much as her mother. Sonia puts out her face for him to kiss. His lips touch her cheek, and then he’s nodding goodbye to Marta, who’s never been known to kiss anyone, or to suffer being kissed. He waves to Darka, who lifts her hand distractedly.

  As the car pulls away, Marta turns to Sonia. On her face is a look that could be mistaken for a smile. “He should have gone earlier.”

  “He likes driving at night.”

  “You should have made him leave at six, like the other men.”

  “He leaves when he wants to, Marta.”

  “He was angry—it’s bad to get into a car when you’ve been quarrelling.”

  “We were not quarrelling.”

  “If something happens to him on the road tonight, you’ll have to live with it for the rest of your days.”

  Sonia turns on her heel. She goes off to the children, making sure they’re washed up and in bed; she turns off all the lights in the kitchen and living room. Out on the front steps the air is little cooler than the soup they have to breathe indoors, and yet she shivers, thinking of Max and the icy fist inside her, in the place where her heart should be. She closes her eyes, remembering those first years of their marriage, how they’d had to live with their in-laws, saving money so they could buy their own home outright: no debt, no being beholden. Laura had been born from the Martyn house; not until Katia was well on the way had they been a
ble to move into a home of their own. She will tell all her daughters when the time comes for them to marry: live in a broom closet if you must, but live with your husband on your own.

  Such freedom she’d felt on her honeymoon, the reckless joy of being alone with someone: intimately together. Not the sex so much as something tentative and trusting forming inside her. How it had showed itself in the way she’d been able to join in with Max, keeping it secret from everyone else, this new life starting between them. The teasing, the jokes, the codes they’d worked out to use in front of the waiters and the other guests at the hotel. She’d been stupid enough to take it all for granted, never giving a moment’s thought to whether or for how long it would last. So that when they came back—back to Motria’s endless sighs, and Marta’s sharp, narrow glances, all that buoyant joy had vanished. Locked into the bathroom that first night at her in-laws’ house, they’d splashed and giggled in the tub together, until Max’s father had started banging on the door, bawling them out for wasting hot water. She had frozen, right then and there, as if the bathtub had become a snowfield, and her nakedness were something raw, skinned over with ice.

  Last night, when Max had leaned over her, stroking her bare arm shyly, as if they’d never lain together before, that was how cold she’d been. She’d tried to open her arms to him, but they’d felt like laundry frozen to the line. All the words she’d practised saying, all the endearments, every attempt at gentleness in her voice had come out as anger and reproach. About Marta, how he let her bully him, scare his children, and wipe the floor with his wife. And Max had sworn under his breath—how could she blame him?—and fallen back to the lumpy mattress; he’d turned his back against her, abandoning her to the stew of her misery, her helplessness, everything she couldn’t show him, share with him, any more than the drowning can share the air in the lungs of their would-be rescuers.

  Sonia’s seen how fast Max drives when he’s angry; she knows how tired he is. Already she hears the knock on the door, sees herself at the hospital, and then the funeral parlour, the white bewildered faces of the children, Marta in her customary black, croaking ya tobee skazala, I told you so. How the loving widow, her lips quivering, will long to throw herself on his body, and how the embittered wife will hold herself back, all the words she could never say to him stuck in her throat, words she’d been made to feel afraid of, ashamed for him to hear, even in the dark. If she could call him back, if it were somehow in her power to make the car turn round and bring him back, she would cover his face with kisses, let him make love to her again and again, and let there be another five or ten or twenty children born, it wouldn’t matter, if only she could bring him safely home.

  It is not her imagination, it really is the car, wheels churning up gravel, the door slamming. Max, safe and well, walking up to her. It’s like watching a film in slow motion; there’s all the time in the world for her to see and know what is happening; how the fist of her heart, instead of letting go, clenches even colder and tighter. So she doesn’t throw herself into his arms as she’d longed to only a moment before, when the drive was empty and the car had vanished. She simply sits on the step, looking up at him as he says, “Forgot my briefcase,” and goes inside to pick it up from the coffee table where he left it. And then he’s back again, so quickly the children haven’t had a chance to register his presence; he’s at the car and she forces, has to force, herself to rise and go to him.

  “Max,” she calls out. He turns to her, impatient. He’s already in the city, thinking about tomorrow’s cases, that world of his with which she has nothing to do. Instead of sorry, or even just drive safely, she says, “Don’t speed.”

  He gets into the car, slams the door shut. But then she stands by the window until he finally rolls it down.

  “What is it now, Sonia?” That weary inflection of his voice. He’s as bad in his way as Marta—why had she ever married him, the both of them?

  “I don’t want you dead, that’s all.”

  “No such luck.” He starts the car, and then remembers: that is Peter’s line. He isn’t Peter; he refuses to be. And so Max stretches out his hand and puts it on his wife’s cool, slender arm. “It’s only a week and then she’ll be gone. You won’t have to see her here for another year.”

  She looks at his hand on her skin: she touches it, lightly, so quickly that he can’t be sure she has made the gesture at all. Her voice when she speaks at last is muffled, as if she’s talking in her sleep.

  “It’s okay. You’d better go now.”

  This time he drives off for good.

  Wherever Chucha Marta goes, even if she’s only moving from her bedroom to the kitchen or from the kitchen to the living room, she always takes her handbag with her. It belongs to her, Bonnie decides, like the scarf she wears on her head, or her underclothes. The handbag is black: it fastens with a shiny gold-coloured clasp attached to a spring; if you were foolish enough to try to open it, your hand would be snapped off clean. This is what Chucha Marta has told each one of them, even Baby Alix, who has shown no signs of wanting to snoop and pry. The clasp on Chucha Marta’s handbag is first cousin to her only other treasured possession: a mink collar made of one long pelt, with small, sorry paws dangling from it, and a fiercely pointed head with brilliant, beady eyes. The mouth of the mink opens like a clothespin to snap shut on its tail: from the start of November straight through to the end of April, Chucha Marta wears the mink collar on her plain black coat, to church and funerals and family gatherings at her brother’s house.

  No one can remember a time when she didn’t wear black. Bonnie imagines a small, skinny Chucha Marta—no smaller and skinnier than Marta is now, but aged fifteen instead of fifty-three—getting off the train at Union Station. She’s wearing scratchy black woollen stockings, a black skirt and blouse, and in place of the head scarf, a straw hat with roses round the brim. Young as she is, Bonnie knows a straw hat would never have survived the journeys in farm wagons and crowded trains and steerage berths that her aunt would have suffered through. Yet she has to give her one article of dress less ugly than her standard gear, something as fragile yet detailed as the clothes worn by Bonnie’s cut-out dolls.

  What’s in Chucha Marta’s handbag? Secrets, Bonnie thinks. She’s seen her aunt pull all kinds of objects out of the great black bag. Balled-up Kleenexes, a cracked change purse made out of some bashed brown material that tries to look like leather, keys on heavy metal rings. Small, flat boxes of Aspirin for Chucha Marta’s arthritis; tubes of Rolaids (taken copiously and conspicuously after dinners prepared by Bonnie’s mother). Bobby pins and paper clips; small combs with half the teeth missing; even a candle stub and a box of matches. But there’s vast numbers of other things in Chucha Marta’s handbag, secret things that make a rich rattle whenever the bag’s lifted up or shoved down. The bottom of her aunt’s handbag is as Bonnie imagines the seabed to be: littered with treasure from ocean liners like the Titanic and the Andrea Doria, about the sinking of which Laura’s read to her, from a magazine.

  Bonnie is sitting on the sofa in the living room; it is Monday morning, and she’s still in her pyjamas, wrapped up in a cotton blanket. Complaining of a headache, she’s asked her mother if she could stay up at the cottage rather than go down to the beach—stay with Chucha Marta. Her mother’s face, already creased with the day’s impending complications, tenses.

  “Are you sure? Really sure?” She puts her hand on Bonnie’s forehead, checking for fever, calculating the odds of this being scarlatina, since all four of her daughters have already had chicken pox and measles. At last she gives a small sigh and says yes, Bonnie can stay in the living room, as long as she doesn’t make any trouble for Marta; as long as she keeps herself wrapped up and quiet on the sofa. But to Sonia’s astonishment, Marta insists on her sister-in-law going down to the beach with the others. She’s no invalid or idiot child, Marta declares—she doesn’t need to be spied on, kept under observation. No, she will not have that fool of a Darka foisted on her. And yes,
she is perfectly capable of keeping an eye on the child.

  Heading for the beach, Sonia wonders what kind of game Marta’s playing: halfway down the stairs she’s about to turn back, run inside and rescue Bonnie, when she tells herself that she’s overreacting. She’ll go up to check on them both in an hour’s time.

  Marta and Bonnie are alone together, or at least they occupy the same room. For Marta seems oblivious of her niece’s presence. Her eyes are fastened on the piece of crochet work in her hands, work that puzzles Sonia’s daughters—why does Chucha Marta spend so much time making holes out of thread? What do her tablecloths do but show what’s underneath them, what they can’t hope to cover up? Dozens and dozens of tablecloths that Marta makes obsessively, and that Sonia stores unused in a trunk in the basement.

  “Chucha Marta?” Bonnie calls from the sofa.

  There’s no reply but the tug of thread through the crochet hook. Bonnie tries again, going over to the chair by the window where her aunt is working.

  “What was she called?”

  “Who?”

  “You know.”

  “Why should I tell you? It’s a secret.”

  “Please tell me. I promise I won’t let anyone know.”

  Chucha Marta puts down her crochet hook and draws her handbag onto her lap. She frowns at Bonnie, and the mole on her forehead doesn’t look like chewing gum any more, but wet and purple, the way you might imagine a bullet hole to be.

  “Why do you want to know?” There is no softening of Marta’s voice, no lessening of suspicion. It’s almost as though she’s been expecting the question, inviting it, for the sheer pleasure of denying her niece what she most wants to hear.

  “Because I’m sorry that I never knew her,” Bonnie says. “If I know her name, then maybe I can make her up in a story, the way I do our-brother-who-died-before-he-was-born.”

  “You’re crazy. You can’t make people up out of nothing. The dead are dead, and they’ll stay dead no matter how much you call them to come back.”