Inland Passage

by Jane Rule

  On Friday of a week for which Tess had prepared every dinner with nothing but reassurance from Margaret, she was very pleased with herself.

  “These beans are a bit overdone, I’d say,” Tess observed, more to preserve a sense of modesty than because there was anything seriously wrong with the vegetable.

  “It’s not like you to criticize your mother’s cooking,” her grandmother said.

  “I’m not,” Tess admitted. “It’s my own. Has been all week. What do you think?”

  “Is it true?”

  Margaret nodded, smiling.

  “Well, maybe I’ll see a great-grandchild before I die after all!”

  Tess scowled at her mother and said, “That’s not for me, Gram.”

  “Ah, but that’s what you said about cooking, and look at you.”

  “Nobody said anything in my sex education class about cooking making anybody pregnant.”

  “Well, it’s certainly a step in the right direction.”

  As Margaret anticipated, Tess surrendered the kitchen at once. Though Margaret was irritated with her mother, she was relieved to have the kitchen again to herself, her own vocabulary and methods restored to her. At least, the mystery of cooking had been dispelled for Tess. She could do it now when she wanted or needed to.

  Margaret did take the opportunity to say to her mother, “Don’t be on at Tess about having children. She may really not want them, ever.”

  “Wait until she falls in love!”

  It was odd to Margaret that her mother didn’t realize Tess was in love. Oh, she supposed the signs were not all conventional though Tess did have long telephone conversations with Annie on evenings they didn’t meet. What made it so obvious to Margaret was not only Tess’ eager happiness when she went off to meet Annie or brought her home for a meal but her increased sense of responsibility. It was not only the laundry and the cooking. She was being more careful about money as well as more interested in it.

  “I like my job well enough,” Tess said, “but, you know, it’s not going to go anywhere.”

  “What else do you think you’d like to do?”

  “I’m a pretty good carpenter, and I like electricity. What I might really like to do is learn to be a contractor. You can start out doing renovations and work up to building whole houses. There’s a guy I work with who says there’s good money in it, just too much hassle. I don’t think I’d mind the hassle.”

  “How do you go about learning?”

  As Tess outlined the options, Margaret realized that she must have been thinking about it for a long time.

  “It would be a drop in salary at first, but I don’t think it would take me very long to catch up.”

  Though “my granddaughter, the contractor” would suit Margaret’s mother no better than “my granddaughter, the grease monkey,” Margaret trusted Tess to find her own way. She had always been someone to learn by doing. Though she’d outgrown a stubborn prejudice against books as “all a pack of lies,” Tess would always trust a teacher more than a set of instructions to acquire a new skill. Margaret had the belated pleasure of learning that about her daughter first hand, when before she had had to trust Lou’s testimony, for Tess had worked with him in his basement shop since she was a small child.

  It was not many weeks before Tess had found a tolerant contractor who hired her as an apprentice carpenter, and Tess woke each morning as excited as a child anticipating a special treat.

  “There are always new problems to solve,” she said. “You’d never really run out of them.”

  Then one night Tess was out unusually late. Margaret was already in bed with her light out when she heard Tess come in. She didn’t go to the kitchen but went straight to her room. The next morning all her sunny energy was gone.

  “I’ll take that up to your grandmother,” Margaret offered about the breakfast tray Tess normally delivered.

  When she returned to the breakfast table, Tess had not begun to eat.

  “Aren’t you feeling well?”

  Tess shook her head.

  “Fever?”

  Tess shook her head.

  “What is it, darling?”

  “We broke up last night,” Tess said quietly.

  “Why?”

  “Her parents, mostly. They came out and said they were sure I was a lesbian, that she hadn’t been dating since she met me. They’ve forbidden her to see me.”

  “Well, in that case,” Margaret said indignantly, “she can certainly move in here!”

  “It’s not that simple. She won’t be twenty-one until August. I could be charged with corrupting a minor. I suppose you could, too.”

  “That’s ridiculous!”

  “Anyway, Annie is pretty scared, and, you know, she’s not as sure about all this as I am. She says, what if she wanted a baby, and maybe this was sort of kid stuff…”

  Margaret’s first reaction was fury at herself for not making Annie welcome all those months ago. Then she reflected that, if Annie’s parents indeed felt the way they did, such a move would only have invited their wrath much sooner.

  “I really love Annie, Mother.”

  “I know you do.”

  “So I have to let her go.”

  Tess got up from the table, put on her jacket, and picked up her tool kit.

  “There’s a plumbing course that starts tonight. I wasn’t going to sign up for it because it’s every night for three weeks. Now I guess I will.”

  Margaret was furious with Annie’s parents, furious with Annie. If she hadn’t been sure of her own feelings, why had she strung Tess along all these months? Who were any of them to question the validity and strength of Tess’ love?

  “Lou?” she demanded out loud. “Now do you see? Who can she ever trust?”

  Though Tess was subdued and absorbed in her work, she didn’t withdraw from her mother and grandmother. If anything, she became even more dependable and solicitous. On week-ends she stayed at home, tried baking a cake, running the vacuum cleaner, and she bought a hideously difficult jigsaw puzzle for all of them to work on together.

  Margaret wanted to suggest to Tess that she shouldn’t neglect all her friends, but they had been Annie’s friends, too, and it would be like Tess to leave them for Annie. In time, Tess would find other people though once her class was over, she saw only her work crew, and they were all men.

  “I think Tess is getting too serious,” Margaret’s mother remarked. “She doesn’t ever go out any more. And what’s happened to Annie?”

  “Exams, I suppose,” Margaret answered.

  “I always liked Annie, such an affectionate child.”

  Margaret was tempted to a negative remark about Annie, but she refrained, out of loyalty to Tess, she supposed, who never spoke of Annie except with tenderness. It was as if a loved friend had died. Sometimes Margaret wanted to snap, “Did it ever occur to you what a bitch she’s been?” But she knew it to be a furious lack of generosity to someone who had hurt her child. In fairness to Annie, Margaret tried to believe that she hadn’t had much of a choice.

  Then Margaret’s mother asked Tess herself, “Whatever’s happened to Annie?”

  Tess turned her level gaze to her grandmother and said, “I wanted more than she could handle. I loved her.”

  Margaret braced herself.

  “Well, I’m sorry, dear,” her grandmother said. “That can’t have been easy for you.”

  When Tess left for yet another series of classes, Margaret’s mother turned to her and asked, “Did you know that?”

  “Yes.”

  “But the poor child! That must have been terrible for her.”

  “Yes.”

  Margaret could not be sure how much her mother actually understood of the relationship between Tess and Annie. Perhaps as long as no one put any name to it but love, her mother had the heart to understand. It occurred to Margaret that Tess had a surer estimation of her grandmother than Margaret did. For, however bad her mother was with generalities, she was pretty good
with particulars.

  Through the summer Tess’ hair bleached, and her skin turned honey color.

  “The only bad thing about being a woman on this job is that I can’t take my shirt off.”

  She had begun occasionally to go to the beach. She had found some new friends to sail with, but Margaret saw a new reserve in her face which made her look older and less sure of herself. She was happier coming home from work or a class than she was from an outing.

  One late evening in the fall, when Margaret and Tess were having a beer together in her office and discussing how Tess might learn to set up books for a business of her own, there was an urgent knocking at the door. Tess went to it, and Margaret followed, concerned by the lateness of the hour. Only because the person who had come in was folded in her daughter’s arms did Margaret know it must be Annie. She stepped back into her office and shut the door.

  Nearly an hour later, wondering if she could decently get past the living room and up to bed, Margaret heard Tess’ light rap.

  “She’s staying the night,” Tess said, the expression on her face concerned, her eyes washed with wonder. “We can talk in the morning.”

  “Is she all right?”

  “I think she will be.”

  “Where…?”

  “With me,” Tess said.

  She’d never before even asked to have Annie for the night as though she had felt anything less than Annie’s living there would be improper.

  Margaret wanted to ask Tess if she were sure, if this was what she wanted after all these months, but to ask was to pretend she couldn’t read Tess’ face.

  Tess laid the facts before Margaret at breakfast before Annie was up. Annie had been made pregnant by a friend of her father’s who had been encouraged to “straighten her out.” This result, far from pleasing her father, gave him the excuse to throw her out of the house. Trash.

  “What about the man?”

  “He’s married, and anyway Annie doesn’t want anything to do with him. She doesn’t want anything more to do with men.”

  “And the baby?”

  “She thinks she ought to have an abortion,” Tess said, her eyes steadily on her mother, “but she doesn’t want one.”

  Margaret who had wanted children so very badly and finally had managed only Tess knew that her own prejudice against abortion was irrational, and she tried now to keep it under control.

  “It would be her one chance to have a child,” Tess said.

  “What are you thinking it has to do with you?”

  “Everything,” Tess said. “I want most to have her move in here because you and Gram would be company and help for her and because I could go on saving money, but, if you still don’t like that idea, I can find us a place of our own.”

  “Do you want a baby?”

  “I want Annie’s.”

  “Will her father call the police when he finds out where she is?”

  “Annie’s twenty-one now. Nobody can touch us.”

  “Let me think about it all,” Margaret said. “Right now, tell Annie she’s welcome, and I’ll talk to her when she feels like getting up.”

  “Mother, if you think we might do it, I’d like to ask Gram about it myself.”

  “All right.”

  Because Tess had volunteered to take on the problem of her grandmother herself, Margaret didn’t let consideration of her mother stop her thoughts. In fact, when she entered them at all, Margaret saw her mother’s expression of amused tenderness at the sight of a baby being carried into the house.

  But was Annie old enough, sure enough of herself to take on the responsibility of a child even in the shelter of Tess’ love and support, which only a few months ago she was persuaded to spurn as “kid stuff?” Then she heard Tess say, those months ago, “I really love Annie, Mother.” Whatever the eventual outcome, decisions had to be made in terms of that fact. Tess and Annie would live here, if Margaret’s mother could be persuaded, or somewhere nearby together.

  When Annie did get up just before lunch, the sight of her pale and distressed young face dispelled the doubts it might have supported in Margaret. Who could refuse to shelter and help someone as abjectly vulnerable, so brutally used by parents in the name of protecting her?

  “Oh, Annie, I’m so glad you’re here with us.”

  Tess came home early from work to find Annie in the kitchen helping Margaret, both of them deep in plans for the baby’s coming.

  “You two certainly aren’t wasting any time,” Tess commented, and then she deliberately and formally kissed Annie.

  “You need to talk with your grandmother,” Margaret said, “the sooner the better so that she won’t feel left out.”

  “Right,” Tess said. “I’ll just change.”

  “I don’t have any clothes,” Annie confessed.

  “We’ll soon take care of that,” Margaret said.

  Their easy flow of talk was somewhat inhibited now, for Annie probably in shyness over Tess’s direct behavior, for Margaret because she was suddenly apprehensive about her mother. It was nearly an hour before Tess came downstairs with her grandmother.

  “I can hardly believe it!” the old woman exclaimed. “A baby in the house! Annie, I’m so glad you’ve come back to us. Tess wasn’t the only one who missed you.”

  Then they were all talking, full of practical questions, plans, sudden bursts of laughter.

  “Never mind about months from now,” Margaret announced. “We’ve got jobs to do right away, this evening. We need to move me out of my bedroom and you two into it.”

  Against protests from both Tess and Annie, Margaret was firm. She would miss the luxury of her own bathroom, but private and comfortable space for the children was far more important. Her mother was surprisingly on her side, and, rather than stay down in the living room alone, she went back upstairs where she could watch and supervise the move.

  When it was accomplished, Tess and Annie needed no encouragement to go to their own new room. Margaret offered her mother a glass of port and joined her in her bedroom where she imagined they might more often be now last thing before bed. Margaret was newly grateful for her mother’s company.

  “This is really all right with you?” Margaret asked.

  “I wish the poor child had a father for her baby, but under the circumstances the only real disgrace is her own family behaving that way! I can’t imagine it. They can’t be Christians, can they? Why, they might even have forced her into having an abortion like those awful ‘pro choice’ people!”

  Ordinarily Margaret would have flinched the more surely for hearing her own prejudice elevated into a moral principle, but at that moment she relaxed instead into the knowledge that she and her mother were on the same side, pro this particular life anyway, which did so clearly establish that they all could live in the same real world, whatever the difficulties it might pose among its certain pleasures.

  JOY

  I’M DIVORCED AND DEREK’S never been married, but this isn’t a story about us so much as it is a story about Joy, who has by now acted out so many of our uncommitted errors that she is the only plot of our otherwise static relationship, if it can be called a relationship at all; neither of us has had the courage or the ignorance to be engaged. And so it is not our game. It is Joy’s game. We are simply Joy’s kibitzers.

  She and I had both arrived much too early at the Vancouver Airport to meet the same plane coming in from California. Dressed in a pale linen suit and a thin summer coat in the middle of November, she sat on one side of the customs shed waiting room right next to the steam radiator. I stood on the other side of the room in sneakers, wool trousers and a duffle coat. She was no more than nineteen; I was no less than twenty-nine. But we had each dressed with our own kind of care for the same kind of waiting. I probably spoke first. I usually do, to animals, children, and all sorts of women. It’s one of the many things about me that Derek thinks he likes but might not like to live with. He speaks to no one, being a Canadian just one generation awa
y from England. And he likes me to come to the airport in trousers, too, because it means that I am not making a special occasion of either his leaving or his coming back.

  Joy, who gave me her name at once as if it explained as much about her as any of the other facts, was, yes, meeting someone, her fiancé. She hadn’t been in Vancouver long herself, just one night, and she hadn’t slept much, even though she’d been on her way the two nights before that, flying from Australia. She just couldn’t sleep; she was that excited. It was cold, wasn’t it? She hadn’t expected it to be cold, but somebody at the hotel had explained it was the beginning of winter here.

  “Do you know, can a person get married here on Sunday?”

  “I don’t know why not.”

  “It is Sunday tomorrow, isn’t it? I’m that confused.” She laughed, which made her cough, a rotten cough, deep in her chest and obviously familiar to her.

  “Have you got a license?”

  “Not yet. Maybe Wally will have one with him. He’s coming up from San Diego. We have to be married before I can get into the States. He said it was Mexico or Canada, and he liked Canada better and so would I. So he sent me a ticket to Canada.” She laughed again and coughed again. “It’s my chest. I was that scared when I had to have a medical, but it turned out all right. It’s nothing really, only my cough medicine spilled, spilled all over my wedding dress, this big stain all down the back of it. I took it right to the cleaners when I got here. They want to fix it for me. I hope they can. I want to be married in a church. I think it’s nice to be married in a church, don’t you? I don’t know much about it, not when people are all alone, I mean. Wally’s folks wanted to come up, but it would cost too much. It’s awfully expensive, isn’t it? Traveling. I would have had to wait another year to save up for a ticket. Wally didn’t want to wait that long. We’ve already waited a year. I’m that excited!”

  As she chattered and laughed and coughed, I grew concerned about her. If her Wally had no more grasp of the practical problems than she had, they’d be days trying to get married. They couldn’t get a license on Sunday. She couldn’t get her dress out of the cleaners on Sunday. A minister, a church, witnesses: she hadn’t a clue how to arrange any of these things.