The Ladies' Lending Library

by Janice Kulyk Keefer

  For Darka’s changed in a way that Sonia can’t pin down, but that worries her far more than the peroxide and baby dolls and movie magazines have done. All of a sudden, the girl has given up—given up on aggravating Sonia, flouting her wishes, rebelling. For the past few days, she hasn’t worn a trace of the makeup she’d somehow smuggled up to the cottage—Sonia had pretended not to notice the smears of rouge, the gobs of mascara Darka thought she was being so careful in applying. Nor has the girl spent hours curing her hair or flouncing about in her two-piece at the beach, when she should have been looking after Alix. Yes, Darka’s given up—the way women of a certain age give up on looking or acting attractive.

  Good as gold, Darka sits back on the kitchen chair, letting Sonia dye her hair back to its natural colour. Fumes rise from the bottle, making Sonia frown and purse her lips as she applies the tint. Dark brown globs are staining the ragged towel round Darka’s neck: they might as well fall on her face for all she cares—he cares. She doesn’t exist for him any longer: all this weekend he’s stayed put, smoking his cigarettes, reading the papers on Lesia Baziuk’s veranda, drinking the glasses of rye and ginger she grudgingly doles out. As if he hadn’t a care in the world; as if he’d made Darka vanish, not just from his view, but from the whole, wide world. The first night she’d thought he was playing it safe, biding his time. But on Saturday nothing had happened, nothing. Even when she walked past his cottage on her way to the store, he stared at his paper as if she were some ghost stopping before him, looking up at him, willing him to return her gaze. A ghost of a ghost, without the power to summon a single shiver from his pale, pink skin.

  It’s not the makeup she misses; to tell the truth, it isn’t Frank Kozak she misses, either. It’s the feeling he gave her of being the most important person in the world, the most precious thing he’d ever held. Far more important than his cigarettes or even the booze, she was his honey, his baby, his sugar-pie. Darka makes a choking, gagging sound.

  Sonia’s afraid that somehow she must have got some of the hair dye into the girl’s eyes, or even her mouth. “Darka?” she cries, “are you all right? It won’t take long, now—another five minutes. Darka?”

  “I’m okay,” the girl says at last. “It’s the stink that’s getting to me.”

  In the one room in her cottage with a lock on the door, Nettie Shkurka is washing her hair. Not that she has anything to hide: her hair really is her crowning glory: long as her arm and not a grey hair to disfigure the rich, mahogany colour that her daughter, alas, has failed to inherit. This is only one of many ways in which Nastia’s been a disappointment to her mother, but Nettie has seen enough of the families at Kalyna Beach to know it’s a universal law that daughters let their mothers down. She also recognizes that, as things go, she should feel relatively confident in the daughter department. Nastia would sooner throw herself under a bus than talk back to her; she’s not going to run after boys; and she’ll continue to do well at school, entering the teaching profession just as her mother and grandmother have done before her. In fact, Nettie’s only worry about Nastia is how to keep her as good as she is now—if not as good as gold, then as copper: bright, serviceable, but needing to be shined up every so often.

  If Nettie locks the bathroom door when she washes her long, thick, red-brown hair, it’s more as a gesture against the evil eye than anything else. For she can’t help feeling vulnerable when that hair is unpinned and splayed down her back; vulnerable when bending over the small sink, fearful lest the tap dig into her scalp, intent as she is on rinsing out each scintilla of soap. For Nettie’s obsession is perfection. “People are always watching you,” she has told her daughter from the moment the child could give signs of an independent will. “They’re always watching and waiting for you to make a mistake, fall flat on your face. I never gave them that satisfaction, and neither will you.”

  The only way to achieve perfection, Nettie knows, is to have it beaten into you, beaten till you’re black and blue. The way her mother beat her; the way Nettie beats her daughter at home in their cramped apartment, and here, in the equally constricted cottage. While the mothers of Kalyna Beach lie down on their blankets at the water’s edge and their children make sandcastles or sunbathe in the dunes, Nettie is taking a hairbrush or a wooden spoon to Nastia. Or else the peeled birch wand kept by the front door, that makes its whistling sound instead of the thwack, thwack of the hairbrush.

  Nettie always makes sure the beatings start when Nastia’s as far as possible from the bathroom with its lockable door—in the kitchen drying dishes, or searching the bookshelves in the sitting room for something she actually wants to read. Always, they occur when the girl has let down her guard, can be taken by surprise by what, after all, she should have suspected was coming: the smack of something hard against a softer target, shins or arms or back. And the words, a rhythmic accompaniment to the blows: “Ty durna kor-o-va.” Nastia never says anything in reply, for her mother’s logic is unassailable: if she weren’t a stupid cow, why would her mother be beating her? She knows she must save her energy for running, ducking, deking this way and that, so she can get to the bathroom without her mother realizing where she’s heading.

  Nastia is small for her age; there is scarcely room on her skin for all the bruises she wears. Were Laura ever to ask, Nastia would say the beatings hurt less than you’d imagine, that she carries her wounds as lightly as if they were the badges you get at Brownies, or those fabric souvenirs of Pioneer Village or the CNE meant to be stitched to your shirt or jacket. But Laura doesn’t ask, because, in spite of how smart Laura is, smart at things they never teach you at school, she doesn’t guess what Nastia’s secret is—not just Nastia’s, but Nettie’s, too. Doesn’t guess even though Nastia’s given her all the clues she can; led her by the hand; shown her the writing on the wall.

  As Nettie Shkurka lifts her long, damp strands of hair, sectioning them off with the end of the thin-handled, stainless-steel comb with its strong, small teeth, she gazes not in the mirror, but at the wallpaper: she disapproves of mirrors, preferring the way she thinks she looks to what actually confronts her in the glass. Thus it happens that, scanning the pattern of tropical fish weaving in and out of ribboned weeds, she discovers a text as deliberate as a message in a bottle. Not some splotch of rising damp or dirt or grease, but small, immaculate lettering scratched right into the paper, for anyone to find.

  At first, Nettie won’t believe her eyes. It can’t be her name etched into the wallpaper; it can’t be I hate in front of her name. Who would do such a thing? Who would wish her ill—who could say something so cruel? For a moment she feels as though she’s going to faint; she wants to stagger off to her room and lie down, unpick the words from her memory as if they were a spoiled stretch of embroidery. But then she tightens her grip on the handle of the comb and pushes the tray of rollers away from her. Half her hair up, half down, her mouth taut, her eyes hard, she steals from the bathroom, down the corridor, to her daughter’s room.

  Nastia is sitting on her carefully made bed, reading a movie magazine Laura has pilfered from Darka’s stash. She’s feeling both guilty and bored: her mother says such magazines are garbage, and now Nastia’s seen for herself that it’s true. There’s nothing in the words or pictures she can make sense of, no idea worth following. So that when she looks up from the exposé on Eddie Fisher and sees her mother standing before her, her arm raised, she is almost willing to take the punishment she knows she deserves. Almost but not quite, for the woman by her bed isn’t recognizable as her mother, this woman with wet hair swinging across her face and rippling over her shoulders, with half a helmet of rollers stabbed into her head. Even as the blows come down, Nastia’s confused, unable to shield herself.

  This time, for some reason Nastia can’t fathom, the beating isn’t a matter of bruises, but of jabs and cuts. She knows she must think harder, faster, must find some way she hasn’t tried before to get away. Before the steel comb strikes not just at her arms and legs, which
can be covered up with long sleeves and trousers, but at her face as well.

  Down at the beach, Lenka and Rocky are drinking cream soda behind the dunes, enjoying the absence of Katia and Tania who, they’ve come to realize, have lorded it over them far too long. Laura is helping Baby Alix build a complicated castle by the water’s edge. Mrs. Vesiuk is still on patrol; the boys are diving off the raft, the air is still and the lake a bowl of blue cream. Sonia has come down with a pitcher of Kool-Aid for the children, accompanied by a listless Darka, and a troubled Zirka; the women stand on the dry sand, absorbing the sun’s heat into muscles strained from lifting and fetching. There is nothing to deflect the sound when it comes: a thick, dark, ugly sound, like the clots of blood at the bottom of the toilet bowl when it’s that time of the month for those who are young ladies now.

  The sound is coming out of an animal of some kind; it is tumbling down the bluff at the far end of the beach, not falling off the edge, but sliding and shoving through the undergrowth, holding on to the trunks of saplings, grabbing at bushes to keep its feet on the ground. Above it comes another sound, just as ugly, but high-pitched, like a drill, shouting the same word, over and over and over.

  Laura clutches her shovel while her mother and Mrs. Vesiuk run towards the sobbing, shaking form that has come to rest on the sand. Zirka is struggling up the hill to where the shrieking has suddenly stopped. Now Mrs. Vesiuk lifts the thing in her arms and strides away with it as if she were carrying nothing heavier than a damp towel. If it’s an animal, it’s not the bear cub the mothers have always been warning them about; if it’s a person, Laura doesn’t want to know who it could be. Blood is pouring from the head, streaking the sugary sand below.

  And then it’s all over: Mrs. Vesiuk has disappeared with her bundle up the steps to her cottage, and Sonia seems to be apologizing to them all, mothers and children.

  “Everything’s all right,” she keeps saying. “There’s been a little accident at the Shkurkas’ cottage, that’s all. Don’t worry. Nastia will be just fine.”

  The only people left on the beach now are Laura and her mother. They are standing apart, facing the lake, their arms wrapped round their waists. For once, an onlooker would be struck not by the difference but by the sameness between them: the sag of the shoulders, the hang of the head, the arms like bandages or a wide belt holding in what must not be let out.

  Overhead, the sky is a pale, stainless blue: the water below it is still perfectly calm, unruffled by even a cat’s paw of wind. Water slaps, slaps, slaps at the shore, and from nowhere a pair of dragonflies darts across the lip of wet, packed sand, and over the water. For a long moment, Sonia cannot say where she is, or even what time of day it is, and which day, at that. It’s not just the end-of-summer collapse, the weak but grateful giving-up, for just one day of the year, of all rules and order. It’s the feeling that she’s fought against all summer, fighting to keep it from drowning her: fear of the worst, no hope for the best.

  Sonia knows that she must go to her daughter, must open her arms to her, hold her close, try to undo what she has seen, as if the blood streaming from Nastia’s face and scalp, the smear of her mouth, could be smoothed away. But her arms stay cinched about her waist; the most she can do is to sink, slowly, to her knees, and then to sit on the sand.

  Laura remains on her feet: she knows what her mother is thinking. She is blaming her for not looking out for her friend, her best, her only friend; for not knowing what was going on at the Shkurkas’ cottage; for not knowing or caring what she knew. And whether or not she knew why Nastia kept to her room so much, and what the word asthma meant from Mrs. Shkurka’s lips, Laura, of all the spectators at Kalyna Beach, knows why this particular drama has occurred. Knows that somehow, while fixing her hair or washing her face, Mrs. Shkurka has found the message inscribed so neatly on the bathroom wall. And suddenly Laura can’t keep from crying out; she sinks to her knees in front of her mother, sobbing, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  Sonia raises her arms to her daughter, pulls her into an embrace. “Shh, shh, donyu, don’t cry, there’s nothing for you to be sorry about. There’s nothing you could have done to stop it—nobody knew, nobody guessed.”

  Stroking Laura’s limp, fine hair, feeling her daughter shudder so helplessly in her arms, Sonia feels something unlock in her, something buried painfully deep. Her voice is soft, as if it were a lullaby she were crooning. “Nobody asks to be born, Laura. We think we are born out of love, we think we are born for happiness. But even if our parents loved each other, even if they wanted us more than anything else, it changes once we come into the world. Everything changes. What’s happened to Nastia—there’s no excuse for it, donyu, and there’s no way anyone could have stopped it.”

  Laura barely breathes. For the first time in as long as she can remember, she has her mother all to herself; her mother is holding her, stroking her hair, speaking to her as if her daughter were a friend, and not an enemy. Sonia forgets, for a moment, about her other children, the ones whom Darka’s shepherded up the hill; forgets that Max will be back with the rest of the men at any moment, and that tonight will be the party for which she’s been longing all summer long. She sits on the sand, with her daughter in her arms, and tells her a story.

  “Once, in our village, there was a girl who was very pretty and very spoiled. Her mother adored her, and her brother loved her, and the girl ended up by thinking she was better than everybody else, that nothing bad could ever touch her.” Sonia breaks off, starts rubbing at her foot, the site of an old blister, a bright pink scar.

  “And?” Laura prompts, needing to break the silence that’s fallen on her mother, afraid to break the delicate spell that binds them together. For she knows that this story which has begun like a fairy tale, like the baiky her baba used to tell her, will be different from them in some crucial way.

  “And so they decided to teach her a lesson, the people in the village—the boys in the village.” Sonia draws away, a little, from her daughter; as she speaks, her eyes are fixed on the lake. Her voice is different now, the kind of voice you use to talk to yourself instead of to the person beside you.

  “One day they followed her when she went walking by the river—it was spring and all the trees were in bloom, and her mother had let her spend the afternoon doing just what she pleased when she should have been working, helping …

  Laura frowns: she was wrong, this isn’t a new kind of story but the same one she’s heard so many times before. How the proud, lazy girl gets punished for her sins; how it’s better to be busy and obedient and meek. Yet as her mother continues, Laura leans in towards her, afraid to lose even one word.

  “So the girl walks down to the riverbank, where the apple trees are in bloom; she thinks of herself as one of those blossoms, pink and white and free to fly off in the wind, wherever she chooses. And all the time the boys are watching her, thinking how pleased she is with herself, without a care in the world, because she is the world, all of it that matters. And just at the moment when she’s most lost in herself, most careless and free, the boys rush up to her and grab her and carry her into the river. First they make sure she gets covered with the muck from the bank, they smear it all over her dress and her legs and her hair, and then they dump her in water just deep enough to cover her, all except her face. They laugh at her and leave her to make her way back to shore.”

  “And?” Laura asks again, eagerly this time. She knows that her mother’s story has its own momentum now, that it has taken its teller to a place that is neither Kalyna Beach nor the Old Place, but somewhere in between, where remembering happens.

  “She couldn’t swim—and she was too proud to tell them. They ran off and she became frightened, too frightened to cry out for help, or to move to free herself, in case she drowned. She knew she was going to die in that river, and that nothing could save her, and so when he came at last to rescue her, she’d given up caring.”

  “Who rescued her? Who was it, Mamo?”

 
; But Sonia doesn’t hear the question. “He carried her out of the water, and he washed her and fetched a towel and dry clothes for her. He walked her back home and she made him swear that he would never tell anyone what happened, especially their mother. And he kept her secret, even though—” And here Sonia breaks off the story. “It doesn’t matter,” she says sadly. “We’d better go.”

  But it does matter to Laura. It matters to her as much as knowing why Nettie Shkurka has battered her daughter’s face. But neither mother nor daughter can say a word; all they can do is take in the sound of the waves Nastia hates so much, pounding steadily, uselessly, against the shore. Sonia has got to her feet and is brushing the sand off her shorts; the voice she uses to tell Laura it’s time to get dinner ready is no longer the voice of the woman who held her in her arms, or who told the story of the girl who was rescued from drowning. It is the voice of Our Mother: tired, resigned, commanding, but with something else folded into it, something that is almost a plea.

  “Come along, Laura, they’ll be wondering what’s happened to us. Come on, donyu—we’ve got work to do.”

  It startles Laura: this is not a command so much as an invitation never before extended. Join us, become one of us, women who know what life is and what it can never be, who must hoard what little power we have, power not to save the beaten or to keep ourselves from drowning, just power over our children’s lives, for as long as we can hold them, nothing more than that.

  Sonia looks at her watch; her voice takes on a hint of impatience. “Look, Laura, I know you’re upset about Nastia. It’s terrible, what’s happened. But that’s the way life is. If you’d grown up where I did—if you knew what kind of things can happen to people, not just being thrown into a river, but things you can’t even imagine, in the war—”

  Laura has jumped to her feet; she’s remembering the mess she made of Sonia’s dress, she’s anticipating the scene her mother will make when she discovers it, the accusations of deliberate destructiveness, of malice. Her mother won’t want her company then, she won’t be calling her donyu, she will never hold her in her arms, or stroke her face again. And now, her head pounding, a stone in her stomach, Laura starts shouting.