Agassiz Stories

by Sandra Birdsell

  “Sure, it’s okay for Claude to say invite them,” Marlene said. She flicked tobacco from her tongue. “But guess who’s going to have to put up with Bernice coming over every day? Claude? Because you know as well as I do, once she gets her foot in, it’ll be game over.” Lureen listened with growing impatience. She admitted that this Bernice and Alike thing was puzzling but she was tired of discussing it.

  “Well this is it,” Lureen said, mimicking Bernice, who inferred she knew everything there was to know and waited patiently for them to realize it. Well this is it, Bernice said with a slight smile on her anemic bony face as she examined a fleck of dirt beneath her fingernail and chewed it loose. Lureen understood the look Bobbie and Marlene gave each other when Bernice said that. They wanted to smack Bernice across the mouth. Marlene joked that Bernice was such a terrible housekeeper that when Mike went to pee in the sink, there were always dishes in it. Bobbie had dubbed Bernice, “The Creature From the Black Lagoon,” because Bernice’s large ears stuck through her thin dark hair and she stored her bottom dentures in a junk drawer in the kitchen. Lureen suggested that Bernice’s smugness was ignorance.

  Sounds of shooting and dying erupted suddenly from the living room. They had left the television set turned on for the kids who all day wandered out the front door and in the back every few moments. They had rid the closets and cupboards of the things that tended to collect during the winter, the mismatched socks and empty sanitary napkin boxes. Now that the spring cleaning was complete, they wanted to enjoy their rum in peace and so they made a plate of sandwiches, set it out on the back stoop and hooked the door. From the window, Lureen had a perfect view of a block of sagging garages, battered garbage cans or sometimes Bernice, bent over and clutching her grapefruit-sized stomach as though she was afraid it would fall out, picking her way into their bitch and brag afternoon. I bleed like a stuck pig, every month, Bernice explained her swollen stomach, her constant anemia. They can’t do nothing about it.

  “Ever notice how Good Friday is always like this?” Lureen asked because she wanted to stop talking about Bernice. She referred to the smoke-coloured sky, water dripping from the eaves. “It’s always so gloomy.”

  “Hah. You just think so because the kids are home,” Marlene said. She sent a cloud of smoke up towards the ceiling and frowned. “Dammit. Will you look at that? I think we missed a spot.” She got up and dabbed at the door frame. “You’re wrong,” she said. “It’s not always gloomy. It was sunny last year. I remember because I took the kids out to Aunt Sally’s Farm at the zoo. Claude was away. As usual,” she said and threw the rag back into the sink.

  Marlene Paquet was not French, but a Mennonite. Lureen Cooper wasn’t English. She hated it when people thought she was. One of the things she disliked about being a Cooper was their lack of customs. Just ham for Easter, she had complained to Marlene, that’s all. Dull and boring. There were no coloured eggs or Paska bread with icing letters spelling out, “He is Risen.”

  One of the kids began pounding at the door and then kicked sharply.

  “Jesus.” Marlene jumped up and went out into the back yard to settle an argument. The kids, five of them, were a collusion of bicycles and wagons. They gathered around her. Bobbie’s boy had seized the opportunity of her absence to act up.

  “You’re not my mother,” he said to Marlene. “You can’t make me.”

  “Sheesh, kill him,” Marlene said when she came back inside. “What’s keeping her, anyway?” Reward yourself, Bobbie said. It’s the only way I can force myself to do this crap, meaning the walls and ceilings. They smoked their cigarettes and waited for her to return. Lureen felt ground-out like the weather because Larry, her husband, was also away, as usual. He was away building a business. Well so long, he’d said to her one day. You won’t be seeing much of me for a while because I’m going to be busy building a business. Those were not his exact words but she liked to work things down to one basic line. And for once, she’d told them, Larry kept his word. She hadn’t seen much of him since then, but telephoned him every afternoon to ask how it was going. She imagined him building the business, brick by brick, with a Leggo kit. Larry inquired, how was it going with the kids? Be sure Jamie stays away from the models, he said, referring to his electric train in the basement. And make sure they eat right and wear their mitts. Tell them this and that, he said and she felt like a telephone answering service. She enticed him into long conversations about the kids. She recited pieces of information which she read in the newspaper. She asked him questions. Who really shot JFK? she asked. And why do you think all those women went and jumped from bridges when Marilyn Monroe died? Even though Larry was just around the corner, she sometimes thought it was as though he’d gone to China for the week and stumbled in every Saturday afternoon suffering from jet-lag. Yellow-faced and surly, he greeted her as though he had a mouth full of broken glass. He curled into a ball in the centre of the bed and slept until Sunday afternoon. While Larry built his business, she categorized and labelled and thought and dusted furniture with stained underpants.

  “She’s here. Finally,” Marlene said as the front door slammed shut. “What in hell kept you?” she called.

  But it was not Bobbie. Bernice tiptoed into the kitchen from the living room in her fuzzy bedroom slippers, walking as though she were avoiding puddles. She pulled her sweater around her sunken chest.

  The kids had betrayed them, Lureen thought. Yeah, she’s home, they probably said. She’s not doing nothing.

  “It’s me,” Bernice said and stepped onto the braided mat. She shook one foot and then the other like a rain-soaked cat. She surveyed the room with her deep-set eyes, in search of betrayal, exclusion.

  “I don’t usually use the front door,” Marlene said. “Usually I have the couch in front of it.” Marlene’s husband, Claude, was a travelling salesman for a tool company. While he was away, she washed walls and arranged furniture. She arranged it according to the seasons, around the flow of cool air in summer and away from icy winter drafts that coated wall sockets with frost.

  “I didn’t come the back way because I was across the street, at the store,” Bernice said. “I wasn’t busy and so I thought I’d drop by. So what have you guys been up to?”

  “Working our butts off doing spring cleaning,” Marlene said. “Love your timing. We just finished.”

  Bernice crossed her arms over her chest and surveyed the room. “Smells like a soap factory in here,” she said. “You sure wouldn’t catch me doing no spring cleaning.”

  “Must be nice,” Marlene said. She ground out her cigarette and lit up another.

  “I clean,” Bernice said. “But I do it bit by bit. When Mike’s off, he gives me a hand with the big jobs.”

  “Good for Mike.”

  Lureen had been thinking about the folly of their work binge while washing walls. Although she would never come out and say it, she thought Marlene’s Mennonite background had not been entirely done away with when it came to the housecleaning thing. She had been thinking of writing an article for Chatelaine on how not to have to do spring cleaning. How they were being foolish and driven and shouldn’t worry if grease from cooking coated the set of good dishes on the top shelf. Wash them as you need them, she was going to say. Or do as she did, cover them in Saran. Come Easter, she would drag Larry out of bed, whip the Saran off the good dishes and serve up his ham on clean pink thistle and pussy willow plates. But it ticked her off that someone like Bernice might have caught on.

  “Anyway,” Lureen said loudly. “As we were saying. This guy I’m reading, Velikovsky, makes a lot of sense.”

  “Uum,” Marlene said. “As you were saying.” She contained her smile in the tiny muscle which jumped beneath the mole beside her lip.

  “I mean, when you think about it, that bit in the Bible about the Red Sea parting.”

  “God. The Red Sea. I never think of it.”

  “But you would if you could make sense out of it and I think a cosmic event happening jus
t at the same time as the sea parted is the answer. It’s the same thing as the quick-frozen mammoths. A possible explanation.”

  Bernice shook loose her slippers and inched towards a kitchen chair. They ignored her.

  “I always figured it had to be something other than the ice age that caused the mammoths to be frozen instantly. Some of them even had buttercups in their mouths.”

  Bernice parked her sharp rump on one corner of the chair and leaned forward with her elbow on her knee. “Well this is it,” she said.

  “What is it?” Marlene asked.

  “What she said,” Bernice said. “A cosmic event. It had to be.” Because her bottom teeth were missing, Bernice’s jaw jutted forward unnaturally. Lureen thought she wasn’t so much a creature from a lagoon. In her stretch black ski pants, she resembled a daddy-long-legged spider.

  “Coffee?” Marlene asked abruptly. “Or don’t you have time? I don’t want to force you.”

  Bernice picked at a cuticle. I quit wearing my teeth because they hurt, she said once. If Mike doesn’t like it, then to heck with him is what I say. She crossed her legs and swung her foot. “Mike’s off today,” she said and smiled. “It’s his turn to look after the kids.”

  Lureen walked home from Marlene’s feeling light-headed because of the rum. Pressed against the fence around her yard was the litter of winter uncovered, newspapers, wrappers of all sorts coated in a powdery dust. She disliked this dreary in-between season after the snow had melted, exposing the grit and garbage which was also entangled in the chokecherry bush. The bush was the only nice thing about her yard. She wondered how it came to grow there against the fence. She had looked it up in a book, chokecherry, and learned the fruit was used in pemmican after being pounded into mush. She read many books, biographies, television-repair manuals, child-rearing books, cereal boxes. She was proud of herself. She understood the language of the Bible and Shakespeare and income tax forms. She knew the women resented her books because once Marlene had asked her, what are you trying to prove, anyway? Sometimes, she wondered if they talked about her in the same way they did Bernice. She carried the frozen farm chicken Marlene had given to her because she complained to them over their rum about having to cook ham once again for Easter. You can have your Paska bread, Marlene said. There’s just too much else that goes along with it. Customs give your kids something to be depressed about when they grow up, she said. But when Lureen looked at her children running around the yard, she felt a pang of doubt. That maybe she was cheating them by not teaching them about Easter. She missed the smell of the bread baking, the toadstool-shaped loaves crawling up and out of their cans and collars of wax paper. She missed the Easter baskets. Her sisters took turns making them, decorating them in mustard yellow and purple crepe paper. Even now, her mother was probably rolling coloured eggs across newspapers to dry and planning Easter baskets for the youngest ones still at home and for the grandchildren who would be there for Sunday dinner. Only now, her mother shaped the nests from Rice Krispie cake and the grass was dyed coconut and so everything, the baskets included, was edible.

  “I’m sorry,” Larry said when she telephoned him. “But there’s no way I can take the weekend off.” The sound of the air compressor chugged and clanked in the background. Her chest tightened with the sound of his voice. When he came home, just the sight of him getting out of the car jumped forward to meet something in the centre of her eye. Even though he often looked frowsy, rips in jeans, every new shirt initiated with a smear of grease, buttons yanked loose or tears snagged where he had brushed against sharp pieces of metal, still, she was captured by the sight of his thick, yellow, too-long hair, the methodical slowness of his movement across the yard to the house.

  “I promised this guy I’d have his car ready to go by the weekend and I’m way behind. I’ll have to stay here until it’s finished.” He sounded as though he had a cold. He was allergic to something he used in the shop.

  “Come on, it’s Easter weekend.”

  “So?”

  “Well, we should do something.”

  “Why?”

  “For the kids. It’s a holiday and most people do something on a holiday.”

  “They’ll survive. I have to do what I have to do.”

  She felt anger rising. “What you want to do, you mean.”

  He ignored her. “So, what’s new?”

  “Not a hell of a lot. I’m reading a book.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “Oh, this guy. He claims that the oil and gas deposits actually came from the sky. From the tail of a comet that passed close to the earth.” Saying it made it sound silly. When she’d read it, she felt it made sense. Now she didn’t know.

  “Oh. Science fiction?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Say.” He hesitated for a moment. “What kind of do is Marlene having anyway?”

  “The usual. Neighbourhood people. She said to come around eight.”

  “I don’t think I’m going to make it,” Larry said. “You’ll have to go without me.”

  Lureen resisted the impulse to throw the telephone against the wall. “That’s just great.”

  “I’m sorry, but I just got to get this car done.”

  Now that the kids were in school and had to be in bed early, Lureen missed not being able to go down to the garage to sit and drink Cokes and watch him when he had to work late. She missed crawling around the inside of the cars, pulling loose torn head-liners, side panels, helping him make it new. He whistled when she was there and told jokes or else they worked without speaking, finding their rhythm in the country western music he listened to. She missed the satisfaction of seeing pieces fitting together, the jars of nuts and bolts whose placement in the metal jumble Larry had memorized or knew instinctively.

  Because she and Larry had moved seven times in six years she arranged furniture once and it stayed that way until the next move. Although they had moved frequently, they had not moved far. From one small town to another. Larry changes his jobs as often as other people change their socks, was what she told the women, but it was no longer true. They had not moved for two years. And she no longer helped put together the metal puzzle. Now she had to think about things like spring cleaning and cooking ham for Easter.

  “This is quite a nice place you’ve got here,” Mike said at Marlene’s party.

  “Get him,” Marlene whispered and nudged Lureen in the ribs. They had seen Bernice’s husband only from a distance before. He had come to the party dressed in a suit and tie. He was tall and very blond and did not look like a mailman. Lureen thought there was something young and earnest in the stiff wave above his forehead, his glossy shoes. He had sprayed them with Amway Shoe Glow, he explained when Claude commented on the glassy look of them.

  “They’re the same shoes he wears on the route every day,” Bernice said. “He’s nuts to spray them because his feet can’t breathe.”

  “And you wouldn’t enjoy it very much if they did,” Mike said without a trace of annoyance.

  Lureen thought of the contrast, Marlene’s hand-made, pinch-pleated drapes and the grey blanket Bernice had nailed up to her front window. When you sit at her table, don’t lean forward, Marlene had warned. There’s so much crap on it, you’ll never get your arms loose. Marlene stood in the doorway watching as Mike admired the furniture Claude pointed out, their new raisin-coloured freizé couch with its glittering silver threads, the colour television set with remote control. Marlene had opened up the gateleg table and covered it with a linen cloth and set out food. Lureen knew Marlene was looking for signs of envy or dissatisfaction. “Hey, is what you do legal?” Mike asked Claude. “This is terrific,” his good-natured smile never wavering.

  “Oh, Marlene’s a real work-horse,” Bernice said and told them how early in the morning she had seen sheets on Marlene’s clothesline.

  Mike shook his head and sat down beside Bernice on the couch. He put his arm around her shoulders. “Sure can’t say that about you, can we, m
other?” he said.

  Bernice laughed. “You wouldn’t catch me doing anything at that hour. Not until I’ve had at least a pot of coffee.”

  Which Mike probably made and brought to her bedside, Lureen thought. Marlene raised her eyebrows. Mike was an enigma, Lureen realized. He had stepped over some line. Last winter he made a skating rink for the kids in the neighbourhood and skated with them. Carried their own around on his shoulders. On his days off he hung out the laundry, did the shopping, painted cupboards. I’ll bet he’s a fruit or pervert of some kind, Bobbie had said and while they laughed, nevertheless, they watched from the window for evidence and found none.

  Bernice wore the same black baggy sweater she had on yesterday and the fuzzy slippers. Marlene wore a long black skirt and a peach satiny blouse knotted at the waist. She had gathered her auburn hair up into a French twist. Lureen wore her only dress, pink, of some nubby material which she bought in Eaton’s. It was a good thing they weren’t going home for Easter she decided, because another of her family’s customs was that everyone bought or sewed a new dress for each religious holiday. Claude, who she could tell had been drinking long before they arrived, began to talk to Mike about hockey. Lureen didn’t know any of the men well. They had an unspoken agreement that if a husband came home unexpectedly, they all left immediately. They spent their time discussing the men’s likes, dislikes, comparing. They spring-cleaned, read, kept the kids quiet on Saturday mornings and stayed attractive. Except for Bernice.

  Lureen found a corner and nursed her second drink. Several other couples arrived and each time the door opened she thought of Larry. Above the kitchen door, a crucifix and the Christ were impaled in agony, an insect specimen under glass for their inspection. Lureen realized, as she listened to the jokes, the laughter, that her mother would disapprove if she knew that Lureen had gone to a party on Easter weekend. Of the crucifix, her mother would say, that’s the problem. The Catholics leave him hanging. Lureen’s mother, who was a Mennonite like Marlene, didn’t believe in crucifixes being hung anywhere, but she had a plaque in the kitchen that one of the kids made at a summer camp and decorated with pine cones and macaroni which said, “By Grace Are Ye Saved.” Which means, her mother said, that you don’t deserve it. Claude’s sardonic laughter grated on her ears. He had told the same joke three parties in a row now. When Claude got drunk he would take out his dentures and drop them down into his drink so no one would take it when he went to the bathroom.