“You say anything,” he says. “You say one thing and I’ll have some pretty stories to tell about you. You betcha.”
“That woman,” Mika is saying to the Wednesday Circle as Betty enters the dining room. “That woman. She has absolutely no knowledge of the scriptures. She takes everything out of context.” Mika is standing at the buffet with a china teacup in her hand. Betty steps into the circle of chairs and sits down in Mika’s empty one. Mika stops talking, throws her a look of surprise and question. The other women greet her with smiles, nods.
“Did you get the eggs?” Mika asks.
Betty feels her mouth stretching, moving of its own accord into a silly smile. She knows the smile irritates Mika but she can’t help it. At times like these, her face moves on its own. She can hear her own heartbeat in her ears, like the ocean, roaring.
“What now?” Mika asks, worried.
“What do you mean, she takes everything out of context?” Mrs. Brawn asks, ignoring Betty. It’s her circle. She started it off, arranging for the church women to meet in each others’ homes twice a month to read scripture and sew things which they send to a place in the city where they are distributed to the poor. The women are like the smell of coffee to Betty and at the same time, they are like the cool opaque squares of Mika’s lemon slice which is arranged on bread and butter plates on the table. They are also like the sturdy varnished chairs they sit on. To be with them now is the same as when she was a child and thought that if you could always be near an adult when you were ill, you wouldn’t die.
“My, my,” Mika mimics someone to demonstrate to Mrs. Brawn what she means. She places her free hand against her chest in a dramatic gesture. “They are different, ain’t they? God’s precious jewels. Just goes to show, His mysteries does He perform.”
Betty realizes with a sudden shock that her mother is imitating Mrs. Joy.
Mrs. Brawn takes in Mika’s pose with a stern expression and immediately Mika looks guilty, drops her hand from her breast and begins to fill cups with coffee.
“I suppose that we really can’t expect much from Mrs. Joy,” Mika says with her back to them. Betty hears the slight mocking tone in her voice that passes them by.
Heads bent over needlework nod their understanding. The women’s stitches form thumbs, forest-green fingers; except for the woman who sits beside Betty. With a hook she shapes intricate spidery patterns to lay across varnished surfaces, the backs of chairs. What the poor would want with those, I’ll never know, Mika has said privately. But they include the doilies in their parcels anyway because they have an understanding. They whisper that this white-haired woman has known suffering.
She works swiftly. It seems to Betty as though the threads come from the ends of her fingers, white strings with a spot of red every few inches. It looks as though she’s cut her finger and secretly bleeds the colour into the lacy scallops. The women all unravel and knit and check closely for evenness of tension.
Mika enters the circle of chairs then, carrying the tray of coffee, and begins to make her way around it. She continues to speak of Mrs. Joy.
“Are you looking forward to school?” the white-haired woman asks Betty. Her voice is almost a whisper, a knife peeling skin from a taut apple. Betty senses that it has been difficult for her to speak, feels privileged that she has.
“Yes, I miss school.”
The woman blinks as she examines a knot in her yarn. She scrapes at it with her large square thumbnail which is flecked oddly with white fish-hook-shaped marks. “Your mother tells us you were at camp,” she says. “What did you do there?”
Mika approaches them with the tray of coffee. “I just wish she hadn’t picked me out, that’s all,” Mika says. “She insists on coming over here in the morning and it’s impossible to work with her here. And Mr. Joy is just as bad. I send Betty for the eggs now because he used to keep me at the door talking.”
Mr. Joy is just as bad. Mr. Joy makes me ashamed of myself and I let him do it. The woman shakes loose the doily; it unfolds into the shape of a star as she holds it up.
“You like it?” the white-haired woman asks Betty.
“It’s pretty.”
“Maybe I give it to you.”
“Ah, Mika,” a woman across the circle says, “she just knows where she can find the best baking in town.”
Then they all laugh; even the quiet woman beside Betty has a dry chuckle over the comment, only Mrs. Brawn doesn’t smile. She stirs her coffee with more force than necessary and sets the spoon alongside it with a clang.
“Obesity is no laughing matter,” she says. “Mrs. Joy is a glutton and that’s to be pitied. We don’t laugh at sin, the wages of sin is death.”
“But the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord,” the woman says so softly, the words are nail filings dropping into her lap. If Betty hadn’t seen her lips moving, she wouldn’t have heard it. “God forgives,” the woman says then, louder. She is an odd combination of young and old. Her voice and breasts are young but her hair is white.
Mika stands before them with the tray of coffee. “Not always,” Mika says. “There’s the unpardonable sin, don’t forget about that.” She seems pleased to have remembered this.
“Which is?” the woman asks.
“Well, suicide,” Mika says. “It has to be, because when you think of it, it’s something you can’t repent of once the deed is done.” Mika smiles around the circle as if to say to them, see, I’m being patient with this woman who has known suffering.
“Perhaps there is no need to repent,” the woman says.
“Pardon?”
“In Russia,” the woman begins and then stops to set her thread down into her lap. She folds her hands one on top of the other and closes her eyes. The others, sensing a story, fall silent.
“During the revolution in Russia, there was once a young girl who was caught by nine soldiers and was their prisoner for two weeks. She was only thirteen. These men had their way with her many times, each one taking their turn, every single night. In the end, she shot herself. What about her?”
“I’ve never heard of such a case,” Mika says. She sounds as though she resents hearing of it now.
“There are always such cases,” the woman says. “If God knows the falling of a single sparrow, He is also merciful. He knows we’re only human.”
Mrs. Brawn sets her knitting down on the floor in front of her chair, leans forward slightly. “Oh, He knows,” she says. “But He never gives us more than we can bear. When temptation arises, He gives us the strength to resist.” She closes her statement with her hands, like a conductor pinching closed the last sound.
Betty watches as the white-haired woman twists and untwists her yarn into a tight ring around her finger. “I don’t believe for one moment,” she says finally, “that God would condemn such a person to hell. Jesus walked the earth and so He knows.”
“No, no,” Mika says from the buffet. “He doesn’t condemn us, don’t you see? That’s where you’re wrong. We condemn ourselves. We make that choice.”
“And what choice did that young girl have?” the woman asks. “It was her means of escape. God provided the gun.”
Mika holds the tray of lemon squares up before her as though she were offering them to the sun. She looks stricken. Deep lines cut a sharp v above her nose. “You don’t mean that,” she says. “Suicide is unpardonable. I’m sure of it. Knowing that keeps me going. Otherwise, I would have done it myself long ago.”
There is shocked silence and a rapid exchange of glances around the circle, at Betty, to see if she’s heard.
“You shouldn’t say such things,” Mrs. Brawn says quietly. “For shame. You have no reason to say that.”
The white-haired woman speaks with a gaunt smile. “Occasionally,” she says, “in this room, someone dares to speak the truth.”
“What do you mean?” asks Mrs. Brawn.
“Look at us,” the woman says. “We’re like filthy rags to Him in our self-r
ighteousness. We obey because we fear punishment, not because we love.”
Betty sees the grease spot on her blouse where his arm has brushed against her breast. Her whole body is covered in handprints. The stone is back in her stomach. She feels betrayed. For a moment the women are lost inside their own thoughts and they don’t notice as she rises from her chair and sidles over to the door. Then, as if on some signal, their conversation resumes its usual level, each one waiting impatiently for the other to be finished so they can speak their words. Their laughter and goodwill have a feeling of urgency, of desperation. Betty stands at the door; a backward glance and she sees the white-haired woman bending over her work once again, eyes blinking rapidly, her fingers moving swiftly and the doily, its flecked pattern spreading like a web across her lap.
STONES
other made a new apron the day after she and Father quarrelled and he slammed the door and went walking. She didn’t come away from the kitchen window for a long time, and I tiptoed around the house feeling nervous because she hadn’t noticed that it was past my bedtime.
She was wearing the apron when she met the doctor’s wife, Mrs. Hallman, out by the clothesline, only you couldn’t see it for the pouch of clothespegs tied around her thick waist. Mrs. Hallman stood tall and slim, her red toenails sticking out the end of her white sandals and she smelled like the sweet william that grew in a patch beside the back porch. I hung around like a sticky fly in August and listened while they talked. Mother played with the pegs in the pouch and made little squares in the dirt with her foot while Mrs. Hallman said how pleased she was to be living in the country instead of the city, so much nicer for the children, didn’t she think? Then she asked which one I was and Mother told her, Lureen the second of five and one was coming.
Mrs. Hallman said, “Oh how nice,” her Jane Russell lips forming a raspberry circle and I wished suddenly that Mother would take off the pouch so the ricrac on the apron would show. Mrs. Hallman patted her flat stomach and told Mother that it sure was good to be slim again and that was it for her. Then she laughed and her voice went high and tinkly like a wind chime. Mother laughed too, and her laughter was like rubbing two stones together.
At supper Mother said to Father that the kids were terrible. And how could she invite Mrs. Hallman in? He hadn’t built the cage he’d promised now for a month and Rudy let Jeepers loose again in the kitchen and Sharon wouldn’t come down from the kitchen table. She’d offered Mrs. Hallman some tomatoes, but they’re allergic to tomatoes, and it was too bad, but she couldn’t play bridge with Mrs. Hallman because she had better things to do with her time.
When Mrs. Hallman came for coffee, Mother would send me to the cellar for a jar of jelly and spread a clean tablecloth. Then she would sit drawing circles with her finger, smiling and nodding while Mrs. Hallman rattled her charm bracelet and talked about Toronto and Minneapolis and “my husband the doctor.” I would sit listening to her wind chime laughter, unable to move when told to go out and play with the others.
When Mrs. Hallman left, Mother would bang pots and pans on the stove or put on Father’s fishing hat and chop weeds in the garden, making chunks of earth fly up around her feet.
The oldest daughter, Emily, and I became friends. She played store with real groceries and let me watch. She had bubble gum and pop whenever she wanted and sometimes gave me sips. She had her own bicycle and she wouldn’t let me ride it. I gave up my perch in the maple tree where I’d spent the summer building a tree-house and began moping about the kitchen complaining of having nothing to do. When I asked Mother why we didn’t have one measly bike, she slammed the oven door hard and said stoves were more important than bicycles and if we ever got anything new around this house it would be a stove that works right.
Then Rudy tried fly-casting at the telephone wires and caught a fishhook in his finger. Mother sent me to the Hallmans’ and the doctor said he’d come over and then stayed to have a slice of fresh bread, his eyes never leaving the cupboard where Mother had piled her batches of bread and buns. And when he asked it if was really true, did she really make that delicious bread, she smiled at him the way she smiles at Father when he pulls the little curl on the back of her neck and says she’s keeping her girlish figure.
The doctor stood in the door with two loaves of our bread under his arm and asked if they could have the recipe. He said some more and Mother laughed high and tinkly like the wind chimes and said she’d always wanted to play bridge, she’d just never had anyone offer to teach her and yes, she’d be glad to give him the recipe.
She sent me the next day with the recipe which I put under a stone for a moment while I helped Rudy untangle Father’s fishing reel, which was tied to a kite. We couldn’t fix it, so we buried the reel in the garden and when I got back, I stood and watched the wind flip the paper under the stone. Then I saw Emily’s bicycle lying in her driveway and I lifted the stone and let the recipe blow away. I told Mother the doctor’s wife said she didn’t have time to bake bread.
When Father came home for supper, Mother was banging pots on the stove and said that she wouldn’t bother with bridge after all, she had too much to do. Father said there was no rest for the wicked and Mother laughed, and her laughter was like rubbing two stones together.
THE ROCK GARDEN
was one of four children who stood beneath the maple tree early one morning. We were on our way to school. Mika, our mother, had spit and licked and polished and we were fresh and as clean as was the day which smelled to me of lilacs. Above us, leaf buds, tight like babies’ fists, began uncurling fingers one by one to the sun. It wasn’t a day to argue. We stood beneath the tree looking down at a rock. The rock had appeared mysteriously overnight and we, like curious animals, sniffed and poked at it.
“I wonder where it came from,” I said.
Truda, the third eldest, spoke. “It could have been a dog. A dog carried it in its mouth and dropped it.”
Betty laughed at Truda and tickled the top of her head. “Silly.”
I nudged the rock with my foot. It wouldn’t budge and I was relieved, seeing in my mind the possibility of a garter snake curled beneath it, or thick slugs kissing the damp bottom of the rock with their sucky mouths.
I was the only black-haired child of the six Lafrenière children. My skin didn’t blister and peel in the sun, but tanned to the colour of a netted gem potato, dusty and dry looking. My hair, straight and black, resembled Maurice’s, my father’s hair. I was the only child in our family who looked like a Lafrenière should look, fine-boned, tiny feet and hands, small black eyes. I was conscious of being different, and felt cocky and self-assured in this difference. “It looks like a rock,” I said. “But it could be something else, you know. It could, for instance, be a fossilized dinosaur egg. It was dug up when they made the ring dike.”
“Yes, it could be an egg,” said the myopic Truda.
I could tell that Betty was stung by Truda’s disloyalty; usually they were a team. “We’ll be late for school,” Betty said. “And then I’ll get the blame for it. I’m the example.” She gathered her books up from the grass and headed down the cinder-strewn driveway.
“If it’s a dinosaur egg,” Rudy said, always wanting to get to the truth of the matter, “then it might hatch, won’t it? I think it will. And then it’ll eat us up.”
“It can’t hatch,” I told him. “It hasn’t been fertilized.” Put that in your pipe and smoke it, as my father would say. I took Truda and Rudy by the hand and led them down the dirt road where we traced our own footprints in the bottom of the deep ruts. Betty followed along behind us, neat and proper, never galloping, our perfect example.
After a time, we left the road and entered the coulee, a grassy dish of marshland that filled each spring with water which receded quickly, leaving behind twitch grass that grew waist-high, and spotted toads that leapt up before our feet.
“I am thee Count,” a voice said in Draculan tones. “Let me bite your neck. Heh, heh, heh.” Laurence Anderson�
�s brown curly head parted the grasses as he stood up and came towards us. He carried a paper sack and wiped his palms against his white T-shirt, leaving behind grey smudges of something he’d been into.
“It’s puke-face himself.”
“Lureen!”
I knew Betty would tell Mother. Lureen swore, she’d say, her blue eyes wide with a pretended innocence. Lureen said: shit, piss and God. Exaggerating, because reciting the words was the only way Betty had the courage to do it too. And Mother would believe her because Betty was her favourite child. Betty had memorized one hundred Bible verses and won a trip to church summer camp. Our mother respected those who could do what she couldn’t.
Girls don’t swear, she often said.
But they do on Father’s side of the family, I argued.
Well, I guess. What can you expect, she said. There are no ladies in your father’s family. None that I know of. They’re coarse and hard. They paint their nails. They walk around in their war paint looking as though they’ve dipped their fingers in someone’s blood. You want to be like that? I knew nothing of my father’s family except what my mother told me. But, yes, that sounded exciting.
Why don’t girls swear? Because, Mother said when she didn’t want to talk to us, just because. Because I say so. And then, exasperated, it gives boys the wrong impression, you know. That you aren’t to be respected. That you’re Fair Game. Like a female dog in heat.
What is Fair Game? I wondered, and imagined a prairie chicken flapping up from the grass in the coulee. I was twelve years old, I knew what the spring dance of the dogs meant and I thought that she was coarse and hard for referring to it. But what was Fair Game?
Sometimes my mother would say, men, who needs them? In the same derogatory way she discussed my uncles’ wives. She would say, Lureen, you would be “wery vise” to forget about boys until you have an education.
By education, Mother meant grade twelve, which, to me, seemed a preposterous length of time to wait for boys, an indication of her being so out of touch with reality, that her opinion couldn’t be trusted. A person whose English was so faulty that they said, “wery vise,” lost their credibility. Piss, shit and God are nothing to get excited about, my father would say with a laugh.
Agassiz Stories Page 6