On her first visit to her mother in her new married state, Vivien hadn’t felt the weight of dread descend as she turned in her mother’s driveway, and what an amazing, hopeful feeling that absence was. And then the sun had come out and spattered the driveway with light. Pearl hadn’t answered the door, and since for once it was unlocked, Viv just went right in, thinking that maybe the light and the unlocked door would prove to be symbolic of her mother’s rebirth, her enormous and astounding change of heart and mind. A change of essential character. Who could have predicted such power in love? She could hear her mother talking to someone down in her bedroom, and wondered if Roger hadn’t gone to visit his son after all. She was at first unable to distinguish words—she heard only her mother’s familiar, monotonous voice boring the walls and floating lethargically down the hall like a lazy carp. Viv put her bag down in the living room, took a deep breath and tiptoed down to peer into her mother’s bedroom. Her mother was sitting alone on the edge of her bed with one of her jewellery boxes open beside her, the blue leather one with the suede pillows inside. She was just lifting out a pair of gold earrings and a chain, which, she was telling an invisible audience, she would wear when she went out for dinner with her youngest daughter, Vivien, who was late.
“Hi, Mum,” Vivien said, entering.
“Oh. It’s you.” Her mother’s voice was completely flat.
“May I come in?”
“I don’t see why not.”
Vivien approached the bed. “What are you doing, Mum?”
“What does it look like I’m doing? I’m getting ready for dinner. My aunt Pearly K, after whom I am named, used to show me her jewellery when I was a little girl.”
Viv sat down beside her mother, made the bed bounce a little, and Pearl frowned.
“I remember,” Viv said, “how you let Amy and me see in your jewellery boxes when we were small. You’d open them on your bed just like this. We loved it, too. It was like the treasure in Aladdin’s cave, I used to think. So magical. Special.”
Pearl looked again at the pieces of gold jewellery she was holding in her crooked, gnarled hands. “Your sister Amethyst owes me a letter,” she said. “You all do.” Then she said, “The K stood for Klondike, after the gold rush that started the year she was born. She hated her name.”
“I would have too. Klondike. Imagine!”
“I thought it was a rather clever idea.”
“I guess. Mum? I also remember how you’d get dressed up to go out, to go into the city, and I’d think you were the most beautiful mother in the whole world. I was so proud of you.” Vivien paused. Her mother said nothing. Feeling a mild desperation, Viv went on. “You know, I can feel your velvet jacket against my cheek if I think about it. I can feel the thick, furry pile of that chocolate brown fake fur coat you used to wear. I can smell your VO5 hairspray, and your Max Factor powder, and I can see the bright poppy red of your lipstick. Mum?”
Pearl was looking into space. “Your father liked those hospital balls. Beresford high society. Ha! I detested them. They were a trial.”
“Amy and I always liked it when you left us a kiss on our cheeks with your lipstick. Remember? And remember how you wore a French roll for a while? I thought that was so elegant.” Viv stopped then, and for a while there was nothing at all in the stale, disturbed air. Then Pearl, who had still not acknowledged her daughter’s opening of her heart, rose, and slowly made her way over to her dressing table, took two more boxes out of the second drawer and brought them over to the bed. One red box, one grey.
“My aunt Pearly K never married. She should have; she would have made a wonderful mother. But when she was a young woman, she acquired an appointment working for an MP in Ottawa, and off she went to see the capital. However. Shortly after she started the job, the man made inappropriate advances towards her, and she packed up and came right home. She stayed in Winnipeg after that, and became a dental assistant, which proved much more satisfactory.”
“And that was it for men?” Viv asked, admiring three of her mother’s dinner rings on her hands.
“You can put those back. She did become engaged once, but she broke it off. His name was Wherrit, and he worked in a bank.”
“Maybe that’s why in the pictures she looks so sad.”
“I wouldn’t hazard a guess as to the reason. I wouldn’t have said she looked sad. And I wouldn’t say she was unhappy, either. She liked the horse races. And wearing stripes.”
“I like looking at your old photo albums,” said Viv. “May I see one?”
“I don’t,” said Pearl.
Viv flopped back on the bed and stared at the light fixture on the ceiling. Her mother could suck the joy out of Jesus. Why couldn’t she be nicer? The light fixture was full of bugs, and one of the light bulbs was out. Still, she was a million percent better than she had been before Roger came along. Viv could see cobwebs in the corners of the ceiling. She could see a big fat spider. Waiting.
“I barely know what’s in here anymore,” Pearl said, returning to her project. Slowly she unzipped grubby satin bags, opened the soiled drawstrings of flannelette pouches, unwrapped wrinkled old tissue paper and lifted out more strings of beads, brooches, earrings and chains.
“That French roll hairdo was a ridiculous amount of work.”
Viv rolled over on her side and reached over to pick up a yellow sparkly brooch with matching earrings and lined the three pieces up on the bedspread. She put on another ring, one with a large pale green stone. “These were my favourites when I was small,” she said.
Pearl picked up a bracelet made of rectangular stainless steel blocks and draped it over her wrist. “Your father gave me this. On a day when he was feeling artsy.” Then she looked up and said bitterly, “When I was having a miscarriage in my parents’ house, your precious father was downstairs in the living room playing the damned piano. The nurse attending me was afraid to interrupt him to ask if she could give me heroin for the pain. In the end she gave it to me anyway, without his permission. Ha! Imagine ignoring the plight of his wife! And him a doctor. Right in my parents’ house in Calgary, on Montcalm Crescent.” Pearl gave her daughter a look as though she blamed her and stuffed the bracelet into a pink satin bag and zipped it up.
“Mum?”
“What is it?”
“When Dad proposed, why didn’t you say no?”
Pearl answered slowly, guardedly, “Well, no one else had asked me.”
“So? You weren’t exactly over the hill.”
“You have to marry someone.”
“No you don’t.”
Pearl looked at her daughter hard. “Well, a lesbian wouldn’t marry, I suppose.”
Viv laughed. “But did you even like each other? Ever? Did you have anything at all in common?”
“We played badminton. Our fathers both worked for the CPR.”
“And that’s it?”
“Well,” Pearl said, a strange coy smile in her voice. “There was a strong … sexual attraction.” She looked Viv in the eye. “You would understand that.”
“Yes,” Viv said, mortified.
“And do you know what else?” Pearl said, still looking at Viv as if assessing the wisdom of confiding in her. “Your father’s mother told me that I must ‘make myself available’ to my husband in bed every night—and you know what that means.”
Viv laughed. Again. Had she ever laughed in this house before? “Good thing you were sexually attracted, then.”
Pearl paused, gave Viv an icy look and said, “I don’t know why you find this all so amusing.”
“I don’t—it’s just that you’ve never told me most of this before and I’m excited. Maybe even happy. And a little nervous.”
“I see. Well, here is something else. Eleanor Mayfield, your grandmother, loved to give advice, and she gave me much more than I needed or wanted. And she was a very good bridge player. When your father and I were engaged, she kept trying to get me to take up bridge. But I did not, and do not, like playing
bridge. Nor did I join the ladies’ auxiliary or the church choir in Banff, much to her chagrin.”
“Mum? Did you ever have an engagement ring? I don’t remember your having one.”
“Yes, I did. I didn’t like it, though. The one from Roger is much nicer.”
“What happened to the one from Dad? Have I ever seen it?”
“No, you haven’t. It was more from his mother than from him, if you must know. What happened to it? Bill Garbageman came right into the house one day and took it from beside the kitchen sink.”
“Bill Garbageman?! Why would Bill Garbageman have come into the house?”
“Don’t ask me.”
“But how would he even know your ring was there?”
“How would I know? I wouldn’t presume to know how a garbageman’s mind works.”
Pearl began bundling the jewellery back up, replacing it somewhat roughly in the bags and boxes, as though every piece, compounded by the presence of this daughter, caused her a struggle.
When she closed the doors of her dressing table, she turned to Viv and said, “Now you can tell me about my fine son-in-law. How is Chas? Why didn’t he come with you?”
By the second year of their marriage, Pearl had reverted to her old self and was treating Roger, and her daughters, like absolute shit. The mooning and fawning had all been crap. Of course. They had all been duped, and poor Roger was stuck with her. “Yes, dear,” he said, chipper in his humility, in his inability to do anything right. “I’m sorry, dear.” What a crock it all had been. She was a bitch, she had always been a bitch, she had just tricked them for a while.
And then the bad news came: Roger had lung cancer. He was going to die. He couldn’t stop coughing; he spat into a basin; the sounds of his retching drove Pearl wild. But in the end it wasn’t the cancer that killed him. One day, after disembarking the HandyDART bus and dismissing the driver, Pearl and Roger had made their way arm in arm across the cement patio to the steps. The three steps, up to their back door, that Roger had wanted to put railings on but Pearl had refused. “No,” she had said. “How many times do I have to tell you? I am not going to fall. Stop pestering me.” That afternoon they fell off the steps and landed on the concrete.
“He has so little to say now,” Pearl complained once her cracked pelvis had healed and she was released from the hospital. “It is impossible to have a decent conversation. I sit there. He lies there. He doesn’t say a word anymore, and so I can’t tell if he can even hear me. And every time it’s twenty dollars by taxi!”
“But how is he?” Viv asked. “How is his fractured skull? How is the cancer?”
“How is he? Don’t ask me. No one bothers to call and let me know. Why don’t you ask me how I am doing? I could answer that, if anyone cared.”
“Maybe they think you don’t care.”
“Did you tell them that?”
“No. Have you called the hospital?”
“Why should I?”
After Roger’s funeral, Viv drove Pearl back to her house, and before the others arrived she said, “Maybe now you’ll get a goddam railing, Mum. It could happen again, you know.”
“That’s a heartless thing to say. But coming from you I shouldn’t be surprised. No. I’ve faced enough change for now.”
“Mum, I think—”
“No one cares what you think. I least of all.”
“Mum—”
“Shut your trap and mind your own business. Help me into the house.”
“Don’t get a goddam railing, Mum.”
“What did you say?”
“Nothing.”
Evelyn stood in the foyer of The Manor welcoming her guests, her tall black beehive glistening, her long black skirt beautifully pressed, a replica cameo pinned high in the centre of the collar of her lace-trimmed white blouse. “Good evening, Pearl,” she said. “So nice to see you.”
“Good evening,” said Pearl. Evelyn smiled benevolently and took Pearl’s coat, and then Viv’s. Evelyn’s husband, Marcel, emerged from the kitchen wearing his chef’s hat. He kissed Pearl’s hand. Pearl beamed. They certainly knew how to please her. Pearl and Viv followed Evelyn’s gliding figure past the other customers to what had been Pearl and Roger’s favourite booth, the last one, at the back of the restaurant, near the big mirrors.
“My daughter may need a menu, but I don’t,” said Pearl. “I am very hungry. I will have the creamed seafood en cassoulet.”
“A very good choice,” said Evelyn.
“I so like the scallops,” Pearl beamed again.
Once Evelyn was gone, she turned to Vivien and the light went out of her face as she said sharply, “I have something to say to you and you are not to interrupt.”
“All right.”
“It concerns my husband’s will.”
Viv’s heart lurched. She felt capable of murder when she thought about Roger’s will. She had promised Chas, promised herself that she would keep her mouth shut no matter what. Poor old Roger. Now, in addition to his shortened life, his will had been declared invalid because of some technical detail and so Pearl could legally keep everything, no matter what Roger had said he wanted for his sons. The sons had asked if they might have some of Roger’s clothes—a hand-tooled leather belt he had liked; a tie one of them had given him on his seventy-fifth birthday. They asked if they could have his special egg cup, and a photo album from when they were children. A plaster dog that had sat on their fireplace hearth. “No, you may not,” Pearl said. “Not a thing.” She threw out the photo album. She sent the clothes to the church thrift sale by taxi. The jewellery, some of it valuable and all of it intended for Roger’s sons’ wives, was in her jewellery boxes. She talked to the Mexican plaster dog and stroked it on the head and put a dish of water down beside it. “Don’t tell me I don’t have a sense of humour,” she said.
Now at dinner she said, “I believe I have acted, and am acting, fairly,” and she took a confident sip of her cocktail, a Planter’s Punch. “First of all, I am aware that you think I have acted badly about the jewellery. But you do not know Roger’s sons or their wives. I have never seen either Charlena or Janice in anything other than blue jeans. Ever. They cannot appreciate jewellery.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Viv said angrily, breaking her vow and hating herself. “You know what he wanted. He wrote it all down.”
“The lawyers have told me I don’t have to do anything, and no one can make me. Least of all you.”
“You wouldn’t even give them his egg cup, for Christ’s sake. Or his belt.”
Pearl took a confident sip and said, “Well, listen to you on your high horse. You’re a fine one to be telling me what is right and wrong. Who do you think you are?”
“Nobody. Is that the right answer?”
“It is. I am not about to listen to the likes of you. You may as well be quiet. Think what you like.”
“I will think what I like,” Viv hissed, choking now with fury. “I think you are wicked. I hate it that you are my mother.”
Viv slid out of the booth and headed for the washroom. She sat on the toilet with her head in her hands. “Just leave,” she whispered. “Just fucking leave. Get out of here. Go.”
But she didn’t. She was trying to be different. She was trying not to get involved, not to get embroiled, ensnared. She was trying to stand back and observe, she was trying to rise above, or transcend. She washed her face and dried it on the rough brown paper towels and returned to the booth, taking long, deep breaths. Her mother said in a meek, little-old-lady voice, “You were gone a long time.”
Vivien’s jaw moved, but she didn’t speak. She crunched the ice cubes from her empty glass like bones.
“It is my turn now,” Pearl said, laying down her fork and placing her neatly folded serviette beside it. Her plate was almost full. Vivien’s was empty. She couldn’t have said what she had ordered or eaten. Vacuumed, was more like it. She wasn’t doing so well on her pledges to be unaffected, was she? So much for progress. Pear
l slid out of the booth, stepped carefully down onto the carpet and slowly made her way along the aisle towards the washroom. Vivien closed her eyes. How stressed are you? she asked herself. The only time the desire to drink got this bad was when she was around her mother. She ordered another Perrier. She kept her eyes closed and took more deep breaths.
“Vivien! Vivien!” There was urgency in her mother’s voice. Viv opened her eyes and looked over. Pearl was standing in the middle of the restaurant in her white slip. Her red and gold skirt was around her ankles, and she was trapped: she couldn’t move forward or backward because the skirt was in the way, and she wasn’t flexible enough to reach down to pull it up. Her eyes met her daughter’s. She looked down at herself. Their eyes met again.
Then Vivien started to laugh. She laughed so hard she couldn’t breathe. She attempted to leave the booth, but she broke up again, laughed, and laughed, and laughed until finally, finally she could move. “Mum!” she whispered as she came up to her, gasping for air, guts aching. “Your skirt fell off!”
Pearl snickered then too. “I know that! Do you think I don’t know that?! Help me!”
They were both laughing then, both bent over, fooling with the silky red and gold outfit. Vivien managed to pull the skirt up and get it rebuttoned, but she was gasping and dizzy from embarrassment and lack of oxygen. Pearl, however, had regained her composure, and she shook her daughter off and raised her head high, pointedly ignored everyone in the restaurant as she continued her trip to the ladies’ room. Still giggling, Vivien returned to the booth, her guts tight and clenched, her face red. She picked up her water glass and held it against her cheek. The coldness felt good. She couldn’t stop laughing. Then the bathroom door opened and Pearl emerged.
Vivien watched her mother’s slow progress as she began her return trip, and she felt gales both of laughter and of tears welling up in her again. She stifled them both, and in that moment she had to admit that in spite of it all, she sometimes admired her mother. She had to admire how Pearl could totally ignore what people thought and keep going. Keep doing what to her was right. Even when it meant taking on the world.
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